Maniacal, murderous 'safety' pins

Safety pins. Bloody safety pins. Has a safety pin ever genuinely kept you safe? Ever delivered on the promise hidden in its name? Of course not. These spring-loaded metallic miscreants are chaos incarnate—tiny, twisted, pain-wielding demons masquerading as tools of convenience. Stupid little pricks. Literally.

In theory, the clasp exists to protect you from accidental stabbings. In practice, it’s about as effective as trying to stop a knife with a wet tissue. You’d get better results using barbed wire to hold your outfit together and just accepting the inevitable puncture wounds as part of the aesthetic.

I’ve been stabbed—repeatedly—by these so-called safety devices. I’ve bled. I’ve suffered. I’ve been left for dead on at least three separate occasions, betrayed by a bit of bent metal. Thankfully, I had a Band-Aid each time and a will to live.

And explain this: why do safety pins spontaneously explode open the moment you rummage through your handbag? You’re just looking for lip balm, and bam—sudden ambush. Blood. Swearing. Regret. Frankly, we should stop calling them safety pins and start calling them perilous pins, so newcomers to the planet know what they're really dealing with.

Let’s not pretend they save you from embarrassment either. Think you're cleverly hiding a wardrobe malfunction with a discreet pin? Think again. Everyone sees it. Everyone. And they’ll always announce it loudly, like they’ve just discovered a rare species in the wild:

 “Oh, is that a safety pin holding your hem up?”

Yes, Janet. Thank you. Kindly shut up now.

I’m sure the safety pin has a fascinating and noble history - something about the Bronze Age, Ancient Greece, and a bored guy without access to the internet—but honestly, who cares?

Their brief brush with fame? That was thanks to Liz Hurley using oversized ones to hold together a dress so tiny it defied physics. Iconic, yes. Practical? Questionable. Honestly, we should’ve renamed them tart pins then and there.

In the end, I think what really stings is this: I’m just bitter I didn’t invent them myself. 

Abandoned vegetales

According to an eyewitness account, someone has recklessly abandoned their health today, after vegetables (pictured) were found strewn on the side of a path.

Chucked in wild abandonment, until someone placed them neatly on a ledge, and bound and gagged them, like some sort of confused serial killer copycat deconstructing the scene of a crime. 

How did this all come about, I hear you cry out, desperate for more information. Was the planned meal abandoned due to poor cooking conditions? Was it lack of cooking ability? Was it forsaken, cast aside for a prepared meal from Uber Eats? Maybe the carry bag was sinking fast and the vegetables decided to jump ship? 

Or is because it’s celery, which deserves to be strewn on a street. We’ll just never know. Because the eyewitness wasn’t so witness-y after all. 

As an Enquiry and, more importantly, an Inquiry, is launched into why there has been a significant increase in vegetables being strewn all over the place on this path and how to prevent it in the future, the fate of the vegetables in question hangs in the balance, and their future is most certainly unclear.
 
What is known, however, is that they are currently wilting in the sun. If it’s any consolation, the vegetables had very few loved ones.

Mortal Engines - my remote control

The other night I had big plans. BIG PLANS. I was going to hire a DVD (Mortal Engines) and go home and watch it! I wish you could have seen my super excited face. So I ventured to the local Hoyts Kiosk – OLD SKOOL!, where a non-human machine thing dispensed the DVD into my hand in a cold, hard business transaction; just the way I like it.

Mortal Engines was released in early 2019, and I missed it at the cinema, and I’m up to the last book of the Mortal Engines Quartet by Philip Reeve, so have been mega keen to see the series come to life.

Anyway, anyway, my Mac is the one made of Air and thus does not allow things to be stuck in it, so I headed to my DVD player, which I haven’t activated since 1908, and the ‘child safety lock mode’ was on, with no remote to be seen for many, many miles. 

I turned my lounge upside down looking for that damned thing, getting more and more frustrated, the way you do when the world Zuckerberg created helps to turn you into an inpatient, demanding jerk who can’t just ‘be in the moment’ with a lost remote.

My lost remote is all very hilarious actually in this context, because the main character’s job in Mortal Engines is as an ye olde world historian who hunts down and trades in old tech to survive. Maybe he could have found my lost remote. Maybe that can be the second movie. 

Mortal Engines is a post-apocalyptic world where entire cities are mounted on wheels and drive around preying on each other and, let me tell you, I’m gonna kill my bloody remote when I find it.

So after lots of button pressing and holding, it quickly became apparent that I needed another way into the machine. Professionally trained ‘child safety lock mode’ defusers get paid a lot of money to do this job with a remote. One small mistake, and you’re dead.

So, I turned to the Googles to help me dismantle the 'child safety lock mode' sans remote. Unfortunately, I immediately ended up in one of those tech help forums, where the answers to questions create more confusion than the questions themselves. And then, before I knew what was happening, information technology folk starting peppering me with questions via a bot called Bob. I didn’t care for it, so I left the theatre of war, and took sanctuary IRL.

