Kill Two Ibis With One Stone!

Dear Ibis,

Many may not be aware of this, but you are the official international bird of Sydney. As a resident of this area, I come in contact with you far too often and I have a few bones to pick over with you.

The first bone is why are you even here? How did you get here? I have consulted with the oracle and she told me that you are actually a native of Australia. And that your sister is the African Sacred Ibis. Logic fails me.

According to the internets, I am not the only one who thinks of you as a ‘bin chicken’, ‘dump chook’ or a ‘tip turkey’. You are despised the web over and this pleases me, however I have more personal grievances with you. For example, the fact that you insist upon joining me for every meal that I have outside. I have a tale from childhood that I would like to recount.

I was six or seven and had just enjoyed a magical day peering at animals in cages at Taronga Zoo. I had had the small but terrifying experience of getting my head stuck between the bars of the kangaroo enclosure and my mother excitedly telling me that they were dangerous before assisting her screaming son’s escape. I had also watched, wide-eyed with fear as a pack of spider monkeys stalked, caught and tore apart a lonely sparrow that had ventured into their cage. I was a little fragile but my mother had bought me some hot chips and dragged out the buttered bread so I could make myself a carb-loaded sandwich. I was happily doing this when one of you horrific avian specimens appeared out of nowhere, grabbed my entire packet of hot chips and knocked it to the ground, where you squawkingly devoured them.

Understandably, considering the day I had experienced, I burst into tears. My mother, stoic leader that she is, refused to buy more hot chips for me and forced me to eat my butter sandwich instead. I can only assume that she was hoping I might learn from this survival of the fittest routine however at the time it was utterly soul destroying.

Do I blame my mother for this zoo experience? No. I blame you, Ibis. Clearly you are at fault.

As I have aged, I have found more reasons to despise you. You smell like all the homeless people in Sydney bathed in the same water, condensed the remaining muck into a perfume and injected it into your sweat glands. I can actually smell you before I can see you and this sickens me more than anything else in the entire world. It is rare to cultivate a stench that actually provokes a physical reaction but you have done this Ibis, and every time I smell you, I vomit into my mouth a little.

You have a disgusting red flap of bare skin underneath each wing and tiny shrunken naked heads which makes you seem like zombie birds. Zombies are terrifying and so are you.

If this were the zombocalypse, and it will be soon, I would target you first. With all strictures of society gone, I would be free to shoot, stab and tear you apart to my heart’s content. Yes, this would reduce me to precisely your level but everyone will be dead and no one will judge me! So watch out Ibis, because when the first zombie strikes, I’m shucking on my gauntlet and coming for you!

Adrik

Copy Fat Cats

Dear American Producer,

Imagine my disgust when I learned Australian cult classic Wilfred had been remade without my express permission. Before the fur of disgust took seed there was a wave of confusion, not dissimilar to the confusion poor Wilfred must have experienced when his master transformed inexplicably into an American hobbit (yes, LOTR fans, I appreciate this is impossible). Dogs can be really traumatised by change, as can audiences.

Later that day, the shock of Bizarro Wilfred resurrected a memory of the trailer for Death at a Funeral, the original of which is more quintessentially British than a milky tea, bad teeth, fish and chips in yesterday’s newspaper, miserable weather and Big Ben cocktail. Again, the recycling of a key player, being Peter Dinklage as dwarf Peter, was confusing. One can only surmise he played the role (renamed Frank) under duress involving electrodes and hot irons. Will the world’s little people ever be free from persecution?

Cue tsunami of formerly repressed memories, saturating the synaptic landscape of my brain, forcing me to relive the horror of learning of so many misguided remakes. Lost in Austen, set in fictional Georgian England, relocated to where, Austin Texas? More like lost in translation. Life on Mars, which you actually set ON MARS. As in the planet. Did you not even watch the original? David Bowie wept. Even the brilliant Miss Marple could not solve the mystery of how the universe allowed her to be dragged across the pond and played by charmless Jennifer Garner. Perhaps worst of all though was Kath and Kim, a show so culturally specific as to be so necessarily completely inimitable and only a dozen Australians really got it. That was one pilot even Cubana Airlines would want nothing to do with.

Other honourable mentions are the shameless casting of creepy William H Macy in Shameless, the skinning of the brilliance of Skins, the official doglegging of The Office, the hackneying of Hachi, the wringing of the Ring and now talk of remaking the Inbetweeners which sits morally somewhere in between genocide and unleashing a WMD. Why not just go all the way and remake classics like This is England, Australia and Big Trouble in Little China.

