Monday, February 23, 2009

Who is Carlo Sands? 25 things you never knew about the man behind the pint

There so many myths out there about the life of Carlo Sands.

His shady past, personal habits, love affairs, these things are speculated wildly about in the tabloids, online chat forums and scientific journals all over the world. Is he Rasputin's love child? Did he really go on a 25-year-long pear cider binge? And, is it true he has dumped Johnny Depp for Lily Allen?

The time has come to separate out fact from fiction. Based on one of those horrible Facebook "list" things that people insist on infecting their friends with, here are "25 things you never knew about the man behind the pint".

Tell your friends.

* * *

1. Carlo Sands is an alcoholic.

2. Carlo Sands likes to refer to himself in the third person. It makes him feel important.

3. Carlo Sands is not on speaking terms with his liver. He suspects the "generation gap" is to blame. His liver will enjoy its 90th birthday next weekend.

4. Carlo Sands was given two phone numbers for AA from a friend just the other day. He appreciates thought, but cannot attend the meetings as, worst luck, they clash with happy hour.

5. Carlo Sands does not have a drinking problem, 'cept when he can't get a drink.

6. He also likes to steal lyrics from Tom Waits and pass them off as his own original thoughts.

7. Carlo Sands believes strongly that work is the curse of the drinking class.

8. He also likes to take epigrams uttered by Oscar Wilde, and claim them as his own.

9. Carlo Sands beer consumption is such that he is the stimulus package. Kevin called him personally to discuss a bail-out of his budget to stave off the total meltdown of the Australian economy. In fact once, when he briefly threatened to stop drinking, the head of the Reserve Bank, the treasury department and a representative of the Chamber of Commerce staged an intervention to convince him the nation needed him at the pub.

10. Carlo Sands goes on regular health kicks, during which he goes out of his way to kick his health as hard as possible.

11. Carlo Sands' idea of looking after his health is to only smoke other people's cigarettes.

12. Carlo Sands' idea of looking after his finances is to only smoke other people's cigarettes.

13. Other people get pissed off when Carlo Sands smokes all their cigarettes.

14. Carlo Sands joined the Facebook group "Who is Carlo Sands?", even though he knows the answer.

15. Carlo Sands was once the subject of intense debate on a North American-based left-wing e-list. This is the highlight of his otherwise quite uneventful life, with the exception of his key role during the French Revolution.

16. Carlo Sands misses the guillotine. He thinks that, in the absence of the guillotine, it is hard to go past the garrotte.

17. Carlo Sands has been informed he is being seriously considered for this year's Nobel Peace Prize.

18. Carlo Sands has his own personal arch enemy, whom he believes to be the "anti-Carlo". His name is Ben Warren, he lives in Canberra and Carlo knows where he works. He runs a blog called "Get fit with Ben!".

19. Carlo Sands has currently two duels to the death on his agenda. The first of these is with a cad who chose aging as his weapon. Carlo looks forward to attending the cad's funeral but worries whether it will be bad taste to wear a triumphant grin. He has a second duel to be carried out after the first has been completed.*

20. Carlo Sands likes duels.

21. Carlo Sands supports the Essendon Football Club, the Mighty Bombers. He finds the question posed by TISM in "Whatareya", of "Who is your favourite genius, James Hird or James Joyce?" strange. It is obviously James Hird.

22. Carlo Sands thinks that Lily Allen was easily "Person of 2008" for her very public champagne swilling drunkeness while hosting an awards ceremony and for telling Elton John to "fuck off" when he made a snide remark about it on stage with her. Unlike Lily, that man has no class.

22. Carlo Sands is engaged to be married to Lily Allen. However, this is top secret. And everyone knows that Lily Allen is good at keeping engagements secret. This is so that Johnny Depp, with whom Carlo Sands has had a complicated, off-and on again long-term relationship with, does not find out.

24. Carlo Sands is plotting to kill you all.

25. Carlo Sands' lawyer has advised him to make no further comment at this time.


* * *

POSTSCRIPT

* It is with a heavy heart I must inform my loyal readers that, since the above quiz was completed, calamity has struck!

