I watched Downton Abbey.

The lovely electronic people who operate the buttons at Foxtel are replaying the sixth and final season of my beloved Downton Abbey, the British historical period drama about a centuries-old estate in England in which a bunch of obscenely rich people sit around drinking tea and whinging about their society friends. It's exactly the same as 2019, but with less comfortable clothes.

In it's 2011-16 hey day, Downton Abbey was among my favouritest TV programs. 

I honestly don't know why Britian's ITV brought it to an end; they could have kept this ship sailing all the way to the 1970s, with Lady Mary now in her early 70s and rocking high cut boots and a technicolour cowl neck sweater. Mr Carson, the house butler, would be still ruling the roost at about 170 years old.

The final season is set in 1925, which will go well to explaining why not one person has a mobile phone glued to their hand. They just had to remain stoic in the face of great suffering without Snapchat filters to cheer them up.

If  they wanted to communicate with each other in 1925 they had to telegram each other, or travel by early, early model crappy cars for hours and hours to reach each other to communicate a thought bubble that could have just been texted with a smiley face emoticon attached. 

Or, and this is the worst of all, they had to pick up a thing that was attached to a machine that was attached to a wall and put it near their ear until they heard voices on the other end! Absurd! Thankfully, everyone in the West is now in complete agreement that  speaking to another person on a telephone is passé and no longer worth our time.

For context, other things that happened in 1925 include the release of Hitler’s Mein Kampf, The Great Gatsby, Phantom of the Opera and Ben Hur, giant tornadoes in the U.S., UKs Child Labor Laws, Mussolini took over Italy, an airship crashed over Ohio, lots of airlines were formed around the world, diptheria outbreak, scotch tape was invented. Scotch Tape! All the things.

For more context - because I acknowledge the last bit of context was not particularly helpful in following the show's storyline - the people who sleep in the comfy beds in Downton Abbey are very rich. They have significant material wealth and also significant mounts of butter on their toast in the morning. I have noticed. Rich in many ways. Both of which sort of kill you in very different ways. 

Downton Abbey, season six, episode 5 or something:

SPOILERS!

Action!

Lord Grantham is recovering from last week’s episode, when his ulcer came out of his mouth in a bloody explosion. Too much butter on his toast probably. He is bedridden and has to receive incessant visits from his family all day because Netflix wasn’t invented. I suppose he could have entertained himself with a newly minted roll of scotch tape.

Kitchenhand Daisy speaks something annoying and annoys me.

The Crawleys  - the custodians of Downton Abbey - are planning to open the house to the peasants to raise money for the local Hospital. Don’t do it, Crawleys. As it turns out, the Open House is a roaring success, except for the common people ambling around their grand home, looking at the artworks with their dirt-poor, commoner eyes and dragging their pauper backsides across the antique furniture and carpets.

All the poor people have to wear dogpoo brown and dogpoo grey because Supre and other synthetic clothes from China were not invented yet.

Everyone gathers in the drawing room over and over again for tea and tedious, fairly pointless conversation.

Mr Bates and Anna, two of the house staff, have a conversation after work in their dark and depressing living room. “What about a fire? It’s a bit indulgent but we’ve earnt it today”. Everything I hate about ye olden times in one handy sentence.

Again, sitting around drinking tea. Always sitting around drinking tea. But they still do that today in England, because it’s always cold, grey tea-drinking weather. I also like drinking tea, because tea is everything that is right and good in the world. Viva la Downton Abbey.

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.

A Culturally Iconic Bowl of Gridiron

America loves its bowls. While most bowls are round, the Americans seem to favour the rectangular ones. They believe their bowls are quite magnificent in their properties and hold things really good. They even go so far as to call them Super Bowls. Once a year, they put all the food and drink in America in a really big bowl and 100,000 people sit there and eat it and cheer on men with footballs. Such great craic.

Such a huge coincidence that I write today of awe inspiring containers typically used to prepare and serve food because that Super Bowl brouhaha has just taken place again - Los Angeles Rams took on the New England Patriots and lost.  There were broken bits of china bowl everywhere. And I watched a bit of it, like I often do, without a darn clue as to the nature of any of those player’s business on the field.

