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.

********************************

Everyone has their names on their doors, and this is my favourite door on the ship. The one with the aforementioned Mark Hastie-Oldland / Lucinda Strickland-Skailes combo was pretty good too, but Coop takes the cake. Coop is the most Aussie guy I’ve ever met, the physical incarnation of that annoying old cliché about loveable knockabout larrikins. He is so Aussie that his name is Coop Cooper. Who needs first names?

We have to make our own fun on this boat, and a few of us band together for the duration. John and I argue over whether cyclists in Lycra are totally lame (I’ve already told you my thoughts here) and then make up over Tenacious D. “This is not the greatest song in the world – this is only a tribute.” The Fox played a ripping (and ripped) cover of that song in BA back in November, at about 5 a.m. after the kind of epic smoking session I hadn’t experienced since I was seventeen. “I was really stoned after that third joint,” he said the next day, “so the twelfth one was probably unnecessary.”

John’s wife Monika is from the Czech Republic, and has one of those completely endearing accents that makes everything she says sound charming. “The government wants you to have more babies,” I tell her after reading a newspaper article. “Vatever government vant,” she says in her best Eastern Bloc monotone. The rest of the time she’s far from monotone, being possibly the happiest person I’ve ever met. We had a teacher at school called Ms Thompson who was as irritating as a bathtub full of fleas, always going around saying “Wonderful! Marvellous! Two thumbs up!” But Monika’s is a different, non-annoying type of enthusiasm. “Zat’s fantastic,” is her catchphrase. The difference, I suppose, is that she seems completely sincere, and is bold enough to seek out things that actually are fantastic. The two of them quickly become my main troublemaking companions.

Daniela the Argentine, on the other hand, is well-behaved and nice to everybody, and says this compensates for my general standard of behaviour. Between the two of us we achieve balance; without us the universe may spin off its axis. Rosie is English, wandering around with a giant furry microphone that looks like a captive badger, recording things for the BBC. Her door provides great amusement too, given that between herself (Rosanna Wynn-Williams) and her cabinmate (Jo Hart), we have the longest and shortest names on the ship on the one label. “Jo Hart!” I take to bellowing in a staccato tone. “Jo Hart, no messing about! Straight to the point, two syllables, who needs more, what are you, French? Jo Hart!” Fortunately Jo Hart doesn’t seem to mind.

“Guys!” Monika says whenever we are together. “Ve are five pirates!” I’m not sure why, aside from being on a ship, but eventually the appellation starts to fit, a self-fulfilling prophecy, as we join Coop in getting up the noses of various staff members. They have a tendency to treat everyone like ten-year-olds, and people like us don’t respond to that very well. As some of the group come and go from a room, Monika sings: “Ve used to be five pirates, but not anymore. Now ve are three pirates…” It’s amazing what will entertain you at sea. My favourite line is when she’s asking me about spoken word. “So,” she says, “you are like a stand-by comedian?”

Traditional pirate ensemble

Rosie is here to follow up on family history. Her father David was a microbiologist who undertook ten separate research trips to the Antarctic. He was the expedition leader of the 1990s mission investigating whether bacteria living in rocks in the McMurdo Dry Valleys could indicate that there had been life on Mars, and whether it could be the source of life here. The story made big news, and I remember being intrigued by it at the time. Strange how things circle back around in life. The most fascinating bit for mine is that he was using a Raman spectrometer to (get this) scan rock for microscopic pigment traces that would indicate the presence of fossilised bacteria up to three billion years old. The fact that this is possible just blows my mind. He was also working with NASA to develop a miniature spctrometer to attach to the Mars Rover and look for bacteria on Mars. Sadly he died young eight years ago, but what he achieved was remarkable. You can read more about him here.

It’s an interesting bunch. Aside from the pirates, I also get along well with an older English couple who turn out to be Liam Watson’s parents (the ToeRag Studios chap who produced The White Stripes’ Elephant).  They stand out among the otherwise inoffensive and gormless British retirees. After dinner tonight there are two lines of people coming from opposite directions merging to get up the stairs. One of the most English of the lot, Gerard, is craning his neck back at a map of the world on the hallway wall. “That must be an Australian map,” he says in an intensely posh accent. “I’ve never seen one like that before. Look at that. Ha! It’s got Australia in the middle!” He chuckles condescendingly, then turns around and almost headbutts  Coop, coming from the other direction, who has positioned himself firmly in Gerard’s way and drawn himself up to his full five-foot-six. “What was that, mate?” says Coop.

