It’s not healthy to keep things inside.

My lovely wife (i.e., ‘The Boss’) and I celebrated an anniversary recently. No, no, don’t applaud – you’ll jinx us. People tend to stare aghast upon this woman’s suffering and ask how long we’ve been married, and I usually respond with something flippant like, “Eleven happy years. That’s not bad out of seventeen really, huh?”

And that’s the amazing thing. Despite being born with a severe deformity - not a trace of a sense of humour, poor thing – The Boss has managed to bear such gentle barbs with amazing good grace. For my part I’ve learned to deliver them with a cheesy grin so she can tell I’m kidding. Though to be honest I’m not a very attractive smiler. Not much of a platform to work from, of course. The Minister for War and Finance, on the other hand, has made an art form of the raised eyebrow. She manages to convey at once a sense of weary resignation and simultaneous alarm.

And that’s the way we operate. I say something that I really shouldn’t simply because it amuses me, and The Boss only hits where the bruises don’t show. It’s an M.O. that was set up in the very early days before we were even seriously courting. When we were shiny and new Queen’s front-man died, and being a bit of a fan my dearest was naturally quite upset. Seeking to apply a salve to her pain, I said something comforting like, “It’s okay, honey. Freddie’s a good poof now.” Well she did stop crying, and I learned that she has a temper as terrible as her throwing arm.

I’d like to point out here that a lot of what exits my mouth is not necessarily reflective of the views of management, and may have only been released for the shock value. A bit like the last Jackass movie, if they were perhaps a bit less considerate of others.

Another case in point. We were sharing some unwinding time in front of the square eye not so long ago, watching the latest Chuck Lorre slam dunk in the form of Gary Unmarried. And isn’t it good to see that likeable everyman, Jay Mohr, getting a regular gig?
Anyway in this particular episode there was some snarky back-and forth between the main characters regarding the boy child being scared of girls. Gary’s response to this was an accusation that it was the ex’s fault - she’d proven that all girls do is pretend to like you for a while and then take all of your stuff. Ever eagle eyed, I saw an opportunity for some point scoring.
Turning to the object of my affection, I said, “At least I know that will never happen to us”.
This got the ‘Awwwwwwwwwww’ cuddle that I was looking for. “Do you really mean that?” she purred.

“Sure”, I replied nonchalantly. “You hate all of my stuff.”

The biggest difference, I find, between a companionable silence and a bitter one is the temperature at which it’s delivered.

Still and all, I love her dearly; and she figures it would be a waste of time starting to train ‘a new one’ now.
Which is why on a sunny lunchtime a week or so ago, we found ourselves in quite a nice riverside restaurant, celebrating our milestone. (If you’ve been married for seventeen years, you’ll know it’s an important one. It’s a whole year since the last one and she hasn’t killed you yet.)

In light of the special day, I went out on a limb and tried something I’ve heard a lot about and wanted to have a go at; Wagyu beef. Having normally shied away due to a feeling that spending that much on meat constituted cheating in some way, I thought that if the wife is present and okays it, we’re on. Next we’ll try that theory at the Daily Planet.

When the thing arrived at the table, I must admit to being temporarily underwhelmed. For a hundred dollar steak it looked remarkably like, well, a piece of steak. (I’m not sure what I expected instead, but had a vague feeling that sparklers would be involved.) I know very little of the value went into preparation because, like any good steak, it was quite rare. Quite. Rare. Not complaining of course because that is the way I asked for it – just saying, is all.

All concerns melted away when the first bite did the same. Praise Jeebus this bovine death was not in vain. If Nine and a Half Weeks taught us nothing else – and it didn’t – it is that the taste buds, treated nicely, are a useful sex organ. If treated nicely. If Ms Basinger had chowed down on the rump of a Wagyu cow, the movie would have lasted for about nine and a half seconds, and Mickey Rourke would have returned to his old job in the Manatee breeding grounds. Leaving us the Hell alone.
Seriously, I enjoyed this thing so much I felt I should have bought it dinner first. I’ve never eaten so slowly in all my life, normally being of the opinion that to pause and draw breath is a waste of time. But then, in the way that I do, I began to over think things.

