I’m a public transport user, it’s not something I’m particular proud of, nor ashamed for that matter; after all it’s saving the environment blah, blah, insert tree-hugging-soliloquy-here. The point is, and trust me I am getting to one, is that by being a public transport user you’re privy to some of the world’s more annoying and unhygienic (that’s another story all together) traits.

Lets ignore the fact that talking on your mobile phone whilst in a crowded public place is down right rude, obnoxious and always results in the person talking in excess of ten times the volume of a 747 engine less than a metre from your ear drum for just a second and examine the latest fashion of annoyance by utilizing your phone’s whizz bang speaker phone functionality.

Most phone’s these days have the ability to use them in a “hands-free” mode where the caller’s voice is pumped out for all to hear and the phone’s microphone is turned up a notch to capture your own voice the general idea being that the phone is not right next to your mouth. Makes perfect sense really, the functionality was ideally created so that you could use your phone in your car (legally) even though that too is now counted as illegal in South Australia, requiring your car to be equipped with a completely separate hands free device. What completely bemuses me, and this is where we get to this post actually meaning something, is why people feel the need to use their “speaker phone” in public places? Why would I or anyone else within a hundred feet feel the need to hear both ends of your conversation let alone just your side?!! If you absolutely *have* to take the call turn off the speaker you f@#king moron!

I might add that this isn’t limited to public transport by any means, lately I’ve seen it around every shady corner I turn. It makes no sense, these people hold the phone less than two inches from their mouths to ensure the person on the other end hears them properly so why not exert yourself that little extra and put the bloody thing next to your ear and save the world from your rather boring life. (OK, so that’s harsh, but someone has to make a stand here!)

The only thing more dumb (although slightly less annoying to everyone around you) is seeing people with the older style handsfree kits (you know, the ones that use a cord to attach to your phone and have a microphone about 3/4 of the way up that then leads on to an earpiece) and they have their phone in one hand whilst the other one has the microphone portion of the cord held up to their mouths because the thing cost $5 out of a discount bin and has the listening reach of an 93 year old woman that was born deaf! Unplug the stupid handsfree kit and put the phone up to your head, you’re just as likely to get testicular cancer as you are brain! Grrr!!

For those of you who are unaware of my plans for this year already I thought I’d announce them to the world via me-good-old-blog. You see in just on two months from now I will no longer be gracing the fair shores of England’s penal colony, Van Diemen’s Land; no, I will be relocating to the whiter pastures of the Great White North… Canada. Yes that’s right kids, this little half Indian duck is packing up his bat and ball and fleeing the country in a way completely unlike that of Christopher Skase.

Some of you may posses highly tuned comprehensive skills and remember that I was actually in Canada not too long ago, less than six months to be exact, when I spent less than a week taking in the delights of Toronto. Whilst I did enjoy myself immensely whilst there I can’t say that the city alone is reason enough to drag me half way around the world. There are many factors that have influenced my decision to take this rather unusual plunge on my behalf.

I think it would be easier to describe the decision process in reverse. You see for me I’d always wanted to go overseas and work for a while, it’s just one of things I’ve always wanted to do at least once, but it was always too easy to find reasons that I *couldn’t* go rather than why I should. Perhaps it has something to with my largely pessimistic nature and love of a relatively easy lifestyle that I currently occupy? Perhaps it’s just because I’m a lazy fuck and finding hurdles is easy than jumping then, trust me I should know I snapped a groin muscle jumping them when I was a teenager! Ouch! I’ve always had no trouble finding these excuses, my Diabetes is always a great card to play, I’ve got a good job here, I’m heart broken and an emotional wreck that thrives on the lifestyle not unlike that of a hermit’s? You see it’s all just too natural to come up with these things. So instead of writing down a list of reasons as to why I shouldn’t go I wrote a list of why I should. I didn’t get very far, in fact I only wrote one and doing that took ten minutes of time that I could’ve been using to watch The Biggest Loser or something else of lesser value (if that’s possible).

“Why not?”. Is what I wrote, I know it’s kind of cheating writing a question to answer your original question, and trust me when you’re answering yourself by asking yourself something else things can get mighty confusing, but you know what I couldn’t have written a more honest answer had I listed a million things. I’m young (well I’m under 30), I’ve got nothing really tying me down to Melbourne, I’m good at what I do and should be able to find work easily and well, you only live once, do what you’ve dreamed of!

