We’re often told that we’re insignificant, and we’re that nothing in the larger picture of the universe.

But you can also look through a microscope, and say that we’re huge and important and omnipotent next to the animals we see crawling around on our bodies.

I have never felt the need to talk to the microbes on my body. Maybe this explains why God doesn’t talk to us very much.

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David Wong at PWOT/Cracked has written a good article about things rich people need to stop saying. In the comments, there’s lots of people talking about work, and how hard they work, and there are rich people lying around on a yacht somewhere.

Guys, nobody cares how hard you work! It’s only minimally related to the discussion! Capitalism doesn’t reward work: it rewards value.

This is the entire game: if you have skills that are rare, valuable, and highly-prized, you will be in demand, and will be able to demand large amounts of compensation from society. But if your skills are commonplace and mundane, you’re much lower on the totem pole.

Paris Hilton has value. She’s earned millions for the entertainment history. She sells CDs and perfumes and fashion lines. People like reading about her. If she collapsed in a club with pills in her handbag, it would be Christmas come early for every tabloid on the planet.

Your average cubicle-dwelling yutz does not have as much value. It doesn’t matter how hard he works. He does something that could be done by millions of people.

Work on its own is useless, unless you’re doing something society wants.

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I’m seeing “Kony 2012″ being posted everywhere on Facebook and on Youtube. I don’t know who or what Kony is. And I want to keep it that way.

As of now, I am seeing if I can survive this noxious fad without ever learning about Kony. I’m serious. If I see someone writing about Kony, I’ll look away. If someone talks to me about Kony IRL, I’ll sing lalalala in my head until he stops. I want to outlast this meme.

To any other Kony virgins out there, I encourage you to join me. Let’s never, ever find out the truth about Kony.

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So I went back and read the Real Ultimate Power site, and it got me thinking about how web comedy ages.

We’re in a place now where we can finally answer that question. Back in 2000 (for example), nobody had been online for too long, so everything we saw was like virgin soil. But now that all these funny classics have aged a bit…how to they stack up?

I still love Real Ultimate Power. The creator of that site has gone on to create a new site called Ghosts/Aliens, and somehow it’s not as cool. Maybe because the character he writes as isn’t as fun.

Tucker Max has recently retired. I always liked him and thought he took a lot of crap he didn’t deserve. He wrote funny stories and somehow raised an army of haters against himself. Bizarre. That kind of concerted negative reaction is usually reserved for actual bad people, not entertainers trying to make others laugh.

I keep forgetting that Maddox is still alive. He was one of my favourite writers for years but he updates very infrequently now. I hear his new book’s good.

This Land was a flavour of the moment like Rebecca Black’s “Friday”. I don’t think it’s funny any more.

Numa Numa is still very cute, but Gary Brolsma went the wrong way with New Numa. What made the original clip appealing was how ghetto it looked. You had a guy unapologetically singing into a shitty webcam with terrible lighting and sound. New Numa is too polished. It’s not a viral clip, it’s a music video.

Seanbaby’s column on Cracked is godly, much better than his website.

I like reading old SomethingAwful articles, like this one. Note that they talk about DragonForce long before the band became huge off their Guitar Hero III song. I always like seeing stuff like that, like references to Skrillex years before he was famous.

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“To revolutionize, at one effort, the universal world of human thought, human opinion, and human sentiment…. All that he has to do is to write and publish a very little book. Its title should be simple—a few plain words—”My Heart Laid Bare.” But—this little book must be true to its title. ” — Edgar Allan Poe

There is a man called Christian Weston Chandler — sometimes known a Chris-Chan — who has become an internet legend in every wrong way you can count.

Forests could be massacred printing his exploits. If you want to start your journey, here’s a Chris-chan wiki with an astonishing 1300~ pages documenting Chris’s life. Every crazy email, every crazy video, every copyright-infringing piece of art.

Who runs the wiki? Good question. They’re definitely not fans, but they’re not exactly trolls or haters either. They’re more in the direction of…observers. You know, like kids with a captured bug in a jar.

One might ask “why?” There are millions of people with autism in the world. Why all this attention for one particular specimen? I think it’s because Chris is so demonstrative and forthcoming. Normally autism makes you withdrawn and disassociated. Here is a rare case that is near-pathologically uninhibited, to the point where he has no problems mentioning to strangers that he randomly shits himself.

People love that. People love looking inside the lives other people. That’s why reality TV is so big. Give someone a view into your heart, reveal intimate, sacred things about yourself, and they’ll show up to look.

I think that most online diaries are boring and unreadable because people are afraid to be open. They filter and censor the exciting and dangerous side of them, letting only the safe and mundane through. That isn’t how it works. I don’t want to read boring things. Why not put on a peepshow? Why not expose yourself a little?

So, go ahead, write your safe, straightlaced, boring-ass blog entries about work and school and travel. You won’t get one hundredth the attention of the a crazy autist prancing around in a bikini.

Openness.

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This is the Mythbusters episode where they polish a turd.

I actually did that once, by accident. I have an older relative who has limited control of his lower body, and his undergarments sometimes contain amazing things.

One day I put some of his underwear on to wash, and when I took them out, there was a turd in there, and it was…clean. No, really. The washing machine cleaned the poop. I was struck by incipient awe. I realised I was seeing a once in a lifetime thing.

What did it look like? Well, it was sort of glossy and shiny. It wasn’t uniform in shape like the Mythbusters’ turds, but it was smooth and rounded. It had an odour but not an offensive odour, it smelled a bit like clay.

I didn’t bag it or anything, I threw it away. But still, I had cleaned poop. Wild.

This story was brought to you by Bro Enterprises.

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It’s about a superhero team containing a white kid, a black kid, an an Asian kid. The white kid will use his dad’s money and social clout to acquire passports, charter flights, bring illegal weapons into the country, etc. The black kid will use his athleticism to defeat bad guys. The Asian kid will do everyone’s math homework.

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I can’t stand how little respect the series has for its past villains. You might recall that back in the day Frieza and Cell were really scary villains that took entire sagas to defeat. Well, here’s a newer episode featuring Goku and some random-ass guy (Pikkon or whatever, I don’t keep track of new characters) flattening them both in a squash match. Two of the greatest villains in the show, plus a ton of other bad guys, and the fight is over in seconds.

It’s so infuriating. I bet we’ll get a filler episode soon where Broly comes back, lurks outside Goku’s front door until it opens, and Goku inadvertently kills him by throwing out the trash.

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Phil Heath is the new Mr Olympia, the most prestigious title in competitive bodybuilding. Only thirteen men have won this title, and now Phil joins the club. I’ve followed his progress for years, and I’m sure he will be a great champion and a great face for the sport. I caught a live stream of the Mr Olympia contest, and this was no political decision. Phil was the better guy, and that’s all you really need to say.

Phil has a lot of critics among the bodybuilding community. He’s “narrow,” and has “arms too big for his body.” But I don’t believe bodybuilding is about having no weaknesses, it’s having pluses that outweigh your weaknesses. Something else I keep hearing (mostly on Getbig, a notoriously troll-filled bodybuilding forum that is infested with Haterade drinkers) is how he’s “all drugs,” and would weigh 180lbs if he was natural. Now that’s a very good point but WHO CARES.

The only thing that bugs me about Phil is that, well, he seems less than honest sometimes. There was a thing on the bb.com forums where he said something about how he’s not on insulin (a drug that every competitive bodybuilder since the 1990s has used). But I suppose he considers himself the sport’s representative now, and if he has to lie to improve bodybuilding’s (rather suspect) reputation, that’s something he’s willing to do.

The whole sport is full of liars, really. Arnold himself once said that he stopped taking steroids after he retired from bodybuilding, when it’s obvious to anyone with a knowledge of human muscle limits that he was still on drugs at least until the Conan movies in the mid 1980s (and possibly later).

Oh well. As Benito Mussolini once said, “don’t hate the playa, hate the game.”

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Harry Potter…

I love the books. Maybe that’s too mild. I love the books THIS much. I love the books so hard, that if Helen Keller engaged her psychic powers I would render an excellent eggplant (I’m testing out my Metaphor 3000 program, let me know how well it works).

But I have been able to muster no interest in the movies. Not even one of them. This is because of two contradictory rubics.

1. I know how the story will end
2. All the divergences from the story drive me crazy

The fact that I know the story kills all the excitement for me. It’s like being on an adventure in a new frontier, vs being on a rollercoaster where you know exactly what the track will be like. The unpredictability isn’t there.

But at the same time, I hate it when the movies are different from the books. It may sound stupid, but these are adaptations of specific stories. The crap with Harry fighting Voldemort on broomsticks just annoys me to tears. That isn’t in the book!

So it’s like the movie gets kicked in the nuts from two different directions. I’m bored, and also annoyed. Maybe for some people in works in reverse, and they’re entertained while being pleasantly soothed. I don’t know this stuff. I’m not psychic, man.

Something I don’t get is why people are complaining about the movie being split into two parts. Sure, maybe it was unnecessary, but Hollywood has been doing this for a while, they’ve just never been so blunt about it before. You don’t believe me? Think about the second Matrix movie. There’s one big plot revelation there…and it’s of no significance to the story. There are few reasons why The Matrix Reloaded should have existed, it was just a way to stretch out two movies into three. I would argue that the second and third Pirates of the Carribean movies were much the same…one movie padded out into two (except they overpadded, and these movies are so packed with characters and events that they hardly know what to do with themselves).

Oh yeah, and this!

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Here’s an article at Forbes about how the world’s richest men don’t live at all how you’d expect.

It has often occurred to me that to be rich you have to belong to a certain personality type. You have to pinch pennies so hard that they could be used to ID your fingerprints. You have to be the kind of person who phones up the bank to enquire about a $1.50 charge on your statement.

We make fun of miserly people, but there’s definitely something to the lifestyle. I know a few people who take an “easy come, easy go” approach to their finances, and money just flows away from them like water down a slope. It’s ridiculous. It’s like their money judges them as unworthy stewards and consciously abandons them. It’s the tight-fisted, anal-retentive people who keep their money.

Last year there was a story on Blabbermouth about how AC/DC was suing a Romanian traffic cop who ripped them out of $2500. The comments were alive with “hahaha, why would the richest rock band in the world care about $2500?” Well, it’s the idea of the thing. It didn’t matter if they needed the money or not. They should not have to pay it, so they were willing to go to court over it.

If Bill Gates dropped a fifty cent coin on the ground, would he bother to pick it up? I think so. If you can be responsible with small amounts, you can be responsible with big amounts, too.

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My uncle, Anthony Cannellis, passed away not too long agoMy whole family made a 4 hour trip to Shoalhaven to attend his funeral.

