Fridge essentials
The ice cube is the very cornerstone of civilised entertaining, perhaps even of civilisation itself.
Its very presence in your fridge suggests someone who has foresight (you filled the trays), cares about others and pays their electricity bills.
My mother will just about wipe a person who doesn't have ice cubes on hand and, as with her considerable intelligence, compassion and good looks, she has also passed onto me an almost obsessive habit of refilling the trays after they've been emptied of their frozen cargo.
This has bled into other aspects of my entertaining, so you will never attend a party for which I have some degree of responsibility and be served warm beer; in fact there will be reserve bags of clear cubes stacked in the bath, in the laundry and the deep freeze because you can never, ever have too much ice.
So, if we start with ice cubes as the absolute essential to have in your fridge (or freezer) - the one thing no man or woman should be without in their Westinghouse - what then do we add to the list? ... more
- Posted at 12:26 AM
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Group mentality
A dozen rugby league players stand around a naked 19-year-old woman, half of them having sex with her, others masturbating as they watch on.
Seven years later it is revealed one of the instigators of the gang-bang is an Australian television icon; the woman involved says her life has been ruined.
Average Aussies everywhere are stunned and outraged by the description of events and the lack of remorse displayed by the men involved; the personality loses his job.
Columnists vent; talk back radio crackles, then slowly, uneasily, men around the country are forced to examine their attitudes, their actions, their pasts; they wonder ... what does this make me? ... more
- Posted at 12:26 AM
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Reveal yourself
Got an email from a 30-year-old Tasmanian geologist a few weeks ago who wanted to know what are the demographics of All Men Are Liars' readers.
We had a little bit of a peek at what many of you do for a living, judging by your responses to the post 'The Two Things', where some revealed the stuff you need to know about certain professions and past-times.
Today, I'd like to take it a bit further. Granted, many of you may not care who reads this blog, but after 34 months writing it, more than 140,000 reader comments and tens of millions of page impressions, I'm just a little curious as to who you all are.
I've given you plenty of (admittedly egocentric) detail about my own life, in particular this 5,000 word post answering reader questions back in 2006 ... so, disembodied voices from the ether, now it's your turn ... more
- Posted at 12:26 AM
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Make way for tomorrow
The very best habit I have developed in the last 12 months is taking a swim each morning with a bunch of mature-age gentlemen (and women) at my local beach.
Swimming has been a solo pursuit of mine for years; doing laps of pools or the beach, competing in ocean races; it's kept me sane and though I've always thoroughly enjoyed it, there's not a lot of camaraderie to the sport.
That all changed when I started the 9am ritual of meeting the old boys at my surf club, from where we'd wander to the south end of our beach, swim out through the breakers, bob around for a minute or two, then race en masse through shoals of salmon (and whatever is chasing them) to the other side of the bay.
Having this kind of mature, masculine energy around me has become a simple, profound joy for me nowadays, especially because it gives me the opportunity to ask the gents questions about how they've dealt with certain situations in their lives or that of their children ... more
- Posted at 12:26 AM
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The Most Interesting Man in the World
I'm pretty sure these ads haven't aired here, but the Mexican beer Dos Equis has been running a great advertising campaign in the US for a couple of years now called The Most Interesting Man in the World.
Some of the copy reads thus: "When it is raining, it is because he is sad. Even his parrot's advice is insightful. If there were an interesting gland, his would be larger than most men's entire lower intestines. His shirts never wrinkle."
"He is left-handed. And right-handed. Even if he forgets to put postage on his mail, it gets there. He once knew a call was a wrong number, even though the person on the other end wouldn't admit it. You can see his charisma from space. He's a lover, not a fighter, but he's also a fighter, so don't get any ideas."
You get the picture. What I find interesting, is that the actor playing The Most Interesting Man in the World, one Jonathan Goldsmith, is obviously in his 50s or 60s, so it's a pretty brave departure for a brewery to lionise a man of advancing years instead of a sporting hero or metrosexual buck.
I'll embed the videos below the jump so you can check them out, but the concept of 'The Most Interesting Man in the World' ads got me thinking ... just who I would bestow that title on in real life? ... more
- Posted at 12:26 AM
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More of everything now
Fast food. Express post. Movies on demand. Overnight success. Twitter. Instant replay. Instant messaging. Instant gratification!
