Some dude down south was charged with (and I shit you not) discharging a missile after throwing a computer hard drive at a bouncer's head. WTF?

A computer hard drive is hardly the stuff that the military are going to pack into their guns and shoot enemies with. Bullets are still cheaper than hard drives in bulk quantities, although I suppose if you're going to shoot someone, shooting them with a hard drive with a guns usual projectory force is going to do quite a bit of damage and they're a bit bigger than a bullet so the chances of missing someone are substantially reduced.

So charging him with discharging a missile strikes me as being incredibly humorous. He was charged with assault too; you'd think just being charged with assault would be enough, given that he actually did assault the guy, but apparently whoever wrote up the charges had PMS in a big way. It seems kind of stupid to me that if they're charging a dude who lobs some hardware at someones head with this, it would make sense to charge people who shoot and kill people with both murder and discharging a missile.

Anyway, I think I'm missing the most important issue here.....

Where the hell did a guy get a computer hard drive from in the middle of the night, in the middle of town, to throw at a guys head?

When I eat at fast food places (I decline to call them restaurants as they are clearly not designed for a gourmet eating experience to rave about) I have a dilemma. A BIG dilemma.

I like burgers, but....

I hate sauces. Tomatoes are disgusting and I refuse to eat them in any shape or form, especially as a sauce, mayonnaise is made from eggs which make my intestines act crazy and tastes like crap anyway and barbeque sauce is only tolerable in very small doses. Everything else seems to be a weird combination of all of these sauces. What kind of sick bastard puts tomato sauce AND mayo on a burger anyway? Freaks.

I also firmly believe that salad has no place in fast food. Oh I have no problem with salad itself, I just hate it when it looks and tastes like it's been in someone's sweaty arse for six hours, which it inevitably does at every fast food outlet.

Finally, I love bacon. Who doesn't love bacon? Bacon is the king of all meats and should ideally be consumed at every meal.

So how do I address these issues? Well I ask for bacon burgers with meat and cheese only. Every fast food place has a button that says "meat and cheese only" on it. Simple you would think wouldn't you. But do you know what the real dilemma is? I say I want a bacon cheeseburger with meat and cheese only... guess what I get asked EVERY single time?

"Do you want bacon on that?" WTF!!!! Bacon comes from pigs, pigs are animals and therefore meat. It's not a dairy product, soy based pretend food or a salad. Of course I fucking want bacon on it you bloody twat or I wouldn't have ordered a goddamn bacon cheeseburger, I'd have ordered a cheeseburger!

I got a death glare from a McDonald's manager today. The sweet 12 year old youth at the counter knew exactly what I was on about and processed the order perfectly (yes, I checked). The pimply apathetic wanker teenager out the back making the burger yelled out at me "Do you want bacon on that if it's meat and cheese only?" The death glare came when I just yelled back "Bacon IS meat, or at least it was the last time I checked"

People are fucking stupid.

The other day while I was hurriedly scoffing down my breakfast at uni, alternating between furiously puzzling out math questions and distracting myself with my shiny iPhone, I came across an interesting article on ABC News that really got me thinking. Yes, ABC News - curiously, while I no longer have a job with internet restrictions I still manage to always find myself at the ABC News homepage searching for clues as to the current state of depravity within the world. Mainly I theorise it's because it's the only news website without countless insufferable ads, it's easily laid out and if I want to find out what's going on in Finland, they make use of a rather excellent tagging system enabling me to find what I want to know with very minimal fuss. Without further ado - the article

The article is about a debate in the UK over the possibility of social networking being "exploited by extremists". Essentially, the Home Office is considering monitoring the use of sites like Facebook and Myspace in an attempt to see who's socialising with who, apparently without any interest as to the content of private conversations.

That's a bit of a stupid statement really. Logically speaking, if you're concerned about who someone is talking to you would be interested in the content of those conversations. Even the nastiest of nasty people have families, co-workers, actual friends, support workers and the like, whom they are perfectly entitled to engage in benign conversation with and who have nothing to do with any illicit activities said dodgy dude might be involved with. You'd really need to know the subject of the conversation to weed out these kind of innocuous social entanglements, otherwise you might accidentally accuse someone of being a terrorist associate based on the fact that they're the 'friend' or 'friend of a friend' of a person of allegedly dubious intentions. But that wasn't what I was thinking about.

