The greatest prank call ever....

 When the telemarketers call do you just hang up, get angry, or have a little fun with them? Well here is an idea. This prank phone call proves that Karma exists, and you can fight back when it comes to unsolicited calls...

From my Inbox (The over 30 crowd will especially love this one).

 I love my Inbox. Like a good friendship it has the ability to make me laugh out loud, cry and sigh. Every day I log on excited to see what my friend has for me today, something to take me away from the ho-hum of my average week. So rather than keeping this one all to myself, I’ve decided to share...

TO THE SPOILED UNDER-30 CROWD:

 When I was a kid, adults used to bore me to tears with their tedious moaning and groaning about how hard things were. When they were growing up; what with walking Twenty-five miles to school every morning....uphill…barefoot…BOTH ways!

 And I remember promising myself that when I grew up, there was no way in hell I was going to lay a bunch of crap like that on my kids about how hard I had it and how easy they’ve got it.

 But now that…I’m over the ripe old age of thirty, I can’t help but look around and notice the youth of today. You’ve got it so easy, I mean, compared to my childhood, you live in a damn Utopia!

 And I hate to say it, but you kids today, you don’t know how good you’ve got it.

I mean, when I was a kid we didn’t have The Internet. If we wanted to know something, we had to go to the damn library and look it up ourselves, in the card catalogue!!

 There was no email!! We had to actually write somebody a letter - with a pen!

Then you had to walk all the way across the street and put it in the mailbox and it would take, like, a week to get there.

Stamps were 30 cents!

 Child Protective Services didn’t care if our parents beat us. As a matter of fact, the parents of all my friends also had permission to kick our ass, nowhere was safe!

 There were no MP3’ s or Limewire or Napster. If you wanted to steal music, you had to hitchhike to the damn record store and shoplift it yourself! Or you had to wait around all day to tape it off the radio and the DJ would usually talk over the beginning and stuff it all up. There were no CD players. We had tape decks in our car. We’d play our favourite tape and “eject” it when finished and the tape would come undone. Cause - that’s how we rolled, dig?

 We didn’t have fancy crap like Call Waiting. If you were on the phone and somebody else called they got a busy signal, that’s it! And we didn’t have fancy Caller ID either.
 When the phone rang, you had no idea who it was. It could be your school, your mum, your boss, your bookie, your drug dealer, a collections agent, you just didn’t know!!! You had to pick it up and take your chances, mister.

 We didn’t have any fancy Sony Playstation video games with high-resolution 3D graphics. We had the Atari 2600, with games like ‘Space Invaders’ and ‘Asteroids’. Your guy was a little square. You actually had to use your imagination. And there were no multiple levels or screens, it was just one screen…forever! And you could never win. The game just kept getting harder and harder and faster and faster until you died, just like LIFE!

 You had to use a little book called a TV Guide to find out what was on. You were screwed when it came to channel surfing. You had to get off your bum and walk over to the TV to change the channel. NO REMOTES!!!

 There was no Cartoon Network either. You could only get cartoons on Saturday morning. Do you hear what I’m saying!?! We had to wait ALL WEEK for cartoons, you spoiled little brats!

 And we didn’t have microwaves, if we wanted to heat something up we had to use the stove, imagine that!

 That’s exactly what I’m talking about; you kids today have got it too easy. You’re spoiled. You guys wouldn’t have lasted five minutes back in 1980 or before!

Regards,
The Over 30 Crowd

PS: This one had me laughing from start to finish and nodding my head in agreement and reminding me what it was like before we had all this stuff, and going "Oh yeah, those were the days! It's all so true." Brought back so many memories too hehe...

Australians would be rubbish on Pandora.

 So I finally caved and saw Avatar on DVD. A large enough number of trusted cynical friends gushed about the film to force me off my high horse and into the local Blockbuster store. As I gazed at the magical Pandoran landscape, a thought occurred.

Pandora is Australia.

 Bizarre plants in lush rainforests. Harsh terrain full of killer animals. Dirt rich with ore. An indigenous culture that is at one with nature. An introduced culture involved in wars they probably shouldn't be. Flies and bushfires all over the place. Pretty much everyone looks like they're wearing zinc. Then I realised that present-day Australians not only couldn't exist on Pandora, we wouldn't want to, and we'd probably stuff the place up in the process. So here, because I know the world is waiting for them, is the Top Eight Reasons Australians Would Be Rubbish On Pandora.

1. There are too many apostrophes:
 Australians aren't known for punctuation and grammar. City signs are full of apostrophe violations. So the phrase "Dave, I'd like you to meet Mo'at of the Na'vi clan" would just confuse and disorientate.

2. Everybody's pretty much nude:

 Seriously. Nobody would get any work done.

3. We're not very good at saying sorry:

 The Na'vi apologise to their prey while they're killing it. Bugger that - apologising to animals cuts into important barbecuing time.

4. The Na'vi get up really, really early:

 There is no snooze button in the Pandoran forest.

