DISCONCERTIONS

Well, I didn't update this thing last week so I'm well overdue for a meaningless vent-fest. Things that have been giving me the irrits in a big way these last two weeks (because you're all absolutely gagging to know, I'm sure) include:

VOLCANICALLY HOT BEVERAGES
I’m not that much of a coffee drinker, but I partake often enough to have had the top fifteen layers of my tongue instantly vaporised into pink-coloured steam by a recently-purchased cup of flat white on more than one occasion. The surprise when this happens is immediately palpable to anyone within earshot. Whoever makes the boiling mechanism in most coffee chain outlet’s machines needs to be sternly reminded that water can actually be boiled at a paltry 100 degrees celsius, not Surface-of-the-Sun degrees celsius. Seriously, the last cup I got was still undrinkable 20 minutes after I hot-potato’d it back to my desk like a juggler on crack. You could’ve used it to de-frost the petrol tank on a Siberian logging truck.

AUTOMATIC AIR FRESHENER DISPENSERS
I tell you, there's nothing I like better than walking into a swanky hotel or office building's bathroom and copping a face-full of sickly-sweet toxicity from the motion-sensor-triggered poison bomb glued to the wall near the door. I try reeeeeeally hard to imagine I've just been showered with delicate wildflowers as depicted in all the advertisements for these hateful little things, instead of 10mls of sh*t you'd sue someone over if they poured it into your frappacino. Sometimes, for a split-second, I'm just like that sweaty husband type from the ad with the slowly-dawning expression of happy surprise spreading over his none-too-bright dial - "Smell...... gooood?!". Unfortunately the reality that I've just been squirted with something that's likely to provide my first-born with a handy extra arm growing out of their ear soon sets in, along with the urge to rip the thing off the wall and mail it back to the manufacturer in a BIOHAZARD container.

"Healthful"
It's not a real word. End of f*cking story! I'll accept "Healthy", "Health-improving" maybe. But not "Healthful". It was made up out of thin air by an over-stressed advertising copywriter racing to meet a deadline on some chickensh*t "natural" product that their overlords needed them to s*x up with a banal catchphrase. Now it's everywhere, spreading faster than cane toads and herpes, being bandied about with cheerful, dimwitted abandon. Even the State government has started using it. Which means it will soon end up in the MacQuarie and Oxford Dictionaries, if it's not already in there already. I declare a jihad on "Healthful" as of right now.

POWER-SH*TTERS
Holy snappin' bumholes, Batman. What’s with these walking fecal-cannons? You all know the type - yes, even you ladies. I've been told by more than one of you that you've been subjected to the following scenario in the Ladies' Room as well:

Step 1. There you are, peacefully attending to the Ye Olde Nature’s Call in one of the bathroom cubicles at work, when the main bathroom door is suddenly wrenched open with enough force to suck half the air out of the room and in stomps what sounds like a racehorse that’s just finished running the Melbourne Cup.

Step 2. This self-absorbed tosser, all oblivious-to-others nose-breathing and got-somewhere-very-important-to-be briskness, thunders to the nearest cubicle (invariably, right next to yours) and throws the door open so hard that(a) you duck because you think the cubicle wall’s going to shatter all over you and (b) you simultaneously cover your nether regions with your hands because you’re sure your cubicle is going to capitulate and go horizontal in protest at this outrageous treatment, exposing you at your most vulnerable in the process.

Step 3. The Power-Sh*tter spins, rams their door shut hard enough to startle birds off trees outside and locks it in one swift motion.

Step 4. You hear the toilet seat clang up as there’s a furious rustling of garments being whipped open and downwards.

Step 5. The Power-Sh*tter’s cheeks get slapped onto the seat so viciously you wince in involuntary vicarious sting-pain.

Step 6. The Horror. You hear the Power-Sh*tter’s obnoxious breathing stop as they ferociously bear down like an Olympic weightlifter (“Hup!!”), then a long, loud, drawn-out “Hnnnnnnnn!”, accompanied by……

Step 7. What sounds like a plate of raw kidneys being poured into a bucket of water from a great height, thundering down so hard you lift your feet to avoid the spillover that surely must come oozing across the tiles any second now.

Step 8. After this horrifying aural onslaught peters out, the Power-Sh*tter takes a big nose-whiff, followed inevitably by a barely-under-their-breath exclamation of “phew!”, repeated a number of time if you’ve not been accruing good karma.

Step 9. If you’ve REALLY run out of luck, you get subjected to another rendition of Steps 7 thu 8.

Step 10. Once the Power-Sh*tter has rid themselves of their inconvenience, the toilet roll whizzes like a deep sea rod with a marlin on the hook, followed almost instantly by a brief tornado of rustling and swiping that sounds like it’d take the skin off an elephant.

Step 11. With frightening speed the Power-Sh*tter reverses through Steps 2 to 4 and stomps back out into the world, ready to thoroughly irritate someone else with their overblown bluster.

