TLASITSH

Sydney got itself one of those Apple stores. People lined up over night to be one of the first admitted to the white palace of Apple. The temple of Apple, crafted from pure white. Not white coloured materials, white. A large block of solid white was airlifted into place and craftsmen in dark goggles carved a store out of it. Reporters cruised the line talking to the freezing geeks when suddenly word spread one fellow had come all the way from America for the opening! Well sir they found him and said “Sir we understand you came all the way from America to be here” and the man said in fluent American “Uh, no. I came from Brisbane.” And the shaken reporter said hopefully “But you are American though right?” and the man said “No, Canadian actually… from Brisbane. Sorry.” But the reporter wasn’t beat and reminded us that, even if no Americans were there, it was still the Largest- Apple- Store- In- The- Southern- Hemisphere. So there.

They depend on that a lot here. Australia has the tallest wooden train trestle in the Southern hemisphere, the largest uranium mine, the biggest sheep station, the most fucked up version of English. Lots of stuff.

It’s a crafty move. What else have you got this side of the equator? South Africa? Brazil? The rest of the countries are what they call ‘developing’. It’s like at school kids don’t ‘fail’ anymore, now they are just marked ‘yet to achieve’. The rest of the hemisphere is ocean except for Antarctica which, as far as I know, has no wooden train trestles at all. Perhaps further inland but I doubt it.

I’m quite sure some Aussies don’t actually believe in the northern hemisphere at all. A mystical land where they have Christmas in the winter and there’s a country where almost all the people speak French. French! Maybe in books written by artsy people from Melbourne, but not for real.

It’s the same inferiority-compensation that Canadians are good at. America may have the world’s strongest economy (well it used to be), the most powerful armed forces, the latest in technology but Canada, Canada has the world’s longest coastline you know. Yeah.

But they know it’s lame and that’s why Canadians are apologising for not being Americans in front of The Largest Apple Store In The Southern Hemisphere.

the further adventures of Muleshoes

That’s something nobody saw coming. Globalization has been heavily protested, often violently, for years. Fears of a world where a few mega-corporations control what we consume, how we live. Sort of an Orwellian Big Brother but with attractive packaging and a catchy slogan. Those are the concerns but of course things never work out the way we predict otherwise, according to 1950’s estimates, we should all be flying around in atomic-powered Cadillac’s by now.

Seems people around the world are starting to get a tad upset over fuel prices and governments and corporations are getting nervous. Of course in a global economy you also have global-size consumers and those consumers are not used to taking shit from business. When you get a whole country-full pissed off it has a lot more power than some guy sending back his soup (never send food back, are you mental? I’ve worked in kitchens). If you get several countries pissed off, well, I’m not sure anybody knows just what would happen. Business does not like uncertainty. Governments do not like uncertainty. Some dogs do not like thunder.

Just to complete the list.

In Greece the residents of the island of Lesbos are in court trying to get women-who-prefer-to-do-their-own-carpentry to stop calling themselves Lesbians. Except the gay residents of the island which are of course already Lesbians, like everybody else living there. Even the children are little bright-eyed Lesbians, learning Lesbian history in their little Lesbian schools. There’s even a Lesbian McDonalds, but anybody can go.

Make up your own fillet-o-fish jokes.

The best my spell check could come up with for McLesbos was ‘muleshoes’. I dunno either, I guess like horseshoes but stockier and sterile.

Sounds like the indigenous sidekick in a 50’s matinee western.

“Train come soon.”

“Good job Muleshoes, how can you tell? Subtle vibrations on the tracks?”

“No. Is almost four-o-clock. Dickhead.”

Ahhh Muleshoes, you’re the greatest.

Gitmo awarded Best Offshore Military Torture Prison by Shackle Magazine.

I know a guy who’s one of those big time TV writers. Family-values type drama with a serrated edge, that’s his bag. If he wrote the Brady Bunch it would be much the same except Mike Brady would have a colostomy bag because their old dog chewed out his small intestine while he lay passed out for nine days after putting out a Valium® fire and inhaling the fumes. Valium is quite flammable. They used to fire the old trans-Atlantic steam ships on raw valium if they were attempting a record crossing. The practice was halted after the Titanic fell asleep (it’s the fumes are the problem) and hit an ice-berg.

But me, I don’t write like that. I don’t have any stories, can’t think of any. Not the kind with traditional subjects like people and places, a plot. I could write about a bucket handle, or an ant’s left back leg, or the particular odour of a particular winter afternoon in 1988 (light, clear, a little like soap). And two pages is getting wordy for those sorts of things. How anyone writes a whole novel or play or TV series or progressive rock concept album, I cannot grasp.

If you make it short enough and obscure enough you can call it a poem. I’ve written hundreds of poems, but I don’t get poetry. Can’t read other’s poetry, it’s like hearing someone describe to you their dream. It’s only interesting to them. I read a poem once in university called “Ode To A Grecian Urn”, pretty straightforward, you’d think, obviously the guy had a thing for pottery. But no, turns out it’s not about Grecian urns at all. No, it’s all symbolic and shit.

So who knows what the fuck it means except the guy who wrote it and maybe not him either. A lot of poets were opium addicts or homosexuals, both of which can be prone to absentmindedness. This is also the reason they don’t get to be president. Ok, that’s not true. There are other reasons too. When you call up Gitmo to see how the torture’s going, you don’t want any flowery bullshit, you want facts and figures. Save the iambic pentameter for when you got to explain wars and such.

I wish I was a gangsta rapper
I wish I was a hip-hop star
I wish I was a short sharp jab
That went a bit too far

I would cast my head in gold
I would cast my feet in clay
I would catch me all them sinners
Come round on judgement day

I wish I was a bill collector
High on life and rum
An inter-dimensional corrector
Doer of things un-done

All the world could follow
My antics on TV
Watch me fix the fixers
Balanced on my knee

Until I grew weary
Indistinguishable from insane
Encouraging bacteria
To feed upon my brain

I wish I was a gangsta rapper
In a gold plated car
A super techno DJ
Admired from afar