When Twitter Attacks: D-Grade Celebrities

Robbie Farah is an idiot. He’s apparently a great NRL player, and possibly a likeable guy in person, but when it comes to some things which are admittedly beyond his scope, he’s an idiot.

Robbie Farah was recently insulted. On the internet. Someone said something about his mother (who died in June) and he got upset. The response was something along the lines of “u worthless piece of shit. If u had the balls to say that to my face I would rip your face off”.  His Honour, Justice Farah then went on to propose that the current codified legal doctrine surrounding people being mean on the interweb was “piss weak” and that people should be “accountable for their comments”. I for one was glad to know that the standard defamation and content laws we have are lacking something. At the moment if you make a bunch of hurtful and untrue statements about someone, you can be charged. Similarly if you are deliberately abusive or vulgar.

Farah seems to believe these laws (that completely and practically encompass the specific kind of incident he is talking about) aren’t good enough. I’m guessing he holds this opinion because the culprit hasn’t be brought to justice. So that’s the law’s fault. It has nothing to do with the anonymity of the internet and not being able to find someone to charge with an offence.

I just get the feeling Farah was standing on his chair in front of his computer, screaming at the screen, red in the face, veins bulging in his neck, hands grasping ineffectively as he bellowed “Come out of your devil-box you bastard! I’ll tear your bloody face off! Robbie Smash!” Poor Robbie was faced with a complete inability to deal with an insult the way he usually would; grievous bodily harm.

As a side note, I quite enjoyed noticing that this was all being reported, and Farah was being declared the blameless victim, by news.com.au despite his initial response being that he wanted to murder someone with his bare hands for saying something about his mother. The same news.com.au that has been championing the #heroeswalkaway twitter campaign to encourage people to stop beating each other to death. Sometimes irony is there if you look for it.

Since this mortally wounding slur of 140 characters or less, Farah has taken to the magical twitter machine to declare that the Prime Minister should intervene to stop people saying things about his mum. Or anyone else’s mum. Probably. He feels that The Guvmint (singular, not that state and federal systems are separate) isn’t doing enough to stop people from saying mean things on the internet.

In an interesting note, it’s been uncovered that Farah recently suggested the PM should get “a noose” for her 50th birthday. But as soon as someone says something mean and you can’t punch them for it, suddenly it’s up to Julia Gillard to solve the problem. Nice one Robbie.

This is a man completely unfamiliar with voice chat on Xbox live. That’s probably a good thing.

For those that are blissfully unaware of the seething mass of bile, vitriol and angry hormones that is voice chat in online gaming, the best description I have heard is “I never knew my mum had slept with so many 13 year olds in so many varied ways until I discovered Xbox live chat”.

Other victims of the internet hate machine include Ray Hadley, a radio host no-one has heard of, and Charlotte Dawson, a reality TV show host no one cares about. I’m not sure of the qualifications for either job but I think they include being able to talk, and pause for breath occasionally. Both people are in, and I use the term loosely, the entertainment business, and part of that business is drawing attention to yourself. So I wouldn’t be surprised to see other D-grade celebrities coming out of the woodwork in the future with a “Tell All Interview” about how they struggled against their haters and rose above the vicious words of internet bullies, who are cowards and ugly and not real people and sit in their mum's basement trynig to drag the winners down. Is it getting to easy to hate celebrities? Am I the only one seeing many of them as colossal, self-aggrandising douche bags?

So Dawson was hospitalised in the early hours of a morning after a bunch of people kept tweet-hating her. Apparently these messages were so violent and forceful she was physically injured, or so I’m guessing after seeing a headline “Dawson hospitalised after twitter attack”. Wait, what? Twitter can hurt you now? Like actually hurt you? not just your feelings? Did the Twitter bird get a hold of a knife? And an opposable thumb to hold it? Is Twitter planning some kind of violent uprising so the computers take over the world? No? Oh, so some genius kept logging onto her twitter feed and reading mean messages until mascara rolled down her face and she decided to post “you win x” with a picture of a hand-full of pills (probably multi-vitamins and panadol if we’re staying true to the 14-year-old-girl-cry-for-attention formula). And then she was hospitalised for feminine-hysteria? I’d prefer that headline to read “Dawson hospitalised after attention seeking”.

