Life in 2D/3D

Ok, so my last blog entry was hideously melodramatic and vague. I feel like I should justify it now with some fantastic story about the amazingly terrible things that have happened to me, but I’m not big on the whole ‘lying’ thing, so maybe I’ll just leave it at this – Monday was a bad bad day for me. It involved many 4-letter words.
Which brings me to the subject of today’s blog – four letter words. Why is it that for a swear word to be truly effective, it has to have four letters? What’s wrong with 5? Or 6? Or even three? Talk about discrimination!
Is it something to do with the short length of the word giving it more drive? Or is it merely because the sorts of people who use the words on a regular basis are hard pressed to remember any word with more than one syllable?

I have to say that short words don’t help me when I’m angry. If I’m going to yell, I want my words to be torrential & difficult to understand. I want multi-syllable expressions and longwinded sentences that I can scream loudly at the offending animal/mineral/vegetable. How can you do that with only four letters?

Also, I’d like to know why all the naughty words are slang terms for parts of the body or things that come out of parts of the body. My theory on this is that because those things are considered ‘naughty’ things when you’re little, some subconscious part of you holds onto that childhood teaching, and just puts an adult spin on it all. I think that swear words should just be any old word that is too stupid to use in regular speech. All those words that you wouldn’t say normally because they sound silly – like ‘plinth’ or ‘schism’ or ‘vandenhoogenband’. It’s only in the heat of the moment that you could say things like that and sound serious.

Of course, doing this would require an incredible control of tone-of-voice, which means that I would fail dismally. It would make swearing that little bit more fun, though. And when you took your kids out places and people were swearing lots, it wouldn’t be a problem, because rather than them going home and repeating words which meant things like ‘faeces’ and ‘vagina’, they would be saying words that meant ‘A block or slab on which a pedestal, column, or statue is placed’ or ‘A separation or division into factions’ or ‘Buff Dutch swimmer with hard to pronounce name’.

There are no words for the incredible amount of rage and anger i feel right now. I think i might punch something.

It’s hats-off Friday, so I’d like to give a little ‘hats-off’ tribute to a few people that have come to my attention over the past few days.

Firstly, hats off to the guy who invented the ‘slow-motion-music-sequ ence’ in Baywatch. It was a fair effort on his part to put an entire 2 minute sequence into EVERY SINGLE EPISODE purely so that all the drooling males out there could watch silicon bounce – in slow motion. That’s ten years worth of slow motion running!

Secondly, hats off to the creators of the 1941 animated Disney movie ‘Dumbo’. While it may have seemed all innocent back then, it’s a fantastic effort to make a movie in which a reject elephant-baby is given a cruel nickname, his mother is branded a mental patient, he gets drunk with a mouse & sees pink elephants, he wakes up hung over - in a tree - and then learns to fly, at which time he throws a whole lot of stuff at the people who laughed at him and chases the people laughing at him into a burning building. Did I mention that he never speaks once? Good quality children’s TV.

And last but not least, a big ‘hats-off’ to Will Ferrell, who is the latest ex-Saturday-night live TV personality to jump onto the ‘make-a-cheesy-physical -comedy-movie’ bandwagon. He’ll be following in the footsteps of Mike Myers, David Spade, Adam Sandler & Chris Kattan and making incredibly stupid movies about incredibly stupid people doing incredibly stupid things that somehow save the world. Or their farm; One or the other.

HAPPY HATS-OFF FRIDAY!!!!

Alright, results are in from My Please take my Win tbucks game. I had a few entries, and since I’m much too fickle to choose one that is my favorite, I’ve given 1^st, 2^nd & 3^rd places. I’ve decided that I’ll divvy up my million t-bucks prize between them.

 

Drum Roll Please!!!!!!

 

In 3^rd place - we have the a tie. Yes, I know this means there are 4 winners, but I don’t care. I had 4 favorites, and this is the best way of doing it. So, as I was saying, in 3^rd place are JohnnyRuin whose entry was inventive & imaginative & ‘The other Mr. Andaloo (Paul) who entry (I thought) was incredibly clever.

JohnnyRuin

Bob had always been an outcast because both his ears were on the same side of his head and he could hear round corners.

 

The other Mr Andaloo

Bob had always been an outcast because of her habits

 

In 2^nd place is Andaloo whose entry I thought got into the whole spirit of the tbuck competition.

 

Andaloo

Bob had always been an outcast because he paid for his sexual favours with tbucks.

 

And in 1^st place, with the entry which I believe was the most imaginative (since I never really defined any rules, I guess I don’t have to justify how I picked the winner!) is SusanofPudlin!

