ROFLMAOTNTGMBPWMK!*

*Rolling On the Floor Laughing My Head Off Trying Not To Get My Balls Poked With My Keys


Good morning internets. This is the first of what I hope will be oh...at least 13 or 14 posts before I lose interest.

My name is Adam Wajnberg. I'm 26. I live in Melbourne, Australia, which is currently blanketed with a fine, grey ash, due to the bushfires in Victoria's north-east.

I was born in Cleveland, Ohio. That's the US, for those who don't know, yet are still canny enough to turn on a computer. I came here just before my 7th birthday, yet I still have mostly an American accent. It makes the chicks go crazy with the vaginas already.

United Zinc? There's a small, not terribly interesting story behind that.

See, I'm a writer. Well, no, I want to be a writer. Specifically, for film and television. This is known in "the industries" as a screenwriter.

Dave Blumenstein, my closest mate since high school, is an animator and writer. We were at dinner a few months ago, when I told him I wanted to reserve a name in my head, should I ever own my own production company. I told him I wanted something industrial, with one of those bland, shadowy, menacing names. I love those names- stuff like IBM (International Business Machines) and Amalgamated Tobacco. For me, it conjures up images of fat, white, powerful men, standing around, smoking cigars, looking over the smoking remains of a crater they just gouged into the virgin earth, filled with precious borons with which to render into paint to coat the houses of the poor.

Which of course, makes such a name funny for a company that will, i imagine, write teh funny. (More on this "irony" thing later).

So anyway, I wanted a name to conjure up the mining industry, so I made a quick leap to Zinc, probably inspired by that episode of the Simpsons where they watch an old-timey video extolling the virtues of zinc. Also, 'zinc' is a hell of a lot snappier than 'tellurium'.

From there, I had options. What word to smack in front of it? You need words that conjure up the end result of a bunch of small companies being eaten up by a major corporation. So there's-

United
International
Conglomerated
Amalgamated
Consolidated

and others besides. But I liked United. Dave suggested Consolidated was better, but as it turns out, there was a Consolidated Zinc.

Other ideas were floated around. Why zinc? Why not Boron? But yeah, if you picked the simpsons reference, than you can probably identify the influence of another Matt Groening creation at work.

"Amalgamated Zinc and Shotgun" had actually been my original idea for a company name, But I found it way too much of a mouthful. So I wasn't going to go back to using "Amalgamated". Look, the point of the story is, that by the end of the meal (which was barbeque steak sandwiches by the way), I had decided I liked "United Zinc".

Now, I'm not so sure about it. But fuck it, I couldn't think of anything else to call this blog, right? Chances are, the name of this blog will change (who knows, you could be reading this in my archives, the year could be 2021, and the name of the blog right now could be "Brainflushings: The Inchoate and Frankly Frightening Ramblings of Adam Wajnberg, Master Plumber").

Okay, so now you know. I bet you feel good enough to reward yourself with that half finished, 600 mL bottle of coke that your girlfriend left in the fridge, because girls never fucking finish the bottle, they always have to put half of it back so it can go flat and lousy- They even do it with cans! CANS! Also, another difference between men and women is how they use the remote...