The winners  are:

1. Coffee (n.), the person upon whom one  coughs.

2. Flabbergasted (adj.), appalled over how  much weight you have gained.

3. Abdicate (v.), to  give up all hope of ever having a flat stomach.

4.  Esplanade (v.), to attempt an explanation while  drunk.

5. Willy-nilly (adj.), impotent.

6.  Negligent (adj.), describes a condition in which you  absentmindedly
answer the door in your nightgown.

7.  Lymph (v.), to walk with a lisp.

8. Gargoyle (n),  olive-flavored mouthwash.

9. Flatulence (n.)  emergency vehicle that picks you up after you are run
over by a  steamroller.

10. Balderdash (n.), a rapidly receding  hairline.

11. Testicle (n.), a humorous question on  an exam.

12. Rectitude (n.), the formal, dignified  bearing adopted by proctologists.

13. Pokemon (n), a  Rastafarian proctologist.

14. Oyster (n.), a person who sprinkles his conversation with Yiddishisms.

15.  Frisbeetarianism (n.), (back by popular demand): The belief  that, when
you die, your soul flies up onto the roof and gets stuck there.

16. Circumvent (n.), an opening in the front of boxer shorts worn by Jewish
men.

.

.
The  Washington Post’s Style Invitational also asked readers to take  any
word from the dictionary, alter it by adding, subtracting,  or changing one
letter, and supply a new  definition.

Here are this year’s  winners:

1. Bozone (n.): The substance surrounding  stupid people that stops bright
ideas from penetrating. The  bozone layer, unfortunately, shows little sign
of breaking down  in the near future.

2. Foreploy (v): Any  misrepresentation about yourself for the purpose of
getting  laid.

3.. Cashtration (n.): The act of buying a  house, which renders the subject
financially impotent for an  indefinite period.

4. Giraffiti (n): Vandalism  spray-painted very, very high.

5. Sarchasm (n): The  gulf between the author of sarcastic wit and the
person who  doesn’t get it.

6. Inoculatte (v): To take coffee  intravenously when you are running late.

7. Hipatitis  (n): Terminal coolness.

8. Osteopornosis (n): A  degenerate disease. (This one got extra credit.)

9.  Karmageddon (n): its like, when everybody is sending off all  these
really bad vibes, right? And then, like, the Earth  explodes and it’s like,
a serious bummer.

10.  Decafalon (n.): The grueling event of getting through the day
consuming only things that are good for you.

11.  Glibido (v): All talk and no action.

12. Dopeler  effect (n): The tendency of stupid ideas to seem smarter when
they come at you rapidly.

13. Arachnoleptic fit (n.):  The frantic dance performed just after you’ve
accidentally walked through a spider web.

14. Beelzebug (n.):  Satan in the form of a mosquito that gets into your
bedroom at  three in the morning and cannot be cast out.

15. Caterpallor (n.): The color you  turn after finding half a grub in the
fruit you’re  eating.

And the pick of the  literature:
16. Ignoranus (n): A  person who’s both stupid and an  a***hole.

***

I just bought a vending machine triple choc choc-chip cookie.  You know the ones that promise so much: I’m cookie, they say.  I have choc-chips, they say.  Half of me is covered in actual chocolate, they say.  You’re actually not sure what the third type of chocolate is, but you know it’s there.

The vending machine light bathes you in a soft halogen fuzz.  You stand there in front of the machine, wondering if you should buy one. Not as healthy the nut bar or the other healthy snack food.  But you’re smarter than that.  Each of those products are just as bad for you.  If you look at the back of the pack, they’ve all got the same amount of every type of fat, sugar, sodium and bi-phenyl-di-methylate as the last.  At least the triple-choc choc chip cookie is honest. You know where it stands and you know what it stands for: not just one type of chocolate in a cookie, but three different kinds.  Even if you don’t know what the last one is.  You know what you’re getting with the triple-choc choc chip cookie,  It mightn’t be good for you, but at least it will be good.

You put in your $2.20.  You rip open the triple choc choc-chip cookie and take a bite. It tastes like ass.

You don’t have another $2.20 in loose change.

FYL.

It goes like this. I was asked for a CV today, for journalism-related purposes, and I realised I didn’t have one on this laptop. So I had to rewrite one, and go and track down a bunch of URLs for old articles of mine online. One of the stops was Citysearch, where I have a stack of old music reviews that I haven’t looked at since they were posted. Now, some of you might remember a middle-of-the-road pop-rock band called Taxiride from ten years or so ago. One of the members, Jason Singh, tried to reinvent himself as an electronic artist by teaming up with a producer called Todd Watson to release a by-the-numbers club anthem under the cunning pseudonym ‘Todd Watson and Jason Singh’. Catchy. Not sure if it worked or not, I didn’t keep tabs. But I got sent the single, and gave it the unflattering review I thought it deserved, as well as having a bit of a dig at Taxiride. (Come on, who wouldn’t?)

