As you are well aware, it is currently Springtime here in the Dandenongs.

Not just here, of course, but i can only speak for myself. “Write what you know,” so the great mantra in every bad/lazy creative writing manual goes. “That should leave you with a lot of free time,” rejoinders Dead Poet Howard Nemerov.

So, with so much free time on my hands, i thought i’d commiserate with you on the current fusillade of magpies raining down upon our heads.

Every year, about this time, the newspapers run cautionary tales about the magpies. Be on the look-out, they warn: watch the skies.

Cyclists take to wearing adorable adornments on their helmets. The latest fashion is to take two or three hundred ziplocks and festoon them echidna-like over the entire surface of the brainbucket.

Sophisticated.

Princess is a little terrified of the black and white ballistic brutes. This is particularly ironic considering the fact that she is a Collingwood supporter.

[Don't get me started on the draw, OK? Just don't.]

Thing is, but, i can bring some succour to those of you who are, like Princess, living in mortal fear of the sound of wings.

See, there’s actually only one swooping magpie in the whole of Melbourne.

The local paper ran a story on it, as did the City Little Paper and the City Big Paper.

All three articles were on the same magpie. This one here, in the picture.

I heard a story (not from the media, but from the real world) of a friend of a friend who was riding a bike when a magpie landed on their foolhardily-ziplock-free helmet, reached around, and pecked them on the cheek.

Not a sweet-and-friendly, i’m-home-from-the-shops-dear type of peck, but a get-away-from-my-nestlings, draw-blood type of peck.

Where was the attack, i asked, with my most sympathetic voice.

Over on Scoresby Road, came the reply.

That’s it. That’s the magpie.

So, if you don’t want to be magpecked, stay the golly away from Scoresby Road.

You have been warned: watch the skies, but only over Scoresby Road.

Yours reassuringly,
Gullybogan

[Gully, you're an idiot. There's about a million magpies out there, and the problem is so bad that there's now a Google map giving the sightings - Ed]

Tess has a computer of her own, which is good.

That way she’s far less likely to stumble upon my almost-complete collection of Downloaded Internet Kitten Pictures.

Her computer has windows in it, which allow her to see things. Like TV.

The bestest thing is that you (that is, she) can choose your (or, technically, her) computer to put TV shows into windows for you (i.e. her).

Which is ace.

Like, recently, Channel Pricks (pronounced “Seh VUN”) ran the last, final, that’s-fricken-it episodes of something called “Ugly Betty” at 6PM weeknights, instead of once a week at six-and-a-half PM on Tuesdays.

They did this the way that Channel Pricks does all its programming: at random, with no regard to the actual time intended, and without telling anybody.

I just happened to notice a story in the Intertube that mentioned that the Ugly Betty Finale was on the next night. Sadly, by then, it was too late for us to record the previous concluding eps, as our TARDIS is currently in for recalibration.

Happily, Tess, who had gone away on a mid-year-break-from-Uni, had left her windows pointed at Ugly Betty, wherever it turned up in the program guide.

Freaky.

Gullybogan: So, it can, like, just follow whatever series you want?

Clever Tess: Well, yeah. You just tell it to follow the series, and it, um, follows the series.

GB: Can it, like, follow actors, too? Like, if i wanted it to tape everything with, say, Sophie Monk in it, would it do that?

CT: Well, it would have to be in the EPG that she’s in the thing, but, yeah. It could do that.

GB: So, it could just go out into the television, and find me Sophie Monk things?

CT: Sure, if that was what you wanted…

GB: Squee! So, does it do keyword searches, then?

CT: Shit yeah. Look. [clicking of big blue buttons, demonstrating the keyword functionality]

GB: Cool. So, then, you could put in the word “nudity”, and it would tape everything on SBS ever with a nudity warning…

CT: [embarrassed silence]

GB: Or, say, um, “technology”…

It would be good if i had a window in my computer that showed me all the nudity on SBS, like, automatically. That would save me having to scan the Green Guide every Thursday and program the TVbot. I could just look in my windows, and there would be the nudity.

Automatic nudity: is there any better kind?

BTW: No. There isn’t.

Yours programmatically,
Gullybogan

Congratulations on your morale-boosting win over the Australian Government. You sure showed them!

Or us. I’m not sure of the exact details there.

You now have to pay far less for your rental of the steadily diminishing mineral resources of this nation. You must be pretty happy with that.

Seems like last time a bunch of miners had a major disagreement with the government over paying to dig up our resources and make themselves rich, there was some unpleasantness.

So well done.

And when you’re finished renting the mineral resources, you can just pop them back for the next person to use. So everyone’s a winner!

I now look forward to my opportunity to negotiate with the Gillard Caretaker Government over the tax that i’m prepared to pay for things.

I’m thinking “none”.

If she bridles over that, i’ll just let the media know that the big project i had planned for painting my studio may have to be shelved. Indefinitely. Losing Australia thousands of jobs and billions of dollars of income.

It’s good to have a bargaining chip like that up my sleeve. Thanks for the tip.

