This is from my weely Gen X Girl column that appears in the Townville Bulletin Savvy magazine.

So the most googled term in 2011—what is love? What a stupid search enquiry. Can you believe that we’ve turned into such an emotionally retarded society that we need to google one of our most base human emotions?

That’s not the only stupid thing I’ve observed this year. Start at the supermarket. Supermarkets have got so stupid that you now have to pay for the privilege of pushing dodgy trolleys around and then have the fun job of scanning and packing your own groceries all the while being bossed around by a voice from a box.

Add to that our limited supermarket choices. At my local supermarket there are only two types of diced tomatoes. Forgive me for sounding like an old person, but back in the day you could choose any number of tinned tomatoes, from fancy Italian ones that were actually grown in New Zealand to thick and rich ones with two generic brands thrown in for good measure. But now, so little choice amongst the canned goods.

Consider marshmallows? Bet that’s a situation that’s doesn’t regularly enter your thought processes, but this is my dilemma last week. I make this fancy little accompaniment to BBQ steak that is based on marshmallows (stop screwing up your face—it’s good). Anyway I like to make this dish from white marshmallows, but there is no longer such a thing as solo white marshmallows. They are mixed in with strawberry ones and peach flavoured ones. I can’t use the pink and orange ones as they make my fancy pants dish look like a bowl of vomit so I have to buy three packets just to get the white ones. And then I’m stuck with all these flavoured marshmallows. Who eats peach marshmallows?

Fixed light speed cameras are also stupid. Road toll statistics are at a record high in 2011. Coincidentally the Queensland Government has rolled out even more of these revenue-raising monstrosities. Simple math. More speed cameras does not equate to less road deaths. More speed cameras equates to more money in government coffers.

The passing of the carbon tax is stupid. Good old Australia is leading the way in stopping climate change by this year passing a tax that will make everyday necessities like power and food more expensive. We’re doing this because we need to make a stand. Never mind that that big polluters like the US, Russia and China aren’t doing anything at all, the Australian government is making a stand on behalf of the world. Oh and so is Finland and Costa Rica.

Actually the whole federal government is stupid. We have an elected government who is totally dominated by the minority party and independents that it needs to actually govern. Our prime minister by proxy Bob Browne gets kudos for the carbon tax, outing our real Prime Minister as a liar. Australia’s dominant legislation for 2011? Gay marriage and poker machine licences. Not the economy and asylum seekers.

These are just a few issues for stupid 2011. To be fair it didn’t look promising from the beginning with it being the year of the rabbit, the year of the flood and the year of the cyclone. But we did get some cool dates like 11/11/11. That was a highlight. Image

Apparently people are being stricken with “text neck” and “text thumb injury”. OMG.

According to British health experts the strain injuries stem from long periods spent string at small screens and tapping at tiny keys. The injuries are becoming more common as hi-tech gadget proliferate.

Shockingly, Tim Hutchful from the British Chiropractic Association reported that he had a patient who “developed inflamed tendons in her thumb from using her phone and was unable to use her hand for weeks due to pain.” What an idiot his patient was. I have very good advice. Stop. Put down the phone. Find a life. (Sorry, being facetious again.)

Hutchful also reports that the human head (weighing about 5kg) is not suited to tipping forward to read small screens. “If the head is held forward to squint at the screen, then the unusual position makes the head feel up to four times heavier, increasing the strain across the whole body.” One worker in 50 suffers from “text neck” in the UK.

Yes, more truly serious first world problems identified and labelled. Take care now (especially if you are reading this on your smart phone).

A while back I wrote that I was getting one of those robot vacuum cleaner things. A few people have asked me what I think of it so here’s my review on my robo-vac (that’s his picture here).

• OK, we named it. Well my daughter named it Vinnie which I think makes it sound a bit gangsterish and doesn’t really suit it at all, but it’s stuck. I was after something a bit more The Bold and the Beautiful like Vance or Vaughn. But Vinnie it is.
• The dog hates it. He particularly hates that it makes quite a bit of noise. He really hates that I talk to it. Yes, I’m embarrassed to say I actually talk to the thing. I ask it what it’s doing in the the cupboard, tell it go and vacuum the hallway, say hello to it and tell it it’s time to go to bed. This morning I told it it was clever. The dog looked at me in disgust and went to his own bed. He’s still not talking to me.
• Robo-vac (aka Vinnnie) has a mind of it’s own. No matter that I lift it up and take it to where I want it to go, it makes it’s way back to where it wants to be. It is a defiant teenager of a vacuum cleaner.
• It is a really good topic of conversation. I had a houseful of people over on the weekend and every single one of them wanted to see the vacuum in action, stand in front of it to make it bounce off them, play with the remote and comment that it was the stupidest thing they’d ever seen. Jealousy among friends is a terrible thing.
• When it runs out of power (after 80 minutes) it docks itself for a recharge. I like to praise it for doing the cleaning and then putting itself to bed. So intelligent.
• The cleaning lady hates it too. She asks in her thick Italian accent, her tone hurt “why you want that thing for when you have me?” I spent a cup of coffee and half an hour reassuring her that I needed them both and like her much more. She spends a lot of time glaring at Vinnie the vac as she goes about her work.
• It cleans OK, but if the cleaning lady didn’t come once a week, then it wouldn’t be good enough. It keeps up with that little day to day dirt and dog hair so it saves me having to vacuum at all–so yes, I guess it is.