A Liberal Democrat, Tom Brake, voiced his opinion; "Plans to monitor our phone and email records threaten to be the most expensive snooper's charter in history". I disagree. With the amount of personal and private information people seem to be very free about putting on Facebook or Myspace, the government doesn't really need to spend any money attempting to monitor people.

Seriously, just log onto Facebook and click through some friends of friend's pages. You'll be amazed at what you can learn. Phone numbers, personal addresses, email addresses, employment histories, schooling histories, names of friends, photos of everything they've ever done, their political alignment and religious ideologies, 25 fun facts, what they did ten years ago, five years ago and now, pictures of their houses and cars and babies, who their best matches are in a variety of quizzes, where they’ll be at any given time, where they’ve been and where they’re going and that's before you even start reading the comments people leave.

Once you get to the comments people write each other, you get a complete sense of who that person is, enough to make it reasonable that any intelligent person with a skill for disguises has a complete unending supply of people to impersonate. Levels of literacy, the things they place importance on (everyone knows that 'profiles' are all wank), how they treat their friends and family and whether or not they're a total dickweed or a decent person are all able to be easily discerned. You can even find out how they know certain people... "Y went to X school with Z", or "A dated B in high school", or "C and G worked together at S place".

I was a bit miffed when I first read the article and thought to myself "Invasion of privacy alert!" but then I realised that it's really not an invasion of privacy when people put the amount of shit that they do on their public profiles. Not only that, but anyone who knows how to use Google properly can search for anybody's name and likely find a few articles about whoever they are searching for. Newsletters their names might be mentioned in, sporting clubs and match/title results, university webpages, you name it. It's all out there for anyone to find.  Case in point - searching for my real name nets you three pages of results. Every single one of them pertains to me. If anyone decided to come looking for me, it wouldn't be terribly hard to find me.

So while I was eating that muffin and doing my maths homework (which, as it turns out, with proper application I am actually very good at) I came to the saddening realisation that there are no secrets left in this world. Whether that's a good or bad thing remains to be seen.

Imagine for a moment if you will, that you are a passionate art student. Your entire being centres on creating one spectacular work of art that will define your career and indeed your whole existence. You spend years refining your technique, studying the masters of the ages, experimenting with colours and mediums and searching deep within your soul for the tiniest spark of inspiration.

*SPARK!* You have been inspired.

 
Now, providing that you haven’t died from malnutrition from living up to the starving artist stereotype, overdosed on drugs, been infested by colonies of bacteria from not washing your hair or clothes for ten years, choked on your own self importance or died of boredom from listening to one too many existential debates, you are ready to embark on your journey to fame and fortune.

It is the time for careful preparation; you plan your stunning masterpiece, select your canvas, lay out your brushes and paints and then it is time. You pick up your brush and years of intense study and a lifetime of passion comes to life.

As you paint, you think about the greats.

Boticelli:

Rembrandt:

Michelangelo:

And then…

There is you:

I am no artist. I am no critic. But this painting is, for lack of a better word, fucking atrocious. How in the world does it deserve 25K and a 3 month stint in a Parisian art school? This looks like something my 2 year old cousin would finger paint at kindergarten. The crap that my old flatmate and I painted when we trashed some furniture, drank a few bottles of passion pop and decided to use what was once a desk as a canvas had more artistic merit than this.

The artist describes her style; "I am highly influenced by colour, the experience of creating line and the effect of random mark making." I am of the firm belief that this is artist talk (making stupid statements in fancy language that you pull out of your arse trying to make yourself sound like some kind of intellectual deep thinker) for “basically no thought went into this at all and I’m a no talent poseur”.

People need to stop paying money for this crap, because by these standards, even a blind dog could be classified as an artist. It’s a wonder we aren’t all trying to dig out the shit we made in preschool and trying to flog it off on ebay as some kind of contemporary art genius.

I have a rabid dislike of pompous jerks who call themselves artists when in fact they do nothing more than plop a few colours around in random patterns and then make wanky statements about the meaning behind it; “life is all about random chance, this painting signifies my own internal struggle trying to overcome the cards that fate has dealt me”.

Oh and 90% of them don’t wash their hair, they smell bad and spend too much time smoking pot and debating political science to realise their head is up their arse and everyone is wishing painful and ironic death upon them.
 

Correct me if I am wrong, but Australia is a mostly democratic society. Sure we're technically held in thrall to that Queen chicky over in England, but it's not like she actually really governs us, except as a figurehead only. The question I've been asking myself lately however, is why is my government beginning to treat me as though my opinions don't matter and that my ability to choose my own actions is questionable and hiding it behind a facade of "protection"?

