So you want to hand me a book

I was in the city a few weeks ago, minding my own business when some Hare Krishna guy gave me a book. A fat hardback book, full of glossy colour illustrations which he eagerly pointed out to me, opening the book while it was still in my hands.

It's not the first time this has happened. A few years ago some other guy gave me a book hilariously named "Teachings of Queen Kunti". He assured me it would be the best book I would ever read, which I suspect would not have been true even if I had read it.

I'm not crazy about being handed stuff I don't want. For example, one of the worst things about UNSW is that there are perpetually people at the front gate handing out flyers and pamphlets and pestering me about stuff I don't care about when I'm trying to get to a class (though I suspect it is the same at every university). That's one of the advantages of having a motorbike - I can ride my bike straight onto campus and park there, bypassing these twerps. A guy called Samuel Kass had a good idea: a pamphlet to give to people giving out pamphlets called So You Want to Hand Me a Pamphlet.

At least if it's a flyer or something I can just throw it away. But I feel weird about throwing a book away, even if I know I'll never read it. I've got better things to read, books that have been sitting on my shelf unread for years - interesting ones. I'm not going to go reading a (presumably religious) book some guy in orange robes gives me. But what really gets me is that these guys give you a book you don't want, and then have the gall to ask for a donation in return. "Most people give ten or fifteen dollars", the guy assured me.

For some reason I felt as though it would be uncalled for to tell him to shove it up his arse, and even just giving him back the book would have been awkward, so like a stupid sucker I dug a few dollars out of my wallet, insincerely apologising that it was all I had (which wasn't true, but I'm not going to reward someone with ten dollars for interrupting me as if I've got nothing better to do). Due to my paltry offering he politely swapped that large hardcover book for a smaller, paperback volume called "The Science of Self-Realization" (taking, I suspect, rather a creative liberty with the word "science").

This seems like a marketing loophole. Traditional marketing is about making people want something so they'll buy it. What this guy and his ilk have done is bypassed the "making people want it" stage, by giving people stuff and then exploiting their sense of social awkwardness and unwillingness to offend a friendly religious person to make them pay for what they never wanted in the first place.

And now this book is sitting on my shelf. I don't want it. I'll never read it. I don't want to throw it away because I sort of payed for it. Maybe I should write a book of my own, and hand it out to anyone in an orange robe. It will be called "I Don't Want Yer Damn Book: How To Avoid Creating Animosity Towards Your Cause".

Junior for bullshit job

I just came across this job ad on Seek.com.au. I can only describe it as epic fail.



How is this ad dumb? Let me count the ways:

1. They say they require someone with a "Good Command of Both Writer & Spoken English". To be fair, they obviously do need someone like that; the person they got to write this ad not only thinks that "Writer & Spoken English" is a valid phrase, they for some reason think that it is acceptable to capitalise the first letter of every word.
2. They claim to have opening hours of 12AM to 4AM. Unless this "Contemporary Workspace" is a brothel, these are pretty weird business hours. I'm sure as hell not going to the CBD at midnight to hand in a résumé.
   
3. No email? What decade to these clowns think this is? I don't know what they think "contemporary" means, but I'm pretty sure a contemporary workspace would have basic email capability.
   
4. I didn't bother including this in the screencap, but the location is listed as "Sydney - North". York St. is in the CBD, not North Sydney.
5. Not only do they not say what the job is in the headline (a pretty stupid thing in itself), they don't say what the job is in the entire ad. They don't even mention what the company does. In my experience any job ad that is evasive about the nature of the job is at best dodgy, and at worst a blatant scam.

I was just going to post this here and rant about its stupidity, but that got me wondering: what is this company? It's listed as Hartbray Pty Ltd, and searching Google for "Hartbray Pty Ltd" or "Hartbray Sydney" turns up nothing but job ads, with no information about the company. Pretty damn shady. I expect it's some kind of multi-level marketing thing.

I've never really understood terms like "dream job". I just dream about weird crap - unless I find a way to get paid to fight killer rats on the roof of my primary school, or steal Fabergé eggs, I don't think I'll ever have a dream job. And that suits me fine. I can only hope that I never have to have anything to do with these idiots.