For the record Vinnie is a Clean-Mate 22QL. I paid $200 for it via a Scoopon voucher. That’s all it’s worth.

This is how this remarkable feat was accomplished. Nan Wise, a researcher, masturbated while in an MRI so that pictures of her brain could be taken. These were then spliced together to make the video. Now the truly remarkable thing about this entire exercise must be Ms Wise’s ability to bring herself to orgasm in an MRI. I don’t know if you’ve ever been in one but it’s akin to a metal sausage casing with Doctor Who show noises beamed in at intermittent times. This woman must have extraordinary focus.

So here’s the video. Think about it next time you’re coming to climax. That’ll put a dampner on it. Image

This is my Gen X Girl column for this week’s Savvy magazine published in The Townsville Bulletin.

I’m starting to think I might be quite old. I actually remember when the internet was discovered. OK, it wasn’t discovered like Captain Cook discovered Australia, but discovered like when it first came out. My first time was at work. We dialled up, the noisy modem made lots of Star Trek sounds and hey presto we were ON LINE.

There were four of us crowded round one computer when the boss asked what we wanted to look up using our Alta Vista search engine. “Porn” we all chorused and that’s what we did. Looked at porn for five minutes, with our boss. Sort of gross—yes. Kiddies, in the olden days you could do things like that without having a sexual harassment suit slapped on you.

I remember when mobile phones came out. Well they more resembled a tackle box with a phone in it. Very big, quite inconvenient and majorly wanky. “Can’t see those taking off,” I thought to myself. Major fail.

However some really cool things have come out just recently and quite frankly I don’t know how we ever survived without them.

1. Group discount coupons. My inbox is full of group discount coupons offering me all sorts of incentives from facials to Thai holidays to golf games. There’s nothing like getting a facial for $25. Reminds me of what things cost in the 80s. My most recent purchase—one of those robot vacuum cleaners. Only $200—what a bargain. Works OK, but the real fun is watching the dog freak out.
2. Online shopping. “They’ll steal all the money from your bank account”, Nana cautioned but the rest of world and I embraced internet shopping with gusto. I buy clothes from the US and UK and have them delivered to my house for free. I think of the deliveryman as Santa bringing me lovely gifts once a week. I buy my makeup from Hong Kong where I pay half the price, get a 10% and more free delivery. God bless you strong Aussie dollar.
3. DIY Travel. I make all my own travel arrangements when I fly overseas. I do lots of research and find good stuff for cheap. I pick my airplane seats online. I don’t use travel agents anymore. The last time I used one resulted in a very dodgy hotel in a male enclave of Dubai. Blonde female? Muslim? Attention for all the wrong reasons.
4. Smart phones. Do you remember when a Filofax was the in-thing for any businessperson? You put your contacts, appointments into a hideously expensive organiser, which resulted in RSI as you lugged it around. Now it all goes on to the phone. The internet is there too. Genius. Now you can look up porn on the bus.
5. E-books. I love a good read but have you seen how much books cost? And then you’ve got to find somewhere to store them which is fine if you have a shelf of Shakespearean works which make you look smart. Fantasy romances not so much. But books can be downloaded for a fraction of the price and stored the e-reader. Money and storage problems sorted. You can even read romance novels on the bus. No one need know you’re reading vapid crap because you look so clever with your fancy e-reader.  Image

This is my column for this week’s Gen X Girl weekly column published in Savvy Magazine in the Townsville Bulletin

I’m in the midst of a relationship breakup. Well, we haven’t broken up yet, but I’m thinking all the signs are there. Neglect, indifference, lack of regard for welfare—classic signs of a relationship on the brink.

Actually now I’ve got all that off my chest I think it’s fairly clear. There is no future for this relationship so Facebook, I’m breaking up with you.

I will accept a bit of the blame for the failure of our relationship by admitting that my intentions for joining Facebook were not entirely in the spirit of social networking. I just wanted to connect with my daughter while she was overseas for six months.

