deanism.com

I joined Facebook about 5 years ago, back when all the cool kids were joining (I wasn’t one of them) and all the dimwits were still running riot over on MySpace. It was good. Facebook was everything that MySpace wasn’t. Basically it wasn’t shit. Like many other social networks Facebook has grown and expanded quite a bit in the last few years, there are groups, pages, fans, like, apps, live streams, videos, photos, status updates etc etc etc. That Facebook has become the new MySpace is not Facebook’s fault, well not directly, its the fault of the people using, and more specifically the way they (ab)use it. Where do I begin.

Status updates are to Facebook what twitter is to, umm, twitter. More to the point the status updates that we now have on Facebook are a result of Facebook’s failed acquisition of twitter a couple of years back. When I joined Facebook, they had status updates, but they were much more like those used in chat app. You could choose from things like “I’m at work”, “I’m at school” or “I’m at the library” etc, the choices were relatively limited and certainly didn’t allow for the lengthy updates that you can post now.

“When did Facebook status updates become chain letters, for the love of all that is good stop copy/pasting each others status updates. If you really want to do that shit go back to MySpace.

Better status updates aren’t a problem, I was actually quite pleased when they made them more flexible, I often use it to post things that I might otherwise have posted to twitter if not for their 140 character limit. Recently though I’m starting to see a trend, a horrible MySpace spam-esque trend. People have started posting things like this “If you like the colour yellow and know someone whos great aunt was a carer for sick orphaned children with leprosy in remote South West Bongowongo, then copy and paste this as your status message to spread the word to those that don’t care”. What word? That you’re just a little fucked in the head? When did Facebook status updates become chain letters, for the love of all that is good stop copy/pasting each others status updates. If you really want to do that shit go back to MySpace. Please.

I don’t even have a huge problem with groups and pages on Facebook, although I still can’t work out exactly why they need to maintain both, they seem to serve the same purpose from where I’m sitting (which is at my desk). The “small” problem I do have with them though is the sorts of crap people are using them for. A few glorious (very real) examples of the MySpace-grade intelligence level of some Facebook users:

• 5,000,000 People Strong For A “That’s what she said” button - currently has 460,000 people who want to tap that button. That’s what she said.
• No school days on Friday! Need 5,000,000 school students to make official - currently has 935,000 students who were on Facebook during class on their hip-top flip-flop douchebag phones.
• If 1,000,000 People Join I’ll Legally Change My Name To Mclovin- yoga05.com - currently has 595,000 people dumber than the creator
• If 5,000,000 people join this, im never gonna get married! - currently has one fan, presumably the creator.
• I Hate Getting Texts That Only Say “k” - 2.5 million ppl h8 it 2, n i h8 thm, k
• I bet people from AUSTRALIA can reach 1 million before USA and UK do! - 750,000 more and they’ll prove that us Aussie are in fact much stupider than both the US and UK

…and my personal “favourite” that I spotted recently:

• In australia we eat meat, drink beer and speak FUCKIN ENGLISH. - We also, apparently, don’t capitalise the name of our country, or know how to spell “fucking”. Sweet ah eh bro, fooly orsome, all 16,500 of you. So proud to be Australian right now. So proud. </sarcasm>

Sure, some people think they’re hilarious, some people think they’re awesome, some people think they’re both hilarious and awesome. They’re usually not. People are free to join whatever retard conglomerations they wish. If they want to exhibit their (lack of) intelligence levels that’s fine, just don’t invite me to join or post countless updates about them to your wall polluting my Facebook stream. Stop it please, I don’t want to have to block *all* of you.

““Hear God talk directly to you through daily messages”. Yeah, sure. Unless he gets great wifi up there I find that unlikely.

The single biggest thing that I hate about Facebook is the apps. Yes, there are a number of good reasons for them, adding functionality that Facebook won’t or hasn’t yet added is one example. Importing twitter updates or flickr photos are also good examples. The following are not good examples:

• How stupid are you? - if you installed this one, you also answer the question. (250,000 have answered already)
• Animal Paradise - what year is it? 1995? tamogotchis don’t belong on Facebook. Unfortunately 3.6 million people disagree.
• God wants You to know - 17 million people have added this app which promises that you’ll “Hear God talk directly to you through daily messages”. Yeah, sure. Unless he gets great wifi up there I find that unlikely.

If you want to play games there’s a pretty good chance you’ll find something amongst the thousands to entertain you, and annoying the living shit out of all you friends when it posts all your scores and achievements onto their stream. Thank god for that ‘hide’ button.

One of the newest developments is the addition of separate “live feed” and “news feed” options. Its annoying, confusing, and stupid. “Live” gives you updates from your friends in chronologcial order, “News” doesn’t - it mixes things from 35 seconds ago in with things from 11 hours ago. Ever found yourself thinking “I’ve seen that before”, well you’re probably looking at the news feed.

