Australia

I spent some time there last week. Brisbane, Adelaide and Melbourne were the cities that I visited. I want to post my thoughts, but I am too lazy to write a proper post. I shall continue in bullet-point form.

Brisbane:

- Brisbane is very humid.

- Simon and Kate make a great raspberry, white chocolate and marshmallow ice-cream; and a fantastic lamb mince, haloumi, pine nut and cranberry pizza.

- I am not very flexible and attempting to drop to one knee while shooting a basketball is not a good idea for me.

- The Asia-Pacific headquarters of the company I work for is located in close proximity to a brothel. 

- Brisbane is not the dump that Mikey made it out to be.

Adelaide:

- Iranian's participate in surf lifesaving. No seriously.

- Parmis are delicious.

- Vegan banana on toast is delicious.

- A shocking amount of bovril is required to make bovril mee taste authentic. Sloe gin is probably not a good alternative to cognac for this dish.

- Jasper Fforde is one badass motherfucker. I never thought I would contemplate reading "Jane Eyre" or bemoan my lack of English literature knowledge. I'm sure there were many English nerd jokes I didn't get.

- Rundle Street is like a deluxe version of old Cashel Mall. *sigh*

- The Ocelot is very good at choosing people. I am very willing to leech off her for interesting people to hang out with.

- It is difficult to grab Piro's belly, for he is Biteymus Prime!

- Med school students can be as annoying and douchey as business school students.

- Stethoscopes make decent earplugs.

- I cannot spell stethoscope without the help of spellcheck.

- I don't particularly like mulberries.

- Personal time will never have the same meaning to me again.

- I would really like a Hikaru Otada music memory post from someone. Please?

- I can spend nearly a week staying 10 minutes walk from the beach and not once set foot in the ocean.

- Jie's room felt like home, as it did in Auckland as well. I felt comfortable enough to be my slobby self... but not to make personal time.

Melbourne:

- Duck with prawn sauce is actually pretty tasty.

- The MCG is fucking huge.

- Vietnamese sandwich rolls are delicious.

- I suck at golf when I sense that people are watching and I get nervous.

- I leech off Mikey for people to hang out with too.

General observations:

- All of the outdoor basketball courts I saw had nets. That is seriously impressive. New Zealand, you just have to do better.

- Moderate-to-mild Australian accents can actually be pleasant and not at all fun to imitate.

- I am not used to seeing tall buildings and being in the presence of them turns me into a slack-jaw yokel.

All in all it was a very good trip. Really, it was the people that made the trip (and some of them were even Australian). The food was also really good. Australia, I will be back. 

Piro's belly....I will be back.....

Rant

I was going to write a post on being annoyed at mispronunciation (I guess I still am). Then I tried to write the title and found that "pronounciation" is incorrect. So I went and checked it up, and sure enough pronunciation is the correct spelling. Then I read through a couple of forums and see that people have posted that hearing people say "pronounciation" makes them wince and grit their teeth. Which made me a little pissed off, because I say pronounciation.....spelling-wise, it just looks better having that o in there....and from a consistency point of view, it makes sense to have it in there.

I guess where I differentiate between the arseholes that......fuck, you going to underline "arsehole" too? Where do I change it off American English? Anyway, there are obviously different acceptable spellings for words in different parts of the English speaking world....and different ways of pronouncing them as well.....Ahah! "Pronouncing" wasn't underlined....it just makes no damn sense to have "pronunciation".  

What really annoys me is when people regularly mispronounce words that come from other languages. I mean words that they say everyday and have heard everyday and should know how to pronounce. For example, why do some English news presenters still refer to the current president of the US as "Barrack Obama (with bama pronounced like it is in Alabama)". I mean, we've only heard his name 50 zillion times before. If you can say "shark", you can say Barack correctly....and if you insist on pronouncing it "barrack", then you have no business being on television presenting the news.

Another thing that had me seething... Kanban, is a Japanese word (and is pronounced "Kahn bahn") that has been appropriated by these business process improvement types. You want to do kanban to help business reduce waste and become more efficient, fine. But pronounce it properly. I went through 45 minutes of hell a couple of months ago, listening to an Australian "kanban" expert explain how he'd helped businesses implement "can ban" (pronounced like you would say "I can ban you from abusing the Japanese language like that"). If you really are such a fucking expert, why not take 5 seconds to learn how to pronounce it correctly?

People who want to seem like they know something about China will drop the word "guanxi" on you. That's fine, whatever....but if you talk to a Chinese person in English about it, they will most likely use the word "relationship"....because they are talking in English. Why not use the word "relationship" as well? The way most English speakers pronounce it, it is harder for native Chinese speakers to understand what you are talking about when you say "Gu-Anne-Shee" than it is when you say "relationship". If you were speaking in Mandarin, then "guanxi" is fine....mostly because the words before it and after it would be in Mandarin as well....and hopefully with reasonable pronounciation.

