I should've been in advertising

According to a recent news article, Bicycle Victoria wants more people to ride a bike to work. I fully endorse this sentiment. Apparently, bicycle numbers entering the CBD of Melbourne account for nearly 10% of all traffic now which is fantastic, and is up from 6% only a year ago. Anyway, I was thinking of an advertising strategy that Bicycle Victoria could use to encourage more people to use bicycles, and I came up with this: Especially that petrol is $1.50 a litre now...someone is getting rich out of this.

Maybe there are 8 Signs of ageing...

...and the Lo'Real Commercial got it all wrong. I had a moment the other night when I got excited driving past a bathroom supplies shop. Toilets, sinks, taps, showers, what the?? I would actually rather have a brand new bathroom than a Playstation 3. Something like the one below will be quite adequate thank you very much.

To be Australian...

I was thinking about a memory I had the other day. It's from when I was living in Perth and I was driving south along the Freeway towards the city, it was a sunny day...not too hot, not too cold, I had three mates with me and Triple J were playing a Jebediah song. That very moment, for whatever reason, is etched in my brain. I can almost SMELL the day such is its clarity. What occurred to me that day as well, was how fricken lucky we are living here, I mean seriously, we are a great country. Yes, I have traveled around the world, not extensively, and hey, there probably are countries out there that are nicer than this, but anyway, I digress....So what does it mean to be Australian? It means many things, to many people. I think when you are abroad one becomes even more Australian. I never used to like Rugby Union until I lived in the UK and had to barrack for the Wallabies. I never drank Fosters either. Go figure huh? Some thoughts regarding Australia...... 1: Vegemite is like eating solidified Guiness. An acquired taste to be sure. 2: Traveling 100km to visit a friend barely raises an eyebrow. 3: Thank goodness we measure things in metric. 10 x 10 x 10...what could be easier right? Imperial measurements just make no sense except for their abject randomness. 1 X 12 x 3 x 1432?? There is no logic....move on. 4: Driving on the LHS means left foot clutch, left hand gear change. Any other way and it's like patting your head and rubbing your tummy. Logic again. 5: No guns...well, not entirely. Maybe our lack of seriously unspooled people that have access to said firearms. 6: Sunday trading. How progressive are we huh? 7: one country, one accent. I still don't understand that. 8: Our bank notes are the most colourful in the world. We are awesome. 9: Sport can knock major world affairs off the front page of a newspaper. It's all about priorities.

The seven signs of aging.....

I guess this post is in honour of the Lo'Real TV commercial explaining to women what the seven signs of aging are. But to me, the seven signs of aging can be summed up thus: 1: Radio. As mentioned previously I have become a big fan of AM radio. So much so, that I don't think I have had the car radio on the FM dial for quite some time. The lack of ads, intelligent conversations, and no more of..."RING NOW WIN CASH RIGHT AFTER WE PLAY ANOTHER BOGAN COLD CHISEL SONG YEAH....". 2: General aches and pains. I have, up until recently thought of myself as an 18 year old trapped in a 34 year old's body. However, what with my feet starting to feel the effects of 34 years of bipedal walking things aint what they used to be. On top of this is some intense muscle soreness in my back which came about due to us letting Merlin the greyhound sleep on our bed the other night. Normally I have been used to things like this becoming progressively better over the course of a day or two, but this has been going on now for a good 5 days. Not a good sign. 3: Weekends. During my younger, and lets face it, much less responsible years, I would while away the entire weekend sleeping in. But now, Fridays nights I'm going to bed well before midnight and waking up before 8am. And I don't mean to do this, it's just that I literally cannot keep my eyes open late at night anymore. Gone are my mis-spent days of university cramming before exams until, well, the next day when they opened the exam room doors. 4: Housework. If you saw my bedroom when I was a teenager...no, let's re-phrase that....if you SMELT my bedroom when I was a teenager, many of you would have been calling for a HAZMAT suit and a de-contamination shower. This did not improve during the formative years outside the parental nest living at university. However, at some point, and I can't for the life of me pin point when, that all changed. I have mentioned previously that I just cannot relax when the house is in a state of ill repute. Dishes to clean, floor to mop, tables to dust. It never ends, but when the house is clean, I feel at peace. Maybe doing housework is my personal Zen...who knows. 5: Technology. I was one of those kids that my parents would turn to to set the timer on the VCR. I was bang up to date with the latest technology of the day. But now things are moving at a pace I am finding I cannot keep track of. I have just mastered the art of MP3 and MP4 players, P2P streaming and wireless internet routing. But I feel like I am being left behind by things like Bluetooth, video messaging, VoIP etc. Maybe I should just go a live in the forest somewhere?? 6: Music. In particular that R and B hip hop shit they play on Video Hits every Saturday morning, or that emo depression inducing crap. Oh my god. No wonder kids either want to "pop a cap is your ass" or else "kill myself and my little kitten because nobody loves me for me boo hoo". For crying out loud, get over yourselves honestly. 7: Fashion. Heading into my mid 30s I think I can still get away with wearing jeans, a t-shirt and a nice pair of trainers. But what is the go with teen-age fashion these days? My main bone of contention is skin tight jeans. Skin tight jeans didn't look good in the 80s and they certainly do not look good now. They make the wearer look like they have no arse to shit out of and when combined with one of those hideous. oversized t-shirts, the knob wearing it looks like a shopping bag with chopstick chicken legs. Skin tight jeans are not flattering in the slightest, even anorexic girls who assume they have a body for them just look all kinds of wrong on so many levels. What's worse is that they choose to wear either a)ugg boots b)Big leather boots or c)Pixie boots with them. They are not elegant, nor are they timeless, think about it.