I just can’t get over the way the media continues to report that it was a “twitter attack” that put Dawson in the hospital, like it was a legitimate assault. Knife attack? Ok. Gang attack? Fine. Midget attack? Sure, why not. Twitter attack? uhhh... really? A bunch of people called her names and this somehow... I don’t even know. Twitter stabbed her? Is that it? Are we to expect YouTube bashings? Facebook brawls? Tactical nuclear Myspace?

You want to beat the “trolls” or “haters” on twitter? Stop giving them attention. This isn’t the “ignore the bullies and they’ll go away” speech you got at school. That never worked because you were right there with them every day. This is the vastness of social networks, skip over their comments and go get ice cream. Seriously. Ignore/block the bad man and go get some ice cream, then ride a roller coaster, while eating ice cream. Post a photo if you have to.

How hard is that?

Troll: I HATE YOUR STUPID FACE! I HOPE YOU GET CRABS!

You: I’m on a roller coaster! This is awesome!! Wheeeeeee!!!

Troll: PAY ATTENTION!! I’M HATING YOU HERE!!

You: wheeeeeee!!!

Right?

-Worst Guy Ever

The Worst Beginning

There’s a story behind the name of this blog, like with most things, and like most of my stories it start with drinking. Then continues with drinking. And then some (because no good story ever started with“So I was eating a salad...”).

It was Pablo’s birthday on a sunny March day, so many of us that had worked at the bar and a few of Pablo’s other friends had decided to gather with him in his back yard and have a few drinks to celebrate. In true style for this group we started at 10am by tapping a keg of Cooper’s Sparkling that someone had appropriated from a bar.

There’s something special about tapping a keg at 10am on a Sunday, it’s like Monday morning knows it’s about to be desecrated and you can almost feel the universe holding its breath, as if to say “oh God, what are they doing?!”. This was the equivalent of revving the engine of your brand new Ferrari, turning to the crowd of onlookers and saying “watch this!”. This was always going to end badly.

By midday we’d already had a few impromptu wresting contests, one of which I won against my supervisor because I held her in the air upside down until she admitted defeat, and i had cheerfully polished off several pints of beer and quite a few Uncle Charlies*.

*An Uncle Charlie is a mix of half vodka & Red Bull, and half champagne, served in a champagne flute (I was drinking them in pints).

We had fired up a BBQ in an attempt to slow the avalanche of the dozen or so hospitality staff sitting around putting some hard yards into getting written off, but it was really a token effort at best (isn’t it always?). This did serve as a great interruption during which we could make a few little speeches about Pablo and remind everyone of the occasion of his birthday. It was during this time and some of the stories that were told that I managed to be more offensive and insensitive than usual.

 

To be fair, I had developed a habit of pointing out that things "weren’t so bad" by responding to a tale of hardship with what was almost a catch phrase; whenever someone went on about how hard their life was, or complained about being overworked, or any of the hundreds of whinges we all put up with on a regular basis (you know the type; “I didn’t get enough sleep and I’m broke and my job is hard and wah wah wah” etc) I would respond with something along the lines of “It could be worse, you could have cancer”.

 

Mostly I would say this because I was sick of teenagers whinging about crap that really wasn’t that much of a problem. The world was going to keep turning, the sun will rise in the morning, your life isn’t over just because you have to work this weekend and can’t go party with your friends. In this case however, it probably could have gone unsaid.

