I thought The Onion's feature on Kafka International Airport was one of the funniest things I've ever seen. Then I started living in a Kafkaesque nightmare, and it's not so funny anymore. My Dell laptop is coming to the end of its useful life, so back on July 24 I ordered a new one directly from the Dell Australia website. For a largish purchase like this, I figured the safest and easiest way to pay would be to use Pay Pal. Oh, what an innocent creature I was back then. By 31 July my computer hadn't arrived and there were no updates to the order status, so I contacted Dell. They told me the payment was showing as Pay Pal decline. Odd, I thought, there had been enough money to cover the transaction in my account the whole time, but whatever. My Pay Pal account showed the payment as pending confirmation by the merchant, so I figured I'd cancel the order with Dell, get my money back in a few days surely, and order the laptop anew. And so the nightmare began. The De
When music legend Tina Turner recently passed away, the mourning was felt especially keenly in Australia. Ms Turner had a particularly rapt following in Australia for her wildly successful partnership with rugby league, Turner's hit "Simply the Best" still recognised as a league anthem decades on. But across Australia, and even in the non league states, Ms Turner was known and beloved by Australians because every child in Australia is taught the Nutbush. We are the only country that does this, and no one knows why it has somehow become a staple of the Australian education system to indoctrinate children into line dancing (it seems it was the NSW Department of Education who came up with the dance steps , which Ms Turner herself is not known to have ever performed). I never learned the Nutbush, since observing and carrying out a simple sequence of steps requires more physical skill than I will ever possess, but teaching schoolchildren the Nutbush provides two important