To that girl who said Pink is "one of the most influential artists ever"

No.

Try:
- Elvis Presley
- The Beatles
- Michael Jackson
- Nirvana

Oh, and she did not create that song she performed at her Funhouse gig. I do believe you will find that Bohemian Rhapsody was created by Queen, and that someone should force you to sleep in an ice bath that is outside on top of a wind-exposed mountain somewhere on a freezing winter night for being such an ignorant douchebag.

The perpetual life cycle

Friday afternoons are a blessing, whilst Monday mornings are the equivalent of starting Groundhog Day with a kick in the testicles from pointy steel-capped boots laced with acid. At least, that's what all those Monday morning and Friday afternoon facebook status updates indicate. Yet even when the long awaited weekend arrives, the back of our minds are always transfixed on why it finishes too quickly. Essentially, life is the perpetual cycle of complaining about how quick it takes for two days to come and go, and then whinging about how slow it takes for the other five to pass by. Most people dream of the opposite, a two day working week followed by a five day weekend bender of chocolate and debauchery.

With the exception of those as socially inept as a 15 year old emo at a school social playing Pussycat Dolls, Brittany Spears, and Pink tracks all night, we go out on weekends and do the stuff we want to do. Watch the football, go out clubbing, play video games, kick out street lights of an entire neighbourhood and steal candy from babies. These are all the things that are exciting to us, and as the most used cliche ever tells us, time flies when you're having fun. In this way, the feeling that Saturdays and Sundays go by too quickly is our own damn fault, in which case we have no reason to bitch about it, or else we'd be bitching about ourselves, and all that does is compromise the very principle behind "bitching" - I am right, you are wrong, so go sit on that pointy fence over there and quietly rotate.

On the other hand, weekdays are not our fault, not unless you get a kick out of smashing your head repeatedly against the brick wall of boredom and repetition. The humble bread-winning day job is a necessity that, when you think about it, makes life five-sevenths shyte! Of course there are jobs that are an exception to this rule such as being Megan Fox's underwear, or being the ruler of the entire world. But even careers that we aspire to take, and the jobs we dream of doing tend to have its novelty fizzle away into a vacuous black hole of tedium. If time flies by when you're having fun, then time .... stagnates when ... um ... when it's boring and repetitive. Yeah I'm sure that's a saying of some sort.

That's where that wish for a longer weekend ends up sucking. Aside from completely melting an entire global economy, one that has been used to the five day working week since monkeys figured out how to use spears instead of bananas to throw at each other, the longer weekend just ends up being the new weekday. Sooner than later, you run out of fun things to do and all that free time ends up boring and repetitive. Eventually, you look forward to going back to work because it's the thing that doesn't consume your life.

Having to slave away for five-sevenths of the week is awesome because it makes the weekend all the more significant and special.

Actually no, screw that, I want a two day working week.

You're only 20 and that makes me sad

When some punk year 8 kid used to be a smartarse towards you, you could do anything to him short of picking him up by his collar and pounding him repeatedly over the top of his head with the spine of his maths textbook whilst taunting, "know your algebra, bitch!". That was because once upon a time, back at school, being three or four years older than someone came with a satisfying sense of authority. Perhaps it was the environment of a school setting, which lends itself to a system where age correlates with hierarchy and rank, or perhaps I was madly drunk on the absolute power that came with a tiny prefect badge and the stripes of a year 12 uniform. Whatever the case, it unfortunately never carried over into the real adult world. Instead, the feeling of authority and invincibility inherent with being surrounded by younger people is irrevocably replaced by the thought that you're becoming an old fart that is finding more and more about the world to whine and moan about.

Being 24 and quickly approaching 25 certainly doesn't make you old at all, but relativity can be a pain in the lower cheeks. When you go to a 21st birthday party where practically everyone is 19 or 20, it strangely makes you feel a lot more ... mature. When people are asking what you do at uni when you graduated almost three years ago, something definitely doesn't sit right within you. When the others talk about what they've been doing on their holidays you think to yourself, "holidays? wtf is that?!"

