ConVicta

I think that Guinea Pigs can finally be put to use. Above is my incredibly detailed plan for a lawn wheel. It pushes itself along with a little electric motor powered by the solar cell panel on the top. The pigs a loaded into the rolling cage and as it slowly makes its way across your lawn, the pigs are cutting, mulching and fertilising all on the trot. The motor stops at night allowing the fit little pigs to rest, but come morning, the wheel starts off again with the hungry little buggers making short work of your grass. Not fast enough to do any damage if it comes to rest against your back fence, simply re-point the wheel when you get home from work. Oh, and please remove pregnant pigs from the wheel until they have produce your next generation of shears.

She's With the Band

Not all exercise is equal. Some is more amusing than others.

Started up the regular training again the other day after a few weeks hiatus to let some injuries recover. (Ahhh who am I kidding? A series of events let me get out of it, so I grabbed the opportunity to skive off with both hands.)

So back to the park and the bars and the weights and the running and the puffing and the boxing and whining and the groaning and the ….. ahem. My trainer pulled out his newest torture device - the largest, thickest, heaviest elastic band I have ever seen, and tied it onto an overhead bar. With the explanation of how to get the foot into the hanging loop and the promise of the type of chin-ups that can be achieved (more with greater control) I threw myself up and down a few times and was impressed. I was supported by a rubber band that was strong enough to: 1) not only not break with a 115 kilo man standing in it, 2) had enough elastic strength to help him get into double figures on his chin-ups.

Then it was Emergency Contact’s go with the rubber band. She weighs 56 kilos. After the trainer and I had stopped laughing, we fished her out of the tree that she was catapulted into and kept going with the evening's torture.

Visions of ninjas jumping backwards into trees shall haunt me.

I'd Buy Art if I Had the Monet (I'm sorry, I really am)

One of the signs that viewing "Modern Art" is still dangerous

I have suffered for my art, now it’s your turn.

Toddled around the Cockatoo Island part of the Biennale on Sunday and I have a few impressions to share with you.

Cockatoo Island is a terrifically interesting place in its own right. If you’ve never been there in the day time, there’s a lot of heavy industrial stuff for a boy to admire. If you’ve only been there at night, it probably means you were there at one of those rave/dance parties - and I can’t think of anywhere better. It’s massive and it’s got more dangerous nooks and crannies than you could shake your glow stick at. I can only imagine how brilliant a spectacle thousands of kids eccying off their tits and falling off, into, and over the various rusted, wet, high, sharp, toothed and uneven things there were around the place. There’s even dangerous wildlife, with the signs to prove it.

Scene. The island, two party goers leave the big dangerous warehouse to chill.

Raver 1: Oh dude, I love this song, I love this island, I love your… ahhhhhh, a seagull just took my eye!

Raver 2: Oh man I love your beautiful flying eye. It’s like that Hall and Oats song.

Raver 1: I love oats, and I love porridge… and halls, I mean how would you get between rooms without them?

Raver 2: …Step forth into any disguise, I still know you’re looking for your flying eye, it’s watching me, it sees your every move… aaahhhhhhhhh, dude, I fell down this huge hole.

Raver 1: Dude, how come there isn’t any water at the end of this jetty?

Raver 2: I think it’s a dry dock, dude, a dry dock on Cockatoo Island… what are the odds?

Modern art was placed around the island, and you walk around to look at it - just like in a gallery. Except that galleries are usually kept above four degrees centigrade and rarely have 25 knot gales blowing over them. This all adds to the adventurous feel though. I’m not actually complaining about that bit.

One complaint, one highlight, one happening, one beer (sing it to George Thorogood, it’s more fun that way). Here’s where I’ll start complaining.

Just say no to ‘Video Installations’. Or at least have a sign that says “The artist does get their kit off in the fourth minute, they don’t just blow spit bubbles for the entire piece.” Several things annoy me about the video installation. Half the time you don’t know where you’ve arrived in the piece. I don’t like standing there thinking that I would be able understand this, if I had just been here for the introduction where the artist stands there and says, “I am piercing my elbow flaps with lacquered vermicelli to demonstrate the futility of expressing ideas of materiality and ideology with charcoal and lime juice”. There should be a TV program, and it should also say whether this guy was a documentary maker who was crap at his job, or actually trying to make art.

