Dreading September 15th…

Posted on May 17, 2013 by borysSNORC

I was going to write a little tribute to Tony Abbott. He’s ever such a good sport providing so many faux pas and such meaty fodder for the social media mill. He’s given us almost as many episodes of foot in mouth disease as His Royal Highness, the Duke of Edinburgh, Prince Philip, but in all fairness good ol’ Phil has another 40 years of sound bites on Uncle Tony.

By the looks of it, he’s going to make a fabulous Prime Minister! He’s against women… homosexuals… immigration… indigenous Australians… climate change (for fucks sake he’s against climate change!)… equality in the workplace… the disabled… super for low income earners… sigh.

This is Australia in the 21st Century, we don’t need none of that equality shit here. In fact, it’s getting kinda hard to see through all the things he opposes to see what he actually stands for. So far, it looks like he’s all for getting elected and throwing money at people who don’t need it.

But turns out… I don’t have to write a tribute to him. I was just driving along in my car this morning and heard this song come on directly after the news which was dribbling on about something that Abbott’s response to the budget (oh my god, the Australian economy is so bad, it’s a wonder any of us have survived the GFC) … and well, it’s perfect! And who would have thought such a befitting tribute, that could have been written directly to Tony Abbot himself, would come from the most unlikely of places – that most erudite of political commenters, Lilly Allen!

“Fuck You (Very Much)”

Look inside

Look inside your tiny mind
Now look a bit harder
Cause we’re so uninspired,
so sick and tired of all the hatred you harborSo you say
It’s not okay to be gay
Well I think you’re just evil
You’re just some racist who can’t tie my laces
Your point of view is medieval

Fuck you
Fuck you very, very much
Cause we hate what you do
And we hate your whole crew
So please don’t stay in touch

Fuck you
Fuck you very, very much
Cause your words don’t translate
And it’s getting quite late
So please don’t stay in touch

Do you get
Do you get a little kick out of being slow minded?
You want to be like your father
It’s approval you’re after
Well that’s not how you find it

Do you
Do you really enjoy living a life that’s so hateful?
Cause there’s a hole where your soul should be
Your losing control of it and it’s really distasteful

Fuck you
Fuck you very, very much
Cause we hate what you do
And we hate your whole crew
So please don’t stay in touch

Fuck you
Fuck you very, very much
Cause your words don’t translate and it’s getting quite late
So please don’t stay in touch

Fuck you, fuck you, fuck you,
Fuck you, fuck you, fuck you,
Fuck you

You say, you think we need to go to war
Well you’re already in one,
Cause its people like you
That need to get slew
No one wants your opinion

Fuck you
Fuck you very, very much
Cause we hate what you do
And we hate your whole crew
So please don’t stay in touch

Fuck you
Fuck you very, very much
Cause your words don’t translate and it’s getting quite late
So please don’t stay in touch

Fuck you, fuck you, fuck you

Solid work from Ms Allen. And just to refresh everyone’s memory on just how fabulous Tony Abbott is, and how deserving he is of such a worthy tribute, here are some of HIS greatest hits:

Famous gaffes regarding women:

‘The problem with the Australian practice of abortion is that an objectively grave matter has been reduced to a question of the mother’s convenience.’
‘I think it would be folly to expect that women will ever dominate or even approach equal representation in a large number of areas simply because their aptitudes, abilities and interests are different for physiological reasons’
‘I think there does need to be give and take on both sides, and this idea that sex is kind of a woman’s right to absolutely withhold, just as the idea that sex is a man’s right to demand I think they are both they both need to be moderated, so to speak’
‘What the housewives of Australia need to understand as they do the ironing is that if they get it done commercially it’s going to go up in price and their own power bills when they switch the iron on are going to go up, every year…’
‘We do not educate women to a higher degree level to deny them a career, if we want women of calibre to have families, we should give them a fair dinkum chance to do so.’

Thoughts on immigration and indigenous Australians:

‘Jesus knew that there was a place for everything and it’s not necessarily everyone’s place to come to Australia.’ (There he is, leaving his religion at home again).
‘These people aren’t so much seeking asylum, they’re seeking permanent residency. If they were happy with temporary protection visas, then they might be able to argue better that they were asylum seekers’
‘Now, I know that there are some Aboriginal people who aren’t happy with Australia Day. For them it remains Invasion Day. I think a better view is the view of Noel Pearson, who has said that Aboriginal people have much to celebrate in this country’s British Heritage’
‘Western civilisation came to this country in 1788 and I’m proud of that…’
‘There may not be a great job for them but whatever there is, they just have to do it, and if it’s picking up rubbish around the community, it just has to be done’

Ideas about rights at work:

‘Bad bosses, like bad fathers and husbands, should be tolerated because they do more good than harm’

Tell us what you really think about Julia Gillard:

‘Gillard won’t lie down and die’ (we will remember to accord him the same respect should Australia suffer the misfortune to end up with him as PM).

