Staying positive about life isn’t the easiest thing to do. Not when we’re wired to think that enough just isn’t, well, enough. We don’t want, nay, can’t have “comfortable”, can we? No, because, see, that implies failure. Whatever self-imposed criterion you’ve set yourself, comfortable is the B-minus you got when you thought, nay, knew you deserved the A-plus -complete with goldstar, smiley face and excessive use of the exclamation mark for good measure. Comfortable means you’ve somehow failed to attain a certain predetermined niveau; downgrading your expectation drastically (there goes that gauge again) in order to settle for the next best thing. You won’t be there for long though, you tell yourself, happiness is right around the corner, and you’ll damn well keep an eye out for it while you ride this comfortable phase out. Of course, nothing says road trip like a good playlist, and courtesy of your constant pining, whining, and impudent quips about how you deserve better to anyone who cares (or the poor sods unfortunate not to move quickly enough away and out of earshot), we’re set for a long one.


Are we there yet? No, now sit the hell down and learn a lesson.

Boiled down to its purest form, that (let’s call it what it is, folks) selfish sense of entitlement to expect more than what we are or have is a rancid, unadulterated greed. And in case you were absent in class that day, greed is an excessive desire to acquire or possess more than one needs or deserves (there’s that word again). So basically, not content with your needs being met, your wants take over. But wants being what they are, nothing is ever good enough, not for long anyway, so cue in yet another long-haul road trip. Best believe that by now, those not-so-poor-anymore sods have learnt to hightail it well before you happen upon the scene.


Unlike your road trip however, this tirade has an actual point. Seeing off a loved one at the airport today, we decided to catch a quick croissant at the cafe, as there was still quite some time before they had to board their flight. We were well into a bout of jovial chatter when my eye happened to rest upon a beautiful woman sitting in a corner. Sat among a group of friends, she was delicately tucking into a salad, while she laughed and joked around with them. Any other time, I’d have regarded the tableau with perfunctory interest and carried on. But here, i found myself drawn to the scene and unable to look away.


You’ve no doubt come across a a photograph of what would seem an ordinary scene, but the more you study it, the more you notice something new about it, and the more you appreciate not only the scene, but also the person that had the presence of mind to capture it. This was exactly that feeling. In that one scene, i learned what i now know is probably one of my most significant life lessons. If i left that airport having learnt one thing, it was that i was to cherish being comfortable. I was to understand it for what it was; a necessity.


i was to be grateful for my status quo, however mundane i might have previously thought it to be; not because i felt i deserved more than what i am or have, but because at any moment, it could be taken away from me, and it would literally have been the best i'd ever had. 


So i'd make the most of it. The whining would turn to gratitude, the pining for another gulp of air. Because that would mean another moment alive to appreciate it more.


You might be wondering what was so special about a beautiful woman, a salad and a group of friends. You might remember that i mentioned the way she was eating her salad. Delicately. At least, she tried to. In reality, she struggled, but the smile on her face told you otherwise. The smile told you she didn't have a care in the world. Not for the wheelchair she was sitting on, nor for her missing legs, and expressly not for the stumps where her arms should've been.


She was comfortable. And i was grateful for the presence of mind to capture it.

Sugar Dusted Croissants & Downgraded Roadtrips

Sooo i’m back. Well, kinda. Missed me much? Not even a tad? Niet? Okay. Right, look, i wouldn’t know where to start explaining my reasons behind my leaving the blog dormant and unattended-which isn’t entirely true in itself. Because i hovered around. A lot. Reading and reading posts, going through the site-visitor app (which by the way, did its sterling job of recording your continuous visits throughout my absence, and for which i can't thank you enough). 

 You’ve visited from as far and wide afield as Bangladesh, Indonesia and Luxembourg;  Ecuador, Norway and Maui. You’d probably scoff at the idea that it took me all of a year and a half to compose my thoughts long enough to write this here little paragraph. Know that had it not been for the little flags on the site-visitor app representing the far-off lands you all logged into the site from you would, in all probability, not be reading this.


Whatever it was that brought or drove you here time and again, i wouldn’t know. But it’s probably the same thing that compelled me to return. For normalcy’s sake, we’ll just refer to it as our collective hate for the flashing cursor with a bunch of nothingness behind it.





















Feels great to be back.

Sautéed Phoenix Wings.To Go.

