My old man. The man who gave me life and now buys me beers (which are one and the same of course). One of the three great Fletcher men in my immediate family. 

Salman Rushdie. Seen here dozing off, obviously while being teleprompted one of my rambling compliments about how much I love his books. Nuff sed. 

Stanley Kubrick. The greatest film director of all time seen here shortly before his death in 1999. An amazing mind with an amazing beard. Nuff sed. 

Scary-Looking Middle-Aged Men with Beards

I realised today how ridiculous my comment about having a disturbing affinity for scary-looking middle-aged men with beards could be. And let's just say, to all those who don't know me personally, that I don't want a repeat of the female weightlifter comment in its responses. For those who do know me personally, you know exactly what I'm talking about...

So just for your perusing pleasure I thought I should just clarify what I meant when I wrote that, or rather WHO I meant, in pictorial form... See above the three greatest scary-looking, middle-aged, bearded influences on my life.

New Heights in Pretension

As those of you who know me well will no doubt attest (And considering the only person with a heavily-enough festering mental state to read a blog written by someone called "Sean's Beard" is my brother, that's probably the majority of you faithful readers), there are three major, and in fact, exclusive reasons, why I ever buy a DVD, or a book:

1) I have seen /read it before, and enjoyed it.

2) I have not yet seen / read it, but have always, or for a fair amount of time, wanted to.

3) It is an obscure / unusual / esoteric book / DVD which, when I show people my collection, I imagine in my feeble mind their supposed state of impressedness at the fact that I have in my collection such an obscure / unusual / esoteric book / DVD in my collection, whereas in actual fact they've obviously never heard of it and don't give half a flying fuckshit that it even exists, let alone that I was sad enough to fork over money to have it in my collection.

Today on my DVD-buying adventure it was numbers 1 and 3 respectively that reared their ugly little heads and said "Buy me! Buy me!"

The first, and less-interesting acquisition was Michael Cimino's best-known, and undoubtably in many circle, only-known work, the 1978 Vietnam masterpiece "The Deer Hunter". This particular film outperformed my expectations during my most recent 7 Weekly DVD Rentals for $9 offer at my local Video Ezy store, to become the most enjoyable and acclaimed-by-me movie of the lot, over such hyped classics as Arsenic and Old Lace (1944, Frank Capra) and Network (1976, Sidney Lumet). It also, in my recent revision-and-extension of my top 100 movies of all time to a top 250 favourite movies of all time, blitzed the competition in its genre to come out on top of the war movies list, slotting into place at #38 overall. But pointless statistics and utter verbal diarrhoea aside, it's a bloody awesome movie. So when I saw it advertised as part of Borders' (Yes I know, big evil American corporation) "Two DVDs for $40" deal, it was definitely at least on the back-burner, that was, until...

*Huge superfluous drum roll, as though anyone actually cares*

Browsing the titles, I came across what has now become both of the following:

1) The First Asian film title in what can now officially be called my "Pretentious DVD collection"

2) The First film that I have purchased based purely on its presence in my hallowed and personal bible "1001 Movies you must see before you die" by Steven Jay Schneider (ed).

I won't ruin the mood by trying to create written suspense while I reveal the title. Instead I'm not going to reveal the title but I shall allow the IMDb to do it for me HERE. And of course with this addition I have raised what some may call the prestige but others may call the sheer and utter and completely insulting pomposity of my DVD collection. So next when someone asks me "Are you a complete fucking wanker" I can, with complete certainty, look them in the eye and say "Yes. Yes I am"

RSA - Ridiculously Simple Attainment

Don't you love my pseudointellectual attempt to take an acronym for one thing and say it stands for something else, when the two things are essentially the same anyway? Well, is it better than my pseudointellectual attempt to achieve coherence and sanity by verbally vomiting onto a worldwide blog website?

Yes, anyway today was indeed the day I trundled into uni at 9:00 on a Saturday (AM, by the way, I'm not trying to draw the same picture of relaxation and sociability as mister Billy Joel here) in order to spend seven hours supposedly being able to prove that I am competently able to responsibly work in any venue with a liquor license. Well, according to the certification in my bag now emblazoned with my name, apparently I have proven that. How, you may ask? And well you may, since I myself am asking the same question.

When one spends seven hours listening to some typical Aussie ocker talk about the do's and don'ts, the can's and can'ts, the ifyoulike's and the notinyourfuckingworstnightmares,d'youknowwhatimean,mate?'s of the whole liquor industry, and then has to answer a quiz on what he's spoken about, then hmm I guess that could be shown as some form of proof. But when the speech of this oratory ocker is interspersed with such subtle and mysterious hints as "Remember that, it'll be in the quiz later" and three different revision periods, during which he essentially asks questions that are later revealed to be verbatim copies of questions from that same quiz, and gets us to answer them as a group so we have an entire set of answers rehearsed in our mind... And furthermore to this, when someone answers a question like "What's the maximum penalty for serving an intoxicated person" with a response like "50 penalty units, which is $5,500" and he corrects them by saying "No, just write $5,500, that's fine"... Well hmm, I don't know about you but I begin to get a certain level of dubiety in exactly how much competency is actually proven by the administration of this test.

