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First time I saw Dolores O’Riordan I said to myself, what would she look like as a Ewok?

(This is part of a series of posts that I am doing in the run up to my first Sydney Fringe Festival show in September. It is called One Man Show and it is a split show performed with Andrew Barnett, in the run up we have another website to promo the show, check it out if you get a chance. Original Post)

People who know me know that I have one huge pet peeve right now, Hipsters! Now that word has quite a few meanings, there were 50s hipsters that were different from the 90s version, but the current version, the post millennial crop, just seem custom designed to annoy the crap out of me.

My theory is that Mother Earth did a stock take at the end of the last millennium and figured out there are far too many of us bald monkeys walking around and screwing up the planet. She didn’t get to 4 billion on the clock without being able to take corrective action every now and again and hipsters are her way of depopulating us from the inside. Just to start off, they seem to enjoy having bad hairstyles, a good way to stop being attractive to the opposite sex and future mate. Should they overcome that obstacle they have a fondness for uber tight jeans, an excellent way to keep the sperm count down and stop the next generation right there.

Have you ever been out walking around and you see a person wearing glasses that look like they were government issued in the 70s, but then on closer inspection found out that the glasses in question have no lenses? Hipsters wanna be! I personally don’t get that one. When I was 11 I found out I had to wear glasses, as I got older and earned some money, I tried to make the glasses I had to wear as invisible as possible. When I found out I couldn’t wear contacts (imagine trying to give medicine to a cat that doesn’t want it, that was me trying to get a contact into my eye) I went for the best science could deliver and got lasik eye surgery, “What’s that burning smell? Oh right it’s me!”. These kids don’t even need glasses, but they wear the frames, GAH!

Back in my day I was a fairly serious cyclist, I enjoyed as we went through the 80s and 90s, bike technology got better, first it was single speed free wheel, then 3 speed, then a 9 speed, then 18 speed, then full hyper glide 27 speed XTR, yay! Hipsters in their obsession with form over function have stripped it all back to either a single speed or a fixie! That is a bike with the gear fixed to the wheel, so that they can’t stop pedaling. This is how crazy it is getting, this is their logic. Because the wheel is fixed, they can just back pedal to brake, hence they don’t need a brake on the bike and they remove all brakes, WTF! I presented one hipster once with the real life situation, “OK so you are going down the road at 60 kph and a car unexpectantly pulls out in front of you, what are you going to do?”, “Eh, I’ll just pedal backwards”, was his response. “You’ll snap your legs off!”, was mine. I have to admit this was before I was in on Mother Earth’s plan, viewed through that prism it all makes sense again, right they don’t wear helmets because it’ll mess up their crappy hair do, so that when the worst happens and they crash, it will be immediate death rather than surviving on some life support system clogging up the world. Nice!

I like to think of myself as an optimist, I can’t fight the system, people are allowed to be idiots and wrong, how can I take advantage of it? Well single speeds and fixies are murder on the knee joints, most of them think that they’ll be 23 for ever, I’m waiting until they turn 30, provided they last that long, and find out they have the knees of a 90 year old due to Osteoarthritis, since it turned out that, yeah, gears were a good idea after all. I am going to set up the first joint replacement facility targeting hipsters. Also since they have the frames already, you know reading distance starts to go as you approach 40, here lets me get some lenses for you. Man I am going to clean up.

(This is part of a series of posts that I am doing in the run up to my first Sydney Fringe Festival show in September. It is called One Man Show and it is a split show performed with Andrew Barnett, in the run up we have another website to promo the show, check it out if you get a chance. Original Post)
I suffer from an unusual complaint. I’m not proud of it, but I know nothing about cars. This is hard to admit as a guy and even harder for some one who works as an engineer. I don’t know how a carburetor works, in fact if spell check hadn’t just kicked in I wouldn’t have even been able to spell it. It sorta comes down to a thing I call “The Lingo”. We live in a highly specialised world, every thing has it own code, series of buzz words. This is mostly noticeable to me when I go out and try and purchase medium to high priced electrical and household goods. Bought a new phone recently, how many mega pixels in the camera, do you have a front facing as well as a rear facing one. Is it NFC enabled, what you still using bluetooth, no one uses that any more etc etc. Now most of that statement is current, it makes sense now, 3 years ago it would have been gibberish and in 3 years it will more than likely be gibberish again. I do live in dread fear of having to upgrade my phone, like a body builder preparing for competition, I have to hit the equivalent of a gym and learn up on all the new technology and find out what is no longer there. Does any body remember express on covers? I do! This is all so that when I enter into the shop and start talking to sales dude he doesn’t start bamboozling me with terms I don’t know and before you know it I have added rust protection to the glass of the lens.If I am honest about it cameras and phones technology usually comes to me, but it is all the other things, BBQs, bicycles, lounges and beds, yes beds! I spent the past three weekends checking out “sleeping giant” and “snooze” to replace our 10 year old bed, you could say we rode it into the ground! (shit joke). But there is a lingo for beds. Frames or bases. Medium or Firm. Memory foam or latex. Matching bed sides, dressers, tall boys, low boys, built in storage, Gah!. After losing the will to live and not being conversant enough on the lingo, at first I thought we were getting it, but was devastated to find out you can not get a racing car bed in a queen size. Eventually we capitulated and picked the first frame we saw, with the first mattress we saw. At times like that I just walk into the electrical section of a Harvey Normans and pick on the sales dudes. I use my powers of lingo to make my self feel superior and ask for stuff on camera or phones that just don’t exist but sound like they should. “I want a 100 Mega Pixel camera, which front, back and side facing lenses. It needs to have 100 GHz of memory and it had to be able to upload all images to the cloud and the intranet!” When they apologise and say they are “Sorry sir, we don’t have that camera in stock”, I then like to blare in his face “Well I believe I’ll take my business else where! GOOD DAY! I SAID GOOD DAY” and then storm out. I can be rest assured I have claimed my human sacrifice to the god of Lingo.I suppose I wasn’t entirely truthful at the start when I said I didn’t get cars, that was true until these things called electric cars started to arrive on the scene, and being an electrical engineer, it was like that scene in the Karate Kid where Daniel-San found out all the shitty work around the house was in preparation to learn to fight. All of a sudden I knew what regenerative braking was and why its cool. Lead acid batteries versus NiMH and why one is better than the other under load. Ranges of 100 Km for Mega Coulomb Hour. Yeah Biatch! That’s what I am talking about!Some times I feel like Indiana Jones trying to stay ahead of that rolling stone ball, but one day I will become the Zen master of Lingo!