Boring Like A Drill.

Krankiboy goes shopping for manilla folders and meets a shop assistant who takes the Real Ultimate Power website way too seriously and is writing a screenplay. Insanity ensues.

If you think most movies are crap, at least you can thank kooks like this for reminding you there are plenty of worse movies that could be made. Dozens of them:

Imagine Julia Roberts, Pres. George W. Bush, Mick Jagger and Olympic Gold Medalist Marion Jones all in the same room. Suddenly the doors to that room are locked behind them, and the famous four are forced to play ingenious and twisted games of survival until only one is left alive.

This is the first screenplay in a planned trilogy. It is told in a non-linear narrative style. A group of kids form a math club which turns into a nightmare of bureaucracy and ends up consuming their lives. It eventually leads to someone’s murder.

“Eyna!” (South African for “Ouch!”) is the comedic tale of a man, a manly-man, a sports-legend, national hero, nay a cricket god, who finds himself… pregnant? Ah, the fickle finger of fate and misguided storks.

Actually, I can imagine that last one as a comeback vehicle for Yahoo Serious.

Illustrator sought for silly project concerning snails. snail99@hotmail.com

(OK, this was actually from the “Readers’ Requests” section immediately below, but in the LRB it cd easily count as a personal too.)

Jesus, if it’s not Peter Phelps it’s Johnny Farnham thrashing about in his tiny, inflatable wading pool of insular celebrity in the misbegotten belief that you can endear yourself to the world by acting like an egomaniacal tool.

A week ago the prime minister of New Zealand suggested that an ageing pop singer warbling “Sadie the Cleaning Lady” (or even “Pressure Down”) might not be the most appropriate way to commemorate the slaughter of ANZACs at Gallipoli this year. Not only did Johnny F. take it personally, but he’s still whingeing about it:

I won’t say she is a real dog. I wouldn’t say that about my mother-in-law … and she is.

Charming bloke; fragile sense of self-worth. I suppose we shd be grateful he didn’t call her a dopey, hairy-backed sheila. Or at least grateful if we weren’t at his gig on the weekend, judging by the playlist (posted after the article above). “Hold On I’m Coming”? “It’s A Long Way To The Top”? Brrrr!

Now to show how topical and up-to-date I am here’s a photie of Michael Moore or somebody from last year’s Oscar ceremony.

“Oh no, the cat’s eaten all the toilet paper.”

Kylie Mole is all grown up and working at The Age. Can’t help but notice the publicist’s disturbing definition of the term “doing well.” Perhaps she’s rehearsing for the old “died in hospital, said to be in a satisfactory condition” gag.

I haven’t felt the need to add to the justified sneering at the contrived and cynical abortion “debate” that just happened to spontaneously pop up at the end of the silly season. But now that whatever point was to be made has been lost in a welter of jokes about discovering your dad is really the Mad Monk, one burning question has been left unresolved.

These were the guys we were told had Changed Australia Forever by every political columnist staring down a deadline and three more years of status quo. Isn’t this type of issue supposed to be their bread and butter? So many hacks were telling us a few months ago how influential FF is going to be, and now not one of them can be bothered hunting down one of the happyclappers for a soundbite. According to their website they haven’t said boo since December. Did the entire party take their Christmas vacation in Aceh? Or is it possible that their good luck last time at the polls was just a teensy bit overstated?

Experimental + interstate music: With or without it, you’d have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, it often takes religion presents…

Thusday [sic] 24th Feb 8pm – 12am

impromptu lons – hi god people – barrage – meatwave – scraps – grey skulls -night crash – das butcher – rory brown / dennis rappoport – old timey dj -an unknown film – plus guests from queensland

Sweatshop Warehouse, 140 Barkly St (off Sydney Rd.) Brunswick

(near the Brotherhood of St Lawrence)

Donation for entry (money please)

This is in Melbourne, don’t go to your nearest Brunswick expecting to find it if you are in another city. I don’t write this stuff myself, it’s all dictated by higher beings.

