June 25, 00. Flying is like childbirth - your body forgets how painful it is in order to trick you into doing it again. Consider me tricked - in two days I'll be in London, in one I'll be in Osaka.
I'll leave you with one last piece of hate mail:
Name: Samantha
Is Celine Dion an alien? No
Comments: Oh MY GOD... U stupid Girl U... That is my aunt u r talking
about. How dare u.. Ya know Aunt C has feelings too just like u do. I
wouldn't be talking, maybe your tha alien.
How did you find the site? None of your buisiness
June 23, 00. For years, my friend Fraser Wilson would steal my lines, shamelessly and without credit. Finally, I can steal one of his, but in order to keep the high moral ground, I'm going to credit him with this line:
The big story today is that three health inspectors were shot dead by an angry sausage factory owner. The moral is, of course, that meat is murder.
http://www.mercurycenter.com/breaking/headline2/024603.htm
June 20, 00. The fact that I'm deeply horrified by the way those people trying to sneak into Britain in a sealed refrigerated lorry died doesn't mean that I can't see a way to make a quick buck. All you really need to do is combine the 'illegal immigrants in air-tight containers' scam with some anorexic or fasting Breatharians who want transport on a pilgrimage and you've got the perfect business.
58 dead in container vs. the Breatharians
June 19, 00. There's a batch of insurance ads currently showing on Australian tv that feature a suited man talking to the camera about how a person with that particular health insurance fares compared to someone else in the same situation.
In each ad, the subjects of the ad act as if he's not there and the scene is played out around him while he craps on directly to camera before interacting with the scenario in some way - pushing toilet paper to a backpacker caught short, catching a bag before it hits the floor, tapping a kid on the shoulder so he goes to chat up a girl. It's all so cheesy that the first few times I saw it I thought it was a parody of ads from an earlier era.
But it's not a parody, so it all becomes incredibly creepy - each of the scenarios also shows someone who doesn't have this brand of health insurance, and he completely ignores their plight. The 'other' backpacker is left without toilet paper, the 'other' kid dateless, the unworthy new mother left to struggle on her own. But he's not even nice to his own customers - the backpacker is left with her pants around her ankles, calling out for someone to help her until he finally gets around to pushing her some toilet paper. Just what kind of a bastard is this man (and subsequently the company he represents) meant to be?
June 13, 00. Bilynda Murphy, of Jaidyn Leskie fame, is pregnant again. Bogans seem to pop out kids with the same thought the rest of us give to choosing dinner. You can take the scrubber out of Moe but you can't take the Moe out of the scrubber. http://news.com.au/0,3546,801814%255E1243,00.html
In other news of the pushing a watermelon ilk, Celine Dion is pregnant. Let's hope the midwives have seen the 'Alien' series.
June 4, 00. So last night I saw "Eyes Wide Shut". I can't guess what Kubrick was thinking but it was one of the most heavily mannered movies I've seen in a long time. Empires could have risen and crumbled in the time it took some of the characters to get out a sentence, and if there was an Oscar for "least subtle symbolism", EWS would have won. This doesn't explain the extent to which Tom's performance failed to involve me, but I suspect that you have to be a married, middle-aged man to really care how he escaped various plot twists. Nicole looked gorgeous but her character's role as prop for Tom's 'journey' didn't leave her much to work with. Overwhelmingly, I was reminded of Rosemary's Baby, with a bit of the Stepford Wives, and lots of John Fowler's "The Magus".
On the other hand, I also watched "Bigger than Tina", an Australian movie that got the usual non-rave reviews that Australians love to dish out to other Australians. Yes, there were some dodgy structural issues and some points were too heavily laboured, but there were also some excellent performances. The family scenes could have been a chaotic mess in the wrong hands but were so finely restrained that the truly embarrassing behaviour of Australian suburbanites shone through.
June 3, 00. Have you ever noticed how some people seem to live their lives with their stupidity levels set to 'stun'?
This next bit doesn't really relate to that, I just wanted to whinge: I was ordering a salad (lettuce, tomato, blah) sandwich in a deli the other day, roting my way through the 'white/brown bread, margarine/butter/neither, salt/pepper/neither, no, really, no meat, it's a salad sandwich' thing, until the deli chick got up to 'do you want that toasted?'. I looked at her in surprise, expecting her to realise and smile, to react in some way to the silliness of what she'd just said. Nothing. And she was still waiting for me to reply. So I said, "no, I would not like my salad sandwich toasted, thanks".