Street performers

There are an unnatural number of street performers on Circular Quay which means there is always something to watch whilst you eat your lunch. Street acts are one of many things in life that tend to polarise people, you either like 'em or you don't . Generally - this will come as no great surprise - I don't. I do not subscribe to the theory that they enliven and add colour to a bleak and forbidding urban landscape as they tend to congregate in the most open and pleasant areas and get in the way until you give them money, ruining the pleasant stroll you were having. Having said this some of them are quite good but they vary in quality from pointless semi-gentrified begging through one-trick-pony and bizarre sideshow all the way to bloody hell! Circular Quay has all four...

Pointless Semi-Gentrified Begging
My objection to this isn't so much the begging as the fact that the performers in question are attempting to pass off something which is badly thought out, requires very little effort and would be illegal begging if it weren't masquerading as performance. This seriously detracts from other performers who are actually trying and should be punishable by a year at a Grotowski based theatre school.* There are a few contenders for the title in this category, mostly of the if I dress up like something stupid people might give me money type, but the one that springs immediately to mind is:

• Bad Effort at a Pantomime Horse - A one man pantomime horse, badly executed or at least he should be. Maybe not so much a bad panto character as a one trick pony, his entire act is being dressed up as a crap pantomime horse but without the comedy of there in fact being two people inside. What else does he do? Nothing, absolutely nothing. He could have a poorly made toy jockey on his back with a carrot suspended from a fishing rod which he could chase around. He could find a friend and make a proper pantomime horse that has a back end that attempts to move in the opposite direction. Maybe he doesn't have any friends or maybe he just isn't trying at all. I found this act so bad thast it confused me. In a daze I sauntered over to a trio stood not so far from Bad Effort at a Pantomime Horse and started staring at them waiting for them to do something with the odd collection of sticks and strange wheeled vehicle the had with them. Snapping out of it I realised that they were in fact three old people, one in a wheelchair, waiting for the minibus driver.


• Dress Up Like a Ten Foot Dickhead Man - At least I think it's a man, you can't tell under the costume. Again not so much of a performer as a clothes horse (can I get any more bad GeeGee gags in this post I wonder?). This one has not only a stupid costume but a stepladder. He looks a bit like a character from a Japanese mythic painting, face-mask and all. Apparently welded to the back of the painted mask is something that looks like a metal peacock. Under the highly coloured and decorated robes the "performer" is a not so cunningly concealed stepladder on which he is standing, giving the "amazing" illusion that he is ten feet tall. For some reason this is supposed to want to make you give him money. The stepladder renders the idiot standing on it immobile if he wishes to stay inside his costume meaning that he is limited to gesturing at people as apparently wearing an elaborate costume and standing on a stepladder renders you mute.

For once and all: if you are going to wear a stupid costume at least do something whilst wearing it, otherwise you may as well be a mannequin and mannequins don't get paid.

One-Trick-Pony
A category reserved for performers who can do only one thing (often in a stupid costume). Such as:

• Paint Yourself Silver and Pretend to be a Robot Man - He has bought a child's face mask and covered it in tinfoil, ruined a suit with silver paint and has mastered the art of standing still for long periods of time and occasionally moving in a jerky vaguely mechanical fashion. I have several objections to this:
  1. Robots, like mannequins, don’t get paid, ever.
  2. Animate Robots don’t exist and if they did they would scare small children too.
  3. This is performance is a cross between a mime artist and a clown, which on it's own is reason enough not to attempt it, it also has a sci-fi theme, requires large quantities of silver paint and could be easily put together by a children's TV presenter. None of these things in themselves constitute a red flag but all three together is a serious warning.**
  There seem to be several of these and they differ only in the tint of their paint. Some paint themselves white and pretend to be statues, how startlingly original.


• Oriental Fiddle Man - This is too culturally different from Australia's largely European musical roots. The far greater use of minor tones in Japanese music would put a lot of people off on its own. If that doesn't do it then the instrument of choice almost certainly will. The Japanese two string fiddle, whilst capable of some beautiful tones when acompanied, takes on a sonorous and rather grating quality after a while. As the fiddle has only two strings, its timbral range is very restricted and it is tough to know when a new song has begun or even if the player has finished tuning up. When a performer saws away at it all day and half the night it becomes just plain irritating. Shame really, it's very different from anything else round there.

Bizarre Sideshow
There are a few of these, they tend to be musical in nature and confound your expectations. I have no real objections to this brand of street performer they tend to stay out of the way and they at least cover the noise of the traffic.

• The Sensitive New Age Economic Realists (actual name) - A small band made up of retirees (not to be mistaken for The Sensitive New Age Bluegrass Cowpersons, who are from Perth and perform rock hits in bluegrass fashion, All Along the Watchtower is particularly good as I recall). They have guitars, violins, a squeezebox and not once have I ever seen them play them. They normally seem to be sat around in the sunshine drinking beer which is what I plan to do with my retirement. How they make any money or if they even intend to I cannot tell.


• Rasta in White - This guy is pretty cool. He is extremely black wears a very white suit and has long greying dreadlocks. He plays pop hits from the Eighties on his steels drum including Love is in the Air, Lady in Red and Brown Eyed Girl. Good but weird.


• Sammy Davies Jr Jr - An Afro-Caribbean guy with a pretty good voice who rather sadly has a face like a 1950's stereotyped charicature of a black man - big lips 'n' all. He dresses like he is in Run DMC and sings Frank Sinatra songs to a backing tape. He is either being unbeleivably ironic in a post-modern manner that would have Baudrillard breathless and afraid of a genius capable of such brash sweeping statements, or he just happens to be a black man that likes to sing Frank Sinatra songs. At any rate Ol' Blue Eyes seems a little different in his latest reincarnation.


• Didgeridoo Techno - A troupe of Aboriginal Australians that play traditional instruments over a dance soundtrack. Not bad, but not unique either.

Bloody Hell!
Normally circus performers, typified by a guy I saw at the Edinburgh festival and again in Covent Garden. For his closing piece he would lie on a bed of nails and get people to drop a bowling ball from the top of a step ladder to crack concrete slabs held on his bare chest. The next two performers make the audience keep their distance with the aid of that most robust of safety devices - a length of rope on the ground. They treat this like a magic circle, performing the most amazing feats of skill and dexterity with hot stuff and sharp things in the firm belief that the rope barrier will protect the audience. Strangely it seems to work.

• Fire Eating American - Not Bill Hicks reincarnated but an actual fire-eating American. You can feel the heat from his act from the other side of the walkway. I have no idea how he has managed to retain facial hair, surely this can't be safe for a fire breather.


• Token Brit - There's always one. This guy is a real showman, he spends quite a while talking to the audience whilst laying out his kit. As his kit includes many sharp things, including a chainsaw this attracts a fair bit of attention. His closing piece is eating an apple whilst juggling machetes whilst riding the tallest unicycle I have ever seen. He does it all in the name of proving that he is "not a pom", despite his pronounced Bristolian accent. You could be forgiven for thinking that he is trying too hard.

There aren't any pictures of the performers themselves to go with this post as if you take a picture of them they expect you to give them money, an expectation that summarises my main problem with street artists. In the main they expect to get money for doing the absolute minimum. If you are a musician sell your CD or play a variety of tracks, if a mime artist or performer be entertaining - I don't mind you asking for money if you are entertaining - but put some effort in or you don't get nuffin' you dole bludging waste of silver paint.

*For anyone who doesn't know about middle-european physical theatre - i.e. everyone - Grotowski's theatre school was more of a Gulag designed to weed out the uncommitted so for the first year you would probably have been getting up at 5am to sweep the corridors and clean the toilets for ten hours being fed only on a thin soup. If you were very lucky and looked like you had really got to grips with cleaning toilets you would be rewarded with a 3 hour lesson in the most physically and vocally demanding avant-garde theatre practice that a serious-minded Polishman could think up. Now that's what I call punishment.

**Sci-fi theme: lots of good things have come out of science fiction, mostly athletic women in tight clothing and hangover friendly TV.
Silver paint: anything that requires large quantities of silver paint and is not a German sports car should be treated with suspicion until its' usefulness is proven.
Children’s TV presenters: have put together many good things, usually other television programmmes with a strong psychedelic element and drug habits of superhero proportion.

work, rafting, giant teddies

Well that was a bastard of a week...

I'd almost forgotten how much of your free time this working crap can take up. I've barely had a moment to myself to arse around on the internet. At least I'm not alone. Charging is so busy that his blog, normally updated at least weekly has slowed to a monthly tickover.

I have been sorting out exams for financial planners all week. It's quite amazing how disorganised people who many trust with their financial security actually are. I had a new candidate for an exam being sat tomorrow at four O'clock this evening. If this idiot is allowed to sell financial advice then there is no hope at all.

In between dealing with people signing up at the last minute, chickening out at the last minute and failing to book their assessment at all I have had to compile 11 feedback reports from other training workshops and man the helpline. It has quite removed my ability to think of anything vaguely amusing to write. Never mind there's a weekend coming up and I am off out for drinks.

We went white water rafting last weekend at the park built to house the canoeing at the Sydney Olympics. Rather oddly it's in Penrith (this is nothing, over here Padstow is on the same train line as Lewisham). This is a rather odd arrangement of raised concrete formed rapids next to and above a lake. Five enourmous pumps remove water from the lake and pump it to the top of the rapids where gravity does the rest of the work and pulls the water back in to the lake. It looks a bit odd when they turn the pumps off and you are left with what amounts to a concrete riverbed covered in slime. Rafts go from the bottom, in the lake, to the top via a 40 meter conveyer belt which is even odder.

