Charles Purcell's Blog, page 7

Stop stereotyping white ants as villains, nation’s white ants tell Canberra press gallery

The nation’s peak white-ant body has called upon the Canberra press and both sides of politics to cease their vilification of its members following talks of a tumultuous Liberal party spill.

Incensed by media references to Tony Abbott’s alleged “white-anting” of Malcolm Turnbull, Ben Insectivore, chairman of the National White Ant Support Group, says it is time for all concerned to put aside their “speciest” behaviour and casting white ants in a dastardly light.

“My members are sick and tired of the Canberra press gallery referring to the perfectly natural behaviour of white ants as something underhanded and cynical,” said Insectivore. “Casting aspersions on our perfectly legitimate habits undermining structures to gain access to the juicy timber inside only serves to demean white ants everywhere.

“Our constant underground tunnelling in the search for new food sources has nothing in common with the Machiavellian cut and thrust of federal Liberal politics.”

Insectivore called for understanding from the human world, threatening to take the matter to the Anti-Discrimination Board if the anti-white-ant slurs did not stop.

“It’s not fair to vilify the hard-working mothers and fathers of the white-ant world,” he said. “My members often work 23 hours a day putting food or dead leaves on the table for their larvae. At the end of the day, your average, true blue, salt-of-the-earth white-ant is too busy scouring Canberra’s infrastructure for tasty morsels to care about poll results, whether the Liberals are heading for electoral oblivion or what another Tony Abbott government might mean for Australia.”

Insectivore added: “To suggest that we’re some kind of secret agents agitating for change is, at best, speciest, at worst, a form of insect blood libel.”

Asked about his own opinion on the Liberal leadership battle, Insectivore said that white ants are by their very non-human nature apolitical.

“Mate, we’re too busy locked into a brutal Darwinistic fight for survival to care about who is PM,” he said. “I’ve already got 1000 kids: try looking after them for a day and just see how much time you have left to watch the 7.30 Report or Tweet questions to Q&A.”

My military thriller The Spartan is out now on Amazon. The sequel is due out in 2017.

Here’s my signed copy of American Gods after I interviewed Neil Gaiman

[image error]

 

 

We had a great talk in 2010. Check it out here. Looking forward to the TV show.

My military thriller The Spartan is out now on Amazon. The sequel is out this year.

Government solves housing affordability crisis with “first Moon home owners scheme”

“It’s the perfect time to go live on the Moon”, Gen X-Y told

The Federal Government has introduced a bold new scheme to solve Australia’s housing affordability crisis – and it’s literally out of this world!

In a daring response to the crippling double-digit prices rises pushing entire generations out of the market, first-home buyers will now be exclusively eligible to travel via spacecraft and rocket ship and purchase homes on the Moon.

The Australian Government has secured prime real estate on the lunar lava plain known as the Sea Of Tranquillity. Held specifically in reserve for young families, Gen X and Y types not “on a good wage” and those in marginal electorates, this location is now available for bold astronauts and terraformers who find the real estate market on Earth too difficult to crack.

The Government has teamed up with Elon Musk’s SpaceX to transport the first bold new adventures to their prospective new homes.

Each interstellar homesteader – to be chosen by government ballot – will be able to purchase Moon homes from $100,000. Space tradies are already busy constructing the first homes, which range from charming one-bedders, two-bedder starter homes, multi-domed delights, “Moon McMansions” and many more.

The Government is expected to announce further details of the “first Moon home owners scheme” in the upcoming Federal budget.

“We have heard the struggles young people are having cracking the increasingly competitive home market, particularly in the thriving capital cities of Sydney and Melbourne,” said the Minister and Lead Astronaut for Homes, Gene Spock.

“This initiative will allow prospective home owners to get a first, virtually gravity-free foot into the housing market.”

Mr Spock denied that entire shuttleloads had been lost already due to unspecified forces.

“There is also no truth to the rumours that the alien ‘greys’ have objected to large-scale human colonisation and have taken numerous human captives as sex slaves to live with them in their underground Moon chambers,” he said, eyes darting side to side and beads of sweat forming on his brow.

“We continue to work with all existing stakeholders – both human and, errr, ‘other’ – to make the ‘first Moon home owners scheme’ work.”

Nevertheless, Mr Spock admitted there would be teething problems at first. Yet he said that those keen enough would “pull up their socks” and overlook the gravity problems, lack of greenery, the risk of shuttles exploding mid-flight, the crippling isolation from the rest of humanity, the lack of wi-fi and cafés and the occasion “alien predation”.

