Mermaid-mafia of the swimming pool – we salute you!

Poseidon-class, nuclear-powered submarines envy your ability to motor up and down those roped-off water lanes, all the while a picture of liquidy concentration.

What we’re curious about though – besides whether you really can sweat under water – is “What in water-logged tarnation do you aqua-men and ladies think about while you’re, er… ‘kicking back’?

It can’t all be about stroke correction and counting laps, can it?

Well… can it?

It can’t. And it most definitely isn’t. Even the most focused, water-tight mind will eventually begin to wander and experience the dreaded ‘laps in concentration’.

When that happens, the lap-swimmer’s mind ends up resembling less a titanium-plated sleek super-sub and more the type of rickety, driftwood raft Tom Hanks’s character somehow managed to cobble together in CAST AWAY.

Or if you prefer, more like the time Penelope Pitstop teamed up with the Ant Hill Mob to cross the river. Actually, the stroke technique of the two brown hats at the back isn’t that bad.

Dust off the embarrassing speedos and get ready with the leaky goggles.

It’s time to take a deep dive into the whacked-out, random thoughts more likely really going on in the chlorine-soaked mind of the humble lap swimmer.

If you’re a long-time fan of the classic television show GILLIGAN’S ISLAND, you owe it to yourself to click HERE.

Recently, I enjoyed a retro-watch of a 1981 bank robbery movie called THIEF.

THIEF is written, directed and produced by virtuoso film-maker Michael Mann and is the precursor to what many consider his master work, another bank robbery movie he made 14 years later, called HEAT.

I’ve always had a dedicated love of the 1995 film HEAT. Watching THIEF brought all those feelings to the surface. I just knew I had to do something about it.

The result is a not-too-serious mini suburban noir I’ve titled NEIGHBORHOOD WATCH… AND LISTEN!

Hope you enjoy it and remember, as Tom Sizemore’s character in the movie memorably says… the action IS the juice!

Fergus Argyle didn’t just love Michael Mann’s 1995 masterpiece HEAT – he lived it. He’d been known to wear charcoal suits, stare intensely at the ocean, and, most crucially, had installed a high-gain microphone in the drywall shared with his neighbor, Gary.

Gary, also a HEAT devotee, was a died-in-the-wool ‘Waingro apologist’, which Fergus found personally offensive. For three nights, Fergus sat in the dark, wearing heavy tactical headphones, waiting for the ‘score.’ He wasn’t looking for bank heist intel; he wanted to hear Gary’s leaked copy of the director’s recently-updated definitive commentary.

Suddenly, the signal hissed to life.

“The air’s raw tonight, Ralphie,” Gary’s voice crackled through the receiver. He was talking to his cavoodle. “Just like the lighting in the diner scene. Pure steel blue.”

Fergus leaned in, his heart hammering. In the movie, Al Pacino’s Vincent Hanna listens to De Niro’s Neil McCauley drilling into a safe. Fergus adjusted his levels, feeling like a wild urban predator. He heard a metallic clink.

“He’s prepping the drill,” Fergus whispered, quoting the film. “Give me the room! Give me the room!”

Through the headphones, a low, rhythmic grinding started. Whirr. Scrape. Thud.

“Yes,” Fergus hissed. “The vault. The silicon carbide drill bit. It’s happening.”

Just then, the audio changed. It wasn’t the sound of a professional thief bypassing a security system. It was the sound of a man struggling with a cheap IKEA Allen key.

“This coffee table is a goddamn weak design, Ralphie!” Gary shouted. “The instructions are a lie! It looked so glamorous in the showroom, but now it’s just particle board and despair!”

Fergus frowned. This wasn’t the high-stakes surveillance he’d envisioned. He wanted the tension of the Far East National Bank job, not a middle-aged man wrestling with a side table.

Suddenly, a loud crack echoed through the wall.

“Slick!” Gary yelled, referencing the heist’s getaway driver. “I’ve snapped the mounting bracket! I’m down! I’m boxed in!”

