You know you're an adult when you discover that there are much more mortifying things to be seen buying at a chemist than condoms.

Even those homicidal reality show contestants had heard it

This is what I wore today on our scheduled appointment with the high priestesses of skin (dermatologists) at the Royal Brisbane Hospital. This isn't a post about Mele's Medical Mayhem. This is about ... well ... The Juxtapositional Nature of Elitist Humour in an Australian Regional Setting (see Adam? The Flowfield Unity affects all!). And snobbery.

The difference between The Island and the Royal Brisbane Hospital is that on Bribie, everyone just reads the shirt and continues staring blankly ahead. At the Royal Brisbane, people stare, frown, double-take, even smile. The lady at the newsagent who sold me our copies of New Weekly and Australian Top Gear drew the ire of her boss for cackling so loudly.
"No happiness at work," grunted her superior, in semi-seriousness.
"But it's! You see! The llama! And the little picture!" hooted the young lady before releasing a satisfied sigh. "Ahh ... it's just funny to me on so many levels ... that these people ... they just ... they just don't appreciate ..."

I know that there have already been a couple of posts that point towards two increasingly obvious facts:
1) Bribie Island is a cultural wasteland, populated by gentle, white folk whose whole lives are shaped by bland food and commercial television.
2) Mele and I are massive toff-nosed, chin-in-the-air, holier-than-though, elitist snobs and living on the island has thrown this endearing little foible into sharp relief.
Everything is groan-worthy, if not sneertastic in its drollery.
The two-screen, tin-shed cinema, the adorable Bribie Twin, is little more than a creche for the elderly with its infuriating policy of "Nothing Over M 15, Nothing Later Than 7pm".
The pub food is all prepared from the same recipe book: "Deep Frying on a Budget".
There are no decent book stores within cycling distance (the one book store deals mostly in gardening, new age and war).
There are no ethnic restaurants anywhere. Indian Brothers doesn't count because the proprietors appear to be neither Indian, nor brothers. The Chinese restaurants definitely do not count because the Chinese food here is so bad it peels little splinters from your very soul. I had it once. The lemon chicken was like a deep-fried thong covered in fluorescent yellow treacle. Never again.
The fish is all off.
The monthly markets all sell detective novels and carefully-archived lever-arch files of thirty-year-old Grass Roots magazines (sorry, Mum, I would have bought it and mailed it to you, but I was already too deeply into the role of Bad Husband - refusing Mele a house plant by citing the pre-eminence of edible versus decorative household greenery on our weekly budget).
Everybody smokes all over their kids. Even the unborn ones. No one bats an eye-lid at the dozens of heavily pregnant women buying cigarettes, smoking cigarettes, giving cigarettes and lighters to their surprisingly-dexterous-for-sufferers-of-foetal-nicotine-poisoning offspring to hold while they waddle into the supermarket to buy more cigarettes.
The local IGA doesn't stock mustard. They will sell a pregnant woman three packs of Holiday 50s, but I can't get anything spicy to put on my luncheon meat.
As my boss at The Club declared on a recent slow Saturday night: "This is a bloody hick-town, isn't it?"
I bitterly agreed.

That said, bear in mind that these are the ginned-up musings of a middle-class humanities post-grad student who has never lived outside a capital city or experienced anything other than privilege, love and luck for his entire life. All hardships have been overcome, all heartbreaks have been educational, all worst moments are slowly being converted into cash. I even order lattes with nary shudder nor shame.
I know the snobbishness and colonial sniggering will undoubtedly continue ("I say, Mele! Look! That one's using a fork!"), but I was a little surprised recently when one of my work-mates hadn't heard of post-punk rockers, Joy Division. No, don't nip off to Wikipedia just yet, bear with me.
Before I go on, I have an important question to ask of you, the reader. You. Reading this sentence right now. I'm asking you:
Have YOU heard of Joy Division? Think carefully. Yes or no.
Got your answer?
Good.
Now click on these blue words and journey to the very bottom of this page where I keep all the links and histories that you've probably never even seen before because I like this blog to read like a wide book, rather than an easy-to-scan blog. Silly me. I'll change it soon enough.
Now VOTE. I'll wait for you.

Back? Great.
I want to see how well-known they really are. I assumed that everybody had at least heard of them or were familiar with their most popular song 'Love Will Tear Us Apart'. It's even included on The CC's blandtacular musak CD. But no one, in a staff of at least ten people ranging in age from 16 to 46, had heard of the band or could identify my off-key, Kermit-The-Frog-on-cream-chargers warble version of Love Will Tear Us Apart.

Be honest now. If you've never heard of Joy Division, but are familiar with Love Will Tear Us Apart, I will count that as a "yes". If you have no idea what the fuck I am banging on about, even after clicking on the sample, then you are a "no".

***

And, speaking of culture, here is a little ditty for you along the lines of 'Bananaphone'. If you have heard 'Sorta Dunno Nuthin' before, but haven't heard 'Love Will Tear Us Apart' you are a very confused personality with many questionable priorities. Call your mother. She is worried. Either that, or stop calling her so much, she needs her personal space.

You know you live on Bribie Island when ...

You help out not one, but two little old ladies before lunch.

First off, Mavis from next door with her telephone. She sits politely in the living room and shouts in her Deaf Old Dearie voice while I call Telstra about her dead phoneline.

Me: I'm calling on behalf of the old lady next door. Her phone line is dead. She needs the phone so that her emergency "I've fallen and can't get up" button that she wears around her neck works in case she falls and can't get up.
Telstra: We are evil bastards, but we will run a line test, just to be sure you are not lying.
Me: Thank you.
Mavis: The line is dead! My emergency button needs the phone to work!
Me: I'm telling them, Mavis.
Telstra: We eat toasted babies and we can see that her line is dead.
Me: Great. So you'll come and fix it, eh?
Mavis: I had to unplug my button! It needs the phone to work!
Telstra: We defecate in hospital beds on our days off and we are just wondering, is her having the phone off all weekend life-threatening?
Me: Well, she's got this button she can push if she falls, which she has done before and she needs the telephone on for it to work.
Telstra: We kidnap African orphans and sell them to Chinese medical companies for vivisection and we were just asking because if it is life-threatening then we can have it fixed within 24 hours ...
Me: Great. Do that then.
Mavis: I fell over before and that's why I got the bloody button installed!
Telstra: ... but she has to get a letter from her doctor saying that she is in a life-threatening situation and that she needs a phone, because if we do send out a team to fix it within 24 hours and then we deem her condition not to be life-threatening then we charge a one hundred and thirty dollar call-out fee.
Me: You evil fucks.
Telstra: Thank you! (We burn household pets alive!)
Mavis: Are they coming to fix it?
Me: No, Mavis. Since it's Friday morning, now you have to wait until Monday or run the risk of being charged $130.
Mavis: Oh.

The second old lady was my own grandmother, who needed the channels set on her digital box at her brand new house in the Red Rooster Retirement Home* (isn't Queensland just shameless?). I managed to get ABC, SBS and Nine, but no Ten or Seven. Overall, I'd say she's probably better off.

*It's actually just next to a Red Rooster, but the tall Red Rooster sign towers above the new elderly living estate so much that I'm sure they must be drumming up some kind of subliminal business from the new elderly tenants.