Being cool in my opinion is not about your fashion sense or whether you were popular at school it is how you handle situations. Like being cool under pressure or not being offended easily.

A cool person doesn’t appear to be offended when somebody calls them an arsehole, but instead comes up with a witty comeback that makes their detractor an item of ridicule. I always thought young people were supposed to be cool as they had not yet been filled up with opinions, prejudices and had not yet developed a hatred for the human race.

In high school I remember this kid, who suffered slightly from small man syndrome. He yelled across the schoolyard to one of the larger female members of our class, “Why stroll when you can roll?” The girl not looking the slightest bit bothered, yelled back, “You should have been drowned at birth you little turd.” This response caused the boy’s friends to fall into immediate fits of hysterical laughter. The boy turned into a beetroot – the colour of one in any case. From this moment I strived to be cool in just that way.

The other day I was talking to someone much younger than me I work with about the current ‘refugee crisis.’ They said some extremely intolerant things possibly in an effort to make me angry. I continued arguing using logic and reason. They got very annoyed when I disagreed with them. I was damn sure that I didn’t actually say anything that was offensive (I asked them later and they agreed). But the person refused to speak to me unless to answer simple yes or no questions for the next four hours.

A couple of days later the same person broke a fingernail, I made a small joke about it and again they did not talk to me for the next two hours.

It is not just me that is having trouble with supersensitive ridiculously easy to offend people. At a pub this girl got cut off from the bar for calling the bartender a “fuckstick”. She went to the toilet or something and her friends started discussing the incident and whether or not it was a case of mistaken identity from the bartender. Later the girl flew into hysterics crying and everything because her friends were talking behind her back. What exactly do parents do to raise somebody that unstable?

I would like to know if anybody else is having trouble with supersensitive young people? If so I would love to hear about it in the comments.

I need one these, a Sonar II Burner. Finally a hand held laser that can light matches and blind fighter pilots!

Thanks to wired magazine for this, Top 5 Gadgets That Could Get You Arrested.

I’m so depressed. My brother says I’m pathetic at least I don’t need drugs to make me happy.

To top it all off I found out someone I like doesn’t like me. I am a likeable person. I am a great person to know. I am funny, humourous and I know how to tell a joke. I am Smart, intelligent and have a high IQ. I am also generally an all-round nice guy. What is there not to like?

At least there is one good thing about being depressed for me anyway, I know that later on today I will go into my manic phase. Actually, I’m probably already there.

Anyway, fuck you to all the people who don’t like me. Actually fuck everyone!

I wasn’t surprised when I heard on the news that parents will be punished for their kids not attending school. In New South Wales they have brought in new laws that will even jail parents. Apparently there is a truancy epidemic throughout Australia.

The thing is there is no way, short of locking teenagers up, that you can make them go to school. Most homes are not prisons and schools are not prisons, so how are you going to make your teenager attend school if they don’t want to?

You can only punish parents for things that they have control over such as enrolling their children in school. Punishing parents for truancy is a waste of money and time.

It seems teenagers (not to mention the parents of binge drinking truant teenagers) are the new refugees or the new black if you take my meaning. They are now being targeted for under age binge drinking as well. This is another thing that parents have very little control over. You can prevent your teenager getting alcohol. You can lock up your wine and spirits. But you are not going to prevent your kid from jumping out the window and going down to the local park where their friends at having a binge drinking session. One of your child’s acquaintances is bound to have an irresponsible older brother who will go to the bottle shop on a teenager’s request.

In an attempt to limit underage binge drinking the government is releasing a series of graphic ads, similar to the anti-smoking campaign. I believe this approach will be counter-productive as it will act as an advertisement raising awareness of binge drinking – it will become even cooler than it was before. Some people have even suggested raising the drinking age to 21. This idea is incredibly stupid. All it will do is vastly increase the number of people who drink under age. An underage drinking culture will become entrenched and teenagers will have even greater access to alcohol. Just compare this to the effect that prohibition had on the USA.

I don’t really know what the solution is to both these problems. I just know that blaming parents isn’t the answer. Parenting is one of the hardest things that someone will ever do. Maybe one idea is: to receive the baby bonus a first-time parent must complete a parenting course.

I would love to hear what others have to say, see you in the comments.