I thought nothing more of it until the review popped up today and I noticed there were some comments on it. So I checked them out, and…Jason Singh himself had found the article and left an irate response about what an arsehole I am. Seriously! It’s. Fucking. Hilarious. Here it is in all its glory. (Jason, if you’re Googling yourself again, then… hi.)

Jason Singh
June 09, 2009

This is the first time i have ever commented on a review in my whole career, but i couldn’t resist! Mr Lemon probably hasn’t walked into a club since he was wearing flares! For your information … Taxiride had 8 top 40 singles, were 5 times platinum, and are the only Australian band ever to have 2 number 1 radio tracks. one in 2000 and one in 2002! … nothing in the ’90s. What have you done? If you would like to meet up for a musical lesson, feel free to give me a buzz. If not, enjoy your time in you study thinking about why you weren’t good enough to make it as a musician!

Hahahaha! Several things I love. I love that he presumes I’m a failed musician rather than, say, a writer. Ok, you got me. I played saxophone when I was thirteen and then I got bored. I lament it daily. I love that because I don’t like his song, I must therefore be an old fogey who doesn’t understand young people’s music. Hmm. Jason Singh was born in 1973. He is in fact a full decade older than me. He can actually remember flares. I can remember phat pants. And I can tell you the clubs were pretty sweet in those days. I love his take on chronology. Taxiride were formed in 1997, and became well-known with an album released in 1999. To the best of my arithmetical knowledge, it is fair to categorise both of these as years in the late 90s. I love that they’re the only Aussie band ever to have two Number 1 hits. Hmm again. Sherbet beat them to it by 25 years. Though I agree Daryl Braithwaite shouldn’t be acknowledged as part of human history. I love that he defends the band via sales. Yes, they sold a lot of records. So did Savage Garden and Delta Goodrem. Selling fewer records were The Angels and The Saints and Crowded House. Who would you rather belong to? Plus bear in mind that during that same era, substantial numbers of people voted repeatedly for the likes of Amanda Vanstone, Phillip Ruddock, and Sarah-Marie off Big Brother. The good sense of the wider Australian public has never been something in which to have an inordinate amount of faith. Lastly, I love that he has supposedly never commented on a review in his life, but that I managed to inadvertently piss him off enough to claim this particular honour. That, my friends, is feedback. God I feel validated right now.

See, I did wonder from time to time whether the artists I was writing about ever read these things. Generally I figured they didn’t. I didn’t picture Bono weeping in his castle because I said his new track was derivative. I figured people in bands would have better and more important shit to do than stress over this stuff. And I have this reflex illusory idea of the internet as so big that I’m way off in a secluded corner, and that no-one will read my writing except five of my friends. Today I found out that when you Google ‘Todd Watson and Jason Singh’ the first result you get is my review. So in the end, perhaps not that surprising that he stumbled across it. But the fact that he did, and was pissed off enough to want to fight me about it, was just so absurd I completely lost my shit.

Anyway. Once I finished weeping with laughter, it occurred to me that maybe some of my other posts had harvested a bit of commentary gold in the last year or so. Indeed they had, mostly from people defending stuff that I’d canned. Not that all my reviews are negative – actually I was surprised by the number of positive ones, given some of the dreck I had to trawl through. But the only argument with a positive review was “Worst song ever. Cringeworthy,” after I’d given Ben Lee a lukewarm thumbs-up. Arguments with negative reviews though? Here are a few of my favourites, spelling and grammatical errors the authors’ own.

.

kyle: re 3OH!3
July 15, 2009
you must have gotten the wrong disc or youre totally stuckup and stuff. this is the most addicting cd i have ever heard bar none. if youre listening to it for the next great lyrical masterpiece move on but as something i would recommend this is number one on my list

.

nuffy: re Jason Singh
May 07, 2009
Seriously!!! i know your entitled to your opinion…its much much better than some of the rapper bad boy crap we are forced to listen to keep it up Jason
[Jason will write nice things on Nuffy’s Myspace page now. Thanks Nuffy.]

.

Melanie: re Karl Broadie
May 31, 2009
Sounds like jaded Geoff Melon needs a hug. This is a beautiful album.

.

tim miller: re The Feelers
February 01, 2009
i know how to play every feelers song and they rock p.s.you wrote weapons wrong!!

.

wjdelliep: Damien Leith
November 22, 2008
I happen to love Damien;s selection of music and would to hear more from a Xmas album . This writer sounds like a dis effected young hoodlum!

.

Awesome. Just awesome. Jason, Nuffy, everybody…you Changed the World As I Know It. Or at least you made me laugh my arse off. This dis effected young hoodlum can only say, thank-you. I will try to be less stuck up and stuff in future.

If you want to read the offending review, you can find it here.