5. We would just use our banshees to go down to the shops:
 Give an Australian an animal that will fly them anywhere they want, and you won't see a nation filled with fit, lean, 3m-tall athletes pouncing from tree to tree. No, you'd see a nation of fat, lazy blue people whistling for their winged taxi every time they wanted a carton of milk or a packet of smokes. Give us a neural connection to our animals, so they know exactly where we want to travel, and I'll give you a big bunch of dinosaur-esque flying things all heading to the kebab shop at pub-closing time. Mind you, just like in Avatar, if a guy shows up with a bigger, redder, shinier flying creature than ours, we'll basically follow him into an exploding tree if he asks us to. Australians can, after all, appreciate the influential power of a sweeter ride.

6. The Na'vi take about ten minutes to accept illegal immigrants:

 If you're one of the Sky People trying to crack your way into the Na'vi tribe, all you need is a willingness to learn and the ability to attract floating seeds from a spooky tree. If you're one of the Boat People trying to crack your way into the Torres Strait, you'll need a pre-existing, comprehensive understanding of the language and culture, a high tolerance for detention centres and a good book.

7. Archery is the national sport:

 Archery. Nobody ever did the Mexican wave or built a beer-cup snake at the archery. Nobody ever had a scarf and beanie knitted featuring their favourite archer's name. And nobody ever streaked at the archery.

8. The landscape is unsuitable for caravans:

 On Pandora, what are old people supposed to do when they retire?

Endangered species - read on!

I miss rooting.

 Not the act but the word; that great Australian term for sexual congress that gets looks of horror when explained to overseas visitors. Rooting. Such an earthy descriptive word but it's being taken over nowadays by foreign synonyms such as shagging, screwing, banging, bonking and, god help us, getting laid. Arse is another term sliding out of usage, at least in the print media, where time and again it is judged far more prudent to use the US expression "butt" to describe someone's behind.

Pig's bum to that, I say...
 And yes, while we've still got a vast ocean of Aussie terms in common usage - words such as blue, flog, lob, pash, spew, sanga, piker, sheila, bodgy, bludger, cark and chocka - there are a great many that are dropping off faster than a speeding P-plater. Country folk reading this might well chuckle when I make that claim because many terms now considered ironic or old-fashioned by your average urban emo/DJ/stylist, live on in rural or coastal Australia, which I reckon is flippin' untold.

 And I fear that, one day soon, we'll have saved the northern hairy-nosed wombat thanks to the noble efforts of environmentalists and grudging intervention of politicians, but some of the following words will be deader than the Tassie tiger.

Some endangered species include:

Bonzer and ripper: A proclamation of extreme satisfaction. Being called a bonzer bloke or sheila 30 years ago was high praise, now there's a generation of Australians who think it's a hair gel. Or the new iPod.

Brasco: An admittedly unclear term for toilet.

Durry and dart: Synonyms for cigarette, the speaking of which in fashionable (rich) suburbs sees you eyeballed like an escapee from prison.

Burl: To attempt something. e.g. "I handed him a nicotine patch and said 'Give this a burl instead, ya nong.'"

Stiffy: A sadly fading term for the male erection rendered somehow naive by yet another Americanism, the "hard-on".

Ooroo: Thousands of grandmas working in tuck shops (school canteen) don't know any other way to say goodbye, god love 'em.

Donger: Another word for penis. No wonder women think men are obsessed.

Clacker and freckle: Your bottom or anus. Moving right along.

Nuddy and starkers: Nakedness. Often while swimming, drinking or reciting bush poetry.

Rack off: Piss off, you heard me.

Squiz and gander: To take a look at something or someone.

Togs: Cossies. Not those clingy, lycra man-pants that make men look like a holidaying Italian waiter.
Bum crawler: Another native overrun by the introduced foreign term "brown-nose". Being called a bum crawler used to be the greatest insult for someone who sucks up to you, now it's a search term on porn websites.

Veg out: Replaced by chillin', which is hardly as thrilling.

Brass razoo: An imaginary coin of trivial value, as in "I'm so broke I don't have a brass razoo."

Yakka: Hard work. See the shorts.

Clobber: While daks and strides still linger as names for pants, the all-purpose term for clothing gets less use than Anthony Whatmough’s dictionary.

Chunder: Writing in The Times Literary Supplement, Barry Humphries explained the word's meaning as being "the act of involuntary regurgitation". To spew.

Foo foo valve: As in "that looks heavy, watch out you might burst a foo foo valve".

Cobber: Your mate, who you'd help if they were chundering or bursting a foo foo valve.

Wowser: C.J. Dennis, author of The Songs of a Sentimental Bloke defined it as "an ineffably pious person who mistakes this world for a penitentiary and himself for a warder".

Galah and drongo: Rarely invoked by persons under 30, both are all-purpose insults conveying reasonable contempt.

Nong: See above.

Flip-flops: A description for thongs, which means G-strings in other countries and certainly confuses Americans when Aussie men and women talk about "wearing thongs to the beach".

Wigwam for a goose's bridle: A fantastical and useless item, the invoking of which snubs off an unwanted question, similar to saying "none of your business", i.e. "What's that in your pocket, mate?" "A wigwam for a goose's bridle, you drongo."

If any of you know of any other Aussie slang terms that you’re not sure about, let me know and I’ll add them on for you.