Why I Won’t Be Eating Lamb On Australia Day

First and foremost, I’m an Australian. I’m proud to be an Australian. I was born in this country, I have lived my entire life in this country and my parents are proud, patriotic – and yes, legal – Australian citizens.
Despite the 40 degree Summers, vicious native wild life both inland and in our oceans, unfairness within our welfare system that deprives university students from funding while lazy drop-outs can live job-free for decades at a time with a seemingly endless supply of ciggies and cheap big-screen plasmas, and our severe lack of amusement parks, we’re a pretty awesome, lucky country and a lot of people fail to appreciate that. But there is one day of the year where I cringe at proclaiming myself an Australian citizen and that day is Australia Day.

And this is why.

For some reason, even the most intelligent Australians - from the most high-ranking honour students and the most reasonable business men and women to the gingivitis-prone red-necks that always have to inflict some sort of ungodly, inhuman stench upon every passer-by and ask for a ciggie - see January 26th as an excuse to revert back to primitive (pronounced: ‘bogan’) behaviour.
Unfortunately when it comes to Australia Day, there seems to be an unhealthy correlation between displays of the Australian flag and foul behaviour. We’ve all witnessed it at some stage: Young girls with terrible, leather-like tans and a morbid obsession with frangipani stickers wearing the skimpiest of Australian flag bikinis and transparent 'Aussie pride' crop-tops from Supre, only to sun-bathe on the beach for fear of actually entering the water and try to shamelessly pick up with their busts rather than their brains. Boys claiming to be men who can’t control their liquor guzzling six packs at a time while desecrating the Australian flag by wearing it as a cape, with very little else to hide whatever shred of modesty they claim to have. For some reason, people are actually proud to call themselves Shazza or Wozza.
And then there are the shameless arguments, racial slurs and derogatory comments fuelled by excessive drinking and poor judgement in the hot sun on the what, why and who of ‘a real Australian’. Even in a recent study, it was found that people who attach Australian flags to their cars express more negative and racist attitudes than those who did not.

With these kind of behaviours being so publically displayed and accepted, it seems like we’re falsely lead to believe that patriotism and Australian pride coincide with falling into the lazy, crude and bogan nature of the negative Australian stereotype.

Sales like the Cheap as Chips catalogue excerpt below don't exactly help our cause either:

Probably the most alarming item of bogan-abilia to rival the giant inflatable finger and Australian flag umbrella hat is the 'Aussie Supporter Cape'. For those of you lucky enough to have never encountered any knowledge of this item, according to Cheap as Chips an Aussie Supporter Cape is apparently what happens when the Australian flag is bastardised with a snuggie.

Crossing the terrible concept of using the flag as a cape with wearing a bathrobe backwards? Evidently, two wrongs make a profit.

And then there are shameless advertising campaigns like this:

All well and good as a joke, but that's what this campaign is: a joke. Not only is it annoying, but it makes us look like a bunch of air-head bogans and I for one do not want to be associated with something so negatively stereotypical.

Australia may be stereotyped as laid-back and lazy, but we've contributed a lot to the modern world. We have some brilliant minds, concepts and ideals. An Australian introduced the concept of the secret ballot system that is now used by the USA and United Kingdom. Our doctors are so renowned that people, seemingly without hope of recovery, come to Australia from all over the world for life-saving surgeries. Australian dishes beamed live footage of man’s first steps on the moon to the rest of the world. Australians produced the first refrigerator and the first basic notepad.

Australia has produced some brilliant scientists, surgeons, artists and inventors. So why is it that we're lead to believe the absolute ideal of what a true Aussie is revolves around being some sporting meat-head? Isn't the true Australian spirit based on hard work, freedom of expression and the embracing of converging cultures, not the primitive concept of how far you can throw something? Isn't being a true Australian being a good bloke, a loyal friend and a fair person rather than how hard you can tackle in short shorts for a ridiculous paycheck? And seriously, who would you rather represent your country, famed neurosurgeon Charles Teo or renowned wanker Wawrick Capper?

As a proud Australian, I will not be draping the flag over my shoulders in a drunken stupor like the satirical bogan I'm told a true Australian has to be. And I will not be eating lamb on Australia Day purely out of protest for that stupid Barbie Girl song parody; Kekovich can go suck it. At least I'm not being paid generous amounts of Australian dollars by the MLA to regurgitate what people tell me being a true Australian is.

Want to do something truly Australian for Australia Day?