Its probably worth mentioning that like Facebook, twitter is also starting to exhibit MySpace traits. Its becoming infested with tweens/teens, spammers, pests, bots and general nuisances. Who wants to take bets? How long before I write something similar to this about twitter?

I’m rolling into 2010 with all the enthusiasm of a frog pinned to a table in a high-school science lab. Lets just get it over with. What’s the new years equivalent of scrooge? Whatever it is, I execute it perfectly. I simply don’t get what the big who-hah is all about. Yes your clock is going to flip over from 11:59 to 12:00, wow, it only does that twice a day, every day, all year long. Woo, its the start of another month, so what we get 12 of those a year. Yippee it the start of a new decade, who cares, do people think that just because the last four digits in the date are now 2010 instead of 2009 that magically everything will be different?

Wrong. It is January 1st right now, and it feels just the same as December 31st. Yes, its slightly warmer, but I still slept in, I’ve eaten food, I’m cruising the internet, I’m still on leave. The globe is still warming, the US are still on their never ending quest to gain control of the world’s oil supplies so that the rest of use can pay exorbitant prices to fill our cars so that we can drive places, thus contributing the aforementioned ‘warming’ that our planet is experiencing.

People in third world countries still get sick and die from diseases that the better-off folk haven’t had to worry about for years. Science still hasn’t found a cure for cancer, aids or the bloody common cold. Swine flu is still over sensationalised by the world media, perhaps if they focused their scare campaigns on one of the many more serious health issues in the world then they wouldn’t be so easy to target in our everyday satirical lives.

“...all the birdies Tiger had been collecting in the quest of his own personal grand slam

The financial “issue” that is the GFC still has us by the cojones, yet the annual boxing day splurge has resulted in a level of debt that is simply hard to believe. The figure mentioned by one weekend newspaper was something like an average $74,000 debt per person. Granted that figure likely isn’t just form the boxing day sales, but probably also takes into account the massive mortgages, gambling debts and all the money that the lovely tax payers donate so that our politicians can spend as much time as possible in any country so long as its not the one that they are supposed to be running. And remember that stupid stimulus package that Captain KRudd put in motion last year, well that amount to something like $22,000 debt per person as well. Is this included in the $74,000 figure that is now being reported? Unlikely.

The behaviour (or lack there of) issues in sport have been topical for years, 2009 didn’t disappoint, but 2010 will be different right? Sure whatever helps you sleep at night, although it might be hard to top the previous years adventures. The NRL started a great year by selecting a new pin-up boy in Brett Stewart who would go on to make an arse of himself before the season even started. Then the media would dig up a 7 year-old incident involving Matt Johns resulting in him being hung up to dry while all the others involved got away without even being named.

I’m not by any stretch of your imagination condoning what he did, but there were half a dozen other dim-witted morons connected to the incident, none of which were ever named or pursued by the media. Why? Probably because they didn’t have careers or lives that could be harmed by bringing it up. And it would be remiss of be to not mention the new movement within Rugby League that was started by Nate Miles. Unfortunately he started this new movement when he locked himself out of his hotel room and proceeded to dump some promotional material at the door of another hotel occupant. Charming.

As if sexual misdemeanors, and drunken midnight bowel movements weren’t enough the league year ended on high when Danny Wicks was busted in connection to a “significant drug distribution network”, lining up charges for both the possession and supply of a prohibited substance. He proceeded to quit his team, quite possibly an indication of guilt or more ‘stories’ threatening to come out. Either way it was a fine example for the footy world to end on, by demonstrating exactly just how many players don’t have access to that other substance, which is not prohibited, not expensive, and provides them with safety as well as numerous other things. Logic, if they all just had a little then what would sports broadcasters have to report on?

But sporting events weren’t limited to just our own shores, lordy no. The instant Tiger crashed his big black SUV in his own driveway, he was probably beginning to wish he hadn’t. It didn’t take long for the revelations to spill out about all the birdies Tiger had been collecting in the quest of his own personal grand slam. There is a joke that about the difference between love and divorce, that “love is grand, and divorce is a hundred grand”. Tiger will be wishing this were true, for a man worth as much as he is a hundred grand is play money, with the mass exodus of sponsorships, and his Swedish wife bound to take him to the cleaners, poor Tiger could experience a slight GFC of his own. Mind you, he’ll still have more money than the rest of us.

“Britney mimes at her concerts - wait, everyone already knew that, why was it news?

Getting away from sport for bit, and back to the more serious issues - you know all the exciting stuff like death, destruction, H1N1, GFC, climate change, twitter and Britney. Nothing brings people together like climate change (especially if its one of those disaster movies where the giant tsunami causes everyone to huddle together at the top of a mountain until the water subsides). So they held this big climate change conference (read: piss up) in Copenhagen, and invited all the world’s leaders with the plan to reach an agreement to cut omissions to a certain amount by a certain date. They even gave it a trendy acronym for the media to embrace, COP15.

