ANZAC Day Apparently Radically Changed in Meaning About 10 Years Ago

I went to university today to start a new semester of learning how to dominate humanity and I parked on the oval as one does when all the normal parking spaces are chocka*. As I did, a gentleman handed me a strange bundle of fibrous material. After staring at it in shock for a few seconds I realised it was a newspaper, which is a wad of paper with information, or news, printed on it. It didn't take me long to recognise it, as I'd just recently seen something similar in Sydney. They used to be quite common before the internet caught on. I opened it up randomly to page 12 and saw they were were bravely trying to give the internet a run for its money in the field of blatant stupidity.

In an article entitled, “New bid to pardon Breaker Morant”, David Jean wrote the following opening paragraph: “It took 30 years to recognise the contributions of Australians who fought in Vietnam and 60 years to recognise that the Australians who fought on the Kokoda Track were genuine heroes.”

How very true. Why every year on Anzac Day we used to gather around and spit on my grandfather. And we only stopped doing this in the year 2002 when we suddenly realised that he was a genuine hero. Before that we thought this whole World War II thing old people kept going on about was just bullshit.


*For Americanoids and others who don't know the word chocka, it means completely full. It's a perfectly cromulent word as evidenced by its use by Shakespeare:

SERGEANT: For brave Macbeth--well he deserves that name--
Disdaining fortune, with his brandish'd steel,
Which smoked with bloody execution,
Like valour's minion carved out his passage
Till he faced the slave;
Which ne'er shook hands, nor bade farewell to him,
Till he unseam'd him from the nave to the chaps,
And fix'd his head upon our battlements.

BERYL: Wouldya like some more pavlova, luv?

DUNCAN: Nah, piss off. I'm chocka.

--From Shakespeare's McBeth, Queensland Folio.

My Sleeve of Care is all Unravelled

Oh dear... I am not at all well rested. I was tossing all night. I tossed and tossed and tossed again, and in addition to the tossing I was also turning. I turned and turned until I was Russia and the sheets bound me like a riddle, the doona wrapped me in a mystery, and just how I got tangled up in the curtains is an enigma. “Take your stinking fabric off me, you damned, dirty doona!” I growled in my best Charlton Heston and flexed my trigger finger, because thinking of Charlton Heston always makes me want to shoot off a few rounds. Eventually, I realised that even though it wasn't cold and stiff, there was no gun in my hand. So I grabbed the doona and I tossed it off! I grabbed the curtain and tossed it off! I tossed off the sheets! The cat jumped on me, so I tossed off the cat! I would have tossed off myself, except I was scared I would land on the cat! Then Winston Churchill ran in and jumped on the bed, so I tossed him off! Then I looked at Winston Churchill in the moonlight streaming through the now curtainless window and I said, “This is a dream, isn't it?”

“Dream?” said Churchill. “Er... yes? Yes! This is a dream! This is all a dream! You won't remember any off this when you wake up, and if you do, you won't remember how much I look like Father O'Flannery at all.” And then Churchill backed away and rushed out the door and tripped over the cat. “Mother of god!” cried Churchill.

Then I tried to get some rest, but I went from a dream into a nightmare. I dreamt, or rather I nightmared, I was being attacked by a zombie I had made from drain cleaner, battery acid or even hair bleach. It kept trying to pop a knob in my mouth. It was a knob from a 1954 Kelvinator and in my dream a 1954 Kelvinator was a robot and the robot wasn't very happy about this at all. I joined forces with the robot and we worked together to invite the zombie to a rave where thirty, thirty-something year olds broke him into twenty-nine pieces and ate him and paid us thirty dollars a bite.

The money turned into thirty pieces of silver and I said, “This is enough to buy a good night's sleep!” and I took it to the cloak room and bought a sleeping tablet that was the size and shape of a mallet. “How do I swallow this?” I asked the salesperson.

“Oh, you don't take it orally,” she said. “Here, let me help you,” and she rolled up the ravelled sleeve on her right arm and cried, “Murder is sleep, and not gained through innocence! No balm known to your hurt mind will stop the death of each day's life! Sleep's chief nourishment is the feast of your life!” And she swung the mallet tablet with impressive force and applied it cranially, knocking me into a deep, relaxing sleep which caused me to immediately wake up. I sat up, looked out the window, waved to Father O'Flannery who was driving by and wondered just who I had to sacrifice to make the sun come up.