And it is important that i have a strategy for reducing the amount of tax i’m paying.

After all, i hear that the government is now 1.5 billion dollars out of pocket, due to your heroic victory.

So i want them to be getting that $1,500,000,000 from some other suckers.

Not me.

That’s what we Aussies call “a fair go”.

Yours arrogantly,
Gullybogan

Dear Voter,

In case you didn’t see it, that was the message that Kevin Rudd sent to his many Twitter followers the day after his party dumped him as Prime Minister.

They dumped him due mainly to the fact that he was viewed as a toxic threat to their return to power for a second term, after the forthcoming election.

Mr Rudd was a bit of a one-man show. He had taken federalism to its natural and logical extension: autocracy.

Turned out people didn’t like that.

But you don’t need me to make tedious and a-week-too-late political analysis. So i’ll stop.

Interestingly, today the outgoing Victorian Premier, John Brumby, claimed that his lower than usual polling was due to the poll in question having been taken while Mr Rudd was still PM. Rudd was so toxic, Brumby asseverated, that he was damaging the entire Labor brand.

Yes, he said, “brand”.

“We’ve had some issues over the last month or two. They’ve been issues across Australia and they have affected the Labor brand and I think you’re seeing that reflected (in the poll),” he said.

We used to have political parties, now we have brands.

And that’s why i wanted to post about this. And now i’m finished.

BTW sorry i was gone for so long.

Oh, and you’ll be no doubt incredibly interested to learn that my own polling (that is, the stats for this blog) were barely affected by my not having posted a single word for two and a half months.

Maybe *i* should run for PM.

Yours federally,
Gullybogan

The TV people have been quite hot on the topic of the Evolution of Our Species of late.

Several documentaries have screened here lately on how we came to be the lovely, cuddly people we are at the moment, all seven billion of us, choking the planet to death under the weight of our flesh and emissions.

One in particular, The Human Journey, made all sorts of interesting assertions, and often backed them up, too.

The basic premise is that some time ago, 72 humans left Africa by way of a narrow, swampy bit of land leading into what we nowadays would call the Middle East. They went on their merry way, these 72 individuals, until they came to a point near the modern day city of Dortyol, and some of them turned left, and some of them turned right.

Apparently it was over a dispute concerning the ownership of a really nice flint knife.

The group that turned right went on to become the Asians and the Australians (aborigines, that is), and the group that turned left became the Europeans.

I’m quite interested in what took place in Europe when those folks who turned left – the Cro Magnons – moved into Europe, the territory of the Neanderthals.

The main reason that i’m interested is that i’m one of those folks. Or their descendant, anyways.

Generally the key points that most people (Cro Magnon people, that is) would generally have held as general dogma were the following:

• We moved into their space and quickly overcame their dominance on the land through our advanced technologies, including fire and language
• Some of our less attractive members may have had some intercourse with the prettier of the Neanderthals, resulting in mixing the red hair gene into our species
• Eventually we outdid the Neanderthals for resources, bred the collaborators out of existence, and replaced them.

Turns out, according to this program and others,

• Neanderthals had fire and weapons technology matching and even surpassing our own
• The Neanderthal hunting style was more likely to foster the growth of language than our own, and that language may be something that *we* got from *them*
• Red hair (and, incidentally, white skin) is an evolutionary response to the thinner, less African sunlight available in Europe, and red hair thus spontaneously occured in our species, rather than coming from the Neanderthals.

Which is all very confusing and disappointing.

But the most confusing and disappointing news came later in the series.

Apparently, Chinese anthropologists are quite set on the idea that their race isn’t a race at all, but a separate species.

They believe that they are descended more directly from Homo Erectus than races like the Africans and Europeans are.

We all tend to think of ourselves as Homo Sapiens, us humans, but it turns out that there was a time up until quite recently that there were at least three different Homo species on the planet at the same time. Homo Bagginsius was one, Homo Sapiens another, and Homo Erectus a third.

There may well have been more, their bones still lurking in the jungles and high plateaux, awaiting discovery.

This is the theory that it wasn’t just those 72 dudes who wandered out of Africa one Tuesday afternoon. Maybe there were continuous waves of Homos wandering out of Africa, over thousands of years!

My personal concern over all this is as follows.

The Asian people moved eastwards into north america, down through the americas, becoming the Amerindians, Mesoamericans, and so forth. At some point quite recently, they invented boats and set sail from south america across the Pacific, where they found some islands to settle down on and become the Polynesians.

My girlfriend is Polynesian.

This therefore means that my girlfriend is a Homo Erectus.

So now i’m not sure if it’s even legal for us to be having sex. Are you allowed to have sex with other species?

If you know, could you please fill me in?

She seems anatomically quite similar to Homo Sapiens girls, going by the pictures of Homo Sapiens girls available on the intertube. Although she does seem to have much more pubic hair…

So if i’m breaking any laws, please let me know. Thank you.

To assist in your deliberations on this matter, i am providing an image of a typical Polynesian girl, like Princess:

…an image of a typical Homo Erectus girl (shown on right):

…and an image of a typical Cro Magnon girl:

You can see, i believe, how easy it would be to make the mistake that i’ve made. In my defence.

