Think It Through, Manufacturers

You never really know how much you are loved until you tell an expensive service provider where to jam it. You certainly don’t get an inkling of their love for you when they’re confident you are going to keep paying. 

No, it’s a sudden and fierce passion that ignites in their breast when you answer their query as to why you are ending the relationship with: 

“It’s not me, it’s you. Actually, I’ve always felt that your service sucked. I was just forced into having it because there was no reception in our valley and we had to have cable just to get free-to-air. But now, my aerial’s been fixed and new splitter boxes put through the place, so I’m just going to do with HD free-to-air.”

“Have you heard about our deal where we supply an IQ recorder and…”

“Why would I want to record things that are endlessly repeated? I made a deal with myself that I would only order in pizza when you played The Golden Child. I put on 11 kilos last year. And just for the record, I don’t believe that On the Buses is technically comedy, anymore.”

In the week between my phone call to cancel and the day we'd  paid up until they rang me, pleading, three times. Yet you couldn’t get them on the phone for love or money when you had a problem… no surprises there.

Another reason I was happy to be rid of the cable-TV supplier is the budget. I don’t have one, and neither does Emergency Contact and we’re not the types to ever go and get one, but it felt responsible and adult and the right thing to do.

So, to celebrate our tight fiscal restraint, I bought a hard disk, high definition, digital recorder thingy - and I lurv it. The special kind of lurv that a boy has for a new gadget. 

(I’ve got a tip for you here, ladies. If you are at a loss what to get your fella for Christmas or birthday or whatever, let me supply you with an absolutely foolproof set of rules for pleasing a hetero man. Is the present you have in mind made of cloth? It is wrong. Does the present you have in mind need electricity running through it? You are right.) 

In my new found maturity, I sat down and read the instructions (because I wanted the whole tuning process to go smoothly. Nothing more annoying than a telly thing that doesn’t pick up telly. Oh, and there are more output choices on the back of the thing than a PC).

My confidence in the manufacturers took a bit of a hit, however, when I read the below on page 7 of the user guide:

Before going any further, check that you have received the following items with your digital receiver. ("Fair enough", I think to myself. Let’s take stock. Let’s do a little inventory. Sounds like fun.)

• Remote control unit (Check. Awww, shiny. Oooh, look at all those buttons with strange symbols on them.)
  
  
• Two batteries for the remote control (AAA 1.5V. Bastard! I hate AAA. They’re the little… oooh, look at all the buttons on the remote.)
  
  
• One Power Cord (Yes. Handy.)
  
  
• One loop cable to connect the first tuner with the second tuner (Loop cable! Two tuners! I just made a mess.)
  
  
• One component RCA cable (Colours on this thing I’ve never seen on an AV cable. This cable, is in fact, going to cost me a lot of money. See, it’s got more connections than the back of my old telly offers. You know what that means… new telly.)
  
  
• One USB wireless module (Yes sportsfans, it hooks into your wireless LAN and you can treat it like an FTP server and drive it remotely through its web site. That mess isn’t getting any smaller.)
  
  
• A copy of this user guide (WTF! How am I reading this list if I don't have the user guide? Idiots!)
  

Surreal Estate

5h0r7 570ry

Life begins at 40 (That's going to play hell with someone's birth canal).

Not the welcome home I expected  (a gaffer-tape parade?).

 

My Bunnings is Tougher Than Your Bunnings

Aisle 3. Cement: free shoe sizing with every bag.

Aisle 4. Chainsaws: and hockey masks.

Aisle 7. Nailguns: complementary 5 minutes on indoor target range included with every purchase.

Aisle 9. Gardening: Electrified fenceposts for triffid farming. Seymore brand orchid feed bins.

Aisle 10. Soilent Green.

Aisle 11. Dead Ringers complete home surgery toolkit (instrument #4 pictured).

Money Saving Tips For The Hypochondriac

In the petri-dish that I call work, all the sickies (or as I call them, “Typhoid Marys”) did the expected thing and soldiered on, only to spread their vile diseases and thereby load me up with a case of the Wombat Flu.

I suspected that I might have been getting crook when my back ached uncontrollably for two weeks. When one of my neck glands went up and I started shivering and sweating, I went for the medicine cabinet to find a thermometer and an excuse not to leave the house.

