Yeah not now, maybe later.

A few days ago I bought myself a new sea monkey set. Didn't have time to hatch them so it was only until today that I did. I've done this before and they never hatch instantly for me. Right this moment I have ONE sea monkey swimming around. A little speck the size of this full stop "." swimming in the tank. I've been staring at it for a while. He's cute. His name is Jester.

I love sea monkeys. They are so cool! They grow, mate and have babies. I know I'm sad.

Happy New Year!

x

1 crazy week down, another crazy week to go. I worked about 40 hrs this week which wasn't so bad until the last few days i.e.: the 24 hr trade at Chadstone. So I was driving happily to the shopping centre, exiting the freeway with ease and suddenly this massive jam was in front of me to turn into Warrigal Rd. The left lane only of course. People wanting to go to Chadstone, of course. So I sat in the fumes of the traffic jam for about 30 minutes. I could walk from where I was to Chaddy in 5 mins but in the car, I was there for a whole 30 minutes. When I finally drove into the centre, there were carpark attendants like those at Disneyland directing you to designmated areas. I had to park in the gravel area. GRAVEL. I've never even known this area existed! So I was early and I sat in the car to eat a sandwich. Sitting there I could just picture Chadstone shopping centre as this monumental monster chugging and churning and sucking in all these cars and going "Muahahahaha, you materialistic suckers!" And so this is what Christmas has become. The owners of Chadstone sure will have a lot of turkey to go around this year! (And champagne on NYE! It isn't over yet. Remember Boxing Day Sales, peoples! I'm going to die. So pity me).

x

Merry Xmas, Happy Hannukah, Happy Kwanzaa & Happy New Year, everyone!

It is fantastic to see that there is so much sharing during this time of the year. You watch the news and all these Salvos are out there wrapping presents and giving Xmas lunches to the needy. Lots of people are donating to the Starlight Foundation and other good causes. People are buying presents for eachother. Generosity is abundant right now as it is the time of year to think of others.

It all sounds great on the surface but why is it that there is only one time of the year where we actually get off our arses to be generous? To think of the needy during this time that they'll be 'lonely' because they don't have any friends or family or a supportive circle. And once this is all over, it's back to our own busy lives and we'll worry about these people again next year. I'm not saying that it's bad to be giving so much during Christmas et al, but you'd be surprised how these things are ignored during the rest of the year.

It is not dissimilar to AIDS Day. It is like people who don't think about AIDS every damn day are supposed to take a moment (once a year) to reflect on it. Why not have a "No AIDS Day"? And so Xmas is like a day for people to think about the needy... "Remember to think of the people who don't have families to share this joy with", etc etc. I'm not a Christian but isn't it part of the religion (like any other religion) to be generous and thoughtful of others ANYWAY? I propose an all year 'Xmas' where all year round we are to think of others and willingly support the community and the Environment and on December 25th, we are to think solely about ourselves. For one day. Now wouldn't that be the perfect stairway to heaven!

This brings me to the second issue: So we help and give to the community during Christmas but at the cost of the Environment. I'm sure of it because I saw a short footage of volunteers wrapping presents for the homeless kids and they use SO MUCH paper! Why do you need so much paper for a Batman action figure? Seriously! Think of the trees too why don't you!

Australians throw away an additional 2 million tons of trash - 25% more than usual during the festive season. All that excess consumer goods, packaging, food waste, and Christmas trees take a real toll on the Environment. More paper and plastic packaging means more trees are cut down and more petroleum is extracted. More consumer goods means more energy is used for manufacture and for transport. Many unwanted gifts end up in storage or even in the garbage, and excess packaging of consumer goods also adds to the waste stream. Now imagine all that magnified by including all the other countries around the world who are celebrating this season.

So in order to lessen the effects on the Environment, I suggest:

1. Don't buy people useless presents that they will only throw away. Xmas is not about HAVING to buy presents for people. It's about WANTING to.

2. Wrap your presents with eco-friendly paper and tie a ribbon around it. That's just as pretty as wrapping it with bleached wrapping paper with all those fancy prints. Or use the following things that you may find in your house that you do not need anymore: Old maps, sheet music or colorful ads from old magazines, baskets, Reusable tins, scarves, and handkerchiefs, leftover fabric or fabric gift bags, lightweight wallpaper, pages from a child's coloring book taped together, newspapers (foreign newspapers are great) and Sunday comic pages, last year's holiday paper (press with warm iron if wrinkled).

