January passes slowly in these here parts

IN SOMETHING OF A STINK
I'll be the first to admit that I am a creature of habit, and when I find something that I like or something that simply works, I'll stick with it. As an example let's take antiperspirants - More specifically let's take my trip out on Tuesday night to the local supermarket to look for a refill. How hard is it supposed to be to find stick antiperspirant? Apparently it's harder than you expect and harder than should be expected.

I went to my local Coles supermarket first. Inspected their offerings to help me not smell like month old wildebeest carcass after the sun has been shining down on me and my motorcycle jacket all afternoon.

• Aerosol deodorant? Check.
• Roll-on deodorant? Present.
• Poxy gel "stick" crap that freezes your pits even as it clags hair together in limb threatening spikes of torment should you be mad enough to hold your arms up until they dry? Also present. Ready and lurking in fact...
• Dry stick deodorant? Dry stick deodorant? ... Bueller? ... Bueller?

Odd. No offerings that would suit my perceived consumer needs to be had. Aerosols are annoying - They snap-chill armpits and freeze-dry hair with blasts of compressed hydrocarbons; roll-ons are designed by balding sadists for use by hairy masochists and those slimy gel tubes of crap should only be used by those who want a career in armpit hairstyling. Oh well, Safeway is just around the corner and down the road. I'll exercise my freedom of choice as a consumer (dammit!) and I'll shop there for my de-stinkifying needs. Back on the scooter I go, heavy jacket and all...

I was always under the impression that a "consumer boycott" was collective action by consumers against a particular product, supplier or company. Up until the moment that I strolled down the toiletries aisle of Safeway was I aware that those two words could be interpreted the other way, and it wasn't until I really searched the men's section of the toiletries aisle that I realised just how pervasive and insidious the conspiracy against me was. Both Safeway and Coles, in different shopping strips, had exactly the same product lines when it came to deodorants, right down to the same amounts of stock available.

Was I mistaken, or just totally deranged? Or is an entire supermarket being plucked from one location and moved to another before I have a chance to notice? I'll admit that I have been known, on occasion and from time to time, to be moderately unobservant. I'll even admit that it's sometimes taken me a week or so to notice that the vase full of flowers in the dining room has changed. Even so I think that even I would notice an entire section of building, undergoing in-flight redecoration, flying overhead. (The most disturbing part of this is if they are flying buildings around to keep me on my toes then they can read my mind. Poor things, how do they cope?)

Getting in trouble with The Lemming

*WHACK* *WHACK* *CLOBBER* *WHACK*
It's something of a miracle that I haven't been laid low with some sort of acquired brain injury, given the number of times that I've been beaten across the back of the head after having The Lemming run away with my mouth. It's not like I actually set out to offend people or to upset them in any way, I just have this problem with poor impulse control. You would think that some people (Jennie for example) would be more understanding of this affliction of mine and not use my occasional verbal eruption as an excuse for a little percussive adjustment of my hairline. You would think wrong on that score. Earlier this month Jennie decided that she needed some help, and brought her mother out for a visit...

Things got off to a frisky start with Carol's first day here. It's the first afternoon that she's here and, proud house-owner in training that I am, I'm showing her the front garden. Carol, pointing at some of the various plants, asked what they were. Without thinking I answer with "Dead and dying", and bring Carol's attention to the hole in the side garden, telling her that we've had just the one successful escape. Carol was most amused, Jennie was not. I went to bed that night with this ringing sensation in the back of my head - It must have been the sun or something...

Things went on as normal for most of the month, the only break from the monotony of Jennie trying to break the back of my skull open was when Carol joined in the cranial pummelling festival. Right up until last night that is, when Jennie was offended into a particularly savage assault upon my person by a particularly witty observation from The Lemming. The latest and most severe of the unwarranted assaults in my person was caused by Jennie's complaints about the ineffectiveness of the fly-swatter she was wielding in the job of fly slaughter. I merely observed that if Jennie were truly serious about killing flies then she should water them.

*POW* And that is how my latest headache occurred. *WHAM* *BONK* *WHACK* And it also brought some friends. My unfeeling brute of a mother-in-law was most amused, both by the comment at her daughter's expense and by the immediate physical response it prompted.

Painkillers, I need painkillers.

The author would like to reassure readers that no animals were harmed in the writing of this blog entry. It must be stated however that The Lemming was solely responsible for any number of smack-downs and beat-downs upon my person. All complaints about the mistreatment of this particular animal should be referred to management, who will in most likelihood use it as ammunition for further abuse.

