During annual sales at the world’s biggest shopping mall, crowds with medieval helmets and body armour gather frontside, hoping to swarm the specials without too much cranial damage. Similarly, modem-hunters and mouse-clickers lurk web-side, riding the ebbs and flows of say – the Australian dollar – waiting for the riot moment to pounce. Whaz on spesh, Elle?

Hitler Wine Vs Chopper Beer
Lunardelli, an Italian vino company ( www.vinilunardelli.it ) has launched a successful range of wines. The artistic series features bottles of wine with labels from Van Gogh, Picasso, Gustav Klimt etc. It’s their ‘historical’ series which is selling shitloads however, and especially their ‘Der Fuhrer range with Hitler in a variety of poses. What sorta hang-over that comes with you’ll have to ask the Germans. And south-side, we have our own Chopper Read first launching his own wine label, and now trying the market out with a ‘heavy beer’. Saw Chopper do a ‘comedy show’ a while back – brutal tales of the old ultraviolence, followed by busy photo shoots with a long line of aunties and uncles jostling to be flashed with their arms around him.

Saddam Sand
If you really, really don’t know what to do with your money – think about how great this’d look on your mantlepiece. An amazing ‘opportunity to own a piece of Iraqi and international history’. Apparently these entrepreneurs ( can you see them scheming this over a beer?) travelled North of Baghdad to a tiny farmhouse and got themselves some of the SAND where Saddam Hussein had buried himself in an underground chamber! What you get for your $US25 is … a limited edition commemorative presentation encompassing a small sample of sandy earth excavated from the hole that was Saddam�s last hiding place, a certificate of authenticity from a leading regional geologist, stating that the piece is genuine and actually from Al-Dawr and a plaque which states:
“GENUINE EARTH FROM AL-DAWR, IRAQ. TAKEN FROM THE HOLE USED AS A FINAL HIDING PLACE BY FORMER IRAQI PRESIDENT SADDAM HUSSEIN.” Hurry now, only 1,000 available.

Micropayments
When done with ordering all your alcohols, war memorabilia & DIY magic mushroom kits, videos of Japanese girls farting etc consider diverting some of your money-flows to some worthwhile and struggling independent artists, coders and organisations. Peeps everywhere be trying to squeeze an income from the web somehow, and ‘micropayments’ have long been touted as a way to make this happen. The hope being that if people were able to pay a very small amount for something they liked – liked 5 cents for an article they enjoyed, and it was very easy to do – like a click, then creators able to get enough readers / viewers / listeners might actually be able to scrape together an income out of that tally. This is also the principle behind shareware software – often coded by one person and made available for free, but requesting some small payment if the user finds the software useful.

The tricky bit is making it very easy for people to pay – and two online companies are trying their best to fill that gap : BitPass.com & PayPal.com. The way these work is that you purchase ‘cards’ or credit with them, which then allows you to click on sites which have bitpass or paypal logos and easily transfer a small amount of money from your account to theirs. For example, you could transfer some money over to www.e-sheep.com/spiders so that Patrick Farley can hurry along with his fantastic Al-Qaeda sci-fi-ish web-reality comic, ‘Spiders’. Tis a captivating story with really creative use of the web, with chapter 4 currently in production, and recommended viewing for any would-be online storytellers or designers.

Dodgy Brothas
Plenny-o-sharks in the money waters, be it Nigerians who need money transferred through your account, ‘banks’, credit card and webmail sites that want you to re-send your name and password for ’security’ reasons ,or online auctioneers who want you to deposit money in a Western Union account in someone else’s name – when they see it is there they will send you the goods. If ever in doubt – who ya gonna call?
http://www.scambusters.org/Scambusters63.html

On the krusty plains of the years ahead, lay a battered pair of mirrored shades. Zoom in like a mars probe and the curved reflective panorama reveals : our future is littered with spam. And so, some navigational strategies for the noise ahead.

Grasping The Situation
Not sure if you’ve heard the one about the disco-dancer who fell on a schooner glass, badly gashing his leg. Rushed to hospital by his friends, the emergency nurse couldn’t convince him to remove his pants for better access to the wound. Source of his reluctance turned out, of course, to be a rather large salami taped to the side of his thigh. Urban myth or not, I feel for this character. On NYE I’d decided to spend the following year aware of silver linings within dark clouds, and so upon later facing an inbox brimming with spam – I embraced all on offer and replied to every email. If you’d like to borrow a Paris Hilton video, I’ve got 36 copies on VHS, and 13 on DVD. I’ve already married 4 Russian ladies and thanks to a potent combination of lotions, creams, patches, pills, and herbal treatments, my penis is now 117 disco-dangerous inches long. I’m expecting most of the feeling will return when all bandages are removed, but swimming pools and tight jeans are out for now.

Adopt A Celebrity
Another way to embrace rather than suffer media overload, is to develop compassion for a front-page human. Next time you’re pushing a trolley full of soy sausages through the checkout, spend just a few minutes glancing over the tabloid mag covers to see who’s feeling the pain. Hard to go past Australia’s real-life croc-hunter at the moment, mostly because of unfair comparisons with the black-turned-white popstar with a penchant for baby-dangling. Once you’ve adopted, striking up conversations on public transport or in ATM queues becomes much more enjoyable, and you can enjoy subtly swinging to the defence of your fragile star eg “It’s not like he sleeps with the crocodiles is it? And I mean, really – have you ever tried to molest a 1000 pound reptile?” Of course popstars with rare skin diseases are also suitable adoptees.

Leave It All Behind
Your eyeballs have already been extended 170 million kilometres if you’ve browsed recent snaps from our Mars robot, so if you wheelie, wheelie wanna getz away from the advertising debris – why not join them? The DIY Space Travel expertise of The Association of Autonomous Astronauts should help you along nicely – but you’ll first face a few obstacles. Namely, you’ll have to figure out a way to get past the upcoming Aussie Star Wars Missile Defence System (code-named Woolly Woofta) and before that – you’ll have to wrestle with the proposed Australian microchip passports (true) to get yourself outta customs.

Sticking Around
If you decide to stay, your ride will be best enjoyed if the other passengers are also comfortable. Deeper rooted way to reduce terrorism too. Kevin Kelly is a Californian, but he also has some good ideas about ‘leveraging’ your donations in the best way. Based on critieria of aiming to help those with the least, where small makes a huge difference, of a gift expanding itself and having global range, he has built a short list of exemplary organisations who are helping improve the lives of many people. Scroll down past the gadget-fetishes at his homepage for more details: http://www.kk.org/cooltools/