2011's turning out to be a pretty interesting year, wouldn't you say? What with the couple of revolutions here and smidgens of natural disasters there, it really has gotten off to a cloyingly heated start. And we're barely into March, mind you. Of course, the overly-exuberant earth citizen will have you know in no uncertain terms that these signs are indeed none other than those heralding the end of times, and who can argue? Their cornerstone reference is, of course, a box office smash hit flic with the inconceivably genius title of -wait foorrr iit- "2012". *insert blank stare here*

The natural disasters are pretty much expected. Nothing new there,really. Mother Earth may indeed be the only female in the history of herself (double-take) to have never gone into menopause. In spite of her age. And therein, perhaps, lies her frustration, because when she's got PMS, she lets us all know about it. And it's not pretty. But we've been around long enough to expect the majority of her groundbreaking tantrums and pacings to and fro in stormy huffs, during which she hails insults and cries floods of inconsolable tears. We're used to it. We might as well, y'know. It's her roof we're living under after all. And we don't even pay rent.

The uprisings however, are a totally different kettle of fish. Seemingly having sprung up from nowhere, what's different this time around is that they've not only managed to tear away our attention from our own self-fulfilling lives and onto the plight of the oppressed in the Middle East who, under tyrannical megalomaniacs who've for decades maintained a miserable status quo; but by their apparent success, the uprisings have shone a spotlight onto the other regimes across the world. Not that we didn't know they were there; with 40 dictators around the world today- of which 23 are autocrats- ruling an estimated 1.9 billion people within the claustrophobic grip of a collective iron fist, it's pretty clear which parts of the world won't be getting a "Best place to Live" award any time this century.

Or will they? Unlike anything my generation's ever witnessed before, the uprising in one country looks to have ignited the sparks in another, and from that, yet another reared its head. From Tunisia to Egypt and now Libya, the trodden-down populace in the North of Africa have engineered an organic revolution of their own machinations. No scripts, no main actors. Just a cast of determined millions. The proverbial domino effect at work and it's been fascinating to witness.

But what's been even more interesting to chew cud and pontificate on,are the ramifications that this might (and in all probability will) have on the eleventeen similar other regimes around the world. The scenes that were played out on satellite television of masses of unarmed people of all ages and classes willing to die for a grasp at freedom from decades of tyranny must have run shivers down the back of even the thickest-skinned tyrant in their overly-lavish multi million dollar mansion. Somewhere, an overly-fed good-for-nothing despot is shaking in their shiny over-priced Dolce & Gabbana boots. Some self-serving egotistical, air-head crocodile liberator with a God-complex has his jowls quivering double-time with fear.

Because the biggest threat to the aforementioned tyrant's comfortable perch at the top of his plasticine pyramid isn't that of some nameless, obscenely-armed rebel movement. But rather, it is the mind of a long suffering and exasperated people who dare to dream: "What if?"

Of course, if you think there's such a thing as an organic revolution, then "they've" got you right where they want you. And who might "they" be you ask? Ditch the rabbit and follow the loot, Alice. Follow the money.

Plasticine Pyramids & Crocodile Skin Boots

Been a while, hasn't it? Roundabout six months  since my last update by my count;  a considerable stretch by anyone's books, that.  However, fret not, for the whys or whens aren't important; suffice it to say though that the enforced sabbatical was indeed a fruitful one.And contrary to popular belief and what appears to have been shamelessly contageous rumour-mongering on the part of decidedly idle minds with equally laxatated tongues, it was not i that was responsible for the provocation of the Icelandic volcano that ground the world's entire aero-transport system to a shuddering halt for all of two glorious weeks earlier this year. However much  i would love to claim the credit as my own.

Which brings us quite smoothly to the purpose of this here post;- a candid look back at the Top 10 people and events that-in my view anyway- helped make the last 10 years the most gripping decade in living memory. And Lord Almighty was it ever an eventful one. Incidentally, our first entry happens to be none other than the chaos-in-a-cauldron created by none other than my volcanic lava from another mother- (our likeness is nothing short of striking)- the Icelandic heavyweight champion of the world, "The Big Easy".