I don’t understand the end game of plays in gridiron at all. What are they trying to do. No-one will tell me. The commentators are really of no help whatsoever. I have to use my knowledge of other codes of football and just assume they are trying to get to each other’s end to secure points by being there with the football.

I don’t even understand what the name of the game means. I’m sure Wikipedia could tell me but I don’t care that much. Okay fine. Wikipedia says gridiron is “a team sport played by two teams of eleven players on a rectangular field with goalposts at each end”. Oh that’s extremely helpful, Wikipedia. Can you please explain astrophysics to me? Wikipedia also says gridiron is an instrument of torture on which people were secured before being burned by fire back in ye olden days, so that’s lovely. I feel like watching gridiron could also be considered an instrument of torture.

I always say I don’t understand this at all, and then it occurred to me that watching the national sport of another culture is like visiting another culture, so the least I can do is try to understand it.

So how does one begin to understand another culture? Become self-aware of your biases? Oh, I’m very aware that this game is stupid and makes no sense. But why is that? Should I do my own research to try and understand? Okay. I’ve done that. None of the plays make any sense. Should I talk to someone from a gridiron background? Um, the commentators are confusing the fuck out of me.  Here are some examples of their lingo:
 “2nd and 11” - I think this is basic gridiron. I don’t understand what those words mean. 
“Rams converted on their last 3rd downs” - that doesn’t mean anything.
 “62, 345, first of 20” - what. 
“The longest 3rd down the Rams face tonight” - not a thing. Not words that should be uttered in a sentence, because it’s not a sentence that makes sense.

Alright, back to the game. From what I can tell, there is only one footballer with any talent on the field. The quarterback. He’s literally the only skilled employee on the books. The rest of them just run into each other like I do all day if I don’t wear my glasses. Is that unfair to the rest of the players? I don’t know.

Oh now another timeout. The players, coach and Other Unnecessary Sideline People are all going to group together to try and figure out what the actual heck is going on.

I have to say that, culturally, I just don’t find it that interesting. But I get it, you know. The hallowed ground of Superbowl is a cultural place of significance. They have their own language, wear different clothes to sporting teams I’m familiar with, the land markings are different, the crowds have a different vibe, the stadiums are…huge. The stadium in Atlanta, Georgia, where this game is being played could fit 3 Australias in it. 

This is not a stadium; it’s a mothership.

Watching a sport you are not familiar with is like visiting a foreign country or culture, which brings me to the final hot tip to understanding another country’s sporting cultural icon. Travel. Go there. This one I have got covered. I’m planning on going to Disneyland later this year, which won’t help me understand gridiron at all, but it can’t hurt.

I saw movie: First Man - that time NASA opportuned the moon

I went to see a movie. It was this one. In First Man, Ryan Gosling answered the call to be the guy who accepted the mission to boldly go where no man had been unhinged enough to go before.

And like any blockbuster feature film featuring Gosling as a NASA astronaut who winds up being the first man on the bright lunar ball, this one was no different.

There’s something about a movie that, in the first few gripping, harrowing minutes, forces you to hold your breathe just long enough for the hero to get out of the messy scrappy culsterfuck the so-called rocket scientists at Houston Space Centre have gotten them into. 

Not out of anticipation; just mainly to see if you can hold your breathe for the time it takes NASA to build a proper rocket that’s not a diabolical lemon (4-10 years).

First Gosling on the moon

In First Man, it’s Gosling’s portrayal of moon pioneer Neil Armstrong causing the turbulent breathe-holding, as he spins out of control, in an out-of-control spin in his space rocket thingy, but handling it a stoic, 1960s I’ve fucking got this kind of way. 

People were tougher than titanium alloy back in the day. People were Neil Armstrong, but with just about all of them lacking his skill, talent, brains, confidence in ability, determination, perseverance and space rocket.

By the time the opening sequence is over, you’re a quivering mess in your comfy cinematic chair, mainly due to the photographic department's overuse of The Shaky Cam, the new cinematography effect favourite of the biopic action-drama-thriller. And I Like It Very Much.

In fact, my new thing, when filming myself on Snapchat with adorable filters featuring fluffy dog ears or panda bear eyes, will be to the use Shaky Cam, as used on Gosling’s good looks. He could have been dressed as a pirate for all I know, with a patch on his eye and a squawky parrot on his shoulder; I never got a good look at him in the first 10 minutes in his spacial rocket.

