The Perils of Lying (Down)

If you’ve been temporarily struck deaf and blind for the last couple of weeks you probably haven’t heard of Planking. For those you that have been so lucky, apparently there’s a new daredevil challenge in town. Move over extreme ironing, stop and drop your cheese-rolling, all the kids are getting into Planking. That’s right, “extreme lying down” is the new cause for mum’s most recent dash to the emergency department.

Apparently several people have been injured while trying to plank on moving vehicles and one person died after performing a plank on a 7^th floor balcony after a hard night on the turps. As a result of this we’ve had another Helen Lovejoy (There’s getting to be a lot of those lately) and community groups, politicians, and hack journo’s (talk-back radio, opinion piece writers, and anyone from New Idea) jumping up and down about kids doing everything they can to kill themselves and demanding someone put a stop to the Plague of Plankers.

I don’t think planking is the problem though. I think people are doing stupid crap and getting hurt. See, when someone tries to plank, while plastered, on a 7^th floor balcony railing, falls off, and dies, I don’t see the “plank” part of this scenario as the danger. Apparently I’m the only person that feels that doing anything on a 7^th floor balcony railing while three shandies to the wind isn’t a great idea. Imagine if this lad had been overtaken with the sudden need to pray. Would church groups be targeted by the media if someone fell to their death while drunk-dialling Jesus on a 7^th floor balcony?

Would lycra-clad road-hogs be abused (more than usual) if the young man had been killed while cycling on the 7^th floor balcony railing with a blood alcohol reading of Charlie Sheen?

Would Cate Blanchett have been the subject of a smear campaign if this ill-fated fellow had necked a few chardonnays and wanted to debate putting a price on carbon pollution on this balcony railing? Although if he had, several journalists may well have spontaneously combusted from the pressure of blaming everyone at the same time.

Despite a few injuries, several sackings and a few suspended students (no pun) much chuckling has come forth from the part of the community with equal parts grey hair and free time with suggestions that ‘planking’ is the most exciting thing that “Gen Y” *cringe* can come up with.  Personally I consider it to be a roundly successful excursion in irony that anyone can turn the act of lying down into something widely considered stupid and dangerous by the talk-back-radio listeners of the community. If we keep this up no doubt we can soon inspire legislation against extreme waving, extreme blinking and extreme respiratory-failure.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m a bit worn out so I might go and have a lie down. Is it too extreme if I have a glass of warm milk beforehand?

-Worst Guy Ever

Also, have a look at The Huntress vs. The Headline over at wordpress. A very wicked friend of mine author's it and quite enjoys skewering wierd and wonderfu- no, just wierd headlines produce by crap-tabloid new providers.

If I Keep Drinking They Might Shut Up

I should be dead right now. It’s true, various cancer council groups, family-friendly researchers and a whole gaggle of finger-pointing fun-haters are all baffled by my seemingly unbelievable ability to form words at all. I should have developed a dozen kinds of cancer, heart disease, kidney failure, liver cirrhosis, brain damage and jaundice. By no small miracle I appear to be fine. Yup, still got a pulse, just checked it then. Liver? Currently straining a pint quite nicely.

Now you might be a little confused as to what kind of affliction could possibly mean I should be suffering from such a selection of near/rapidly nearing death experiences. Have I been snorkelling in the lovely glowing reefs downstream from Japan’s happy-go-lucky Fukushima nuclear power plant? Did I suddenly develop a terminal case of being 65 or older? Perhaps I’ve taken up a job testing suspicious substances found by the post office by snorting the lot of it with the force of a jet engine. No sadly, it’s nothing so glamorous or welfare-friendly.

I’ve been drinking. Alcohol in fact, all kinds of it; Beers, spirits, wine, and a wide variety of cider too. I’ve mixed energy drinks with alcohol, I’ve knocked back shooters, bombs, test-tubes, jelly shots, chazwuzzers and quite a few drinks that require you douse their flames before you drink them. I have engaged in “high risk” drinking activities (as described by someone’s mum as having more than 6 standard drinks in one night). I called that pre-drinks before heading out. Hell, some days that was just how I got ready to go to work! Various health groups would see these activities outlawed, some of them already are.

There’s a bit of truth behind the argument that “there wouldn’t be a law to stop people doing this if they didn’t want to do it”.

I’ll admit it, I have considered it a “good idea at the time” to start an evening/afternoon/morning off with a few pints of champagne, vodka and cider (um, yeah, all in the one glass). It went down a fizzy little treat and I have to say made an excellent basis for the black-out party that occurred for the rest of the night inside my head. By all accounts I was charming, well-mannered and a great dancer. I felt like death the next day but I’m fairly certain I hadn’t been murdered or died of alcohol poisoning, much to the shock and disbelief of certain parts of the media.

