Safety first

Society is mad. Completely fuckin’ bonkers.

I’m all for seatbelts and airbags and all of those things that make death a little harder to slip into, but at some point people have to take responsibility for themselves.

If you are too stupid to wear a seatbelt, that airbag shouldn’t save you. Like that muppet who sued MacDonalds after burning herself with a hot coffee. It’s coffee, you moron, it’s meant to be hot.

Here’s another crazy bit of health and safety bullshit.

We need less health and safety–bring back natural selection.

On the road

I’m writing this from the back of a moving car. We’re heading interstate to go to a certain beach; the weather is sweet, and I’m pretty sure the birds are singing.

I’ve finally got this mobile internet thing connected and working, and at some stage I’ll find a mobile blogging client that will let me post pictures on the fly.

Technology is cool.

Yeah, mate, I’m walking down the street; I’m on the phone

People annoy the shit out of me, particularly pedestrians—but yesterday, I found a new kind of wanker.

I was walking down the street to meet some friends for lunch. I was running a bit late due to a meeting that had run overtime. One of those guys that spend too much time in the gym stepped out of a doorway in front of me. He wore too-tight clothing and waddled down the street, massive steroid-boosted thighs crushing tiny balls, I expect. He had a phone pressed against his ear like he was trying to affix a poster to a power pole using only spit.

However, on account of being a wanker, he held his arm perpendicular to his head like some kind of fucked-up walking right-angle triangle.

‘Yeah, mate, yeah,’ he grunted into the phone. ‘I’m walking down the street now.’

And he was, being a dickhead, elbow jutting out, meandering all over the footpath. It wasn’t just the people behind him who were being impeded, people coming towards him were being forced into the gutter.

When I’m king, this fucker won’t be getting a pedestrian licence.

Watch you while you sleep

I was house-sitting for a friend of a friend, looking after a little wooden house filled with hundreds of cats. Pictures of cats, tapestries of cats, little figurines, stuffed toys, paintings, postcards, paw-print pictures painted by cats, and one real, live, old, grumpy and neurotic cat.

His name was Hamish, and he was mental.

I was there for a week. I sat around eating curries, drinking wine and reading books on the little sunny veranda out the back. I played some guitar and fed the cat.

It was quite warm, so I’d left the veranda doors open to allow a cool breeze and the schizophrenic cat ingress. I’d fallen asleep at about 11:00 and stayed that way until I woke up at about 3:00 am. Something had woken me up. Something was in the room.

It’s the cat, I thought. He’s lonely and wants some company.

‘Hey, Hamish,’ I called out towards the rustling noise in the corner of the room.

‘Come here, puddy cat.’

The noise in the corner of the room walked in front of the window. The silhouette was not that of a cat.

OK, I’m awake now.

I switched the light on, and there on the window sill was a possum. Its eyes twinkled and its nose twitched. Well, this is going to be fun, I thought.

I got on the other side of the bed, so that it had a clear path to the door, and grabbed a pillow. I threw the pillow at the possum, making a shooing noise—it bounced off and the possum just crouched there looking at me, twitching. I tried again with another pillow. Then some stuffed toys that were lying around. Bert didn’t work, either did Ernie. The possum sat in a pile of pillows and toys, glaring at me. It did not look very happy.

Careful not to turn my back on it, I sidled over the bed and went looking for fresh ammunition. What I found was a broom.

I went back into the room to face the possum, resuming my position on the far side of the bed. ‘Look, possum,’ I said. ‘It’s three o’clock in the fucking morning. Can you just, like, fuck off?’

It looked at me and its little pink nose quivered.

OK, here we go, I thought and reached out with the broom. I gave it a tentative poke—it did not move. I pushed it harder—the thing was just a ball of pure muscle—it pushed back. I had no idea possums were that strong, and despite its inherent furriness, there was no way I was going to try and pick it up. It had some serious tree-climbing claws.

It was about 3:30 now, and I was dead tired. I switched the light off and got back into my now pillowless bed. I tried closing my eyes, but I could sense the possum watching me. I opened my eyes and it was still in the same place, sitting on the window sill. Oh, fuck this.

I got out of bed, switched on the light and stared at the possum. It stared back.

Then I had a thought. Carefully, I reversed the broom and held it by the sweeping end. I got a bit closer, closer than I wanted to be, and used the broom to reach past the possum and fumble with the catch on the window. I could picture the possum running up the broom and trying to climb me like a tree, but thankfully it didn’t.

I got the window open and the possum launched itself straight out.

Trim

I left work early to get a haircut yesterday.

I crossed the river (right across to the other side) and sat down in the chair.

‘Hey, darl, how do you want it?’

‘Can you just neaten up the back and sides and leave it the same length on top?’

‘Sure.’

And then, as always, she goes ahead and cuts how she feels like.

‘Ah, crap, I’ve done it again, haven’t I?’

‘Yes, you have.’

‘That’s 20 bucks, darl.’