********************************

Here’s a poem for you, about the last leg of our getting-to-Antarctica voyage.

Elephant Island Fog

It’s like being in a snowdome, he says
and as much as we can’t speak Russian
we can speak the language of shrugged shoulders
and the unstated obvious.

The boatman’s overalls move independently
despite the wind
which doesn’t.  The rattling sound
is descent and crescendo in one

and when the anchor chain hits green water
it exhales rust
in the shape of a jellyfish.

In this absence of sound
and this fluctuating radius
it’s not clear why the elephants hang back
why the islands are hesitant.

But still the day is the second word of this stanza
and the sun is a story we remember;
there is only the chain, umbilical, one hand upon it
and a shout from the bow that will never bounce back.

But what comes to my mind this morning is that, surely, surely, in all the history of rectal-object interaction, there is at least one man out there who genuinely did fall and unfortunately end up with an unwanted novelty item wedged in a very personal cavity. And when that man fell, and realised he had internalised not only his feelings for all these years, but also much more recently a GI Joe or a can of Doctor Pepper or an ARIA award, what did he decide to do? He would know, sure as the burning pain within, that if he told the doctor he fell on it, the doctor would say “Of course you did,” and never even come close to believing a word. And the more he insisted, the less the doctor would believe him. But he did fall, he really did. So what does he do? What does he do?

Having taken the first step, we decided to involve the power of supercomputers. We found a website that analyses the databases of dictionary sites, and programmed it to bring us every word in the English language containing the fragment ‘ei’.

The results were staggering. 2826 words. I almost had a stroke (I was also downloading porn). But I told myself to concentrate. That could wait until later. So instead I removed all those words that contained ‘cei’, given they’re legitimate under the rule. This still left 2655 words. We could have presented that data as it was, but I didn’t want to massage any figures. (That could also wait until later.) The data in its most compressed form would be strongest, like carbon squeezed down into a diamond. So I applied our earlier criteria, and removed any variants based on a common root word. This included plurals, and variants modified by suffix (vein/devein, surveil/countersurveil), which took some weeding out. It was effective, cutting the original list down by 1933 entries – the word ‘weigh’, for instance, had 111 variants (deadweight, weightily, weightless, etc). But after all of this culling, with the broken bodies of variant strings lying twisted and bloody on the floor, we still had seven hundred and twenty-two words to which this ‘rule’, this fabrication, this sham, does not apply.

Of course the list isn’t infallible – I deleted various retarded spellings (deinosaur, anyone?), and even now it includes Germanic words that I doubt are considered part of lexical English. Other entries are obsolete, and should perhaps be housed in a separate category, given the I before E rule was not taught in Chaucher’s day. I will require a university grant before I can go through and verify the derivations of all of these words, and the legitimacy of their place on the list. On the other hand, there may be more words as yet unfound, and the list does not currently include proper nouns, with the exception of names like Einstein that have been absorbed into the language as common nouns. Whatever the outcomes of these subsequent investigations, the mountain of evidence as it stands is incontrovertible.

I ran a similar analysis on a computer-generated collection of ‘cie’ words, those that flout the rule’s second clause. An initial list of 930 was reduced to 580 after eliminating variants. Of these, the vast majority were plurals of nouns that end in ‘cy’ (consultancy, redundancy, etc), constituting 493 of the total. To which the Federation of Filthy Lying English Teachers would perhaps argue that it was only one category of exception, so it didn’t really matter that much. Well, if it was only one category, then they should have worked that category into their rule, shouldn’t they? Oh, wait, except it didn’t rhyme, did it? It didn’t have a nice pat little rhymey bit. Superficial facile bastards! Besides, there are still 87 other words that don’t follow the rule. Stop trying to put the language in a box, you vultures. Vultures with sufficient manual dexterity to put things in boxes. Vultures with thumbs, and a need for order. OCD thumb vultures? This analogy isn’t really going anywhere.

