This Wonderful Life

In memory of Vincenzo Spirelli

2007-12-07T10:10:00.000+11:00

Vincenzo Spirelli (1845-1912)

Known as the worst poet in Calabria. His work was so bad that review after review made him chronically suicidal. Nevertheless he soldiered on writing shockingly bad poetry until 1890s, when after two failed attempts to cut his own throat lead him to be committed to an insane asylum and a life-time of Gillette razors. To this day, on every 29th of Feburary, his hometown of TestaDiCatzo holds a festival of bad poetry, where townsfolk are encouraged to write and perform their own bad poetry while everyone laughs.

The List of Unspeakable Torments: Number 2

2007-12-07T09:48:00.001+11:00

I’ve never been accused of being a bleeding heart, strangely enough, but someone, somewhere has to finally do something to stop those filthy, ignorant, moronic little Japanese cunts from slaughtering whales. There. I’ve said it. I’m not embarrassed by it. I stand by that statement. I whole heartedly believe it. I’m not backing away from it. It’s just the truth - plain and simple. As Shaw put it in a time of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act.

And there you are, probably thinking I was hesitant about bagging the Japanese like that, in those virtually racist terms. Or else the inappropriateness of labelling any nationality as either filthy, ignorant or moronic. Or you thought I was being reluctant to use the dreaded C word that nobody would dare utter, and is now vaguely OK. Not really. I just have this thing for marine mammals, and the nimrods that refuse to leave them well enough alone. I don’t why and it vaguely shits me. It’s pretty much out of cultural character really. There are about as many Italian environmentalists as war heroes. By the way, for mine that Shaw quote is up there with the one wrongly attributed to Goring or Goebbels who was supposed to have said, every time I hear that word ‘culture’ I feel an irresistible urge to reach for my revolver. Now there’s Nazi gold for you. Genius[1].

Racism. It’s one of the very few true, long held Australian values. The thankfully now ex-Prime Minister of Australia, John Howard, would take that statement as being blasphemous, un-Australian. As the world first confirmed garden gnome come alive, Howard didn’t have the required grey matter to engage his opponents with dialogue, facts or argument. He liked to call them names, and he pretty fond of calling people who disagreed with him un-Australian. Of the new natural talents of Australians, apart from chasing balls, drinking beer, white-anting success and doing things with wire, is that they’re good at spotting bullshit so ironically the un-Australian tag is good measure of Australianness. But racism is an undeniable Australian trait and not confined to little, stuttering, short-arsed, conservative toe rags like that stunted dickhead Howard. The ‘White Australia Policy’ (1901-1973) was basically a ‘No Yellow Cunts Here Thanks Very Much’ Policy. It actually had pre-Federation origins, and has lasted in various guises to this very day.

The telling thing about that illiterate, cross eyed, pasty skinned, pointy nosed, middle aged, vacuous modern Australia bigot, Pauline Hanson was that every time the urban intelligentsia (pretty much all six of them) tried to take her on and bring her down, not only did they all fail dismally, but pretty much fuelled her appeal. Why? Because she reflected what a large chunk of Australia thought. They didn’t give a flying fuck about whatever the likes of Pilger, Manne, Greer, or Horne said about her in Arena or any other lefty rag. In fact, it was proof that she had the guts to step up and have a go. Good on her, they thought. At last, some one was speaking for the ordinary people. The ordinary Australians. The ones that weren’t interested in Wittgenstein, ASEAN, or monetary policy but the ones that used to tune into the squawking B.A. Santamaria from the National Civic Council, watched the Sydney to Hobart on Boxing Day, knew about Kadoka, had a Jack Absalom print hanging in the lounge, and used Moretein Fly Spray. And the ordinary Australian’s just happen to harbor a thick vein of suspicion and mistrust of anyone that doesn’t look, sound or act pretty much like they do.

I remember being in a queue at a newsagent at the time Hanson was proclaiming herself as ‘Mother of the Nation when I’d overheard some tottering old biddy mentioning to her friend how that Hanson ‘had a lot of good ideas’ and ‘spoke a lot of sense’. I butted in. Sorry, but what do you mean? Exactly which policies do you think has merit? She spluttered away, clearly unable to answer, so she straightened up and retorted in an indignant falsetto, well I support Pauline, she’s a great Australian, that’s MY opinion and I’m sticking to it. And that doesn’t mean I’m a racialist.

I let it go. I wanted to say, racialist? RACIALIST? You can’t even say ‘racist’. You just called it racialist. I heard you. Just then. Its not pronounced racialist. It’s called racist. R-A-C-I-S-T. As for your opinion, your stupid, creatanous, misinformed opinion. Your pointless, valueless, arsehole of an opinion. The opinion that you’ve malformed after countless hours of meaningless drivel with similarly mindless friends, all of you stinking of old pee and death, over bingo and bowls. Each of you contributing your own nonsensical world view fed from twisted personal bitterness and the grim fact that that you’re all irrelevant to almost everything and everyone. That’s what I wanted to say. That’s what I was thinking anyhow. But don’t get me started. Old people. Can’t live within them, can’t dose them with kerosene and set them on fire. It’s a deeply unfair world.

As much as that might shit you, there are others all too ready to excuse any manner of vile behavior under the banner of cultural practice, which should not only be tolerated but apparently celebrated in some sort of spirit of inclusiveness, preserved as part of the rich social diversity of modern Australia. Yes, sure, like female circumcision. You don’t see anyone applying for council funding for a street festival celebrating female circumcision. People defend Japanese whaling the same way. The have the right to hunt whales and dolphins because it’s a Japanese cultural practice. It can’t be because they actually want to eat whales. Apparently it tastes like shit, is only eaten by pensioners and is mostly used as cheap school lunch meat for a couple of million public school kids. The fact that they claim it’s for research is stupid beyond words.

The only other reason they hunt whales, I suspect, is because the entire world wants them to not hunt whales (except for Iceland and Norway who are pretty much useless as countries go[2]). It’s like when you were a kid, and your older bother or cousin had your arm twisted behind your back, telling you to do something, applying more pressure every time you refused. You get to the point where you know there is no way you’re giving in, that he’d have to actually break your arm to get his way. It’s the equivalent to giving the world the finger. The Japanese don’t need to kills whales. They don’t particularly want whale in their kitchen freezers. They could live perfectly happily not killing whales. But they’ll go on and on on indiscriminately slaughtering them for one simple reason - the fact that we say they shouldn’t.

I once sent an email to the Japanese embassy in protest. I spent a morning crafting a reasonable sort of written appeal. It acknowledged Japanese culture and custom. It said vaguely flattering things about their society, its leaders, its history and national character. It tried to calmly and reasonably explain my own personal objections. In the end it humbly asked that they kindly consider an alternative position. I though the tone was right. I wasn’t being smart-arsey about it. It was genuine. Of course I received nothing in response. In fact I don’t know what I wanted to achieve. I thought I might get a response from some low level embassy bureaucrat that said something along the lines of, look, you have to understand that apart from a couple of hundred fishing industry heavies and maybe the odd Yakuza, we basically agree with you’. A response that claimed that the natural world and nature are closer to the Japanese soul then perhaps any other. That whale really does taste like shit and no-one knows why we still hunt it. And that he’d pass the email on to higher authorities. That would have been enough, plenty in fact. But there was nothing. Well fuck that and fuck them.

The only ones who seem to be really on the ball are those Sea Sheppard guys who have that black boat, the one with the pirate flag, who believe in taking direct action. They regularly harass the whalers out at sea, ramming the boats, scaring off the whales, flashing brown-eyes, that sort of thing. They should, of course, be armed with torpedoes and really get the job done. Simple arithmetic. There are 127 million Japanese. There are 10,000 humpback whales. What if you accidentally ‘wasted’ 10 Japanese fishermen in your effort to protect 10,000 whales, just as collateral damage? To let them know that if they go out there, illegally, on the hunt, for no good reason, they’re pretty much going to cop it. Just ten or so, maybe fifteen. Let’s say under twenty for argument’s sake. Is that justified? There would still be well over 126 million Japanese left. More than plenty. I say ‘hell yes.’ Let’s get some perspective into the situation.

It’s not just the Japanese either. Not by a long chalk. No sireee. What’s even more loathsome and unjustifiable are the grimy, amoral Chinese obsessed with eating endangered animal parts. Rhino, tigers, bears, lizards, snakes, you name it, the Chinese are busily scurrying around either draining off its bile or noisily scoffing it down with both filthy hands. I’ve got a particularly personal thing about the Chinese and their disgusting dog eating habits. And it’s not just the fact that they insist on killing, butchering and eating intelligent, loyal and noble animals like dogs, animals with personalities mind you, the same ones that work to keep out drug runners and bail up criminals, that would drive into a raging torrent to save your life, or search through a blinding blizzard to find you buried in the snow, or lead you around the rest of your days if you were blind, or just lick your face when you’ve come after a hard day. But worst of all is the inexcusably cruel way these filthy barbarians treat them. Stuffing them into wire cages, binding them up by their legs, throwing them around on market trucks, breaking their bones, inflicting pain. Leave the fucking dogs alone, you scum-sucking dickheads.

And it won’t be long before the burgeoning Chinese middle class has single handedly wiped out the world’s entire tiger population. Why? Because your average Chinese office jockey thinks it’ll help him get hard and he’ll feel like a man rather than a snot nosed arse-wipe. They’re killing wild tigers to get a hard-on people, a hard-on! It’s a vicious cycle with tens of millions of the most reprehensible fuck-knuckles as players. It goes like this. Mr Chinese Noodle Nut shells out some serious yuan to buy tiger penis. Naturally, having bought tiger penis, he’s been thinking about rooting for most of the day. He goes through the motions of preparing and eating the tiger penis, all the time thinking of missus Noodle Nut and how the tiger penis is going to help him bang her. Surprise, surprise. Tiger penis actually seems to works due only to its placebo effect. A colour A4 of Paris Hilton’s ‘ham sandwich’ probably would have done exactly the same. So, Noodle Nut sticks it to missus Noodle Nut as she’s bending over the washing. Naturally she pops out more junior Noodle Nuts. Not only do they all spend the next twenty odd years or so sitting down to regular dinners of sweet and sour dog and treating any manner of ailments with bear bile or snakes blood, but now there are even greater numbers of male Noodle Nuts and even greater demand for tiger penis. More cash to the tiger penis suppliers, more cash to the poachers, and basically every living tiger on this planet will have his head blown off so that someone can hack its dick off with a machete and sell it the millions upon millions of brainless, fuckwitted Noodle Nuts. Well fuck that and fuck them[3].

