RED REEFER REFLECTIONS

The sham elections this weekend held in Zimbabwe reminded me of my days at Red Reefer Community College. Back then young students like myself were giddy at the prospect of Africans reclaiming their countries in the post colonial era.

We all desperately wanted to believe that Robert (Bob) Mugabe would not become another tyrant when he transformed Rhodesia into ZimBOBway...

I finished off the ME decade at Red River Communtiy College where I was enrolled in a two year Journalism & Advertsing course called Creative Communications...

and that is where I met withinwithout !

WW is pictured here on the right and I'm on the left, at one of our many Toga Parties...with a bit of a Clash Rockin The Casbah thingamabob added for good measure.

Hmm?

Initially he thought that I was the biggest arsehole in the known galaxy, but I soon won him over with my high spirited hijinx and madcap, zany, antics...

hilarity ensued and we have been besties ever since .

As you can see from these yearbook pictures I introduced skateboarding through the halls thanks to a trip to California a few years earlier...

a tad ahead of the curve on that one...GO ME!

My intention was to have fun, which I did...and believe it or not I actually did get into TV production right after so I did make some use of the course.

During College I became the Illustrator for the radical student newspaper the Projector. I also started a ridiculous cartoon feature called Airhead & Woodhead.

I didn't give Airhead much thought..usually thrown together the night before deadline..afterall how could I find a lowest common denominator for students studying Hairdressing, Meat Cutting, Mechanics, Computers and Business?

So I focussed on the influential excessive experiential antics of the popular characters in the recent movie sensation Animal House. My other big influences were Hunter S. Thompson, National Lampoon, raging hornymones, a variety of mood altering pharmacological agents, ridiculous amounts of beer, and of course being in my early 20s, I knew everything!

Here are a few of those dumbass cartoons which many students seemed to enjoy and lent me a bit of notoriety during my stay...here I am portraying an angry Vietnam War Vet in the 'Oral Sex Revival Show' at Beer & Skits night..

we won First Prize, a $100 from a brewery sponsor, which I believe was immediately spent by the cast at a nearby Pub.

you can click on the Toons if you'd like to read them?

Oddly enough I was offering my 2 cents on many of the same things that I blog about...mythbusting, geopolitical issues, sex, movies...

I'm not sure if that's good or bad?

Perhaps this proves my arrested development?

Unfortunately my father passed away during final presentations in 1980...

but up until then I had a blast!

COMING & GOING

A recent event in our city highlighted the collision of church and state in our medical system. The 'death' of an 85 year old man has reignited the debate on a delicate issue.

This patient had been, for all intents and purposes, gone or 'gorked' as they say in the biz, long ago. He had been placed on life support for over 200 days at a cost of nearly half a million dollars...money that could have been re-allocated towards helping a younger person who actually had a chance of recuperating and moving forward with their life.

The man's adult children, in accordance with their interpretation of their religious beliefs, it doesn't really matter which religion, refused to have him taken off of the machines in order to die when he was ready, and their God 'took' him. Three attending Doctors refused to continue and actually quit working at the hospital in order to sidestep a court order that was won by the family's lawyer.

Cases like this present an emotional minefield for all of us to cross. The simple truth is that had the man NOT been put on life support he would have died 200 days ago. Ok I'll state the obvious...if it was one of my children I would be inclined to hope for the best and interpret every flicker of an eyelash as a desperate plea to continue..Doctors are not infallable...but, if it was an elderly member of my family I would have probably let them 'go'...

to my way of thinking a mechanically preserved 'shell' of someone who had experienced a long life deserves to expire in a timely fashion...

being mechanically sustained with no sign of improvement is not my definition of a human 'being'...

'BE'-ING.

I'll say it...Age matters.

On the flip side religious organisations that need no introduction still refuse to allow their subjects to practice birth control because it interferes with their interpretation of what happens during coitus. I presume that they think that a tiny angel that looks like Tinkerbell swoops down the Love Canal and sprinkles glittery magic dust on the lonely exhausted sperm as it burrows into the reluctant egg. Really. This is incredibly convenient because it 'magically' provides a builtin supply of pew warmers and tithers. Hmm.

Despite the fact that billions of other multicellular organisms on the planet perform this identical method of reproduction millions of times every hour, somehow we are special eh? Really.

