The Backflip Boys Weblog

I’ve always been an advocate of the concept that you never stop learning. While some things take a few days to learn and others a few years, ultimately, no matter how long a person lives, those little life lessons never stop popping up. Here’s a short list of a few things I have learned:

Never pour bleach into an electric kettle in an effort to clean the brown gunk that years of use deposits on the inside. Black may be a great colour for a cocktail dress, French maid outfit or the night sky, but when it’s inside a kettle it will only result in the spending of $31.99.

While walking may be a great way to get the heart rate up and burn off a few extra calories, it isn’t so good on that part of the back used to bend over. On the other hand, there is the realisation that a pair of slip on/off shoes is a much better idea after an extended period of time in an upright position.

While something you have lost will always be in the last place you look, it will never be in the first place you look. Therefore it is advisable to always look in the last place first - it will save a lot of time.

Long term friendships have nothing to do with the earning of trust and respect. In the end, you’re just someone to talk to, ask a favour of or yell at when someone can’t accept they are wrong.

Whenever you lose something, chances are it will be in your other pair of pants. My advice - buy another pair of pants…. NOW!

The perfect thing to say to someone during an argument will come to you within 15 minutes after you have parted company. I have won so many arguments at home because of this.

When in a group of males, the conversation will always turn to sport, cars and sex and ways all three can be intertwined. When there are females around, it’s all about kids.

There is only one person you can rely on 100% of the time - yourself. Prove me wrong.

It doesn’t matter how old you are, in your mothers eyes, you are always going to be her baby.

Animals are just waiting for their chance to take back the planet - your pets are plotting against you on a daily basis.

When you get old, young people don’t regard you as wise, they see you as a creepy pervert.

No matter how hard you wish you were adopted, you are never prepared for the disappointment that comes with the realisation that you are a blood relation to your family line.

Life will always be a learning experience. Obviously, some of what I just wrote was intended to be amusing, but most of it rings true. I learn something new every day about myself, the people around me and life in general. I have a very flexible attitude which lets me adapt to different situations. I may not be as quick witted as some of my colleagues but I am certainly a fast learner.

God, the universe or whatever you believe in will throw curve balls at you at any opportunity. Just remember this - the important things in life will be the hardest to learn, especially those things you need to learn about yourself. Everything else will be a walk in the park.

My hope for myself is that I never stop learning.

Later days.

Trivial fact number 132:- Ernest Bevin, British Minister of Labour during WW II, left school at the age of 11 (eleven) - and I bet the country was run a lot better with undereducated politicians than it is today.

Today I decided that instead of getting in the car to take to 8 - 10 minute drive to the nearest hardware store (Bunnings at Minchinbury), I would walk the distance and see how long it took. It ended up taking me about an hour each way because it is actually located just under 2 complete suburbs away from my house. Couple those two hours with the 20 or so minutes I spent inside, and it killed off the boring part of the day.

I tend to not take a lot of notice of what is whizzing past me as I speed along the roads leading to this massive structure full of tools and other hardware bits and pieces so walking gave me an opportunity to take in a bit more of the surroundings that I have been living amongst for the past 18 years since I moved to my current address (I would say current house, but as you know, it’s not the same house I moved into originally so I won’t confuse you by stating that).

It is interesting how different the houses look when you get a chance to see them from ground level while walking at a nice steady pace. In the blink of an eye at 80km/h, you don’t get to take note of too much detail such as the house that has the exquisitely odd 3 ft tall concrete Kangaroo whose pouch was being used as a mail box - its tail was not to scale. Certainly one of the more strange, but uniquely Australian, concepts I have seen when it comes to the extravagant mail boxes some people have.

One section of my trip took me past a sizable vacant block of land that will one day have four houses built on it. When you drive past, you don’t notice that there is a light pole in the middle of one of the driveway lay backs and an electrical pod in the middle of another. Both things will make it difficult for whoever builds there to get their cars in and out. I will forever be astounded at the logical intelligence of the highly qualified people who decide where these items should go.

Footpaths are another thing. These are things I take little notice of when I am driving but for some strange reason, a lot of streets have them only on one side of the road and even that isn’t laid out in any consistent format. One block will have a path on the right side of the road while the next will have it on the left or have no path at all. The council recently put in a new footpath across the road from my house and when I asked one of the workers if my side was going to be done, he said no. Yet the other end of the road has a path on both sides. I am at a loss to figure it out.