But what are you going do? No point refusing to travel there when you’ve either already been or have never been that much interested in going there anyway. Little point boycotting their imports when you’re pretty much a minimal consumer, and there are millions of others who’ll gleefully purchase shiploads of future Chinese made landfill. Are there any alternatives to calling them names and telling them to ‘get fucked’ like some belligerent, snot-nosed schoolboy bully in a useless blog that no-one will ever read? Probably not. But strange things do happen. Fate. Serendipity. Who knows. Perhaps N. Spirelli will receive a windfall. A huge windfall. Enough to hire ammunition, enough to contract assassins. I’d buy them all sharp suits, and get them around an oval table in a boardroom. I’d brief them on personal missions. Sniper attacks on Japanese whalers, torture and execution of Chinese dog farmers. I’d have them round up as many Noodle Nuts as possible, dump them in purpose built coliseum and let half a dozen tigers go to work. And I’d televise the lot on the internet and pirate TV. Two wrong might make a right and I think time has come for a bit of payback.

[1] Goring or Gobbles might not have been serious when they didn’t say that. It might’ve been a joke. They might have been sitting around having a beer at Oktoberfest, listening to Himmler spinning some yarn. Ja, Ja, nice one Himmler, but you know, whenever I hear you use that word culture, I can’t help but reach for my gun, har har (chinking steins). But you never imagine that the Nazis had a sense of humour, liked the odd gag. Apparently, a Berlin munitions worker was executed for telling this one. Hitler and Göring are standing on top of Berlin's radio tower. Hitler says he wants to do something to cheer up the people of Berlin. Why don't you just jump? suggests Göring. Then there was this one. A senior Nazi visits a factory and asks the manager whether he still has Social Democrats among his workforce. Yes, 80 percent, comes the reply. Do you also have members of the Catholic Centre Party? Yes, 20 percent, the manager responds. Don't you have any National Socialists? Yes we're all Nazis now! Still, you can’t expect much from Germans humour-wise. If you want world domination, they’re your guys. Or snappy looking uniforms. Now those SS knew how to wear black. It’s like they’d hired Armani.

[2] What’s Iceland ever done for the world? Apart from that tuneless demented Bjork, famous for nothing apart perhaps for being the most boring weird person imaginable. Well, apart from Yoko Ono, whose similarly plain looking, terminally dull and talentless. As for Norway, all they’ve managed to do is pollute the entire world with mobile phones, and it’s because of freaking Norway that I’m forced to hear Shaz or Kylie-Anne or SuZianne inanely banging on to friends during every morning commute and AGAIN every evening. Thank-you Norway, a fundamentally selfish nation, populated by drunks and truck drivers, and mostly drunk truck drivers. At least the Danes made decent furniture.

[3] In this case, the sums here are even more ridiculous. There are currently around 5000 wild tigers left. There are 1.3 billion Chinese. My calcultor doesn't even have enough room to determine the number of Chinese per individial tiger but it must be a lot. If I had the resources I’d employ a food technologist to develop and release a couple of thousand kilos of fake tiger penis onto the black market, laced with a slow acting and fatal poison. If possible, one that involved rapid atrophy of the genitals. Word would soon get out. So, a couple of hundred Chinese pop off. Or even a couple of thousand. That’s probably less then twenty minutes worth of the current rate of Chinese reproduction worldwide, even without tiger penis hard on helper. No-one is going to miss them for crying out loud.

This Wonderful Life Hires New Publicist

2007-02-14T14:41:00.000+11:00

Having witnessed Nino's anguish over the mediocre number of hits on TWL, Gina decides to take matters into her own hands...

Mustafa’s Burning Love

2007-02-14T12:11:00.000+11:00

I’ve got a personal theory that you can’t genuinely accept another person, gender, race, nationality or whatever until you feel comfortable humiliating them. No really, the rest - that rhetoric about diversity and inclusiveness - is pretty much nothing more than empty, cloying middle class courtesy or worse still, boring clichés drawn from that endless stream of tangled, incomprehensible PC psycho babble, learned from god knows where, parroted throughout 20 years of what’s loosely called education, and finally ending up in that most pointless of all pointless places, regurgitated like bloated seagulls bringing up half digested sardines in some leafy suburb Book Club. God save us.

I think we only truly accept one another when we take the piss, an expression that I’ve never understood since I’ve never got the link between having a lend of someone in a playful way and confiscating their urine or anyone else’s urine for that matter. It’s along there with the saying, piece of piss. How’d that presentation go Garry? No worries mate, piece of piss. Or worse still, piece of the proverbial. For starters, I’ve never understood the connection between something being easy and urine and furthermore have always thought that urine would be easily segmented in way that a birthday cake might be for example. And I don’t think you’re likely to see a reference in Proverbs. They’d be nothing like, blessed are they that taketh the piss but I can’t be sure.

Thou shalt take the piss – the thirteenth commandment. I’d personally explain it this way. Jesus was wandering around one day, in a decrepit park next to a TAB, in his Birkenstock sandals, going about his business, preaching about this and that, giving advice on removing stains, signing some autographs, with the disciples just hanging around as they do, and a bit of a crowd milling about, when suddenly he hears someone say, Jesus its hot, I could murder a coldie. Having heard that Jesus produces two cans of ice cold Victoria Bitter stubbies, and a couple of Benson & Hedges cigarettes fished out from the bottom of this rucksack. He then asks the disciples to hand these out to the crowd. After a bit, he instructs the disciples to collect the stubbies and the butts from the mob, and to their amazement they find that they’ve filled four jugs with the dregs and rolled a full packet of Benson & Hedges from the butts. So Jesus instructs the disciples to pass these out among the faithful. After some time, the disciples collected up the jugs of VB and the rollies, and were astounded to find that the dregs now filled ten jugs of VB and were able to roll four packs of cigarettes. So he tells the disciples to hand these to the ever growing and appreciative crowd. Having collected the dregs and butts, the disciples discovered they’d two kegs of VB, ten cartons of Benson & Hedges, five Cuban cigars, a bottle of McWilliams cream sherry, and a copy of Hustler. No, sorry, forget about that Hustler bit. If there had been a copy of Hustler it would have invariable been St. John's. He was the good looking disciple (ie probably had all his teeth). The Bible hints that he used moisteriser and therefore was either a man-whore or gay.

Anyway, around 11.00 the next day, one of the crowd looks up with a shocking hangover and asks his friend, what the fuck was that all about then, probably in an Irish accent ie. aye, what ta fook was that all aboot. To which the other relies, fooked if I knoo, something about taking ta piss. OK, perhaps they were Scottish. And no, it’s not a punch-line. It’s just a stupid parody on how a thirteenth commandment could have come about. In fact it wouldn’t surprise me if there was a thirteenth commandment that the Vatican ‘conveniently’ dropped off, just like the Gnostic gospels. Just does to show, never trust blokes that wear dresses at work…unless of course they’re also wearing heels and have names like Candy or Bubbles Fontaine.

For some, that theory is characteristically Australian, something somehow related to irony which Australians apparently have in bucketfuls (in the same way that Americans have bucketfuls of Jesus or fried chicken or bile inducing hubris). There might be a bit in that. Perhaps most things genuinely Australian only actually existed a couple of generations ago in the black and white world of John O’Grady’s They’re A Weird Mob. The time when Menzies presided and country towns grew fat and cheery on wheat and wool. When jobs were everywhere and workers carried Gladstone bags. When one income and one family car were plenty and racehorses became legends. When men built their own houses and women drank in the Ladies Lounge. When kids wore hand knitted jumpers playing footy in the street and cracker night was a wondrous delight of perilous amateur pyrotechnics. When Rod Taylor and John Mellion were stars and Saturday night meant being bored shitless by Mary Hardy’s shrill, cackling co-hosting on The Penthouse Club [1]. You get the idea.

But if there was any truth in that it’s pretty much long gone. It’s hard to see what’s left that’s distinctly Australian in this fading, failing, jerry-built, A V Jennings pre-fabricated suburban wasteland. There’s little to suggest from the population of nervous, snivelling, self-obsessed, second rate middle managers, sales reps and franchisees. Go ahead and pretend all you like but the fact is that we’re all just getting as fat arsed and stupid as your average American. It’s a new Krispy Crème version of Australia, where the only things that count are the brand, the sugar, and the fat, and where substituting that sweet fried turd for food and misspelling ‘Crispy’ and ‘Cream’ clearly amount to a clever corporate strategy for a nation of white wobbly morons.

I’ve got a particular thing about MacDonald’s. I used to say that their food was nothing. That it has no history. No cultural meaning. No origins. It belonged to no-one and no-where and meant nothing, unlike cacciatore for example, or the humble onion frittata. But it’s a bad argument. The quarter pounder actually represents a lot about America, about post war corporate mechanisation of agriculture into agribusiness, about standardisation in the retail food sector, about exploitative labour practices, and sophisticated mass social psychological manipulation that allows that freakish, perverse, dribbling, grinning pscho Clown give it to us up the McArse. None of what it says is much good. Anyway, don’t get me started.