 

SusanofPudlin

Bob had always been an outcast because everyone in the small town in which he resided knew the story of his selfish demand that he be the recipient of the liver he shared with his conjoined twin, Ted.

 

Congratulations, and may your tbucks bring you minutes (or at least seconds) of happiness & joy. May you cherish them and may they bring you good fortune and many irritating javascripts.

 

 

Honourable mentions also go to:

 

Audie

Bob had always been an outcast because he naturally smelled like burned whiskey poured over a fart.

 

BadAunt

Bob had always been an outcast because he never cleaned his ears and was frequently abducted by aliens.

 

Satorisam

Bob had always been an outcast because he was always cast out.

 

Vodka B

Bob had always been an outcast because he loved brie.

 

CrimsonHatred

Bob had always been an outcast because BO and brussell sprouts isn’t an attractive smell!

 

Muzak9

Bob had always been an outcast because his name spelled backward was the same as his name spelled forward.

 

I have just made a valiant effort to remove my kneecap from my body with the side of my desk. While I was unsuccessful, I was able to cause myself some excruciating pain and a large red mark, which will no doubt reappear later as a muted rainbow of bruising. This attempt was followed up closely by a second, more half-hearted attempt to slice my foot open on a CD case while hopping around in agony from my earlier failed endeavour. I think this was my punishment for spending the last week bludging at work.

I had an interesting/scary experience this weekend. Saturday was KJ’s mum’s birthday, and because he’s a workaholic, he didn’t make time to get her a present.

He knew he wanted to get her an umbrella (she’s been asking for one for months), so we had to go find a store that was open late-night so that we could buy an umbrella. Tyring to find somewhere to purchase an umbrella at 11pm on a Friday night isn’t as easy as you would think! The only places that seemed to be open were service stations - and 7-11 may have had a wide choice of toilet rolls & pornographic reading materials, but they were running short in the umbrella department. After a little scouting around, we heard on the grapevine that there was a Kmart store that was open 24 hours. Why anyone would want to shop at Kmart in the middle of the night was a little beyond me – but given the fact that I was on an umbrella quest at 11pm, I could only assume that people have all sorts of “quality goods at competitive prices” emergencies that I couldn’t even come close to imagining. We did a little digging around and discovered that the store was about 25 minutes away, which was fine – it was a nice night for a drive. The problem was that the store was in a rather questionable area of town. The kind of place, in fact, that you have to drive along with your doors locked and your windows rolled up for fear of being car-jacked. I’ve always been especially paranoid about high-crime areas & have a deep fear of being raped & pillaged. Clearly, I watch too many crime shows. Still, it’s better to be paranoid and un-raped/pillaged than the alternative.
Since this was a birthday-emergency, I swallowed my fear, and with determination, announced that if 24-hour Kmart in crimesville was the only place to purchase a last minute gift, then to crimesville we would go!! (With rolled up windows, locked doors and a tyre iron nearby just in case.)

As we sped through deserted streets in the pitch black, with nothing but the wail of a distant police siren to cut through the silence, I prayed that we wouldn’t have to stop at too many red lights. The better part of the drive was through an industrial estate. While it may have seemed deserted, my instincts told me that many a chop-shop was operating within the dark cocoon of silence, re-birthing cars that had once belonged to innocent car enthusiasts such as myself.

Alright. So the trip was uneventful. We didn’t get carjacked. We didn’t get raped and/or pillaged. Pure luck, I say. We arrived to find an almost deserted carpark. It was a vast landscape of bitumen & discarded fast food wrappers. The only signs of life were in the form of a man with a truck delivering stock to a late night food outlet and a few straggling shoppers. The delivery driver’s single tooth and torn tracksuit pants did nothing to reassure me.

The Kmart sign flickered like a cheap vacancy sign outside a seedy motel. A ‘Now Open’ sign was attached permanently to the wall in faded terracotta-coloured letters. KJ parked the car and reluctantly unlocked the doors. He turned to me and looked my in the eye.

”I love you and I’ve really enjoyed our time together. I just wanted you to know. Just in case…”

I laughed, despite my paranoia. There was a man sitting in the car next to us, who was shovelling a pizza down his throat and managing to collect the better part of it on his long, unkempt beard. He seemed oblivious to the greasy morsels that were showering his car and slipping beneath the seat. We stepped out of the car and I grabbed KJ’s arm as we started the long and daunting trek to the entrance.

There was a lone security guard at the entrance. He looked like the kind of guy who was great at fending off angry little old ladies who are fighting over discount slippers, but I didn’t think he’d do much good up against, say, a Mafioso gang or a very large, burly man named Bruno with lots of tattoos and a knife. He did, however, inform us that the store was closing in 5 minutes. This seemed kind of an odd thing for a 24-hour store to do. We queried him, and it turns out that the store with the permanent ‘now open’ sign is not always open. Probably too many stabbings or something.

