How I Stopped Fighting And Learned To Love City Hall

// Filed under: Life on Friday September 28th 2007, 11:36 pm

Back in 2005, when I was working at Coles Express, it was required that I wore a badge. But not just for identification purposes, no. Coles Express takes the wonderful opportunity to use my name as a ledge for the purposes of which to hang advertising. Fuel discounts, Fly Buys specials, there is nothing which the Company feels is too ostentatious to decorate your body with. But I had enough. I fought back. I wore this:

As you can imagine, the Company found this distasteful in the extreme. Not so the Customers, who laughed uproariously and thanked me for bringing joy to their small, insignificant and carbon-based lives. But alas, the Company was Always Right, and the badge was removed. Fast forward to 2007, and anybody fortunate enough to receive an email from one Tim Colwill could expect to find the following buried at the end of their email in tiny, tiny text:

Unencrypted electronic mail may not be secure and may not be authentic. This is the sum of most large tracts of small text that follow most business-related emails. As such, this large tract of small text is not likely to be read by most users and will be skipped over for a belief that it contains no new or relevant information. If you have received this email in error, please inform me by return email with the subject line “The Sparrow Chirps At Midnight”. A man will contact you by the usual method and provide you with further instructions. After these instructions have been carried out, destroy your computer by ejecting it from a fourth-storey window onto a large pile of unstable explosives. Wearing of this garment does not enable you to fly.

Alas, despite receiving several blank emails subjected “The Sparrow Chirps At Midnight”, and sending not one, but two, academics on a fruitless search for a man in a bowler hat at Berlin Central train station, this happy state of events could not be allowed to continue. The email signature was forcibly removed, leaving it empty, amputated and floundering in a sea of whitespace.

That is not to say that I do not understand the Company’s Position; I understand the Position with great clarity. I just long for a world in which everyone can tell the difference between bringing a bit of fun to a dreary commercial world, and sustaining punishing body blows to the reputation of the Body Corporate. Perhaps the Sparrow does still chirp at Midnight, somewhere out there in the tempting wilderness, where the long arm of I Don’t Think That’s Quite Appropriate Do You has no grasp.

To work; perchance to dream…

// 2 Comments

Bilious, Bilious and Vile

// Filed under: Politics on Thursday September 20th 2007, 8:39 pm

Have you ever noticed that nearly half the Mortal Kombat characters were created simply by changing the colour of the costume of an existing character? No? Well, there you go.

Man, blogging! Who does that these days? It’s so passe. Anyway.

A little while back now, the Chaser team mixed a little fake motorcade together with some terribly, terribly fake security passes and a third pair of testicles, stuck a little Canadian flag on top and drove the whole crazy cake through the supposedly impenetrable $160 million security surrounding the 2007 Sydney APEC Summit. Understandably, this upset a few people - not to mention the boys themselves, who never expected to get past the gates.

After all, they were wearing Insecurity Passes with the word “JOKE” written on them in giant letters, and they were up against the biggest lockdown the nation’s most populous city had ever experienced. A lockdown that apparently equates a motorcade of black SUV’s with importance, but that’s neither here nor there. No, my friends, the real outrage facing the nation today, the real scandal here is not that $160 million dollars of taxpayer-funded extraordinary, draconian security measures failed to stop a team of 11 comedians - one of whom was dressed as Osama bin Laden - the real scandal is that these filthy, disgusting, and above all leftist fucks are laughing at terrorism, spitting on the grave of everyone who’s ever lost their life in a terrorist attack, and they’re doing it on my goddamn taxpayer money.

Or so Gerard Henderson tells me.

Gerard’s article is a real scroll-wheel turner, and basically only because it’s the most delightfully biased piece of opinionated trash I’ve heard since the last time I recorded myself trying to quantify the exact level of shit present in a single Ctrl+Alt+Del comic. Gerard’s main point is this little gem: It is not okay to make fun of terrorism because people have died from terrorism - a wonderful line right up there with other clinically small-minded arguments like “Burning the flag should be outlawed because good people fought and died for that flag”.

But not only is Gerard taking the time to come down from Moral Heights Luxury Apartment Blocks to tell us what is and isn’t an appropriate subject for humour, he’s also prepared a wonderful dissertation for us on how doing so was an abhorrent waste of taxpayer’s money. Thanks Gerard! He is obviously the most qualified to know - as the Executive Director of the Sydney Institute and former Chief-of-Staff to John Howard, he knows only too well the peculiar tang of wasted taxpayer money hanging heavy in the acrid Sydney air.

Oh, Gerard! Your enlightening opinion pieces speak to me in the illuminating manner of a shaft of light from a musty tomb; the lid on the sarcophagus cracking to reveal the screeching generational values of a thousand years past. I can actually see the paper on which ink was wasted printing your article aging before my very eyes, crumbling into dust almost as fast as support for the Liberal party plummets in the opinion polls (See what I did there?).

“THIS IS NOT FUNNY, TERRORISM IS SERIOUS!” you wail, spewing your Chardonnay out onto your copy of The Financial Review as you prepare to host one of your high-powered lunches for the Prime Minister in your exclusive Sydney estates, with their high walls and their electronic security. How convenient that all those Algerians were able to die to remind you that terrorism is a real threat, and that we can never be too secure. And how convenient that you, a man who doubtless earned more writing that single piece of morally fossilised diatribe than I’ve earned in the past two months of working full time, has taken the time out to tell me how the average man should feel.

I tip my budget can of soft drink at you sir, from my worn hand-me-down chair in the splendour of this semi-rural unfashionable suburb - I can now vote for the Liberal government with complete peace of mind, knowing that this team of arrogant comedians has got the tongue-lashing they deserve. Having the temerity to tell others what is and is not funny, having the insufferable hubris to treat authority with anything but grave respect, these are the hallmarks of the subversive and the radical, my friends. We need to watch out for this sort of free thinking and crush it remorselessly under our boot-heels, lest the terrorists win and we become one of those horrible backward little Eastern countries I can’t pronounce. With their highly religious governments, their crushing of free speech, their outrageously brutal anti-sedition laws, and their security measures which allow people to be held for obscenely long periods without trial for the most minor of offences.

That would be bad.

// 6 Comments

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