Unchain my heart

Ok quick post because I am in an internet café and the $6/hour price tag is really eating into my holiday beer budget. Nevertheless, I felt compelled to post about an issue that really boils my blood; motherfucking chain letters.

Here is a classic example of the chain letter.

Attention all Facebook membeRs.
Facebook is recently becoming very overpopulated,
There have been many members complaining that Facebook
is becoming very slow.Record shows that the reason is
that there are too many non-active Facebook members
And on the other side too many new Facebook members.
We will be sending this messages around to see if the
Members are active or not,If you're active please send
to other users using Copy Paste to show that you are active
Those who do not send this message within 2 weeks,
The user will be deleted without hesitation to create more space,
If Facebook is still overpopulated we kindly ask for donations but until then send this message to all your friends and make sure you send
this message to show me that your active and not deleted.

Founder of Facebook
Mark Zuckerberg

If the text above was last seen by you in a FunWall new post window along with the names of all your friends with little check boxes next to them then you are an idiot who deserves to lose internet privileges for a week.

Ok, maybe a little harsh there. I know it’s a bullshit chain letter, but how would the average punter work this out? I’ll list the ways so that the reader can refer to this if they chance upon a similar thing in the future.

1) It contains numerous grammatical and punctuation errors.
2) It reads like it has been written by a 5 year old autistic child.
3) The message actually makes no sense. [Facebook knows when you are active on Facebook because you have to fucking log in to their servers.]
4) It asks you to forward it on.
5) It mentions something happening if you don’t forward it on.

The last two points are important. ANYTHING that asks you to forward it on to all your friends is a bullshit chain letter. All the ones about little Jenny the crippled AIDS sufferer who will die if a million people don’t send the letter on, all the ones about Bill Gates giving you an X-Box 360 and a blow job if you send the letter on, all the ones about… well, anything, that asks you to forward it on.

I know, I know, some of my dearest friends have fallen for this letter and others like it, but that’s OK, I have now educated them on the error of their ways. They, and you, get one mistake. If you forward a chain letter on after reading this you are clearly beyond help and I will be around shortly to confiscate your computer.

The only way we can stop these letters (besides checking everyone’s sent mail and drowning serial offenders) is by first immediately deleting one when we are sent it then chastising the person who sent it to you until they cry and beg for you to stop.

Now some of you might be thinking that I am overreacting here, but I’m not. This afternoon I logged on to Facebook to discover that not one but two chain letter had been posted to my FunWall. The effect of this was that a video post about sexy bikini jelly wrestling was pushed off my profile page. That right, bikini girls gone, because of a fucking chain letter.

It’s ruining Facebook people. Facebook is about amusingly title groups, softcore porn videos and cyber stalking old girlfriends, and I will not stand idly by and let it be sullied in this way.

It’s a war people, and we’re losing it.

Thar she blows!

It’s whalin’ time! The Japanese are sharpening their traditional explosive tipped harpoon cannons and polishing their floating abattoirs in anticipation of a bumper catch this season. Purely for academic research of course, previous research having proven conclusively that most whales die when shot in the head with an explosive-tipped harpoon and that dead whales taste pretty good with wasabi and soy sauce.

Whaling is such an emotive issue. The vast majority of Australian’s would like all whaling stopped but I wonder if they can justify that opinion in a non hypocritical way. I personally want the Japanese to fuck off out of Antarctica, but my reasoning basically boils down to ‘cos it’s wrong’.

So I’m going to tackle a few reasons not to kill whales.

We shouldn’t hunt whales because they are endangered. Fair enough there. But the next question would obviously be can we hunt them when they are no longer endangered? Is it OK to hunt the Common Minke whale because there are still lots of them? If not then we move on.