“Critics have complained too long that this government is doing nothing to solve the housing crisis,” he said. “We remain to see the Opposition suggest such an innovative scheme.”

Mr Spock refused to rule out that Moon homes could be negatively geared or that “Moon land banking” could potentially be a future issue.

When further questioned if this meant that the Government had found the Earth housing crisis too hard to solve and had simply given up, he played the pre-recorded noise of a shuttle blasting off into space, silencing all further questions.

My ebook military thriller The Spartan is also out of this world.

I hug lions better than Jessica Chastain

Happy Easter!

From the bunny army.

Top 10 lies, crimes and misdemeanours from my first cooking class

Does your oven have at least one umlat in its name? If not, you’re some kind of prole.
Chefs refer to table salt as “shit salt”. Behind your back, they probably refer to you as “shit customers”.
Three glasses of white wine – also known to chefs as “bitch diesel” – will aid your fine motor skills as you chop onions.
Cous cous was invented by the Nazis as a cheap, barely edible alternative to rice.
Chef: “You’ve touched worse things than that.”

You: “My God … how does he know? He is some kind of SORCERER.”
No, it is not just like a TV cooking show, apart from the comparable levels of shame, fear and ostracism.
Your “hilarious” gluten jokes will die a horrible death when someone says they’re coeliac.
When someone says your spring rolls are “fatty boom-bahs”, remember to scream “Don’t you fat-shame me!”
Have you added pine nuts to everything? Go back and add pine nuts to everything.
No matter how many movies you’ve seen featuring buxom Tuscan peasant women blissfully serving elaborate, time-consuming meals to grateful hordes, no meal tastes better if you’ve cooked it yourself.

In fact, they taste worse.

Laugh at any of these jokes? Go on and buy my ebook military thriller The Spartan. I know you probably won’t but I always ask anyway.

My diary of how I wrote my second novel

Inspired by the excellent story in The Guardian about how Wyl Menmuir wrote his first, Booker-longlisted novel, The Many, I offer you the uncensored diary of writing my own, unpublished, second novel, The Last Newspaper On Earth.

Enjoy.

Day one: Bursting with ideas. This will be the best book ever!

Day two: Put in a killer second sentence: “And then the murders began.”

Day three: Drink four coffees in quick succession. Manage to pound out 2000 words. And they said Graham Greene only wrote 500 words a day. Slacker!

Day four: Reduce the 2000 words I wrote yesterday to 500 as the rest are mostly caffeine-infused gibberish. Wonder if Greene had it right all along, seeing how he wrote Brighton Rock, The End Of The Affair and The Quiet American.

Day seven: Ask a friend to act as my editor. He says he’d be honoured, as long as it doesn’t take up too much time and that I know how to take criticism. “I’ll show YOU criticism,” I mutter to myself, an instant ball of rage.

Day 10: Wonder about padding out the plot with copy from 19th-century horror novels out of copyright. Laugh like a maniac. “This secret will remain between you and me, Bram Stoker,” I cackle as I hit control “c” and “v”.

Day 11: Friend/editor wonders whether aristocratic vampires have any place in a tale about the decline of newspaper publishing. “Of course they do,” I reply.

Day 20: Read a story, possibly apocryphal, about an author who shot himself in the foot so he would be forced to finish his novel. I stare down at my foot, wondering where would be the least painful place to shoot myself. Also wonder where I could get the least-painful gun.

Day 40: Friend/editor says the main character isn’t likeable.

“Is he based on you?” he asks impertinently.

Day 50: Spice up a dull scene where journalists are sitting around a table at a news conference with a sudden explosion.

Day 55: Make my character visit an orphanage so he will seem more likeable. Friend/editor loves it.

Day 60: Filled with sadness as I glance at the Amazon ranking of my last book. Is this new effort also destined to end on the scrapheap, next to the biographies of sporting heroes who have fallen out of favour due to sex scandals?

Day 61: My main character interviews a sporting hero who has suddenly fallen out of favour due to a sex scandal.

Day 65: Up to 20,000 words. Celebrate by throwing in a spicy sex scene for my unlikeable main character.

Day 75: Reward myself with a digestive biscuit.

