screens of pain

Don’t let the screen door hit you on the way out. If you let it, it will just keep doing it. Don’t let it, discourage it. Speak sharply to it, make eye contact. Try to appear taller.

Either that or disconnect the spring at the top.

This also works with threatening dogs, except the spring part, dogs have no springs. That’s threatening, not committed. You can tell from the eyes. A dog that has made up its mind to attack does not bark and is looking where he plans to go. If a dog is looking you in the eye it’s because he’s worried what you might do. When he stops looking it’s because he doesn’t care. That’s a committed dog.

Screen doors lack the ability to form such commitment. They are never sure, confident. You might slam them, which is bad for them. Also they are usually fixed to a door frame or other solid object which means they are more opportunist than predator. Hyenas of the home. This is why the screen door usually strikes from behind. Unless it is of the sliding variety in which case it tries to clip you from the side if it senses you are drunk or wounded. Or stupid.

And so it is, with a summer storm rolling in, Jessie the Dog who is afraid of nothing except thunder came up against the cunning tactics of the screen door - blocking her path, standing between the devil thunder and the safety of the space in the laundry room between the freezer and the wall. And, like a lion harried by nipping hyenas, when she decided to take on the screen with all her doggy force it was of little contest.

The carnage is difficult to imagine. The lower panel of screen in tatters, the upper panel grieving. Mosquitoes calling to their kin “the walls have fallen, the humans are ours.”

And now the storm breaks, the wind whips, the temperature drops and the rain begins to smash down, stripping the newly blossomed Jacaranda flowers from the trees.

So I don’t care because I’m closing the doors and windows anyway. Stupid dog can stay out there. Tomorrow I will repair the screen to confound and puzzle the mosquitoes (“no really, you could get right inside, where they live. They have pay TV”) but the screen will not care. Will not be grateful.

This is why I tell you not to let it hit you on the way out, give it no quarter, cut it no slack. Be firm with it, don’t take any shit, but don’t slam it. That’s bad for them.

a damn good rodgering

War

(huh)

What is it good for?

Settling political disputes.

(good God, y’all)

Say it again.



Wait till we get some more planets. Then we’ll have some wars, boy.

Mars is like Earth Lite® - most of the gravity without the annoying oxygen-rich atmosphere or embarrassing liquid water.

There are no fish on Mars. I’m certain of it. Now.

I hear India is planning to land a million men on the moon. I stole that one out of the newspaper. A column by one of those urbane metro-sexual types. Urbane, it’s a word, not urban, not ghetto, urbane. Like the people in an F. Scott Fitzgerald gig. Like an RAF Group Captain in a 1950’s British war movie named Rodger. Steady-on, Rodger.

Did you know, between 1939 and 1945 very few babies born in England were named Heinrich Himmler? Quite a few Rodgers though.

And they all went on to be RAF Group Captains.

“Rodger, whatever’s the matter?”

“Oh Dick we’ll never find the target in this bally fog! Sorry, …I didn’t mean to lose control.

“Quite alright considering the circumstances old man. Now, let's see how much scotch we can drink in 20 minutes.”

I stole the scotch line too. From an urbane comedian. So it’s ok because it’s in context or something.

Whatever. There’s still no fucking fish on Mars.

(huh)

Say it again.

why I like economic disasters

Now here’s something you don’t see everyday. While the US and England and the rest are tossing buckets of money at their failing banks, the Australian government is hucking it at the people. Everybody with kids is getting $1000 for each kid, retired folks are getting $2000 each just for being old. If you are buying your first home the government will slip you a cool 21K.

Young childless renters get fuck all.

The hope is we’ll spend the money on plasma TVs and fast food to stimulate the retail sector in time for Christmas.

Meanwhile I have become a smoker who is bothered by cigarette smoke. Fate having yet another little ironic dig at my expense. I swear cigarette smoke, in anything less than a class 3 gale, will stream directly into my nearest eye. Even in wind you can see the smoke fighting, resisting, trying to return to complete its mission to annoy me ceaselessly.

I was going to say annoy the living shit out of me. But I have no idea what living shit is. Doesn’t sound like something one would want within one. You’d think you’d want it annoyed out of you. But I can’t speak for everyone.

I'd rather be a ten year old cheerleader than a GWB

Last year P4’s cheerleading team won state and got 4th at nationals. This year they got 6th at state and won the nationals. Obviously the judges at these things are drunkards.