*head desk* TA on climate change:

‘Climate change is absolute crap’
‘If you want to put a price on carbon why not just do it with a simple tax.’

His not religiously motivated thoughts on homosexuality:

‘I’d probably … I feel a bit threatened’
‘If you’d asked me for advice I would have said to have – adopt a sort of “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy about all of these things…’

And there you have it… I’d like to say a big Lilly Allen style “Fuck you, fuck you very much” to Tony Abbott. Now if only the MSM were a bit less bought off and the average Australian a bit less apathetic. 🙁

Goldfish strikes again.

Posted on May 16, 2013 by borysSNORC

I had a little chat conversation at about 7:30 in the morning a couple of weeks ago that went something like this:

Yale: Wow, that is expensive just for the shipping.
Borys: Huh? What’s expensive?
Yale: You said earlier that it costs $100 to ship that lens you want… read back up.

*scrolls up* … discovers that I had sent a message about an hour and a half earlier saying that the camera lens I had been coveting (a Canon EF 70-300mm f4-5.6L IS USM Lens) was going to cost $100 to ship and that I thought that was ridiculously expensive.

Borys: I don’t even remember looking at that this morning or sending you that message.
Yale: Did you buy it?
Borys: No.
Borys: I don’t think so.
Borys: Shit, I dunno!

*checks email* … discovers some alarming correspondence.

Borys: OMG. I bought it! Not only did I buy it, but I had the wherewithal at the time to search for a discount code and got 30% off the shipping cost.
Yale: lol.
Borys: I also bought a Canon 2x III multiplier/extender too 🙁
Yale: Really?
Borys: According to my confirmation email… checked out with Paypal and everything, so didn’t even have to find my credit card. FFS.

Okay, this is getting beyond a joke. We’ve been saying for ages that I need to have my credit card taken away, but obviously even that ain’t gonna help! Not only did I spent about $1600 in the early hours of the morning and have no recollection of it barely two hours later… I bought an extender for $385.00 that is NOT compatible with the lens I ordered. Never fear, the extender has been offloaded on eBay for a slight profit already, but yep… that’s right I ordered the wrong damn thing. I read the details on the screen in front of me and I think all I saw was that it was ‘compatible with L series lens’ and a long list of which lens it went with, and only after receiving the stuff in the mail did I have a better look at that list and realize the EF 70-300mm f4-5.6L was not on the list!

Sigh… Goldfish have probably got a better memory than me at the moment! Thank god, Mr K has a sense of humour about these things…

Appreciation is not the same thing as enjoyment!

Posted on May 12, 2013 by borysSNORC

Many, many, many moons ago, way back before the days of Youtube movie trailers at your fingertips, that takes some of the hit and miss out of movie going… Myself Mr K, Eduardo, and my little sister went to see a movie called Breaking the Waves that was getting great reviews in the newspapers. We could only find it playing at a strange little independent theatre in East Brisbane (that place is some sort of martial arts dojo now) as it wasn’t showing in any mainstream theatres in the area. My elder sister, BigSal and her boyfriend at the time, Woliver, were supposed to have joined us but had cancelled at the last minute… lucky them!

We bought our cokes and popcorn and found some uncomfy chairs and then sat through THE most tedious three hours of cinema of our entire lives! Well, some of us did, Eduardo had the good sense to fall asleep by about the third ‘chapter’ learning on my shoulder and occasionally snoring. It was, and remains, one of the most bizarre films I have ever seen. My recollections were of a disjointed and jarring narrative featuring an extremely annoying and naive quais-bipolar girl who was fond of talking to herself, that marries an indifferent, crude sort of man who works on oil rigs in the North Atlantic somewhere and is gone for long periods of time. Readers Digest version of the plot is – he ends up paralysed and starts making unusual sexual demands of her to satisfy his lack of ability to perform for his young bride. She in turn being very malleable and well, stupid, goes about looking for random men to fuck so she can come back to his beside and report her antics.