In the end, much like in the movie, the device wasn’t infiltrated, someone was mortally wounded in a sword duel, the crash drive was destroyed with an old tech nuclear warhead, and no-one lived happily ever after.

Thoughts from the Big Bash League

Last night I went to a Big Bash League (BBL) cricket game at Manuka Oval in Canberra. Cricket being the sport where two team play a game with sticks and balls and one team wins and the other does not. If you’d like me to describe anything else to you please let me know.

So this particular match was between Sydney and Hobart - the Sydney Thunder versus the Hobart Hurricanes, with Sydney hijacking the Canberra pitch as a lesser second-string home when their parents at Spotless Stadium have kicked them out for partying and cricketing too much.

BBL names are curious. While Sydney is very dependable with it’s thunder activity throughout the summer months, I’m not convinced Hobart has ever experienced a hurricane, but that’s not important right now. Well it is important actually if you are of the view that team names should perhaps vaguely reflect something about that city but, alas, nope. Maybe it’s a bit like Gandhi’s world view - be the stormcell you want to be in the BBL. 

Clearly the BBL Team Naming Gods were not concerned with the potentially adverse consequences for international tourism of giving Australian sporting teams names like hurricanes, thunder, heat and scorchers. Maybe in the future they’ll add terrifying spiders, deadly snakes and bogans to the comp to really give those pesky tourists the boot.

Anyway, I’ve been to the cricket before, and I always find it a mirthful experience - what’s life without MIRTH! - except I always get wet because it always rains, and I always get cold because it always gets cold, even though it’s supposed to be summer, and my brain apparently can’t be bothered reminding me of these facts before I go.

So last night was no different - wet, cold, yet mirthful - and also a kid got hit in the head by a cricket ball. If the world of cricket is foreign to you, the balls are made of the hardest substances in the known universe and they are whacked at a very, very hard speed. 

The crowd announcer always thoughtfully tells us to watch out for balls that may fly into our heads. Look, thankyou for the threatening heads-up, but it’s kind of difficult to avoid when you’re constantly being distracted by the endless advertising, adorable little attention-seeking robot cameras zooming around, dance cams and crowd waves. Also, head injuries are highly likely when the you’re working within a framework that rewards a player with a ‘six’ for clubbing a ball into the crowd. It is, in fact, a work, health and safety nightmare.

The offending ball. Maybe.

Onto other burning matters. I almost forgot how most excellent Australian sport is at promoting the junk food industry. It actually does a better job at promoting the $20 billion a year Australian junk food industry cash cow than the industry does. Last night was KFC’s turn to turn us all off healthy options and be less health conscious consumers. 

Last night the crowd announcer - who had seamlessly moved on from a kid getting hit in the head with a ball - told us excitedly that if a ‘six’ was caught in the crowd we could all win free KFC. Because that’s the way to earning yourself a cricketer’s physique, kids. Fairly confident the cricketers are not eating that for supper, ever.

Anyway, my team won - the dependable Sydney thunder activity - so yay.

Coles mini shop obsessive-compulsive disorder

A few months ago, Australians were busy shopping for groceries wherever we damn well pleased. It was a great time to be alive. Coles, Woolies, Aldi, the markets, you name it, we were there, purchasing things, for no reason other than we needed things. 

And then the Coles marketing team came and ruined everything that is good about grocery shopping forever.

They stormed into our lives uninvited and, since July, they have been hunting us like prey. They threw out a silky web, made up of gross spider glands and other gross things, and also millions of those Coles Mini Shop Collectibles that have made us lose our collective shits with the excitement of all of it. (Don’t pretend you are collecting them for your kids.)

Me gently cradling my beloved Coles Mini
Shop Collectible Nescafé Gold.

We should have all kept our poker faces and shown only a vague, passing interest in the useless miniatures but, no, we’ve showed our hand and actually LOST. OUR. MINDS. over pointless pieces of plastic handwash. 

Bloody iconic products too, because Coles are not amateurs at this. This is not  their first time at the rodeo. Who turns down a mini Timtams or Weetbix? 

I haven’t read up on the Constitution recently, but it’s presumably in there as an Act of the Australian Parliament – if someone gives you free iconic Aussie shit, you take it, and you collect it, until you have all of it and, ironically, can no longer afford to buy groceries because you went and spent all your money buying minis on eBay. She’ll be right, mate.


Since the promotion came, saw and conquered I have become conditioned, like Pavlov’s dogs, to spend $30 or more in store when I just pop in to pick up some milk. But I think, eventually, I will be okay and come out of this fog. 

I’m popping in this afternoon to get bread, which, because I don’t buy the gluten free type, will come in under $30. I’ve got this.