I chose Canada over other destinations (ie. England) because I loved it there, the people were great, the city was alive and I had the best time of my trip last year when I was there. Add to that the fact that I’ve got some distant relatives, should I get really desperate, and a couple of close mates who’re already occupying the country Aussie style that will undoubtably help me out. All that and frankly London (and the rest of the UK) just didn’t do it for me and there’s nowhere else that’s so easy to get a working visa for.

Of course whilst I’m away I’ll be keeping you all abreast of my adventures and updating this blog with the usual paraphernalia that you’ve all become accustomed to and adore (come on I know you do! hehe). Keep an eye out because I’ll be selling pretty much everything I own to pay for the whole damn trip and prove to the customs dude that I’m worth having in the country (You need to show C$4000 in your account before they let you in!) and I’ll be making everything available online to you all.

In closing, it’s going to be a great adventure, I can’t wait and I’m absolutely scared shitless.

I *love* Guitar Hero (or as I like to call it “The Heterosexual Man’s Singstar” *). To this date there hasn’t been a game, on any platform, that I’ve returned to as many times as I have with Guitar Hero. It really doesn’t matter how much of an idiot you might look like thumping away at a tiny plastic guitar that’s more likely to have been manufactured by Fisher-Price than Fender because for those few precious moments I am The-Rock-God and you will bow to my power of awesome-ness!

So with all that praise and admiration for myself Guitar Hero why wouldn’t I want the next imminent edition of this fantastic saga? Well you see, like many things in the world, I have a little problem with the Guitar Hero franchise. Personally I feel, as a game, there’s not a lot more that you can really add on in terms of gameplay. You plug in your guitar, you watch pretty coloured balls of light float down the screen and you do your best to co-ordinate your fingers pressing the same coloured buttons on your plastic axe, that’s pretty much the description on the box word for word. No really, it is… I’m sure that’s what it said.

The point is there isn’t much else to change or do; before you know it the developers try and lure you with fanciful ideas like having “battles” (ask any Guitar Hero fan boy about that and you’ll quickly find a unison feeling of hatred) and see the game incorporate tangents off a core functionality that works and is what people want. Sure, all the little additions haven’t been complete waste of time, and with the advent of “Rock Band” it wont be long before Guitar Hero will no doubt join the multi-faceted instrument world of its new competitor, but again it’s pretty much the same coloured blobs and timing.

If that’s the case then the only real desire for me purchase any new iteration of Guitar Hero is purely to gain access to a new range of new tracks that I can jump around the lounge room to, staring in my own personal sold out concert for one. In this my friends is where my problem ensues… Each Guitar Hero disc contains a range of songs, some you like more than others and some you only play once to get past them to finish the game and gain those precious Gamerscore points (you gamer-whore you!). What I’ve come to quickly learn is that there’s tracks on GHII that I really enjoy playing, Freebird for example, and occasionally I want to jam out it but the GHIII disc is in my xBox’s drive and now I’ve got to stand up and switch discs and re-load the game, blah, blah. OK, so doing it once isn’t too bad, but now I want to play 3’s & 7’s so it’s a disc switch again… and again… and again… and… well I’m sure you get my point.

It’s pretty annoying, I mean I can understand that a disc is a disc and that’s what’s stored on the thing, but when you buy tracks for GHII online which are stored on your console’s drive why can’t they be read by GHIII too? Have the guys at Red Octane changed the track’s code/format that much after their bust up with Harmonix? Come on people, a little thing called “backwards compatibility” springs to mind (even if I could care less about it on a console, that’s another story kids).

This is my big solution to make the new Guitar Hero 4 worth while as a purchase for little-old-me. Give me a disc, hell I’ll even pay double and take another plastic guitar too, for a game that works just as well and as fun as the others before it with a whole bunch of new tracks and low and behold it can read (at the bare minimum) all of my paid for downloaded tracks from GHII & GHIII. Now that would be great, but to make it awesome give me the ability to pop in my previous copies of Guitar Hero and copy those tracks to my drive and play them in GHIV too! Yeah!! That idea kicks royal arse! Sure there’d need to be some security, copyright bullshit so you can’t just have your mate pop around with their old disc and leech the tracks, I get that, but figure that shit out dudes, I’m the ideas man!

