When I eat at fast food places (I decline to call them restaurants as they are clearly not designed for a gourmet eating experience to rave about) I have a dilemma. A BIG dilemma.

I like burgers, but....

I hate sauces. Tomatoes are disgusting and I refuse to eat them in any shape or form, especially as a sauce, mayonnaise is made from eggs which make my intestines act crazy and tastes like crap anyway and barbeque sauce is only tolerable in very small doses. Everything else seems to be a weird combination of all of these sauces. What kind of sick bastard puts tomato sauce AND mayo on a burger anyway? Freaks.

I also firmly believe that salad has no place in fast food. Oh I have no problem with salad itself, I just hate it when it looks and tastes like it's been in someone's sweaty arse for six hours, which it inevitably does at every fast food outlet.

Finally, I love bacon. Who doesn't love bacon? Bacon is the king of all meats and should ideally be consumed at every meal.

So how do I address these issues? Well I ask for bacon burgers with meat and cheese only. Every fast food place has a button that says "meat and cheese only" on it. Simple you would think wouldn't you. But do you know what the real dilemma is? I say I want a bacon cheeseburger with meat and cheese only... guess what I get asked EVERY single time?

"Do you want bacon on that?" WTF!!!! Bacon comes from pigs, pigs are animals and therefore meat. It's not a dairy product, soy based pretend food or a salad. Of course I fucking want bacon on it you bloody twat or I wouldn't have ordered a goddamn bacon cheeseburger, I'd have ordered a cheeseburger!

I got a death glare from a McDonald's manager today. The sweet 12 year old youth at the counter knew exactly what I was on about and processed the order perfectly (yes, I checked). The pimply apathetic wanker teenager out the back making the burger yelled out at me "Do you want bacon on that if it's meat and cheese only?" The death glare came when I just yelled back "Bacon IS meat, or at least it was the last time I checked"

People are fucking stupid.

So Michael Jackson's dead. We all know that right? If you don't then you obviously live in a cave in the bush.

To be perfectly honest I'm surprised he even lasted this long. I would have thought that creepy face of his would have melted off his strange alien cheeks years ago. Any wonder he always went around wearing a surgical mask. I would too if I looked like the stuff nightmares are made of.

Apparently though, people across the globe are so distressed at his unexpected (hardly) passing and have decided to chuck their lot in and catch up with him in the otherworld. How insane is that? These idiots, who've presumably never even met the guy, or had anything to do with him beyond listen to his shitty music for the last squillion years and maybe seen him in concert once or twice, are topping themselves over their distress at his demise.

WHAT THE FUCK?

I have no idea if half the shit that's been said about him over the last few decades is actually true or not, but let me review what I DO know (which to be truthful is sweet fuck all because his music sucks, although I will concede his talent as an entertainer):

• He was born black man and died a white man. How does one go from being a reasonably attractive black dude to a hideous freak of a white man? Oh and not only that, the hypocrite famously sang "It don't matter if you're black or white". Obviously he couldn't take his own advice (I'm choosing to believe that his transition was intentional and not a 'skin condition').
• He was accused of molesting children. Seriously creepy.

Why on earth would you go and kill yourself because he dies? Your lifelong spouse who dies after 100 years of marriage I can understand, but some weird dude you didn't even know? WTF? How sad are these people's lives?

It seems all that has been on anyone's mind the last few months has been the "recession". Oh yes, I did just use little rabbit ears to visually convey sarcasm to those of you reading - ten thousand people are going to get cranky at me now!

So some bad shit happened over in the US and their economy goes all wonky and for some stupid reason the rest of us plebs around the world somehow end up with a "Global Financial Crisis" and twenty bajillion news outlets predicting doom and gloom for the foreseeable future. Whatever. I don't really care about the fine details of how it all started, I'm sure it makes for some scintillating reading when I desperately need something to send me to sleep. The fact is that shit happens. The other fact is that we are NOT in a recession.

I don't know about the rest of you, but I have relatives, friends and acquaintences who are actually old enough to have experienced a real recession - you know, like in the Great Depression and the aftermath of the two world wars earlier last century. People would have to queue up to get their daily rations of bread, butter or flour, not nip down to the shop and pay an extra 30 cents.

So far as I know we here in Australia are not lacking the availability of anything (except maybe common sense) and even if the US economy did decide to shrivel up and die like a spider that came into contact with extra potent Mortein, we're a goddamn agricultural nation for heaven's sake, it's not like we can't just sell our stuff off to some other twit who lacks the skills to grow their own apples. The only thing we don't have freely available within the confines of this fat island is petrol.