Now we’ve all seen the growing numbers of skinny ribbed, sun-burned teenagers and twenty-some things wandering around draped in the Australian flag. Surely, here’s true Australianism. But just wait till one of them opens their mouth and you quickly realise that their braying patriotism is as superficial and empty and manufactured a sentiment as whatever you periodically scrawl in those oversized novelty cards that do the rounds at work when someone manages to retire, find another job or is quietly admitted to a mental institutional. Dear Janine, Terrible to see you go. Just terrible. While we’ve not had the opportunity to work together or the fact that we’ve probably actually never spoken to each other in the seven years that you’ve been here. I’m going to miss you terribly, and it’s a terrible loss to the organisation. Good Luck. Keep up the mediation. Save a spot in your ward for me. Ha. Ha. Mindless, hysterical patriotism. Imported from America, exploited by the fear-driven, ugly, squawking dickheads who call themselves our leaders. Give them a tour of the Middle East.

Speaking of which, I have to confess that there’s one cultural import that’s personally seduced me. Few freely admit to doing it. Yet millions do. There are countless websites devoted to it and some souls are hopelessly addicted to it. Reality TV. Still, there’s no great surprise in that. Spirelli’s have always been engrossed by misery and humiliation, especially when it’s served up gladiatorial style in prime time. There are almost no downsides to reality TV. True, your expectations start low. You don’t want to be informed. You don’t want to be impressed. You don’t want to be inspired. You don’t want plot or story. You’re not even that interested in being entertained. It’s TV that you happily switch on after you’ve spent the day having your hard work disassembled into complete shit by some skew-eyed nuff-nuff manager who owes their position of authority over you to the cruel but simple and unavoidable fact that their obvious myriad personal and professional deficiencies actually makes their manager look less incompetent and therefore more powerful. No, it’s pretty much TV for no reason, which is where TV is at its best. The allure is the deep voyeuristic satisfaction of watching ordinary folk in some sort of genuine pain. The quiet tears of the medical intern who discovers her fiancé has porked some fake titted Los Vegas croupier on Temptation Island. Or the thrashing indignation of the management consultant whose demise has been coldly engineered by his smiling best friend on Survivor.

One of my personal favourites was My Big Fat Obnoxious Boss, one in series of clever parodies of genuine reality shows – in this case, Trump’s The Apprentice. There was another called My Big Fat Obnoxious Fiancé which was a take off of The Bachelor. They ran the same formula but pushed it to extreme and bizarre limits, just to show just how stupid and gullible the participants could be, since they believed they were part of a real deal. Each week he would give them a challenge. Where Trump had his people devise marketing strategies for new movies or fast food, the Big Fat Obnoxious Boss had teams develop their own cute furry corporate character and marketing jingle for a known carcinogenic product and then make a story book presentation to school kids who then voted on the best character and song. Where Trump had his guys designing brochures for luxury cars, Todd has his on the streets of New York trying to sell re-usable toilet paper, eco-tampons made from sticks and bark, and an aerosol spray that purported to take carbohydrates out of food. In another, contestants had to navigate a fake office obstacle course in a field, dressed in a suit, while being attacked by Mr Todd with a rapid fire paint ball gun, the only protection being a briefcase.

All the while, Mr Todd peppers the young greedy aspirants with a series of managerial insights into corporate success, each one more mangled, improbable and incomprehensible than the other. They listen. They try to understand. They clearly don’t. Yet they say nothing. Worse still, one of Mr Todd’s helpers, a handsome senior executive, starts to take a shine to some of the men, and his affections become increasingly obvious. They catch on. They don’t like it. Yet they do nothing. Then Mr Todd starts inventing activities where the females end up having to wear skimpy clothing and bikinis and he starts to generally favour them for no apparent reasons part from the fact that they’re good sorts. They understand. Some of the women hate it. Some play up to it. The men hate it. Yet they do nothing.

Each week, losing teams would isolate their worst two competitors, and Mr Todd would then consult a mysterious head boss in another room for an elimination decision. You only ever saw the back of the head boss’ chair. Finally, when only two contestants had survived the implausible challenges Mr Todd goes to consult the big boss, and the chair swings around to reveal a chimpanzee in a suit that spins a wheel to decide the winner of the $250,000 prize. It works on so many levels. Just so brilliant.

But they’re all getting a bit predictable those shows. We need a new, fresh angle. I personally propose a new show, called, My Fourth Wife where women compete to become the fourth wife of a well to do man, with a surprise twist at the end. It’s an Islamic Bachelor.

Scene One. The Introductions. A large black limo pulls up to a mansion, with Jeff the host and Mustafa standing out front. Out comes the first woman in full burkha, with that little see through window, walks up to Mustafa. Out comes the second – also in full burkha, same deal. Then the third and so on. All in full burkha. As each contestant is introduced Mustafa is increasingly animated, his eyes getting wider and wider, until after the seventh where he’s almost overcome. Jeff: Well Mustafa you seem to have particularly liked Fatima. Mustafa: O, yes, Jeff, yes, I’ve always loved redheads!

Scene Two. The Group Date. Mustafa invites a group of select contestants for an intimate dinner. They arrive and are ordered out back to cook kid goat and cous cous. Mustafa and seventy five of his cousins arrive and eat the food. The women are never seen. They’re sent back to do laundry. Mustafa to Jeff…Jeff, I think that went quite well.

Scene Three. The individual date. Mustafa invites Fatima to a date. Fatima is looking in a mirror, straightening out the creases in her dress, turns to the others in the room and asks…does my bomb look big in this? The limo pulls up with Mustafa in a dinner suit and carefully waxed moustache. In comes Fatima (in full burkha). Then old crone chaperone one in. And then another old crone. And then another. Until the limo is impossibly crowded with twenty two chaperones a la Marx Brothers in Duck Soup.

Scene Four. The Individual Date (continued). The party arrives for their date. Mustafa picks up a glass of champagne, Fatima picks up a glass of pomegranate juice (and straw), and they slowly walk in glowing evening sunset up to a firing range, where they don AK47s and simultaneously fire indiscriminately in target cut outs of George Bush and Christian crusaders. Mustafa turns and looks at Fatima expertly emptying her automatic clearly impressed. An old crone comments…and she can do rocket launcher too. Mustafa gets an instant erection.

Scene Five. Elimination ceremony. The women are lined up; Mustafa reaches for a grenade, calls out, Fatima. Fatima walks over, kneels. Mustafa, explains – Fatima, you will accept this and continue this journey with me Inshallah! Towards the end, Jeff strolls up and says, ladies, this is the last grenade. Each of the picked contestants then do that tongue rolling cheer in delight. The loser is walked off. You hear a short burst of automatic fire somewhere.

Scene Six. Grand Finale. Mustafa waits in the Rose Garden as the winner Fatima arrives in wedding burkha via camel. He orders her into a white van, and we watch as they drive off at great speed and slam into a white washed UN compound, exploding in a violent fire ball. They play Lionel Ritchie’s Three Times a Lady as the scene of smouldering buildings and strewn body parts is framed by a giant red love heart and slowly fades from the screen.

You’d have to watch it.

[1] The Penthouse Club was Melbourne’s idea of sophisticated evening TV. Mary always wore a gaudy scarf tied at a strange place high on her neck. Popular option was that she used it to cover a failed suicide scar. She had that look of someone that had drank too much, smoked too much and had generally done it hard.

You Gotta Get Hot to Play Real Cool

2006-08-10T11:29:00.000+10:00

There is creativity, then there is artistry, and then there is sheer genius....

Remember the story of the 3 little pigs
One played a pipe and the other danced gigs
The 3 little pigs are still around
But are playing music with the modern sound

3 little pigs were in the groove
Everything was running smooth
The pigs were due for a big surprise
For the wolf appeared with red rimmed eyes
Oo you cool, oo you cool, oo you cool man cool

Well sho he was friendly he shook their hands
Announced he was joining up with the band
Instead of starting an argument
A 1 and a 2 and away they went

The 3 little pigs were really gassed
They’d never heard such a corny blast
We’ve played in the west
We’ve played in the east
We’ve heard the most, but you’re the least

Well the big bad wolf was really mad
He wanted to play music and wanted to play bad
They stopped me before I could go to town so I’ll huff and puff and blow their house down

The house of straw was blown away
The pigs had to find another place to play
Dew Drop Inn the house of sticks 3 little pigs were giving out licks

Well the piano playing pig was swinging like a gate
Doing the Libarace on the 88 (I wish my brother George was here)
The 3 little pigs were having a ball
When the big bad wolf he entered the hall

The big bad wolf he sat right down
C’mon cats we’re going to town
From the crowd came an angry shout
Stop the music
Throw the square out

The Big Bad Wolf was really sore
If they’re going to get tough I’ll give them more
They don’t know talent in this here town
I’ll huff and I’ll puff and blow the place down

Dew Drop Inn did drop down
The 3 little pigs crawled out of the rubble
This big bad wolf gives us nothing but trouble
We won’t be bothered by his windy tricks
The next place we play must be made of bricks

Sturdy place this house of bricks
Built in 1776
High class place with the high class crowd
Sign on the door no wolves allowed

The wolf was sore and fit to be tied
He was sworn and determined to get inside
He huffed and puffed at the house of bricks
But the bricks are stronger than straw or sticks
He huffed and puffed and bleeped and blooped
And at 10:00 was completely pooped
When all of the sudden came a ray of hope
I could disguise myself, boy what a dope

Well the big bad wolf took it all in stride
He figured out the way to get inside
I’ll show those pigs that I’m not stuck
If I can’t blow it down I’ll blow it up

Well the big bad wolf was really gone
And with him went his corny horn
Went out of this world with out a trace
Didn’t go to heaven it was the other place
The big bad wolf he learned the rule
You’ve got to get hot to play real cool

Spirelli Entree

2006-06-13T15:21:00.000+10:00

From left - La Familia Spirelli - Rosa Spirelli, baby Mario Spirelli, Enzo Spirelli, Nonna Spirelli, Luciana Spirelli, Gina Spirelli (senior), Fabio Spirelli. Exiled by Papal Decree after Enzo's sexual encounter with a Sicilian witch lead to permanent blindness and demonic possesion. Second from the right is a Vatican agent. Apologies to David Moore (Migrants arriving in Sydney 1966).