So we ran around inside Kmart, frantically searching for an umbrella. I felt like a contestant in one of those weird Japanese game shows, where they run around doing silly things and if they fail, get thrown into a pit of scorpions or something equally as weird and awful.

The announcement came over the loudspeaker:

”Shoppers, the store will be closing in one minute. Please finalise your purchases.”

We ran hectically around the shelves full of pink frilly sandals and smack bang into the strangest man of all time. He looked like he had once been a pirate, but couldn’t find anywhere to sell him a new hat & eye patch and so had been forced to wear a woolly jumper full of holes and a pair of faded grey tracksuit pants instead of the usual pirate garb. His parrot had been replaced by a pigeon that flapped its wings as though trying to escape, but remained on his shoulder as though it was glued in place against its will. He scowled at us before leading an aged woman, who I can only assume was his mother, away from us and muttering with distaste.

I spotted the umbrellas a moment later, wedged in between the hats and the underwear, grabbed the first one I could reach and headed for the front counter. At the counter we were served by yet another person who was missing the better part of their teeth (are there no dentists in this suburb or what!) and we walked out of the store at a pace almost brisk enough to be called a run.
As we headed towards the car (yes, surprisingly enough, the car was still there!), the man with the parrot, mother in tow, left the store behind us. We had almost reached the car, almost made it to safety when he began to yell.

”Hey! Hey you!”

I threw a terrified look at KJ, who was fumbling madly with the keys. He had almost reached us. The pigeon was flapping it’s wings wildy. I kept expecting it to break into song, like a parrot from cheesy a pirate cartoon.

”Hey! Buddy!”

And then he was there. I leaned back, thinking that maybe KJ’s joke in the car earlier hadn’t been such a joke after all.  KJ spoke.

”Er, yeah?”

The man reached out towards us…and he was holding an eftpos card. KJ’s card.

”You dropped this back there.”

The pigeon man walked away, and KJ and I jumped into the car and got out of there as fast as we could. It was like one of those stupid stories where the big scary biker takes a bite of the little kids chocolate bar, so in defiance the kid takes a bite and they go on like that until the kid leaves and finds his chocolate bar in his pocket.
I suspect that I might be a bit of a drama queen.

My grandmother is the perfect little old lady. She epitomizes the Australian grandmother, from her cooking to her craft work to her ideas about marriage. She cooks a mean lamb roast with roast vegies, and she makes the gravy from pan juices instead of instant gravy mix. She makes the best butterfly cakes, yo-yo's, mars bar slice, and whenever we have people over, she always bring scones & pikelets with jam & cream. She does dress-making, china-painting and anything that involves sticking beading or lace onto things. She wears old lady slippers and puts her hair in curlers once a week and she always serves dinner at 6:30pm on the dot.

Tonight i visited her for the first time in quite a few weeks. She cooked me lamb roast with roast potatoes, pumpkin, beans & cauliflower with cheese sauce. She even made a chocolate pudding for dessert. She's a funny little woman. She's about 4 foot nothing which is strange because i'm about 5'10"ish, so she basically fits underneath my armpit. She's so short that she has a metal pole with a hook on the end for pulling down the blinds, and she has a step ladder to reach the food on the top shelf in the pantry.

Which brings me to another question - what is the difference between a doona, a quilt and a duvet? And why are wind (as in "it's very windy today!") and wind (as in "wind-up doll") spelt the same. Or live and live? did they run out of words or something? They could have just asked me - i'm well known for inventing new words that really should be a part of the english language. Like 'Canadia'. Canada should really be named 'Canadia'. This is because it makes no sense to live in canada and be canadian. I'm in Australia and I'm an Australian. People form Mongolia are monglians. You can't jsut take this logic of adding an 'n' to the end and use it on the end of Canada jsut because it ahs an a on the end too. Every other one has an 'ia' on the end. So therefore it should have been named canadia for them to be Canadians. Or else they should call themselves Canadans.
I had a teacher, ,many years ago who was a Canadian and he used to get incredibly upset if you asked if he was American. He was a bit strange. He was once shot in the hand by duck hunters while he was protesting in some marsh somewhere. Or so the rumor goes.