3. Use minimal wrapping. Put all your presents that you want to wrap together with the wrapping paper in front of you and plan how you want to wrap them. Is it possible to wrap two presents with x amount of paper instead of one? And remember, you do not need to overlap the paper more than 2 cm.

4. If you don't trust the receiver of the present to recycle, if possible, remove the packaging of the item (i.e.: take the item out of the original packaging that you purchased it with) yourself before wrapping it. Then you definitely know that the packaging will be recycled because you'll be doing it yourself!

5. If you have problems wrapping, put the present in a box. That will save on wasteful 'mistakes'.

6. Reduce, reuse and RECYCLE! After opening all the pressies, recycle all that packaging either in the recycling bin or save the good ones for next year. It'll save you money too! ;)

And for that festive lunch/dinner:

1. Buy snacks and beverages in bulk, to reduce packaging

2. Try to avoid disposables when entertaining, and instead set your table with china, silverware, glasses and cloth napkins.

3. Recycling cans, glass, cardboard, paper and plastic is especially important during this time since such a huge amount of waste is generated.

Okay, so get on with it peoples. Oh and don't roll your eyes at me for going on about Mother Earth... because that just means you're selfish. SELFISH! Have a Safe & Merry Eco-Friendly Holiday season! And think about yourself on 25th December... because you've got the rest of the year to contribute to the community ;)

x

- Read a report "The Hidden Cost of Christmas" about the high Environmental price we pay for Christmas gifts.

So George Bush and his camp are tapping into the phone lines of the ordinary citizens of America to suss out 'terrorists'. Of course, this is one of the measures to defend the notion of "the land of the free". *In the fireman's voice from the Family Guy movie of which he says shortly after Stewie's house is burnt down due to stress release candles* Irony!

x

Today I bought 20 books. That is a personal record. I don't remember having bought more than 4 books in one go!

I went to the city today with Romy & Victoria for lunch and some shopping. I got to the city a bit early and so I went to the place where I always go to kill some time, the Reader's Feast Bookstore on Swanston St. There, in the 'Classics' section, I found a rather spiff version of Sun Tzu's Art Of War and I said to myself "Wow, that's so spiff!" - it was completely modernised into a thin paperback with a clean white background with black and blue embossed text on the cover.

It certainly drew my attention and so I picked it up to have a look at it. On the back cover of the book there was a list writings/books by famous philosophers, radicals and great thinkers such as Plato, Marx, Orwell, Freud and Machiavelli that are also in the 'series'. And then I thought "Now this is COOL..." as I am really into these books but have always found them too expensive and inconvenient to read but now here they are: accessible and very cheap ($9.95 per book). So I scanned around the bookshelves trying to find the rest of the series (they had them in alphabetical order according to author). It was rather easy to find due to their concise size and simple yet stunning embossed covers.

I collected a few of the ones I thought would be interesting to read and so in the end I decided to purchase 3 books from the series by Orwell, Marx and Nietzsch. $30. Then I walked around the corner to find out that I could purchase the entire of series 1 for $60. That's 20 revolutionary books for just $60. It was a deal I couldn't resist even if Adrian Brody stood there in his Zegna suit and said "No, you should rather spend this money on those gorgeous yellow pointy snakeskin heels that you are absolutely dying to have!"

So I walked out of the bookstore with the following books in a big bag:

