In his first visit to the sunken wreck of the Titanic since 1985, Bob Ballard was shocked at how fast the wreckage had deteriorated and he wants the US Congress to pass legislation giving greater protection ot the sunken vessel.

Huh?

The tub is in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean - international waters. And it's two miles down.

Bob Ballard says most alarming is the damage caused by submersibles landing on the deck.

Damage? It's a fucking shipwreck. Let's just put a little perspective on this. The boat's fucked. It's not like you can paddle your inflatable dinghy out to take photos of the thing on a sunny Sunday afternoon, it's at the bottom of the ocean and you need serious cash and not a little gumption to land a submersible on it. For what purpose and to whose benefit is it to 'preserve' a decaying hunk of metal so far removed from Joe Public the only ones who care what happens to it are those thinking they can profit from it somehow.

Including Bob Ballard.

And what kind of absurd conceit firstly to approach the US Congress to IMPOSE a solution on the rest of the population of planet Earth concerning a decaying lump of metal 2 miles beneath the surface of the middle of nowhere, and secondly to actually believe they would or could do anything to make sure Bob Ballard's rights are given preference over these vandals to make money out of the Titanic at the expense of those who are actually now investing their time, money and lives beating him to the spoils.

I want to kill Bob Ballard. People that unbalanced are a danger to the gene pool.

What a cunt.

And there's more from today's edition of MX that has for the moment planted me firmly into a world of surrealism.

Junk food ads are set to be banned before 9pm in Britain because pommy kids are turning into fat little pooh bears. This is a move to 'protect' children watching early evening television.

Can anyone else see 500 million cubic feet of irony here or is it just me?

And finally...

Ian Fothergill has started up his own business removing dog shit from the backyards of the dogs' owners. With such an outstanding degree of laziness on the part of dog owners in Tasmania, I am looking forward to an exponential increase of double chins on both faces of the two headed Australians.

This week is not the week to be buying up big on lottery tickets methinks. Then again, with this much weird shit happening here and around the world, maybe karma is so fucked up right now, it may give me a win by accident.

There are people employed to be at the service of others. These people are supposed to be encouraging of their clients and whilst catering to the needs of their clients, they're also supposed to ensure their clients meet their part of the bargain.

What a dicey situation in which to be.

If these agents were good, I'd live in their offices. But they're not. They walk this intricate web which marks the boundaries between those who use the service on one side, those who use it on the other side and their own needs as an independent business.

In other words, they're pimps.

These pimps dress in business attire and talk the talk of the business type individual.

So, naturally without being offensive you understand, I do my very best to circumvent all this straight lacedness. In short, I swear a lot. I do it in a non-threatening way of course; I wouldn't want to cause any actual offence - or commit one, but there is no way I'm going to allow them to get the better of me in any way, shape or form.

I'm their client. They are my agent. I can take my business elsewhere if I don't like them and they had just better remember that. In short, they have to put up with my shit whether they like it or not. If I do something outlandish, as is fairly often the case, they have to live with it. End of story.

I just got off the phone to my agent and told him of my latest bit of writing, which was pretty much 90% bullshit, but the punter bought it hook, line and sinker. I told my agent it was pretty much all bullshit and if the punter checks it, I'm basically fucked. And with the usage of the words "bullshit" and "fucked" I could hear my agent squirm in his seat with the discomfiture of it.

The sound of someone's unease through the telephone is, I just rediscovered, immensely amusing.

Here's something you might like to try...

Ring someone up and ask them if they want the good news or the bad news. Guage their reaction. Tell me if I'm wrong about this.
If they say they want the good news, just tell them to Google "ChatRat" and let them find out for themselves what the good news is. If they ask for the bad news, tell them you've been reading this blog and have all manner of evil ideas.

It's more fun when you don't care.

No, I mean when you REALLY don't care. :)

Well I'm just too good!

I have just one option for selling a book through CafePress.com and I put out a collection of my internet musings over the last 3 years, designed a front cover, back cover and spine and within two days, one charming individiual had already bought it.