But you just know there’s more to come. The marketing and advertising teams of the big companies now know how to catch their prey. Which, in my opinion, isn’t an accident.  

As if it couldn’t get anymore dire, the chatter on the street (in Coles aisles – I don’t go to streets anymore, unless there is a Coles), is that they are going to bring out a second range called Coles Normal Size Shop. 

Which is just grocery shopping, Coles. And we won’t play your game. We won’t no matter what (we will).

What is with the cheer squad?

I got the rugby league football finals fever. Night fever, night fever… don’t sue me Bee Gees.

Symptoms of the strain of finals fever that I have contracted include feeling hot and sweaty, shivering, and shamelessly jumping on the bandwagon and riding it all the way to the stadium, presumably stealing a real fan’s ticket along the way.

Well it pays to hold onto some of your dole payment and give it to Ticketek rather than to Dan Murphy, doesn't it. Yep, first stereotype - there will be more. The thing with stereotypes is it’s not allowed to be funny unless it is being acted out by someone who is a member of the group being stereotyped, so now I'm just a monster.

 
I went to the Canberra Raiders versus Penrith Panthers final at GIO Stadium last night. It was a great night’s entertainment, and the league fans were nowhere near as bad as union supporters (or just about anyone else) make them out to be. Maybe I just Steve Bradbury’d my way through it all. I don’t know.

I’m not technically a Raider’s enthusiast. I have heard of them, I’m from the same city as them and I recognise the worth of all the shades of green - accept not really at all the Raider’s preferred shade of green - so we have a lot in common right off the boot.

Every team in the NRL has a cheer squad. They are the Shiny Things. They are designed to distract you from all the fist fights, drive-by shootings, traffic violations and other misdemeanours in your seating location. The Shiny Things are most excellent at stereotyping themselves, which saves everyone else from doing it. 

I’m quite sure the Penrith Panther cheer squad would heartily agree that the respectability of the females on the squad would improve immeasurably if they didn’t wear black latex dominatrix outfits. I mean, REALLY? Is that a good choice??

Unexpectedly, I didn’t take issue with Canberra’s Shiny Things, presumably because they weren’t prancing around in front of children while radiating sadomasochism. Also they seemed to have modelled themselves on Sandy’s cheerleader outfit in Grease, and who would be opposed to the fresh-faced innuendo of that icon.

When the players ran out onto the field at the start of the game there were flames thrown into the air. Everyone loves flames being chucked around everywhere. It’s so captivating and dangerous. Except it’s not. It’s a really precarious situation. Especially when the Shiny Things could have gone up flames with their synthetic hair extensions flapping in the wind. I suppose it would have kept us supporters at a fairly moderate temperature for a while during a typically fickle spring/winter (sprinter) evening.

The Shiny Things could distract you from a plane nose diving into the middle of the field. They stand and stare at the crowd, for ages, waving their pom poms and exposing elaborate fake smiles with nary an awkward twitch. It’s classic sociopathy, and leads me to wonder whether somewhere inside them lurks the capacity to suck someone’s brains out with a straw. 

The P.A. system regularly bosses everyone to report anti-social behaviour to a special anti-social hotline. Um, I'm gonna go with the cheerleaders behaviour? 

It’s often kind of hard to tell the difference between anti-social behaviour and what is just normal to some people. A guy near me was screaming and caterwauling for his team. Most people in and around this sport seem to be anti-social, and also ideally equipped with a tattoo advertising either their toughness or their promiscuity. 

I'm not sure the Terms of Reference for anti-social behaviour in this context but it seems to be a pretty loose sliding scale.

So, anyway, 'my' team won. Go Raiders!

A Tale of Two Warring Tribes

I’m off to the big football game on Saturday. The one where they play with oval shaped balls.

Collingwood versus Carlton at the Melbourne Cricket Ground, Melbourne, Victoria, Australia, the World, THE UNIVERSE.  

Should be fun, if I don’t die in the crossfire between two warring tribes.

I’ve made a lame attempt to learn a bit about these tribes, so I can negotiate my way out of a blood-soaked armed combat situation if the need arises.

Back in 1892 (or maybe it was 2189, I forget), a bunch of tribes joined together in Melbourne, Australia to create a new form of entertainment for the masses, to replace the previous form of entertainment that involved watching people die of bubonic plague or something. I don’t know; I was unalive then. 

One of these tribes was known as Collingwood, and everyone dressed in black and white and stripes and nothing else. They all looked very much like human zebras but they’d bust your chops if you said that to their faces so no-one did ever. 

The Collingwood tribe took fortress in a crowded, unhygienic place with historic buildings and, like modern times, most people worked in places and did other things when they weren't doing the work things. 

This tribe grew and grew until it had over 300,000 likes on Facebook which is important because Facebook likes meant everything to everyone in 1892.