Hey dear!
How are you? I hope that all nice for you.
I write to you, because I want to find man from Europe.
My name is Liudmila and I am 29 years old.
I from city Zelenodolsk
And I very beautiful and friendly woman and to search for serious attitudes.
In June I wish to visit the Europe.
But I have no friends in the Europe.
Also it would be fine, if we could have a meeting in your country.
I yet have not decided what country to visit, but it would be fine if you will tell to me more about the country.
In what country you now live? Tell to me more about the country?
It will be great if you will answer to me, so we can to have communication together.
If you will reply to me I will writing to you more about me and send photo of myself.
I want only serious and long relations, I hope you support me in it.
It will be interesting to me to learn that you think of it.

I hope to hear from you soon on my mail:  liudmila-malina@rambler.ru

Liudmila

The best part is that there’s a photo attached, of a generic attractive Slavic woman, even though they tried to use a photo as the lure to make you write back. ‘If you write to me I’ll send you a photo of myself. Here is a photo of myself.’ When I go to the Europe I will look her up.

In other news one of my poems will be in the next issue of Blue Dog, so keep an eye out for that if you have a literary inclination. And I have two new Book Show articles up. One is on the weird nature of Argentine patriotism via literary heroes, and somehow ends up talking about Lionel Messi, because it’s impossible not to think of the World Cup with everyone here living and breathing it. You can find it here. And the other is on trying to read Camus without looking like a wanker – it lives here. Let me know what you think, I’m still sussing out how best to approach these literature-based articles.

His journey home, related to me later by email, was vintage Washington, straight from the School of Good Decisions handbook. He’d taken his taxi at about five in the arvo, after we’d been drinking most of the afternoon. Then there was the Fernet-pragmatism incident. Then, as he recounted it, “I ended up blacking out on the plane. I remember the flight attendant having a warning talk with me, but I don’t really remember what I did. I lost my iPod somehow, and when I got to Houston Texas, security though I had drugs, so they searched me and went through all of my stuff. Do I look like that much of a druggie? Oh and on top of all that, they lost my bag. And I’m still hungover.” I asked for some clarification of exactly how the hell all that transpired. I mean, we’d been drinking, but he definitely wasn’t that drunk. I’ve seen Washington drunk and that wasn’t it. “Well,” he said, “it didn’t help that I got a Fernet-Coca at the airport (I slipped the guy some extra pesos and told him to make it muy fuerte, which he did). Then I drank three bottles of wine on the plane.”

Gold. Just gold. This is the most perfectly fitting finale to his trip, that final apt touch to cap it all off. I mean, I don’t want you to get the wrong impression. Back home Washington is a responsible guy, a manager at his work, considered one of the bright young talents of the company. But here, he said, he was on holiday, and he was damn well going to make the most of it. And I salute his full-blooded commitment in riding that sucker right into the ground.

It’s interesting that we ended up such good friends, because I really didn’t predict it. I tend to make very quick assessments of people when I meet them. I know very quickly if we’ll get along really well, and I know instantly if I think they’re a dick. The rest fall somewhere in between – not that I think they suck, they just don’t provoke a reaction either way. I’ll happily be nice enough but essentially indifferent. Washington struck me as a nice guy, fairly typically American, we worked fine in the same space, but we didn’t seem to have that much in common. That assessment came naturally and I didn’t really give it any more thought. But then we ended up in a Seinfeld friends-in-law situation. I became good friends with Hawkeye. She became good friends with Level Five. Washington was Level Five’s best friend. So via the others we spent a fair bit of time together. The party was loud and long and beer-stained, but when the two of them abruptly left at around the same time, there was just me and Washington, looking at each other in an awkward silence across the table.

Now, I know I have a reputation as an arrogant motherfucker. But I actually really like finding out when I’m wrong. So, we didn’t see each other for a couple of months. I went to Antarctica, he went to Chile. But we were both back in BA by February, and we each knew the other was in town. I figured that Washington and I would say we were going to catch up a few times, might actually follow through with it once or twice, and then it would gradually taper off. And it did take Hawkeye’s passing through town on her way home to actually force the issue the first time. But soon after that we caught up again. And again. And gradually, the in-law status faded and our own friendship began to develop.

The differences – the reasons why I hadn’t expected a friendship in the first place – still existed. We disagreed strongly, vocally, occasionally violently, over a whole range of issues. A lot of nights ended in fired-up debate. It was really fascinating to have a friendship that wasn’t exactly easy, or natural, one that maybe wouldn’t have developed if we’d been in a bigger group where we could each have split off toward more like-minded people. And granted, we would both (quite proudly) admit that this friendship was heavily based on a) drinking and b) the stupid shit one can do after drinking. But there were other aspects to it as well. For all the disagreements there were a lot of things on which we were in accord. The conversations got funnier. The list of shared exploits grew longer. Washington could seem incredibly earnest in that particularly American way, but once every couple of days he would drop in some left-field one-liner that completely took me by surprise and made me fall off my chair laughing. So yeah. I learnt some shit. I do make snap judgements. And what I think of someone first-off isn’t always going to be right. It’s good to trust your instincts, but it’s also good to be aware they can be fallible, and to keep an open mind in case they are. So, thanks for the lesson, man. That and the subjunctive tense.