Back at the BBQ someone was telling a story about a friend of theirs who caught his missus cheating on him with his best friend, after getting fired earlier that day and reversing over his dog (or something, I was getting pretty smashed by this point). So I’ve responded with“well, at least he didn’t have cancer” and basked in the immediate drop in temperature around me. If we had been indoors I could have sworn we aircon just kicked in full blast. Unfortunately, we were outside and the frost forming on my beer was a result of the cold glares of quite a few people around me.

Pablo suddenly remembered he’d been meaning to show me something inside the house, away from everyone. Right. Now.

As it turns out, one of the people I didn’t know, who had been sitting right next to me, was his ex girlfriend from a fair while back, and had been battling cancer for a number of years.

Oh.

The immediate feeling of guilt and shame sets in. Unfortunately I barely notice it thanks to most of my day having thus far consisted of drinking so hard that sobriety had long ago disappeared into the rear vision mirror of the shitshow express that the party was rapidly turning into.

Pablo assured me it was fine, and I had no way of knowing, but I should probably not mention cancer again today. That was the plan at least.

So we ventured out back to the party and continued drinking until it was time to head to the pub to see what revelry we could drum up. The bar we were heading for was renowned for its Sunday Session and was a favourite amongst the neck-tatt, single mum, white gansta, generally retarded crowd. If you had a dead end job, a kid to a partner you’re no longer with, or considered a Bali Ed Hardy t-shirt to be your best “going out” shirt, then this was the place for you.

We liked it because the jugs were cheap, the women dressed like they were cheap and it enabled out favourite pastime of sitting around and judging people. We weren’t really judging anyone that day though, we rolled up like a tornado of drunk, horny bar staff and the beer garden became ground zero. There’s really not much more to tell about the day except that it was widely considered to be the inspiration for the movie “The Hangover”.

We drank as a group, we blacked out as a group.

Somewhere around sunset we all started to black out, apparently we kept on partying though because during the following week the entire staff of the bar we worked in played a communal game of “What The Fuck Did I Do Last Night?”, we managed to piece together a few parts of that nights Deleted Scenes eventually, but it was not pretty.

We went to a park and climbed on a children’s playground. I travelled to and from this location in the boot of a car, apparently.

Someone was the Paper Bag Penis Ninja. (google it)

Someone climbed a tree. Briefly.

Someone fell out of a tree. Hilariously.

I got so wasted I was convinced I could see the future. I told one of the other bartenders that he would die in 18 months in a house fire and would be survived by his girlfriend (who he hadn’t met yet) and their newborn son. I managed to tell him this completely straight-faced. What makes this so much worse is that usually when someone who is so drunk they can’t lie on the ground without holding on tells you something like this, you dismiss it as someone being blackout-drunk. He believed me and immediately started arguing that it couldn’t happen to him, and that he was always careful. I apologised and told him there was nothing I could do, I couldn’t change the future.

Holy shit I was wasted.

I finally blacked back in on a couch at a friend’s place with the core group sitting around outside drinking still. The sun was starting to come up. I was duly informed by one of my managers that I was in fact a pussy because I wasn’t drinking, so breakfast came in the form of a vodka and whateverthehellwaslyingaround. I joined the remaining battlers as we shared the sight of the sun rising over the neighbourhood and all cringed in pain as we scrambled for sunglasses. Sunlight was not our friend at this time of morning.

It turns out that during the course of the previous afternoon at the pub I had been quite a busy character. At one point I’d kept falling over to my left, and one of the barmaids had kept falling to her right, so someone had been kind enough to prop us up against each other. That’s teamwork!

Oh, and the girl with cancer? Apparently I only stopped making cancer jokes briefly...

Once I blacked out it seems I insisted on telling her a long stream of cancer jokes, not matter how much people asked me to stop. or tried to strangle me.Then I may have possibly abused the girl for having cancer.

What kind of a horrible bastard abuses someone for having cancer? Could I have done anything worse?

Apparently yes, because not long after that I ended up making out with this girl. For several hours...

What.

The.