On Sunday we went to a free festival with Techno and Drum'n'Bass and people on stilts dressed as giant teddy bears. No we did, honest. I have pictures, I didn't imagine it whilst drunk.

AAAARRRRRR

Shiver me timbers right soon it be the time o' the year when it be right to talk like the cutlass wavin' scum o' the spanish main.

Avast ye scurvy dogs September 19 be Talk Like a Pirate Day.

Ashes

Well I wasn't expecting that!...

Unfortunately I was knackered last night so I didn't stay up to watch the cricket but walking home you could hear the cursing coming from people's living rooms. Very satisfying, but it still didn't look like we'd win.

The Aussies aren't particularly bad losers, they clearly need some advice from the English on how to be uncharitable and start bitching about team selection and bad umpiring. There is a little of this going on, which I imagine might balloon into something significant over the weekend. The one thing I have noticed is that Kevin Pietersen is apparently English when he gets out for 0 but South African when he makes 158. Funny that.

Your average Australian seems to consider it bad form to mention the fact that they've lost, they'd far rather you didn't mention it but there are some very tired despondent people around the office today. This week's Aussie bating activity will throwing easy catches to Australians all week and seeing if they can hold them. Oh, the fun I shall have.

Snowy Mountains

If there's one thing I didn't expect to be doing in Australia it was snowboarding. Where exactly would you go snowboarding on the world's driest continent? Surfing certainly, there's a fair bit of coastline, but snow was not amongst my thoughts when I moved here. But snow there is. Atop the imaginitively titled "Snowy Mountains" sits a layer of skiiable snow for two months a year...

"Look Bruce, mountains."
"Stone me they're beautiful Bruce. What's that white stuff on the top of 'em?"
"Well I guess that would be snow mate."
"What the bloody hell shall we call these snow capped mountains mate?"
"Well, we need something descriptive but original. Something distinctive that encapsulates our pragmatic national character, our utilitariam literalism, doggedness and frontier spirit."
"Er...how about Oowoga Loonga Wooratoowa."
"...You weren't listening to me, were you Bruce."
"Sorry mate, I was thinking about beer. How about ...The Snowy Mountains."
"Good on yer."

The Snowy Mountains are a fair bit lower than the European mountains I've been to, top station on Mount Perisher is only 2,014 metres ("It's bastard cold up here Bruce, what shall we call this perishing cold mountain?"). The mountains are also a bit flatter with more of a bowl effect to them which means that the marked pistes only denote groomed snow, you can go across pretty much any bit of the mountain. The snow was a bit slushy because of the absolutely blazing sunshine. In retrospect I should have put some sunscreen on in the morning as by lunchtime I was crisping up nicely. Panda eyes are not a great look, red panda eyes even less so.

Perisher was less technical than European mountains but there are a lot of trees and some fairly sizeable "unmarked obstacles", or bloody enourmous rocks to give them their full name. This does mean that there are some pretty tidy little bouncy jumps to have a go at all the way down the mountain. Your average run would have you haring down the hill dodging trees and keeping a little wide on the track to find the bumps to jump off and then having to hold your speed accross a wide flat section to reach a steeper narrow section leading back to the lifts. The runs are not very long but they are good fun.

The lifts by comparison were bloody awful. Not one of them had footrests meaning that by the end of the day your left leg felt somewhat longer than the right. If the wind started to blow the board caught in it and started dragging you under the restraining bar, if there was one. One lift we went on looked like it had been constructed by sawing narrow park benches in two and welding poles to them. These didn't just lack a footrest but also a restraining bar. In place of this was a piece of light steel hawser that had a socket clip on the other side of the chair, it was a very long way from reasssuring. It wasn't a great option but the alternative was the longest, steepest most painful T-bar it has been my misfortune to experience.

For those who have never tried snowboarding try to imagine being given a roughly T-shaped rod and, standing on your board being dragged up the mountain by hooking this inside your front thigh. Needless to say it isn't my favourite way to travel. The picture makes this look pretty easy and for the first three times you do it in a day it is, then it begins to ache a little and then it begins to really hurt until finally you consider purchasing a team of huskies and learning to drive them simply to avoid having to do it again. Actually, that's not a bad idea...hmmmm....husky boarding eh?....

At the bottom of the mountain there was a fair bit of wildlife, much of it roadkill but much more of it alive and weird. We saw wombat and a lot of roo (collective noun: mob or troop). Wombats are very strange things, like someone was trying to breed a footrest to go with their sofa. Apparently they scarper pretty quickly if you walk towards them, I can't say they look like they're capable of anything other than lumbering. "...of course they're all called wally..." said our septegenarian driver. Of course they are.

beer

To the outsider beer would seem to enjoy almost mythic status in Australia: national drink, passtime and major export. You would have thought that quality would be the major selling point in a crowded marketplace. Sadly this does not seem to be the case. Whilst the fizzy pish loaded with colouring and sweetners that haunts the UK lager market is broadly absent, so is flavour. Don't get me wrong, Aussie beer is in no regard as bad as American "beer" but it still doesn't taste of anything much.

As with a lot of things in Australia that are unexpectedly a problem, the reason behind the phenomenon is that Australia is a very long way from just about everywhere, is quite stupifyingly large and is the driest continent on earth. This means that in its' developing years Australia has had to try and grow critical beer ingredients and attempt the brewing process in conditions far from suitable for either. The resulting product, whilst it probably resembled beer, was actually nothing of the sort.

The beer problem is also a matter of cultural heritage in that the beer early colonials were trying to make would have been a British style ale with light hops and quite a depth of malt, a fact still present in that many Aussie beers are still called "Bitter". Bitter does not drink too well in hot climates, crisp pale ales and lagers are far better in the blazing sun than your average pint of heavy. Unfortunately to make lager you need to use a strain of yeast that ferments most effectively between 10 and 5°C, (5°C is roughly the same temperature as your fridge)*. This kind of temperature is readily available in a Czech or German cellar but a little difficult to find in early colonial Australia. What the colonials would have brewed is something called California Common: lager type ingredients with not quite enough hops fermented with an ale yeast. This produces a fizzier than normal ale with a dry-ish flavour that needs to be served very cold to be palateable. This has had an effect on national tastes and so Aussie beer remains pretty crap, particularly to fussy bugger like me.

As the informed reader will already know and has hopefully been made clear the "Australian" beers available in Britain bear very little relation to the beers actually served in Australia. They are attempts to break into an undiscerning and tasteless British market by Australian brewers who have an insipid and uninspiring product ready to go. Fosters for example is nowhere to be found in Sydney but the biggest selling beer in Australia is brewed by Fosters, this is VB (Victoria Bitter).


VB is flatter than lager, it is served at lager temperatures and tastes of ...er... well, not very much. It also gives you demon grade hangovers. Unpleasant.

Other brands, many brewed by Fosters, include:


Tooheys New - this is a fizzy lager-style drink with not enough hops, but tolerable enough.


Carlton Cold - also a fizzy lager-style drink with not enough hops, unfortunately you can't taste the malt as much as you can with Tooheys.


Carlton Draught - This is the pick of the beers available on draught. This is much closer to a European lager, nicely balanced hops a good grain flavour, easy to drink. Hangovers still a bit of an issue. You may have seen the ad for this beer kicking round the internet.


Cascade - Slightly more crisp than Tooheys but not much.


Hahn - A better effort this one, more hops, a decent grain flavour but still it doesn't have the finish of the European lager it is emulating.


Coopers Pale - Pretty good, has the advantage of having no artificial colours etc. in it. A very Aussie beer.


Crown Lager - This is a good crsip clean lager and extremely drinkable. Very similar to Carlton Draft it is available only in bottles. Probably the pick of the litter.

Imported beers do make it to Australia but they are often a bit overpriced because of the distance they have to travel. Lowenbrau actually have a bar in Sydney to lure punters in with the promise of beer that tastes of something. The Aussies seem to like this but the beer is still too expensive so a trip to the Lowenbrau Keller is not an everyday occurence.

Not being the world's greatest lager devotee I have also been trying some of the independant breweries proper beers. Thus far my favourites have come from: The Malt Shovel Brewery, which produces very high quality full-flavoured beers, and on micro-brewery level The Lord Nelson which is a pub/hotel/brewery which has some stunning beers which they serve far too cold (review).

Beer over here comes in some rather strange measures and protocol for ordering varies from state to state. Being your average pom I haven't fully got to grips with it yet but have found this guide to be of some use. To make life even more complicated the Australian Government doesn't use a simple method of measuring drinks either. They have a system of "Standard Drinks" which is annoyingly confusing. A bottle of beer that appears to contain a single serving of beer will often have "Contains 1.5 standard drinks" printed on the label in clear contradiction of the facts, surely they can't be suggesting that you share your beer?*

Among "interesting" beery things to do in Australia, other than drinking it alone, are the Darwin Beercan Regatta, which you've probably heard about and an outback pub crawl, by aeroplane. The latter sounds interesting until you think about: a) what happens when you need a pee and you're only a third of the way to the next pub? b) motion sickness? c) the huge amount of money it costs.