Being such a hideously tedious film and seeing that a misery shared, is a misery halved; we, four of us made, a pact to tell BigSal and Wolliver that the film lived up to it’s critical acclaim and was ‘amazing and unbelievable’ and that they ‘simply had to go see it’… largely because we could see no reason why we should have been tortured thus and that they had fortuitously managed to escape the horrid experience! The following week they went to see it in due course, and apparently spent the entire duration thinking, ‘Hmmm, it’s okay… but we don’t quite understand why the others were raving about how good it was’.

Yes, it was a bit of a cruel joke but, it simply had to be done! When we finally caught up after they had seen the film, their thoughts were roughly, ‘Well, we thought it was good… but we didn’t enjoy it as much as you guys obviously did’. At which point we blurted out how much we hated it! And oh my God, how tedious were the ‘chapter’ breaks that broke up the segments of the film with oddly quaint static landscape views set to ’70s rock anthems that all seemed to play just a little bit too long?!

Some fan (read: weirdo) has put the ‘chapter’ breaks together in a compilation on Youtube… that, even taken by itself, is kinda window-lickin’ special.

Ever since, Breaking the Waves has become the common benchmark around here for being THE WORST FILM EVER in our collective memory! A film to compare all other crap films to, and an in-joke that has been periodically trolled out when occasion warrants. Anyway, a few months ago we thought that maybe we should give it another chance (yes, this may have been an alcohol fuelled decision!). We are all 16 years older, and hopefully wiser, so perhaps we’ll have a greater understanding and appreciation for Von Trier’s vision by now. So we organized a movie night and decided we were going to sit through the whole thing over again, come hell or high water! And we discovered a few very interesting things –

1) Absolutely NONE of us had any solid recollections of the storyline or the plot or any understanding whatsoever of what was driving the plot, nor could any of us even remember how the damn story ended!

2) We had little to no recollection of the background of each of the main characters, the motivations for their various actions and had completely judged all the characters totally differently back then than we did on this more recent viewing.

3) None of us remembered the heavy religious overtones of the film, instead thinking of poor Bess as some sort of brainwashed borderline personality, schizophrenic type. Rather she is someone who knew no other way of life than her heavily indoctrinated religious cult thing, AND she probably has a borderline personality disorder and schizophrenic tendencies!

4) And the most alarming discover of all… Wolliver (and to a lesser extent, Mr K), have a mysterious and inexplicable ‘thing’ for gold lame hotpants, which do NOT feature in this film in any way shape or form!

Viewing this film for a second time, with the benefit of maturity, hindsight and experience, we found ourselves coming away with a greater appreciation for the film’s complexity and the nuances of its flawed characters. We also concurred that Emily Watson’s portrayal of Bess was actually due the acclaim accorded to it at the time, as it seems a challenging role to play someone so damaged, slightly psychotic and yet naive and sheltered in a film filled with challenging sexual practices and perceptions.

Having said all that… it remains, in my humble opinion… still RIGHT UP THERE IN THE WORST FIVE FILMS OF ALL TIME! And I have now devoted nearly six hours of my life to it that I will never get back!

Friday nights are for fighting!

Posted on May 10, 2013 by borysSNORC

Well, that was fun. I think that was funny.

I went out earlier and pulled into the local shops to pick up some things for dinner tonight only to find that the entire car park was full and the only two disabled car parks were both taken up by two vehicles neither of which are displaying the required Department of Transport parking permits to legally use those spaces. Fighting down the urge to key the inconsiderate bastards, this then meant I had to park underneath the building and go up a long flight of stairs to get to the shops.

Now, I have been issued with a Dept of Transport Parking Permit because, well, I’m a fucking chronic pain sufferer who has a lot of difficult walking without exacerbating my pain problems. I also have trouble standing up for more than five minutes which has the rather unfortunate consequence of causing me to hold my breath against the pain, go red in the face and feel like I am going to pass out. My other major mobility impairment relates to traversing flights of stairs or inclined ground… this literally makes me throw up!

Sometimes into the nearest garden, sometimes into a gutter, and on several occasions, empty cardboard boxes at Bunnings (don’t ask). This particular problem stems from many years of cyclical spasming pain which has in turn caused maladaptive muscular behaviour and has forced a bony spur in my cervical spine to protrude forwards in such a way that it drags along the back of my oesophagus, triggering a gag reflex and subsequently plenty of up chucking. It’s not pleasant and I’ve learned to avoid stairs as much as possible over the last few years… because well, it’s kinda fucking inconvenient, not to mention embarrassing to be throwing up everywhere in public all the time!

