Everything is a medical condition

Have you noticed how no one is ever thirsty anymore? Instead everyone tells you that they are 'dehydrated'. There simple desire for a drink has suddenly turned into a medical condition.

Today everyone is an expert with a desire to blame every tiny little thing on some sympathy winning medical condition. If I go to the wrong address, turn up at the wrong time or call the wrong number it's generally because I wasn't concentrating. However if someone asks me why I stuffed up, I tell them I'm numerically dyslexic and all is magically forgiven. Mostly people will say that they are also a bit numerically dyslexic too.

When Tiger Woods got caught screwing a dozen different woman, he didn't say he enjoyed sleeping around - instead he said he had a sex addiction. Whenever a rugby league player tries to drink his urine, punch someone or molest an animal they don't say they are just a horrible human being - they inevitably blame it on an alcohol problem.  If it is a medically diagnosed alcohol condition that caused them to disgrace themselves, it is suddenly more forgivable.

I don't know how many people have told me they are a little bit ADHD. They generally just do this as an excuse for ignoring you whilst playing with their phone. Their only real condition is rudeness.

World Championships of Farting

Men are generally fascinated by farting and anything which is competitive. It’s almost incomprehensible that no one has put the two together and created a large-scale event.

I envisage the World Championships of Farting would be held in the elevator of the Empire State building. (qualifying events could be held in other tall towers around the world). The competitor would enter the elevator along with three judges. The doors would close and the competitor would have the entire journey up to unleash their worst.

50 per cent of the score would be awarded for the volume and duration of the farts. The other 50 per cent would be awarded for aroma.

I imagine the TV coverage would be packed full of special segments covering each of the competitors and what they ate and drank in the lead up. I'd go German with a lot of beer and sauerkraut. 

I was thinking of competing under the name Gaseous Clay before converting to Islam and becoming Muhammad Arseleak. Being white I then decided it may be more appropriate if I compete as Rocky Bowelblower.

  

The decline of children

When I was a kid there was a magical place you could go and get presents even when it wasn’t your birthday or Christmas. This magical place was called the tip.

I once got an awesome scooter from the tip. When I say awesome it was old, rusty and fairly beaten up but it had all its wheels and it went completely fine. Why would anyone throw away such as an amazing object?

While I dreamed of one day getting taken to Uncle Pete’s Toys, the tip had that added element of excitement and danger. There was the rank smell, the risk of tetanus and the very slight chance you might come across a severed body part like in the start of a Law & Order episode.

I did eventually get to go to Uncle Pete’s Toys one day, but as much as I nagged I don’t think I actually got anything. At the tip you could take home whatever you wanted (provided it wasn’t a manky severed arm or something).

The tip was a breeding ground for more than just germs. It also bred ingenuity and creativity. Old prams were in high demand because you could take off their wheels and make billy carts. You could then race these billy carts down very steep hills, dramatically crash and then spend weeks picking at all those lovely scabs.

At some point all the tips got closed down and from then on you never saw billy carts. Gradually kids become softer and more annoying and then Justin Bieber appeared and it all went to hell. 

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?