So there you have it, my idea for selling a ba-jillion copies of GHIV and perhaps even providing a reason to back-sell a crap load of old stock out there. I’m sure it’ll probably never happen though, and you know what, I’m pretty sure, come the later half of the year when the new version does come out, I’ll be one of the millions of consumers out there that add that game to my shelf right next to it’s older sisters regardless of my dreams coming true or not.

ROCK ON!

* Before you start sending the flame emails let me just clarify that in by saying that it doesn’t mean homosexual people wouldn’t enjoy Guitar Hero just the same as heterosexual people. I just don’t do Singstar… regardless of how drunk I get. lol.

Quite often I find myself walking down the street at any particular random time of the day in any just as random city approached by complete strangers who want to know if I’m the guy behind this website. More often than not almost immediately after I’m approached I also get to meet the warm embrace of their open palm or on particularly lucky occasions I have a more hard, clenched fist approach to the upper bridge of my nose further perpetuating my never ending quest to join the crooked likes of Hollywood greats such as Adrien Brody or Owen Wilson. You see, just in case you hadn’t figured it out already, these “fans” are in fact random persons who have no knowledge of myself and are probably wondering just who is this weirdo and why on earth should I know him?

Whilst the previous scenario may be entirely fictional it does provide a rather convenient segue into this particular post’s topic of who actually reads this blog? Someone must, there’s a few hundred hits every week and judging by the wonderful world of web statistics you’re pulled in from all corners of this big round ball I like to call “Earth”. So what I thought would be an interesting social experiment that I’m sure a tiny, tiny majority of you may partake in would be to ask you, the reader, to comment at the bottom of this article and tell me a little about yourself. I mean it’s only fair, you know all about me and my petulant ways why not tell me a little somethin’, somethin’ (to borrow a phrase from the kids these days) about your bad self!

“But Raj, what is it that you want to know about me?” I hear you painstakingly asking yourself. It’s OK my child, don’t fret I will help you out by providing some wonderfully well rounded and scientifically deduced questions below this very paragraph of all places! All you need to do is copy and paste them into the comments field and fill in the blanks! Ready?? Here we go…

The Questions about your “bad self”

• What is your name?
• Where are you from? (ie. City/Country)
• Do you know Raj in the real world and not just in a stalking online fashion type of way?
• Two part question… Do you come here often? Can I buy you a drink? Hang on; 2nd part applies to females only.
• Why is it that you’re reading this? Work that boring?
• What would you like me to write about more/less?
• How many roads must a man walk down before he can call himself a man?
• Tell me something interesting, anything… quickly, first thing that just zipped through your head!

There you go, they’re not hard at all are they?! To prove it I’m going to answer them myself to show you exactly what I’m expecting from you…. oh and if you’re wondering how to get to the comments section you need to click on the article’s title to take you to the right page.

When I was a kid I always struggled with the concept of “New Years”. You see I saw the calendar of twelve months as a linear path, you travel in a straight line through time from January to December and once you hit the 31st that’s it, year over. The problem wasn’t in that logic but more so the fact that after December 31 it was once again January. Calendars weren’t round like the clock hanging on the wall of my bunk-bed adorning room. Clocks made sense, you went in a circle, years were straight. I always imagined that there was this strange Euclidean time period between the end of the year just gone and the start of the new, some sort of time spatial U-turn the universe made to allow it to travel all the way back to January 1st. What made my mind explode just that little bit more causing me to start dripping blood from my nose Butterfly Effect style was if the universe had to travel all the way back to January how on earth did it do it so freakin’ quickly when it took us 365 days to trudge through the year. Had I been alive in the days of Magellan or Columbus I dare say I would’ve been your typical ham sandwich pitchfork farmer burning witches and waiting for some poor bastard to sail of the edge of the earth because he was some crackpot that thought the world was round.

Needles to say I was quite young when I thought like that, you get a little older you learn about orbits, the year being another circle of the sun, blah, blah, yadda, yadda. Boring science, I like my idea better; you try and get a four year old to create their own time/space theories! I was a special child.