Oh my God I finally understand how interest rates work. The reserve bank is responsible when they go up and the government is responsible when they go down. Of course the opposite is true when you are in opposition.

Turnbull you’re a genius!

I recently got a message on Facebook from the President of Parent Project Australia an organisation for the parents of children with Duchenne muscular dystrophy. This message started a conversation about various treatments for muscular dystrophy.

Duchenne muscular dystrophy is a genetic disease that mainly affects males. It is a degenerative muscle wasting disease. At birth a child with the defective gene appears to be perfectly normal. A child will slowly lose strength and they stop walking at age 9 to 12. At about age 15 weakening can begin to slow. In some cases the heart is affected and this can result in heart failure – sometimes suddenly. But if the patient is lucky their heart will remain relatively unaffected. Respiratory muscles can also fail, but there are treatments such as mechanical ventilation that stop this being a fatal symptom.

As many of my readers will know I have Duchenne muscular dystrophy I am now 29 and use a ventilator at night.

For this next bit to make sense you will need a bit of background information: In your lungs you have two different types of muscles: voluntary and involuntary. Voluntary muscles are used when holding your breath or when you take a deep breath. Involuntary muscles are the ones allow you to breathe without thinking about it, without these muscles you are unable to breathe when you are asleep. At around the age of 20 some boys with muscular dystrophy lose their involuntary lung muscles that allow them to breathe during sleep. Without mechanical ventilation the patient will die. This is exactly what happened to many of my friends.

You see it wasn’t until 10 years ago that ventilators were widely used to treat muscular dystrophy. It was commonly believed that anyone with muscular dystrophy would die before their 21st birthday. It can take a while before a change such as this is reflected in the medical textbooks. Duchenne can result in an early death, but this is not true in all cases. Some doctors continue to believe that Duchenne is a terminal illness.

I feel this belief is reflected in the type of treatments given to boys with muscular dystrophy. The focus of Parent Project Australia is in early diagnosis and early intervention. By intervention they mean physiotherapy and drugs. It is the drugs bit that I’m concerned about. Children as young as four are given steroids in an effort prolong the time they walk. I think parents and doctors are thinking about the short-term benefits and almost completely ignoring long-term ones. There are many studies that indicate children given steroids do walk longer, but, just look at the list of side effects: weight gain, hair growth, mood changes, stunted growth, decreased bone mass, acne and cataracts. I find this more than a little bit disturbing. There are no studies that I know of that steroids improve the long-term survival of someone with muscular dystrophy.

Just think what it would be like to be nine years old, you are progressively getting weaker and you know that you are going to be a wheelchair soon. This very stressful time often results in sometimes extreme behavioural problems – I know I’ve been through it. I can just imagine what taking a drug that has its own side effect of extreme behavioural problems would do. Early childhood is a very important time for someone’s emotional and psychological development. I feel this treatment could damage a child’s future prospects.

If you are a parent of a child with muscular dystrophy giving them steroids is not necessarily the best thing. You will make very hard choices had and you will make mistakes. It is important not to feel guilty about the decisions you have made or will make whether you choose steroids or not.

20 years ago when my brother and I made the transition from walking to wheelchair our family was given some valuable advice. Our parents were told not to put pressure on us to walk as this would just make it even harder for us and could even result in injury. We received our electric wheelchairs nearly a year before we actually stopped walking. This allowed us to adjust us to the idea of using electric wheelchairs and we learnt how to drive them before we needed to use them every day saving many plaster walls from certain doom. My brother and I both feel that this is the one piece of advice that made the most difference to us during this troubling time.

The second India versus Australia test seems to have caused a shit load of drama. First of all was the monkey incident. Second was the poor quality of the umpiring. The third was Australia’s apparent poor sportsmanship.

I am not much of a cricket fan and I don’t know much about cricket in general, but here’s what I think of all this.

I have two ways of thinking about the monkey incident. Part of me says it’s okay for an Indian to call someone a monkey because of all the sledging that has gone their way over the years. You can’t start complaining because it is suddenly coming your way now. This is similar to the way it’s okay for an African-American to call someone a nigger. Or a disabled person like me calling someone a cripple or a spastic. But then again not all people with cerebral palsy appreciate being call a spastic even if it is coming from another spastic. Also what happened to the old rule, what happens in the middle of the cricket pitch stays in the in the middle? If it is the sport of gentlemen this sort of thing should not have happened in the first place. And why did it have to be so public? Could the captains have sorted it out between them afterwards?

