Jock's Jocks

Talking about crossings, I've always cheekily laughed at pedestrian crossing signs as:

One of the current debates filling the education airwaves is that of the consumption of junk food in canteens as well as outside the school grounds.
We saw Jamie Oliver tackle the issue of crap in canteens with his hit tv show whose name I don't remember. Filling the bain maries with delicious healthy food for little horizontally challenged kids to devour was a great idea, but I think that only happened at school. Did it change their dietary habits at home? That means the parent's need to adopt a healthy policy, and lets be honest - it's far easier to whack a hash brown in a frying pan and a meat pie in the microwave/oven than to prepare a wholesome curry.

Someone mentioned in the rag today that maybe kids and parents need to take some responsibility for their own eating actions, and quite frankly I've tried that and it isn't easy. I've gone from eating curries and other vegetarian fare to toast and meat pies; before I know it I've slipped back into fat bastard mode, and it happened right under my nose, just like the lovely aroma of a piece of shit pie containing dogs cock and horse's ass. Imagine getting kids to change their diets? I remember when I was a kid, I just wanted to eat fairy bread and cocktail frankfurts (did my parents think I was gay?). Juxtaposing that with rice and vegetables makes it a pretty choice, thumbs up to the bread for fairy's and small red cocks.

Here is my solution, and one that doesn't involve a lot of thought and it works using the simple theory of basic economics. Imagine if you were the parent of a fat child and walked into the supermarket, worried that he might be getting a little overweight after his chest tightened when he decided to run down the hallway the previous day. You think you should try to include more vegies than you normally do, and maybe not cook them until they've mashed themselves and you've covered them with salt - nature's version of cutting your own dietary wrists.

When you walk throught the entrance you can't help but notice everyone looking white and shocked. As you walk to the vegetable aisle, you see that everything is in fact replaced by candy and chips. You are a bit dumbfounded, and you check the juice section and realise instead of orange juice, there is just an endless see of full-fat cola, and you have no choice but to fill your trolley with fatty crap. It's like this for the next month and by the end of four weeks, everyone is sick, miserable and people are giving greengrocers a furtive hand job for a couple of black-market bananas (wink wink).

You see, the idea of taking away all healthy food works on the premise that if people just ate shit for a month, they'd get so sick of it that the sight of another doughnut or jam fancy makes them feel nauseous. It's a perfect example of supply and demand, as there would be no supply of healthy food, and by the end of the 30 days, demand would be soaring for fresh vegies and tomato juice. Watch the world as they live their very own Super Size Me piece of shit movie.

So…marketing acronyms are becoming more frequent in people’s vernacular these days, ho-fucking-hum. Admittedly, one of the only slightly memorable pieces of knowledge gained from a business degree was that of categorising people with acronyms such as DINK (dual income, no kids), OINK (one income, no kids), YUPPIE (Young Upwardly Mobile Professional Person) or SKIPPIE (School Kid with Income and Purchasing Power). I guess I’m an OINK, but on the lower end of the socioeconomic spectrum. Maybe I’m a PYGTEN, or a Poor Young Guy That Eats Noodles.

The latest acronymical hit in Australia is the CUB: the Cashed Up Bogan. If you’re not from Australia and don’t know what a bogan is, then this is what Wikipedia said:

“A bogan is an Australian and New Zealand English slang term, at times derogatory, for a person who is, or is perceived to be, unsophisticated or of a lower class background. The stereotype includes having speech and mannerisms that are considered to denote poor education and uncultured upbringing. Mostly applied to white, working-class people.”

Basically if you drive a ute (small pick-up), swear, drink beer and love watching football then you could be classed as a bogan. Some people are part-time bogans, or even closet bogans. That is, they might secretly sit in their closet, drink beer and yell words such as cunt and fuck at their neatly pressed shirts.

So a cashed up bogan is a bogan with money, which is obvious really. The idea of a bogan can be seen as being slightly controversial, as it can be conveniently used as a term to elevate the user above the ‘un-cultured’ notion of Australians.

Incomes have increased a lot over the years, and now plumbers and the like are able to fulfil their spending aspirations that may have remained unfulfilled ten years ago.

So like it or not, I can’t help but feel that when people suddenly have a lot more money, they are then egotistically distanced by those that have had high incomes or large inheritances for a longer time.

Classic cases of CUBS are the fictional masterstrokes of Kath and Kim. A real-life example is that of Lleyton and Bec Hewitt and some other Australian celebrities that I don’t give a shit about; it’s not that they’re CUBS, but I’d rather down a turd milkshake than read about them.

However staying true to my one-man bogan debate, I decided to try my own hand at marketing segmentation and here are my results:

LOSER – Large Overweight Singles stalking people and Entering their Rubbish bins.

WANKER – Wives and Nanas who Kill and Eat Rabbits.

