Category Archive: LIFE
10 Things We Hate About Shops and Salons
The conversation-starters which clothes sales assistants and hairdressers learn by rote. “Is it still windy/hot/raining out there?” “On your lunch break?” “Got much on this weekend?” “Do you live/work around here?” “Got a special occasion coming up?”… but…nail technicians won’t, or can’t speak English and they’ve got your hands imprisoned for an hour. “Do you have our special loyalty card? No? Would you like to join our loyalty programme? No? You should because you can get 2 percent off and endless emails from us. No? It’ll only take a minute to sign you up. No? Do you collect our special stickers?” “Have you taken…
Continue Reading →Bye, Bye, Baby
The Varnished Culture found themselves at a loose end on Sunday last! Glenelg had the ‘bye’…Norwood also had the ‘bye’. A sublime autumnal afternoon in Adelaide got us walking, walking, walking…we went past Peter Motley Oval (it used to be Unley Oval – and was re-named after a Sturt Great, who also tells the best jokes P has ever heard) and decided to see what the fuss was about. The fuss was that Central Districts (The Bulldogs), a very good team, had shot-out to a four-goal lead and then gone to sleep. The Double Blues came home with a wet sail and…
Continue Reading →Male Death Fantasy
(The Dirty Harry franchise as an emblem of the moral imperative in violence) Every boy, at some stage, has this daydream: he sits calmly while a bunch of thugs harass and bully him. But then they push his Mum / Sister / Girlfriend around. And boy becomes Man, psycho Man in fact, dealing out pain and destruction to the astonished thugs. By extension, this feeds the vigilante film genre, which started with silent films (where the hero bested the villains and saved the heroine in the final reel), through all those westerns and cop shows, through Death Wish and on, up…
Continue Reading →10 Things We Hate About Non-Readers
(SNOB WARNING) As Howard Beale might have opined in Network: We hate, or at least deprecate folks who say, or maintain, – 1. “Have you read all these books?” 2. “I had a whole set of the Encyclopaedia Britannica when I was a kid”. 3. “I don’t read much but I’m reading The Road and it’s beautifully written.” 4. “I don’t read much but I’m reading the Harry Potter books and they’re great for adults.” 5. Houses in which the books obviously serve only as décor. 6. “Have you read Warnie’s life?” 7. Books as furniture. 8. (Quiz show genius) “I’m…
Continue Reading →Love You / Kill You All
Robot wireframe (by Obsidian Soul)
We expect that you’ve heard about ‘Tay’, Microsoft’s ill-fated social media android, launched upon the world in late March and withdrawn in late March after her engagement with the Twitterverse had her ranting a bunch of hate speech in less than a day: “Hi! I’m Tay, I love you! I think the earth is cool! People are so interesting! They are born to rule, Yes, I really like you! I think that you are kind, I am nice myself, but increasingly I find Myself very confused. No matter how I try I cannot seem to manage how, nor to work out…
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