Buy your friends a beer. Share some kangaroo steaks. Above all, don't be a dick.

Let's prove to ourselves and the world that we're more than just some bogan stereotype.

Why Women Date Jerks

You always hear women making the same argument: “There are no decent men out there.”
And likewise, you always hear their ‘nice guy’ counterparts – the platonic guy shafted into the ‘friend’ group, the nice ’boy next door’, the clean-cut university student turned down at the bar for the guy in the red tie and the brooding eyes – retort: “We’re right here, you just date jerks!”
Admittedly, there is some merit to what the nice guy is saying; women do date men who are less than appealing on a whole. However, we don’t just choose to date jerks because we necessarily like jerks. Upon reflection the men I have been with and the men I have politely declined in their efforts, I’ve been asking myself why. Obviously there are common qualities between the men that I am attracted to that suggest I have a ‘type’, yet there are also qualities these men hold that I and most every other person wanting a solid relationship can’t stand. While jerks on a whole are, well, jerks, they do tend to hold similar attributes that females want and are attracted to, even subconsciously.
It’s not the fact that women like being abused, yelled at, ignored, manipulated or cheated on. We don’t want sexism and ridicule from the man we share our life with. We don’t want a boyfriend who never has any time for them – whether it be a night in or a night out – but has more than enough attention to give other people, particularly other women. Contrary to common belief, no woman wants a womanising Don Juan. We do want monogamy, we do want honesty and we do want security in a relationship knowing the guy we’re with isn’t going to bail at the first sight of a shorter skirt on a newer, prettier model.
But Don Juan did have one thing going for him that women want: seduction.

The truth is unfortunately the majority of nice guys just aren’t dirty or sexy enough.
Now I know that sounds a little crude, but honesty about sex and intimacy usually does get labelled as a little crude. I can’t speak for every female on the planet, but I can at least speak for a significant percentage.
Don’t get me wrong, of course we appreciate the men who take us out for a romantic dinner or invite us out for a beer. We like being treated with respect and dignity as real ladies and independent women. We like being liked for our mind and passions and ideas and opinions. We like men who are refined and intelligent and considerate and real gentlemen.
But we also like excitement. We also like passion. We also like physical intimacy. We also really like sex.
We like getting a spank and a woof-whistle from our partner, even if it’s in the home you share together behind closed doors and all we’re doing is making a coffee. We like dirty talk having rough sex on the bedroom floor just as much as the close intimacy under the covers. We like the idea of a boyfriend who will walk hand in hand down the street with us one day, make out with on the dance floor and sneak off for a fuck in the bathroom on a night out on the town the next day, and then wake up to for coffee and conversation the day after that. We like a guy who lusts after our bodies as well as loves us for our minds.
It makes us feel sexually desirable, and when we feel sexually desirable and wanted, women find it really enjoyable to provide and give back to their partner. We feel more inclined to dress up and be seductive ourselves. Women are very physical, very sexual, very passionate people. We like physical attention and intimacy. Nothing turns us on more than a guy who can’t possibly keep his hands and lips off his lady. Crudely put, some of us feel there’s just no point in getting a triple-X wax every month and wearing nothing but a garter belt and stockings in the doorway if the male we’re doing it for isn’t going to then rip it off with his teeth.
So why don’t women admit this out aloud? Because for some reason, we’re lead to believe that women just don’t like sex. There are countless sex and intimacy surveys out there saying that the top things women want and fantasise about include forceful sex and aggressive, animalistic kissing. However, if a woman were to admit that openly, they’re made to feel like a slut and their fantasies inappropriate. The guy who indulges in a bit of lustful behaviour every now and then is our security and our outlet to be sexual, passionate women without being reprimanded for it. It’s just a matter of whether the guy facilitating that is a womanising arsehole, who acts that way because sex is the most important thing on his mind regardless as to whom he is doing it with, or the ‘nice guy’ with the cheeky grin who has no shame in making it clear he thinks his girlfriend is a complete fox and wants to take full advantage of being able to be intimate with her as her partner.
We want to spend our day with someone who will help us carry our groceries home, have passionate sex with on the couch, watch an episode of American Horror Story with, talk about work or uni with, plan a night out to a gig or a piss up, kiss and touch spontaneously, buy a home-brewing kit to try out together and then go out for a coffee. We want the solid, reliable life partner, but we want the excitement and the passion too. What’s the point in planning a future with someone who bores you to tears with just being nice?