And now, just to prove what a classy and debonair gent my friend was, here is my list (in no particular order) of the best and worst Washington moments, the ones that either left me open-mouthed in disbelief or rolling on the floor. (Try to imagine most of these quotes in a partial slur.)

W: “But California’s real big. It’s got, like north…and south…”
G: “Yeah, there’s a lot of places got those.”
W: “Yeah, but it’s… … …fuck you.”

“Whoah. This is an unbottomly beer.”

“These are the wasted troof.”
Getting philosophical.

W: “I wish I just had, like, tons of money. And I could spend it on whatever and not even think about. I did that once, in that week we went to Vegas.”
G:  “Well at least you tried it. You know what it tastes like.”
W: “Yeah. It tastes expensive.”

W: “Once they find out you have a small dick, you’re still fucking ‘em.”
Washington doesn’t let it get him down.

G: “We gonna smoke here or at the bus stop?”
W: “You can do what you like. I’m gonna smoke two. I smoked a whole packet once, and my face swelled up.”

W: “When you get up tomorrow, you’re gonna look at yourself in the mirror and say [pointing, Lord Kitchener style], ‘Hey. Hey! You’re gonna have a great day.’”

W: “Your problem is you drink too much.”
[Long pause.]
“Jagerbomb?”

G: “You want to hear the best joke ever?”
W: “Women’s rights?”

W: “My life could be written as the worst incredible story known to man. His jeans stained with blood, and his severed finger… well it’s not severed…”

In Argentina the little Chinese-owned supermarkets are routinely called ‘cinos’.
G: “Man, this is like the biggest cino I’ve ever seen.”
W: “Yeah. This is a Wal-cino.”

W: “She’s not like…hideous…”
Wholeheartedly defending some prior choices.

[Pausing and pointing while passing a hotel mirror] “Hey buddy. You need to step up your game.”

The Handlebar
(Fortunately this only stayed around for a couple of days.)

“Hey. Hey! You…are gonna have a great day.”

G: “This wine is weird, man. It smells terrible, but it tastes alright.”
W: [sniffs] “I don’t know if I’m smelling the wine or my moustache.”

G: “You can’t talk, peanut head.”
W: “Why am I peanut head?”
G: “Because you have a head like a peanut.”
W: “How?”
G: “Your head is shaped like a peanut. You have a peanut-shaped head.”
W: “No I don’t.”
G: “Yeah, I’m afraid you do.”
W: [to Clemenceau] “Do I have a peanut head?”
C: “Yes, it’s a bit of a peanut head.”
W: “How do I have a peanut head?”
C: “Hmm, maybe it’s the beard… No, it’s definitely the head.”

W: “What, just cos it’s your birthday, I have to fuck you?”
Washington finds some female friends too demanding.

Washington vs. the Cockroach
We are on the roof terrace of La Casa Teixera on another warm spring night, drinking a couple of litres while the near-darkness and the drone of the autopista overpass sends its lull over us. Washington reaches down by his chair to grab his bottle, raises it to his mouth…and I see it. Sandwiched between his fist and the neck of the bottle is a cockroach, a giant palm-of-the-hand-sized brown shiny Argentine house cockroach. It’s struggling to pull free. Silhouetted against the streetlight, for a brief moment I can see its antennae duelling frantically with his moustache hairs.

He notices around the same time as I do, and pulls back with a guttural roar of disgust, somehow retaining the presence of mind to put the bottle down rather than drop it. “Oh God,” he babbles. “Oh no. A fucking cockroach. I almost ate it.” It must have been trying to steal a sip of his beer, perched on the neck of the bottle. Washington never grabs a beer lightly, so he has mushed most of the roach’s body against the glass. I’ve smashed these things with footwear before. I know how they squish open. I know that his whole hand is now covered in yellow gunk. “Ohhh,” he moans. “I could smell it. That’s how I realised it was there. It stinks so bad.” He creeps away to clean himself up. If you’re wondering whether he wiped off the bottle and finished the beer, you obviously haven’t been paying attention so far. But that’s ok, he needed something to steady him after the shock. He settles back in his chair, shaking his head slightly. “At least I didn’t get him in my mouth. Oh God…I hope his guts aren’t on my moustache.”

So I wasn’t sure whether to consider the theory proved or disproved back in late November when I met Washington and Level Five, two Colorado boys with a respective dash of Arizona and North Carolina. On the one hand, they were excellent company and first-rate chaps, and I don’t have a bad word to say about either one. On the other, there were indeed only two of them. Who knows what would have happened were more involved. But then, we met some solo Americans who still managed to be pretty loathsome on their own, and who the Coloradans detested as much as anyone else. And I think it’s only fair to point out that plenty of Australians who I meet travelling make me want to implode with shame for the mere fact that I might be associated with them, and that their dickishness is exponentially proportional to the size of the group. The same can be said for many demographics of British travellers. Maybe it’s just a language thing, but the Europeans seem a bit more inclined to lower the volume and raise the tone.

