So we’ve all pretty much heard about the dopey British backpacker who survived 12 days lost in the Blue Mountains, Jamie Neale, by now, yeah? It’s a wonderful relief that he’s been found, it goes without saying. He’s a very lucky lad.

And that should be the end of that, right? He goes back home to England and recuperates fully and resumes normal life, right?

Oh no. Not at all. Don’t be so fuckin’ naive, Bron, for this is the day and age of instant “celebrity” and round-the-clock, in-your-face media exposure. Timespan of everyone wanting a piece of your arse: usually a week.

Thus I was shitty when I saw the headline on the SMH website, “Jamie Neale stands to make a fortune”.

Shitty because I really need to make an instant fortune and it was him who gets the money and I don’t.

Seriously, though, it’s shitty because everyone is getting fiscally rewarded and instant “celebrity” for mishaps, accidents, and just generally getting caught up in the vicissitudes of life.

Shit happens.

And who the hell are these celebrity agents? The dude’s just come out of the bush after 12 days and is recovering in hospital and he’s already signed up to a celebrity agent? Do celebrity agents hang around hospital corridors waiting for the next “big” story to be wheeled past in a gurney? There is just something sordid about the speed at which Jamie and his dad were snapped up by a “celebrity” agent.

I, for one, won’t be reading or watching any interviews. I know the story, I know what happened, and I know how it ended. I don’t need a complete rehash and deconstruction of The Boy Who Was Lost in the Bush for 12 Days. I’m just glad he’s been found safe and sound. And that’s that.

Four reasons why the Navy ’sex scandal’ is a malodourous beat-up:

1. There is nothing particularly unusual about young men discussing their philistinic dreams of sexual conquests, both likely and improbable. There’s no real scandal in writing these things down, unless they involve degrading personal commentary that subsequently harms someone. If we’re going to start sacking or indicting males aged 17-28 for playing silly games and thinking with the wrong head, a quarter of society will be out of work or in the slammer.

2. It’s the military, fer Chrissakes. It has a blokey, boozy, misogynistic culture, fuelled by large amounts of testosterone, perpetuated by playing with big guns and propagated by living in a hothouse environment, at close quarters with each other for eleven months of the year. When not fighting, which is 99 percent of the time, they spend their hours either training, being yelled at, oiling their guns, swabbing poop decks, whatever. It’s hardly surprising that they’d engage in dubious horseplay to relieve the boredom.

3. Why the hell do we expect our military to be a paragon of gender equality and political correctness anyway? Their job is to kill people and blow things up – do we really believe this attracts libertarians, feminists and Greens voters?  Or that it doesn’t attract risk-takers, loose cannons or people of dubious psychological integrity? The problem lies not with the people concerned but the glorification of military service that’s been ongoing in this country since Howard came to power.  The ADF has always done and continues to do a fine job – but it is not a patrician class, upholding civilised mores or furthering higher social values. The military’s job is to protect the values of liberal democracy, not to practise them.

4. Horniness in the military is now entirely understandable, given that the ADF is now headed by John Faulkner – the world’s sexiest politician (if you’re a practising female actuary). $250 for John and $300 if he keeps his glasses on. Yum yum.

On the back of this story, I’d like to confess to heinous war crimes:

• I have committed genocide using weapons of mass destruction
• I have bombed entire populations resident on my land with chemical weapons, out of pure racism
• I have launched military action against a colony on the false premise that they posed a danger to me
• I have employed torture devices that have maimed and killed countless innocent creatures, just ’cause

I submit myself to PETA and humbly ask for leniency.

When I was travelling around India a few years back, I picked up a beautifully bound and illustrated “gift edition” of the Kama Sutra. Every tourist does it. Seriously. Shut up.

Anyway, if you’re not too familiar with the ancient work, it’s probably not quite what you’d expect. Forget about the infamous 64 sexual positions — that part occupies only 10 of Vatsyayana’s original 36 chapters and, frankly, is about as useful a guide for lovers as Weekend at Bernie’s is for apprentice morticians.

The bulk of the Kama Sutra concerns itself with how one should live one’s life — not just in lurve, but also in general. Practical advice covers a diverse range of topics, from pseudo feng shui right through to convoluted schemes for seducing your mate’s missus.

