Senator Mousington

A while ago we had a mouse in our house. We would see it darting under couches and hear it scurrying around at night. I nicknamed him Senator Mousington, which stuck.

"Senator Mousington, how do you respond to allegations that you are a dirty rodent?"

"Mousington, what are your policies regarding eating our cheese?"

We weren't really sure if it was just one mouse, or if there were multiple Senators Mousington around. We figured out that it was just the one when the Senator was finally impeached by a mouse trap in the study.

There was only one night where Mousington really bothered me. I was in bed and I could hear him scurrying around somewhere. I would turn the lights on and the noise would stop. Looking around, I would find no mouse. The problem was that as soon as the lights were out, the noise would start up again. I never found where the mouse was hiding.

Flash forward to the other day when I was getting ready for the Pixies. I have these fantastic black boots that have a platform wedge and a bunch of buckles and laces. They make me look much cooler than I have ever had the ability to act. I hadn't worn these boots for a while, but I thought they would be perfect so I started putting them on. When I put my foot in them, something was not right. I peeked inside. These are reasonably high boots so it was hard to see what the problem was. When I put my hand in to feel around, I discovered that there was a hole in the sole and the entire inside of the platform had been eaten away. It was suggested that I had just worn them down, but there were a good few inches of shoe that were missing and it was all torn up. It had clearly been eaten.

I realised with a start that this meant Senator Mousington had at some point been trapped in my boot and tried to eat its way out. Vegatrain was the one who figured that it would probably have been that night where I couldn't find him. The whole time, he was almost definitely right next to my bed, eating my favourite boots.

Horrifying. Just... horrifying.

Autonomy Day

If you live in Newcastle you're kind of expected to be a raging alcoholic. Of course there are a lot of people that aren't, I'm in no way that saying teetotalers and moderate drinkers don't exist. I'm just saying those people are looked down on.

People drink a lot in my hometown. I remember when we all graduated school and started drinking in other parts of the world, we were all shocked to discover that it's not socially acceptable in most places to get absurdly drunk on a Wednesday. Or more accurately, every Wednesday without fail. I'm not joking, we were all honestly surprised. We talked about it. Wednesday night binge drinking was so acceptable in Newcastle that it actually seemed strange that it wasn't a big thing anywhere else. If you drank on Tuesday you had a problem, but Wednesday was fair game.

All of this drinking culminates in one absurdist university holiday. They call it Autonomy Day and it marks the celebration of Newcastle Uni splitting off from Sydney Uni and becoming an educational institute in its own right. Kind of like an Independence Day. And Newcastle uni students celebrate their independence the traditional way. By waking up early, going to school and getting mind-bendingly drunk.

Every year there are students who set their alarms earlier and earlier purely to be the first ones to start drinking. The earliest I ever heard was 4am. Autonomy Day is the only day of the year where it is socially acceptable to be passed out drunk before ten in the morning. The best thing is how well this activity is tolerated by the other townsfolk who all have to go to work as per usual. See, it's not actually a holiday in any official sense. It happens on a weekday and classes are still held. It's just that the few people who actually go to class are drunk and usually wearing togas. It really is amazing how well this event is received by the community. I heard a story a few years ago of a drunk student who got off a bus, threw up, and then got back on the bus. Considering this happened around morning tea time, an old woman on the bus complained to the driver. The driver apparently just shrugged and said 'It's Autonomy Day' before telling the woman to take her seat.

I only went to Autonomy Day once, during my second year of uni. I had been working the previous year and from all the stories I'd heard, I was quite excited about it. I started planning my day. How I could spend as little money as possible, how I was going to get home afterwards and just how drunk I wanted to get. Then the topic was raised while we were eating lunch one day.

"Hey Sarah, I hear you're playing Autonomy Day this year?" one of my friends mentioned, casually.

"Ha, what?" I asked, not really thinking anything of the comment. But then someone handed me one of those 'What's On At UoN?' leaflets and sure enough, the band I was in had been listed as entertainment at Autonomy Day.

"Huh," I said, making a mental note to call one of my bandmates and make sure that at least one of them knew about the gig. 

It turned out we were playing quite late in the day, and this posed a dilemma. Could I still get drunk?  In the end I decided that Autonomy Day comes but once a year and that I had an obligation. It turned out that being in the band was quite advantageous for the whole drinking thing. I didn't have to wait in line to get in, didn't have to pay entry (especially nifty as this was the first year they had charged an entry fee) and I had a whole instrument case to work with for sneaking my own cheap vodka in. I was set.

