olilolo blog

A lot of attention is being given to global warming at the moment. Scientists are divided on the cause and the actual mechanics of it all, but the consensus seems to be that the earth’s climate is changing. Governments around the world are scrambling to do something about it, like drunk teenagers who have just heard the garage door going up announcing their parents are home. The party is over.

So we see clean coal tech being announced, and carbon offset schemes, and mammoth overblown concerts filled with ageing rockers who flew there on a private jets urging us to “do our part” for the environment. We seem to be on the right track in terms of curbing our polluting behaviour.

Of course, it doesn’t help if the Earth is doing everything it can to negate our efforts by spewing huge amounts of methane into the atmosphere.

See, as the Earth’s temperature rises, the polar ice caps begin to melt. The trouble is that in the arctic there are enormous pockets of methane trapped in those ice sheets. Once they start to melt, the methane is released into the atmosphere.

This is a problem because methane is approximately 20 times more dangerous as a greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide, which is the main focus of most global warming initiatives. And so it should be, as it’s produced by most of the world’s nations as a waste product. The trouble is, much smaller amounts of methane have the same or worse effect. It has such an effect that some scientists are seriously worried that the methane from cows farting is contributing to global warming.

Cows produce fairly small amounts of methane. The arctic has just bubbled up hundreds of tonnes in fresh supplies.

Basically, it works like this. Did you ever have a roomate who farted a lot? Like, a lot? and they were always stinkers? It would get so bad sometimes that you had to go outside for some fresh air? Well, now imagine you’re living IN your roomate. And outside is SPACE.

That analogy may have broken down, so let’s use another. The Earth is farting, and we’re all caught in the dutch oven.

That’s why I’ve called it the “Dutch-Oven Scenario”. The scientific community has largely snubbed me and chosen to call the phenomenon the “Clathrate-Gun Hypothesis“, which just goes to show that being smart doesn’t mean you can name things worth a damn.

Whatever you call it, it’s something which should concern you, because scientists say events like this have been responsible for several extinction events over the history of life on the planet, including the “Permian Event“, not only a cool band name but an extinction which saw 96 percent of all marine species and 70 percent of all verterbrate land animals disappear from the face of the earth. Because the temperature rose a few degrees.

I should point out at this stage that my fallout bunker is fully equipped with air-conditioned life support systems. So I don’t need to worry about any of this. But you should be informed.

The Internet is rife with people selling things. Websites like ebay and CafePress have made it possible for any random guy with an idea and some free time (a lot of free time in some cases) to sell useless junk to people all over the world who have far too much money.

There’s a second breed of person out there who prefers the personal touch, building websites themselves and operating a cottage industry in specialised clothes, carved dolls, stuffed cane toads wearing dresses; the possibilities are endless. The internet puts these people on a level playing field with multinational corporations and gets their product out there to the entire world.

Then there’s a third type of person who sells purses shaped like vaginas.

Have you ever looked at the leathery, rippling folds of your purse and thought “the only thing that could improve this is if it looked like female genitalia”? Then Art Goddess is the site to visit.

Parents take note- this is the must-have item this Christmas. Kids will be laughed at in the playground unless they have a plush velvet vulva with pearl clitoris on their arm.

As a Doctor of Internets, I make it my business to observe the ebbs and flows in the great sea of information and manga porn we call the Internet. And recently I have noticed a particular new little current which has been popping up time after time. Friends, I believe I have discovered a new meme.

Memes (named for Venezuelan adventurer Jose Me-Me) in an internet context are usually pictures of sometimes video which can be easily edited by many users, all adding to the “joke”. Of course, like all good in-jokes, they are practically inconprehensible to an outsider, and those involved have long ago forgotten why they were funny in the first place.

But still they continue. Oh God, how they continue. Memes tend to come and go so quickly on the internet it’s like a flickering flip book of stupid, but occasiaonlly something sticks and we’re stuck with it. Witness the Ubermeme, the lolcat. Followed very closely by the orly owl. There’s no getting away from these things. Did you know there’s an ongoing project to make a lolcat version of the Bible? You do now, and your day is a little worse.

And any veteran of the tubes knows about the great Pirate-Ninja wars. Endless rolling flame warsspanning countless boards, all arguing who would win in a fight- pirates, or ninjas. It doesn’t make any sense. It doesn’t have to.

But this new meme I have found may actually be some sort of mutated strain, some super-meme. Because when I saw it, I realised it was so awesome that it may be the first of its kind to finally break free of the internet and tear the arse out of popular culture itself. The new meme is the Fuck Yeah Shark.

