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.

First world problem

A moving tale of a guest blogger's first world problem.

The other day I picked up my e-tag package from Australia Post on the way home from work. When I got home I dumped all my stuff on the table and I was hungry so I started eating cheese things and got orange all over my hands. Then I remembered I had an e-tag!!!!!! I had to open the package up right away and play with my new toy!!! However, I had orange all over my hands so I went to my automatic soap dispenser to get some cucumber and aloe soap, but the battery was flat. I went into the bathroom and I was all out of honey and vanilla scented moisturising hand wash so I had to get some out of the linen cupboard. Before I went through the linen cupboard I had to go outside and wash my hands under the hose like I lived in India or something. Then I went back to the linen cupboard and some Egyptian cotton sheets fell on my head while I was rummaging around. They were 1200 thread count and really heavy. Finally I got the hand wash out. I had bought a six pack from Costco for about $10 and it was really heavy and hard to get the plastic and cardboard wrap off and the weight of it hurt my wrist and I got a paper cut from the stupid packaging. Then the soap went all over the basin when I tried to put it in the dispenser. By then I was really tired, so I watched some TV and ate more cheese things. I still haven't put my e-tag on my car. The package is still sitting on the coffee table, taking up room, which means the remotes are all bundled up in one corner, so I had to move my drink coaster, and now I have to reach further to get my tea when I'm watching television.

Cyber Browsing

I've been trying to get interested in the whole internet shopping thing, and it's not going terribly well.  I find shopping in the real world to be a bit of a slow death, let alone in the cyber world.  A waste of one or two perfectly good hours looking at stuff while shuffling along at an infuriatingly slow pace through a retail outlet the size of the Pentagon.  Shopping is tediously boring at the best of times, and it seems that the cyber version isn't terribly interesting to me either. 

Although, at least in the cyber world you don't have to put up with apathetic retail assistants.  Things have changed alot since the glory days of retailing, when specialised salespeople would inform customers about the merits of a given product with an air of servitude and grace.  These days you have to deal with shop biatches who avoid eye contact in fear of having to actually assist you, or worse, are so perky and lively you just want to give them a smack in the back of the head. 

And then they try to sell you clothing items of high quality, which means they are designed to wear out in eight months instead of six.  And shopping online also means you don't have to put up with trying to negotiate your way through a sea of baby strollers, which are pushed fervently through the mall, and are apparently designed to ensure your child can survive a sudden and unexpected encounter with a herd of charging wildebeest. 

So women all around me have been banging on about their online shopping purchases; wearing faux fur coats from New York and red boots from Swaziland, or somewhere similar to that but probably a place that has a functioning economy, thus the ability to ship clothes to women all over the globe.

Anyway, I do believe I have just failed at online shopping.  This evening I spent a good eighteen minutes or so browsing the websites Google decided met my exacting search criteria; that being online shopping.  I looked through about thirty identical looking t-shirts on one site before I decided that I would prefer to stick a hot poker in my eye rather than look at any more.  How does one find anything they are looking for? 

Scrolling down the sidebar under Styles, I was offered timeless, contemporary, bohemian rhapsody, modern romance, disco fever, and casual.  Casual!  Yes, I know what casual is.  Let's go there.  I found the Style: What's this? tab to be particularly unhelpful.  Under casual tops, I could choose from knits and tees, blouses and button-down shirts (what's the difference?), tanks and camis (difference?), polos, sweaters, fashion hoodies, blazers or rompers in ruffles, silk, cotton, loose boatneck, assymetrical, rayon, blah, blah, blah.

Most of these websites are user friendly.  When I say user friendly, I mean completely infuriating.  And the FAQ section is always special.  Neither questions nor frequently asked, this is the section of the web site that compiles all the spin the company wants to snowball you with in one convenient location.  Question: What is the preferred customer discount plan?  Answer: Duh, an opportunity for us to assist you in hemorrhaging money. 

Who the hell has the time to follow fashion anyway? Probably about six people in the world. Which might explain why runway models are always wearing some of the weirdest crap, none of which ever makes it to your local retail outlets.

French Cooking

I've spent the morning planning what I will cook for dinner tonight; like I do every Sunday morning.  So many choices, so many ingredients, so many cookbooks!  Do I choose a cookbook written by an actual chef who has tasted food, or do I take the passionate yet pointless advice of a vegan moviestar who eats air for dinner, like Gwyneth Paltrow?  Oh, so many decisions...

As if.  Let's come crashing back to reality, my friend. I don't cook. Well, I occasionally cook, but I would call it obliterating the basic foundations of the food pyramid rather than cooking as such. I am, however, a highly competent chef when it involves pressing a couple of buttons on the microwave. 

