I have a current Polish passport. It expires tomorrow. Not surprisingly, I started lodging an application for a new passport in November last year, thinking that five months should be more than enough. HAH! What a fool I was! I may have a current passport, but apparently I don't exist. Nup. I'm just a figment of my own imagination. And yours, if your reading this.

There's no record of me in the polish records because I wasn't born there. So, now I need them to acknowledge my existence. This will take around 7-9 months, apparently. Isn't that nice? I can jump up and down and scream all I like but I won't exist for 7-9 months. And then there's another waiting period for the actual passport itself. That can take up to 6 months. Wonderful. So it's looking like 13-15 months (minus the 4 that have already passed since i was able to submit the application) until I can have a nice little book with my photo and my name in it. Given I'm hoping to go to Europe in about a month, having a Polish passport would be exceedingly helpful.

Fortunately, they issue temporary passports while passport applications are being processed.

I called up today to find out how long it takes for temporary passports to be issued. The first person I spoke to had absolutely no idea what I was talking about. She didn't even speak Polish very well. Everything I said to her in Polish she replied to in English. That threw me. Pretty much the only place in the world where I'm usually guaranteed to be better off speaking in Polish is the Polish consulate (and Poland, of course.... and, well, when caught with a student ticket on a train but no student ID). So I switched to English and then she worked out she didn't know what was going on and put me onto the phone with someone who had half an idea.

This woman tells me it can take 4-5 weeks for a temporary passport. FOUR to FIVE WEEKS? A MONTH! My friends and family get a full ten-year Australian passport in TWO WEEKS! I want to leave in a month, and I don't like the idea of cutting it that close, especially since i'll need a new visa to be allowed back into the country. And that's bound to take a few days, too.

After 30 minutes of trying to get through to the consulate, 5 minutes on the phone and 10 minutes waiting until she called me back, she worked out that YES, i have submitted an application. And YES I just need a temporary one in the meantime. And YES that should only take a few days, maybe a week.

Red tape is evil. Avoid it if you can. And if you can get a passport in just a few weeks, be happy. Be very very happy that it's that simple for you. For the rest of us it can take over a year EVEN WHEN WE HAVE A CURRENT ONE.

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Seen in a Turkish kebab place in Camperdown:

Latai.

As in a type of coffee.

It's almost as good as the time I saw hommous spelt with 3 Ms. As far as I know, that kebab place at Broadway continues to spell it with 3 Ms.

I suppose it could be worse. At least here they're trying to do it phonetically.

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It was my brother's birthday recently. And, as many people his age and gender tend to be rather immature, a friend of mine got him this as a gift:



A bubble-making kit. You know the ones. You dip the wand in the bubble-goo and blow through it to make bubbles fly wild and free. It's good fun. Particularly when you're bed-bound and are trying to annoy nurses. :) Suffice it to say, my brother loved this gift and couldn't get enough of it for a good 10 minutes.

But take a closer look at the packaging. At the warnings, more specifically:



Yes, you read right. It says WILL WANG INSIDE. And it can't just be a typo because it's written in the pink-coloured bubble on the left, too.

Now, this just leads me to wonder what the manufacturers meant by this charming declaration.

Is there a small Chinese man inside called Will Wang? Can I rub the side and be rewarded with three wishes of my choosing coming true? I wouldn't mind keeping him as a pet, to be honest. He would come in handy for eavesdropping purposes.

Or did they just strip him of his manhood and squeeze it into the bottle? Does that mean that I don't want to know what the key ingredient in these bubbles is? Is this the Chinese human equivalent of milking rats?

Alternatively, they may have used wang as a verb. The bottle my brother used may have been rather defective. It didn't transform into anything even remotely wang-shaped when brought indoors. Unless that's the size and shape of remote chinese wangs in sweatshop conditions. Who knows. If so, I pity the women.

In any case, god bless Engrish. There's nothing like it for providing unending amusement to people like me. :)

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Couldn't have said it better myself.

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In a similar vein to Ms Fits' post where your writing style is analysed by a machine and it tells you whether you write like a man or a woman based on your vocabulary, I link you all to the Brain Sex test. Does your left or right hemisphere dominate? Can you mentally rotate 3D objects? Do you have freakishly mutated fingers because you have older brothers? These questions and more are answered in this approximately half-hour series of tests.

Go, be enlightened.

Apparently, I have the brain of a boy. I'm right in the middle of the guy range. Not that I really give much weight to the results of this online test (I saw no figures of reliability or validity on the website whatsoever), but I can't say I'm particularly surprised. Being able to read maps upside down has to come from somewhere, after all. But then that doesn't explain my penchant for funky shoes.... hrm...

So yes, now that you all think I'm an utter nutter in the wrong body, go and see whether God misplaced your mind as well.

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My brother's birthday's coming up in the next few days. He'll be 32. My parents, being overseas as they are, tend to just send us birthday cards for the most part. This year, they included a small gift in with the card. It's a pack of "Healthy Aging" pills.

I realise the sentiment behind this gift is to encourage him to be healthy and well, but I can only wonder if they realise that by sending him a pack of pills aimed at the senior geriatric market - the people really worried about aging gracefully - that they're telling him he's old. Very old, in fact.

The thing that really cracks me up, though, is that clearly, they're serious about the gift. It's not just a poke in the ribs to make fun of his ever-increasing years. Most people would give him walking frame or something similar to make that point. But no, they said in the card that if he wants more of the Healthy Aging pills they can order him a few boxes and send them over. They're more than willing to.

The final icing on the cake, however, is that the envelope containing the card and the pills got searched by customs on the way through. People concerned that the contents of the card is both safe and legal. And while it's disappointing that the pills got through ok, I can still say proudly:

My parents are turning into drug dealers. :)

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"When I put my hand on your weiner and said it was small, I didn't really mean it. Well, it kind of is."

I really don't want to know the background behind that comment. Nor why they felt that the frozen food section of a Woollies was the best place to discuss it. And I can only hope that they were referring to some sort of small edible sausage.

Something tells me they weren't, though.

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Yes, I was eavesdropping. Deal with it. Not that I really had much choice at the time, given I was trapped on a bus full of people.

"Today?..... Serious?...... Really?.... Really?.... REALLY?..... You're joking!.... Really!?"

And people wonder why I hate schoolchildren.

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