Nice One, Dad

There is an awful lot of doxy, both ortho and hetero, on controlling your child’s crying. Do you have non-stop contact with the child or do you increase the periods of time between visits to the wailing infant? It appears that the jury is still out but I am pleased to say that my research into uncontrolled crying has been started and concluded in a single morning.

What I have found is that if you get a good chunk of flesh in with the fingernail when you are manicuring babies miniscule fingers, you can go straight from zero to uncontrolled crying in a nanosecond.

Now that I have successfully broken the sacred bond of trust between father and infant, I’m going to nick up to the shops and see if I can run over a few kittens on the way.   

He Saw It Too, I'm Just The Only One Who Can Speak

There are sideline benefits to having kids (apart from having organ donors on tap) that I had not considered. Here’s one. Criticism By Proxy. I have never, ever before, been able to say:

Did silly mummy put your nappy on backwards? She’s so silly. Look at how silly she is. Daddy wouldn’t make those mistakes. No! Gusha gooo gooo.

Did crazy mummy think that a bath this deep wouldn’t drown you? Crazy mumma. Dadda wouldn’t do that, would he? He’d make it safe, wouldn’t he? Yes he would. Yes he would. Yes he zsha zsha gia boo gia boo.

Did mumma push the plutonium rods too far into the reactor just before the Soviet Delegation got here? Silly mumma. She does that, doesn’t she? A gusha goo goo blatty bum.

The avenues for self righteousness open up before me in nauseatingly proliferate ways.  

Cut It Out

Tribal Wives is a show that takes English women of varying degrees of poshness and catapults them into a village where vaccination is witchcraft and the technology behind bras is borderline magic. I’ve watched only one and I was disgusted, but probably not for the reasons that you would expect me to be. (I’m fine with people volunteering to be put in embarrassing or potentially dangerous situations for my entertainment.) This was something else.

One of the Posh Girls was getting to know her local matriarchy when she came upon their practice of female circumcision. The elder proudly stated that she had circumcised hundreds, maybe thousands of girls in her community. Our Posh Girl, remaining open minded and culturally sensitive, asked why. The main reason for a total clitorectomy on all of the girls in this “society”, is so they can get pregnant.

Let’s be clear - They believe that if they don’t get circumcised, they can’t get pregnant. Obviously, no one in this group has put that to the test, but there’s their reasoning.

Posh Girl remains politely interested and asks questions of the girls who have had it done and we learn a little more about female sexuality, but nothing more about the hideous injuries that must have been inflicted. Posh Girl finishes the show with a new found respect for her sisterhood and we’re all heart-warmed as she disappears back to Blighty to resume her life with running water and antibiotics.

But, really, after the cameras stopped rolling, Interpol should have swept in. Why isn’t this elder up in front of the Hague for crimes against humanity? She is a self confessed butcher of children and her rationale is an easily disproved belief. We’re happy to try Milosevic for his stupid beliefs. No doubt Anders Breivik is going be dealt with as harshly as possible for his ridiculous beliefs, why does this mutilator in a mud hut get away with it? We’re now too embarrassed to intercede with the noble savages after centuries of our rape and pillage?

Priorities and perspective please, people. 

Dwarf Star

Recently, Emergency Contact and I were sitting in a boardroom with four other seasoned professionals, and all of a sudden, I met my son.


He swept into the room like Darth Vader and the world sort of stopped for me. Well, like a small Darth Vader being carried by his current minion, but he had a retinue and he definitely swept in, carrying all before him. True to form, the boardroom went silent. He was polite enough not to choke anyone with his mind, but my throat did go a little tight when I held him, and EC burst into tears, so there was obviously some mind trick going on.

Little Vader moves his base of operations to our place on the 18th of this month. I'm expecting that there will be tours by lesser minions to see if it suits his purposes. He will want to know that the troops don't need new ways to be motivated and that everything will be finished on time. EC and I have been working feverishly to get the base finished. It's no moon, I can't promise him that, but we do have a good feeling about it.

C'mon Already

I’ve never been terribly good at waiting. I’m particularly no good at waiting for a delivery. Once I’ve committed to the misguided shopping spree brought on by promises and poor judgement, I just want the thing to arrive before the thrill wears off and regret sets in.

You may or may not remember my debacle with the steam mops, but that is actually a fairly accurate portrayal of my general dealings with the non-bricks-and-mortar retail world. And yet, I persist.

After several years of up and down, in and out, optimism and straw-clutching, Emergency Contact and I were recently given the go-ahead by a local NGO, and now we’re waiting on another delivery.

Of a baby boy. Ahuh... a boiby. Doesn’t that drop a couple of steam mops down the list of ‘things I’m looking forward to the delivery of’.

The Urban Wilds

I might have finally hit upon something useful to do with myself - Come up with PhD thesis subjects for perpetual students who can’t think of one themselves. I know, right? How much more useful to society could I be?

This brilliant idea came to me today as I was driving to work and I noticed a new phenomenon.