• George Orwell - Why I Write
  
  
• Sigmund Freud - Civilisation and Its Discontents
  
  
• Niccolo Machiavelli - The Prince
  
  
• John Ruskin - On Art and Life
  
  
• Friedrich Nietzsche - Why I am So Wise
  
  
• Thomas Paine - Common Sense
  
  
• Virginia Woolf - A Room of One's Own
  
  
• Charles Darwin - On Natural Selection
  
  
• Edward Gibbon - Christians and The Fall Of Rome
  
  
• William Hazlitt - On the Pleasure of Hating
  
  
• Arthur Schopenhauer - On the Suffering of the World
  
  
• Mary Wollstonecraft - A Vindication of the Rights of Women
  
  
• Jean-Jacques Rousseau - The Social Contract
  
  
• Seneca - On Shortness of Life
  
  
• Marcus Aurelius - Meditations
  
  
• Karl Marx & Friedrich Engels - The Communist Manisfesto
  
  
• St Augustine - Confessions of a Sinner
  
  
• Thomas a Kempis - The Inner Life
  
  
• Michel de Montaigne - On Friendship
  
  
• Jonathan Swift - A Tale of the Tub

I'm totally excited. Sun Tzu's Art of War is in series 2 together with a lot of other Asian philosophers/thinkers/great minds (whatever you will). I think I'll eventuate to that once I'm done with this set. Gonna start with Orwell because that was the one I really wanted to buy in the first place. And Nietzsch? I've been mildly exposed to his Ubermensch ideology and so I want to read this one to better understand what he's really on about. I don't really know what it is about this stuff that draws me. I guess it's because I've been a long fan of philosophy and have this fascination with wanting to know how others perceive the world in which I can use to compare with my own views. These books have had such a enormous impact on world history and therefore serves my curiosity about them whenever and wherever I hear about them, which is ever so often.

x

*Giggles*
Yesterday Mum & I cleaned out our study and threw away many old magazines that we no longer wished to keep. This one in particular is incredibly out-dated... "The Internet Magazine" dated March 1997. Let's dig in for a little bit of nostalgia shall we? Here are some quotes that I find hilarious if not mildly entertaining.

• "The technology which will allow 56kbps download speeds is being pioneered by US Robotics and has been taken up by many US and UK IAPs (I have no idea what an IAP is either). The technology exploits the digital connections that many IAPs use when they connect to the phone network. We'll be taking a closer look at the pros and cons of this technology NEXT MONTH!"
  
  
• "Are you really ready for the 56kbps modem?"
  
  
• Price of a decent 33.6 modem is 199 British pounds. POUNDS! That's AUD 464. I wonder how much an iPod would have cost if it came out in 1997.
  
  
• Price of a PC card (so your laptop can connect onto the internet) 399 British pounds (A $931). This particular PC card won the Internet Magazine's award for "Best Buy PC Card".
  
  
• "Who'd want to be working for AOL, what with the US arm of the service virtually grinding to a halt?"
  
  
• "Get 5MB of web space for only 50 pounds per year!" (A$116)
  
  
• "Nonethless, basic chat servers - where you type and other people read what you type - are still relatively new to many Internet users, particularly the growing number who have come online in the past year and have only really ever used the Web and email"
  
  
• "Watch the background of your homepage. Steer clear of the dreaded grey. White or a very pale colour is the best background for potential web surfers" - Remember the grey backgrounds?!! Omg, I totally forgotten about them until just now. And 'web surfer'? Haha... If you said you 'surf the web' today, you'd probably get a slap.
  
  
• Half of the sites that they advertise as 'up and coming' websites are no longer existing.

Yeah, tis quite funny. There's a whole lot of other really random things but I won't list them all. So much advancement in the last 8 years. Thank God! Wonder what things will be like in the next 8 years. I'd probably be laughing off 'wireless' internet. But all this technological stuff must be logarithmic. There's got to be a point in time when you can't really get any further apart from really small changes. Such as wireless internet. How can you get further than that? Underwater internet? When you look back at the different ages... it took so long for advancement to become apparent. Now, every year there's something new and so much better. It's so exciting and all I have to do is just sit here and wait. It's impossible to be bored with anything because as soon as you are, there's something better on the market and you move swiftly on... and the new thing is probably cheaper too!

x

There's a lot of little things in our lives that never think twice about that we rely on everyday to make us feel that everything is okay, normal and running smoothly. Such things include the familiar voices on a radio station that we often listen to, the same people we see at work, the common group of friends who often text you each day, coming home to the family... down to the familar scent of your moisturising cream. All these things that we take for granted and things that make up what you would call your 'comfort zone'.

In the last few days I have lost a few of these little things... but enough to make me feel I have been thrown out of my comfort zone. Atleast for now until I adjust into the new scheme of things. One of these things was the ending of my favourite radio show on triple j called "Today Today".

Some of you would know that I rave about Today Today many many times. Click here to see a post I made about them earlier this year. If you look to your right, you'll find an animated .gif of Chris and Craig pashing (they aren't gay if you're wondering). Chris and Craig are the presenters of Today Today and are my favourite radio personalities EVER. Not only are they incredibly entertaining, they are mighty intelligent too. They are both law graduates from Sydney whom have somehow ended up in show business taking the piss out of current events, pop culture and politics.