The other tribe was known as Carlton, and to this day do much the same thing as the Collingwood tribe with their days, but they have only 225,000 likes, so what even is the point of them. 

Back in the day, both tribes spent much of their free time engaging in hobbies such as breeding rats and suffering from typhoid and cholera and other health related conditions. It was the fun, carefree days.

And since 1892, on one day of the week, both these tribes gather in sports grounds and watch men throw their balls, while they engage in cheering and alcohol drinking and the ensuing violent tussles and then go to bars to discuss all of those things in gratuitous detail. 

Both tribes still obsess day and night about the hunting and gathering of the points earned at these sporting fixtures with the aim of bragging about it the next day at the work places and while they huddle in shops to purchase caffeinated beverages. It’s just what they do.

I had a great thought the other day.

I had a great thought the other day.  It was pretty epic.

Not a Kim Kardashian inconsequential brainpop, but something great passed through my neural pathways.

Like something Einstein may have come up with if he hadn't spent all his time watching pink lady apples fall from trees. Where was that leisurely activity ever going to take him?

This shit happens to me often.  My brain did that thing where it cuts out like a hairdryer when you pull it away from the wall socket, sometimes mid-sentence. Actually more often that not mid-sentence.

Unfortunately the great thought eludes me to this day. Oh well. I might go and sit under my mum's lemon tree and see if the great thought returns.

Sequel to this post: Return of The Great Thought.

Apple Fools

Ah apples. They are so great, aren't they? I love apples.  If they and bananas and mangoes ever disappeared because of some post-apocalyptic nightmare scenario that only affects specific yellow and red and orange coloured fruit, I would be massively screwed because I just don't care for any other type of edible flowering plant except those ones.

So it's most fortuitous that I love pretty much every vegetable that's ever been born, except the ones that I loathe, most notably brussel sprouts. I mean, really.

Brussel sprouts are a member of the cabbage family, which certainly explains why they are so disgusting.  Worst family genes ever.  Anyway, back to apples.

I ate a royal gala for my post-lunch repast today.  It was really delicious and crunchy, except there were two stickers on my apple, and I don't really approve of my fruit being used as a platform for insidious promotion from fruit growers.

Individual stickers on apples are just annoying, because I just don't care where they come from and the sign above the fruit in the shop tells me what specific fruit I am purchasing.  Plus I have a brain and may be able to detect all by myself when a banana has accidently or deliberately been tossed into the royal galas.

Through the story of Adam and Eve, apples have become the symbol of knowledge, immortality, temptation and rampant advertising.  When Eve took the apple off the Forbidden Tree she probably had to peel off a fucking promotional sticker. I think I'm going to create tiny oval stickers of my face and put them all over Canberra.  Just because.

Warning: This is about defecting tyres.

Got to my car in my work carpark the other day to find a plastic-covered notice from my local government, alerting me to the fact that my front left tyre was defecting.  I found this all very exciting because how often do your car tyres defect?  One minute you're doing donuts in morning peak hour traffic - which should have been my first red flag - the next minute you find out your tyres actually work for the KGB.

In hindsight, I should have known there was dissent in the ranks when I caught my car engaging in what I suspected was counter-counterintelligence gathering.  This is almost just like the Petrov Affair.

And then I questioned the likelihood of my little car being caught up in an dramatic international spy incident and realised they probably meant my tyre was defective.  It must be from all those left turns I make, and indeed all those anti-clockwise burnouts I do on the Tuggeranong Parkway in Canberra at 2am with my street racing pals.  Yep, that's me.  Can't sleep. You have your hot chocolate, I have my night hobbies.

Our rubber can fly. Or something.

So, fair call, they want my car to be up to scratch.  Can't argue with that logic.  So I contacted a tyre place to organise some new front-end Goodyears.  If they are good enough for blimps then they are good enough for my car.

And here's a practical tip: it's probably best to not wear a pale pink winter coat when visiting the mechanic.  They see you coming.  Oh, here comes Barbie in her little red corolla car; let's rip her off.  She's probably so daft that she'll drive up the ramp on the street out the front that's reserved specifically for cars that are not hers. Yep.

So once these folk attach my new tyres and I'm paying the bill, they advise me they don't do inspections anymore.  That would have been really useful information when I booked and asked them if they did inspections. 

So a few days later I put my car into the same dealership, except one closer to my work, for a roadworthy inspection.  My car is so sick of being judged and criticised but we passed with flying colours and they told me about some things I needed to watch for in the future, which is exactly what I expect from my car servicer.  I find it's always ideal if the people who service your car alert you to any defects before your local government sees them.

Can it be that I have found my dream mechanic? One who isn't going to make out my car has a whole bunch of fake illnesses just to drain my bank balance or accuse me of Car Munchausen syndrome by Proxy?  Kmart Tyre and Auto in Phillip, Canberra.  I rate them.