I have to say, it was pretty cool. There was an area surrounding the bar that was fenced off in an attempt to contain the event. I remember the inside being like no event I'd ever attended before. All I remember about what I was drinking was that it was blue and no-one else would go near it. They would go to taste it but recoil in horror when the smell hit them. I guess it was pretty strong.

This was around the time of those Nicorette commercials with the motivational anti-smoking squad. The first thing I saw when I walked in was a whole group of people dressed up like the cheer squad in that ad. When I first saw them they were running around in single file singing 'No, Gary, No!'. I later saw them approach any person they saw lighting a cigarette and recite the whole ad in perfect unison. 

I also made out with Jesus. It wasn't technically a costume event but it was the one day of the year where you could get anyway with anything that wouldn't normally be tolerated. There was a guy that year dressed as Jesus. I saw him drinking and mingling, then later found myself running into him.

"Hey Jesus! Wanna make out?"

I'm not sure if those were my exact words, but that was pretty much how I approached the situation. Luckily, Jesus was up for it so we had a quick pash before shaking hands and going our separate ways.

There was a part of me that had hoped I would have sobered up before the gig, but there was a larger part of me that I could still feel laughing while I typed that. Let's just say, it was not my finest musical hour. Nothing dramatically bad happened, apart from the fact that I don't think I played many correct notes. The good thing about Autonomy Day is that not only does the crowd expect you to be drunk, they are so drunk themselves that they don't care what sounds you are making. They just hear the noise and know they are being entertained. I'm just glad no-one filmed it.

-Smackie Onassis

Seeing People Play Music Is Fun To Do

When I heard the Pixies were coming to Australia, I flipped out a little bit. I read the details of the tour, getting more and more excited. They were not only coming to a place where I would get to see them play but they were going to play all of Doolittle, in order. 

"Holy shit," I thought, "Doolittle is not only my favourite album, but the one with the most personal significance to me. It's like this tour was custom designed to suit my Pixies needs!"

But then I logged onto the internet and saw every indie kid I knew saying that exact thing. Doolittle was EVERYONE'S favourite album. It is a joke I've heard a few times from Pixies fans that the band could release a new Best Of and it would just be Doolittle with a different cover.

When I arrived at the venue, I realised that it wasn't just the indie kids who were excited about this. While waiting for the doors to open, I cast my eye over the crowd. I can honestly say that I have never seen a more diverse group of people all so excited for the same band. People of all ages, representing every musical and societal subculture you can name bumped shoulders trying to get to the merch stand.

Sometimes when you go to a really important gig, there are a few people there that you wish had stayed home. I remember when I saw Belle & Sebastian, it was a huge deal for me. In the years I'd been listening to them they'd never once come to Australia. Then in 2006, they finally came to promote the Life Pursuit. The nearest show to me was in Sydney and I even had to leave a university exam early to catch the last train that would get me there in time. Luckily it was a multiple choice linguistics exam which involved having to correct the grammatical errors in set sentences. I was done in about fifteen minutes.

I was ridiculously excited. We had standing tickets and ended up staking out a spot about a metre from the stage. It was amazing, being so close to this band who had been so influential on my music tastes. The only problem was this group of awful girls. There is a type of person who goes to gigs with the strange need to make themselves the centre of attention. It's a level of narcissism that gives me no end of the shits, especially when it's a band I've loved for that long. Everyone else has paid to see the band, not you being a tool. But these girls. They got Stuart Murdoch's attention between songs and cried out that they wanted to come up on stage. He laughed it off at first, but they persisted. Murdoch has quite a good sense of humour so he giggled and told them they could come up for a song if they wanted, but they had to act it out. They squealed and pulled themselves up in front of the crowd. Asking to get onstage with one of your idols is one thing, I can understand the appeal of that. The problem is that these girls had clearly only listened to the most recent album and jumped on the bandwagon. And it's fine if you want to go to a gig in that situation, I just don't understand why this type feels the insatiable need to draw attention to themselves. You see them all the time, trying for some reason to act like they are the number one loyal fan, screaming when the one song they know the words to comes on. If people seeing you enjoy the band is more important to you than actually enjoying the band, kindly stay home next time. It's obnoxious. 

When the girls were on stage, Murdoch made a joke.

"What would you do if I started playing the Chalet Lines or something?" he said with a smirk. The crowd burst out laughing, knowing that this particular song opens with the line 'He raped me in the Chalet Lines' and continues along that vein. But the girls on stage? Blank looks.