There is good beer to be had here, but you do have to look for it a bit harder than you would expect or would have hoped. I think it may be time to kick off the homebrew over here. Then all I have to do is convince Aussies to drink warm flat beer. Oh well, I needed a challenge...

Click related link for an Australian guide to Australian beer - don't trust the beer reviews but everything else is straight up fact

*Water chemistry comes into this as well but I haven't included anything about this, I wouldn't want to sound obsessive or anything.

**Not that the units of alchohol system used in Britain is particularly clear but at least the units of alchohol are easily worked out: amount of drink in litres multiplied by strength of drink ABV% = units of alchohol. Ergo a pint of beer (0.575l) at 5% is a little under 3 units.

Lollies

I haven't eaten a mars bar in years, not a full-size one anyway. There's something not quite right about trying to eat a piece of confectionary that represents about half your daily energy requirements. People give these to children and wonder why "little Darryl is such a handful". Mars bars are an adult dose of sugar. Giving one to a child is tantamount to attempted poisoning*.

Mars bars have been removed from the shelves in New South Wales since early July and have only just made it back in to the shops this week. This was triggered by an extortion racket that seems to be very shady and very short on detail. The strangest part of it is that Masterfoods, who make the mars bar, have been putting a senior member of staff on TV with updates. This tubby bespectacled man has the charisma of a more boring than average theologian. He looks like he could use a little sugar injection to get him through the day and will be very glad when this issue is put to bed and he can work, rest and play as normal.

To celebrate the return of the Mars bar - its' absence was clearly an issue for the women in the office - a family pack of "fun size"** mars bars was handed out. Australian chocolate has more preservatives in it compared to European chocolate and is tempered very differently to deal with the heat. The result is that Mars and Snickers bars taste even less like chocolate than I'd expected. Thank heaven the liquorice here is pretty good and much more prevalent than in the UK. I shall, in addition to switching my default filthy food from pastie to pie, be changing my default confectionary back to liquorice.

Personally I couldn't care less about Mars bars, and I had already heard from other poms that the chocolate here was shite. What I hadn't expected is that the Aussies call sweets "Lollies". This is just plain backward and the bread-stealing recedivists need to be corrected. A lolly is a type of sweet and entirely unrepresentative of sweets as a whole. Even Americans haven't debased sweets so badly. The word "candy", whilst not necessarily accurate is at least descriptive. Lollies?! Horrid.

Oh well I guess it's the little differences that make Australian culture*** different.

*For those wishing to cause trouble giving a child a can of Coke to wash their full size Mars bar down with is an ideal way to send them absolutely sky high. In additon to the caffeine Coke contains another 17 teaspoons of sugar. I recommend dosing the child approximately 10 minutes before their parents come and collect them, the child's blood sugar levels will reach their peak around ten minutes after collection. You will never have to babysit again.

**Tolerably small

***[insert yoghurt joke here]

A moment of clarity

Idly dreaming as sauntered home last night, lost in my usual comfortable childish fantasies (Jedi/James Bond/Batman/Free Ice-Cream – delete as appropriate), I was struck by an awkward moment of clarity:

I had just been playing tennis at the club and was walking along the seafront to go back to the apartment to sleep and to prepare for another day at my job working for a huge financial corporation, in Australia. That doesn’t sound like me, how the bloody hell did this happen?

Thankfully this moment was a particularly momentary one, interrupted as it was by a pair of flying foxes doing a quick circuit of the park. These things are bloody enourmous and make a quite incredible sound as they take off (a bit like a wet sheet being shaken). Normally I get to the spot where I had this awkward feeling, deep in infantile reverie, and startle one of the bats. Naturally when it's dark a bat with a wingspan nearly the size of my armspan taking off and swooping low over my head can interupt my train of thought. It's uasually about this time of the night that I realise I need the toilet quite badly and that I should run home up the hill as quickly as possible to avoid an embarassing accident. The shrill scream of "AAAaaarrrgggH! A fucking vampire!" is completely incidental.

I was pleased to see the bats this time. Firstly because for once I saw them before they saw me and secondly it brought me back in to focus. I came to Australia to see things like this every day.

Contracting

I have, as I hoped would happen, got a new job. I have left the Supreme Court of NSW and am now working for AMP which is a large financial organisation that does just about anything you can think of with money. My job title seems to be Operations Consultant which suits me just fine, I can make up any amount of bullshit to go with that! It may even be good enough for me to claim that I am helping them out with a bit of Change Management, which is a half-truth but it might open a few doors.

I am doing the same kind of thing I did in the UK but for a commercial organisation, dealing with Financial Planners as learners, with a bit more client facing stuff and a fair bit more process re-design. On my CV it will sound a lot more impressive than that. I will be squeezing in as many business catchphrases as I can and still make sense. Which is only fair as that seems to be a favourite passtime here. For example I didn't have an induction but "gained exposure to team activities", to me this sounds like walking in on a rugby team in the showers but here it just means being shown what people do on a daily basis. As far as I can tell they don't do very much. The pace of work seems unreasonably slow, sorry that should be measured, and the sense of urgency almost non-existent, a low-pressure environment. The office I work in is right on the front by Circular Quay and from the front of the building there is the most amazing view out over the harbour towards the bridge, naturally I work at the back where there is the most fabulous view of a few stories of the even taller AMP building behind that holds AMP Capital.

There is so much space in this office, the desks are probably 3m long, there are about 6 meeting rooms of various capacities shared between around 70 staff on this floor, there is a large staff kitchen with seating and sandwich makers and...well it's all a bit much really. The environment is so different from anywhere I have worked before I am beginning to wonder what the catch is, other than having to start the job on my birthday, no doubt I will find out in due course. It is so nice to work amongst humans again after the freakshow that was the Supreme Court that I have completely ignored the fact that they aren't giving me enough to do and that I could probably do most of the jobs in the team without too much effort, possibly doing a few of them at once. For the moment I am content to relax and earn my cash doing very little, this will all change next week.

temping:2

Okay, it's been a month and I am thoroughly sick of being a filing clerk. Working here is like some sick parody, a bit like The Office but with a darker tone. All the characters are certainly here (all names have been changed to...er...no sod it, they need to know what a bunch of freaks they really are, and if they find this it'll be a bloody miracle:

Liz
Liz is genuinely physically impaired. Through some hideous accident of birth her left upper arm is about half the length of her right. She would normally get my patience and sympathy but unfortunately she can also be loudmouthed beligerent and dogmatic to the point of me actually having to walk away from her. She has an idiotic high-pitched laugh which she uses every three minutes without fail on items of conversation that would not elicit a chuckle from a nervous hyena. Liz's nose appears to emit a strong gravitational field which has, over the natural course of time, sucked the features of her over-wide face into it's middle and elongated both eyebrows.

Patricia
Patricia has the most deadpan sense of humour I have ever witnessed and takes great delight in saying the most miserable possible things to you without a flicker of emotion passing accross her face. She would be very hard to read had I not caught the slightest most momentary upturn of one corner of her mouth when she does it. She also gets the hiccups at least twice a day, very loudly.

Gail
Gail is a great person and very easy to work with but English is very much her second language. She flits around the office in a very businesslike way and generally gets the job done. Her favourite trick is to jab me in the ribs with a biro and say, "You mean to me Tom, you saying me a bad girl!" and giggle maniacly.

Lynette
Lynette is of Italian descent and is very pretty. She also knows it and can be an unbearable flirt. When Andrew, a typical Aussie of the 6 foot sheap shearing rugby playing type, joined the office she melted into butter. "Andrew's a country boy, aren't you Andrew? I'm a country girl, I like country boys, don't you like country boys Gail?", all this whilst fluttering her eyelashes in the most cartoonish possible way. I could have punched her were it not for the fact that she is the only thing of aesthetic value in the entire building.

Renee
The biggest mouth of the section belongs to Renee, as does the widest arse (it's funny how often those two go together isn't it?). Renee is going nowhere and doing it fast. She is a genuinely dead-end person, unfortunately the end that is dead has her head on it. Renee has the work ethic of a primadonna celebrity hooked on strong painkillers. Renee likes to act the boss and she's crap at it. I subtly started suggesting tasks to her so that she wasn't anywhere near me for the larger part of the day. She is engaged to Tim, who I can only assume, was roughly chopped, Pinochio like, from one of the branches of the ugly tree, one of the the long thin knobbly ones near the top.

George
I can't for the life of me work out what is wrong with George. He looks vaguely simian and indeed walks like a chimp that has had the idea of life on the ground explained to it and is doing it's best to fit in. George likes to talk, Christ George likes to talk. Unfortunately he is one of the least interesting people I have ever met. He warbles incessantly about the infantile processes going on in his head. He talks about the ridiculous amounts of yoga that he does, he talks about global events from his own, far from unique, perspective: "...both sides think they're fighting evil". If you try and walk away from George whilst he is talking to you he will follow you around as you work until he has finished talking. Eventually all you want is this well-meaning chatter to stop and you are quite prepared to tie George up in knots to achieve this, which is probably why he does so much yoga. I have come to the sad conclusion that George is just a fuckwit.

Thankfully I now have my long-stay business visa to stay in Australia and work as a resident until 2009. I have registered with a whole bunch of recruitment agencies and will hopefully not be working there much longer...please God.

dope

The biggest ongoing news story in Oz at the moment is that of Schapelle Corby, a 27 year old Australian woman who was found in possession of 4.5 Kg of marijuana going in to Bali.