Actually I’m not sure where I stand on this inclination to identify particular characteristics as belonging to an entire nation of people. It’s attractive and convenient, but encourages a lazy acceptance of mythology. Anyone who wants to claim that irreverent knockabout larrikinism is part of ‘the Australian national character’ should talk to some of the joyless cunts who ran my high school, or who dish out parking tickets in deserted streets at midnight on a Wednesday, or who justify the practice in council board meetings as “essential to public safety and traffic management.” Dealing with these people is like gargling talcum powder.

Doug Stanhope has a fantastic bit on this subject. “There’s no such thing as ‘We’re Americans.’ That’s just a bunch of bullshit to get you rooting for the home team. You’re not an American, you’re a guy. Until the Mongols come over the hills swinging machetes, trying to take our fire-hazard underground comedy club away from us, then we all buddy up as one. But those days are over, there’s no-one trying to take over America. We weren’t on the verge of speaking Iraqi. As far as ‘America’ goes – there’s two countries in the world: Dick, and Not a Dick. The border goes all the way around. Did you ever go to another country and meet another American when you didn’t expect to? You always talk to them, just for the trivia. ‘Hey, you’re from America? I’m from America! Where you from?’  And it’s never more than three sentences before you realise, if I was in America, I wouldn’t talk to this douchebag if my hair was on fire and he held a monopoly on liquid. I’m an American? What does that mean? I’m no more an American than I’m an Aires or an uncle. It’s just something you called me when I showed up.”

But this is something of a digression. The point is, I never really told you about meeting Washington or Level Five. Nor did I tell you about Hawkeye. It was a weirdly frantic time, shit was flying everywhere, and I didn’t write down all the stories. I met all three at the tail-end of my trip with Mr Fox and The Doctor, in a backpackers – those places that are so often a morass of unmitigated awfulness, but occasionally vomit up a diamond or three. We all partied with a bunch of other people for a few days. Then, for all we knew at the time, we went our separate ways.

Hawkeye was a hard-out fast-talking tomboy from Melbourne, the kind of girl who brings to mind words like ‘ballsy’ and ‘feisty’ – words that could be considered patronising but in my lexicon relate solely to awesomeness. A no-bullshit kind of girl. While I certainly find some girly-girls and ladylike women very appealing in a range of ways, I also really enjoy hanging out with the other kind, the kind of girls who will spit and swear and match you drink for drink. It’s well established that men behave differently in all-male groups. You can feel the change in atmosphere – the licence to be as crass and relaxed and uncivilised as you like. The licence to leave your style and charm in the boot of the car. I wouldn’t want to live like that, and it’s not necessarily any closer to my genuine self than any other persona I could assume, but it’s definitely fun for a time. Tomboys, then, are ideal, because they break up the gender monotony without making you feel like you need to behave. With non-tomboys present, even if you’re not trying to impress them, you still feel constrained – “You can’t speak like that in front of a lady, Mr Epsworth.” You don’t want to appear like a complete Neanderthal, so you tone it down. Of course there are crossovers and lapses and inconsistencies, and they don’t always end in disaster – I once somehow got taken home by a very sweet Jewish girl despite my opening line being, “Wow, this whisky is like being raped in the face by a pig.” If there’s a category in the Australia Day honour roll for first-class saves, I think I deserve a pretty shiny gong for that one.

The story continues. Those of you who’ve read this blog for a while will know that when I left Australia it also meant the end of a long and intense relationship. Leaving was necessary but difficult, like jamming the arrowhead through the other side of your leg while biting down on a leather strap and swilling moonshine out of a rustic ceramic jug. For the first month and a half I felt relatively good, I was on the road with The Foxtor and doing all kinds of stuff. Then those two gents went home. I moved from the hostel into a place on my own in a strange city. Back home, my grandmother died, and it was really difficult that I couldn’t help with anything or join in the send-off. And a couple of weeks after that, I got The Email from my ex. You know, the completely gratuitous thought-you-should-know-I-have-a-new-boyfriend email. I didn’t read past the first line, but that was enough to get the gist. Of course the news was no surprise, it had to come at some point. But it burned my fucking heart out all the same.

As luck would have it, though, my solitary confinement had ended a day or two earlier. Hawkeye had been passing back through town after some further travels and had needed a place to crash. She was in the room at the time and could clearly read my face over the laptop screen. ‘What happened?’ she asked. I told her. She grabbed the half bottle of wine leftover from last night and poured a huge glass. ‘Put this inside you,’ she said.