Ok, I thought. That's fine. Fold Your Hands Child, You Walk Like A Peasant was in no way their most popular album, I could see how that reference could slip through. But then the band started playing Judy and the Dream of Horses. If you are a Belle & Sebastian fan, you know that song. It was from one of their most critically acclaimed, influential early albums and it's a beautiful song. The crowd went wild to hear it but the girls on stage who were supposed to be acting it out had obviously never heard it in their life. They didn't have a clue what was going on and Stuart Murdoch was loving it. He played it slower, repeating lines when he wanted to see them struggle to act them out and laughing to himself when the girls made strange horsey gestures, having no clue what the song was about.

Admittedly, it was pretty funny and Murdoch approached the situation in the best way possible. But more than that, it was annoying. This was a band I had been waiting with baited breath to see for a long time, and these jerks had picked up one album and decided that they needed to go to the gig of the band that very rarely comes to Australia and make it all about themselves. 

Luckily, there was none of that at the Pixies. It was something that was really noticeable about the crowd - this gig was extremely meaningful for every single person in attendance. There was no-one I could see that was there for any reason that couldn't be expressed by the phrase 'It's the motherfriggin Pixies'.

And it really was amazing. They opened by playing a bunch of b-sides, silhouetted in fog. I was in the seats up the top (not brave enough to face being crushed in the standing room) and it was a strange and wonderful thing to see unfold. When the band came on stage, a sea of phone screens appeared in the crowd. People were taking photos, filming bits of songs and then putting their devices away. But for the duration of the gig, as soon as one turned off, one on the other side of the crowd would turn on. The effect was a sea of dancing, intermittent lights appearing randomly throughout the crowd. I liked it. 

The crowd lapped up every moment, but it was when the first few chords of Debaser started playing that people started seriously losing their shit. They played through the album as if they'd never spent any time apart. The songs still had the quality of the recorded versions but the live performance added a whole new element of raw sound. Even though it's not my favourite song on the album, Tame was a huge highlight for me simply because of the way it sounded being shouted across the Thebarton Theatre by Frank Black, whose voice has gotten more intense if anything.

I'm not going to describe every song in detail. All you really need to know is that it was good enough to procure two separate standing ovations. Before the second encore, it seemed like something went wrong. There was a unusually long gap in the music while the stage was invisible through the intense amount of fog that they'd used. It could well have been that there was too much fog and no-one could see anything, because they played the last few songs with the house lights on. This meant that for their closing song (Where Is My Mind, as if it was ever going to be anything else), I had the strange experience of being able to see the faces of every other member of the crowd. People were closing their eyes, swaying to themselves. People were dancing madly in the aisles, not giving a fuck what anyone else thought of them. People were grabbing each other, staring at the stage in awe.

That was when I realised that this was a defining moment in the lives of every single person here. A once in a lifetime experience, seeing the Pixies playing what was probably their favourite album, one they assumed they would never get to see performed. Every one of these people was from a dramatically different background to the person next to them, but they were all experiencing the exact same thing.

This did lead me to start thinking about how the music of the Pixies could create universal harmony a la the Wyld Stallions in Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure, but that's not something I need to go into. You must admit though that if one band were going to do that, it would be the Pixies, right?

-Smackie Onassis

A Rare Moment Of Seriousness

I was in the middle of working on a more whimsical and light-hearted entry when I found myself distracted. There were a bunch of little things appearing on my facebook feed that seemed to be bagging out Nestlé. Obviously not up to date on my current affairs, I hit the streets. As the streets these days are paved with the internet, I started with google, entering the search term 'Why is everyone all up in Nestlé's mustard?". This returned little more than a bunch of questionable recipes. I adjusted my search terms and discovered that the controversy is centred around Nestlé using a product that's been pissing off a bunch of environmentalists (and orangutans, one would assume) for having an adverse effect on the native habitat of a certain species of orangutan. I thought it sounded like an interesting issue but when I saw that Greenpeace were at the helm of the campaign, I stopped reading. If my previous experiences with Greenpeace (as a former member and supporter) were anything to go by, I was about to be hit by a wave of stories that focused more on guilt-tripping the general public than providing any real, objective facts on the issue.

For the record, I do support taking actions to preserve the habitats of endangered species. Unfortunately I can never condone the actions of organisations such as Greenpeace, or even worse, PETA. As someone who gave a regular, monthly donation to Greenpeace for a number of years, I have been following their activities for some time. Eventually I decided that I can't put my support behind any organisation whose director has admitted to "emotionalising" the issues for which they campaign. Regardless of the way this is done, adding an unnecessarily emotional element to a public campaign is the easiest way of misleading people into agreeing with you. Just look at any piece of political propaganda from any point in history. While not always the intention of the creator, I completed enough media studies courses at uni to know that this tactic almost always leaves the viewer with a warped understanding of the issue. 