And besides that, how come because things go tits up in the US it has to go tits up in the rest of the world? Since when does the US finance the entire globe? (I have a feeling some conspiracy theorist is going to give me an incredibly detailed answer to my rhetorical question).

"Industries are seeing an economic downturn across the country"... because dickbrained journalists are creating the bloody hype and people are stupid enough to believe it.

"Oh but it's so incredibly apparent in the construction industry". Well you know what, we live on a fucking ISLAND people, most of which is DESERT and stuff all people live here. It's not like there's going to be continual and constant demand for expansion unless we decide we all want to go and live in the Outback with the creepy critters designed to kill you in all manner of painful way and piss off the Aborigines while we're at it.

The day I can't walk down to the shops and buy bread and milk freely and everyone I know has lost their jobs is the day I concede we're in a "recession".

On the plus side, all this hype has driven property prices WAAAAY down. I see a quick way to make my fortune when people stop being retarded.

It would appear that within the last six months of this year everything that could possibly happen has happened. I've done a lot this year so far.

• I  began physically attending university instead of being a distance ed student.
• I had an incredibly unpleasant start to the year (I have since deleted my post regarding that incident as I deem it too personal to be in the public domain, yet I'm incredibly glad that it was written and for the support it garnered).
• I got married.
• I sold a house and made a shiny stack of zeroes.
• I bought two new cars.
• I became unemployed for the first time since I was 14 and it was voluntary to begin with, although now is not.
• All of my computers have broken, one at a time until there were none left working.

Point being, I've had a lot on my plate and haven't really been in the mood to do much in the way of writing.

The University of Maryland, who I know nothing about for reasons mostly due to the fact that I'm Australian and have no desire to ever visit the USA, have won my respect for attempting to curb students boozing it up until the wee hours of the morning by screening a full length porno flick. Unfortunately, the screening has been cancelled after government dweebs threatened to pull the uni's funding.

Apparently it's not the done thing over in the USA to allow adults to watch pornography together. One is curious to know how many of those government officials who are crying foul over this have pictures of boobies on their computers and a Playboy under their bed? My money is on a significant proportion.

Anyway, the movie they were going to screen, Pirates II: Stagnetti's Revenge, actually does have a plotline and if you took out the sex scenes (or at least the graphic penetration ones) it would make a passable C-grade movie. I'm guessing anyway, I haven't seen it. But I did see the first one. How could I not? It was called Pirates!

What's the big deal anyway? They're all adults who can choose whether or not they feel it's appropriate for them to watch it.

If only my uni had such great motivational tactics!

Earlier today a friend of mine mentioned that she had been introduced to fmylife - a collection of short little snippets of how much peoples lives suck. The jury is out of course on how many of them are actually true, but for the most part they're pretty funny so I tend to overlook that. I hadn't checked the site for a while and just spent the last few hours reading 42 pages worth of interesting things, some of which I may even use as plot devices in a book, they're just that good.

As I was reading, I started wondering what my classic 'bad day' story is. I actually have several of them truth be told, because A) I'm the kind of person that random crazy shit happens to, and B) I have 'interesting' (read: dubious) friends around whom all sorts of shenannigans occur. The best one however must be from about 4-5 years ago and was the first one I thought of when I thought of having a really bad day.

Once upon a time I wasn't feeling very well, I was very tired and I had to go to work very early. I got dressed, got in the car and headed off to work which was very conveniently quite a long distance away from my house. About halfway there I realised I wasn't wearing any shoes. PANIC! I immediately turn off the main road onto a side road and then onto another side road where it was safe to park.

I popped the boot to my car. As anyone could tell you, I'm famous for leaving my shoes in the car. I had just cleaned out the car but I remembered seeing a pair in the boot. So out I hop, shutting the door behind me so an oncoming car doesn't hit it, and I check out the boot. Shit. I'd taken them out. Oh well, looks like I'll have to go back home and get them I think to myself as I slam the boot shut and open the door. Fuck. It's locked. I've accidentally pressed the lock when I've gotten out of the car and because the keys are still in the ignition (!!) it's locked all the doors, which it doesn't do normally because it won't lock unless all the doors are closed - except if the ignition is on!

