Hackpacker

A sultry snap of Kenny (Shane Jacobson) - the first celebrity plumber or blokesploitation victim It began with retrosexuals – the flipside of the latte-sipping meterosexual dandy, who’d rather a Big M and could tell people exactly where they could stuff their zucchini flowers. They were rough diamonds from a time before gourmet grub and when manscaping meant burying a bloke in your backyard. Back in 2007 popular culture cottoned on to the Aussie man exemplified by Kenny , the waste management bloke with a heart of gold. The return of the flannie and competitions for hot tradies all made the yob on-trend again. But mostly blokesploitation appeared on lifestyle shows so no episode of Better Homes & Gardens was complete without a loveable chippy showing the requisite builder’s crack.  In Other Words is a regular on the Big Issue 's Ointment page.  

A little known dadvocate is unearthed in Darth Vader and Son , an important fathering text by Jeffrey Brown It’s not enough to just raise your kids to not eat their own snot – today the parent is the political as dadvocates push for ward the case for active fathering . Author Jeff Sass reckons iPads are bested by iDads as the latter has better battery life though memory decreases in older units . Not to mention the danger of their dad jokes going viral. But you don’t have to be male to wear the mantel . A uthor of parenting bible What to Expect When You’re Expecting , Heidi Murkoff calls herself a dadvocate and included a whole chapter in the latest edition dedicated to proactive papas. One day dadvocates may even dream of having a book of their own. In Other Words is a regular on the Big Issue 's Ointment page. 

In the corporate jungle there are few things as dangerous as the slow-moving HiPPO. The meeting is going fine until everyone turns and listens out for the confused charge of the Highest Paid Person’s Opinion (or HiPPO).  After absently fidgeting with their Blackberry for most of the presentation, HiPPOs will typically yawn, “Yeah, we’re not doing any of that. What about building a MySpace page? Kids love that don’t they?” This is answered by howls of approval from the corporate hyenas. HiPPO decision making is becoming extinct as businesses are placing an emphasis on marketing research and what their customers actually want. In Hollywood, however, amphibious animals are still calling the shots with the announcement this month of – hold onto your balls - HungryHungry Hippos: The Movie . In Other Words is a regular on the Big Issue 's Ointment page. 

It starts innocently enough with a birth announcement on Twitter, maybe an image of a new born on Facebook, then slides into a blog about your beautiful baby’s every poop (images included). If you’ve ever known more about a friend’s child’s bowel movements than their doctor then you’ve been a victim of oversharenting. The blog STFU Parents has become a watchdog for the worst offenders, pulling out cases like misspelled defences of homeschooling or opening up a Facebook page in honour of their precious child’s snot. They’ve even discovered new subtypes like mommyjacking , where an apparently innocent status like “I’m tired” becomes mommyjacked with comments like “You don’t know tired until you’ve had a teething baby screaming in your face at 3 AM!!!”. Child-free friends encountering this are officially allowed to respond by putting parents in a “timeout” in a bar somewhere. In Other Words is a regular on the Big Issue 's Ointment page. 

It sounds a little filthy, but this cheerful exclamation is just another word for awesome. The origin of amazeballs has been attributed to bitchy celeb blogger Perez Hilton who encouraged Twitter users to retweet it to make it a trending topic way back in 2009. Tim Burgess and his Amazeballs But the word (sometimes spelt amazballs) really jumped the shark in February 2012 when Tim Burgess of Brit indie band The Charlatans tweeted that he thought totes amazeballs would make a good breakfast cereal. Kellogg’s’ surreally took him at his word, producing a concoction of shortbread, raisins, marshmallows and chocolate-flavoured drops in a pack featuring a cartoon version of the singer. The sugared-up cereal should come with a pair of dentures in every box, though Burgess reckons it’s true to the word’s inspiration because it “sounded to me like something Willy Wonka would come up with.” In Other Words is a regular on the Big Issue 's Ointment page. 