Some may say that the ends justifies the means. In my opinion, there is no end that justifies the use of emotional manipulation on a large scale. If your arguments are not convincing enough to get people's support without having to make them feel personally responsible for the destruction of the planet, maybe you should rethink your arguments.

Gerd Leipold, the aforementioned Greenpeace executive who made those statements, later lambasted the BBC for misunderstanding what he meant by the quote. However, as someone who has received Greenpeace newsletters and emails for a long time, it is clear to me that by "emotionalising" the campaigns Leipold meant distorting the issues, leaving out facts that don't serve their campaign and essentially guilting people into putting support behind them. These are not the actions of an organisation dedicated to the pursuit of objective, evidence-based environmental protection.

This idea is supported by the fact that Patrick Moore, a founding member of Greenpeace, now speaks out publicly against them. In that particular article, he was quoted as comparing one of Greenpeace's campaigns to a "Trojan horse", accusing them of using the issue "to deliver an activist agenda that is not in line with science or sustainability."

This is the reason Moore claims he left the organisation he helped create, and the same reason why I now take everything Greenpeace publishes with a grain of salt. They have stopped being about real environmental progress and have instead been overtaken by politics, to the point that finding out the real facts and figures of environmental issues is less important than promotion.

For the record, I would class myself as an environmentalist. People who know me will tell you that I don't eat meat due to my objections to large-scale factory farming and the environmental and social impact that it creates. However, while I will gladly argue in favour of a vegetarian or semi-vegetarian diet, I understand that this is a matter of personal choice. If someone disagrees with me, I'm not going to accuse them of murder and throw a bucket of red paint over them. Those kind of aggressive, immature tactics are not going to win any respect for the cause. 

I find myself in the difficult spot where I am a vegetarian and an environmentalist and yet, I cannot bring myself to support the main institutions that claim to represent me. For me to support such an organisation, they need to stop using these tactics. All they are doing is destroying the credibility of both themselves and, by association, the issues for which they campaign. I support a kind of environmentalism that makes sure to research their facts objectively before shouting their position from the rooftop and making blanket accusations. I support a kind of animal activism that doesn't take what I see as important issues and ensure that no government will take them seriously due to the sheer dodginess of their methods. I support any organisation that puts rationality over spin.

-Smackie Onassis

Handwriting Analysis: I Call Bullshit

I'm going to put it out there: I love Penn & Teller's Bullshit. It's fantastic. They take a bunch of issues people usually have strong opinions on and then call everyone on their, well, bullshit. It is one of the more honest and informative documentary shows I've seen and it's also totally funny.

I have an idea for something I could probably debunk, Penn & Teller style. Has everyone heard all about the people who tell you they can analyse your personality through your handwriting? It's called graphology and it's been around for some time. I actually once read a whole book on the subject and I thought it was interesting. It was a whole lot of 'on unlined paper, optimistic people write on an upwards rising slant' and 'creative types use more loops!'. It seemed to make sense, only I couldn't see any evidence that this wasn't just something they'd made up. With a few more years of experience under my belt, I'm now pretty sure that this is because one day, a long time ago, someone actually just made the whole thing up. I imagine it happening a bit like that recurring Mitchell & Webb sketch with the two writers brainstorming, a sketch I can't seem to find online so just buy the dvd you cheapskate. Anyway, this is how I pictured it:

"We can tell them your handwriting says something about you."

"What?"

"Like, your personality. What you're into."

"So a bit like astrology?"

"Yeah, a bit like astrology. Only it can't tell the future. Just stuff you already knew."

"Will people pay for that?"

"It's not like it'll cost us anything to find out!"

Either that, or someone wanted a ransom note written in someone else's handwriting. They must have realised they could tell a person to write whatever they wanted if they told them they could analyse their personality with it. If this is true, I would love to meet the guy who decided to charge for the service.

But here's what makes me think it's a crank: I'm cross-dominant, meaning I can write perfectly well with both hands. When I was in high school, I broke a bone in my right hand. I tripped over and instinctively put my hand out to protect my face, cracking it on a nearby doorframe. What was funny was that the particular fracture I had is called a 'Pugilist's Fracture' on the basis that it is almost never caused by anything other than punching. When I told my friends, they were convinced that I was lying about the tripping and that I had in fact raged out and punched a wall. I tried to deny this, but then realised their story made me sound a lot cooler. 

