Year of the Rant. Part Two: The Winter of Our Discontent, Winter, 2013.

By Lachlan Barker

I started ranting to the internet, mildly enough, in Autumn, 2013.
As the weeks went by things seemed to bug me more and more.
So with a new audience (the internet) I began to get a few things down in ePrint.
This is the second installment of my collected blogs, and you can see the steam staring to coalesce from the pages.
Follow further my rage against the machine.
My targets include, politicians, commercial TV and anyone, really, who gets up my f$%^ing nose.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lachlan Barker
• Release date: Mar 26, 2014
• ISBN: 9781311218551

Lachlan Barker

Lachlan Barker is an author who lives in Byron Bay, Australia.When not constantly complaining on the internet, he surfs, cycles or works as a gardener.He entered rehab for booze and pot in 2008 and hasn't looked back since.He has been on every continent except South America and Antarctica, and they're next.

Book preview

Year of the Rant

Part Two: The Winter of Our Discontent

Winter, 2013.

By Lachlan Barker

Copyright 2014 by Lachlan Barker

Smashwords Edition

With thanks to all those who continue to read this rubbish weekly.

Contents

1 - Kevin Costner, wanted by the cliché police

2 - Finally some good news

3 - On the road all right

4 - Let me park the mower and I'll be right in

5 - The worst p-plate test experience of them all and botanico-sexual kinks

6 - The largest sexual organ of them all and clammy females in my bed

7 - The secret of eternal happiness

8 - Lesbians in the lounge and my cervical cancer scare

9 - Out with the new, in with the old

10 - The cemetery is in Cemetery road

11 - Bong diving aardvarks

12 - Demi goeth and the snakes cometh

13 - Is Karma real? It bloody was that day

About the Author

More Works by Lachlan Barker

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Read the first chapter of Lachlan’s first fiction work – The Destruction of Lasseter’s Road

1 - Kevin Costner, wanted by the cliché police

Kevin Costner and Whitney:

I was rooting for the stalker.

Some posts ago I wrote I'm not one to complain(much) and put at least a nice photo of the Pass in the morning to alleviate the moaning.

Well this post follows a similar theme, but even for me have I got something to moan about, stick with it and you will be reading a coruscating, white-hot flame out of certain movies that have been festering away inside me for some years.

But first the good news.

I paid off my car this week.

So relieved, and I want to give thanks to my loan officer, Calvin and his team for treating me with courtesy, respect and professionalism.

I won't name his firm here in the copy, as a lover of Media Watch on the ABC it would be against my journalistic ethics (such as they are), but I can say that, when I thought it through, it was the honesty that I appreciated.

The interest rate was high, 20%, but I knew it would be as my credit record has been spotty as a giraffe wearing a leopard-skin coat, but there were no hidden costs and now the car is mine.

You've seen bits of this car in some of my photos, usually bearing down on some numbskull walking, driving or riding on my side of the damn road, and you'll notice it's maroon.

Thus, my only (minor) complaint is that Calvin's company are Queensland-based and driving around in NSW in a maroon car during state-of-origin season doesn't make me happy, and I wouldn't be surprised if they organised it so that any NSW applicants for a loan get good service and a maroon car.

Moving on, the photo here shows the sunset over Mullum, with Naturopath Mick and his lovely daughter Evie-May enjoying the peace and beauty.

I was around there to talk with Micko about a garage renovation we have coming up together, but sunsets like this are one of the reasons we moved here, so we thought we would take a moment to get in touch with our lentil munching side.

The next night I snapped this sunset pic over my tent, the beauty is eternal up here.

You can also see MY car on the forecourt.

So enough of the tree luvin' hippy crap as Cartmen would say, time for some serious spite.

Some years ago I was watching TV and finding nothing was gripping me, to quote Lister from Red Dwarf, I was in a state of total smegging ungrippedness.

I flicked around between channels and Kevin Costner appeared on the screen.

It was The Bodyguard.

At this time the only thing I knew was that Costner had been in Dances With Wolves, which I had never seen, but everyone had said was a great film.

Tom Cruise made two good films, Born on the Fourth of July and Risky Business, Kevin Costner made one, Dances With Wolves, but at least he scored better than Steve Guttenberg, who has made none.