Your interspecially,
Gullybogan

With the long weekend upon us, no doubt your mind is turning to getting some work done with your tools.

Well, have you got yourself a Stanley Fubar FatMax II? Because if you haven’t, you’ll soon be wishing you did have.

The original Fubar (which stands for functional utility bar, but is clearly referencing the more foul-mouthed acronym) was a smart sort of crowbar multitool, adding serrated jaws and a hammer head on one end of a pry bar. The jaws were sized to grip 2-in. lumber, and the well-balanced heft made you want to destroy something—anything—with a few mighty swings. Problem was, it was too much monster, its 4-pound weight threatening to pants you if hung from a hammer loop.

The new Fubar II is a more compact demolition tool, at a belt-friendly 2.5 pounds and measuring 15 in. Though less powerful, the tool’s smaller profile means you’ll haul it around more often, especially if you’re on a ladder or roof. And when we tested it, we found it to be a more useful as a hammer, too, with a framing hammer’s 22-ounce head and one-handed balance.

See what i mean?

I have nothing at the moment that needs wrecking, but i want to call up all my acquaintances, colleagues, and associates, just to ask them if they have anything that needs busting up.

The FUBAR (which stands for “fucked up beyond all recognition”) is too tempting a tool to not want to be smashing shit the fuck up with it.

In fact, i might just take my fubar off with me and assist some neighbours with demolition work they are too damn lazy to do themselves, and too damn stupid to realise it needs doing in the first place.

Plus, the handy pry bar will make it a cinch to remove any nails i might find hammered through the wrists and ankles of lazy pricks who plan on spending easter just hanging around.

Yours destructively,
Gullybogan

I added the Spam generator widget to my Wadpress page and my penis immediately became much larger.

My waistline also was reduced and i grew both abs and pecs. Both of the latter grew in the right places, too, not just somewhere random.

I also discovered that i am a Nigerian prince, with thirty truly magnificent wives, and a castle.

Apparently i also have a pony.

You too can reap these sort* of enhappying rewards by subscribing to my Spam Generator, too!

Actually, no, you can’t. It’s just a stupid April First thing.

Yours sacrificially,
Gullybogan

* your sort of enhappyment may involve a large man with a rubber truncheon, rather than Nigerian Princesses and ponies

PS i removed the spam generator because it was silly.

I hear that you are complaining about the “Don’t be a dickhead” ad campaign because it uses the word “dickhead” and “campaign”. Also that it threatens creating emos and rangas if a driver uses a mobile phone while driving.

This is called humour. We have that in Australia. It’s to do with jokes.

Watch this ad again and i think that you will find that it is not only funny, but hilarious.

Plus, it has Lawrence Leung in it, and he is brilliant. Him and me are BBFLs (i said something to him once at one of his shows, offstage, and he was really nice), so backoff.

I also have friends know people saw a sales assistant at the shops today in Myer who was a ranga. She was called Bianca, and if her own parents called their redheaded baby “Bianca” [it means "white" - Ed] then i reckon that rangas would have to have a sense of humour too.

So get a sense of humour and get back to me.

Yours hysterically,
Gullybogan

Ever been in a real life conversation with someone who was just plain boring?

Ever wished that you had a phone that you could just stealthily reach into your pocket, press a button, and – HEY PRESTO! – the phone fakes an incoming call?

(That’s so that you can pretend to be answering the phone call and walk away from the boring person)

Well, Sybylla’s latest burner is the fantastic Samsung E1080T, which costs $39 and comes not only with a flashlight (so that you can find your way away from the boring person in the dark), but also a FAKE CALL FUNCTION!

Sybylla demonstrated for us.

At least, i think she was demonstrating for us. Either that or i was being boring again.

Princess thought that this was the best idea in the whole world, and reckoned that all phones in the world should have such a feature.

I was of the opinion that if all phones in the world had such a feature, it would no longer fool anybody.

I had more opinions on this, but both Princess’s and Sybylla’s and Tess’s phones rang simultaneously, and they had to take the calls. Something about “Hmmm” and “Yes” and “Let me just talk to you some more about that interesting thing you just said, caller”.

A little later i was talking to Sybylla at home on her new mobile phone and it rang and she had to take the call. Which was a pity, because i was telling her all about my new shovel, and i had really only just started telling her about the ergonomic handle design. I didn’t know they had call waiting on mobile phones now! What terrific technology.

Yours boringly,
Gullybogan

Yesterday i had 1265 visitors to my homepage looking for important breaking news on Pamela Anderson.

I have no idea why.

If you are just looking for photos of Ms Anderson, you might try the intertube. They have lots.

I regret that the shitful stats facility of Wadpress does not allow me to narrow down what you were all looking for.

I also regret that the shitful policy of Wadpress that prevents us free users from embedding proper grown up tracking code in our pages likewise prevents me from finding out what you were all after.

Hopefully you found whatever it was you were looking for.