Day 80: Wonder if Tolstoy also had days where he thought everything he wrote was crap. Day 85: Friend offers to install a social media blocker on my computer to remove distractions. “Hemingway never would have agreed to that,” I tell him.

Days 90: Wonder if it’s too late to change it into a children’s book. Anyone can write those! Just look at all the celebs who do it.

Day 125: Editing a particularly dense piece of text, my friend/editor says: “You should consider the reader’s point of view.” “Why would I want to do that?” I reply.

Day 145: In my novel, the internet is starting to affect newspaper sales. The fictional newspaper editor shows the staff a website that is eating into our classified sales. “As the editor hits ‘return’, the computer suddenly explodes,” I type.

Day 150: Break the 50,000 word mark. Huzzah!

Day 170: Friend/editor whittles the 50,000 words down to 40,000. Leave an anonymous one-star review of his own book on Amazon, accusing him of being a “pulpy hack”.

Day 171: Friend accuses me of writing the one-star review. I deny it. When the review is mysteriously deleted, we both mutually agree to never bring it up again.

Day 180: My character is disturbed by the number of redundancies in the newspaper industry. I go down to the harbour and stare moodily at the sea for a few hours.

Day 200: Italicise the name of a book, but don’t bother unitalicising the comma next to it. No one will notice it – or the gaping holes in the plot.

Day 201: Friend/editor notices the gaping holes in plot.

Day 210: My character has an Aaron Sorkin moment, standing up on a table in the newsroom and lamenting what will happen to the world if quality journalism continues to decline. Pathos!

Day 220: Up to 80,000 words! Friend says more needs to be cut. I remind him of a story from my days in magazines where a company actually sold their magazines by weight. “Is that what you plan to do?” he asks, incredulous. “Sell your books by weight?” “Why not?” I reply. “It works for chocolate.”

Day 250: Near the end. I wonder if I really need an end. Can’t it just end abruptly, like in The Sopranos? Maybe even mid-sentence? Or with an explosion?

Day 265: Hurrah! I finish the final sentence. Light a Cuban cigar, then choke as I remember I hate smoking.

Day 270: Friend/editor yet to get back to me. Does he love the ending? Or hate it? I can’t bear the almost Hitchcockian suspense.

Days 277: Friend hates the ending. “It’s simply not believable that our ‘hero’ goes back in time, destroys the internet from ever being created, and thus ensures the survival of newspapers forever.” “That sort of thing works for Doctor Who,” I reply meekly.

Days 278: Friend gets back to me. “I know how to rewrite your ending – and realistically save newspaper journalism forever!” he says. The simplicity and brilliance of his subsequent idea astounds me. I wonder why no one ever thought of it before.

My ebook military thriller The Spartan is out now on Amazon.

Why Noel Fielding is the perfect host for The Great British Bake Off by someone who has interviewed him

Because we just can’t wait to see what he’ll do with it.

I’ve been a huge fan since his days on The Mighty Boosh.

If he’s anything as surreal and witty as he was in 2012 when I interviewed him, viewers are in for a real treat.

Gothic bun cake, anyone?

And yes … Julian Barratt MUST make a cameo.

Check out the interview here.

My ebook thriller The Spartan is out now on Amazon.

Why Hugh Jackman should win the Best Actor Oscar for Logan

What becomes of the hero when he is no longer needed?

What happens to the gunslinger who hangs up his gunbelt?

What is the fate of the knight who slew the last dragon, the soldier whose wars are long over, the warrior who has seen all his friends and loved ones die … the cowboy who realises that killing is a brand on his soul that will never come off?

There is no such thing as a Retirement Home For The Formerly Fantastic Action Hero (except, perhaps, The Expendables movies). Valhalla is for dead heroes only. There is only a lifetime’s memories of regret and pain and hurt, both received and inflicted, waiting for the hero at journey’s end.

Happily ever after is not on the agenda. To quote one wit, a man stops being a hero when he is happy.

And judging by the Wolverine of 2029 in Logan, he – and the world – are unhappy indeed.

Logan is Hugh Jackman’s swansong for the Canadian mutant with the adamantium claws, mutant healing power and surly attitude.

And the critics are right: it is Jackman’s Unforgiven.

As someone who has read the X-Men and Wolverine comics for years, I can attest it is a tone-perfect final outing for Wolverine. It’s dark. It’s brutal. It’s unforgiving. And it’s not for kids, even if one co-stars in it.

You could even call it “the X-Men’s Dark Knight”.