Firstly, Belgian Gardens State School in Townsville has banned children from doing cartwheels, handstands or basically anything that could be considered to be of a 'gymnastic' origin. Education Queensland, naturally run by the government, has defended the principal's decision. What a crock of shit.

It's a ridiculous decision for the principal to have made and I most certainly violently oppose it. What gives us the right to stop kids playing at being kids? Oh that's right. We're a litigation happy culture, that's why people are making stupid decisions like this, all because some stupid bitch got her knickers in a knot because her kid fell over playing tiggy or hurt themselves in an athletics carnival. It's all part of being a kid and growing up! Shit, if I had to count the number of times I'd hurt myself playing tiggy, in an athletics carnival, being naughty when nobody was looking or just being a kid it would be an integer of monumental proportions. I think I sprained/twisted ankles and wrists on average about once a month, broke a few bones here and there and fell over, cut myself and got covered in bruises somehow just about every other day. If I sued Education Queensland or my gymnastics coach every time I hurt myself I'd have single handedly bankrupted the state. And that's just me! If my brother Connor had done it he'd have bankrupted the entire country, that kid is made of stitches I swear.

Kids are kids and I reckon half the reason that teenagers today are such useless little fuckwits is because years ago the Government decided that mummy and daddy are no longer allowed to smack them when they're being shits because that's "child abuse" so we've got all these apathetic little twits running around with God complexes because nobody has been able to take them down a peg or two and properly discipline them. We all got smacked as kids, it sure as hell didn't do us any harm. It's how we train animals for God's sake - what dog or horse hasn't got a whack around the nose when they did something wrong?

So basically  we've taken away childrens rights to be children, and the parents rights to discipline them. I don't really want to contemplate what kind of monsters this is going to produce in the years to come.

Secondly, so-called 'experts' are all up in arms because Hungry Jacks have decided to sell a burger titled the 'Quad Stack'. Basically it's four meat patties, four bits of cheese, apparently only two bits of bacon (which kind of ruins the whole quad theme), BBQ sauce and a bun. No salad. That sounds fucking awesome to me, who routinely chomps a double bacon cheeseburger as a hangover cure with lots of refill post-mix coke. Oh yeah, I hate salad so I always make them take if off the burger and get rid of the tomato sauce and mayo because that's gross too. So people are now saying HJs are 'irresponsible' for bringing out an approximately 1100 calorie burger and that it's promoting obesity, blah blah blah. I call bullshit.

HJs are not saying "Everyone must eat this for dinner, every night of every day" are they? No. Is anyone attempting to force people to eat this burger? No. If you don't want to eat it, then don't fucking eat it! Go much on a carrot stick you miserable, calorie counting, shit-brained, do-gooders!

Thirdly, along a very similar line actually, I noticed today that for some fucked up reason the hospital I work for has decided to remove all their vending machines. One coke machine got replaced with one that stocks only bottled water in a variety of flavours. We don't even sell Red Bull or V in the cafe. Where the fuck am I supposed to get my caffeine fix from now? Coffee tastes like shit and if I want a pep-me-up I'll go a coke or Red Bull and a chocolate. But apparently the hospital is on this crazy "healthy initiatives" scheme and had decided to be a complete fucking nazi about selling anything remotely tasty. The staff kitchen has gone health mad and the public cafe has stopped stocking chocolate and has downsized it's softdrink collection. Where the hell has my freedom of choice gone? Oh yeah, it's a PUBLIC hospital, which means it's owned by the government who've taken it upon themselves to fuck up my life even more.

Seriously, I have the right to choose what the fuck I eat. I do believe I may have scared a few people at work when I loudly exclaimed that while stamping my foot in protest today. Luckily we've got a box of fundraising chocolates on the front desk, but apparently even that has been threatened with removal. If people choose to eat nothing but HJs quad burgers and die from heart attacks or obesity-related illnesses, so be it. If people want to eat nothing but rabbit food all day and make snarky comments at everyone who even looks at anything above 2 calories, so be it. And if you're like me and are somewhere in the middle, so be it. Allow us the choice at least and don't hide it behind the smokescreen of "acting in my best interests", because that's my job, not anyone elses.