10. Volcano disrupts picnic plans. How ol' Eyjafjallajökull (gesundheit) failed to clinch TIME magazine's much coveted 'person of the year' over Facebook head honcho, Zuckerberg is quite beyond my level of comprehension. For a fortnight the wheezy, old crocker set transportation back 120 years, forcing  millions of travellers worldwide to find simpler, alternative means of getting to point "B"; with millions others deciding the effort was not worth leaving point "A" in the first place. 



The continuous flow of lava and accompanying cataclysmic explosions set off a series of events incomparably much more impactful in their gravity and significance, and that deserved much more recognition;- recognition that was rather diverted  to the heralding of the inventor of an online social media utility that makes it easier for people all around the world to "poke" each other. But just so we're tuned in on the same wavelength, my contention is not that Zuckerberg made TIME magazine's person of the year. It is simply that he made TIME magazine's person of the year for 2010. Capisce? Bene.


9.  The Great Recession.  The buzzword of which the average Joe really didn't know the exact definition nor technicalities concerning the economic phenomenon, but like the roll-off-the-tongue name of some venereal disease,  simply knew that whatever it was, it wasn't good. 

A financial crisis that claimed collapsed housing markets, stock markets crash, economic hardship, exponential unemployment figures and retrenchments, and slumped consumer confidence on a worldwide scale. It was the stuff of Steinbeck-esque lore, which in all honesty wasn't too far off the mark, as the crisis was being readily compared to the Great Depression of the 1930s.


8. The day the sky fell. One of those, "where were you when you heard?" events. I'd just ambled languidly into the dorm television room and turned on the telly just in time to see the second plane slice into the second tower and the instantaneous bright orange flash of the ensuing explosion. i remember wondering whether the guys at CNN had already made a computer animated representation of what had happened to the first plane, until the news anchor clarified that it was a second plane. And that it was live. And that this was real.

i remember the dorm room filling up slowly until it was packed to capacity, everyone watching in stunned silence; the occasional nervous murmur, comment or restless shifting of sneakers from the crowd breaking the silence the anchor had trouble filling. i remember going home to my appartment shortly afterward and spending the rest of that day, evening and night camped in front of the telly watching the events unravel, the towers come down, the people run,the smoke chase, the sirens wail. Little did we know that this numbing moment in time- on a decidedly curious date- would mark the beginning of the end of the world as we'd known it. Although come to think of it, i think  we all had a pretty good idea where we were headed.  Just that it was too terrifying to think about.

7. "It sounded like a train wreck". Before Boxing Day 2004, the last time most of us had come across the word  "Tsunami" was probably in a geography textbook, back at highschool. And having witnessed the utter devastation, death and destruction that it had left in its wake, the irony became apparent afterward at how "by-the-book" the phenomenon had indeed been. 

Human suffering  has always been heart-wrenching to witness, but it somehow seems exponentially more so when it occurs around the festive season, as this one did. The first reports filtering through were of a massive earthquake of the magnitude of about 9.2 on the Richter scale, somewhere off the west coast of Sumatra in the Indian Ocean. A few minutes later, the news came through that a tsunami alert had been issued. A little while went by before the first reports of a couple of hundred casualties were broken on the news. i remember thinking that, granted the loss of human life, a couple of hundred was thankfully small, considering the size of the earthquake and tidal wave the experts were bandying about. i couldn't have been more wrong. 230, 000 people perished in 14 countries; the single biggest disaster in recorded history.

6.Yes. I Think We Just Did. A very tiny, minute and infinitesimal (really, it was that small) part of me felt somewhat sorry for both Hillary Clinton and John McCain during the course of that presidential election of 2008. Because it must have been slowly becoming apparent to them that they weren't just running against a  juggernaut  of a candidate supported by most of the Democratic and, as we would later find out,  the majority of the American electorate; but, by all accounts they were indeed running against the entire world. From the bustling streets of Kinshasa to the teeming coffeehouses of Budapest, there was but one name on everyone's lips;- "Barack Obama". Let's face it, the public has always loved the underdog in ANY race or matchup, let alone a presidential one for that matter;- but what was special about Obama's race was its ludicrosity. Its implausibility. Its improbability. Its IMPOSSIBILITY. Until ofcourse, he made it possible. And won it.

