Sadhbh Warren

Despite the tinsel and sparkly lights and fat bearded men in bright red suits, I find Christmas a sneaky season. One again, December has rolled round and I haven’t even bought my Mum a pressie yet. Every year, all the magazines advise shopping early and taking advantage of the January sales. I read them, think “what a good idea, I’ll do that” and then forget. So, instead of basking smugly with a glass of wine, I’m gearing up to battle maddened parents and frazzled assistants who have been tasked with finding an intimate present for their bosses partner - or partners. But you start optimistic and energized - ready to shop and roll, baby. You start thinking big. Wouldn’t it be great if you got everything in one shop? You’d be finished! The Queen of Christmas shopping. Then you can ditch the bags and the mad shoppers and go straight to the pub! This all seems like a really good idea, but leads to situations like you trying to persuade yourself that your sister would like a socket wrench, ...

Some of you might find this familiar, my feelings on why you stick your Kind Regards where the sun doesn’t shine has been amended for publication in today’s SMH, under the Heckler column . KR, it says. Right there, at the end of the introductory and unrequested email about his PR firm. Just before his name. KR. I have no idea what it means. Keith Richards? Keep Right? And then it dawns on me. ''KR" is short for Kind Regards. This man, this PR man who is looking to make a good first impression, not only uses the most vague and insincere closing since "Yours most humbly affectionate" thankfully fell out of use but he can't even be bothered to write it all. Kind regards is foul enough, Victorian and vague, yet capable of starting an arms race of affection. Someone signs "Kind regards", and then someone trumps that with "Kindest regards" and things get totally out of control with "My most kind regards" and "Yours with the kindes...

But if you're not reading MX on delayed public transport in the 35 degree heat (Summer has arrived in Sydney, and it's taking no prisoners) here it is. Watching the wildlife on public transport - are you a Koala, a Pole-Dancer or an EcoLeech? Based off a CityRail customer courtesy campaign to name and shame the Beasts who make catching public transport a pain (the Hogger, the Rubbisher, the Yeller et al), I had to re-work to make it understandable to the other cities. Summer is here and the temperature is high. That would be great if I was at the beach, but stuck in a crowded carriage with no air-conditioning and all the seats taken, I’m wishing I was somewhere – anywhere! – else. To keep my mind off the heat, I’ve turned my daily commute into a safari trip. It’s the cheapskate version of going wildlife spotting by jeep; it’s hot, you're stuck in a vehicle and you don’t know what you might encounter but you hope it will be cute and not try to bite you. Watching the wildlif...

Contains strong language. Which is ironic, as the beer is pretty weak. My beer mat informs me that Victoria Bitter has a new slogan. Victoria Bitter - VB to its friends of which it has very few publicly - is a beer. An iconic Australian beer, if by you iconic you mean “yeah mate, it’s Aussie as, but I don’t drink it coz it’s shit”. Except they do. It’s cheap and cheerful and accounts for a third of the pre-packaged beers sales in Australia. Note that pre-packaged bit. You’d bring a VB home to quench your thirst, but you wouldn’t order it in the pub. Drinking VB is a bit like sleeping with your ex. It’s not really classy, but everyone has done it when there was nothing else available. Especially if they were already drunk and it was just hanging about at a party. It’s okay to drink, provided no one knows. Their long standing slogan, which said VB was “for a hard-earned thirst” was at least evocative in that it reflected the product. VB is for a hard-earned thirst, because dying of semi-...

KR, he says. Right there at the end of the email he sent looking to introduce his PR firm. Just before his name. KR. I have no idea what it means. Keith Richards? Keep Right? Keep Rocking? And then it dawns on me. “KR” is short for Kind Regards. This man, this abomination of a PR man who is looking to make a good first impression on me and my firm, not ONLY uses the most fatuous and over-gentrified closing since “Yours most humbly affectionate” bit the dust in the sixteenth century but he can’t even be arsed to write it all. Kind regards is foul enough. Victorian and stilted in its vagueness and yet capable of starting an arms race of affection. Someone signs “Kind regards”, and then someone has to beat them with “KindEST regards” and the whole thing gets totally out of control with “My most kind regards” and “Yours with the kindest of regards” and “Prostrating my most humble self on your bidet to offer the very kindest of my kind regards”. Or the person who tries to play the strong si...

I love both to travel and to talk about travelling. It interests me; the places people have been, why they went there, what they saw and what they ate and who they met and what they did. I love to ask questions and find out the best and worst bits of people’s trip. It’s fascinating. Right up until the point where they pull out the photo album. Then my eyes glaze over and my brain goes into sleep mode as I prepare to be bored silly. I blame digital cameras. Back in the good old days when people accepted travellers' diarrhoea as a normal part of travel (for God’s sake, just drink fluids and stop WHINING) and cameras had films and cost lots of money to develop, people took less photos. Instead of twelve pictures of the same sunset, they took one really nice one. You didn’t get endless shots from the train window and the plane window and the inside of the local police station, it cost too much to develop. But thanks to the advents of digital bloody cameras, people feel unfettered in th...

