Gross Or Net

My head's too heavy, according to Emergency Contact. I think it likely that it's approximately the right weight for my size, although sometimes I do get a little tired lugging it around. A good lie down is usually good for what ails ya, though.

I decided that I needed to put a figure to this alleged heaviness, so taking the Archimedes approach, I ran down the street starkers, shouting eureka. Actually, that's not true. I had thongs on.

After getting home, I decided to take the other Archimedes approach and put my head in a full bucket of water, aiming to catch the overflow and therefore work out the volume of my head, and then do some calculations on likely density and mass. Unfortunately, I have no real way to gauge the density of my head (stop it) and although we are supposed to be mostly made up of water, I felt it was still too inaccurate to warrant the effort, as well as potentially dangerous. After all, I am a little forgetful. What if I failed to take it out again?

So, I lay down with my head on the bathroom scales. Emergency Contact, not getting into the spirit of scientific enquiry, got annoyed with me when I got her out of bed to come and read the scales (some experiments cannot wait, no matter what the time of night) but we got an answer.

Why Is The Champs Elysees Lined With Trees? 'Cause Germans Like to March in the Shade

I was listening to a nice Francophile lady on the radio yesterday and she was saying that the French, when being rude about Australians, say we are too polite to be honest.

Well cut me to the quick, but I'm pretty sure the phrase “Cheese eating surrender monkey” originated in this  country, so I don’t really get her point.

Pensioners Insurance... Please

There’s an ad on telly for a pensioners-only insurance agency that illustrates nicely the depth of baby-boomer’s self deception. Yet again, the hateful bunch of bastards are so certain of their place in the world, they absolve themselves of  all responsibility - certain in the knowledge that we are honoured to have them around.

The ad tells these self-satisfied retards that no matter how life-threateningly inept they are with their cars, if the vehicle they wrote-off was under ten years old, they get a new one.

The ad then amuses us with little vignettes of the difficulties they’re going to have when they are befuddled by their new-fangled horseless carriages.

One can’t find his fuel cap. Sigh. Imagine how charmed we are, as he jams up an entire row of bowsers on a work day.

One leaps his car onto a raised flowerbed after not being able to tell the difference between reverse and first. Chuckle. Especially funny when later, the quick learner does the same thing onto a toddler playing in their front garden.

One turns her windscreen-wipers on instead of signalling. Oh, bless. What could possibly go wrong, while changing lanes at 110 km/h into a westerly sun with grit on the windscreen?

This insurance company, APIA, calls this policy the “rewarding experience” policy.

I call it the “PUNISHING THE REST OF THE PLANET WITHOUT A THOUGHT IN YOUR HEAD FOR ANYONE ELSE - AS PER USUAL - NOW GET OFF THE FUCKING ROAD BECAUSE I HAVE TO GO AND EARN A LIVING SO I CAN PAY MORE TAX TO ENSURE YOUR RETIREMENT BECAUSE YOU DO NOT HAVE THE GOOD GRACE TO GO AWAY AND DIE!” policy.

Not as catchy an acronym on the disclosure statement, I’ll grant you, but I want a little more truth in advertising.

Fadtastic

So, the Apple iGouge came out overnight.

Phew. Now I've got a phone for my music, an iPod for my lap, a laptop for my desk and a footprint for my consumption.

It's all about i, i, i isn't it?

Over Promise

Westpac is currently advertising that they are: "Backing over 600 bank managers."

As a consumer, I just want to know if they are using a big enough vehicle.

G'day. Now Piss Off

One of the defining qualities of being Australian, one I would point to and say, “That, one. I don’t mind that one” is our belief that we are suspicious of authority. We naturally don’t like people lording it over us. This feeds the ratbag, anti-authoritarian thing that we like about ourselves.

How true this is in everyday life and whether we act on it constructively is a whole other thing but we have told ourselves it’s true.

Well, my government has been foisting a lot of stuff down my throat about what to do on Australia day. I am Australian, and therefore suspicious of my government. I will therefore do nothing on Australia day because my government told me to do something. I am being un-Australian and by being un-Australian, I am being Aussie as.

Up yours, Plastic Kev. Happy Australia day, North Korea.

Nippon It In The Bud

Jen Hawkins is hanging around the living room without any clobber on. I’m not complaining, just saying.