YES! Due to an unforeseen circumstance and, frankly (though I do not wish to appear a bad sport), SHOCKING bad luck, I regret to inform my multitude of fans that Carlo Sands lost the duel referred to in this post.

Also, I am dead.

I mean, that should be obvious, logically, as I had already explained it was a duel to the death, but sometimes you need to spell these things out to avoid misunderstandings.

I shall attempt as best I can to explain how this catastrophe occurred. And I assume it will shock few if I point out that, at bottom, this is all Facebook's fault.

Yes, among it's many crimes, including selling users' private information to corporations and censoring supporters of Palestine, Facebook is pretty much responsible for killing Carlo Sands.

But I am getting ahead of myself.

The facts are these. As I was the challenger in the duel, the challengee -- a cad whose murderous name is not even worth mentioning on such a civilised blog -- reserved the right to choose the weapon.

As I explained, the cad chose aging -- claiming he had seen the state of my liver and it was only a matter of time.

But it was not liver failure that did me in. It was a Facebook quiz.

Foolishly, without a thought to the consequences, I took the quiz "When will you die?"

And I received the answer: October 21, 2008.

I took the quiz sometime in 2009 and, as we all know Facebook never lies, the cad promptly declared a victory I had no legal, technical nor moral grounds to deny.

It is always disturbing to discover you have dead for many months. It is much worse when it involves losing a duel to the death to a cad.

I won't deny it was a shock, but I am coping as best I can. Still, if you wish to assist with my grief, you can donate consoling booze via the paypal donate button near the top of the right hand column.

Saturday, February 14, 2009

So, which one is true?

Here we have two film clips.

They are by a band called Sonseed.

You can decide for yourself which of these clips is more likely to be literally true.

First up, "Jesus is my friend, I have a friend in Jesus".




Second, we have this version.





I do not wish to prejudice the case, but I feel obliged to note that personally, I think we have further evidence of the arguments I expounded in greater detail in relation to the case of the world's greatest ever Olympian, Michael Phelps.

And, while we are on this topic, here is a third version — easily the best of the three.

Wednesday, February 11, 2009

How to celebrate the festive season appropriately

It is now February and the "festive season" is now well and truly behind us. I, for one, say thank christ.

It is not an easy time for those of us who dedicate ourselves to hedonism and substance abuse. Suddenly, everyone else decides to get in on the act.

In other circumstances, this would of course be welcomed with glee. But the context gives it a mocking character. "One more, it is the festive season after all..."

Well, fuck you.

What about those of us for whom this is not some "once-a-year" holiday, but who battle week-in and week-out all year round to destroy ourselves in sacrifice to the God of intoxication?

The worst is New Years' Eve.

It is the only day of the year I encourage responsible drinking. That way, there will be less out-of-control drunks to trip over when staggering home some time on January 1.

If you love getting wrecked so much, why don't you do make the effort all year round? Fucking "booze tourists" is all these people are. Making a mockery of alcohol abuse.

Either take you booze seriously, or stop getting in the fucking way at the bar.

Nonetheless, I have to say, I have learned something important this last festive season. There is indeed a proper, respectable way to celebrate it.

The events detailed below occurred on Boxing Day. They occurred in Perth, which is a little known town on the west coast of Australia. Not much happens there and their pubs are uniformly shit-house, so you probably have never heard of it.

As to whether the person in the story is my sister, I can neither confirm nor deny. My lawyer has advised me to make no further comment on the matter at this point in time.

What I will say is no one can deny she pays her dues in the drinking game.

So, my eye was taken by a Facebook status message posted by my sister (or not, as the case may be).

It read: "really should not wee in public."

Now, I saw that and thought to myself, oh dear, she's gotten a little tiddly and had to go and found some ill-conceived bushes and some people walked by and she doesn't think they saw her but she can't be sure, little embarrassing that.

No.

I was wrong.

When I asked where in public she had gone to wee the answer I got was: "On a car."

Her car?

No, a strangers.

It was, to be precise, a 4WD. And you have to say, on grounds of environmental consciousness, the action can hardly be faulted.

