A little housekeeping and viva Las Vegas ...

Well sadly - oh bugger it, I'm not sad at all - I'm off to Vegas, and between blogging and Vegas it's likely the bright lights will win.

I'm hoping to find Mike Tyson and a tiger in my room, but failing that, I'll settle for a renewal of my marriage vows at the world famous little white wedding chapel, wherein such luminaries as Joan Collins and Burt Reynolds testified to the sanctity of marriage.

Why Patty Duke liked and believed in marriage so much, she went there to acquire her first and third husbands, while Mickey Rooney tried it twice (he did it six times elsewhere). Now that's a commitment to marriage in the best American way ...

And then there's Paul Newman and JoAnn Woodward (sic), and Mary Tyler Moore (first husband), Burt Ward - Robin to oldies - and Frank Sinatra showing old guys how to molest young women like pretty pert pixie Mia Farrow, before Satan did it to her in Rosemary's Baby, and Bruce Willis and Demi Moore and some opera singer from China, and Stone Cold and Steve Austin (WTF), and the drummer for Cher, with Cindy Lauper as the maid of honour, OMG, and Michael Jordan and George and Alana Hamilton and Natalie Maines from the Dixie Chicks, never mind who she actually got hitched to, some nonentity, and why I see that Victoria Principal did a renewal and Rita Hayworth added Dick Haymes to her belt of scalps, and Freddie Prinze was there, and Steve Lawrence and Edie Gorme (marriage and renewals!), oh you crooners, and Don Allen, en vogue, whatever the fuck that means, and Ryan Young from the Dallas Cowboys doing a renewal and Slash from Guns and Roses and ...

OMG. Eeek, shrieek, I feel so faint and flushed with excitement. I'm off to America, home of culture and civilised values, and my spiritual pulse is throbbing as I hot wire into the zeitgeist.

Put aside those memories of the US military blowing away Iraqi civilians in surely what are amongst some of the most chilling and disturbing images to emerge from that dismal exercise in murderous stupidity (collateral murder), showing that, when you get in the road of a 30 mm M230 chain gun being handled by a loon who thinks he's playing a video game, shit happens.

Can the same culture that produced Las Vegas produce this kind of shit? Sure thing.

Meanwhile, and sorry for that total bummer aside dudes, because I still maintain the rage, there'll be a bit of work, but hey, that's only between losing my memory, making out with Mike Tyson's tiger and forming a deep sapphic relationship with a pole dancer. I'm hoping, yearning, to meet a few Republicans so we can embark on a lesbian bondage fiasco together ...

Perhaps when it's all done and dusted, I might head up to area 51 so I can finally reveal the truth about aliens ...

You know the truth is out there, but as with chilling military footage, sometimes only WikiLeaks provides the answer.

Okay, there's only one major downside to this orgasmic delight, apart from American food and constantly avoiding Fox on the box.

I'm flying Qantas. Dear lord, did Geoff Dixon strip the guts out of this airline or what. The only thing worse would have been if his scheme to sell it off to the private debt equity moguls had succeeded. Then we wouldn't have had an airline at all.

As it is, the cabin staff are constantly petulant and quarrelsome, and do their duties with a reluctance and stiff indifference that can only be matched or bettered by the people to be found on British Airways, surely the most wretched airline in the world. No wonder they strike all the time. I'd strike too if I had BA staff as companions. (And as for those Qantas grumps, why wouldn't you feel surly and peeved, herding and feeding and tending cattle all day and night, when you've been screwed and nail gunned to the floor).

Throw in the regular Qantas maintenance scares that now make the front pages every second day, and you have to have - even if Air Crash Investigations isn't your favourite program - the suspicion that some day soon Qantas's nose dive might turn into an irreversible double flip pike. (And it's not just me - the cardigan wearers at Choice agree - Worst airline? Australians make their choice).

Here's hoping that the in flight entertainment system is actually working, and the compression of the spine in the seating doesn't produce a permanent disability and the maintenance guys in Rangoon clocked on for the day.

Given a choice, you'd be mad not to fly Singapore Airlines or Cathay Pacific, or any of a dozen other airlines. I'm stuck with running down my points until the agony can be brought to an end ...

If this blog fails to recommence, don't imagine it'll be because of a mugger in LA, an alien from Mars in area 51, getting it on with Mike Tyson's tiger, or discovering the seamy side of life with wayward Republicans. It'll be Geoff Dixon's legacy at Qantas.

Phew, it was good to get that off my chest. If you read about a passenger running amok on a flight to LA, just nod your head wisely. You saw it coming ...

Meanwhile, this site is profoundly contrite.

We've been giving the Catholic church and Senator Conroy and various guardians of our morals working hard to prevent the downfall of western civilisation a terribly hard and unfair time.

So as we jet off to Vegas, we thought we'd leave behind a very important message to young folk at the head of the column. Whenever Conroy wonders why someone, anyone, won't think of the children, it's a gentle reassuring reminder that here on the pond, we're always thinking of the children.

There are many more historical wonders to be found in the Prelinger archives at the Internet Archive (search for Sid Davis here, or sex education here).

If you want the companion piece to Boys Beware, it is cunningly titled Girls Beware, also made in 1961, and available here for streaming or download. Truth to tell, it lacks the resonance of its partner, but if you have hours of your life to waste, why not do it as an antipodean John Waters savouring absurdity?

Because surely Sid's Boys Beware is a masterwork of paranoid film-making, epic in its evocation of a 1961 sensibility. As well as total abject sickness, it has the charm of the very best Ed Wood, though unfortunately without any cashmere sweaters (but Sid kept his budgets down to 1k a show, just like Ed).

Still any gourmet buff of the hideous will be compelled, knowing that it's only too easy to pick a dilettante by their interest in Plan 9 from Outer Space, when Glen or Glenda is to hand.

Sid Davis has even earned his own wiki page here - the good lord rest his paranoid sexually repressed mountain climbing soul - and perhaps I can even earn redemption, or at least a few brownie points by spreading his message.

Which is of course that the nineteen fifties was seriously weird and fucked up, and under Senator Conroy, the Pellites and the Jensenist nepotics, we seem to be heading back to that never never land of surreal weirdness.

Oh why do I bother pretending - get stuffed Conroy and the Catholic church, along with your great big internet filters, not to mention the Catholic church's ongoing attempts to evoke the theology of Sid Davis.

And now with a Daffy Duck laugh, and a Porky Pig stutter, that's all for the moment folks, as I head off to entomb myself in Geoff Dixon's legacy ...

Rock on dudes and dude-ettes.

Oh jesus, I've broken my first and only rule.

Never actress, only actor, thank you very much, never pole dancer-ette, only pole dancer, never Mrs., only Ms. And ditto sculptress, waitress, stewardess and all the other coy sexist claptrap that infests this godforsaken world (and just where is that bloody absent god, sheesh, have I got a few choice words for her).

Unless you're thinking of heading off to a doctress or a cheftress, enough with the diminutives ... (thanks to Jakki for these circumlocutions).

And if any bright spark hurls the word 'mistress' at me, thin ice on the pond buddy ...

Rock on dudes, and fuck the -ettes and -resses...