B R A I N S S s s z z z z zzz

RISING FROM MY GRAVE
2 months of silence. 2 months buried in an unhealthy dose of "Blah". That's the main reason for this hiatus, honest. "Procratination", "absent-mindedness" and "sheer, bone-idle LAZINESS" have absolutely nothing to do with the sheer level of non-productivity that has been evidenced on this blog recently. Anything that you may have heard to the contrary are LIES (dammit!) spread by people who just happen to know me. (It saddens me tho think that I may now be more unreliable than Piro of Megatokyo fame, who at least has the excuse of still being a new(ish) father to excuse him from his current bout of non-productiveness.)

It's not just this blog that's fallen victim to my flurry of inactivity. The decking out in the alfresco area at the back of the house hasn't had anything done to it since just before Melbourne Cup Day, DIY (Don't Involve Yourself) at it's very best! This is most likelly due to the recurring nightmares that I'm pretty sure that I have every night. While I can't remember anything of my dreams each night, I'm so tired when I wake each morning that I'm certain that I spent the night running away from delivery trucks from Soilworx. I have furniture that I need to put together before Christmas (like Ikea flat packs only without the Allan Key to go with it), presents to buy for my father and brother (for which I have no real clue for the most part) and I'll have to clean the BBQ before Thursday. There, the griping about what's on my plate is now out of the way so time for coffee...

SPEAKING OF CHRISTMAS...
We have a real, live Christmas tree slowly dying in our living room, and presents underneath it, around it and behind it, blocking off all possible access to allow water deliveries to prolong the tree's torment. The only real difference between the vegetation in the lounge room and the vegetation in the front garden is that the stuff in the front yard dies in natural lighting conditions. (Which is not entirely accurate, the tomato plant that Jennie ignores is thriving! Go figure...)

Every year we make a solemn and heartfelt vow to not lose control this coming Christmas and every year, shortly after November heaves its way into view, there's a *splash* as we go overboard again. This year Jennie started a computerised inventory just to help keep track of things, and by next year we should be on a full-blown, multi-user database with a crack (addicted?) staff of one (me) to keep it working.

More to write later, now I must get back to work for the benefit of the security camera that's pointed right at me!

Waking up, still not dead. Damn.

NO REST FOR THE WICKED
I'm sure that one day, while I'm enjoying the convenience of modern al-fresco dining, that I'll be able to look at this time and laugh. I won't be able to do that today though, I hurt too much for that. In fact I hurt too much for much of anything at all - I assume that those bits of me that don't ache were surgically removed from my body sometime on Friday night and were only reattached last night. Everything else had to endure moving a large pile of crushed rock from the front of the house to the back of the house, one wheelbarrow load at a time on Saturday.

Sunday was the day when the fun really began when the timber frame for the paving stone deck was slapped together and the pile of crushed rock was spread out to all parts of the frame interior. Just when I thought that things couldn't possible get any worse than I had endured, reality strolled up behind me and subjected to to a savage, brutal mugging. I don't know what I have done to earn the distaste, ire and downright blatant hostility of anything to do with hardware but it must have been major.

Yesterday it was the turn of a hired flat plate compacter to subject me to misery without end. Not content with having its motor splutter and die every 6 seconds on average it then decided that the only way possible that it was even going to approach working was if I lifted the back end of it up so that the back of the plate had no chance of harming its delicate surface with the likes of tangible work. Compacting that layer of rock involved being stuck in the middle of the wrong end of a biceps curl while man-handling an irrationally murderous mass of petrol powered metal up and down the decking to be.

The icing on the cake from all of this? Finding out that we need more crushed rock, and that Jennie will be ordering it for Wednedsay delivery. My plans for much of this week are now as follows:

• Monday - Wake up, curse the fact that I'm still alive, go to work, come home, move a large pile of sand from the front of the house to the back of the house, collapse in the lounge room, pray for death and then go to bed,
• Tuesday - Wake up, curse the fact that I'm still alive, go to work, come home, move 32 square meters of paving stones from the front of the house to the back of the house, collapse in the lounge room, pray for death and then go to bed,
• Wednesday - Wake up, curse the fact that I'm still alive, go to work, come home, move more of that fuckinig crushed rock from the front of the house to the back of the house, spread that rock out for compacting, collapse in the loungeroom, pray for death and then go to bed,
  
• Thursday - Slip into a coma and then fade gently into death. Or, wake up and curse the fact that I'm still alive should I prove to be less than fortunate... Plough through the rest of the day with a smile on my lips (rictus of horror) and a song in my heart (silent shriek of pained terror) as I wait with breathless anticipation for the new trial of pain to be given...
  