Of course, considering I now have that certificate which gives me license to clean up steaming piles of people's vomit and to have my eye gouged out by a pool cue while trying to break up harmless disagreements over the time-honoured male conflict of "Whatthefuckareyoulookingatmotherfucker?", I'm not going to argue with the system. But I do think it's worrying that all you have to do is spew out lines that have been rehearsed and rehearsed and rehearsed, and then you can (technically, although obviously not legally) sell as many bottles of Johnnie Walker Black Label to as many inebriated 15-year-olds as your heart sees fit. And naturally, if you need proof that these people are still responsible servers of alcohol, they have that certificate. Remember, you can't fake that...

Hmmmm

"Colour is the New Black"

I can't remember what ad it was which included the asinine title of this post... But I saw it last night and everyone at the dinner table, including me, went at least as far as raising one eyebrow and repeating what had just been said in some combination of mockery/disbelief at the sheer stupidity of what was just said. I believe my proportions were mockery 80 - 20 disbelief... The disbelief factor may have been higher except for the fact that it merely reaffirmed my faith in the utter lack of intelligence in the world of Australian advertising.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but essentially translated this statement IS saying, is it not - "Colour is the new abscence of any colour" right?

Secondly, I thought I'd give you a strange insight into the bizarre and utterly indefensibly esoteric state of mind I go through in the shower. Yes, ladies and gentlemen, it was in the shower this morning that the following thoughts went through my mind...

I was thinking about the slang term "axe wound" for a certain area of a specifically female anatomy that is probably best left to the imagination. It then occurred to me, along this same path, that the Latin word for the verb "To Wound" is "vulnero" (or something to that effect) from whence we get such classic modern English words as "vulnerable" and (believe it or not, yes, these two words have the same origin) "invulnerable". Anyway, as I was thinking there, using the shower gel in such a way that is probably also best left to the imagination, I wondered if, in fact, the word "vulva" was in any way related to the same word and named as such by some 19th century linguist who was having a fairly hefty acid trip while updating the anatomical lexycon... Well considering the word "galaxy" and the name for our particular galaxy come from the same Greek source, I thought in my shower-induced state that it wasn't entirely out of the realm of possibility that a crude colloquial term and a purely technical term for the same thing may have the same origin... But unfortunately, no, according to www.etymologyofthewordvulva.com, "vulva" in fact comes from the early Latin volva, meaning quite simply a womb, or female's sexual organ, which in turn is simply adapted from the verb "volvere" meaning "to turn around or roll"

Oh, by the way, that link isn't real. Do you think someone would be sad enough to create such a site? Anyone with that sad a life would instead start up a blog...

Stupid Just-Woken-Up Ramblings

God knows why I'm even writing in this... I just thought if I were going to start directing people to read in such ways as "Yes, the famous Sean's Beard finally has his own blog" I should at least include something interesting in it. And then I thought, no screw it, let's waste time and space with some absolute rubbish that you think of only AFTER you've already typed it. So I'd say bear with me but hey here's news for you jackass, the internet isn't a neo-nazi kryptofascist regime and you have the right to leave this site whenever you please.

I was just reading my brother's blog and instead of writing a comment on that I just decided to rant on my own very special piece of bloggingness...

RANT #1

Don't you hate it when you work on a night when there's really good TV on, and so you set the tape to tape the really good TV, and then you come home from work at like 9:30 and you're dog tired and so you're hoping for some good sleep but of course you have the stuff you just taped and so instead of sleeping you actually lie in bed and watch the Simpsons and Law & Order and don't actually get to sleep until after midnight? And then don't you hate it even more when your circadian rhythms seem to think that they're kingsh*t of everything and they don't have to listen to your biological need for sleep at all and so they go "Hmm, I feel like a f*cking w*nker today, why don't I cut this sleep short at 6 hours just because the goddamn garbage truck's going past outside the window? Hmm yeah, let's really piss Sam off today and put him in a sh*tty mood so he goes and whines perpetually to everyone out there in cyberspace who gives even half a flying f*ck"

RANT #2

Vote Latham.

RANT #3

God I'm bored.... Why won't my parentage leave the house and permit me to wake myself up with loud Opeth music?

RANT #4

Vote Latham again.

RANT #5

Jeez blogs are tedious to type, especially when one has nothing to say...

Oh well remember to have fun, and never stick anything in your mouth that you just scored off a seedy Lebanese (Yes, I ethnographically stereotype, what's the big deal?) bloke in the pub. Unless it's a non-descript pill. Or his penis.

Blah

I dunno, it seems I may have to create a post in order for there to appear anything on this page. And God knows I'd hate for anyone to miss out on the excitement of seeing a URL with "Sean's Beard" essentially included...