To put this in context Bali is to Australia as Ibiza is to the UK, more or less. Bali falls under the governence of Indonesia, a state with some of the strictest - read draconian - drug laws anywhere in the world. Indonesia is also not noted for its' commitment to human rights, particularly with reference to its' judicial system. Corby got 20 years, the prosecution asked for life and drugs campaigners in Indonesia were asking for the death penalty.

Part of the intricacies of Indonesia's drug laws, which are designed to intimidate potential smugglers by achieving convictions with the minimum of effort, the burden of proof is shifted to the defense on a technicality. The defense that someone has tampered with your baggage is no defense at all. All the prosecution has to do is prove that the bag containing contraband is yours, not that you had knowledge of its' contents at the time you were arrested. The concept of reasonable doubt is dispensed with; if the bag is yours the contents are your responsibility.

Whilst initially this sounds unnecessarily harsh but if I attempted to walk through customs at Heathrow with a few kilos of grass I would have more than a few serious questions to answer. I would almost certainly be detained for trial. However, as with any incident like this there are complications. Australian customs have been sitting on a report that indicates that baggage handlers at Sydney's Kingston Smith Airport have been involved in drug smuggling and stealing from passengers, forcibly reinserting reasonable doubt into Corby's trial. Something the court didn't consider as the story was late to arrive on the scene and was broken by an Australian newspaper.

To further complicate matters prior to Corby's 9 young Australians were caught attempting to smuggle serious amounts of heroin out of Indonesia strapped to their bodies. They are the Bali 9. There have been real indications that the 9 mules have been coerced into this. They face death by firing squad should they be found guilty of drug smuggling. I hate to be a pessimist but without some really serious evidence of coercion they've had it.

Australia has naturally got behind Corby as an apparently blameless victim of circuses. This is despite the fact that her defence case is not particularly strong, and wouldn't be even if she were tried elsewhere. Much of the money given to her defence team by the Australian government thus far seems to have been targeted at Australian public opinion. The fact that Corby's parents have now taken on the Australian equivalent of Max Clifford to manage the media has done very little to persuade me that they are in no small part to blame for the inefectual nature of her defence. They so convinced that her innocence was self-evident that they barely seem to have tried to use the resources at their disposal. Allegations of bribery and corruption have seen Corby sack her entire legal team over the weekend and re-hire 3 of them. It's a right bloody mess.

In fact the entire event has been characterised by semi-constitutional and extremely partisan behaviour behaviour by everyone concerned. Jury trials do not happen in Indonesia, three judges were allocated to hear the case. At the head of this panel was a man who, in over 500 drugs cases, has acquited exactly no-one. He also, other than just stating that there would be no special treatment for a high profile case, started dropping hints that Corby probably was guilty and the trial would be swift.

The Australian government has so far put about $250,000 of legal aid the way of the Corby family, critically without stipulating that the 2 QCs, both with substantial training and experience of trials abroad, offering their services on a pro bono basis, were used. Only now that Schapelle is a convict has this been done. More legal aid has been put her way to try and strengthen her case, with negligible evidence, but at least a chance of getting the original conviction thrown out on an accusation of bias. In turn Indonesia's strong popular anti-drugs lobby has been campaigning for tougher sentancing with particular refference to Corby. Some of the ugliest scenes at court have been the clashes between Corby's family and campaigners.

Both prosecution and defence have appealed against the verdict. The defence against the verdict and an apparently biased judiciary, and the prosecution against an apparently over lenient sentance.

Whatever you think about the proceedings it is utterly impossible to talk it through with any degree of clarity over here, so you will pardon my rambling. All Aussies - 90% according to The Australian - think she's innocent and this is self-evident and none of the ex-pat's I know will touch such an emotive issue with a ten foot Polish national. The resolution of this is not even close. It's going to be long ugly and unpleasant and I will be thoroughly sick of the name Schapelle Corby at the end of it, which is a terrible thing to say about something that will decide someone's future. My own opinion is that she probably is innocent, but everyone involved has made it exponentially more difficult for her to prove this with every intervention.

That's the news in Oz...

good 'n' bad in Oz

Bad

• Advert jingles - alive and well and living down-under


• TV generally - not great but some stunningly awful individual examples.
  
  'Blue Heelers' - think the bill in small town Australia.
  
  'Hi 5' imagine Steps (remember them? A sort of pseudo Abba but with boy band types in place of comedy scandiwegian beard wearers) made a kids TV programme. They sing athe theme tune at the end, each presenter has their own dance move. Awful isn't it?



• Australian sports - Iron man contest? Why not just have a triathlon? Rugby league; 'tis a silly game but not compared to Aussie rules football. This is football?? I can't see a trace of any rules in the game Aussie or otherwise. They call their soccer team 'The Socceroos' which makes me cringe whenever I hear it

Good

• Food - cheap plentiful and fantastic. Lots of Thai and other Asian flavours.


• Wildlife - Loads of it. Whales swim past on their migration. Bloody amazing!


• Weather - The locals are wandering around shivering in long coats. I wear a jumper and laugh at them.


• Insults - Aussies are good at these. Calling someone a 'slack-arsed tart' works no matter what their gender or sexual orientation.


• Shop names - I went into a cafe called 'Wok on Inn', I was hoping the food would be crap so I could tell people to wok on by, but it wasn't. I also have to try 'Holy Crepe', I nearly walked in to 'Bush Outfitters' to see what they were about but something stopped me...

More later, run out of credit...

temping

I have just got a temporary assignment working for the Supreme Court of New South Wales. This may seem like a rash decision by our antipodean cousins as the phrase "The law is an arse!" - ass being too weak a word, and seemingly some kind of American donkey - has been heard to escape my lips on more than one occasion (probably more frequently than I'm letting on, particularly if beer is invloved).

Just consider, if the pattern of my work history continues as it has for the last few assignments I will be taken on full-time, promoted and end up running half the day-to-day operations of the place. I can almost feel Sydney, Canberra and the rest of the state shivering at the prospect.

Un-PC thought: Just how do you have a justice system for a country that was colonised by criminals (allbeit people that were branded criminal for stealing things like bread to feed their starving families)? Drumhead trials? Some kind of code of conduct a la pirates? Or just a damn good thrashing behind the courthouse?

nosh vs knowledge

We ate out at the thai place down the road a few nights ago. The total bill came to $21. Both of the books I wanted to buy earlier that day were $25. I have come to a country where knowledge costs more than luxury and I'm not quite sure how I feel about that.

To be fair this is probably more a reflection of Sydney's low-cost and super competitive restaurant industry than it is a cultural indicator; made for a good quick blog post though didn't it?

Starwalker

Walks into Mont Blanc shop, looks at expensive fountain pen. Sales assistant approaches...

"You want StarWalker?"
"No me want Light Saber!" Makes appropriate whosshing noizes

Receives utterly bamboozled look from sales assistant.

"This is not the sci-fi fan you are looking for...." Makes appropriate Jedi gesture. Still nothing. Backs slowly out of shop.

Good to see that the 13 hour flight hasn't dented my twisted sense of humour.

Changi

At Changi Airport in Singapore. I'd forgotten how bloody big this place is and how little time the computer terminals give you.

Only 30 mins left to wander aimlessly through acres of overpriced luxury goods that I don't want and couldn't afford anyway. How will I cope?

panic

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaarrrghh!!

Have I got it all done? Christ alone knows. Moving to the other side of the world is giving me stress attacks. I got good and pissed last night & I still couldn't get to sleep before it started getting light outside.

Too much to do....run out of time....

tiger

I know that truth is supposed to be stranger than fiction but honestly who would make this up?

If Ms Htay sticks to her offer of only breastfeeding until the cubs grow teeth, she won't be at it long. Tiger cubs grow teeth within weeks of being born, says Taina Strike, a vet at the Zoological Society of London (ZSL). "I still feel sorry for the woman though. Their sharp claws will be pummelling her."

As to why Ms Htay has offered her services, when bottled milk could do just as well? "I don't even want to go there," says Strike.

Imagine the psychological trauma this is going to cause to both Tiger and Toddler. The tiger will grow up believing it is okay to try and take milk from humans, which is probably going to prove a trifle hard to deal with for any future female keepers. My overactive imagination is already picturing the headlines should the unfortunate creature ever escape; "Titty Kitty on the Rampage" or "Faster Titty Cat, Kill Kill" (Russ Meyer gags must be made at every opportunity)....

Ferocious Feline Savages Sister Theresa's Ti...er...Dignity

Nuns on the Run from Confused Cat

A small superfluity of sisters from St Agnes' Home for Enervated Ecclesiasticals( Enfield) were enjoying a day out at London Zoo when disaster struck. "Titty" the Tiger, so named as she was breastfed as a cub, leapt from her enclosure and lunged at the group, pinning elderly nun Sister Theresa to the floor and ripping off her habit.

"I thought I'd had it," Sister Theresa said later, clearly traumatised by the ordeal, "I was praying that the tiger would finish me off quick and not start toying with me. Goes to show how wrong you can be."

Far from going for the kill the tiger, apparently thirsty, began trying to suckle from the octegenarian.

"Its' tongue was ever so rough," continued Sister T. "I haven't felt anything like it since my youth, but he's gone now..."