Clearly the woman was part doctor, part shaman, part prophetic genius. You all know how that kind of kick-in-the-guts news feels. The first half hour or so of numbness, and a vague dread of the imminent emotional shitstorm that is even now brewing thick and dirty on the horizon like a foul intestinal maelstrom after a night of heavy drinking and dubious late-night food choices. The knowledge that any minute now you’re just going to have to open the toilet door, bite down hard on its edge, and hold on for the duration while that Alaysia chicken kebab rides you like a Shetland pony. The inevitability of ending up pallid and shaking, collapsed like a pile of dirty laundry on a public toilet floor. But Hawkeye’s quick thinking at least put a bit of a cushion between me and the tiles. I should perhaps specify that the first glass of wine was prescribed at just past 10 a.m. The second came a few minutes later. The day unfolded from there.

In an effort to get ourselves out of the house, we went on a mission around town to gather my lost belongings. In my Foxtor travels I had managed to leave clothes at three different hostels and a repair shop in disparate locales. We visited them all, in between drink stops. By the late afternoon when we were done, she reminded me that Washington and Level Five were still in town, living in an apartment in Centro, and that tonight was Washington’s birthday. The four of us teamed up for an epic supermarket run. Umpteen litres of beer, a bottle of tequila, a bottle of dark rum, a bottle of Fernet. (For those who don’t know, it’s a 45% whack of thick black liquid evil.) The rum was my call –for whatever reason, when it comes to heavily destructive drinking, it always seems like a winning option. I took care of most of that on my own, but everyone else still managed to put themselves in a world of hurt. The tequila was mixed with lemonade in teacups and slammed against the floorboards to make it fizz to the point where the taste disappeared. Once we ran out of Coke the Fernet went down in straight shots (my earlier description of bad whisky would not be entirely out of place here, either). The Coloradans understood my plight. We were a team, on a mission.

Now at this point in the story comes the moment that really made me rethink my lazy attitude toward Americans. It is late o’clock. Somehow I have ended up in the stairwell. With all the fierce clarity that being drunk as shit and momentarily alone can bring, the full reality of the situation comes swooping in to smack me upside the head. The reality rather than the theoretical idea of something really being over, after years of loving and hoping and despairing and hurting and trying again with everything you’ve got. It hits me and I break, slumping down onto a step. And then Level Five is there, this guy who at this point I barely know bar a couple of casual drinking sessions, and who owes me nothing. And he puts his arm around me, and I fold into the aforementioned laundry heap, and he holds me while I fucking bawl my guts out into the front of his shirt. Actually holds me, like I was eight years old with skinned knees and not a semi-giant a foot taller than him. And he barely says a word, just says it’s alright, go for it, get it all out. And we stay like that for I don’t know how long, a long time, half an hour, more maybe, and I howl and subside and howl again, and he holds on, until I’m empty and shaky and wordless and spent, and the entire front of his shirt is wet from my crying, and he doesn’t mind the slightest bit. And then he talks me through it, tells me that I’m going to feel like shit for a long time but that it’s ok. That this is part of my experience. That I have to embrace that hurt, and own it, and make it mine. And unlike almost the entirety of a lifetime’s worth of well-meaning advice, what he says makes sense, and I carry it with me from that point on.

Later, five or six a.m., Hawkeye and I got home. The universe was not with me. I forgot the bag with all the clothes we’d collected, and it drove away in the backseat of the taxi. Then I realised I’d also lost the keys, and had to break into the apartment complex via a neighbouring property, a bunch of barbed wire, an angry dog, and about three layers of walls, including jumping a passageway to grab hold of a railing, hauling myself up onto the roof of my place, and breaking in through the skylight. I thought I’d pulled it off pretty smoothly, until I started writing drunk emails home and realised I was bleeding into the keyboard from both hands. Only then did I remember that one of the walls I’d climbed was studded with broken glass.

Thus we got through the first night. But the next little while was also very rough. So Hawkeye stuck with me for the next ten days or so, and she pretty much saved my life with her irreverence and her irrepressibility and her astonishing powers of chemical consumption. She had her own shit to deal with too, so we holed up in the house through the Buenos Aires thunderstorms and cranked The Lonely Island and blasted our way through. Since then it’s been like a Wall Street graph, with peaks and troughs of varying magnitude, but that first bit was definitely the lowest low. Eventually she went on her way, Level Five went home, and Washington and I teamed up to bring you the epic two-man stupidity of our more recent adventures. But when Hawkeye passed back through BA for one day a couple of months later, on her way back home, she stopped by and gave me a poem, an perfect 20-line summary of that awful wonderful fucked-up time, that is one of the best presents I’ve ever received. And so I wrote her this reply, taking my cues from what she gave to me. And if you guys click here you can listen to it (or right-click to download). Hope you enjoy.

Free Boat Ride for Three.

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This is the the most accurate definition I have ever heard.

It’s no surprise really. Hyperbole and a Half is a website of pure gold. It also contains my single favourite blog post on the internet ever of all time. It is for people like its author and me and many of you – people who know correct grammar and suffer fits of incandescent rage at the retardedness of the internet and text message speak. If this is you, this post may save your life. So click here. You can explore the rest of the page from there. Godspeed.

