For those who don’t know, I’m currently in Japan on holiday. Arrived just the other day. Having a great time…

Anyway, I of course flew here - a boat trip would be a little slow, and I get sea sick. That meant travelling on a plane. And I hate plane travel more than I hate going to the cinema.

First, you are stuck for hours (in this case 10 hours) with little room to move. You breathe the same recycled air as everyone else - and all around you you can hear people sneezing and coughing. Little snot nosed kids run up and down, the guy in front of you keeps pushing his seat so far back that the tiny 4:3 screen they show crap movies on is so close to your face that you can’t actually focus on the movie without getting a headache, the headphones are made to be uncomfortable and have non-standard connectors so you can’t easily plug in your own, food comes out infrequently, is so awful that you end up picking at it and leaving the rest, and then you are left with the tray and rubbish sitting on your lap for a good hour before they bother to collect it, the seats are too uncomfortable to sleep in, and anyway, the noise of all the people and engines would pretty much put a stop to that.

And then you have the toilets. Tiny little boxes that you line up to use, and inside you find your feet swimming in piss. You can almost see the germs flying around you as you stand or sit trapped in that little box.

Which brings me to the title of this article. The Mile High Club.

Who the hell is going to have sex in a plane’s toilet? First, there is hardly enough room for one. And then there is the sticky floor, the smell of urine and faeces, and those germs. Those germs!

The fact that there are people who would actually consider this is exactly why I hate shaking hands with people. And exactly why I love the Japanese - they bow when you meet them, they don’t shake your hand. I’ve got to move here permanently.

Apparently.

Here is the watermark as I discussed some time back:

And here it is now:

So, the ABC “listened” to the complaints. They made it a little bit smaller, and a little bit more translucent.

And apparently everyone is now happy. “The ABC care about us”. “The ABC listened”.

No. The ABC served everyone a shit sandwich. And when there were complaints, they put some sugar on it. And people ate it and thanked them.

People today are conditioned to accept crap. Whether it’s the software they use, the cinemas they sit in, or the TV stations they watch. Near enough is good enough.

Where are the people questioning why we need this watermark at all? Or why it has to be so large? Or why it has to be in the 4:3 region of wide screen broadcasts?

And more importantly, how could anyone in charge of such an organisation have allowed the first version of the watermark to be released - regardless of whether they later “fixed it”?

The people of Australia own the ABC. We pay for it in taxes. We should be demanding the removal of this watermark from our screens - not celebrating that they reduced it in size! That’s not a victory!

I hope you are enjoying that sandwich.

I went to the movies Saturday afternoon. I don’t go to the movies very often, for good reason. But I had a free ticket, so I chose There Will Be Blood.

Anyway, great movie. Worth watching just to see the last 10 minutes actually. But this isn’t a review.

The movie is very very long. About an hour in to it, the people 2 seats away from me start to get bored - low attention span I suspect. So they begin to chat. Quietly, but just enough whispering and giggling to get on my nerves and make me remember exactly why I hate going to the movies.

This goes on for a good half hour, and I’m starting to get really pissed. I keep hoping they’ll stop and get back in to the movie, but it doesn’t look like it. I’m really angry. So I turn and I say “Mate! If you don’t shut up - there will be blood!”.

Ok - I didn’t. I wanted to say that. But instead I said “Guys, can you please stop talking?”. And to their credit they did for the rest of the movie.

Anyway, the whole movie experience just sucks. Every time I go it sucks. Mobile phones go off. People chat. There is always some dude with bad B.O. that keeps wafting in my direction. People come in late and ruin the start. People open their chips and rustle the wrappers. Phone lights flash as someone sends an SMS. People sneeze and cough around you. How is this enjoyable?

“But you have to see it on the big screen”. Yeah, that’s just great. So you sit amongst the human filth and look up at a big screen. A screen that more often than not has some flaw in it that your eye keeps being drawn to. The one I was in Saturday is a brand new Hoyts cinema (Melbourne Central), and either the screen had a vertical seam half way across, or there was a fault in the entire copy of the movie they were showing.

Like everything today, people are all too willing to accept “near enough” and will put up with stuff like this. Get the movie on Blu-ray or DVD and watch it at home. You’ll thank me later.