TOSSER – TOp Secret Spies who also Enter Rectums .

DICKHEAD – Dual Income, Crying Kids with Heroin ADdiction.

KNOB – Kan’t Spell, Offloaders of Bribes.

ARSELICK – Anally Retentive SometimEs Laborious Income through Cock.

I was in a bookshop the other day, and it is so big that it even has it’s own café. It's a nice little nook where you can enjoy a coffee and a muffin; perfect for those people who need a break from the rigours of looking at books for twenty minutes. Some people don’t like this bookshop though, as it represents something what most bookshops do not - bulk buying hence affordability.

I was there looking for a book that I needed for an assignment I was working on. At some point, after having checked out the comedy section and having a quick laugh, I walked past the relationship section, and noticed that there were a lot of books about dating and relationship success. They contained amazing insights into the female psyche, the male psyche, fail-safe plans on how to attract that special girl; basically 101-ways to pants-jumping success. There were some really big books there, with alluring ‘buy-me’ covers, all written by people with ‘Doctor’ preceding their name, which I found really impressive. If the author were titled Dr Doodlelittle, Sir Usemylancelot or some other such saucy, impressive name, maybe I would have taken one of those books home and had an extended leaf through it.

Left: "Wish me luck, I'm about to battle my dating demons."

When did the first dating books actually appear? I suppose a few cultures have arranged marriages, so there is no market there at all, but other places would have been ripe for the reading.

In Ancient Greece was there a man entitled Datius Maximus who released a stone tablet on how to successfully date women? Did he call it “How to turn your lowly thatched cottage into a colosseum of love?” or “How to fool girls into thinking that you’re a gladiator and not a loser?” Maybe there were ten love commandments inscribed on the tablet. Here are a couple I haven’t selected:

Love Commandment Five: Thou shalt honour your father and your mother, and not use their bed for love-making if they are away on vacation.

Love Commandment Eight: Thou shalt steal someone else’s woman.

So maybe Datius Maximus was in fact the first verifiable respected authority on dating. A few others may have popped up on the way.

What about Sun Tzu’s lesser-known title, The Art of Dating? Apparently he released this book after his famous book on how to fight a war, as he found that so many soldiers were getting lucky before they proceeded to destroy whatever village they were in.

One of Sun’s immortal dating lines that I have found to be invaluable is:

You can be sure of succeeding with you attacks if you only attack places which are undefended.

Or if you are being threatened by a not-so-pleasant member of the opposite, or same sex:

You can ensure the safety of your defence if you only hold positions that cannot be attacked.

I interpreted the last line to mean “go and lock yourself in your car, or jump into a taxi before your defences are worn down.”

Apparently Tzu also talked about how to deny the fact that the person you are attempting to court is in fact not the least bit interested:

Therefore the clever combatant imposes his will on the enemy, but does not allow the enemy’s will to be imposed on him.

Some men maybe become intimidated by a female’s friends and then run off into the toilets. This is in fact a turn off according to Sun Tzu.

To begin by bluster, but afterwards to take fright at the enemy’s numbers, shows a supreme lack of intelligence.

If you can tell that someone is about to make a move on a ‘bird’ in a bar, Sun has warned us of the danger signs.

The rising of birds in their flight is the sign of ambuscade. Startled beasts indicate that a sudden attack is coming.

It seems that dating books have been around for years, and apparently a cave painting was recently uncovered in a forest somewhere with a picture of a man in a bear skin giving a woman a dead boar on a stick as a sign of his intent. The next cave drawing had to be censored, as this ole’ cavemen got lucky.

Dating; it seems that when man discovered fire, he also found the eternal flame of love.

It started one morning two years ago when you were propped up on the couch in front of the telly, eating soggy corn flakes and slurping down a cold glass of killer hangover. Sick of watching cartoons about cute creatures you’d love to strangle with piano wire, you switch over to a music video show. The instant sight of the hunk of rough-hewn man meat belting out a predictable rock tune melts your heart like hair gel in the rain.

“Gosh,” you think to yourself, “After all this bible reading I’ve finally found god, and there he is on channel ten.”

The cliché doesn’t stop there, and over the next year or so you start collecting their entire back catalogue of crap albums, and raid news agencies on a never-ending quest to get every different picture you can find of this Adonis and his firm arse. Before you know it you have an obsession with a rock star and his band, although you had some clues about your pre-occupation on the way. Camping overnight on a turd-encrusted pavement to be the first to get those precious tickets to their tour, and punching people to get up the front of the crowd to see his shopping center appearance, where you not un-predictably cried.

You dump your boyfriend and replace his photo in your wallet with our Rock Star, and his photos are even stuck inside your underwear drawer, and you start drinking whiskey out of the bottle because he does; except you replace it with cola cordial.