Thanks to those that have ill-advisably wasted at least some small portion of their remaining conscious lives reading the vitriol offered below. Still, I think the pictures are quite nice. Special thanks to those that have left comments, be they good, bad or barely literate.

I’ve recently added a site counter which allows me to either fuel my vanity or be mercifully reminded that there’s just no-one reading. It tells you not only the location of where people have accessed TWL but exactly how they've managed to get to it. Clearly many visits have been purely accidental – where people have stumbled here through search engines. The counter even displays the actual search terms people have used. One person typed ‘hairy armpit pictures from beauty salons’ into Google and ended up here. Another put ‘plastic surgery “hairy mole” Mumbai.’ Worst still, another used ‘black cock “old wino” pussy’. I swear it’s true. Funnily enough I’d never intended to write anything even remotely related to cocks, moles, nor hairy armpits for that matter. I’m simultaneously appalled and delighted.

Yours in bewilderment – N.S.

The List of Unspeakable Torments (Part 1)

2006-05-26T15:15:00.000+10:00

Traci Moffat's Something More

(no relation to Alan Moffat, winner, Bathurst 1000 1973 & 1977)

Writing certain things on certain bits of paper. That's mostly what the bureaucracy is about. Writing bit of paper about things you couldn't humanly care less about and then diligently passing it on to people who cared even less than you did. They then pass it on to someone else that you don't know of and naturally couldn't care less about. Sometimes it would come back with comments like - rubric? what's that mean? Rephrase. Or a post-it note instruction to replace a colon with a semi-colon, demonstrating that their knowledge of grammar comes directly out of their own large colon. Good one, Spirellli.

But in the end it all ends up either shredded and surreptitiously carried away in black plastic bins at night or put in bar-coded white files archived in a storage unit in some industrial estate surrounded by cheap residential housing where people eat bucketfuls of KFC convinced that you can't beat that taste. Pointless? Pretty much. Amazingly I'm told that its now less pointless than it used to be, and here I am stupidly thinking that something pretty much had some sort of inherent relevance or just didn't, much like Catholicism, male nipples, frozen pizza and hippies. How on earth could this have ever been more pointless?

But it just wasn't working for me today. I'd gone to the well and it was dry. Not only dry but full of scorpions, and not just those ordinary scorpions, angry scorpions. Angry, defiant fundamentalist scorpions, intent on bloody jihad. OK, that's probably overstating it. It wasn't the normal distractions of the open plan office. Sure, someone was graphically reporting to someone how her incontinent dad had shat on the new carpet, again. Yesterday in all seriousness they'd advised their pregnant friend to think about getting the obstetrician to organise liposuction for immediately after the delivery. You might as well Cheryl. They're going be down there anyway. Urgh, colleagues. Can't live with them, can't sink a rust pitchfork into their necks. Not legally at least. Unable to start resolved to make a list.

I'd once worked for a forgettable and thankfully brief period in the non-profit sector. The place had started as an advocacy group for women in vocational training - marshalling teenage girls into plumbing jobs and motor mechanic apprenticeships they they had no interested in and didn't care for. That sort of self righteous thing. They'd started small and through determined effort and careful strategy managed to stay that way, despite having dropped the chick thing to quaify for richer funding pickings. It was a weird place full of little secret rules. One was that you were under a daily obligation to begin every single day re-capping in minute detail every single thing that'd happened in the hours since you'd last seen them (or in fact might have happened). This included, but was not limited to, last night's dinner, conversations, visitors, children, the ABC, cardigans, hair, the shocking government, shoes, and impotent husbands that refused to listen. And if anyone happened to have a shopping bag of any description there had to be a ritual of show and tell, and naturally yet more talking. Even a fucking Safeway bag. You had no option. Even if it was a single tin of damn tuna. You were forces to waste at least an hour of your remaining life talking about tuna or tuna related topics, which would inevitably lead on to last night's dinner, conversations, visitors, children, the ABC, cardigans, hair, the shocking government, shoes, and impotent husbands that refused to listen. The place had still pretty much carried its old lefty women's rights attitude on its sleeve. So, there'd you'd be, the only male sitting at a meeting of the board of management where other women who didn't actually work there would naturally bang on about last night's dinner, conversations, visitors, children, the ABC, cardigans, hair, the shocking government, shoes, and impotent husbands that refused to listen, and occasionally they'd throw up any number of self congratulatory comments. They'd say things like behind every successful man is a woman, and behind every successful woman is a list. And how they'd all guffaw, chins a-wobbling, as if it was the funniest joke ever told. I'd smile, pretending to be in on all of it. Secretly I felt like chucking most of the time.

Anyway, the list. It was meant to be a list of the Top Ten most personally annoying and aggravating things. No real surprise in that. In a world so jam-packed with justifiably hateful things I though it might help to isolate the worst and put them in priority order. Then, perhaps, I could concentrate on these, make them manageable. I've made similar lists. I'd once made a list of my previous sexual encounters while pretending to listen to some bloodless insect drone on endlessly about some sort of legislation. I'd been given the choice of that or a seminar on Workplace Diversity. If drinking a litre of petrol had been the third option I would have gladly opted for that. A least it looked like I was taking notes. The guy next to me was whistling through his bulbous nose asleep. It's a depressing list both in terms of quantity and quality. A short lived flurry that coincided with my worst nihilist period and then almost nothing. Little more than what's known in common Australian parlance as a handful of lame, passionless sympathy roots.

Some of the entries are just places since I'd forgotten the unfortunate girl's name or been too drunk to have ever known - the Prison View Hotel, Middle Footscray Station, the Discount Camping and Motor Home Show, Coburg Wholesale Bulk Cheese Factory, Ashton's Family Circus. Others are more cryptic, based simply on scant details dredged from long distant memory (Panda, Carpet Girl, Racoon Armpits, Spastic Eye, Pancakes, Rover). Allegedly one poor girl had once complained to her friend after I'd tried some fumbling drunken move that she'd rather a dose of viral pneumonia than sleep with that moronic Tourettes' affected dickhead. And to think it was my essays that got her through Marxist Theory in fourth year. But who was I to argue. Anyone stupid enough to think they can trade an undergraduate understanding of dialectical materialism for a head-job is a moronic, Tourette affected dickhead. ASSHOLE. ASSHOLE.

No, but seriously my Top Ten started with one entry. What is it about the country that it's always associated with any number of virtues, purity and god fearing goodness? The simple, uncomplicated life where you get up in the clean crisp fresh air and with a strong arm and stout heart begin your honest day's work in bright sunshine, the chorus of morning birdsong in the trees, the warm, life-giving earth under your fingernails. It's about being one with nature, working with the land, the cycle of life, and being part of god's plan. It's about honouring the pioneering ancestors, respecting your parents, saving yourself for marriage, toiling without a harsh word or complaint for your family. It's about being part of a community, about stoically enduring floods and drought, being the first to volunteer, and fighting raging bushfires with your bare hands. It's about treating your neighbour like your brother, about stepping up to help the weak and vulnerable, about defending your country without the slightest hesitation or fear or question, about being solid, having pride and never letting yourself down, and never letting your mates down. For fucks sake its all about having a heart as big as Phar Laps', cheering the Don with a cold VB in your hand, the spirit of ANZAC, Bob bloody Menzies, and each and everyday sinking to the hard wooden floor and on your bony knees unashamedly crying out thanks to almighty god for all your blessings and most of all for Australia - the greatest country in the world.

The more I thought about it the less I couldn't think of any other entry as potentially hateful as the country. I've lived there can speak with some authority. And we're not talking about those little quaint villages nestled in green hills with antique shops in the day tour 'tea and scones' belt two hours out of metropolitan Melbourne. No siree. I'm taking of a hot, dry place where the stinking corpses of rotting, fly-blown kangaroos adorn the road and a municipal town sign peppered by the shot-gun pellets of bored, listless youth. A monochrome town bleached by the crushing relentless sun with sad abandoned shops, broken fences and pissed aboriginals camped under the struggling Eucalypt trees. A home to a millions flies where no tourist in their right mind has ever been. And to be honest, it's not the place itself. Even a scrubby desert or a dank backwater can usually lay claim to some particular charm. But, without question, what makes the country such an awful place is the people that live it - county people.

Country people. I once spent some time in Maroopna, just outside Shepparton in the Victorian fruit district. It called itself 'Fruit Salad City' and I was on the run from real estate agents that were hunting me down like the Yule Bruner character from WestWorld. I ended up on a farm planning to sweat out some fast cash and anonymously head back to the city. I was staying in the single men's quarters, basically just tin Nissan huts with beds made from galvanised pipe and chicken wire. You'd queue for breakfast each morning and they' slap a chop dripping with fat into a chipped enamel bowl and had it to you. For lunch you got two greasy chops in your bowl. Dinner, naturally, was three rank oily chops, but with sauce. The pickers were a pretty rough crew and although there was nothing obvious to single me out it instantaneously clear to everyone I wasn't one of the tribe. It wasn't long before the tribe came a-calling.

It was late one afternoon. I was sitting in the door step trying to digest my three-hundredth fatty chop for the week, reading. One of the guys just came over and brazenly kicked my hand sending by book flying almost into the paddock. A couple of others let out a nervous giggle. It was one of those moments, like in prison where you have to step up now or pay the price for the rest of your time. I chickened out. I did however collect my book, went into my hut and in a small act of defiance, continued reading. Basically they were personally affronted by the fact that I was reading something that wasn't titled Pregnant Jugs 2, The Best of Fuck City Cum Dumps, or 1001 Vaginas. It's not as I was reading Heidegger for godsake. In fact I think it was Peter Benchley's Jaws without a cover and missing the first couple of pages that I'd picked up from a charity shop that stank of old people, pee and boiled sprouts. Chances are every one of those guys is now living lives of abject misery. That's consolation enough for me.

