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Yep, it’s three days til Christmas and yours truly got a sunburn while traipsing about on the beach today. I’m sure you’re all radiating sympathy… NOT. 🙂

Anyhoo, on Thursday the Snook and I set off for an eight-hour train journey up the coast to his parents’ place. Total nightmare. We arrived at Sydney Central Station to discover that the signalmen had called a random strike that morning and that every departure was currently suspended. So we waited. Miraculously, the strike ended rather quickly and we were only twenty minutes behind schedule. Naively, I thought that was the end of our troubles. Then we boarded our carriage and I discovered that the Australian equivalent of the Herdmans (remember them?) were sitting behind us. A few hours later I sat there gritting my teeth as three half-naked, barefoot, be-mulleted little boys flung themselves from one end of the carriage to the other. They discovered that the railroad magazines would slide on the carpet and amused themselves greatly by “skateboarding” up and down the aisle. They staged ninja fights for our entertainment. They ripped the rubber armrests off the chairs and beat each other with them. I’m serious. And get this: at one point, their mother got up and moved to another carriage, instructing her kids to stay put! Other people were deserting us in droves as well. (Not to mention the fact that the air conditioning wasn’t working so well.) I’ve never been so glad to leave a place in my life. I actually muttered “Thank GOD” as we stepped out onto Eungai platform. Arrrgggh. Luckily Ma Snookums is giving us a lift back to down. I couldn’t bear that trip again.

But anyway, here we are in the country, enjoying the heat and the ocean. I believe the plans for Christmas Day involve a picnic somewhere deep in the bush. Should be fun. Oh, and I haven’t met any leeches this time, thankfully. 🙂

HAVE A GREAT CHRISTMAS, EVERYBODY!

Over the past year I’ve been noticing a new advertising trend. Let’s see if you can spot it:

1. In a UK Ferraro Rocher commercial, a man at a swanky dinner party asks his wife to go get the chocolates from the kitchen. She goes in but wants to keep all the chocs for herself, so she returns with coffee, and then cognac, and her husband gets more and more exasperated, and he’s like, “The chocolates!” And she’s all, “Okaaaay.” And she brings them out and everybody digs in and she’s all upset and like, “Don’t eat them all! Teehee!”
2. In an Australian “Persuasions” commercial, we see a young woman in close-up reluctantly accepting one of the chocolates. She eats it and it’s delicious. “Oh thank you!” she says. “Another one? Oh, I couldn’t. Well… okay!” And the camera’s slowly pulling out, and suddenly we see she’s standing in her living room alone talking to herself surrounded by dozens of candy wrappers on the floor.
3. In another Aussie commercial, this one for some gourmet chocolates, a little old lady comes to visit her friend. Her friend is happy to see that she’s carrying a big box of the chocolates. They have tea together, and the friend keeps reaching for the box, but the other old lady never offers it. Finally they say goodbye and the visitor leaves, still clutching her box of chocolates. She smiles as her friend looks disappointed in the background. The catchphrase: “Too good to share.”

Did you see the pattern? The one where we women are irrational, chocolate loving, childlike insane freaks? Don’t you find that a trifle insulting? The worst part is, every guy I’ve mentioned this to (mostly Snookums and his friends) are like: “Aren’t most women really like that?” Grrrr. It’s like there’s this regression, where we’re heading back to Freud’s vision of women as hysterical creatures of repression and hormones. I can’t even really explain how degrading I find that. Yeah, yeah, I know it’s just a few commercials. But it’s obviously infiltrating the psyches of a lot of guys who should know better.

Fifty-two things they do better in America. Not. The guy who wrote this is obviously a Brit whose only time in the U.S. has been on holiday. As someone who’s actually LIVED in both countries for a significant amount of time, here are some of my corrections:

2. Senior citizen reductions at cinemas and in restaurants from 60 years, “with ID” (ie driving licence). Huh? Every cinema I went to in the U.K. had an “OAP” (Old Age Pensioner) discount.

3. Free refills of coffee (without asking). The only places that happens are diners and Big Boys (i.e. places with really, really bad coffee). And personally, I hate when the waitress comes around and ruins the perfect ratio of milk and sugar I had painstakingly created, which was the only thing allowing me to drink the sludge in the first place.