Yours regretfully,
Gullybogan

This morning we discovered that the running repairs i’d performed on the hailstone-smashed skylight (cling wrap held on with electrostatic energy and positive affirmations) weren’t as up-to-the-task as we thought, so we headed down to Bunnings Scoresby, where we soon found that there were a number of items they were short of:

• Duct Tape
• Plasterboard
• Laserlight

Supplies were being brought in from areas less hit-by-the-hailstorm, but there just wasn’t enough Duct Tape in the whole of Melbourne to repair all the cracked windows, smashed skylights, and shredded solar sails in Knox.

Happily, i found on the very top shelf the second last roll of something called “Cinta Para Ductos”, which i think is Spanish for “Duct Tape” (in Bahasa it means something like “i love your many ducts”), so we grabbed that and went over to look at what was going on in the laserlight aisle, just for kicks.

Grown men in shorts were fighting – politely, mind – with tobacco-tanned old women over the last of the sheets of transparent roofing. It wasn’t even the right type (“grecian” rather than plain corrugated), but things were getting desperate.

Apparently Bunnings Scoresby had had to keep open an extra two hours on Saturday night, after the storm, and Sunday morning (and again this morning) there were queues of hail-damaged 4WDs with trailers on outside the doors at six a.m., politely blasting their horns.

When the doors were opened, it was like those post-xmas sales you see footage of on the news, but with people running around screaming at shop assistants, “Where’s your Duct Tape?” instead of demurely sprinting to the Manchester tables.

Duct Tape can be used to create almost any goal of human endeavour, including clothes. There is a right way and a wrong way to make clothes out of Duct Tape, though: can you pick which is which?

Sadly, because most Bunnings shoppers don’t speak Spanish, or Bahasa, they had to go home to their busted-arse roof accessories empty handed.

Not that i speak Spanish, of course. I just figured that any roll of tape with “Ductos” in the name would be a good bet.

Who knows? Maybe it’s not duct tape. Maybe it’s some sort of Indonesian adhesive contraceptive, and it’ll dissolve in water…

I’ll let you know.

[Ed - Although why a contraceptive tape would dissolve in water is beyond me. But, if it did, Duct Tape even has an answer for that.]

Yours ductily,
Gullybogan

Princess was giving a girlfriend a call, just to say hi.

“Can’t talk,” the girlfriend spluttered as soon as she answered, “Golfball-sized hailstones… bye!”

Princess turned and repeated to me what the girlfriend had said. This girlfriend lives in a suburb about five kay north-west of us. The sky here had been steadily darkening for the last hour or so. We looked at each other, pondering possibilities.

“I might just go and put the wagon under the carport,” Princess said, thoughtfully.

When the hailstorm hit us a few minutes later – and it hit just like that! – she was still out in the carport. She came running in screaming, but i could hardly hear her over the noise of the hailstones slamming into the roof of the house and the carport and the pergola.

“There’s hailstones hitting the ground and just exploding!” she squealed. “They’re huge, like golfballs…”

Golfballs is the cliche. You have to say golfballs.

Our backyard – indeed, our suburb – had been turned into an artillery range in the space of a moment. Happily, there’s a covered way from the carport to the house, and Princess was completely unharmed.

Sickening smashes were coming from the roof overhead, though, as it is open to the sky. A general hammering rattled on, punctuated by occasional stronger concussions, each sounding terribly expensive.

And then the smaller hail started to come down.

If you’ve ever read any of those Hornblower books, you might remember “grape shot”. That’s where you load a cannon with lumps of lead the size of grapes, and blast all that death-dealing crap across the decks of the enemy ship, to tear to shreds any personnel or rigging that happens to be in the way.

That was what it was like, the arrival of the smaller hail.

Tess had arrived on deck, so to speak, emerging from her room, all excited about the storm. The playful atmosphere she brought with her, of looking out at the pretty hailstones, quickly evaporated, though.

The water had started coming in. Down windows, out of light fittings, through the skylight.

Along with the hail was coming trillions of litres of water.

We grabbed towels and tried to staunch the flow of water, but there was just too much of it, in too many places, all at once.

Then it occurred to me: why was there water coming through the skylight?

I looked up and there were those golfball-cliche hailstones appearing one after the other on top of the actual diffuser of the skylight.

Then the power went off.

I grabbed Princess and shouted at her – you had to shout just to be heard – that the skylight was smashed, get a bucket. She ran to get a bucket from the laundry and i set about figuring out what had happened to the power.

There is always a single moment in a situation like this when you realise: this is more than just us, and this is capital-s Serious.

Watching the hail come down, and knowing that it was hitting over multiple suburbs, it was like watching a bigger dog picking up your dog by the throat and shaking it. There was nothing you could do, and every second more and more damage was being done, right now, in front of your eyes. That was the single moment for me.

We watched as the trees we had nursed back from the drought were shredded by the grape-hail. Water thundering down off the mountains and coursing through the entire suburb was finding its way into our little property, too, vomiting up over already full storm drain inlets and seeking other lines of least resistance.