Speaking as someone with travelling ambition of Richard Branson but the budget of a ham sandwich, Simonseeks.com is a really good travel resource; real people write real reviews of places and activities and then earn cash if people take them up on their suggestions. What makes it good is that it has a more exciting and budget approach to visiting places from people who visited the cities, rather than the usual “this hotel let me sray free for a review and I liked it”. If you are planning a trip, I’d recommend researching it here. It’s particularly good for city breaks and for finding points of interest in places that are a little further off the well trodden tracks advised in the guidebooks. My recent offering to them was a budget guide to romancing in Sydney. And they liked it so much that it won a prize. A prize of two hundred dollars sterling. Which may not allow me to fly RockStar class with Virgin Atlantic or purchase my own Virgin Island, but will allow me to take up some of my o...

My first thought today when I woke up in Sydney was “I slept in, I’m late”. My second was “oh, and the apocalypse is here”. There was an enormous dust storm last night and Sydney was blanketed in a thick red cloud of dust. It’s faded to a sullen yellow glow now, but at seven this morning the rising suns rays hitting the dust obliquely turned the city amber and red, like all the city was the outback glowing in the dawn. There are some great shots of it here . The million dollar views of Darling Harbour look out now on an outback dust-storm. Exasperated staff sweep tracks of red dirt from the floor and furnishings of shops and restaurants. Billboards look sepia through the fog, like relics of another time and place. The cars in the city are coated in grime, the corner offices of the financial district smeared with a film of dust. You forget how big, how dry this country is. You forget most of the cities cling to the sea, cowering away from the vast hot red and yellow plains of the centr...

Summer is coming, and I’m not ready. I thought I was in shape but according to a fitness assessment at the gym, that shape is a Stop-sign – stationary, large and bright red. I knew I should have got fitter before I went to the gym to get checked out. It’s like cleaning before the cleaners come; it doesn’t make sense but it’s a bit less embarrassing. So today I plan to start stage fourteen of the get fit for Summer plan. Stage one is persuading yourself it’s all hormonal and seasonal fat. Christmas dinner, Easter eggs, cold weather, water-retention, the running of the tides - all these are better explanations for why your fattest Fat Pants are gaping at the seams. Not that you ate too much and stayed on the sofa for the last three months. Or that you have been stuffing your face with chocolate and counting walks to the Thai place across the road as exercise, oh no. It’s not your fault; it’s winter weight! The first bit of Stage two is asking your partner or friend if you have put on a...

Stephen Fielding, Victorian Senator and the Federal parliamentary leader of the Family First Party in Australia, speaks out on the Punch about the mocking he over his disability. He revealed that disability – dyslexia - this week. He has frequently mispronounced words, including stating "fiscal policy" as "physical policy". He was questioned about the mispronunciation. "I'll make it quite clear: fiscal, F-I-S-K-A-L," he spelt. Journalists were quick to jump on the gaffe. The incident was a God send on a slow news day, and it appeared in every paper and every site. In the Senate, a Greens MP called out ''spell it'' as he tried to speak. Unwilling to take the roasting lying down, he wrote back, revealing what many people suspected; that he is dyslexic. He makes some excellent points. He argues that we shouldn’t mock people for their disabilities, that one disability does not negate their ability in other areas. There is nothing wrong wi...

Consider, if you will, the advert for Yves Saint Laurent’s new men’s fragrance, La Nuit de L'Homme . As befits a perfume advert, it is filmed in black and white and contains no actual information nor footage of the perfume. A mysterious man, well dressed, descends a staircase in opulent surroundings. Despite having a face that only a mother could love, and even then only if she was drunk and myopic, he turns heads. Young ladies of a groomed but conservative appearance stop dead and paw at him. They are slack-eyed and vacant, like zombies who have forgotten where the brains are. The man looks smug. The end. There are several obvious interpretations, to whit: this man deals drugs and the vacant-eyed ladies want them; this man has paid these beautiful women large quantities of cash in the past for sex, and they desperately need a new outfit. I’m going with option b – the young women last shopped in the eighties and wear satin polo necks, hair in a bun and pearls. Clearly in need of a ...

This writing lark is, quite frankly, not all it is cracked up to be. I am sadly lacking in freezing garret or a beret or any of the various French things ending in “et” I have been told go with the trade. I have been doing some research on what I can claim on my tax for 2009, being in the rather annoying situation of having outlaid more cash in the last tax year (some) than I earned (none). This means I am unlikely to be able to afford a garret or a beret in the near future, unless I can work out a way to claim deductions for writing that no one is willing to pay for. The Australian Tax Office is website is not being as helpful as one would expect. For a start, a search for publications on tax for unpaid writers is, ironically, unwritten. The words “freelance”, “writer” or “artiste, dammit” bring up no results. It appears that the Australian tax office only wishes to clarify matters for either that rarest of beasties, the employed writer. That and performance artists, presumably on the...