Thus I watched a little of Bodyguard because of the Wolves vibe and saw that the film was heading for a major cliché, Surely they're not gonna do that, I said to myself, but sure enough the particular cliché was perpetrated.

I watched a little more and saw they were coming up to another cliché, bigger than the previous, once again I debated in my mind if they could possibly be so bereft of originality that they would go there.

They did.

I then watched with a truly cosmic level of fascination at how bad that film was.

Cliché followed cliché, bad writing overlaid wooden acting that would have made Pinocchio ask for his name to be taken from the credits.

Since the plot called for a stalker to be threatening Whitney, I found myself totally starting to barrack for the stalker and hope he offed her quickly and the film would come to a merciful end.

That film was so bad that, believe it or not, it was one of the few times I yelled at the screen.

My yelling was engendered by the bit where they sleep together (bet you never saw THAT coming).

Then the next morning in a staggering display of hypocrisy suddenly Costner has an attack of morals and says with vehemence, I can't do this. I can't work this way, and leaves a tearful Whitney begging him not to leave.

At this point, driven beyond endurance I yelled, Well why did you sleep with her in the first place you f*%$^ng arsehole.

Mind you, perhaps that was the only honest part of the film since all men hightail it the next morning like they're leaving the scene of a crime.

Costner couldn't even give it the, I've got to be at work early line since guarding Whitney was his job.

This film so enraged me that I first developed my system of Ultimate Audience Feedback or UAF.

What you do is, when a film makes its debut at Grauman's Chinese theatre the producer, director, writer and lead actors have to attend with their genitals linked to a major power source and then anytime the audience are unhappy they can turn a switch on the armrest of their chair and watch as said perps of the movie start shuddering with infused current.

I would also like to see the UAF used, with extreme prejudice, on Leonardo di Caprio, for The Beach.

I saw this joke of a film one night on the WOOFING farm where I first lived and worked when I drifted into Byron all those years ago.

My friend Dave said, "I'd like to see The Beach tonight, I've heard it's not great, but the scenery is fantastic".

I agreed, sort of hesitantly, and we sat down to watch.

Well he was right on both counts, the scenery was fantastic, and I could certainly believe it repaired the damage to Thailand tourism done by Bangkok Hilton with Nicole Kidman.

Also, Yes, Dave, it wasn't great.

First thing about this film that boiled my potatoes was that the book by Alex Garland it is taken from is absolutely superb.

One reviewer wrote: A stunningly confident debut, and I fully agree.

So good was this piece of work that I was amazed that it wasn't his tenth novel.

The book has a crucially tight plot dealing with drug induced madness, pressure, real tension and not an excess word.

But then Hollywood got hold of it and this is what happened next.

The producers approached Leonardo's agent and asked if Leo would do it.

The agent then got back to them and said Leo will do the film as long as he gets to have sex with all the young women on the beach and no one else does, and no one in the film can have a sceric of fat on them.

The producers cravenly agreed and turned a great book into a huge steaming mound of Leonardo's ego.

Additionally, Robert Carlyle was in this rubbish.

He was most famously the lead in The Full Monty, and played Hamish MacBeth and many other roles.

He is a superb actor, just superb, and I wanted to contact him and say "next time you need money, call up and we'll have a whip 'round, that way you don't have to appear in celluloid rubbish like The Beach".

Anyway enough ranting, I didn't even get to Independence Day and Jurassic Park, but that day is coming.

Believe me.

2 - Finally some good news

We had the day that we all work for at Seabird Rescue on Tuesday this week, a turtle release.

You can see in the photo Kath and Helga on the latter's point of departure for the ocean (Helga is the one with the flippers).

I am aware that there is a thing called sympathy burnout or awareness overload, a phenomenon referring to the overwhelming amount of causes that need to be fought for, but which caring people just don't have the time and/or resources to fight for.

So I'll just quote few stats.

We see 60-100 sea turtles a year at our hospital in Ballina, half of those die.

This is not through lack of care of course, but to quote Dr Mark Flint from University of Queensland, we still understand so little about the functioning of the [sea turtle's] digestive tract.

This was evidenced by a story Mark