Panic stations again. It's about 6 in the morning, there is nobody around, I'm locked out of my still running car and my phone is on the passenger seat. What do I do? Something terribly clever of course, I cry. I still can't think of what to do and a random passer-by walking home from work asks if I'm ok and after relating the sordid story she lets me borrow her mobile phone and I call and wake up my still sleeping boyfriend (who was pretty grumpy) and asked him to come and bring me some shoes and his phone so I can call RACQ. For the record - I didn't know the RACQ number so I would have had to fart arse around trying to get it so I figured it would be easier to let the kind lady go on her way and not wrack up her phone bill by calling people to see if they knew what it was. The RACQ number was on the back of my RACQ card, tucked inside my purse, inside my still running car.

Ben showed up eventually, I had no idea where I actually was and didn't see any street signs when I called him to tell him where I was, so it's amazing he even found me at all. He brought me shoes. Yay. One problem solved.

Then I grabbed his phone and rang my dad. Dad knows everything. I asked him if he knew the RACQ number. He said to look on the back of my card. I screamed down the phone at him my situation and he laughed and then told me. Bastard knew it off the top of his head. Why couldn't he have just said that instead of being a smartarse?

I hung up on dad and called RACQ. Ben's phone went flat. Fuckity fuck. Now what do I do? Meanwhile, at least 40 minutes has gone by and my car is still happily idling away. Ben kept change in the front of his car (thankfully) so I grabbed some change and said I'd go find a payphone. I was parallel to a main road and I knew there were payphones scattered along it close to where a friend lived. I instructed Ben not to let anyone steal my car and off I trotted (wearing shoes) and eventually found a payphone a few blocks away.

First I called work and told them I would be late. Not good enough. I had to tell Jon exactly what was going on. I was treated to even more laughter. Then I called RACQ to ask for assistance. Turns out that my membership had expired the week before and I hadn't paid it (the bill was sent to my old address and good old Australia Post decided not to forward it even though I'd paid for redirection). The very helpful operator told me that I could renew my membership over the phone with my credit card and then they could send a car out to help me. I explained that my credit card was three blocks away in my still running car that I was locked out of. She had to discuss it with her supervisor because their policy is not to send cars out to assist people who aren't current members. Eventually they decided they would help me. Great.

I ran back to my car thinking that the day's troubles were going to be over finally. We sat down to wait since we were told it would be at least half an hour. As we were waiting a car pulled into the street and decided to park behind my car. The driver noticed she was blocking a driveway and decided that instead of moving up the street in front of my car she'd park as close as humanly possible to the back of my car and hit it. She got out, looked, shrugged her shoulders and walked off. Normally I'd be screaming blue murder at the bitch but I was just so gobsmacked I was actually lost for words.  The only saving grace of the whole incident was that I had been too lazy to take the bike rack off the back of my car after BMX the night before so she dented the bike rack and not my actual car.

Eventually the RACQ man showed up, let me back into my car and I went to work. Upon my arrival I found that Jon had told everyone in the building what had happened so the rest of the day was a universal 'pick on Kaitee' day.

Now how's that for a bad day? :p

The other day while I was hurriedly scoffing down my breakfast at uni, alternating between furiously puzzling out math questions and distracting myself with my shiny iPhone, I came across an interesting article on ABC News that really got me thinking. Yes, ABC News - curiously, while I no longer have a job with internet restrictions I still manage to always find myself at the ABC News homepage searching for clues as to the current state of depravity within the world. Mainly I theorise it's because it's the only news website without countless insufferable ads, it's easily laid out and if I want to find out what's going on in Finland, they make use of a rather excellent tagging system enabling me to find what I want to know with very minimal fuss. Without further ado - the article

The article is about a debate in the UK over the possibility of social networking being "exploited by extremists". Essentially, the Home Office is considering monitoring the use of sites like Facebook and Myspace in an attempt to see who's socialising with who, apparently without any interest as to the content of private conversations.

That's a bit of a stupid statement really. Logically speaking, if you're concerned about who someone is talking to you would be interested in the content of those conversations. Even the nastiest of nasty people have families, co-workers, actual friends, support workers and the like, whom they are perfectly entitled to engage in benign conversation with and who have nothing to do with any illicit activities said dodgy dude might be involved with. You'd really need to know the subject of the conversation to weed out these kind of innocuous social entanglements, otherwise you might accidentally accuse someone of being a terrorist associate based on the fact that they're the 'friend' or 'friend of a friend' of a person of allegedly dubious intentions. But that wasn't what I was thinking about.

A Liberal Democrat, Tom Brake, voiced his opinion; "Plans to monitor our phone and email records threaten to be the most expensive snooper's charter in history". I disagree. With the amount of personal and private information people seem to be very free about putting on Facebook or Myspace, the government doesn't really need to spend any money attempting to monitor people.