Fergus couldn’t help himself. He grabbed his own microphone and keyed the frequency. “Son of a glitch! You’re acting like a cowboy, Gary! You want to be making moves on the street when you can’t even assemble a cheese ‘n crackers flat-pack?”

There was dead silence on the other end. Then, Gary’s voice came back, surprisingly friendly and, like his celluloid hero, unnervingly calm.

“Fergus? Is that you in the drywall? You’re doing the Hanna surveillance bit, aren’t you?”

“I… I have to leave in thirty seconds if I feel the heat around the corner,” Fergus stammered, committing to the bit.

“Ten degrees flat,” Gary replied, completing the quote. “Now come over here and help me lift this tabletop. It’s solid oak, and I think I may have pinned Ralphie.”

Fergus sighed, took off his headphones, and headed next door. His cover may have been blown, but the brotherhood of the cinephile remained.

This is an excerpt from one of HEAT‘s most well-known scenes, the restaurant meeting between Al Pacino’s character and Robert Deniro’s ‘Neil’ –

Now watch British actor Tom Hiddleston (‘Loki’ in Marvel’s THOR movies) do his absolute best impersonation of this scene…

This post has been brought to you by the new Harper Collins-published novel THE INFINITE SADNESS OF SMALL APPLIANCES.

Written by Canadian author Glenn Dixon and set in the near future, it tells the story of a sentient Roomba vacuum cleaning robot who sets out to save the humans in her house from a rising, evil technological power. Original, huh?

Inside a Korean restaurant in busy downtown Seoul, I spied what looked like a bowl of freshly prepared guacamole.

A few seconds later and I’d heaped a generous sized dollop of the green stuff onto my rice bowl, decorated with BBQed beef pieces, and … down the hatch!

The ‘guacamole’ that instantly set my mouth ablaze with the power of a thousand suns turned out to be none other than the cleverly disguised undercover agent that is… wasabi.

For those who’ve never experienced a wasabi ‘wake-up call’ before, allow me to say – if chili peppers are a slow-building campfire, then wasabi is nothing short of a precision-guided thermal missile aimed directly at your entire central nervous system.

A few days later when my wife remarked about the ‘avocado’ fighting back and how I’d wanted more greens in my diet, I’d finally ‘cooled down’ enough to enjoy the joke.

This post was composed for a weekly travel writing competition that asks readers to share a travel experience in 150 words or less (with or without photos).

The comp runs in a travel magazine called ESCAPE, found inside the Brisbane (Australia) newspaper, THE SUNDAY MAIL. There’s a monthly prize (something usually to the value of around $500) for the best story published. The address to send entries to is escape@news.com.au if you’d like to have a go. Click HERE to find out more details.

That picture of ‘me’ on fire and fleeing the restaurant was, very obviously, courtesy of our silicon friends at Skynet, or as most folk refer to it …A.I.

Wanna see some images from the reject pile? The instruction to A.I (Nano Banana) was “Create a cartoon image of an Aussie guy in his 50’s running out of a Korean restaurant with his mouth on fire.” And this is what I got –

I’m Aussie for sure, but not THAT Aussie, so I changed it to ‘guy in his 50’s’ and got this –

This was still a little too grandpa vibe for my liking, so I then opted for ‘guy in his 40’s’ –

I may not want to admit it, but these days I’m probably closer to the 50’s look than the 40’s one, however I’m clean shaven, so the ‘Jim Carrey’ version of ‘me’ was the one that got the nod.

How’s this for a literary flavored story plot – six struggling authors find themselves on a remote island where they race to complete the final chapter of a famous, recently-deceased author’s unfinished novel. The competition turns deadly over a tense 72-hour period in what critics have called a “clever locked-room thriller which is also a biting satire of the publishing world.”

Released last week, THE ENDING WRITES ITSELF is written by ‘Evelyn Clarke’, which is the pen name of co-authors Victoria Schwab (American, aged 39) and Cat Clarke (English, aged 47).