My email is stuffed. I keep sending people emails and then getting irate at them for not responding, only to find that they didn’t actually get the email in the first place. I think they’re disappearing to that place that ballpoint pens & socks run away to when they’ve had enough of the world. My emails are doomed to wander around endlessly, searching for their recipient, only to be scribbled on by frolicking ballpoint pens & smothered by odd socks – all of whom are basking in the glory of freedom.
Maybe my emails are going to people who they weren’t intended for & they’re getting angry at what’s in them & it’s creating a chain reaction sort of thing that means no one will ever respond to my emails ever again. I think that’s a less likely explanation as I don’t write anything particularly controversial in my emails. I do, however (and I think I may have mentioned this before) have trouble with tone of voice – particularly in emails. I can say things in a serious sort of way and have them come out sounding sarcastic, or I can say something as a joke and have it sound like an insult. It comes across in my writing as well – I often write people emails only to read back over them later and realise they sound really rude. Who invented this tone of voice thing anyway?
Maybe it was Bob, and that is why he is an outcast.

If t-blog was a country, and t-bucks were our currency, we would be in economic collapse. When you were little, did you ever wonder why we couldn’t just print more money so that there was enough for everyone? This is the principle that tblog works on. Every time you write a blog, 5 t-bucks are created out of thin air. It’s the internet equivalent of printing more money every time you need it. This is the reason why 99.9% of t-bloggers are multi-t-buck-millionaires . It also explains why the t-buck has no value whatsoever. If I was watching the news and they were telling me the value of the t-buck against other currencies, they would say “And today the value of the t-buck reached an all-time low…again. The t-buck is now buying you 0.0000000001 US dollars.”
Since it’s only blog currency, I think it’s nice that everyone can be so wealthy. Except that if you only have, say, T$1,000,000 you’re technically poor, because everyone else has multi millions. But it makes you feel rich. And it makes people very generous with their T$, which is nice. I recently had the wonderful honour of winning a very large amount of tbucks from Andaloo in a One-sentence-story competition type thing. It was fun – holding mini-competitions on your blog is about the only fun thing that you can do with your millions of T$. Unless of course you’re inclined to spend a whopping 25tbucks on an incredibly annoying javascript thing that will make glowing stars flash around your screen, thus making your blog impossible to read without having an epileptic fit.

Given this lack of things to do with tbucks, I’ve decided that another competition is in order. I’ll stick to the same sort of lines as Andaloo’s idea, but instead of writing a one sentence story, your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to finish this sentence in the most interesting way you can possibly think of.
No extra sentences, just an end to this one sentence. Send your entry to me in a private message & I’ll post the best entries one week from now. The person with the best entry will win a ridiculously large amount of tbucks!!!! Come on, you know you want them!!! Tell your friends. Tell your friends to tell their friends. Tell your friend’s friends to tell their friends! Tell your friends…well, you get the idea.

 

So here goes - finish this sentence:

”Bob had always been an outcast because….”

Goodluck!!!

It's 1:30am - im just heading to bed after my sister's birthday party which started at lunchtime. I'm sober enough to type this before i turn off my computer, but not so sober that i really know what i'm saying. It's been a while since i've actually done anything on a saturday night. Surprisingly, the police showed up at 10pm tonight to say they'd had complaints about the noise. My neighbours are evil. Pure evil I tell you!! Good thing the police weren't too phased about a little noise at 10pm on a saturday night.
I will blog about this later, for now this is like a place holder, so that i rememeber all the things i would like to blog about. tomorrow i wil lblog about the party, my neighbours, my subwoofer experience, my overpriced tax return & the reason why sports should be banned in Australia. Until then, goodnight, goodluck, goodbye.

My car is working again. It turns out that the brake specialists who rebuilt the brakes on the front of my car stuffed it up & didn't mention to anyone that they weren't sure they had it right. Gives you a lot of faith in the people who fix your brakes, doesn't it? to be quite honest, i'm not entirely sure that they did the job properly in the end anyway. It's making a strange sound. But that strange sound could just be the sound of working brakes. I wouldn't really know - it's been a while since mine have actually worked properly. I was used to all my car's little noises. they're the kind of little creaks and mutters that any old car makes - i barely even notice them any more. And now that my brakes have been rebuilt, they sound different. It seems wrong to hear them making noises that they shouldn't. Or maybe it's noises that they should be making. Either way, it sounds out of place and it made me nervous as i drove home. The pedal is different too. It's softer. I can't get used to it. I feel like i imagine a parent feels when they realise that their children are growing up and changing and they can't do anything about it. My baby is different and i want it to go back to how it was, but i can't. :(