Now I’m sure the intention was right, but this thing ran for 11 days and it was until there was about a day left before Barrack Obama even turned up. From all the reports I saw it seemed a lot like they spent 10 days talking about climate change related things to whoever was around to listen in an effort to make it look like they were progressing, and then at the eleventh hour they all of a sudden realised what they were actually supposed to be doing. Perhaps that is why so many people feel that COP15 was a failure.

How much global warming did the conference itself produce given that there were thousands of officials representatives there, not to mention the tens of thousands of protesters. I’m sure that a hell of a lot of them used planes trains and automobiles to get there, and I doubt any of them were electric or ran on bio-fuels.

140 characters became the new 15 minutes of fame, twitter took over the ‘popular’ space. Ashton Kutcher got twitter, then Oprah got twitter, and I’m pretty sure even Osama bin Laden’s got twitter (don’t be fooled by the sneaky pseudonym he’s using for his username - SexyBeard57). Twitter became the new way to find out what was happening as it was happening, we learnt that they found ice on the moon, we found out that the King of Pop was dead and we found out that Britney mimes at her concerts - wait, everyone already knew that, why was it news?

The problem is that twitter was better before it was the cool new thing. It was better when it was primarily used by people who actually know about the sorts of technology required to produce such a thing. That is probably a really pessimistic way of looking at things, but its the truth. People were using twitter before Ashton, yes kids Ashton didn’t invent the twitter apparently he just has nothing better to do with his time then sit on twitter all day.

“MySpace was cool, then all the 13 year-old girls joined, made their pages hot pink with yellow & green text, with awesome background music & half naked pictures of wannabe vampires from the latest teen cash cow.

Long-time users of twitter answer me this, how many spam/warez/bot/porn accounts followed you before Ashton, Oprah, Britney and co joined the craze. Now how many follow you. Cause and effect. The same thing happened to mySpace (and I seriously hope this isn’t the way twitter goes). MySpace was cool, and then all the 13 year-old girls joined, and made their pages hot pink with yellow and green text, with awesome background music and half naked pictures of wannabe vampires from the latest teen cash cow (or whatever the 2002 equivalent of twilight was). Now, the only mySpace user that are left are those same 13-year olds, indie music and those who don’t have enough human friends to warrant the need for a facebook account.

I guess my point is, yes I was getting to one, what’s the point in making new years resolutions, when the new year is just another day with a different number on the calendar. No one lives up to their resolutions anyway, eg I could make a resolution that I will write with a less hate-filled pessimistic view of the world, but that’s not going to happen, is it?

But while we are still on the topic of new years lets quickly talk fireworks. Seriously, every year they are going to be bigger and better than the previous year, with more technology, colours, shape and innovation. And every year they look pretty much the same, or worse. As far a Sydney goes they’ve flogged every little piece of life out of the “lets put a silly image on the side of the bridge to make everyone excited, oh and while were at it lets connect it to a ‘cool’ theme”. Yes, themes are great, but what is the point when 99% of the people that you’ve got harbour-side are pissed seven ways ‘til Sunday. How many of them a re going to remember that the city’s theme was poverty despite the fact they’ve just sent millions of dollars up in smoke for a fancy light show to entertain some drunks. Or that the them was about being “green” in your everyday lives when the way that you’ve expressed it is by expelling large amounts of toxic chemicals into the atmosphere.

I just don’t get it, maybe I’m thick. Most of last nights fireworks were just big glowing clouds because there was so much smoke being produced that you would have been forgiven for thinking that the harbour bridge was actually on fire or being demolished. Every year they seems to cram more and more explosives on to the coathanger, its like a giant game of chicken. “How many pounds of explosives can we get on here before the fireworks finale is the bridge collapsing into the harbour”.

Happy 2010 everyone.

How do you spot a homeless bird? They’re the one pushing their nest along in a shopping trolley.

In the last week or so I’ve noticed a collection of pet-related products gathering in our cubicle farm. Had no idea what they were for, and didn’t really care, however I spotted a notice posted above the growing pile this afternoon and it is a collection to be donated to abandoned Christmas pets. Aww how nice… two issues.

First, I’m not a pet person, maybe that’s sad but that’s the truth, probably comes from not having pets as a kid because we moved too often. Plus I live in an apartment so pets aren’t really an option, except maybe fish, I could probably handle fish… although I’d probably also manage to kill them. But I’m not an animal hater either.

The fact that so many families buy pets as Christmas presents only to dump them shortly after is a little disgusting. That whole advertising campaign “pets aren’t just for Christmas, they’re for life” is true and the people should pay attention. I can understand how the ‘simpler’ folk can pick out a cute puppy from the local pound with the greatest of intentions without thinking about any of the numerous costs involved with owning a pet. But I would imagine its not just the ‘simple’ folk who are guilty of abandoning these animals.

“I wonder where {insert pet name} went, I really hope they didn't accidentally fall into that sack of rocks that I threw overboard when I was out on the river yesterday afternoon...

