Watching Championship Stupid From The Sidelines

We all see foolish things done and exhibited on crass television shows. We see them on Facebook and YouTube. But nothing beats seeing them fresh, live, and right in front of you.

I don’t mean the car crashes and people hitting light poles – these are accidents of our modern life. I also exclude criminal behaviour and its consequences – also a feature of modern life, but one that can stay well away from me. I am thinking of the modest little instances of stupidity that pop up from time to time and make us grin.

Yesterday I visited our downtown area to do a job, and when it was completed I repaired to a bookstore and then to a rooftop bar for a bit of reading and refreshment. It was delightful, until the last inch of beer in the glass. Then tow families of bogans invaded the bar with their 5 squalling children – obviously hungry, overtired, and at the end of a school vacation. The bartender looked like the hatch of hell had opened at his feet; I hastily downed that last inch and dived for the door, pursued by rising screams.

There is a provision in Western Australian liquor laws for children to be on licensed premises under direct adult control for ” reasonable refreshment” but up two flights of stairs onto a city rooftop bar seems to stretch the case somewhat. I can only hope that the children got espresso martinis and red cordial and that the train back home was delayed between stations…

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SIn For The Sinless – On Being An Armour-Piercing Saint

If you are pretty well free of sin and error – like Mother Theresa, the Dalai Lama, or the Pope – you may feel that going to confession is a bit of a waste of time. Oh you might scrape up something like inattentiveness or the vague desire to take a third tea-cake, but you’ll be scrapping to interest the confessor on the other side of the grill. If you irk them they’ll just tell you to go and get blessed…

None of us are that good, but still, many of us have never set fire to an orphanage or touched a supporter of the Democratic Party in an inappropriate manner…and thus we struggle to make a meaningful confession or profession. We hesitate to attend. The BGA business model will change that.

We welcome news of sin and malignancy, but in the BGA booth you need not tell your own. You are free…and indeed encouraged…to tell that of others. The wider your vision of the faults of humanity can range and the more accurate and detailed your information can be, the quicker you can get out of the booth and the higher your standing with the Guild will be. To put it frankly, if you can bring us the goods, you need not pay the gold coin. In some cases it can be quite the opposite…

We all know people who do the right thing by others. Let us forget them for the present. Now concentrate on your friends and relations who really DO have something to hide – tell us all about them. We’ll even allow you a little leeway in the matter of strict truth if the story is juicy enough.

If there is one thing we have learned from the internet and social media, it is the elasticity of truth…

Of course we are prepared to grant you absolution, insofar as it is in our power to do so. Which is pretty well not at all. But the great thing is that you will have been enabled to traduce, calumniate, denigrate, and defame those of whom you disapprove from the safety of an anonymous structure in a public place. And with no consequences – save the occasional beating with a suggested post.

As we said – if there is one thing we have learned from the internet and social media, it is that we have learned two things…

 

” Now Hear This ” – The BGA Cures The Ills Of The World

Well, we’ve got the BGA booths into the train stations, malls, hospital waiting rooms, and fish and chip shops – now what is going to happen?

People will line up to enter the booth – their gold coin in hand for when they want to get out again. They’ll enter the darkness, snuggle up to the speaking tube, and start to tell the world what they want the world to know.

Part of it will be confession – the murders, robberies, and lustful thoughts of the week. Part will be profession – who they hate – Donald Trump, the brother-in-law, etc. Some will take the opportunity to brag about the size of their private parts, and some will tell the truth – in neither case will anyone out in the waiting line believe a word of what they say.

The trained counsellor will interject with helpful things like ” My, my.” and ” Well, I’ll be darned, eh? ” or just sit there making soothing noises as the professor gets more agitated. If they are asked to forgive the professor they will do so immediately, knowing that everyone else in the surrounding area that has heard the news will be ready with cudgels and handcuffs as soon as the curtain slides back. No sense being judgemental when you don’t have to be.

There will be no penances awarded – people can leave the booth feeling cleansed and free. Of course they may then be collared by the police or attacked by an enraged mob, but that is no business of the BGA. We will only step in when someone admits to a fiscal sin that has resulted in the accumulation of a large amount of ill-gotten gain in a Swiss bank account. The only thing we need is the special number and then you will be free to go.

The effect of this open-ended opportunity to get it off your chest will be to free up the psyche of individuals and let them get on with their lives. Of course, some of the less cautious ones may be devoting a great deal of those lives to running and hiding, but then they would have been brought to that eventually. We give them a clean chance on the starting blocks.

But what if you do not have any sins? Or any money, for that matter – is the BGA booth going to be any use to you? You bet it is – and you’ll read about that in our final chapter tomorrow.

How To Avoid Being Stalked

These days there is a great deal of unease about the business of stalking. The term crops up in newspapers, legal cases, and the social media. Many accusations are made and in some cases substantiated. The BGA has a few points of good advice for those who would avoid the problem:

a. Do not poop in the wild. Or on the screen.

This is the number one give-away for wild animals – at least for the ones who do not instinctively bury their shit. They leave steaming mounds everywhere and eventually the predator who wants to find them just ends up following a trail of increasingly fresh dung until it finds the arsehole that is putting it out. Not a pleasant way of shopping, but a sure-fire way of finding one end of dinner.

In the social media world it works the same way. People post the most improbable piles of merde on the internet – for the most part picked up and ” shared ” in an effort to get attention. Well, if they share enough of it and it gets to be fresh, it can lead directly to them.

b. Do not leave your leavings around.