But the important thing is this. Mr Fox and I have been making our objections known. We have been armed with this data for some time, although we’re only now making it public. But behind the scenes, the threat of a public revelation while the problem remained extant was enough to make the wheels start turning in the corridors of power. Yes, those corridor wheels. You know. Operated by vultures with thumbs. Shut up, you’re distracting me. So we greased the cogs of the vulture halls, and their thumbs of power opened the box of white flags to wave all of this under the carpet. We were driving them up their goat without a paddle. The authorities were so troubled by our findings, and by the prospect of being seen to have done nothing to oppose this travesty, that representatives of the British Government’s education department actually went back in time to June 2009 and ordered British teachers to stop teaching the rule. The reason? That there were so many exceptions it was effectively meaningless. In their words, “The I before E rule is not worth teaching.”

Oh, the sweet sweet taste of time-travel justice. The sweet clear ringing of the bell of truth being struck with the hammer of determination. And the sweet laughter of the children of the future, happy and secure in their salvation.

Height. Weight. Feign. Deign. Ceiling.

Best sleep face ever. This guy isn’t snoring. He held this rictus for over an hour, all the way up to Cuzco. His friend had to hide. Imagine what he looks like when he orgasms.

Mushroom mushroom!!

Could you get any more English? Mr Fox climbs a massive Peruvian mountain, and the first thing he does is have a cup of tea.

Yes, but I am Vader! I am … Lord Vader? Darth Vader, I’m Darth Vader. Sir Lord Vader? Sir Lord Darth Vader? Lord Darth Sir Lord, Lord Vader of Cheem? Sir Lord Baron von Vaderham?

Props to shaky old Peruvian dudes for keeping it real.

Apparently Jerry O’Connell is huge in the remote Bolivian Altiplano.

]]> http://heathenscripture.wordbuzz.com.au/2010/01/03/lord-vaders-o-face/feed/ 3 http://heathenscripture.wordbuzz.com.au/2009/12/22/lie-before-e/ http://heathenscripture.wordbuzz.com.au/2009/12/22/lie-before-e/#comments Tue, 22 Dec 2009 18:31:19 +0000 Geoff Lemon http://heathenscripture.wordbuzz.com.au/?p=339 To start with, we always believe them. Adults. Authority figures. We are small, and they are large and impossibly wise.  We might impulsively disobey them, but for a time it doesn’t occur to us that they could actually be wrong. The timing of this revelation is as unique as the timing of any other aspect of our development. For me, much to parents’ discomfort, it was by about the age of nine, making me the only child to be suspended from Research Primary School on four separate occasions. All were for arguing with teachers on matters of logic and principle. For others it didn’t hit until the early teens, for some it held off until Year 12. Some small number of people manage to go their whole lives without questioning authority. To them the idea is terrifying; it means they might actually have to take some responsibility for their own lives and decisions.

But generally, as we age, we start to realise just how many lies we’ve been told. They told us that drugs would make us crazy and criminal, but most of my friends just seemed to have a real good time. They told us that cracking our knuckles would give us arthritis by fifteen,  and here I type with fingers as limber as a Latvian gymnast.  I have written hundreds of thousands of words for the sake of writing, and probably millions in correspondence. But it says so much about the inherent trust we place in these figures, and the level to which they abuse this trust, that I had somehow reached the age of 27, with nearly two decades of rational questioning thought behind me, and still never consciously noticed the magnitude of this most abhorrent and enduring of lies.

I before E, except after C.

This is what they told us. If you think back, you can probably see them now. A dusty portable classroom, late afternoon, with beams of sunlight cutting through the motes in the air. Or a cold winter morning under fluorescent tubes. The carpet hard and corded under the palms of your hands where you place them behind you, bracing your weight. Your legs crossed like a good kid. And that teacher standing up there, whoever it was for you. A beard and corduroy pants, or a tied-up bun and a wicker basket under the desk, or, like the ones you fell in love with, a colourful skirt and a vivid gauzy scarf. They stand up there and they tell you the rule. I before E except after C. That’s how we spell, kids. That’s how it’s done. And that rule sank deep into you, into your skull plates and brain tissue, like radiation into Lucas Heights bedrock. To this day the phrase comes back at you, whole and entire. And to this day it is a lie, brazen and glaring as a brass band at full force in the noonday sun.

