Farewell to ’94

Well, welcome to the last day of 1994. I personally find it rather worrying that we’re going into the second half of this decade already… I mean, where the hell did it vanish to? Oh well…

Not to worry. Plenty has happened over the last year. Keeping in the tradition of world history, most of it has been bad
news, with a bit of good news thrown in just to give us a bit of hope and spirit for living.

• Russia and Chechnya have a little tiff, because… umm.. well, actually it’s because a Chechnyan contractor did a really bad pebble-dash job on Boris Yeltsin’s driveway.
• Yugoslavia continues fighting amongst itself… themselves… itselves… Anyway, they continue to fight, because… umm… they don’t like each other. And someone said something very nasty about Slobodan Malosovic’s haircut.
• The IRA and British Government finally work out that bombing the crap out of Northern Ireland and each other probably isn’t going to get anyone anywhere, except closer to the next life. So they decide to call it a day and be friends at last. Well, perhaps not quite friends, but you know what I mean…
• The Pope (you know, that sad lonely guy in white who drives around in a really tall car, and knows too much about aircraft safety for his own good, hence his kissing the ground whenever he lands) publishes "Crossing The Threshold of Hope", a romantic 400 page adventure novel. Sadly, it fails to make it into the Top Ten, causing disappointment amongst readers who were expecting it to be a realistic moral guide to living in the 1990s, rather than an idealistic work of fantasy.
• Rwanda draws the short straw, and has this year’s African famine. And everyone who gives money to help feels really good about themselves, and swears they didn’t do it just to claim a tax deduction. And everyone who doesn’t give feels very guilty every time an ad comes on the telly about it.
• North Korean leader Kim Il Sung dies after being very Il
• United Nations Population Conference concludes in Cairo with all countries agreeing that they were resolute in not getting around to mutually agreeing to actually do anything
• Telecom hits an Australian record corporate profit of A$1.7 billion. Of course, the cynic in me says no way will they reach that next year, now that I don’t work for them anymore…
• Up and coming airline pilot Frank Corder fails his navigation test, when he flies his light plane into the White House. Oops!
• The Order Of The Solar Temple, certified YABORLs (Yet Another Bunch Of Religious Lunatics) all decide to commit suicide to achieve spiritual well-being. They’d obviously failed to realise that physical very-deep-shit-being would also result.
• What begins as a practical joke of gluing down the accelerator and locking the steering wheel ends in anger, as Ayrton Senna hits the wall.
• Another Asian Pacific Economic Committee (or whatever the hell APEC stands for) meeting takes place in Indonesia. World leaders from the Pacific Rim arrive to see how bad the painted pictures of them placed on public buildings by their Indonesian hosts are.
• The Achille Lauro sinks after catching fire off Somalia. That’s one ship that’s probably better off sunk. Let’s face it, the damned thing was doomed. It sounds like one of those Swamp Castles in Monty Python And The Holy Grail… "was hijacked, burned down, rolled over, and *then* sank into the swamp"…
• South Africans finally catch up with the basic concepts of democracy. Which is that everyone gets to play.
• Kurt Cobain finds a novel way of hiding the oil on the garage floor when he blows his head off. Actually, let me share with you the best Cobain quote I’ve heard so far: "I think it was Kurt… in the garage… with the shotgun." – Cam Winstanley, Amiga Power magazine

And I’ll leave you with this little thing ‘ere, created by me and Brian Smith, which I never got around to finishing off completely. And I have a nasty feeling that someone else came up with the same thing… but oh well, here you go. It’s to the tune of Cocaine, if you can’t work it out:

He’s got shredded jeans
Don’t know what it means
Cobain

Said he don’t have a gun
But he must have got one
Cobain

Was it somethin’ we said
Now he’s blown off his head
Cobain

He’s in bits
He’s in bits
He’s in bits
Cobain