The only time I use my Transport Disability Parking Permit is at Uni, because my old University campus was all up hill and down dale and impossible to traverse… and my new University campus is so huge I’d end up having to park miles away, and throwing up before every class is hardly optimal. So, on the odd occasion in other public carparks where I am trying to avoid stairs, if I have no other choice, I will reluctantly use the marked mobility impaired parking spaces and clearly display my Transport Disability Parking Permit as required by law.

As I came out of the shops, I saw the offending driver and asked the woman as she was getting something out of her car if she had a Transport Disability Parking Permit to use the disability parking space where she had left her vehicle. The conversation went something like this:

‘Excuse me, do you have a Disability Parking Permit to be legally parked in that space, as you don’t appear to be displaying one.’
‘I didn’t even know it was a disabled parking space.’
‘Well, it is a space for people with mobility impairments and I just had to walk up a long flight of stairs because you are illegally utilizing the park.’
‘Well, I am leaving soon anyway and I didn’t know.’
‘Well, now you do. So perhaps you could take more care in future.’

At which point the over coiffed, over made up, besuited, middle aged, mutton-dressed-up-as-lamb, car park hog went to walk off. And as she did, I decided to take a photograph of her vehicle, you know… just for shits and Twittles, which gained the following reaction:

‘Are you fucking taking a photograph of my car?’
‘Why yes, yes I am.’ I said smiling sweetly.
‘You can’t take a photograph of my car, you fucking bitch!’
‘Well, actually yes… Yes, I can photograph your car.’
‘I’ll fucking photograph your car you arrogant bitch!’
‘Be my guest. I’m not the one illegally parked. It’s right down the bottom of the flight of stairs which I had to traverse because you are parked in the disabled parking space.’

At which point she said the worst possible thing you can say to someone with a disability of any kind:
‘Look at you! There’s fucking nothing wrong with you, you stupid lazy bitch!’ (Yeah, I have no idea why she was calling me names all of a sudden… I really hate that. It just shows a lack of creativity and a decided lack of education. Not to mention it totally ruins my natural inclination to argue with someone as I immediately peg them as someone with no common sense, no common decency, no useful discourse and a potentially limited ability to comprehend anyone I might say should I be foolish enough to use words of more than three syllables… meh).

I sighed in a resigned and somewhat exasperated manner and said ‘Just because you can’t see someone’s pain, doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist.’ And it was at this point that I uncharacteristically chose to disengage from the conversation because I didn’t have the energy for fighting with some inconsiderate, chicken fucking moron tonight (maybe tomorrow night? Tonight however, I was just too damn exhausted from my torturous Latin exam today). But unfortunately for the lady with the cheap crushed suit and the butt ugly shoes… it was too late.

Mr K had heard my conversation with this woman and knew it was a losing battle with a selfish, entitled priss, but at hearing her last statement, he literally flew into a rage, which started with something like, ‘How dare you speak to my wife that way you Fucking. Arrogant. Ignorant woman!?’. No energy for this! I started to walk away about now (down the problematic stairs in question) while Mr K and this woman traded barbed accusations and not even remotely veiled insults. At some point, the stupid bint attempted to impersonate a Qld Police Officer in an effort to intimidate him. His response of course was to demand to see her ID and inform her that, if she was a police officer, she should know better than to break the law by parking illegally. Not surprisingly the haggard looking granny/business woman wannabe backed down and oddly enough, did not offer to show Mr K her identification. They swore at each other a bit more and the woman looked equal parts selfish, arrogant and ridiculous in front of a small crowd outside the shops before they retreated into respective dark clouds of confrontational angst.

By the time this was over, I was nearly back to my car and thinking… why are people such complete and utter arse holes? I mean seriously? Name calling and swearing at total strangers? Can’t we be better than this? But, I guess if you are the sort of person who is prepared to take up a car park that might be needed by someone with a genuine medical need to be in closer proximity to their destination, then yes… you probably feel that childish name calling and excessive and unnecessary use of profanity in public is entirely appropriate.

Lady, I hope that karma comes and bites you in the arse big time… preferably in the form of a dirty big truck with a huge fuck-off bullbar running up the arse of your gold Toyota Camry Qld licence plate number 102-KLG. 🙂 Have a nice weekend!

The Wondrous Tail of D50.

Posted on May 7, 2013 by borysSNORC

About a month ago, I saw a call go out on a friend’s Facebook page looking for people to foster rescue animals that were coming from a puppy mill out back of Roma somewhere. Apparently they were expecting potentially around 60 dogs and needed an equal number of volunteer foster families to look after them, as the local RSPCA and pounds could not handle that sort of intake of rescued animals. Rather uncharacteristically, I sent in the paperwork and offered to take on a couple of SMALL dogs if they were desperate. I agreed to two animals as 1) I thought they might keep each other company if the poor little guys were traumatised from being at a puppy farm, 2) they might not be used to being alone and 3) the odds of our falling in love with one of them were reduced if we were lavishing attention on two animals… well, that was the theory anyway!

