With the success of Thor both in the US and around the world, Aussie actor Chris Hemsworth has come to the attention of many. For most guys it’s because he gave a great performance as the titular thunder god, combining charm and charisma to keep an epic character grounded in a very human performance..

For some guys and most girls however, he came to their attention because this-

I swear, when I saw the movie and this scene came on I actually felt the air rush out of the theatre as half the audience gasped.

Anyway, regardless of how aroused or confused a shirtless Hemsworth makes you, you have to admit the dude got in some serious shape. And, at least some of you out there have seen that and are inspired. And those of you who aren’t inspired to make a shrine are inspired to get in the same sort of shape as Hemsworth did.

Now, if you google “Thor Workout” you’ll already see hundreds of links with people claiming to have the actual workout routine used by Hemsworth to bulk up for the movie. They are, of course, lying. But here at olilolo, we’ve used our best industrial espionage techniques to bring you the ACTUAL, GENUINE THOR WORKOUT. This isn’t like all those other workouts out there that make you do difficult and painful exercises, this one is totally easy! It only has, like, four steps! Follow them EXACTLY, and you too can attain a godly physique!

STEP ONE-

Be born happy, healthy, in a first world country with good muscle and bone structure. Avoid being weak, weedy, hunchbacked, or anything other than strapping and well-formed. As you grow, make sure to eat plenty of vegetables, eggs, and supermarket chicken, chock-full of those valuable growth hormones.

STEP TWO-

Become a movie star. This may involve work as a child actor, or possibly a little later, but don’t wait to long. You want to work your way through soaps or TV dramas in your teens before moving on to Hollywood by your mid-to-late 20s.

STEP THREE-

Get cast in a movie that requires you to become massive. If you’re good-looking this will probably be for a superhero or action movie. If you’re not so good looking this will probably be for the same type of film, but as the bad guy.

STEP FOUR-

Take full advantage of the studio appointed fitness trainers, weapons masters, nutritionists and small man who yells at you if you even LOOK at a cupcake. Spend all day, every day in the gym, because this is literally your job and you have nothing else to take up your time.

And there you have it. After around six months of constant workouts with professional trainers, you’ll be in the best shape of your life, and ready to take on a whole horde of frost giants!

Protip- to maintain your physique, try to get re-cast in the role, hopefully as part of a franchise, or if that isn’t possible, then in a series of similar roles. Then, simply repeat steps two to four as necessary.

I bough Portal 2 the other day. I dowloaded it off Steam (which is a great service, and means game-playing shut-ins never have to experience even the rudimentary human contact required to go to a store and buy a physical copy). I’ve been following the production blog, and have been greatly amused by the little promo vids they’ve put out (the Turret one was my favourite). Admittedly, I haven’t been so eagerly awaiting it that I played that weird Potato Sack RPG, but I was looking forward to the game. I was a fan of the first one, and everything I had seen led me to believe that Valve had really upped the ante with this sequel. Far from a cash-in, it seemed to be a labour of love from a company which makes excellent games.

And after buying it nearly two full days ago, I’ve yet to play a single second of it.

The reason for this is my nearly sociopathic ability to procrastinate. It is a constant source of surprise to me the lengths I will go to to avoid doing something I have to do. And I’m not talking about the usual zany stories such as  “Oh, when I have assignments to do I clean my whole house”. We’ve all been there. It’s a fairly natural tendency to want to put off something you don’t want to do. However most functional adults manage to get past that and rip the proverbial band-aid off.

With me, I think it borders on categorical mental illness. I once did a bunch of work-related stuff remotely from home, because I didn’t want to iron my clothes. There was one time when I rearranged all the books on my bookshelf into genres, because I didn’t want to brush my teeth. I recently moved house, and I have resigned myself to the fact that there are some items that I own that I will never see again, simply because I will never, ever take them out of their box.

Where I find this whole thing weird is that the procrastination doesn’t just extend to things I DON’T want to do. I actually avoid doing things I WANT to do, simply because I had planned to do them. Which brings me back to Portal 2.

I had set aside this afternoon as the time I would play Portal 2. Probably just for a while, depending on how into it I got, but  that was the time I had free. It’s the Easter weekend, I’ve got family stuff over the next few days, but today I was going to play Portal. Instead I read about a novel’s worth of words on various websites, caught up on some shows, and then wrote this blog.

And it’s far from the only example of such behavior. I have a towering stack of books by my bed, all of them due to be read. Some of those books have been sitting in that pile for over two years. Almost all of them are books I genuinely want to read, and have in fact bought, with cash money. I started one the other day. Got about a chapter in and put it down again.

I mean, this is the work of a deeply disturbed mind, right? I am actively denying myself things I know I will enjoy, in some bizarre game of keep-away I’m playing with myself. It’s fascinating. Someone should do a study.

Lately I’ve been able to sort of work-around the problem, by using it for positive ends. Namely, I’ve been using procrastination to get things done. I start by planning on doing something. Ah, but it is all a cunning ruse, designed to trick my brain. In actuality, I will have another thing that I want to do, and I will procrastinate on the first thing by doing the second thing. Things get confusing though when my brain figures out I’m doing this, and I have to find a third thing to add to the procrastination pile. I haven’t yet had to add a fourth-tier into my own little Inception-style motivational ouroboros, and I’m afraid if it ever gets to that point I’ll start bleeding from the nose.

The upshot of all this is, I’m now going to play Portal 2, having finished this blog post. And if you’re procrastinating by reading this, well, there’s no hope for you.

I don’t mean to sound like an old fuddy-duddy here (and yet I just used the term “fuddy-duddy”) but I feel like the pace of technology is getting away from me a bit. Not in the sense that I’m scared or concerned about recent advances, just that I sometimes wonder if we really NEED them.