Beijing rhymes with paging....not pronounced Beige-ing.

I could continue this rant by moving onto Wade-Giles romanization.....and  I will. Chinese is hard enough for people to learn without adding in apostrophes in weird places and having double consonants that are the wrong way around. I get that it was invented years ago....but why use it or other variants of it now? Thank you is 谢谢, which is "xie xie" in pinyin, and something like "hsieh hsieh" in Wade-Giles. Which looks more daunting? Some people like the Wade-Giles because it brings back a sense of nostalgia... but apart from pleasing sinophiles longing to return to 1920's Shanghai, it is just a more confusing and less useful way of learning Mandarin. I drive my car to work and not a horse-drawn carriage because it's a lot easier and more convenient. Glad that Taiwan has finally moved away from it. Now to move everyone on to using simplified characters as well. I get hand cramps just looking at how many strokes are in some of the characters in traditional Chinese.

Facebook Scrabble

Last night, I was playing Facebook Scrabble. Facebook Scrabble isn't particularly good or challenging. It doesn't have a proper rating system or game clock. It's basically a lazily done app (big shock, I know) that is vastly inferior to Scrabulous, which was an unauthorized free Scrabble site that was forced to cease and desist (It became Lexulous, and offered a Scrabble-like copy which just wasn't the same).

Anyway, I start up a 2 minute per turn game (which by the way, is really stupid....could they not have had an overall time limit for all your turns in the game? How difficult would that be? If you make your move in 10 seconds, then your next turn is still limited to 2 minutes....and if you are playing someone who feels the need to take the entire 2 minutes to play every turn, a single game can take an eternity. It's pretty stupid....but I keep playing and keep going to Facebook....so yeah).

I lost my first game. I played against a lady from Canberra who seemed to have an idea of what she was doing. It was a pretty tight game throughout and unfortunately, I picked up the Z right at the end with no vowels on my rack and no places to put it.

My second game was against a weird guy who was one of these annoying people that take the entire time limit to play their turn. He was also asking a lot of personal questions. That is not cool. Saying "Hi and gl" is fine. Asking where you are from is fine. Asking your gender and age is a little creepy, like asking a/s/l in IRC....who does that? Also, you can see the first name of the person you are playing against, and my first name is pretty unambiguously male. Other tedious questions followed....What is your job? Do you have a girlfriend? What are your hobbies?

So, I play along and answer the questions seriously. I figure, he must be slightly mentally disabled in some way...better to be safe and be polite. I found out that he had two jobs. One was some kind of data entry job. The other one was... the other one was... It was... I think he was trying to be mysterious by not typing it out straight away. He must have been waiting for me to be intrigued and say "What is it?"....But I didn't, because I wasn't really interested and I was trying to build a seven letter word (which I did, SWIFTER going through a triple word score with the W on a double letter score, 106 points).

So after about four attempts at being mysterious, he lets me know that his second job is as an online performer. In this role he can earn 300 for a 4 hour show or 1000 for an overnight visit. So, I decide to look at his profile. Profile picture is a far shot and kinda blurry....but he appears to me to be a middle-aged overweight guy. I look through his pictures....half his pictures seem to be of adolescent boys. I look at his friends list.....Well.....nearly all of his friends are male......some of them have profile pictures of themselves half naked.....some of them have pictures of their naked butts.....oh and there was this one dude whose profile picture was a penis. Fantastic.

So Mr Middle-aged Fat Internet Porn performer/Escort starts telling me about the dangers of his work. He got beaten up recently by the boyfriend of a client of his. In future he is going to be more careful about who he goes out to see..... At no stage was I encouraging him to reveal all this to me.... I just provided polite short answers to his questions and didn't ask any of my own.

My timing was pretty good, because I managed to take my final turn, write "Thanks for the game, good luck with your job" and win the game right after he wrote "I'm feeling horny right now".

The whole thing was a bit unusual and a bit sad. I'm not sure what his intentions were or why you would engage in that kind of conversation with someone in an online Scrabble game. Did he think we would transition from Scrabble to cam sex? I could appreciate it if it was just someone doing it as a mindfuck/practical joke, I'm still hoping that it was. I mean really......Scrabble? Scrabble is the opposite of sex. It would be like going to a chess tournament hoping to see streakers. The only people sad enough to play Scrabble on Facebook are people who, you know, kinda just want to play Scrabble.....not have a wank to some chubby, ugly, middle-aged dude...

August

I am a huge fan of Rilo Kiley's album "Take Offs and Landings". Melodic, cheesy pop gets me every time. I really like Jenny Lewis' singing voice.....something sexy about a plain Midwest accent. She is also on the list of "redheads who I didn't find good-looking at first glance but who I am attracted to".... Mick Hucknall is not on this list.

Ichiro's Theme

This makes me sad every time I hear it, yet I can't get it out of my head.