Meanwhile,

Sara Palin reminds me of the female villain on Kim Possible. At least I could see her going that way after a time. Some long black rubber gloves, crazy goggles…

What’s-his-name, the guy she’s running with, he’s looking more and more like Hank Hill’s dad.



Obama worries me too. He fits the profile in US politics for getting shot at. He should try to stand behind Sara Palin if possible.

And poor old GWB, what a time he’s had. Squeaked in by a whisker through some mighty dodgy election shenanigans and Inherited the Kingdom of Clinton, booming economy, all the soldiers on their own side, blowjobs in the Oval Office, and what happened? It all fell to shit on him, poor bastard.

9/11, Afghanistan, Guantanamo Bay naked prisoner stacking, Iraq, more Afghanistan, an anthrax scare, more Iraq, and to top it all off, the end of Free-market Capitalism and one of the corner-stones of US foreign policy in the most spectacular economic disaster yet seen. And of course more Iraq and Afghanistan.

It certainly wasn’t all his fault, for some of it he was just lucky. Yup, Clinton spent his two terms playing bad saxophone, eating Big Macs and inventing new uses for cigars while all GWB's cigars exploded in his face.

(muted trumpet)

Kevin The Brave

Well, sports fans better fill you in on recent events:

Wall Street fell apart.

SJ lost his job.

Wall Street got better.

SJ got another job.

Wall Street fell down again.

SJ got another, other job.

Wall Street ran away and joined the navy where it realized it could love other men without being a homo.

SJ finds itself with a better, easier, less stressful job closer to home and for more money. Hell, I save at least $80/week on fuel. And possibly a second, sub-contract job which pays even better. We shall see. As Jutratest once wisely said, God has a plan. By God he meant Alyssa Milano. He’s had a thing for her since Who’s The Boss.

However my old company - which did not crash and burn but rather trundled along like a garbage truck on fire rolling down a gentle slope until it just stopped there, smoking slightly – still owes me close to ten grand in unpaid wages and other benefits which I am not likely to ever see.

Maybe GWB could bail me out. I hear he’s giving away money. The Australian Prime Minister, Kevin Rudd, is in New York at the moment going around agreeing with people and delivering speeches to a half empty UN gathering. He’s all for the bail-out. It’s not his money. Hell you could buy Australia for 800 billion if you threw in some free steak knives.

What do you expect from a leader named ‘Kevin’? Kevin The Brave, that’s him. Firmly on the side of GWB or Popular Opinion, whichever is easiest.

I’m sorry I called you sports fans earlier. Maybe you hate sports. Perhaps you prefer the term enthusiast. I shouldn’t assume.

with joy on my shirt

Mother koala on the road tonight, little wee baby on its back. Baby kangaroos hopping across the road in the mornings, sparrows trying to nest here in the laboratory. The government declared spring began on September 1st and damn it if the critters didn’t listen. Marsupials are very civic minded.

Real team players, the pouched ones. They delegate well and work cohesively as a pro-active unit within their defined roles. That’s not to say they enjoy role-playing. For that they need to be forced. It’s hard to get them to wear the boots.

There is a little cafe in the village run by a lovely women whom I have known for some years. She will not wear the boots either, however she has a burger named after me, which I think is a far better endorsement on one’s character than any medal or parchment paper. It is a bacon-cheese-mushroom burger by the way, which Australians think I invented. It had not occurred to them to combine these ingredients before since none of them are pickled beet-root.

And now it has been announced P3 will be working there part-time. Oh joy doth burst from my heart and runneth down my shirt. P3’s first job only five minutes from home, with someone I know, who cooks great lasagne and names burgers after me.

Yes government-declared spring has sprung, the light is clearer. The air is warmer. I smell mushrooms.

Salted Hippies

To drum up a little interest in the blog I’ll be offering $5 for every comment left from now until the end of the year. To receive your prize simply send a S.A.S.E for each comment, along with a money order for $11.95 to cover shipping and handling in US, Canadian, Australian or one of the other good dollars, and I’ll send you five crisp Zimbabwean dollars by registered mail.

Ahhh Zimbabwean dollars, as plentiful as grains of sand, but not hardly as useful. You can’t drop Zimbabwean dollars one at a time on ants to make them think their god is punishing them by making it rain boulders. They don’t fall straight. Ants are not afraid of them. They have no concept of currency. Ants are like hippies, mindless robotic hippies with too many legs.

You throw a Zimbabwean dollar at a hippy, see if they care. Fuckers.