Emergency Contact bought the magazine that features Jen, oh-so-bravely (cough) going without her smalls or air-brushing. I can’t see what the fuss is about. She’s not actually bearing all. More importantly, she’s in her mid-late-twenties and is hot. No-one needs airbrushing at that age or at that temperature. I reckon the undies advertisements where she skips off to work in just an overcoat fastened down to the navel, knee-high boots and a pair of knickers is far more provocative.


I know I’m not alone. I was in a pub with three mates recently and that ad came on. We all just shut-up and gazed respectfully at the screen. When it was over, we centred back on each other and nodded slowly as we came back to our realities.

But it wasn’t Jen that got the magazine into the house. No, it was Lisa Katayama. She wrote an article called, "She’s My Girlfriend. I Have Real Feelings For Her", and it’s a fatal car accident of an article. You are not supposed to slow down and gawk at this sort of stuff - but we couldn’t tear our eyes from the tragedy.

I quote the lead paragraph: Struggling to navigate modern romance, Japanese men are turning to two-dimensional “girlfriends” printed on pillowcases.

The article follows a growing trend where Japanese uber-dorks, having given up on reality, have settled for printed images of young anime women on pillow cases and believe they are having real relationships with them. They go on dates with them. In public.

Actually, I’m being far too polite. They are not images of young women. They are little girls. Google the word otaku.

Vive la difference and all that, but I’m going to hang cultural sensitivity here and say, "Not all things are of equal merit". Chucking cultural relativism is sometimes necessary.

Not all cultures are entirely equal. Burning to death five-year-olds because your culture sees them as witches (Nigeria) is not as good as my culture’s tendency to go into a lather of finger pointing when a kid at risk gets missed by DOCS and dies. Both bad. Ours is a preferable type of bad. It goes to intent.


Those two examples are at the extreme of human behaviour, but if you know anything about the trends in Hentai (adult anime), you will know that rape, child exploitation, bestiality, hermaphrodite crime-leagues, non-anthropoid aliens and incest are big sellers.

Rape is rape.

I won’t criticise the hermaphrodite thing too much, assuming that all the chicks-with-dicks are consenting. But the Japanese male’s interest in coquettish girls with truncheons between their legs doesn’t scream well-balanced-heterosexuality to me. Just hanging it out there… as it were.

The incest taboo doesn’t seem to be as strong as it is in the West but if I‘m going to be truly open minded, my only real worry there should be the power differential between the participants. Modern medicine can deal with the rest of the consequences.

Tentacle penetration seems to get an amazing run and I guess if the octopus from another planet is consenting, well, it's not that bad. But you know who is rarely consenting? You guessed it, the young woman tied to the pole being tentacled. I’m going to leave that one too, partly because you don’t have all day, but also because it is so obviously impossible, it has to be a fantasy. We should be able to tell the difference.

But here’s where Japanese men have a completely fucked-up way of thinking about their relationships with women and should be encouraged to think of it as a national disgrace. The amount of doe-eyed, short-skirted, pre-pubescent schoolgirls who are the lead characters in this “art”, is a worry. I don’t think we should mince words about it. The bulk of these characters are underage schoolgirls and they are the objects of fantasy for grown men.

From the article again:

… at the World Congress Against Sexual Exploitation of Children and Adolescents… Japan was singled out for its lax laws relating to child porn. But others claim there’s little connection between paedophilia and “pillow love”, and that the phenomenon has far more to do with the failure of some Japanese men to navigate modern romantic life.

And I can understand how you might fail at navigating modern romantic life if your hobbies were Japan’s national sports; rubbing up against unsuspecting females in the train and appearing on reality shows where you’re rubbed down with banana essence and thrown to some Orang-utans. Biting the pillow seems an obvious choice.

So, as I close the magazine after writing this little rant, there’s Jen Hawkins again. Nearly thirty, nearly nude and totally delicious. She doesn’t appear to be anybody’s fool and I cannot for the life of me understand what the Japanese male sees in an animated, child substitute.

I'm So Confused

Now, I admit to only being an amateur student of history, but this sticker (found on a sign near my group of shops) really puts my limited understanding in doubt...

It Tolls For Thee

The Lane Cove Tunnel went broke this week.
 

In NSW, that’s the 438^th large infrastructure project to burst into flames and injure every banker nearby, this financial year!*
 

There’s something pleasingly curious about this in a Zen kind of way.
 

How does a tunnel go bust?
 

A bridge? Yes. A bridge can go bust because it’s a thing. A tunnel is not a thing. It’s the absence of a thing. If we leave it alone, what happens? The Billy Goats Gruff find it easier to get around and avoid the Troll-Toll?
 