Should I die this week I'd just like Jennie to know that I hate that fucking plate compacter, I really do.

A view from far, far outside the cage.

"ECONOMY" IS THE WATCHWORD
There's a part of me that has begun to really admire the sheer, bloody-minded level of consistency that the U.S Republican Party has shown in its choice of Vice President since 1988. Back in the dying days of The Cold War they gave us Dan Quayle - A man of extraordinary qualities I'm sure, provided that you were able to stop laughing at him long enough to actually find them. I'm still laughing. From 1988 until 1992 the leadership of the free world was a single assassin's bullet away from devolving to the sort of specimen that should have been expelled from the human race for failing the drug test. (He was tested and found to not be on any of them, thus the epic fail).

Fast forward to 2000 - mainly because I can't remember who the Republicans shoved into the arena after Bush (the Lesser) and Quayle (the bewildered) lost to Clinton and Gore, which marked the victory of Bush (the Least) and Cheney over Gore and somebodyorother. Once again, in fine tradition, the office of Vice President was occupied by someone who can only be described as ... "gifted", and was the perfect pairing for a former cocaine and booze hound of gargantuan proportions from Texas. It was amusing to watch, after a certain fun-filled hunting trip involving Mr Cheney, a firearm and a badly misplaced hunting companion, the members of the Secret Service keeping a paranoid eye on the VP, just in case he tried something against the President. (Who would you shoot, and how many times?)

If you go to the woods today, you're in for a big surprise,
As the Vice President shoots you between the eyes..

Now we have Sarah Palin. The sort of politician that has comedians the world over coming in their collective socks in sheer, unbridled joy. I'll admit, I'm a fan - But only because I enjoy watching this sort of train wreck in action secure in the knowledge that I'm not there. It's like somehow the Republican Party managed to grab everything that's memorable about Quayle (dim, without the charm of Gomer Pyle to make it work for him), Dubya (ignorant as sin and as thick as a bag of frozen pig shit) and Cheney (bad news with firearms no matter what species you are) and rolled them into a one-size-fits all bag of genetic defects before giving it as a running mate to John McCain who, from latest accounts, probably needed a guide dog to help him fly his plane properly back in Vietnam.

Bleaugh!

A PICTURE OF HEALTH
Ahh, spring! How I love this time of year. The football season is a memory, finishing with my football team crashing out of the finals, the Grand Final's been and gone (and gone to bloody Hawthorn) and that brief 2 month period in the year when I don't have some form of lung infection is just around the corner. Love it! I am so looking forward to going through a day where I'm not trying to cough up a lung, my lunch, and the soles of my shoes. Of course, for a brief period of time things had the potential to be so much worse...

I have to admit that there was a small part of me that was a little disappointed when I got the result of my CT scan back with negative results. I was really looking forward to telling the tale of how, for a brief, shining moment in my life, my clumsiness was responsible for saving my life instead of trying to bring it to a premature and humiliating close. Sigh. Just once I thought that the pain, the frequent and hard to explain (to an audience that isn't collapsed in laughter) injuries, the indignity and the massive social cost would have been justified in some small measure. Instead my lungs, apart from being full of the byproduct of another chest infection, are totally clear of anything remotely threatening, and the fact that I trip over everything (including misplaced oxygen molecules) is but a part of the burden that I have to carry as part of being me.

HORRORZ ON THE INTERNETZ
My brother introduced me to an absolute gem of a web-site the other day, Encyclopedia Dramatica, which is what Wikipedia would be like if it were written by a crazed collection of smutty-minded, juvenile adolescents. Prowling through the pages on this site (such as entries for Melbourne, the United Nations, pwn and lulz) is to be let off the e-leash into a world where karmas are crushed, sacred cows are lined up for slaughter and dogmas of all varieties are subject to surprise buttsex. It's wildly entertaining in places, quite a lot of them in fact, but parts of it are also like the sensation you get when you hit your feet with a hammer time and time again - It feels so good when you stop. You must be cautious, some stuff there is not suitable for minors, not suitable for the office environment and probably not suitable for anyone who enjoys polite conversation. This place has many parts that are electronic equivalent of a toxic waste dump - It's rough, it's libelous, it's probably an abomination before the eyes of God and it's funny as hell.