Now we zoom over to the other side of the world to our cool, swaggering Rock Star. He’s getting loads of fan mail, none of which he reads, and countless marriage proposals from complete strangers - and not just females either. Then something strange happens, he reads one marriage proposal and decides in his north-end English accent, “Fuck it, I’m a Rock Star and I’ll do something edgy and cool, I’ll marry this Australian bird and see what all this marriage shit is about.”

What you might not ask? Someone actually taking one of those marriage proposals seriously? People send marriage proposals to their ‘idol’ because it’s all part of their celebrity fantasy, not expecting it to actually happen. But what if it does?

Before this obsessed fan knows it, her life is turned upside down, and her plans for opening a tea-towel store are put on hold. She finds herself stepping out of a stretched limo onto the doorstep of a posh English manor. She still can’t believe what has happened to her, and after the door is opened by Jeeves, she is led through ye-olde palace past twenty toilets and loads of nude paintings. She’s so excited and shaking and is predictably uttering “Oh my god, oh my god” over and over again.

Then as she walks through the double doors to the observatory, she sees Rock Star lying prone on a chesterfield couch, surrounded by beer bottles, shaving cream, and vixens in varying states of undress. It becomes clear to her that he doesn’t eat vegetables, as carrots, cucumbers and sweet potatoes are all in various spots, which we don’t need to go into (they’re already there).

However she sees through the vegetables, shaving cream and passed out women, seeing only our Rock Star, rugged and handsome. Rather, his liver is getting a prolonged workout and his veins are pumping with methadone. Oblivious, she takes a few furtive steps toward him and softly whispers his name.

“Rock Star,” she breathes gently. This is her fairytale moment, one that she’s dreamed of for ten months, and he opens his eyes, looks over to her general direction and sees the blurred outline of his bride. He smiles and the burps out an “Ullo gorgeous” then promptly passes out.

Fast-forward two months, and she is on a plane with beer-stained divorce papers in hand. What happened you may ask? During their short marriage, it slowly dawned on her that Rock Star is in fact, Cock Star. She also realizes he isn’t perfect either. He leaves the toilet seat up on the odd time he bothers to use it, sleeps in until 4 in the afternoon, and when he is awake, he just eats cereal and watches racing cars on the telly. He doesn’t really talk about much except for being mashed up, and Obsessed Fan is nay to happy.

So let this be a lesson to all of you obsessed fans. He may be sexy, but you’re probably better off saving the obsession for the spotty mailroom boy at work. Maybe you can photocopy your respective arses, then send them to each other in the internal mail system. And at least he won’t sleep in until 4 in the afternoon, as he has to be at work by 9am.

'Is your best friend a spy?'
'Found a gun in your boyfriends' pants?'
'10 top-secret sex tips from the hunkiest spies.'

Did they just sound like those titles that you might find on the cover of an edition of Cosmo?
It recently dawned on me that we rarely see our friends, housemates or even parents at work, and so I understandably jumped to the conclusion that they might all be spies.

Imagine your living with an accountant, who comes home every night complaining of how the water cooler ran out, while they refer to their loopy co-workers as ‘loop holes.’ They might even remark how they couldn’t wait to come home and ‘debit’ some love from their ‘partner.’ However this white shirt, bad tie wearing number-eater might in fact be putting up a rather tax-offset front. (Like all relationships, people need to contribute equally so the love runs strong, so they need to ‘balance their love-ledgers.’)

The water cooler may in fact have run out, but that might instead mean that they ran out of ammunition in their secret machine-gun. Those ‘loopy’ co-workers could in fact be hard-ass, seething spies who have fallen into enemy hands a few times too many. I’m not sure what those enemy hands may have done, but it certainly didn’t make them love life more.

Instead of crunching numbers, our accountant could in fact be crunching hard middle-eastern desert sand under their boots, dropping half smoked Cuban cigars that sear into the sand as if they were prawn crackers in black bean sauce. Over dinner one night, I may complain about the traffic or how the milk might have gone slightly off, while he is sitting next to me comparing my wimpy peak-hour traffic story to the crowded streets of an anarchic African nation he was driving through two days prior.

Maybe my parents are spies, and all those times they came home late from work might have been because their flights from Beirut were delayed. While they were photographing blueprints for weapons guidance systems, I was probably growing impatient as the Bold and Beautiful was a couple of minutes late. Later that night, I would complain to them how I got held back at school for being a bit too loud in class, all the while they were getting their finger-nails pulled out by a sweaty, unshaven bloke wearing a stained singlet in a dungeon somewhere far away.

My next question is, how come I’ve been left out of all this? I thought I would make a great spy, as I can act, make wisecracks and appear clueless. Who would suspect a primary school teacher might in fact be blowing up ammunition dumps and flipping through laser beams in a perfectly timed break dance? I like dressing up, especially sometimes in the bedroom, but heck it’s all practice isn’t it? I make a pretty good pretend doctor, so I think I may as well put that on my spy CV.