Your hole went bust and we are going to repossess it. That’ll learn ya. Or as the Zen masters would say, “Dig a hole. Then fill it in.”
 

If the NSW government can’t make a quid from a Zen-porno film called, Your Hole Went Bust And We Had To Fill It In, then, that Catholic Premier of ours isn’t worth her salt.
 

*All A Grey Area ‘facts’ qualified with an exclamation mark are open to debate. Ok. All A Grey Area facts are open to debate. Ok. I’ve never said anything remotely correct. You’re still here, aren’t you? Killjoy

The ABC News-Feeds Are Scary Today

Hundreds Mourn UN Dead in Haiti Quake

I didn’t read the article becau… lookout, a zombie!

Voodoo is the only scientifically proven way a civilian can make a zombie. The situation is appalling in Haiti but let’s not get sentimental. If they are dealing with the un-dead, it means the Voodoo practising locals are re-animating their loved ones.

I can understand that. If something killed Emergency Contact a bit, I would have to have her re-anima… lookout, a koala with a gun!

Police Investigate Another Koala Shooting

Australia, you reap what you sew. If you allow slovenly marsupials to buy firearms, you are inevitably going to suffer gently-paced shooting sprees. The police should have been able to see this coming. Koalas should have been limited to rifles. Handguns are too easily concealed in pouches.

To Dream That Implausible Dream

There is no real scientific consensus on what dreaming is, so while there‘s confusion I’ll take this opportunity to throw my three cents in and when my theory is eventually proven to be the most incredible neurological insight of our time, I will be given the keys to the city. I dreamt I got them once, the keys to the city. When I asked if they got you into cool things like Town Hall or The Opera House, the Lord Mayor looked at me like I was an idiot and pointed at the fruit stand near Wynyard bus station.

Dreaming is not left over thoughts being chucked out. It’s not the back-up of short-term memory to long-term, no. People dream to keep the human realm in balance. You get up to stuff in your dreams that you can’t get up to in your real life and it keeps you sane. You also get to make some emotional book-ends on stuff that is otherwise horribly incomplete. The Grey Area Theory of Sleepy Bye-Byes Equilibrium or GATSBE for short. Let’s not muck around. Let’s call it ‘The Great GATSBE‘.

So having been seduced by the inescapable sense in what I am saying, I will hit you with a sad comparison. I have a much more interesting life than you. I make this revolting claim because it’s the only way I can feel better about my unconscious life. My dreamscape is just killing me. I’ve complained about this before when I blobbed that I had a dream about doing the washing-up. When you actually have to do the washing-up after dreaming it, that’s twice as boring. I have topped myself, though.

Emergency Contact lost her wallet in a three story, many roomed house, and we had to find it before we could go home. This is what I get up to in my dream life. I searched a house, in minute detail, looking for a red patent-leather wallet. It took for freakin’ ever and I was bored and annoyed. In my sleep, I was bored and annoyed. (E.C. wasn't very much help, either. She kept on getting distracted by wine and cheese.) This seems to be monstrously unfair. I don’t even do jigsaw puzzles because that’s just looking for lost stuff, yet my subconscious has seen fit to treat me to an hour long rendition of one of life’s medium sized butt-pains. Good one brain! What’s on for tonight? Hanging out an endless pile of identical black socks? Dusting the bookshelves in the national library? Counting sand in a dust storm?

The Valhalla

The Valhalla movie theatre in Glebe, Sydney, had three distinct historic periods. The period before I was aware of it, the period during the 80s where it was the best thing since spiced Lollobrigida, and everything after that.

One of the best things about the Valhalla during the 80’s was the poster for the coming year’s attractions. It was more important than going to the attractions themselves. Your earnest young style councillor had to have a Valhalla poster on the bedroom or kitchen door, partly to hide the stain of something almost as exotic as the films they were going to miss, but mainly for culture-vulture cred.

It always had French and Italian suave, American underground, and for some reason, Eraser Head. I still haven’t seen the film and consider it one of my sacred human rights; not to have seen Eraser Head. The poster also had “fun” reviews within the borders of the film ad panels and exotic words, like “Koyanisqaatsi” and “A Boy and His Dog”.

During that time, there was barely a weekend where we didn’t make the pilgrimage... and it was a bit of a trek. I was a Northern Beaches kid and getting into Glebe in the inner west of Sydney required the sort of energy and stupidity only youth can bring to an endeavour. We loved it.