Final warning:

It has direct links to goatse, and no! I won't be linking to it (or sleeping comfortably at at night ever again).

Dreams of Impending Father's Day

THE VERY DEFINITION OF "INSANITY"
Jennie says that I don't spend enough time on this blog talking about my children, so here's a little something to help rectify that oversight, and to help me talk my way out of the trauma of moving our youngest from his cot to a fully fledged bed.

My favourite definition of insanity is "Repetition of the same action despite assured failure." Last night that definition would have been a perfect representation of the chore of putting Oscar to bed. In fact, let's have a blow by blow repeat of the whole, "Putting Oscar to bed" saga. It goes something like this...

Put Oscar to Bed. Put Oscar to Bed. Put Oscar to Bed. Put Oscar to Bed. Put Oscar to Bed. Put Oscar to Bed. Put Oscar to Bed. Put Oscar to Bed. Put Oscar to Bed. Put Oscar to Bed. Put Oscar to Bed. Put Oscar to Bed. All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy. Put Oscar to Bed. Put Oscar to Bed. Put Oscar to Bed. Put Oscar to Bed. Put Oscar to Bed. Put Oscar to Bed. Put Oscar to Bed. Put Oscar to Bed. Put Oscar to Bed. Drink a beer. Put Oscar to Bed. Put Oscar to Bed. Put Oscar to Bed. Put Oscar to Bed. Put Oscar to Bed. Put Oscar to Bed. Put Oscar to Bed. Put Oscar to Bed. Put Oscar to Bed. Drink another beer. Put Oscar to Bed. Put Oscar to Bed. Put Oscar to Bed. Put Oscar to Bed. Put Oscar to Bed. Put Oscar to Bed. Put Oscar to Bed.

And so on. After a while it got to be quite the chore. Of course by the time that it became quite the chore it was 11:00 pm and it was time for the parents of the household to go to bed. In hindsight perhaps I should have given the beer to the two year old, or done something less painful to myself to help break the monotony of the evening - Like hit the recently injured big toe on my right foot with a hammer or something.

AND NOW, THE TRIUMPH OF GOOD OVER EVIL!
Tonight was a different story. It only took somewhere between 6 and 8 attempts to get that little shi ... Errr, little bundle of sunny faced joy ... to stay in his bed and go to sleep. All things being equal however it could be that he was extremely tired from the night before, and is therefore saving the Next Big Thing for tomorrow night. Ah, the joys of Monday! Just in case they weren't miserable enough, Boo can make them so much worse. In the words of Michael Garibaldi, "I'd rather have my gums extracted."

POSTSCRIPT TO LAST MONDAY
I have this nagging suspicion that, in my misadventure in zealous customer service, I may have broken a rib. I'll let you know how it turns out, and how much my colleagues and family laugh at me should my suspicions be confirmed...

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Now playing: Within Temptation - Forsaken
via FoxyTunes

Ouch time. Yet again.

NEW HORIZONS IN CUSTOMER SERVICE
Why it seems that I update my blog only in times of personal injury is probably a coincidence, but here we go again with another episode of the slap-stick comedy that is my life at the moment.

Thanks to the kind people who work at Asus (and their rather nifty looking Eee PC 1000H) I am able to type this entry from the confines of my pain-filled bed, rather than the chilly solitude of the study at the other end of the house. Thinking about it I feel that perhaps there would be little difference, other than missing out on the pleasant(?) company of Jennie at the moment who is next to me, comforting me in my time of need with much heart-warming laughter and merriment. Well, it would be heart-warming if it wasn't at my expense. Deep down I'm sure that she means well - Even if "means well" in this case probably translates as "deeply amused". Jennie has been a rock of support and sympathy to me, even if appearances can be misleading.

The latest incident happened at work yesterday at VU's St Albans campus when a student had finished paying a late amendment fee using her debit card. Seconds after leaving the student service centre I noticed that my most recent client had left her debit card behind. Like a rocket, a bullet even, I was up, out from behind the counter, across the foyer and out the door of building 4 and moving at speed. Look out! Here comes Customer Service Guy (or Clumsy, Suicidal Git - you decide). Across the courtyard I ran, determined to return the card to its rightful owner. I caught sight of her some distance away and, keeping an eye on my target, put on a burst of speed. In hindsight I should have kept two eyes on where I was going.