Delirium set in at about the same time I found the old style chemical-strip thermometer. Remember them? The ones that you put on your forehead and wait for the strip to change colour. What you are then supposed to do is compare that colour to a handy chart to derive your temperature.

I must have mixed up my medicine cabinet chart collection at some point because, in my delirious state, I discovered that my temperature was ‘happy romantic tending towards nervous and anxious’.

After throwing the mood-ring instruction book away, I staggered round the house looking for an alternative. I decided that a trip to the quack was in order when I discovered that my condition was also rated nearly ‘rare beef’.

The doctor disagreed with my diagnoses but congratulated me on my resourcefulness.

Caution: For people looking to save a little money on household implements, be aware that meat thermometers are usually very sharp on the sensing end. When resting it under your tongue for three minutes, be sure not to walk around or bump into things. This results in needing to tell the doctor that there are two things wrong with you.

The Close Personal Friends I Keep in a Bright Box.

I’m usually pretty half-arsed about most things. I have to be really convinced something is a bloody good idea before I’m going to be levered off the couch and into action. But there are a few things that I do commit to, and do in a full-arsed kind of way.

One of them is lemonade icy-poles. Always had a soft spot for them and I will admit, on more than one occasion, to giving myself the most amazing heart-burn by eating six or seven in one go.

My lemonade icy-pole binges have nothing on my TV series binges, though. Emergency Contact and I have had some absolute shockers in the last eight years. I‘m not totally embarrassed about it... just mostly. It reminds me that I am never going to be the hard-headed adult who can’t suspend disbelief. 

Upsettingly, though, these exposure levels reveal how porous and easily warped my prefab personality is. I used to joke that if  there was no-one else in the room, I had no definable personality characteristics. I don’t joke about it anymore. Once we sat down and watched an entire season of The Sopranos and I had to resist calling everyone goombas and craved baloney sandwiches for a week afterward. My Star Trek: Next Gen festival left me unable to say "yes", rather than, “Make it so!”

There have been upsides. Mentioning that you’ve just completed a two season Dexter weekend means a lot of people leave you alone. My West Wing marathon, which left me a Wing Nut, made me smarter, able to do 14 things at once, and able to accurately recall any set of figures on any subject. I wasn’t able to impress many people with my new debating talents because I insisted on doing all my talking while walking and I have quite long legs, but hey, swings and roundabouts. (I want funded swings and roundabouts for every underprivileged public school attached to the Lafferty Bill going before the sub-committee next week and we’ll use it as leverage on the farmer’s strike news-cycle. Hey, what did you say you were having for lunch?)

The new binge is not harmful or helpful. It’s just a bit jarring. As I’ve mentioned before, I’m in the thick of a Buffy The Vampire Slayer attack, and it’s affecting my mind. EC and I have watched so much that we’ve sort of convinced ourselves that we’re just very quiet members of the Scooby Gang. Coming up to lunch time today, I found myself wondering what Giles was going to have to eat. I trust his judgement you see. I think he’s got good taste.

Grown Up Or Blown Up

It’s commonly held that 'the kids grow up fast these days'. 

From a relatively temporal position, I would contend that kids are experiencing the world at approximately one second per second, just like the rest of us. But I’m pretty sure that’s not what Beryl at the bowling club means when she looks at a couple of 15-year-old slappers on their way out for a night on the town.

In one of those oddly synchronous moments (that ends up being a flimsy excuse for me to write a blob) three incongruent things got thrown together and made me think about generational differences in maturation speed.

I like watching Talking ’bout Your Generation, mainly to see GenY get slammed. Even when they win on points, they‘ve been so thoroughly patronised and humiliated, it warms my cockles.  So comparing the generations was on my mind.

Immediately after Generation I watch Australia’s Next Top Model which, in the normal course of events, I would be embarrassed about, but I only watch so I can better appreciate Australia’s Next Top Westie Scrag… (actually, I tape the show and watch it on fast forward). 