Now you got me all riled up about the hippies. Only thing worse than a hippy is a French hippy. Stinky French hippies, can’t stand them.

I got some McDonalds french fries the other day, I’m going somewhere with this, and there was no salt on them. I’m not one of those salt-people that has to put salt on everything, but man, McDonalds fries without salt taste really bad. Not like fries without salt, more like socks without salt.

Which is ironic because they only way to get rid of stinky, sock-like, French hippies is to pour salt on them, one grain at a time, which makes them think their god is punishing them by making it rain tiny boulders.

The wheel turns.

f O o l

I’m nobody’s fool. I am an independent.

The Olympics is on. Men are running and jumping, huffing and puffing, exchanging precious oxygen for evil CO2. The Olympics is ruining the planet. Also the Special Olympics at a lesser, albeit just as valid, rate. Last night they ran the 400m relay combined hurdles, heat 2, and sea levels rose half an inch. We need to find an alternative to coal-burning athletes.

What we need is an engine that runs on CO2 or rhetoric. A rhetorical engine.

What if we could lead hypothetical lives? You could ring up work and say “hey, if I was to come in today, what do you suppose I’d be doing” and they’d say “well, you know same old stuff, except we are having a staff BBQ at lunch because Tanya is leaving on Thursday, but she actually has Thursday’s off and she has clients Wednesday so we’re doing it today.” And you could reply “well let’s just say I came in and all that happened and you paid me a bonus”

You know, it would go on like that for a while but neither of you would know how to end it and you’d be trapped in a hypothetical discussion forever and our naïve dreams that a hypothetical society of hope and freedom where we have the freedom to hope will be crushed by it’s very enslavement of us in that cruel irony fate reserves for the worst of sinners and bus drivers.

I am an independent fool. I fought a battle with myself in the 1700’s. There is a flag, embassies in all major cities, the money is hard to copy.

I am an independent fool and if I close my eyes you cannot see me.

Why not to have girls:

SJ: Here, pose for a photo to email grandma (click)
P4: How was that? Was it sexy enough?
SJ: (!) There will be no being sexy at ten years old. Or twenty.
P4: Probably by then I won’t be able to help it.

Also I was thinking, as you do, about what fairytale character I might want to be if I was forced into such a situation. You know in Snow White, the Woodsman guy that lets her go instead of chopping of her head like the evil step-queen-witch said? I’d be that guy.

He said “look I’ll let you go but I’ll need to chop off your finger or something to show the old lady. I need this job until I get my firewood business up and running. And whatever you do, stay away from those freak-ass dwarves.”

And then you don’t hear from him again. His story-obligation is over. And, because he’s technically a Good Guy, he gets more royalties than, say, the evil mirror. It’s a union thing.

even megalomaniacs get the blues

That girl on the radio, if you should drive down there, if you should head on down there to destroy her, make sure you go in style. If you're gonna make your way down, through the gates of hell, you can’t take the Corolla or the Jeep Wagoneer. No. If you’re going through hell on a radio death mission you got two choices of transport my young sir. You got your flaming 1974 Gran Torrino wagon, flat black with the back doors welded shut and the rear window stuck down, that’s number one, then you got your flaming death cycle which looks like Batman’s Bat Cycle except the speedometer is in kilometres and it’s flaming. But not like the Bat Out Of Hell Meatloaf flaming bat cycle, that one was just made up. Some artist made that one up. Meatloaf was too busy making up songs which feel like someone poking you in the chest, songs which bring the roaring and make you want to head downtown, 3 miles past hell, to destroy the radio girl.

She uses too much inflection. She is her own Doppler effect. If an air-raid siren could read an ad for Sleep City Warehouse they wouldn’t need her. Like a fat worm doing the Soul-Train chug-a-chug into your brain. Oops there goes the left side, better head out.

Take the Torrino, on second thought, it’s chilly out there. I taped over the window, it should hold, and when you go through hell don’t forget to toss out a silver dollar so’s they keep the gates open for you. I’ll wait for your call, the signal it’s been done, or you can text me. Or, if the radio girl wins, if she warbles you down, sets up a harmonic resonance within your molecular structure, reducing you to a pool of burst-cell ruptured bio-mass at her feet, well then don’t worry about it, I'll get by.

But I fooled them, I did have the rabies.

One government agency won’t accept the letter another government agency gave me to prove I’m a legal resident of this country. “This letter is from 2004”, they said, “you’ll need to get another one.” I pointed out that I was granted permanent residency in 2004, so it makes sense the letter is dated as such. Let’s listen….