Now, I can’t vouch for the quality or authenticity of the translation of the book I rediscovered on my bookshelf the other day, inspiring this post — it was published by Roli Books and now appears to be out of print, and my own Sanskrit has been rusty since I stopped speaking it in the 16th century — but if it’s in any way representative of the genuine article, the Kama Sutra is a work of comic genius.

Don’t just take my word for it, though. Here are three of the book’s best passages, quoted verbatim.

1) On general hygiene:

You should bathe daily, rub yourself with oil every other day, use soap every third day and shave every fourth day. You should do all this without fail and rub the sweat of the armpits every now and then.

2) For the laydeez:

The rules for a courtesan to make a quick fortune are simple:

• First check your man out carefully.
• Secondly, make him fall desperately in love with you.
• Then fleece him well.
• When he’s broke, throw him out without remorse.

3) For mah homies (on which women are the easiest to seduce):

Those who stand at the doorways of their houses; who peer out on to the street; one who steals glances at men; one who is jealous, covetous, immoral or barren. Also those who are lazy, cowardly, vulgar, foul smelling, sick or old.

Well, what are you waiting for? Get out there and be the best damn lovers you can be.

Back in the mid-1980s I was a teenager and our family lived in a small town south of Bendigo. Our home, a modest weatherboard three-bedroom affair, was tucked away in a small bush clearing, just off the main highway to Melbourne. Had a fire come, there would have been no saving our house: surrounded and dwarfed by eucalypts, it would have been swallowed and vapourised. No fire plan, no fuel clearing, no water pumps could have saved it – something we knew but generally took for granted.

In January 1985 a series of small fires started outside Maryborough, west of our house, then merged into one and headed our way. It was a Monday, the weekend before had been hot and glaring, strong winds had whipped up from the north-west. My memories of that day are of us being pulled out of school and packed into the family car, along with anything of sentimental value. Of my mother and father, first arguing, then discussing calmly, then crying. And my mother driving us to our grandparents’ house in Melbourne, my father heading off to join the CFA and other volunteers. He abandoned our little house to its fate, knowing that it was probably doomed and that his efforts would be better spent helping others save theirs.

Luckily, through a change of wind, the fire never made it as far as our house - but it raged for days, claimed the houses of people we knew and razed places where I grew up and considered part of home. I can remember returning days later and seeing a smoky, blackened moonscape. And the charred bodies of sheep and horses, left to die helplessly in their paddocks. And the people, good country people who had lost everything they owned – and in a few cases, members of their family – either vacant and staring or hysterical and sobbing. The fire had cost us nothing yet life would never be the same again – God only knows what it meant for them.

There is nothing like a bushfire: it destroys everything, forgives noone and is stopped by nothing. Follow Scott’s advice and donate, big or small, as much as you can.

Remember Magna Doodles? They’re awesome. A friend of ours gave Baby Rogenous a similar magnetic drawing board the other day, and I couldn’t resist having a crack at it.

Fifteen-month-old Baby is really beginning to talk now, and he’s able to name a handful of animals and make their noises. So I decided I’d make a game of drawing a few creatures for him to identify.

Now, I’m well aware that drawing isn’t a strength of mine … but there are worse people to get stuck playing Pictionary with, I reckon.

Turns out Baby begged to differ when I drew this dog:

He looked at the board; looked up at me; looked back at the board; looked up at me …

“Meow?” he said.

Off I ran to tell E Rogenous my latest hilarious “kids say the darndest things” story. She looked at the board; looked up at me; looked back at the board; looked up at me …

“Is that a nose or a penis?” she said. “And why does its tongue have testicles?”

PWNED. By every member of the family.

I spent the recent Christmas break with E and Baby Rogenous in Indonesia — a nation of some 237 million people, of whom close to 90 per cent are Muslim. We went in spite of the usual DFAT warnings about terrorism and in defiance of the Islamophobic idiocy of Francis “Quarantine or Genocide” Porretto and his ilk, because … well, frankly, because we thought we knew better.