And now for the weather.....

Ahhh the weather, like it or not, it affects us all in some way or other. Some people tend to ignore it and some people become meteorologists. I have to admit that I'm a bit of a closet meteorologist, and have confessed to Miss R in sheepish overtones that, yes, I have taken part in a storm chase, and yes, it fully exemplifies my inner geekishness. To this day I take more than a passing interest in the weather, and living in Melbourne things are never quite dull....except maybe these past 10 years of prolonged drought. So, on Wednesday my fair old city was hit with the remnants of ex-tropical cyclone Pancho (who decided on 'Pancho' for crying out loud??). The day dawned with nothing much to suggest the day that lay ahead, except that the sky was, in the words of Jimi Hendrix "...a hell fire red yeah!" I did also notice that my ride to work from the illustrious northern suburbs only required the most minimal amount of effort thanks to a tonking tail wind. And then the wind got worse.....much worse. Luckily by this time I had arrived at work and was safely cocooned in my office. Within three hours the wind had gone from a stiff breeze to strengths normally associated with category 2 cyclones. The windows actually buckled and I had to pop my ears on numerous occasions. Unfortunately I had to brave the elements and head out to get some lunch. THree buildings in the immediate vicinity had had their windows blown out and glass was all over the street. Trees were losing branches all over the show and the dust in the air made the whole scene apocalyptic. By home time things hadn't gotten any better, and that lovely tail wind in the morning had turned into the mother of all headwinds. To make matters even better for riding, it has started to rain. So with that I thought the only solution was to ride to a train station and get a train home. Alas, such an idea was fruitless; every train had been cancelled due to fallen trees and lightning strikes. I guess the number of people waiting haplessly at the station would've told me that. So it was time to buckle down, turn into the wind and pedal my arse off. The traffic has horrendous to say the least. Every traffic light had been knocked out and the entire city had become choked in dust, rain and peak hour traffic. The sky glowed an eerie red colour suggesting that Judgment Day was nigh. And yet, on I rode, by passing all the traffic, slowly, but surely, and in the end, I managed to get home. How I managed it I'll never know. Riding head first into 100kph winds is not much fun, but I count myself lucky that I could get home. I would hazard a guess and say that if I was in a car it would've taken another hour or two. Just awful.

I should clarify in my last post that by facial hair I mean a full beard. I would like to point out that those people with goatees need to question their need to identify with 1990s slacker chic. Time to move on me thinks. So I'm not entirely sure what cutting edge facial hair is nowadays. There are a few options I guess....the Abraham Lincoln jawline beard comes to mind, super old skool for sure, or the handlebar moustache, which is so 1970s porn that it is unfathomably hip. Not a big fan of the Bin beard though, those people who think that they're Osama is just wrong, like seriously the upkeep just to keep the thing clean would be extraordinary.