It combines the easily replicable nature of lolcats with the extreeeeme awesomeness of pirates and ninjas. It could actually be the most perfect example of its form ever to exist.

Almost like the noble engine of death which is the shark itself

There’s even a site which collects the things now, which is what happened just before lolcats got everywhere. You are going to be seeing these things all over the place in the near future. You heard it here first. Just don’t come and shoot the messenger when you’re so sick and tired of fucking sharks that if you see one more you’ll kick a baby, you swear to god. Maybe you should go outside for a while. Trust me, I’m a Doctor of Internets.

or “Another damn post about the American Election”

To all you recovering coma victims and space aliens out there, Barack Obama was elected President of the United States this week. Oh dear, Mr Johnson’s just fallen back into a coma. Mr Johnson was hit by a car in 1962, and woke up two days ago. Someone should probably have been on that.

Anyway, people have generally lost their shit over this Obama guy. There’s a massive sense in the air that this is the turning point, the dawn after the long night. People danced in the streets of most major American cities after the announcement on Tuesday, and indeed they danced in many cities across the globe. There was the definite sense that this was an important election not just for America, but for the world.

And it was the most important for the people of Obama, Japan, who understandably have a personal stake in the new president, like Trumanville and JFK Airport before them. The people of Obama have embraced the Senator from Illinois with a fervour that is slightly unsettling, yet fairly typical for the Japanese.

Their reverance for the new President is such that they have declared November 4th (election day) a local holiday, and erected a damn statue of Barack in the main square of the city. That’s not quite as cool as the Serbian town with a statue of Rocky Balboa, but it comes close.

But by far the highlight of the capaign is the theme song they came up with to celebrate Obama’s win.

OBAMA IS BEAUTIFUL WORLD!

“La la la la la OBAMA” indeed. In one simple, broken Engrish phrase, these people have summed up the zeitgeist of the time. Well done, people of Obama. And a Beautiful World to you.

Much is being made of the serious warning given to Melbourne and Australian Rugby League fullback Billy Slater over his reckless and dangerous practice of throwing himself feet-first at opposition players trying to score a try. I definitely add my voice to that chorus, and I’ve been singing this tune for a while now. Even the fact that he’s a Queenslander can’t stop me from having an intense dislike for the guy. I don’t like the dirty style of football he plays, I don’t like his constant, unending attempts to milk penalties from the referees (we’re not playing soccer, Billy), and I hate his unsportsmanlike behaviour during and after games, such as kicking the ball out on the full on the last tackle after the siren.

But there’s another big issue that I think often gets lost in all the hyperbole. Namely, that Billy Slater is a deformed little dwarf-creature with a stupid fucking face.

Gah. Just look at the fucking munter.

Aaargh. Damn. Fuck.

Jesus tapdancing Christ I hate you, Slater.

GIANT BIRD-EATING SPIDER!!!

AAAAAAAAAHHH!!!!!

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHH!!!!!!!!!!

THAT THING LIVES IN CAIRNS!!! THERE’S ONLY 1000 KILOMETRES BETWEEN ME AND IT! I’M LOCKING DOWN THE ANTI-RAPTOR BUNKER UNTIL THOSE THINGS DIE OUT! I’LL SEE YOU IN A FEW THOUSAND YEARS!

So last weekend I flew to Adelaide to meet up with some people I met online. Now I’m posting about it on my blog. And I’m single, ladies!

The Pointless Waste of Time forums have a long tradition of meetups, called “cheesefests” because of an incident at the first one which people are legally required not to ever mention. There’s been fests is several countries. Last year there was a major fest in Perth which I couldn’t get to because I’d been feeling quite good about myself at that point, and didn’t want to bring my mood down by flying to the other side of the country to meet internet people.

However I’ve been in a funk of self-pity and melancholy for several weeks now, and so decided this year’s fest in Adelaide was the one for me.

* * * *

Explaining to people where I was going, and the reason, was tough. If I just came out and said “I’m meeting people I met online” they looked at me askance and asked if perhaps I really need to sink that low for casual sexual encounters. Even worse is when I added they’re mostly guys, at which point people’s eyebrows shot up and they got this little smirk, and said “well, we’ve suspected for some time.”

So I stopped telling people the absolute, unvarnished truth, and said things like “I’m meeting up with some people who write for the same website I do”. Which is true, up to a point. Several of those people have written articles for Cracked, and the ones who haven’t have still “written” messages on the forums. So I hadn’t been completely honest. They were little white lies, which hurt no one except Baby Jesus, and quite frankly he can take a few hits for the sake of my ego.