The cinematography in this flick is ace, and kicks you right in the prefrontal cortex. It was immediate, visceral, very personal and demands – DEMANDS! - your attention.

You were there on the lunary surface of the moon, sitting on your Hoyts deluxe recliner with a bag of popcorn, getting cranky that your shoes were soiled by white moon dirt and glaring occasionally at the moon martian morons in front of you who was loudly discussing everything they had just seen like they were in a cinema back on earth.

It’s okay folks, I got rid of them by shooting off a couple of powerful rays of moonbeam, which stirred up even more moon dust and aggravated my allergic rhinitis, which was annoying but necessary.

I did appreciate all the cinematic shots of the space rocket’s buttons and levers and magical devices and appliances, but it really wasn’t necessary. No-one in their right mind knows what any of those buttons do. Not even Ryan Gosling. Maybe 3% of the mass audience had a clue. It’s a language that’s almost as hard to fathom as basic English, folks.

While the fake moon landing loonytunes claim Armstrong's setting foot on the lunar surface was fake and set in a movie studio, let's just note that a fake landing would be almost impossible to cover up, given the Soviets were on USA's tale in the Space Race. 

I can in fact confirm, however, that claims Gosling shot the moon scenes in a movie studio are fake. It was actually shot on the moon. Life's confusing.

Final note - agoraphobes, agrophobes and moonaphobes need to beware this movie. It does all the bad things you don’t like. Constantly.

🚀🚀🚀🚀
4.5/5 spacey rockets.

Can Tiger change his stripes?

A few days ago Tiger Woods won a golf game by being the best at whacking hard little white balls into a hole. His first professional win in five years, as I understand it. It was a HUGE DEAL game in the big PGA Tour series, with the winner’s loot coming in at a staggering UDS $1.62 million; which is really just maintenance money on his USD$54 million private jet. 
 

If there was one thing Tiger probably wishes he could do with the enormous mountainous alps of golfing cash he’s earned over the years, it’s deleting his internet history. I don’t know much about The Golfing, but I do recall the sensationalised history of Tiger Woods, and The Internets is only too keen to remind me.

As we can recall from our previous experiences with Tiger, he is a tiger. Arguably the most recognised of the world's large animal species, he has widespread popular appeal. He spends his days stalking his prey and charming the tigresses. It's a jungle out there.

 

It's hard to believe that it's been nearly nine years since the world discovered that the golf world’s golden boy  - the human Tiger - had an off-duty hobby that took up nearly as much time as his golfing commitments. 

That being his wild infidelity scandal involving a gazillion affairs, and the fallout in 2009, when the media drooled as one mistress after another crawled out of seedy Las Vegas and New York City stripclubs to tell their sordid Tiger tale.

 

Back in the day, he really took his most bankable sponsor’s logo to heart – Just Do It.  While the media tore him apart, much of the public merely marveled at Tiger's clearly superior time management juggling so many tigresses.  He really put wedding planners to shame with his organisational skills.

Amid all the scandal and the global media's insatiable appetite for celebrity sleaze, one thing confused the hell out of me. Apparently Tiger first met his wife Elin when she was the on-tour babysitter for Swedish golfer, Jesper Parnevik, and his wife.  At what point would Parnevik's wife have agreed to having a gorgeous, Swedish ex-model come along to look after their children on tour with her husband? 

For the past few years, apart from a few trips in and out of court houses, Tiger has done a great job - or at least his management company have - at staying off the radar to refocus and concentrate on the sport that enabled him to score with so many trashy tigresses young women in the first place. 

While Woods was once widely acknowledged as the best adulterer golfer in the world, he is currently ranked 13^th, up from the 55^th a few years ago, which is roughly the same number of women he had going in 2009 before he was caught with his hand in the skanky jar. 

Which begs the question; should we expect a return of strippers / cocktail waitresses / nightclub door tigresses now Tiger’s clawed his way back out of the jungle?

 

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).

The Making of Cadbury

Once upon a time, many aero bars ago in like 1801, a man was walking through the forest near his village in rural England when he decided that he didn't like people actually at all really, so he devised a top secret plan to make them all very, very fat. I guess he didn't have access to the internet so had to troll his frenemies in person.