It worked just fine for that, lots of tame scenery photos. You’d think that she was quite boring but I could only friend her on her fake Facebook page. Apparently the real one has too much information for my delicate senses. More likely she didn’t want me to know what she was up to. I respect that. I don’t want to know either.

Along the way I picked up lots of friends of my own. The only problem is that I don’t have any real interest in knowing what they are doing. I don’t have the time to check out their pages when I accept their friend requests. I don’t know whether they are married, have kids or where they work. This makes me a very bad and selfish Facebook user.

In the beginning though I did try to give it a go. I’d try to make witty comments on posts, say nice things about people’s photos, the usual and then, well let’s say I couldn’t be bothered. I think I might be too self-centred for Facebook. Or too busy having real relationships with family and friends.

The email account that is attached to my Facebook page hasn’t been opened for three months—that’s how long it is since I’ve accessed Facebook. I just know there will be hundreds of email alerts with things like friend requests, birthdays, comments on my page and I just can’t face it. The thought of seeing all those emails and knowing that I should deal with them sends fear into my soul. Really a breakup is the only option. The relationship has turned me into a procrastinator.

Anyway I’m not alone. People all over the globe are abandoning Facebook. This year has seen the takeup rate for first-time Facebook users drop. In the UK more than 100,000 Facebook users deactivate their accounts in May. In the US an estimated 6 million users did the same thing.

This disenchantment with Facebook even has a fancy name—Facebook fatigue. Dr Larry Neal, QUT Facebook expert (how on earth did he get that job?), says that the slump in usage is a “natural progression for any new technology or form of entertainment”.

“People are legitimately exhausted with it and the idea of having to maintain it and keep up with event invitations and the games that keep popping up in the feed,” he said. I hear you Dr Neal.

So Facebook, sayonara. And if anyone I know out there has sent me a friend request—I’m not ignoring you—I’d just prefer it if you gave me a call. Oh and happy birthday to anyone who’s had a birthday in the last three months. Image

This is from my Gen X Girl weekly column in this week’s

Along with 11 million other Australians I went and saw the final instalment of the Harry Potter series last week. It was good, not great but that’s OK as the series generally was excellent, not at all over-rated. What is over-rated is the fact that it was in shown 3D.

3D is over-rated. Think about it. You are paying the price of the GDP of a small African nation to watch bits of paper floating just out of your reach. Whoop-di-doo.

And you have to wear those disgusting glasses that make you look like Roy Orbison in the afterlife. They are not only hideous looking, they are also heavy. So heavy in fact that I walked out of the movie theatre with two red indents either side of my nose. Not my most attractive moment.

They’re also distracting. Let’s be honest here—3D and the glasses don’t exactly give the clearest picture. I spend the whole of the film wondering who the actors were in the Three Musketeers trailer. I couldn’t clearly see their faces. Stupid 3D.

How then is the push for 3D TV going to pan out? I’d be thinking that if you jumped on the bandwagon early you’d be feeling dudded. It’s not as though there is a plethora of 3D programs out there for you to watch. And there’s the whole wearing of the glasses and what on earth do you do when people come round. Do you wear your silly glasses and let your guests watch the weird blurry TV or do you switch it off and have to make useless conversation?

Enough though about 3D. There’s heaps more things out there that are over-rated. I’ve compiled a list of my other top 5.

1. Twilight series. I tried, really I did. I persevered through books one and two and I have to be frank—they are crap. Lines such as “his lovely, lovely face” did nothing to convince me that these are nothing more than glorified Mills and Boons dressed up like vampires. Movies too. Rubbish.
2. Kate Moss. Can someone tell me why this woman is still and icon after 20 years? She is bony, skinny with ordinary hair and even more ordinary teeth. She’s not even particularly pretty. She lives on fags, booze and recreational drugs and it’s starting to show. Yet put her in a tweed jacket and a pair of denim cutoffs and hey presto the fashionistas go wild, a style is born. Why?
3. Pastel tattoos. They’re not even real tatts. More like a colouring book for the body of middle-aged women. If you want to commit to permanent ink on your skin till you die then go for a hard out one. Think Pamela Anderson’s barbwire or Mat Rogers’s primary colours.
4. Jazz music. Seriously it sounds like they are just making it up as they go along. Mostly listened to by skinny, older men who wear scarves and statement hats.
5. Facebook. Big fat time sucking device that keeps you abreast with the minutiae of someone’s else’s life that is more boring that yours. “Should I hang the washing out?” is not a post—it is stupidity. Look outside the window. Don’t bore your 456 friends with inanity. Image