I have injuries from drinking, many through stupidity, and some from a big Maori who didn’t like me judging by the scars. That’s right, I’m part of the statistics, I wouldn’t say I got into a fight out drinking. That would be inaccurate. I’d say I got the crap kicked out of me while I was drunk. I’m not upset, I got into more fights in school than in bars yet I don’t see a government push to ban fifteen year-olds. Drinking injuries are the same as bike riding/skateboarding/chair-racing or sexing injuries. You learn from them and improve over time. Failure leads to learning, you can’t have one without the other.

So why are we stopping them? Why is it becoming illegal for bars to sell people shots, or bombs, or giant cocktails served in a fishbowl? I’ll answer this in two parts:

Part one: Because people want to drink. They want to drink shots, or large crazy cocktails. Why? because it might be fun, it might be new and it might get them drunk. And, like peeing on powerlines, this might come as a bit of a shock, but young people like to get drunk.

Part two: Because there are a bunch of people from generation who popularised LSD, Weed, Acid, magic mushrooms, drink driving, and conscription that feel the need to tell us that we drink too much alcohol. You think? Well everything else is illegal now so that’s all we have left! Excessive drinking and partying might not be the best option, but it’s all that we’ve got these days.

The point is that despite all the government warnings in the world people are still going to drink and still going to survive. I spent a few years where I was more often drunk than not, I called it university, it was awesome and somehow despite all this recent tests showed that my liver, kidneys, and heart are all in perfect health. That’s right, it turns out your body can take a fair bit of punishment if you work hard and train it to handle a bath-tub of vodka per night despite what a bunch of whinging health groups would have you believe.

So I’ll keep drinking as much as I like and knocking back cocktails, shooters and buckets of gin at any hour of the day or night like I’m the Queen Mother. If we’re lucky the nanny-state health groups might become so enraged they fatally choke on their cous cous and bile while we enjoy the spectacle from the beer garden of our warm, fuzzy contentedness.

Because we live in a liberal society, not a kindergarten, and we should be able to do what we damn well want.

-Worst Guy Ever

Round and Round the Original Thoughts Go

I remember reading an opinion piece written by an obviously underworked journalist once. The entire piece was a long, drawn-out whine, which coincidently sounds nothing like my suggested remedy of an artillery strike on the journo as he sat waiting for his decaf espresso.  He related the story of how he and a friend tried to get a coffee in the city but were set upon by the needless delays of the staff making other peoples orders first. *dun dun duuunnnnn*

Dramatic scene-music aside this guy must have been jonesing like Charlie Sheen in Amish country. He needed his fix and he needed it to arrive quicker than me on a date with Jennifer Hawkins. So the story unravels that he complains about the wait, then he complains about the over-worked teenager behind the counter’s response to his original complaint, then he starts on the staff’s attitude (who the hell expects smiles and sunshine from a teenager making coffee for minimum wage?).

After all this our journalistic white knight, defender of the “good ol’ days” moves on to express his disgust at ‘kids these days’ always seeming to have facial piercings, which never happened back in his day, oh no! And politicians were honest, and the roads were safer, etc. ad nauseam. Cue shaking of fists, waving of walking sticks in the air and angry letter writing to the editor/mayor/Easter bunny. Interesting point; if you want to make a complaint about something and immediately start looking for a pen and paper there’s a good chance you have no idea what an internet is thus won’t be reading this and can’t argue back. Nyah nyah, your hip’s broke!

Seriously though, facial piercings? On a teenager working in hospitality? Heaven forfend! I can already hear Helen Lovejoy shrieking in the background. Isn’t hospitality the industry where you can get away with that sort of thing? It was turning out that this was the degradation of civilisation happening right in front of us and a bold and fearless journo was there to shine the light on this scourge of the cafferatti.

This is where it hit me, this isn’t an original thought. I could picture some chain-smoking journalist sweating into his polyester shirt twenty years ago thinking the same thing. No, not that he had desperately needed to come up with an opinion piece by 3pm or start looking for a new job, the other thing. Someone would have written the exact same piece about the quality of service at his local restaurant and the lazy, good-for-nothing, long haired layabouts that worked there. Long hair and unkempt side burns! These were the problems of that age. Also chlamydia, but more on that later.

This was the same “damn kids, get off my lawn” crap that had been doing the rounds in journalism for generations. Swap piercings or tattoos for long hair, facial hair, rock music, short skirts, the word ‘dude’, or any other hundred decency destroying habits and you have essentially the same argument going all the way back to 1665 when  Lord Orpington published his hand written essay “ “The Modern Youth and Their Damn Baggy Pantaloons”.

I'm wiritng this with the full knowledge that absolutely nothing will change and in twenty or thirty years time I'll be sitting down to a breakfast scotch and nodding along to an article about how kids these days need to respect their elders and stop getting their skin dyed/eyes tinted/cyborg limbs chromed/whatever. It's a cycle, it's going to go round and round and will continue to do so unless we do something. I for one can't be arsed, but i'm going to sit back and giggle about it from time to time, so I'd like to invite you to join me...

Ladies and Gentlemen, the Comedy of Generations.