Clearly unsatisisfied after some five minutes Titty jumped back into her pen of her own accord, much to the releif of her keeper.

"At first I thought that Titty'd mistaken her for a penguin or a zebra or somthing, what with the black 'n' white get-up 'n' all," said keeper Joe Harris, "but then I saw what she was trying to do. All I can say is thank God it wasn't Titty's brother. He was suckled for much longer than Titty and has developed a real fixation. He could've gotten really confused, I dread to think what could've happened."

Several such attacks on female keepers in the past have resulted in Titty having an all-male keeping staff. Despite these obvious warnings the big cat enclosure carries no warning notice for women and is set into the ground causing people to lean over the edge, giving the lions and tigers an exagerated view of their chests.

When asked to quote on the event RSPCA spokesman, Tim Holt, gave us he following statement:

"London Zoo have known about this problem for some time and have singularly failed to take action. Similar such incidents will continue to happen whilst ZSL refuse to address the core of this issue: namely Jovani the leopard's 'Show us yer tits!' tee shirt. Until this is taken from the animal female Zoo attendees will be at risk."

Truth stranger than fiction, he says, instantly proving himself wrong.

coffee

I love coffee. On an average day I will drink about 8 cups of the stuff. My favourite comic book hero is the excellent Too Much Coffee Man. It doesn't matter how much coffee I've had to drink if I can smell it I want a cup. Coffee is great.

However, coffee is far from being an ideal drug of choice as it can make you hyperactive and dehydrated give you a frenetic lifestyle flitting between cups, getting headaches, being knackered by 3pm and introspection (please God no, not introspection, anything but that!!). What can I say, I'm an addict. The boom-bust cycle of caffeine dependancy is all part of the fun, until you OD and get the shakes.

Today I have clearly been suffering from withdrawal symptoms. The caffetiere at work has been broken for a couple of days and I decided that this might be a suitable point to try and cut down my intake. Instead of cutting down I seem to have gone cold turkey. My flatmate who is used to being woken by the sound of the coffee grinder and being constantly surrounded by the smell of coffee must be wondering what has been going on. I have been sluggish and grumpy for 2 days and I decided that I had had enough of it (this has nothing to do with the last post I made on here, *sarcastic cough*, nothing at all). I resolve to pinch the coffee pot from upstairs:

Ninja-like I creep into the lift unseen by the ever-watchful Raj in security. Stealthily I slide up the third floor corridor, insinuate my way into the sparsely furnished corridor that serves as tea room. Making full use of the available cover and carefully keeping to the shadows I make my approach. Then with the speed of lightning and the subtlety of a stealthy moth, I strike! A double forward somersault lands me tantalisingly close to my target. A few combat rolls and a swift grab and it is mine! Concealing it in my clothing I drop neatly to the floor and go to make an unobserved escape when disaster, the door opens and I am seen! I fell the first of my oponents with a hail of shuriken, the second falls to a dart from my blowpipe and the third to a hail of kicks and punches as I somersault over his head. Disuading persuers with a scattering of caltrops I make good my getaway, slipping away more smoothly than an oiled otter.

My childish fantasies aside coffee is bloody interesting as one of the world's first internationally traded leisuretime commodities.

Most people think that tea is the British traditional drink but it was far less popular than coffee until about 1750 onward and tea's popularity exploded when the East India Company made tea fashionable and capitalised on it. Tea wasn't as popular early on because of it's outrageously high price and the fact that it was often adulterated with non-food things, like rat droppings, a flavour retained for the sake of tradition in many of today's most popular brands.

The first recorded coffee house was "Angel" in Oxford in 1650, but it was London's coffee houses that were really famous. The first of these was opened in 1652 by a Greek named Pasqua Rosee. By about 1670 London coffee houses became meeting places where political and literary ideas were discussed, something of a rarity in Britain which was run by puritain thought police at the time. Coffee houses were seen as a breeding ground of subversive dissent, both French and American revolutions were plotted in coffee houses. Something which makes me wonder whether the social order, not to mention the democratic process in Britain, would be vastly different had tea not been so popular. Ultimately British coffee houses slowly died out as tea, which they initially served, became more popular but had bizarre taxes and licensing restrictions put on it making it's open purchase in private houses problematic.

London women didn't agree with coffee at all; launching The women's petition against coffee, a fantastic historical oddity which basically calls for the serving of coffee to stop. The reason? Since their men stopped going to the pub to drink ale and took up coffee the women weren't getting enough sex. With the beer goggles removed and quivering from too much caffeine their men had become "as Impotent, as Age, and as unfruitful as those Desarts whence that unhappy Berry is said to be brought".

Coffee became more popular in America as a result of a little-known event called The Boston Tea Party where uppity yanks revolted against perfectly legitimate British tea taxes and ruined vast quanitities of tea, the mutinous caffeine-addled colonials (points awarded for the best revolting yanks joke).

Instant coffee was invented when Brazil developed a coffee surplus equivalent to a world supply for 6 years. The Brazilian government approached Nestlé in 1930 to see if coffee's popularity could be boosted with the introduction of a new product. Amazingly it took 7 years of development to produce this thin bitter and virtually flavourless travesty of a drink that they had the nerve to call coffee. Imagine what they could have done with another 7. On 1 April 1938, NESCAFÉ was launched in Switzerland; worst April fools gag ever.

Without the Second World War I doubt that instant coffee would have got very far. I mean, just how instant does a drink have to be? Take ground coffee, apply hot water, lo and behold coffee. Instant is clearly lighter, easier to carry and makes more sense during war time. Nestlé had timed it perfectly (check out Nestlé's history of instant coffee as a point of information you should also check out baby milk action to find out why people refuse to drink NESCAFÉ).

Coffee factoid attack:

• The ingestion of coffee provides the equivalent amount of antioxidants as three glasses of orange juice


• Coffee originated in central Ethiopia and then was transplanted to Yemen, where it was cultivated as far back as the sixth century


• October 1st is the official Coffee Day in Japan


• Currently there are approximately 2,200 ships involved in transporting coffee beans each year


• Over 53 countries grow coffee worldwide, but all of them lie along the equator between the tropic of Cancer and Capricorn


• Coffee stimulates the apocrine glands and makes you sweat more. Which is why I sweat when I eat - bugger.


• It takes 42 coffee beans to make an espresso


• 80% of the world's coffee farmers are smallholders working on less than 3 hectares. The rest comes from plantations which are run more as agri-businesses.


• To make a roasted pound of coffee it takes around 2,000 Arabica coffee cherries. With 2 beans per cherry - this means around 4,000 beans are in a single pound of coffee.


• In December 2001 Brazil produced a scented postage stamp to promote its coffee - the smell should last between 3 and 5 years.


• The USA is the world's largest consumer of coffee, importing 16 to 20 million bags annually (2.5 million pounds), representing 1/3 of all coffee exported. More than half of the United States population consumes coffee typically drinking 3.4 cups of coffee a day


• Coffee is the most popular drink worldwide with almost 2 billion cups consumed every day


• The world's most expensive coffee is made from beans cycled through an Indonesian marsupial's digestive system. It is called Kopi Luwak and no I haven't tried it.


• The French philosopher, Voltaire, reportedly drank fifty cups of coffee a day.


• Regular coffee drinkers have about 1/3 less asthma symptoms than those of non-coffee drinkers according to a Harvard researcher who studied 20,000 people.


• Turkish law makes it legal for a woman to divorce her husband if he fails to provide her with her daily quota of coffee.

I could hardly sign off this post without mentioning that as a traded commodity which grows best in some of the world's poorest areas coffee has become a worldwide economic conundrum as farmers in the developing world are ruthlessly exploited by large corporations. This happens with a lot more than just coffee but is probably most pronounced with coffee given that, as stated above, 80% of the farmers involved in coffee production are smallholders with no leverage at all. Buying fair trade coffee can help but I have heard rumors that not all coffee labelled as fair trade are really that fair. Have a look at Make Trade Fair for information on this. I have found that the fairtade coffees are far more likely to be organic and generally taste a lot better, even the instant.

If you are a real tree hugger you can actually buy fairly traded bird-friendly coffee, I am happy to report that it is delicious.

hangover

How is it that a few drinks in the park ends up with me walking halfway home in the middle of the night?

Complaining as I am it did give me the opportunity to practise my new favourite hobby of falling asleep standing up at a bus stop. Sounds like an invitation to robbery? Remarkably I have never lost anything more than my sense of direction doing this.

Outdoor drinks are clearly a case of soft drugs leading to hard drugs. If you have a can of Red Stripe in the sunshine you will end up doing Tequila slammers at one in the morning (*gags slightly* I can still taste it).

Thank Christ I didn't get really carried away and decide to go for a kebab. There are limits to even my hard drug use.

sweets

Can anyone explain to me who the audience for this website is?

It describes itself as "a traditional , old-fashioned sweetshop, online" which strikes me as a bit of a misnomer. Whilst I do occasionally get a hankering for humbugs or a craving for coconut mushrooms I have never had trouble finding them in a sweetshop, ever. There may be somewhere in Britain where you are more than 5 miles from a pick 'n' mix, but I've never been there. In fact most village shops have a better selection of traditional sweets than city shops.