If just the mere candidate matchups themselves weren't enough to draw you into this most intriguing of races (a former First Lady, a septagenarian Vietnam vet and a wet-behind-the-ears lawyer with an African name), then the soap-opera of events that plagued it throughout its course definitely would have. From videos of sermons of former controversial pastors coming out of the woodwork; to "mis-spoken" speeches flowered with dramatic descriptions of non-existent memories of coming under fire on a Bosnian runway; to a campaign volunteer making up a story of being robbed, pinned to the ground and having the letter “B” scratched on her face in an apparent "politically inspired" attack, this was without a doubt a race like no other in history. And lest it be forgotten, its culmination afforded us a chance to witness a moment we never thought we'd experience in our lifetime. And on that day- visas, greencards, nationalities and trade barriers aside- one would have been forgiven for thinking that the whole world just might get along afterall.

5. T.I.A One thing about underdogs is that it's not only a pleasure to see them succeed in the face of adversity and pre-perceived challenges, but to see them succeed WELL makes that support all the more worth it. Such was the story of the first ever football Word Cup on African soil. The usual "it can't be done", "they're not ready to host such an event", "it's too dangerous, tourists risk their lives by going there" and all sorts of condescending remarks and negative commentary were flying around on the eve of the most watched tournament in the world. 

And ofcourse, as we all now know, the biggest humble pie in history was also served to all doubters by the end of a most magnificent showcase of The Beautiful Game. This time, it WAS for Africa, and no amount of negativity was going to steal the Mother continent's moment in the spotlight away from her..

4. "Long live the King. The King is Dead." From the very first time you saw him donned in a slanted black fedora, shimmering silver glove, ankle-length black trousers,  sparkling white socks and an open, fluttering shirt; to the moment his glittering coffin was wheeled away from his own tributary memorial service, you knew you were privileged to have lived to witness a magnificent human being use his God-given talents to all of his ability.


Misunderstood, adored, persecuted and inspiring, Michael Jackson truly encapsulated the star we'd all grown up with, and for whatever you might've thought of him, the King of Pop he surely was.

3.The day the universe shook-We thought we'd witnessed the worst of Mother Nature just six years earlier with the devastation of the Tsunami, but she surprised us when she reared her ugly side once again early in 2010- this time in Haiti. An earthquake, 7.1 on the Richter scale razed nearly all buildings on the Caribbean island to the ground, killing more than 200, 000 people and leaving millions homeless. 

Although the miraculous stories of people being pulled out of the rubble alive, days (and in some cases weeks) after the quake hit served to give the rescuers and waiting family members wisps of hope, the overall picture was a bleak one at best. Entire families, neighborhoods and communities had been wiped out as Haiti experienced the second worst natural disaster in recent  memory.

2.A true heroine & an addict for freedom- The fight for freedom has borne many faces throughout the history of man;- from David to Joan of Arc, from Martin Luther King  to Ghandi; and from Lumumba to Mandela, the rights of the meek, disadvantaged and oppressed have been fearlessly spoken for by heroes who put their personal safety aside for the greater good of their people. In 2010, the face of freedom belonged to the Burmese heroine. 

Kept under house arrest for years by a brutal and  oppressive regime after her party , the National League for Democracy won a landslide election in 1990, her non-violent protest for freedom and democracy for all the people of Burma, and those everywhere searching for that most basic of rights, saw Aung San Suu Kyi finally released. 






1.And in my # 1 Moment of the Decade; The Chilean Miners. Sometimes, all you need is a feel good story to garner a better perspective on the challenges you face in your own life. The story of 33 Chilean miners trapped  2,000 ft underground  for more than two months before being rescued presented that perspective in all its powerful resonance. 

The ultimate tale of adversity, pain, helplessness, perseverance, hope and triumph played out on screens across the world as the rescue mission saw each miner make his way up the narrow shaft in the claustrophobic, yet appropriately named "Phoenix" capsule, the world holding its breath tentatively as each second ticked torturously by. They were nameless miners from the other side of the world, but they represented humanity's perpetual quest to survive, no matter what the circumstance.

Happy New Year everyone! Let's hope the coming decade is even half as exciting as the last one was. Good Luck, God Bless and Godspeed.

Good Luck, God Bless & Godspeed.

Having one's head stuck between the burglar bars criss-crossing the tableau windows of one's lounge isn't the most ideal way to spend one's sunny school vacation morning. Especially not when there's nobody around to proffer a Samaritan hand in aid; as the folks are at work and the nanny's in the kitchen fixing up one's French toast and hot milk brunch and can't hear one's desperate boyish squeals...er... grunts as one tries to wriggle free, courtesy of her banshee-inspired attempts at keeping up with the sounds of Abba's "Dancing Queen" blaring through the stereo speakers at full volume.