FEMALE MUSIC STARS
I’m a straight male. I appreciate a gander at a good-looking member of the fairer s*x as much as the next hetero dude. Love it, in fact. But W.T.F., people. W…T…F?? Video Hits and even Rage now seriously resemble the audition shoot clips from “Girls Gone Wild”, “Forrest Hump” or "Edward P*nisHands".
Every female solo musician who’s lucked their way to the plastic heights of the mainstream music charts now has their follow-up album produced by someone like TimbaLand or Dre and is suddenly morphed into a smokey-eyed, bootylicious hip-hop artist with film clip choreography straight from Bad Girls strip club (think Nelly Furtardo, Avril Lavigne, Jessica Mauboy, yadayadayada, list goes on).
I don’t even want to sully my keyboard describing out-and-out slags like Kesha and Rhihannon. Skanky is skanky sistah, mmm-HMM.
Yeah yeah, "Gee, Matt's getting o-l-d", "heard this one before". Uh huh. All I'll say to that is this: when the 6-year-old niece of an acquaintance gets showered with praise for demonstrating how well she can do the Booty Dance and the “sliding-down-the-imaginary-pole-while-sticking-your-butt-out-seductively” move, you KNOW the end of civilization is nigh. Stock up on topical cream, people.

BLACK WALLETS
Wow. Really? They only hold some of the most financially important, difficult-to-replace items of most men’s lives. Nothing important, really. That’s why they make them black, you know. So we can’t find them easily whenever we’re somewhere dark and have our hands full of other things. It’s a fun trick we men like to play on ourselves – buy the blackest, plainest, most nondescript wallet possible then pretend like we’re surprised when we lose it or can’t spot it easily. Oodles of fun.

FESTIVALS
Forty-five-minute sets from every band except the headline act (an hour if you're lucky). Tickets that cost more than a return flight to Bali. Packs of shirtless beefy f*ckwits clutching their beers in one hand and doing that f*cking stupid "point-to-the-sky-bounce-the-one-foot-up-and-down-on-the-spot" dance. The obligatory dude on the reeeeally bad trip scurrying wild-eyed from one hiding place to another. Young semi-clad females ready to throw uppercuts at the mere hint of someone pushing in line or bumping their Rum-and-Coke arm. The cringe-worthy awareness that a growing majority of the first-timers are actually looking at themselves and each other more than the bands they “came to see”. Just keeps getting better and better.


RIGHT WING AVERAGE-JOE CLIMATE CHANGE SCEPTICS
Climate change??? It's a load of rubbish, those Chicken Little, doom-and-gloom scientists all disagree with each other!
(Okay sir- where'd you hear that?)
It's been all over the news! And those debate shows! And I've read a few articles in the paper and in a few magazines as well that were pretty detailed.
(Riiiiight - so have you looked into this on your own, counted up scientific articles for and against climate change theory over the last few years, that kind of thing - just to check if the "news" has got it right?)
..... Well, no....I don't have to, though. Its a cyclical thing, the Earth always goes from Ice Age to warm and back again. You learn that in primary school, any idiot knows this!
(Uh huh. So do you have any thoughts about the claims that the current rate of climate change is measurably faster than at any time in the planet's known history?)
........ Well...... how could they possibly know they've got it right? They're always changing their blo*dy minds, going back on what they said a few years ago.
(Hmm, yes, ongoing research and learning do tend to have that effect, unfortunately. So who do you think makes the most sense on this issue?)
Tony Abbot's the only one who makes any blo*dy sense on the whole climate change thing, more than Ju-liar, that's for sure.
(Okay. So you trust an Australian politician who studied theology at university to know more about climate change science than the thousands of climate scientists around the world who've spent their entire adult lives studying nothing else?)
...........uh......well, what do they know about the Australian economy?
(I imagine they're too busy monitoring and testing all the various contributing factors and variables related to climate change to know too much, to be sure)
Well there you go!!!!! There you blo*dy-well go!!!

YOU KNOW YOU'RE IN BRISBANE WHEN...

People around you start wearing scarves, coats and jackets the first time the temperature drops below 20 degrees in April and steadfastly refuse to stop dressing like Londoners in December even if the temperature climbs again;

The spiders that invade your house are big enough to back your cat into a corner;

If you want a major print news alternative to the ultra-parochial, conservative News Corporation-owned rag masquerading as a newspaper that rules the roost here..................... you're a long way from Kansas, Toto;

Being outdoors at sunset in summer after a bushfire is like watching a movie scene in the sky;

Almost every major public event / festival / celebration you come across is sponsored by a mining company cheerfully claiming to be part of our "green future";

Northern suburbs residents suddenly lose all navigational skills and coherent driving ability upon crossing the river in a southerly direction, and vice versa for southern residents;

If you light up a cigarette in the CBD mall you run the risk of being sconed with a shopping bag (and then fined while you lie dazed on the pavers);

The local national championship-winning sports team sees its crowd attendance drop by 90% if they lose their first two games of the following season;

People at every party you attend grimly tell you how glad they are not to be living on the Gold Coast;

Growing your own vegies is sometimes like being in charge of constructing the D-Day defenses on Normandy's beaches due to the plethora of nibbly beasties who seem to have evolved to subsist on plants grown only within your property boundary;