My car is broken. It was semi-broken, and now it’s completely broken. Funnily enough, it was the mechanic that broke it. A year and a half of driving it without anyone touching it, and the second a real mechanic touches it, it whimpers, sobs loudly, and has a complete breakdown. It’s not that he’s a dodgy mechanic – in fact he’s quite the opposite. He’s worked on my car once before and he did a fantastic job. He also does lots of little jobs on the car without charging me for them. It’s just that my car is old and old cars don’t like to suddenly have old, weary parts work like new. It makes the other old, decrepit parts jealous & they crack the shits and pack it in. It’s the brakes that are broken – minor thing, not hugely important anyway. After all, who really uses brakes these days anyway? I’d say roughly about the same amount of people who still use indicators.
The mechanic was very apologetic – I think he thought I would blame him for it and crack the shits at him. He sounded like a little kid when he said “I did everything like I normally would, but when I tried to bleed the brakes…well, I just can’t get any pressure. The pedal just sinks straight to the floor. But I didn’t do anything out of the ordinary!” He’s a nice man. Unfortunately, this meant that I was stuck at the mechanics. While waiting for someone to come and pick me up, I thought it would be a good idea to start walking – just to save them from having to drive the whole two minutes to the mechanics. I was wrong. It was windy as hell. To the people in their cars, I must have looked like a mime doing a walking-into-the-wind act – I was practically horizontal. My clothes looked like they were vacuum-sealed to the front of my body. All the people in their cars on their way home from work were throwing me smug looks. I know they were all thinking how nice and warm they were and how cold I must be and feeling just that little bit good about themselves. I’m sure that’s what they were thinking – it’s what I would be thinking if I were them.
To top things off, it started to rain. So now I am cold, wet, uncomfortable and stuck at work until KJ decides to leave, which, knowing him will be sometime around midnight. Expect much blogging. I’ll need something to keep me amused…

Recently while dining at my favourite Japanese restaurant, i had the pleasure of experiencing an imported Japanese beer. Clearly, it wasn't as good as Australian beer - that just goes without saying. Australian beer is the best in the world. That's right, you heard me - In the World. Regardless of which country is resposible for inventing the stuff - we do it best. I've tried a lot of different beer, and i have to say that nothign compares to a good, cold Australian beer. American beers are like water, English beer is warm, german beer is bland. Now this Japanese beer. This Japanese beer was kind of scary. It's the only beer i have ever seen that looks like it is being produced by an ex-artillery factory.
It's called Sapporo Beer, and it comes in a tall, silver metal can which bears an uncanny resemblance to a missile shell. Or rather, to what i think a missile shell looks like. I can't claim to have ever seen a missile first hand.
I think the star on the front has a particularly russian-war sort of look. The thing that really caps it off is that the call it a Draft Beer. Purely coincidence? I think not.. Everyone knows it's Draught Beer. I think maybe they're trying to keep with the war theme.
The one thing that i really did like about the beer was that the can is 800ml. That's right - 800ml. None of your silly 375ml business. It's a longneck in a can. Fantastic!

Why do goldfish get flushed down the toilet after they die, when every other kind of pet gets buried? I can't work out if it's a symbolic gesture in returning them to the water or if it's a terrible fate that fish the world over would dread - if only their memory lasted longer than three seconds.

Just an Update: it is currently 10:01pm. Still waiting to hear from KJ. Coctktail party will probably be well and truly finished by the time i arrive. If i arrive at all.

Needless to say, I am quite angry. Livid, in fact.

Men.

Ok, i admit it. I've been lazy and i haven't blogged in a week. It's way too long. And in fact, i barely have time now, but i'm making the effort because i feel bad. I said i would try to blog at least every few days, but at this rate it will turn into every few weeks.
Tonight i'm headed to a cocktail party. the new sales rep at work is having it. She invited everyoen from work, and KJ and i said that we would go because we figured that all of our work pwople would be there too, so it wouldn't be too bad. On friday afternoon, we found out that we were the only work people going. So now there's no getting out of it. We will be spending our saturday night drinking cocktails with a bunch of boozed up ex-nurses who will spend the whole night talking about how they need to find a man soon, because they're runnign out of time to have kids.
i shouldn't complain. Without the cocktail party, tonights entertainment would have consisted of...well, let me think...oh, that's right - nothing. How depressing. My social life has ceased to exist as of late. people keep popping out babies and now they have children to look after on a saturday night instead of drinking themselves silly. And it's just no fun drinking yourself silly on your own. It's more tragic than silly. And no one wants to join you on a night out to drink yourselves tragic.
I'm beginning to even doubt that we will be going to the cocktail party. It starts at 8pm on the other side of Mlebourne. It's currently 7:57pm. How late is fashionably late, anyway? At what time does being fashionably late turn into being appallingly late? I'm not even ready yet. I should go. the quality of the blog entry is terrible, i know. I'll make up for it soon. really, i promise!