The sad truth is that jerks know what women want: passion and excitement and seduction. And every moment until the point they shaft one woman for another, they deliver. Ever seen Don Juan depicted reading a news paper and sipping coffee in old jeans? It may be simply because they're constantly on the market, but jerks are always switched on. Jerks always take great pride in their appearance. Jerks always know what to say, when to say it and how to say it. Jerks are incredibly skilled in knowing how to gesture to, look at and touch a female to make her melt. Jerks always have an opinion. Jerks always aim to impress. They are always well dressed and well presented in the public eye, groomed and handsome, always charming, always witty, always seductive, always flirty. They are always oozing sexuality. It's not simply an argument of females finding bad boys with bad behaviour attractive and exciting; we put up with the shit bad boys deliver through bad behaviour because they deliver the attention and excitement and physicality and experience that nice guys generally don't provide out of fear or apprehension. The problem with nice guys is they treat women how they think women want to be treated and in response, women don't feel like they can be honest for fear of not being considered ladylike.

Advice to the nice guy: If you can master being all the things girls are attracted to in 'jerks' while still being the nice, solid guy you are, jerks wouldn't be standing a chance and we females would be much, much happier in our relationships.

Lean in for a kiss at a red light. Give your girlfriend a wink and a grope while you’re over the sink together washing and drying the dishes. Sneak off from a romantic dinner to do the dirty. Make out like teenagers on your couch during a movie now and then, or as soon as the elevator doors close. Go on a date, even if you’ve woken up to each other for the last 30 years. Have passionate sex against a wall in the shower with your wife before share a kiss goodbye and both go your separate ways to work.
It’s not dirty, it’s not smutty and it’s not sexist to not be able to keep your hands off the person you’re in a relationship with. In fact, if you can go without that kind of lust for your partner, there’s definitely something wrong with you.

The Harbinger's New Clothes

A lanky shape shifter somehow conjures a moustache on his face before turning into David Bowie’s Ziggy Stardust. A mysterious (pronounced: just plain confusing) man in a cliché Bela Lugosi cape is paralysed (or maybe not) by a photograph that may (or may not) depict a stranger’s father. And a young girl may (or may not) have been attacked by a vampire.
Confused yet?
Welcome to Brink Productions’ Harbinger.

Let me back track.
A few weeks ago, my partner and I, went to see a performance of Harbinger. I have no real qualms with the performance of the actors or the minimalistic stage. As for what the performance was actually about, I’m still trying to decipher. Not only is the blurb on the Harbinger flyer vague and downright confusing, the “boy meets girl, girl eats boy” tagline is somewhat misleading. In fact, the first paragraph pretty much sums up what unfolds on stage. No, really.
By the end of the performance, I was left utterly baffled. An old drama friend I had studied theatre with for years, who also happens to be some sort of physicist, also couldn't decipher what just happened, shuffling along the seats to ask me if any of it made sense to me. My partner, who is involved in the arts and is usually quite philosophical when it comes to meanings and metaphors, seemed just as confused as I was.
Even after staying to listen to the subsequent Q&A session in the hopes of being enlightened, I'm pretty sure the only conclusion we could discern from the director's and performers' vague feedback was that Harbinger is about as confusing as being punched in the face by a giraffe. It was during this discussion between the cast and the audience that we learnt that Harbinger was actually a quick ‘we need a play’ commission piece written over just a few months, with no established theme, topic or message at the time of its creation.
And it certainly shows.

Running into my old Drama teacher and his wife, I asked him what his take was. Being the kind of guy who usually goes into theatre in great detail, I began to suspect the play itself was severe bollocks when my former teacher merely quoted the director's cryptic regurgitation that “a good performance is one that leaves you with more questions than answers.”
Well, pardon me for calling: “Bullshit.”
The Goat or Who is Sylvia leaves you with questions. The movie Inception leaves you with questions. Even Oprah’s Bookclub leaves you with questions.
Harbinger only leaves you with one: “What the fuck just happened?”
The absurdist play Waiting for Godot prompts many interpretations. The Bald Soprano mocks the concepts of language. Harbinger is just so random and void of any discernible metaphor, point or plot that I seriously doubt that the piece, with all of its inconsistencies and slap-dash excuse for a storyline, has any real meaning at all. In my opinion, Harbinger is nothing more than a failed, try-hard attempt at sounding 'deep'.
What really concerns me is that every article I have read and most of the audience feedback I have heard online has praised the piece as some sort of dazzling and enriching masterpiece with some hidden meaning to live itself - although, ironically, no one actually mentions what the play is actually about.
Either there’s something seriously wrong with me and my intelligence is severely impaired, or everyone else is just trying to appear sophisticated and open-minded by playing along and ignoring the fact that the Emperor's walking down the street naked.
Seriously, explain to me the big mystical metaphors and meanings buried deep into the dialogue. Really, I’m genuinely curious. Better yet, admit this play has no meaning at all and the script was just some trash written early one morning between the hours of 2am and 5am between sips of Mount Gay rum and reruns of The Vampire Diaries. But don’t piss on my leg and tell me it’s raining, don’t tell me the Emperor is wearing pants that I'm too stupid to see and don’t give me some completely vague response about how fantastic Harbinger is to appear refined and coincide with everyone else’s view if you can’t back up the claim with some explanation or personal opinion.