Between 3-5.30pm Mon-Fri, these guys would be on which meant that when I drive home from Uni everyday, or from work, etc, I would be listening to them. And I looked forward to it. Their jokes, their interests, their stance on different topics of discussion completely and perfectly aligned with me - for example, the hatred of Big Brother, Australian Idol, dumb and ignorant people and all other things mainstream. We were on the exact same wavelength and I looked up to them for being just what they were. For me, they were the best thing to have happened to radio. I remember thinking last year when they had their final week before the xmas break "Oh man, what am I going to do until they come back next year? No Today Today for more than 1 month!! But thank god they will be coming back" But now it's all different. They won't be coming back :( I'm totally heartbroken.

Here's a very MODEST selection of some of the things the boys got up to over the last two years on Triple J:

• Called up the Japanese goverment science department asking whether they could kill Japanese people for research purposes - just like how they killed the whales.
  
• Called up Microsoft in USA claiming that the devil has taken over their screen and have asked them to do things. The guys at Microsoft actually spent ages trying to help!
  
• Called up a night club in Canada to query about the clubbing season there (as in the seal clubbing season). Some quotes "So do you provide the seals?" "What do you mean seals? What seals?" "You know the seals. So we can club them" "What?!"
  
• Made a whole series of Coma FM sketches. Coma FM is a commercial radio station that Chris and Craig made up in order to mock commercial radio stations. I crack myself laughing each time! Listen to an mp3 of one of my favourite Coma FM sketches HERE. Download it... trust me. And find the entire collection here!
  
• Interviewed a whole bunch of cool people including the Scissor Sisters - hint hint, Sarah. Click on the link for interview Part 1.
  
• The PC - a take on the OC. Stands for "Politically Correct", basically a tv show that tries too hard to be politically correct. It's so funny. Listen to one of the sketches here.
  
• Small Talk Challenge - Craig prank calls random small businesses and see how long he can 'small talk' them until the shop assistant asks "What do you want?!". Listen to one here.
  
• Called John Howard's PA to ask whether he walked to work on "Walk to work" day
  
• Oh the list is endless... I could go on forever.
  

Today Today has been running for two years on triple j. They were the intellectual left wingers and made justice to that particular demographic by being well poised and never classless. The ending of the show is a huge tragedy for me because not only do I love listening to them but also because its a reflection on the quality of Government supported Australian media. It's fantastic that whilst being Govt. supported, there is no intervention whatsoever. If there was, triple j wouldn't be employing the presenters that they have right now... whom are mainly lefties.

I am never passionate about anything unless it's good. And Today Today was GOOD. It was great. It was everything I wanted in a radio show. It will be sadly missed. Having said that, thank God Steve Canane is still doing 'Hack' and Robbie Buck is taking over the Today Today segment. I wouldn't be able to control myself if Robbie Buck or Steve Canane had left as well (Steve Canane is incredible. If I could have half the ability to communicate the way he does, I would absolutely be beside myself).

Chris and Craig are moving back to ABC TV where they will be making a new TV show. Well it BETTER BE GOOD because I just lost my ultimate radio show. The last time they were at ABV TV they did CNNN which is absolutely hilarious. Again, to take the piss out of current events, politics and pop culture. Look out for it!

Tune into triple j on 107.5 :)
Or PBS on 106.7.
Or 3RRR.

Support independant media! Why? Cos you could have it so much better.

x

There are three things I'm most scared of. Cockroaches, spiders and perverted old men. The latter critter is avoidable so let's just focus on the first two. If I had to choose between the cockroach and the spider to be the thing I'm most afraid of, I'd choose cockroach. Spiders, as freakish as they are, don't really move around and will be there in the same place as you found it until you come back with the can of Morteen. And when you kill it or take it outside, you know you're pretty safe after.

COCKROACHES on the other hand run EVERYWHERE. As soon as you take your eyes off it, it's gone. When you find it, you spray it, it goes crazy and lays dormant. You think it's dead... Until you come back later finding the 'corpse' has disappeared. THEY never die (unless you crush it flat). And when it DOES die, you know that there's probably ten more that you haven't seen yet.

I have had a few encounters with cockroaches in and around my home. That would be surprising to a few of you who have been to my house. My mum is a clean freak. Our house is 99% of the time spotless. And therefore for me to find a cockroach is indeed alarming. They come in from outside because we find the random dead cockroach underneath the door semi annually. The lucky ones make it inside without getting crushed and I came face to face with one yesterday.