We met our outer circle of relatives (whom you see about once a year), and the next concentric ring of relatives outside of that (the ones you only see at marriages and funerals), and we got together for the service at a small chapel. Anthony will be cremated and then buried. I think his sons took care of all his arrangements.

The funeral director gave a short talk about Anthony’s life. He was very good and professional. What a high pressure job, right? All the anxiety of public performance, and also the knowledge that if you screw up, people won’t be laughing about it the next day.

There wasn’t a wake after the service, but we did have tea and coffee at a neighbouring hotel. One of Anthony’s sons picked up the bill for us. In all, it was a very well run event, and a worthy tribute to my uncle’s memory.

I feel bad about this. All my relatives are dying, and I hardly know them!

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I don’t see anything ridiculous about thinking that black people might be different to white people. They have a genetically different skin color, don’t they? Maybe they genetically differ in other ways.

I am a fan of professional bodybuilding, and I’ve noticed that black bodybuilders often have a very different calf shape to white bodybuilders. Look at current 202 competitor Kevin English:

His calves are short, and insert high on the shin bone. Now look at 80s-era bodybuilder Jeff King:

A very different shape, with calf insertions far lower on the shin bone, giving his calves a full and thick sweep (and his calf development is far better in general, but that’s not genetic). You can compare photos of many current and past pros, and black competitors consistently seem to have calves that insert higher than white competitors. The black bodybuilders who buck the trend (such as Chris Dickerson and David Henry) seem to be statistical outliers.

I don’t know how or to what extent the races genetically differ (and if black men turn out to be genetically superior to white men, I’m perfectly cool with that!), but I don’t understand why you’re a Klansman for just discussing the subject.

The racists of the past literally loved their ideology to death. Their crimes were so flagrant and sickening that now nobody feels comfortable discussing race at all! You can draw comparisons to other parts of society. Pedophilia is a horrible crime and nobody wants to be associated with it, so you’ve got the other side advancing itself unopposed into truly ridiculous territory (ie, Perez Hilton being accused of hosting child porn because he had a nude picture of Miley Cyrus on his site, who was 17 and a half years old at the time).

Seriously, if black people are different to white people, then that’s that. End game. If you think they’re not, then that has to come from a place of actual data. The laws of the universe do not bow to civil rights movements.

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I was reading a Tumblr feed called Gays against Gaga, except in this case I wasn’t really reading it, because reading implies understanding. Like you might say “I was talking on my mobile phone” when in fact you were only making elephant seal noises.

This…amazing post caught my eye.

“As someone who isn’t a fan of the singer (sorry, I’d honestly rather dance to Ke$ha) and loathes the many times the pop star is revered as a gay icon (yeah, propagating reductive views of queer identity that only serve to reinforce heteronormativity does not a gay icon make), I’ve spent a lot of the time the past few years wrestling with the quandary that is Gaga, and I think it comes down to an interesting revelation about popular art and cultural discourse. The only thing Lady Gaga has going for her is her meta, ironic, performance-art aspect. (Yup, that really is the only thing. You can love her music and enjoy dancing to it, but even the most ardent fan has to acknowledge that her songs are reductive. Yet if they are still danceable, that doesn’t matter, because they’re ironically danceable. You can run that sort of test with any of her other appeals [e.g., her ultimately heteronormative lyrics/videos are okay because they’re camp]. It all comes back to the meta/irony/performance aspect.) However, you can’t break your meta/ironic/performance act into the mainstream without some serious dough. And whether that dough comes from some sort of gay-owned mega-company or Target, the dough must come. And therein lies the interesting revelation: Meta/irony/performance art cannot survive in the corporate world. It’s the one thing I’ve learned from all of this. I always hoped that there could be some sort of meta/ironic/performic identity achieve some high level of commercial success. And no matter how much I wanted to cut off my ears whenever her music came on at a club, I respected her persona and what she was ultimately trying to achieve. But it just can’t be done. Gaga’s failure is now proof of that. You can’t be meta in the machine; you just become a tool selling some prepackaged idea of counterculture. And I’m not saying this as some sort of specific rant against Lady Gaga, but rather it’s a general rant about anyone trying to achieve that same goal. This makes me sad. *END RAMBLE*

Wow, that’s so incredible. You know what I believe? That the author set out to write a serious piece about Lady Gaga, but then decided it would be funnier to just to write straight out stream-of-consciousness blurb off the top off his head, while using lots of buzzwords from his gender studies class, and then Gays Against Gaga re-ran it, not realising it was a joke. Didn’t Fox News do that once, reference an Onion article as part of their news commentary?

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It’s easy to be the biggest goldfish. All you have to do is find a really small pond.

The problem happens is when you try to step outside that pond and conquer worlds beyond. Think of the stereotypical small-town beauty queen who tries to make it big in Hollywood, gets clotheslined by fifty thousand other small-town beauty queens, and develops a cocaine hobby. And then, I don’t know, maybe runs for public office. History is littered with people who think they’re king of the world when in reality, they were only ever capable of being king of a small part of it.

The weird, wacky world of social media offers many examples. It’s a safe and harmless way to build a following, so you get misguided souls who attain flavour-of-the-month success and think they have way more talent than they do. Like Tila Tequila. She attracted up an insane number of Myspace friends, tried to turn herself into a mainstream star, and from there it’s been a hideous flaming downward spiral from a music icon…to a reality TV icon…to a tabloid icon…to a the-next-step-down-from-tabloid-icon icon, and I don’t know what the next step will be but it sure as hell won’t see her as a female empowerment icon.

Less dramatic examples can be found in Smosh and TheHill88. Smosh were two adorable kids lip-synching the Pokemon theme song in their bedroom. Since exploding in popularity, they’ve now tried to reinvent themselves as a comedy sketch group, and the results are shitty and unwatchable. Caitlin Hill was a pretty and vivacious teenage girl who had a video go viral, so she went to America to try and become an actress. That didn’t work out, and she’s since deleted her viral video. I don’t know why, it’s like George Lucas throwitng his original Star Wars movies down the memory hole.

I think it’s important than you understand where your ceiling is, and be realistic about where your limitations are. In my case, I have to restrict myself from kicking too much ass and being too awesome, lest people think I am a demigod rather than merely the greatest person on earth.

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This is unrelated, but you know the story of Alexander cutting the Gordian knot? History’s most famous example of solving a problem with lateral thinking? It occurred to me that the Phrygians missed a slam dunk. “A true king must be able to create as well as destroy. Retie the knot.”

Anyway, I got in trouble with the police last week for driving in a breakdown lane. An officer pulled me over, and wrote me a ticket. I enacted the usual defensive maneuvers one performs when faced with a police officer (“yes, sir, I understand, sir, thank you, sir, I was wrong, sir, I’m a horrible criminal, sir, you’ve turned my life around, sir, I’ll never do it again, sir, your divine presence has cured my tumor, sir”) and he fined me $201. Now, that’s not so bad. I was worried I’d have my license suspended.

I went online yesterday to pay the fine…and it tells me I owe $251. Damn it guys, what gives?! I have it clearly written here on my notice that I owe $201. I know donuts are expensive these days, but this is just lame.

I tried to phone them but the state debt recovery office was closed. I’m going to call them again today, and I took advantage of the time to write some one-liners. Samples include “I have your exorbitant fine right here” and “it’s funny that you’re doing this because your daughter also raised the price by $50 when she sold me her virginity.”

Watch this video:

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The audiophile ethos is that old is better than new, and that homemade is better than mass produced. Now, these things might be true in some cases, but there’s no thought process there. That’s a big problem. There can be no room for the arbitrary in your buying decisions.

There’s a brand that’s really common in Australia called Behringer. They manufacture clones of other brand’s musical equipment, and since they don’t need a R&D department they have some REALLY competitive pricing. Compare the price of a OD100 to a Ibanez TS7, or a VD1 Vintage Distortion to a Big Muff Pi. They give their gear away.

Now, I’m not speaking towards their professional ethics or anything like that, but what we’ve seen lately is a snobby, anti-Behringer movement spawned on the internet which regards their equipment as dried goat turds with circuitry etched into them. Guys, NO. They have some crappy equipment, but also some equipment that sounds identical to what they’re cloning. Don’t talk smack about Behringer just because their pedals are made of plastic.

An even worse group of people are the tube amp purists. I can’t stand tubes. They break, they’re temperamental, and transistor-based equipment gives you far more options now and digital equipment more options still. There’s a guitar rackmount emulation system now called the Axe-FX that sounds crazy. But the general sentiment among tube fans is “never use a computer to do a real amp’s work.”

I will never know where this attitude comes from or how we as a species can get rid of it.

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While I was at the shop, I saw a large amount of weird and counterproductive labeling.

Mexican tortilla bread, with the byline “fresh tasting”. Thanks, guys. For a second I thought the bread was actually fresh. Instead, it’s only fresh tasting. We really dodged a bullet there.

“Budget-rate bacon.” Gee, could they have a less appetizing name? How about “Grade-X Reconstituted Meat Product, Fresh From the Radiation-Scarred Tundra of Siberia.” I can see their whole ad campaign. A woman turns to the camera, smiles, and says “Did you know that 94% of our focus group were unable to tell the difference between imitation pig snouts and the real thing?”

Breakfast cereal with “20% of your daily fibre requirement” on the box. Above the words, you could squint and see a tiny, TINY asterisk. It was so small you’d swear a bug had not crapped on the box. I didn’t look for the text the asterisk was referring to, but I assume it was “*just as long as you’re on a zero-fibre diet.”

Double D candy is still in business. I respect those guys. They don’t tiptoe around the truth, or try to conceal the obvious. “Yeah, our candy turns you into a fatass. Bitch, please.”

In the “corporate executives trying to be hip” category, there was a cyber cafe with various “wacky” slogans printed on the computers. One of them was “Want to p0wn some n00bs? Ask at the counter.” Yeah, that was how they spelled it. I don’t know what p0wning is. I think it has to do with misplacing your soap in the prison shower.

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I was at the gym and I thought “this is the day I bench press 210 pounds.” It was hard to explain but I felt psychologically ready. Like there was a dude inside me already benching that amount and he was trying to come out. Feels gay typing that. Anyway…

I had 150lb on the bar and I did 10 reps. Then I added a pair of 10′s to the bar and did 7 or 8 reps of 170lb. Then I added two more and got about three reps of 190lb. I thought “okay, I’m ready! Two wheel club, here I come!”

I loaded up the 10lb bar with a pair of 50′s on each side, lifted it out of the rack, brought it down to my chest, and I couldn’t get it back up again. I was stuck. My chest and lats had turned to jelly and I couldn’t lift the 210 bar off my sternum. I called out “hey, can someone get this off me?” I heard “coming!” and the sound of approaching footsteps.