We shouldn’t hunt whales because it’s cruel. Here again is a valid argument. From what I have researched it doesn’t look like most of them die immediately, so they probably do suffer quite a bit, which is horrible. But what if the hunters could guarantee an immediate kill, like in a cattle slaughterhouse? The Norwegians claim that 80% of the whales they kill die instantly (the Japanese claim 40%). Would it be ok to hunt whales if the hunters used a high explosive anti-tank gun that would vaporise the poor whale’s brain instantly so it didn’t suffer at all? If not then we have to move on.

We shouldn’t hunt whales because they are intelligent creatures. This one sounds good on the face of it, but falls over when more broadly applied. For example, pigs are pretty bloody intelligent too; as are squid and octopuses but they all make it to the kitchen table without a protest song. I really don’t think that we want to be applying the intelligence test to the animals we eat unless we are prepared to live with the results and only eat Golden Retrievers (surely the Down syndrome afflicted of the canine family).

We shouldn’t hunt whales because they are fucking whales and whales are awesome you fucking earth-raping Nazi! You only like them because they are beautiful, majestic looking animals, but where would we be if we only looked out for the cute animals? We’d have nothing but pandas, whales and baby seals left. Who’s going to save the bats, the leeches and the scorpions?

We shouldn’t kill and eat any animals because it is wrong to kill animals and the environmental costs are too high. If you happen to believe that the moratorium on whaling should be extended all the way down to oysters and everything in between then it pretty hard to argue with that. I may not agree but at least it is consistent.

I’m not pro-whaling exactly; it’s just that if a certain species of whale was not endangered and could be killed humanely, then I really can’t see any difference between that and someone shooting a kangaroo or wild pig. In the back of my head I hear a voice that says ‘but how can you kill a whale, its wrong’, but where is that same voice saying the same thing about cows, sheep and pigs? I definitely eat those, so I suppose I indirectly kill them.

It’s pretty clear in my mind that we, as greedy humans, have royally screwed up this world to the point now that we need to take drastic action to prevent a catastrophe. It’s now the time to put our faith in science, not our emotions, to provide us with solutions. The piecemeal approach that ‘Save the Whales’ epitomises is exactly not the kind of approach we need. It makes up hypocrites and fails to tackle the big, non visible, problems.

So much energy is focused on whaling but at the end of the day we are facing much bigger problems in our oceans. Every year we catch 3.5 million tonnes of tuna from the oceans. That's the equivalent biomass of 700,000 minke whales, and that's just one fish species out of the hundreds that we catch each year. The realist in me thinks that Japan only keep up their whaling to distract the world from their other fishing operations. They are distracting us with an admittedly cute hand puppet while they harvest the ocean (Japan is notorious for overfishing).

So I say don’t ‘Save the Whales’, but ‘Implement global fishing practices that ensure that all species fished are fished at a sustainable and constantly monitored rate with the purpose of minimising the impact on the ecosystem, also I am using the word fish to include the hunting of whales even though they are not fish but mammals’.

Can’t fit that on a badge though.

Why you should do what I say and buy the Big Issue.

Do you buy the Big Issue each fortnight? No? Well you should, and here’s why.

1) It helps out homeless and disadvantage by giving them money. When you buy an issue for $5 (it just went up from $4) the vendor you bought it from gets $2.50 directly into their pocket. How many times have you mumbled under your breath “Get a fucking job” to a beggar asking you for $2? Well, these are the people who have gotten a fucking job and are no longer begging.

2) It helps the homeless and disadvantaged improve themselves. It helps them improve their self-esteem and social skills and allows them to hold their heads up high as working members of the community. Hopefully it helps them move on to more gainful employment too.

3) It’s a really great read. It’s funny, intelligent and interesting. The cover stories are always an interesting read and the many editorials range in topic from hilariously petty pop culture to intense social reflection, so there’s something for everyone.

It has all the usual magazine stuff of course, film/book/TV/music reviews, interviews etc, and a stupidly hard crossword which I have solved exactly nunce.