 
 Half a brick of butter, a bit of strategic and carefully executed prying and maneuvering of my headless body by the nanny (bless her vocally un-blessed soul) and a bruised ego later (it wasn't particularly amusing in the least that during the entire extraction procedure, a bunch of construction workers laying bricks at the next door neighbor's driveway downed tools and, amid guffaws and body-raking laughter, made their lardy rear ends comfortable in order to witness the humiliating spectacle), i was free.

They'd been the cause of my predicament in the first place, those construction workers. Could you blame me though? Aged 5, the world was still fresh, new and pregnant with unimagined possibilities. Realities yet to be discovered (especially those of a loud, muddy and JCB-ish nature) were deliciously interpreted into cause for adventure by the 5 year old mind. It was a fearless and thirsty mind, that one; ready to sponge off of anything that would expand its realms of knowledge- real, imagined or otherwise. It dared to explore. And explore it did when it sent my head through the bars on a reconnaissance mission on the noisy goings-on of the next door neighbor's driveway that summery sun-kissed morning; but alas with no proposed plans of how exactly to retract said-head back through said-bars.

 It is a decidedly human thing, exploration; is it not? From the moment we push forth from the warm, umbilically attached enclosure of our first residence, we're gripped by the urge to explore and discover everything about our new address in all it's weird, wonderful and horrific make-up. And it is thus from cot to country to continent to constellation; that we discover in order to comprehend, and ultimately conquer.

Our insatiable curiosity has landed us further than we've ever been in our history. Currently, there are two mobile buggies, Spirit Rover and Opportunity Rover taking a jolly Sunday drive around the surface of Mars and beaming us back signals of their extensive geological analysis of Martian rocks and planetary surface features. All the required preliminary setting of the table, of course, for the much- anticipated main course of landing the first pair of human size 10s on the surface of that planet. At the astronomical (sorry, i had to) total cost of $20 billion, it won't be a bag of chips in the least bit.


 Don't get me wrong, my intention is not to deride the importance or, indeed, the relevance of scientific developments such as this obviously will be. The time, effort, sweat and countless balding scientists' tears will ultimately benefit humankind. A task as elephantine as sending the first human crew off to the red planet would obviously require the invention of the necessary technologies to accomplish such a feat, which- as evidenced by our previous forays into the the mysterious black yonder that is space- will create a spin off of said-technologies into our everyday lives.

i need not remind you of such simple and taken-for-granted pleasures as freeze-dried food, cordless tools, ATM technology,water purification filters, microwave receivers used in scans for breast cancer, remote robotic surgery and heart defibrillator technology (a mere handful from a large vat of 1500 other space program-inspired technologies).

No, that's not my intention at all. It is, however, my intention to have you ponder the following; - to have ventured so far away from home would imply that we have discovered and thus, as is our nature, conquered all there is to be conquered of home. Correct? The average length of an adult skull is around 21 to 22 centimeters. The average width is about 17 to 18 centimeters. In terms of circumference, the average skull of an adult measures 54 to 57 centimeters. And lo and behold, within this shell lies the frontier we have barely begun to understand, let alone conquer.

  You see, ladies and gentlemen, for as much as we can claim to have conquered everything on good ol' Mother Earth; the same (shock upon horror) can't be said of the human brain. For at this very minute, 90% of its latent potential is still to be accounted for.

 Though it does makes you wonder... what is 90% of infinity?

 
Hm...

  

Feud 'Fore Thought {Entry Two}

i'm not the biggest fan of reality television. In fact, i'd go as far as to profess my absolute loathing for the genre. i find it abominably boring, pretentious, devoid of any entertainment value whatsoever and just about as intellectually stimulating as a bowl of cooking lard. It's not for my lack of trying to watch either. i did try. Really, i did.Once. And if i could find a way to claim back that wasted, soul-depraving half hour of my life in its entirety, believe me i would've done so. A long, long time ago. i can't for the life of me recall what show or indeed which episode therein had so instigated a reaction in me so much akin to that of the turning of one's nostrils up in the presence of a decidedly toxic and stomach-curdling pong, but suffice it to say that it had from that moment on turned me off of the purgative genre for good. Thank God, the ancestors and good genes for a brilliantly pedantic pair of nostrils.