It was on the second last turn (left) that I came a cropper... I misjudged it, ran into a flowerbed and tripped on the sad remains of a once mighty shrub pruned down to a stump of sullen, vengeful fury filled with nothing but a burning rage against the species that cut it down in its prime. "Tripped" is such an inadequate word to describe the landing I made, and "splashed" doesn't quite work when you're talking about landing in tanbark. In any event I was a victim of momentum, gravity and hostile vegetation.

While we're at it, the phrase "The bigger they are the harder they fall" is misleading. Believe me, the bigger they are the more time they have to think about things on the way down... The list of things that went through my mind during this incident went something like this, "There she is! Shit! What the hell was that? I'm falling? Crap, I'm falling! Where am I going to land? Not good, not good. Can I turn? No. Shit. Arghshitfuckdamnthathurts!"

After impact I went about the sorry business of finding my glasses and removing about half a tree worth of tanbark from my clothing. I trudged my way back to the office, a picture of misery with that bloody debit card still in my hand. After cleaning the abrasions I did what I should have done in the first place, I punched her student number into my terminal to find her mobile phone number and left a message to let her know that her card was still in the student service centre.

This morning shortly before lunch I handed the card, still awaiting collection, in at the security office...

Busy busy busy....

Damn, getting slack again. Oh well, here goes ... One big post to catch up.

(MORE) CLUMSINESS
Those of you who know me best know that sooner or later I'm going to injure myself in some acutely embarrassing way. Last week was no exception, and was probably overdue anyway. It all starts with a cat. Which one? It doesn't matter. For one night last week I hated them all...

It all started with the wondrous odour of freshly laid cat piss in the study. One of our feline inhabitants decided that Graeme, far from having the piss taken out of him, needed to have some deposited on his air mattress that was lying around in the study as a matter of urgency. I decided that I'd better remove the large and ungainly cat toilet from the room, and shift it down the hallway to the garage where I could get to work on trying to clean the bloody thing. The smart thing to do would be to mop up the excess first.

I wasn't smart.

The first part of the trip, navigating the whole thing out of the study without spilling anything on the carpet, was a success. This should have been my first warning, but I wasn't paying attention. Little dribblets of cat piss dripped over the side of the air mattress as I moved it up the hallway. "No problem", I thought, "Hit it with some cleaning stuff and wipe it up with a paper towel (or two, or three) once I've got the rest of this in the garage and taken care of things there." My second unheeded warning was just how quickly I was able to clean up the mess in the garage as well as the trickling mess down the hallway. I used a lot of spray cleanser during the cleaning process and, being winter, things were a little slow in drying. Things like the tile floor running the length of the hallway for instance, that was slow in drying...

The almost inevitable dance that followed this bout of late night cleaning went as follows....

1. Stomp - Stomp your way up the hallway, muttering about cats, bladders and the bladders of cats in particular.
2. Slip - Slip your soft-rubber shoed foot (I was wearing crocs, an apparent injury hazard) on a wet patch of tile floor.
3. Split - Split your legs just as far as they'll go - All the better to lose what little balance you have with.
4. Swing - Swing your foot up, perch it gracefully in the air before you,
5. Stab - Stab your big toe into the floor just has hard as you can.
6. Scream - Scream as waves of pain crash their way from your toe, through your leg, up your spine and into your (soon to be) long suffering brain before you,
7. Swear - Swear and swear and swear and swear...

Guess which foot did the slipping, stabbling and eventual bruising? Remember this post? Same foot. In fact, here's a picture of last week's injury.
As you can see the big toe is looking all painful and nasty. Jennie, paragon of compassion and empathy that she is, on the night of the injury told me to shut up and stop bitching about it... See! I told you it was injured!

SURVIVING INCOMPETENCE
I am at a loss, I really am, to wonder how anyone would even begin to think that giving Telscrape control of a national fibre broadband network can be anything other than a truly craptacular idea. These chuckleheads have trouble enough as it is with the vagaries of copper wire without giving them even more scope to fuck things up with fibre-optic cable. In my opinion the only cable that these invertibrates should be associated with is the ones separating their lungs from access to a viable oxygen source. Kill them all, and replace them with sheep. Sure, the sheep are still stupid as all hell but at least they're useful when it comes to things like wool and socially acceptable foodstuffs.