My knight in shining armour proved to be a 70-year-old gent with a mother-in-law complex. I was expecting him to lift the bar off my chest (it doesn’t take much, he could have saved me using by pressing two fingers against the bottom of the bar) but he didn’t help me. He just stood there, talking about all the things I had done wrong and how I shouldn’t lift more than I can handle, etc. This must have gone on for 20 seconds. I was in serious pain, and yelled “GET THIS BAR OFF MY CHEST!” but that stupid asshole just stood there, giving me a lecture on gym safety.

Eventually, I saved myself. I rolled my trunk from left to right, sending the weights flying off the bar (tip: never use safety collars when bench pressing). He was like “woah! Woah! Are you okay?!” I guess he thought I had done it unintentionally. I stood up, and was very, very sarcastic to him. If that it had been 420 instead of 210, I’d probably be in hospital now thanks to that retard.

But still, I guess the adrenaline had positive effects because I went on to do a very good chest workout. That was four days ago and it’s still very painful to extend my arms to my sides. The dude benching 210 inside me is now under house arrest for perjury.

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Just as Lemmings and iPhone physics simulators evolved into Transformice, Bebo scribble walls have evolved into…THIS.

http://www.superfreedraw.com

It’s just a huge blank wall. You can draw anything you want on it. No registration is required.

It’s a huge blank wall.

No registration is required.

You can draw anything you want.

No registration.

Draw anything.

Huge blank wall.

Let’s just say that crudely-drawn penises are to this website what water was to Kevin Costner’s Waterworld. But it’s amazingly fun. Travel to X 9.6 Y -20.0 and you’ll see a city that was partially designed by me personally. Feel free to have a play around. But if you draw something pretty take a screenshot fast, because it will be covered in dicks in under two minutes.

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I won’t get on a high horse here. Rest assured I have things on my computer that I have streamed without performing the “paying money for the goods and services rendered” ablution expected by society. I’m not above the problem. I’m not below it either. It’s impossible to be above or below a metaphysical idea and I’m not sure what we mean when we say that, but the point is, yes, I have committed the digital five-finger discount.

But for God’s sake, I don’t build facades to try and make piracy look like a good thing! People are really good at defending their vices, and just as the world is full of stoners who are convinced that pot cures cancer, people on the internet will talk your ear off about how online piracy isn’t theft, how they only do it because of [x], or any other fairly unconvincing smoke screen. Let me posit that people download because they want free things, not because of any higher ethical justification. If you hear some dude say “I download mp3s to fight the music business! Down with the man!” get ready, because he is likely to try selling you Amway within the next 5-10 minutes.

The following is a thought experiment. I have no intention of doing it myself. But I think piracy would end itself if all would-be pirates were forced to spend an afternoon with one of the musicians they’re about to rip off, or one of the game developers whose work they’re about to stream. Have a barbeque with them, or watch their kid’s soccer game. Listen to their views on whether kids downloading movies in their bedrooms represents the liberation of technology. Come to the realisation that if everyone acted like them, these guys would never receive another paycheque.

With that said, there are exceptions to every rule and I fully support people who pirate Sevendust. That band sucks.

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Hamburgers make awesome meals. I’m talking about homemade ones, with lettuce, tomato, onions, cheese, etc. They’re sandwiches on steroids. If you need to go for a long time without food, hamburgers are the best thing to eat, since they fill you up for so long. As they say in the scientific community, “hamburgers are a fresh, funky, fly, dope source of calories, brozilla.”

I’ve started a new website.

When I was young I played a game called Claw, and this website is a collection of all my memories of playing it. I’ve hit up all my old friends and asked them to chip in their own stories, and a few have already responded. Now that I’ve put this out on the internet, I expect a lot of the comments will revolve around the general theme of how useful PR3M1UM V1AGRA and D1SC0UNT C1AL1S were in beating that final boss, but we’ll see. There’s pictures of me, too.

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I recently had the misfortune to find an “anti-Twilight” site. Needless to say, it’s saturated with hipster 14-year-old girls from 4chan who are convinced they are the saviors of literature, but that’s not the issue. They have a hate mail section, and I was struck by the realisation that nobody knows how to pull off funny hate mail responses anymore.

http://theantitwilightmovement.webs.com/mailbag.htm

That shit is WEAK. No funny put-downs. No witty zingers. It’s just various rewordings of “I DISAGREE WITH YOUR OPINION!!!” and over the course of ten hopeless pages. There was one hate mailer who said “leave Meyer alone!” and they replied with a picture of Chris Crocker, but that was as funny as it got.

I’m a slow-witted person myself. Once, a bully at school called me dumb, and my response was “y…your mom!” mumbled alone in my bedroom, seventeen years later. But not even I suck this much. These girls are so bad, that if they had to perform stand-up they would…NOT BE VERY GOOD AT IT.

I will steal some of their hate mail and write my own response to it, to show you fellas how it should be done.

“you need therapy. you must have alot of problems. pretty much everybody likes that movie. you doin this, because you think it makes you kool? pretty much makes ya’ll low as hell. get over yourselvs ive never read any of the books, or watched the movie. but my bestfriend is in love with them. and YOU ruined her mood! so now you geta hear from me =)”

SHUT UP. I HATE YOU. YOU SUCK.  YOU’RE GAY. YOU’RE GAYER THAN THE GAYEST GAY WHO EVER GAYED IN GAYSBURG USGAY. GAAAY. GAAAAAAAAAAAAAY.

“Um Yeah, You ..must.. not of read the fucking books, your ….STUPID…. for making an ‘anti-twilight’ site. ….Twilight is amazing…. ..DONT.. fuckin diss Stephanie’s writing,cos like,really. Shes an amazing writer,and i love her books, Specially the Twilight saga, They ..ARE.. the best books,And ..YOU..,you stupid fuck tard, are gay,and stupid,and a loser,and all those fucking things you think Twilight are,Get a life. Go Die.”

You use a lot of full stops. Perhaps, then, you’ll enjoy the “full stop” I will administer to your life via a golf-club to the face. And then I’ll force you to eat a cancer pill. And then you’ll have to fly to the hospital on a plane surrounded by psychologically devastated children and you’ll be wearing a crotch-mounted child-molestor belt that puts 16 billion volts through your body every time one of them cries. And then you’ll get to the hospital and they’ll put you in a bed and the doctor will be all like “don’t worry, we can operate on the cancer” and it will all be really hopeful and upbeat but then he’ll be be all like “nah, just kidding. You have five minutes to live” and then you’ll cry I hate you forever and ever and ever and ever and ever and ever.

“ok, u ppl the “anti twilight movement” whatever that is, NEED TO GET A LIFE! your just jealous because twilight IS the best book ever written and IS the best movie ever! GET THE FUCK OVER IT!!!!!”

I would “get over it” but I can’t because I’m so fat. Wait, no, because YOU’RE so fat. Oh shit, that doesn’t work…

…Just trust me, you’re fat, OK?

“you suckkk! twilight rocksss! ”

It’s funny that you should say this, because your mother once expressed similar (although not identical) views to me when we were playing scrabble. This game of scrabble led to small talk and sharing of anecdotes over a glass of wine, and although I sensed your mother was attracted to me, I respected her as a person and didn’t push things any further. We said goodbye and I left her house, and remain on good terms to her to this day. [Note the subtlety. You don't charge out with all guns blazing each time. Start slow, and chip away at their confidence.]

It can be tough writing funny responses to hate mail, but work at it! Practice hard and study your craft, and one day there will be 235239872 boring chucklefucks expressing their whiny opinions on the ‘net instead of 235239871 like there were before.

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I am a circumcised man. It’s not something I think about at all. I don’t feel violated, or mutilated, or “incomplete,” and I actually think that to describe the issue in those terms is sensationalistic.

It’s hard to find neutral, uncoloured information about circumcision, to say the least. Everyone has an opinion. Mine is that it’s a useless flap of skin over the penis, hundreds of millions of men have had theirs removed without issues, and that if it’s a source of psychological trauma for you, you should stop being so shallow.

Truth be told, I would register a “neutral” on the issue, except that the anti-circumcision types are so strident and unreasonable that it’s impossible for me to even sit on the fence. They freely lump male and female circumcision in the same category and place equal judgement on them both (because they’re totally the same thing), try and turn it into a civil rights shriekfest about how men are oppressed and downtrodden by women or Jews or whatever, and introduce utterly bizarre red herrings into the discussions (like saying men were supposed to have foreskins and we’re violating what nature intended blah blah blah…do any of these people shave in the morning?!)

Most annoying of all, they use drama and imagery as a debating crutch. Discuss the issue with the hardcore elite and they’ll throw buzzwords at you like “mutilation” and “child torture” in lieu of  arguments. They’re as nice to be around as those hardcore anti-abortion guys who have seemingly replaced “abortion” with “baby murder” with Mad-libs. ”Oh, so you support MURDERING BABIES?! It’s nice to know that gun owners get prosecuted while BABY MURDERERS get off scot free! So, have you MURDERED ANY BABIES today, BABY MURDERER?!”

That’s why I refuse to associate with anti-circumcision activists. If they had a leg to stand on, they wouldn’t need to play rhetorical games.

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I’m a member at a forum, and they had a writing contest. I wrote this short story and it won first place. Click this link to read it.

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So Maddox has finally unveiled the first part of his new video series. It’s five minutes long and is basically him reading one of his articles while a video plays. One obvious fact continues to remain obvious: there’s no web comedian who over-promises and under-delivers like Maddox.

In between his habit of taking eight months to write a quickie rant about swine flu, and his announcements of mysterious “projects” in an effort to keep people visiting, he just doesn’t seem to give that much of a crap any more. He used to be funny. Hell, maybe he still is funny. I don’t know, and that’s the problem. I can’t judge his humor because he basically doesn’t write comedy for the internet any more.

Let’s think about better days, shall we?

His style seems dated now, but remember he comes from the age before 4chan and Encyclopedia Dramatica, where SomethingAwful and eBaum’s World were kings and jokes about pirates and ninjas were the cutting edge. I can’t explain why I find him so hilarious. Just the image of this ugly, hand-coded site, filled with hysteric rants about tiny, unimportant things, illustrated with images made in MS Paint…that’s the Maddox experience.

He was at his best from 2003-2005. His classic “How to Kill Yourself Like a Man” piece is a good example.

“…dig in, you chunky son of a bitch! Keep eating until you can’t possibly eat anymore, then eat some more. Your gut will rupture and you will shit yourself. The cool thing about this method is that it’s not only disgusting to clean up, but you’ll probably be so bloated from the beans (choose Van Camp’s by the way, not Bush’s baked beans unless you like the taste of beans pickled in ball sweat) that you probably won’t fit in the casket without some serious reconstructive surgery. Guess who’s footing the bill for that one? That’s right: friends and family. Just kidding. You have no friends.”

