Assaulted by Sea Salt

Well!
Yesterday, I bought a 200g bag of Red Rock Deli, Sea Salt flavoured chips.
Supposedly gourmett, yeah?
They tasted like what the sea would taste like if it was a crunchy solid substance.
In other words, the chips were totally inedible!
I mean seriously! I had two other people attempt to eat them - neither of them were able to finish just one of the chips. I courageously managed to eat about five of them over the following twelve hours as a matter of pride and principle.
But polishing off the whole bag of those chips would have been an effective means of seriously dehydrating myself and my shit would have felt like sandpaper the
next day probably. Hardly worth the effort, methinks.
If I had eaten any more, I may have ended up looking like this poor soul:

So I rang up the Red Rock Deli hotline and they say they are now going to send me replacements (note the plural). Some friends of mine got on to this scam. Ring up companies and tell them that their products are second rate and they give you shit loads more stuff u want. I know someone who got a carton of cigarettes after complaining to Philip Morris that the pack of Peter Jacksons she'd just bought tasted bad. No shit? Cigarettes actually taste bad?

Anyway, I digress. For the story continues! Yes, today I went to return the opened bag of chips at the Safeway from whence they came and I had to passionately plead my case. The conversation with front desk woman went thusly:

Me: (friendly) Hi. Yesterday, I bought these chips but I couldn't eat them. They're ridiculously salty and inedible. Can I get an exchange?
Her: (insolent and surly) Yeah. Did you read the packet? They're sea salt.
Me: (defencive) Yeah, I know. But these taste like the sea. They're inedible! Try one!
Her: (shakes her head, still insolent) No, I don't think so. Look, they're sea salt, they're supposed to taste like that.
Me (raising my voice) No, but these are inedible. I can't eat them! They're too salty to eat! They're not supposed to taste like that.
Her: (getting miffed now) But they're sea salt. They're supposed to taste salty.
Me: (incredulous) But not like this! I can't eat them!!!
Her: (inquisitorial) Have you ever tried these before? They're sea salt!
Me: (beginning to get quite pissed off) I know they're sea salt! You don't have to keep telling me! And yes, I have tried these chips before and they tasted nothing like this! I tell you, they're not supposed taste like this! They're inedible!!!
Her: (relenting - finally!) I suppose you can get an exchange then. Go get a replacement packet from the shelf.



Maybe she didn't understand the word inedible...
Classist of me, I know.
Yeah but no but yeah but no but...

severed heads will roll

Severed Heads! YEAH!


God!
I just saw on TV a very young child's face being peeled off their skull and then put back on.
What qualifies for entertainment these days is truly fucked up...
Between so called real life medical dramas and The Biggest Loser (a 'reality tv' show where a bunch of fat arse contestants compete against each other to lose weight) and endless cop shows - the pickin's are slim on commercial stations.
I've spent the last eight months letting my brain go to waste, filling it up, as I have done, on the trashiest trash that ever was inflicted on the public and I've nothing left to show for it except for a creeping lobotmised condition.
I really must get back into higher education.
I have sent in a proposal for a presentation I would like to conduct at Monash's Colloquium '05 in early December. I want to talk to a bunch of people I don't know about my Philosophy Honours thesis. I did my thesis on comparing the late Wittgenstein and the early Merleau-Ponty, seeing what they had to say about consciousness, the body and culture and the way these three things interact (because they are not discreet) in the case of cognitive 'acts' like 'learning' and 'knowing'. Their language is different but their conclusions are similar and quite surprising.
I hope they let me speak! That would be great.
And Frederic Jameson will be a guest speaker at the colloquium too. I would love to hear what he has to say these days about Capitalism.
Speaking of which, my radio show is going well.
I get to interview refugees who have spent time at the now defunct Woomera detention centre. Truly amazing. I could see that my guest bears a lot of pain.
'My' Government and 'my' country disgust me. How could we have such disdain for other people. How does having a different skin tone preclude one from even just a base level of respect, dignity and human rights?
A bunch of protesters throwing eggs and pies and collectively knocking on the outside of a building will never accomplish much...
I have to hand in my dole form tomorrow.

I thought I'd left the 80s in the late 90s

I used to go every Friday night and most Saturdays to this place in Launceston called Sims.
They started off playing really cool 'alternative' (I'm not sure what that means anymore) music.
This was in the mid to late 90s.
By the time I was granted my freedom, that is, moved out of my parents' home in 1998, Sims had started turning into a Tackyland 80s Pop Extravaganza.
You have to remember that this was the late 90s and this kinda shit wasn't trendy yet. Wasn't quite retro cool. Not even Les Rhythmes Digitales was THAT hot at this point. Not as hot as he later became. And the 80s retro bubble hadn't quite blown out of proportion yet - not like it has now. The point is, Sims became a place of derision because they catered to the lowest and cheesiest common denominator.
Anyway, I didn't like the music that much then, though I danced like a dancing fool regardless.
Cut to the mid 00s:
I'm still dancing to the same music I was then! But the music is acceptably cool now!
So Tasmania finally gets into various forms of electronic dance muzak and the rest of Australia seems to be catching up with Tasmania's 80s revival! Seems like the 80s never really quite went out of fashion. (I knew this day would come, when musicians would run out of original ideas and styles and the retro fund they were pillaging from would become overdrawn. That is, would catch up with where they were at. Still there's room for invention there too.)
I could (when they were still on) dance at a Daggy Disco or go to a Bite Party (happening this Saturday) in Melbourne and I can go to a Trash Dance in somewhere in New South Wales!
Anyway, the highlight of my trip to This Is Not Art (TINA) in Newcastle was seeing Severed Heads perform and give a talk.
So one of my youth fantasties has come true.
Let's see what other fantasies I can make come true.