Eventually the hailstorm maelstrom subsided into mere torrential rain, and we could come out from under our shelter against the stones falling from the sky. Tess joined me in running around the yard, which was under fast-flowing ankle-deep freezing water. We started desperately grabbing things before they floated away down the street: a buoyant basketball; a smug watering can; a bemused tub of seasol. We were soaked to the skin in seconds. Tess took the unexpected step of removing most of her drenched clothes there on the spot and running around in just her underwear and bare feet. I shouted at her to get off the front lawn and put some clothes and footwear on like a sensible girl, but she ignored me and kept saving stuff.

She had a point; it wasn’t as if there were people driving past who might see.

Well, that’s not exactly correct. Cars did occasionally still shoosh by down our street, but most had their hazard lights on, so it was safe to say they were pretty preoccupied with their own little dramas, without needing to be perving on liquefied young women in their knickers jumping around trying to rescue a conga line of clothes pegs while simultaneously struggling to unplug stormwater drain inlets. All over Melbourne, cars had been and still were being dimpled by the hail, windscreens smashed. Graham Werner Toyota, our local dealer, lost two million dollars worth of brand new vehicles in a matter of minutes, just days ahead of the grand opening of their fabulous new showrooms.

The barrage continued for what seemed like hours, but wasn’t, and in time the rain slowed, the groundwaters fled away, and eventually Tess went to put some clothes on, and i – along with hundreds and hundreds of other Knox residents who found themselves in the same boat – started wondering what i was going to do about the shattered skylight.

And everyone started phoning everyone else, to check they were ok.

One of Princess’s girlfriends had been driving home when it had happened, and she had had to make the last few kilometres of her journey holding her shattered laminated windscreen in place with one hand to stop it caving in on her. When she got home, she found she had sixty smashed roof tiles to deal with too, and the kids’ bedroom window in scimitar daggers, the curtains, carpet, and bedding sodden through.

Tess took time out from mopping up to check Facebook, where the “OMG the hail!” group had more fans than the “Bring Back Hey Hey It’s Saturday” group, which must be some sort of important social statement that the legacy media will now labour over.

She also found on the interweb a picture of the roof of Southern Cross station collapsing under the weight of several tonnes of frozen water. I can imagine the station’s engineer in Vancouver getting that pic in his inbox on Monday morning and muttering to himself, “oh, of course…”. It’s designed to withstand a bunch of flowing water, which drains away, but apparently not frozen water, which doesn’t drain away.

Once the rain stopped all together, i got up on the roof and stuck some gaffer tape over the hole in the skylight. I could easily put my fist throught the hole, whatever that means. It wasn’t until the next day that people started describing the hail as “lemon” or “fist” sized. One woman not far from here collected a hailstone allegedly 10cm in diameter, which is the biggest hailstone ever collected in Victoria.

We collected a few, popping them in the freezer for posterity. We found ones that were cliche-sized (the lemon-sized ones must have exploded on impact). The ice was very clear, very pure. At the heart of the ice you could see a fuzzy white blob about the size of a hazelnut. The ice around that seed blob was clearly little hailstones all accreted together. It was like someone had very carefully crafted a Ferrero-Rocher out of ice.

This morning, the day after, we were lying in bed when we heard a helicopter circling overhead.

Princess jumped up and went to the window to see what was happening.

“What do you think they’re looking for?” she asked.

“I think it’s probably a newschopper, looking for footage of roofs with tarps all over them,” i suggested.

“Really?” she said, looking for the chopper in the whitewashed sky.

“Yeah, and if you don’t want to end up on their End-of-year-party Bloopers tape, you might like to stop standing in the window stark naked.”

It was a weird day today. I don’t really trust the sky at the moment. Whenever it started to rain, i felt edgy. The weather bureau saying that the recipe was right for a repeat performance didn’t help.

Happily, so far (touchwood), there’s been no second act to the Worst Storm in Victoria’s History.

Which is good. I’m getting sick of looking at the sky to see what’s going to destroy us next: firestorm or hailstorm.

On the plus side, it seems unlikely now that we’ll be having Black Saturday 2 this year. Everything’s too wet to burn, now.

Yours precipitatingly,
Gullybogan

As you are painfully aware, Fev took a snapshot on his phone of erstwhile girlfriend Lara Bingle while she was in the shower, with her nuddy on.

She was clearly not impressed with this at the time it was happening, as she can distinctly be seen waving Fevola away, and telling him to fuck off.

She was apparently less impressed when he decided it would be a great idea to text the photo to some mates.

Fevola holds his mobile phone up for those who haven’t received the photo yet to have a look

According to Telstra, text message traffic for the country of Australia is significantly increased as a result of the image going viral. Apparently 50% of all living Australians have been sent the image in the last 48 hours.

It’s not even a good image. If you wanted to see Lara Bingle’s boobs, there’s much better photos of them available.

Apparently Lara has long since moved on from being intercoursed by a footballing boofhead and is now servicing the middle stump of some cricketering ponce instead.

Let’s all wish her well with that.