Like most people, around here the number two train to the beach normally departs twice a day. But I’d just spent a hundred bucks on a piece of steak, and it was AWESOME. But it was a hundred bucks. It was the closest food ever took me to a religious revelation. But, without wishing to labour the point too much, it was a hundred bucks. So I did the only sensible thing and, in an attempt to make the whole experience last longer, ummm, held it in.

This lasted the better part of two days, by which time I was distinctly unhealthy. Still holding to the theory that I was continuing to enjoy that wonderful cow, it was nonetheless becoming increasingly difficult to either see the telly or walk in a straight line. My sweat, of which there was now quite a lot, had an odd red wine jus taint to it. Well even Captain Kirk knew when to abandon ship, so with a heavy heart and a belly dragging along the ground, I attempted an evacuation.

This relief turned out to be easier to seek than find. Having been sent home without pay, the Peristaltic Transport Union was unwilling to go back to work just because someone was sweating and moaning. There were negotiations, thankfully, and after a mercifully short time the trains were once again running. Although the result was a little disappointing, because I’d anticipated a bright shaft of sunlight, maybe some harps and a choir to mark the occasion. Perhaps the several gallons of coffee and hundredweight of bran muesli used to bribe the P.T.U. shrouded Bessie (yes I named the steak) and prevented the deserved recognition from occurring.

Anyway despite a desire to never do so, I learned something as I recovered over the ensuing days. Something valuable. Wagyu steak is a metaphor for life. It is to be savoured and enjoyed. But when the moment is over, everything (EVERYthing) must move on. Otherwise we can’t enjoy the next serving, can we?

Also, it is simply hilarious to niggle at your wife a little bit at a time until she explodes.

Part of the English speaking world.

I always manage to have a quiet chuckle when I hear a Yank ask someone if they speak English. Why, I wonder? YOU don’t. Now before you go getting all big and tall on me, I’m not claiming to be a paragon of pronunciation. Me, I don’t even LIKE plums. No, I’m a Norstrayan; I speak Strine, and I’m proud of it. Our biggest crime, linguistically speaking – which is... well, you know – is that we tend to make entire conversations into just the one word.
“Gdaymatehowyougointoday?” And for the love of all that’s good don’t you dare either open or move your mouth when you speak. We’re a nation of ventriloquists, we are.

At least Australians can all understand each other. Have you been to Britain? I haven’t but it’s on my to-do list. Just under ‘amputate own toes with rusty pliers’. Anyway, it seems that if you’re from more than two villages over, no-one can comprehend a bloody thing you’re saying. Or such is my understanding, at least. Apart from being cold, wet, and full of Poms, it IS still all villages there, isn’t it?

The septics are the same. Put a guy from Kentucky and another from somewhere clenchy like Vermont in a room together and there’s no chance they’ll get along. Granted they’ve got more barriers than just language – their grandpappies probably sighted each other over muskets once or twice, and it seems the Yanks are worse at getting over stuff than Christopher Reeve’s horse.

But where we compress and slightly mangle our words, and the Poms just lay thicker and thicker accents over their mother tongue, the Ahh-Mayor-Eye-Cans have taken it upon themselves to ruin it completely.

They’ve got form on this sort of thing, too. Let’s start with sport. Ever seen more than about five minutes of their football? I guarantee you haven’t, even if you think otherwise. They’ve taken the game (allegedly) played in heaven – rugby union – and turned it into the most stilted, slowed down, overdone garbage ever seen. Whilst simultaneously turning the players into raging Pooves. They look and act like ballet dancers (masculinity benchmarks that they are) that have never shrugged off the shoulder pad trend. Their scones must be pretty soft, too – helmets are for warriors, boys...

