The Heart of Light And Darkness

I’ve sniped from the parapet enough.

Suit up, Emergency Contact, we’re going in.

In a couple of days, we leave for China. The Middle Kingdom. The Dozey Dragon. We’re going with some mates who know my thoughts on certain monochromatic mammals, and they have threatened to dress me in a black and white suit and throw me to the pandas - just for shits and giggles.

Yep, as part of the tour we’re going to end up in Chengdu – where they have the extremely ominously entitled “Giant Panda Research and Breeding Centre.”

All manner of dire scenes play themselves out before my sleep deprived mind's eye. Like sitting there in the passenger seat going, “That’s no breeding centre, that’s a space station!”

Or perhaps, as I face the great, insane panda in the dark GPRBC, sitting there with his bald head and white gut, drooping over his ankles, we will speak.

“I expected someone like you. Are you an assassin?”

“I’m a tourist.”

“You're neither. You're an errand boy, sent by grocery clerks, to write a blog.”

You don’t have nothin’ to worry about. I’m a professional.

(If you are unaware of the ground breaking research that the A Grey Area Institute for Fuzzy Things has done on pandas, click on Pandemonium over there under Themes. Or, you know... here.)

Muffin Won't Rise?

Thanks to roving reporter, Stick

Scene From Space

Woke up on Mars this morning. Wasn’t expecting it, either.

Emergency Contact and I had left a few windows open overnight and I was woken by the taste of dust and a vague slippery feeling on the sheets.

So, Sydney’s in the grip of the worst dust storm since 1944. Visibility is down to three arm lengths and all of this is coming from South Australia. (So boring, even the dirt is leaving).

Harking back to an old theme of mine though, I witnessed one of the most futile things I have ever seen as I pulled into work on my sandworm, unhooked and made sure I had a spare thumper for the trip home.

There, in among the billowing red dust in the carpark, were our two loyal South Americans. One with his leaf-blower, the other with outdoor vacuum cleaner, both putting their backs into the task of… perhaps a post-ironic art happening?

Just The Fax, Ma'am

Collapsing under the real weight of the imaginary paper in your faux-paperless office?

Wondering why it takes 47 arse-covering replies, with 57 witnesses known in modern speak as “cc“’s, before anything gets done?

Is your inbox your greatest genuine nemesis?

That’s because 99% of the time email is not communication. It's semi-anonymous speech-making.

Most of what we really do as humans requires backwards and forwards interplay. It needs the checking of comprehension and authenticity… that certain something that indicates there has been a casual covenant made. There’s been a promise and some understanding.

Anything less is too easy to ignore. (That’s why we still require each other to actually turn up to funerals and weddings.)

Upper management know this. It’s why they spend bundles of money on meeting each other, face-to-face in exotic places (well, one of the reasons) so they know that the business can go on. They’ve looked each other in the eye.

In my opinion, email should never be the driver of actual work, just the filing system… yet it is inexorably the main tool of business.

Join me in my new, poorly subscribed movement: One year without email. Just the phone and the fax. Let’s cut communication back to what it really should be about… people talking to each other, and then swapping the contract.

Oh, and shoddy blogs.

What's The Matter, Skip?

The finest documentary of all time was aired last night on Australian television - A searing expose into Skippy, the Bush Kangaroo.

Things learnt:

Kangaroos don’t make a "tsk tsk tsk" sound. You can, however, get them to chew so there’s some movement to dub the sound to, by feeding them rubber bands.

Kangaroos are dumber than a box of hair and cannot be trained. You know whenever you saw Sonny running up a hill and the kangaroo appeared to be following? Yeah, well that was a happy coincidence. It had just been let out of a hessian sack off camera and happened to be going in the same direction.

Kangaroos cannot really fly aeroplanes.

As kids, we all believed that Skippy was an excellent attack/guard kangaroo. What you see as an adult is someone off camera, throwing a marsupial at some actors.

Many skit shows have spoofed Skippy by exaggerating the level of comprehension implied by the one-way conversations the actors would have with the animal. Turns out - you can’t exaggerate them.

There were a lot of Skippies and the crew didn’t try too hard to match the replacement with the recently lost one. The thing would gain and lose weight, change colour and height, within a single scene.

And on a personal note:

Every kid who has ever been to any wildlife sanctuary in Australia, has met “the real Skippy”. Just as every kid has been secretly thrilled when Skippy has grown tired of a day’s worth of attention from little children, and has gone mental.*

*Tony Martin captures this beautifully in Lolly Scramble

The First 15,000

Today marks the 15,000th day I’ve been here... you know... alive... on this planet. That sounds like a lot and to be honest, I don't remember all of them. It sounds like other things too.