Yours textingly,
Gullybogan

I was surprised to find that hundreds of people were hitting my site looking for pics of Australian Winter Olympian™ Torah Bright in a bikini.

They were landing here, where i mention Torah Bright, and – naturally – bikinis.

There is, however, no apparent connection between Ms Bright and bikinis, other than that she is associated with Roxy, which is a water sports clothing company, and sometimes the water in the sport is frozen.

The closest i could find to a photo of her in a bikini was this image of her on a beach somewhere, rehearsing her snowboard manouevres sans snowboard and snow.

Usually she looks like this:

So sorry, but that’s the best i can do.

And those of you looking for “TORAH + BRIGHT + NAKED + FISTING + MARSUPIAL” need to try somewhere else altogether.

Yours snowboardingly,
Gullybogan

I am stupid and without self-discipline, or the ability to tell right from wrong.

This is why i appreciate you installing a special filter on my country to keep me safe from the bad things that sometimes bubble up from the intertube.

Filth like this must be stopped!

I totally trust you to decide what i need to be protected against, and i defer to your superior judgement about what constitutes appropriate things for me to think and talk about.

I only wish you could sit in my home and protect me from the books in my library, and the things that guests in my home might say!

That would be great.

I am especially proud that you have asked Google to censor YouTube for all Australians!

This is terrific! Overseas people will be thinking about us, for a fleeting second! It’s just like the Olympics!

But the very best part is that in support of your request for censorship of the Australian Google/YouTube you are citing the censorship that the Chinese and Thai governments are getting Google to use to protect the citizens of China and Thailand!

Please censor the kitten on the right – it’s clearly thinking bad thoughts

The fact that Google recently stopped filtering China’s search results in the name of freedom and democracy protecting their business model shouldn’t daunt you.

Perhaps you could also cite the case of the Iranian Government shutting down Gmail within its borders, to help protect its citizens against intertube nasties. Maybe we could set up our own Ozmail, the same as the Iranians are planning, to act as a more protected e-mail alternative, and we could even have some sort of clever filtering and monitoring system embedded in that, to keep us safe.

But first, please get those evil bastards at Google to stop awful things like child porn – of which there is already far, far too much on YouTube – and other horrific antisocial crimes such as graffiti, euthanasia, Xbox chipping, and … um, that thing where people say the things that they think without checking with the government first (i can’t recall what that’s called).

Only then will i truly be able to return to the more pure, safer times of the 1950s, when Australia was a sleepy backwater on the edge of forgotten.

The Great Australian Dream has always been to live a quiet life of suburban unconsciousness!

Better yet, please lobotomise me, so that i never have to think or worry about anything ever again.

Yours protectedly,
Gullybogan

I just want to apologise for not attending your Melbourne show this time.

As you know, i’ve been to the Melbourne leg of every tour since 1981′s seminal Back in Black tour, the tour when you, Mr Johnson, replaced the regulation mallet midway through striking the Hell’s Bell, switching to a McEwans ball peen hammer, sending the Bell up several octaves from A below Middle C to Avon Calling.

Ah, those were the days! Remember the brawler vans chasing us drunken bogans through the Kings Domain Gardens after that concert?

Oh. Yeah. You would have been back at the hotel by then, huh.

I also have fond memories of the Money Talks Tour, where you sprayed us with thousands of dollars’ worth of fake dollar bills. That was a romp! I still have one of those fake dollar bills, thank you. I’m waiting for the CPI on fake money to go through the roof, then i’m putting it on eBay.

Only joshing! Like i could ever sell something so precious.

See, the reason i didn’t come to see you guys tonight is that… I think we’re both too old.

Angus is, like, fifty five or something now, isn’t he? It makes that whole schoolboy uniform thing look a little silly.

And i hate to say it, but i think you’re slipping from the consciousness of the bogan youth, dudes.

Some bogan boys on the train were on their way to the concert (they were fully equipped with flannelette, torn jeans, and a lone girl in an AC/DC rock singlet, scruffy shorts, and legs), and they were trying to name songs from your oeuvre.

for the girl who clearly has everything, the AC/DC bikini

They couldn’t.

“But they’re still really great,” one of them enthused. “The singer guy, whatever his name is, he’s Thirsty Merc’s father or something…”

Ah, Gen Y!

So, instead of moshing with a whole bunch of fifteen year olds who don’t even know your music except from movie trailers, i thought i’d just sit quietly at home and dial up a playlist of my favourite AC/DC melodies on my iPod.

I hope you don’t mind.

Yours satanically,
Gullybogan

I understand that you are a bit anxious about the prospect of terrorists blowing planes the fuck out of the sky.

That would be bad.

And i understand that you want to check out – if not in person, then by proxy – whether or not i have explosives strapped to my penis before i get onto a plane, in case i’m a terrorist who is intending to blow the plane the fuck out of the sky by careful application of a loaded penis.

And we both know that, what with my quite sizeable penis, that would be a fuckload of explosives!

But what i can’t understand is why you have to bombard me with X-rays to check my penis for explosives.