We are not suggesting that you shred every piece of wrapping paper or McDonalds container that you collect to prevent hackers from trolling your recycle bin…but remember what happened to the US Embassy in Tehran in the 1980’s.  Look at the stuff you throw out and securely destroy the bits with the numbers.

Or fish the number bits out of your neighbour’s verge on bin night and put them in your own waste. Hell, just exchange paper all up and down the street and hack each other.

c. Do not pay by credit card, cheque, or direct debit.

If possible do not even pay in cash. Promise to pay and then skip town. There are towns all over the place. Skipping is healthful exercise.

d. Do not take surveys, answer questionnaires, enter contests, play free games, or request free samples.

You might as well be drawing a red circle around yourself on an ordnance survey map. The people who harvest information trade and sell it, and you, based upon what you give them. You may well end up being used but you do not have to run up the gangplank of the slave ship to embrace it.

e. Do not react to anything.

Reaction is what people want when they wish to know where you are and what triggers you. Depend upon it; when you give them the information they will use it and they will not use it in a way that makes you happier.

f. Be beige. Bland, Swiss, middle-aged, from an outer suburb, and never seen. Try to become a fully visible invisible creature.

g. Avoid all interpersonal relationships – in particular avoid the ones that involve loose clothing and lapses of memory. When that old sweet song echoes in your ear, put your finger inside there instead.

Love is another thing. Love is perennial and blessed. Love is violets and daffodils. Love is the stuff of which very successful pulp novels can be made. If it occasionally becomes a soggy mess and soaks through into the upholstery, regard this as the price you pay for happiness. Or misery. In any case, if you do pay the price, get a receipt – you can sometimes claim it on your tax return.

 

The Mobile Billboard

I was passed one day, on the inside, in rainy weather and heavy traffic, on a notoriously busy road by a person who used the old ploy of zooming up the road shoulder and then lurching into the lane. You’ve all had that at some stage of the game and cursed the fool who did it.

In this case the fool had an advertising screen attached to the back of her hatchback car – the type that are see-through but can carry signs and telephone numbers on the outside. I observed that it was one of the belly dancers that I take pictures of at dance shows.

I’m afraid this is probably another case of  the first-day-of-wet-weather syndrome in Perth. Edmonton and Calgary used to have a first-snow-day show of about the same sort. It paid to leave the car at home and take the bus that day.

Perhaps I can persuade this lady to take up driving in Alberta instead of here.

I Blame The….

a. Police…when people who are committing crimes are chased and caught and jailed and made to be unhappy. This is not right. A criminal has a constitutional right to do crime…based upon their ethnicity and their desire to do crime. The police want to punish this and it’s an outrage.

b. Police…when people are injured or die evading them after committing crimes. A person who does crimes is supposed to escape from the police because I have seen it on the telly and in the movies. If they do not succeed it is a basic assault on human rights.

c. White people. Because it has proved to be an effective way to get publicity and eventually get paid for it. And it would be wrong to prevent a successful business from flourishing.

d. Society. In case there are successful people with money that can be accessed who are not white. They are guilty too…of being successful.

e. Pauline Hanson. Because everyone hates her and if I blame her I look virtuous.

f. Pauline Hanson’s former partners and party members. Hard to tell who’s being nasty to whom, but I figure that when you see a head you kick it.

g. Donald Trump. I get kewl points for this and Trump is so far away that I never get pulled up for it. I tried blaming Hilary but I got an email with a picture of a horse’s head in my bed. So I just blame Trump for everything…I’m no fool.

h. Vaccines. And when that doesn’t work I blame non-vacc people. The effect is the same – I get publicity.

i. Schools. Well, we all hated school, didn’t we, and we made sure that our kids knew that it was the right way to be…the hating, I mean. So now when they screw up royally, it’s all the school’s fault. Stands to reason, eh?

j. The flag and the anthem. Well, it worked for Kaepernick, didn’t it? I might get a lucrative shoe contract if my kid won’t stand up at school assembly. Worth a try, innit?

 

Never Apologise For Saying You’re Sorry

Because if you do, somewhere a Canadian Prime Minister dies.

Mind you, Australians are also into the Sorry game. We’ve been forked into it by successive federal governments – and successful lobbyists – who have arranged for us to maintain a permanent attitude of apology to anyone who has decided to hire lawyers to demand it.

It is a business that changes frequently at the behest of university professors and radical writers. We are presented at intervals with scripts read out on private and public occasions that can be frankly bizarre. The most recent one I heard was an acknowledgement of aboriginal tribal elders prior to a middle east belly dance show held in a Croatian soccer club’s function centre. With portraits of HM Queen Elizabeth and Marshal Tito looking down over the crowd. Frankly, Salvador Dali couldn’t have drawn a more surreal spectacle.

For myself, I agree to apologise for any of my sins that have been detected. So far these have been remarkably few, and as I age, I move out of the danger zone. I still have sins, but people tend to think of them as charming peccadillos. I am not so much forgiven as tolerated. I am hoping to live long enough to get to the point where people will actually pay me for my errors of judgement. Then I can anticipate a steady income…

Should you apologise for the actions of your ancestors…or for the ancestors of other people? Should you apologise for being a migrant in a nation of migrants? Or a native in a nation of natives? Will it not be enough for you to apologise for your own follies, and leave those of others to them and to history?

I think so. I can find a number of cultural links that could place me in either the apologetic or the offended groups…and I would find myself frowning at myself and demanding compensation for things done 100 years ago by people I have never seen. The effort of doing the cultural book-keeping would be insurmountable…

I think I will just leave the past to cope with itself and concentrate on doing my own terrible things in the future.