I’m plugging this because I’m playing that night as a “guest” (even though I’m not from Queensland – brr!). Expect to find me lurking in the background messing with some bits of balky electronic gear with one hand, nursing a beer with the other and clumsily propositioning girls.

It must be dead because an ageing manchild complains that even air guitar isn’t as cool as it once was, even in that stanky pen of rockpigdom, Hawthorn:

One conclusion was inescapable: the imaginary guitar is in grave danger of vanishing into thin air. As I see it, it’s part of a long and insidious plot to take rock’s power out of the hands of the common man and woman and towards the whims of corporatised music fashion. My own story is perhaps typical…

Next week: a scorching exposé of how they’ve changed the formula of Fanta. It’s so sickly sweet these days, what they hell were they thinking?

Well, it’s why Rollertrain hates it, actually. But I’m sure we all agree with her, don’t we? Especially you, auntie.

Answer me this, bitches: If a dick devotee like myself can figure out that all clitori pretty much require the same kind of stimulation that mine does, then why – you eighteen-year-old Californian cretins, with your sexual boundary issues and your ass tattoos and your daddy deficits and your navel rings and those cheap plastic stripper shoes – shouldn’t you?

Oh yeah, and for christ’s sake cut those stupid fingernails.

Incidentally, if you google for “Helen Clark” and “John Farnham” you get results that are more informative than the New Zealand prime minister’s jaw-dropping revelation that she’s never heard of Australia’s richest leagues club singer:

… Among the 1000 or so guests was New Zealand Prime Minister, Helen Clark.”. … saw an ad for the “Greatest One Hit Wonders” that featured John Farnham’s “You’re the …

… SOUNDSCAPE PJ Harvey, John Farnham … It must only be a matter of time before Helen Clark and Paul Swain make it compulsory for the Government to install hidden …

… hairy dwarf from The Lord of the Rings), New Zealand Prime Minister Helen Clark (ditto the … I don’t want to sound like a snob but John Farnham’s Your the Voice? …

… DELTA Goodrem has done it again, surpassing John Farnham’s record for the longest …NEW Zealand Prime Minister Helen Clark was frisked for explosives by security …

… Prime Minister Helen Clark says cannabis … John Farnham’s record label is giving thes11.org web site until 5pm Thursday the 24th of August to remove a …

… Most Spectacular Musical Event Described by Prime Minister Helen Clark as an … In-Earmonitoring engineer) and John Henderson (John Farnham’s monitor engineer …

… of red last night didn’t help and being dragged to a John Farnham concert neither. …Does Helen Clark have furry toes to go with her pointy ears and bad teeth? …

… Yeni Zelanda Başbakanı Helen Clark, ulusal radyo kanalına yaptığı açıklamada …Kidman’dan sonra listede şarkıcı John Farnham, AC/DC grubunun eski …

UPDATE: Best Prime Ministerial Press Statement Ever. NZ Government spokesman Ian Kennedy said “I’m authorised to say New Zealand’s Prime Minister has never heard of Johnny Farnham”.

Dr David Thorpe at Something Awful does a beautiful job describing the joy I find in listening to crap music.

As far as I’m concerned, claiming to like a song ironically is a cop-out. Whether you’re spinning “Rump Shaker” by Wreckx-N-Effect with the intent to smile wryly or with the intent to actually zoom-a-zoom-zoom and a boom boom, it matters not; you’re still spinning “Rump Shaker.”

Amen to that, and exactly why I’m listening to “The Al Wood Orchestra plays the Hits of Rod Stewart” while typing this and grinning like an idiot. You can’t like something ironically any more than like it sarcastically.