I’m quite happy to strip naked and show my penis to any proxy officer you wish to assign the pleasant duty to (i would recommend a female officer, as male officers would obviously have their egos totally crushed at the sight of my enormous appendage), but i’m not willing to receive a dose of radiation just because that is more convenient and expedient for you and your minions.

I don’t mind at all the prospect of blurry images of my enormous cock appearing in the intertube (as happened to Bollywood heart-throb Shah Rukh Khan) as i’m sure much clearer pictures of it are already out there, somewhere.

Indian actor Shah Rukh Khan has debunked the British government’s claims [that images are not kept), telling BBC talk show host Jonathan Ross that he autographed printed scans of his own body for two female security officers.

What i mind is the invasion, not of my so-called “privacy” (whatever that means), but rather the invasion of my body’s cells, the place where the cancers grow when stimulated by things like, say, airport X-ray scanners.

So give me the option: strip naked, or get a dose of radiation.

That’s all i ask.

Oh, and BTW, now that terrorists can no longer strap explosives to their penises, they will no doubt begin swallowing those explosives in condoms, the way drug smugglers do.

Are you going to have an extra strength X-ray scanner to look for that?

Yours enormously,
Gullybogan

So that thing went well on Wednesday, and the head honcho did offer me an impressive amount of money to sell my soul and become one of his zombies, the way i expected him to.

If i’m getting three hundred dollars a week now, he offered me four hundred.

I still said no, even though it was a very generous offer.

But he went off thinking what a brilliant person i am, and all that shit, and no doubt plotting another clever way to lure me into his clutches.

The company zombie that i’m working “under” on this project, on the other hand, was quite circumspect, and had nothing to say about the thing at all.

Later in the afternoon, i started on some work that she’d asked me to do, and i checked with her a bit of the way into it that it was exactly the way she wanted it to be, and she said that it was marvellous and fantastic (she’s always saying that, even when it’s just that i’ve photocopied an invoice for her), so i finished it off, and i went home.

I got home about nine.

This morning, i had a lovely interaction with the baristas at the train station, bought the Green Guide from a street newstand, and i was all positivey about things.

It felt good. I was enjoying myself.

The end.

So company zombie straight came over to my hotdesk before i’d even put down my takeaway hot chocolate, and she asked me if i had any idea what the HELL was going on with the thing i’d worked on for her last night.

I explained that, well, nothing was going on with it other than that it was just exactly the way she had asked for it to be.

For some reason, she was obviously upset (i figured), so i threw in a “sorry”, to help her feel better.

It didn’t help.

“Take all that GARBAGE out of the code, and put it back the way it was,” she demanded, quite put out.

“OK,” i assured her, “I’ll take out all the GARBAGE and put it back the way it was.”

And i did. And then i sent her an e-mail that read: “GARBAGE removed, as requested.”

It was twenty past eight, and my day was ruined.

And then, on the train home, there was this guy sitting opposite me who was so fat that he gave me a sore back. I couldn’t sit straight on my cramped little seat because he overlapped not only the seat beside him and the aisle, but my legroom as well.

It was awkward.

I tried to figure out where he was likely to get off the train, so i could determine whether it was worthwhile moving to another cramped seat, or if doing so would be rude. I tried to remember if there were any towns that i’d noticed had had huge bites taken out of them, but i couldn’t. In the end he got off after Ringwood, so i’d sat with my spine twisted and my legs pressed into each other for three quarters of an hour.

When he got up and walked past me, he hit me in the head with his backpack, because, of course, he fitted the train aisle like the falafel and tabouleh fit a falafel roll.

So that was my day.

[Ed: Harden the fuck up, Gully - these whining rants are becoming tedious. Isn't it about time you did a post that involved tits? or sex? or titsex?]

Yours garbagely,
Gullybogan

As you know, i’m currently deployed on a Special Mission for a Top Secret Organisation, developing widgets that are so Eyes Only that even i don’t know what they do.

And let me tell you: it’s wa-a-a-ay past tedious.

The worst part is the travel. Oh, sure, it gives me heaps of fun stories about the fun times i have riding on the fun train, but when i’m spending three hours a day commuting, and i leave home at six of the clock in the morning and don’t get home until nine of the clock at night, it gets a bit ploddy.

Ploddy, you ask, your ears cocked, your face all quizzical and puppy-dog-eyed?

You know, things slow down. Ploddy.

Time dilates, as with a birth canal.

“Hmmm,” Bub thinks, “That was tedious.”

Like, i’m presently enjoying watching the slo-o-o-ow dissolution of a pile of human shit that some kind soul deposited on the footpath on the way to the Station. Every day it’s a little worse for the elements.

Also, there’s a cardboard box that’s been sitting in a certain doorway in the City now for three weeks…

And at the same time that things are slowing down, they are also speeding up. Frinstance: i was quelle surprised to find that i haven’t posted here since the 8th…

Happily, i finish up on this project on the 25th, and i’ll be back at what’s left of the Widgetplex the day after Australia Day.