"I could bury some of those people!", he exclaimed to his cat, and thus Couldbury, or Cadbury, was born.

Unfortunately, for this plan to work, he would need access to sugar and a sugary food making machine. "Oh fudge!", he said to his cat. Fortunately, he then remembered he had in fact bought a sugary food making machine in the village trash and treasure last week, so that was a very convenient and somehow not pointless purchase indeed.

He spent weeks but mainly just a few hours reading up about the history of chocolate, modern techniques of whipping up a batch, cultivating, processing, marketing, production, the chemistry of flavours, tempering, dipping, decorating and molding, ganache making and fondue excavating. That last one isn't even a thing, but - guess what - I'm telling the story.

And thus Cadbury was born. And just like all demented fairytales where the storyline is terrifying and the antagonist is fucking crazy, this one was too.

*names, places, truth have been irrevocably altered to ensure a more captivating storyline.

I went to rugby. I blogged.

The other night I dusted the spikey icicles off my season pass and dragged my seasoned arse to Canberra's numero uno football stadium. I was wildly anticipating an evening of watching my Super Rugby team, the ACT Brumbies, get their (foot)balls handed to them by the Wellington Hurricanes; a team that is, generally speaking, considerably better than my team. 

It was never going to be about Having Fun or Enjoying Oneself; one just has to support one's team through thick and thin, rain or shine, snow or hurricane, Chief or Crusader, self-annihilation or crushing smackdown. You have to be there and just go with it when we are playing a New Zealand team.

ACT Brumbies versus Wellington Hurricanes. Let's take a look at the matchup on e-paper. A free-roaming feral horse, an animal known for its random roaming usually through alpine countryside for no particular reason, versus a hostile weather system known for its wanton random destruction of stuff in its path.

Well it seems to me that everyone involved just needed to sit down for a planning morning and focus on developing some type of strategic plan for getting through the game with maybe some scones and jam for morning tea if you don't mind. None of this fly-by-the-seat-of-your-pants entertainment; that's not want the people want.

As it turns out, the wild horse gave the hurricane from UnZud quite a run for its money. Alas, as they say in the classic sports broadcasts, "Are you not entertained?! Are you not entertained?! Is this not why you are here?" Or maybe that was a quote from the movie Gladiator. It's hard to say.   

At kickoff, the opposition started as a Category 4 storm with sustained winds, causing heavy rains that were expected to continue for several hours. Linesmen were down, sponsors were airborne, and there was all kinds of carnage going on at that place that sells cold hot chips, which was potentially not hurricane related though.

Wild horse fan, Jimbo, saw all the action, saying “Everyone was warned to expect catastrophic flooding, and I think we got 6-8 metres of storm surge. Now my cold hot chip are wet”.  I think Jimbo may well have had a few.

But before you could say “that’s a ferocious battering, squire”, the strong gusts stopped, the eye of the storm passed, and the cell was fairly quickly downgraded to a tropical storm. And then it turned into a little rain shower as it continued to make landfall. My team won, which made my head spin on its axis and explode in astonishment.

As the game went on, I turned my attention to all the similarities of professional rugby union and my work as a public servant. Playing for a professional public servant team is a dream for thousands of people. But behind the glamour is grinding hours of hard work:

Desk work
Look, I did see a slew pf people with clipboards parading along the sidelines at the footy. It's hard to say what they were doing, but they looked like they were of great significance; they had pens and they were ticking things on paper. And if ticking things on paper for no good reason whatsoever doesn't constitute a desk job then I don't know what does.

Applause
Every morning, as I jog out of the elevator with meaningful purpose on my face, there is a throng of people who cheer my sudden presence and clamour for a glimpse of me as I head to my position on the floor, and then spend the day marvelling at my skillset - what a skillset! - when I use the printer, and cheer loudly - what a great delivery of that email!

Near the end of the day, they yell loudly - hurrah! - urging me on, to keep doing the impressive things I do. I didn't want this. This life, this dream life, was thrust upon me. I can’t make it stop. They idolise me. Occasionally, after work, I hang around to sign autographs.

Blood bin
Like rugby players, as soon as we have a piece of trash that needs tending to, we can leave the field of play to place it in the blood red bin. But only if it can't be recycled.