It sounds like 11101010011000² in binary.

It’s apparently Amy Winehouse’s 26th and Alexander von Humboldt’s 240th birthday... and they’re going to be quite hard to tell apart at the bash.

This all comes to me through an enormously entertaining site called Wolfram Alpha. So if you’ve got a touch of the nerd abowtcha, then take a peak here.

Turn It Up

For the few of you who don’t know, Channel 9 Television has a new digital dumping ground, where they send all their crap and pretend it’s real telly. It’s the broadcasting equivalent of making a resort island out of untreated sewage. They’ve called the thing “Go” - and it really should. As an example, it’s where you can still see Dance Your Enormous, Dimpled Arse Off.

But there is some unintentional entertainment to be had. The advertisements.

I laughed until I broke something when I saw an ad for an ear-wax treatment. After showing me some gut-churning vision of what the solution will do to the “build-up”, we then inexplicably cut to a pleasant looking middle-aged stranger sitting on his couch. After a pause where there’s no action or sound, he then lunges forward and yells, (and I mean shouts) “I wasn’t deaf! I just needed ear-wax treatment.” Satisfied he’s got his message across, he settles back into the couch and continues to watch his really loud telly.

It was funny enough that he shouts it. Even better that it’s an American ad where they’ve inaccurately dubbed an Australian accent over the top. (Why do they do that so badly? There are countless ads on at the moment where I think “What on earth made them think that voice actor was a good match for the vision?” I’m thinking particularly of a toothpaste ad where the “dentist” is a petite American/Asian woman, and the talent scouts decided that what sounds like 6’2” Brunhilda from Lithgow was the ideal voice fit.) Anyway, the shouty stranger’s words don’t quite sync with the lips and he really looks like someone who’s only just had his cochlea implant turned on. You know exactly what I mean, don't make me spell it out.

On a completely different matter - this is the 300th blob for A Grey Area. Three hundred! You know what that means? Yup. Not enough friends.

Shipping News

As Kyle Sandilands implodes under the weight of his own stupidity, others gravitate towards his patented method of attention-getting.

Evidently, he wasn’t receiving enough negative press and decided to make a throw-away remark about weight loss, concentration camps, and someone with the last name of Szubanski.

If you are unaware of Nazi travesties in Poland, it’s very hard to put those things together before you blurt them out… so, you know, give him a… give him a fucking high-school history book.

On the same day as he blundered into the steely edifice of Third Reich history, I was amused to hear the story of a Queensland girl, who wants to be the youngest solo-sailing-global-circumnavigator.

Just like any teenager not getting enough attention, she took the grown-up’s vehicle and a couple of miles from home, smacked it into the steely edifice of a tanker.

Well done.

It’s the grinding sound of ambition that lets us know you’re there.

Things You Didn't Know #1

I'm pretty sure I just saw a spider caught in his own web. He was thrashing around and behaving like his bedsheets were tangled around his neck.

Maybe it wasn't his web. Maybe he was visiting a mate and wasn't sure how to walk around on a web that wasn't his own.

Anyway, this is worth mention because spiders do not, in general, get caught in spider webs. That's because they're made of teflon.

It's a cruel fact of the trade that it takes over 400 spider hides to coat a single 14cm pan, with teflon.

Only the Japanese still do it. They herd the spiders into this secret cove (it's really difficult to get into the town there and filming is strictly prohibited) and once the spiders are all gathered together, foaming and frothing... wait...

I'll get back to you on the details.

Advertising Looks Up

Farve, Ten, Fifteen, Twenny

Twennyfarve, Thirdy

Thirdyfarve, Fordy

Fordyfarve, Fiddy

All that munny

Still lechin' the puss

You Can Do Better Than That

Australia is growing up. Slowly but surely, it’s finding its feet, slipping them into some thongs, and going down the beach.

The hysterical European cultural influence in Christmas decorations is slowly giving way to something far more appropriate for this part of the world.

In my childhood, every shop had fake snow in the window, alpine scenes of white covered loveliness would be populated with snowmen and rugged-up urchins.

These days, chestnuts, mulled wine and reindeer are featuring less and less as we become more comfortable with our reality - and I can swing with that.

But this is just taking the piss. My company’s efforts at Christmas decorations have hit a new low.

We'll Make Great Pet Minders

Extreme-leisure correspondent, Gooby, has found the franchise I've always wanted.

No outlay. All profit.

It'll be vaguely educational, too.

Eternal Earthbound Pets