Seriously, just log onto Facebook and click through some friends of friend's pages. You'll be amazed at what you can learn. Phone numbers, personal addresses, email addresses, employment histories, schooling histories, names of friends, photos of everything they've ever done, their political alignment and religious ideologies, 25 fun facts, what they did ten years ago, five years ago and now, pictures of their houses and cars and babies, who their best matches are in a variety of quizzes, where they’ll be at any given time, where they’ve been and where they’re going and that's before you even start reading the comments people leave.

Once you get to the comments people write each other, you get a complete sense of who that person is, enough to make it reasonable that any intelligent person with a skill for disguises has a complete unending supply of people to impersonate. Levels of literacy, the things they place importance on (everyone knows that 'profiles' are all wank), how they treat their friends and family and whether or not they're a total dickweed or a decent person are all able to be easily discerned. You can even find out how they know certain people... "Y went to X school with Z", or "A dated B in high school", or "C and G worked together at S place".

I was a bit miffed when I first read the article and thought to myself "Invasion of privacy alert!" but then I realised that it's really not an invasion of privacy when people put the amount of shit that they do on their public profiles. Not only that, but anyone who knows how to use Google properly can search for anybody's name and likely find a few articles about whoever they are searching for. Newsletters their names might be mentioned in, sporting clubs and match/title results, university webpages, you name it. It's all out there for anyone to find.  Case in point - searching for my real name nets you three pages of results. Every single one of them pertains to me. If anyone decided to come looking for me, it wouldn't be terribly hard to find me.

So while I was eating that muffin and doing my maths homework (which, as it turns out, with proper application I am actually very good at) I came to the saddening realisation that there are no secrets left in this world. Whether that's a good or bad thing remains to be seen.

Well it seems that the new editor of the Cairns Post is just as much a shit stirring, unethical twat as his predecessor. I had such high hopes that the content of the local rag would somehow miraculously improve from repeating slander and gossip as fact, reporting on things in the most biased of fashions, quoting people who they've never actually spoken to and perhaps even going so far as to improve upon their editorial process to the point where stories are written as an actual news piece should be, not an introduction to a dodgy novel written by a 15 year old. It would seem not.

Tuesday saw an article regarding the Facebook pages of some council members. The Cairns Post admitted to accessing the profile of councillor Kirsten Lesina and decided to make comments about the content found therein: "It also lists memberships to groups "come the f--- on bridget" and "1 million strong against Labor"." Not only that but they seemed to have had issue with the fact that her status message that day was that she had seen Zack and Miri Make a Porno and loved it.

First off, Zack and Miri Make a Porno WAS a good movie (admittedly it could have had a better ending but as a Kevin Smith fangirl, I'm not complaining too much). It's rated R, she's over the age of 18, what exactly is so terribly scandalous about having that as her Facebook status? Secondly, as Kirsten pointed out in her Letter to the Editor the day after (seriously, stick it to them! Three cheers from me) they decided to make that an issue and disregard the fact that it was later changed to her urging people to support Wildlife Victoria & The Red Cross Bushfire Appeal.

Actually since the topic had been brought up, I decided to go and look at her profile for myself. The Cairns Post reported her Facebook status on February 24th. Her Facebook status at that time was actually "Kirsten is trying to organise a walk along the Esplanade to raise money for Wildlife Victoria and the Red Cross Bushfire & Flood Appeal". Her Zack and Miri status was changed on the 17th of February. Does anybody really need any more proof that The Cairns Post is hateful?

Well, just in case you do need more proof that The Cairns Post is the most ridiculous excuse for a newspaper in the entire world, we come to the matter of them claiming that Kirsten is a member of groups "come the f--- on bridget" and "1 million strong against Labour". Again, by actually looking at Kirsten's profile, it is abundantly clear that she's not a member of either of those groups. She's in quite a few PRO-Labor parties but no anti-Labor parties. The only reference I can see to "bridget" is that she has listed Bridget Jones' Diary as one of her favourite books (10 points to her, the books are a zillion times better than the movies).

It's completely infuriating that The Cairns Post has yet again seen fit to report on A) something that isn't actually news, and B) something that is only half based in fact. When the hell is someone who isn't me and preferably in a position of power to enforce changes actually going to call them on it?

I don't smoke. I dislike smokers and I especially dislike smoke pushers, the people who think that unless you are slowly filling your lungs up with enough smoke to spend the last 5 years of your life hacking and wheezing and breathing via oxygen tanks that you aren't cool or worth knowing. I think that those of us who can breathe unassisted are actually the cooler, smarter ones. Sure, we might miss you when you're dead but I've got no desire to jump into the grave with you. The worst kind of smokers however, are those that smoke and drive. There is nothing more revolting. I see someone puffing away on a death stick and driving and my reaction is visceral.