So how does all this relate to the year that is soon to be passed, 2007. Well… it probably doesn’t really, but I thought it best to share a nice story rather than swear through this entry entirely about how much of a shit year it’s been and that no matter who I’ve talked to they all say the same. I don’t know what it is (actually no that’s a lie, I do know, but I’m not sharing so there!) but boy did this year suck the cock meat sandwich (Harold & Kumar 2 reference… watch trailer here). I truly hated this year; even with my world trip I am gladly leaving this year in the past!

To mark this rather dubious celebration of crapness I wanted to do something a little different than highlighting what I believe are my favourite movies, TV shows, and similar junk that every man & his blog (I say man because 99% are done by nerds) will do and never be read. Whilst I’m most certainly not under the illusion that millions will read my blog either it will none the less be entertaining and cathartic for myself.

It is with belated breath and great pleasure that I present to you… Raj’s list of stuff for 2007 (very similar to the Raj-makes-up-categories TV Awards)

Most annoying thing of the year - People on Public Transport
I could devote a yearlong expose on how much the persons occupying space on any form of public transport truly shit me to tears but I’ll try and keep it brief today. I’ve got no beef with public transport itself, as in the actual physical thing that gets you from A to B, it would be a fantastic system if I was the only person using it at any time of the day and I didn’t have to put up with the seemingly endless sea of frigtards (see next award) that don’t cover their mouths to cough & sneeze, that stink, that are just purely nuts and that don’t make room for anyone to get on! I fucking hate public transport, and if any of you write a comment saying “buy a car then” I’ll personally send the crazy air gun guy from No Country for Old Men after you.

Word/Saying of the year - frigtard
Whilst the rest of the world can go on believing that the geek word “w00t” is somehow cool now because all the frigtards out there are now online using Facebook or MySpace and can speak like a 12 year old kid playing Halo 3 for sixteen hours straight on his Xbox I will break from the collective sheep and personally elect another completely made up word that I have already used in this paragraph. Frigtard (pronounced frig – tard)
Frigtard is a word that I believe was made up by this guy who wrote a blog pretending to be Steve Jobs (well that’s where I found it anyway). The word (if you haven’t guessed this already) is a derivative of two, frigging (used as a euphemism for ‘fuck’ according to Apple’s Dictionary app) and retard (a politically incorrect way of saying moron). Ergo all people on public transport are frigtards. See what I did there, tying it back into the previous award, clever!

Best procrastination tool of the year - Guitar Hero
I’m extremely tempted to put the Internet as the winner of this award but I spent a month without that and one of the only things that kept me from doing anything productive during the solemn period was Guitar Hero 3. That and not only did I get Guitar Hero 3 this year but I also bought number 2 earlier on and haven’t stopped playing both of them since. When you haven’t got time to spare but you really don’t want to do what you’re supposed to be doing than this is the tool for you! Sit back and watch the hours literally disappear and your impending unemployment become ever closer.

Worst moment of the year - Being overseas when I should’ve been at a funeral
Had a couple of things happened in January instead of December 2006 this little award would’ve been completely different but as it turned out they just happened a little too early and basically made this year shit. Anyway that didn’t happen in 2007 but this one did. So I was overseas, sitting around Paris enjoying myself as you do in Paris when I find out that an old friend of mine has passed away. Shit in itself but the next two weeks I spent trying to get home early to attend a funeral and unfortunately couldn’t do it. It sucked; I still feel shit about it.

Best moment of the year - Watching Ice Hockey in Toronto
Just to prove I’m not a complete pessimist I thought I’d better balance things out with the best moment of the year. Sitting in the Air Canada stadium watching the Toronto Maple Leafs and some other team (I forget) play live was just awesome! I’m not really good at talking about stuff I actually enjoy or like so I don’t really have much else to say other than it was like I was a kid again just having fun!

2008 Resolutions - None
Making a New Year Resolution is just a stupid idea. Anyone that hasn’t figured that out by now is either five years old or has the brain of a five year old. If you want to do something or make a change in your life do it right then and now, don’t wait for some special date because it will never last my dear kiddies.

A special thanks to all the people that have contributed to this year sucking so much; you know who you are. I couldn’t have been so bitter and dry without your help and without your shit I’d have nothing to write about. True I might be to blame for a lot of it myself but in true Raj fashion I’ll blame others. hehe.

In all seriousness though, I hope everyone has a great year in 2008. Thank you for reading my ramblings throughout 2007, perhaps if I find a girlfriend any time soon you wont be subjected to them anymore! Hehe. Au Revoir.