“Hmmf. Do you have your passport with you?”

“No, it’s expired anyway.”

“You don’t have a current passport?”

“No, do you?”

“I don’t need one.”

“Do I?”

“Uh, well, if you plan to travel overseas you do.”

“And you don’t?”

“Everyone does. But I’m not travelling.”

“I’m just on my way home from work.”

“Do you own any property here in Australia?

“Better, I own property right here in town.”

She keeps flipping my driver’s license over in her hands, “What’s this address on the back? Is this your property, the address on the front, or the one on the back?”

“Both.”

“But you can’t have two addresses on your license.”

“The one on the back is the stick-on change of address label they gave me when I moved. You have to put that on.”

“So you… so this one on the back is yours then.”

“No, well yes. Both are mine.”

“You live in two houses?”

“No I live in the one on the back.”

“But… you still own the other one, on the uh (flip) front, is that it?”

“That’s it.”

“Well we need a tax notice or something like that to prove you own property. Would you suppose you might have something like that?”

“I’m sure I would have something like that. I got one last month.”

“And we’ll need a new letter from Immigration.”

“But why? I’m already in your system, you just didn’t send me a new [Medicare] card when my last one expired.”

“Why have you waited until now, your last card expired two years ago?”

“I didn’t need to see a doctor until now. And now it looks like I can’t.”

“Since it’s been more than six months you have to re-apply. We need a new letter from Immigration.”

“But I never applied in the first place, you just started issuing me cards. Then you stopped. Well not you. You know. Them.”

“If it was less than six months…”

“Ok so if it was less than six months you would accept the letter dated 2004 but now you want a new letter, saying exactly the same thing, but dated recently because some letters degrade into forgeries over time?”

She unconsciously began to finger the paper of the letter and told me all about the six month thing again and it was clear all was lost. I now have to leave this mildly irritating example of bureaucracy, a tiny local office with a staff of two, and enter the maw of the beast that is the mighty Department of Immigration and Multicultural Affairs in Sydney. DIMA must hire a lot of the people it processes because every time I call there I get someone who can’t speak fucking English and knows nothing of Australia except their neighbourhood in bloody Redfern (Sydney). I once had to call 4 different times until I got someone who could give me a list of doctors in my (non Sydney) area certified to give me a medical exam for my immigration application, make sure I don’t have the TB or the rabies.

“I live on the North Coast, not Sydney, is there anyone up around here?”

“There’s one in Parramatta…”

Parramatta is to Sydney what Oakland is to San Francisco except there’s no collapsible bridge. Parra-fucking-matta would have saved me 20 minutes off a 6 hour drive.

No I’m not looking forward to this. Also this damn letter is going to cost $100 according to the website. But the nice thing about bureaucracies is that they’re like slot machines, same dollar – different pictures. I might just go try my luck at a different medicare office, I hear the one on the other side of town is paying out…

Seige Weapon Of Mass Destruction

Here's a little something I knocked up over in the lab on the weekend. Something to keep the barbarians away from the gate.

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

Not (going to be) Easy Being Green

If the earth was a business, if it were to be managed properly, you’d kill off all the animals that you couldn’t eat, experiment on, or ride for amusement. You’d wipe out the forests and plant food crops. You’d take money spent on weapons and reality TV and use it instead to create ways to regulate the environment. You’d look into mining the moon, cold fusion, nano-construction, that sort of gear.

You do that and things should tick right along. And you’ll have to, eventually.

What else can there be? Eventually we’ll all be standing shoulder to shoulder in a living museum where we can’t touch anything or it might go extinct and with better and better medicine we’ll get to stand there a long time, while more and more of us keep popping up. Something’s got to give. It’s simple physics.

There isn’t room for everything.

Should we do the noble thing and kill ourselves off to save the planet? Mass cullings every century, or generation. Our entire species becoming Jesus? It’s only purpose to constantly sacrifice itself to save the world. Caretakers of a garden, nurturing and aiding the other species and then throwing ourselves into the sea or maybe a volcano. Which ever was handy. Maybe the bodies would have to be shot into space, as burying or burning them would contaminate the garden. Rocket powered Ascension to Eden. Go Jesus Go.

Heavy.