I also suspect a lot of these cases are where Mummy and Daddy do the ‘nice’ thing and buy their little kiddies a pet for Christmas. Undoubtedly kiddies are thrilled and bound to throw buckets of love towards their new pet. So what happens two weeks later when ‘nice’ Mummy and Daddy decide they can’t actually afford to look after the cherished Christmas present that they bought their children? What do they tell them? “Oh no, {insert pet name} name ran away”? “Oops, I ran over {insert pet name}”? or “I wonder where {insert pet name} went, I really hope they didn’t accidentally fall into that sack of rocks that I threw overboard when I was out on the river yesterday afternoon…”. Which ever way you look at it, the ‘nice’ parents ain’t so nice, but their kids should probably feel lucky they haven’t been similarly discarded.

Back to the pile of goods to be donated. There are the usual thing like dog and cat play toys, collars, food bowls and the like. But then there is a bird cage, and not overly large one, probably the right size for a budgie. Really? A bird cage. Seems to me like someone just had it sitting around and thought this was an opportune time to dispose of it.

Now I’m not saying people aren’t going to abandon birds, because they will, but unlike with cats and dogs you’re pretty unlikely to see a stray abandoned bird fluttering around your local neighbourhood. How would you tell it apart from the thousands of other wild birds? And to be honest the bird is probably going to be happier in the wild than it would have been living in a square foot of steel mesh.

Finishing on a slightly darker not what’s the bird equivalent of stick a dog or cat in a back full of rock and throwing it into the river? Do you tie rocks to its feet so it can flap like crazy but won’t be able to take off? Guess that could work.

Lets get this out of the way up front, I don’t like Jerry Seinfeld. I don’t find him funny, never have. To those that love Jerry and think he’s a comedy god, I’m sorry. Sorry that you’re probably not going to like parts of this post, and that you’ve been misled for the best part of the last two decades. So, with that out of the way.

What’s the deal with home loans? (Sorry had to do it) You want somewhere to live you’ve really only got two choices. Sure there is probably three, but I’m ruling out purchasing property outright because unless you’re filthy rich, or have recently disposed of a wealthy relative after forcing them to change their will, there’s no way you’re paying cash for a house. Except if it’s really small, falling down (renovators delight), and located in a one horse town with just a pub and a post office.

The two options you’ve got are to rent or t get a home loan. And if your headed down the home loan sink hole, err, I mean, path of happiness, then you’ll need to consult your bank or building society - strangely that can be shortened to ‘BS’, coincidence?. And if you’re a sucker for gimmicks then you’re probably already half way through the door into your nearest Greater Building Society branch (anyone and everyone outside of northern New South Wales, will likely never have heard of them or their ads, fear not).

“Their reason for you to switch? They're not a bank, so they're awesome. Apparently. Or something like that.

For years, at least the last 10, they’ve been running this con ‘special offer’ where you get a “free” holiday when you switch your loan from your  current provider over to them. Their reason for you to switch? They’re not a bank, so they’re awesome. Apparently. Or something like that. If they’re so awesome why do they need to offer bribes ‘incentives’ and ‘bonuses’ to make you switch, should not their service, fees, interest rate etc be the selling points. Apparently not.

I imagine that the fine print that accompanies these ‘free’ holidays probably takes longer to decipher than the holiday itself would last. Ok, maybe not, but you’d be stupid to think that there isn’t some list of conditions. So I did some searching. This is how the ‘free’ holiday works (roughly). You get allocated “one triangle reward point” for every $250 you borrow. So if you borrowed $250,000 you’d get 1000 “triangle reward points”. So, what can you get for that?

You can get, 4 nights in a 4 star resort in the Whitsundays, or 5 nights in a 4 star resort in Fiji, or nearly two weeks in 4 star luxury in Canberra (not sure why you’d do that). There are numerous other options too, that’s just a tiny selection. I’ll admit they didn’t seem as scummy as I was expecting, whether or not saving a couple of hundred bucks because you’ve now got $250,000 and 25 years dept is really worth it… There are some catches too, like this “the journey to and from each property is your responsibility, including the cost”, your ‘free’ holiday to sunny Fiji suddenly ain’t so ‘free’.

Given the persistence of the free home loan gimmick in the last decade you’d have to assume it works well enough for them to justify its continuation. Either that or they have a marketing team with a severe lack of creativity. They started to mix it up a few years ago when petrol prices first started to rise, by offering ‘free petrol’, well not ‘free’ but discounted nonetheless. Recently they’ve brought this back (or perhaps they’ve just started advertising it heavily again, don’t know, don’t care), offering a 50c per litre saving on your petrol bill. Woo…

I’ve always had issues with these petrol cost saving schemes, but that’s a topic for another day, and I don’t even have a car. Again, like the holiday scheme there are conditions. Basically the more you borrow the longer your petrol discounts lasts, eg. $200,000 loan gets you 1 year of cheaper petrol, for a maximum or 80 litres per week. Not terrible, and better than a kick in the goolies, but the question has to be asked, why do they need gimmicks to lure their customers in.