This is why you need smart friends. It took the enquiring mind of Mr Fox to notice the anomaly. He’d been chewing on it for some time, and he could think of plenty of words where it didn’t apply. Height. Weight. Being. Neither either nor neither obeyed the liars’ rule. The veil was lifted. Their heinous heist became forfeit. We would seize their reign at our leisure. Off the top of our heads, we came up with:

height, weight, being, seize, foreign, vein, reinforce, beige, veil, weird, sovereign, kaleidoscope, heinous, heist, forfeit, feint, leisure, their, neither, either, seeing, seizure, eight, atheist, heir, poltergeist, zeitgeist, reincarnation, feign, deign, neighbour, sleigh, feisty, rein, seize, stein, caffeine, freight, reiki, queueing, reign, hieing, kneeing, fleeing, teeing, peeing, freeing, decreeing, agreeing, geeing, squeegeeing, BeeGeeing (the act of impersonating the Bee Gees).

If you can think of any more obvious everyday ones, feel free to include them in the Comments section. No Googling, please. We also deliberately ommitted plurals and permutation strings like neighbour/neighbours/neighbourly/neighbouring/neighbourhood, in order to avoid falsely swelling the numbers. The evidence is damning enough. And we’ve avoided archaic words. But this list is not all. There are two more subset lists. In the words of Mr Fox, “These words are big offenders.  ‘Except after C’ my arse!  More like ‘especially after C!’” Bam.

society, species, science, ancient, sufficient, efficient, fancied, conscience, glacier, icier, inadequacies, democracies, captancies, concierge, deficiency, hacienda, jucier, bouncier, omniscient, conscientious.

We’ve realised that pretty much any noun or adjective ending in a ‘cy’ (consultancy, racy) will use a ‘cie’ to form its plural or its comparative and/or superlative (consultancies, racier/raciest). There must be dozens. So again, we’ll avoid those permutation strings. And finally, “there is no reason names should be an exception, otherwise it should have been “I before E except after C and except for names.” Viz:

Einstein, Tony Greig, Keith Richards, Rammstein, Frankenstein, Heineken, Neil, Budweiser, Timothy McVeigh, Carl Reich, Sir Walter Raleigh, Keira Knightley, Barbara Streisand, Seinfeld, Rachel Weiss, Heidi Fleiss (double jeopardy!), Carl Zeiss, Calvin Klein, The River Seine, George Speight.

Justice will be done.

The great Sergio Penis. Que nombre.

Presumably Sergio Penis’ favoured form of transport.

He certainly is.

]]> http://heathenscripture.wordbuzz.com.au/2009/12/22/sergio-penis/feed/ 0 http://heathenscripture.wordbuzz.com.au/2009/12/12/the-funky-bus/ http://heathenscripture.wordbuzz.com.au/2009/12/12/the-funky-bus/#comments Sun, 13 Dec 2009 04:39:37 +0000 Geoff Lemon http://heathenscripture.wordbuzz.com.au/?p=226

Well, it’s good to have reminders.

.

.

Yep, you saw it here first. Looks like we finally found somewhere to put Mark Phillipoussis.

.

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The funky bus. This public bus dared to be different.

.

.

To quote a great man, when is two dogs dry-humping NOT funny?

.

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When is drawing moustaches on passed-out Americans who you hardly know not funny?

____________________________________________________________

Actually Mr Fox and I got comprehensively sprung for this when I drunkenly left my camera on a nearby table. The crime was committed at about 8 in the morning. Dan busted into our room at midday.

Dan: Ok, which one of you was it?

Me: Ungh? What are you talking about?

Dan: Who drew on my face?

Fox: We didn’t draw on your face.

Dan: You didn’t?

Fox: No!

[long pause]

Dan: That’s a real nice camera you got.

[pause]

Dan: How many pesos would you give me for it?

Me: Oh shit.

m

.

Geoff Lemon is inaugurating International Pick A Fight With Someone You Don’t Know On A Mutual Friend’s Status Update Comment Thread Week. I’m on five or six in the past 24 hours.

01 December at 14:26 · Comment · Like

Randall Stephens, Ankita Kita Raturi, Toby Kingsley and 3 others like this.

Mike Katz
Brilliant.

Tim Renowden
Fuck you, Mike.

Lucas Parry
You’re all wankers!

Liam Williams
You know that guy that totaled your volvo. Yeah, I paid him $50 to do it. I didn’t know it was your car, I just picked a random volvo. Afterwards when I realised it was yours, I was even more pleased. Suck shit you non-volvo driver.

Rebbecca Lewis
I think the point of this exercise, Liam, is to start a fight with someone you don’t know. Dickhead.