Also, this succicntly explains my irony-free, ever-expanding collection of crappy old LPs:

Why is it that a snob like me will joyfully listen to crap from the past while violently eschewing crap from the present? Let’s put it this way: the war against shit like Maroon 5 is still claiming lives. However, the war against Bobby Brown was won over a decade ago… in ten or fifteen years, the songs you hate today will probably be hilarious instead of annoying.

You’ll be driving your kid to school in your hoverbubble with the radio tuned to “00’s Retro Breakfast,” and a smile will creep across your face as Hoobastank’s “The Reason” comes up. “I remember this song,” you’ll tell your pasty and unpopular son. “This song used to be crap!” And you’ll love every minute of it.

I just can’t stop thinking about Peter Phelps. How does he do it? It must be his extreme versatility that dazzles me. One day he’s running for the Senate, and the next he’s soliciting public humiliation for being a self-confessed lardarse on 3rd-rate TV filler.

It reminds me of Ita Buttrose: one day she’s named in all seriousness as a special advisor to the would-be Prime Minister John Hewson, and the next she’s happily cuddling bog rolls in TV ads. I would also add Gough Whitlam spruiking pasta sauce, but so many decades of being swaddled in sycophancy have extinguished his desire for credibility.

THIS JUST IN: Peter Phelps is fat.

On the positive side, his career has soared to the dizzy heights of Sunday evening reality TV, where those greedy stupid scriptwriters can’t hog all the credit for his character development.

Many weeks ago when I was a pretentious young nerdboy I went around telling people I was a writer. Invariably they would ask if I was working on the Great Australian Novel, and with equal predictability I would answer that I was writing the Great Adelaide Novel. Drunken ranting ensued.

For a while I kept a collection of the incidences when some person, thing or abstract concept with vaguely Australian connection was publicly referred to as an ‘ICON’. This task took up far too much time and effort, so I tried restricting it to South Australian icons. This, however, also felt like too much work, so I just googled for the phrase and found that National Trust has been awarding lucky South Australian doodads officially-recognised iconicity annually since 2001. Prepare to be enlightened as you meet some of the South Australian Heritage Icons of 2002.

Police Greys. Did you know that the South Australian police force have recruited aliens to do their dirty work? Neither did I, but it would explain a lot about Adelaide: kids mysteriously disappearing en masse, mutilated bodies popping up in the darndest places, law lecturers floating face-down in the Torrens. Then I read a bit further and found that by ‘police greys’ they mean horses. Apparently all police horses in SA are grey. I never noticed this, but then I’m not a thirteen year-old girl and so don’t notice horses much.

SA police like grey horses “for night visibility”, which is unique somehow. They don’t say if the unique part is that all the horses are grey, or that Adelaide has yet to discover the secret of artificial light.

The horses are used for “crowd control, patrols, searches & ceremonial events” (my emphasis). So if you read a news report about some kids from Adelaide getting busted outside the Big Day Out with sugarcubes in their pockets, you know that Sgt. Dobbin was on their case.

The Stump-Jump Fucking Plough. Along with the Hills Fucking Hoist and the Victa Fucking Mower, the stump-jump fucking plough is one of the only three things ever invented by Australians. Every year thousands of school children are taught about Australian ingenuity, and every time these are the only three fucking things the teacher can think of, because they are the only three fucking things he/she was taught.

Every year dozens of politicians waste precious oxygen about Australia forging ahead into the 20th (sic) century with a strong manufacturing sector and, when casting around for examples of Australian technical innovation since The War, will quickly give up and just mention the stump-jump fucking plough again.

In ever case the result is the same. Everybody walks away thinking (a) “I hate the stump-jump fucking plough” and (b) “Christ this country is doomed.”

Why is there such gratuitous hostility toward the stump-jump fucking plough? Unlike the Hills Fucking Hoist and the Victa Fucking Mower, no-one can explain what the stump-jump fucking plough does or how it works. It seems to have something to do with the plough going over the stump, somehow, instead of you having to go around it. Thus the need for steering was obviated, influencing the design and technical specifications of Holden motorcars until the mid 1980s.