When your work colleague asks you “Report QUESTION MARK” you’ve got a case of verbal texting on your hands. It’s that socially awkward mode of speech that texting and emails has left us with , where people believe they can no longer communicate tone and need to spell out their punctuation. We are so sick of these guys EXCLAMATION POINT. At its worst it can degenerate into emoticons – “You’re giving me FROWNY FACE right now and I need TONGUE POKING.” – and initialism - “Don’t make me LOL” – in conversation. Some try to specify font in conversation – “This joke is much funnier in Comic Sans” – but at its worst it becomes twitter speak. There’s nothing worse than talking to someone using hashtags in dialogue #justsayin. And it has to stop before people start trying to insert hyperlinks into speech FULL STOP. In Other Words is a regular on the Big Issue 's Ointment page. Off Verbal Texters appeared in Issue No. 374. 

If you’ve ever waited by your broken computer all morning to finally get a pasty kid in a Dungeons & Dragons t-shirt to visit and tell your machine is broken then you’ve already met a princeling of the geekocracy. The geeks have inherited the earth in a bloodless coup of confusing jargon such as power-cycling (switching your machine on/off), user error (blaming you for computer breakdown) or server issues (meaning “We have no idea what just happened”). The kings of the geekocracy rarely leave their courts. With titles like Sys Admin or Chief Architect of All Time they are guarded by banks of servers and rarely deign to answer the phone preferring you “Fill out the email form and we’ll get back to you”. You are as likely to see a Sys Admin as Queen Elizabeth II popping around to explain why Windows keeps crashing. In Other Words is a regular on the Big Issue 's Ointment page. Geekocracy appeared in Issue No. 362. 

You’re probably already overwhelmed by iAnxiety – that rising mania as everyone you know has bought at least one iPad. Plus your inbox is full, you’ve got 14 unanswered Twitter DMs and they’ve probably just invented a new social network for you to be behind on. It’s time you embraced off gridding. Author Susan Maushart took the off gridder experiment, telling her family they’d live screen-free, truly cordless lives for six months. The connected kids LOLed, but Maushart’s book Winter of Our Disconnect has become a bible to turn off, tune out and drop out. Though they talk about increased attention spans and appreciating boredom, off gridders are commonly mistaken for Amish. In Other Words is a regular on the Big Issue 's Ointment page. Off Gridding appeared in Issue No. 356.

Photo: Jeff Burton In the dying days of his book tour promoting his latest Imperial Bedrooms , cult author Bret Easton Ellis is so over answering questions about his novels. “I have a completely different relationship with the novel than the reader does,” he sighs. “Which is why it’s very hard to sit here and answer questions about the book, because it’s such a disconnect.” Imperial Bedrooms uses the characters of his 1985 debut, Less Than Zero , 25 years later and looks at how time has scarred both the characters and the once enfant terrible himself. On this tour he’s survived that interview at Byron Bay Writer’s Festival where he repelled questions from Ramona Koval about his role as a satirist by joshing about his newfound crush on Delta Goodrem. Koval in turn scolded him for treating the interview as “a stand-up routine”. But in person Ellis is entertaining yet open – his powerful chin is blunted by a navy Nike cap and his playboy image muted by glasses and an overcoat

Experts trace their origins back to the blokey billionaires of the 1980s. But don’t confuse Bondy or John ‘Pig’s Arse’ Elliott with the everyday fauxgan. The yobby (yobbo-yuppy) of the 1980s is an almost extinct breed. The first fauxgans appeared in the late 1990s when tradies got scarce and then fashionable. The first signs of mainstream fauxgans were the arrival of Merrick and Rosso, who groused their way into Ocker hearts across the nation. Fauxgan royalty finally hit the telly in the form of Dave ‘Hughesy’ Hughes, who out larrikin-ed larrikins and made ‘bein Stralyan’ a performance art . Today fauxgans may comb their fauxlets back so they are barely visible, but offer them a choice of beer of a cheeky imported merlot to spot them in a field. In Other Words is a regular on the Big Issue 's Ointment page. Fauxgans was the first one of the series.