Admittedly you have adopted, mastered and really enhanced many foreign creations, like the motorcar, democracy and imperialism. If I wasn’t armed with gauntlets I would be afraid to write this for fear of imitation by you, changing the font to size 48, with animation, added sugar a crass backing voiceover and some sort of NASCAR wallpaper. It’s time now to stop taking square-pegged, archetypal and iconic works of cinematic brilliance from abroad and trying to shove them into the round holes of your television and film industries, so to speak.

Kyrani

Mxffy

Dear Miffy,

You are a strange leporine piece of jailbait that has haunted me since I first learned of you deep in the dark depths of my teenagedom. You wear a cutesy little dress and have fat little ears and small features like you have been designed by someone in Japan or China, but you are not, are you Miffy? You are not! You are Dutch! That aside, you are almost sixty years old which is offensive considering your trap-like exterior.

Now, in Dutch…land your name is Nijntje which, and I’m sorry to say this, is clearly a monster’s name. It’s a scary, pointy name with no comfort in it at all. Somewhere else in the Netherlands, your nest is located and it is known as Nijntjepleintje. The Dutch tell me via wikipedia that this means ‘little Nijntje square’ which is oh so sweet and twee but also a filthy lie for I know, deep within my soul, that it means ‘mountain of skulls upon which Nijntje sleeps’.

I could go on and on about your blood-soaked origins, your draconian law-hands laying down all over Sanrio and poor Hello Kitty and her friend Cathy, as well as your infiltration into the imaginations of children all over the world ala Skynet and the end of said world, but I will not. Do you know why? It is because there is something far more sinister lurking underneath your two-tone surface. And that something is your mouth.

Your adorable, cross-stitched, miniature mouth carved straight from the bowels of hell itself. Clearly no one has thought practically about this mouth or you would not be so adored. For this mouth is not for speaking, or mouth-breathing, or any such thing, is it Miffy? No. It’s for eating children! I have counted the lips on your face, and there are four of them. Four! Someone else I know also has a mouth with four lips. That person is the Predator. And we all know what happens when he opens his mouth, don’t we? Shit gets real.

So what will happen on the occasion that you open your mouth publicly for the first time? It will be rather like a coming out party, where the world discovers that innocent little Miffy is in fact a soul-sucking demon, come to eat their younglings and bathe in their blood! It will be a day of doom.

So rest now, Miffy, like the succubus that you are, but know that my army of revolutionaries grows stronger every day, and be-armed with these gauntlets, we shall rise up and fight for our lives in the face of your unspeakable horror.

Adrik

Shhhhhhhh!

Dear Moviegoer,

You come in many forms and types, much like Pokemon, however I despise you all, much unlike Pokemon. When I decide to go to the cinema however, for some reason I do not recall this absolute hatred and blindly careen into a den of moronic twits each and every time. Why on Earth it cannot be me alone in the cinema every time, I don’t know, but since I do have to apparently deal with you people, I would like to remind you of some cinematic etiquette on the off-chance that you realise your idiocy and the even more remote chance that you attempt to change your ways.

Firstly, as the giant notice preceding every film at every cinema everywhere in the entire world states, SHHHHHH! Films are to be enjoyed on their own merits and surprisingly, I did not pay an enormous amount of money to listen to your commentary while I watch something very likely to be quite close to my heart, like the previous analogy of Pokemon. Further to this, any comments that you do make are generally witless, infuriating or delivered in a tone of voice that seems to pierce my brain with a type of pure irritation I have rarely felt. Sadly, unlike the commentary of a DVD (similarly infuriating and pointless) I cannot deselect you. But that I could…

Following directly on from this, and also in that giant notice shown before the film, cinemas are no place for telephone conversations. Nor are they the place to be SMSing, Twittering or tumblring from. They are in fact, a place in which to watch a film. If you cannot spend two hours away from the Internet and your various vacuous iPhone apps then you are a sad excuse for a human being and likely should never have left the hole you crawled out from. If you insist on answering your phone call, then at least have the decency only to do so in an emergency and to leave the cinema when you do. Do not say to someone ‘I’m in a movie’ or ‘I can’t talk now’ because these sentences are ridiculous and you should be shot if you do. Failing this, you should at least be lifetime banned from cinemas worldwide.