4) It increases your understanding of the shitty situations some people exist in in Australia. If you’re reading this from your own computer in your comfortable home which you pay for with your decent job, as I am, then it can sometimes be hard to empathise with people who have either been dealt a bum hand in life or screwed it up royally themselves and landed in shitsville.

While being by no means preachy, the Big Issue gives up a few of it’s column inches each fortnight to tell the stories of the lower lower class, usually, and most importantly I think, in their own words. The Vendor Profile section on page 5 tells the short life story of a particular vendor, explaining how they came to become homeless, what they have done about it and what their aspirations are for the future.

Far from being a depressing read, it always gives me hope that those who are downer than down will be able to pick themselves up again. It also helps me think of the less fortunate as people rather than just statistics.

5) The vendors are awesome. Most of them look rough as guts, but there have been very few times when I haven’t received a warm friendly smile when I bought a mag. For those in Brizzy, there is a cranky bitch who sells outside of the GPO but she is definitely not the norm, so please don’t let her public whinging turn you off.

The guy who whistled on Adelaide St was my favourite. Funny as balls, I almost bought a second copy from him. He’s gone now but there’s a young kid who has taken his place. Friendliest kid you’d meet. He must have been having a slow day the other week because he finished the transaction by giving me a huge high-five, calling me awesome at the top of his lungs then apologising for embarrassing me in front of the fifty odd people that turned around to see what he was yelling about. See? Always a good story. I smiled the whole way back to work.

6) The Hearsay section at the front. A collection of quotes from the last two weeks of the world. I think I would buy it if it were a one-page pamphlet with just this on it.

Australia the Great!

I’ve so far managed to keep this blog mainly about our perfect little country called Australia and it’s crazy politicians. I’m still up for plugging ‘straya, but my politics theme may just have run its course. So I’m trying a different angle today… Australia the Great!

I heard the other day that Australia is the world leader in greenhouse gas emissions. That’s right, we bag the yanks for their 9 litre hummers and 13 bedroom, perpetually lit homes but, per capital, we actually kick their arse in destroying the planet.

So I got thinking, what else are we tops at? Google was my friend.

Well, sticking with the global destruction theme, Australia manages to be both the driest continent on earth, as well as the heaviest user of water per capita. I’m all for cutting back where we can, but I still believe every Australian is entitled to their own quarter acre of flooded rice paddy.

It is a bit depressing though, so how about something more uplifting? How about this, we are the highest users of ecstasy per capita in the world. Admittedly that was back in 2005, but from the euphoric, bordering on comatose looks on the younger punter’s faces the last time I hit the dodgier nightclubs of Brisbane’s Fortitude Valley I’m pretty sure we will hold this one for at least as long as our 18 year ashes run.

We also have the highest rates of skin cancer in the world. No surprises there I suppose, we’re a nation of pinkies living in a land of eternal sunshine. Though according to latest research we should evolve a protective darker skin in five to ten thousand years.

According to the Durex Global Sex Survey 2005, Australians have the highest rates of having sex in a park. Not bad, but probably not a statistic we want printed on a commemorative dollar coin. We came second in the world for the highest average number of sexual partners. One shag each behind Turkey if you can believe it, randy bastards. I reckon this is an easy one we can knock off, what with all our ecstasy use and all.

We also work the most number of hours per week of any country in the world, beating even Japan. It all starts to make sense now. We work like dogs to pay for our massive cars and houses, take ecstasy to dull the pain of our workaholic lifestyles then shag in the park, under the sprinklers to cool our growing skin cancers.

It’s not a bad list, but, like the ‘most sexual partners’ stat, we’re just a few spots away from the gold in quite a few lucrative polls. Here is some homework people. We are:

Second in the developed world for unemployed single parents.
Second in the developed world for violent crime.
Third in the world for teenage abortion.
Third in the world for petrol use.
Fifth in the world for obesity.

If we all pitch in and focus on the titles we’re close to claiming, I think we can cement our place as a nation of greats.