What both of these situations finally come down to is a clear legal definition of what a Human is.

Is it a half mystical being comprised of an eternal, indestructable, imvisible spirit destined to either be recycled or sent off to a heavenly reward or infinite torment?

Or are we bipedal mammalian uber-primates that have by chance and billions of years of trial and error, somehow managed to evolve with an extraordinarily over developed brain that has allowed us to be conscious of our existance, and able to remake our world?

Thirdly, could it be some inexplicably complicated and bizarre combination of the two? Hmm..this is where many of us stopped examining the enormity of the question. Idunnoknow?

Because we refuse to confront the conundrum of WHAT WE ARE, we sort of reluctantly deal with life and death issues with kid gloves. Economic factors will eventually provide most of the solutions through a supply and demand driven osmosis..

more so than Ethics..

because there simply aren't enough resources available to keep every self interest group happy, for lack of a better term.

Politicians will kowtow to the whims of the almighty voters and merrily swing either way ...in order to stay in power.

Many will stake their political 'lives' on designing their demographically driven platform to dovetail with the religio-politico majority...to the exclusion of others who believe otherwise...ah Dumbocracy..to think that this is the best method of settling issues that we have to work with.

God IS 51%.

Here in the West we seem to be fairly nonchalant about 30,000 children on the OTHER side of the world starving to death every day and yet we'll spend half a million dollars preserving a single 85 year old man that 'died' almost a year ago.

We really need to talk about how we are coming & going.

WHAT FANBASE?

I love the droll antics of the
FLIGHT OF THE CONCHORDS

These Kooky Kiwis Kwack me up!

Have a lash at their Bowie sendups! For diehard Bowie fans like myself, these two have brilliantly captured the intonations, nuance, and stylings, of Rock's greatest chameleon to perfection with hilarious results.

First to get a feel for the droll self effacing flavour of this duo, you need to sample a typical Band Meeting...


now you can enjoy watching them parody the eccentricities of the Thin White Duke and his ever ch-ch-ch-changing personas. HA!

Ziggy era Bowie




Ashes To Ashes Bowie




Labyrinth Bowie and in spay-ay-ay-ce!





'ave yew 'evah' taykin a Flight Of The Conchords?

PHI((cough))SOPHY 101

Put on your thinking caps..

I am an advocate of practical skepticism based on common sense.

HAHAHAHAHA...as if there is such a thing as Common Sense!

I believe that Earthlings should formulate their Worldview or Cosmology, and everyday reasoning, on empirical evidence that has been presented by patterns of repeated Human Behavior...

call me crazy but that's just me and hey, I could be wrong.

Human Life on Earth is so indescribably fercockt because it is impossible for people to either know or agree upon WHY we even exist!

Almost every discussion between two people with differing viewpoints on Politics, Art, Sports, or Religion, becomes a Strawman Argument.

A Strawman Argument is when you make an embellished or exagerrated claim which superficially and/or not-so subliminally, resembles your opponent's actual dumbass view.

This strategy, makes their dumbass ideas, views and notions, much easier to attack, ridicule, and refute, and is used from the schoolyard to the highest courts.

Theoretically this makes your opponent a helpless, inanimate, numbskull that can't fight back..like a Scarecrow..."If I only had a brain"

The vast majority of discussions, articles, and news items concerning Religion, Art, Sports, or Politics seem to be based on this practice...

because it works...

and I know you are but what am I?

INFINITY!

This is WHY it is a tedious exercise in futility to discuss Art, Politics, Sports, OR EVEN Religion at the Dinner Table.

These so-called 'touchy subjects' are primarily based on purely speculative emotional evaluations unemcumbered by empirical evidence that people vigorously defend to the death in order to validate their Parking Tickets...

aka their Existance!

Most Earthlings cannot engage in a rational discussion about these subjects because they are very offended when their personal interpretation of WHAT THEY THINK is challenged by another Earthling.

Most Earthlings appear to be too intefrickinllectually lazy to bother examining WHY they even believe WHAT they believe!

We seem to love copying shortcuts, mental links, memes, or cheat sheets, instead of undertaking the arduous mental journey of examining all available scientific and historical data.

Pfft...Like we have time for that sh*t!

Why re-invent the wheel?