Yeah, it was simple, but it worked! He had his own voice, and he never compromised it. He wasn’t like Cracked, which seemingly has a quota of pop culture references and internet memes to meet in each article. He never surrendered even the smallest inch of ground in order to gain traffic.

But now he’s just pathetic. Horrible attempts at being “edgy,” random name-dropping of 4chan and /b/, and art school snobbishness…that’s what he takes eight months to write now.

For the “IF YOU HATE HIM WHY DO YOU KEEP VISITING CROWD”, I turn myself in. No matter how bad he gets I will still keep visiting. That’s how deep his early articles have their hooks in me. He can turn out bi-millenial articles about how gay I am and I’ll probably keep showing up to read them. Damn him.

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Justice League of Assmerica
Babette and the Shitwhistles
AFROdisiac
70s Disco Revival in My Pants
Guitarded
Freddy Mercury’s Dick
It’sNotOurFaultIt’sTheSoundGuy
02-4382-3991-GROUPIES-DIAL-THIS-THX
Linkin Park
Hunkahotlove McAnalWedgie
Man Love Rules OK
Dongtacular Crotchsicle
The Endorsed by Fender Guitars(c) and Zildjian cymbals(tm)s
The Our-Ex-Bassist-Is-A-Dick-and-The-Drummer’s-Mom-Ruins-All-Of-Our-Practices-and-the-Promoter-for-this-Gig-is-Ripping-Us-Offs
Nickelback
Pony Slaystation
Crotchflex O’Hungilingus
El Senor Nipplehammer
Assburger and the Man-Butt Bangers
Band’); DROP TABLE Bandname;–
Rage against the System of a Linkinknot Bizkit 182
AIDS Chariot
Cockslam Rectumpunch
Band Play Musician Instrument
Harry Pooter
Negro Anus Engineer
We’re Thinking of Changing Our Name
Drew P Wiener
BandIsWorthy and the GiveMoneyYouWills
Coldplay

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Is…is this medically possible? Could you do it, if you had a really strong pool pump? Not that I’m trying to re-enact the story or anything. I was…curious.

Actually, I feel a sudden urge to experience something memorable. Something that will erase “Guts” by Chuck Palahniuk from my mind. Does Youtube hold the key?

SUCCESS!

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You have to look at the bodybuilding scene in the 50s, 60s, and 70s to realise how much we’ve lost. Look at Arnie…

See that? Perfection. No saggy growth hormone gut. No stretch marks. No “mapping out China, one village at a time” veins all over his body. Just 100% quality buffness. He also knew that some muscles grow quicker than others, and was able to keep it all in proportion (as opposed to the huge traps, huge thighs, huge lats, etc we see today). Some say his waist was too small, but I think it adds a dramatic effect to his physique (plus it allowed him to compete above his weight, he was about 240 but looked as big as some 260-280 guys.)

Now look at a relatively uncontroversial choice for the world’s top bodybuilder today, Ronnie Coleman…

…who looks like randomly-sized rocks packed into a burlap sack. Good God, how do these people contrive to look so damn hideous? They’re not powerlifters. Everyone expects a powerlifter to have ugly-looking muscles. The goal of bodybuilding is to look good. I don’t understand it. He’s a walking “say no to drugs” PSA.

I can’t even blame the roids. That’s only a symptom of the problem (Arnold took small amounts of gear in his early years, although only a small percentage of what a pro bodybuilder would use today). The main issue is that bodybuilding has become a statistic driven sport.

People don’t want muscles that look good. They want arms that measure TWENTY THREE INCHES AROUND! Mass is the alter these people worship at. More mass, dammit, and get those whiners below deck. If that mass causes you to go out of proportion (look at Arnold’s square roofbeam shoulders, and then look at how Ronnie’s traps make him look like he’s wearing a life preserver vest), or, hell, causes health problems for you later in life, that’s tough. They’re not going to put you in the record books for having “nice-looking pecs.” They’re only going to put down the raw numbers.

That’s a shame, guys. We’re making bodybuilders do dangerous things with their health, and at the same time losing the original spirit of the sport.

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Schwarzenegger once said something to the effect of “I am a Republican because I believe you can manage your money better than the government can.”

I sort of get the idea, but the government undoubtedly can manage money better than the individual, because that’s what it’s designed to do. An individual only cares about his own welfare (and maybe the welfare of his neighborhood), while the government cares about everyone, no matter where they are or who they are. Even a sheep farmer in Campbelltown has a vote. Individuals also have a short-term outlook on finances, usually the next couple of years, while the government recognises that, due to its power, the changes it makes will have effects down through the decades and that it’s disastrous to have a “I’ll just do anything to out of this latest debt” attitude.

But does the government have any right to your money? Of course not. Just because they could manage your money better than you doesn’t entitle them to take it away from you. Maybe I think I could manage my neighbour’s money better than him. That doesn’t entitle me to his money. Even if he’s horribly mismanaging it, his money belongs to him. Maybe I’m a sports freak and I think I could make much better use of my neighbour’s $6000 titanium bike which he rides for 5 minutes a week. That doesn’t matter. The bike is his. What he does with it is his own business. Who could make better use of it is irrelevant.

So maybe what Schwarzenegger should have said is “I am a Republican because I believe you have more right to your money than the government does.”

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We all love bumper stickers. They are shiny and pretty. The sticky side can be used to suffocate children and infants you hate. Buy in bulk and you get a FREE box that is useful for storing things in. Also, sometimes they have words written on them, and sometimes these words are funny.

Seriously, they’re like 21st century literature. Our ancestors got Homer, Shakespeare, and Tolstoy. We get little plastic stickers saying “I support the troops who support women’s reproductive rights groups who support the priest who molested your honour roll student LITTLE DARWIN FISH! ^_^”

I recently saw the below bumper sticker. Fairly harmless. Just an anthropomorphic peace sign making the V with his fingers.

But take it down to 30% size, and it becomes a million times better on every possible level.

Now it looks like it’s smoking a joint.

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I used to be a fan of the music gear megasite Harmony Central. But they’ve just pulled a Youtube and ruined everything with a needless, obnoxious site update.

Technical issues aside (good luck accessing any of your old bookmarks), the new review layout is simply horrible. They’ve added a 5-star system (with half-stars possible), which isn’t anywhere near as useful as their old decimal point system of ratings. And I can’t damned see how many people have written reviews. Does that Rivera Knucklehead have 5 stars over 50 people, or over 2? I don’t know. Well, I could scroll down and count the reviews by hand, but if it comes to that I’d rather use the Wayback Machine to restore myself to a time when the site wasn’t an unrecoverable load of gay.

Does anyone agree with me? Well, only the entire planet Earth.

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Firstly, I want you to watch Redlettermedia’s review of Star Wars: Attack of the Clones. Let it be your break from Chatroulette and the the Twitter community’s Around-the-Clock Justin Bieber Girlfriend Watch.

It’s exactly the same as the first one. Just a systemic 70 minute review, destroying the movie scene by scene. I love this guy because he always finds new things to talk about. It’s not 70 minutes of “BOOO!!! THE ACTING IS LAME AND I HATE JAR JAR!!!” The stuff about lightsabers (I think it was in part eight) was quite thought provoking.

This video caused a minor upset at Youtube when some jackoff flagged it for copyrighted content, and Youtube took it down for a few days. Screwed up his Digg links and everything. By the way, here’s a sample comment from the video:

“U people are? the ignorant ones the original trilogy is poorly written bullshit ther as intereesting as a textbook u complain how bad the prequels r well I’d like to see u make a film trilogy. And see how it cums out I bet u paid money to see these movies so who’s the real fool Lucas or u who he’s made money off morons”

People on Youtube aren’t very smart. I know that’s a controversial stance to take, but it’s my opinion and goddamn if I won’t stand by it.

—-

But mainly I wanted to resume discussion about my dad’s medical condition (see two posts down). He’s come out of hospital and he didn’t die. Whether the entire exercise was worth it remains to be seen.

He was treated shittily as per usual. He has a huge pressure sore above his right hip (from lying on a bump in his hospital bed, I guess), and his foot is looking awful. It actually turned bluish green. Now he has a huge spreading sore on his right foot. It’s covered over with skin, but if you brush it the skin will peel back easily. Things are rotten in the state of Denmark.

Anyhow, they got out a kidney stone, so I guess that’s one thing they did right. In the end he got tired of being shuttled from ward to ward by overworked and ill-equipped staff, and discharged himself. He looks very thin and tired. He weighs maybe five kilos less.

He still isn’t takings steps to improve his lifestyle. He eats, but only red meat and carbs. If you asked when he last ate a vegetable I couldn’t fucking tell you. Still, maybe things will turn out all right.

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Time flogs our asses like Mistress Helga. That multiplatinum pop artist is revealed as a shallow and disposable whore. That public health scare is revealed to be so much hot air. That new genre of movie is revealed to be just a flavor-of-the-month trend. Want to know the truth of something? Let it sit for a few years.

What I like doing is looking at pop culture figures that have fallen off the radar, and discovering what they’re doing now. Meaning, I type their names into Google.

Prussian Blue

I was just thinking, “hey, what happened to that white-power pop group? Are they still around?”

Everyone had a hair up their ass about Prussian Blue a few years back, but lately they’ve just dropped off the grid. If you don’t remember them, they were the creation (in numerous senses) of their mother, April Gaede, who has attracted controversy even among her fellow Nazis, in order to promote good ol’ tried and true values such as independence, patriotism, and curb-stomping black people.

Anyhow, Prussian Blue learned to play instruments (“NO! NO! NOT THE TUBA, YOU STUPID GIRL! THAT’S A JEW INSTRUMENT!”), crapped out a couple of albums, attracted more media attention than most Third World disasters, and now they’re gone…although maybe there’s an explanation for that.

Are they really trying to break away from their mother’s views? If so, that’s very brave of them. They’re only 17 years old, and since they still live under their mother’s thumb (I guess), they probably can’t openly defy her. I want to see what becomes of them after they move out of home.

By the way, it will be fun when they apply for a job, considering that searching for their names brings up page after page of Neo-Nazi hate sites.

Corey Worthington

This was the 16 year old kid who posted his home address on Myspace and had his party gatecrashed by 500 people (roughly 600 more than he deserves.)

Maybe I have a personal stake in this, since one of my friends met Corey in person and he called her a bitch. Anyhow, the world has returned to its regularly scheduled activities, including not giving a crap about Corey Worthington, and he decided to do something vaguely within the ballpark of acceptible…get a jorb!

Worthington’s manager Max Markson said the controversial teen had not worked since his party planning disaster, other than various media appearances, including being an intruder on Big Brother.