If a snooty Parisian food critic ever comes to my house assessing microwave cooking techniques, I will earn a couple of Michelin stars straight away for my superior and savvy style. Ohhh, technique fantastique! they will snort. I know, you're judging me. That's okay, I get that alot.  But when people tell me they enjoy cooking I say - enjoy it compared to what? They probably also enjoy using toilet duck and vacuuming cat hair from velcro carpet.   

Denial: "I love vacuuming the floor.  I don't get to do it very often, but when I get to do it for someone else, it makes me so happy and fulfilled! And a clean toilet makes me fulfilled as well. But if I'm the only one home, I never do it."

I see cooking as a chore, which I why I commissioned French cooking artiste extraordinaire Manu Feidel to come around to my house every Sunday afternoon to prepare a roast or some exotic dish involving pheasant, goat's cheese and other posh-sounding food for my gastronomic pleasure. Are these ingredients supposed to go together? I don't know. See why I don't cook? 

Although Manu didn't show up last weekend.  I can't comprehend his beautiful broken English at the best of times, but I believe he cited some ballroom dancing competition that he was involved in. Honestly, who's going to believe that? He's French, he can cook and he can dance? Yeah right. 

But he did tell me to text - Manu to 191 777 - over and over again. I don't question French chefs, so I have done so. You probably should as well.

Elevator Departure Statements

The elevator is a great invention, isn't it?  Designed to induce awkward silences whenever more than one person occupies it at the same time.  I work on the 10th floor of an office building, thus I ride the elevators a fair bit, thus I spend a fair bit of time listening to snippets of conversations of people coming back from lunch, and I take the opportunity to interpret various topics and meanings of their chat in any way I wish.

And I stand quietly in the corner. Judging. Psychoanalysing. No, not really, most of time I just want them to talk about something more interesting.  So I’ve started to notice a lot of Elevator Departure Statements (EDS), and I’ve decided that I want to make like the lower floors and join this elite group.

An EDS occurs when random strangers are having a conversation in the lift about a topic that could verge into disagreeable territory at any moment. And then you hit floor seven, and a lady gets out and throws a smoke bomb into the conversation and everyone stares at her as she flounces off with her grocery bags and latte as the doors close.

Let me give an example.  The other day, us elevator riders, as a collective, agreed that the weather was too friggin' cold.  Because it was.  And then the lift binged for the seventh floor.  As the doors opened, a lady got out and said "Well, I like this weather." 

You know what just happened? We just got EDS'd – she dropped the verbal smoke bomb and got the last word. No questions asked, just the last word. You can’t argue with a set of metal doors. Well you can, and I'm sure there’s a therapy group in the public service that you can join and some public servants who are willing to champion your disorder. There are no (habitable) floors above me, so my elusive EDS moment may never eventuate.

An EDS is psychological warfare, my friend. They so know the effect their weapon will have on innocent bystanders. As far as I’m concerned, if you have a point, make it, and stand behind it. Everyday Aussies dropping an EDS. What is this country coming to?

It's cold. Seriously.

Somehow through the blah blah blah of the opening news stories on Sydney's outrageously self-absorbed national-ish nightly news, I heard that the precious residents of Bondi, Coogee and the North Shore froze last night when they bottomed out at 8 degrees.  Seriously, is that all they got? 

Right now, I am simultaneously too warm AND too cold; but my built-in thermostat has been on the blink for years.  Canberra has real actual cold weather at the moment, Sydney.  Winter is an impatient mistress, and I do not like cold weather one little bit.  Oh, the expletives!  But I chose to live in Canberra because the housing market in Antarctica is through the roof.  If this keeps up, I'm going to have to order an ice throne from Narnia like Tilda Swinton's. 


I did not order this weather and I would like to know who I can return it to.  No-one forecasted it accurately, and it feels a lot like false advertising, because, if I remember correctly, we were promised at least 9 degrees. 

Do these meteroweatherologist crystal ball readers just pop any old number into their comp-a-tar before they head off for their morning brew - secure in the knowledge they have foiled us yet again?  Forecast collusion anybody?  And what happens if they accidently put in a figure that is grossly inaccurate?  Like 40 degrees instead of -10?  These things need to be addressed forthwith.  But you know what they say about the internet. Not wrong for long.    

I, on the other hand, can forecast the weather like nobody's business.  Lets see; tomorrow is going to be friggin' cold.  Consider your weather forecasted.  The scope of my forecasting brilliance knows no bounds. 

Anywho, it's far too cold here, and I would like to send this coldness back to the cold land in which it came from; which is likely to be Antarctica or Iceland or perhaps it popped over from Norway.  Is there some sort of cold weather convention going on at EPIC in Canberra?  Just another thing no-one told us about.  And remember, tomorrow is going to be friggin' COLD.  I'm a forecasting fountain - drink from me.  Or throw coins of silver and bronze.  I also accept Visa and American Express.