In her debut novel In-human Anna Dusk mixes poetry, Aussie vernacular and a gutsy werewolf heroine. Don’t ask Anna Dusk if werewolves are the new vampires. Sure she’s releasing a lycanthrope book just as the zeitgeist howls with The Wolfman and the Twilight franchise has been re-booted by shapeshifting spunk Jacob. But Dusk began In-human over 12 years ago so she’s hardly jumping on the fangwagon. In-human follows Sally, a high school girl who tears out of the humdrum of rural Tasmania as she transforms into a werewolf. Her allegiances are tested between family and the pack, between hunger and herself. Far from Twilight ’s de-fanged fairy tales, In-human is powered by Sally’s anger with buckets of sex and blood. As Dusk sees it, “Growing up in a small town and having people constantly commenting on her all the time really pisses Sally off.” Dusk is no fan of Stephanie Meyers vegetarian vampires. “Where’s the fun in that?” she laughs flashing her prominent canine teeth. “Peop

On the way to meet journalist and novelist Mark Dapin at the Kings Cross Hotel, I witness a junky couple squabbling. She’s ten steps ahead of him and he’s yelling ahead “You’d be all right if you got off the gear!” Her grubby T-shirt says “LOVE”. Dapin, a former Cross resident, is familiar with these human dramas. “I actually had one of those scenes in the book, because it happens continually here. They’re people right at the bottom so they argue at the top of their voices to show that they’re not ashamed of what they are.” His first novel King of the Cross centres on the characters and crims of Sydney’s dodgiest suburb. Jewish gangster Jake Mendoza is as big as the Cross’s landmark Coke sign when aspiring British journo Anthony Klein comes to interview him. Klein’s interviews chart the slimy self-rationalisations of Mendoza as he grows up with the Cross while Anthony finds his place in the seedy suburb. Dapin is known for sticking a microphone in the face of the likes of Gordon Ramsa

When I meet the unshaven man in plaid zippered jacket and vintage 70s shirt he looks more like a bass player than the crisp profile image of Big Issue columnist, Mic Looby. “I shaved especially for that,” Looby quips. His eyes are ringed with tiredness characteristic of too much computer time or caring for a young child. And this Mic Looby does both. The Looby I’m here to interview is the author of Paradise Updated . His first novel follows newbie guidebook writer Mithra as she heads to Maganda in search of the legendary Robert Rhind who wrote the first version of the guide revered by travellers as ‘the Bible’. Complications arrive when Mithra realises she has to sack Rhind while researching Maganda. The story flips between exotic locales and corporate machinations as Looby satirises the “bogus authority of the guidebook which is at the heart of a lot of what I wrote”. And Looby should know – he’s penned guidebooks to Burma, the Philippines and Australia as well as working as an editor

The Big Issue Fiction edition hit the streets on Friday. Already I've gone out and bought a copy for me and my mum. It features a new work by Cate Kennedy that makes for a vivid blackly funny insight into a community centre that reminded me of a few jobs I've done. There's also YA author Penni Russon with her first major piece for adults that I'm keen to read. Plus Andy Griffiths and Terry denton with an illustrated peak at their follow-up to The Bad Book . Plus the talented Jo Bowers , Alice Pung and more. It's only about for a limited time, so track down a vendor this week or next.

The weird thing about writing for print as well as the web is the lag time. With the web you hit 'Publish Post' and it's out in the world. With print it disappears into a big machine and becomes a publication that's almost unrecognisable. In a good way. I've got a short story coming out in the Big Issue fiction edition. An editor told me they were looking at how to illustrate the piece which stretched my brain in the visual direction. The trigger for the story was seeing a Vietnamese kid doing his homework in the window of his parent's cafe. It was one of those "What's his life like?" moments that takes you off on a fictional tangent. It was a fairly mundane mental snapshot but that was where my brain went. But as an illustration it really wouldn't stand up. As a reader it can be tough to see your favourite book adapted into a film and seeing how a director has represented a key scene or miscast your favourite character. It's best to just

With a new film and book out this year, writer Paul Auster is anything but a quiet American in the year of election. “I’m feeling nervous,” Paul Auster’s voice burrs down the phoneline from Brooklyn. “I desperately want the Democrats to win. I think it’s just absolutely crucial to the future of the country that we get the Republicans out.” Like many Americans, the New York writer is watching the election anxiously to see who will be the next leader of the free world. He campaigned actively at the last election against Bush alongside Dave Eggers, Salman Rushdie and a packed bookshelf of contemporary literati. As well as writing an anti-Bush song, he leant his succinct prose to The Future Dictionary of America, a lexicon imagining Stateside language 30 years from now. His entry: “Bush (bush) n. a poisonous family of shrubs, now extinct.” Auster’s pre-election definition didn’t come true with America’s political weeds thriving into a second term. Preparing for his Australian visit this mo