Want to frustrate an Australian? Make them wait for something.
Want to drive them insane? Make them wait without mobile coverage so they can't text or email or tweet.
As a generation we want more of everything now and if we can't have it, we at least want to distract ourselves with ipods or Facebook updates or talkback tripe because otherwise we're left with just us and our thoughts and for many that's more terrifying than driving at 120km/h while texting ... more
- Posted at 12:26 AM
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Fringe dwellers
Some of you may have seen the documentary Solo that aired on the ABC a couple of weeks ago about Andrew McAuley's ill-fated attempt to be the first man to cross the Tasman, paddling 1600km in a kayak.
Directed by Jennifer Peedom and David Michôd, Solo, utilises unsettling footage McAuley shot of himself with a camera mounted to the bow of his kayak. The vessel was recovered a day or so after he disappeared, about 30 nautical miles short of his destination of Milford Sound, New Zealand.
Solo is a distressing yet riveting look at what drove a father and husband to risk, then lose his life attempting something no-one had then achieved and the conflict inherent in McAuley's decision is stunningly captured in this piece of video (jump to the 3:35 mark and let it run).
When I watched the doco with my girlfriend, she said to me "you're never doing something like that" and I agreed; I couldn't understand the why anyone would want to leave behind their lover and family to risk death. Then a few weeks ago, I had the chance to meet and go rock climbing with another stone cold Aussie hellman - Dr Glenn Singleman - and, as I dangled over a 100m high cliff, the mindset of this type of thrill-seeker came into sharp relief ... more
- Posted at 12:26 AM
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Anything less than perfect is failure
When you think about all the competing variables that two people bring to a relationship - likes, dislikes, sexual kinks, baggage, addictions, exes, family and mental issues, children - it's amazing human beings last as couples for days or months, let alone years and decades.
Why then do we constantly heap the condemnation of "failure" on any relationship that ends prior to the death of either party or dissolves before the couple get married?
Just because a person has had a series of respectful six or nine month 'relationettes', does this make them any less accomplished than another who's been stuck in a destructive partnership for five years?
I think the tendency to apply the label of failure to relationships that are anything less than perfect saddles many people with impossible expectations and the result is unhappy couples destined to become unrealistic singles ... more
- Posted at 12:26 AM
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Choose your battles
As I've written previously, there's a saying that "every man becomes a feminist when he has a daughter" because suddenly guys see their attitudes and that of their mates through the prism of "that could be my little girl they're talking about."
It's a pity the same perception shift doesn't occur in so many women, with huge numbers of mothers continuing to transmit the trivial obsessions of shoe shopping, beauty products and fashion magazines to their baby girls.
It's a bit much to expect men to take the insoluble issues of western gender equality seriously - things like abortion rights, equal pay and sexual discrimination in the workplace - when millions of intelligent women spend their days consumed with what Gwyneth Paltrow is wearing.
If female opinion makers and power brokers spent a quarter of the time they devoted to worrying about which celebrity woman has had plastic surgery, to an issue like universal free day care - the groundswell of media and community pressure would be overwhelming.
Seriously, put free day care on the front page of every woman's magazine for the next six months and tell me it would not be pushed to the forefront of the national consciousness and to the top of the Federal government's agenda where it rightly should be ... more
- Posted at 12:26 AM
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The Two Things
I'm not in the habit of lifting ideas from other blogs but this one sent to me by reader Elizabeth a few months ago struck me as the perfect Friday distraction, as well as great method for you all to distill your thoughts on your professions, hobbies and other cultural oddities.
Back in 2004, an economist named Glen Whitman recounted on his blog Agoraphilia meeting a stranger at bar who asked him "so, what are the Two Things about economics?"
Unsure what the man meant, Glen asked for clarification and the stranger replied: "You know, the Two Things. For every subject, there are really only two things you need to know. Everything else is the application of those two things, or just not important."
Said Glen: "Oh, okay, here are the Two Things about economics. One: Incentives matter. Two: There's no such thing as a free lunch."
Since then, Glenn has been collecting Two Things by playing the game with people he meets, as I did on a business trip to Melbourne, Wednesday, asking the flight attendant what were the Two Things you had to know about her job.