Every time I read another story about some new restriction or new 'safety measures' or similar removals of freedom with a ridiculous politically correct sounding name I cringe in horror because the more I think about it, the more I realise that we really are going to turn into the society that Aldous Huxley envisioned. Technology will advance, everyone will be happy and healthy because that's what they're told to be and slowly any traces of freedom, creativity, innovation and individuality will die a long, painfully agonizing death. Huxley wrote Brave New World way back in 1932 and set the story in 2540, but I don't think it's going to be another 500+ years before we see his nightmare become reality if things continue as they do.

So I had occasion to walk through the city this afternoon and observed a rather large portion of the population while I was at it.

As I was walking through City Place a group of young girls walked past us, probably aged very early 20's, if that. Definitely not any older. They were all decked out like a christmas tree; hair done in ridiculous upstyles or flat ironed so straight it could cut you, enough makeup to shame Kiss, jewellery enough to sink the Titanic and heels that would make even the most hardcore dominatrix pale in fear. Their clothes looked incredibly hot and uncomfortable given that it was more than likely at least 37 degrees (that's celcius by way non-Australian peoples). As they tottered past one of them tripped up and naturally I pointed and laughed and said "What kind of dickead wears shit like that walking around the city?". Of course that didn't win me any friends, but it did elicit a snigger from the guy I was with.

Women do some seriously weird shit all in the name of vanity. I saw a girl on Friday who had huge long nails, the kind that you look at and wonder how they manage to do anything without ripping themselves apart (use your imagination). She had little rings on the ends of them and diamontes glued to them. WHY??? Why would anybody want to do that?

Why would you spend hours perfecting your hair and makeup and then spend the day walking around the city in sweltering, melt your face off kind of heat? You're going to look like Alice Cooper's little sister by the end of the day. Why not just wear something cool and comfortable? Oh yeah, that wouldn't be, like, cool, to be seen like au naturel. Because we all know that breaking your ankle from teetering about in sky high heels is something to brag about. And wearing clothes tight enough that I can count the change in your pocket as well as see the outline of what you had for breakfast snaking it's way down your digestive tract is sooooo attractive.

You know why women do these stupid things? Women's magazines. Seriously. If you are A: a man; or B: a woman who has never read one, purely as a social experiment go and have a look at one. "Ten ways to a slimmer new you! - Top tips to make your tummy toned for summer! - What does your clothing style say about you? - Boost your self confidence! (after we tear it down)" the headlines all read.

Reading a women's magazine is tantamount to having hot bamboo rods shoved underneath my nails. They are filled with articles talking about empowerment and self confidence and on the very next page show this years 'must have' jeans with a size chart... if you are above a size 10 you get the message "Sorry these jeans don't come in this size because you are a fat arse". Way to build a girl up and then tear her down again. We're constantly made to feel bad about ourselves because we don't look like the anorexic hos on the catwalk who are being hailed as the image women should strive to be, never mind the fact that for 99.99% of women, unless they have their ribs removed and all their bones shaved in half, being that thin is absolutely impossible. We're expected to look at pictures that have been photoshopped beyond recognition and think to ourselves "Golly gee, I should look like that too" and subsequently spend our entire life savings on overpriced beauty products, ugly clothes, tasteless accessories and then be driven to spend all of our time slaving away at the gym or over the toilet bowl with our fingers down our throat trying to acheive a look that will kill us in the end. Women's magazines are there to capitalise on your insecurities by ingenious product placement and hypocritical editorials. Get a clue idiots, it's not cool.

So with that in mind, I have accepted the fact that I will never be cool. I don't want to look like a trussed up peacock or an acid rainbow. I don't want to wear bubble skirts that look like lampshades or wear baby doll tops that make me look pregnant. I don't want to spend hours painting my face or doing my hair.  I'm too lazy to be a 'real woman'.

Imagine if you will a very busy main street in a metropolitan area or at the very least in the centre of what passes to be a city wherever you live.

Now picture lots of cars zooming down the street. There are no traffic lights on this section of the road so the flow of traffic is highly unlikely to cease any time soon.

Now picture a pedestrian crossing about 10m away from where you are standing.

Now think about crossing from one side of the road to the other.

Do you:

This little gem kind of says it all really. And that stirring piece was written by the Chief of Staff.

As I was reading it I was wondering how it was going to end. I was hoping for a nice cheery "and this sarcastic piece of inane vitriol was all in the aim of fun fun fun".  Unfortunately not. It seems this wanker was actually serious.