A good one. Lara Favaretto rigs a room full of gas canisters on timers. They intermittently blow up party-blower-whistly-thingys, with the paper roll on the end. It’s funny. It’s like looking at the deadest party ever. The blurb craps on about a disillusioned army and the betrayal of defeat. I don’t think it needed to be quite that hysterical for it still to be good.

One ‘happening’. When we were having lunch down near the kiosk, a kid fell off an old canon onto his head. I was confused for a minute about this. I didn’t know if I was watching a Mike Parr installation, or a crap circus that couldn’t be bothered firing a midget out of the cannon. Turned out to be neither. Turned out to be a kid falling on his head. I don't know much about pratfalls, but I know what I like. I guess he was just 'bein' gnarley'. (Biennale... see it's like... sorry... won't happen again...)

Mac and Jake Together at Last. For One Night Only

It's the Simple Things, Like Parking a Tiger

The nations ‘yoof’ radio network had a talkback break the other day, to commemorate the second anniversary of Anna-Nicole Smith’s death. The topic was “Places I Have Thrown Up”, and the whole thing really made for some fabulous and classy radio.

There were the usual places (the cupboard at the party, the back of the car, the boyfriend's hair, etc etc) but in a turn up for the books, the producer had done her work, and on this occasion the final two callers were show stoppers.

The penultimate caller was a guy with a well honed story. You could tell it was true, and he had refined the telling of it over many dinner parties and pub lunches, so he knew how and when to throw the detail.

On a crowded train, between stops that were very far apart, having thought that he would make it home and then realising that he was in worse shape than previously suspected, he threw up in his briefcase. He tried to make it as subtle as possible by hiding behind the lid, but there was no real way to make it inconspicuous. He then poked his eyes above the level of the open lid to see a trainload of horrified passengers staring at him. He rounded the story off with how hard it was to balance a briefcase full of chuck on a swaying train, without it leaking out the sides of the closed, but not watertight case, and what he wasn’t able to rescue from inside the case when he got home.

Like I said, he knew his story, he told it well, and on any other planet he would have ‘won’ the talkback, but he was trumped by a five year old. The little person followed by very simply and sweetly (and with not a little pride) saying,

“I threw up on a cat.”

Killing Joke

I’ve got a couple of joke killers in my life. They shall remain nameless but their crimes must be documented. I don’t think they even do it on purpose, but they take those innocent jokes and wring their little necks.

Here’s a good example. I told person ‘A’ the joke below:

“What do Winnie the Pooh and Jack the Ripper have in common?"
"They have the same middle name”. Pause for laughter, thank you and goodnight.

Some weeks later, person ‘A’, rips out:

“What do Winnie the Pooh and Rip Van Winkle have in common?” Slaps forehead - staggers from room laughing.

That one is quite an old one, but recently, person ‘B’ committed the double crime of repeating the joke I had told him a week earlier, and getting it wrong.

The original:

“What’s E.T. short for?”
As the respondent is about to answer “I think it’s Extra Terrestrial” You interrupt with “It’s them tiny little legs innit?”

So person ‘B’ leans over the divide and asks me, “Why’s E.T. so short?” penny drops, snot flies out of nose.

Knock Knock
Who’s There?
Control Freak. Now you have to say Control Freak who for this joke to work, ok?

Come On Baby Light My Pariah

I’m late onto the bandwagon with this one. Not because I hadn’t thought about it, just because I’ve been busy and hadn’t got around to it. Fat people are the new smokers. It is perfectly socially acceptable now to lean over to a fatty at a restaurant and instead of saying, “Would you please put that out?” say “Would you please put down the spoon?”