Offside
This occurs when you eat your packed lunch before lunchtime. It's not really in the spirit of the game, but some people do it deliberately - and get away with it - when the ref isn't looking. What's that? That doesn't even make sense? Well, look, the cyber universe is under no obligation to make sense to you.

Nutrition
Every public servant player knows the secret to maximise on-field performance: 'tis cake. 'tis always cake.

Scrum meetings
A key part of the day. Unlike an actual scrum, which rugby players use as a method to restart play to gain possession of the ball, public servant players pack down closely together just for the hell of it. 

The average acceleration at which a public servant player moves forward, out of a scrum meeting, is 29.2.54m/s2. What's that - that doesn't make sense either? That's not really relevant? Much like the minutes wasted in rugby scrums, many scrum meetings are also an officially sanctioned waste of time.

Rugby union for puppies

I've recently added value to my life by getting a puppy. Ellie is easily excitable, often overstimulated, bubbly, bouncy, unrelenting when I’ve relented; a textbook case of puppy.

Every morning – before, throughout and after I’m getting organised for work – we play chase the ball, which mainly involves her making forward passes, consistently knocking the ball on, deliberately obstructing me when I don’t have the ball, making a late tackle after I’ve already kicked the ball away, or some other type of illegal tackle like a head-high tackle around my neck or jaw violently at high speed, which is often my fault because my head is on the floor.

But her tackles are potentially very dangerous and are not sanctioned by the rules of the game, so at this point I blow my whistle to give her a yellow card, but she just bites me. It’s like she doesn’t know or care about the rules of rugby union.

Sometimes she plays fairly, but more often than not she plays the man and not the ball. Like any puppy heading towards the teething development milestone, she loves her chew toys - among her favourite ones being my hands - which often sends me to the blood bin to stop the flow before I can return to the pitch to continue playing.

I kick off from the 22m line, just off the try line, but I’m not going to make any ground because she charges it down when I try to clear the ball. I get it back and box kick over the top of her clear into undefended territory and then try to play the advantage but she ankle taps me with her milk teeth and it really hurts.

I won’t accept it so I call a free kick for myself and stand with my back to her as per the ‘How to stop your puppy from biting you” Youtube videos, but she barks at me for holding up the game, so instead I call a line-out, and she barks at me for holding up the game.

She’s lucky I don’t pull her up on all her impatient puppy barks, let alone all the infringements and technical offences. I’ve got no-one to throw it to in the line-out, but I throw it right down the middle, which is completely missed by Ellie because her hand-eye coordination is not a thing yet.

She prances off to get the ball and does a grubber kick, her favourite, which makes the ball tumble and roll along the ground, making it bounce all over the place. It’s literally the only bit of this game she’s good at. She runs down the blind side straight past me, dummy passes the ball, and goes on to score a try in the corner of the lounge room. Well, there go the blinds.

Instead of taking a kick to convert the try for extra points she runs up the field of play with her bed, shaking it furiously in some weird post-try celebration, which is not in the rule book so I’m not entirely sure what the infraction is.

I decide to have a scrum, because that’s always a great idea with a puppy. We crouch, bind, set and then she tries to scalp me because she sees my hair dangling in her face.

I call a red card on her and she sits and looks at me with puppy dog eyes, which are the only eyes she has admittedly, but still doesn’t get her out of the penalty.

And then just for funsies we have another scrum, because I hadn’t learnt my lesson, which collapses, but then we have a rolling maul, because if the ACT Brumbies can do it, so can we.

I grab her by the head in an illegal spear tackle, and she rolls around on her back trying to be cute as we both scrap for the ball. She wins obviously because teeth but I award myself a penalty try because I believe she illegally prevented me from probably getting over the try line. So many professional fouls.

We’ve been playing 30 minutes – not even half time – and it looks like she’s going to take a kick from the centre line but then she lies down and goes to sleep.

Succulents, you succ.

I feel life this isn't my best blog post - it's maybe in the top 490 - but the brain wants to write what the brain wants to write.

When it comes to sticking my fingers in dirt with the intention of growing little green things into big green things, I fail like a fat kid trying to get excited by a stick of broccolini; which is just more of the many types of green vegetable things that I can not grow at all with a very high success rate.