‘Thanks, see you in a few months.’

A couple of hundred bucks later …

Jesus. Fuck.

I’ve woken up this morning drunk.

Last night was fun. I went out with some people from work; started drinking at 4:30. The others tapered off until it was just two of us left. After our fifth beer or so we thought it was probably wise to go to a different bar; so, we did.

More beer was in order, this time it came in pint glasses. A young, keen fellow came in wanting a game of pool. So we played. He was good, but I won. Twice.

Shaven headed, covered in tats, he looked a little rough. It turned out he was a nurse in an oncology ward. I asked him how he managed it—I said I couldn’t do it, being around dying people and their families all the time. He said he pretty much grew up in an oncology ward—he survived a rare form of Leukaemia.

The people you meet, hey?

Shut up, damn you!

The baby next door has been bawling for the last hour.

When I typed the title of this post, everything went quiet.

When I typed that last line, it started screaming again.

Shut up, damn you!

Shhhhhhh …

Man attacked by feral bee emerges victorious

Last weekend I drove interstate for a friend’s party, partied, woke up thinking I was dead, then jumped in an icy river to make sure I wasn’t.

This weekend I dove into an icy beer (and uncounted others—just to make sure they weren’t poisonous [unfortunately, it turned out they were]), woke up spastically hungover, then went outside and jumped on a bee.

Now, I’m not being euphemistic or metaphorical: I stood on a bee and it stung me. Fair enough, Mr Bee, I probably would have done the same thing. The bee definitely got the worst of the deal—it’s dead, and all I ended up with was a pointless story.

I’m sure it would have looked quite amusing: me dancing around the clothes line on one foot trying to shake the bee off [again, not a euphemism] while saying the first thing that came to mind, which was some thing like, ‘oh, fer fucking Jesus fuck!’

Despite the initial shock (Hmmm, what’s that sensation? Ahhhh!), it didn’t hurt much at all. When I was a kid, bee stings hurt. Gosh, kids are sissies …

Wild bee preparing to attack

Image borrowed from <http://globalswarminghoneybees.blogspot.com>

Me and my mobile—a brief history (part 1)

My first encounter with a mobile phone was when driving back from the beach one evening in 1996 with my friend Dave. Dave was driving and asked me to get his mobile out of the glove box so that he could call his girlfriend—to say that he was going to be late.

Inside the glove box was a lump of plastic that would choke a horse—although any horse stupid enough to try and eat a phone probably deserves to die. It was a Motorola but looked like it was made by Black and Decker. It appeared to be ergonomically designed to be held in the claws of diving robots, and had a thick antenna that looked like a rogue plastic carrot.

The model name was ‘Ultrasleek’.

It was the year 2000 by the time I bought my first mobile phone. I thought we were all supposed to be driving flying cars and arguing with incorrigible computers (I’m sorry Dave, I can’t do that …), so getting a cell phone was a consolation prize.  I was living in Korea at the time and felt somewhat emasculated by not having a phone. It also made it difficult to receive phone calls.

After work, a Korean friend went with me into town to a night electronics market. She negotiated on my behalf, and ended signing the contract in her name because, apparently, a situation had never arisen in the history of time where a foreigner wanted to buy a mobile. Sorry, a hand phone.

Yes, ‘hand phone’ is what Koreans call mobile/cell phones. Literally, with bad pronunciation, ‘han deh pone’—which is fair enough as Korean lacks the ‘f’ sound. Interestingly, this is also what the Chinese call a mobile—‘sho ji’, meaning ‘hand machine’. It really makes you wonder what part of the body they previously used to pick up a home phone. (A regular phone is ‘dian hua’, meaning ‘electric voice’, in case you were wondering …)

So after an arbitrary decision and an extended negotiation in a language I didn’t yet understand, I signed my life away on a shiny silver LG hand phone. The menus were all in Korean, but it did have one cool feature: an MP3 player.

This technology was probably a year off being seen on the streets back home, and for a while I felt pretty cool to possess it. It had a 16-meg card, meaning it could hold about four songs—which I listened to on loop. I did regularly change songs—these were the days when Napster was king—but two that stand out in my mind were ‘Kryptonite’ by Three Doors Down and the theme from Mission Impossible by the Chemical Brothers. Good songs to get you ready for work.

I had the phone for a year then when I left I gave it to a friend. He had it for over a year then gave it to another friend. When I returned to Korea in 2003, I got it back.

Most of its shiny silver paint had been worn away, exposing a bone-coloured plastic underneath. It looked significantly bigger than what I remembered.

But of course, there were other phones in between. Three, actually.

To be continued …

Eye-catching headline

Plane-sized bird?

I am a little perplexed about:

They said the animal did not have teeth made of enamel and dentine like today’s birds, but bony “pseudo-teeth” common to a group of extinct giant birds called pelagornithids.

Birds have teeth? I thought that was just in the cartoons …

Update: Only mutant birds grow teeth …