Stories

Debate over defining the past perfect tense turned nasty after the second bottle of whiskey.About three nights a week my buddy Yutaka and and I knock off from work about the same time. Normally around 9.30pm we cut through a nest of bicycles and swarm of people to a supermarket, buy some booze and then cut back to a tiny park in the middle of the city.

There's our work building at our back and a 25 storey mother to our front, the subway station is right next to this paved square with a giant beech tree. We try to find a bit of real estate in the square that is not so reeking of salaryman piss, and sit and drink and talk for an hour or so before getting on the train home. It's mental health time.

The other night we invited a student of ours to come, and he brought his guns wrapped in towels. Hiroyuki is a very shy but very cool guy. His hobbies include drifting, in the Tokyo Drift sense ie fast cars and motorbikes, and, aparently, air guns.

Just a second, brother. I really, really need that five cents.Australia's newspapers, and I'm looking at you Fairfax, have turned to shit. The SMH should rename itself New Weekly. A breath of fresh air from the spead cheeks of Paris Hilton and Britney Spears and some obscure sex death on the other side of the planet was a piece neatly explaining the declining birth rate: men are masturbating too often and too vigorously.

The premise was that with the rise of internet porn, men are simply jacking off too much and with 'too tight a grip', and when it came to actual sex the vagina could not bring a man to orgasm because it was not like the hand, and that many men had to pull out and 'finish themselves off' manually, and I quote.

Man, has that journalist had some bad sex recently. Vagina. Hand. Vagina. Hand. Shit, I can't figure this out.

Tonight's Top Ten!Ok so we're now a month into Jan08 so it's time to talk about the best songs of 2007. This is less about mine but just a spot were we can make our own lists of our fav songs from the past year.

10. Rihanna - Umbrella

So this is probably an unpopular move listing this on the site, especially given the topic, but for whatever reason I like this song. Albeit I did edit Jay-Z out of the version I have. It's incredibly catchy, if you deny that there's something wrong with you. There's something about Rihanna though that I like, this is not my sort of music at all but I’m not going to deny myself listening to a song that I like because it doesn't fit in with my regular programming. Rihanna gets a lot of heat from people, especially about the size of her forehead, but like a friend of mine says, turn it into a positive - more space to aim at!

Our keys travel through a temporal universe before returning the mother-in-law's bag 24 hours later.Getting to Miyako Jima, a tiny island in Okinawa prefecture a skip and a jump from Taiwan took a deal of scrimping and saving. For months I forwent foi gras and Bollinger and had beer instead, the coffers filled and the wife booked a dealio ticket with car and hotel for what we could afford.

For months Shizuka plotted and planned; maps were examined and hotels compared to the point where I was tearing my hair out. Just choose one! I basically yelled. I wanted to go somewhere quiet without too many tourists that was near the beach and where a baby could paddle.

Then Shizuka's mum said she wanted to come.

Which was awesome, because she is an extremely enthusiastic, happy and cheerful person with a violent temper, just like my wife. They do not cope well with small inconveniences or disappointments. Also, while having the in-law along for the ride meant losing tropical holiday sex, all our meals were paid for. I don't know whether this is good or bad. I think bad. I'm not such a huge fan of food.

I'm not a violent man, but if I'd had a sniper's rifle this morning, or even just an axe, there would be bodies littering the streets.

I refer to the megawanker who parked his four-wheel drive at the end of the crescent opposite and over the fence from my study this morning. Megawanker, whose face I never saw, was picking up several kiddywinks -- it must be school holidays because the shrieking brats are everywhere -- and, judging by the mountain bikes strapped to the back of the 4WD, was taking them on a cycling holiday. So far so good. As a matter of principle, I do object to 4WDs because they're environment-degrading, motorist-killing, trophy vehicles for people who have oversized bank accounts and undersized social conscience, not to mention microscopic genitalia. But I haven't yet reached the point where I would kill someone for owning one.

However, I would happily exterminate someone who parked their 4WD outside a house and sat there beeping the horn on and off for 10 motherfucking minutes. I'm gonna make this crystal-clear so that even the mentally deficient can understand: instead of beeping your horn, GET OUT OF THE FUCKING VEHICLE, COCKLORD.

Typing this, I'm starting to get angry all over again.

But honestly, am I wrong? If you drove up to the Smedley-Higginses' house to pick up little Meredith -- to take her on a holiday jaunt with your precocious little Madiison -- would you sit in your goddamn urban-assault vehicle beeping the horn to summon Meredith, or her parents, or her brother, or a delicious iced-tea before departure, or for the glory of drawing everyone's attention to your sleek black shiny planet-killing vehicle, or for the lordly pleasure of watching people scurry back and forth between the house and your semi-trailer-sized car?

Did eight years at Chino for exposing himself to an eight-year-old. Had to go door to door telling everyone he was a pederast.Everywhere you go on the internet there are ads for dating and social networking sites. Some have pictures of attractive ladies with wide piano-key smiles and captions informing you that there are literally thousands of others like her impatiently sitting by their computers, drumming their fingers and waiting for you to chat to them. How it is possible to chat to '1000s of sexy women' at one time I don't know. I suspect there would be a lot of Control C, Control V action involved. Also I want to state for the record I fucking hate the word 'chat' almost as much as I hate the word 'peeps', which is a lot. Who the fuck 'chats'? Chat. 'Chatting'. Fucking hell.

Once or twice I have clicked on an ad just to see what the conditions are like on the meat market these days and what sort of outrageous lies are being told by ugly people in the hopes of striking up a conversation with an old man who has pasted a picture of a young woman into their profile. I only have a very short attention span and have never got past the reams of forms demanding email addresses and dates of birth and so on that you need to complete before being ushered into the members area of these kinds of sites, to browse the good stuff at leisure. This said, I have been exposed to enough to become sufficiently exasperated to make this long, rambling and pointless post about social networking sites.

The Croation high-dive judge brought Quan Ling Bo's dreams of Olympic Gold crashing down.Unfortunately, I'm not, and have to settle for the infinitely less glamourous and infinitely more humiliating 'alcoholic'. Still, at least I didn't launch into an anti-semetic tirade at any police officers and be forced to deliver a televised apology about my 'disease'.

Yes, ladies and germs, the Baron set sail for home shores, blissfully unaware of the planned family intervention awaiting him. There was wailing, some teeth knashing, and then, in the cold light of day, I had to accept the booze had overtaken my life and was ruining pretty much every relationship I had. Which came as a bit of a surprise, as I wasn't even aware anything was the matter.

The Mc.... As some of you may or may not be aware, McDonald's is running a competition to name it's newest burger creation.

I noticed this the other day on a lunch break from work. It's rare that I will wander into a McDonald's but when you're on a later shift all the other food places in walking distance seem to shut up shop around 1pm, so if you happen to have a lunch break at 3pm Maccas is about your best bet.

Right well let me start off by saying that this is a real book. A work friend of mine who is studying at uni happened to find it in the library. Now this is a big post (not suitable for those 56k users) but I think you'll find it most instructive. I don't think I even need to add commentry to this, it just speaks for itself so please, enjoy: