Rants of a Slakbarsted

What got me on this train of thought was seeing a new French film in March called Prix à payer, Le (The Price to Pay). What really struck me (maybe I’m just naive) was the amount of deception that is involved in marriages. Following the deception train of thought led me to conclude that much of society (I can only speak of western society) is built on deception.

Think about it for a moment,

Women use make up to hide some flaws on their faces to maintain an illusion of her beauty.

Men wearing expensive clothes (or imitations) and driving a nice car to feed an illusion that he is successful.

People entering occupations just to keep their parents happy and they pretend to enjoy it.

The people who have disabling addictions do an excellent job of maintaining a facade to hide their “troubles”.

Yes even people who are “different” sometimes go to great lengths to conform, be part of the crowd just to survive. (I did that when I was younger pretending to be “hearing” and hid my deafness whenever I could)

A man who is gay married a woman then proceed to acquire a house with the white picket fence, 2.5 kids and leading a double life by trawling bars to pick up other men at night. (I’d wager this scenario is more common than you think)

Various professions has turned smoke and mirrors into an art form, advertising, law, politics, accounting, IT, film & television in fact just about every profession I can think of does make use of deception.

It’s obvious why advertising & PR use deception, to paint a “nicer” picture for their clients.

Politics use deception to screw their opponents and to secure votes to stay in power. Even Stalin would deceive his detractors by inviting them to dinner at his palace to discuss their concerns then have them shot outside after dinner.

Accounting sometimes would “fudge” figures to weave an illusion that a company is worth more than it really is, or that it is solvent when in reality it is insolvent.

IT believe it or not makes deception incredibly easy these days. Think of photoshop touching up photos of celebrities in magazines, and conjuring up fake evidence of weapons of mass destruction.

Heck even in The Terminator movies the machines themselves relied on deception in waging their war against humans. Ok that is pure fiction.

It doesn’t end there..

You will see examples of deception in mother nature, some species use deception as a way of staying alive.

Crocodiles use deception by popping up their eyes (like a periscope to see above the water) while scoping out potential prey, from the prey’s point of view all they see is two bobs in the water. Not much of a threat is it ? Not until the croc lunges out of the water trying to snap your neck into two.

Cats feigning affection when they really want to be fed. As soon as the cat gets what it wants it will piss off.

Various species use camouflage to protect themselves (which in a way is deception)

The message I read from examining elements of deception in society and in nature is, it’s a very effective way to compete for survival.

I know I’m not used to writing fully fledged arguments and I’m still learning how to do so. I feel this post is all over the shop and it’s just a bunch of rambling. So I hope you can understand the argument I’m trying to make here.

This story is starting to have a life of it’s own and another article was published in the SMH today. This afternoon it was on the front page of the SMH website (see the picture below for evidence)

Yesterday’s article implied the distributor was responsible for the offending DVD.

In today’s article, the official distributor for the DVD said their captioning is “absolutely perfect”, implying the council had screened a pirated copy of the DVD. If a pirated copy was used Ryde Council might be prosecuted for copyright infringement.

At this stage it is still not clear where the offending DVD came from.

So far Ryde Council has been keeping Mum about the whole sorry affair. Not even an apology to the Deaf and deaf people who were present that night.

I speculate the following…

1. They’re trying to find out where the offending DVD came from before they issue a press release.

2. They’re seeking legal advice to find out if they can be sued (from say… discrimination or copyright infringement)

3. Trying to convince the treasurer to write a big fat cheque to pay their spin doctors.

However I cannot shake the thought that just maybe… maybe the Council had got their hands on a rouge copy of the “official” DVD.

Who knows ???

Still… It’s a damn good story.

What a terrible embarrassing moment for Ryde Council on Saturday night!!

Ryde Council had organised a screening of The Queen as an outdoor cinema setting in a cricket oval somewhere in North Ryde.

The council had thoughtfully advertised the event using their contacts within the Auslan community stating the film will be screened with captions. The Council had organised a similar event last year, which I attended with a friend and saw An Inconvenient Truth. The event last year went without a hitch and the captioning quality throughout the film was excellent.

However last Saturday night (I didn’t attend the screening because I support Australia in becoming a Republic and am not interested in the British Royal Family) the captioning was dreadful.

To make matters worse it was splashed over the Sydney Morning Herald Website around lunchtime today (see picture below for evidence) complete with a link to the article about poor captioning during the screening.