And this journey isn't over yet, because that would be entirely unbureaucratic.  Before me and the little red four-wheeled fella are roadworthy again we must cut through more red tape and turn up to the house of condemned souls - the A.C.T. Government Shopfront - with our paperwork and beg for a gigantic novelty cardboard tick of approval from our Chief Minister, Katy Gallagher.  She works there, right?  She probably should occasionally.

Calculators - fast relief from adding shit

I’ve been reading up about internet usage in North Korea. We all have our hobbies). I’m thinking of starting a Facebook page called 'Kimmy John-un’s TicToc addiction is ruining people's lives and communism doesn't help either', and I wanted to know whether my disparaging remarks regarding the little sociopathic nutjob would put my life at risk.  Turns out it very possibly could.

According to Wikipedia, which can occasionally be more trustworthy that you think, hardly any communists in North Korea have access to Google but the ones who do spend their days surfing the net are high level government officials.  Henchmen.  And I don't want to be number 8,098 on their torture machine bucket list.

Plus, randomly, do they even have calculators in North Korea? Kimmy J-u is screwed up enough to ban the kiddies from using a contraption to solve math shit.  If Johnny has 6 apples and Susie has 3 apples then they're probably going to jail for stealing from the state-owned orchard anyway.

Would anyone like to know the story of the history of calculators?  I see someone at the back has their hand up.  Here we go then.  Once upon a time, someone invented a calculator.  The End.  This is a blog; I don't got no time for the history of a device that solves basic and complex math shit, friends.

Although I imagine the person who first operated such a machine was a bit like me - hated math.  Lots. When faced with a math equation of considerable proportion, or just an easy one, his brain likely threw up a gigantic anti-algebratic wall, as if to protect itself from the horrors of the apocalyptic nightmare that is any arithmetic problem that has the alphabet in it.  Because that's what menial silver-collar calculators are for.  Calculators live for this shit. 

Just say no to snow.

I've said it before and I imagine I'll bang on about it many times in the future - if I wanted to live in a place where the temperature regularly drops below zero for a bloody long period of time and it can't even be bothered to snow then I'd move to Antarctica.  Minus 3 degrees celsius and no snow?  Piss off. 

Shit just got real.  Tomorrow is the start of the ski season in my country, or at my local snowy mountains, or maybe someone just made that up.  I dont know.  I don't much care, because I don't do snow.  Snow is super pretty, but it's also super cold, and that just doesn't work for me.

Flashback Time.  *cue that zigzaggy pattern they show on Days of Our Lives when Hope has a flashback and laments ever meeting that Bo Brady, what with his cheesy bad boy one liners*  

I was first introduced to snow as a highschooler, and my foremost memory is of us all getting caught in a howling blizzard (as opposed to the calm and serene type of blizzards you usually get) and of me falling into a snow ditch with one ski wrapped around my neck.  That was some good times for sure.  I'm usually more outdoorsy, but snow drives a massive ice-cold wedge between me and nature.

I'm thinking about driving down the alpine way this year and picketing the ski fields.  Say no to snow, say no to snow!  Snow has to go!  Go home snow, go home snow!  The summer, united, will never be defeated!  Snow kills baby ducks!  And stuff like that. No-one ever pickets summer, because everyone likes a bit of warm weather.  Ask everyone.

Snowboarders, I like. I'm okay with snowboarders.  And lots of skiers I have also found to be decent folk, despite their horribly soggy hobby and their endless conversation icebreakers (boom, boom) regarding powder runs and other tedious snow-type lingo.

But over the years I have learnt that the more some people bang on about how great snow is, the more likely they are merely rich, pretentious twats who ride up and down chair lifts by day and toast each other over Bordeaux in their chateau over an open fire by night with a skewer stuck firmly up their marshmellows.

Feral Boojay & bogan-breeding

I'm feeling massively lazypants, but I want to whinge a bit about my city, Canberra, so this post has been tweaked, rehashed and recycled from last year to become the writing masterblogpost you see before you.  Alas, not a lot has changed since last year.

Living in Canberra and working in the public service is just bollocks at this time of the year. Speaking of balls, this place is cold enough to freeze them off a brass monkey right now.  Canberra is getting it's arctic monkey on.

As if that wasn’t enough horrible, we may as well rename my town Boojayberra for a couple of days and cut out any confusion. 

When it comes down to it, the federal budget is all about a small group of people who move massive amounts of money around an imaginery monopoly-type board while the rest of us go to work and hope they don't send us directly to jail or give us an old boot to play with.

I unfortunately know at least half a dozen people who get all excited by the associated budgetary figures and statistics of this system of commerce, and they're not even paid to be enthusiastic about the nuts and bolts, or faux interested at the other end of the public sector spectrum.  One of them works in advertising.  It's really not right.