“As news.com.au put it, the signing of Jerry was "either an absolute coup for a Newcastle financial business or a sign of how far your star can fall". I'm going go with the latter.

Seemingly free holidays and cheap petrol (which by the way, you can only have one or the other) still weren’t bringing across enough hicks intelligent country folk so they needed to try something new, or more to the point something that was ‘current’ ten years ago. They hired Jerry Seinfeld to do some commercials. Genius move. While we’re at it, why don’t we get Toyota to use the Flintstones to promote the Prius, afterall they had the first eco-friendly car, the only emissions from the Flintstone-mobile were generated by Fred.

Yes, Jerry is a successful stand-up comedian. Yes, he had a successful sitcom that ran for 9 years, but come on that was 11 years ago. We’re only just bringing the 80’s back, we don’t need to start bringing tragic 90’s trends back just yet. As news.com.au put it, the signing of Jerry was “either an absolute coup for a Newcastle financial business or a sign of how far your star can fall”. I’m going go with the latter. It was mainly surprising though because he’d only ever appeared in two other advertising campaigns, one for Microsoft and one for American Express. Comparing “The Greater Building Society” to “American Express” would be like comparing psuedo-planet Pluto to the planetary giant Jupiter. Worlds apart.

I can’t find how much they were stupid enough to pay him, but I’d guess its got at least 7 figures. Perhaps they’re embarrassed to say how much. Especially given that the ads are only shown in the Newcastle and Gold Coast regions. All that money, and they aren’t even showing it in the capital cities? Sure, ok then. Even with all the money they must of thrown at him they still couldn’t get him to actually shoot the ads in Australia, instead they recreated (not very well) a Newcastle street in Long Island.

According to Wikipedia… yes I use wikipedia for research so what this ain’t no university essay, it’s a rant about shit I hate, I don’t need fully qualified bibliographicalised sources to back up my wild and sweeping claims. That’s something academics do. Ok, lets try that again… According to wikipedia Jerry wrote the scripts for all fifteen different ads that were shot. Which totally explains why they are all as pathetically lame as each other. I hope “The Greater”, and its gullible customers, are pleased with how the money was spent. Or not.

I’m not an advertising expert, but I know what I like. I’m not in the market for a home loan, but I know where I wouldn’t go to get one. I don’t need cheap petrol, I don’t have a car. I’m in need of a holiday, but I don’t need to take out a loan to get one. Really everything that bugs me about “The Greater” shouldn’t really bug me because it has no relevance to me. But shouldn’t their advertising leave me wanting a loan, cheap petrol and a holiday even if I don’t need/want them? If thats the case, then perhaps they should rebrand themselves “The Lesser Building Society”.

In the last couple of years fast food giants have started to push ‘healthier’ options as part of their menus. I’m not overly concerned about how healthy or not these meals are, because presumably if you’re eating fast food with enough regularity then you’re probably not too concerned either. Whether this health-shift is a direct result of the “Supersize Me” doco from a few years can’t really be proven, but there is probably a good chance that one moron’s on camera antics actually started the move towards a healthier fast food. If you believe in such a thing.

Another trend I’m spotting is ‘gourmet’ fast food, mainly pizzas and the occasional burger, but seriously ‘gourmet’? No. I don’t care what exotic salads, fungi or dead animals you’re serving up in your gourmet dish, its not gourmet. Its fast food, gourmet isn’t fast, or at least it shouldn’t be. My pet peeve when it comes to this pseudo-gourmet craze is pizza. I don’t know about you, but I buy takeaway pizza because its unhealthy, tasty, greasy, meaty etc. I don’t want 7 different kinds of capsicum, 4 different types of pumpkin, feta cheese, spinach, tofu, re-fried beans, Mongolian sausage, Russian lamb etc. I want pizza, not an orgy of ‘gourmet’ ingredients spread sparsely over some Portuguese flat bread. Pizza. Gimme.

It would also appear that the creativity levels of fast food giants (or more specifically their marketing folk) is shrinking, unlike the waists of their faithful customers. A few months ago McDonalds released two new ‘gourmet’ burgers, with ‘better’ ingredients - things like “fancy lettuce”, “purple onion”, two sauces and a fancy bun. And apparently that was enough for them to use the tag line “it’s a little bit fancy”. Oh, fuck off, it’s not a little bit fancy, yes the one in the add looks all crisp, firm and delicious, but I can guarantee that the one you actually buy will look like a Big-Mac with fancy lettuce and purple onion. The tag line should have been “it’s a little more expensive”. But I digress, back to the lack of creativity I mentioned.

“Hungry Jacks doesn’t really seem to be trying the whole fancy/gourmet/health scam, instead they seem to be running with the 'bigger is better' logic. This new burger has more of everything, not better, just more.

