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!!!