Liam Williams
I live by my own rules Beccy, you pathetic sheep.

Rebbecca Lewis
oooo, good one. i like this game.

Liam Williams
You might like the game. Pitty you suck at it.

Rebbecca Lewis
i know. i’m far too nice to be good at this game. what’s your excuse for sucking at it? i’ve heard that you’re a bit of an arsehole, so there shouldn’t be a problem with being too nice. FYI: pity only has one t.

Anthony Cherny
His name was Robert Paulsen! His name was Robert Paulsen!

Rebbecca Lewis
Geoff – pretty easy one to start on my wall re: Tony Abbott. Though if you show support for Tony, everyone will know you are lying.

Anthony WP O’Sullivan
I wanna play, too! Anthony, (other Anthony), That’s just stupid. Movie quotes don’t belong in a fight-stream. You smell of elder berries.

Anthony Cherny
I fart in your general direction!

Anthony WP O’Sullivan
I wave my private parts at you aunty! Hey, they do have a place… hmmm… Well, you still emit a foul and pungent odour. Stop using my name.

Liam Williams
Geoff you have a pathetic bunch of friends. I’m glad I have not met many of them, as I know they would bore me silly.

Anthony WP O’Sullivan
Liam, get a job. Grow up and log-off. Passive aggression from the comfort and safety of my bedroom?!? Yes, please!

Geoff Lemon
This is awesome.

Anthony WP O’Sullivan
Shut up, Lemon. You’re too tall and your eyes don’t work properly. Yeah! Such fun.

Geoff Lemon
You already know me, dipshit. Go and play with the new kids. Better yet, get on someone else’s wall and start shit up there.

Anthony WP O’Sullivan
I’m on the case. Sorry about the eyes thing. And the height thing. I got a bit carried away in the moment. I’m gonna go pick a fight. Stand by for reports.

Dale Slamma
Golly.

Anthony Condon
I did this with two people yesterday, can I count that? lol Rebecca: that’s what my two fights were about :P There are abbott supporters out there. Someone called him “trustworthy”. Douchebags.

Liam Williams
“WP” O’Sullivan. How about you grow up, step away from the mirror, stop grooming yourself, take off your stupid headwear and bracelets and jump off the West Gate. Melbourne has enough wanabe bohemian poet wankers.

Anthony Condon
At least we got rid of one.

Rebbecca Lewis
I concur geoff, this is awesome. Who said i wanted to meet you, liam?
I’m not sure how this is going to work… I just really want to say it. To the two Anthonys: you are!

Anthony Condon
Am I one of the two? There’s three in this comment thread…

Mike Katz
Thanks for all the notifications, cunce.

Randall Stephens
(Sorry I’m late) Now, all you guys ~ I reckon your favourite band sucks. Especially yours. Awful shit. Your team is fucking shit too, and the sport or sports you like.

Dave Fox
God I hate Anthonys. Pretty much all Anthonys are cunt bubbles.

Randall Stephens
Daves shit me up the wall, and Foxes too. What the hell has a ‘Dave’ ever done for anybody, nothing that’s what.

Randall Stephens
ahem -I would also like to add at this time that I had sex with your momma, your girlfriend/boyfriend or significant other, or ex-partner, or person you have a crush on. (sits down and resumes listening)

Po Tate-o
Yo Randall, how was that guy we met at Zoe’s farewell the other week, you know, the one carrying around the philosophy book and who couldn’t get drunk because he “had to go work in a soup kitchen”. Man, what a self-righteous douchebag.

Rebbecca Lewis
I know you did these things Randall. So i kicked your cat/dog/ rabbit, and stole those beers you left in the fridge last week. FYI: my team kicks the arse out of your team.

Attacking three at a time Dave? I like your style. but you’ll probably lose.

Dave Fox
Randall, when your mum was cruising Grey St the other day offering me a $1 gobbie, I said ‘no fucking way’ right into her herpes encrusted face (which she apparently caught off Rebbecca)

Rebbecca Lewis
*cough* what? I don’t even remember what Randall’s mum looks like. Shit. I meant “know”. I don’t even know what Randall’s mum looks like. Shit. You’re dead, Dave.

Dave Fox
teehehe heee…!

Randall Stephens
Po Tate, Dave and Rebecca ~I question your parentage.
Your mothers are (all) so hairy, they look like they have Don King in a headlock.