Indeed, the government’s warnings and Teh Right’s fears seemed positively ludicrous while we were there. Everywhere we went, smiling locals wanted to chat and have their photos taken with us. Their approaches were never short of being polite, welcoming and perfectly innocent.

Or so we were led to believe…

On close inspection of our holiday snaps, it turns out we were wrong to be so carefree. Pernicious extremists were trying to kill us at every opportunity.

The photo below still sends a shiver down my spine. It was taken at a 1200-year-old Buddhist monument — which should have set off alarm bells immediately because, as we’re told, Muslims hate freedom of religion and therefore couldn’t have been visiting the site for any reason other than to destroy it. Oblivious to the danger and having proceeded to the top of the monument, we were approached by a group whose ostensible desire was to have a photo taken with the handsome Baby.

I’ve noted, for your untrained Leftist eyes, just a few of the ways our lives were put in jeopardy by these bloodthirsty lunatics:

1. Wiener kid has clearly swallowed a large quantity of explosives.
2. “We’ve got two of ’em, Osama!” Phone poised to play lethal Crazy Frog ringtone as soon as bin Laden returns the call.
3. Clove cigarette smells delicious but is killing us slowly with second-hand smoke.
4. Provocative hint of homosexualistism designed to distract me from imminent danger.
5. Anthrax residue.

Honestly, it’s a miracle that we made it back to Australia alive. Next Christmas we’re going to the United States, where no one ever gets murdered at random.

Sometimes I see or read things that make me angry beyond all sense of logic or proportion. Like this:

A GROUP of teenagers involved in a crash that killed an 82-year-old man and left his 72-year-old partner fighting for her life had fast food delivered to them at the crash site, a witness says.

The elderly couple were in a van involved in a collision at a Gold Coast roundabout with an unregistered car allegedly driven by a disqualified teen driver on Saturday.

When [a witness] reached [the scene] he saw the man was unconscious and the woman was “wailing”. While residents comforted the distressed woman, the five teens stood motionless on the footpath, he said… none of the youths attempted to help.

“They just stood there, and then they sat down and then someone dropped Maccas off to them,” he said.

Scumbags. You have all been charged with being callous, thoughtless little turds and are hereby sentenced to ten years of reverse-Fleshlighting and reading Still Not Sorry. Furthermore, your entire diet for this sentence will consist of ’Big Macs’ made from stale buns, plain-label goatburgers, brown soggy lettuce and special sauce supplied by the ‘lifers’ in your division.

I did something most unusual today – I read the editorial of Saturday’s edition of The Australian. It contained a most curious paragraph, one that made me spit out my double-shot-warm-soy-decaf-latte (sweetened with Tasmanian honey, no less. Four stars):

“And Rudd has systematically alienated those on the cultural Left who dreamed that, through him, they might prosecute their war on the values of ordinary Australians. “

Oh! Silly me! That’s what this whole thing is about. Leftist child pornographers (is there any other kind?) forcing their depravity on decent Australians! How long have we been prosecuting this war on the good and decent people of Australia who never dreamed that beneath the clothes of a young girl there might be a body? What hath Bill Henson wrought? And to think I get laughed at for wearing camouflage casually and carrying a rocket launcher.

Fear not imaginary-values-from-a-time-in-the-distant-past-that-may-have-not-actually-existed, we’ll destroy you yet. At least we would had a Leftist band by the name of Blind Faith not gotten there first.

So I’m a member of this reunion/social networking site, right, that used call itself ‘Schoolfriends’ but has since changed its name to ‘Friends United’ or something similarly wankified. And it was all very funny a couple of years ago when all you could do is scroll through the list of names of those from your school, prompting vague but slightly amusing memories of all the underwashed, mullet-sporting boys and Cyndi Lauper-lookalike girls with whom you used to share a classroom. Back when I set up a profile you could message people on this Schoolfriends thingame – but that required paid registration, which kept the bogans and the quasi-stalkers at bay.

Until now. Now, anyone who sets up a profile can send messages to anyone. For free. Oh the humanity. Yesterday in my inbox, I received notification that ’Jane’ (name changed to protect the certifiably insane) had sent ‘Bridgit’ (ditto) a message via Schoolfriends.

