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!

Rio’s ‘Danger Games’

The Danger Gamea are over for another four years. The 2016 dystopian series is set in Rio, aka The Poor Universe, because they just don't have enough crap to deal with. 

While the posh bit of Rio is flush with vast material wealth, millions and millions and millions of synthetic Rio2016 banners, thousands and thousands of people just doing it (don't sue me, Nike or Durex), and not thousands and thousands but a vast array of impossibly dim swimmers, the majority of the other bit is flush with disease, sickness, poverty and dying that is covered up during the televised event in favour of trendy, bouncy adverts for Coca Cola.

The two-week series follows the terrifying journeys of about 12,000 young participants who have been selected by merit or not so much by merit (depending on what floats each country's selection process boat) to compete in a quadrennial pageant called the Danger Games. 

The purpose of the Games is to provide entertainment for the Western masses and to remind The Poor Universe how the hell are they going to cope with this floorshow with all the other shit that’s going down in their patch?

During the Games, participants are strongly enticed to fight to the death in dangerous public arenas through the allurement of shiny, heavy circular objects. 

Even more modern pentathlon

The winning participant is rewarded with the shiniest of the shiny objects and the solemn promise of relentless scrutiny from obsessed media outlets and general busybodies pertaining to their being an overrated twat and that their whole existence is a massive waste of taxpayer’s money. Sometimes they also get diarrhea.

The allure of shiny things makes the participants do just about anything really, including going to that shithole in the first place. 

While Rio has given the masses dodgy infrastructure, incomplete accommodation, often shambolic logistics, questionable security, curiouser and curiouser water quality, petty, violent crime, and hourly armed holdups, the Games also brought us “the dumbest bell that ever rang”, possibly the greatest catchphrase of all time.

A special mention to the niche sport of modern pentathlon, that nobody knew or cared about until the Australian participant won the highest medallion in this discipline in an all-day Danger Games fiesta of freestyle swimmin', cross country runnin’, pistol shootin’, and, weirdly, show jumping and epee fencing, skills important to all modern day knights of all shaped tables. Eat your heart out, Katnis Everdeen.

The Hollywood Laundromat

Once upon a time there was a girl who went to West Hollywood with a dream. That dream was to find a coin-operated laundromat that had a lower crazy people to washing machine ratio than just about anywhere else on that strip. For some inexplicable reason it just made the hour she had to sit there waiting for her clothes to endlessly dry and dry not quite as insufferable as it could have been.

It's 5pm on a Monday afternoon and I'm at a laundromat on Santa Monica Boulevard doing my laundry, much like Marilym Monroe probably did in the 1950s. It's all glitz and glamour, this Hollywood life.

I can just see Marilyn doing her laundry here. She would have perched herself atop one of the washers, purring out stain removal instructions and tips to any man who entered the establishment. It's also probably why none of her clothes ever fitted; they shrank in the dryer. Poor Marilyn.

This laundromat is very typical of what happened to Marilyn in Hollywood. She got spun around, pulled in all directions, and then left out to dry and presumably turned into a spiritually shrunken version of herself. I guess I just compared Marilyn Monroe to a spin cycle.

Marilyn spent a lot of time in this area. My Hollywood Things map tells me she lived here when she met Jo DiMaggio. She lived in another house around here too with a girlfriend and shared everything from minks to men. My map says that.

At another house nearby, Joe DiMaggio had a private investigator break down a door where he thought she was cheating on him. It was the wrong house, but it's just around the corner, thus exciting. And about 200m down the road is where Janis Joplin spent her last night drinking up a storm before ODing at her hotel.

Ho hum, my washing''s done!

Sugar how you get me so high

My brain and I have been in negotiations for some time now regarding our intake of sugar. We've held a series of closed-door meetings to discuss this weighty topic and have come to an agreement that we need to continue to think about it for a while longer before making any rash decisions that will take candy away from us.

Sugar is my cocaine. It is actually just another addictive white powder that is in its own way as deadly as cocaine. Furthermore, most people would probably snort it given half a chance.