It seems that she and some friends were on their way to a party, having already partaken in perhaps a drink or two. Possibly, she was already a little affected.

Regardless, she had a definite need to go.

She wasn't the only one and as they made their way to the party, one of her friends spoke up first. Desperate for relief, she said "I'm going between those cars".

Never one to be outdone, my sister shouted, "Yeah, I'm going to go off a car!"

The 4WD conveniently had a ladder down its side. This was a key defence used by my sister when describing these events: "It had a ladder!"

Frankly, I think being a 4WD is asking for it enough, but a ladder to the roof is no doubt extra temptation.

So she climbed up and her pants came down.

I inquired as to whether she was caught by the owners.

"No”, she said. "But an old couple walked by".

"And", she added, "you should have seen the look on their faces".

"I've seen everything now", said the man.

"Is that your car?", asked the woman.

When the answer came back negative, the elderly woman said: "Then maybe you should down from there then."

My sister could only oblige, pulling up her pants and descending the ladder.

Reaching the bottom and looking around her, she realised her friends were long gone.

The key thing is she found her way to the party.

Her night ended, she told me, with her partner yelling at her: "No one care's about Boonie!" and going to bed. You have to know my sister to understand that last point.

So there we have the standard set by an expert in the field of excess. This provides a fine example of the appropriate way to celebrate the festive season, a task that is far from simple.

A benchmark has been set. "How were your holidays?" If you can't answer along the lines of "I stood on a strangers car and urinated", then you should be ashamed of yourself.

That I cannot offer a similar example of my own from the just-past season of festivities is something I have to live with ever day. I can only pledge to make amends when the Christmas-New Year period comes upon us once more.

Tuesday, February 03, 2009

The demon weed: don't touch it, it will ruin your life

I have made my firm views on drug use pretty explicit.

It is without a doubt a major problem in our society. It is nothing less than a scandal.

Booze is getting more and more expensive and drugs prohibited by historical quirk appear to be getting harder to acquire and, yes, more expensive.

And should we actually take out a mortgage in order to acquire an appropriate level of intoxication to deal with late monopoly capitalism, the cops would rather see us forced to overdose in a bid to avoid persecution than enjoy them in peace.

How the fuck are we meant to get wasted? Or do our rulers seriously expect us to just cope sober?

However, I am the first to admit when I have made a mistake.

Now, mostly I choose booze (which would make a great advertising slogan), but I have never sought to counterpose my choice to those of others. We are, all of us, united by our deep-seated desire to kill the pain, even for just a bit.

However, it is clear that when it comes to marijuana, I for one clearly underestimated its dangers. It turns out it is the demon weed after all.

Yes, the world was rocked just days ago when the News of the World, a bastion of investigative journalism for the betterment of humanity, published a photo of Olympic hero Michael Phelps enjoying a cone.

I had always considered the likes of Phelps to be bizzare freaks who do crazy things to themselves for no apparant reason.

Now, thanks to the NOTW, it all makes horrible sense.

This is a clear example of the dangers of smoking pot.

It starts out as the odd joint with mates. But it is a slippery slope.

You go deeper and deeper until the next thing you know you are a champion swimmer and the greatest Olympian in history in terms of gold medals won.

Can you begin to concieve of the amount of pain and suffering it takes to reach such a situation? I mean what sort of lifestyle is that?

It is proof that pot make you do completley irrational things. I mean, seriously, how wasted do you have to be to decide it would be a cool thing to get in a pool and then swim to the end, only to turn around and swim back again?

Over and over again?

Now, swimming in moderation is fine. But it so often starts as just a bit of harmless fun, but before long you find yourself doing it every day. Obsessively, and at the expense of all other facets of your life.

At first, it is just a few laps. Next thing you know, you're hooked.

It starts with pot and it ends with a severe swimming addiction.

What a horrible way to live.

Don't touch pot, it'll end with tears and whatever horrible national anthem your nation has playing while you stand on a podium.





It started as a bit of fun at parties. It ended with the "Star Spangled Banner" playing twenty times.