Perhaps a quarter of is aimed at housebound pensioners that can't shift themselves away from Trisha to get their weekly supply of aniseed balls in a noisy and toothless nightmare of pink froth. This doesn't quite tally with the fact that the older generation seems to have taken to the internet like a fish to space travel. Perhaps because they find it unbearably patronising to be called silver surfer (link goes to an over-fifties portal. No really).

Who the bloody hell wants sweets through the post anyway? Differed gratification and confectionary are almost mutually exclusive. If you live in a dodgy part of the world where postmen are less scrupulous than they should be not only are you going to lose your sweets but the rest of your post is going to be sticky and covered in popping candy.

I think it may be the name of the site. If you asked me to finish a sentance that started with; "A quarter of..." you would almost inevitably elicit a facetious reply such as; "...your finest marijuana my good man", or "...an hour with your daughter costs how much?! A tad overpriced for used goods I'd say.".

Perhaps I shouldn't be so quick to laugh, it is probably for expats. As a website this clearly has a global audience and whilst I may take the piss a bit now after 6 months in Australia I will probably start to get a bit misty eyed at the idea of a bag of sherbert flying saucers in all their stale papery foulness, but I doubt it ( I hereby reserve the right to send the occasional email pleading for Marmite).

click on related link for a sick giggle (internet granny related)

toads

Cheers to Phil for putting me on to this one: exploding toads in Hamburg.

What I particularly like about this story is the suggestion that the toad's dramatic self destruct could be:

"...a defence mechanism against aggressive crows" - Werner Smolnik, animal protection worker

Toad thinks: "Oh shit, that crow's looking a bit tetchy. It's wearing a Burberry cap, it's coming this way..." Toad goes BANG!!

Somehow it just doesn't wash as a defence mechanism.

If only I could persuade the damn turtles to part company in such style. Anyone fancy a trip to Hamburg to see if it works on turtles?

celebrity tongue

You can tell I'm having a slow day at work can't you.

Click on pic for a collection of pictures of celebrities with thier tongues out. The awful example below is in fact Celine Dionandonandonandon.



Why do people collect this kind of shite?

horse's head

For the film nut who has everything a horse head pillow.

I mean honestly what is the point, but I still want one...

australia

I think I have now told everyone who would be shocked or surprised now, so I can announce it on here too. I am moving to Australia to live and work for at least a year. I leave the UK on 20 May and Christ alone knows how I am going to get everything done before then.

If you are still shocked and/or surprised by this announcement try reading your email you may have been told and just not picked up your messages in a while. If you still feel aggrieved because I haven't got your email address, or your computer is broken, or you just haven't called me in a while, then tough. Harsh I know but I can't be held responsible for your lack of dilligence.

I have been offered a working visa and a plane ticket to Australia with the help of @www, the web agency the beloved Mrs, works for and I am at a point in my life where I would be stupid to turn it down. Huge thanks to @www. Things might otherwise be very different.

Thanks too to The Place2Be (P2B), the excellent but little known children's charity for whom I have worked for the past 2 and a half years. P2B took me on from being a temp, gave me training and continually took risks on me that have benefitted me enourmously. I will genuinely miss everyone I have worked with there.

One of the main reasons for the recent flurry of activity on this site is because I am trying to get into the habit of posting as often as possible so that this page can be a journal of where I am and what I am doing(and my slow descent into Aussie slang). I will eventually be posting pictures as well and have discovered a thing called a moblog which allows you to post pictures from a mobile phone camera. Updates as they happen.

hubble telescope

The hubble space telescope has been operating for 15 years this week and has taken over 700,000 images most of which are awesomely beautiful and make you feel suitably small and insignificant. They have also advanced the cause of astronomy and cosmology by leaps and bounds, greatly increasing our understanding of the universe (click on pic for more).



Something so good couldn't be allowed to go on indefinitely. Ultimately George W. Bush holds the purse strings for NASA and naturally feels threatened by anything that increases knowledge and understanding. He is running down the maintainence schedule, read cancelling, on Hubble to pay for more ambitious projects (as if you needed another reason to hate him). Namely a return to the moon and a manned flight to Mars, neither of which will tell us anything new about space. It's just being done so that the US can say "We did it first!". It's the national equivalent of "look Mum, no hands!".

The telescope's orbit will soon start to decay and given the amount of valuable kit on board and the size of the thing it will have to be brought down safely. Couldn't they just do some repairs and nudge it back into a stable orbit?

Let us leave aside for the moment the fact that the British contribution to the project was the mirror, which rendered the telescope short sighted for the first year or so of its operational life, and that the European Space Agency has a record of innadequacy and hopelessness bourne of not having even a third of the budget of NASA couldn't we buy or lease Hubble from the yanks just to keep it in service? ESA could use it for practise missions. We could let the Americans do the dangerous exploring bit and we can have the knowledge and understanding bit.

Let's have a whip-round. I'll start us off with a fiver...

elephants

So these two elephants walk into a restaurant...

In a strangely accurate allegory for contemporary life six elephants escaped from their daily grind in an amusement park and tore through Seoul. Two of them took the opportunity to act like a pair of drunken louts, breaking into a restaurant and engaging in the treasured drunken tradition of garden hopping.

To my mind there are two ways of looking at this:

1. Don't try and use a creature which is probably as intelligent as you, and which is 70 times more massive, solely for entertainment. It is a foul and inhumane thing to do and eventually it will rebel.


2. The anthropomorphic (as at the beginning of this post): The elephants as a metaphor for workers service-based economy.
   

   "It seems one of them panicked, causing the others to also panic and flee the grounds," one official said.

Which presents the intriguing possibility that if one of us freaks out at work our colleagues will charge out of the building with us and cause havoc. Something I have long suspected.

Perhaps it is worth trying to provoke erratic behaviour in our colleagues so that we can get wrecked, destroy restaurants and go garden hopping. Something to think about as May Day/Labour Day approaches...

(related link requires realplayer)

Pope Benedict XVI

Bugger. I suppose it was too much to hope for really. They had the chance to elect the first african pope but instead I find the words:

"For more that 20 years he was head of the congregation of the Doctrine of the Faith in the Vatican - the Vatican's guardian of orthodoxy."

...on the bbc website. Oh well, he's 78, it won't be for long.

leaving

For reasons that will shortly become apparent on this page I am about to leave my job. This is an event that brings with it its' own set of anxieties and problems, most of them a bit embarrassing.

1. Writing and handing in of the letter of resignation, which is probably the easiest part of the whole process. It's such a formal thing to do that that it needs little or no attention other than to remember to put 'Yours faithfully,' at the bottom instead of 'Yours sincerely,' (something my last minion did on his rather unceremonious departure).

2. The bit when people start to find out before you've told most people in the office. You are from this point until you leave the building on your final day going to be asked the same questions again and again. Culminating in the inevitable 'so why are you leaving?'. This question is always asked with a slightly searching look no matter how content you have been in your job. At this juncture I intend to try bursting into tears and quickly leaving the room. That should raise a few eyebrows. At this stage in the leaving process it is wise to invest in a small tape recorder which you dictate your plans onto in detail. Whenever anyone approaches you with the 'so you're leaving' look on their face you simply press play.

3. The announcement that you have to make by email to everyone you work with. This is something I am not looking forward to at all. My natural tendency with things like this is to be a bit too...er...frivolous. The temptation to misbehave is just too great. For example what on earth do you put in the subject line of that email? My current personal favourite is 'So long suckers!' but I'm not 100% convinced that will go down particularly well with the Chief Exec. It is still better than 'I am rid of you all at last!', or 'Fuck this, I'm off', but none of them look like they will go over at all well. I have had 'The mother ship is calling me home...' suggested to me which I quite like. Any and all suggestions considered.

4. The agonising leaving gifts presentation and cakes etc. in the office. Which requires you to look pleasantly surprised at the touchingly unimaginative gifts they clubbed together to get you whilst trying desperately to find something to say that doesn't make you look insincere or hard of thinking. The temptation here to misbehave is also fairly pressing but is somewhat more intimidating prospect with everyone staring at you. Some surprisingly senior members of staff have misbehaved, or worse, spoken their mind, at this step in a 'screw you guys, I'm going home,' kind of a way.

The fifth and final step in the process is actually divided into parts 5a and 5b. This is the final release after the trauma of leaving day - the drinks after work.

5a. Everyone you have ever had any dealings with at your place of work is entitled if not pressured into coming to have at lease one drink. Which normally means you are surrounded by the people you disliked the most in the situation you disliked them the most in at a venue you hate (the one you like being deemed either too dingy, too loud or too far away). Thankfully the polite maximum number of drinks for people you didn't actually invite yourself is only 3 so you can be rid of them pretty quickly.

5b. All the people you actually liked at work accompany you to a venue that you actually like and get you shouting drunk. This is normally followed by a curry and possibly another louder drinking venue. Sometimes there is also a...
5c. Drunken, and slightly sloppy, clinch with the one you always fancied but never got close to before, but let us draw a veil over this unseemly thought.

I may try and come up with a more dignified exit strategy but will probably stick to the 5 step programme. I doubt I will get as far as 5c, but you never know...

sun guilt

Saturday morning and the sun comes out. I have nothing to do and no one to do it with. Still spaced out from Friday night I don’t feel quite up to calling people. They might want to talk to me, which I don’t think I would respond to particularly well in my current dilapidated mental state. I’m getting sunshine guilt, I have to get outside and do something, anything. Armour on, in the shape of sunglasses, I wander down the hill to pose around Crouch End with everyone else.

