Why it is time to panic and lose your shit

At the beginning of 1637 Dutch investors were paying many times a typical annual salary for a single tulip bulb. In February of that year, the boom came to a sudden spectacular crash and tulip-mania became a famous cautionary tale about the perils of paying stupid amounts for things.

It’s now 2015 and someone who clearly never learnt about tulip-mania has just paid more than six million dollars for an ugly house in Chatswood. This big brick box of a house was built at the very dullest point of the 90’s and stands in a bog standard suburban street. The backyard has a large lawn and a Hills Hoist but appears not to include a pool, a tennis court or a magic tree which money grows on.

Clearly this price makes no sense and when prices start making no sense it is time to worry.

I have spent many years living in Chatswood and it never struck me as the kind of super special suburb where six million dollar homes would ever exist. Chatswood has gargantuan shopping malls, great yum cha and a Korean hairdresser who will give you a decent hairdo for just eighteen bucks. You will however struggle to get harbour views or a deep water frontage, which are usually part of the package for a six million dollar joint.

Logically this buyer would have been far better off purchasing their own tropical island. This secluded piece of paradise would not be as close to all the fancy clothes shops, but when you own your own tropical it’s fairly simple to adopt a nudist lifestyle. With the money left over it would also be easy to employ a Korean hairdresser, a personal chef and some surly Shirley to wheel trays of chicken feet and steamed buns around on a Sunday morning.

While I can’t fathom the buyer’s reasoning for spending such a stupendous amount of money for a big box in Chatswood I do hope they enjoy it. Perhaps they will decide to pretty up the garden by planting a few tulips.

Is a million dollar median really something to applaud?

In Sydney we cheer the property market on like it’s Black Caviar coming down the home straight at Flemington. It is easy to see why people get excited. A large proportion of us are punters and there’s a couple of trillion riding on it.

But not everyone has a bet on. Many of us simply can’t stump up the cash or find the odds far from favourable. Having seen that horse whipped so hard for so long, we’re waiting for it to finally fall over and die.

Paying a million bucks for a bog standard house in the burbs doesn’t seem like a winning bet. It doesn’t seem like the “great Australian dream” either. It seems more like a horrific, panic-inducing nightmare. Just imagine waking up in a fibro shack on a main road and realising you owe the bank a seven figure sum. You would be in a constant cold sweat.

Is this really the best Sydneysiders can dream of? Getting a good job, working ridiculously hard and coming home on a toll road just in time to flick on a home renovation show? Is this what we now call living?  

What have the next generation got to look forward to? I’m sure very few are excited about the prospect of bunking down with their parents until their mid 30’s, just so they can pay off their HECS debt and start scraping together a home deposit. Don’t expect them to reproduce either. Kids really get in the way of mortgage repayments.

Instead of treating housing as a basic need, we have transformed it in to a wildly speculative investment. Each massive price rise gets cheered on with glee. But would we all be this happy if a loaf of bread cost $25?

While successive governments have feigned tremendous concern about the cost of living, all have done diddly squat about the cost of housing. Rather than being brave enough to put a pin to the bubble, they have concocted ways to make the problem worse.

We now have a city which a generation of people can’t afford to live in. Who’s grand vision was this? Who wanted to see a bunch of stressed out wage slaves, commuting from dull, distant suburbs, just so they could fling half their earnings back to a bank?

Perhaps it’s time the pollies stop putting the punters first and give the rest of us something to cheer about. 

Am I sleep-eating cork?

Even though this blog is called alphabet soup vomit, I'm not one to normally write about bodily functions. Today however I'm talking about poo.

I did a poo the other day that just wouldn't flush. It was incredible. It was like I had been sleepwalking, eaten a whole bunch of corks and had them pass through my digestive system, forming the shape of a poo but retaining all of their original buoyancy.

After the third full flush I was getting resigned to the fact that this poo might never leave. I thought about naming it. Initially I decided on Bob, due to the fact that it just kept bobbing up.

I then decided on a different, more poignant name. I called my poo John Howard. After all, he was an annoying little shit that wouldn't go away no matter how much I wanted him to.

Eventually, on the fifth flush he did go down. I celebrated like it was the 2007 election.  