"Yeah, the x-rays were expensive. Nothing compared to how much it's going to cost to fix the wall, let me tell you." 

Regardless of how it happened, I had to study with a broken right hand. Out of sheer frustration, I learned how to write with my left and as a result I can now write with either. The thing is that I have different handwriting for each hand. I don't know if this is common among people who are ambidextrous or cross-dominant, but this is the case for me. And I'm not sure what this means from a handwriting analysis point of view*. 

Here's what I want to do: Tell a graphologist that I have a couple of friends who want their handwriting analysed. I will say that because I don't want them to get any visual clues about them, I am handing in the samples on their behalf. I will give them one sample from my right hand and one from my left hand.

Then, then we will see. I would be very surprised if the results came back with 'These two people are so similar they could be the same person'. And I know some smartarse would try to tell me that maybe it's just because I have split personality disorder or something. For your information, hypothetical smartarse, it is a common theory among psychologists that split personality disorder isn't real at all, that it's usually just clinically induced in people who have narcissistic or histrionic personality disorder. In other words, people who have a chronic need to be the centre of attention so bad that they start making up new personalities.

I may actually try this little experiment. There seem to be a bunch of graphology sites offering free analysis, so maybe I will try it out.

-Smackie Onassis

*Although I do know what it means for an instant alibi if I ever found myself a suspect in a case where handwriting is being used for evidence. Don't think I haven't thought about that.

The Best Shop That No Longer Exists

I did another shift at the op-shop yesterday. It's great because volunteering means I get excellent things even cheaper than I normally would. Two sweet rockabilly dresses and a great jacket for $20 is the sort of charity work I can get behind. Yesterday I didn't find as much funny stuff as last time (although there was a pair of pants with a built in bumbag, for people who don't even want the option of not looking like an idiot), but it did remind me a lot of when I worked at the clothes shop back in Newcastle. I mentioned it briefly in my entry about insane role models, but that brief couple of paragraphs doesn't really do justice to how amazing a job it was.

As I mentioned, the shop's owner hired me pretty much out of the blue, on the basis that I came into his shop sometimes and he thought I was cool. For the sake of a joke, we will call him Bernard. When I started working for Bernard it was just a shift every now and then when he wanted to go do something else. When he realised that I was able to turn up for shifts at short notice (I lived around the corner) and that I had a knack for convincing people to buy things, he started giving me shifts all the time. He was dramatically underpaying me - we both knew it. I didn't care. It was a cushy job and he was a funny guy, so I never pushed the issue. I got to dress how I wanted, read on the job and play my own music. I viewed it as a bonus that I was even getting paid at all.

It was a small shop, with a lot of really unique stuff. Barramundi skin boots, polka-dot tops with suit-style tails, you name it. Because there was a lot of stuff that you wouldn't find anywhere else, people were always very disappointed when I didn't have their size.

"Can you check out the back?" was the most common question I would hear. I would agree to have a look, but it was almost always to humour them. Admittedly, the shop did look like it had a back room. It didn't though. There was a little corridor behind the till, but it didn't go anywhere. Customers, however, didn't know that. Whenever someone asked me to have a look for something out the back, I would just go and stand in the corridor. The whole thing was out of view of the shop, so to the customer it would look like I was disappearing into a vast, stock-filled area. In reality, I would be half-heartedly flipping through the one rack of clothes that we had there. I would open the little bar fridge, the only other thing that was hidden in the corridor, and see what Bernard had in stock. For the record, I never saw anything other than wine and random condiments in that fridge. There might have been half a kebab for a while, I'm not really sure. You can see why I gave my boss the name Bernard. I always pictured him telling a customer that he was going to look out the back for something, only to pour a drink and laugh to himself. 

We used to spend a lot of time laughing at our customers. While there were some great items in the shop, there were also some seriously awful ones. I remember coming in one morning to be shown the latest item of stock. It was a handbag, designed for carrying around a tiny dog. We had hysterics, joking about the kind of person who would buy that. Later that afternoon, I checked in with him on my way home.

"Did anybody buy the dog purse?" I asked. He looked at me with the utmost seriousness.

"A woman has gone to buy a dog so she can use that bag."

I kid you not. I only wish that I could have seen that unfold with my own eyes.

The thing about Bernard was that I could never quite predict what he was going to say. He never felt the need to give his conversations any kind of prior context. Instead, he would jump right to the point. I remember one morning, I came in to open up the shop.