You watch a cockroach the size of a sunglasses case carry off your lamb cutlets before you've finished defrosting them on the kitchen bench;

You get road-raged by wildly-gesticulating 20-something females with infants in baby seats in the back for driving as slow as 100km/hr in a 100km/hour zone;

The newer buildings look like they were designed by Soviet architects after smoking their first spliff and the older buildings look like they were designed by Michaelangelo's Australian nephew;

Local mates talk about the city's far southern suburbs as if they're referring to the Bronx in the early '80's;

You can spend a warm subtropical evening gazing up at the CBD lights from an inner city riverside park while hand-feeding the bull sharks;

Catching public transport involves packing a good book, 4 bus timetables, a seat cushion, antiseptic surface spray, motion sickness tablets and a day's rations;

You get tail-gated, road-raged and swerved at by an over-caffeinated labourer in a ute going at 95 clicks an hour through the speed-camera-infested Inner City Bypass tunnel;

Locals continually bemoan the fact that there are no good dining-out/cafe/bar options within the city limits whatsoever...... thereby highlighting the fact that they've not paid a visit to Toowoomba, Ipswich, Caboolture, Redcliffe, Logan or Beenleigh lately;

You get tail-gated and road-raged while going through a MacDonald's drive-thru;

You can write "Swerved to avoid scrub turkey" in the "Cause of Accident" section of your car insurance claim and actually be granted a pay-out;

My Dopplegangers

Don't ask me where I found the time to finally write another blog entry (okay, okay, it was underneath the bed beside the vacuum-sealed winter woolies, the little rascal), but by Jove I need to put something out there.

Once again a friend who shall remain nameless (Kirsten) has had the temerity to declare that I bear an uncanny likeness to a celebrity who, in my humble opinion, is about as similar in appearance to me as George W. Bush is to a miniature schnauzer.

The celebrity in questions is one Matt King - apparently a Canadian purveyor of comedic stylings, host of a number of edgy television shows and owner of a serious "second-straight-day-wired-on-crack" bouffant, among other things. See left:

As I politely informed Kirsten, Mr. King looks for all the world like an ageing crystal meth tweeker. To no avail.









Like I mentioned above, this happens every now and then. Other celebs I've been accused of being directly related to include:

1. Robin Soderling

Professional tennis player. Playing style described as "brutal". Middle names are "Bo" and "Carl". Frowny sort.

My team leader at work sidled up to me one morning and breathlessly attested that he'd seen my honest-to-god doppleganger playing in the Wimbledon quarter finals the previous evening. I checked up on Monsieur Soderling. Doppleganger FAIL.

2. Ed Norton

Actor. Fluent in Japanese. Penchant for smoking-hot latino girlfriends.

Sweet Jesus, really??? He's a damn fine thespian, to be sure, and I know that a few ladies with severe glaucoma consider him a tidy bit of crumpet they'd like to give their own Oscar-winning performance to, but being likened to Tyler Durden's skinny, wimpy alter-ego is like being told you've won the Most Likely To Be An Office Drone award in high school. Boooo.





3. Chris Martin

Falsetto-voiced frontman for overly-earnest UK band Coldplay. Free trade activist. Hubby of Gwynny Paltrow. Fond of fruit-derived children's names.

Another bag-over-the-head-punch-in-the-face winner from a work colleague. This one, for mine, is like when those South American types start seeing an image of the Virgin Mary in their burnt tortilla. Or maybe those hateful 3D pictures you had to stare at until your eyes protested and a recognisable picture emerged (and which I could never get, by the by). Sometimes the viewer just wants to see something. Of course I couldn't be considered similar to a rugged action man like Hugh Jackman or Brad Pitt, oh no. I get puss-boy Chris Martin. Oh the humanity.

4. Larry Bird

Greatest forward in the history of basketball. Smartest basketball player ever. Shortest shorts in NBA history. May be The Messiah.

Don't get me wrong, I have nuttin' but lurrv for Larry, but this one really got my goat. Some high school friends started banging on about my likeness to Larry Legend in the early '90's. Clearly those friends were in dire need of retinal surgery. Or a swift cancellation of their supply of LSD. I mean, come on. Seriously??? Larry frickin' Bird???




5. Mystery Porn-a-Like

Un-named male adult film "actor".

A friend-of-a-friend once loudly and emphatically stated at a party that he'd been sampling some visual entertainment of the Rumpy-Pumpy kind earlier that day (as you do) and one of the participants in an interracial DP 3-way fun-fest had born a near mirror-image likeness to ol' Muggins here. So much so that the shock of recognition threw him out of rhythm. My first question was where he'd seen me in action to be able to make such a comparison, to which he replied that he'd just used his imagination. My questioning stopped at that point.

My mind has naturally rejected many of the other look-a-like claims thrown my way over the years out of pure shock and revulsion so I can't remember the majority of them. However I'm learning to embrace the horror - it's cathartic, apparently. As a great man once said: "Laugh and the whole world laughs with you; Cry, and I'll give you something to cry about you little b*stard".

So if any of you have an MB look-a-like in mind, send me a photie - I'm offering a bounty for the most ridiculous doppleganger example. Entertain me.