Thirdly, I’m reading a book called Dambusters. Not Paul Brickhill’s The Dam Busters. Every self-respecting aeroplane-nut over the age of 30 will have read that one, so no news there. This is by Max Arthur, was published in 2008 and is a collection of interviews with the airmen, ground crews and scientists involved with Squadron 617 and that same dam-busting mission. The accounts are amazing and always told with modest understatement and self-effacement that can only come from genuine heroes. 

They speak in plain terms about proper derring-do. About flying Lancasters so low that, when getting back from training runs, the ground-crews had to clear tree branches out of the radiators. If you know anything about this sort of thing, you will know how un-freakin’-believably dangerous that is. That’s not all folks. The boffins put nearly opaque black Perspex over all their canopies and made the crew wear yellow goggles. This simulated doing it at night. At this point, all normal means of navigating a four-engined, 29 tonne bomber go out the blackened window. Turns out, the best course is (and you really need to see how big a Lancaster is to fully appreciate this) to fly under the freakin’ high-tension power lines. But wait, there’s more. Apparently the trigger-happy Navy would regularly take pot-shots at them, thinking they were the bad-guys. This is all before even going on the mission. I won’t spoil it, in case you want to read it. One pilot’s testimony to all this exemplifies the group‘s attitude: “Well, it was good practise. It made you a bit flak-happy, but you couldn’t play silly-buggers.”

Almost as amazing is the timeframe. Wing Commander Guy Gibson chose his crews in a couple of hours. They built the squadron, fitted it, kitted it, staffed it, did all the research, development and the training… in six weeks. To put this in personal perspective; I am currently part of a team trying to put together a few web pages for the Asia Pacific region. We’re six months in and only half way through phase one. 

The other night, I put down Dambusters to tune in to the HQ of Australia’s Next Top Module, where their challenge was to walk in a straight line, in clothes. This seemed to get the better of most of them, what with all that breathing they had to do at the same time. Earlier, a challenge involved the modules having to think of a line with their brain to say with their mouth, and then say the line with their mouth while getting out of a car using their legs. This onerous task ran tensions so high that sabotage and foul play were called on and the modules were forced to storm off, burst into tears and hit things.

How do these things relate in any way, shape or form? 

Those two groups, the modules and the airmen, are essentially the same age. Late teens to early twenties.  

Wing Commander Guy Gibson was 24 years old when he commanded the 617 and it was staffed by his peers. The crews refer to the few 30-year-olds as “the old men“. 

Four generations ago, Air Marshal “Bomber” Harris expected a bunch of kids to have the maturity, piloting skill, and management smarts to get 21 top-secret, heavily modified bombers ready on the runway, with trained crews who were to fly at tree-height and bounce experimental bombs across the lakes of brutally fortified industrial dams in the heart of enemy territory… in six weeks. As history shows, they did it. 

The contrast is stark when Air-Head Marshaller Sarah Murdoch asks some of the current generation to stop thinking solely of themselves for four seconds and get ready for the runway.

(Look, I know it‘s not an entirely fair comparison. I could have used real people for the second group. But my initial premise is that it‘s widely held that each generation grows up quicker than the last. I think no generation grows up faster than a war generation, and no group has the luxury of growing up slower than a generation that grows up in peace and unbelievable prosperity.)

Tattoo Top Twenty

In a moment that made me feel like a tourist in my own society, I recently read a top 20 list of the most popular tattoos that are corporate logos. (Sun Herald felt it sound enough to run with. Smurf voted it suspect. I like the story...)

The list was compiled by a legal company, so I’m looking forward to seeing the opportunity they’re building themselves - in the form of infringement cases.

So here we go, slightly out of order, for the sake of dramatic delivery.

Number 1, and not hard to predict - Harley Davidson. That’s the market that traditionally gets the tough-stickers and is unlikely to suddenly wake up one day and think, “Bloody hell! I like Kawasakis, now.”

Number 2, and I felt a good contender for the top spot – Nike. It’s a symbol that is so symbolically iconic in its symbolicnessitude, that it’s lost its connection to poorly made, sweatshop sports shoes.

Number 3 - AFL Team logos. (Survey done in Melbourne) I can almost understand that. Loyalties run deep about footy. Hands up all those with a Super League Tat… come on, it’s not that embarrassing.

Numbers 4 and 5 - I need to come back to them.