Jackman’s pain – and the pain etched into Wolverine’s soul after more than a century of being an unkillable superhero – stays with you long after you leave the cinema.

Which brings me to my main point: it is time “the critics” got over their prejudice about superhero movies.

It is time to look beyond the critical stigma attached to “comic-book films” and realise that they have something worthy to share about life, suffering and the human condition. (And what are comic books, except a newish medium for the communal campfire at which stories, myths and legends were told for millennia?)

It is time a fantastic outing such as Jackman’s gets the recognition it deserves.

In short, Jackman should be nominated for the Best Actor Oscar for 2018 for Logan.

There is nothing stopping Jackman getting the nomination apart from the belief that the superhero crowd aren’t considered high art. Take a look at Jackman’s performance and tell me you don’t see every aspect of the acting craft in there.

Don’t take my word for it. Go see it for yourself.

Then go tell the Academy if you agree.

My ebook military thriller The Spartan is out now on Amazon.

They came for the Old Men’s Pubs. Now they’ve come for the Old Men’s Cafes

It used to be a cake shop.

In the years Before Gluten (BG), in the years Before Gentrification (B$), long before the median price for a Sydney home was $1 million, it used to serve the type of giant, triple-decker desserts and pastries that would’ve made the Country Women’s Association proud.

There was only type of bread (white), the type of wonderbread our ancestors fought and won two world wars with. Kids also ate the crusts because otherwise you’d grow up with curly (or even possibly ginger) hair.

There was only type of sugar (also white).

There was only one type of coffee (unknown).

And everything was packed with glutens.

Later, in a nod to the times, it started serving sandwiches along with cakes, scones, lamingtons and Chiko rolls. If you ordered a salad sandwich, it only came with lettuce (not “cos” – cos didn’t exist yet), onion and beetroot. No one wanted the beetroot, but it was reassuring to know it was there. It was a touchstone of cultural consistency every bit as valid and reassuring as the gherkin in the Big Mac. Sure, no one wanted to eat the gherkin either, but somehow, it was important that it was there.

It was the sort of unpretentious place beloved by tradies and sparkies and labourers and mums with their kids: more school tuckshop or canteen that sophisticated café.

A simple place harkening back to a simpler time before iPhones and property portfolios and MasterChef teaching five-year-olds to expect penne alla arrabbiata in their school lunchbox.

A place that had perfected the bacon-and-egg roll and large coffee as its signature takeaway dish. A Café for Old Men.

It was the bottle of pink Himalayan salt that first alerted me to the irrevocable changes in my Old Man Café. It rested on a metal table that looked like it had been crafted out of the wing of a Boeing 787.

Looking up, I realised that my Old Man Café has irrevocably morphed into a Middle Class Café.

Gone were the tuck-shop types, replaced by younger, better-looking waitstaff.

The menu was partially in Italian and full of dishes I barely understood.

For instance, the Caesar salad had become a “Contemporary Caesar Salad”, as if Caesar, former ruler of Rome and conqueror of Gaul, no longer cut it in a world where Asian slaw was served on cement slabs and watermelon juice came in mason jars.

I looked enviously at the kids’ menu – which served all the delicious things that were once on the adults menu like fish and chips and spaghetti and meatballs – knowing I could now never order off of it.

I imagined there was some kind of detector at the door that loudly went off if it detected anything with glutens in it.

I stared around at the young, hip types enjoying what I assumed were Bonsoy cappuccinos.

This was clearly a suburb in the throes of gentrification.

The mothers with their kids now wore activewear and lived in million-dollar houses and drove 4WDs.

The men were younger, bearded, aspirational, one eye on their dining partners, the other on the iDevices upon which they were furiously tapping.

The well-behaved children nursing babycinos were probably in Advanced Reading Classes and knew the difference between a tortoise and a turtle.

It was no longer a Café For Old Men.

I imagined all the tuck-shop-volunteer mums, the labourers in King Gees and checkshirts and even the roving pigeons and ibises all being bussed away to a less-salubrious suburbs to make way for the new customers.

I couldn’t fault the food and the service. But this café was no longer for me. Yet another sanctuary of my youth was no more.

This Old Man’s Café was heading the way of the Old Man’s Pub.

“And what rough beast, its hour come round at last, slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?” I muttered.

But there was no longer anyone old enough – or interested enough – to understand what I was saying.

My ebook military thriller The Spartan is out now on Amazon.