The McDonalds burgers were named ‘Grand Angus’ and ‘Mighty Angus’, because we’re meant to believe that its genuine Angus beef. Ok, whatever. Anyway, despite my obvious issues with the way they marketed this slab of meat in a ‘fancy bun’, I didn’t really have anything against the name. In fact, if anything, I thought it was good, they managed to come up with a product name that didn’t start with ‘Mc’ - although the ‘Mighty McAngus’ has a certain ring…

Things were all good, I was over my hatred, well, with the exception of the curly haired git on one of their ads offering his partner a ‘sparkling cola’ to go with her ‘Grand Angus’. He’s not funny, he’s a douche, a supersized McDouche in fact. Get off my television you fool.

Then last night my discontent was stirred, a TV ad appeared featuring some dude with a thick Scottish accent. He was spouting about some new Hungry Jacks (or Burger King, depending on where you’re from) burger that had been named after him. His name? Angus. Fuck me, McCopy much? Oh, but it gets better/worse. Unlike Maccas, Hungry Jacks doesn’t really seem to be trying the whole fancy/gourmet/health scam, instead they seem to be running with the ‘bigger is better’ logic. This new burger has more of everything, not better, just more. And what have they named it?

Well, its the “Angry Angus”, yes I’m not making this shit up. And as someone pointed out to me on twitter, why would you buy a burger called the “mad cow”? Unless of course you were a mad Scotsman, with a hankering for a big burger. Have they no shame (probably), how do they expect to get proper brand recognition, when their new brand is so close to a competitor’s brand that even your smartest fast food junkie is going to struggle to work out which comes from where. How long before someone heads into their nearest Maccas and asks for an “Angry Angus”, the one with the double meat and bacon etc, but all they can get is a wannabe gourmet “Grand Angus” with fancy lettuce and purple onion on a fancy bun.

Fast food, you’re fast becoming (more) farcical. But, if you ignore the lame ‘healthy’ and ‘fancy’ shenanigans, some fast food tastes great, and you ‘only’ feel like crap for a few hours after eating it… yeah on second thoughts, its not that great, but that’s not going to stop me eating it occasionally.

It took way to long but smoking was finally banned in pubs, clubs and many other public places. But that’s just the first step. This doesn’t remove smokers from these places, meaning they are still free to step outside suck down a few cancer sticks and then bring their putrid stench back inside with them. The next step is to ban smoking in public completely. If you want to kill yourself fuck off and do it in the privacy of your own home.

Too harsh? Not likely, I’m only just getting started. I’m not saying make smoking illegal altogether, that’s never going to happen, just remove it from public view.

Imagine a world where you could walk down the street and not have to pass through random clouds of cigarette smoke, where you could catch public transport without fear that a dirty smoker is going to sit nearby and spread their putrid stench (then we’d only have to worry about those with toxic B.O.).

Hospitals have huge waiting lists right? Now what would happen if all of a sudden we started refusing treatment to smokers, and give treatment to patients who aren’t ingesting a carton of ciggies a week. This alone would solve the issues raised by my next point…

Smoking in and/or around hospitals. What. The. Fuck. The local hospital that I go through twice a day on my way to and from work has large signs at the entrance clearly stating that for health reasons there is no smoking permitted anywhere on the health campus. These main signs are backed up by additional signs placed on the outer walls of the hospital at 10-15 metre intervals. Yet numerous dumb fucks still smoke and nothing is done to stop them. One proposal would be to give the general (non-smoking) public the right to use the nearest fire extinguisher to douse anyone smoking in or around the hospital grounds. I’d get enjoyment out of that.

“I'm pretty sure I wouldn't be allowed to take regular 15-minute "I don't smoke be cause I have a brain" breaks

I’m not even sure which is worse the retard nurses who smoke or the patients hooked up to drips who venture out into the cold just so they can continue to shorten their pathetic excuse for a life. An example, yesterday morning there was this woman sitting out side the main doors into the hospital, coffee in one hand, death stick in the other, coughing a lung up in between puffs, with a baby (presumably hers) sitting beside her and all this in temperatures well below 10 degrees celsius.

For starters you’re in hospital - stop fucking smoking. You’re coughing like there’s no tomorrow - stop fucking smoking. Its freezing outside - stop fucking smoking and go back inside AND take your poor child with you.

Then there is the workplace. Smokers take regular cigarette breaks to feed their addiction, god knows how much of their 8 hour day they spend away from their desk sucking in nicotine, but I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t be allowed to take regular 15-minute “I don’t smoke be cause I have a brain” breaks, hows that fair?

I still can’t fathom why, in this day and age, people still take up smoking. Seriously WHY? Complete lack of neural activity could be a possibility, but its more like they have a much lamer excuse. 14-year old girls smoke because “it makes them look cool”… yes, when I was in high school there was nothing more attractive that a girl who had a cough like a 80-year-old and who smelt like an ashtray…or not… and I went to a pretty ordinary high school. Other teens smoke because their no-good-shit-for-brains parents buy their cigarettes for them, either that or because their parents tell them not to smoke so they do it to be rebellious.