Perhaps country people are not dumb. But I have been told stories. One about a young farmer that discovered an old wrecked Model T Ford in some ditch and having dragged it out with his tractor, decided to restore this historical piece of rural farm machinery to its former glory. He proceeded to work on it day and night, sparing no expense, and unveiled the polished and gleaming end result to much applaud from friends and family. Until someone asked how he proposed to get it out of the lounge room. It's not an isolated incident. Another independent source once recalled how some country genius sent off for a one man helicopter kit and had successfully assembled the impressive machine, again, in the lounge room. But that's all anecdotal. You'd have to do an empirical study. There could be a PhD topic in it. The purpose of this dissertation is to precisely determine just how stupid country people are. Perhaps then it's more a question of narrowness.

A friend of mine once travelled to Mildura in the far north west of the state with his new girlfriend to meet her parents, a pretty urbane, friendly sort I knew from school. He wore a lot of black and listened to Joy Division. We'd smoke joints and watch art house films. Now, Mildura's famous for many things, including probably the very worse rural TV on record. Every evening Sunraysia TV presented the Stock Market Report where for one hour some startled guy dressed like a carnie in a cheap checked suit would come on. He had huge sideburns and a brylcreamed come-over, and would stare down at a sheet of paper the whole time studiously reading out the daily prices for fat sows, yearlings and wool in a flat monotone voice. He'd end it by suddenly looking up and in a relieved voice say and that was the stockmarket report for Tuesday the 14th of June as if he was reading out your Miranda rights.

Worst still were the live STV commercials from local traders. At 3.00pm every Thursday there'd be Joyce, from Joyce's Cosy Country Crafts in a red gingham apron and Coke bottle glasses (she was clearly blind as a bat). She'd proudly show off her knitted tea cosies, dried flower arrangements and various bits of crafty rubbish. Ladies, here are these marvellous gift ideas. Aren't they lovely? Just in today at Joyce's Cosy Country Crafts, 15 Langtree Avenue Mildura. And you've got all your pretty colours. Here you've gottya greens. You've gottya yellows and youse even gottya blues. And the cameraman would very, very, very slowly pan across each of the terrible tatty items, the image all shaky from the symptoms of the cameraman's alcohol withdrawal. You'd be there as a kid, your life barely begun and you'd look around astounded by the fact that with the whole world of potential and possibility lying endlessly in front of you, there you are, alone, watching Joyce shuffling around bumping into the cheap sets. You'd end up thinking Joycie, at least you will never, ever realise just how fundamentally offensive you are. Too harsh? Probably, but the anger would have subsided by the time the guard-tower hit the ground in the opening scenes of F-Troop.

Anyway, my friend came back with a shiner. He'd gone to the Mildura Working Man's Club that once had the title of having the longest bar in the world for nothing more than a quiet drink. Some of the local heroes had taken him out back and given him a belting. Why? Because he was wearing pointy black shoes. For fucks sake, it was the 80s, we were all wearing pointy black shoes. He never went back. If you're planning a trip to the country, make a note - only pack books with pictures and round toed shoes only thanks.

Perhaps this narrowness is best evidenced by the degree of self obsession exhibited by our country cousins. Who on earth spends more time and energy thinking about and taking about themselves then country people? There are entire programs on TV and radio devoted exclusively to rural life with a seemingly endless stream of country people, one after the other eulogising about how great the country is and how great they all are. So deep and ingrained is their self love that normal words often fail and they can only express it lyrically through home made, tearingly god awful, rhyming bush poetry. And if they're not inducing your bile with their own sickly sentimental poems full of down to earth, home spun wisdom, they're braying homage to those champions of tedious bush literature, Banjo Patterson and Henry Lawson who truth be told were little more than talentless, opportunistic, bi-polar, wife beating, alcoholic miscreants. And if its not poetry, it'll be some sort of never ending, pointless old country 'yarn' that is neither funny nor remotely interesting to any living sole apart (from other country people), usually spun by some smart lackey, dirty bearded old country 'character', (re: coot) sitting there milky-eyed in the front bar of the otherwise deserted Dimboola Hotel, half tanked on port and cokes. And when they've exhausted every single opportunity for self aggrandisement, they'll then move on to their second favourite topic - complaining.

Who complains more than country people? OK the English perhaps. But still the do whinge a lot and like the poms they have their favourite topics. Above all else, they love criticising the Government. To them, it's the number one scourge all time, the source of almost all evils. Bureaucrats with noses firmly in the tough sucking the life blood out of the bush through taxes. Kow-towing to the Europeans, the Americans, and the Chinese, signing dodgy trade deals that sell out the bush. In bed with their mates, the foreclosing banks. Giving any number of hand outs to the dirty blacks. The Government. Funding the arts wankers. Sympathising with the AIDS spreading poofters. Listening to the deluded environmentalists. Supporting immoral single mothers and the bone idle dole bludgers. Worst of all cranking the flood gates open to the tsunami of Asian migrants who aren't Christian, can't speak Australian and god forbid, don't have Australian values. There was a TV story recently about a young rural tackle and bait shop proprietor who so incensed by customers with poor English that he banned them. He'd fashioned a homemade sign from some cardboard and had proudly and defiantly displayed it in the front window. It read...If you cant speak english then dont arsk for service. It may as well have read...Owned and operated by a slow talking, dim witted, xenophobic, gun totting, red neck dickhead. Moron. I hope he goes broke.

So there you have. As uncharitable as it is, that's the first entry to the List of Unspeakable Torments.

The Rigatoni Brothers

2006-05-10T14:25:00.000+10:00

Right to Left - Mario 'The Collar" Rigatoni, Luigi Rigatoni, Carlo "PipeSucker"Rigatoni and Shane Rigatoni. Concreters from Niddrie.

I, Dishwasher

2006-05-10T12:25:00.000+10:00

People watch those chefs on telly and think how much fun cooking is. How creative. But those of us that have occupied that strange netherworld of commercial kitchens know the reality. As a former dishwasher of several years standing and not insubstantial notoriety, I've lived the reality and still bear the physical and emotional scars.

Some myths about restaurants are easily dismissed. For starters, no-one in their right mind could honestly think that female chefs actually tend to have big inviting brown eyes, great tits, wear spotless black cashmere turtleneck sweaters and moan while they mix ingredients. In fact the last one I worked with had the physique of a stunted fifty year old diesel train driver who would occasionally grunt in what we only guessed was Croatian. Personally I don't mind watching boring Delia Smith, with her boring English commentary explaining how to whip up boring English baked things with the view of her boring English garden through the kitchen window of her boring English house. One of my friends once said of Delia, that woman''s rod up her arse has got a rod up its arse. But I disagree. She might look like a Laura Ashley rabbit stunned by headlights but for mine she's a true subversive.

My theory is that people like Gordon Ramsey because they believe him, and I think that they believe him because every now he says "fuck". We never swanned around talking in cliches and catch phrases. We swore a lot. There's no boundary to profanity in a real kitchen. You might be there quietly working your way chopping through a sack of unions, minding your own business, when you'd hear a chef slam down their knife and loudly threaten a badly turned out terrine. Oh you. Oh you cunt. Oh you fucking cunt. You fucking cunty fucking cunt I'm going cut your fucking cunty head off, right here. I'm going to fucking cut your fucking cunty head off and fucking fuck your fucking throat hole. I'm going to fucking fuck your fucking cunty throat hole till you FUCKING CHOKE. You hear that you FUCK. Till you FUCKING CHOKE, you fucking cunty fucking fuck. It wouldn't make sense. They'd be shouting at a terrine, be shaking a threatening fist at the mildly deformed thing slightly quivering in the middle of a plate, as if it would make some sort of difference. Now, you won't hear that on Jamie Oliver. Actually when said with the right accent, French for example, it's pretty funny. And you'd know you're in a real kitchen when three hours later the Head Chef barks out an order for one lamb, two fish, green salad and a cunty terrine.

The other rubbish about cooking is that it is special, intricately associated with the very notion of celebration, and therefore worthy of being celebrated in its own right. Really? Valentine's Day was the single busiest day of the year for us. We'd get in early and organise the floor into as may tables for two as we could. It was the only time of the year when the whole place would be booked out. The couples would start to roll in early - the guys would be decked out in smart casual ie checked shirts and grey vinyl shoes and the women typically overdressed. It was clear that it was their one big night for many. Invariably, within an hour the husband would be staring blankly over his wife's left shoulder and she'd be staring over his right in the other another direction. Thirty odd tables and they'd be a pervading, crippling, awkward, stilted silence. Every now and then the guy might try to break the deadlock but would usually blurt out some banality about spare tyres, or cutting the lawn or whatever which only served to highlight the ordinariness of their lives and their relationships. In less then an hour they'd have ordered, eaten and left. It happened very single year, precisely the same. It was also the single obvious stupidity that we didn't take a cruel and roaring delight in. In fact the tangible sadness made you want to go out the back and chuck. Yes, lets all celebrate.

But in my view the biggest myth is that the cooking process relies on any number of higher order cognitive abilities. I vividly remember once during a break opening the door to a filthy bathroom out the back of the restaurant only to find Marco, the second chef at the time, on the toilet with trousers around his ankles and a colander in his lap, shelling peas, mid grunt. And smoking a 'roll your own' cigarette. He looked at me with his three day growth and bloodshot eyes, barely surprised. I just looked at him blankly, shut the door and made a mental note to avoid staff meals for the night. But in my own experience nothing dispels this preconception more than the crushing truth of Saturday shopping tours.