Read more…

I was very relived the other day to read that scientists from Brisbane were working on a way to stop a massive asteroid that’s headed straight for the planet. “We’re totally on this,” the scientists say. “We’ll wrap it in tin foil and the solar radiation will push it off the collision course it’s currently on. With Earth.”

And then I reread the article to see if there was some mistake, but no, there it was, printed in black and white pixels. AN ENORMOUS FUCKING ASTEROID IS HEADED STRAIGHT FOR EARTH.  It’s due to hit in 2036. Well, maybe. There is the possibility that it might just pass us by. Scientists have to wait till 2011 to find out for sure.

If I do my sums right, I’ll be about 56. Which is much, much earlier than I planned on checking out. I mean, you can live a full life in that period of time, but I always wanted to reach 112. I don’t know why. It just seemed like a good, round, and especially faraway number.

2036 seems very very soon in comparison. Fatally soon. I mean, there’s a massive rock that is very likely to hit earth and we’re planning on wrapping it in tinfoil? BUST OUT THE NUKES, GENTLEMEN. Get some salt of the earth types to fly a rocket at this thing and give it the old one-two welcome to earth combo. This is not a fucking baked potato.

What makes it even worse is that we know about this one, and are planning for it. What about the ones we don’t know about? Space is infinite, and it’s not all on a level plane like most diagrams or science fiction shows would have you believe. There’s a full spherical 360 degrees of space out there and rocks are hurtling through it at speeds which would make you shit a goat.

So you can understand why one of my many ulcers is caused by news reports like this recent one which gleefully informs an increasingly damp-panted populace that a medium sized asteroid hit Earth and broke up, and that scientists didn’t know anything about it until it was streaking through out upper atmosphere.

That was a small one. We’re very, very lucky. What if it had been a hundred times that size? Like the one which nearly hit the Earth back in 2002? Oh sure, you say, that one was six hundred thousand kilometres away. A near-miss in cosmic terms but still a fairly comfortable margin. So what about this one back in 2004 which passed so close it was closer to the earth than some communications satellites?

If your pants aren’t filled to bursting at this point, you’ve got serious mental problems (or you can’t read English). The sheer fact of the matter is, if one of these bastards hits us, we’re done for. Gone. Life as we know it ceases right then, and one of them could be headed for us right now. And there wouldn’t be a damn thing any of us could do to stop it.

And the buggerance of it all is that this has never, ever worked for me as a pick up line.

Scarlett Johansson married Ryan Reynolds over the weekend.

I’m sure that when they said “I do”, the clouds parted and a single beam of sunlight lanced down to illuminate them as they shared their first, perfect wedded kiss. Then twin doves descended from the sky to carry Scarlett’s train as they walked arm in arm down the aisle, and everyone in the place was bawling, even old Uncle Herbert who always seemed to disapprove of the couple but secretly was a romantic at heart. It would have been the best wedding ever, and they are possible the best couple in existence.

And I fucking HATE IT.

I mean, I had about as much chance of actually meeting Scarlett Johannson, let alone having her fall for me, as a snail has of suddenly sprouting wings. But I, and probably many, many other guys across the globe, was holding onto that infinitely small possibility, that statistical miracle, which would allow me to somehow end up with her.

The fact that I live on the other side of the world and have a head like a smashed crab did not really factor into my planning. I was vaguely banking on a universal sense of romantic narrative to carry me through.

(My lawyers instruct me to also state that at no point did I have a shrine dedicated to Ms Johansson, and that it did not contain hair fibres, nail clippings and stool samples from the actress purchased via the internet.)

The news is made doubly unbearable by the fact that she’s marrying Ryan Reynolds. RYAN FUCKING REYNOLDS. I LOVE that guy. He’s great. There’s like three male Hollywood stars that I don’t want to beat to death with a blunt instrument and he’s one of them. He’s fantastic. He’s the kind of guy you’d want going out with your sister. He good looking and funny and seems to be pretty down to earth. Hell, if we lived in a slightly more liberal society, I might be writing a post about how terrible it was that HE was off the market.

They’re going to be a GREAT couple. And that BURNS at me like ACID.

Like ACID.

She packed my bags last night pre-flight

Zero hour nine a.m.

And I’m gonna be hiiiiiiigh… as a kite by then

And I think it’s gonna be a long long time

Till touch down brings me round again to find

I’m not the man they think I am at home

Oh no no no … I’m a ROCKET MAN

ROCKET MAAAAAN, da da dee doo da da dee doo daaaaaa.

We all wish we could be this awesome.