In tune with modern lyrics

Gidday, readers. It's great to be back as a regular columnist after an extended
holiday break. Now I know you've missed me and my insightful discourses on current and social issues but - and call me old-fashioned if you wish - I didn't think it was right while the trouble and I were on hols to keep filing a column.
Bloody hell, jobs are scarce enough as it is without me boring you shitless with our escapades. Give someone else a go at writing top-shelf banter has always been my principle.
I'm always fairly confident that when I wander back into the office all tanned and relaxed after a well-earned break from the Olympus 100, I can trust the editor not to have permanently given my space to some upstart brown-noser with a formal education.
Besides it was good just to pitch the tent down the backyard for a few weeks so we could feel as if we were somewhere exotic, although we did splash out midway through our hols and took the watertaxi over to Coochie Mudlo Island for a day.
Anyway, it's good to be back in the saddle. Any saddle for that matter. Cos I don't know whether I've mentioned this before but Joan is in the family way and things are getting just a little bit irregular in the horizontal folkdancing department.
I reckon next time the missus gives me the nod you'd be excused for thinking a major pipe had just burst at the Clag glue factory!
Anyway, it's happened and there's not much we can do about it now.
One thing's for sure, I'm glad to back in the office to get away from her constant references to her condition.
After one recent bellyache about her bellyaches, I said to the women: For god's sake it's a bun in the oven. Bake it, pump it out and stop bitching.
You'd think she's the first sheila who's ever had a sprog, and in a way I'm glad I'm the only famous columnist in the family.
I'd hate to think what Bug readers would have to put up with in the months and years ahead if Joan had an outlet for her misery.
She'd be regaling us with stories of morning sickness, having a gut full of arms and legs and heaven help us afterwards - column after column on filled nappies, cracked nipples, post-natal depression and post-baby diets and trying to get her one-piece to at least cover one piece. Not that it ever did, mind.
Anyway enough about my problems. What will we talk about today? Something that Jim Soorley hasn't already nailed in that excellent column he writes for the Sunday Mail.
As I mentioned from the outset, I guess I'm a little old fashioned in adhering to once dearly held principles that have now been lost in the Aussie workplace.
And I guess I'm also a little old-fashioned when it comes to music.
I've always know this, but it sort of came home to me the other day while enjoying a superb flat white at Fat Boys in the Valley.
As people of all ages wandered in and out, the funky sassy young people who always seem to find employment there were playing some modern piece of hiphop, techno rap crap with some no-talent spending his time repeating "Who will I fuck tonight?".
At least I think it was "fuck".
Remember that old song that went "Fuck the Kasbar" all the time. Well, I always thought it was "Fuck the Kasbar" Maybe it wasn't.
A bit like that song by that latin star Ricky Martin.
"She bangs, she bangs," he extolls all the time
And you yell back at the radio "I bet she does!"
So here's this guy at Fat Boys pondering one of life's great questions - "Who will I fuck tonight?" - and you know what, readers, it didn't raise the greying hackles on any one in the cafe
In this modern world, they were clearly oblivious to his touching mating call.
Which got me to wondering about how our society's changed over such expletives.
Now I know The Courier-Mail still uses s..t for shit, but the rest of us have moved on and I think to a place that has changed for the better.
I reckon it's great that some of our more virulent four-letter swear words have lost their ability to shock, to the point that they virtually permeate our post 8.30pm TV and no-one gives a, well, fuck.
There was no better reminder of how times have changed than with the recent death of Johhny Cash, and the brief flooding of the airwaves by some of his classics to mourn the Man in Black's passing.
If I heard it once, I heard it again, and that was My Name is Sue, with the famous line "cos I'm the BEEP BEEP BEEP who named you Sue".
For years I actually thought it was beeped out because Johnny sang something like "I'm the low-life cunt who named you Sue".
A good friend of mine - a very senior scribe in the mainstream media who knows everything about music - explained to me that all he was singing in fact was "I'm the son of a bitch who named you Sue".
"You're fucking kidding me," I said to him.
"Nope, that's what he said."
Which reminded me of my years at college in the last millennium, when that song by the Royal Guardsmen, Snoopy versus the Red Baron, told us about that "BEEP Red Baron" of Germany
See, so BEEP used to cover BLOODY and BEEP used to cover SON OF A BITCH.
Now there's no beeping about the bush.
When an artist wants to sing FUCK, he thinks, what the fuck, and sings FUCK.
Now whether our friend at Fat Boys was actually engaged in anything approaching lyrics that might be remembered into next week, or that it involved anything with a melody that might linger a little longer, is another debate for another day.
I guess if the BeIn tune with modern lyricsatles were around today, their first big hit would be I Wanna Hold Your Gland.

Frank Mullet's book, Looking Up the Dresses of Unsuspecting Marching Girls, is no longer available at leading bookstores and newsagents as charges are pending.