Shopping Tours were bus trips that on every Saturday efficiently delivered any number of variously overweight, large arsed, track suited women called Cheryl or Leigh-Anne, or Susan-Lee, or Kylie-Anne from the outer metro wastelands to inner city factory outlets where they scuttled about to save five dollars on perfume that reeked like fly spray, elasticised pants, nasty Chinese made lingerie and general stuff that normal people in their right mind wouldn't buy retail or otherwise. During a particular period of psychotic depression the restaurant owner had chased down one of the buses in his car, literally forcing them to pull over and bribed the organiser with a sizable kick-back to come to the restaurant for lunch. And come they did, in their hundreds, red faced and perspiring, totting in with their little plastic bags, chirping about their bargains. Actually, I didn't mind them. They were alright and good for the restaurant. Joe would be smiling behind the bar, watching the ladies sit down, lighting up their Holiday and Horizon cigarettes signalling the beginning of yet another Saturday circus of swill.

The Shopping Tour Grande Luncheon started with our special garlic bread, a chop-smacking favourite of this particular social milieu. I made the garlic bread. I'd use the left over bread and on slow nights there were lots. I would make a bucket of spread from five or six kilos of catering margarine and whatever garlic I could pilfer when the chefs where looking the other way. Think DeNiro in chequered pants waving a large knife in your face. "What? You want garlic? Is that what you want? Is that it? Garlic? You want garlic for the fucking garlic bread? Is that it? Garlic? You want fucking garlic for the fucking, garlic fucking bread?" Truth be told I would've used garlic flavouring if it'd been invented since every second ingredient in that kitchen was booster of some type. Huge tins of it, from China, pork booster, chicken booster, seafood booster, beef booster. And what wasn't booster was usually'extender'. Of course, where possible we'd use both together, booster AND extender. Anyway, I'd coat slices with the paste and then dust them with catering parmesan cheese that sank like dead baby feet. The cheese was my idea. I'd fill massive black plastic sacks and they'd go into the deep freezer and sit there for months. Then, when a customer had been stupid enough to order it, we'd throw a couple of pieces under the grill to simultaneously defrost and toast. It was likely that the garlic bread we used for the tours had been in cryogenic deep freeze for a year. More than once I had to quickly put all of the bags next to the bins, pretending they were rubbish on rumour that a council inspector was on the way. That's why we used garbage bags.

Next was the main course. Only one choice was ever available to the depressingly young, cottage cheese thighed suburban matrons, the somewhat confusingly titled Pollo Schnitzel con Mediterranean Vegetables. Polio Chicken we called it. Apt since any connection between it and disease wouldn't have surprised any of us. We'd make these the night before. We'd order in a hundred or so boiler chicken legs, legs only mind you, cheap from a Asian supplier Joe had found in Kangaroo Flat just outside Bendigo. We'd bone these out and then hammer each one on wooden chopping blocks until they were huge and almost see-through. Then we'd cut them into anywhere from two to four separate portions, put each though a diluted egg wash and add a thick coat of bread crumbs. The crumbs we used were made from left over bread we got from other restaurants. There was one up the road that we regularly went to when we needed a spare pot, or whatever. They gave us their left over bread like they were donating to a charity for the homeless. There was actually just enough meat on those terrible things to keep the crumbs together. Then we'd partially cook them in batches of twenty at a time in the industrial deep fryer, in oil that I had regularly and unsuccessfully pleaded with Joe to let me change. We'd then re-deep-fry them in the late morning just before serving. Polio Chicken. The vegetables were just diced carrot, catering brand frozen peas and sometimes zucchini. I never worked out what was Mediterranean about peas and carrots.

The highlight, well for us rather than the customers, was dessert. Our special Chocolate Mousse. I'm surprised it wasn't called Buddino Chocolato Speciale. We'd also do these the night before. We used cans of catering mousse, so cheap that they didn''t even had a label, just some blurry blue machine printing. Perhaps they were ex-military. Joe never confessed as to where he had got his hands on them but we had a shed full. They indicated that they each can made forty separate portions. But we'd worked out that the longer you mixed it the more portions you could actually get. It became a regular challenge. We'd start the industrial mixer first thing at the start of the evening shift and we'd beat that muck incessantly for hour after countless hour. During service we'd smile at the very thought and every mention of that mixer happily thumping away in the corner. Occasionally the Head Chef would crank the speed up to unprecedented levels and we'd know that we were pushing physical limits and a record attempt was in the offering. After service, the apprentices would pipe the highly aerated goop into glasses that had frosted in the cool room and top them off with a button of fresh artificial cream out of a can. We'd get progress reports..fifty, seventy, ninety� ...and towards the end the whole kitchen would surround the apprentice piping out the last one. We'd piss ourselves laughing every time. I think the record stood at 120 portions per can. They actually didn't look that bad, that whipped air smeared with fake chocolate flavouring.

I'd often throw on a pair of black pants to help serve. Not because we were short of front of house staff or because I needed the extra hours but because you were guaranteed hard core laughs. This involved a terrible game where each waiter would attempt to present not just a professional demeanour, but a completely unfeasible, extreme caricature, as if you were working a five star fine dining room, and the most important part was to maintain an absolutely fixed, frozen smile. We'd practice our individual smiles before starting. What killed us was that those dear girls just loved it, the whole thing, the plastic tablecloths, the terrible, terrible food and the deranged waiters. You'd spot one of them with their huge face smeared with garlic margarine, actual drops on her chin, and you'd walk up, and deftly inquire whether madam would care for an additional napkin, mentioning that you'd be delighted to be of any other assistance should they need it.

How they'd giggle and gush. I'd be there handing out the mousse� and they'd say things like 'I really don't think I should' and you'd be thinking, judging by fact that you're carrying around an arse the size of a VW Beetle of course you definitely shouldn't - but you'd just try to hold that smile. Without fail they'd declare it to be the very best they'd ever tasted, nodding to each other cheerily. Others want to meet the chef to personally thank him. Others would want the damn recipe. So you'd try to play along, holding your breath, grinding your teeth and stomping your feet to hold back the tears. Look, just between us two, really its pretty complicated, not to mention very time consuming. And I don't think you can just buy the ingredients in the shops you know. Anyway, the chef would just kill me. But usually, you'd lose it, first the smile, then the lot and have to run out back in order to re-gain your composure, leaving the others to explain to the suddenly worried ladies. If it was one of the guys, I liked to bend close to the table and whisper empathetically that his boyfriend had just left him, and then wink. Shopping tour service is still the only time I have actually urinated in my own pants.

But there then came a particular time, after the chaos of Christmas. I'd pulled so many consequent twelve and fourteen hour shifts that I'd lost track of the days. The kitchen was running on auto-pilot, kept humming by caffeine and nicotine. I was sitting on the stairs out the back, in my filthy dishwashing jeans and apron, towels in the back pocket, drinking a mug with six shots of espresso and chain smoking cigarettes, squinting at the bright light of the afternoon. Alcoholics call it a moment of clarity. It's not a bad analogy. I'd almost fully succumbed, surrendered to that unholy place. My degree had been long finished. I'd changed houses at least four times. I'd recycled girlfriends. Abandoned family. Lost friends. I had atrophied, basically declined as a normal, functioning person. The kitchen was like some terrible, acne scarred, tart with bad teeth that you didn't tell your friends about but tore at you when she wasn't around. I'd never been able to explain it. Was it that daily rush of adrenalin? Was it the sense of belonging to a brotherhood of fucked up misfits? Was it having a front of house that operated like a causal sex vending machine? I don't really know. But Head Chef had offered me a fast track apprenticeship that would lock me in, permanently. Deep down I knew it was fundamentally wrong. But it was hard to accept. Perhaps at an embarrassingly advanced age it was time to grow up. Within weeks I'd left and was deferring the issue by wandering pointlessly around South East Asia. Within a year the place had closed, the staff migrating to other various other restaurants.

Of course, you look back with a fair whack of nostalgia. It's unavoidable. It was the right decision. Still, you soemtimes wonder. Now I'm surrounded by some of the most lifeless and indefensibly pointless people that I'd ever had the misfortune to set eyes on. Truth be told it's a thinly disguised sheltered workshop constructed from equal parts gold medal arse kissing,
tepid mediocrity and bowel clenching fear. My dentist recently reported that I have been grinding my teeth together in my sleep. Its frustrating and my own fault. The worst thing is that days and months might pass and I seriously won't be able to remember laughing. There is no-one around me that will ever shell peas in the dunny. Once I tried to explain about the chocolate mousse and no-one understood. No-one is ever going to make up a song called Grandma was a Cocksucking Gunslinger.

One day I will open up a small cafe of my own.

2006-03-24T11:04:00.000+11:00

Gina Spirelli, circa 1982, getting ready for the Year 12 Senior Formal at East Keilor High

More on the legend of Choc 'n Bits

2006-03-09T13:36:00.000+11:00

The following was posted in reponse to my stupid story entitled Lamentable Enterprise. I feel an obligation to post the comment out of respect and the obvious authority that the poster clearly commands on the whole question of the orgins of Choc n Bits. Might I add that that commenter's work is his own, and I deny all legal liability in relation to any subsquent actions claiming defamation, slander or any similar. Enjoy - NS

Re: Choc N Bits FAN Club, I mean what the fuck, what are the chances of? I am not sure if Nino Spirelli is aware of it or not, but in fact, a Choc N Bits Fan Club has been thriving in the business community of Melbourne in particular for over a decade, and in fact, it even has cells in Sydney (where an Australian commodities tycoon come movie maker is well known for letting the phrase 'Choc N Bits' role of his tongue each and every time a member of his crew comes out with an economically dim-witted business concept just before he fires them. "What the fuck I am paying you for? Don't waste one more second of my time and life with your lame duck Choc N Bits ideas, and get the fuck out of here".

The club itself was founded by a renowned player in the grain business (late 80s/early 90s), quite famous for making money where there was none to be made, in an industry that sends suited cowboys to the cleaners year in year out. The individual involved, while on a road trip to the depths of the grain belt to visit growers, heard a community radio announcement broadcasting of course none other than the latest fabulous rural news the grand opening of Choc N Bits, in (well where the hell do you think?) Dimboola of course!