"Do you like dead animals?" he asked me, straight up. I was a bit taken aback. I figured that this was some kind of pop culture reference that I wasn't getting, a band that I should be familiar with but wasn't because I didn't listen to the radio.

"Um..." I stuttered, thinking fast about how to bluff my way through this situation. Luckily, he didn't seem to expect a reply, leading me to a locked cupboard at the back of the shop. He opened it and as it turned out, he meant dead animals in the most literal possible sense. It was a mink stole, the kind with the stuffed head and feet still attached.

"Someone donated it to the shop," he explained, "I'm not sure what to do with it."

I'm not sure what ended up happening to it - it was never put on display. I'm honestly not sure if he was actually against fur or whether he was aware that a lot of his customers were the type of people I call "corporate hippies", the type who are happy to drive an expensive 4WD halfway across the country to attend an anti-coal protest. Although, just because it was never on display doesn't mean it was never sold. He often brought special items out of that cupboard for certain customers and I didn't see it again after that.

Hey. Hey you guys. Maybe it was STOLEn. B-because it's a stole? Guys?

Guys?

-Smackie Onassis

A Turnipseed by any other name would probably have a more promising rap career

The other day I found myself reminiscing about one of my favourite shows from when I was a kid. It was an American show called Ghostwriter, and it was about a bunch of inner-city kids who solved mysteries with the aid of a ghost who could only communicate through writing. I remembered it because I was reading about the parts of the brain for my studies and it reminded me of a rap they did on the subject to help one of the kids pass a test.

I checked out the wikipedia page for this show and it was even better than I remembered. The ghost could even time travel. Apparently there was also an episode where it travelled through the internet, which I thought was pretty special for the early 1990s. But the best thing I found out about this show was the story of one of the main actors. A young African-American guy by the truly wonderful name of Sheldon Turnipseed. 

He received a lot of accolades for his work on the show, before going on to pursue a career in rap. From what I saw, it didn't look like he'd been very successful and last year changed his name to Tyrone Gabriel. Which means that for as long as 15 years, there was a rapper going around using the name Sheldon Turnipseed. It made my day.

I've always had an interest in funny names, ever since my father told me about a women he knew by the name of Olive Pitt (she'd married into that one). When I lived in Newcastle my favourite part of the local paper was the birth notices. I would read through them every morning, purely to laugh at the awful things people were naming their children. The only one I really remember (because it was the best one I had ever seen) was a baby boy. For the first name they'd given him something I can't quite remember, something along the lines of Tiger. But the middle name I remember with crystal clarity because it was J7. The letter J, the numeral 7. Nothing else. As if they were in the middle of a game of Battleships and couldn't be bothered stopping to think of a middle name. You may think that surely that's a typo, but it is unfortunately not. My mother worked in paediatrics at the local hospital and she knew that the baby names were the one thing that paper actually seemed to double check.

The best one my mother told me about was one that seemed to get pretty widely circulated afterwards. This was the kid whose parents decided to name him/her Abcde, pronounced 'Absidee'. A lot of people have heard this one, although most seem to discount it as urban legend. Well, I can tell you right now kids, that one is for real because my own mother has seen the birth certificate.

As for others that I knew about in Newcastle, there was certainly no shortage of those. I remember a girl at my primary school who was named Cola, only it was spelled 'Koelah'. I remember that vividly, because there was another girl at the school whose last name was Beveridge and I always secretly hoped that family would adopt her.

There was a rumour when I was in high school of a girl at a neighbouring school whose name was apparently 'Shagina Lamb'. I always dismissed this as a myth fueled by high school rivalry but having thought about it a bit more, it would honestly not surprise me. These days, I could not say I would be surprised if a couple named their daughter solely for a cruel joke. Horrified, sure, but not surprised. 

There was another great one that I never verified. I heard about it from my boyfriend at the time, who apparently had some connection with the family. They had recently had a new baby and were introducing the child to their friends.

"Carosenee?" their friends repeated, "That's a nice sounding name, where does it come from?"

"We saw it on a tin in the garage," they replied casually.

It was then that everybody figured out that while they were pronouncing it 'Carosenee', they had actually named their child Kerosene. That's not begging for your child to grow up to be an arsonist, not at all.

-Smackie Onassis

Newcastle: Keepin' it Classy

I don't know if you saw the article, but apparently my hometown is now some kind of STI capital of Australia. Before commenting, I will be quick to say that this has happened since I left the town.