So how good do you think I feel right now!

The Swamp is and has been my pride and joy on the net since May 2001 and all this time later, It has accrued 98 messages in total and ZERO FlyBuys points!

I've been trying to get someone on my side of the International Date Line to buy the thing and snail mail it to me, but no luck so far. I've offered to pay for it, of course and I've even offered to pay for a second copy so some lucky punter with a credit card could order two, send both to me upon receipt of my payment, then I'd autograph one and send it back.

I mean, how good's that?

You get a free book AND it's autographed by the author and all it has cost, basically, is a few bits of clickage from the comfort of your own home.

Go on, be brave...

The Little Shop of Rat's.

And after having quit all my msn groups bar one or two (down from about 13) I finally put my pyreighted version of Photoshop to good use and designed a few t-shirts.

Forty of them in 4 weeks to be precise.

There's a link to the "Ratwears" bit of my e-boggery in the Batcave

Only trouble is, I didn't factor postage into the price of the things too well. I'd thought, yeah, $6.50 for international postage but it ain't. It's $10.50 for the first shirt and $8 per shirt after that.

So basically, I set the price too low and ferked myself in the arse costwise.

I am going to have to come up with something really cunning now or the sale of shirts is going to send me to the wall. So if you're going to go and have a look, just look. Don't buy. At least not until I've had a chance to build up some sort of inventory.

As for the rest of the wonderful world according to The Rat, it's better to be safe and happy in your own home town than visit Rat in his and be forever disatisfied with your own hovel afterwards.

Ah, the joys of living in Melbourne.

It's almost better than chocolate. :)

In the world of idiots, there are those who acknowledge the fact they're idiots and there are those who never will.

I don't like either variety.

If you just happen to be an idiot, do your best to hide the fact, preferably by keeping your fingers off the fucking keyboard. If you can't supress the urge to write, at least have the decency not to tell everyone you're an idiot. If we have to put up with your inane dribble, we sure as hell don't want to have your dirty laundry waved in our faces as well.

Netizens should be harsh with idiots. Stomp them back into the ground wherever you encounter them. They are not worthy of taking up bandwidth. They are the reason supermarkets were invented. They have no idea about what they want so they just grab whatever is available, hence Safeway make a fortune out of them. If these idiots had brains, they'd take a shopping list, spend one third as much as they do and keep the express lanes clear for people who actually do have a brain.

Bastards.

It's these idiots who feel that just because they have a place to splatter their braindead opinions around the place that others actually want to read them. Get a clue, dippies, we don't.

Nobody gives a fuck about your boyfriend/girlfriend troubles - unless you stitched them up in amusing fashion. Nobody cares about the problems your kids are having at school. They're probably fat little pooh bears anyway. Euthanise them now before they make other people suffer later. Fat fuckers are the worst kind of loonies. It's true, just watch an episode of Rikki or Springer and see just how many fat fucks there are on those shows.

Pasty faced morons.

I watch one episode per year of those shows and nothing changes except the level of my incredulity that anyone can be that fucking stupid. It makes it easy to see how Bush got elected.

I'm fed to the back teeth of idiots - especially on the net.

I bailed from almost all of my haunts. Just packed my shit up and left. At least here I can tell you all what a pack of thick mother fuckers you are and nobody is going to assail me with their "Oh yeah, well guess what..." Especially stupid people try that thinking I somehow give a tinker's damn what they think or that they're going to have some sort of influence on my thinking.

Here's a hint: I don't care what you think. If you don't like what I've said, sux to be you. If you do like what I've said, good for you, I still don't want to know about it. Just go about your daily business and don't try to engage me in your tiny little worlds because I'm not interested.

This is my vent space, not yours. And my email is for people I want to email, it's not for you to tell me what I already know - that you're not happy with what I've said, and by default, that you are an out and out moron.

My advice is to go teach a pig to speak. It will doubtless prove more intelligent than you anyway.

Writing in short choppy sentences is neither attractive nor artistic. Elongating them is just ugly self indulgence. To put it bluntly, just put it bluntly.