Well, the worst did happen and Harbhajan Singh has been suspended for three tests. There is no question in my mind that it if an Australian player called an Indian a monkey the punishment would be equal if not greater. So the Indian team needs to pull its head in and accept the punishment.

Cricket is meant to be the sport of gentlemen. I remember when I was younger one of the Waugh’s would be batting, suddenly there would be an appeal and the umpire would be struggling to decide. But Waugh would decide for him tuck his bat under his arm and walk back to the pavilion. Why did he do this I would ask? Because it was the right thing to do – it was the sporting thing to do. But our current test team seems to have forgotten this. Our captain appealing after the ball had touched the ground. Clark appealing after he had caught a ball that had bounced. The worst of all – appealing for caught behind when the ball obviously hadn’t touched the bat. Maybe all of these were mistakes by the players – but I think they should apologise for these mistakes after seeing the replays. They may be one of the best teams ever, but they are not the greatest.

In the current era of cricket umpires are no longer able to rely on players to make decisions for them – so they need to learn how to make correct decisions. Judging by the last test this seems to be an impossible task. Does this mean replacing umpires with robots? Or maybe umpires should be given a handheld device that would allow them to watch replays.

Maybe I am taking this to seriously, cricket used to be the sport of gentlemen, but now it is just another sport. I need to accept this and move on.

On a related issue the Herald Sun is holding a poll, should Ricky Ponting be stacked? I voted no, but it looks like thousands of others haven’t. I smell a rat – I think Indians and the English have been voting in this poll. How very un-sporting of them.

I’m back from my unannounced one-month holiday, with a new layout. I would like to thank my brother Nick for coming up with the new graphics.

A lot has happened over December and early January.

I went on a family holiday to Sydney. I will be doing a write up of all my thoughts about Sydney – and there are a lot of them, good and bad.

Our family recently got a new cat. This disturbed our dog greatly causing her to go into a fit of barking whenever she saw the cat. The cat also hated the dog. We had to divide the house up into cat areas and dog areas. Incredibly, the cat and dog are now best friends. How did we do this? Stay tuned and find out.

I’m getting sick of World Warcraft so I have been downloading lots of demos. It is very hard to find a good computer game these days. I shall be posting reviews of all the games I have tried.

Happy New Year!

The Fryer household has a new dog. She is a two year old black standard poodle by the name of Sophie.

We have recently trained her to play fetch. This is great as we have never had a dog that plays fetch, it is a novelty and it’s handy too. When it is stinking hot and you don’t want to torture yourself and the dog by going for a walk you can simply throw the ball.

Yesterday we discovered that it depends on which ball you use whether the dog will bring it back or not. If it’s a nice new fluffy green tennis ball there is not a problem. If we throw a faded greeny grey one she runs after it, but neglects to pick it up and bring it back. That damn ball snob! A diva dog.

I enquired of Sophie why she has such an attitude towards faded balls and she just stared at me smiling. Is it the brand? Is it the taste? Is it the fact they are not fresh and new? Or is she just attached to a particular ball? Alas, maybe it’s our fault.

There is a new conspiracy that may be costing people their lives, this conspiracy is called Smart Tan. Ever since Clare Oliver died blaming UV tanning for her skin cancer, the salons have absolutely shit themselves. They are terrified they will go the way of the cigarette and be, rightly, demonised for their adverse health effects.

Ever since I heard about the idea of tanning under UV lamps I knew it had to be bad. How could baking yourself in such an unnatural manner be good for you? It was widely assumed that solariums were bad for you. I strongly advised my female friends to not go to them. I called them the man sized microwave.

Now that the danger of solariums has been so publicly aired the tanning salons have turned to a bunch of professional liars. This group is called Smart Tan. Smart Tan is a bunch of lawyers, doctors and scientists who have the “truth” on their side. These guys have supposedly proven that tanning is fine provided you take certain precautions, but all it really proves is that if you pay someone enough you can get them to say anything.

Tanning salons have been sending out letters to their customers advising them of the falsehood of Clare Oliver’s allegations. They have even started advertising on the television. These people are deluding themselves if they think their word is going to be trusted above a girls dying words.

The age of UV tanning is over, the tanning salon’s should realise this and move on to the alternatives.