Likewise, they also make your liver feel much older. I like to think that I can hold my drink (for a skinny Asian guy). Except for that one time a couple of years ago on my birthday, I've never had to enlist the assistance of my friends to drag me to my front door whilst in a state of lifeless dystonia and apparent death. At the same time, I can't exactly drink a football team to alcohol school either. But when you see teens cringing agonisingly everytime they down a shot of what can only be described as blue death mixed with whatever the closest bottle is, whilst you happily shot it away with a straight expressionless demeanour that says, "meh, I've had worse", you feel strangely older than you actually are. Granted yes, I wasn't exactly sober by the end of the night, and I ended up being one of the early sleepers, clocking out at the toddler bedtime of 3am. But I put that down to chronic fatigue brought about by three straight weeks of staying up 'til about 2 in the morning watching insane nutjobs on the TV cycle around France.

Maybe I need to get some more friends that are older. No wait, maybe I just need to get some more friends, full stop.

On a slight tangent, isn't it funny how being 21 automatically makes you super cool? As arbitrary as it is, it's the magical number that officially qualifies you as an adult. Welcome. Join the club. Bring a plate of food. But if you're 20, you're immediately one of "them". I don't care if you're smarter or more mature than I am, you're still not 21 and you haven't earnt your wings yet. It's the same as when you turn 18. One day, at 11:59pm you're not allowed to drive by yourself and you are deemed too innocent to be sullied by the evils of alcohol, but when that clock ticks past midnight, all of a sudden it's all ok. Likewise, that one single second can make all the difference between being on the right side of the law and having your name share the same sentence with the word 'paedophile'.

Nerds dressing up

I'm a bit of a nerd. Even though I haven't been lured into playing World of Warcraft and forgetting to feed three kids because of it, I will not deny the fact that I'm a bit nerdish. The acronym 'lol' has weasled its way into my daily, everyday speech. I watch Stargate and then proceed to buy the entire 10 seasons on DVD. I take offence when people tell me to buy a Mac instead of a PC. And I tend to play videogames when I come home from work instead of watching crap vomit Grey's Anatomy.

I am also a coward. You won't catch me proudly displaying my nerdish tendencies. Why else would I live in denial and refuse to get my eyesight checked? For you see, the world can be divided into two groups. Most are a bit of both, to varying degrees, but at the end of the day, you're on one side or the other. In the blue corner we have the aforementioned nerds, wearing their out-of-date glasses, debating with each other on which is the better weapon between Star Wars' light sabres and Star Trek's phasers (oh c'mon no contest, light sabres win on its ability to decapitate limbs), solving squiggly calculus lines, and laughing uncontrollably at the word 'roflcopter'. In the red corner we have the jocks, lifting 100kg at the gym every second night before kissing their guns in front of the mirror, starting fights on the ground every weekend because they haven't touched the ball and are getting bored because of it, drawing penises on the blackboard before the teacher comes in because it's so damn funny, and chugging beer to help offset the water shortages.

If the world broke out into a massive war between the two sides, the jocks would burn all the villages and have their way with all the women before the nerds could even learn how to take the safety off the rifle. It's for that reason that I would happily feign disdain for my nerdy brethren, when the cool kids come by with their super hot girlfriends. I'd tell them that the kid over there with the glasses not only likes Star Wars, but can also recite the entire script word for word, before happily standing there watching the jocks pound the living crap out of the guy. Some people, however, choose to express their inner nerd, and to those people ... much respect. Good on you for sacrificing yourselves for the good of all us cowardly nerds.

And nothing says "NEEEEEEEEEEEERD!" *points finger at person* than those enthusiastic fans who go to movie premieres, book launches and sci-fi conventions in costumes. They have no shame. For them, shame is forgetting the colour of Luke Skywalker's light sabre. They won't get offended by what others say of them. They'll only get pissed off if you call them "that Asian girl Harry Potter kisses" instead of Hermione. If there's something remotely popular in a sci-fi or fantasy culture kind of way, you can always count on a brave few showing up proudly in a costume they spent six months preparing, or paying $300 for.

More power to them!

I thought I'd find a relevant picture to post up just for the hell of it. As I was searching, I came across this (from all4humor.com)













Classic!

How to flip the middle finger up at your loyal audience

1) Base your new reality TV show around an activity that everyone can take part in, as opposed to one that requires contestants to dance around monkeys, sing like broken records, or lose the equivalent weight of a Mac truck through dangerous exercise methods. Borrow a proven concept originating from overseas TV to maximise chances of success.