The latest trendy and hip lifestyle choice thing to do is to quit the sugary goodness. All the experts tell us to do this, do that, sugar is bad, candy is the spawn of the devil; it's goes on and on. That's why the only expert you should listen to is Willy Wonka.

While I suppose it is probably very good for you to eat sugar, it just so happens to be quite impossible to quit, so if you do manage to pull it off your virtuous bragging rights go shooting into the stratosphere, where they spend their days orbiting the earth and mocking all the western people around the world who are addicted to lollies.

So how the hell do you quit sugar willingly? Unless you're Sarah Wilson, the self-proclaimed and very successful 'I quit sugar (and you didn't)' guru, it's the hardest thing in the world. Potentially eight times harder than nicotine, according to some close encounters of the sugar kind I've read on the interwebs.

All of this has been leading me to ponder the inevitable. If it's so darn difficult to quit, I imagine one would need to significantly alter one's circumstances for a time to get it right, right?

So here's a list of fun maybe sure-fire ways to quit sugar:

Become a instagram health guru.
Unless it's made of kale and beetroot, they are not allowed to eat it. Not even Caramello Koalas. Also, if you stop eating The Sugar you may just fit your entire bodyshape into the teeny weeny little square filter frames that Instagram forces you into, and that's everything.
 
Go on a hippie retreat.
On second thoughts, this is a terrible idea. While sugar acquittal may come just that bit easier at these places, the trade off is just not worth it. You will be massively brainwashed, forced to play acoustic guitars for a hobby or worse, for a living, and no-one likes that person.

Join the army.
Join the Australian Defence Forces and get deployed to a war zone. I don't know how this will help you quit sugar at all - I'm sure they have cake in the Taji military base in Iraq - but it sounds like a good place to burn it off.

Bury yourself.
Not in your work. Literally. Make sure you do this project with a reasonably trusted friend who owns a decent shovel.

Move to the bush.
Get out there! Eat only the contents of your veggie patch. This may be a problem if you, like me, are a seasoned and convicted vegetable murderer. I'm sure you'll be fine. Dirt tastes gross, but it's not sugar, so well done.

Go on a three hour tour like Gilligan.
Take a leisurely cruise forever on a dodgy rickety boat and be marooned on a deserted island in tropical, touristy far north Queensland. Make sure there are no Michel's Patisseries, or you'll ruin everything and be a failure forever.

Just drink wine
There is no sugar in wine. How dare you make these allegations. For those who need evidence, the fructose in the grapes is what ferments to become alcohol, leaving the finished product low in sugar. I heard this from someone who knows someone who know everything so proof.

Nepalese Government considers Everestland theme park

The Nepalese Government has lodged a planning application to turn the sacred site that houses Mount Everest into a massive theme park, complete with a summit roller coaster, an inflatable north face, and eventually a 5-star hotel on the Chinese side of the jumbo-sized mountain.

Mount Everest is the tallest mountain on the planet and has long been considered a symbol of adventure and exploration, so it is no surprise whatsoever to anybody that it is now being slated for conversion into a big, western, capitalist cash cow.

Everestland will operate much like the Kennedy Space Centre at Cape Canaveral in Florida, where a working space centre somehow operates in tandem with fun theme park rides and character astronauts.

Journeying to Mount Everest is a right of passage for many adults who are suffering a mid life crisis and need an existential / transcendental / embracing of their own mortality experience to make it through the rest of their lives.

A spokesman for the Nepalese Government said, "people can still come here to question whether their life has any purpose, meaning or value, but they might have to queue for a bit. Although if they come between 2 and 3pm they will be able to access a fastpass to get up to Existential Corner before the evening onslaught".  
 
The Everestland brochure recommends that anyone in this position plan their midlife crisis for the off-peak season.  Alternatively, they can purchase the Everestland Existential Crisis Package.