Basketball? That’s just a bastardisation of Netball (a GIRL’s game) with the rules changed around to make it less appealing. You see, what makes Netball bearable – even enjoyable, at times – is the presence of tall hot chicks in shorts skirts running around getting all fired up and sweaty and... Unnnnngh...
Where was I? Right, so basketball does away with all of that. Sure, there’s ladies (using that term loosely) basketball but when there’s already the original game, why bother? And they wear PANTS. Yuck.

NASCAR – Latin for, “You want me turn in WHICH direction?”

Then finally we have the disgrace they’ve made of interpreting cricket. Great game, cricket. Five day tests played in (but not mostly by) whites, nasty hard ball, batsmen who spend hours at the crease building big scores; I could (and do) go on.
Baseball. Utter shite. More poofy pyjama based uniforms. Nuff said.

Warfare, it’s not a really difficult concept. We all learned how to do this in the schoolyard. Pick some kid you don’t like – smaller than you, if you’re smart – crack him one when he’s not looking and then run like buggery. (Let’s face it, if there’s been buggery, there’ll be running. In more ways than one.) If any teachers ask, you were never there. What you don’t do is go around to his house, camp in his lounge room and go him there. He’s probably got older brothers, and his mum will give you SUCH a whipping with the wooden spoon. Are you listening, America?


Yes, the Seppolians like to take something elegantly functional, ruin it, and then hand it back to you with some needless extra bits and the claim that it’s ‘new and improved’. How can it be both, I wonder?

Which brings me to English. It was working fine the way it was, but our Empire-building North Pacific cousins have long established themselves as the supreme exponents of the art of choosing to be wrong simply to be in possession of the opposing point of view. And then chucking a hissy fit when we don’t all agree.

The Americans, they’ll claim, stopped using vowels in their words because they have a burning desire to spell things the way they sound. Phonetically, like. While this argument may seem good in theory, it falls apart under scrutiny. Particularly when you factor in a detail such as a standard of pronunciation that would see the word ‘second’ contain two ‘T’s, an ‘A’ and a ‘K’.

And the changes in meanings, for just no reason whatsoever. Ask for a biscuit in the States, and up North you’ll get blank looks. Down where the cotton done get picked they’ll give you something, but my friends a biscuit it is not. What you need to have been requesting is a ‘cookie’. Why you’d want to chomp down on that companionable chef from the RSL is beyond me, but there you go.

Having some toast, are we. Like some jam to put on that? HAH. Try ‘jelly’. Fear not, you’re not stacking Aeroplane’s lemon-lime on your toast; that’s what they call their conserves. What do they call their jelly, then – why that’s Jell-O. It’s just all messed up. Has anyone ever rung a mate up and asked for help because, “I’m in a bit of a jelly”??? Over here that means that he’s wrestling with bikini-clad dancers in a wading pool, which is no cause for concern unless his wife finds out.

Incorrect usages, that’s a personal fave. ‘Momentarily’ means FOR a moment, NOT IN A MOMENT, you tosser! Often I hear a seppo say, “I’ll be with you momentarily”. I think, ‘Okay, so I’ll need to be brief. Then where are you going?’

Or another classic is the utterance ‘I could care less’. So you care then; to a degree at least. Do you, just by chance, mean that you couldn’t?

Look up the word ‘rout’. A defeated and fleeing army is said to be in ‘rout’. Or, a rout is also a groove cut in your Craftwood. Remember that stuff? Sold to us by that old Pommy actor guy in those clever ads – don’t claim you don’t know. Now say it with me. R-Ow-T. To cut said groove, we use a machine from Black & Decker that’s technically known as a dovetail cutter, but is universally called a ‘router’. Easy enough so far, right?

And then there’s ‘route’. A route, as opposed to your short cut which is a different kettle of fish, is quite simply ‘the way’. Your direction, if you will. Your Tom-Tom points out the route, and I’m told computers use routers for something or other as well.

Here’s where the problem arises. Route is pronounced ROOT, but some jerk probably got embarrassed or something, and decided that we should refer to the dovetail cutter instead. Maybe they were worried about routers being confused with rooters, which might seem fair enough but is really no cause for concern.

