February 14, 1929, Al Capone commemorated Saint Valentine's Day by dressing two of his thugs as police officers and having them 'apprehend' seven members of the rival North Side gang before executing all of them in a Chicago garage.

I'm thinking of doing something similar this Valentine's Day.

I'm so two thousand and eight. You're so two thousand and late.

Darn.

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I get the song 'Fergalicious' in my head probably more than anybody else in the world. Which is a real shame, because it's the type of horrendous abomination that makes me want to punch a baby or something.

When I was somewhat younger, one of my sisters paid me the princely sum of $5 to make a typed copy of a school assignment she had hand-written. The essay was an enthralling piece about the problems of soil salinity and, as a joke, I added on to the final sentence the addendum "and this dirt was the grooviest dirt the world had ever seen."

I didn't do this maliciously - I honestly thought she'd proof-read the work before printing it off and submitting it. She didn't.

The first she knew about it was a few days after handing it in when her teacher called her up after class to question her about it.

I guess we all learnt a valuable lesson about trust that day.

Americans are communists. And American football is boring.

see more Funny Graphs

This is funny because it's true. But tragic, because I never post an original thought on here any more.

I went to Melbourne over the weekend. If I had a dollar for every time I heard the sentence "I'm a prostitute robot from the future!" in my 4 days over there.... well, I'd have several dollars.

The top ten songs of 2009, as voted by Australia in Triple J's Hottest 100:

1.Mumford & Sons - Little Lion Man
2.Art vs Science - Parlez Vous Francais?
3.Hilltop Hoods - Chase That Feeling
4.Phoenix - Lisztomania
5.Bluejuice - Broken Leg
6.La Roux - Bulletproof
7.Lisa Mitchell - Coin Laundry
8.Lily Allen - Not Fair
9.Muse - Uprising
10.Florence & The Machine - Dog Days are Over


I didn't realise until I was writing it out, but not a single American artist/group in the top 10. My number one song of the year was American, but it only came in at #15. I couldn't stand it the first time I heard it, but it just grew on me so darn quickly.

I'm sunburnt like a mofo. Take my advice, kids. It's not worth it.

I'm trying to read Mark Twain's The Adventures of Tom Sawyer & Huckleberry Finn, but the copy that I have is really old and has a strange musty smell that makes me want to sneeze. So I can really only stand to read one chapter at a time. It's slow going.

I turned 25 on Sunday. Nobody here mentioned it which, I'm sure you're aware, makes all of you completely bad people. But don't worry, I'll forgive most of you in time. Excluding, of course, any Canadians.

Over the past quarter century I've learned to walk, talk, use a knife & fork, read, count, critically analyse film & literature, make chocolate bread & butter pudding, and even perform algebraic equations of some small complexity.

I doubt I can match even a single one of those monumental achievements over the next quarter century.

Yup, it's definitely all down hill from here.




POSTSCRIPT - Sunday was also Al Capone's 111th birthday. When Bilbo Baggins turned Eleventy-One he had a giant party. I wonder if the Capones got up to anything.

I got chewing gum on my shoe today. My life is a misery.

Check out my sweet new ride! If this doesn't get me the ladies, then I honestly don't know what will.

"It's wonderful to be part of a place that so values fair and balanced news."

Sarah Palin, on her decision to join Fox News as a political commentator.

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Now, I know it's only early January, but I'm willing to bet that this is the funniest thing anybody will say all year.

It's so effing hot.

So it's 2010. And we all know what that means.

Yet another damn U2 'Best Of' Album.

And because I probably won't update before then, you can take this as my loving and thought-provoking New Years message to you all.

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Much earlier this year, I was working on the road quite a lot, driving for hours to reach small country towns, where I'd perform the 45 minutes of work required, before getting in my car, setting my GPS to the next country town and starting the whole dreadful process again. Over days and weeks, I covered many thousands of miles and saw dozens of tiny towns.