But he said his client was ready to get his hands dirty and was looking for a job as a bricklayer, a carpenter, or a concreter, “anything outdoors”, in the Narre Warren, Dandenong, or Frankston area.

“He is happy to work five days a week, he is happy to work seven days a week, he wants to work,” Markson said.

“His 15 minutes of fame is well and truly gone. He has earned some money from that, now he has to join society and get a job.”

A manager? Freaking shit, this kid needs a MANAGER? I want to punch this entire stupid planet into the sun.

Still, it’s great that he’s doing something useful with his time, and is finally integrating into…

…NO, WAIT, SCRATCH THAT, HE’S GOING TO AMERICA TO PARTY ENDLESSLY, SMOKE SUITCASES FULL OF CRACK, AND ALSO MAKE A MOVIE.

Crap.

Jim Gillette

I know, you’ve never heard of Jim Gillette. Let’s see if I can fix that.

He was a famous cock rock singer from the 80s. Over the years, he has gone from this…

…to this…

My thought pattern followed “so where’s Jim? Is he standing behind the rhinocerous…oh, he IS the rhinocerous!” Seriously, that’s some major jacking up. Guy must have an IV of anabolic steroids stuck in his arm.

There’s a ton of folklore surrounding Gillette. He claims to have the highest voice in metal (over an octave higher than Rob Halford), and can shatter glass with his voice (he turned down an appearance on Good Morning America where he was meant to demonstrate this). He said he was starving once. I mean, literally starving. He claims to have gone 14 days without food. At one point, he was touring with his band and three men jumped him, and he beat their asses. Says he still has a scar where his kneecap smashed in some poor fucker’s teeth.

So what’s he up to now? He’s raising children…and turning them into killing machines. Here’s a video of Rocco Gillette in action:

His sons and Prussian Blue should hook up. This could be the start of a true master race.

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I’m obsessed with health now. Not to the extent where I count calories and measure out doses of protein powder, but I think I will be in place some day. I do cardio and stretches and take supplements and drink carrot juice. I’ve gotten into the weights and have added about 5kg of muscle to my body. I talk about this not because I like bragging, or because I have some homoerotic fixation with the male physique, but because I don’t want to end up like my father.

My father, in addition to having a case of Pixelized Face Disorder which puzzles the entire medical profession, is in horrific shape physically. I won’t this in any detail. Partly out of respect for him, and partly because I’d be typing all day. The short version: bad kidneys, a bad gallbladder, paraplegia from a motorway accident two decades ago, and years of accumulated incompetence from various stupid doctors.

He’s made me realise that, no matter how shitty a hand you’ve been dealt by God, your health is in your hands. Many of my dad’s problems are caused by his poor eating habits and his refusal to exercise. Let me make a point here. People in wheelchairs can exercise. To say otherwise is to tell the greatest lie ever told. But he’s stubborn, and sometimes refuses to see what’s right in front of his face. And now we’re in the final stages of it all. We’ll either fix his body or lose him.

I drove him to RNS Hospital in St Leonard’s last week. What a fucking stupid place. No parking to be had for love or money. We ended up parking illegally, and getting a $84 fine (hey, I wonder if we can claim that on his public health insurance!) before taking him in for some pre-admission tests that went smoothly as silk. And now he’s in hospital. And things are going badly.

He was only supposed to be in there for a few days. They wanted to remove some kidney stones and take out a stent that had been left in his body by some criminally retarded mouth-breather during a past surgery. But he hasn’t taken well to the medication they have him on. His blood pressure has cratered, and he can barely breathe. They’ve taken him to intensive care.

I hope, hope, hope he’s okay, and that he can come home and be like the man he was when me and my sister were growing up. My dad is a powerhouse. He’s very skilled with electronics. He’s flown planes and sailed boats and sold real estate and rebuilt cars. He used to be a high-ranking paymaster for Coles. In the last few years he’s been making Youtube videos and Twitter feeds. He might have been one of the first five Australians to own a personal computer. And now he’s going into a place where none of that matters.

Complacency is the gun pressed against the skull of every man and woman on earth. Thinking bad things won’t happen to us, thinking that our loved ones will be there forever. They won’t, you know. Sure, each of us will claim to understand this. But do we really?

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I have a new computer, with the latest new version of Windows pre-installed. I heard about Windows 7 a few months ago, but never really looked into it. I’m happy when I get one version of Windows working properly. I’m not in a hurry to learn a new one.

Windows 7 is okay. It still has that “HI! I’M A HUGE ANNOYING DICKFACE! AND I’M GOING TO INTERRUPT YOU EVERY TIME YOU SO MUCH AS TRY TO EXIST IN THE SAME ROOM AS A COMPUTER!” message box when I try to move files, but that’s no big deal. What I do hate is how they’ve streamlined and oversimplified everything. I want power and options, not a system that has been brutally castrated for the sake of a visual layout that won’t confuse grandmothers.

See, Acer is big on energy conservation these days. And their energy conservation policy consists of causing my computer to go into a coma every time I leave it alone for a few minutes. I spent the last 20 minutes looking everywhere for my power settings. On XP, I just right-clicked the screen, clicked “Properties”, and it’s right there. That doesn’t happen here. Nothing. I went into the “Control Panel”, was greeted by some ambiguous but friendly-looking icons, clicked around a bit, but found nothing on how to change my power settings.

Eventually, I realised that I have to click “View by” in the Control Panel and select Icons instead of Categories. Suddenly all sort of hidden crap appears, including my power settings. I duly changed my hibernate wait time from 10 minutes to 4 hours. TAKE THAT, RAINFORESTS!

It’s a similar story with a lot of my other stuff. Confusing, “streamlined” layouts that branch off down illogical and unintuitive paths, having to click past five or six GUI layers just to edit something, things that are completely different from XP (which was a good operating system at the end of the day) for no apparent reason but to be different.

Yes, I know this is a “Windows sux!” post. I know I’m beating a horse that is so dead that it’s almost alive again. But can someone find Bill Gates for me, tie him down, urinate in his ear, and explain to him in clear King George’s English that there’s a limit to how much you can simplify something before it becomes complex again?

I opened a command prompt and tried to abort gay.exe, in the hopes that this would fix my problems. Alas, no such program as gay.exe exists. Maybe Windows caters to lesbian markets now.

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I hope some of you remember Edarem, aka Edward Muscari…

…the convicted child molestor who maintains a fairly horrifying but kind of cool Youtube channel.

The skinny, if I’m reading his recent videos correctly, is that he has been arrested and jailed for another five years. Why? He violated a South Carolinian law banning registered sex offenders from having computers. Fucked up, right? His Youtube channel brought him internet fame, and that same channel landed him back in the cooler. As a longtime fan of his videos, I feel almost…personally responsible.

I don’t think he deserves this. He committed a crime in the past, an unthinkably horrible crime. But he’s served his sentence. He’s square with the house again. He had a damn Youtube channel, for God’s sake! It’s not like he was trying to join the priesthood or the boy scouts. Besides, his videos brought the internet great joy. If I ran the world, I’d consider his Youtube channel a final act of moral restoration. Well, maybe not that video where he took off his shirt…

Some of you are thinking “he molested a child! How dare you suggest he be treated with mercy! I hope he burns in hell!” This is an understandable reaction. A stupid, sad, bloodyminded and pathetic reaction, but an understandable one nevertheless. People love feeling superior to others. It’s the greatest high in the world. Give them a horrible person and they’ll wank all day long about how much better they are than him. But more to the point, justice must always allow for mercy. Always, always, always. It’s kind of the whole point. Punishment exists to reform people, so what’s the point of punishing people if we don’t allow them to be reformed? It’s pure vindictiveness, that’s what I think.

“It’s easy for you to talk! You’ve never been molested!” Yes, and that’s exactly why I can have an opinion on the subject. I don’t have an emotional stake in the issue. I can look at it like it is, a terrible crime, but not something that turns a man into a walking piece of meat undeserving of rights. I like to think that even sexual predators can redeem themselves, and stand alongside their fellow men and women without shame once more.

Edward is raising legal funds to fight the sentence, and he wants each of his fans to donate a dollar through Paypal. I think that’s a bit unrealistic. Maybe $5-$10 per fan?

Fight on, Edward. Long may you lip-synch Roy Orbison songs in front of a webcam, gyrating and twitching your eyebrows in a way that leaves all your viewers shuddering and taking long, hot showers. Fight on.

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Having a family is different to having friends. You choose your friends. You can’t choose your family. And since at least someone in your family will have traits that you would avoid in a friend, your family, strangely enough, is your first point of contact with the unfamiliar.

It’s been a few years now since the second of my two grandmothers passed away. She was an amazing woman. If you pitched a character like her to a filmmaker he’d reject her as being too cliche’d. She baked things for me, and knitted clothes, and had tea parties with my sister. In the earliest years of my memory she was able to mow the lawn and play soccer with me in the back yard, although of course she was too old for that soon.

That was when I was a little kid. When I became a teenager I spent hardly any time with her. Is that my fault? What does a teenage boy do with his grandmother? Nevermind. I was 17 when she passed away from an aneurysm, and although I wasn’t there at the moment, I saw her in her final hours. She was pale, but dignified and collected. She knew how to die, and I’m certain she’s gone to somewhere better.

My other grandmother I don’t really remember. She died when I was very young.

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I read somewhere that Bic pens used to be called Bich, but the h was removed because, well, you know how it is.

I also saw an Asian restaurant in Port Macquarie called (I’m doubtful here) Phuc-Thanh Hot Bread. Underneath was a note saying “pronounced ‘fook’”. That was pretty funny.

There’s a confectionery here called Double-Ds. Nice idea. Let your brand name double as a dietary warning.

Yesterday I saw a shop called Cookie Man, but I misread it as Cookie Mon. I thought I was in Jamaica.

Also, once I saw…

I’m in hell, you know. This is hell. I can’t get out. What’s wrong with me.

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People are never honest online. When you see 16 year old girls filling out Livejournal and Facebooks quizzes full of of personal info, there’s always a nagging sense that they’re lying, or that they’re at least being selective with the truth because they desperately want to fit in. It’s like everyone puts a “coolness filter” over their keyboard, so that only cool stuff enters the internet while the uncool stuff stays behind.

However, there are certain places where the coolness filter is defeated. Certain places where you can lift a rock and see a creepy-crawly world of personal problems and angst and sexual issues bared before your eyes.

There is a persistent online rumor that pop singer Lady Gaga has male genitals. Many people are obsessed with the idea. I know this, not from reading Livejournal quizzes, but from Google. Google attempts to predict your searches based on what other people are searching for, and here’s what I get when I type “Lady Gaga”

Out of the top ten searches for Lady Gaga, two of them were related to her having a penis (and one of them is the top search). What, do people spend all day searching for this kind of stuff?