Driving along a barely used road that branches off the Western Highway, in the outer sphincter of nowhere, as the never ending hot bitumen road kept flying beneath his executive edition Commodore's bonnet (and that is what all the new money business folk used to drive back then), with destination arse-hole of the universe� not seeming to get any closer, our man was out of mobile phone range, mobile towers where few and far between in those days, and mobile phones were like bricks in volume and weight, so it was just him, the car, and a good old dose of rural isolation, broken by the occasional wheat truck flying by in the opposite direction. Totally consumed with the pressure of running an export focused industrial business, our dear founder received no therapeutic benefit from the rolling fields of wheat stubble, the sheep huddled under the shade of the branches of ancient gum trees, or the sight of the glorious Grampians on the horizon, and feeling quite frustrated and stressed, thought he would lighten his substantial mental load by listening to a little country radio.

Wanting to escape the game of business ping pong going on in his head (business does that to you), he butted out his International Passport to Smoking Pleasure cancer stick into an over flowing ashtray which had the word stress written all over it, and started fidgeting around with his radio dial (back and forth, back and forth), desperately searching for a clear signal. "The fuckin thing" he thought, as he nearly lost control of his car in the gravel on the side of the road. Anyway, as soon as he managed to finally lock onto 3WM (three standing for three cents short of the full two bob, not two, but three cents, and WM being the abbreviation for Wimmera Mallee, although to this guy, it might as well have stood for Wasted Money) well, within seconds of him finally managing to get something at least audible from his pioneer speakers (pioneer being all the rage back in those days, young women were attracted to men who had pioneer sound systems in their cars), out comes the Choc N Bits announcement, with all of the fan fare in the world.

The announcement went from the radio, to the ears of our man, to his brain. He stared blankly ahead. Seconds went by that felt like hours. His grip on the steering wheel tightened, the whites of his knuckles began to show, and our dear founder began to sweat, his face twisting and contorting with anger. Screeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeech – in the middle of no-where, he slammed on his brakes, and his car came to a complete stand still, engine stalled. Sitting there, the smell of burning rubber in the air, with no living animal in sight, the silence being broken only by the distant hum of a tractor engine, he buried his head into his hands and thought. "What the, what the, my God, what the, what the fuck was that? Fuckin Choc N Bits? What the, what the fuck! Fuckin Choc N Bits! I, I, I, I must be dreaming, FUCKIN CHOC N BITS, FUCK, FUCK, I CAN'T STAND IT ANY LONGER. FUCKIN CHOC N BITS!!!!!!!".

Well, we are all entightled to a mini-nervous breakdown when the nearest human being is 50 miles away. Our dear founder did thankfully recover from that moment. He has never admitted it, but we all think it did make him weep, not tears of sorrow, but tears of anguish and frustration, the kind of tears that an irate toddler who can open the fridge door sheds tears brought on by the frustration of knowing that someone actually exists that thought of a business plan called Choc N Bits, that they brought it to the table, and they actually went about bringing it to fruition. Our poor founder was deeply insulted by it all, his business brain was slapped in the face by it (not slapped, that is not strong enough, punched is better, his business brain was punched in the face by it) � what he thought was going to be the sounds of some relaxing country radio might as well have been a shot gun going off a centimeter from his left ear. So, the story goes on - he got out of his car, poured some water from his water bottle into his handkerchief, wet his face, took ten deep breathes, got back into the car, started the engine, promptly turned the radio off, and went on his merry way, later in the day buying 5000 metric tons of grain to be shipped to India and Bangladesh.

But, and there is always a �"but", the insult of Choc N Bits endured. Each week, our man would make phone calls to other business people, in non related business areas, to discuss business in general, these mini phone conferences, which were more about talking about business in a universal sense , in a relaxed and comfortable manner (since the folk involved were in different industries, and thus were not necessarily hostiles), well, each and every Friday they were made (just before pub time, what they were, they were pretty much wind down and relax calls, but still with a general business focus, since people in business find it very hard to talk about anything other than business). They went nation wide (because our founder in fact had friends from school, and friends he met via business, across the entire continent, across the world in fact) � well anyway, they were called 'the whip around' and it was via the �whip around that the legend of Choc N Bits was established, and Choc N Bits became the label to attach to any dumb business, any failed business, any stupid idea at all in fact. � "How did your week go Banger? Mine was busy as shit! Man, you would not believe what I heard on the radio the other day, it just about did my head in. Some people are so fucked. Fuckin Choc N Bits! There is this fucking idiot"

Choc N Bits then grew in notoriety - members of THE Whip Around Gang (originally a gang of three), would then make calls to their own groups, and so forth, and so forth and so forth, and the news of Choc N Bits gained momentum, and raced around the globe. I am sorry if the above bores you all but that folks, was the true beginning of the legend of Choc N Bits – no shit.
It is now pretty much in the Australian Dictionary of Business to describe any failed business. I was once in a hotel foyer in Sri Lanka, and witnessed an Australian business man, who I had never met, and knew nothing off, throwing a tantrum and berating his Sri Lankan business partner for having conned him into investing in a Choc N Bits business. Choc N Bits – just fabulous!

2006-03-08T15:03:00.000+11:00

John Brack's The Seagull

Spaghetti con Seagull and Piseli

2006-03-08T14:41:00.000+11:00

Seagull Spaghetti with Peas - A traditional Calabrese dish provided by Nonna Spirelli.

Spaghetti con Seagull and Pisceli was handed down from her mother. Her own mother learned it from Nonna's grandmother, and she learned it from her own mother. Her mother learned it from her mother, and her mother stole it from the back pocket of some hairy-arsed Genovase fisherman while he was giving her a seeing to against the back fence in some ally. A right slut apparently.

The interesting thing about this dish is that unlike most recipes from this region which tend to focus on fish, meats and various peasant vegetarian staples, this utilises seagulls, a form of poultry absent from every other coastal cuisine. It remains the only seagull recipe ever recorded in history. Enjoy!

The following is enough for a family of 18.

Ingredients:

White flour
Egg 1
Water ½ cup
Olive Oil 24 litres
Carrots 1
Tomatoes 10Kg ripe
5 Kg tinned
2 Kg paste
Garlic 15 bulbs or 2Kg
Onions 2
Seagull 2
Procuitto 2 slices (thin)
Peas ½ cup
Black Olives 1 cup (dried)
Porcini mushrooms ½ cup
Red wine 10 litres
Rind of orange 1
Basil (fresh) 1 bunch
Rosemary 1 bunch
Bay leaf 2

Method:

To make this, you will need to begin by donning the same black mourning dress that you'd worn everyday since your great grandfather died in 1956.

The first step is to collect your good walking stick and gather a large wicker basket of firewood from the nearest forest. Best if you mumble complaints as you go. Ignore anyone milling around wells since they are mostly likely gossiping about you.

Make a fire in the mud brick oven that you’ve constructed by hand in the backyard the night before. Be sure to start the fire only on the morning of the previous night where there was a full moon.

Once you've said 28 rounds of the Rosary the fire should be right to begin. If you've used hardwood, you may need some extra Hail Marys.

Take the olive oil, dab your finger in it and make the sign of the cross. Pour a glass and drink it to keep your skin looking healthy. Finally pour a litre or three into a large stock pot. Look into the pot and add another litre.

Take a large sharp knife and threaten to cut the throat of your grandson's new girlfriend, the one that isn't Catholic and has short hair. Cut the carrot into small cubes, then slice the onions. Vow to the saints that you'll make that little tart cry like the onions are making you cry. Peel and cut the garlic, giving thanks to god. Sautee the carrots, unions and garlic till brown and take off heat.

Place colander between knees and shell peas while watching World Championship Wrestling. Pour yourself a glass of the red wine for your blood. Not that shit that Louey made last year and not fit to use as vinegar, some of the good stuff. Drain the olives, slice the prosciutto, and prepare the mushrooms.

Take the seagulls and the wine and move the front porch where you can keep on eye on that bitch from Number 27. Pluck seagulls thoroughly and singe with blow torch or gas stove to remove any remaining feathers. Keep neck and head attached. Gut the gulls and cut into pieces. Keep the feet.

Take flour, eggs, water, and salt to the good house next door and make the pasta. Be sure to give your ungrateful grandson a crashing backhander to the head on your way. Threaten with a rolling pin if there is one handy. Leave pasta to dry out the back.

Cut a loaf of Vienna bread in two, place a whole mozzarella and some salami inside and eat with half litre of wine for lunch.

Hang crucifix above stove. Return the pot with the sauteed vegetables to heat, place in gull pieces and cook until brown. Add 6 litres of red wine, all of the tomatoes, the olives, mushroom, prosciutto, rind and herbs. Place a fresh log on the fire, say a prayer to St. Anthony and add more garlic and tomatoes.

Simmer on low heat for nine hours. In the meantime you may, while half pissed, lecture the dog on how easy you children have it compared to what it was like in village during the war. Gloss over the part about the lost infantryman and the barn.

Get the spaghetti from the good house next door. Curse the ungrateful greedy widow three doors down that refuses to sell her house to you. Cook and drain the pasta, and add to the pot. Stir through while secretly pretending to be a witch. Make a note for your next confessional.

Take the pot to the table. Make sure the table is in the garage, next to the industrial deep freezer and the plastic wine tank. If not, under a carport will do.

Serve in portions of no less than 5KG each.

Garnish the plates of the guests of honour by sticking in two legs, as if the gulls had buried themselves in the steaming pasta.

Say grace and eat.

Best served after a large horsemeat steak.

If anyone fails to finish their second plate ask why they don't like it. After that ask why it isn't good enough for then. Following this, ask if they'd like an omelette. Regardless of what they say, get up and make them that omelette. You should be muttering under your breath various exclaimations as to how it couldn't be good enough. Finally start banging on about how much you've suffered over the years.