Walking over to Minchinbury is the furthest I have walked in a long time as well, but with petrol at such a high price, I figured that it was a more economical choice to walk plus it satisfied my voyueristic tendencies to want to look into peoples yards. They aren’t evil tendencies, just curious ones. Only at night do they become evil.

Later days.

Trivial fact number 131:- Julius Caesar wore a laurel wreath to cover the onset of baldness - beats a combover any day.

….why pets are easier to cope with than family:

1. They won’t hit you with insurmountable problems the minute you open your front door. Be thankful they can’t speak because animals have a lot of issues.
2. They take up only a small amount of space, as do babies. However, babies eventually turn into teenagers.
3. They don’t care that the colour of your new car doesn’t match the colour of the house or their coats. Try winning that one with your wife.
4. When you cuddle them and say nice things to them, they don’t immediately ask you what you’ve done wrong. Once again, try that with the wife.
5. You can put them on a leash, in a harness or dress them up in gay little suits and you won’t get sued later for humiliating them in public. It never done me no harm.
6. They don’t cause arguments about where to go on holidays. They go to boarding kennels.
7. If they get annoying, you can lock them outside. You can do that with kids, but eventually, you are legally required to let them back in.
8. Funerals for them are very cheap. You can bury them in the back yard and it isn’t an effort to visit them.
9. When they get old and sick, they can be given a dignified death. Maybe we should class our elderly as pets…..
10. They will love you unconditionally. Truly.

Later days.

Trivial fact number 130:- In 1969, shares in the Australian company “Poseidon” were worth $1. One year later, they were worth $280 each - and you thought the internet boom was crazy.

Somewhere in Hollywood, Sean S. Cunningham is still rubbing his hands together because he realised that you can make a really low budget movie based on a superstitious fear of a particular date or event in a year then have it race out of control and make you a few millions dollars plus generate numerous sequels to help buy that second (or third) mansion you always wanted. Mind you, John Carpenter had already thought of the idea in 1978 when he gave us Halloween, but that’s a holiday that only comes around once a year in one country in the world, so it doesn’t elicit the same response that Friday the 13th does.

Trivially, the fear of Friday the 13th is called paraskavedekatriaphobia, a word derived from the concatenation of the Greek words Paraskeví, meaning Friday, and dekatreís, meaning thirteen, attached to phobía, meaning fear. The term is a specialized form of triskaidekaphobia, a simple fear of the number thirteen appearing in any case.

I’m not a superstitious person, unless you believe Karma to be a form of superstition which I do have a slight belief in. In fact, give me a ladder leaning against a wall and I’ll happily walk under it. Step on a crack? I’m there. Hell, I even own a black cat. I’ve known people to throw salt over their shoulders to ward off some imagined evil - the only evil I could think of would be the fact that someone will have to get the vacuum out to clean the mess up.

I don’t really think that I believe in the idea of good and bad luck. Things happen randomly - sometimes they have good consequences and other times they are disastrous. If I find some money on the ground, it isn’t good luck, it’s nothing more than it slipping out of someones hand or pocket and not realising it or bothering to pick it up. If, after 10 successful goes at jumping off my roof onto a pile of mattresses, I miss them on the 11th go, that’s just my stupidity at diving off the roof in the first place. What I really needed there was my sign.

My mother was a superstitious person. Black cats, ladders, mirrors - the standards. She also had a ritual where she would always buy a lottery ticket on any Friday the 13th. While she had the whole bad luck thing going on, I think she also thought that buying a ticket on what is deemed the unluckiest day of the year would counteract it. Suffice it to say, she never won the lottery.

This particular Friday the 13th (which is today) would have been my mothers 74th birthday. That, I guess, is the problem with being born on the 13th of any month - eventually, it comes around to being “that” Friday. This would have meant that she’d have made the special extra effort to get out and buy that lottery ticket first thing this morning. My overly logical mind generally took perverse pleasure in letting her know it was all bunk. She couldn’t come back at me though - mothers are contractually obligated to tolerate their children. If you don’t believe me, ask yours.

So, I’m off to walk under a ladder or two, rub my black cat all over my body (not in a perverse way) and find as many cracks in the pavement I can. I’d break a mirror, only I need those to shave.

Later days.

Trivial fact number 129:- Queen Elizabeth 1st passed a law which forced everyone except the rich to wear a flat cap on Sundays - now you know how and why beer coasters and midgets were invented.