Fuck.

Upon hearing this story, my fellow bar workers conveyed upon me a title that seems to have stuck with me in the years to come. A title that truly conveys a special level of depravity and moral decay i have displayed in the past and continue to display. What was that title?

-Worst Guy Ever

Mortal Responsibilty

People need to take mortal responsibility for their actions, and the actions of those under them. Not moral responsibility, MORTAL responsibility. Moral responsibility would mean that you accept the consequences of the decisions you make being right or wrong (in a very “good and evil” kind of way). Mortal responsibility is just what it suggests; life and death business.

There are a number of jobs in this world of ours that require people of outstanding care, dedication and courage. These everyday hero’s are trusted with our care and safety for a period of time, be it long or short. Speaking of shorts, sometimes these hero’s wear outfits that would seem strange anywhere else, for example the knee-high-socks-and-shorts combination worn by an overweight, 50 year old bus driver. Yeah, that mental image is going to haunt you.

We put our trust in others, it’s part of our interaction with other people that forms the basis for our society. I trust a pilot that he’s not going to suddenly try and find out if his plane can swim. I trust my bank manager that he’s not going to invest my savings in booze and strippers (that’s what I need it for). I trust a tattooist that he’s not going to make the coy fish on my arm look a lot like a cock (happened to a mate of mine).

The point is that these people are given a great deal of trust and when that trust is broken, the consequences are severe. It used to be the captain of a ship was responsible for the safety of his crew and passengers, he safeguarded their lives with his own. The captain was expected to go down with his ship, should the worst happen. This really gave captains an incentive to make sure their ship was going to make it to port. When your options are “everyone arrives safely” or “death” you really get some motivation happening there. Apparently that doesn’t happen quite as often these days, as we’ve recently realised with the Costa Concordia’s Captain doing a runner like a pissed teenager legging it from the scene of an intimate couple between mum’s Hyundai and a tree that “wasn’t there a moment ago”.

Later on in history, aircraft pilots found themselves in much the same situation, mostly because your odds of surviving a plane crash aren’t brilliant if you’re sitting right at the point end when it hits the mountain (not that anywhere else on the plane is a whole lot better, or so I’m lead to believe). That and it was often considered “bad for business” if a pilot was seen to board a passenger jet wearing a parachute.

Other examples include Generals standing their ground at the end of a battle that didn’t quite go their way, or quietly going out into the garden with their service revolver after learning about a particularly embarrassing oversight (like losing their boss’s country to an invading army). Even Hitler did it, he saw the end coming, realised he had failed completely and punched his own ticket.

Recently in history, we’ve experienced a shipwreck of another kind, the financial cruise liners of several economies have run aground on the rocky shores of Ohfuckwe’vebeenspendingimaginarymoney-land. Someone else we trusted has gone and made a mess of things. Our bankers.

Traditionally at this point we would usually see bankers and stock brokers climbing out on the window ledges of their offices and performing a very well-dressed impersonation of a particularly chunky rain storm. But that’s the problem, they didn’t.

Instead they all looked a little bit ashamed, shuffled their feet, delivered a half-hearted we’re sorry” and fired a bunch of people that worked for them, some of them lost their banks and had to shack up with friends in other banks for a while. It was like the scenes after a massive natural disaster when people end up sharing tiny houses with strangers because they have nowhere else to turn. Except the houses are multi-billion dollar banks.

All of this was a few years back, and now we’re feeling the damage that that has caused. If these philandering phuckwits had done the right and proper thing by taking a running leap out of their 35^th floor office window we wouldn’t be hearing worrying stories about a second recession. They’d be dead, which usually prevents people from rooting the economy the second time round.

It also serves as a very poignant reminder of the kind of consequences catastrophic failure end in. The next round of bankers looking to sell a bunch of useless assets might stop and think about what they were planning on doing next year, because if everything went tits-up again their plans might be reduced to “testing theory of afterlife”.