The message is clearly not getting across, if all the advertising dollars that are being spent showing disintegrating lung tissue, clogged arteries and mouth cancer aren’t a deterrent then what on earth is? I think, and I’m deadly serious, that if we started to take away the benefits from smokers they might start to come to their senses.

Think about it, if they had to choose between having access to health care, health insurance, social security payments, disability pensions, etc or killing themselves with cigarettes which would they choose? Obviously there would be those who would still continue to smoke a pack a day, but lets face it, the world’s probably better off without them anyway.

Lets face it you probably don’t care about the budget, its monumentally boring, and apparently event the government don’t really care for it either. No real surprise there I guess.

Captain KRudd and merry gentlemen deliver their second budget a couple of weeks ago and to be honest I couldn’t tell you what 90% of it was about. Simply don’t care. However there are a few bones I’d like to pick. Remember Kev’s “you beaut” stimulus package (no, not the one he gave his cat…) where he gave everyone $900, right, keep that figure in your mind.

One of the “big news” items out of the budget was that thanks to the stimulus the country is now in a big fuck-off pool of debt to the tune of umpteen billion dollars, and in effect every man, woman and child in this fine country “owes” around $2,500. Wait a sec, how the fuck does that work? He gives us $900 and then expects $2,500 back. Where’s Swanny, I want to punch him in the face.

Perhaps the massive debt has something to do with the $22 billion “infrastructure project” to “secure the nations future”, call me crazy but I would have though that not turning a substantial budget surplus into ginormous budget debt in just two years would have been a better way to “secure the nations future”.

“If you make the premixed drinks more expensive then 16 year olds will just mix their own and they’ll be much stronger than any of those stupid price-jacked lollie drinks.

Stepping sideways for a second to go back to the stimulus cock-up (no pun intended). So the deal was that virtually anyone who entered a tax return in the last financial year would get the $900 payment or pat thereof (or something like that). It didn’t matter if you had died, it didn’t matter if you’d been dead for 10 years, it didn’t matter if you left the country, it didn’t matter if you only ever lived in the country for 2 months 40 years ago. Apparently everybody could get stimulated by Kevin. And some more than once.

Yes, students (and I’m not hating on students, I was one just a couple of years ago) received double payments if they were also on youth allowance. Right, so they get a weekly handout from the government anyway and then they get twice the stimulation as the rest of us? How’s that fair? You’d like to think that the students would put the extra money towards paying off their HECS debt, but they won’t. Instead they’ll use their giant stimulus to purchase all the alcohol that they were unable to afford because of that fucked up alco-pop tax bullshit. Newsflash: If you make the premixed drinks more expensive then 16 year olds will just mix their own and they’ll be fuckloads stronger than any of those stupid price-jacked lollie drinks.

Back to the budget. Pensioners also got (apparently) a raw deal, well so I’ve heard, didn’t really pay attention to that bit. Something to do with them not being pensioners until they’re older, meaning it’ll be longer before they can start getting their pension payments to buy all those shiny things that they don’t need.

And that “infrastructure project”, $22 billion spent on things that won’t work, won’t be finished, won’t run on time or any combination of the above. Using my local bus network as an example, this money should be spent replace the 30 year shit heaps that they call buses, they aren’t air or water tight, 80% of the seats a broken, they smell like urine, and they are loud, inefficient, polluting junk mobiles. An improved scheduling system would be fucking awesome as well, mind you anything that could improve on the current system would be welcome. For example a bus that is due at 4:40pm should arrive at 4:40pm, not 4:30pm, not 4:50pm and definitely not 5:00pm. If the bus is early, wait and catch the time up, and if its running late don’t wait. Simple.

Lastly following the budget there was talk about the possibility of an early election. Seriously there’s no way in hell Elmer Krudd is going to call an early election, he couldn’t be that stupid surely…oh wait…

* cue background music * Since the dawning of the ages humans have been killing animals to eat them. It’s called the food chain. Deal with it. * end background music *

Why shouldn’t we be vegetarian? Apart from the obvious (lack of protein, lack of iron, lack of dead animal consumption, its boring) there are a number of good reasons each which I think goes against some of the “logic” people use to justify their vegetarianism in the first place.

General health reasons. Most vege-munchers will tell you that they are vegetarian because its the healthier alternative, and in turn makes them healthier. Ok, now how many of these people also take numerous supplements (vitamins etc) to provide the things that they could simply get from eat a decent slab of steak.

“Would it make you feel better if we housed the battery chickens in 5 star penthouses with faux-leather couches... and then we killed them. Seriously chicken already expensive enough.

Environmental reasons. They say be a vegetarian because the breeding of animals requires land to be cleared and uses lots of water. Right… and you don’t need to clear land for veggies or water them, sure. Just because the minority choose to steer clear of meat doesn’t mean that any less is going to be produced, a 10 percent rise in vegos isn’t going to result in a 10 decrease in beef production. So if there are more cows, and less normal people eating them, then they are out there producing methane instead of having a bolt driven through their skull, which ceases the methane production and starts their journey to my plate. Hows that for environmentalism.