Prolonged isolation is a thing of the past for expert seasoned mountaineers, as they will soon undergo an excruciatingly long climb past hordes of screaming overtired sticky children, and pass through the centre of themed restaurants serving deep fried glacier sticks and frozen pizzas, on their way to the Summit Cafe at the peak.

The spokesman said, “this is part of the attraction. Diners want to see people haul themselves up dangerous slopes and across gaping crevasses when they are eating their cheeseburgers, fries and coke. This is real entertainment”.

The spokesman added, "we will be dealing with the lack of oxygen issue at a Planning Meeting next month.  We are thinking of rebranding oxygen as Everest Air or something like that and charging our guests for the right to use it, sort of like the model they use for wifi in Australia. 

Also, we don't want parents to think that their child might die at Everestland through altitude sickness. It's not really something we are worried about though. The American theme park tourist well run deep".

It is believed it will be left up to parents to decide whether they think their child will be okay walking around a mountain at the cruising altitude of a 747.  

Other planned attractions and experiences include a cliffhanger ride, wave pool, glacier challenge and the Hunt for the Yeti.  There will also be character actors dressed as Sir Edmund Hillary and sherpa Tenzing Norgay, the first climbers to reach the peak of the world's highest mountain.   

The icing on the cake, so to speak, will be the ice sculptures immortalising these two pioneers at the  highest point of Everest, sort of like twin angels wedged atop a Christmas tree.

While there are currently only two main routes to the summit, tourists will soon be able to access the peak via an endlessly long travelator. Guests will be given a sleeping bag when they embark as it will take approximately 16 hours to reach the top.

But for the clients who have paid mountaineering companies exorbitant amounts of money to get them safely to the summit, some up to USD$250,000, it's the suffering that really counts. 

The Nepalese Government spokesman has confirmed that no-one has had the balls to tell China about any of this yet.

Easter - the Chocolate Religion

It is the fairest - and my favouritest - season of them all, which involves four consecutive days where conventional thinking dictates that you will gorge yourself silly on hot cross buns and chocolate eggs, or you're simply not doing it right.

Who the hell knows how an animal with floppy ears and a basket of foiled chocolate eggs came to embody the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. It’s one of life's many ambiguities that I don't care to question because I think everyone wins when the upshot is chocolate.

As it turns out, I do think about more than chocolate eggs at Easter time – it just seems like I’m shallow and one-dimensional. Although, if you do break the surface, you’ll find that your original suspicions about me were in fact correct, and there really is no need to delve any further or you’ll hit a sub-zero, infinite pit of nothingness.

So, Easter is also about other stuff apparently. I went to Sunday School when I was a wee bonnie nipper with a bunch of other kids, but I can't say that I ever go to church as an adult. I'd feel like a bit of a fraud; plus I don't understand any of the hymns and churches don't do reverse cycle air-conditioning so well and that doesn't really work for me.

I have my views on God, but you'll never hear me preach about it. It’s not because I’m being considerate of your beliefs; it’s most likely because I think you are beyond redemption, salvation or any sermon on morality. Um, no offence. 

I know a few people who are dedicated church goers, but it's ironic that the only people I know who fanatically preach - and are completely preoccupied - with religion are atheists. They always seem to be enraged about it. Tell someone who cares, atheists. Just let me eat my chocolate in peace.

I went to Brumbies rugby. Naturally I blogged about it.

Once upon a time, a very long time ago, in ancient 1996, people in the Southern Hemisphere decided that there just weren't enough gladiatorial sporting competitions involving balls so a new one absolutely needed to be created forthwith. Thus, the dawn of the Super Rugby.

There were originally 12 teams involved in this new rugby ball tournament and thus it was aptly named the Super 12. And then more teams wanted to play with the balls so it became Super 14. 

And then some smart minds decided this was a bit silly, wasn't it, so best call it Super Rugby, which means 18 billion more teams could participate if they wanted to with no name change required. There's a lesson in there for everyone.

Watching rugby union is my new shiny thing. Who knew it was so entertaining.  Here's how it goes: there are two teams, and one wins. The other loses. 