Most Earthlings presume that their Candidates, Artists, Athletes, or Cosmologies are true because they either 'got it in writing' or because 'somebody said so'.

DUH!

The term reductio ad absurdum (reduction to the absurd), or proof by contradiction, is a type of argument where one assumes a claim for the sake of argument and derives an absurd or ridiculous outcome, and then concludes that the original claim must have been wrong, as it led to a result that is WHACK!.

WHY?

Because the LAW of non-contradiction means that a statement cannot be both true and false.

Oh really?!

Somebody should forward that memo because that's how we roll.

MY RAGING ALBEDO!

The albedo of an object is the extent to which it reflects.
Yesterday I watched a show on the Discovery (You and Me Baby ain't nothin' but Mammals..) Channel called;
NAKED SCIENCE SNOWBALL EARTH .

“Imagine a world frozen solid. Imagine that vast sheets of ice, hundreds of metres thick, encased the entire planet - a giant snowball floating through space.
This is not some exotic new world deep in space - it may have been our world, the Earth.
In this episode, Naked Science explores what may have been the most extreme period of Earth's climatic history.
Some top-ranking scientists believe that in the past the Earth completely froze over for millions of years... then warmed up rapidly approximately 600 million years ago.
Struggling against skepticism and disbelief for years, these experts have gathered a growing body of evidence supporting the claim, and others in the scientific community are slowly coming around to the incredible idea - not just of the dramatic freeze, but of an equally extraordinary thaw.”

There is a great deal of concern these days about the Earth's albedo. Our planet’s albedo is a measured by how much of the Sun’s energy is bounced.
Fresh snow has the highest reflectivity. If a snow covered area warms and the snow melts, the albedo decreases, more sunlight is absorbed, and the temperature tends to increase. The converse is true: if snow forms, a cooling cycle happens.

The average albedo on Earth is about 30%.
Thirty per cent reflection eh?

I am far too retrospective and if you added it all up I probably spend more than 30% of my time rehashing the past.

Every day a new OLD regret seems to resurface..

if only I had done this or done that.

Like the Earth I need to stop these THAWts!

Guilt..the gift that keeps on giving.

Did I learn from my mistakes?

Hmm..for the most part I would say yes but I still wish that I could apologize or make amends to all..most..OK atleast some of the people that I hurt...

even if they have long since forgotten or forgiven.

Keeping my albedo in check is a struggle for me.

For the most part I am attempting to overcome these nagging interruptions by simply avoiding making the same mistakes today or tomorrow..

and trying to teach my children how to avoid making BIG ones.

Nobody is perfect or even close and most of us..OK some of us...

strive to be the best ME that we can be while inflicting the least amount of grief on others.

You know trying to be charming and NOT tedious!

When do you finally put down that load of bricks that you're carrying around?

So how do you keep your Albedo in check..

what is your percentage of reflectivity?

Are you focussed on the horizon

or do you reflect too often?

A 'GUY'DE TO REVELATIONS

My six year old son informed us that he FINALLY found out what the ‘F’ word was courtesy of a Grade Sixer.
He can check that off of the list of personal 'GUY' Revelations.

It was inevitable.
There are many more to come.

The First Revelation is a light bulb moment that ‘Guys’ have is that we are not merely an extension of our Mother’s Breast, we are a separate entity. WTH?

The Second one is that it will take us more than a decade to get our hands on another decent set of boobs!

The Third Revelation: 1-1,000
concerns a series of cause and effect principles which we finally start to figure out around 999…stuff like...

if I stick my finger up the Dog’s Wazoo, I shall receive a swift retaliatory chomp on my hand, gravity is a bitch, and my head is not made out of iron,

OW F*CK THAT HURTS!

Revelations 4: 1-100
Involves interpersonal relationships with other toddlers. We discover that other guys who scream and make a complete ass of themselves in a shopping mall, either get rewarded with ice cream or screamed at by their Mom..
a-ha, girls are unpredictable so there is a 50-50 chance that you'll get what you want if you beg, whine, or have a fit.

Revelations 5:1-50
Generally reveals the basics about dealing with other (dumbass) males.

No matter what you say or do, some guys will steal your lunch money, your bike, your girlfriend, and a few will punch you in the nose just because they are complete assholes..

this will remain constant throughout your entire life.