4. Supermarket baggers – courteous youngsters who expertly pack your purchases at the checkout while you fumble with your wallet. I worked in a grocery store for four years. We’re not courteous, and we’re not experts. We’re high schoolers getting paid minimum wage. The only reason I didn’t squash your eggs was that I didn’t want to get yelled at.

8. “Less talk, more rock” on pop radio – ie 15-minute music blocks (no ads, no DJ chatter). Ha! Try driving to Chicago on a weekday morning. Turn the dial all you like; you won’t hear a damn bit of music unless it’s a commercial. And I hate that Mancow guy.

9. Overtaking on the left or right on the motorway. Only if you’re in the wrong lane, Pops. Get in the slow lane or you’ll cause an accident.

29. One dollar (70p) bills and 1c (0.7p) coins. Small denominations mean that shopkeepers can’t overcharge you by rounding up. Are you kidding? It was such a hassle when I went home to suddenly be given handfuls of dollar bills as change. I much prefer a pound. And hello? I had pennies in Britain. Pennies are the worst things ever. You can’t actually buy anything with them. All you can do is save them up and take them to the bank to change in, which banks are getting more and more reluctant to do (or the bastards make you put them in “rolls” when you know darn well that they’re just gonna weigh them anyway). Actually, I think I like the Australian system best. They have no pennies; everything is rounded up to the nearest nickel (which is only about two American cents, anyway). Small price to pay for the luxury of having less change to carry around.

30. High-school graduation, and regular class reunions. High school sucks. Graduation sucked. Nobody likes class reunions.

42. “Happy holidays!”, not “Merry Christmas!” at the festive season. TV stations say “Happy Holidays” because they don’t want to offend their audience. Everybody else who isn’t Jewish says “Merry Christmas”. You just do.

52. Timeouts in spectator sports like basketball (you have a chance to pee and not miss the highlights). Wrong. Timeouts are so the networks can make more money by shoving in commercials, you incontinent old man. Ever been to a real football game? TV timeouts are the most annoying thing to a real fan. Learn to hold it or buy a Tivo.

Wow. That’s my rant for the day.

Hee hee. King Kaufman puts that whole George O’Leary/Notre Dame debacle into hilarious perspective. Oh, and he invented plastic. 🙂

What corporate mascot are you? I regret that I am the Micro$oft Office Paperclip, and Snookums is Ronald McDonald. What a fine pair we are. (Link courtesy of John again, who has all the best links lately.)

Despite Divorce, Cruise Expects Warm Reception in Australia. I don’t think he should hold his breath. We’re all very pro-Nicole over here. The evening news showed her landing in Sydney to spend the holidays with her family. Nobody wants to applaud Cruise and his puffy-lipped trophy girlfriend.

Fun! Yesterday the Snook and I headed down to the Sydney Aquarium for some fish interaction. They’ve got these great walk-through oceanariums with all kinds of Australian sea life. The “Sharks and Rays” one was the absolute scariest. I kept flashing back to Jaws III. Ooh, and remember when I discovered that my ideal zoo date was a moon jellyfish? I finally saw some of them and I’m forced to agree. They’re pretty (at least when they’re in the water).

Have I mentioned that Sydney has both Taco Bell and Mountain Dew? Unfortunately there’s a trade-off though. I was riding the bus with Snookums the other day when I realized that something was missing. We’ve been through the central shopping district several times, and never have I seen that familiar blue sign. There’s no GAP! Where are we going to buy our pants now?

Here’s an essay about a 25-year-old who suddenly gets a new half-sibling. Yeah, I identified a little bit. “The mathematics of a post-nuclear family is a bit stunning. When my [brother] enters kindergarten I will be entering my 30s. When [he] goes to prom I’ll be a soccer mom. By the time [he] is legal to drink, I’ll probably just be coming out of rehab myself. When I’m 50, [he]’ll be 25, the age I was when [he] was born. We weren’t [siblings]; we were victims of circumstance.” (Link courtesy of John.)

London went on full terror alert today. “Anti-terrorist detectives fear that the capital could be the target for both Islamic extremists and renegade Irish terrorists trying to disrupt the peace process.” In other news halfway around the globe, it rained a little bit in Sydney this morning but was still warm enough to wear shorts, Australia hit 436 in the first innings at cricket, and my only worry leading up to the Christmas season is which beach to hit. Life is good.