Here’s “Lady Gaga h”

Six results now. Sweet merciful balls, what have I done? It feels like I’ve stepped into an alternative universe.

And here’s the kicker: Google censors words. What you’re looking at is the search results with words like “dick” and “penis” filtered out. If euphemisms like “Lady Gaga’s dongtacular crotchsicle” are appearing, just imagine how many people were simply searching for “Lady Gaga penis”. It boggles the mind.

Hey God, can you send a flood or a plague or something? This modern civilisation thing isn’t working out for us.

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It’s been months and months since Duke Nukem Forever was cancelled. I intend to exploit the internet’s short memory, and will say that is not old news because hardly anyone remembers it. That’s the cool thing about news. Once it passes over a certain point on the horizon, it’s fresh again.

I was a huge fan of Duke Nukem 3D. Most classic games either have great concepts or great content. But DN3D had both. Every other FPS game from the period looks boring. But as great as DN3D was, it will be forever by buried under the mountain of shame and failure generated by its sequel, Duke Nukem Forever. That game needs no introduction. It out-Daikatana’d Daikatana in the category of “vaporware”, which is French for “a game famous for not fucking existing.”

Here is an article revealing why DNF was never released even after 12 years of work. George Broussard screwed the pooch. He refused to stop adding new featues, he refused to call it a day, he treated his publisher like an enemy instead of a partner. But mostly it was money. Broussard was rich, and could afford to finance the game himself, thus giving him total control. This shouldn’t have been a problem, but he ended up proving himself unworthy of total control.

But I think there’s an important lesson here.

It’s a cliche to say this, but beople do perform best when they’re on the ropes and can’t afford to goof around. Seriously. The quality of Metallica’s albums can be graphed according to how much money they were making at the time. The Wachowskis blew up when they made the The Matrix…and that was the last good movie they made. Lou Reed became rich, and straight away released an album consisting of 60 minutes of guitar feedback. The stereotypical comedian who becomes a hit on the comedy circuit and gains 20 kilos and a amphetamine habit. It’s like the sudden easing off of pressure flips a switch in the entertainer’s head. “It’s okay, I’m set for life, I don’t have to work hard ever again.” I’m sure most of them would deny this…but since when does an idiot know he’s an idiot?

Maybe it’s the loss of a motivation to work. Of course you’d strive hard if you know your paycheck depended on how well you do. But once you’ve made it, and you know you’ll have a house and a car and a mistress no matter the quality of your work…well, I doubt that would take an artist to the next level.

Or maybe it’s just an illusion. Maybe poor entertainers are just as prone to self-delusion, but we don’t see them crashing and burning because they’re not famous.

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When you ask a conservative what his idea of a perfect society is, he’ll describe something roughly similar to what we have now. Maybe slightly different tax rates and immigration policies.

But if you ask a liberal, you’ll probably get some fantastic fairytale utopia that could never exist in a million years (“…and then we’ll force all the corporate bosses to submit to brain surgery so they stop being greedy! Yeah! And then we’ll disband the police force and instead promote a culture that encourages peace and mutual respect! And free weed! 420 FO’ LIFE!”)

Something I’m really starting to wake up to is that the left is awesome at finding solutions to problems…just so long as you don’t care that their solutions will usually never be practical. In the last century we’ve seen communism and anarchism, two failed liberal experiments, and those were the two that people actually tried to implement! Liberals shoot holes all over conservative ideologies, but guess what? At the end of the day, those ideologies work. They might not work perfectly, but they work. I’ll take a flawed but workable model over a perfect but unworkable model any time.

Both sides of the political spectrum are necessary to balance each other. Liberals move a society forward, conservatives keep society standing still. Left-wing types will scream “WHY DO YOU WANT TO SLOW DOWN PROGRESS?!?!” but the answer is obvious: for the same reason you have breaks on a car. Sure, most of the time you want to be moving forward. But sometimes you need to break your car so it doesn’t go off a cliff.

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I haven’t felt any need to post “Merry Christmas” or “Happy New Year” on this blog. Guys, they’re the two biggest holidays in the year. It’s not like people are going to forget about them. If you’re going to shout out a holiday, make it an obscure one! Please!

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Here’s a video review of Star Wars: The Phantom Menace that’s blowing up all across the internet. It’s not some whiny fan bitching about Jar Jar. It’s a masterpiece. Second for second, this video review is as entertaining as anything I’ve watched. It’s both educational and funny. And possibly sexually arousing.

It’s a no-holds-barred assault on the movie, brutally unpacking it scene by scene. He describes how the story doesn’t work, how the characters don’t work, how the plot makes no sense…

…and yet he never becomes annoying or obnoxious or negative for the sake of being negative.

And whenever you start to get comfortable, the craziness starts. He’ll be in the middle dissecting some piece of dialogue, and then suddenly he’ll veer off on to a tangent about murdering prostitutes and locking children in his basement. It’s awful and disgusting. AND HILARIOUS.

The Phantom Menace was the first Star Wars movie I watched, so I guess I wasn’t as offended by it as other Star Wars fans. Comparing it with the first three movies, yeah, it isn’t the same thing. The soul isn’t there. The first three movies were simple and fun. The Phantom Menace was tedious, overbearing, and exhausting to watch. And the guy nailed a point really well, there’s not a single character in that movie you can emotionally connect with. It’s as dry as a documentary.

The video is 70 minutes long, but it’s totally worth your time. I linked the first part above. To see the rest, click on the video to open up a new Youtube window and you’ll see the other parts in the Related Videos box.

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I’ve just changed over from my bank of fifteen years, Commonwealth, to Westpac, mostly because of convenience.

Changing bank accounts is easier than I thought. I always had a nightmare where I’d empty and close an old account, but forget to notify someone I owe payment to, and they’d try to bill the account, and it would reject them, and they’d charge me an extra pile of ching, and I’d go to the shops to think it over, and I’d accidently stumble upon the winning lottery ticket lying on the ground, win 40 million dollars, and be rich for life. How would this be a nightmare? I wouldn’t know what to do with all my money.

I may be getting a car soon!

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I get tired of how the internet seems to single out a target for abuse, and then spends months and months driving that subject into the ground.

At various points it has been Britney Spears, goths, The Jonas Brothers, emos, furries, Twilight, and Sarah Palin. Twilight in particular. It’s like I can’t go on a forum anywhere without some retard trying to score free cool points by saying “Hey, you know what sucks? TWILIGHT!” Who cares? Shut up. Kill yourself. The horse is dead. Stop beating it. I hope you get cancer.

I haven’t read Twilight, it doesn’t sound like my thing. But this bashing is pathetic. Are people so desperate for approval that they can’t offer opinions unless they’re same opinions of everyone around them? Remove the laugh track from sitcoms and these guys probably wouldn’t know what parts to find funny.

I wonder: would so many people have protested against Scientology if it hadn’t been what all the cool kids of the internet were doing?

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I’m not into the body modification scene at all. To me, piercings and tattoos are just one more way peer pressure is screwing up the youth of today. Yes, I believe that peer pressure is the only reason people get tattoos. I’ve had friends tell me that they don’t care what their friends think, but here’s a tip: if someone feels the need to tell you they don’t care what you think, it almost certainly isn’t true.

What’s wrong with getting inked? You’re setting yourself up with what is, in some situations, a major social handicap. My friend has applied for work at over 50 places. But even Burger King turned him away, all because of his full tattoo sleeves. You’re sending a stronger message about yourself than you realise. Lots of businesses are wary of hiring people with virtual statements of “I’M A REBEL AND NONCOMFORMIST” on their arms.

Tattoos will earn you some short-term kudos among your friends. But friends change. What if you abandon your bikie ways and try to fit in with the rest of society? Are you still going to want to have a flaming skull on your arm? How about law school? How about that nursing home 50 years into your future? I emplore you, if you get inked, make it something small and tasteful. Not “YOUR MOM WAS HERE” right above your dick. I mean, come on.

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I just got back from new Zealand, and here’s a holiday report: broken into three sections.

Prelaunch

My mum got a phone call asking if she’d like to talk at a conference in Tauranga, and she decided the whole family could go on a holiday: myself, my sister, and my parents.

Getting passports proved to be fairly painful. My mum needed to provide a birth certificate, which she didn’t have, and by the time she finally acquired one (unearthing a family scandal in the process), we were getting very close to the hilt and had to pay $400 to get the passports expedited. It was the only way they could have arrived in time. We had to go to interviews, and the photos we paid for were rejected twice for being the wrong size.

This would have been in late August. By the 3rd of September, we were finally ready to go!

Stage 1

We drove to Sydney airport, but were slowed down by traffic and missed our flight. The next one would be in two days. So we drove to Mercure hotel and crashed there. It was sick being able to explore the inner city. I found a music store, and annoyed the living hell out of the salespeople by playing all the instruments and refusing to buy anything. Finally, it was Friday and we got on our flight, landing in Auckland airport at roughly 4:00pm NZ time.

We booked into the Sebel hotel, which is a really fancy place. The rooms were amazing. During the days, when my mum was at the conference, we were at liberty to explore Tauranga and soak in the New Zealand experience.

New Zealand is to Australia what Australia is to America. It’s very laid back, relaxed and friendly, although fairly uneventful. At some time the following week, we checked out of the Sebel, and the freaking holiday began. AAHH YEAAAAHH!

At Rotorua we went bungee jumping and white water rafting. We also stopped by at Lake Taupo and rode the Luge, which was about sixty different kinds of fun. After spending tons of money there, we drove to Wellington, which was definitely the most Sydneylike city in the country, and boarded a ferry to the South Island.

Stage 2

We landed in the South Island, and stayed in Picton overnight before moving on to Christchurch. It was now that we saw the true face of New Zealand: lots of fields, agriculture, and livestock. I have so many photos of sheep on my camera it isn’t funny. The country has its own set of quirks: for instance, it was rare to see an actual wall, people just plant rows of pine trees and let them grow into a natural barrier.

We saw a seal colony on the eastern coast, and nearly got charged by a bull seal as big as me. We learned all about the Maori culture and visited every museum we could find.

Somewhere along the road to Nelson my dad became very sick, and when he’s sick he, frankly, becomes an asshole. This was probably the least pleasant part of the holiday.

For the day before leaving Christchurch we went on an Alpine train ride across several hundred kilometers. This trip really drove home the fact that you can’t rely on people who have a monetary interest in what they’re selling. My dad made it very clear to the guy on the phone that he’s in a wheelchair, and was assured that the trains were wheelchair accessible. They were not. The factory-made wheelchair we put my father into simply would not fit down the chair aisles. We broke one of the chairs trying. Eventually we physically lifted my father out of the wheelchair and carried him several feed into his designated trip. The guy in charge of the trip was super pissed. He told us, in no uncertain terms, that he would find the guy who told us that the trains were wheelchair accessible and have him fired.