McBogans

Ah, Today Tonight. What would we do without you? We’d probably get along just fine, and be a far less litigious society, and have far less cashed-up bogans, and no-one would notice you were gone.   Anyway, TT ran a story tonight on parents who take their children on family shopping adventures. What? So why is that TT-worthy? 

Well, aside from the fact that TT is completely ridiculous at the best of times, this story was about a type of shopping adventure that you engage in without any exchange of cash taking place. No, no credit cards either. Don’t need credit cards. It’s more of a five-fingered discount type of family outing. For arguments sake, let’s call it bogan shopping. Because bogans think shopping the traditional, old-fashioned way of trading cash for goods kinda McSucks.

But who can blame the bogans.  When the parole officer told Tracee-Lee that she should spend more quality time with her offspring, Chardonaay-Jaiymee, she probably meant do something that wasn't illegal.  But how can Tracee-Lee have possibly be expected to know that?  Those parole officers really need to be more SPECIFIC. “Quality time with your family” for convicted criminals means taking your offspring with you when you steal a three-pack of skivvies from Best and Less / hold up an IGA.

And then the journalist (that's italicised for the purpose of sarcasm), spoke to the security manager of one electronics outlet. Surely, if they have footage of a bogan lady walking out with a blue ray DVD player and surround sound system they should have caught her. How do these people get the guts to walk out with a pile of hot goods anyway? That’s confidence.

And what were the security personnel doing when the stock was walking out the door in the hands of bogan trash? Probably eating one of McDonald’s new Pounder burgers.  Rather than securing things, they were probably stuffing their faces with 50,000 calories of fluorescent cheese and a curious meat-looking product on a sesame seed bun-looking product.  Maximum taste, minimum wage. Sheesh, it's like putting Hamburglar in charge of the security department.

I really hate segways on commercial television. Why do they have to announce that they have just made a fabulous segway into the next story? It was stupid even before they decided to point it out.  Anywho, speaking of McDonalds...

TT also reported that McDonalds are denying they have a burger called the Pounder, even though they do in fact have a new burger called the Pounder.  Instead of dealing with the fallout of having a burger on your menu with a calorie count that would feed a third world country, and further bloat the waistlines of people who seem incapable of driving anywhere expect fast food outlets, the McDonald’s PR simply denied its existence.

Despite the fact the TT man (I can’t bring myself to call him a journalist again) had just gone into McDonalds and bought a Pounder.  Genius damage control. I like it. I stand behind it. Bill Clinton also famously got away with it with the skanky McIntern using this little tactic.  Well, got away with it in the sense that most lefties still think the sun shines out of his McArse.

British Royal 'pain in the arse' Mail

The big royal wedding is inching closer, but, alas, I still have not received my invitation. It certainly is no secret that I'm a constitutional monarchist, and the moniker of one of the most mentally stable members of the British Royal Family was bestowed upon me at birth, so it seems perfectly acceptable that I should expect to have received a royal embossed envelope in the mail by now. So, where the bloody hell are ya, my little regal invite? Hmm, I wonder if Lara Bingle knows where it is.

I shouldn't be surprised.  The postal classification of First Class merely ensures your mail will be lost even sooner that if sent at the regular rate.


It would just be so typical of the British Royal Mail to lose my invitation to the Wills and Kate nuptials.  During my backpacking stint in England many moons ago, I worked as a casual mail sorter at the Royal Mail Sorting and Letter Misplacement and Frequent Displacement Centre in Oxford.  During an action-packed five days working for the Queen's mailbag, I learnt much about the efficiency and professionalism of the national mail service. 

For example, one of my learned colleagues told me he sorted the letters by handwriting style, because that made his day just race on by.  Through watching my colleagues, I learnt that it was not necessarily essential to sort every piece of mail by the correct postcode.  Well, I kinda thought it was essential to sort every bit of mail by the correct postcode, so I had a formal conversation with my supervisor to that effect. 

Alas, the captain of the mailroom did not appreciate my insane common sense palaver, and so ended my short, turbulent career in the royal mailroom.  Which was a shame, because it was so mentally stimulating spending eight hours sorting thousands and thousands of white paper squares into numbered piles.  Unless you have undertaken menial work of this nature, you have NO idea how excited one gets when one comes across a red envelope!  I even got a blue one and a yellow one in quick succession one afternoon, and the sheer joy got me through my shift.  But no-one seemed to care if I sorted them correctly.  You know, in a way the average Joe might expect their mail to be sorted in a mail-sorting centre.

So essentially what I am saying is that the British Royal Mail is not really the ideal service to use if you want your Oxfordshire-bound postage items to a) get from A to B, b) get from A to B without going through C, D and E, and c) get to its destination in less than six weeks, if at all.

