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The thing I love most about Crystal is that she never disappoints in the hair department. How does she get those poodles to sit still that long? At least she’s in good company for once. This looks like some kind of L’Oréal-sponsored Reality Show from the 90′s. For my Lawyer’s sake, I can’t take credit for this photo as it was (finally!) sent in by an avid listener. One Miss A. Christian, from somewhere English-sounding. Perhaps Surrey. Or Tetleys. I can take some of the embarrassment off Crystal’s literal shoulders: I did have a crush on Miss Norrish for all 8 of my high school years. Speaking of crushes, I need to go stop my wife’s impending marriage to Katy Perry…
Remember, if you have shameful MK photos, there’s no place than home.
John & Walter. Gazing at their able-bodied, coma-free future disappear out of sight.
Remember when you’re a kid, and there’s always some older guys at your school that you look up to? Not just because you were 2ft nothing. But you know the ones. The embodiment of everything you wanted to be? Purveyors of coolness and suave-erity?* Despite appearances, being fully aware of the amazing mullet, John and Walter, sadly, were not those guys. They were the reason why most fun things are now illegal.
To their credit, as a kid I thought they were both amazing. John wore leather jackets and a pair of jeans that looked like they’d been in a blender. Or maybe it was just from the hordes of women clawing at them. He rode a BMW motorcycle bigger than our toyota wagon, and as far as I was concerned, it must have been specially built for him by the folks in Germany, ’cause up till then all they made was cars. Just like me, Abi had a crush on John for a while too, but over time focussed her guile on his younger siblings. It’s possible she’ll kill me for that last revelation. Such is life on the interwebs. I stayed over at Walter’s place once, since I was cool enough at one point to be friends with his younger brother Frankie, who was in all likelihood the missing member of New Kids on the Block. After watching about 15 horror movies in a row Walter kindly let me know we were sleeping above an Indian burial ground. Awesome. They found me that morning in the bathtub, trying to scoop my brains out of my ear canal with a dessert spoon. Anything to make the voices stop. Those Indians just didn’t understand I had no muskets to trade. Read the rest of this entry »
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The great thing about school in Bolivia was that Miss Christian taught you how to make Cocaine. That, and it’s one of the few examples in international curriculums where they blend science and economics into one class.
Photo supplied by me, because, as usual, you guys came up with nothin’.
Graphical representation of the Internet, circa 1994. No traffic, barely any sites, and the promise of big things off in the distance.
While we were back in Australia on furlough, most of my free time was spent either talking on the phone to my girlfriend for hours, or talking to random strangers online for hours. It’s possible neither activity was actually helping my non-existent social life. This was before all this new fang-dangled stuff you kids have, like Facebook. And mice. My parents even got me what they described as my ‘own phone line’, which turned out to be just a long phone cable to could take the phone down the hallway to my bedroom. Though, the silver lining on yet more abysmal parenting was Dad was able to hook us to the internet for free through his work. This was a good thing. Since we were just about the only family in Bathurst to have the net at the time, it allowed me suddenly become cool and popular and to coin terms at school like ‘surfing the net’, ‘website’ and ‘oh my goodness why is it taking so long’. In those days… well, the internet kinda sucked. Even our second, supercharged, ultrafast modem with winged monkeys from the future was only 14.4K (you kids wouldn’t understand) and still tied up the telephone line every time you wanted to use it. Downloading an HD movie back then would have taken about 5 years, which was fine I guess, since you’d need about 5000 Floppy Disks to keep swapping in & out to store it on so at that rate it’d take you 5 years just to watch the thing. Here’s a picture of one for you young whipper-snappers who never lived through the floppy era. On second thought, that sounds like some kind of medical condition. Let’s go with ‘Age of the Floppy Disk.’ Nana would always ring up and complain the phone had been busy for ages and I’d have to make up some story about talking to customer service in India or some equally implausible lie. In the end, I guess the speed thing wasn’t really such a big deal, due to all the pages being mostly gray and boring and having nothing but blue links on them. Who thought blue on grey would be easy to read? Probably give you some kind of epileptic seizure. Looking back, it’s good that real people took the internet away from the nerds and actually made something useful out of it besides being able to tell if a coke machine in Milwaukee needed servicing. Read the rest of this entry »
click for bargains
Here we are selling our junk before the trip home. There’s even a can of fuel for a remote-controlled plane. Who in Bolivia is going to buy that?! Or, for that matter, from memory, any of the other crap we had there. Eagle-eyed listeners may notice two land-speed records bearing my name on the board on the wall, between my shoulder and elbow. (You’ll have to view the enlarged photo, and even then, squint real hard)