She thought for a moment and said, "the two things you need to know about being a flight attendant: 1. Safety before service. 2. Have great hair" ... more
- Posted at 12:26 AM
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The first time ... almost
When you're a boy, there comes a confusing yet thrilling time around age 12 or 13, when you morph from being this sexless "o" floating in gender's alphabet soup, grow a "tail" (♂) so to speak, and become a son of Mars.
Massive changes occur as a boy's brain literally starts to talk to his balls, his body pulsing with gonadotropin-releasing hormone (GnRH), testes increase in volume seven-fold, bones become denser and heavier, musculature develops, hair sprouts, his voice deepens yet, ironically, demands for pocket money become shrill.
Boys have already seen the girls they've grown up with get taller and grow lumps and curves and begin to eye off older dudes. Now the process has started with them, dots join in their heads, the female geometry heaves out of the horizon and suddenly they find themselves forever in The Land of Sex.
Their friends begin talking and lying about it, they can't stop thinking about it and once they get their first girlfriend and some pashing and heavy petting ensues, every thought gets compacted and pushed to the side to give space in their head for ssseeeeeexxxx ... more
- Posted at 12:26 AM
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Domino's dirty deeds discussed
It's been a big couple of weeks for YouTube, with it's most popular upload ever and now one of the most creative uses of the website by a mainstream corporation, this spectacularly sincere apology by Domino's CEO Patrick Doyle.
You might have seen this video last week of two hardhead North Carolina Domino's employees fouling and farting on food for customers in what was a massive public relations disaster for the fast food chain.
However, Doyle, thanks to a seriously well-crafted response, not to mention a sizable dollop of personal presence and integrity has gone a long way towards repairing the damage. The owners of the Coogee Bay Hotel should take note ... more
- Posted at 12:26 AM
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She doesn't know her place
If you're not living under a bridge talking to fleas, you've probably heard the name Susan Boyle and likely been one of the more than 60 million people worldwide who've viewed her variety show performance on YouTube.
I've been thinking a lot about Susan and the similarities in her story to her predecessor, mobile phone salesman Paul Potts who won the first season of the same reality TV show, Britain's Got Talent.
The thing that made Susan's appearance on the show all the more remarkable was that she faced a hostile audience that openly mocked her, yet she silenced and won them over within four or five bars of her rendition of Les Miserables' 'I Dreamed a Dream'.
Potts faced no such hostility during his audition in 2007 and the reason was he knew his place: he was fat, ugly, poorly dressed, a typical schlub and the look on his face when he fronted the judges was almost pitiful - like he was bracing for the inevitable rejection and bullying that had crowded his youth.
Susan Boyle, however, did not know her place: she was old, fat, ugly, dowdy, unemployed and didn't pluck her eyebrows, yet she had sass, she refused to shuffle meekly onto the stage, her body language said "like it or lump it" ... more
- Posted at 12:26 AM
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Mourning Susan Tsvangirai
Early last month the Prime Minister of Zimbabwe, Morgan Tsvangirai, was injured in a car accident when his four-wheel-drive collided head-on with a lorry near the capital of Harare. His wife of 31 years, Susan Tsvangirai, died at the scene.
I'm not sure what it was about the accounts of her death but it prompted me to do a bit of reading about Susan and Morgan and was soon touched by the obvious strength of their union.
According to The Independent, Morgan first saw Susan in 1976 when he was a foreman at the mines in Bindura and she was visiting an uncle. "He reportedly nudged the friend who was walking next to him and declared 'That is the girl I am going to marry!'"
Since their marriage in 1978, which bore six children, Susan was by all accounts Morgan's rock as the then-opposition leader survived an assassination attempt, was imprisoned, endured a lengthy treason trial, was badly beaten and this year was shoe-horned into a power-sharing agreement with his long-time foe President Robert Mugabe.
(According to The Independent, the joke doing the rounds in Zimbabwe says that the reason Tsvangirai was bought into the government was so Mugabe "could shoot him from point blank range.")
I reckon Susan Tsvangirai must have been a pretty remarkable woman, who will be dreadfully missed by her husband and for some reason her story and passing really brought home to me just how traumatic it must be to lose your one and only; the person you were put on this earth to walk with ... more
- Posted at 12:25 AM
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