I decided a few months back that I have about another 50 years left in me. That would take me to the ripe old age of 92. Not a bad innings really, and with a history of longevity in my family, a fairly optimistic and reasonable expectation. Assuming my health holds out and my mental stability continues its exceedingly slow (but constant) decline, I’m hoping to go out with very little fanfare and at least some of the knowledge that has managed to lead me to where I will be at the appropriate time. Of course, knowing the way my luck falls, every single atom that makes up the universe is going to conspire to ensure that I live forever - or at least long enough to learn how to play the Theramin properly.

My physical well being is something I take about as much interest in as the annual top to bottom clean of the house - not a great deal. It helps that I compare the medical profession to cab drivers and lawyers - full of opportunistic thieves out to make a buck or two. I wouldn’t have a clue what my cholesterol levels are or whether my blood pressure is good or bad (I was once told I was borderline - fairly generic and unhelpful at best). About the only time I need to see a doctor is when I have my 5 yearly medical exam for my job.

At work the other morning, Driver Mathews was mildly concerned about my lack of interest in my health and encouraged me to go and get a full physical, but since he had a heart attack, he’s become a tad more cautious when it comes to health matters than most people.

Apart from the usual childhood illnesses that children go through (my mother said I had them so I must have), my only other major period of being sick was the three weeks in 2000 that I had Chicken Pox (obviously I didn’t have all of them when I was young). I’ve been living pretty much a charmed life when it comes to getting damaged, with the only major things being a chipped middle finger bone on one of my hands as a result of falling off the top bunk, a slightly dodgy knee after a bush dancing incident and a case of bruised testicles at 14 due to a disastrous game of leap frog (my friend Allan had a ridiculously hard head, but on the positive side, it did get me out of P.E. for a couple of weeks).

What surprises me about the lack of interest I take in being healthy is that the less I think about it, the more I seem to be in pretty good condition for my age. The general body shape is a bit odd, but the physical condition of that shape is working out well for me. I think if I molded the body into a slightly more acceptable shape, lost a few kilos and shaved off my (slightly) graying beard, I could almost pass for around 35 years of age. Thankfully, however, a general lack of middle aged vanity prevents me from carrying on like a chook.

On the other hand, I know a lot of people around my age (and younger) who do everything they can to preserve their health and wellbeing. They eat all the right foods, exercise regularly and keep an eye on all those little things like vitamin intake, their cholesterol and blood sugar levels yet they are the ones who are always getting colds and flu or have diabetes, high cholesterol or blood pressure issues. My older friends generally don’t seem to get sick that often at all. Even the genetics in my family seem to have bypassed everyone else and lean in my favour when it comes to being healthy.

I enjoy cooking my own meals and only splurge out on takeaway food once a week (Friday night binge at the fish and chip shop). I have been known, on occasion, to buy a bacon and egg roll for breakfast at work as well. I think there are two extremes when it comes to putting food into our bodies - extremely healthy or “call the funeral home” - and then there is the middle ground of moderation, a place which I like to inhabit. It becomes difficult to go there with some of the odd shifts I work, but I’ve managed to get into a rhythm by feeding myself when I am hungry rather than when I have time.

Also, because of the sedentary nature of my job, I’ll take any form of low impact exercise I can get. Mostly a bit of walking. Low impact because I have come to grips that I am 42 years old and the mind is more willing than the body to do things. I do have a bicycle which I haven’t ridden that in a couple of years but I think that this summer may be when it gets a bit of a work out.

You will often hear me espousing the merits of children eating food dropped on the floor or rolling themselves in mud. Not because I have some strange fetish for these activities, but because I feel that todays children are kept in a more sterile state by paranoid parents and the plethora of cleaning materials available on hand at any time. There has always been the 5 second rule when it comes to food falling on the ground - if you pick it up within 5 seconds, it’s still good (of course, there are some exceptions as to what the food falls into). Mothers spitting into a hankie to clean our faces didn’t do my generation any harm at all - in fact, it probably did us all a world of good to have our faces and hands smothered in mothers germs.

So for me, it’s simple. What I don’t know won’t kill me. Well, actually it probably will but since I won’t know it’s killing me, it won’t matter - especially after I’m dead. I tend to think that by knowing you are sick, you tend to resign yourself to that fact thus slow down the healing process by worrying yourself into a frenzy about it. I don’t have any proof, but it seems to me that people with a terminal illness who are told they have a specific amount of time to live, do tend to get sicker faster and live up to that prediction, whereas people who don’t want to know lead a much more fulfilling life until their body tells them it’s time to stop.

That’s where I want to be.

Later days.

Trivial fact number 128:-Catherine The 1st of Russia made a rule that no man was allowed to get drunk at one of her parties before 9:00pm - women could be lushes obviously.