And the absolute pinnacle of plant growth impossibility is the ruthlessness that is succulent propagation, which is really just plant porn with fancy science name. Propagation is the act of breeding specimens of a plant or animal by natural processes by the mummy and daddy. Apart from trying to illegally download the U.S. version of Netflix, there are fewer challenges that you will face in your adult life that will be tougher than trying to propagate succulents.

Herein lies the problem. Succulents do not like water. They do not care to be fussed over. They don’t want you serenading them with Bing Crosby tunes or to cover them with a thermal baby blanket when it gets a bit cool in the night hours or give them some sunscreen when it’s a bit too sunny. They want you to leave them the fuck alone. They can manage all the life things by themselves please. As a chronic overwaterer, I can't cope with this.

It’s unnatural. It’s inhumane. The only people who should be comfortable leaving a poor little succulent leaf to flounder are sociopaths. It goes against human nature.

Humans are nurturers. If a human can’t water something, or wrap it in a blanky, or give it benzos when it can't sleep in its pot, their head will spin on it’s axis until it explodes. Succulents lure you in with their charisma and magnetism and then, once you get to know their cold hearts, they end up destroying the lives of all they touch.

If a living thing doesn’t require water and shelter from you, because it's already stored it in its body when you were sleeping in a Freddie Kruger type scenario, then I put it to you that they are in fact zombies, and we all know how well zombies can be controlled by anyone who isn’t already dead. They are corpses. And they will stop at nothing until they suck all the joy and happy out of the world.

In the human world, one can become a plant zombie by having your brain’s sucked out by another zombie plant or by getting a job in the public sector, but how does one possibly make a second plant, without turning it into the undead? Does anybody on the mothership earth know.

#InstagrammableCrumpets

In 2010, two guys - probably two nerdy, but now detestably wealthy beyond their wildest instagrammable imaginings type-of-guys – unleashed on the world their online photo sharing portal that we all should have just known from the get-go was going to play right into the most narcissistic human tendencies in the history of humankind. Selfies. These jerks invented the platform that allowed selfies to breed, through their creation of Instagram, and now there is no return. Internet is hashtag forever.

Aside from the nation states that are weirdly not signatories to the Mass Selfie Treaty, the last time the collective world lost their egotistical minds over a modern advancement was following the creation and unveiling of the phonograph, the 1877 innovation of the first device to record and play back audio. 

Believe it or not, the phonograph was not invented by the ubiquitous Apple. Or Samsung. As if it was invented by Samsung. They are still struggling to work out a reliable method of searching GIFs to add to text messages.

No, it was little known light enthusiast, Dr Thomas Edison, and it made him a celebrity. He even Broke the Telegram when he posed naked with just a light bulb covering his…brain.

Sponsor me. We can be great together. How can I butter you up?

Edison was involved in the invention of the electric light and the telephone, which was just the start of the master plan to ensure  future generations had as many options as possible to communicate with people they hated in high school.

His first recording on the phonograph was of Mary had a Little Lamb, and then it all went major slippery slope when rappers got hold of it, a-yo bitches. Instagram and its social media peers could potentially be a vehicle to viscerally change the world, but find me someone who hasn’t whiled away important hours of their day looking at baby goat Youtube clips. Someone other than Thomas Edison.

Anyway, I’m a keen purveyor of going off on tangents, so back to Instagram. The other morning I decided to Instagram my food, because a few reasons:

(a) I have a Mickey Mouse-inspired toast cutter, which trims the bread to the shape of Mickey’s noggan, and that requires worldwide showcasing;
(b) all the cool kids are doing it;
(c) sometimes I naively want to be one of the cool kids;
but mostly (d), I accidently woke up at 0445 and I must have been profusely sleep-deprived.

I have a new appreciation (I don’t) for the Instagram-obsessed who walk among us, and then into lightposts and trees because their heads are literally in an iPhone app. I want to start a new meme trend which will entail taking photos of iPhone users with their head in the iCloud and then superimposing it onto a cliff edge, or walking off the rim of a firey volcano, or into the mouths of sharks. Just positive stuff like that to make non-wankers feel good.

There’s so much to think about re. planning any foray into Instafoodland.

The Right Light
First, you must wait until the light is right. The right light is all of the things that are important. Given my early rise, I had to wait about eight hours before the damn dawn happened, so I just inhaled five cups of coffee and waited. 