From 6 to 10, Disney characters, Holden, Ford, Fox/Alpinestars and Triple J Radio. Not much to say about those. My head doesn’t spin with the brain-bending oddness of wanting those symbols permanently emblazoned on your flesh. It only aches a little.

11 to 20 defy explanation.

Louis Vuitton - Because fashion brands will never go out of… wait.

Chanel - just wear it on your wrist, not on your sleeve.

Playboy - your mother is soooo proud.

Coca-Cola - cool refreshing drink. Symbol of free West. That’s not white-trash at all!

Jack Daniels - shows a real commitment to unemployment.

Jim Beam - gotta keep up with Joneses, who got the Jack Daniels tat last year when he got the Judge Judy court summons.

Mountain Dew – Topping the white-trash quotient.

QANTAS – wha’?

Back to the motors for Triumph cycles and finishing the list with;

Fender/Gibson – which almost makes sense, in comparison to the preceding 8.

But back to 4 and 5. Coming in at number 5, and the only tattoo in history to actually drop a credit rating as the needle does its work… VB.

Number 4. Vegemite. This is so inexplicable, it’s almost cute. It is, however, considered unpatriotic in trailer-park circles, to place the vegemite tattoo above the bum-crack.

Caution: When choosing your corporate logo tattoo, think about what you liked and how smart you were ten years ago. Still like the same stuff? Learnt anything between then and now? 

Now, put yourself ten years forward.

The Revolution Will Not Be Televised

In comedy circles there's a standard known as 'the lawyer joke'. As in;

"What do you call 50 lawyers on the bottom of the ocean?"

"A good start."

So is this.

(With thanks to roving Panda correspondent, Spellstryke.)

When You're Buffed It Means Healthy, Right?

 

America’s health system is pretty regularly scrutinised and criticised - but I think there are plenty of culprits still to be identified...

 

In TV scripting, the groaning edifice of healthcare is often used as a plot device to give the protagonist some hardship to endure. They come up against the hopelessly overcrowded hospital system and we hope they prevail over the stifling corruption and malpractice. But at least these protagonists are in the position to be let down by their heath system.

 

Over the last couple of months, I’ve been exposed to an incredible amount of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. By series three, I’d actually been sucked on (I’m sorry… in).

 

It has occurred to me that Buffy did not help a whole generation of American kids set very high expectations on their healthcare system. She just didn't engage with it.

 

The characters are constantly being bumped, burnt, battered, bludgeoned and blown up; and I don’t think I’ve once seen them go to the hospital. They set no store by it, preferring a mixture of homemade remedies and “don’t worry, I’ll walk it off”. Ok, that smacks of hardy self-reliance but there’s another side to this I don’t like. (Well, actually I don’t really care, but let’s pretend I do.)

 

Buffy kills a lot of vampires – hence the name, I guess. But doing what’s best for your community and helping a victim of a virulent disease doesn't have to be at such lethal odds.

 

First, a question of intent. In most cases, the vampire didn’t ask to be bitten. Given that, what’s the appropriate response to someone who is not behaving rationally and is biting people? It is to attempt treatment and a cure. 

 

They’ve alluded to how we really should perceive the vampire menace in one early episode. In a refreshing improvement to the Mother, Teenage Daughter Relationship, Buffy’s mum goes out on patrol with her. As a fanged monster leaps towards them, mum says, “Oh, that’s Stephen from the bank.”

 

That’s right. That’s Stephen from the bank. Stephen from the bank, first. Suffering a bit of a malady, second. Buffy’s response is to see the illness, not the person - and her cure is on the radical side.

 

I can relate to the bind this must present in the minds of the afflicted. I had to go to a doctor after being bitten by a dog once. I don’t know if I would’ve been so keen if I felt there was a chance of being staked. This show has set an expectation in the back of American minds that they will go to the doctor with a bit of a head cold, and be euthanized.

 

Buffy’s methods are like the war on drugs. They're never going to work. You need to treat vampires with a medical model, not a martial one. The biggest problem that I can see is that Buffy the Vampire Locator, Restrainer and Curer doesn’t have much of a ring to it, but it may help a teensy bit in changing a generational mindset.