But I bet I know what has caused this sudden spike in infections. And I could track it down to a little place usually called 'Number Five Union Street'. Number Five was a strip club. I'm not sure if it was the only strip joint in Newcastle when I lived there, but to be honest I can't imagine why anyone in their right mind would go there if they'd had any other options. 

Number Five wasn't the actual name of the place. It didn't really have a name, just the letters XXX painted above the door. As a result, people started referring to it by its address. I never went there myself, but I have heard enough stories to know how seedy it was. When I was in high school it was something of a rite of passage for boys who had recently turned 18 to have their first stripping experience at Number Five. I've always thought that African tribes must feel pretty ripped off that their rites of passage consist of painstaking feats of strength, wrestling lions and all that, when their Western equivalents get to do shots off naked women and call themselves men. But in the case of this particular rite, I don't think the comparison to lion wrestling is that much of a stretch.

As I mentioned, Number Five is pretty much just a door in the side of a wall. Inside it doesn't get any better. A dimly lit room awaits you, with a circle of plastic lawn chairs. The women come out and from the stories I have heard, these are not the kind of strippers you want making any large degree of physical contact with you. Yellow teeth, needle tracks, stretch marks. Exactly what you'd expect from the surrounds. Apparently they're aggressive too. A guy I went to high school with told me about how one of them decided to give him a lapdance against his will. He ended up fending her off with one of the chairs. Like a lion tamer.

I do want to be clear that I have nothing against strip clubs in general. If that's what people want to do then I don't see a problem, provided people act responsibly. However, if you live in a town where reported incidences of gonorrhea have quadrupled in the past year, maybe these are the things you should be looking into.

-Smackie Onassis

Why I Can No Longer Listen To Love Shack

People are always surprised when I tell them I can't listen to 'Love Shack' by the B-52's. They'll spit back at me that I should like it, that they would have expected better from me. I always find myself explaining that it's not that I don't like the song. It's a good song. It's just that I physically can't bear to listen to it, due to an unfortunate case of extreme overexposure.

It was a birthday party, not so dissimilar to every other birthday party I went to in high school. All you really needed was a backyard, a barbeque and a few beers handy. If only the hosts of this particular party had kept to that tried and tested formula, I would have no need to write this explanation. But somewhere in the planning stages of this particular event, someone had uttered the immortal words:

"Hey! Why don't we hire a jukebox?"

Apparently everybody else thought this was just a top notch idea. As a result the party's soundtrack would be chosen for the people, by the people. It was all very democratic. Unfortunately, it is a scientifically proven fact that democracy doesn't work if "the people" consists entirely of drunk sixteen year olds.

It was still daylight when the juke was turned on. Those of us who were unfashionably early started tapping our feet to the B-52's most popular jukebox hit, Love Shack. I joined in. I probably even sang along. As I said, it's a good song and at that point I had no particular problem with it.

Then the second song came on. Again, we tapped our feet to Love Shack. After all, hearing the same song twice can be a good thing. Just ask Sublime or the Reel Big Fish*. But the third song was also Love Shack. And the fourth. And the fifth. I was starting to see a pattern and I didn't like the results it forecast.

Apparently some class clown thought this was pretty funny. That, or one of my friends really honestly likes that song to the point where it could be classified as a mental disorder. The song played over and over, more or less constantly for the entire duration of the party. Just thinking about it sends a small shiver down my spine.

I can remember the relief I felt when the jukebox was finally turned off for everybody to sing Happy Birthday. It washed over me like a hot shower. Or a shot of heroin. The song had stopped AND there was cake. Admittedly I've never done heroin and can't say for sure, but I imagine that's basically what it's like.

But then, out of the blissful silence came a sound I would have been happy to never hear again.

"If you see a faded sign at the side of the road that says 15 miles to the looooooove shack!"

The last thing I remember is the anguished cry that escaped from my mouth. I'm not saying that I went briefly insane and murdered everyone within a 10km radius. I'm just saying that I don't think a jury could have found me guilty if I had.

Admittedly, people I went to school with will tell you that I had a jukebox at my own 18th. But that was actually hired against my will, by my parents. Considering that I had already made a lengthy playlist for the party on the family computer, I'm guessing they realised that I was planning on playing music that no-one other than myself and a scattered few of my music nerd friends would enjoy and intervened accordingly. I was a bit disappointed, but the party was probably better for the easily recognisable pop hits.

Love Shack, however, was banned.

-Smackie Onassis

*For the few people who will get this reference, it is worth it.

So What Exactly Happened Yesterday?

Yesterday, as I'm sure you can infer, was a pretty crazy day.