Recently a giant, multinational, Swedish, flat-pack-furniture retailer opened up on my route between home and work. I don’t want to give too much away, but it rhymes with Ikea.

Anyway, what I have noticed is the gradual but uneven migration of trolleys into the surrounding suburbs. I take many different routes to and from work dependant on influences such as:  Traffic. School Days. Angle of the sun. The soreness of my back versus the number of speed-humps. Boredom. Visions. Hallucinations. Revelation. Whether I want to turn left more than right or vice-versa. Number of gear changes. Radio reception to small, independent radio stations. Shopping needs. Parking direction coming into main shopping strips. Needing to keep a check on the hoarders up the road from my place. Whim. And some others that I can’t think of right now. Point being though that I can take an almost limitless number of ways home and I get to observe the suburbs that neighbour the furniture store in some detail.

These trolleys are spreading, but clumping. I observed four in a heap in a street some distance away from the main car park. Someone needs to track them somehow and observe what is going on. Not only would it be an interesting exercise to compare it to other networks and natural migrations, I bet there would be some advice there for future town planners and urban environment designers. At the very least, the impoverished student-about-town would stand to make a couple of extra bucks as “This month’s champion Trolley Tracker”. I understand you can win nearly a hundred dollars for finding a few trolleys.

Fatting The Gap

One of the highlights of my television year was on last night. While there have been better episodes, i.e. more unethical, this one still bore the hallmarks of entertainment designed by Donald Rumsfeld. It was the “Challenge” edition of The Biggest Loser.

Or, Get A Fatty To Shit Themselves To A Better Life.

This year they were taken to Switzerland to be challenged by going from high places to low places. The reward for getting enormously heavy was to let gravity do its job.

(If I didn’t know a little something about Galileo and falling bodies, I’d suspect that the tubbies would be better at that than the rest of us. The real challenge would be getting them to go up… but I digress.)

Last night, Switzerland played host to, by weight, about 18 Australians. By headcount, about five. Even though it's ANZAC time of year, I've got to say that the Swiss were incredibly brave.

They got those fatsos up in helicopters, on thin suspension bridges, hanging off ropes and all sorts of other adventurous stuff. I mean, who wants to pilot a helicopter with a hysterical shifting load in the back that could roll you into a mountainside at any moment?

For that matter, who wants to stand on a wire-and-sky-hook construction, ninety metres above the earth, with a panicking fatty? They drag you down just like the fabled drowning man. They don’t have much to live for. If you’re lucky, they just take a bite out of you as they shamble past to throw themselves off the platform. More likely though, they make a lunge and hug you all the way down - like the last lamington at the gates of a health farm.

Who’s the guy who does a tandem sky-dive with a panicking lardo strapped to the front of him? The physical limits of what a harness and parachute can take beggar the imagination, let alone the opportunity for the fatty-in-free-fall-feeding-frenzy-fiasco where the instructor arrives back on earth as nothing more than a pair of hands gripping the chute controls, while the ‘contestant’ dabs at the corners of their mouth. Croix de Guerre for that guy.

Last night had some high points, but mostly low. The Swiss will be convinced of a few things after dealing with this lot of winners:

• The only response to anything outside the set of experience even narrower than the set of their own eyes, is “Or Mar Gawd”
• The only response to having just achieved something momentous, such as relaxing and letting the equipment and tour personnel do all of the fucking work as per usual is “Or Mar Gawd! I didn’t think I could do it. I am so brave.”
• Despite the wheezing and asthma, those lard-balls can really scream. There’d be wildlife in those cliffs that are going to grow up slightly deaf and fearing a legendary wild-thing they once saw swing by

Yup, the rolly-pollies really did us proud last night and I was relieved to see that the angry lesbian who pulled the full Gabor before her jump, was able to pull it together enough after her jump to make another pass at her instructor - before waddling off to the all-you-can-eat buffet. It was a win for equal rights all around. I’m pro-Gay Marriage. I’m anti-Gay Cannibalism.

Next year, I’m looking forward to a naked chubster fighting their own weight in angry lemurs and another, using nothing but Sellotape on their eyelids and a giant adult nappy, to fake their way into the Sumo grand finals.

Life Does Get Around To Imitating, Eventually

The boring old farts often say, “We take too many things for granted”, but I think we take even some of the for granted things for granted. Take the below:

The other day, I saw a bird fight its way out of a wet paper bag. It was unreal. It was funny. It ended in triumph and it also gave me an indelible mental image for that often used saying.

In the recent filthy weather we’ve been having in Sydney, I was afforded another terrific image. A for real-deal drowned rat. Never seen one before, now I know what people are talking about.

I mentioned this to Smurfy and he suddenly got all excited and said, “Oh, I forgot to tell you. I slipped on a banana peel the other day. It was outside the post office and I went ‘wooowah’ and looked down and thought, so that actually happens, does it?”

And I bet you’re thinking the same thing. I’ve never, ever slipped on a banana peel. Thought it was just one of those ‘things’.