Humane reasons. Fuck humane, these animals were bred to be slaughtered and eaten. The fact they they may die a slow an painful death means nothing, their purpose is to eat, bulk up and then to be killed, simple as that. Inhumane breeding? so what if my fried chicken grew up in a 6-inch square box, as long as its dead and cooked when it arrives in my three-piece feed I’m ok with that. Would it make you feel better if we housed the battery chickens in 5 star penthouses with faux-leather couches… (can’t use real leather ‘cause we’d have to kill something…) and then we killed them. Seriously chicken already expensive enough.

We have canine teeth, the big fella upstairs gave them to us (if you believe that sort of thing), we don’t have vegan-tofu teeth. Do as Sam Neill does, eat red meat, you owe it to your somewhat developed brain.

And the award for the most overblown news story of 2009 goes to, drumroll, the fucking pig flu. It seemed to first get attention after some nut in Mexico reported that 150 people had died from the so called “swine flu”, this number was downgraded late last week to, umm 7. Mexican math fail. They were also reporting something like 700 cases, of which only about 300 actually had the flu, the rest were just Mexican.

Feral-albino-Mexican-hog flu seems to be worked into each and every news item, with the media doing whatever the fuck they can to drive the fear of death into the general populous. I don’t believe that this “threat” is any more serious that the bird flu “threat” from a couple of years ago, but the main difference this time is that it might affect Americans. Poor things. Here I was thinking they only cared about oil.

“The Prime Minister of Israel suggested it should be know as "Mexican Flu" due to their religious beliefs about pigs being dirty, he later withdrew his comments after he’d figured they were probably offensive towards Mexicans.

Last night on the longest running, and most reliable current affairs program in this country (if there can be such a thing) they had some so-called expert predicting that if nothing is done that 40% of the world’s population would get sick form the flu. Yeah right, whatever you reckon, the only way that 2.68 billion people are going to catch pig flu is if they start adding it to the water supply. Someone pointed out to me on twitter that the Spanish flu affected 50% of the population, but that was a century ago… somehow I think 40% in this day and age is virtually impossible.

The name “swine flu” is stupid, and its convinced the ‘simple’ folk that they should stop eating pork products. It’s not Mad-cow disease, so unless your pork steak sneezes on you, you’re going to be fine. The Prime Minister of Israel suggested it should be know as “Mexican Flu” due to their religious beliefs about pigs being dirty (which they are, but fuck me they taste good), he later withdrew his comments after he’d figured they were probably offensive towards Mexicans. Officially it supposed to be called something lame like H1N1 Influenza, but seriously how many media outlets are going to adopt that?

The experts have being saying that “we’re just days away from a pandemic”… and they’ve been saying that for nearly two weeks. Mr Pandemic, I’m still waiting, if you don’t arrive I can’t justify my in-progress screenplay title “Phase 6: The Day Swine Flu”.

How about the world goes back to focusing on the things that are actually killing much more significant portions of the population, you know, things like cancer, AIDS and heart disease. Just a thought.

So if you’ve got a sore throat, runny nose, general aches and pains, blocked nose, headache etc stop worrying, there’s a 99.9% chance you’ve just got this thing called a common cold. Suck it up, stop being such a whiny bitch, and go and eat some bacon.

While watching The Biggest Loser finale the other night… ok laugh it up - I watch reality TV, so what, there is nothing wrong with me getting a little enjoyment out of sitting on my skinny ass, eating mostly unhealthy food, watching fat people lose weight. Ok, maybe there is something wrong with that. Meh.

Throughout the entire night (which, just quietly, seemed to go on forever) they were flogging to death a series of ads for “The Biggest Loser meal replacement bars”… these bars come attached to the slogan “just replace two meals a day with a bar or a shake”. I’m sorry, but what the fuck? How is this sound nutritional advice?

“Essentially what their marketing campaign is telling people to do is stop eating and you’ll lose weight.

They’ve just spent the last three months with the contestants driving into their skulls (some of which are thicker than others) about what its a healthy diet, what foods they should eat, how they should be prepared, how much they should eat, how many calories they should consume etc etc. Then they get out of the house and the “solution” to keeping the weight off is these friggin’ meal replacement bars. How does this make any sense?

Essentially what their marketing campaign is telling people to do is stop eating and you’ll lose weight. Umm, yeah, of course you’ll lose weight. If all you’re eating is these stupid bars you’re also going to be incredibly hungry in-between your replacement meals, and what does hunger lead to? Snacking! And snacking is what got these fatties in trouble in the first place.

I’m hardly an advocate for healthy eating, in fact I’m terrible at it, but there is absolutely no part of me that sees the logic in this madness. If the only way for you to lose weight is to effectively starve yourself, then perhaps, maybe, you should just stay fat.