">My Big World Of Crap

Kraft proudly launched its new Vegemite variant on Saturday, calling it iSnack 2.0.  This name was decided upon following a national competition to pick a name for the new product, which is a mixture of the traditional Vegemite and cream cheese.

Following almost unanimous scoffing by Australians at the stupid name of the product, Kraft announced today they were dumping the name and holding another competition to find a better name. 

Now there’s just the small problem of about 500,000 jars of the stuff that Kraft need to sell.

Here’s a couple of suggestions.  Maybe they could force feed it to the marketing executives who signed off on the stupid name as being a good idea?  Maybe ust give it to the guy who dreamed up the name and won the contest?

Meanwhile, I’ll stick to the normal Vegemite on my toast – spread thinly thanks if anyone wants to make me some toast.

Violence at a school fete in Papua New Guinea left eight people dead and a severed head hanging from a power pole.  According to local media, an armed gang attacked villagers gathered at the fete in Kainantu district last Friday, and killed four people.  The gang’s leader interrupted a speech by a local magistrate, produced a gun and shot him dead.  Villagers retaliated by killing three of the gang members. One was beheaded and the head hung on a power pole.  Another was killed the next day.  The gang’s leader, Patrick Sira, is wanted by police over a string of murders, rapes and robberies – he escaped after the attack.

While I’ve never been to a fete that extreme, I still hate them.  Can’t see the point of buying other people’s shit and crap made by other people’s kids.

A man called Dalton Chiscolm is apparently unhappy with the service provided by Bank of America.  So what does he do?  Sues them of course – for "1,784 billion, trillion dollars".

There are a couple of fundamental problems with his lawsuit.

First, the judge can’t figure out what Mr Chiscolm’s problem with the bank actually is.   US District Judge Denny Chin said in a brief order released in Manhattan federal court.

"He seems to be complaining that he placed a series of calls to the bank in New York and received inconsistent information from a ‘Spanish woman’. He apparently alleges that checks have been rejected because of incomplete routing numbers."

Then there is the small matter of the amount of damages he is claiming. Chiscolm’s request is equivalent to a 1 followed by 22 digits. The sum also dwarfs the world’s 2008 gross domestic product of $60 trillion, as estimated by the World Bank.

"These are the kind of numbers you deal with only on a cosmic scale,"

said Sylvain Cappell, New York University’s Silver Professor at the Courant Institute for Mathematical Sciences.

"If he thinks Bank of America has branches on every planet in the cosmos, then it might start to make some sense."

Maybe someone should just give him a few Triganic Pu’s or Ningi’s and tell him to piss off?

Woohoo! The Geelong Cats won the AFL grand final, beating St Kilda in a tightly contested game, by 12 points.  Congratulations to the Cats – they have been the champion team of the last 3 seasons.  Last year’s grand final loss was an aberration, and today’s win rightly places the Geelong team of 2007-2009 as one of the best teams I can recall in my lifetime.

It was a great game today, close all the way.  I actually thought the Saints were on top most of the game.  But Geelong hung in and finally came home over the top to win in the last few minutes.

A survey has found that women like to have a drink before having sex.   The study found 75 per cent of women liked to drink before getting into bed with their husband or boyfriend, and 6 per cent had never had sex sober.  Almost half said they preferred sex while under the influence of alcohol because it helped them lose their inhibitions and be more adventurous.  14 per cent of women in a relationship can’t sleep with their partner without a couple of glasses of wine beforehand.

The researchers, who surveyed 3000 women aged 18-50, found on average they slept with eight men, but were drunk with at least five, and on two occasions couldn’t remember the man’s name the next day. 

More than half claimed drinking with a prospective partner was "part of the dating process" so were a bit drunk when they had sex.  Well, duh, tell us something we didn’t already know.

The conclusions reached by the researchers included that women drink alcohol before having sex because they lack confidence in their bodies, and:

"The fact alcohol plays an integral role in their love lives shows that women are looking for a boost in self-esteem when it comes to their bedroom antics,"

also:

"But in doing so many women will be losing self-control, and this is when drunken one-night stands are more likely to occur."