As an example, I went to the store the other day to buy a flash drive. These are devices that even 5 years ago cost like a thousand dollars and a toe, and you got like 2MB storage space. Nowadays, they come withwhat seems like a gajillion terabytes and in every conceivable casing geeks ever dreamed.

The problem is that sometimes I don’t want a super-awesome thing with several coolio-mod-daddy bells and whistles. Sometimes I want a cheap piece of shit to get the job done.

Which brings me back to me, at a supermarket, trying to buy a cheap-ass flash drive so I can transfer a few files. Like, a video and some word documents. Absolutely nothing fancy. Admittedly, it’s way, WAY more than I would have been able to fit on a floppy disk, but still. I needed, like, a gig at the MOST.

The smallest sized drive the supermarket had was 2 gig, and it cost 30 dollars. Now, again, that’s not a crazy price. But it’s far above what I wanted to pay. Of course, my ideal price would have been “free”, but we live, as my counselor keeps telling me, in a society that has rules, so I get there will be a charge for items. But this is a situation I’m looking to get out of for like, 5 bucks, tops. Instead, I’m buying what ends up being a reasonably major purchase, for something I’ll likely lose in a month because these things are small and I’m messy.

Basically what I’m getting at here is developers are making me peronally uncomfortable and I need them to stop doing that immediately. Thanks guys, I appreciate it.

Whitney Houston performed in Brisbane last night. Although, if you read the reviews or listen to anyone who went to the show, you might be forgiven for thinking that she actually punched everyone right in the kidneys and killed their dog. Vicious, hateful vitriol spewed forth from the internet and talkback radio today at a rate only seen since the last Schoolies Week.

But I think ultimately everyone is being a bit unfair on old Whitney. I think what’s happened here is that everybody went  in to the concert with a certain expectation which is actually wrong to have in the first place. They thought they were going along to see a diva perform some songs. That’s not the show they bought tickets for.

They saw a MASSIVE DRUG ADDICT perform some songs.

Seriously, the mountain of chemical substances between Bodyguard-era Whitney and today would make Hunter S. Thompson whistle and say “that’s a lot of drugs”. Houston was like a specially designed drug hoover for nearly a decade. She went so far off the rails the people she met had never heard of trains.

And therefore, judging her by that criteria, she actually did pretty damn well. Sure she was breathless, couldn’t hit certain notes, and frequently appeared disoriented. But you take some speed freak you find in the Valley and put them up on stage and they’re just going to scream and soil themselves. And while that could be entertaining, it’s no Greatest Love of All.

And yes, she may have forgotten several of her band member’s names. And that was probably embarrassing for them. But most junkies couldn’t remember their own names, let alone the names of their friends or loved ones, and they sure as shit aren’t going to remember the names of several employees they met a week ago for fit-out rehersals.

And, I will grant you, she did take several LONG breaks during the show, ostensibly to change costumes, but more likely to be injected with more of the stuff that prevents her skin from sloughing off in great waves. However most serious drug fiends wouldn’t even bother leaving. They’d just start convulsing and shitting themselves right there under the centre-front spotlight. The audience are complaining about her missing notes when they should be glad the first three rows weren’t covered in excrement stinking of mescaline and fear.

So lay off Whitney. She did her best. And just think- if she’s this bad NOW imagine what she’ll be like by the END of the tour. You’ve actually probably seen her best show of the Australian leg. And you weren’t stabbed for stash money, so you’re a winner out of this deal.

Late last week the internet had a bomb dropped on it courtesy of Apple Inc in the form of a shiny piece of plastic and circuits that had fanboys experiencing Jesus, haters finally popping an embolism, and people who were ambivalent deciding that they really need to get off the damn computer and go for a walk.

And amongst the shit-flinging monkey fight that was the internet’s reaction to the iPad was, of course, the jokes. They started almost immediately- people latched onto the name of the device and made the  obvious connection to feminine hygene products, provoking the brain-scraping mental image of a sanitary pad with some kind of user interface to check RSS feeds. Girl Clumsy, The Wah and I were hanging out when the announcement hit the net, and on hearing the name all three of us made the same joke, at the same time. Apple must have known that was going to happen. The scary thing is, it looks like they just didn’t care. And hey, people thought the Wii was a dumb name, until it turned around and owned the console market like a Chihuahua humping a table leg.

People also made jokes about how it’s basically an oversized iPod touch, how it’s sort of like a computer for special people, how Apple may have their heads so far up their own asses they form some sort of douchebag tesseract. The jokes were flying think and fast.

And then, some one went and did it.

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What would be  more upsetting to you, your mother dying, or your friend’s mother dying? What about if you’ve never met your friend’s mother? All right, which would be more upsetting to you, your mother dying, or a bus full of children plummeting off a cliff on the other side of the world? The two events happen simultaneously, although they are not connected in any way (that we know of; the dark Lord Dennis has been looking shifty)

I mean, it’s your mother, right? Unless you really hate your mother, and have an unnatural fondness for schoolbuses full of children, in which case the authorities are probably already keeping an eye on you. You’re more upset by events which happen closer to you, that involve you in some way. It’s selfish, but it’s human nature. A really smart guy I know wrote an insightful and funny article about it once. Everyone should read it, because it underlines so perfectly how humans work, and why we react to things the way we do. Plus there’s dick jokes included for free. (Not to mention I paraphrased the above example from it. That’s a nice way of saying I stole it, and me linking it is like leaving a note saying “sorry” after I’ve burgled a house)

“Stu, why are you even mentioning this?” I hear you hypothetical readers ask in your thin, whiny voices. I’m getting to that. But keep that idea in mind, the idea of proximity to tragedy making it effect us more.

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