I find their overeagerness terribly tragic and deeply disturbing, and it also means that no-one wants to talk to me right now about more pertinent matters, like what's happening in the Daily Mail.  I love the Daily Mail.  Pure British tabloid trashiness.

I know not to watch commercial news stations EVER. I know not to do this. And this is why.  Why is a single mother with no income and five children under the age of five by five different fathers considered a ‘victim of the economy’, rather than what she really is, which is a completely irresponsible skank?  Why is she considered disadvantaged, and why does the Gillard Government support people like this with a sugar hit?  Well, skank, Wayne Swan says no more baby bonuses for you.

If you can't afford to have children then you probably shouldn't be having children. Is this really rocket science?  It shouldn't be an entitlement; it should be means-tested, and not only financially. While I admit that would be a win for the nanny state, it would also be a huge triumph for the rest of the community.  In reality, the only people who worry about whether they can afford children are the people who can afford to have children.

RANT OF THE DAY - Recorder Distorters

Everywhere I go there are annoying little people - I think they may be called children - learning how to play the recorder.  Badly.  They do it very, very badly.  Why is this happening, you ask.  Nobody knows.

Learning how to play a musical instrument when you are a snotty, little ratbag serves no useful, practical purpose whatsoever, unless you want to be in a jazz band (fair call) or a busker (not the best career choice but inevitable for some) when you grow up, although it is also a very useful method of irritating this shit out of everyone within a one mile radius.

For the uneducated and uninterested, a recorder is a musical instrument of ear death.  A flute-like eardrum-bleeding torture machine.  A wooden tube that needs to be snapped into little pieces as soon as the user blows that hideous squeaking racket out of its little holes.

Rant of the day.  Thank you and good day.

Donna from That 70's Show

Unless it was English literature period or sports related, I didn't pay a great deal of attention in primary slash high school, but I'm pretty sure that during geography (or math or biology or textiles or whatever they taught it in) they indicated, through a procession of native costumes from around the world, that there were at least 30 people in the world. 

In the ensuing 82 years since I've become an adult, it must be at least 40 annoying human beings by now inhabiting this place.  Which means some of us must have a doppelganger or two or three.  We can't all be different.

For many years people - often strangers, weirdly; strange and weird strangers actually - have been telling me that I look a lot like Donna from That 70's Show.  Ah, Donna from That 70's Show.  Bloody Donna from That 70's Show. 

The offending actress.

I used to quite like That 70's Show until I started getting compared to bloody Laura Prepon, the offending actress who happens to be the spitting image of Donna. 

I didn't really mind the comparison - I mean, who cares - but I have been stroppy about it for so long that it would be hairbrained to just go along with it now.  I got the Donna comment again last week, which has strongly encouraged this social media rant.  

Bloody late night reruns on free-to-air.  It wasn't too bad when Laura had red hair, even when the show was on in prime time in the early 00's.  But as soon as she decided to go blonde I was a'stuffed.  

And much of this was before the gods of internet search engines reinvented the wheel, in the days when people actually had to use their brains to try and work things out for themselves, rather than just type "daggy television actresses" into The Google.  

And there's nothing more annoying than someone trying to remember who you look like and thinking you have any interest whatsoever in helping them in this process.

While I refuse to be able to see this apparent likeness, I've been following Laura's career over the years out of self-respect really, fearful that, as an out-of-work actress receiving meagre Hollywood benefits, she may decide to take on a D-Grade movie role as a dancer in a tawdry, seedy strip club.  I don't much care what Laura Prepon does with her life, so long as she keeps her clothes on while she's doing it.        

        

Why I hate Sudoku

10,000 years ago - which is just a few years before Rolf Harris learnt how to manouvre a piece of butcher's paper to elicit noise because he couldn't play a guitar - a Chinaman sat alone on a hill, probably somewhere in the hills in China, and wondered what to do with his day. 

He was bored, you see, kind of how Westerners feel when an inconsiderate thunderstorm screws with their internet reception and they can't spend the afternoon LOLing at I Can Haz Cheeseburger cats. Except the Chinaman didn't have electricity or Google, he barely had dial-up internet access, so he was really bloody bored as shit.  

So what did he do?  The little bastard decided to invent Sudoku, didn't he.  Nothing to do, so let's create a monstrosity of a cryptic puzzle that no-one can ever solve because they aren't friggin' mindreaders, they don't have a spare 53 days to complete a stupid brainteaser and they aren't blessed with the patience of a Buddhist. 

Only someone who can focus the mind on meditating for hours and hours and hours has the patience for this shit.  Humour me while I curse some more - I FUCKING HATE THIS GAME. (Disclaimer: Probably because I am really shite at it)

I first discovered Sudoku last year, when I was stranded in an airport in Florida as a ferocious hurricane threatened to blow the state away.  Apparently planes don't do hurricanes.  My internet refused to work, so I resorted to the delightfully quaint and old-fashioned pen and paper to entertain me. 