The next day we flew home, pretty uneventfully. Oh, and when we lost our house keys when we arrived back home. So much other weird and wacky stuff had happened that we took it in stride, though.

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It’s hard to write stuff here now since I’m on holiday and internet access is sporadic. But new things are coming, I promise!

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Lately, I’ve been playing a fair bit of Stick Arena. You can easily recognise me, I’m the guy BRINGING THE PAIN.

AAAAH YEAAAHH. Everywhere I go, mortals cower in fear. I can’t go into the lobby anymore without people going “OMG! Bart, you’re my hero! I saw the Youtube clip of your match against donkey_boner441! Man, that wall sniping thing was evil! I practice eight hours a day, just so I can be like you! Also, I’m newly single and looking…here are my details.”

Though seriously, a 1.5 kill/death average isn’t that impressive, especially if you use dubious tricks like only playing in Quick Start games. It’s easy to rack up kills when you’re playing against newbies.

My tactic is to use the AK47 and shotgun exclusively, only picking up the other weapons when there’s nothing else available. Although melee is quite effective on maps like Concrete Jungle. Also, if you have a choice between fighting a strong guy and a weak guy, always pick the strong guy, because you can always mop up the weak guy afterwards.

I first started playing in about 2006. What appealed to me about the game was its accessibility and speed. You click “Quick Start”, and in five seconds you’re there in an auto-generated account, playing against actual humans. It’s like Counter Strike meets solitaire.

The free, anonymous nature of the game means it has a lot of hackers, unfortunately. If you enter a game and there’s a guy with 14 kills and zero deaths, quit and find another game. Don’t waste a single second of your time. Don’t try to get them booted, it won’t work.

Actually, the main reason I’m posting this is because of something I saw in the lobby a few days back (look at the games list):

Someone actually titled their game Quick Fart. I tried to join but it was full. Damn. Should have known.

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Good music should make us ask questions. What kind of questions? Ah, that is the key.

In the case of the five songs below, the question is “what sort of hard drugs were being handed around the studio? Angel dust? Crack?” The below songs are what I personally find to be scary.

1. Revolution 9 by the Beatles

This song is a weird, creepy outro from The Beatles’ White Album. It starts of with random sampled conversations and instruments, and gradually builds into a screeching wall of sound. With various backmasked sound clips (which allegedly contain messages about Paul McCartney’s death), it contains as much Beatles lore as any three of their songs combined.

2. They’re Coming to Take Me Away

More disturbing than scary, this song is some sort of weird ode to mental instability. To whoever wrote this, seek help, I beg you!

3. Hellhounds on my Trail

Written in recorded music’s early history, Robert Johnson’s mini epic is as creepy as it gets.

4. Caledonia

This, uh, “song” by Cromagnon is a weird, distorted, lo-fi piece of crazy released before Black Sabbath’s debut and probably qualifies as the first heavy metal song. The bagpipes just push it over the limit.

5. Threnody for the Victims of Hiroshima

Terrifying and nerve-jangling, this song is like getting teabagged by Satan. If you need material for a “screamer” video, this song is all you need.

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The head executive of a business summoned five employees to his office, and said “our profits are coming in well under expectation, and we can no longer afford a full workforce. I’m going to have to let one of you go.”

A black man said “you can’t fire me! I’ll sue for racial discrimination!”

A woman said “you can’t fire me! I’ll sue for sex discrimination!”

An over-45 said “you can’t fire me! I’ll sue for age discrimination!”

A Muslim said “you can’t fire me! I’ll sue for religious discrimination!”

Everyone in the room then turned to look at the fifth worker, a young, white, male agnostic. He gulped and said “Uh, hey, did I tell anyone I’m thinking about becoming gay?”

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It’s up to 250 pages already.

Please, let’s not get all outraged and offended. Michael Jackson is dead. He ain’t gonna care. He lived an incredibly rich and successful life, and a couple of silly jokes on a web page seems like a tiny price to pay.

And holy shit, is that a terribly designed website. They stick billions of ads in there, with the exact same font and decorations as the jokes, so you think you’re reading a joke and then you discover it’s an ad. It’s also pointless reading the back pages, as people keep making the same couple of jokes over and over. Yeah, thanks, we get the point, Michael Jackson died in the chldren’s ward having a stroke. Okay, whatever, Michael Jackson was melted down into plastic toys so children could play with him. Still, the one about Jackson 5 concerts being 20% off cracked me up.

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The presenter has an annoying voice, looks like a gay Nikki Sixx, and pronounces “frustrated” without an r. But man, he really knows his stuff.

What a mind-blowing video. Can you imagine living in a house with that many cockroaches? When I lived in Sydney we had tons (although nowhere near as many as that family), and the damage they can do is nuts. We live on the Central Coast now, and you can easily tell which books we bought up here and which books we brought up from Sydney, because the Sydney books have roach-nibbled pages.

I say we irradiate them all and see what happens.

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We’ve long had a problem with rats in our garage. They’re cut little bush rats, but they chew holes in things, make lots of noise, and are generally a nuisance.

Today, my family had a look through the garage and found that our problem had resolved itself. You see, when we moved here, we brought a packet of rat poison. We put it on ground level, and forgot that it was even there. But now, this forgotten packet of rat poison was lying ripped apart on the ground, the poison itself (it resembles blue Play-Doh) lying in clumps over the garage floor. The rats had stumbled upon it, and had begun eating it over the course of a few weeks. Needless to say, their meal was never completed.

Our pristine garage has become a Dachau. There were two dead rats side by side, and one was teeming with maggots. We found another dead rat inside a gardening pot. A fourth dead rat was found in another location, but we don’t think he was killed by the poison since he is heavily decomposed. Old age, probably.

There’s guaranteed to be more dead rats. This week, I intend to play a grisly, rat-based version of Where’s Waldo in our garage. Except instead of finding an amusing fellow with a red, stripey hat, I will get the opportunity to ponder my own mortality.

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Or Australia at least. Why are things so expensive here?

It’s like this. I use eBay a lot (you know, the site where you buy something because it’s $50 cheaper than retail and then pay $70 for shipping and handling) and most of the time it’s cheaper to buy from America! This is particularly true for high end electronic equipment.

It’s becoming ridiculous. I recently bought a multi-unit power pack from America, ate shipping and handling, ate the currency exchange rate (the Australian dollar is worth roughly 79 US cents), and ate the $13.95 or so it cost me to buy a transformer so I can run the thing on 240v…and it still worked out cheaper than buying from Australia!

I don’t pretend to know much about economics, but it’s like anywhere from 20% to 60% gets added to the price as soon as something enters the country. A $600 Ibanez guitar becomes a $900 Ibanez guitar. A $2000 generator becomes a $3000 generator. Sometimes the prices are ludicrously, insanely out of line. I own a Marshall amp that cost $1000 Australian, and I just talked to a guy in the UK who bought the same amp for 200 pounds. Yay. Great stuff to hear.

I don’t fully understand why this is, although I’d expect it to have something to do with us being a vast country in a remote location of the globe with a small population. That’s what common sense suggests, anyway.

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We live in a time where words like “world wide web” seem tacky and old, where they once indicated the cutting edge. The internet is getting long in the tooth, and good domain names are increasingly hard to come by. Oh, we’ll never run out, but if you want a five digit domain name now you’re not going to get much better than kfgdf.com

It almost seems like there’s a certain kudos for websites with a short domain name, because it indicates they were registered a long time ago. I suppose I should be proud of http://ben-ts.net, which is pretty short and somewhat coherent (it was registered in 2005).

I’m not convinced it matters that much. Short domain names aren’t necessarily more memorable than long ones, you’d only get accidental “I-typed-this-into-my-web-browser” traffic if your domain name is widely recognised (like coke.com).

Ultimately, I think it’s the kudos thing, like how real absinth costs much more than imitation absinth even though they taste the same.

Beeth: Girls are like internet domain names, the ones I like are already taken.
honx: well, you can stil get one from a strange country

– Bash.org quote

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Tonight I took a personality test you can find here. I won’t post the results, since it would not be helpful to man or beast. Actually, I just went through it clicking the craziest, weirdest, most contradictory options possible, in the hopes that the test would diagnose me with a crippling mental disorder.

Somewhere through that exhausting 120 question waste of time, it occurred to me that no-one answers these tests honestly. It’s an advantage of the internet that you can exaggerate your abilities by as much as you want. Try it. Go to whatever message board your visit, start a “What’s your chest measurement” thread, and watch as the community of D&D geeks you thought you knew transforms into a community of bodybuilders, Navy SEALS, and Mr Universe contenders.

If you’re wondering “but why would people lie to a personality test program?” then you have to realise that people are so used to lying about their skills and abilities that they can’t turn it off. They even lie to anonymous php scripts on the internet.

Uh, well, I forget where I was going with this and it seems to have run out of steam, so I’ll finish by urging you to take the test, which is by far the best test to pay me $10 to say something nice about it.

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In my ongoing quest to make my website not look like total ass, I made a new skin in Xara Web Builder and converted it to WordPress over the course of several days. So far I’m fairly happy with the results, although I need to fix the fonts and some other things.

WordPress is an amazing blog, and can be modified into an amazing CMS as well. I would definitely recommend that others use it. The only small drawback is that you need to have a passable grasp of PHP to fully turn it into a CMS. Create an account at the WordPress support forum and the folks there will step you through it.

So what’s next for the Empty World site, which, by the way, gets the traffic of a good-sized country (assuming said country has been depopulated by a moderate to severe holocaust/plague)? Well, I have a few ideas. I’ll break promises left right and center, not update for six months, piss off what few readers I have left, then maybe I’ll take the whole site down for just for fun and redirect viewers to a Rick Astley music video. Stay tuned!

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Every now and then I see things on Youtube that blow my mind, and then I forget about them. But here’s one I bookmarked.

It’s a channel called Edarem, run by a 76 year old man called Edward Muscari. He was a semi-famous TV personality at one point (famous enough to have a Wikipedia and IMDb page), and he is also in the Florida Sex Offender Registry for molesting a 14 year old boy. But enough about his background. Let’s talk about the man.

Imagine the weirdest, creepiest old person you know, and multiply it by ten. You’re still not close to Edarem, although you are starting to get a blurry image. Here’s a video of him lip-synching a Roy Orbison song.

The average person is 75% water. Edarem is 75% creepiness. His every gesture makes my skin crawl. Why he wasn’t tapped to act in that Lemony Snicket movie is beyond me. He’s exactly the way I imagined Count Olaf in the books.

You can check out his channel here. Warning, there is a video of him topless.