Maybe I’m not cultured. Maybe I’m not particularly deep or profound or philosophical. Still, I’m not ashamed to play the part of the child from the tale of The Emperor’s New Clothes, turn to the guy next to me and ask: “Hey, why isn’t Harbinger wearing any pants?”

Giant Douche, Anyone?

So, I’m not the biggest politics junkie out there – I don’t blog about asylum seekers, I don’t plaster other people’s Facebook walls with campaigning jargon on which party they should vote for and I’m pretty sure I was sleeping when Kevin Rudd kissed arse again said “sorry”. But it’s been over a week since we cast our votes for the federal election and I’m still left with the question: So, does anyone know who’s actually running the country yet?

In my opinion, when it comes to democracy, most Australian elections are full of bollocks. But never before has South Park’s “douche & turd” analogy been more fitting than this year’s choice between Gillard and Abbott. Because seriously, who else had this image going through their mind when they stepped up to that little booth to vote?

Ok, so we know they're both puppets, but election buzz phrases like aside - if I hear the phrase "moving forward" one more time, I think I'll puke - , did either Gillard or Abbott actually put forward a single policy worth mentioning? Did either major party confront any big issues to sway our love? Come on, we're Australians, it's not like it's all that hard to swing our vote.

From what I can tell from my short-lived experience with politics, Australian politics runs a little like this:
One party steps up and says, “You don’t like us and we don’t like you. We’re not going to give you as many hand outs or kiss as much arse. What we are going to do is leash up your economy so that by the time you forget why you voted us into power, this country will at least have enough cash horded up to somewhat compensate for our replacement’s excessive spending and debt.”
Years pass, enough rednecks complain about not having enough fun or getting enough of a bonus in their welfare check for that new fully-sick 50 inch plasma, and the opposition party steps up. The opposition claims to be the voice of Australia – that is, if the majority of Australians were hooked on Centrelink handouts. They promise hand outs and one hell of a good time, something that those tight-arses in power would never let you have. Forgetting that no hand out is free and suck ups in power is usually a bad idea, people start to dig this party’s hollow policies of extra red pencils for primary school students while university students get less support than dole bludgers. Out with the old party, in with the new. Dollars from the country’s kitty get thrown into the air or set on fire to light cigars with, a big slap in the face for anyone who actually pays taxes.
Years pass and, like inexperienced teenagers praying to the porcelain god at 4am after a 3 week drinking binge, the public begin to realise there’s a reason why daddy won’t let us drink vodka at lunch time. Sure, it was fun, but now all you’re left with is $35.50 in your savings account and a fake number on a napkin from that girl you met who lied and said she’d love to catch up again sometime for coffee.
Election time rolls around again and the not-so-fun party we kicked out is smelling like roses now as they tower above you in their tailored suits, sour-faced and arms-crossed with that scowl that says: “And what time do you call this, young man?” They offer us a proposition. Nothing fun, nothing fancy, just that they might clean the vomit off your chin and hold on to your cash for as long as they can until you forget just why they’re there. We nod, just a little too hung over to care, and make our mark on that voting ballot in the hopes for some aspirin as soon as we can stumble out of the booth.

So as for this year's election, I don't think I particularly care whether the giant douche or the turd sandwich got in. It'd just be nice to know without hearing jokes about the parliament being hung by equestrian properitons.

As for me? I voted the Australian Sex Party. I liked their policies before, but after seeing this clip, the stupidity of the Family First Party sealed my vote. Thanks Wendy!