Kerrie Murphy | July 01, 2008
DEFRAG doesn't wish to alarm you, but there's a good chance we're in bizarro world.
We should probably state from the outset that Defrag is occasionally prone to prematurely deciding we're in bizarro world, such as last night when the oven tray that had been missing for a year suddenly turned up with an oven.
And when we say "suddenly turned up", we mean the tray landed on a shelf with a clatter when we opened the door, suggesting that it had just lobbed in through a portal to another oven.
So if you have an oven tray that mysteriously appeared in your oven and has just as mysteriously vanished, it's possible our ovens are connected by a wormhole. Let us know and we'll try to send through an apple cinnamon muffin.
Anyway, while there's possibly a non-bizarro world explanation for the oven tray, such as that it was just wedged somewhere, blended in with the oven, Defrag is sure there's more conclusive proof in an article we read about Swedish children being upset that their parents spent too much time on the internet.
When we heard this, we assumed the issue was that the children wanted their parents to get off so they could have a turn, but no, it seems they were contacting BRIS (Children's Rights in Society) because they were worried in general about the amount of time their parents were spending online instead of paying attention to them.
Paying attention to your children is something that society values these days, as opposed to when we were younger and our father was this shadowy figure in the garage fixing something and the most contact we had with our mother was when she was simultaneously pushing us out the back door while admonishing us for walking on her freshly mopped floor.
Consequently, Defrag spent the first 12 years of our life up a jacaranda tree playing with Smurfs.
Given that kids back then seemed to spend a lot of time using magnifying glasses to start fires, maybe this more attention business is not a bad idea, but we're still concerned about this parents-on-the-net business.
It is the role of the elders of society to complain about how youngsters are spending far too much time using a certain technology instead of doing whatever it was young people did when the elders were that age.
It has been that way since the cavemen and women would mutter disapprovingly about cave teenagers spending far too much time poking sticks into this newfangled fire thing and looking at violent cave drawings, instead of hitting things with clubs as they should be.
A mother not paying enough attention to her daughter because she's too busy playing World of Warcraft is the thin end of the wedge, a slippery slope, the tip of the iceberg, the first sip of a long island ice tea and all those other things that seem minor in themselves, but eventually result in a society gone to ruin.
Before we know it, parents will be doing other things that are generally the providence of young people, and as we know from when they try to use the slang of youth, that's embarrassing. Mums and dads trying to do a bitchin' ollie on the skateboard while simultaneously tagging a building is a thought too weird even for bizarro world. Although it does have all the makings of a YouTube phenomenon.
TOP 10
THE Trons are a New Zealand band entirely consisting of instrument-playing robots. Here are the Top 10 ways you can tell a robot band from a human one.
10.After the gig, they're more interested in hooking up with the vending machine than the groupies.
9.Nothing happens on stage until you Push 1 for Track 1. Push 2 for Track 2. Push # to speak with Groupie Support.
8.The band's bus is called PCI.
7.Their electric guitars really are plugged into their butts, rather than merely sounding like it.
6.When they trash the stage they yell: "Exterminate! Exterminate!"
5.Members of the audience take off their iPods and throw them on the stage.
4.The bass player enters rehab, swearing off "duo-coupling" and "electricity shots".
3.The critics define their unplugged work as having no power or intensity.
2.The No1 hit does not compute ... no really, that's the title: Does Not Compute.
1.The band members all dress and sound alike, and all their songs are very similar (nb this does method does not enable differentiation with the Veronicas).
Contributors: Clockwork, Allan Bell, Mark McIntosh, Don Knowles, Matthew Taylor, Simon Brooks, Iain Muir, Matt Rainbow, Brent Muir and Dwight Lemke
Next week: John Beltman was miffed that we didn't make Bill Gates' retirement the subject of the Top 10 this week. So send us the top 10 things on Bill's to-do list now that he has left Microsoft. Answers by Thursday please to OzDefrag@Gmail.com