So there you go; how suicide prevention hotlines have ruined the economy.

It’s up to you to stop this from happening again. If you get the chance to meet the senior executives of a large bank, do me a favour and point out how refreshing the air is outside the 35^th floor window. Maybe they should check it out.

-Worst Guy Ever

Straya Day!

January 25: Workplace productivity is low, the temperature is up and so are the floodwaters if you’re reading this in Queensland or New South Wales (possibly on some kind of iPad flotation device, iFloat? Still better than the Costa Concordia’s navigation app “iTanic”). The whole nation watches as the day works its way to 5pm. It’s like the Melbourne Cup on a clock face; “and the minute had is resting at 4:59, but here comes the second hand, passing 10 o’clock. It’s at the 50, the 55, 57, 58, 59... IT’S 5 O’CLOCK!!!! It’s all over here for another year at the Clockwatching Cup. Pass me a beer, I’ve got tomorrow off”

The flag lowering ceremony was eagerly awaited

So I’ve read a few blogs and columns in the last couple of days about our annual tradition of taking a few moments (probably during office hours) to think about what it means to be Australian and what Australia Day is all about. We don’t do this thinking on Australia Day though, that’s valuable pool, beer and BBQ time. The usual questions come up; Who are we? Where are we going? Are we going to be ok? Are we too racist? And so on.

There seems to be a lot of concern about a bit of research that has been widely reported as “People with Aussie flags on their car: Racists”. What the very small report carried out by a few students for a research assignment actually reflected was more along the lines of “Leading questions in research makes conclusions easier to forecast, assignment easier to write. Tavern time also increased.” A bunch of students asked 500 people about their views of Australia on Australia Day. All these people were on the South Perth Foreshore and out of these about 100 admitted they have Australian flags hanging off their cars.

Of these 100 people, less than half admitted they were concerned about immigration, Australian culture, and had negative views of Aboriginals and Muslims in Australia. We’re not told whether this was Islamic Extremists, Islamic nations or even Islamic cricket players. Considering the news cycle at the time having a fair bit of coverage of boat people and various wars in the Middle East that had dragged on longer than The Lord of the Rings Exxxxtra Long Super Extended Directors Cut Collector’s Edition (with previously unseen behind-the-scenes footage of the making of the behind-the-scenes special).

The story apparently is that while a few people with flags on their cars were concerned about stories the media and Today Tonight/A Current Affair/talk back radio had been bludgeoning people with. Hardly surprising really. I’m shocked that there weren’t more people openly displaying racist or downright obnoxious attitudes. This IS Australia Day on the South Perth foreshore remember? Not exactly the place you go for highbrow political discourse. Punch-ons at the flag pole? No worries. Australia’s foreign policy and multiculturalism... not so much.

Speaking from what I’ve seen of people opinions of Aussies overseas, we’re not all that bad. You hear stories of Indian students being the targets of racism in Australia? It’s even worse in some other parts of the world. People like Australians, we’re considered to be naturally good-humoured and friendly. We’re seen as a friendly, hard-working nation with beautiful women, beautiful beaches, and politicians which are easily ignored. We have a strong economy, business is booming, people want to come here to work. Sure we drink a lot, and we sometimes get into fights. But on the whole we’re doing alright.

Aussie pride is a bit overrated though, be proud to be Australian by sharing all that we love with everyone else. Show people why Australia is such a great place, NOT why Australia is better than everyone else.  It’s not a race, there is no “winner”. Be Australian be being cheerful, good-humoured and hard working. Nation-level narcissism to be point of being masturbatory is the providence of Americans, and they’re welcome to it. They can have their redneck “immigrants stole my job” mentality and their loud-mouthed decrying of everyone else who is slightly different.

I’m proud of the fact the when we’re given a day off for our nation, we spend it with those we care about, we get together, we share food and drinks (sharing a meal is one of the most ancient rituals or trust and respect), we enjoy the beautiful weather of our country (once again, except those currently being flooded or cycloned, bad luck).