Ah, well that won’t happen for a little while yet. Not my problem. Every age had it’s problems. The Middle Ages had that pesky Black Death, the Thirties had the Depression and the future will have the Jesus thing. My only problem is the price of diesel fuel. Not that bad really. Probably won’t die from it. Now and then there’s a lull I guess.

magma

I dreamed the centre of the earth was accessible to all for a small fee and we went down there one Sunday morning, my sweetie and me. They put you on a sort of fire-proof roller coaster except it doesn’t go up and down, just down. And there’s a bar. Umbrella drinks are popular. They are fire-proof umbrellas for safety.

And we got to sit at the front and my sweetie turned to me and said “we get to sit at the front” and I nodded. I thought it was odd there were windshield wipers, but I’m no geologist. Neither is she. Not anymore.

A man in a blue cap, he also had pants, took our tickets and we were soon under way. When we reached 10 thousand leagues under the surface a pleasing female voice told us to put on our 10 thousand league glasses for safety and to help extinguish our individuality. It says about the glasses right on the ticket so you got to wear them. My dreams are strict. I got arrested once in my dream and couldn’t make bail. I did thirty days. Everyone thought I was in a coma.

After about three hours we pulled into Earth Central which is just what you’d imagine: a vast ball of molten rock and iron, but more commercial. You can’t get out or anything cause of the molten-ness but you are allowed to take non-flash photography. Sweetie took a picture but it just came out red.

And then we climbed the ladder back to the surface which took most of the afternoon, and found our car had been broken into. The portal to the centre of the earth is in a bad area, as you would expect. They took all our change and a Kleenex box full of raw opium we had been saving but I didn’t call the cops. I didn’t need any more trouble from them. I can’t face another coma.

Stickening Situation

More in our series of foods I have never eaten:

28) Coal.

Now tonight’s episode. The truck was making a funny ‘worp worp’ sound and I was worried it might be the differential. Turned out to be a stick stuck up in the suspension, rubbing on the inside of the wheel, and I was relieved. The next day the truck developed a melodic ‘fffffffwiiiiiing’ sound, a bit like brakes, and I was again worried about costly repairs. I hate doing brakes. But it was another stick, other side this time, jammed way up there above the back axel and rubbing at the inside of the tire. And I was again relieved at the simple nature of the problem.

Except now I think people are sticking sticks, someone stuck a stick, how are sticks getting up there?

Do I need stick guards? Can you get them this time of year?

I saw a documentary once and these apes, chimps I think, or possibly Frenchmen, were just sort of sitting around and this really mental one with an erection came screeching out of the bush brandishing a big stick and causing a general ruckus.

That’s another way sticks can be a problem.

I used to go around picking up all the sticks on the lawn, but now I just mow them over. It’s not good for the mower but it was made in USA and if it breaks they give you another one free. As long as you’re not a terrorist, the friend of a terrorist or be able to spell terrorist, then there is a small shipping and handling fee.

I tell you one thing, that fucking monkey was a terrorist. Running around like that with his woody and his stick, scaring all the other chimps. Someone could lose an eye. Nobody loves a one eyed chimp. Or Frenchman. Could have been Frenchmen. You know, the more I think about it…

I’m worried the French have found my compound and are taking the sticks off my lawn and jamming them up under my truck, causing it to make odd sounds. Almost like they’re trying to communicate with me.

What can they want? Cheese? I have no cheese. Not much. Shit.

US channeled top secret Burma footage, hogs to self

Hey what’s the deal? I’m watching The News Hour With Jim Lehrer, hosted by a woman who is not Jim Lehrer, and they have a report from Burma which is also Myanmar, and the non-Jim lady warns it may contain ‘images of a disturbing nature’ and suddenly I get a blue screen with the words VIDEO FOR THIS REPORT RESTRICTED while the audio continues to run in the background. SBS, the network airing it here, apparently, found it too disturbing for Aussies.

What the hell was in it, that is ok to air in America but not Australia? Australia where nudity and swearing in the media is common and R-rated films are shown un-cut on TV. Australia where there is an ad depicting two gentlemen playing a piano duet with their erect penises (peni?)...

And then there's America where I’m not sure if they’re allowed to say ‘shit’ yet on network TV, where Janet Jackson’s nipple threatened to bring about the end of days, where people go to the bathroom or washroom but never the toilet. What the hell could be ok for America but not Australia?

WHAT WAS IT?

I must know. Ok, what are the facts:

1) The only people who don’t want bad pictures coming out of Burma is the government of Burma.

2) Australia is sort of close to Burma geographically, kind of, if you sort of tilt your head.

3) Slugs have two different types of slime – one for clinging to things, and one for traveling.

No. I still can’t work it out.

give

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