B-Boys, Sex Shops and Charlie Sheen
I spend most of my time in China either being on trains, finding a place to stay near the train station, or eating food. I’ve been playing a lot of Cuisine Roulette, where I point at something in Chinese on the menu and order it. I’ve only lost badly once: I ended up with thousand-year eggs and river squid (it looked like tapeworm) in a Szechuan sauce. I nearly threw up. But back to my hair.

Since I decided I was close enough to take-off date to not care whether I offended my bosses with unruly hair, I haven’t had it cut. This makes a total of about six months sans cut. So, my somewhat fetching ‘corner of Brunswick and Collins St’ haircut has grown into a rather ungainly and randomised light brown mane. It’s probably fair to say that I look like Chris with a haircut. In India this wasn’t so much of an issue – there were people with far more tangled manes than me, and wearing much funnier clothes too. As far as the Indians were concerned, I pretty much looked like an accountant. But China is an altogether different story.

Whilst I don’t imagine that I have the sort of trouble that a blonde person would have here (I think in certain parts of China that shit would make their heads explode) I have run into certain hiccups. In India, the most I would get is an unflattering comparison to Shane Warne’s coiffure in the early 1990s. In China, most every Chinese native I have met who speaks English says something along the lines of, “You look just like Charlie Sheen.” It’s never anyone else. There are plenty of other brown-haired celebrities out there, but for some reason I always get Charlie Sheen. I’m not sure anyone realises just how racist this comment is; I have been tempted on occasion to say, “And you look just like Jackie Chan.”

The other thing that fascinates Chinese people about my hair is that it is so damn messy most of the time. People randomly tug on it at bars to see what will happen (half the time following up with something about Charlie Sheen). I would keep it cleaner, but the showerheads over here aren’t up to much, and they certainly can’t penetrate five centimetres of sweaty kerotonin. People feel I must be somehow ashamed of this – whenever I even walk near a hairdresser someone tries to pull me inside. They seem to feel really, really bad for me – “Come have a haircut Charlie Sheen…”, “Too messy Charlie Sheen”. By contrast, the Chinese boys who have longish hair are always meticulously groomed. Young people over here simply love being neat, tidy and obeying ALL THE RULES. No-one even walks on the grass. Ever. Case in point: Chinese B-Boys.

Chinese B-Boys (or CB-Boys, or Breaker-Breakers) wear all the ghetto fabulous gear they can get their hands on. But they wear it neatly. They’ll wear their Converses with the laces done up properly. They’ll wear baggy jeans at a level so their underwear doesn’t show, but conveys the fact that it could if they wanted it to (but they don’t). They wear singlets in the street, with nice neat plaid shirts open over the top. And when they break, and I’ve seen this happen on flagstoned backstreets, they do it to early 90s happy hip-hop. It’s actually pretty fun: these ultra-fly, ultra-neat Breakers working it out to Naughty-By-Nature, ‘Whoomp! There It Is’ and Will Smith. I guess this is because in China, they still think of hip-hop stars as guys like Will Smith; over here, gangsta rap simply never happened.

I actually figured this out when I was at Dalian, and some students of Dad’s were telling me the one incident of campus violence anyone can remember was three of four years ago, when a student was stabbed in Cafeteria Five. I joked that, ‘He must have got on the wrong side of the Wu-Tang Clan’ (Five translates as Wu in Mandarin). They all stared at me blankly. It wasn’t a great joke (well, I liked it) but they simply had no idea who Wu-Tang were. I said, you know, Method Man, Ol’ Dirty Bastard. More blank looks. Um…NWA? Nope. ‘Fuck Tha Police?’. They looked simply horrified. I guess gangsta was censored from release, so this idea of sticking it to authority through hip-hop never got a leg up. If you wanted to redo NWA and release it here you’d have to call it ‘Respect Tha Police’. You’d probably sell a billion.

That said, whilst I may make China sound very buttoned-down and repressed, it’s not. People are economically emancipated. If you come to China, the national hobby is not kite-flying, it’s shopping. During the middle of the work day, gargantuan shopping malls will be filled with people on their lunch breaks just buying everything and anything. It’s amazing. Along with shopping (or alongside advertising), they’ve also got the hang of a liberalised sexual culture (or ‘raunch culture’, or whatever). Chinese people are now half expected to have three or four boyfriends or girlfriends before they get married. One of the English teachers on CCTV6 is a flaming homosexual who spends most of his lessons on Slang English demonstrating scenes from The Bodyguard where Kevin Costner asks for an orange juice ’straight’, and emphasising that he personally ‘would prefer it a little different’. The government, in order to keep everyone from getting pregnant, started putting sex aid vending machines on the streets. These machines sell everything from condoms through to a nasal spray which says on the box (it’s in the mail to you Geoff) ‘makes you a goldengun but not actually turn into a gun’. Which I guess is a relief (although somewhat disappointing if your girlfriend has a Transformers fetish).