2) Give the show a sense of credibility by rewarding skill, as opposed to popularity. Borrow the services of several renowned professionals in the field to adjudicate and decipher the eventual winner. Ensure the show is not a popularity contest by scrapping the laughable revenue raising exercise of viewer SMS voting that plagues other reality gimmicks.

3) Bake the new show for a few weeks in front of live national audiences.

4) Watch as viewers, even those not traditionally fond of reality TV, praise the show for its format being conducive to honesty and integrity, unlike pretty much every other "judging" based reality show.

5) With one week remaining, make a decision as to who would sell the best cookbook (the final prize) and thus rake in the most revenue for producers. Designate her "the chosen one".

6) Criticise someone for making food too basic to be worthy of final week competition, then reward the chosen one for making uncreative lamb and potatoes later on.

7) Punish the chosen one for completely botching a pie, by eliminating another competitor who at least competently finishes his.

8) Allow the chosen one to leave a fish raw, and eliminate another contestant, one whom the public believes should've deserved to be the eventual winner (based on apparent skill, and not just popularity).

9) Lay down a challenge which will primarily be judged on presentation and whether it can be "licked straight off the page." Then, to contradict yourself, proceed to save the chosen one who didn't even finish creating her dishes, and eliminate some other guy who managed to at least complete the task and plate up with some form of presentation. It doesn't matter who, just someone else. He is not the chosen one, and therefore expendable. To at least attempt gaining some semblence of popularity, make the expendable one the least liked one amongst public sentiment, despite the fact that he has been the most consistent performer, and easily one of the top two.

10) Bring in apparent cookbook extraordinaire Donna Hay to help judge the aforementioned presentation challenge. Allow her to show obvious premeditated agenda through use of overtly contrasting body language towards the chosen one and the expendable one throughout the episode.

11) Let the chosen one cry and sob in front of the cameras, and continuously mention something vague about family and cooking being her life. Allow judges to take in that emotional drivel and influence outcome. It will make them look human, and that can't be a bad thing in objective decision-making.

12) Disregard the fact that the chosen one, despite being able to cook some tasty homestyle food, really wouldn't cut it as a professional, commercial chef because she has nervous breakdowns, cannot handle pressure, shakes like crazy, is ridiculously messy, has no concept of time management, sweats more than an obese man running, cycling and swimming at the same time (and allows the sweat to drip into her food!), sabotages her own confidence by continuously muttering to herself that she's going to lose, and does not think laterally enough in her creations when compared to her competitors.

13) Sit back and watch as once loyal viewers vent frustration at the show at the water cooler and in online forums, for slapping them in the face and assuming they have no intelligence. Allow them to realise that they have been duped into believing the show was about the best amateur chef, rather than the one that the public can most relate to and will be most suited to making a sellable cookbook.

14) Consider changing the title of the show from Masterchef to Mediocrechef or Mastercookbook.

15) Make sure next season's chosen one will be in the demographic that makes up most of channel 10's audience (adults at the younger end of the scale). These are the intelligent ones that appreciate legitimacy and credibility over being smashed on the head with disguised petty drama and political influence, as opposed to the middle-aged housewives of the country that relate to the current chosen one because "yay! Go Julie because of I likes you and you have kids, and cry and make me cry and make hubby cry, and make kids want to cook for me, and such, and therefore you are Masterchef extraordinaire."

*Flicks back to the Lifestyle Food channel to watch the proper and original UK version of Masterchef*

Transformers 2 ...

... had horrible acting
... had campy dialogue
... had near-non-existent character development (including the Transformers)
... had a sketchy, disjointed plotline like the first movie
... had too much comic relief (but at least a better attempt than the first)
... overplayed the sex appeal card

The movie was essentially nothing but two and a half hours of CGI robots bashing the shit through each other in utterly confusing fight scenes.

And I loved every single freaking minute of it. :)

No KFC Noooo!!

So a couple of years ago, perhaps over a decade, every kid in the western world decides to fatten up like oompaloopas and all of a sudden we have an obesity pandemic. Problem at hand needs solving and being humans, we like to take the easiest way out. Bugger the effort of exercising. Let's just blame someone!

The first in line to suffer the wrath of bubble-wrap politics were fast-food restaurants. Fair enough too, for walking into a McDonald's used to automatically equate to an extra five minutes of your life lost. However, under immense pressure from health experts, family groups, and cows, McDonald's changed its ways. Healthy was the new cool, and ordering an apple from Maccas became the new thing. It's a pity that people who do order this said apple are met with glares of bemusement and genuine calls of "wtf?!". The 6 year old kid working the counter obviously has no idea what an apple is judging by his face. "App...Appel?"