I remembered at once who ’Jane’ was: the meanest, cattiest, most devious princess-bitchface in my year level at school. This girl modelled herself on Jai’me King before there was a Summer Heights High; she was an Internet bully before Al Gore invented the Internets. She was vain, self-loving, boastful, manipulative, gossiping and snobby. She intimidated the teachers as much as the students, once skipping an exam to go somewhere with her dropkick boyfriend and, when caught, having her parents threaten the school with legal action for not believing her completely implausible story. She was naturally spoiled rotten - back in Year Eight she used to bring a new CD to school every week when the rest of us were barely subsisting on hatcheted TDK mix-tapes hastily recorded from Triple M’s ’top 40′. And of course her triumphalist parents bought her a car after she’d passed Year 12 (not by very much, if I remember rightly).

Anyway, the last time I’d seen ‘Jane’ was at our ten-year reunion a few years back… and nothing seemed to have changed. She was still under-dressed, over-made-up, a cigarette in one hand and a glass of Omni in the other. Loud, attention-seeking, a right royal pain in the arse. And now this message from her, which read in full:

hi ‘bridgit’!!!!!!!!!!
how have u been luvly?? things are grate with me, last wk [her husband] Tim got a new position at [company] and next yr they are looking to send him to Singers for six months….
(blah blah…delete six sentences talking about how great her and her dopey husband are and how good she currently has it)
so anyway, u wanna catch up for a coffee? heres my mob, give me a call it would be grate to relive the old dayz at [school name]. luv u!!!
‘jane’

What are my options here, Grodsters. Ignore her? Write back and tell her to fuck herself? Contact her and opt out with an excuse that’s just as much bullshit as her own personal stories? Hire a hitman? One thing’s for sure, I’m getting the hell out of that Schoolfriends website.

So there I am today, huddled over a terminal, stomach rumbling, thinking impatiently of lunch. Last night I’d taken some corn-fed chicken breast, cut into large chunks, then stirred it lovingly through a marinade of yoghurt, mint and tandoori spices. I let this mixture sit for an hour or so then baked it to tenderness in the oven, before putting it on the griddle to give it those blackened stripes across its moist pink-orange flesh. I parcelled this repast up into three plastic tubs and tucked it away: my lunches for the rest of the week. Now, as the clock ticked towards noon, my thoughts turned to this delight, waiting for me in the fridge, cool and tender with lashings of minty yoghurt raita.

Mmmm…. tandoori chicken.

Ding ding! Noon strikes. I log off, get up, bid a temporary farewell to Tim the page-sub who looks like William H. Macy. Down the corridor, around the corner, into the staffroom anticipation building. Open the fridge and…

Gone.

I hope you fucking choked on it, you cowardly, inconsiderate, thieving sack of horse shit!

P.S. Some black guy won the presidency.

Don’t the wankers in the mass media love it when someone slags off ‘Australian icons’ (TM) like Don Bradman, Steve Irwin or Gallipoli. Today it’s Paul Keating, who in his latest book points out quite correctly that the Gallipoli campaign was a disaster from whoa-to-go, and that building a national identity on it is tenuous at best. You could just sense the populists, the blind patriots and the blue-rinsed bigots queueing up 3AW talkback or tapping away madly on the Herald Sun’s comment pages. Keating: the ‘lizard of Oz’; the lover of froggy antiques and Italian suits; the man who groped Her Maj; the scumbag who gave us ‘the recession we had to have’ (as opposed to the one we’re about to) – now he’s slagging our brave Diggers.

But we all know Keating’s not slagging anyone off – save perhaps Churchill, the drunken imperialistic old toad – and that factually, he’s quite right about Gallipoli. It was a tragedy for our troops but its elevation above other battles and campaigns is illogical. It wasn’t our first war as a nation: we had close to 20,000 men serve in the Boer War, another British military fuck-up. We didn’t suffer the worst there (France lost a much higher proportion of its troops) nor is it our costliest defeat (six times as many Australians died on the Western Front – and three-quarters as many died in one day’s fighting at Fromelles as did in the entire seven months at Gallipoli). But let’s face it, the rocky beach, the high cliffs, the Muzzies with machine-guns – it all makes for a great yarn, the stuff from which national myths are woven.