Bet you that’s an amazing revelation – a stunning addition to humanity’s vast body of knowledge.

So watch out when your husband/boyfriend/partner/random stranger offers you a drink or three – he is after something.  Oh wait on, I don’t imagine that is a surprise to anyone.

Of course, women don’t need to be drunk to have sex.  They do it for many reasons, such as relieving boredom, keeping the peace or curing a headache – this according to some other research reported recently.  

"Research has shown most men find most women at least somewhat sexually attractive, whereas most women do not find most men sexually attractive at all,"

The women in this survey gave many reasons for having sex, among them:

• for a spiritual experience, "It’s the closest thing to God."
• relieving boredom
• keeping the peace, easier than fighting
• as a tradeoff for household chores
• “gives me something to do”
• sympathy - “I slept with a couple of guys because I felt sorry for them."
• in exchange for gifts - "He bought me a nice dinner", "he spent a lot of money on me early on", "he showed me he had an extravagant lifestyle".
• fun.

Love, lust and that sort of junk came into it somewhere too, I believe.

Among the guests at the Australian Football League’s Brownlow Medal presentation last night were medical entrepreneur Geoffrey Edelsten and his fiance Brynne Gordon.

I saw this picture last night and still can’t decide:

• was she planning to go to the beach hence the bikini top?
• did she just forget to put a blouse on over her bra?
• couldn’t she find the buttons on her top to do up?

Congratulations to Geelong’s Gary Ablett Jr on winning the medal by the way.

And go the Cats this Saturday!!!!

In this case, children.   Sydney mother-of-two Melissa Blackley is so obsessed with work that she doesn’t know what her children eat for lunch and hasn’t cooked dinner in two years.  Her and her partner, John Anderson, are both high-powered sales executives and are so focused on work that neither of them knows what time their children go to school. Mr Anderson said he only has "a pretty good idea" of the school’s location.  Both of them work at least 12 hours a day.

"Our jobs are incredibly important to us and an extension of that is having a BlackBerry which distracts me when I am home,"

"I find work exciting and engaging. It’s easy to drift off and do work rather than playing dominos."

The couple maintain their relationship largely by email.  Each day they run a "dutch auction" to decide which parent will take their children to their extra-curricular activities, like music lessons.

Ms Blackley outsourced much of the responsibility of raising her children to her 69-year-old mother, who quit her own job at her daughter’s behest just months after India was born. Grandma arrives at the family’s Randwick home at 6am every weekday to look after the children.

"I asked her (to resign from work) because like many mums I was concerned about my baby going into childcare,"

Ms Blackley said.

A few observations I would make about this:

• why have children if you’re going to spend so little time with them?  I mean, whats the point?
• I wonder how the children feel about their place in their parents’ list of life priorities
• I’m surprised her mother didn’t tell her to take a hike when asked to quite her job and care for the grandchildren – my mum would have told me to get real and get my priorities right – and that she’d done her fill of child raising with my brother, sister and me, and it is up to me and my wife to raise our own kids
• I’m amazed she’d think that asking her mum to do this was a reasonable thing to do.

I’m always amused by stories of criminals getting harmed or killed in odd ways during their crimes, so this one appealed to me.

A student in Baltimore, USA, killed a burglar with a samurai sword after spotting the intruder in his garage.   He and his housemates asked the burglar to stop, but while they called police, the suspect lunged at the student,who retaliated by striking him with a samurai sword, severed his left hand and gave severe lacerations to the upper torso and neck.

The undergraduate medical student at Baltimore’s prestigious Johns Hopkins University was being questioned by police but he may not be charged if found to be acting in self-defence.  He had recently reported a burglary in which thieves reportedly took laptop computers and a Sony PlayStation.

The burglar, who was in his late 40s, had a history of burglaries and had just been released from prison on Saturday.  In my opinion, no great loss to the world – got what what deserved.

Interesting choice of weapon though – just happening to have a samurai sword handy in the event of burglary?

Many would actually argue quite the opposite in fact.

