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.

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.

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.

Doyle, Yongas and I have decided to go on a fact-finding mission for olilolo, to see if there are better ways of writing about nonsense. Is it better if you do it with the Collosseum in the background, for example? Does the ancient stone lend your inane rambling a certain weight? “Yes,” people will hopefully think, “this man’s opinions about comic books are strangely compelling.”

We’re going to travel across most of the more famous or “civilised” parts of the continent, before you go too far east and everyone starts seeming REALLY foreign. From the culture and sophistication of London and Paris, to the ancient edifices of Rome, to the wall-to-wall drinking in Munich, we’ll take in the sights and sounds through a variety of electronic devices designed to more accurately record the experience than our own brains.

I find it very interesting the variety of people’s reactions when I told them I was going to Europe for a month. Unbridled celebration was common, which I thought was a bit harsh with me standing right there. A less common but still frequent reaction was snide superiority. “Oh, really? We went to the Maldives for FIVE weeks last month. We try to take every other month off and just GO somewhere. It cleanses the spirit.”

I am not friends with those people any more.

Universally though, people would trot out their horror stories of travelling through foreign lands. The time they missed their train and had to beg a lift across France from a driver who didn’t speak English, or French. The time they tried to go to a public toilet in Italy, only to find they’d run out of toilet paper (and what they thought was a public toilet was actually an indoor drinking fountain). The time they went to Europe and Australia blew up while they were away. I began to suspect several people were embellishing the truth slightly.

Pickpockets also seemed to be high on people’s list of concerns. Judging from the number and emphatic nature of the warnings I received about securing my valuables while overseas, I’ve calculated that a full two fifths of mainland Europe makes a full-time living through the practise. In response I’ve decided the best defence is a good offence, and have vowed to punch anyone who comes within a two metre radius of me directly in the mouth. Sure some innocents might get a fat lip, but it’s a small price to pay for safety.

Having said all that, I did receive some valuable advice. I will record it here for any other potential travellers wishing to learn a few tips and tricks to get you out of a tight spot while abroad.

-Londoners really all do speak like in Mary Poppins, but they’re kind of embarrassed since that film came out, so many hide their natural accent. Try to coax it out of them by speaking in your best Dick van Dyke Cockney.

-Germans consider it a great honour to be slapped right in the face. Just right in it.

-French policemen can be paid to perform menial tasks such as carrying your bags or acting as a footrest

-In Italy, always take off your shoes when entering a shop, and whirl them about by the laces to discourage panhandlers.

-In Europe in general, many people do not speak English, however if you speak English to them slowly and in their own accent, an understanding can be reached.

A couple of valuable tips I’m sure you’ll agree. I look forward to trying them out! I’ll report back on how everything goes. Until next time, Bongiorno Voyage!

A Bat’leth

These should be standard police issue.

What is a Bat’leth, you ask? Is it some ancient Asian weapon, prevalant amongst gangs in the inner city? Is it a weapon favoured amongst some of the more warlike sects of Islam, being encountered by troops on the battelefields of Afghanistan and Iraq?

No. It is a ceremonial weapon used by the Klingons, in the science fiction show Star Trek

Yes. Police are now concerned by cosplay.

Now to be fair, that is a nasty weapon. You could take someone’s eye out with that thing, and probably their head along with it. Once you put aside the fact that it’s a nerdy replica from a science fiction series, it’s a metre-long lump of sharpened steel.

However that doesn’t stop the horrible geek in me from being UTTERLY DISMAYED that that AWESOME FUCKING THING was handed in to the cops. Holy shit, would you look at that thing? That is RAD AS HELL. I bet some kid’s mother found it and handed it in. Either that or some narc of a brother. There is no way someone got their hands on that, and then voluntarily handed it in. No way in the universe.

And to be perfectly honest, while it looks badass on the show, the bat’leth is a very clumsy weapon in real life. You’re more likely to cut your own hand off while using it than inflict damage on someone else.

The guy the police need to track down is the insane genius who actually made a working phaser. All he needs is a small enough power source and that guy will be unsoppable.

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.

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.

They made a Downfall parody video about it.

I think it’s safe to say at this point that if I see one more Downfall parody video I’m going to track down the person who made it and shank them. Far be it from me to try and stifle someone’s creativity, but I think if you’re making another Downfall parody video you’re not being creative. You’re shitting into the open mouth of the internet.

If you don’t know what these things are, basically there was this really awesome German movie called Downfall which was all about Hitler’s final days in the bunker in Berlin. It was an incredible movie, and an incredible performance from actor Bruno Ganz as the nazi leader. One of the most powerful scenes in the film is a briefing between Hitler and his generals, where the terrible realisation sinks in that the war is lost, the Third Reich is in ruins, and his time is growing very short indeed.

So of course some guy switched out the subtitles and made Hitler rant about how his Xbox Live subscription was cancelled.

