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

Live Update

Ok, I was in the middle of writing an entry, but now there is a political party being interviewed by a drag queen in the middle of my living room.

What.

Could You Put A Name To Someone Else's Sigh?

Apparently, I am a pretty memorable person. It was a large incentive to move out of my hometown when people kept coming up to me in the pub and saying 'Hey! Remember me?' and I would have to try and pretend that I had the slightest clue who they were. The most memorable of these incidents occurred when a young man I didn't recognise came up to me out of the blue. This is what I remember of the conversation that ensued:

Boy: Hey! Remember me? 

Me: Um... well...

Boy: You kicked me in the balls once!

Me: I don't remember that, sorry. Are you sure you have the right person?

Boy: Sarah, right?

Me: Yes. 

Boy: Yeah, you kicked me in the balls when we were fourteen or something. It's okay, I deserved it.

Me: Oh. What do you do these days?

Boy: I'm a nude model.

Me: Oh.

After some prompting, I did remember that kid. I have no recollection of the ball kicking incident though, but apparently I was doing it on behalf of a friend of mine whom he had wronged in some way. I can only hope that the nude modeling wasn't connected.

But people do seem to remember me a lot better than I remember them. There was a particular incident one Valentine's Day a couple of years ago. I had just come out of a long-term relationship and I was planning on doing the whole single girl out on the town thing. Unfortunately, it was a Thursday. Fortunately, it was Newcastle, where every night is an acceptable drinking night. We started off at a club near my apartment which unfortunately didn't have a lot going for it. I was approached by someone though. An innocent looking red-haired guy who told me he knew me. I thought he had me mistaken for someone else, but he insisted that I'd been at the same party as him. When he mentioned the name of the party's host I was surprised that it had indeed been a party I'd attended. I did think it a tad weird, considering that I don't really remember talking to him that much and also for the fact that the party in question had been held halfway through the previous year. I remember thinking it sweet that he remembered me. On his insistence, I gave him my number. His name, he said, was Maxxie.

Later that night I did end up macking on a dreadlocked French backpacker, but it was Maxxie who called me the next day. He seemed nice so I went out to lunch with him. Unfortunately, after that day he very gradually revealed himself as some degree of mentally unstable. His name wasn't actually Max, or anything that could feasibly be shortened to it. That's just what he called himself. Whenever I asked him how he'd arrived at that nickname he simply said that it was just what people called him, or made a joke about the size of his penis. Well, I say joke. To be honest, I'm not sure that he wasn't telling the truth about why he'd appointed himself 'Maxxie'. He did love his penis.

Probably the most blatantly abnormal behaviour Maxxie exhibited during the time we were going out was his "showering habit". I am really not sure how to describe this. I didn't realise it until after I had made the decision to stop seeing him. See, looking back, Maxxie had a sort of strange thing in that he would not have sex with me without washing me first. And when I say washing me, I mean, washing my... lady parts. Thoroughly. With soap. 

When I tell that story, most people have the same reaction, a resounding 'How could you possibly not notice that??'. In my defense, I knew he was doing it, I just didn't realise it was every time. At first I thought it was some weird attempt at foreplay. But at some point I looked back and realised that he had done it every single time we'd had sex.

That wasn't his only little 'quirk'. He had this strange habit of insisting I was Italian, something I really couldn't get my head around. I tried explaining to him that despite my mediterranean features my family tree did not contain a single Italian. But then we would be out and something like this would happen:

Max: Gee, it's cold out here

Me: I feel fine.

Max: Ha, you Italian girls, you don't feel the cold.

Me: I'm not Ital-

Max: Ha, you Italian girls. I don't know.

Among the other things he did were randomly accusing me of being on heroin (more than once) and referring to his ex-girlfriend as his girlfriend, despite the fact that he hadn't seen her in a long time and had been going out with me for a couple of months. Don't get me wrong: he was nice enough. I knew him well enough to know that he had a heart of gold, or at the very least rose quartz. It's just that the crazy kind of overpowered that.

I tried to break up with him so many times, but the boy was very persistant. I would explain to him that I didn't think we should see each other anymore and he would agree to those terms. Then, a few weeks later, I would receive a text from him asking me what I wanted to do that night. At first I thought he was trying to be friends, so I would go see him. But then he would sort of expect us to act like a couple. As if the whole break up had never happened.

I haven't seen or heard from him in some time now. I guess he finally got the picture. I guess moving to the other side of the country probably helped a bit with that. 

-Smackie Onassis

The Neglected Sister Blog of Thinly Veiled Threats

On my walk today, I listened to one of my favourite Canadian indie-rock outfits, Mother Mother. I really like this band, you guys. They only have two albums out at the moment, but I have listened to both of them way too much. I came home with the need to tell the world about how seriously great they are. I was going to do a post in here, but then I remembered the much neglected music blog that Vegatrain and I started together a while back. There is not much on it as yet, but it does now contain my lengthy rant about how much I love Mother Mother.