I must say that I am completely a city boy. I really do not like the country very much at all. My phone would always lose signal, I was forced to stay in dim, falling-apart motels and ate so many bad dinners in so many bad pubs that at times my stomach would cramp. Country-folk are supposed to be renowned for their homeliness and hospitality, but overwhelmingly what I experienced was an attitude which I suspect they thought was subtle contempt for the city-dweller, but in actual fact bordered on outright hostility. The bigger towns were better than the smaller, but still were not great.

Despite all this, though, there is one thing I like about being in a rural areas. While I was doing this work, I didn't do much night-driving. My work could only be accomplished during the day so, as a general rule, once it hit 5pm, I'd seek out the motel in the town I was currently in, and settle in for the night. Except the last day. I had finished all my work, but was still about 1000 kilometres from home when it hit 5pm, so I decided to put in a few hours driving so that I could get home at a reasonable hour the next day.

The night-time is the thing I like about being in the country. Everything is so quiet and clear and it's like nothing you can ever find near the city. At one point, I passed a sign warning me to look out for kangaroos for the next 159km (about 100 miles), which I correctly presumed meant the road I was on was devoid of any human settlement for the next 159km. About halfway through that stretch, under the influence of too much yellow Powerade (I became an expert on sports drinks during those long driving hours in those summer months), I pulled over to the side of the road to, uh, relieve myself.

Getting out of my car in this, the middle of nowhere, I stared at the sky in amazement. Free from ambient light pollution, the sky was dazzling bright with thousands of stars, accompanied by little wisps of white which could've been clouds, or could have been entire galaxies. Looking up at something like that, you begin to feel very small. Here I am, a small pile of flesh and bones standing upon a gigantic ball of rock whizzing through space. But even that ball of rock is small compared to its neighbouring planets, and even our biggest planet, Jupiter, pales in comparison to the size of the sun which lies at the centre of our solar system.

But it doesn't stop there. Our local star is, by star standards, really quite small, and is one of only billions within the Milky Way galaxy. And there's nothing distinct or special about our native galaxy when contrasted to the billions of other galaxies which make up the Universe. And beyond that, we can only speculate. What lies beyond? Other universes, contained within an even bigger construct? Or an infinitude of nothingness, stretching beyond human imagination and comprehension?

I was born, I am living and I will die in what will be less than a fraction of an instant on this cosmic scale, and the universe will never even know I existed.

And it was then, looking around in the star-streaked black in a nothing-corner of existence, faced with the truth of how small and insignificant and alone I am on the grand universal stage, that I came to a profound realisation. I was peeing about 5 feet away from where another family were set-up for the night in their Winnebago.

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Happy New Year, all.

I've done this thing the past two years, so why not keep going. First line of the first post from each month this year. You know the drill.

January: I'm back, complete with many ridiculous tan lines.

February: I hope we're all suitably excited about Cardinals punter Ben Graham, the first Australian ever to play in the Superbowl.

March: This song has been voted Oklahoma's Official State Rock Song... And that's OK by me.

April: Two monks were washing their bowls in the river when they noticed a scorpion that was drowning.

May: I just had the weirdest feeling of deja vu.

June: Being a boy, I've wanted a Playstation 3 for a while now.

July: It is a truth universally acknowledged that a Burgotastic in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife.

August: My friend helped make this video clip. Created using only glowsticks and god-knows-how-many hours, it's pretty cool.

September: I like the duck-billed Platypus/Because it is anomalous.

October: It happened again! It's kind of giddily exciting, as well as gut-wrenchingly disappointing.

November: The words 'Bravia' and 'Playstation' now have a place in my home and in my heart.

December: Do you think the really hardcore vampires inject blood straight into their veins?

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In conclusion, I was fairly lazy this year, as two of those posts reference YouTube videos, and another references an earlier post.

On the other hand, I do like that November fulfils the prophecy set out in June.

A Merry Christmas Carol for you all.

Have a good one, ladies and gents.

Back from Melbourne and my (early) Christmas.

I got to meet my brand new niece for the first time. She was already six days old by the time I got there. Babies are pretty much spoiled by then, and only useful for cooking up some stock, right?

I also saw Avatar in 3D at IMAX. That was pretty special too.