The last remaining stump in pastoral Australia was dynamited in 1847.

The Ligurian Bee. I remember when I was a kid watching that episode of Batman when The Penguin unleashed a swarm of Ligurian Bees on Gotham City. Wait a second. On second thought, they were actually Lysergic Fruitflies. In which case, I have never heard of Ligurian Bees until today.

Apparently Kangaroo Island has been a Ligurian Bee Sanctuary since 1885, and remains home to “the purest strain of bee in the world” Which is nice for them, but it’s a pity they couldn’t find an indigenous species to be an icon. Of course, we could have named the short-legged emus, which were unique to Kangaroo Island, but we killed them all.

According to the website, “Ligurian bees supply a very high quality honey” which is exported all over the world, but then they would say that. I can’t imagine the local chamber of commerce would put out press releases saying “COME TO KANGAROO ISLAND, QUARANTINE FOR THE WORLD’S SHITTIEST ARYAN HONEYBEES! EMU-FREE SINCE 1897!” I can imagine, however, Batman episode where the caped crusader investigates sinister goings-on at the P.N. Guinn Honey Factory Inc. Come to think of it, I am not convinced that Kangaroo Island exists. I’ve never seen it, and it sounds like the sort of Australian place name Americans would make up for a TV show.

The Green and Gold Cookbook. The above photograph is a lie. You do not need eggs when making recipes from the Green and Gold. Or real milk. It was “conceived” (eww!) in 1923 and “although revised, it is little changed from its original edition”. This is easy to believe, and what revisions were made must have been during World War II, unless chickens and cows had yet to be domesticated eighty years ago.

If your mum has one of these she’s never cooked from it, otherwise you wouldn’t be alive to read this. Every dish begins with a hefty dollop of lard, dripping or suet. Milk is powdered; eggs are something you can only dream of owning one day when you win X-Lotto, each time you’re instructed to dissolve a dessertspoon of bicarbonated soda in water. It’s amazing these books weren’t thrown ecstatically en masse onto bonfires on V-J Day.

If you do get your hands on a copy, try to follow their recipes for cooking vegetables. Every one is identical: boil for 40 minutes, toss in hot lard. Invite your friends for tea. Make sure your larder is stocked up on copha, Cream of Tartar, junket, waterglass, borax and alum before you start, or you won’t get very far.

On the plus side, the back of the book contains useful information on how to remove bloodstains from carpets and soft furnishings, in response to housewives from Rose Park needing to know what to do in case they bayonet a Hun in their drawing room.

Stobie Poles. It’s good to see they’ve picked one heritage icon everyone can agree on: both the “Convict-free universal-suffrage Humphrey-B-Bear” camp of SA lovers and the “Child-raping bodies-in-barrels Fat-Cat” camp of SA lovers. You can’t help but notice they have photographed said poles from a long way away, so you can’t get a good look to see how ugly they are. I tried Googling for images of stobie poles but couldn’t find one that does justice to their uglitudiness. However, I do remember a newspaper years ago running a contest to find the biggest eyesore in Adelaide. The winning entry was a photo of a stobie pole which had recently had a station wagon ram into it.

It says ‘ere these engineering marvels of rusted steel and reinforced concrete were invented in 1924 “due to SA’s lack of suitable timber”. This always sounded like an urban legend to me. They can get wooden poles from Sydney to Broken Hill, but it’s only after the border that timber gets scarce?

The website tries to talk them up by pointing out ‘advantages’, such as “they’re termite proof and have a life span of around 50 years”, as if no-one’s going to remember this was the sales pitch for vinyl furniture. Or you can go them one better by arguing that in future the poles should be made from plutonium.

I actually know where this photo was taken; it’s the top end of Goodwood Road in Panorama, where it turns into Fiveash Drive. Sad.

The Checkside Punt. It’s a banana kick. I’ve never heard it called a checkside punt, and I suspect I never will.