There are no encouragement awards for the losers. They just have to get back on the horse and give it their best shot the next week. Because that's how life works. Sometimes you win; sometimes you don't.

Speaking of horses, my local rugby union team is called the ACT Brumbies. A brumby is a free roaming feral horse that roams the Australian alps. With that in mind, the ACT Brumbies are remarkably good at ball control and passing in general with all those hooves getting in the way.

I understand about 3.7% of the rules of rugby union, but I appreciate that my home city is very good at it. For example, I've been to two games and they have won all of them. I have heard a vicious rumour that they don't always win every game, but I call that out as conjecture until I see this loss situation take place.

I have worked out that the aim of the game is to get a ball from one end of a field to the other while grunting and piling of top of each other. The rules of the game seem very complicated but I guess I will begrudgingly learn them because they seem important to the fans who yell about them loudly and endlessly to no-one in particular.

Things I noted:

• My heightened awareness of my condition - of being unremarkable and ordinary.  No-one expresses such approval of being entertained when I send an email at my work in the Australian Public Service. No-one wears a business shirt with my name on the back of it. There's no-one on the sidelines yelling at me to send the email straighter, you goose.

• The brumbies running around the paddock are built like double-brick stables constructed to withstand a herd of marauding wildebeest. Next time I need to lift my jumbo jet and store it in the overhead aircraft hangar I'm calling the ACT Brumbies.

• Abs City (see above).

• It doesn't matter if you don't know the rules of rugby.  As long as you show your support for the home team through fist pumping and random heckling of the opposition players, occasionally your own players, the referees, the team doctors, the ball kids, the TV camera guy, the guy who carries the camera guy's cord, the guy who carries the camera guy's microphone or the guy who rides a quad bike out to deliver a little sand castle for freekicks (which is never not hilarious), you are accepted and acceptable.

• Never, ever look at the bright paddock lights above you to see how bright they are. They are brighter than the sun (if you are from England, see picture. This is the sun).
  

• I thought there would be many interesting and varied peoples who would attend rugby union matches but, on the whole, they were well civilised and not one soul tried to pick a fight with me, probably because they have jobs and aren't on parole like football fans from other codes.  It's also possibly because I'm just like a scary bikie, except without the muscles, anti-social behaviour, sleeve tatts, criminal rap sheet, harley or drug dealing ways.  I did give two panadol to a colleague the other day, but she swore she had a headache so I was just administering some light first aid.

• The hot chips from the catering are strangely delicious. Life continues to smack me in the mouth with it's darn surprises.

Stayin' Alive

As Mark Twain famously uttered about growing vegetables on your balcony, "All you need in life is ignorance and confidence, and then success is sure". Right on, Marky Mark.

So, with Twain's guidance and tentative approval, I've seemingly decided to become a 'plant person'. Let me tell you a story. Don't worry; it is not a long story. Even if it was a lengthy anecdote that's likely more your problem that mine because this is my blog actually.

Anyway, once upon a time about five weeks ago I was gifted a strawberry plant, by someone who was clearly unaware of my past arrests, prosecutions and convictions as a violent plant murderer. 

My recidivism rate has been high over the years. I couldn't help it, it's just who I am.  It was a time of plant hardship; trees died, shrubs ravaged, flowers annihilated, the lives of young plants cut too short, perennial herb families torn apart.

While in some cases the death penalty may be a viable option for dealing with people who kill plants for a hobby, some people can change after committing murder.

The statistics are fairly low, but some people who have been found guilty of murder can be rehabilitated. With this in mind, I receipted the strawberry plant, with the hope and the promise of a new dawn, a new day, a new life, or of someone who doesn't know what's good for them.

So I left the strawberry plant at work in the sun that weekend. It didn't end well. My strawberry plant died, didn't it. Cue sad violins and all the sad emoticons to illustrate all my sad feels of that sad time.