The place is a ghastly nightmare of three wheeled buggies and arguing couples. One of the things that unnerved me about moving here with my girlfriend is that people evidently move here to breed. We moved here and she goes to work on the other side of the world for six months, talk about mixed message. I decide to buy a notebook but then resolve not to, as can be seen from this page it is rare that I have particularly important or insightful thoughts that need recording. Spending a tenner on a notebook that I don’t need seems a little pointless. Dodging another three buggies and walking past yet another café I wander into a record shop, safe at last. Wandering around buying nothing and adopting a vacant look is accepted behaviour for record shops. Demonstrating an unusual degree of restraint in buying only two CDs I wander out aimlessly for a bit more toddler dodging.

Wandering up the hill again I still have no idea what I am going to do with the day and have to resign myself to the fact that it will be nothing. I am so bored of apathy.

inspiration/filthy brain

I have thankfully returned from my sojourn to the antipodes with a far clearer mind, a desire to write and some actual material! Unfortunately I have also returned without my girlfriend. this has caused my libido to corrupt my unconscious mind and I am experiencing some of the filthiest dreams I have ever had. Which is in a way great, but in another, far more accurate way, bloody awful. However it is enticing me to get the amount of sleep that doctors say you should actually have.

With this in mind I decided to gain extra readers by describing in thigh-squelching detail my adventures with the hot brazillian twin sisters and their whipped cream aerosol that my disgusting brain treated me to last night. You will be relieved to hear that I thought better of this the instant I realised that it was 9:30 and I hadn't left the house yet (yes I am still gainfully employed). Or maybe you won't. Perhaps you the kind of lonely pervert who spends hours typing things like "masturbating teen lesbians" into google. Perhaps I shouldn't have exposed the depth of my own depravity on such a public medium. Or perhaps its all just a hollow sham, a way of dropping in frequently searched for strings into open text as a way of fooling the bored and stupid into a page view. I hope it works!

Just to close off if anyone has a cure for ragingly filthy dreams that doesn't involve self-abuse, spending thousands on ladies of questionable virtue or otherwise being unfaithful, answers on a postcard. I'd just got rid of the calouses dammit.

christmas

As I have no time to type anything new here is an oldie but a goldie. Enjoy:

I hate Christmas. Bollocks to Christmas. Newspaper hacks and stand-up comics like to write little skits at this time of year stating just how much they despise Christmas. No they don’t. Christmas has, for a change, provided them with something approaching a universal experience to witter on about. They find certain aspects of Christmas confusing but they don’t hate Christmas. I hate Christmas. I hate this time of year so much that I have taken the time & effort to write this. Written out this is a four page document comprising nearly three and a half thousand words and I don’t feel that is even nearly complete enough. That’s how much I hate Christmas. In fact there are so many reasons to despise Christmas that I have had trouble sufficiently encapsulating them at all. Christmas is a time when we are reminded that despite our distinctly privileged position as a wealthy western nation we can easily create enough problems for ourselves to turn what ought to be paradise into utter purgatory. There is no other single time of year when such avarice is displayed, when emotional blackmail is openly used as a control mechanism by your relatives, charities and as a marketing tool by every consumer product corporation that thinks it should have first call on the money you make. Christmas really only serves to illustrate just how foul we can really be and the worst part of it is if you point this out to people and you are regarded as some kind of killjoy, a freak that hasn’t understood the question, a scrooge. So not only do you have to actively take part in the worst display of the bad side of human nature you have to enjoy it as well. NO. FUCK OFF & TAKE YOUR CHRISTMAS WITH YOU. Never one to pander to people’s preconceptions I have decided to tell it like it is. This extended rant will hopefully serve to illustrate just how bad Christmas really is.

Christmas often brings out the absolute worst in people, not least in myself. There are exceptions to this but such people are so rare that they serve only to highlight the disgraceful mess around them. No good deed shows up the rest of us like a good deed at Christmas, so we give money to the charities & silently pray that they do their work invisibly. Surely that’s not how it’s meant to be. Having discovered the inherent guilt in Christmas every charity under the sun now gets the idea that I somehow have some spare money left after succumbing to the raging materialism all around. They then decide to go on a bizarre and, frankly, pointless mission to relieve me of my few remaining pennies. This I truly resent. Fine, manipulate my guilt if you really need the money but not all at once and not using the same, rather lame, justification: you’re going to spend so much on yourselves that really you ought to be giving us money to make you feel better about it. And who let the fucking kids in on this? The snivelling, spotty, snot-encrusted, money grubbing little whingers hammer on your doorbell, perform the most tuneless cursory effort at a Christmas carol and then demand money with menaces. This is just another version of the trick or treat idea, which the Americans can take back any time they like, please. Parents are plainly instilling their children with more business acumen than musical talent. I blame the Thatcher bitch, under-fund education & flog off our national assets & what can you expect from an example like that. Charities are, at least, going to do something beneficial with your money. What is that 13 year-old going to do with your cash? Exactly what you would have done with it at that age; take it to the nearest off-licence and blow it on ten B&H and as much cider as it can turn into rancid corrosive vomit in an hour.

The English language takes a pasting at Christmas. On no account should Xmas be used. This appalling abbreviation is among many Americanisms for which I would happily institute the death penalty. Crimbo, whilst native, also needs to be stricken from the nation’s vocabulary. Gratuitous use of the word "festive" becomes almost compulsory. Holly is no longer a prickly nightmare but "festive". Mince pies are also "festive", plastic snowmen are no longer naff but "festive". Even the humble robin is "festive", put a toy robin in the garden & watch as the real one rips it to shreds in a territorial homicidal frenzy. Festive my arse. Every time someone uses the word "festive" attempt to pluck out one of their nasal hairs. That should curtail its’ use a little.

Bad television programs are par for the course over Christmas and have become so much of a tradition that bitching about them is almost pointless. Nevertheless it must be stated for the record that the Christmas "special" is anything but. It is an excuse to fill time with the kind of formulaic tripe that causes irretrievable brain damage whether it be soap opera or "light" "entertainment". The only excuse to put the likes of Scilla Black, Michael Barrymore and Dale Winton on television is for the population at large to witness their agonising deaths by torture as an object lesson in how not to behave. Putting them all on a stage at once with the nation’s entire stock of D list celebrities with a teen pop soundtrack & calling it the Royal Christmas Variety Performance should rate as a crime against humanity. Although the upside of this is that at least one royal is subjected to this gruesome parade of dying career after dying career. We get to watch as the "upper class twit of the year" grin that they arrive with fades into mentally damaged grimace as their head-guts slowly dissolve as the performance goes on. The reason the royals have had such a tumultuous recent past is that each & every one of them has, at some point in the last two decades, attended The Royal Variety Performance. This has left them with all with little nervous system to speak of & a total inability to comprehend the world in terms of anything other than pantomime: "I’m not married", "Oooh yes you are" "Ooooh no I’m not".

Our barely suppressed gluttony springs into overdrive at Christmas. The usual benefits of huge food all the time and as much drink as you can pour down your neck are rapidly overcome by, raging indigestion & stinking hangovers day after miserable day until you finally realise that you are actually poisoning yourself & that gout is a distinct possibility should you keep on in the same vein. What better way to celebrate the birth of our Lord & Saviour (stick with it you know I’m going to get to that bit in a minute) than by eating and drinking until we pass out, puke, or both. The faux Christianity that takes hold of the nation at Christmas is not only depressing but tantamount to heresy. Not that I have any Christian leanings of any description, its just that I find it faintly disgusting that an entire faith is wheeled out once a year, not because of any deeply held respect for the basic tenets of it, but to justify what, when it gets right down to it, is a big piss-up. There are more images of Father Christmas on Christmas cards than there are of Jesus. Saint Nick was taken out of his traditional green robes by no less an evil than Coca-Cola who put him in their company livery. Craven idol anyone? Rampant commercialism? Personally I’d plump for just plain fucking evil. For the Churches, of course it is open season. Time to suck in the guilty ones who haven’t been to a service since last Christmas and brainwash their children. Sink the fangs in whilst they’re young and you can feed off the imparted guilt and fear for the rest of their lives. You can almost smell the anticipation in the notices outside the Churches. And what about those religions that perhaps don’t quite marry up with the dominant Christian faith, well they just have to watch while we shut the country down for a week and make idiots of ourselves. I bet that gives them all a lovely warm glow, not to mention a fucking good laugh.

Another fine reason to hate Christmas is mistletoe. Old ladies, strangers, scutters and munters of all shapes, sizes, ages and states of physical and mental decay, your relatives and the office slag use mistletoe as an excuse to indecently assault you. Who started this ridiculous tradition? What perverted fiend decided that, just because it’s Christmas, a leaf & some berries, poisonous by the way, constitute grounds for impinging on my personal space in such an overt corruption of the accepted norms of social interaction? Should I really have to be groped by the physically repugnant because some deluded wench has managed to procure a small amount of a parasitic plant? If, in the unlikely event, that you see me standing under any mistletoe I will probably be smiling. But stop, think, and use your imagination. That smile is not because I am looking forward to a sloppy clinch with every slathering deviant that walks past. It is because I am concealing a small sickle which I will use to slice off your lips if you even get close to me. Guess what I’ll do with them then.