We watched interesting, if not always good, cinema in a dilapidated old flea-pit, went outside and drank cappuccinos with the lesbians and then made our way home to have energetic, youthful sex with the thoughts of Paris and the future on our tiny, nicotine-addled minds.

When I moved to Glebe for two years in the 90s, quite literally three minutes walking distance away from the Valhalla, I didn’t go once. There’s a lesson there.

But, many of my tastes and favourite scenes are burnt in from the Valhalla. I have no idea why I choose to share this, other than it always makes me smile when I think of it.

The opening to a film called Subway, starring Christopher Lambert (when he’s in French films, you should say it Kristoff Lombear, it’s more fun that way) is all black, then three quotes appear in sequence.

“To be, is to do”, Socrates

“To do, is to be”, Sartre

“Do be do be, do”, Sinatra

Philosophical development in a nutshell.

Road Brains

The police report on the accident I almost had this morning would have been interesting.

“The motorist looked to his left and claimed to have witnessed a zombie driving a car. He then claims that if zombies were able to drive cars, we were all in deep kaka. He reports that his instinctive emergency reaction was to swerve violently into oncoming traffic to escape the un-dead horror.”

It was horrible, folks. The zombie was driving along, head totally still in that stiff necked zombie way, skin all mottled and rotten and about to fall off, and then I got a better look and worked out what was going on.

Some nut-bag of a woman was driving to work with a full, cucumber facemask on.
Facemasks might make her look younger, but it aged me about ten years.

Palin Into Insignificance

I heard something nice on the radio today. Sarah Palin has joined the Fox “News” Channel. She said she was really excited to be joining an organisation that was so committed to fair and balanced news coverage. I don't even need to add anything there, do I? Let's just sit back and bask in the glow of that for a while.

I suppose she's qualified though. In the same way that she was qualified to deal in foreign relations because she could see Russia from her kitchen window, I bet she's watched telly before. So, yeah. Cool.

Jesus tap-dancing H Christ.

Stain Alive

OMO is advertising a new washing powder compound with the promise that in a low water environment, it is the best product for combating, and I quote; "bolognese, grass and chocolate stains".

Kids, the only good way to deal with a low water environment that is somehow kind enough to hit you with bolognese, grass and chocolate, is to add beer.

First Big Question Of 2010 (For me, anyway.)

What is going to become of SBS without Top Gear?

WMDs Part 2

If left to settle naturally, whippets will point to magnetic north.

WMDs

Emergency Contact and I did our (now) usual trick of needing to get out of Sydney for NYE, but still wanting to celebrate it somehow. So we got onto the The Family Gag Reflex, who we've holidayed with before (China. Thailand. Bucca Wauka). They're great company and have their priorities set correctly. Do something. Get comfortable after doing something. Get fed and watered once comfortable.

After EC and I asked if they would like to invite us up for NYE, they invited us up for NYE. Psychic. They were off on their own holiday about 24 hours after we arrived but remained unfazed; they asked if we would like to house-sit once they were gone.

It's the sign of a truly classy host when, in making their place ours, they made it sound like we were doing them a favour. So we got the run of a lovely huge house with an in-ground pool – and two whippets.

My philosophy on borrowing people's stuff is, wherever possible, leave it better than you found it. If not, at least as you found it. But Yuki and Otto, the Whippets of Mass Destruction, have got it in for me. They are determined to make sure I'm a nervous wreck by the time I leave the Gag Reflex household.

Waving the family goodbye on day one, I turned around to see the smaller whippet, Otto, had already pilfered a good shoe from an impossibly high place and was giving it the treatment. The family hadn't even turned the end of the street.

After feeding them early the next morning we went back to bed. We re-emerged to find that rather than a packet next to the toilet, the whippets think it's handier to keep rolls of toilet paper in small pieces everywhere around the house. Certain tissue boxes have suffered the same interior redesign.

But the whippet rebellion that seemed to be a direct poke in the eye to my dog management skills was this. Coming home after being out for brunch for only a couple of hours, we opened the back door to let the dogs in and one of them ran straight into the only bit of carpet in the room, dropped a quick dog-egg in front of the TV, and then ran straight back outside.

Another person is coming in to house-sit for a few days after EC and I leave. I'll be quite glad once I hear that the Gag Reflexes returned to their house to find it wasn't burnt to the ground by a whippet running past rough surfaces with matches in its mouth.

When Devo ask if whippet good? No. Bad whippet.

(Hard to stay angry at something so cute, though)