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This morning, my family went to a dawn service on Anzac day, which is an event commemorating the Australian and New Zealand soldiers who served at Gallipolli in the first world war. It’s a significant event for us since many, many, Sheffields have fought in wars, and my great-grandfather died in a Japanese internment camp. If I had been born in the early 20th century I would have fought there too.

It was a dawn service at five thirty am, which meant we got up at, er, four am (I didn’t keep track of the time), which was fun. We got into the car and drove to the Entrance Park, where they held the service. It was funny, when we left the house there were no cars on the road, but as we got further and further down the Entrance highway, the roads were clogged with cars. And the Entrance wasn’t even the only service held in the area.

It was dark and mysterious. We were at the far back (there must have been 3000 people there), but we could hear what was happening over the PA system. There were some technical hitches. They were going to play tapes of the Australian and NZ national anthem, but they slipped up and we only heard the Australian anthem. Otherwise we had a prayer, a short speech by the president of the local RSL club, a minute’s silence, and, for anyone wearing a military decoration or uniform, a breakfast ticket at said RSL club (they made a point of mentioning that alcohol wouldn’t be served).

The function could have been handled a lot better, but it doesn’t matter, since the point was that we all gathered together to pay respect to our nation’s heroes. There were plenty of veterens there (none from Gallipoli, obviously, the last one died in 2002, though there were probably a couple from WW2 and certainly some from Vietnam and Korea).

After that I met up with some friends and watched the sun come up over the lake. We also saw a water rat, and I feel ashamed that the rat sticks in my memory more than the entire event.

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Sometimes wireless is good (like you don’t want cables trailing everywhere). And sometimes wireless is the only way to go (like when want to network two computers at opposite ends of the house). But wireless seriously licks wang. You plug something in and it works. You connect something wirelessly and hope it works.

My dad has fallen in love with wireless mice and now we spend huge amounts of time repairing Bluetooth connections and recharging batteries. I personally use a mouse with a cord (although the mouse itself is optical) and have never had any issues with it.

My family uses wireless networks, too. We’ve never installed one and had no problems, or not had to modify it afterwards. In fact, the less said about them the better.

Seriously though, cables rule. If Star Trek’s transporters are ever made, they should definitely use them.

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In these troubled times I’m sure we all have lots of questions, from whether to sell our kids to NAMBLA to pay the bills to exactly how camels digest cardboard. Here are some random questions I thought of that have one thing in common: the question is far more interesting than the answer.

1. A lawyer bills $200 an hour. On his way to work, he drops a 10c coin on the ground. Is it worth his while to pick it up?

2. Why do Youtube users complain about you wasting your time, but if you called your video “A Waste of Time” they probably would have clicked on it anyway?

3. Why is “homelesssexual” such a fascinating word, even though, technically, it doesn’t mean anything?

4. Why do people ask questions like “if you could take 1 movie with you on a desert island…” when they could just have asked “what’s your favorite movie”?

5. Isn’t it ironic how movies like Grindhouse spend large amounts of money making themselves look low-budget?

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The best job: being a child entertainer, like the Wiggles or Gay Waldo or whatever they have now. Think about it…it’s perfect! You can tell the same jokes over and over and your audience never clues in. Your audience has ridiculously low expectations, and most of them have no choice but to listen to you (as a kid, I was forever being force-marched off to these things). Sure, soon your fans will grow up and forget about you, but there are always more where they came from!

The worst job: being an entertainer who is a child. There’s a lot of media attention given to “child prodigies”, so you’ll be sitting pretty for a few years. But what happens when you start growing hair on your chin? Suddenly you go from being a child genius, to an adult who happens to be moderately good at something. Let’s take acting: you have Macaulay Culkin, who garnered rave reviews for his performance as the kid in Home Alone. But fast forward however many years, and where is he now? It’s one thing to be typecast: it’s another thing to be typecast into a role you won’t be able to play in a few more years.

What do you think? Let me know with a comment. Yes, I know this site doesn’t have a comments, just use the power of positive thinking. My mother says you can do anything with positive thinking.

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Politics is treated like a football match these days. If you support one side, you can’t support the other. But what’s wrong with picking and choosing the best policies from each side as your political identity? Do you have to “choose” a party and then stick with them, even if there are things that attract you about another party?

I’m politically in the middle, though closer to the right than the left. An ideal government is lean and efficient, and does not interfere with the lives of its citizens any more than it has to. Citizens should be self-sufficient, and the private sector should always be developed ahead of the public sector. Charity is to be encouraged, but those who work should not have to bear the brunt of feeding those who don’t.

Does that sound like a good (albeit incomplete) description of conservatism? A smaller government and an emphasis on the individual? Well, it sounds great, but there’s another side to conservatism that doesn’t mesh with the above at all.

Why is conservative politics usually associated with harsh laws? Take the death penalty, which is usually associated with the right. How can a government be unobtrusive and passive while at the same time being able to kill people? Why were things like segregation, anti-suffragetism always the domain of the right, while the left took the side of the individual (which the right claims as its own)?

It doesn’t make a whole lot of sense…which is why I don’t feel bad about mixing liberalism with conservatism. Sometimes, that’s the only way to go.

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I love the hell out of Snopes.com. You can spend hours there. It skewers all the popular folk myths of the 20th century from front to back, determining what is true and what is false. There’s another website called Cracked.com who endlessly ride these guys’ nuts, copying their facts and rewriting them into funny “Top 10 Celebrity Goofs”-style articles.

Take a look at their Disney page. What the hell?! I was watching all this stuff, and didn’t even notice. Sure, I know movies like Shrek have some well-hidden double-entendres (“Lord Farquaad”), but I never knew there was full frontal nudity in “The Rescuers”. If I ever met the man responsible, I wouldn’t know whether to kick his ass or shake his hand.

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As a rule, before I buy a software program I check to see if there’s a free alternative available. I might have to sacrifice some features and customer support, but otherwise there’s no reason to drop $500 on Microsoft Office when I could use OpenOffice.

Did you know it’s possible to do this in real life? People in rural areas of Australia buy very little, and make do with trading and borrowing. My brother is 40 years old, lives in Campbell, and hasn’t bought a car the entire time I’ve known him.

Like on the internet, the imprimature of big business is something you can avoid if you know your way around. Want a guitar? I guarantee you that somewhere in the world there is a person who would give you a guitar for free, just to get it out of his house. Maybe there’s a mechanic somewhere whose house is being forclosed and is selling his collection of rebuilt cars for $600 each. Earlier last year we threw out a perfectly good computer monitor, because we didn’t have enough space in the garage.

Places like Craigslist are an imperfect way to distribute unwanted goods because everyone wants a profit. But it would be a real kick in the ass to businesses if some sort of communal dumping pool was started.

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The trouble with living in a remote area is that the local council tends not to care about you. We’ve had several days with no power and no phones because lines were broken. When they said they’d have power off all day while they did maintenance work, with only a few hours notice, it was the last straw, and we took matters into our own hands. My dad ordered a diesel powered, 15hp, 140v, single-phase generator that can power the entire house. Yesterday, it arrived.

The delivery was a story in itself. We bought the generator over the internet (you can see where this is going…) with no clue as to how big it was or how much it weighed. On second thought, that may have been an oversight. Anyway, on the morning of the delivery a truck pulls up, and a confused-looking Lebanese fellow steps out and explains that he doesn’t have our generator, and that it’s coming in a “beeeg truck” with a forklift to get it out. A forklift? Just how big is this thing? Furthermore, he explained that the truck likely would not fit in our driveway (which is a fairly big driveway!), and that we would have to unload the generator in the street and wheel it in. Huh? We ordered a nice, mid-sized generator to power the house during outages, not a freaking apartment block.

An hour later, a tiny truck pulls up (our mailman’s van is seriously bigger), and what do you know, it has our generator. So much for huge trucks and forklifts. We got the generator out, and although it’s a decent size (about as big as a small fridge) it was far smaller than the Lebanese guy had made out. This was a relief to us, as we have about 1 meter of free space in our garage and it was nice to have somewhere to store it.

We’re really happy with the thing so far. It’s quite similar to a car engine, in that it has a battery and you can start it by turning a key (no yanking on a pullstring) and since it runs on diesel it will save us money too.

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I was just reading about how Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd’s plane broke down in Queensland, and several of his staff were stranded while the PM was transported on another plane, and it got me thinking about politics.

At the moment, Australia is divided between the Coalition (roughly comparable to the American Republican Party) and Labor (roughly comparable to the American Democratic Party), who won the 2008 election in a monster landslide. I watched the whole thing on TV, and it was like watching the most horrific MMA fight you can imagine, where instead of kicks and punches the damage was being done by ballots.

The 2008 election wasn’t about issues but about appearance, and Kevin Rudd couldn’t have lost. He was hip and young, and savagely popular with younger voters. In the debate, he repeatedly name-dropped Myspace and Youtube. Coalition leader John Howard looked old and out of touch. Add to this the fact that Howard planned to step down soon anyway (so voters would face a new, untested leader soon no matter who’s name was on the ballot) and it was a lost cause for Howard…you sort of wonder why he even bothered to show up.

I voted for Howard because, well, I liked the man. He got things done. Kevin Rudd specialises in paper politics. He’s good at smiling and waving at the camera, but isn’t an effective leader. He signed Kyoto, which is a meaningless gesture since he will be out of office long before any meaningful deadlines are underway. He apologised to the stolen generation, but doesn’t seem interested in making financial restitution. His promise to pull Australia out of the Iraq war was a bait and switch, as it only applies to a third of our soldiers and no-one knows when the rest will come home.

What’s John Howard doing now? Nobody knows. He’s vanished. Maybe we’ll get some memoirs or something out of him in the future, his legacy nearly demands it after all.

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Yesterday I was with Quadra, today I’m with HostGator. My old host was great, but it cost a lot of money, and with this new one I save about $100 p/a, which is a big deal. On the downside it’s in the US, so my FTP speeds aren’t quite as snappy. Also, it introduced me to the dark side of CMS software, like having to back up all of my tables and transfer it to a new database, not to mention messing around endlessly with permissions and config files, which was kind of a drag…

But on the bright side, it gave me an excuse to upgrade to the latest version of WordPress. WordPress isn’t one of those programs that stays the same from version to version aside from a few irrelevant details, it actually packs a lot of changes into its upgrades, and it’s great having the latest version.

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The old site was difficult to update, so I killed it and rebuilt it using WordPress. This was a relatively steep learning curve for me, as I had to code a template from scratch and I don’t know PHP. Nevertheless, I finally got it working through my own sweat and tears. Plus copying other people’s code. That helped.

I’ll let this function as an “About” page. My name is Ben Sheffield. Yo. This site is for my writing.

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