Our phone service is out, again. Telstra is denying all involvement with anything remotely resembling a fault, again. I want to execute Soloman Trujillo with a chainsaw enema, again. On Saturday I made the mistake of reporting a fault with our telephone service and then getting my expectations up that something would actually be done for a change. I'll leave it to my email to Telstra's complaints department to continue this line of thought.

Re: Fault number [TOP SECRET STUFF!]

I am emailing this as you do not have the facility to lodge or follow up on fault reports via email, and I feel that lodging a formal complaint with your office is the only avenue available to me at present.

I reported a fault with our residential telephone line on 2 August 2008, and during the call I stated that a full isolation test had been performed and that despite not having any telephone equipment connected to our line at all still yielded a busy signal when I called my home number from my mobile phone. Plugging in completely different telephone equipment that is known to work properly also resulted in no success whatsoever.

During the course of this call to your 13 22 03 number I also stated that our telephone and/or ADSL service suffered whenever the weather was poor, and that if it rained then our telephone service, our ADSL service or both services at once would be interrupted shortly thereafter. In addition I noted that this situation had been an ongoing issue since the telephone line was installed back in February of this year.

Arrangements were made for a technician to visit our premises this week and I confirmed my mobile telephone number with the operator who took my call and was assured that any technician who would be making the visit would call me half an hour before arriving. I stated that I would be available to be on the premises if given 30 minutes notice and was assured, twice, that I would be called before the technician's arrival.

Sweet load of good that did. I arrived home this evening to find that "Mike" had called by our place at 12:20pm today. He was nice enough to leave behind a card saying, "I called to repair your telecommunications service, however you were unavailable". How strange it must be to employ a telephone service technician who seems to be incapable of calling a mobile telephone; or seems to be incapable to remembering that, as a courtesy at the very least, a telephone call prior to a service call is always appreciated.

The fact that your technician stated that the telecommunications service to our premises was working merely adds another level of insult to an already pathetic level of customer service. If I were to deliver a similarly shabby experience to my clients, I would be out of a job in no short order.

We have been without a telephone service since approximately 11:00am on 2 August 2008, and so far this situation shows no sign of becoming any better any time soon. I find it even more galling as my ADSL service is working just fine at the moment, and IT SHARES THE SAME BLOODY LINE!

I'm not asking for much, just the telephone service that my wife and I pay our monthly service fee for. Is that too much to ask?

I expect a swift resolution to my current issue or my next email will be to the Telecommunications Ombudsman, and I will include all the details of this email as well as any response (or lack thereof) that may result.

I can only assume that "Mike the Technician" was pressed for 12:30 drinks at the pub... Oh, for those of you who know what our telephone number is and need a laugh, do a directory for our telephone number search using Whitepages.com.au, and then click on the 'view map' link for our entry. The result is close enough I suppose, it still shows a location in the Melbourne metropolitan area...

For more laughs check out the Troll Doll's wikipedia entry to see the traces of clumsy and ham-fisted edits to make complete jerk seem plain and boring - It was a much larger, and far more critical, document than when I first checked it out in January this year. Then a slash and burn edit happened and all I have is memories...

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Now playing: Pink Floyd - Comfortably Numb
via FoxyTunes

Looking up from the haze.

SUCKED IN
It seems that even the most steadfast and stubborn of people will succumb to the all-devouring social-networking hydra that is Facebook, (except my friend Derek who is still hideously addicted to Everquest after all these years). From the depths of (very) short-lived enthusiasm when I created a profile back in March (afterwhich I did exactly nothing for months) to the sudden burst of activity in late June, now I find that no day is complete without at least once visit per day to see what my friends have been up to and so on. Facebook, like Tupperware or any other pernicious drug, is like an addiction - Tupperware just costs more to indulge in. Yes, I'm looking at you Jennie....

A NEW TURN OF PHRASE
What do you get when your wife notices that your hair appears to be thinning in a rather odd way? Rather like parallel lines running back from your forehead... I looked in the mirror and sure enough, almost like racing stripes, were the areas of hair defficiency that Jennie was talking about. "Cool!" I thought, "Male Patterned Baldness." The reality however is more than a little mundane, and with less scope for the Advanced Hair Studio to play with, when I realised that the hair was merely clumped and jammed together by the combination of sweat and motorcycle helmet from earlier that evening. Oh well, at least I look better wearing my helmet than Shane Warne does sitting under that stupid looking lamp set up. (Maybe someone should try telling Shane that treating your hair like it's a plant just isn't going to work, even if your head is full of shit ... errr ... fertiliser.)