Then, a few weeks ago, completely unprompted, the same enabler gave me a tomato plant. It was tall, it was healthy and it didn't look like it wanted to die. So much pressure. SO MUCH. This was the turning point. I could look to the past and learn from my mistakes, just like with the Titanic, Chernobyl, Costa Concordia and Tiger Woods.

This time I sought help, and was rewarded with much conflicting plant care advice. Gardening is confusing and hard.  I had a list of instructions of things to do to care for the thing that effectively amounted to 'water it and don't kill it'.

Growing vegetables comes with great responsibility. For example, you have to give it a name.  My little tomato plant is called Harry Highplants and also Harry Potted. Behold the two-named plant!

And it's going strong! I've got little tomatoes.  I've turned over a new leaf, so to speak. The damn tomatoes want it all though. 

They want sun, sun, sun but they also want shelter. They can't have everything they want. We don't always get what we want in life. They probably want to live in the garden of an ocean front mansion in Malibu, but only the rich and famous tomatoes get to do that.

Feb(r)uary

Oh great, it's February again.  Who the hell can pronounce February?  I would like to stage an intervention to rid the western world of having to use the 'r' in February, or at the very least be able to ruthlessly mock extra ruddy consonants by enclosing them in a mocking-type set of brackets. I don't see the point of silent letters.  Empty letters.  I blame the French for this nonsense.

That crazed word fanatic, Shakespeare, has a pointless 'e' desperately clinging to the end of his name like some pathetic groupie.  And thanks to Willy Shakes and other overwordiness muppets, we have an abundance of words, which means simple folk are able to breathlessly talk and talk all day long, repeating words over and over again.

Fortunately some years ago - maybe like a decade ago or something - someone decided that February sucked and it deserved to have just 28 days, with an extended 29 days every fourth year.  Smart. I think we should also leap over Wednesdays, because no-one likes a week day with a silent 'd'.


 

Ah, Christmas shopping

Christmas really is simply the most wonderful time of the year...

Providing you stay away from shopping centres and all of the people.  Shopping centres at Christmas are proof that misery and despair are accessible to anybody.  The public suck at the best of times, but they reserve a little extra something for the festive season.

I love how we commemorate the birth of a man who pleaded with us to eschew personal possessions by trampling each other half to death in the hopes of snagging the last Teenage Pregnancy Barbie at Target. Seeking salvation - you're doing it wrong, shopping anarchists.

And the person who came up with the phrase the customer is always right has obviously never worked with customers.

Having previously worked in a hotel chain, I can say with confidence that when a disgruntled customer thinks they are right, they are usually wrong, and a freakin' nut job, and would be banned from the establishment if I had my way.

Also, I don't understand the desperate need to get the parking spot closest to the door.  I imagine some people could do with a little wander from their car to the food court.

Getting the closest park doesn't make you special.  And you don't have a parking angel who gets you a good spot near the door, because celestial beings have nothing better to do than hover around your shit mobile and make sure you get a fabulous parking spot.

And how about the shop assistants in David Jones?  I believe some of the largest sticks known to man are shoved permanently up their backsides.  These people used to be required to think and calculate basic math equations in their head, old school style, but it looks like their sole duties now consist of glaring at you with disdain for daring to approach their counter, interrupting their Facebook status update and waving objects over a scanner until it beeps.  Liaising with these people equals slow death.  Thank goodness for online shopping.

Ironically, the shops that are the least annoying are the ones where you leave your standards, taste and any measure of class at the door - the $2 shops.  This is where you can buy all manner of faux-marble Greek and Roman statuary and cheap whore cosmetics.  Fortunately the pretentious gits of the world refuse to ever be seen in these stores.

Oh, and effing baby strollers.  These mini humvees are apparently designed to ensure your baby can survive an encounter with a herd of charging wildebeest.  While I can understand mothers of small, screaming little people being a tad cranky in the mall, what's everyone else's excuse at this most jolly time of the year?

Even if you aren't forced to liaise with humanity on your shopping trip, they may still get you through the air conditioning system, which kindly regifts the disgusting, contagious pathogens of hundreds of people as a present to you.