Whilst making some potato wedges I was just about to open the oven door to find this huge mofo sitting on the handle bar STARING AT ME. I screamed, jumped back and stared at it for a whole 5 seconds hoping that it won't run away while I go get the Morteen. Ran to laundry for can and back to the kitchen in approx. 3 seconds and... IT WAS GONE! I thought it had slipped inside the oven. No way am I going near that oven until I find that loser. Then after a minute or so it emerged between some tea towels and I SPRAYED. Oh God, I SPRAYED. It ran in between a crack in the pantry and I was thinking "Oh SHIT, I can't spray inside the pantry!" As soon as I was finished with that thought it ran out of the crack and went totally beserk. Fell on the ground and I sprayed it until it was soaking in the stuff. Then I smooshed it. Phew.

That is not good news. Not at all. Who knows how many more cockroaches are around. Today I got up and vacuumed and cleaned the whole of downstairs while mum was still at work to hopefully eliminate all traces of 'cockroach bait'.

What is the purpose of cockroaches anyway?? And why do they keep living after you attempt to kill it?! One time I took a mop from outside (it was left outside to dry) and dunked it into boiling hot water in order to mop the floors. I mopped the whole of downstairs with that mop, dunking it into scorching hot water about more than 6 times. Then I went upstairs to do the bathroom floors and whilst mopping, a cockroach fell out of the moppy bit and started running around! I mean, WHAT THE.

Is there a purpose to the cockroach? What purpose do they serve in the food chain and thus the circle of life? Are they just merely indicative 'species' to alert people to the fact "hey your house is dirty, clean it!"? Are they specifically designed to survive a nuclear holocaust? Because nothing apart from a tap dancing shoe smacking it into a pulp will kill it.

I just did a bit of research on the internet:

Q: I am deathly afraid of cockroaches and it may soothe my fear a little if I knew they had a purpose. What are cockroaches good for?

A: Fear of domestic cockroach pests is perhaps warranted because they have been associated with the development of childhood asthma (Asthma?! Er no, I'm just scared of them cos they are ugly and gross) and thus it is better not to have them in your home environment. Cockroaches as a group are part of the worldwide food web. They are omnivore scavengers which clean up our environment and help recycle the organic litter that would accumulate if it were not decomposed by organisms which include cockroaches. Furthermore they serve as food for small mammals, birds, amphibians and lizards. There are over 3000 species of cockroaches and only 10 species are on the World Health Organization list of human pests. The other 3000 species are welcome members of the biodiversity on this planet.

So they DO have a purpose. How about that. They are still terribly disgusting, though and it doesn't explain why they are so incredibly resistant to death. I mean, think of those long long feelers that go woosh woosh and those scurrying little legs that carry them with the speed of 60km/hr. Ugh. I'm not converted, no.


Oh puh-lease. Get a room! And leave my house alone! Shoo! Take your biodiversity ELSEWHERE!
x

I have been on Bnet for almost 3 (?) years now and Kelmar the super vixen writes Gay Of The Day or now known as GOTF (Gay Of The Friday) which is a regular segment dedicated to sharing with us the lives of famous gay people. This week's GOTF was Peppermint Patty!
I really liked this week's and I thought I might share it with you. And so it follows!

On to the Gayness Already!

Alright, alright. Keep your hair on.

This young lady has been a beacon to all the little lez-beans of the world, living in a world full of boy kissing and slumber parties, this girl was a hero to the little girls who had Barbie marrying Malibu Wendy instead of Ken.

So clap your hands and give a standing ovation to...

Peppermint Patty!



Patricia "Peppermint Patty" Reichardt is a fictional character featured in Charles M. Schulz's comic strip Peanuts. She is one of a small group in the strip who live across town from Charlie Brown and his school friends. Generally displaying the characteristics of a tomboy (read: lez-bean), she made her first appearance (read: came out) on August 22, 1966. The following year she began coaching a baseball team that played against Charlie Brown (read: OMG, how much more GAY can you be, girl?). She calls Charlie Brown "Chuck" and Lucy "Lucille" and is the only character to do so.

Peppermint Patty is noted for her persistent habit of profoundly misunderstanding basic concepts and ideas that most people would consider obvious. For instance, she probably is the only character in the strip who for a very long time did not recognize Snoopy as a dog, continuously referring to him as "the funny looking kid with the big nose". She also thought a school for gifted children meant that she would get free stuff if she enrolled. Likewise she once confused a dog obedience school with a human one, going so far as to enroll and graduate with the other dogs. It was only later that she found out to her mortification when she used that diploma to justify why she didn't have to go to regular school that she publicly humiliated herself for a meaningless honor.