I started about 24 easy games of Sudoku, and felt a vague sense of achievement and satisfaction each time I gave up and looked at the answers.  Sometimes you just gotta keep your expectations low.  Plus shit gets done a whole lot quicker with this approach.

I'm currently trying to complete a hard Sudoku.  I don't know why - but I did emerge from a Coles supermarket today with a touch of a headache, so maybe I was abducted by fresh food aliens in the fruit and veggie patch, curious at why anyone would ever voluntarily eat celery.  I'm also trying to complete the cryptothon without cheating.  I honestly don't know what's come over me.  Maybe the Sudoku's inherent Buddhist teachings are rubbing off.



Can this game possibly get any more annoying? I need a game plan.  Would butcher's paper help?  It's got Rolf out of many a sticky situation.  What would Jack Bauer do? He'd glue some C4 to the page and blow it all the way back to Beijing.  Alternatively, I could just watch some telly.



Too much Sudoku



Rockets and Oranges

I live in a first world country, which means I don't have to worry about food, water or sanitation, at least until I go to an open air loo in a hick country town.

So basically, for the most part, my mind is free to concern itself with such pointless matters as the vagaries of my mood on any given day (usually Monday to Friday, funnily enough), the hideousness of the shock frocks at the Golden Globes, or, tonight, the outrageous bright orangeness of the outfits of the linepeoples at the Australian Open tennis in Melbourne. 

Think of the most radiant orange day-glo neon hue you can possibly imagine and then go ten times brighter, shine 18 big arse sporting lights on it and stick a couple of high-voltage neon lamps down their pants for that blinding effect.

I guess if Mothership Earth has a power outage we'll at least have Rod Laver Arena to guide us back to orbit or whatever happens when we turn the lights out at night.  I don't know, I'm not an astronauteer.  Plus I don't need to know about science; that's what Sheldon and The Big Bang Theory are for.

Despite the fact that I've almost mastered a high-level (see: very basic) understanding of entropy, the second law of thermodynamics - which is in fact a true story - my grasp of anything else related to science or math is akin to that of a kindergartener, perhaps even leaning toward advanced preschool level.

My brain just refuses to acknowledge that science and math make any sense whatsoever.  The other day my sister and I watched one of those disastrous disaster movies made by the special effects trainees at Universal Studios.  My sister possesses a university degree in some brain debilitatingly boring science shit and found it necessary to laugh raucously throughout at the actors lack of understanding of the basics of physics as they tossed out lines like "magnetic activity is unpredictable". 

Okay, given, magnets don't really surprise you that often with their behaviour, but which science is phsyics again?  I know; embarrassing.  Science actually hurts my brain and math leaves even more collateral damage.

The Incredible Shrinking Mountain

I don't know if this is an Australian thing, but plastic bottles ain't what they used to be. Coca-Cola Amatil, the makers of the deliciously tasteless Mount Franklin spring water beverage, have decided that the best way to completely piss off the thirsty people of Australia is to use 35% less plastic in their new easy-crush bottles.

That's great, CCA executives; a container that's easy to crush when empty. But you know what that means? It means it's also friggin' easier to crush while your drinking it.  Or when you twist open the lid a bit too heavy-handedly.  I bet this was one of those massively stupid decisions that chief executives make when they are brushing their teeth in the morning. 

I thought I was bulking up a bit too much at the gym before I read the side panel advertising the incredible shrinking bottle. CCA claims that one little bottle now creates a carbon footprint that is 27% lighter than the previous little bottle. A lighter carbon footprint, my arse. You sell your products in plastic, you dickheads.  I imagine it's more to do with reducing overheads than saving the world, but kudos where kudos are due.

All the inner city hipsters with their hippy, environmentally friendly lifestyles have probably whipped out their special wind-powered calculators they use to measure the square root of their carbon footprint and have figured this is a good enough deal to stop drinking water straight out of a grimy tap in a back alley and start buying plastic.

Anyone who hoodwinks the hipsters into believing they are saving the earth – which has been perfectly capable of looking after itself for 4.5 billion years without their help - gets my stamp of approval. 

The Curse of the Mandarin

Since I've returned from my holiday to the United States of Crazy, I've stupidly begun a healthy eating diet, which people tell me means I need to eat health food or I fail.  Well that's got recipe for disaster written all over it then, doesn't it?

So I've been eating a lot of healthy food lately, and lots of fruit, which isn't much different to usual.  But the word on the street is that fruit is healthier for you than chocolate.  Wha...??  While I find this so-called 'fact' fairly difficult to stomach, I'm going to give health food (italics used to denote derision) a shot in the name of eating-options-that-are-brain-debilitatingly-boring.