If I had an extra three hours and the schedule of a celebrity - which seems to be remarkably similar to that of an unemployed person - I could have riddled my crumpet with sun flecks that would make the butter shimmer and mouths drool with insta-envy, but I didn’t, so I didn’t, and the only people who suffer are everyone on Instagram. 

Hashtags
You gonna need a hashtag son; you gonna need a real good one. There is absolutely no point at all in any socially acceptable way in creating an Instagram post if you don’t use witty, pithy words and phrases that make people laugh out loud or cry tears of self-pity. 

The number sign, or hash, aka “#”, used to be the most boring symbol in the whole symbol world. Now, thanks to it’s elevation as Instagram’s global superstar, it is outrageously famous, hangs out with The Kim Kardashian, and, like Prince, insists that people refer to it as a symbol. 

My only hope for the future is that one day it remembers where it came from, and goes back to its birth name, Gary. Personally, I believe hashtags have #jumpedtheshark, which incidentally has over 3,000 posters at present, which is just mocking what I just said. I'm mocking you Instagram, not the other way around.

Likes equals self-esteem
Don’t fall for this. If people don’t like your post it means they are living their own life at that point in time. I know! - they be weirdos. But I’m sure the time will come when they are 100% invested in your life (it won’t). People like other people’s posts in the hope that the “favour” will be returned. You know there’s a problem on planet self-esteem when there are apps where you can buy “likes”.  Yes you can.

1,000 draft photos
How many photos do we need to take until the creation is perfect? Oh, the crumpet is in the dark. There’s too much shade. Why is there a crumb on the plate - this crumpet cannot have crumbs. Should the coffee be in there too. That’s not the crumpet’s good side - don’t upset the talent. It’s all just too hard so eventually I gave in and hired a cherry picker from a construction company for an hour to get the right height and perspective. Money well spent.

When you start to think of people who make money from their Instagram by taking off their clothes as a bunch of talent-free, antisocial pariahs who are genetically incapable of feeling shame or self-respect, it makes it quite enjoyable. 

Some social media tarts have come out to tell the world how hard their inst-life is, and how long it takes to set up a photo and how many they have to take to get a good one and it just makes me really sad for them because my proper job isn’t hard at all. I just wish there was a way I could help their plight that involved somehow making their suffering so much worse.

Delete that post and move on with your life
After 23 hours of Crumpet Time, I eventually deleted the post because I didn’t want my conceptual art, replete with mockumentary hashes, to offend anyone who takes instaphotos of food for a living, especially not the people who use the hashtag conceptual art.

Musings from the Seaside

I’m been presenting myself for weekend penance at the South Coast, New South Wales, quite a bit lately. The South Coast, if you are unfamiliar, is the coastal belt between Sydney to the north to the Victorian border to the south.

My location of choice for optimal sun and sand experiences occasioning sunburn is Broulee, just south of Bateman’s Bay, which is often branded as Canberra by the Sea. Broulee, population of just over 1,700, is so laidback and blasé about life that it's on the brink of toppling over.

It feels like the place is a refugee of the 1950s or 60s, whichever decade was the last one with unobtrusive capitalism and a laissez faire attitude and I do not hate this. Sure, internet reception is scant (but very curiously receptive on the beach), there is not a lot to do if you don’t want to devote the entire day to sand worship, and there is just one takeaway shop, which has implausible opening hours for an operational small business. 

On the flip side, there are no loud and kitschy billboards encouraging food or services, just sporadic signage of a small business courteously and respectfully expressing the purpose of their existence.

If you need to uber-advertise your goods and services to the market for a price to do capitalism properly, Broulee doesn't really care a whoop-de-doop.

What commodity are they selling in Broulee, then? If anyone cared, it would be lifestyle of ye olde days, by effortlessly laidback means.

I don’t care how current your hipster status is, how many mason jars containing salad you have in your arsenal, how many trimmed bearded men work for your ironically named business, you cannot engineer ye olde days. Thank goodness the hipsters haven't gotten their conceited mittens on this seaside haven.

Walking in the direction of the ocean I can smell it's briny aroma, but it’s not always that way. The wind has to be blowing from the east, or at least from the north. 

October in Broulee? It’s all about cold sandcastles and iced water. I go there for the simplicity, the ease of life. Minimalism. 

