How life seems to go in circles – or cycles, for that matter.
Take haircuts, for instance.
Former AFL pretty boy Warwick Capper had a mullet in the ’80s. Mullets are well and truly in vogue again these days.
But I have noticed of late that they may thankfully be losing their lustre and being overtaken by bowl cuts.
So, all a sudden, kids are getting around thinking they are pretty cool. A bit like the movie Dumb and Dumber.
Jeans have done the full cycle as well: tight in the ’50s and ’60s and we seem to back there again now.
I am guessing that bell bottoms or flares may be just around the corner.
One thing I cannot get my head around is a fashion that has been with us for well over a decade: people buying jeans that are torn and already half-worn-out. But it seems that bizarre fashion is with us for a while longer.
The part I find even more startling is how much people are prepared to pay for ripped clothing. That, to me, makes as much sense as a politician at Question Time.
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Technology has come a long way and we certainly aren’t cycling back.
Listening and music devices are getting smaller and louder, which is far different than when I was a kid getting around with my ‘portable’ cassette player the size of a small toolbox and listening to Daddy Cool.
Then, my first mobile phone back in the late ’80s/early ’90s was the size of a Besser block with a massive black antenna.
Language, in my day, included ‘beauty’ or ‘bonza’ (a good name for an airline) and then morphed into ‘cool’ or ‘sweet’.
It wasn’t that long ago that ‘sick’ or ‘filth’ had to be explained to me by an eye-rolling youngster – that it actually meant ‘good stuff’ (not what Mr Dictionary designed them for).
These days, they are telling me things are ‘slap s–t’, which naturally I would presume to be bad but it actually is good as well. Wow!
I have noticed a lot of motorised scooter-riding youth seem to talk like American gang members in the hood, which doesn’t make any sense to me as we are half a world away from there and a lot luckier.
Maybe we could come the full cycle back. If they want to be gangsters, they could adopt a phrase of our most famous: Ned Kelly.
As he stood in the gallows, he was supposed to have uttered “Such is life”, although recent studies claim he actually said “Ah, well, I suppose…” before they pulled the trap door.
Maybe this will work when the scooter riders get caught doing the wrong thing: “Ah, well, I suppose I was speeding like an idiot.” And, when they get fined: “Such is life.”
Works for me a lot better than torn jeans for 400 bucks.
Ashley Robinson is a columnist with Sunshine Coast News and My Weekly Preview. His views are his own.