See, there was a political party that was going to be interviewed in our house. I don't want to mention any specifics, because it is all kinds of topical at the moment and I don't want any backlash of any kind. 

I was on the couch, chatting to the group about the state of journalism in Australia, tapping away on my laptop, when the 'reporter' bounds into the room. What none of us knew was that this particular publication decided to send a transvestite comedian to do their political commentary. He opened the door, film already rolling. He was wearing torn fishnets, hot pants with his name sequined on the arse and eye make-up that would have embarrassed Eddie Izzard. He thrust the microphone into the face of the candidates, who each introduced themselves by their name and electorate. He then reached me, sitting in the corner wearing an indie band shirt and shorts. I had not realised there was going to be a camera, so I can only imagine what my hair looked like. I stuttered out that I just lived here and he moved on. He didn't seem as interested in getting a proper political interview as he was interested in getting footage of himself singing Blondie with a strange, slightly Germanic accent ("One Way Or Anuzzah"). But I guess you have to expect that.

It was pretty insane. I said afterwards that I would say that it was one of the most bizarre things that has happened to me but it's not. It really isn't. Life is too bizarre. I remember, one time, I took LSD. And it kind of worried me. Not because I had a bad trip or anything, but because... nothing happened. I watched all the other people who had taken the same stuff get all silly and fall over and the like, and I was looking around going 'Yep, this is life as I've always known it alright'. The obvious answer is that my life has actually been one long, drawn-out acid trip. Which, to be honest, wouldn't surprise me THAT much.

But the whole transvestite-political-reporter thing was only part of what happened yesterday. After everything had quietened down, I trundled off down the road to have coffee with a friend of mine. I can't think of a codename that could possibly sum up this guy, so for the time being we will just call him Aristotle. I choose this name because while adventuring in Europe, he made one of those life-changing decisions. He decided that studying to be an accountant was lamesauce and is now planning on doing an honours degree in philosophy. He is going to be a proper philosopher. As you may know, Vegatrain is also studying philosophy. My cousin also did a degree in the subject, although I haven't seen him in years so I'm not sure what he's up to these days. For the record, the last time I saw him he was touring the world as the lanky white keyboard player in a reggae band where every other member was actually from the Caribbean. I saw them play once and thought it was fantastic.

But I was thinking about Aristotle being a full-time philosopher and I thought 'Would I hire him?'. Obviously, the answer was yes. These days everybody has a psychologist, right? It's nice to have somewhere to go to work out your emotional issues with someone who (hypothetically) knows what they are talking about. I would put this forward - why not hire a philosopher to work out your more spiritual issues? I would say that there are a lot of people who would like a bit of philosophical guidance every now and then. I am totally going to set up that business. Philosophers-for-hire. Genius.

Aristotle had some excellent stories for me. First of all, a bit of backstory. Aristotle was a friend of mine from high school. That is, until he moved to Adelaide at the end of year ten. By a beautiful coincidence, he apparently ended up at the same high school as Meattrain (whom I would not meet for many years). He was telling me about this school yesterday. Apparently they didn't offer German as a subject, which was a pain in his butt because it was a subject he very much wanted to pursue. They told him that he could still do it but he would have to go to another school campus for his lessons. As it played out, he was sent to an all girl's school for those lessons. He said it was kinda crazy, that all he needed to do was walk across the quad and he would get jeers and wolf-whistles from the (I imagine) sex-starved girls. I asked him if he realised he was actually living every teenage boy's biggest fantasy and he sort of shrugged. Because he's chill like that.

He told me a lot about his time overseas (mainly in Germany), including recommending me some really cool 1960's Estonian rock, but he also had probably the most awkward break-up story I have ever heard. Aristotle had a girlfriend before going overseas. She was a lovely girl, and she was going abroad at the same time, to a different country. They decided to "sort of" break-up but were still in contact. Then, it came time for this girl to fly across Europe to visit my friend. The only problem was, when she arrived she informed him that she was now in love with some guy from Melbourne that she had met in Switzerland. When he told me this, Aristotle cocked his head in a very understated way and told me that he probably would have preferred her to not come at all, which I think is putting it lightly. Especially considering how much worse it gets. She arrived, told him she'd met someone else. Unfortunately, Aristotle was her accommodation in Germany, so they still had to spend the night together. I can only imagine how awkward that would have been. Oh also, she gave him some kind of horrible illness. She herself had only had it mildly but apparently she still managed to pass it on during the course of the break-up, resulting in Aristotle spending the next 24 hours violently expelling everything he had ever eaten. Poor guy.

-Smackie Onassis