2006-03-03T15:21:00.000+11:00

Nino Spirelli

Transport

2006-03-03T14:11:00.000+11:00

There are times, moments even that exist simply to let you know that you're in for an ordinary sort of day, a signal of sorts that you might as well brace yourself for more than your fair daily quota of sanity eroding twentieth century stupidity.

I don't know. It started on the morning tram, as I sat there on those fabric seats and their inescapable remnant odour of one million previous arses. It reminded me when I'd once caught the last tram from the City to Brunswick in the middle of winter, wet and freezing. I was sitting in the carriage alone when an old wino scuffled in and sat next to me despite every other seat being empty. He stank about as bad as a live human being possibly could, the type of gangrenous, gut wrenching stench that makes your nostrils reel. He was clutching a package of fish and chips. I was doing my best to pretend that I wasn't there when he looked over, wiped his mouth and nose with the length of his arm and proceeded to dig out a sorry looking chip. With a mucus smeared hand, he wagged the horrific limp, oily thing at me, offering it up. All I could manage was a, er, no thanks mate, not wanting to appear rude. He was one of several unsavoury public transport experiences as any regular commuter can testify to.

There was a woman recently on my morning train to the city. In fact more Michelin Man than woman and a gaggle of snotty nosed spawn - proto juvenile offenders � all 70s rat tail haircuts and bite marks. Apart from her sheer size, she stood out by her very hairy armpits. It was as if she was walking around with a racoon head-locked under each arm. I'd heard her well before I'd seen her. Cory you fucking little shit. For fucks-sake. Cory. Cory, come the fuck here fuck ya. CORY I said COME HERE!!!! There were two empty seats to my left. I instantly knew that I was unlikely to escape this. My seated neighbour, a corporate woman with excellent posture, French Bun and expensive shoes almost visibly shuddered. Michelin squeezed to the edge of the seats, clearly intent to move in. The best I could hope for was that she'd plonk the least offensive of her kids next to me and that they'd behave. Unlikely though. The last one that sat opposite me took great delight in inventing a game called Kick the Legs of the Guy Opposite. He even made up a little song to go with bruises he was systematically inflecting on me. After a couple of minutes I protested to the bizarrely orange tanned mother. Excuse me, but your son is kicking my shins. What I wanted to say was, look leather face, would you kindly stop your vile child from kick me. It sort of worked. Junior contended himself by licking the window. That's a good boy, I thought, consume the germs, consume the germs.

Michelin started to move towards the seats and Corporate Woman and I moved our knees to the side to let her in (as required by unwritten law of commuter manners). With various bags across each shoulder, and grappling numerous kids with each hand, she was half way, red faced with effort, when the driver suddenly slammed on the breaks. The first thing I remembered was being suffocated by what seemed like a roll of upper stomach fat and a huge, monstrous bosom. It was as if my head was being sandwiched between two overweight fur seals. The more she struggled to right herself the deeper my head was sucked into the flesh trap. It felt like a full five minutes of both us flaying around like epileptics before I managed to shove her off me. The entire carriage was transfixed. I gasped for breath and it was clear Corporate Woman had suffered collateral damage. One the kids had been flung wide and their shoe had caught her on the bottom lip which was bleeding slightly. Fuck, sorry love, sorry, sorry about that. Michelin tried to give her something for the cut and could only find a dubious windcheater with Cats on the front at which point tears began to swell in Corporate’s eyes. I pretended that everything was OK. In fact I felt like spinning Michelin around and giving her a serve.

But it wasn't the wino this morning, or a dangerously large woman but two young girls, probably thirteen, fourteen, obviously friends, off to the city during the school holidays to hang out, smoke cigarettes, meet others, eat mass production burgers made by that paedophilic clown and engage in those particularly pointless teenage dramas, recounted over and over in that particularly annoying teenage gibberish. They were dressed in what you might call high camp young slut, THE fashion trend of the moment. One had a cut off T shirt with the word, "Pussy" on the front, tiny denim shorts, fishnet stockings and silver disco boots. The other wore sunglasses, had "Shaved" on her singlet, no bra and was sporting what looked like a homemade black tutu and army boots. Charming, I thought. It reminded me of an ad I'd once heard on the radio about Schoolies Week. YOUNG GIRL trying on fragrance to MATURE SHOP ASSISTANT, in hesitating voice� "Does this make me smell like a slut? MATURE ASSISTANT ..no! Of course no! .YOUNG GIRL� "Hmm, can you show me one that does? They were the new generation of young Australia women I'd recently read about. Those that thought nothing of venturing out at night and dragging a newly acquired playmate into a corner for a pash and a head-job, walking away, wiping their mouth, saying, "see what a dirty little minx I am, so there," as some type of small defiant victory in a tangled, fucked up, gender based, post feminist dating war. I don't know. They disturbed me. I can't be convinced that they're confident, strong, or empowered.

On balance however the girls were somewhat less disturbing than their mature counterparts. We've all seen them. Same clothes. Same attitudes. Just forty years or so older. Perhaps I've been in a coma. Since when did grown mothers and yes, even grandmothers, ever latch onto the idea and dressing like some dried up, withered old bargain basement crack whore constitute an informed aesthetic style for the mature woman? My grandmother was content to wear the same black dress without variation and watch World Championship Wrestling with her grandchildren while making fresh pasta. She didn't wear boob tubes. She didn't pretend to leer at men's asses. Now she was the power, an immovable monolith. As to the new lot, you can only shake your head with wonder. They'd have their own magazine soon. It'll be called Skank of the Third Age, something like that. And there will be in-depth stories about some bizarre, wide eyed, surgery addicted septuagenarian banging on about how liberating and exhilarating it is to get in touch with your inner whore. Of course, it probably is liberating and exhilarating, and, my objections are just my own multiple neuroses. Clearly.

With that thought mentally polluting me, I averted my eyes to something a bit more manageable, and settled on reverse reading the newspaper of the guy in front of me. I was hoping for an interesting story about a lost tribe or the discovery of some ancient artefact. What it had was a full colour head shot of Bronwyn Bishop. What a face. It's as if the Federal Member for Mackeller one day decided to have her make up done by a Kabuki artist. But not just any Kabuki make-up artist but one cruelly disabled by arthritis, and not just any arthritic kabuki make-up artist but one that had just spent the previous three hours on the piss. And not being content with a crippled Kabuki make up artist off their face from sake, but deciding to finish the whole horrible lot off by being dragged face down across a gravel pit by a tractor. Good grief. Her number is (02) 6277 4382 by the way. Ring her and ask her to explain. Alternatively, ring Dr Pearlman and nominate her for an extreme makeover.

For those that don't know her, Bron's a former Liberal party Queen of Hate, somewhat displaced by equally horrific Amanda Vanstone whose three times as large and twice as incompetent (if that's possible). They're both typical bullet headed conservatives - devoid of any imagination or intellect, full of born to rule ignorant self assurance. Her daughter is similarly plain and talent less - a third rate celebrity interviewer occasionally featured in the most inane programs ever broadcast by the cheapest TV station in Australian history. You'd suspect she'd readily bend over for any C grade celebrity after a pre-made cocktail or two. You know the sort - Big Brother contestants who were voted off first three years ago, magazine chefs, regional radio broadcasters, gardening segment hosts, lotto presenters, that lot. It's almost guaranteed. Scary? They should both be arrested and locked away under the new anti-terror legislation.

So that's what public transport does for you. At 8:45 today I walked into Public Servant Land with terrible images of that rancid old wino, strangulation through indirect obesity, pathetically wobbly old disco queens, and horror puppet Bronwyn Bishop in my head. Thank-you.

2006-02-27T14:42:00.000+11:00

Gina Spirelli (portrait circa 1980)

Preparing for the annual East Keilor Girl Guides Jamboree at Lake Epilock

Father O'Connor's Fish

2006-02-27T14:02:00.000+11:00

Father O’Connor is walking by the Shannon when he sees one of his congregation fishing. He stops for a chat, and mentions that he's never fished before.

It's a doodle, says the angler. Take a rod and give it a go.�
�Well, I suppose that blessed Saint Peter himself was a fisherman. Perhaps I'II try my hand, says the priest.

Father O�Connor sits down and casts out his line. After a few minutes he gets a bite and reels in a fat ten-pounder.

He's pleased as punch as his parishioner slaps him on the back and says, �that's a great big fucker, Father!
Language! replies Father O'Connor. I am a priest.
No, Father, this fish is called a fucker, explains the angler, thinking on his feet.

Laughing at the misunderstanding, the proud priest takes his catch home and finds the bishop waiting in the front room.

That's a splendid looking fish, Father� exclaims the bishop.
Aye, replies the priest, a great fucker.
Please, Father! Such language,� says the bishop.
No, no, Your Grace� replies the priest. Fucker is the name of fish.

It being Friday, the reassured bishop suggests they repair to his residence for a fine fish supper. Once there the bishop goes to the kitchen to clean and gut the fish. They are then joined by the mother superior of the local convent. Being no great cook himself, the bishop says, Reverend Mother, would you mind poaching this fucker for us?

Bishop, you cannot say that in the house of God,� gaps the horrified nun.
You misunderstand, Reverend Mother, explains the bishop, this fish is called a fucker.

Calm again, the Mother Superior sets to cooking the fish. Shortly they are joined by the Pope, who is making a surprise visit as he does. Delighted, the bishop invited him to supper.

They sit down at the table and the Pope says grace. Then the mother superior brings in the fish on the finest silver platter. Eagerly, the three of them await the opinion of God's mouthpiece on earth.

That is a fine fish, remarks the impressed pontiff.
That it is, Your Holiness. I caught the fucker, says the beaming priest.
I cleaned the fucker, adds the bishop.
And I cooked the fucker chips in the mother superior.

The Pope sits back and stares at them for a moment. Then he plants his feet on the table, lets out a mighty fart, and says, You know what. You cunts are all right.