Convicted criminals and budding jailbirds

This week the Commonwealth Bank stuffed up majorly, when “routine maintenance” miraculously caused various ATMs to spew out money to people who had no money in their bank accounts. The media and consumer groups are whinging and whining about how the Commonwealth Bank are trying to deflect attention onto the "decent people" who took the money. These groups believe that people commit crimes because they are angry at the system, and that if we could just convince them that the system is fair by not putting them in prison, no one would ever commit crime again.

Sure, the Commonwealth Bank ATMs were disrupted for some ridiculous reason, allowing idiots to take out random amounts of money that did not belong to them. But another key issue here is that society is so screwed up that people turn into criminals at the first opportunity. And this isn’t society’s fault; this is a problem at the individual level. At the level of people who think what’s mine is mine and what’s yours is negotiable.

If you think this is society’s fault, then you need to wake up and take some responsibility for your own actions, with includes the consequences that come with stealing money. It doesn’t matter who you are stealing from, or the circumstances that surround the act of stealing; you are a criminal and you should be punished within the law.

Speaking of convicts, felons and other assorted criminals, Channel Seven’s new reality show, Conviction Kitchen, pits a bunch of convicted felons against each other in a cooking competition. Or something of that nature. I haven’t watched it and don't plan to.  I don't give a rats if they can cook cordon bleu, I just don't want them to break any more laws and screw up society any more than they already have. The show is just another of the network’s idiotic programming decisions, and claims to give criminals a second chance. But I take their tearful remorsefulness with a giant silo of salt.

Prison. Naturally I think of LiLo


 “Would you give me a chance?”, says one Conviction Kitchen contestant on one of the network's ads. No, I will not give you a chance.  You have had your chance to play by society’s rules and you blew it. When you break the law, you go to jail. That’s how it works.  And you also gave up certain democratic rights and freedoms that are afforded to law-abiding citizens.

For example, you forgo the right to freedom, and you forgo the right to be given a second chance, because I just don’t trust you and don’t think I should have to.  These people convicted of petty crimes are stigmatised because they have broken our trust, and a stupid cooking show isn't going to fix that.  Why are law-abiding citizens always pressured to place their trust in people who have already screwed them (society) over?

Let’s be honest (a virtuous attribute that escaped our kitchen help convict).  She went to prison because she got caught; she didn't turn herself in.  The legal mumbo-jumbo for this is premeditated.  People who turn themselves in - I might consider giving a second chance, depending on the crime. But she got caught, and there’s no point whinging about how remorseful you are when are caught stealing with your hand in your employer's money jar in what the law likes to call fraud.

Jack Bauer - fighting tyranny since 2001

I'd just like to say that, despite the fact that he is fictional, Jack Bauer, played by Kiefer Sutherland, is awesome. Jack spent his television career fighting off all sorts of devilish criminals, from Islamic fundamentalists to Mexican drug lords to loose cannon, poker-playing Chechen militants with bad accents.

But by far, Jack's biggest opponents were often the left wing governments he worked for. Jack's show, '24', was produced by the Fox Network, traditionally a conservative news outlet, meaning they produce news that is fair and balanced, unlike CNN, who don't care terribly for facts and truth. And '24' was a pretty accurate summary of the international political environment - where the only way to deal with international terrorists is generally through a process of force and torture. Anyone who says this violates the human rights of terrorists needs to know this: you are an idiot.

Jack knew that terrorists aren't big on sitting around a table with a U.N. panel to discuss a fair and appropriate solution to their disagreements. Because a fair solution usually means the terrorists have to cede some of the power that they misuse, and start treating people with respect and dignity and stop using them for target practice, as human shields and for suicide missions. Terrorists much prefer blowing up the negotiating table, as Jack discovered in seasons 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 and 7.

But instead of fighting the bad guys, Jack had to spend alot of his time trying to convince one stupid democratic president after another that his way was best. And of course, the Democrats always agreed that Jack's way was best AFTER the deaths of hundreds of people.

I really have no idea why the American people vote for Democrats to run the country in the first place. George Bush spent the first few years of his first term cleaning up the mess that Bill Clinton could have prevented while he was in office. In the 90s, Clinton was offered Osama Bin Laden's head on a platter by Sudan. He could have locked up the mass murderer and tossed away the key, but he didn't want to look like he was racially profiling, plus he was far too busy having sex in the oval office to worry about international terrorism.

'24' was axed in 2010, midway through it's 8th season. Fox believed the new producers were veering too far away from Jack's character, and because their stupid storylines involved Jack heading out to have tea and cookies with Islamic imans to apologise for offending them while he was defending the United States from destruction at the hands of their followers.