And the day after that will be the day Steve Jobs announces the iSlate, or iTablet, or iDrinksTray, or whatever. And then Mister Widget will call us all together and tell us that we’re now going to be upsizing all our iPhone apps to suit the bigger screen…

Translation: tedium.

Tomorrow, at the Secret Mission place, i’m part of a big Presentation to one of the head honchos. If it goes well, word around the water-cooler is that the Top Secret Organisation will try to lure me into their cubicle farm permanently, to help make sure that this new widget (whatever it is, whatever it does) is an on-going success.

Just one of the many lurings and enticements: Naked Friday Sex Chat Club

Lurings and enticements notwithstanding, i can’t imagine anything worse, frankly, than working in the City.

Next time i post, remind me to tell you about how terrible the tucker in the Food Court is.

Yours ennuily,
Gullybogan

This is apparently the one week of the year when it’s best to perform open street surgery on the intersection of two of the Outer Eastern Suburbs’ main arterial lifelines: Springvale Road and the Belgrave/Lilydale train line.

As a consequence, the trains have stopped their regular rhythmic routines of thundering back and forth.

Now, instead, they’re twitching, and going slack, like a just-come cock in a debutante’s tight, moist embrace.

And, just like such a cock, they’re a little shamefaced. After all, the debutante has gone to a lot of trouble.

She’s not just done her hair, she’s had trial hairdos.

She’s spent months finding the right dress, and then as many months worrying about putting on a smidgen of puppy-fat and not being able to fit it, so she’s been trying on that dress every week, just to check.

Her nanna and poppa are back there, in the hall, looking over the array of professional photos on offer, to show their friends down at the bingo, and here you are, cock, in the carpark, inside their grand-daughter’s cunt and finished already.

disclaimer: serving suggestion only
none of these debs were ever fucked in the back of a car

You’re hoping that maybe she won’t figure it out, that it’s over. But she’s starting to wonder where that golden, screaming orgasm that Dolly magazine promised her is, and why you’ve inexplicably stopped before it’s arrived. You decide, cock, just to give her another few thrusts, out of pity, to save face, but the best you can manage is a bit of a pull out and a bit of a poor example of a push back in, already folding in half in the face of her fadingly expectant snugness.

You try again with these limpening faux fuckings, but you can see in her eyes that she knows, now, that you’re just not that into it anymore. You can see in her eyes her downshifting from anticipation of that inner shuddering climactic explosion, down down down to a sullen hope that at least she’ll be spared ending up with blood-stained cum on the tulle lining of the skirt of her beautiful gown.

You give another half-hearted push, but you figure you’re not fooling either of you. Fuck it, you think to yourself, and then chuckle, in a cockish way, at the irony of that choice of words.

So you pull out altogether, cock, trailing your curdy nose across all that tulle, and then your other end lights up a smoke and asks, “Hey, have you got protection?”

Now, if you could choose, i think you’d choose, dear Reader, to be the cock in that little allegory, but, sadly, we commuters had no choice, and we are decidedly not the cock. Oh, no. We were the debutante (just in case you were thinking we might be the tulle).

Granted, the intersection has for a long time been merrily identified by theRACV (an automobile club and car drivers’ advocate) as the most dangerous intersection in our fair(ly good) city.

Granted, lotsa people’ve been kilt there for no real good reason.

I’m all in favour of people not getting kilt.

And if they can fix up the gridlock traffic jams that the boom gates cause, that’d be fine.

What shits me, though, is the guy from the intersection company who went on the TV news and said that it was “Short term pain for long term gain.”

OK. Fine. But i’m not the one getting the gain. I’m just getting the pain.

And the first day they ran the bus replacements, the flotilla of Cold War Era buses they’d trundled back into service out of museums and playgrounds across Victoria were too few, too slow, and too unprepared.

Hordes of zombie-like commuters crowded up to the proffered buses, waiting for the doors to open (zombies can’t open doors, remember). And then buses were dropping zombies people off in the general vicinity of Box Hill (they were meant to go to Blackburn) and the drivers were telling the brain hungry walking dead commuters to find the station themselves, see ya later.

some clever zombies made it all the way to Flinders Street

I rang up Metlink Monday night, and asked if they’d heard of (a) peak hour and (2) the need for proper bus replacement services when you cleave a rail line in twain.

The nice chap i spoke to advised me, and i quote:

You’re best off avoiding the trains altogether. If you can drive to Glen Waverley station or something, that would really be best.

Seriously.

Sadly, i was not prepared to drive to another station, on account of how i don’t like leaving my car sitting in some farflung, benighted suburb that is, for all i know, the haunt of carthieves and paintchippers.

Happily, the next day, everyone else in Ferntree Gully had already made the decision to avoid the Belgrave line like it was beset by zombies, and the carpark at Gully station was completely empty. There were maybe three people on the platform, waiting for the train.

Which ambled in when it damnwell felt like it, regardless of the specially printed timetable.

And even though it was much less crowded and zombieish, and the kerfuffle only added half an hour to my commute, i could go on… but that’s enough of a rant from me, i’m sure you agree.

So, how was your trip home?

Yours commutingly,
Gullybogan