Welcome to a special global edition of Bellamy’s Barometer where we celebrate all that is great about world superpowers. After all, we wouldn’t call them ’super’ if they weren’t kind, loving and generous big brothers, the sheriffs of the global community, gleaming like the sun with incredibly bright sunlight that blinds us in a really, really awesome way. This column celebrates our superior brothers, who teach piddly little Australia about things like electronics, why abortion sucks, and that canola oil is for Obama-lovers because real men drink lard.
Please join me on this exploration, sit right down and roll down your metaphoric window, just remember that seatbelts are for cheese-eatin’ surrender monkeys who would choke on a freedom fry even if it was the soggiest thing in the world, so you should just give up and stop calling yourself a patriot, because patriots are fighting right now for your right to LIVE and PROSPER, they’re in Iraq and Afghanistan and Dubai, just sweating their little butts off for you, you stupid leftie scum.
HOT:
Buying major purchases in a flippant way.
The other day I decided the time had finally come to purchase an iPod; after all I’m a saavy, hip laydey, about to travel the world by myself at the end of the year, about to be accosted by architecture and museums and friendly fellow backpackers in hostels, so I need a way to BLOCK THESE THINGS OUT and remain my USUAL ANTI-SOCIAL SELF. This is where the iPod comes in. I did a lot of research about which kind I should buy. I knew I needed an iPod and not some other crap MP3 player because one day when the Apple company swallows the rest of the world and replaces all ruling leaders and my favourite reality TV stars with a blow-up figure of Steve Jobs, I want to be sitting firmly in the Apple camp, texting from my iPhone, blogging furiously about Apple-sanctioned matters on my MacBook and shivering tremulously to the strains of Delta Goodrem’s Innocent Eyes on my 80G brick’a’love.
My research also let me decide exactly what I was going to buy: I knew it was going to be black, and a classic model, and this meant I could do my favourite thing ever when I went to the shop: buy something fairly expensive in a really flippant way. It went like this:
David Jones electronics salesperson: Hello, can I help you?
Me: One iPod please.
DJES: Alright. Which kind?
Me: (points at glass cabinet) That one.
DJES: (looks in) The 80G classic?
Me: It needs to be black.
Uncomfortable pause.
DJES: Let me ring that up for you.
LIGHTS DOWN.
I heartily recommend that you all try and make a major purchase in a flippant manner this week. It doesn’t have to be expensive; it can be a tattoo or an adoption, just little things that you can get rid of one day if you change your mind. We can change the world, readers! One credit card at a time!
NOT
Being shit at a language
If you were keen readers who read my first paragraph in full instead of just skipping down to the NOT paragraph, also known as ‘the MONEY SECTION!!1!’, you would notice that I am going on a trip at the end of the year. I will be travelling to countries where people speak Mandarin, Gaelic, Greek, Italian, Spanish, Cantonese and Hungarian (which, for bonus sensitivity points that could maybe help you pick up one day, is also known as ‘Magyar’).
Of these languages, I know how to say ‘you’re welcome’ in Italian, and how to order my favourite carbohydrate-rich cuisine. There are many other things I need to learn before I go away though, like how to ask for vegetarian food, where the nearest toilet is, or in which part of town I might find the most authentic reproduction of classic Commedia Dell Arte, in order to satisfy my need for Il Dottore’s sanguine advice to a hot-headed Arlecchino; just regular shit that all tourists need to ask for.
What I’m saying here is that I’m going to be wandering around Spain just repeating ‘Eva Longoria’ and ‘Carlos Santana’ in baffled distress, because I am an uneducated slob who can only speak my birth tongue. And this, dear readers, is where I link in to my slightly inflammatory opening to today’s Barometer: if globalisation was more widespread, I wouldn’t feel the urge to travel and subsequently embarrass myself by making sage comments on the site-specific outdoor performance of contemporary youth in Belfast when what I’m really watching is a bunch of dudes trying to blow up a bus. Instead, I would stay at home and enjoy all the wonderful worldly products of international culture just sitting at my fingertips, I’d watch Living Lohan and So NoTORIous, I’d get the Jonas Brothers CD as soon as the boys released it, and I would be one happy, worldly customer.