We’re Australia. We’re Awesome. People know it, we don’t have to tell them.

Happy Australia Day everyone. We’re doing pretty bloody good.

-Worst Guy Ever

PS - Fun Game: Drink every time some blogger or journo uses the phrase "navel-gazing" when talking about Australia Day.

Rhetoric Kills

Speed doesn’t kill, that’s just another convenient excuse that’s been jammed down drivers throats for so long that it is now being trumpeted to the exclusion of all else. I’m sure it’s easier to fit on a billboard/coffee mug/key-ring/commemorative butt plug/whatever than “driving like a dick, not paying attention, not understanding the road rules and then passing all these habits on to your children which for some reason you are allowed to teach to drive... kills”. The unbelievable single-target focus of so many road safety campaigns has resulted in the greater public only being aware of one single variable in traffic accidents. Speed.

On a recent trip back home from overseas I realised exactly how bad things are. People have absorbed the message “drop 5, save lives” like it had been chemically introduced into the water supply. I feel like this might be a once off type thing and this is the only message the government has ever been able to pound into people brains. What a waste! If I was going to get the population of a city to absorb only one message I could think of hundreds that would have been more useful. Think about it, you could have had the whole population thinking;

n   Stop being self-centred for the next 5 minutes.

n   Watching The Biggest Loser does not count as exercise, put down the chips and step away from the couch.

n   Buy beers for everyone in the bar.

n   Stop playing the pokies, you’re not going to get rich, spend that money on soap instead. Please.

n   Tits out for the boys.

n   Does anyone REALLY give a crap about this facebook status?

But no, instead people now think “drive slower than speed limit, be superhero”. It was great to see people driving along in a 100kph zone doing 80kph chatting away to the person next to them. That’s great, well done, please stop drifting into my lane... screw this, have some HOOOOOORRN (I wish i had a bigger horn, the kind that destroys eardrums). And then they look surprised!

“How dare you blow your horn at me sir! I’m a safe driver! I drive well below the speed limit, usually in the right-hand lane because it’s my right as a road user!”. This right here is how people end up in shallow graves. They harp on about their Rights and ignore their Responsibilities, like paying attention while driving (to the road, not the phone/kids/GPS in the middle of their windscreen).

Who the hell decided that driving 5kph slower was a good idea anyway? Aren’t speed limits designed to be the safe speed at which to travel on any given road? If that speed limit was 5kph too fast, wouldn’t that be changed? Aside from the blanket 10kph speed reduction on all roads across the state a few years ago, which has been largely regarded as an easy way to increase the number of people getting caught for minor speeding offences, what has improved?

Certainly not the quality of driver training. The current requirement to take an L-plater for an educational spin is having a full drivers licence for 4 years. That’s it. 4 years of not indicating, failing to give way, talking on your phone and having no concept of how a round-a-bout works. That gives you the experience necessary to pass on all these horrible traits to a new driver. You can’t avoid it, even if you have lessons with a professional driving instructor you still have to complete your P-plate log book by spending hours listening to Johnny-No-Brakes telling you that you don’t _really_ need to indicate there, or you can just get away with mounting the curb there. Nothing like having to spend hour after hour in a confined space with someone supervising you to help reinforce their bad habits. Good work to whichever bloody genius had that stroke of logic:

(Read in a posh British accent, just because) “We have a bunch of crap drivers on the road, we should make new drivers practice for longer under the supervision of experienced drivers. That will solve this problem!”

It was a good idea right up until it turned out the people who are currently crap drivers are the ones training the future of crap driving.

So next time you’re driving home plastered at 3am with your headlights off and trying to text a booty call, remember that to be a safe driver all you have to do is slow down from 50kph to 45kph on those suburban roads... verge, footpath... whatever. Mind that letterbox.

-Worst Guy Ever