Now, bananas.  I've always been a big banana fan. They are delicious, zero drama and easy to consume.  No mess, no fuss; just a completely psychologically balanced fruit that appears to have no discernible personality disorders.  My type of fruit. I hate crazy fruit.

Citrus fruit, on the other hand, make me fairly angry. Take mandarins. They have an obstructionist manner that I just cannot tolerate. There are simply too many steps involved in eating a mandarin. I ate a mandarin today. This is what happened to me - I'm sure you've had a similar experience. Step one is always choosing one that doesn't smell like it has been invaded by a herd of marauding worms.

Step two involves peeling the damn thing; like I have nothing better to do with my time.  Mandarins need to take a banana leaf out of the famous yellow fruit's book and learn how to be peel friendly. No-one will ever love you if you continue to be a narcissistic, passive aggressive ball of hard to peel, orange annoyingness.

Step three brings you to the eating stage, but that doesn't mean you can rest on your laurels. There is still much work to be done. The eating stage involves monitoring the fruit for pips, of which there are usually about 500 of the damn things in every segment of mandarin.  And the final stage is mandarin juice.  Everywhere!  This fruit is so annoying.  

Mangoes are one of my favourite summer snacks, but they can also be quite frustrating, given that one can only eat about 30% of the fruit, and it is so slippery and slimy you need to take a shower after you've dealt with it.

I've only just started noticing avocados, after a life filled with fear and terror of putting the green slime in my mouth. They have rapidly become one of my favourite snacks, even though they come with a big pointless stone in their centre.  I think that's about it.

Ruinous Rats and Drowning Swimmers

It seems the long-awaited (in that we've been waiting eons and eons) NBN rollout is been sabotaged by jaded and ravenous rats in Darling Downs.  I have no idea where Darling Downs is, nor do I especially care, but I assume it is in some inaccessible part of Australia where the NBN will fail to work properly anyway.

I think perhaps the Gillard Government could provide a rat welfare program for vermin that are just scraping by on the poverty line. Or at the very least allow them to dodge filing a tax return in 2012-13.

Perhaps the government could also administer some type of rat fulfilment scheme, where rat youth could while away their days playing free pokies and developing an alcohol or nicotine addiction rather than spending their time destroying the somewhat futile government infrastructure. There is no evidence that I know of that suggests rats suffer from gambling dependence, so I'm sure a program of this nature has some legs.

Speaking of rats, two swimmers that were chosen for the Australian Olympic team are watching their careers go down the gurgler. The two boys - I don't know their names, and don't really care, and couldn't really be bothered Googling them or reading their names in the attached article to find out - that will carve up the dirty, grubby, swampy Thames during the Games in London in July have found themselves in sticky festering septic water again, thanks to the fact that they are both total dickheads.

I think one of them broke someone's jaw once and the other lied about something or something. It seems to me that if the people who pay for your togs and your jetsetting around the globe already hate you it is perhaps best to not give them any more ammunition, like access to photos on Twitter of you posing with guns and ammunition. 

But the boys did just that, most likely because they are not terribly smart; I suppose you don't have to be to pursue a black line up and down a pool. I expect the left wing media and Swimming Australia wouldn't have blinked an eyelid if the boys had been embracing a javelin, for example, which is, however, also a nifty weapon to be clutching if you are suddenly overtaken with the psychotic predisposition.

But guns, woah, guns are dangerous. Leftwingers (ie. much of the media) are terrified of guns.  They start  hyperventilating when anyone holds a gun: "Aghhh! It's a serial killer! We're all gonna die!"  It really is anyone's guess why they allow coverage of the swimming at the Olympics in that case, because kids drown in pools all the time. And doing backflips on a thin mattress and coining it gymnastics isn't the best idea for your posture.  And sprinting over hurdles is just a wacky brainchild.

I am going to Florida shortly, home sweet home of redneck alligators and Disney World, and I think it is an ideal location and an opportune time for me to buy a handgun. Just because you can.  I don't mean at Disney*, I mean at Wallmart. I’ve always wanted to go to Wallmart. 

And then I can post some snaps on Facebook with my new toy. One of my favourite pastimes is watching leftwingers get so agitated that their heads spin around until they explode, so what better grounds do I need?  And then I could get labelled a pro-gun extremist - ie, the Age's name for anyone who disagrees with the Age on gun control.

Anti-gun groups and the nutty left wing media windbags start screaming like banshees about banning guns altogether whenever they hear the word. They seem to think the crime rate would simply disappear if guns didn’t exist. The assumption that everyone would start shooting everyone if everyone had a gun is absurd. And the assumption that criminals would forget about murdering, raping and pillaging society if there were no guns is also idiotic.

The left wing media should be targeting Federal judges, who often release serious criminals back onto the streets, believing they can be rehabilitated. They believe murderers are basically good people except for their tendency to sometimes kill people.

* Just kidding Disney.  Why would you sell handguns? What I mean is please don't sue me.