What I find really interesting about this whole phenomenon is that the government in their ‘we’ll do everything, but do it to the extreme’ philosophy is that it has, along with the sex aid vending machines, okayed the promulgation of sex shops. Now, I don’t mean the back alley, Club X, brown-paper bag, old men in a dirty mac shops. I mean shops, open onto the street selling everything under the sun. Particularly near the train stations (I think the logic being that people take the train to see their lovers). It’s a very weird experience, walking along stocking up on everything you need for your 12hr train ride: “Two litres of water? Check. Marinated duck in an Al Foil bag? Check. Lollies? Check. Double ended black suction-pump magnetic fisting machine? Check and mate, Mr. Boredom.”

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But the nicest thing I learned is that lots of people are actually reading this blog. Apparently people like being part of popular things, so this should be reassuring for all of you. Well, popular by my standards, not necessarily by Perez Hilton’s. Between 600 and 700 visitors per month, with three-quarters of those being return readers. Which is way, way more than the very modest readership I was expecting. So, thanks a whole lot, it makes the effort I put into the posts very worthwhile to know that there are people wanting to read them, and coming back.

The data is crazy. It tells you how many people are visiting, how long they stay, which posts are most popular (my cathartic New Year’s rant, by a distance), and which sites have linked to you. You can analyse any given timeframe, and compare different ones. You can also find out which countries and even which cities you’re getting hits from. 55 countries so far, including Kenya, Fiji, Jamaica, Bangladesh, and the Palestinian Territories, and 208 cities. The internet is a weird thing.

But the funniest part? The funniest part is the Falkland Islands again. Since I wrote my post bagging the Falkland Islands for being freezing, dull, and inhospitable, I received 14 separate hits from the Falkland Islands themselves, and three of those translated into angry comments on my post. Now, those raw figures may not sound that impressive on their own, I’ll grant you. But – if you consider that the civilian population of the Falklands is only 2000 people, that means that 0.7 percent of the population read my post, and that 0.15 percent of them commented on it. Again, that might not sound so impressive, but in fact it represents an astonishingly high per capita rate of readership. If we applied those percentages to the population of Australia, this would equate to 154,000 page views, and the small matter of some 33,000 responses. Which by extension means that if I now write an article bagging India, I will receive 7,979,754 page views and 1,709,947 angry comments. Time to order some bigger servers.

(The numerical analysis also backs up my disputed analysis of the Islands themselves: it proves that living in the Falkland Islands is so impossibly desperately boring that their inhabitants have nothing to do but sit around Googling ‘The Falkland Islands’, in the futile hope that their non-country will have assumed some kind of relevance to somebody, anybody, anywhere, and thus they can feel just that little bit less pointless and alone.)

But actually the Falklands may be the second-funniest part in the end. The funniest part of Analytics would have to be the full list of terms people have typed into Google to land on your page. The Bedroom Philosopher has been publishing a list of highlights in his newsletters for years, and they’re routinely hilarious. I just never knew where he got them. Now I do. So obviously I’m going to steal his idea, and provide my own list below. All of these are one hundred percent true. So if you find some of them offensive, don’t blame me, blame the sick minds of internet users everywhere. It’s this kind of filth that the noble Stephen Conroy is trying to stamp out.

Search terms to find Heathen Scripture

sergio penis
“wimpey seahorse” drilling
buenos aires house paint
charlie brown cocaine
constance e little
circumcision geelong
did the british bayonet wounded argentine soldiers in the falkland war
don king in a headlock
ella ella after we leave yours is bleed after victorious
bottled cunts
falkland fish and chip shop
girl sucking type scriptures
grong grong torrent
ian thorpe aquatic centre –sidney +from highway
keith richards arthritis
kevin muscat’s wife
liam williams criminal
love my balls long time
love on my balls
make love to my balls
now i know my abc why don’t you come and suck my
of autralin male swimmers who has won the most numbe rof gold medals
places of interest Atherton tablelands
poem with now shut up and kiss me
porno drajina
pringles are moorish because
bolivian anal
pron beard
racking
rosario rash
my testicles are making their journey south
shackleton chose because they looked funny
sad giant stories
shackleton’s boat crash
shitting stomach acid
they are called the falklands not the Malvinas
uruguay customs stupidity
wallpapers of facebook or fightbook
what is the spanish word for oven
what language is ella,ella,ey,ey,ey
who is baron von vaderham and darth vader
как объяснить слово сатинат

Thanks to the invaluable Cherny, we have translated that last entry to mean “how to explain the word satinato”. Further research shows that satinato is an Italian transitive verb meaning to glaze, to satin finish or gloss.  Well…whatever gets ‘em through the door, I guess. On a closing note, I was stoked to learn from Analytics that shortly before the Wordplay site died (it’s currently being reanimated) someone landed on it by Googling “where to find hookers in Kanchanaburi”. The class level just keeps on rising. I wonder if he stuck around to check out some high-quality spoken word?