Month: February 2016

Rob Thomas told the truth but Australians can’t handle the truth

Lili Gans totally absurd

Poor Rob Thomas made a comment about Australians being big alcohol drinkers. He also said that the traditional owners, that is, the aborigines, were heavy drinkers as well.

For this he had to apologise.

Why?  When he only spoke the truth.

Australians do drink. In fact, for them it’s a rite of passage. Heavy drinking is responsible for car accidents, domestic violence and violence in the streets. In fact,  being drunk has been used as a mitigating excuse for breaking the law. “I didn’t know what I was doing, your Honour,  cause I was pissed.”

The hospitals are overwhelmed on the weekend by drunks who are violent towards nurses and doctors.  Aggressive behaviour combined with the use of other drugs chokes our health system and it is the genuinely sick people who cannot be treated in our emergency departments because of these drunks who waste our precious resources.

There is hardly an event in Australia that doesn’t involve drinking. Watching sport? Have a beer. Fishing? Have a beer.  Watching TV? Have a beer. It’s hard to think of any occasion that doesn’t involve drinking alcohol.

Now, I have nothing against drinking in moderation, but being too drunk to remember what you did seems to be the ambition of many revellers and that is pathetic.  It could be our colonial heritage that is to blame.  Who knows why?

A few years ago someone wrote a song about a pub with no beer. It was amusing but also prophetic and it became one of those iconic songs in Australia.  Seems to me it would be hard to imagine a greater tragedy for the majority of Aussies than running out of grog.

It’s a pity that poor Rob Thomas had to cop it for telling it the way it is.

 

 

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What sort of creature abandons women and children?

Lili Gans Uncategorized

Two weeks ago I attended a Current Affairs discussion.  As usual, the subject of  “refugees” or  “migrants” came up.

I posed the question :

“If Australia were being attacked by an enemy would you expect the young Aussie men to abandon their families, their parents, their wives and children, and escape to another country or would you expect them to stay in Australia and defend and protect them?”

That question received much applause.

This afternoon,  visiting Canadian journalist Mark Steyn made the same comment on our local radio station, 3AW, about who was abandoning the elderly and the helpless in the Middle East.  It made my day.

Disgusting Smiths Crisps TV advertisement

Lili Gans What Pisses me off

If you want to judge a society you should observe what TV ads appeal to it. It will tell you a lot about the moral fibre of viewers.  Of course,  it may only tell you about the values of the marketing companies, but you have to concede that along the line,  after the ad men created the ad,  the manufacturers must have  approved  the commercial.  So both manufacturers and marketing had to agree on the ethics of the campaign.

In this case, I feel entitled to blame the manufacturers of Smiths Crisps who are originally an Australian company founded by a Mr Smith, but which is now owned by Pepsi.

The advertisement which has distressed me is the one which shows an elderly woman opening the door to a repairman who has come to fix her stairlift.  He enters and  places his open tool box on the floor.   She notices that he has a packet of Smiths Crisps in it.  This old lady wants some and when the repairman closes the tool box she steals a part of the stairlift.

When he sits down on the stairlift and turns it on to test it,  it shoots upstairs and ejects him out of the window.   She then chuckles to herself and steals the packet of Smiths Crisps.

The final scene of the commercial portrays the old crone cheerfully  munching on the crisps.

Is that funny or is that funny?

Wow!  What a distressing depiction of old age!  The worst aspect of this commercial is that it condones violence and theft.

Shame on Smiths,  shame on Pepsi,  shame on the marketers and shame on the TV channels who didn’t have the moral fibre to reject this tasteless ad.

Irritating women at supermarket checkouts

Lili Gans Uncategorized, What Pisses me off

Here is a typical scene at a supermarket checkout. You are standing in line behind a few women. You have your credit card at the ready.  This is contrary to the behaviour of  other women in front of you who go through the checkout and then at the end of the process are taken by surprise…apparently.

It seems that the checkout person expects them to pay.

So now the farce begins. Most female shoppers fumble in the depth of their handbags. Out come the hair dryers, the make-up purse, the chocolates, the collection of tissues and all sorts of other personal items until at the very bottom of the abyss,  the wallet is found. Then it takes a few minutes till the credit card or cash is located.

This seems to be a female thing.  They go through the process of placing the shopping items on the counter and  it’s only when the cashier has finished totalling that they work out that they actually have to pay for their purchase.

Of course this lack of  preparation slows everybody else down.

Honestly,  I have no idea how their mind works.

Now men, on the other hand,  always,  and I mean always,  have their wallets or credit cards ready so as not to delay the other shoppers in the queue.

I invite you all to observe this weird phenomenon.

Which is why when I select a queue in a supermarket I always head for the one that has many men in it.