However, a woman in Scotland was banned from getting married due to social workers deciding she was not intelligent enough to get married.  Kerry Robertson, 17, who is five-months pregnant was preparing to marry Mark McDougall when social services told her she would have to cancel her big day because she "did not understand the implications of getting married".  Under Scottish law, a registrar may refuse to marry a couple if he believes one or both the parties lack the mental capacity to understand what the institution of marriage is about.  Kerry has mild learning difficulties and has been in the care of her grandmother since she was nine-months-old after her parents were unable to look after her.  She will now undergo a psychologist’s assessment to determine if she is too unintelligent to get married. 

The couple said they are concerned their baby may be taken away from them if the council decides they are not smart enough to be parents.  Mr McDougall said Miss Robertson’s learning difficulties are not severe and the decision was cruel.  He said:

“It’s true she is not very academic, but she is nowhere near as stupid as social services are making out.

"She is a loving caring person. She can also read and write, although not very well, and was going to college to catch up.

"I didn’t even know she had learning difficulties until we’d been dating for two months.

"For the first time in her life Kerry was truly happy so we cannot understand what all the fuss is about."

This all got me thinking how useful it would be if all people wanting to get married, or have sex with each other, actually had to pass some sort of tests of their intelligence and of their emotional fitness to be parents.  Think of all the social problems that might be avoided if people actually had to meet some sort of standard of fitness to be together. 

I noticed my Sitemeter stats clicked over 240,000 while I was away a few days ago, lets call it Sunday for arguments sake.  That makes it about 86 days for the last 10,000, which is slightly less than the previous 10,000.

Not much change in the key search words that bring people to my blog.  In order of significance, these can be summarised as:

• Hermione Grainger, nude
• pussy, 6,9, 10, 11, 12, 14, 16, 17 year old, “big old” and just plain “old”
• Kimberley Vlaeminck – the tattoed girl
• Jessica Bratich, nude, of course
• Shayla Bastani Rad
• mankinis
• how to tell if you’re drunk.

No surprises there. At all!

Got back yesterday from a week travelling for work to Singapore then Bangkok.  Singapore I’ve been to before, but it was my first time in Bangkok, so I stayed till Sunday night before coming home, to have a bit of a look around.  I’m glad I went, and definitely going back to Thailand is on my holiday agenda for the future.

Interesting contrasts are many in Bangkok, from the splendour of the temples and palaces, like this:

to the slums.

Not to mention the contrast between the devout Buddhism:

and the sex trade which is pretty much out in the open.

I couldn’t begin to count the number of times I was asked by a taxi or tuk tuk driver offering to take me to a massage parlour or a sex or pussy show, and walking around Patpong Road on a Saturday afternoon, having a pamphlet full of nude girls shoved in my face and asked if I wanted a girl – or on saying no to that, a boy.  30 minutes for 1,000 baht (about $30).

No, I did not take up any of those offers.  Nor did I see a ping pong show, or darts or anything like that at one of the clubs at Patpong.  Tempting as it might be to see a woman shoot things out of her pussy, I was able to resist that temptation.  I did go for a massage, but it was of the traditional Thai variety - not one with a “happy ending”.

Never mind the seedy stuff, the food was great and cheap, the drinks cheap.  Apart from the heat and humidity, I really enjoyed Bangkok.  I want to go back now.

Callie Rogers won $3.7m in a lottery when she was 16.  At age 22 she is broke and living at home with her mother. She spent the money on booze, two boob jobs and almost $500,000 of cocaine. About $400,000 was spent on a family holiday while a large amount was also spent on a string on boyfriends.

 

She seems to have had appallingly bad taste in men.  One of them got her hooked on cocaine within weeks of her lottery win.  He blew about $1m of the money, on drugs and other goodies for himself.  He then topped it all off by sleeping with her 16 year old sister.  Despite this, she remained with him for 5 years, and has a child with him.  She then started up with a new boyfriend, also a drug dealer.  He got her back onto the cocaine, after she’d been off it for 3 years.  This winner ended up going to jail for 22 months after police found $10,000 worth of cocaine and a stun gun hidden in a cupboard at the couple’s house.

Callie Rogers, lottery winnings, cocaine, loser boyfriends