You see, all of our rooters are mad, and are automatically noted as such. But that’s not a bad thing. A ‘Mad Rooter’ is a thing of beauty to be cherished and admired – put the Black and Decker away because she already has a groove, and she knows how to use it. Bless her.

The last word on this comes courtesy of our sheep-rooting (not routing) little bros on the other side of the ‘dutch’. Some Kiwi bloke made a beer purely for the Yank market, and in a fit of inspiration called this brew – which incidentally sold quite well - ‘Wanker’. I’m not making this up. He then launched the most brilliant marketing campaign with Tee shirts emblazoned with the prophetic words, “I feel like a Wanker”.

And so you bloody well should. You’ve already buggered up the footy, but if you could just leave our beautiful expressive language alone, you meddling pricks, everything would be just fine.

You can always tell when the holidays are on.

I’m not talking about public holidays, those one-day events that are merely an excuse for an epic Tuesday hangover. No, the fault here lies with those two-week clumps of school leave that always seem to hit just when I want to go somewhere nice.

Now, I don’t have kids - as mandated by the UN - not that there’s anything wrong with having them, of course. Some of my best friends are munchkin ranchers. Really.
But this being the case, why should it bother me when the dirt magnets are on the tear? Because, come evening peak hour, the way the roads work is completely different from the norm. Generally, there are only two classes of idiot that you’ll encounter. The morons going faster than you (good luck to them, I say) and the utter clowns who have the temerity to go slower.

But when the ankle biters have downed crayon, things are different. For a start, those ridiculous forty-kay signs aren’t flashing, which is actually quite good for the blood pressure. Darwin must be generating enough torque over that one to give Jeremy Clarkson a chubby: hasn’t anyone in the OH & S world ever heard of natural selection? And besides, the only person that you’ll ever see speeding in front of schools is the soccer mum with a carload of kids. You have to see her point – why should she slow down? Her kids are safe. Besides, the sooner she dumps- er, drops them off, the quicker she can get to her ‘tennis lesson’ with Miguel.

I almost don’t have the heart to point this out, but it’s also fairly pointless having the speed restriction out the front of the school. Think about it; that’s the exact point where the kids won’t be on the road. The ‘40’ signs should be in front of the real high risk areas in which the short folk congregate: - milk bars, skate parks, (pony clubs, I suppose), and the house where that year eleven girl lives. You know, the one who hit her ‘growth spurt’ over the summer.

But when the holidays are on, we swap one hazard for another. Because hols mean the kids are home, and this in turn means that swarms of nannas and pops descend like Heritage-listed Griswalds upon the built up areas in order to visit with them. Without getting into the (undoubtedly) hilariously entertaining area of family dynamics, these geriatric vacations create a problem that affects everyone, not just you breeders. Oh, shut up, you know you are.

The trouble starts at evening peak hour, when these befuddled old farts hit the highways like so many wobbly Wildebeest. With just about no idea as to either destination or route, incidentally. Just cruising along in the fast lane at a steady 28 knots with the blinker on, to the sound of nan screaming, “Clarry! SLOW DOWN!”, while maintaining a white knuckle grip on (simultaneously) her seatbelt, the Jesus handle, the dashboard, the handbrake lever, and grandad’s now-separated shoulder. Nannas have LOTS of arms – each and every one armed with a death-dealing, suffocation inducing bye-bye.

Anyway, where are they going at six in the evening? It’s not to dinner; they had that at two, and tomorrow’s breakfast around half-five. Maybe when they woke from their post-prandial nap to a dusky sky, they imagined it to be morning, and ‘got going early on the run to Dubbo’. Fine, but then why go so slowly? You’d imagine people with so little time left would be in more of a hurry.

And that’s the thing: The Olden Farts are doing forty (EVERYwhere), and they’re not very safe, now are they?

It’s probably mildly evil of me, but I’m waiting now for one of those self-congratulatory political road shows to pop up out the front of one of our fine primary learning installations during morning peak hour. Just a quick trip for the local member to pat himself on the back before your huddled masses. Showing them how, with the signs all aflash, it’s now quite safe for the year fours to play cricket on the footpath out the front.