One might deem it rather unjust to base an all-encompassing opinion regarding an entire genre upon a brief half-hour's sitting, but to that critique i offer a short rebuff: it may walk like a duck, it may look like a pheasant, and it may very well run like an ostrich too. But by Jupiter it sure tastes like chicken. You see, once you've seen one (reality shows i mean, not the fowl),you've seen them all.

One can thus imagine my gack-shock-horror just the other day when i had the torturous misfortune of having to sit through what would be my second half-hour lost entirely to yet another piteous attempt at entertainment by a so-called reality (humph!) show. Be in the firm knowledge, however, that the experience was involuntary and totally out of my control, and is the main reason behind my continual and fervent belief in the tactics of successful remote control concealment when leaving your throne in front of the television;- entirely necessary precautionary measures done in order to avoid what can only be described as a domestic coup d'etat to wrestle away control of the aforementioned remote by marauding female siblings or sub-plotting other halves. Alas, short of taking it with you to the ablution facilities, there are only so many places one can hide a remote that haven't already been discovered and scavenged by the band of rebels.

It was following one such incident that i made my unpleasant introduction to Dr. 90210. For those as intentionally ignorant of the genre as myself, this show is a series that focuses on plastic surgery in the wealthy suburb of Beverly Hills in Los Angeles, California and features interviews with the patients, semi-graphic footage of the surgeries, and before and after footage of the patients. The episode i was forced (you might ask why i didn't just do something else while waiting for the rebel scavengers to vacate the throne room, but it's very hard to find a patch of drying paint to watch, however much i would've loved the experience) to sit through, focused on three individuals- two sisters and an additional lady, each seeking some sort of aesthetic surgery to have performed about their person.

The one sister, a slender high school student of about 17, has already had a nose job done and is now looking to have her breasts enlarged.Still well below the legal drinking age in most countries, but wise enough beyond her short years here on Earth to know that self-esteem and pride about one's appearance don't come from within one's self, spirit or soul, but rather in the form of a face-masked man in green loose-fitting slacks and a shiny, sharp scalpel. Somebody hand her a medal, please.

Her older sister, who can't be her senior by any more than a couple of years, is overweight. Nothing a bit of exercise and nutritional self-discipline couldn't fix, you ask? Please perish the thought, what year are you living in anyway, 1995?? No, think more along the lines of a wonderful buffet combo of body shaping liposuction, Abdominoplasty ( tummy tuck), breast augmentation and gastric by-pass surgery (hold the fries and onion rings though, thanks).All this in one sitting, of course.

You might well enquire about the girls' family's thoughts on this. Their mother is an anaesthetist at the clinic where both girls are having their restructuring done. Oh and she's perfectly fine with them wanting work done on their bodies so early in their lives. No problem with it whatsoever. Why should there be? It's not like she's their moral and conscientious compass in life or anything. Go figure.



The last patient in this episode is a lady who, if there were a spectrum graphically displaying the extent of absurdities relating to cosmetic surgery (1 being "minimal" and 10 being "extreme"), would be perched comfortably under the number 100. She apparently has an addiction to cosmetic surgery (otherwise known as BDD, or Body Dysmorphic Disorder) and doesn't know it yet. She's been under the surgeon's knife dozens, upon countless of times, and still finds something about her body that she doesn't like and wants changed. In fact her parting scene involves her talking to the camera (us) about her last cheek implants that went wrong and made her look like E.T., oh and by the way, she wants work done on her pinkie toes because they're too "chubby". Right. Somebody clearly needs to be phoning home for help. Or Dr Phil, if the line's busy.

By the time the end credits rolled up, i must admit i'd taken pity on these three individuals. Maybe it's because i realised that however stupid i might have thought their reasoning behind whatever decisions they made to go under the surgeon's knife, they were sculpting their bodies not for them, but to what they thought we wanted them to look like. "We" being society. So, effectively, they were victims of their own society.Victims of society's barbaric view of what a beautiful human being should look like. And if that weren't enough, we commercialised, packaged and glorified the entire process of the ugly duckling turning into a plastic swan into one high-gloss, 30 minute show (minus commercial breaks).

