Saturday, 27 January 2018

What A Time To Be Alive

Most of us would all know Bob Dylan once sang, 'The times, they are a-changin'.'  Well, 'sang' might be too generous a term.  Perhaps 'brayed like an adenoidal donkey' would be a more accurate description.  Come on people, you know I'm right.  He's a brilliant lyricist but his voice is sheer torture.

But yeah, times sure are a-changin'.  I am just thinking of major news stories from when I was growing up.  When I was eight or nine years old, I had a flick through my parents' newspaper and hitched a breath as I beheld a photograph of a Vietnamese boy, probably the same age as me, with his head bandaged from shrapnel wounds.  This boy was weeping, and contemplating an uncertain and scary future as a refugee to Australia.  I was contemplating my immediate future of an episode of The Flintstones, my dinner: chops, peas, and mashed potato, and reading a few chapters of Charlotte's Web.

Other major news items were the Whitlam Dismissal, which caused one of the nuns at my school to have an orgasm.

Whilst I was still a youngster in primary school, I spent one Christmas playing with my new toys and grieving for people I didn't even know, people who lost toys and presents and houses and - in some cases - their lives; victims to the fury and ferocity of Cyclone Tracy.  You know something? I still recall headlines and quotes from witnesses: 'Darwin looks like a giant rubbish tip; and 'If you've seen pictures of Hiroshima after the atom bomb, then by God you know what Darwin looks like'.

Since reaching and traveling through adulthood, the news we saw included: the Chernobyl disaster, the fall of the Berlin Wall, and the September 11 attacks.

Now, when I scan for headlines, this is what I hear about:

1. Donald Trump supposedly paid a woman to spank him with a copy of Forbes magazine.  I actually don't really care if this is his fetish; he's allowed to have it and it's harming nobody.  Well, in theory, it's harming nobody.  But there is irreparable grave damage to the psyche and soul of everybody who has imagined this grotesque Dorito-in-human-form bending over a chair, pants around his ankles, yelping as the magazine makes contact with his arse. This is an arse that is not quite seventy and undoubtedly resembles two large blobs of blancmange, and each strike of the magazine would create a series of ripples across said blobs like a pebble dropped into the creek.  I will now take a brief respite from typing as I upend my keyboard and shake loose the flecks of vomit that have lodged betwixt the keys.

2. People have to be told to not eat detergent, to wit, Tide pods (I've not seen Tide on a supermarket shelf in Australia, but I've heard of it from reading US-based novels).  No, I'm not kidding.  We live in an age where pretty much every piece of information we've ever needed is accessible with the typing of a sentence and touch of a button, on a device that can be held in the palm of the hand, yet people have to be discouraged from eating a pouch made from polyvinylalcohol containing, among other things, sodium hydroxide, borax, and sulphates.  You people taking part in this warped challenge: what the fuck is wrong with you all? But on the other hand, this could be Darwinism toiling hard to rid society of these pointless oxygen thieves.  Bon appetit, foolish cockwombles.

3. There has been a scandal in a beauty contest.  Hey, this is nothing new. Controversies have sullied beauty contests in the past.  Personally, I'm not a fan of these things in principle, but if people wish to enter them, then that's their right. I remember the scandal when Vanessa Williams had nude photographs surface (God, why do people bloody CARE about this?  Does nobody have a skeleton in the cupboard?  It's not like she murdered anybody). I remember a stir one year in the Miss Australia contest - might have been around 1992 or so - when the drama was the entrant who should have won on merit, being the amount of money raised for the charity supported by the contest, was a man.  I'm not talking a she-male, or cross-dresser, but a legitimate cis-gendered male who entered the contest.  He wore a tailored suit in the evening gown section, and like I mentioned, he actually won on points.  However, the judges have to award according the rules, and the rules stated Miss Australia has to be female.  I thought this a great lark, and was very admiring of the man who had the - ahem! - balls to do this.  I don't know why he did it.  Maybe to raise money and awareness for the charity. Maybe to challenge gender stereotyping and sexism.  Maybe for a laugh.  Whatever. Good on him, I thought.

But, continuing with Point 3 above but merely inserting a likely-needed paragraph break, a scandal has rocked another beauty contest.  Contestants have been injected with Botox, in a beauty contest designed for camels.  I cannot tell you how much I wish I was typing that wrong.  I'm not.  There is a beauty contest for CAMELS, and it has been shaken to its very core because some contestants have been injected with Botox.  Okay, is there a big red button emblazoned with 'STOP' that I could press?  I'm not sure I really want to be on this planet anymore, and would like to get off.

So, my friends, we have images of the 45th POTUS (a buffoonish travesty) being spanked with a magazine targeted toward rich business folk (I think he's meant to be one).  We have to tell people to not eat detergent (I'm not talking babies and toddlers who put things in their mouths whether they be buttons, vegetable peelings, or dog poop).  Camels have been Botoxed in order to gain an unfair advantage in a beauty contest (and how on Earth do you determine a camel's desirability, anyway?  The creatures are ugly and ungainly, and the whole things sounds seriously sick).

What a time to be alive.

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