What a damn shame, if I ever find out which distributor was responsible for the DVD I will publish their name on my blog and urge you to write a letter demanding the distributor to produce better quality captioning on their DVD’s

There is no excuse for poor captioning… period.

The reason why I state that is Deaf & deaf people rely on captioning (I too rely on captions in film and Television) and it detracts the viewer from enjoying the film/TV program if poor quality captioning is present.

All this talk of captions had reminded me to find out what is happening with the inquiry into the state of captioning in Australia. Perhaps due to a change of Government it has been put on the backburner.

However there’s no harm in trying to find out is there ??

Oh Fuck! It’s the new year already.. I’ve been lazing around during my two week break and had meant to do a post about the Eugenics debate which is currently being fought by deafies in the UK. I promise to post my views on the topic later this month. The truth is I can’t be arsed to write a post about it at the moment because there are too many thoughts of mine on the topic and I need time to sort them out.

This year I hope to have some more dating stories to share on the blog (to provide some entertainment for my readers at least), so yes I *will* be getting off my arse with aim to socialise more often. Which reminds me I did go to another speed dating event in November last year but forgot to make a post about it.

It was an interesting experience so gather around children and listen to a tale which shall astound you…

It was a gruelling night where 14 dates were to be conducted, yes that’s right 14 of them. You see the usual number of dates is around 7 – 10 with about 7 to 8 minutes per “date” so that night was unusual due to the large number of people attending the event. Methinks the company who organised the event had “overbooked” the night to rake in some spare cash.

My dear readers I have taken liberty to carefully craft some worthy mentions of some of the women I had met that night.

An airplane blonde who admitted if she was a guy she’d have a beard because she’s lazy. (cue the cuckoo clock) It turned out she’s a journo for the women’s health magazine and I’m damned suspicious that she’s there to write up an article for the next issue.

A rude women (whose name escapes me) who before I even sat down to introduce myself said “wait a sec” and proceed to chat to her friend who was sitting next to her for a minute or so.. not cool at all and I kept the convo to a minimum with her… and wait for it..

Her friend had some weird arse Kiwi name (whose name also escapes me although she’s doesn’t look like a Maori) for the whole six minutes she had her head cocked to one side with this blank stare like a robot asking me disjointed questions which REALLY freaked me out. She reminded me of one of the fembots from Austin Powers and half expected her breasts to start shooting at me..

A lawyer who does IP stuff answered my question of “Who was the most memorable person you’ve met tonight” with “Ohhh the Banker.. yeah the Banker” she said this with a smile on her face while stroking her chin.. she didn’t mention anything else about him not his name or anything.. just “The Banker”.. anyway she was cute so I wouldn’t mind meeting her again.

*Sigh*

I’m actually grinning now having told this story to a few friends of mine who are also single and are on the dating treadmill. You see going to such events provide me with rich material I can use to entertain my friends (and to you my readers) with. Stay tuned because I will be going to two more speed dating events, one later this month and another one in early Feb.

Anyway I can hear you asking what about any matches ??? Well fuck me I had one match, which I was not expecting at all. Remember in my previous post about speed dating I was training ? Well I went with the mindset of not expecting to have any matches at all. So the chick who matched with me had ruined my plans for eternal literary glory.

How dare she !!!

She

Ruined

It

I was going for a record number of attending speed dating events without getting any matches at all and aim to write about my experiences. Oh well, there goes that idea.

Anyhoo I sent an email asking her if she was free the following Sunday to meet up, she replied with..

Yes it was great to meet you too…the gong was too loud, even for me and i could see when she was going to do it… Unfortunately i am not free this weekend, i have to study for an exam next week but will email you soon to organise something…have a good day.

This tells me she got cold feet at that stage, a clear case of buyers remorse methinks. She never did get back to me by the way.

Noooooooooo I hear my readers scream at me. I know I know I know I should have followed up with another email a week or two later but I had the feeling that she wasn’t really interested. If she was interested, don’t you think she would have suggested the following weekend to meet up. Besides who the fuck studies for an exam the entire weekend? You’d think she’d be glad to have a distraction for a few hours then get back to it.

Oh well.

Let’s see what will happen at the next one shall we ?

Many thanks to the people who had sponsored me for movember, I appreciate it. I had raised a total of $126 considering I didn’t do much to hassle people to sponsor me. It’s a good amount.

Overall a record 96,623 Australians had registered themselves to raise $10,745,570 (money amount was correct at the time of writing). Well done, this amount had easily surpassed last year’s amount of money raised (approx $7.5 million).

Excellent….

I’m will be looking forward to doing it again next year.