Comic back cover ad #3

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Pitfall II. It took some time for me to realise that this was not the image of a gigantic rectal passage. It then took some time for me to realise that despite that, I was still staring up someone’s arse.I never played Pitfall II. I don’t know what to say about it. The computer looks supremely chunky. It practically sports love handles. And the game looks very orange. That is all.

Comic back cover ad #2

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Are you man enough for Megaforce? Megaforce.

Chuck Norris is. Look at him. There he stands, wearing only a belt and a calculator, not a gonad in sight. Erupting from behind him, a motorcycle with dinnerplate wheels, a decepticon DeLorean blasting whipped cheese from its windshield, a squadron of dune buggies and the entire US Air Force from the Vietnam war. Save up your dollar, you too could be the proud owner of a Megaforce patch, membership card and bike decal. You can proudly display your lack of genitalia, resting assured no one will question your nudity or calculator-laden chest because you’re a card-carrying, patch-weilding member of Megaforce. If anyone questions you, just point at your glistening bike decal and laugh in their faces. Don’t have a bike? Stick it on your DeLorean.

Bill Bryson: What the hell?

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I’ve just finished reading Bill Bryson’s “Mother Tongue”, a reasonably amusing edutainment book exploring the history, complexity and potential future of the English language. All in all, it’s a suitably entertaining read, but I find it’s somewhat flawed by the small issue that factually, it’s probably wildly innacurate. I base this assumption on the various passages devoted to the Australian dialect of the English language, most of which are fundamentally, well, wrong. While I’d like nothing less than to simply reproduce these passages verbatim for your own edification, I have a moral aversion to plagiarism, and shall instead address the various “examples” of Australian speech/grammar/spelling, and then we’ll discuss whether or not anyone ever actually uses them.

Another temptation I shall avoid is the urge to address Mr. Bryson’s quoting from “Lets Talk Strine”, a comedic parody of a book written in 1965 by this bloke, and not representing anything realistic whatsoever about the way anyone did, does, or likely ever will speak.

Anyhow, the actual examples that annoy me:

“Tucker”. This word means “food”. It’s commonly used as part of the term “bush tucker”, and by Australia’s version of rednecks. It’s very quickly disappearing from the language. (And good riddance, say I.)

“Slygrogging.” I have never ever heard this word spoken, nor have I read it prior to seeing it in this book. Apparently (and somewhat evidently, I admit), it defines the act of sneaking out to have a drink. Where I come from, we call that “sneaking out to have a drink”.

“Nong.” A nong is an idiot. No one has used this word since 1987.

“Don’t come the raw prawn with me.” Oh, god. How I both love and loathe this phrase. This alleged common element of Australian parlance, along with various others (”technicolour yawn” for vomit, as cited in this very book is another) survive thrivingly on tea towels and in useless Australian language phrase books. No one ever says them.

Furthermore, the next paragraph in the book proposes a few additional facts that are entirely debatable:

“In Australia, people eat cookies, not biscuits.” No, we don’t. We eat biscuits. Americans eat cookies. If you want to be thoroughly pedantic, we eat cookies when we buy them from Subway.

“They spell many words the American way - labor rather than labour, for instance.” To hell we do. If I’d have spelled the word “labor” in school, I’d have been sorely reprimanded for it, and rightly so. The Australian Labor Party is a vestige of some idiot’s idea of modernising the image of the political party (well, as modernised as it could get in 1912), and is the only time we spell the word without the “u”. As a rule, we follow British spelling conventions, not American conventions. No “-ize” endings, no “-or” endings. And no nukular.

It’s inconsistencies like these that make me doubt the other “facts” presented in the book, particularly when I’m unable to verify them myself and am forced to take them at face value.

I also dislike the easy-to-digest approach when it’s used to present incorrect information, because, frankly, people are more likely to remember rubbish when it’s presented in an amusing format.

I’ve had my whinge. You can all go home now.

Time, Under Fire, apparently

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I have a weak spot for two-dollar DVDs. The more ambitious the plotline, and the more the cover looks like it's been designed in Paint Shop Pro, the more likely I'll buy it, and the more likely I'll enjoy it for all the wrong reasons. To wit: “Time Under Fire”

Starring: Jeff Fahey, Richard Tyson, and absolutely no one else of any significance.

Nuclear submarine.

Plot: A nuclear submarine cruising around the Bermuda Triangle is inexplicably drawn into a luminescent undersea vagina --

That can't be good, surely.

-- that throws it into the future. In this bizarre alternate timeline, the captain of the submarine encounters himself as a militant rebel leader, and must fight his way through a thoroughly confusing series of events involving another, bigger, and spectacularly unexplained submarine, Richard Tyson with no neck performing the worst Jimmy Stewart impression since Jimmy Stewart, and Emperor Palpatine if he was from Alabama.

There's no possible way this character could have been inspired by Star Wars.

Worth watching for: Some of the worst split-screening actor duplication ever, and easily the most horrific sex scene since Titanic.

Just because you can split-screen, doesn't mean you should split-screen.

Also, random goo-oozing robots.

At least he can't bleed on the sofa.

Overall: It’s extremely shit, but that was to be expected. It appears to have been filmed on a budget of about sixty cents and a licorice strap, and the plot is so thoroughly confusing even the most basic elements of it fail to make any sense. The special effects are decent. However, it would have been an adequate movie if more time had been spent ironing out the spectacularly convoluted storyline, rather than spent trying to find a way to crow-bar in some exploding cloned robots with green paint on.

Also, if anyone can explain to me how the evil submarine can at one moment be randomly hovering in a vacuous black space inside a warehouse, and the next moment be submerged at the deepest depths of the ocean, you’ve won yourself a gold star.

Oh, of course, it's in the submarine warehouse.

Comic back cover ad #1

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So, there we were, walking to the railway station. In the rain. And kind of in a hurry. Almost at the corner, there’re two green environmentally friendly shopping bags, their contents covered in cling wrap with a small sign with my favourite word on it: “Free.” After spending a day in the city, we return to explore the freebies. Under the layer of moist cling wrap lay two foot-high piles of comic books, ranging from this year’s latest obscurities to some Teen Titans comics from the early ’80s. Also, some “mature aged readers” arthouse comics (read: badly inked porn) and the instruction manual for an iPod.

Atari Lynx.

Atari Lynx. It consumes food, apparently. I remember the Lynx.I remember it being gigantic, yet, at the time, beautifully designed and executed. The screen, capable of displaying approximately four crudely coloured pixels (and capable of draining approximately six AA batteries in the time it takes to turn the power on) was amazingly crisp compared to the Sega Game Gear, and the ability to rotate the device to play games vertically was awesome. Even though there were virtually no games made that exploited this gymnastic skill.This advertisement was on the back of a comic from the early ’90s. The alarming brown stains on it are probably just water marks, but I chose not to delve further into their origins. Atari made a brave choice in comparing the Lynx to the Game Boy in the advertisement, considering the original Game Boy (as displayed) was little smaller than a housebrick. Here, the Lynx galumphs over the Nintendo handheld, threatening to crush it like so many a teenage knee. In the centre, Steve Irwin attempts to outrun the Game Boy by surfing headlong into a game of mastermind. I vaguely want a Lynx, now. I’d buy one on eBay, but the postage charge for something the size of an arcade table would be phenomenal. I miss the ’90s.