Christmas decorations are also distinctly bad. For some reason everyone feels the need to cover the entire country with shiny fire hazards. They are a kitsch, gaudy eyesore that often act as a trigger for use of the word "festive", which is itself reason enough to prohibit them. At no other time of year would you countenance bringing a pine tree into your house to shove up a fairy and slowly kill by progressive degrees of dehydration (if you really want to sexually assault a fairy with a conifer you need your sex drive rewired). In a final desperate act of revenge the tree spreads agonising pine needles through your house inflicting a thousand irritating puncture wounds on unwary feet. These will only just have given up their grip on the carpet by next Christmas and you can guarantee that even then the last needle will somehow manage to embed itself in your sock. Baubles are a fantastic way to spread broken glass around the living room and fairy lights melt the chocolate monstrosities that everyone mercifully steals before they begin to drip. Anyone who has ever had a cat will be able to testify that keeping a Christmas tree vertical when it has so many tempting toys for a feline is next to impossible. The resulting explosion of broken glass, pine needles, chocolate and terrified moggy will inevitably rouse you from the stress-relieving bath that seemed like such a good idea just ten minutes previously.

At Christmas your relatives expect you to be with them and exert the kind of emotional pressure on you to come home that makes oppressive regimes look positively light handed. I’d rather face down an Indonesian secret policeman armed with an electric cattle prod than try to explain to an disappointed mother why I’m not going to be there to provide culinary & moral support. They also expect presents, and to be treated nicely and to play God-awful parlour games that remind you that just how refreshing it was to finally leave primary school and just how infantile your family’s sense of humour really is. If I want to see granny spit her dentures across the room I will punch her in the stomach. I don’t feel the need to play charades just to get the same effect. You are made to spend your hard earned on them & then told to be happy about it when really it’s just the capitalist profit motive in action and you didn’t put up much of a fight against it. Oh, but it’s the thought that counts though, no really it is. I am made to associate with these people that I dislike &, in some cases, actively despise, then I’m told not to throw sprouts at them or be rude to them, or pour gravy in their handbags because I’m related to the buggers. I do not particularly wish to be reminded of that whilst watching my grandfather spreading bread sauce all over his chin. At least at funerals I don’t have to watch them eat, not unless the cannibalistic urges really get the better of them.

The Christmas turkey can always be relied upon to ruin my day. The thing about such an enormous bird is that you have to cook it properly. This means slowly, which means getting up excruciatingly early with the second worst hangover of the year to get gory to the armpits by pulling the giblets out and stuffing the fucking thing. This brings on an attack of nausea so overwhelming it threatens to finish the day before it has even begun. Not to mention that the poor creature has probably been kept indoors in a shit covered pen with eight hundred others like it, given just enough room to breathe, force-fed growth hormones and antibiotics until it is so grossly oversized that it can’t balance properly. And you want me to eat that? Turkeys do not reach 24lbs on their own, ever. If you think you really need 24lbs of meat buy two turkeys, seek help from a trained professional (a caterer or a psychologist, either will do), or buy beef, you may have noticed that cows regularly exceed 24lbs. The brief unhappy life of the turkey is brought to a close by a bath of electrified water & the combined auto-plucker and evisceration machine. Just a little something for you to think about if you are under any illusions about Christmas dinner. Just hope I don’t get the urge to tell you what chipolatas are made from.

The task of eating the turkey is, if anything, more unpleasant than cooking it. Most people can’t cook; even people who can cook have trouble cooking turkey. This is a task usually requiring yards of foil and greaseproof paper, several ounces of butter and numerous bastings to stop the total desiccation of the unfortunate avian. It comes to the table in a blaze of glory that is intended to be the highlight of the main course but in reality only hides the dishevelled state of the cook who has suffered nervous trauma as a result of attempting the near impossible. This tactic usually works until the turkey is carved when almost anything can happen, often this means discovering that the damn thing is half-thawed and stuffed only with a small plastic bag of luke-warm stinking giblets. At best the meat will crumble into a tangled fibrous mass.

On the plate the meat is an unpalatably dry and rasping slice of unpleasantness that soaks up gravy somewhat more efficiently than kitchen paper. Forcing it down removes the skin from the back of your throat and leaves you with what is essentially a large shredded sponge in your stomach soaking up the beer, wine and sherry that you’ve chucked back and expanding, expanding, expanding. It is for this reason the 24lb turkey that you thought would only just feed the family could, in fact, feed several. Bringing me to the perennial problem of the leftover turkey. I am yet to come up with a way of getting rid of this. Dissolve it in acid, throw it on the fire, create small accessories from it’s leathery skin, try anything because come Boxing Day evening the cat will turn its’ nose up at it and the tramps on the street corner will laugh in your face if offered turkey. If in doubt bury it, but whatever you do, do not attempt to make another meal from it. There’s nothing quite as transparently unappealing as "a nice bowl of soup" or "a good curry", everyone has had enough of turkey for a whole year and disguising it as something appetising will earn you some seriously dirty looks as soon as taste-buds uncover the awful truth. Serving it up straight from the fridge should be avoided at all costs: there is a reason that heroin withdrawal is called cold turkey and I re-discover it every Boxing Day.

Among the myriad of reasons for despising the "festive" season one stands head and shoulders above the rest. The most vile foulness that ever saw airplay, the most disgraceful excuse for a marketing ploy and the one element of Christmas that can almost always be relied upon to send me into paroxysms of napalm-spitting rage is Christmas music. This brings with it and the concomitant fuss over who will have the Christmas number one. Who gives a shit? It’ll either be a song aimed at the only people that are allowed to enjoy things like Christmas & chart music (i.e. children, and drunken children at that), or some sentimental drivel by a washed-up/ born again star from many decades ago. Christmas is treated by the music industry as an excuse to abandon the normal mores of recording, production and marketing taste. It seems to be okay to record, produce and market a record completely devoid of all artistic merit as long as it is Christmas themed. I like to think of Christmas music like football records, there isn’t really much difference, except that the football team in question may just have a bit of hope behind it, there is no hope for Christmas records. They are cursed to be locked away until mid November every year until ruthless advertising agencies and moronic DJs dust them off and play them non-stop for six weeks before locking them away again. Just for those people I have a very special message, I’m going to use simple language but any DJs should still get someone to explain it to them, carefully: CHRISTMAS DOES NOT REPRESENT AN EXCUSE TO PLAY SLADE RECORDS, DO YOU FUCKING UNDERSTAND? Glam rock came out of the west midlands in the 1970’s. That should be enough to put anyone off.

Michael Jackson, Bing Crosby or any of the Mafia backed Rat Pack shite, The Wombles, Cliff Richard etc. they can all roughly be grouped under the heading of "Play it, and I will genitally mutilate you". White Christmas gets singled out for special criticism at this point, drooling sentimental rubbish that it is. The song is twee, sickly sweet and in no way accurately represents the emotional anguish that surrounds Christmas. But it isn’t really the song so much as concept that I object to. It’s not meant to snow in December where I live. It’s meant to be cold, but not really snow. Yet every year the Met office give us odds on a white Christmas, it seems to be the number one conversation starter. Again only children should want things like this. Our country is not well equipped to deal with snow and it would be inconvenient at best. If you want a white Christmas let’s have a twenty-foot snowdrift. Let’s have so much snow that you can’t open the front door, that the power lines go down & halt your oven in the middle of ruining your turkey dinner. Lets have it so cold that the water pipes freeze and your central heating fails so that you have to sit inside wrapped up in your winter coat and your duvet. All there is to watch is the wine freeze in your glass and ice crystals form on the inside of the window instead of the mind alteringly poor television. Let’s have so much snow that Aunty freezes to the toilet and expires with a look of constipated pain on her rapidly solidifying features. Let’s have so much snow that you are trapped in your house with only the fading hope of rescue by the paralysed emergency services who are still desperately trying to dig out their snowploughs and thaw their petrol tanks. Forced to witness the slow indescribably painful deaths of your entire family one by one until you are the only one left you eventually take your own life with a sharpened slice of frozen Christmas pudding. Still want a white Christmas you CUNT?

I still don’t think I have satisfactorily captured the true horror of this time of year but the sheer effort of considering it in all its hideousness is taking it’s toll on my nerves. I must stop before I turn into a shivering jelly of psychological trauma.

Merry fucking Christmas.

This year dataphage will be in Fiji for Christmas, far from family and the madding crowd, not to mention turkey and Slade records. Something that pleases him greatly (posted from Noosa in Australia's sunshine coast).

ever have trouble finding your banana in the dark?

Then what you need is a glow-in-the-dark bananaguard.

Alternate uses for this odd bit of plastic on a postcard please.

breakfast

I think it's going to be quite an inspiring day, I may even post more than one thing today, which would make this the most successful day ever for this blog.

The day had quite an inspiring start. It being a friend's birthday we went to a pub for breakfast. A pint of Guiness before you've had anything to eat can be quite an inspiring experience. Not quite as inspiring however as watching your friends do lines of coke off the table after eating the biggest, meatiest fry-up I have ever eaten. That was very inspiring.

My filth levels aren't quite set as high. A full English and a pint of Guiness is about all I'll stretch to on a weekday. I finished my pint and went to work.

no it's not working...

...I still don't want to post anything. It's all too boring, I can see I'm going t have to keep a diary of some kind.