Revelations 6:1-2
Some of the girls at school will think that you are the greatest thing since sliced bread, BUT the ones that you like, loathe every molecule in your body..

this too will remain fairly constant.

Revelations 7:1-500
Around the age of 12, you discover that you have a second, much more powerful ‘brain’ in your swimsuit area that makes you jump off of garage roofs and ride your bike into parked cars if there are girls around..it is a merciless taskmaster that will get you into all kinds of trouble with your friends..who you will betray in a heartbeat if there are girls around.

Revelations 8:1-10
Your first girlfriend will not be your last girlfriend, neither will your second or 23rd…you start to wonder what is WRONG with all of these girls? Why don’t they want to do all of the things that your second brain is commanding you to do?

And why-0h-why-oh-why do the ones who DO what you want to DO to them, always have enough emotional baggage to fill a 747, an inordinate affection for firearms, and atleast five big badass brothers?

Revelations 9:1
By the time that men are in their early 80s, they eventually start to realize that every woman that they see may NOT actually be interested in having sexual reltions with them..right there on the spot

..Hmm, maybe with a little coaxing they will come around.

Revelations 10:1-20
It finally becomes self evident that Monica (*bites hand) Bellucci may not be breaking into your bedroom in the middle of the night begging you to satisfy her uncontrollable animal lust…

and then you die D'OH!

Here endeth today's lesson.

MAN APES MONKEY!
(Summer Re-Run '06)

A short time ago I watched a televisual program about a Baboon troop that eerily mirrored our human society.

A large male, an outsider from another troop, fought and defeated the reigning King and took control.
Chaos ensued.

As if to maximise his reign of terror the new Tyrant killed one of the old King's offspring. This act of infanticide was a premeditated act to stop the Queen from lactating and therefore prompt her to become fertile again.

The opportunity to replace the exisiting constituents with your own is afterall the ultimate reward for any new Tyrant.
It's always about US and THEM!

Naturally the entire troop was thrown into a state of chaos but it miraculously devolved into a sustainable society of neurosis and fear much like our own. Within a surprisingly short period of time the entire troop nervously adjusted, submitted and adapted to the new King.

It seems that the day to day pursuit of food and shelter overrides all of the angst about the political state of affairs. Sound familiar?

Baboons certainly appear to be almost human with their expressive faces, busy little hands, and the myriad of required interpersonal conventions required to maintain the status quo. This particular program could have easily been a documentary on homo escapeons by simply replacing the images with footage of humans and leaving the audio intact.

You could call it automatic anthropomorphic authenticity thanks to the replication of all that monkey business to our own screwed up world.

Like Baboons, we unfortunately can't seem to shake the political aggression that continues to terrorise our own species. We so called higher evolved types continue to ape this sadistic behaviour...
Rwanda, Haiti, Bosnia, Kosovo, East Timor, Armenia, Sierra Leone, Liberia, Burundi, Congo, and Darfur.

Our world is still plagued by aggressive males invading and killing the neighbours and their offspring to satisfy their primal naked ambitions.

US against THEM.
I am sure that early man went through the exact sort of power struggles for millions of years. I find it totally depressing that in the 21st Century we still struggle with it.

WHY? Is it our lingering Colonial Paternalistic world view? We seem to treat Africans and other developing nations as children left to work it out on their own? This fantasy that it will all just somehow miraculously work out is crazy.


It also certainly appears that the United Nations has proven itself to be completely incompetent at protecting the global village. The UN might as well join the grotesque PR charade of the Olympics as an equally castrated eunich singing the praises of global harmony.

Striving to eliminate monstrous acts of genocide from history the whole world once cried 'Auschwitz, Never Again', and yet it is now Darfur and the world sighs 'Sudan, Not Again!'

With humans it seems that all of the window dressing that we put on display cannot disguise the little shop of horrors that we call Humanity.

tick tock tick tock tick tock tick tock tick tock tick tock tick tock tick tock tick tock tick tock...

"Some say the world will end in fire,

Some say in ice.

From what I've tasted of desire

I hold with those who favor fire.

But if it had to perish twice,

I think I know enough of hate

To know that for destruction ice

Is also great

And would suffice."

Many of you are familiar with this famous poem by Robert Frost (1874–1963).