Also, there are birds. Lots of them. David Attenborough would be able to tell you more. Or anything. The birds are arguing about bird things. Or just being interactive in a shared space. Who knows the ways of birds.

Painted whores of the plant world

The first of the summer flies harass me as I walk past all the painted whores of the plant world (A Homer or Bart Simpson reference to flowers) on the way to the beach. 

Teenage boys ride their bikes past me on the footpath, precariously balancing their beloved surfboards in their strong arm, forgetting that when they recklessly spin around to chat to their friends the board whips around too and there goes my ribs if I wasn’t quick like a butterfly.

And then I see the offending sign, which is always there; a picture of a dog with a cross through it. DOGS NOT ALLOWED. Seriously, if you a barbarian who does not like watching dogs playing on the beach then we have nothing to say to each other and move along from this planet please.

I love watching people playfully encouraging their dog to do instagrammable tricksies for photographs, which they obligingly do, through a volley of barks which ricochet for kilometres along the beach.

This visit, to the beach, I had to be vigilant. There are brutal brutes seaside who will find you. And then they will hurt you. But they are so pretty, so one must get up as close and personal as possible to their tentacles to admire their bright hues. Bluebottles. Lots of ‘em.

The statistics are not in your favour when it comes to avoiding their sting, and the little suckers pack quite a punch. I imagine it is their vengeance for being purged from the ocean.

Weekend visitation to the World Ocean

Stop it, Broulee.

I’ve just returned from an unscripted getaway to the New South Wales coastal town of Broulee to visit the Hydrosphere. I always find it a bit annoying that, despite the ocean comprising 70% of the earth’s surface, it still take me two hours to get anywhere near it.

The World Ocean and I have a thing, but it’s more of a unrequited type of thing, because I care considerably more about our bond than it does.

I spend thousands of dollars visiting it nearly every year (courtesy of the Hawaiian Islands unfortunate stranded geographic location in the middle of the Pacific Ocean), and it's never visited me once. I think it likes to keep things planktonic. That’s the thing with the ocean; it's quite shellfish.

I’m always a bit of a nervous shipwreck driving down to the South Coast via the precarious Clyde Mountain, the 780 metre steep, winding peak that comes between me and my watery plankonic friend. Evidently it is the locale of many car crashes. No big packet of surprises there.

Moi

If you have the stamina to endure the oncoming racing cars speeding right into your face and overtaking vehicles side swiping your side mirror - presumably because they are neurosurgeons heading to perform delicate emergency open brain surgery? - then you will have a pleasant trip down the way.

I do hope they know that if they crash into a tree I’ll have to choose between my need to casually continue my drive and any attempt to prolong their lives, and I've already made my choice.

It was forecast to be a lovely day down the seaside and I was heading there with one porpoise because long tide, no sea. It sounds like the sealiest thing, but I swear the ocean waves at me every time I get to its shores. I'm not a stage five clinger, but I will pier pressure it to come around to my way of thinking. Stop doing ocean jokes? Shore thing, buoys and gulls.

In the nineteenth century, the township of Broulee wasn’t all that. One squire, in 1840, even wrote to the District telling them so:

“SIR, – After a tiresome journey from Braidwood over a most mountainous road, I arrived at this place a few days ago, having been induced to visit it from certain passing accounts of it which have appeared in the Sydney papers, vaunting the excellency of its harbour, land, but, after a patient investigation of the whole country, I find I have, like many others thrown my time away to very little purpose... Being here, however, and being thoroughly disgusted with all I have seen and heard, I take advantage of a leisure hour and opportunity to Braidwood to forward to you the following description of its situation…”

Okay.  Not a fan.

Still, old mate was probably in the area prior to the invention of rest and relaxation, because those pursuits, or lack of, are a hit down that way these days. I suppose relaxing and letting off steam in 1840 wasn’t a prospect many could afford. If it couldn’t be peddled, vended, propositioned or haggled, them what really was the point in spending time in the sand and water.

I imagine most spent their every waking minute trying to avoid the massive waves of contagious diseases and epidemics, rather than the massive waves emitting from their jetskis. What did people do for fun in Australia in the 1840s? A quick Google search will tell you that fun was actually invented in the 1960s, so I guess they just worked and then died for their troubles.

Mogo

Free lunch. There is such a thing.