Merry Christmas!

I watched Home and Away.

Putting aside the piece of chocolate cake that I stole from colleagues last week at work, I'm a good person. And sometimes bad things happen to good people. For example, tonight I watched Home and Away. Here's proof.

Straight off the bat - mere minutes into the show - Number #1 girl uses a big word. I can't remember what it was but I was actually impressed.

Number #1 girl undoes all her good work during an argument by turning to her pantry and placing her face in such a distressed arrangement that made me think that someone ate her 12 pack of twisties. She must have been really sad or angry or frustrated or something.

Here's Number #2 girl. Another Oscar winner in the making. She's super sad or frustrated or depressed or something and I don't even know what she's going through because she also has no facial expression.

Now I feel like a bitch because expressionless lady actually lost her twin babies in her womb. But that doesn't change the fact that her only facial expression is expressionless. Who hires these people?

Watching teenagers sitting around in their lounge room watching AFL on television and drinking vodka cruisers and beer and making out and being bitchy to each and doing all the teenage angst things. I hate them all within seconds.

Spoiler: This guy doesn't do this show anymore.

Yay ad break. Head to the kitchen to make a cup of tea and find a hot poker that I can have on standby in case I need to gouge my eyes out.

Number #3 girl is concerned or angry or sad when she finds out her boyfriend of two weeks has "commitment issues". He's 20. His name is Tank.

The most concerning part of this scene is my realisation that those precious minutes it took me to watch it are lost to me forever. And now I have to live with that.

Number #3 girl gets home 18 seconds after her curfew.  The parents are waiting in the dark on the driveway with a location camera crew. Cue boring argument. Jesus, this show.

Whatever happened to Brax (pictured in the picture), the feared member of the River Boys? Just googled him. The car transferring him to jail ran off the road and plunged into a lake but HIS BODY WAS NEVER FOUND...

Ooooooh, ahhhh, ooooh, ahhh, the sun is rising over the ocean. That's a bit pretty.

Oh great, actors have just walked onto the beach and decide to speak. Sunset ruined. Oh great, here's more of them. It's a morning beach sunrise-ruining congregation. This scene would improve enormously if the actors went away so I could just watch the sunrise in peace.

More teenage angst. I feel like I'm not the target audience.

Thank the lord that's over.

Runs on the Cheeseboard.

We all know that Australia is in the middla ocean in the middla nowhere. A back of beyond, full of the Bush, the Outback, the Bushfire, the Cricket and big mobs of the Whoop-Whoop.

Our country is like one half of a pair of ships that pass in the night, except there isn't any other ship for miles, unless the other ships are lost or have been overrun by pirates who like vegemite on toast and a glass of milo before a night of pillaging on ye high seas.

The remoteness of Australia often gets my goat. You know when you're on a lilo in a pool and you get to the edge and you kick off with your feet to drift to the other side? I wish we could do that with Australia. We could traverse the world! I suppose the sharks would pop an inflatable Australia with their baby teeth in seconds.

One of my main gripes with our remoteness is during The Ashes. If you don't know what The Ashes are then how dare you.

The Ashes are an extremely tiny but important urn that is given to the winner of a series of cricket test matches between Australia and England.

Aussie cricketer Mitchell Marsh tucks
 into a cheeseboard because yum.

Cricket is a religion in Australia. It is an institution founded on the worship of skank slash loveable rogue slash cricket commentator Shane Warne and a strict set of beliefs. Like winning. 

And giddily jumping up and down when this happens. So happy. And then so sad. So sad. All the emotions. And that's just after one ball from a fast bowler, the dramatic divas of the cricketing world. Ours are called Mitchell. It's just easier to remember one name.

If you need me to explain cricket to you it goes like this: two teams, one wins. Although sometimes they play for five days and then shake hands, drink tea, and eat cheese and agree to a draw so no-one wins. It's complicated. 