On the subject of small sources of general irritation, I have noticed on occasion that some of your more prolific examples enjoying bringing an entire flock of children with you to a film that is clearly inappropriate for their age. Toddlers do not mix well with adults at the best of times and halfway through a tense psychological thriller when your child decides to start asking questions or running down the aisle or pooing themselves is hardly the best of times. And just quietly, anyone below the age of twenty five should not be allowed entry to a cinema in a group of more than two unless they have passed a rigorous examination to determine that they are one of the rare young people who are not odious.

Now I don’t want to move on from your obnoxious talking variety, Moviegoer, but I’m afraid your other types deserve some light also. Directly central to my ears is my nose and this is accosted time and time again by the oft mentioned and seemingly never resolved Body Odour. The cinema is actually not your ‘good room’. It is not acceptable to remove your shoes and place your besocked, tinea-encrusted feet on the back of my chair or even worse, at the point of my armrest so that my elbow may occasionally come in contact with them. I do not know if my elbow is susceptible to tinea and I have no desire to find out. You, and all your cronies need to keep your shoes on. Nothing, nothing is more offensive than Body Odour, except perhaps when wielded by you, Moviegoer, then it is a fine line.

Coming a close second though is the smell of other people’s fast food. Considering the rule that hot, outside food is not allowed in cinemas, this is generally smuggled in down tops and in handbags and brought out in a crumpled mass of warmth to be scoffed in the dark much like a rat might eat a cockroach in the sewer. Because of this method of transport, it compounds some people’s Body Odour and permeates the air with sickly, oily fumes. It is overwhelmingly abhorrent to me to have to smell your half-congealed pad thai or moist naan or plastic mass of McDonalds. Eat it before or after the film outside the cinema, please. I beg of you. Grow some common sense. Sadly, this plea is likely falling on the deafest of ears.

I haven’t even touched on perverts, inappropriate PDAs or questioners. Nor have I talked about tall people in front of you or fat people attempting to get past you or applauders! There are too many types of Moviegoer than I care to think about and it would be impossible for me to catch you all. Hopefully however, this gauntlet will eradicate you all and I will no longer need to fear my cinematic experience.

Adrik

Bog Off!

Dear Bog Troll,

I hate you.

Yours sincerely

Kyrani

……..

Haha, no you don’t get off that quickly, but seriously, I really do hate you. WHY ARE YOU THERE? If there ever was a profession that shouldn’t exist, surely it is yours. There is a reason you are not affectionately called Latrine Consultant, Strategic Toilet Director or Ablution Administration Assistant. It’s because your name is true to form – you work in a bog (loo) and you live in a bog (bog) and you are a TROLL!

You know, nobody chooses to go to the loo. Sadly, our bodies make us do it so that we may ingest many delicious foods and drinks, but it is unpleasant and I for one, resent paying for the privilege! We are all taught to do it from a young age and except in special cases, do not require assistance beyond infancy. I don’t need you to pump soap onto my hand or hand me a paper towel, and when you ration out the loo roll I want to spray your cheap deodorant in your eyes.

The first time I see you is at the inaugural “breaking of the seal” visit and I am shocked, for I will have repressed any memory of your existence since my last night out, and frankly you are an unwelcome blow when I open the door. You want me to hand over my hard earned cash, but here’s the catch - I don’t carry cash. Why? Because it’s absolutely, f*#king disgusting. If I did carry cash, I still would not want to give it to you because you do nothing for me I can’t do myself.

You serve no purpose and you should get a job that actually needs doing. When we make eye contact I insincerely apologise and justify the absence of filthy cash on my person. You make me lie! In reality I have no intention of paying you at any point during the evening. After my second visit I know our relationship will soon sour, though not as sour as the air you must breathe for the duration of your shift. Imagine the UTI’s you are causing in women and men who avoid going to the loo on nights out to avoid you and your brethren. For shame.

Before I close, a special shout out goes to the Bog Troll at a certain karaoke establishment I won’t name other than to say it’s in a part of London that starts with “F” and rhymes with Claringdon and has the word “Box” in its title. Reading the bible instead of doing your “job” is not going to put food on the table for your many children. Furthermore, your office is the toilet in a karaoke club. God has clearly forsaken you.

So Bog Troll, though I wish I could throw you into a river like the 3^rd Billy Goat Gruff did, sadly I can’t, so throwing this gauntlet at you will have to do for now. Until electric hand-dryers and common-sense prevail, you will be free to lurk about in nightclubs and bars handing out paper towel, stale lollipops and cheap perfume, but rest assured I have my eye on you and I will be celebrating heartily and rejoicing when your kind disappears from these classy establishments FOREVER.

Kyrani