Bullies at school are no longer disciplined if the target is a chubby. They are applauded and sometimes get to be school captain. Just the other day I saw a bunch of kids rolling a rolly-polly in a muddy puddle and chanting, “Rub the mud like batter on a fatty.” The teacher nearby encouraged them with kind words saying, “Yeah, stick it to the gross little bastard…you missed a spot… yeah over there on zone three, area 14.” (That last bit isn’t entirely true.)

I was remarking on this to Jo Blogs the other day (if you haven’t had a look, click on that link. You’ll thank me. Not until you’ve finished here though, you with the kitten attention span) because her schtick is the “reality” show Australia’s Next Top Module. I was saying how eye wateringly funny The Biggest Loser is, not because it’s a show about people who try to lose weight by crying, but because it is legalised torture of overweight people for our amusement. I don’t watch it religiously any more, the only one I really stuck with was the first American one, but I feel the need to share some highlights that I’ve collected over time.

At a late stage in the competition, they strap the fatty’s lost weight onto the front of them. The weight is made up of the fatty's favourite food. Then they make them run laps. This is funny on many levels. Not only is it funny to watch someone crying and running at the same time, it’s funny because the aroma of their favourite food is flowing up their nostrils. It’s like the worlds heaviest and most obvious carrot on a stick. It’s also funny watching the combined snot and tears ruining the fatty’s favourite food as they run.

On a ‘face your fears and improve yourself day’ they ended up with a dead fatty in a flying fox. The flying fox is one where you lie on a stretcher much like the type that you always see rock fisherman being winched to safety in, and it is very high, and goes a long way. The fatty in question didn’t like heights. They also didn’t do their sums on whether the fatty would make it to the other end and the safety of the platform, or whether they would stretch out the cable and come to a complete stop in the middle of the ride, with a steep ascent of dangerously over stressed cabling on either side making a nice V shape. I am giggling just typing this… the fatty’s panic reaction to all of this was to pass out. All that could be detected from beneath, were two arms dangling on either side of the stretcher and a faint snoring sound. They yelled at him for a while to wake up, and then I think they just went home.

But this is the piece de resistance. They once had a team challenge to build the largest structure they could… out of food… without, wait for it, without using their hands. The sight of these people running backwards and forwards with sticky buns in their mouths, tears streaming from their eyes and saliva streaming from the sides of their mouths, is one I shall never forget. They’d get to their structure and there’d be a tragic moment of indecision, followed by some not so subtle chewing, then the food would be deposited on the table and the fatty would be dragging themselves back for more, mumbling lost love imprecautions at the food. I laughed so hard I spilt chocolate sauce on my brownies.

Out in the real world, I also enjoy those stories where someone has had to have the side of their house taken down to get them to the hospital. There are two that have really charmed me lately.

The fattest man in the world recently lost half his weight, in losing half his weight, he lost an astonishing TWO HUNDRED AND FIFTY KILOS. That means he was a half-ton man. Half a ton… I have driven cars that weigh less than that. In final proof that there is someone for everyone though, his fiancé said she was very pleased. Now there’s an all-round sports girl for you. Or as I’m supposed to call them now “Enabler”.

The other one was a woman who had to be craned out after they demolished her room, because they suspected she had broken a bone. Realising that she was too large for human X-ray machines, she was taken to the local zoo. When you are in line behind the rhinoceros at the medical clinic, your life has reached a pretty low ebb I reckon.

Anyway, it’s not all bad news for the larger among us. I was in Texas last year, and they are just normalising the hell out of being overweight. They have lobby groups that go around suing places until they widen the turnstiles. Airlines don’t know what to do next with people who patently should be buying two seats, but then tie them up in court proving that they’re only one person.

Actually talking of Americans normalising odd things - I had been wondering around a Texan shopping mall large enough to be seen from space, aware that there was a visual annoyance that I couldn’t quite put my finger on. It was just niggling away at me every time I passed a clothes store. It was something about the mannequins. When it hit me I had to stop myself from laughing out loud. The mannequins had all had breast augmentation. I don’t mean that they had been modified after manufacture, they were modelled on people who had had jobs done. That’s the market ladies. It’s that normal.

All this typing has made me hungry, time for lunch.

The Emperor's New Car