Now, that’s a funny idea. The execution is a bit dodgy, and it’s not as hilarious as it might be. But it gets by on the fact that they’ve taken this powerful scene and made it about something trivial. Seeing the leader of the Nazis rant like a schoolboy about Microsoft game points is funny.

Of course like any good idea around 50 thousand unoriginal tards then descended on the meme, making their own rants about everything from the Half Blood Prince delay to Kanye West crashing Taylor Swift’s acceptance speech. And that one already had a damn meme. That’s just greedy.

There are literally hundreds if not thousands of the damn things floating around the net now. And that number grows daily, as every time something happens that makes news some tedious arsehole fires up windows movie maker and farts out another ridiculous Downfall dub.

Now that’s not to say there aren’t some funny ones in the bunch. Hell, with that many out there, it’d be a statistical miracle if there wasn’t. Mortal Wombat made a very funny version-

I love that one because it actually tries to tie in with what’s happening on screen, matching the speech to the actions. A lot of the Downfall vids just write subtitles, without any sort of care about what’s going on on screen. This one tries to justify everything that the characters do and it makes it instantly funnier. From the finger pointing discussion to  “And who put these pencils in my hand?” it plays perfectly with the form while actually doing something new.

And then there was even the one where Hitler himself rants about how there are so many damn Downfall parodies.

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.

So. You’ve no doubt heard about the terrible tragedy unfolding in Haiti. A magnitude 7 earthquake ripped through the country, destroying buildings and killing people. The latest reports at the time of my writing this indicate more than 100, 000 people are dead. Not injured; dead. That’s death on a massive scale. That’s more than a football stadium’s worth of people.

And tragedy on that sort of scale is hard to comprehend for some people. Hell, for most people. It hard to imagine an entire city in ruins, and everyone in it dead or seriously injured. That’s a level of destruction that we in the western world are fortunately not privy to. We have no frame of reference for it.

And so the media steps in to inform us of what’s going on, and does its best to relay to us the scope of the tragedy. But we’re on the other side of the world. So not only is the tragedy on a scale we find difficult to comprehend, but it’s half a world removed from us. That can make it difficult for some people to get a handle on the story, to find their way in.

Journalists use a word called “proximity” when talking about stories. It means how close a story is to you, the reader/listener/viewer. How it affects you. Now, while it may sound callous, despite it being a terrible tragedy, the Haiti earthquake will have no real effect on the lives of your average western reader. It’s not something that will effect their commute to work, or how much their rates bill will be, or how much it’ll cost to buy petrol in a month.

But if someone they know was involved, THEN it becomes relevant to them. It sounds completely heartless, but it’s not; it’s just being able to relate to something on the human level. So if they personally knew someone involved in a disaster, it becomes immediately relevant. More broadly though, someone from your town, state or even country can bring a story into your sphere of proximity, and make you pay attention.

There’s been some criticism about the way the Australian media have been covering the Haitian earthquake. In Brisbane especially we’ve had two major points of contact- aid worker Rachel Hoffman was from Brisbane and is currently in a serious condition after surviving the quake. And Brisbane resident Jonas Ramone has family in Haiti who he was talking to literally moments before the quake struck.

People have criticised the coverage of those two stories, because they see it as somehow lessening the stories of the hundred thousand others who died or were injured in the quake. But that couldn’t be further from the truth. First of all, their stories are not going unreported. Both the Australian and international media have been covering this story closely with up to the minute updates in some cases, especially as the event unfolded initially.

Secondly, it is absolutely appropriate for Australian media outlets to report about Australians. It sounds so simnple when you put it like that, but there’s this mentality that exists that we should all be one world nation and not care where people are from. That is ridiculous. Of course I care if one hundred thousand Haitians are dead, but if someone from my city is involved, that provokes an immediate interest in me. That’s not a bad thing, again, it’s human nature. There are people out there who have that reaction regardless of how close they are to an event like this, and those people are good people. But they are most definitely not in the majority.

Not to mention, these people deserve to have their stories told, and they very likely aren’t going to get that from foreign media. Australians report what happened to Australians, Americans Americans, Brits brits, and everyone covered the wider disaster. We take care of our own.

I understand people’s gut reaction against this type of reporting. It’s born from hearing reports that start “No Australians were killed when a bomb ripped through…” or something like that. Making the lack of local deaths the story. And that IS wrong. There’s no question. Actual, real people are dead, and we’re happy none of our mob got hurt. That kind of mentality in the news was parodied brilliantly in the Monty Python sketch “News for Parrots“.

But that’s not what’s happening here. There is a difference between “No Australians were killed when an earthquake tore through Haiti” and “A hundred thousand people were killed when an earthquake tore through Haiti. Australians are believed to have been hurt.” It’s not a big difference, but it’s an important one.

I found this awesome chart which shows in simple graphic form all that I was trying to bludgeon you over the head with using clumsy words. Read and be afraid.

(Thanks to MightyGodKing for the link)