Anyway, all of society's other notoriously unhealthy, saturated-fat havens caved in likewise. Except for one.

KFC ... Mmmmmm. All-star boxes and ultimate burger meals would remain soaked in sodium and drenched in palm oil. "Bugger what the others say! We're keeping our recipe the same. If you die of heart failure it's your own damn fault!" And that was quite a real prospect too, since consuming palm oil is the equivalent of clamping your main artery at three different points with metal clothes pegs.

But alas, those days are over since KFC (in Australia) have finally buckled, and will now use healthy oil. No palm oil?! Palm oil was the secret recipe Colonel Sanders conjured up when he wasn't funding the KKK (probably a rumour but eh ...). Not only that, but there's now going to be less salt!

I used to love you KFC .... *sniff*

Supermarket fuel vouchers

You step into the supermarket with a few coins and the intention of buying a cold drink. It's a pretty simple task, which should take just a few minutes. Unfortunately, supermarkets are bastards at tempting you. When you step inside, you're bombarded with specials and hot deals at every turn. Buy two chocolate bars and save 50 cents. Take a dollar off these freshly made bread rolls which expired yesterday. Buy one and get one free whole energy drink and you don't have to sleep tonight. Buy this beef we overweighed, and you can take this free recipe so you can impress your girlfriend and hide the fact that your only culinary skill involves a microwave, and a fork.

Perhaps the most cunning little supermarket trick is the fuel voucher. The golden number is thirty. Thirty bucks spent and you're on your way to petrol savings heaven! Four cents a litre off your next fill-up? Yes please! You'll save a good dollar or two at your next trip to the pump, and as daddy first taught you when a five cent coin first felt like a pot of leprechaun gold, it all adds up.

There is one problem however. When you go into the supermarket with that one single drink in mind, you end up buying all this other stuff. So you buy an extra thing or two and now the supermarket run will cost you about $10. No matter, you have a credit card to make up for the feeble few coins you have in your pocket. But oh no, cheap Berocca ... and cheap baked beans. Now the cost balloons up to $24. But that's ok because the stuff that you're buying is stuff that you need. If you don't buy it now then you'll just end up getting it some other time.

Now the real problem starts. $24?! Oh man, I'm so close to that $30 mark. I just have to get that voucher. So now you find yourself going up and down each aisle looking for useless crap to make up the remaining six bucks. You find things that are totally unnecessary and you try to justify its necessity and/or usefulness.

Hey, this chocolate milk is on special, and I need calcium. Who cares if it expires today? I can drink the whole two litres in the next minute, fill up on a week's worth of calcium and save a few cents on my petrol! Mmmm my bones feel stronger just thinking about it.

The really silly part of it is when you're lining up to pay for the petrol a few days later. You hand over that fuel voucher to the overworked store attendant, and you read the receipt given back to you that shows the enormous saving of $1.64.

And you actually believe that you've saved money from the whole exercise.

Winter camping

Two schools of thought fuel the desire to go camping. There is the 'going back to basics' idea that is deeply flawed since setting up a tent requires a postgraduate university degree. Gone are the days of a pole, some pegs and a piece of cloth you cut out from your spare room curtain. Now there are awnings, waterproof shells that cannot touch the inner shell and voyeur peek holes. Then there is the 'going outdoors' notion that is silly, since setting up the aforementioned tent provides a makeshift 'indoors' that contradicts the whole point of the exercise. You essentially leave the indoors to become one with the outdoors by making a fake indoors to which you still think you are outdoors. Confused? Good.

The really adventurous souls are the ones that decide to camp it out in the cold of winter. It is essentially the substitution of warm blankets, lamb roast, and Friday night football on the TV for stiff, hard nipples, perpetually moist buttocks, and influenza. It is a substitution that is, despite sane logic, quite appealing.

There will always be the healthy chunk of the population that make the pilgrimage to camp insane-o at some point in the winter. The ones with the marbles still present will drive their car and pitch tent just outside, using General Motors as emergency warmth and shelter. The ones with an undiscovered brain aneurysm will hardcore it up and go overnight hiking, pitching their tent in 3 degrees darkness after refusing to stop while the sun is still up. Of course, these are the people that Bear Grylls wholeheartedly applauds.