Planes and windmills

Wind farms tend to be located in paddocks where pretty much no one lives aside from a few cows. They are less noisy than a lawnmower.



Jet aircraft are a shitload noisier than lawnmowers. Sydney's second airport will be located in the middle of a city where millions of people live and is planned to operate 24 hours.

Why the fuck is Tony Abbott so worried about cows and so unconcerned about people?

I can't agree with all this nodding

When a politician addresses the media why are they now invariably flanked by two people whose sole purpose is to nod? It all seems a little creepy and weird. These background nodders look like they have been lobotomised or given some heavy duty mind altering medication which helps them to agree with every imbecilic utterance that exits the politician’s mouth.

The nodders were most likely the invention of genius media advisors – probably the same ones who discovered the magical powers of repeating three word slogans and assiduously avoiding answering any direct questions. Somewhere along the way, they decided to unleash the amazing power of the nod.

With two people visibly agreeing with the politician in the form of a nod, they reasoned that the gormless public would never again question whether their message was just a steaming pile of horse manure. If the serious-looking nodders in the grey suits agreed so wholeheartedly, we would surely believe every word is true.  

Unfortunately those clever media advisors forgot the public also value authenticity and that relentless sycophantic nodding never quiet seems real. Most of us suspect the nodders are bored senseless of hearing the same tired lines and just want the press conference to end quickly so they can finally go to the toilet. Their nodding performances look tortured and are sharply lacking the authenticity we crave.

Strategically placing two nodders behind the leader is no doubt supposed to engender an image of party unity. We are supposed to believe political parties are big happy families where everyone is always in complete agreement. Given recent political history this does not exactly ring true. It seems more likely our leaders are just paranoid about back-stabbing and want two people forming a protective wall behind them at all times.

The main impression given by all this nodding is that political parties are weird cults. Leaders can say anything and their followers must only gaze upon them in awe and nod along in complete devotion. It’s not the kind of role which would make a free thinking person seek a place in parliament. Who wants a job where the two main responsibilities are nodding and remembering not to pick your nose?

Being a nodder is a job which could be easily replaced. They would just have to buy a few dashboard toys from the two dollar shop and make sure to jiggle them every now and then so their heads keep bobbing up and down. Instead we are still paying hundreds of thousands of dollars for the salaries of all these professional nodders. It is bound to get even worse. Pretty soon half of Canberra will be putting in compo claims for nodding induced RSI.  

Why don't we pay terrorists?

We've seen paying people smugglers is a cheap, effective way of getting shit done. I think we should extend the program to terrorists.

If someone writes "terrorist" as occupation and "jihad" as reason for visit on their immigration card, we should just give them a fat wad of cash and turn them around. It would be far cheaper and less convoluted than all this spying nonsense.

Data retention is really expensive, and it takes ages wading through all the spam ads for Viagra and penis enlargement before you get to the bit were the evil genius lays out their master plan in an unencrypted email.

We should probably pay people to stop importing drugs too.

Dear Senor Estobar,

We ask that you kindly stop sending drugs to Straya. Enclosed is a fat stack of taxpayers' money. If you continue to import drugs we will be forced to give you more money.

Love,

Straya

X0X0X

Digfit

I have a mate who needs a large quantity of earth dug out from his backyard. I suggested he advertise a program called Digfit, where people pay money to get fit by digging. If people are dumb enough to sign up for horrible boot camp programs surely they would be dumb enough to sign up for this. He would get his hole and have money left over for some pavers.

While this idea has great merit, I think there could be an even better solution. I think he should advertise casting for a new reality TV program, which pairs weight loss with home renovation. He could just stand about with a camera as people literally work their arses off doing painstaking manual labour to fix up his home. I'd even call the show Work Your Arse Off.

If there were such a show people would probably watch it in Australia. It would probably rate its big wobbly man tits off. I would however prefer the whole thing just be a big scam, with the video taken being used to make a documentary about the scam. The contract would be written in such away to make sure no one ever gets any prize money. It would however be a thought-provoking exploration in to how the promise of fame, fortune and a slender waistline can make people do pretty much anything you want them to.