None of that will matter to the Gallipophiles, however, who have spent their lives marching to the nationalist drum and getting drunk on CEW Bean or Les Carlyon. The facts of history mean little to those who just want to use it as a euphoric drug.

This morning I had a dentist appointment. Incidentally, the dentist’s name was Rob and I could see his face.

I don’t mind going to dentist. I’ll take whatever kind of pampering that I can. I don’t understand why some people hate going to the dentists — it’s not that bad. Is it?

Anyway, I had to get some fillings. So, I’m lying back on the surprisingly comfortable patient’s chair with my head resting on the surprisingly comfortable but noisy plastic pillow, my jaws wide apart as far as they could go with many bits of probing metal sticks and mirrors and whatnot in my mouth.

It was impossible to talk, obviously.

And thus you’d think a dentist would know that, wouldn’t you? You’d think they’d explain all their tools that they’re going to stick in your mouth (I realise some of you might see a rude joke in there) and discuss any possible pain or discomfort, before you’re pretty much voiceless.

Not this dentist. Rob. He tells me these things after I’m rendered literally speechless.”This is a laser light that will super charge water particles in dental tissues… Understand?”

Lying there on my back, mouth gaping wide open, I try to respond that no, I have no fucking idea what he’s on about, but I don’t care, just get those fillings in. As it is impossible to tell him this, I make a gurgled sound like “gnnhk” and slightly nod my head.

“Good. And this red light is the laser, it’s not harmful and won’t hurt your tissue,” he continues. “See the red light?”

Again, I can’t respond vocally, and also I can’t even see what fucking red light he’s talking about, because he had it out of my line of sight, the dopey bastard. I raise my head slightly, look down and peer beyond those ugly black glasses they make you wear and see the red light beaming out of some metal electronic stick he’s holding. I try to answer “Yes, I see it now!” but not only am I still rendered voiceless, I am also unable to convey my sarcasm that was growing rapidly. Again, I just nod slightly and make a noise, “gerrrnk”.

Then he holds up something else and says, in a slightly awed voice, “And this is similar to the traditional dentist drill, except it’s not. That’s why we don’t need to use anaesthetics, as this is groundbreaking laser dentristy work! It’s not radioactive either!”

By then, I’m ready to plead for anaesthetic, just to numb me from my aching jaw, my dry throat and lips, my inability to respond as well as my inability to tell him to get a fucking move on!

Then there’s a knock on the door, and it’s the other dentist, with a small “emergency” on a patient he’s working. Rob apologises, he and his dental nurse withdraw all their objects from my mouth and he rushes off into the other dental room. Gingerly, I close my jaws shut, try to find some saliva from somewhere and lie there, traumatised already with nothing actually being done yet to my teef.

Rob comes back shortly and asks, “Now, want me to go through any of that again?”

You fucking bastard, I thought. Now you ask, when I have the ability to speak. “No, I’m OK. Let’s begin, shall we?” I suggest politely.

And 30 minutes later, I was out of there, with two new fillings, $355 poorer and a newfound pathological hatred for dentists.

I get up really early for work these days. I’ve never been much of a morning person, and since my brain isn’t exactly firing on all cylinders first thing in the AM, the few minutes I spend getting ready to leave the house are fraught with danger.

Yesterday, while getting dressed in the semi-darkness, I reached for the last piece of my ensemble — this necklace I bought in India in 2003, which I’ve been in the habit of wearing almost daily ever since:

I picked it up, pulled it around my neck, then plugged the ends into my ears.

I blame mp3 players.

Only just emerged from bed after 36 hours of incapacitation.

Disease: Food poisoning

Source: Asian food (isn’t it always?)

Symptoms: Headache, bloatedness, tear-inducing stomach cramps, explosive diarrhea. Oh, and that charming gas you get from food poisoning where it backs up from your intestines and ushers forth in a foul, gangrenous burp – it feels and smells like you are farting from your mouth.

Prognosis: S(h)it it out and wait.

Peg me now at your own peril…