After realising that you're all spies I now feel alone and excluded from you crime fighters, and it’s circumstances like this that turn people like me into super-villains who want to take over the world by controlling the weather or shrinking people. So if anyone is looking for any work and wouldn’t mind being sneering henchmen wearing matching orange suits and helmets, then drop me a line. Austin Powers 4? More like Austin Cowers 4.

Your brother was killed ten years ago by a heartless sword master called Blackheart. Upon his last breath you swore revenge on his death, and henceforth dedicated your life to perfecting the deadly art of fencing. You trained day and night, slurping down medieval protein shakes and ruining ancient tracksuits until you and the sword became one revenge-driven killing machine.

Finally after ten years of training and searching, you find Blackheart, who is no less heartless even after having started a family and already going through a mid-life crisis. On that historic day, you duel into the night and after hours of toil, you finally have him on his knees, where you utter those oft-practiced words “My name is Jock Hutton, you killed my brother, now you must die.” He sneers, and in one swift stroke you drive your rapier home, where he then exhales his last breath and crumples to the ground like a sack of turnips. Triumphant you hold your sword aloft and breathe a sigh of relief.

However something suddenly dawns on you. “What the hell do I do now?” you ask yourself. You didn’t plan for this post-killing moment; not thinking past the bit when Blackheart dies, and realize you’re barely in your thirties and have no qualifications or trade. You’ve got nothing to fall back on, and so over the next 6 months you lead a directionless life, develop depression and anxiety due to recurring thoughts of worthlessness and end it all by swallowing a packet of those yellow toilet blocks.

The revenge business is a fickle sort of game, as once someone has had their revenge, they must then make the transition to the post-revenge period of lives, and most of us are thoroughly unprepared for it. The post-revenge transitional period is one that has plagued us since their dawn of man, but one that has never been talked about because men in general are unable to open up to anyone about their feelings and insecurities. Instead they grunt into their skein of ale, or kill a boar.

The lack of plan is an issue that happens mainly with men successfully gaining revenge over a close family-member or even a friends’ death.

What defines revenge, you may not ask? I don’t really feel that any non-murder-avenging type of revenge should be called revenge, as it just doesn’t sound revenge-ey enough. Fancy someone stealing your prized gumboots, inspiring you to then go and dedicate the next ten years of your life training to avenge the theft of those beloved red wellies. Upon killing the gumboot thief, I wouldn’t think, “may my red gumboots and I now grow old together after this triumph.” Instead I’d probably think, “what the hell have I just done, spending years in the revenge business over some rubbery footwear that is by now hideously out-dated?

It is from this realization that I thought the responsible thing to do would be to provide some post revenge planning education to those people who are either currently in revenge or are seriously thinking about it.

As I have discussed, the problem is that of what to do once revenge has been carried out. Triumph will soon turn to heartbreak if you don’t plan carefully. Your dead relative or friend will turn over in their hastily dug grave if you fail so soon in life after your triumph.

It is important to think about how much of your time you will dedicate to revenge. If you were particularly close to that dead person, then you will probably spend a lot of time in training. Step back for a second though, and contemplate a few things. So many of us are dedicated to some goal that we lack balance in our lives. Instead of doing sword-fighting all day, take some time to maybe start a certificate in landscape gardening at night-school, or try reading a book about decorating eggs and baskets. All that machismo would be enough to make Hercules look like he was about to decorate his sword, not stab someone with it. So get a balance, yin and yang, feminine and masculine, junk food and fruit, and insert uninspiring analogy here.

Why not open a small pub? It would be perfect, as you could be trainee during the day, and innkeeper by night. Once Blacktwig is dead, all you need to do then is go back to your inn and pour a beers for thirsty soothsayers, break up a fight between elves and dwarves, and feed some hay to a few horses; a seamless revenge/post-revenge transition.

For those who are not only seeking revenge, but are also fugitives on the run from the hated city inquisition, then why not masquerade for a while as a hairdresser. No one would suspect that the well-manicured man with a pencil thin moustache who specializes in layering and medieval mullets is also a master swordfighter who is just biding his time. The guards aren’t going to search ye olde salon and upon the sight of aforementioned hairdresser immediately come to the conclusion that he could kill them all with a playful laugh and a few casual slices of his rapier.

So if you are thinking about entering the revenge business, or are already some way into your sword training and “you killed my father...” line-practicing, then make some time in that deadly schedule to think about your future. I haven’t had anyone come up to me seeking advice before, as I still have all family members intact. However I will leave you with this line,

“Yon person who forgets thy future, willeth finde yourselth un-skilled and directionless thou lumpish, onion-eyed, flax-wench.” That roughly translates to “Have a post-revenge plan you nitwit.”