It's also non-contact. At no time during a game is it acceptable to touch each other, until they all hug and drink tea at the end of a game after agreeing that this sport doesn't always need a winner, sometimes it's just nice to drink tea together. Lovely.

A lot of people think cricket is boring. Well many things are boring to those who unable to grasp the concepts of strategy or thinking.

I think you are probably going to get some enjoyment out of any sport if you attend in person. 

Live elite cricket, for example, highlights the speed of the game, the precision, the skill, the technique, the strategy, the dedication, the persistence. That's all worthy of an admission price, innit?

You may not love it, but you will appreciate something about the skill sets on show. Unless we're talking about the sport of boxing, in which case you may as well save your cash and just hang around the pub and appreciate that no-one has KO'd you yet.

I love my cricket. However at this time of the year - winter in Australia - any cricketing event of import involving my national team is played on the other side of the world, in another time zone, in another galaxy.

But now that this year's Ashes is finished, I need to find a way to get off London's Greenwich Mean Time (GMT) and return to a time zone that is vaguely, or, even better, specifically, connected to my every day existence.

Another Mitchell. So confusing.

While I happily exist on London time my home town of Canberra, Australia is not. It is from the future.

GMT was invented in England in the late 17th century to give English cricketers a general idea of when to stop their match for a spot of jam and scones, or cheese and crackers if that's your jam. 

And, to this day, the unruly GMT continues to ruin the sleeping patterns of cricket fans the world over.

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.

Dude, where's my holiday bubble wrap suit?

I’ve just spent ten nights on a tropical island. I shall call this island Hawaii. 

The place is horrible.  They should write that on signs everywhere in the world. Don’t go there. No-one go there. You’ll hate it. I guess the main point I'm trying to get across is STAY AWAY, IT’S MINE.

I know no-one wants to hear about someone else's summer holiday, so let me summarise:

• I did all the tropical things.
• I did not look at a watch. Mostly. There is a big  vintage clock on the Waikiki Beach strip, like anyone cares what time it is.  Most of the time I didn’t know what day it was.
  

To make you feel better about your non-tropical existence, I also conveniently captured a litany of issues from my travels. I shall call them Hawaii Problems. They are real problems:

• I ran out of my Australian Cadbury chocolate quite early on so I had to eat Hershey's. I can't untaste that.
• The drying of my favourite swimmers could not keep up with my thrice a day swimming schedule.
• The tiles in my hotel room were forever covered in sand. 
• I kept bumping into the same Americans in Waikiki and was compelled to start acknowledging their existence.

• I only know so much Russian and there's always the danger of bumping into an actual Russian-speaking Russian.
• They install some type of magnetic field in your brain when you arrive at Honolulu Airport so when you pass any of the three thousand ABC Stores in Waikiki you are forced to enter because of the electric charge emitting from their extensive souvenir magnet collection. Also, I'm not entirely sure this is how electromagnetism works, but it sounds like something an electromagnetist would say in a Hollywood movie.
• I was forever sunburnt because.... I'm from Australia and we don't really get access to sun so I'm not trained in the ways of the shade...
• The magical Waikiki salt water healed my reef rock wound like a boss in no time at all and I don't have a body of salt water in my street at home to heal all my future reef rock injuries.

So I’ve grown a little tired of talking incessantly about Hawaii this week, particularly given I’m not there anymore. I've returned to the glaciality of my frozen city, the mundanity of my livelihood, and the general unremarkableness of my existence.  Oh, that sentence isn't depressing at all. Hey, I'm a writer. We are depressing.

I'm going to write a comprehensive set of Frequently Asked Questions and hand them out to anyone who requests information on my what-and-whereabouts abroad.
 

See, every time someone asks about it the precious holiday bubble deflates just a little.  And you've got to protect that effervescent little blob that protects you from reality and all the people who want to pop it.  

I know the bubble won't last, but that’s okay, because I will take the soul-sucking fairy who pops it down with me into the chambers of hell. Terms and Conditions apply when you ask about my damn holiday.