Issue #1: "Virgins are pure of character and strong of will."
This is a very generalised and broad statement, which given that the nature of his column is a blog, can be slightly forgiven. But I still find it sets my teeth on edge as it seems to imply that once you lose your virginity you turn into something slightly less human. I don't think that I, or any of my friends who are no longer virgins, have lost our strength of will or have had our sense of decency lessened in any way. Nor do I find that those friends of mine who chose to remain virgins until their wedding day, chose to wait until they felt they had found the right person or those that waited (or are still waiting) thanks to bad luck, bad taste and certainly not for lack of trying are necessarily pure of soul either.

Issue # 2: "I watched in wonder at their unique ability to laugh and dance the night away without a skerrick of sin or illegal substances involved. Then I remembered they were virgins, and quickly realised this was their secret weapon."
This makes me want to get up and whack "The King" with a sharp pointy object. The ability to laugh and dance without drinking or drugging oneself is certainly not restricted to virgins wholly and solely. It's certainly possible to have fun in a large crowd without ingesting large quantities of booze and puking up all over your shoes and waking up in a gutter. It's even more possible to enjoy yourself without swallowing strange substances of questionable origin, acting like a fruit loop for a few hours before doing something incredibly stupid that likely results in some serious self harm in a variety of ways. And I especially resent that this wanker seems to think that virginity is a weapon. For heaven's sake! What kind of society are we living in when someone writes about virginity being a weapon? Virginity is not a weapon. It's a word describing someone who hasn't had sex, for whatever reasons, more than likely because of their own personal choice.

Issue #3: "Virgins, I can safely assume, don't bully other kids, or do drugs or binge drink or bash old folks."
What is that oft-coined phrase about assumptions? Oh yeah, they make an ASS out of you and me. Why is it safe to assume that only the deflowered folk are the ones binge drinking or bullying? That I can safely say is absolute crap. I've known some very nice Catholic boys, virgins, who have downed as many if not sometimes more beer than the rest of us in a pub on a Friday night after a really shit week at work.  What about bullying in primary schools? It's getting to be a rather large problem these days, are we going to assume that the children doing the bullying are full of rampant sexual hormones and are out shagging everything they can lay their 11 year old hands on? I highly doubt it.

Issue #4: "No sex means no babies. That's good for our population quotas and even better for those of us who like to travel on planes in peace and quiet."
If you don't like travelling on planes next to children, who have as much right as the next person to be allowed freedom of travel, then you can pay the extra money for a business class seat, or take advantage of the in flight entertainment, take an ipod, take a laptop and watch a DVD or better yet, get a train (which in a country the size of Australia is problematic but I really hate dickheads who yell at parents on planes about babies). And when you're old and sick and need quality care and wonder why there is a shortage of well educated medical staff trying to save your life ask yourself why. Oh that's right. You preached for the world's youth to remain virginal. Everyone else is dead and all the women are past child-bearing age now.

Issue #5: "Unfortunately, the crowds of God's chaste children are now returning to their far-flung countries, leaving us with a vacuum of virgins. So when crime rates suddenly soar, financial markets nose dive and the sun stops shining, you'll know it's because the rest of us are too busy copulating."
Of course, the crime rates wouldn't suddenly soar from the release of most of Sydney's police force being released from Pope duty or doing crowd control at a long event with numbers pushing well close to half a million (seriously, that's a lot of people) and actually being able to catch baddies. I'm pretty sure the sun won't stop shining because the Pope and his pilgrims have departed our shores either (although those particularly religious folk might think so for a time).

I'm still hoping that this douchebag has written this as a sarcastic social commentary, noting that while hundreds of thousands of people flocked to Sydney for World Youth Day there were no (that we heard about anyway) incidences of violence, rape, drinking and drug fuelled idiots causing havok or causing trouble of any kind whereas if you got that many people together for say, a heavy metal concert, it's likely there'd be a whole lotta booze and quite a few fights (and you'd find me right in the middle of it). But as "The King" has a tendency to just write whatever is on his mind and doesn't seem to mind pissing people off left, right and centre with his poisonous diatribes, I've decided he's erring towards the slightly more serious than sarcastic side.

So I'm left with a slightly dirty taste in my mouth, but that's probably just because I'm not pure of mind and soul, given that I have sex and drink booze on a regular basis. I suppose I should join the rest of the crew down at city place. We've got a mob bashing scheduled for 8 and after that we're going to mix some meth and coke, rob a liquor store, drink it all and knock over old ladies and break a few windows. Coz that's what us boozing non-virgins do.