"So you think you got it all figured out

You're an expert in the field, without a doubt

But I know your methods inside and out

And I won't be takin' in by Fire and Ice

You come on like a flame

Then you turn a cold shoulder

Fire and Ice

I wanna give you my love

But you'll just take a little piece of my heart"

Pat Benatar couldn't decide either!

I was thinking that the scariest scenario would be that it will never end.

What if things never change and we keep making the same mistakes over and over and over and over and over and over and over?

However it WILL come to an end!

Scientists predict that the Sun has 5 to 7 billion years of energy left.

According to a synopsis on Wiki;

"Earth's biosphere will be destroyed before then by the Sun's steady increase in brightness as its hydrogen supply dwindles, its core contracts, and it becomes a Red Giant that engulfs us.

The extra solar energy input will evaporate Earth's oceans ultimately leaving Earth as a dessicated, dead planet with a surface of molten rock."

So be of good cheer because we have a few billion years left to smarten up.

Can we do it?

DON'T LET DIRTY LAUNDRY
HAMPER YOUR LOVE LIFE
(Summer Re-Run March 06)



Attention married men, it's time to clean up your act and iron out a few things. Here is some spin on how to recycle your romance.

For starters, NEVER 'air out' your dirty laundry in public, EVER, you will only agitate your wife. Man up!



If the little white thing down in your basement is only getting used once a week, then its time to turn the tide.



Allow me to shed some sunlight on the subject.
It's time to bounce that fleecy feeling and start from zero.




First of all, you can't just lift the lid, crank the nobs, shove your stuff in, slam it shut, run off, and expect your good-lady-wife to be satisfied?!


You shouldn't feel hampered by time ...
slow down..

take your time separating your wife's delicates,
and concentrate, you wouldn't want anything to shrink now would you?



Don't forget to insert generous amounts of fabric softener into the designated receptacle before putting anything else in.

Pay careful attention to the labels and follow instructions...
don't just stand there and fiddle with the control dials..these are finely tuned instruments that respond accordingly.

Gently rotate the little dial around and around until you locate the warm to hot setting, then you can push the big nob in.




Now on occasion, when you are pressed for time,
the short spin cycle is OK...
just don't make a habit of it.


This should go without saying but..



If you haven't advanced a load lately it's your own darn fault.
DO NOT wait until the stuff in your basket looks like it is ready to explode?
You can always do a few small loads by hand.
DUH!



Another delicate matter;
every once and a while you may have difficulty keeping your junk wrinkle free, you may have to use the fluff setting..add a little starch to stiffen the collar..
hey, it happens.

When the buzzer goes off, don't panic, and don't think that you're finished...
it ain't over until the rumbling and tumbling completely subsides...
then you can politely ask if she would like you to do another load.




Before you take it all out and start folding..
wrap your arms around and feel how wonderful and cozy-warm that is. MMMMMM.



Follow these simple guidelines and before you know it, you will both be looking forward to things getting down and dirty.

DOUGH!
(Summer Re-Run circa March '06)

This is hard to believe but according to Forbes there are 793 Billionaires living beside us on Earth who have a combined wealth of $2.6 Trillion...
and almost half of them are Americans.

There are 371 American Billionaires!
Forty of them live in New York City.


That is amazing when you consider that John D Rockefeller became the first billionaire around 1916.

He was eventually worth an astonishing $200 Billion which is about four times wealthier than Bill Gates!





Today they're a Dime A Dozen.


There are 78 Billionaire$ who have vaginas.
So now the next big thing will be who will become the first TRILLIONAIRE!

That's 12 zeroes!

That is a concept that is well beyond my comprehension because I still think that $1,000 is a lot of money.

If I was a Billionaire;
I would buy the moon back from the United States and just use it for target practice.
Every Sunday night I would go out on my balcony and launch huge expensive rockets at my moon.


My rockets would be propelled by burning millions of 100 dollar bills,
just like NASA.




Every now and then I would load the tip of my rocket with all sorts of crap like priceless paintings and irreplaceable antiquities.

I could buy all of the diamonds in the world and plow them into the surface of my moon and then charge DeBeers ONE TRILLION DOLLARS for the mineral rights.


Or I could just keep one single little crappy diamond here on Earth and then it would be worth $1,000,000,000,000!




Either way, I would be the first TRILLIONAIRE on Earth!

What would you do with ONE TRILLION DOLLARS?