Hopefully I will be adding to it a bit more often. I have been feeling a bit useless recently and writing helps. Especially when I get to rant on about music, which I do most of the time anyway.

A New Cult

Check it. Also: yes, the name of the blog is a Belle and Sebastian reference.

-Smackie Onassis

A Whole Damn Article Of Name-Dropping

I have noticed over my time on facebook that there are a bunch of very popular groups and applications dedicated to the whole belief that only a few people stand between you and the cream of the celebrity crop. It's a nice idea, the whole "six degrees of separation" thing, but I've never once had one of those applications do anything other than ask me for my personal details. However, I woke up yesterday feeling like balls. Considering that doing anything useful was not high on my priorities, I sat down to work out some of my own celebrity connections.

The first one was pretty easy. You all know Jason Lee, right? From the Kevin Smith films, and the show 'My Name Is Earl'? Well guess what, he knocked up a girl I went to school with. She was in my brother's year so I didn't know her well personally, but I remember her alright. Let's just say: she had a reputation for being a total slut. And I'm not one to believe every high school rumour that I ever heard but the fact that she now has a son named 'Pilot Inspektor', fathered by a celebrity scientologist, is pretty damning evidence. The one thing I remember most vividly about this girl was her yearbook quote, because I laughed at it quite hard. I don't remember the beginning of it but the last sentence was something along the lines of "My favourite things are unicorns and my new leather jacket". I thought it was hilarious, especially considering that it was almost definitely not a joke.

So that gets me to Jason Lee. But that's too easy - I don't want to stop there. I could always just add one more connection and get to Kevin Smith. That's a pretty good one. But then I thought - Jason Lee is a scientologist. Beck, also a scientologist. I bet all celebrity scientologists at least have each other's phone numbers. They probably receive a print-out of them when they join, under the headline "Your New Family". So there you have it, a somewhat tenuous connection to Beck.

Then I thought, well, who is someone I would really want to meet? Stephen Fry was a name that came to mind pretty quickly. See, I have these "awesome fantasies". Not fantasies that are awesome, but fantasies in which I am being just that awesome. I don't really have sex fantasies like most people seem to, so I guess I have to replace that void with something. Anyway, one of my favourites is the fantasy in which I high five Stephen Fry on TV*. As a result, I am the coolest kid on the block forever and ever.

But how do I get to Stephen Fry? It was a lot easier than expected. You see, I remembered that my aunt knows Tony Robinson aka Baldrick from Blackadder. She has done archeological research with him, which you would know that he does if you have seen the show Time Team. That's not even what she does for a living, either, it's just a hobby. She actually does something along the lines of research in the field of veterinary science. But that just means that she is more successful in her hobby than most people are in their actual careers. Something of a humbling thought, that. I remember once a neighbour of hers found a skeleton in their backyard and after confirming that it was old enough to be a historical artifact rather than a gruesome murder, the neighbour simply palmed it off to my aunt. Who kept it under her bed for a ridiculously long time until she got around to dealing with it. I'm not sure if she WANTED to get haunted, but that seems like a pretty good way of going about it.

Anyway, you can see where the connection goes from there. Baldrick -> Stephen Fry. Done and done.

What about any others? I must have some from the old band days. 

I actually managed to (very tentatively) connect myself to Damon Albarn. When I was first in talks to join the band, they had just finished the Australian leg of a tour supporting the Specials, and were about to embark on the NZ part of the tour. As I have mentioned, I was invited on this leg of the tour but turned it down. Some people might get a bit confused that I turned down the opportunity to tour with the motherfucking Specials, but it was for three reasons:

1. I didn't know any of the songs, didn't want to embarrass myself in front of the Specials.
2. They hadn't kicked out their current sax player at the time, and I can't think of anything more awkward than touring with the dude I was replacing, who didn't even know he was being replaced at that point.
3. I was in the middle of a uni semester and couldn't really leave the country at short notice. 

But considering I did go on to be in that band for several years, I still count that as a connection to the Specials. From there, you have a list of all the artists ever connected to the Specials. I chose Damon Albarn, who apparently did something with them at Glastonbury one year. The band I was in also gave me a connection to the Whitlams, as our producer had worked with them. Also, the drummer (the only member of the band I still contact every now and again) knew Terepai Richmond and actually had drum lessons from him. I tried to see if I could get any more impressive connections via Tim Freedman, but just try googling "Tim Freedman's famous friends". Google just stops and stares at you. The only result is the word "Really?".

There were a few more that I'd worked out, but for what it is (an exercise in wishful thinking with zero practical applications) this entry is already way too long. Also: it is too easy to connect oneself with any Australian personality. I got to Paul McDermott, John Safran, Daniel Johns (for this one just put: I am from Newcastle) and John Laws with just two connections each. And that's not bragging, I am just saying that our population is so small I bet anybody could do it. 

-Smackie Onassis

*Other "awesome fantasies" include Tony Martin asking me to do a cult radio show with him a la 'Get This' and being the personal guest of Bill Bailey at the Glastonbury Festival.