I then imagine the local MP’s antiquated mother quite coincidentally Braille-ing her way down the main drag in a clapped out smoky behemoth, perhaps her late brother’s 65Galaxie. In no hurry of course – she’s old, after all - rhythmic braking to the beat of whatever tossy random opinion generator yaks away on 3AW nowadays. Captain Polling Booth is extolling to the assembled ante-pubescent masses the virtues of the latest safety campaign that protects not by educating - hey, this is a school, after all - but by legislating everyone else to a standstill. Just as our favourite pork barreller (does anyone actually know what that means?) gets to the part where he tells the kids they’ll never need to look before crossing the street again because the passing cars are being overtaken by foot traffic, mama ploughs through the assembly at precisely thirty-eight kilometres per hour, taking out everyone over the age of nineteen (it’s a wide car).

That’s probably only an Alanis level of irony, but oh-so-sweet nonetheless.

Now tell me; wouldn’t THAT be worth a public holiday?

Something must be done.

Ever since filming of Charlie’s Angels finished, sales of snub-nosed 0.38s have apparently just plummeted. Actually, it’s not just them – those who interacted with a certain Mr Thomas Magnum seemed to be proponents as well. Maybe it was just an 80s thing. Perhaps Sydney Sheldon had shares in the factory, I dunno. But it just seems that the class of your average thug has dropped a few rungs since that golden age when the lovely Jaclyn Smith, the hotttttt Cheryl Ladd and that other chick – Mrs King, I think she was – used to solve all manner of crimes and stuff aided by nothing but a tie-side bikini and a piece that fit in your pocket. Not today, though. Those big shiny slide guns, while admittedly quite masculine, are too much chrome in an already overly blinged world. And the Glock is just so soulless, I think. Sure, they’re efficient and well designed and all, but then they come from Sweden, don’t they?
Speaking of which (whom?), is there like some kind of handgun superstore, where you have to be in a committed kidnapper/kidnappee relationship to shop there? Outside of the ‘States, I mean. That could really work, you know. You’d get a little flat package with an Allen key and a pre-rounded Phillips head screwdriver, and by the time the thing was assembled you’d forget who you were angry at. Then there’s bound to be a vital bit missing that prevents it working at all.
That could be an effective means of – it irks me to say it – gun control. (Have to say, I’m with Ted Nugent on this one. It was he who suggested that gun control meant the ability to put two rounds through the same hole.)
Maybe we could get back to a simpler time, when just having a gun gave you an inflated sense of power and self-worth. Rather than having to have the biggest gun. Or maybe, just maybe, I’ve been watching too much day-time Tee Vee.

But everyone else is doing it...

If you are reading this, you may just have been searching for something weird and kinky. If so, you're sick, broken and wrong, not to mention filthy - but you're here now, so we'll see what we can do for you.

So why start a blog?
Everyone has an opinion, and sharing it seems to be the thing to do nowadays. The whole world is blogging; conformist moron that I am, I've joined in.
If everyone else jumped off a bridge, blah blahdity blah. I just felt that having a) nothing of value to add, b) a list of natural enemies that include light colours, horizontal stripes, bright sunlight and plastic furniture, and c) no real desire to actually work for a living, this seems like a good fit for me. Surely I can't have significantly less to say than at least a very few of the others...

So what can you expect? There's your first mistake; I'll only disappoint you if you keep that attitude up.
I'm going to tell you what I think, if and/or when I manage it. Take pot shots at those who deserve it, or maybe just because it pleases me to do so. Celebrate the ridiculous, point and laugh inappropriately - just general stuff, really.
Some days it'll be mercifully short, others will have PFC Wintergreen in a tizz over the excessively prolix prose (oh, did I mention there'll be more than a fair share of stupid obscure references?) What it boils down to is, I've a head full of useless information, and here's where it landed.

Leave any sense of balance at the door, there will be ranting.