The real estate agent’s property pitch assures me, with the myopically deranged semi-perjurous optimism of someone who only gets paid if they sell this place, that Redfern is the new Surry Hills. No. No, it’s not. Redfern is an inner-city suburb of Sydney, just south of the city centre. It’s an inexpensive suburb, with local shops and small family restaurants that sell to people who usually don’t have much money to buy. It’s not full of students on the parents’ payroll. It’s Redfern. Redfern is also not, as I have seen claimed, the new Newtown or the new Erskineville. It is certainly not Strawberry Hills, despite frequent attempts to shove the boundaries on a map a few small, but extremely profitable, inches over. It is definitely not East Redfern, which does not have a postcode or appear on ANY maps but frequently does on property ads. Watching someone try to call their home address East Redfern is like watching Keeping Up Appearances’ social snob and secret ex-lowlife Hyacinth Bucke...

This article has been published on Homepage Daily, please view it there. If there is one good thing coming out of the Global Financial Crisis, the media agrees, it is that those cocky Gen Y bastards are getting the reality shock they deserve. The wheel has turned, and the first thing to get crushed beneath it will be their delusions of grandeur. Incoming Gen Z, born in the late 90’s, are already being touted as society’s saviors with more fiscal responsibility and a better work ethic - despite that fact that none of them have hit their teens. By contrast, Gen Y are “impatient, disloyal and demanding“ and have recently been exhorted to not be picky ”job snobs” in the new recession world order. Follow the minimum wage pay packet, not your overblown dreams, is the stern message. But what have Gen Y done other than be young and optimistic in a time of optimism? Being a snarky cocky know-it-all with little respect for authority and a desire to make your mark on the world is not new. An A...

This article has been published on Homepage Daily, please view it there. It was an interesting experiment, but Twitter has been spammed out before it even got mainstream. Twitter, a micro-blogging service where users send and read posts of up to 140 characters called tweets, is aptly and deliberately named for its very low ratio of signal to noise. We’d don’t know, as Twitter won’t release hard facts, how many users it has and how it plans to make money. But in early 2009, Twitter had a monthly growth of 1,382% and total users were estimated at just under 20 million. That’s a lot of user data, and the only real asset Twitter has right now. Sounds good? In fact, the hype may have been Achilles’ hell. Once word got out it was a great way to reach a large audience for free, it was hi-jacked by salespeople long before the customers arrived. Pollies, porn sites, police and spammers – meet your new Twitter friends. Trends, topics that are mentioned the most in tweets, are mainly propagated a...

This article has been published on Homepage Daily, please view it there. Two weeks have passed since the news broke, but you still can’t avoid seeing Michael Jackson wherever you look. The King of Pop. MJ, the Moonwalker. On Twitter on the day of his funeral, messages about him could be found under 4 trending names, or hash tags. Every magazine cover that could be cranked out had his photo, his name, on the cover. But nowhere can you find the nickname that, up until a week ago when he dropped dead of and the world suddenly developed a conscience, most of the world knew him as for years. Wacko Jacko. This article has been published on Homepage Daily, please view it there.

If you want to be an Astronaut when you grow up, you have seven days left. Want to travel somewhere off the beaten path? Sick of hearing your holiday hotspots declared “passé”? For once you can go somewhere without some world weary backpacker telling you they visited it five years ago, before it was spoiled by tourism. Virgin Blue, the Australian branch of the Virgin airline group, have put together a competition that is, quite literally, out of this world. Every time you earn frequent flyers points, you enter a competition. The prize? A trip to space. Or to be precise, enough reward points for a sub-orbital space flight with Virgin Galactic, the first airline that plans to actually send its customers into orbit. You don’t have to pick space flight. Your reward could also be a pair of Alfa Romeo cars, a shopping spree worth $170,000, or a luxury holiday worth $150,000. Velocity Rewards, the reward program of Virgin Blue, will give you twenty five million reward points to spend. It’s p...

Delta Airlines look set to start offering cheap flights with free booze from Sydney to LA, starting next month . And I, for one, won’t be booking them. Yes, you read that right. The permanently broke Irish backpacker turned Aussie, whose travel and beer spend monthly is higher than her horribly expensive Sydney rent, won’t be booking or even looking at them. Don’t get me wrong. Some of my fondest, and fuzziest, memories involve free bars. There is a place for free alcohol in both my heart and real life. I just don’t think that place is on a metal tube packed with three hundred people and only three bathrooms, whizzing through the air at 600mph. That’s over 900 kilometres an hour, for those of you too drunk to convert. The reason that you are so drunk is that the cabin pressure affects how your body deals with oxygen, meaning that a small beer can affect you like a very large one. While getting extra drunk on less might seem great, you’re getting something else for free too. You can als...