By the time the puppies were ready to collect, they had more than enough volunteers – social media rocks! – to house all the rescued animals and we bought home a somewhat thin, terribly scared little nameless pup who would not come anywhere near us. 🙁 She was bedraggled and unkempt, covered in fleas and multiple cattle ticks! The poor little thing had a real hangdog look about her – in fact I don’t think I knew what that term really meant until I met this puppy. She could hardly walk properly and kept her tail firmly between her legs at all times. For such a young little pup she had the most anxious eyes I’ve ever seen and she literally trembled whenever anyone picked her up. She would not eat out of her bowl and would scoot in, grab some food, drop it and eat it somewhere else while keeping a wary eye on anyone who was nearby. And I think the thing that pulled on the heartstrings the most was the way she didn’t shake herself when I bathed her… she just stood in the tub. Trembling and scared, while I poured water over her head as I wrestled the fleas under control. It was as though she was used to standing around in the rain with a wet head or something and didn’t bother to shake the water off, because it was somehow pointless. She looked so small and helpless and sad. 🙁

After a few days, she started to tentatively walk around the house investigating this huge space… it must have felt like the world had opened up compared to being stuck in a horrid cage her whole life. Clean up and slowly getting her diet up to scratch, we watched on as she walked around on her very wobbly and under-used legs and saw her first attempts at running once she realized she could actually move about. Talk about clumsy. Her back legs didn’t want to cooperate at all and she would sit down oddly as she tried to sit AND keep her tail between her legs. After only a few days she started to come out of her shell a bit and would let us gently pat her, and while still extremely timid she started to make progress in leaps and bounds… literally.

Skip forward a couple of weeks and she’s wagging her tail in excitement every day, running around the house with confidence, jumping up on the couch with ease and trying to lick people and biting on her chew toys and basically well, acting like a puppy! It’s amazing to see the transformation in her. We’ve been working on learning to sit, we’ve learned the areas of the house she is not allowed into (invisible doorways), we’ve learned to pee when told to ‘hurry up’ outside and while we are still working on coming when called, I am sure we will get there eventually! I’ve noticed that instead of having two somewhat forlorn and floppy ears, she’s now listening to everything going on around her, and one of her ears sticks up straight, and she is alert and interested in all the interesting noises going on. She seems to love nothing more than to curl up beside me and sleep while I study my dreaded Latin, and will happily roll over onto her back for a tummy rub at every opportunity! She’s still a very quiet and placid given she is barely seven months old (approximate age according to her vet check up) and sometimes I think she sleeps so much because she is trying to catch up on seven months of lost sleep from being constantly surrounded by nearly a hundred other trapped and anxious barking dogs!

The one thing we really have to work on is teaching her to come to her name though! I think we’ve inadvertently given her a bit of an identity crisis. After bringing her home we found after a few days that calling her D50 wasn’t going to cut it at all (D20 maybe… but D50 – nope!), and we started to call her Kimber (because they make a very cool 1911 ;). But then she got a naming sponsor to help raise funds for Animal Rescue Queensland, the organisation who saved her from the puppy mill (donations of dog supplies or money can be made here) and her naming sponsor chose to call her Pixie. Which strangely we all absolutely hated, as it didn’t seem to suit her at all. But we thought if she was going to potentially go off to a new home we would have to train her to answer to her name, and the closest thing to Pixie that we found palatable was Dixi – which in Latin is the 1st person, singular, perfect, indicative, active of the verb dīcō dīcere dixī dictum 3D meaning, ‘to say, talk or speak’ … which is slightly ironic given how quiet she is. So Dixi it is. 🙂

It’s been amazing to see her change from such a scared little pup into such a gorgeous little girl with such a sweet personality. But as they say in the foster community, she’s turning into a big ol’ foster fail… because there is no way we are letting this little girl out of our lives now! She is such a gorgeous little dog that she has won her way into the hearts of the whole family and nearly everyone who has met her so far! So we are going to adopt her as soon as the last of her vet work and paperwork is completed. She’s had the worst possible start in life but thanks to ARQ and a friend sharing a post of Facebook, she seems to have totally landed on her feet.

And so that is the Wondrous Tail of D50, and how she found a home.