Yesterday I saw a woman in a sports car, with an expensive hairdo and super long nails puffing away as she was driving. She might have thought she was hot shit, but to me she looked like the worst kind of white trash. You could be the hottest, sexiest, most popular woman on the face of the planet, but the second you get into a car and start on the fags you become the lowest common denominator.

And let's face it, you are. You can't even get from A to B without succumbing to your addictions. That's pretty damn pathetic. Not only do you not have friends because you smell like a rubbish dump and if you're a coffee drinker as well then you smell like the newly risen dead, but you're also alienating people you've never even met who see you sucking down a ciggie as they drive past and think "Jeez, how trailer trash is that?"

Men are just as bad as women, although I suffer the urge to punch their teeth in far less than women because most of the men already look like bogans, usually driving utes and wearing wife beaters, so there's not much lower in the social scale they can really fall to. Women at least, are clean about their disgusting habits. I've known men to drive cars where the entire floor of the car is so covered in cigarette butts that you can't tell what colour the floor is (obviously it's brown since it's covered in dirt, ash and scum grime, but if you wanted to see what colour it was you couldn't). Seriously dudes, your car is a crack den. That's gross.

The moral of this story is that smoking is revolting. It makes women look like trailer trash and men look like dirty bogans. Zombies smell better than you. You are gross.

DISCLAIMER:

This is my opinion of ALL smokers, including those in my family and every single one of my friends.

The Cairns Post created somewhat of a shit storm recently when it reported on a woman who had the audacity to complain about having to pay for two seats on an plane because she was rather more than average in size.

Crowing that their report had made international headlines and had been the subject of much debate on their website after the original story was printed, it seems like The Cairns Post feel they've done journalism proud.

Bollocks.

The opening paragraph in the original story, about an overweight woman who paid for two seats on a plane only to find that they were on opposite sides of the plane, begins thus:  "A Cairns woman says there is a fat chance she'll fly with Jetstar again after she claims she was discriminated against for being overweight". A fat chance? A FAT CHANCE? This is supposed to be a news article, not a sly dig at someone's personal situation by a cheeky pun. I'm going to chalk up one nomination for "Low of The Year" for that disgustingly unprofessional intro.

The follow-up article where TCP praises themselves for breaking such a successful story was titled "Samantha a Big Hit". Once again, TCP tries to make a pun on an unfortunate personal situation.

I never bothered to watch the Fox segment, but after following the story for several days it became clear that Samantha's actual issue with Jetstar was not that she was forced to pay for two seats (in the original story it mentions she had discussions with Jetstar staff regarding this policy, so she was obviously not unaware of it), but that Jetstar had said they would work around the issue and then reneged on their stance and asked her to pay for a 2nd seat and then in a fit of genius allocated that seat somewhere else on the plane.

The comments on the original story made me want to punch my computer screen in anger (but I didn't because it's shiny and big and expensive). Most of them were in the vein of "lose some weight you fatty bitch/fatties r gross n i hate sitting nxt 2 dem on da plane ew lose wt!" and calling for Samantha to stop complaining and get on a treadmill, all of which miss the point of the article (the two seats being in different sections of the plane) and completely disregard the fact that there are many other reasons for obesity that have nothing to do with being a lazy cow who scoffs cheeseburgers all day (diabetes, thyroid disease, etc). Some comments were insightful, well thought out and not inflammatory, but the majority made me disgusted at the ridiculous amount of intolerance people have.

As a frequent flyer, I can well attest to the fact that Jetstar have very screwy policies. They've screwed me for scandalous baggage fees at one leg of my trip and then not a cent extra on the return leg. They're also late 100% of the time when I flew with them. Unfortunately at the time for me, being on minimum wage and in a long distance relationship with George I couldn't exactly afford to fly with any other airline. Catching a flight that should arrive at 11.30pm isn't fun at the best of times but is especially un-fun when you arrive at 3am. Another time they completely cancelled my 7pm return flight and put me on a 6am flight instead, effectively cutting short my holiday by an entire day (and that was the ONLY flight option to return that day so I had to accept it). While it's an unfortunate situation for Samantha, it's also nice to see that I'm not the only one that Jetstar have fucked around.

Enough paying out on Jetstar however, let's get back to talking about how stupid The Cairns Post is. I'd be taking The Cairns Post to the anti-discrimination tribunal for that introduction.