She is widely known for getting a D- on every test or assignment in school, possibly aided by her tendency to sleep through class. This was explained by the fact that her father works late, and Patty is too insecure to sleep until he returns home. Her mother has never been mentioned it is generally assumed she is either dead or divorced.


Now, I know what you're going to say. "But KelMarSuperVixen, there is no empirical proof that Peppermint Patty was a lez-bean!"

To which I say, "Pishaw, you wouldn't know a lez-bean if she fell out of the sky, landed on your face and started a conga-line."

Here is your proof:

Exhibit A: Bitch is wearing Birkenstocks

Exhibit B: Marcy is her girlfriend

Exhibit C: Marcy calls Patty "Sir"

Exhibit C Con'td: We all know that Patty and Marcy were lesbian lovers before being lesbian lovers was cool (Portia De Rossi, I'm lookin' at you, girl. No, really, I look at you. A lot.). The way Marcie constantly worked for Patty’s approval, coupled with the way she referred to Patty as “sir,” signifies a typical femme/stud relationship.

Exhibit D: Both girls played for the female field hockey team. And Patty coached a baseball team, not some namby-pamby slow-pitch softball team.

Exhibit E: Dood, no girly girl on this planet would wear the kind of butch-ass outfits Patty does.

Exhibit F: Bitch has dyke butt. Seriously, check it out sometime on teevee. Bitch be sporting serious dyke booty.

I rest my case. Wow, look at me. I'm Perry Mother-Fucking Mason over here.

Kelmar is probably one of the most entertaining women I know. Don't you agree?

x

I haven't done a 'ramble' post for a while so I will do one now.

So yesterday I was really depressed. Things not going perfectly well on my end after the high I had on life just a couple of weeks before got to me and the horribly dull and muggy weather heightened the effect. But the greatest contributor to the 'crawl into a hole and die' day was the fact that Van Nguyen was executed in the morning.

I couldn't really sleep the night before just thinking about life and death. My recent contemplation on my own death a few months ago had its closure and I came to terms with it i.e.: What I would have to do in this life so that I won't panic and regret when I know I am about to die. You know not a lot of people think about these things or really care about it. But death is real and it can come whenever it wants - usually when you least expect it. And Van Nguyen's death, I believe, was a catalyst in making many people think about their own lives and what they might go through during their moment of death.

I woke up at around 9am feeling ill and forced myself back to sleep just so I won't have to think about it. I ran downstairs at around 10.30am asking "Did they save him? Did they save him??"

Now, stop press, I am not saying that I agree with his actions. Drug trafficking is bad and to do it in Asia and thinking they can get away with it is the silliest thing a person could do. But I do not agree with his sentence. I do not agree with what Singapore has done to him and the emotional turmoil placed unto his mother, close friends, relatives and all the Australians who felt strongly about this issue and capital punishment.

A lot of people have been saying that he should be killed because the heroin that he will bring will kill a whole lot more people. My rebuttal is: could these people be any more shallow and naive about the world around them? Taking heroin or any drug is a CHOICE. If you overdose, that is your choice. If I can't get apples from Safeway, I will go to Coles. It is like saying I blame Cadbury for making chocolate that has made me fat. I could stop eating chocolate because I CHOOSE not to. These people will overdose anyway if they continue their lifestyle. So executing Van Nguyen will not contribute to more lives lost because the drug market will always prevail. Why? Because executing Van Nguyen is like eliminating and punishing the mail man.

And that is what I am so furious about. Drug lords who are established in certain countries don't cop this because they don't traffic the drugs themselves. It is the mules like Van Nguyen who work for them - naive young people tangled in a financial mess that they can't get out of that do. Executing people like Van Nguyen doesn't affect the nerve centre of the drug business. Sure it will serve as a deterrent to people in the future not to traffic drugs but it is not in any way tackling the root of the problem. The underworld is a shifty and cunning one - they will always find other ways. So why not use Van Nguyen as a source of information? Why does he have to die? He was willing to give all the information but did they want that? No. Because Singapore knows that it doens't want to as it will uncover something that they are probably hiding.