I dislike male authors who write for typically female audience for the same reasons I dislike women authors. There’s just too much damn clutter and a propensity for not telling it like it is, but giving the author’s impression and why. I want to read the story. I want to get from start to finish in as entertained a fashion as I can not spend the entire time trying to sift through the psychological baggage of the author. I have my own baggage; I don’t want theirs as well. I bought the book because I want to read a story, not get an author’s impression of events.

Fortunately, I didn’t buy the book.

Nor will I recommend it and anyone who asks me if I have read it is going to be told I put it back on the shelf after reading the first three pages and skimming through bits and pieces of it. I cut to the chase but even that was painfully beset with literary clutter. I was expecting at any time to see the author address the reader with an example of how an event their life was eerily similar to the story in the book. Instead, I was left thinking the author must have issues with which they can only deal by writing things down in the third person as if these terrible events happened to someone else – only the events weren’t terrible, they were just terribly dull. Anyone who spends two entire pages describing rain hitting a storefront window and being reminded of a family barbecue is not writing a story, they’re wasting time. And for anyone who cares to notice, the beads of condensation running down the sides of a glass filled with champagne look absolutely nothing like raindrops running down a huge storefront window. No they don’t.

This particular book was written by a woman. I’m not going to tell you her name or the name of the book, so don’t waste your time asking. The fact is, I didn’t get the author’s name and I forget the title of the book.

I found myself looking at books because of two I’ve had my nose in recently. The first is the thousand page documentary of The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich by William Shirer and I find myself questioning the accuracy of his work which really is off putting. I’ve already spotted one mistake – or out and out lie, I’m not sure which – and a fair amount of other stuff just doesn’t quite gel with other information I have.

The other book is Account Settled by Hjalmar Schact, who was Hitler’s Minister of Economics from 1934 until 1937. Now, Schact is no writer but he has a hell of a story and it’s the story that is interesting. In fact, it’s better than interesting. There just isn’t a whole lot of aesthetic detail.

Shirer’s book is fascinating for its historical value, but he smatters the pages with his personal opinions. The truth is, he wasn’t present when Ribbentrop signed the Non-Aggression Pact with Stalin, so he has no claim to report how the two men behaved that night based on the available information.

Where Shirer was present in Germany and Austria prior to 1939, he gives descriptions of parades, radio broadcasts, the mood of the populace and so on. That’s valid as far as I’m concerned.
The rest isn’t.

Is it just me, or are things changing in the world of authors?

My god has it really been 6 months since I last blogged here?

Incredible.

The reason is twofold. I've had writer's block since October last year when some fucked up shit went down in a chatroom and I just didn't feel like being sociable any more. The second reason is because I've been really going berserk fixing up my lovely website.

I have to admit, I really am tickled with the Batcave and also Bravenet web services. I can't recommend them highly enough.

The Batcave (www2.batcave.net) gives you oodles of space and functionality and the freedom to do pretty much whatever you want to do except link to pictures from outside or post porn - but let's face it, porn is so prevalent on the internet these days, it's boring as hell. It makes a change arriving at a site that doesn't actually contain porn.

I have good stuff to laugh at instead. Lots of links leading all over the place and the best part is, since converting the site to a framed site, most of the links are going to bugger up the visitor until I get it all straightened out. I've not done too badly so far. Most of it opens where it's supposed to open.

I didn't Swamp for ages either. 4 months. Gads, my subscribers must have thought I'd given up on them. They knew I wasn't dead or missing in action because they emailed me from time to time to make sure. Isn't that sweet.

I finished my play, converted the archive of the Swamp to pdf format and put both the play and The Swamp up for sale in the batcave too. Had to open a PayPal account to get it all kicking along, but what the hell... now that the account is up and running - and I've started getting money in it - I can put other stuff up for sale as well - my beloved idea of t-shirts and earthware.

Bliss!

Well that's my news, http://chatrat.batcave.net <-- that's my website. It might not look like much to you, but I like it and it's all my own doing.

Nice start to 2004 for The Rat.

:)