 

 

Sand Witch

I might have been a little unkind about my canteen in the past. I might have suggested that they were a raving pack of incompetents, unfit to serve swill to swine and unable to fathom the complexities of an 80s cash register. They’ve tried to kill me with brillo pads in the mousaka and coffee with a mean temperature slightly above the surface of the sun. The sum total of offences to dining that these people have delivered are too numerous to list. But this morning’s effort is worthy of mention.

I asked for a sandwich and as catering lady went for the bread, she wiped her nose on her gloved hand. I listed the ingredients that I wanted, for the second time, and finished off with, “And go easy on the swine flu.” Her response is illuminating about her thought processes and alarming for my survival chances.

She came back with, “Ahhh, I don’t believe any of that stuff. It’s in your genes. It’s got nothing to do with all o’ this hygiene rubbish. You either get it or you don’t.”

Appalled but unsurprised, I said, “So that whole germ theory revolution thing was all a bit of a beat-up, was it?”

She cleverly puts a stop to my petty quibbling with, “I thought you didn’t want salt.”

I’ve decided that whenever a conversation isn't going my way, I’m going to throw out a baffling non-sequitur and then wipe my nose on my hand. It stunned me, so I don't see why it shouldn't work elsewhere.

The dishes are done, man.

Talkin' 'Bout My Generalisation

Channel Ten broadcast their new show Talkin’ ‘bout Your Generation last night and I enjoyed it. It’s a completely unfair competition (more on that later) but Shaun Micallef amuses me and Gen Y got a hiding. Perfect. (Good, also, because it follows a show I find stressful.)

 

MasterChef is tough on me. Don’t get me wrong, it’s not nearly as bad a show as I would’ve expected. Apart from the odd personal idiosyncrasy from the judges, I don’t feel angry, retch or throw things when I see them. In fact, they’re quite encouraging to the contestants, which makes a nice change, yeah?

 

Many of the contestants seem nice and I don’t instantly want them to die a horrible, deep-fried death. They have some substance and skill and certainly bring more to the dining table than contestants on some other reality shows. They’ve done more than just eat enough to shift themselves into a new species category and they do more than walk in a straight line… in clothes. The show is almost about something - and that’s good enough for me.

 

But it’s not a fair competition. Anyone who has cooked for anyone else, and cares about the result, knows how tough it is.

 

Once I tried to poison some guests by being too conscientious. I broke the recipe because I had stage fright. I checked the meat more often than was necessary and inadvertently kept dropping the temperature in the oven. No meat thermometer, but I knew the weight and I’d made the meal successfully a few times before. No problem. But even by the most liberal interpretation of the word  “blue” , I couldn’t serve the quivering mess in good conscience.  

So how are these poor buggers, who have to perform for tough judges and the camera, ever going to get a fair hearing when an unpractised dish goes for a Burton? The artificial time limit means they have to chuck out the masterwork and resort to cornflakes, Worcestershire Sauce and yoghurt and pretend they were going for something “traditional and simple”, yeah?

 

I also find the show a little confusing. I’m usually eating my own, real dinner while I immerse myself in their little pan-fried fantasy world. My senses are spread too thin. The discord happens when I’m listening (and watching) a judge say, “the meat has a good, honest flavour” as I’m spooning fish into my mouth. I get a slight reality twist going and think, “these guys have got no idea, it‘s the fishiest piece of bee… Oh.”

Confused and shovelling all manner of hybrid weirdness into my mouth, I’m going to keep watching, though. For the record; I can’t work out what Lucy Liu is doing there, I’m glad the vegetarian that wept at meat has been boned, I want Trevor to win (I know he can’t because he has cooked “chicken starfish”, but I want him to win) because anyone who has done time in a submarine is probably going to be good under literal and metaphorical pressure and will be nutty enough not to stand out from real chefs.

So, what’re Talkin’ ‘bout Your Generation’s unfair bits, you ask? Well, unless they stack the Baby Boomers panel with hep cats, the Gen Y’s panel with hXc Neo Cons and the Gen X panel with muppets, the Gen Xers are going to cane it every time. Not just because it’s my generation and we are all misunderstood geniuses, but because it’s the middle ground. We are sucking a little from their oxygen tents and their humidicribs.