Fruit bag

I just saw a McDonald's ad. In their latest attempt to appear healthy they're apparently giving kids a choice with their happy meals: fries or a "fruit bag". The little girl in the ad, ordering a happy meal, made a big show of being woefully unable to choose between these options as if they were equally appetising, or equally unappetising as the case may be.

The fallacy lies herein: what kind of kid is ever going to choose a fucking fruit bag over chips? Nobody, that's who. No kid goes to Maccas to eat fruit. Imagine it: a group of kids go to Maccas for a birthday party or whatever, all getting happy meals. They're all getting chips, as you do, and then one of them gets a fruit bag. He is teased mercilessly by his peers and nicknamed "fruit bag" for years to come. Kids do that.

"Fruit bag" is the worst thing kids could call each other. As well as sounding like "fruitcake", and hinting at homosexuality, the "bag" bit alludes to such as ratbag, scumbag, old bag, and hoe-bag. Not to mention it would eventually be spoonerised to "brute fag". It could also be rearranged into the following unflattering phrases:

• Fiat grub
• I tug barf
• Bra if gut
• I, fart bug
• I, fat grub
• I, barf gut
  

Way to potentially scar unsuspecting kids for life, when they just wanted to eat healthy foods, MACCAS. You stupid fruit bags.

Radio is officially crap now, because I said it is

Is it just me or is the radio getting more painful to listen to? There's not much to choose from. Pretty much all AM radio is for old people, and most of everything else is for bogans and wannabe gangstas.

When I'm listening to the radio I usually flip between three stations, Triple J, Triple M and FBI. Now even these are getting shit. Well OK, Triple M always was shit, but after I heard a few Pink Floyd tracks on it I started listening. Now I listen to Wil and Lehmo at 4pm but there's masses of ads and promos and other assorted bullshit. They blather on about how they play "the old stuff AND the new stuff, OMG" but they always seem to play the worst of each.

Triple J has some good music but they play too much hip-hop and crap like that. They seem to want to play all music that's popular with the young'uns, without realising that playing such a wide range of music will make the station incoherent and unlistenable. FBI has some good music, indie cred and no ads but they too play well above the maximum amount of shit-hop (hint: the maximum amount of hip-hop is zero).

And don't get me started about Nova. In my old job they had Nova on constantly, and it is the single worst station in the history of radio. Anyone who listens to Nova is either a bogan or mentally defective (oh wait - same thing). In between horrible, awful, retch-inducing teeny-bopper music and ads about "nasal delivery technology" to increase sexual performance (which says a lot about their audience) they go ON AND ON AND ON about how they have "never more than two ads in a row", which effectively cancels out all the benefits of having less ads in the first place. By the time I left (escaped) my job, I was ready to go over to the Nova studios and shove never less than two chairs up their arses.

Luckily my stereo has a direct input so I can plug in my MP3 player and listen to some good music. If I had to listen to the radio more than a few times a week I would lose all faith in music.

Samsung arrested the development of my phone

OK I am going to talk about my mobile phone, because I KNOW YOU WANT TO HEAR ABOUT MY MOBILE PHONE YOU GUYS. It's one of those clamshell type ones. When it's folded up you can't press the buttons, so it doesn't have a keypad lock. BUT there is a button on the side to activate the camera, which can still be pressed when the phone is closed. So every couple of weeks I find two or three pocket photos, when the camera button has been accidentally pressed in my pocket and I get pictures of blackness (and occasionally a bit of light depending on how the phone was oriented). So yesterday I checked my photos for some reason and found 163 pocket photos.

Samsung, you are all morons. If you are designing a phone with a camera, one of the design objectives should be to make sure it doesn't take hundreds of photos of nothing inside the user's pocket. Some more free advice: in this day and age it should be a standard feature that a phone can ring and vibrate at the same time. When I'm in a slightly noisy environment I can't hear the damn thing ringing, so I have to put it on silent so I can feel it vibrate. But I like to be able to hear it ring as well as be sure I know it's ringing even if I can't hear it. My ringtone is The Final Countdown. It's awesome. Samsung, get a clue.

I finally finished watching the last season of Arrested Development last weekend. It's the best show ever made, pretty much. How is it that this fucking brilliant, hilarious show which should be an example for comedy writers everywhere gets axed after three seasons while the festering drivel that is Big Brother is invading our screens for yet another drawn out season? TV viewing public, get a clue.

Also you need to hear the new Battles album Mirrored. It sounds like nothing else before.