I heard on triple j's current affairs half-hour, 'Hack', that Singapore has a strong relationship with Myanmar (Burma) of which almost half of its GDP come from the drug industry. My opinion is that they are only executing these 'mules' to give themselves a false image that they are strict on drug trafficking when really they are not. And it's true because what are they achieving by killing them? Why not just sentence them to 30 years in jail? Isn't that sufficient enough? Drug trafficking is not a sickness (compared to say child molesters, paedophiles, rapists). After 30 years, the accused would have most likely completely rehabilitated and probably wouldn't want to risk another 30 years again.

I'm just so pissed off and upset over this whole Van Nguyen thing. It's not even my problem but I feel so strongly about it. He doesn't have to die for this but he did. As I said, I don't agree with his actions but I extremely do not agree with his fate.

So - I got that out of my chest.

Moving on, hmmm... what else is there to talk about. Been playing the guitar a lot more lately and on Monday I'm going over to Andrew's place for a bit of a jam. I can't wait! I've never jammed with anyone before! Our slight difference in music taste may become a bit of a problem as I hardly know any Pearl Jam stuff or really listen to Nirvana and all that... and he's probably never heard of my music that I listen to... But hey, we'll do fine. We've gone thru four years of uni together ever so peacefully and we're two VERY different people.

My current favourite song is Little Birdy's cover of the Split Enz classic "Six months in a leaky boat". It's awesome! Preview it here. I really love Little Birdy. I used to hate them though. I was like "What's up with the chick's voice? Is she for real?" I thought she was just trying to be cool with that voice... but really, its natural. And now I love them and the girl has a sense of style that I really like. If I was a rockstar, I'd probably dress like her (plus a touch of "oh that's so George").

So I might go plays some more guitar. My fingers don't hurt anymore and have regained its strength. Das ist gut. Sehr gut. Ja.

x

Yesterday was the first of December and the weather was largely brilliant to set the season off. So what the hell happened today? What's all this raining and muggyness and grossness? It makes me feel so lethargic and depressed. Well I know what I'll do. I'll just sit here and reminisce the beautiful day that was yesterday... and blog about it too!

I set out at 10 am yesterday to pick up Sarah and started a hike drive to Rowville to pick up Mark. Mark had a wonderful picnic basket prepared with roast chicken foccacias, FRUIT KEBABS, sundried tomatoes, olives, kabanas, frozen grapes... that guy knows how to make one picnic basket for the beach! ;)


Purdy!
The drive to Edithvale beach was not a very long one from Rowville. I wouldn't have guessed there was a beach there. I'm not really a suburban beach goer. In fact, I don't remember the last time I went to relax and have fun at a Melbourne beach. I usually just do this overseas! The beach is gorgeous, the water crystal clear and all aquamarine with little fishes swimming around and heaps of those sausage looking clear jelly things. What ARE they? Are they living creatures?

A highly bloggable conversation whilst holding and fondling these jelly-like see thru sausages:

Mark: I don't think they are living things. They are excretions.
George: EXCRETIONS?!
Mark: I think so. I think they excrete these to prevent things from going inside.
George: *wondering who's "they"*
Sarah: *looking grossed out*
We walk into the water.
Mark: There's probably heaps in the water but can't really see them.
George: Yeah they probably have the same refractive index as the water.
Sarah: What the fuck is a refractive index?!
Mark: Ooh look at me, little Miss Engineer and my refractive index!!
George: Oh that's so bloggage material!


This is me and Mark with awesome fruit kebabs.
What a great idea. Nobel prize worthy.


Mark & I doing our 'swimsuit calendar' pose.


Sarah & Mark looking trendy.


The view from our beach tent. Mark's a good photographer.


Sandy feet! Mark's a good photographer.


Sarah & I!


My tatt & I - I actually chose black swimmers just so it won't clash and look bad with my tatt. You have to think about these things when you have this red thing on your back! It's all about looking good :P


Check out my Geisha towel!
Thats some 1 on 1 action right there between me and my towel ;)

Awesome awesome day. The water was the most perfect temperature. It was really HOT on the sand but the water cooled you down the perfect notch. I got a great tan AND we didn't get a parking ticket after 3 and a half hours in a 2 hour parking spot.

Mark and I did handstands underwater as well as backflips. I haven't done these in years!!! Came home with some water in my ears though but that's inevitable, especially for me because I ALWAYS have problems with water in ears. I always have problems with my ears fullstop.

This day has started a beautiful relationship between myself and the Melbourne beaches. I think I will be visiting them a whole lot this summer!



Me and the beach!

x

PS: Thanks Mark for the wonderful food!!!