Just the other day (roundabout 186 BC, to be absolutely precise) the Romans would throw people they didn't really fancy into the arena of the Colosseum and watch as hungry lions made short work of them. The difference between now and then? We've evolved, you say? We've changed, you quip? We're not like that anymore, you retort? Not likely. The human being hasn't changed for thousands of years. Given the right environment, we're still as barbaric as ever. The difference is that today we can throw the word "television" behind anything, and it instantly becomes something that we can accept. Something we can adapt to. Something we can enjoy.

Just in case you were wondering, i've got a different opinion on reality television to what it was before i'd watched that episode of Dr 90210. No, i still loathe the genre.

But now more than ever.

Pedantic Nostrils & Plastic Swans

Some twenty-odd years ago, a little boy of about 7 grabbed a black umbrella off the hat rack in the vestibule, ran up the stairs to his room,clambered through a window and onto the railing of the veranda , unfurled the large umbrella open, and - brandishing it high above his head in one hand - jumped out into space. Give or take a week before that, he'd been spotted (by a nosy-good-fer-nuffin neighbor no less) tying a rope around the uppermost branches of a Jacaranda tree and swinging off in full vocal rendition of a tribal ululation, clad in nothing more than "...what appeared to be Scooby Doo..."- (to damnation, i say, that no-good neighbor's eye for detail and even more-so, her feeling of moral and communal obligation to rat on one to one's parents)- "...undergarments". Barely two days before that, he'd been standing in the backyard with a makeshift cape (later to be identified and confirmed during a rather painful disciplinary spanking, as mum's best table cloth) fastened around his neck, his hands fisted at his waist, feet wide apart and staring brazenly at the sun in an apparent let's-see-who'll-blink-first showdown.

 A couple of Mary Poppins-Superman-Spiderman-Tarzan-Huckleberry Finn- inspired gaffes were about as far as the effects of television on my development as a kid went. No broken bones (surprisingly) , but in their place a lifetime's worth of stories, bookmarked in all the scabs, scars and bruises i sported proudly; much like the pins, badges and sashes of an old general in full military regalia. Television-inspired violent conduct in our day amounted to the occasional staged post-kung fu flic mass fracas involving all the lads in the neighborhood or in the playground at recess; or the McGyver-glorifying attempts to build a nuclear submarine out of planks of wood, fire crackers, dental floss, super glue and chicken wire.

i suppose the lads and i followed some unspoken rule or code as to how far towards the border between the realms of make believe and hard hitting reality we could take our copycatting, concerning what we witnessed on television. i'm almost certain we were pretty much cognitive of the basic differences between the two. i'm positive we knew when Wile E. Coyote kept coming back from a fall/an explosion/getting chopped up into slices/disappearing underneath a large boulder , that it was really all make-believe? That it couldn't really happen in real life? i'm convinced we knew that when Rambo rattled off a couple of shots at the enemy to send them screaming and sprawling off a cliff edge or off the roof of a building, that all that 'blood' was really only just ketchup? That upon the scrolling of the credits at the end of the movie, we'd find out that 'Bad Guy #1' actually had a name and that he wasn't really dead, after all? But that the same couldn't be said of those other people on the news,y'know, the ones covered in white sheets or zipped up in black bags at that school?

We were 7. Grown kids, we were. Of course we knew the difference between fantasy and reality. Just as much as i'd known the difference when- as a seven year old- i'd grabbed a flimsy umbrella and jumped off a balcony 26 feet up with the expectation of floating and steering myself to wherever the wind would take me; or as i swung around from a frayed, knotted rope attached to the branches of trees the height of buildings in the full belief that i was the king of my very own patch of jungle; or when i did permanent damage to the photoreceptors in my eyes by staring down the sun in my cemented conviction of my invincibility as an underground superhero.

And so, when an eight year old goes to school one morning with a couple of loaded handguns in his backpack in preparation for that day's exciting game of cops and robbers at recess, of course he deserves our benefit of the doubt that he knows full-well the difference between make believe and reality. After all, he has it on good authority that the presents underneath the tree at the end of the year will have been delivered by an overly-obese, jolly good Samaritan of a man dressed in a red coat and hat with a long white beard. He's also seen that on the telly, by the way, but he knows for a fact that the jolly, fat man is real. 

He's pretty sure he is, anyway.

Scabs, Scars & Tangy Ketchup