What both groups have in common, besides being likely fans of this show, is that unexplainable urge to forego all things comfortable, and make life as freaking miserable for themselves as possible for a few days. Of course, you could just sit through a couple of Grey's Anatomy DVDs and that would achieve the same result.

Wilsons Prom was awesome!

Checklist for the weekend shenanigans

Energy drink to last 3 hour drive at night after full work day - check

2,356,323 layers of clothes - check

Alcohol to warm the body up even though it does the exact opposite - check

Watch a few Man vs Wild clips - check

Switch sanity off - check

24 hour Kmart

There are certain inevitabilities that come with the passing of the night. As the moon floats higher and the alcohol flows in quicker than the bladder can expel it, you can count on a few things to occur. Nightclubs and bars in the CBD will continue to select, serve and expel patrons, and someone will get stabbed. Rival gangs will call for backup before a skirmish ensues, and someone will get stabbed. 24 hour McDonalds will continue to accommodate drunken folk who have nauseating stomachs that only the healthy and nutritious grease of a Big Mac can cure ... and someone will get stabbed. But the most mind-boggling certainty is that people actually go to the 24 hour Kmart at 3am.

I would have loved to have been in that meeting where they decided to turn the store into a 24 hour one.

Regional Manager: Your outlet is underperforming. We may have to close it down unless we find some way to rectify this.
Store Manager: Any ideas guys?
Employee who is having an affair with store manager: Um... how about we make it a 24 hour Kmart?
Elderly woman who has been working there all her life: That's a great idea! More time for people to come and shop.
Part-timer still finishing off his 14 year uni degree: Yeah!
11 year old supervisor: Nice one!
Male employee who always detours through the lingerie section: Yeh!!
Store manager: Yeh good idea Katie!
Only sane employee who is sitting in the corner of the room: errr...wtf?!

Honestly, I cannot see the concept of a 24 hour budget department store successfully passing through a meeting of people with IQs higher than 7. But it did, and you know what? It actually works! People actually go there at 3am in the morning.

I can see the usefulness of a 24 hour McDonalds. The aforementioned drunken munchies spreads through the night and is more deadly than the swine, cow and bird flu put together. For that same reason, 24 hour supermarkets are valid and useful. But Kmart?! The only reasons I can think of for going to a Kmart in the wee hours of the morning is that it's a stinking hot night, and you want to leech off the store's airconditioning because you live in a cheap rental house with airconditioning that doesn't work, or has killed someone through legionnaires disease. Or perhaps the barely coherent girl you picked up from that seedy pub has stripped down to her underwear, and you are halfway through dropping your pants before you realise that you are in dire need of rubber protection. Apparently, though, there are people that want to buy boots or a board game at 3am in the morning who can't wait until the next day.

So anyway, I'll be going to 24 hour Kmart this Thursday.

Many things can happen in 177 days

A minority president can finally be king of the world. A couple of Ameri, er I mean Mexicans can decide to make love with some pigs and create a new deadly global pandemic called overblown mass hysteria. Not that the swine flu was created that way. Well, at least I assume that wasn't the case. But for some reason that obviously needs addressing through professional psychological help, that was my first thought upon hearing its official name - some sick freak got a little too curious, and now the world's face mask company executives have booked a holiday to Bora Bora, the Cayman Islands, and a night in that one hotel on the corner of the hairpin at the Monaco Grand Prix. 177 days is also plenty of time to be given free fat $900 cheques in the mail, and for Wilson to finally have the balls to get House some help. It's also enough time for me to realise that Cuddy just may be the hottest 40+ year old ever. Evidently, 177 days is not long enough for news to surface of a group of rugby players masturbating in front of each other in a room of small, or intimate shall we say, dimensions with some impressionable girl in there as the ticking bomb of perilous scandal. Group sex is one thing... but honestly, what the FUCK!? Isn't wet towel slapping each other's naked butts in the showers of the lockerooms after a long game out in the cold gay enough for you guys? Oh, and 177 days is also evidently not long enough to find Osama Bin Laden .... or Wally/Waldo for that matter... especially on that damn page where everyone is in red and white. Argh!

I also forgot this thing for 177 days. Oops.