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Nothing that starts with 'I'm not racist, but..' ever ends well, so I'm going to give this story a different intro. Obviously, I can't think of another intro, so I will just use someone elses. Ladies and gentlemen, the intro to Matthew Reilly's epic classic 'Hover Car Racer'...

The race was barely nine minutes old when Jason Chaser lost his steering rudder.

At 690 kilometres an hour.

The worst thing was, it wasn't even his fault. Some crazy kid from North Korea driving a home-made hunk-of-junk swamp runner had lost control of his car while trying to pull an impossible G-9 turn and had crashed spectacularly into the crocodile-infested marshes right in front of Jason, sending sizzling pieces of his car flying in every direction - three of which punched right through Jason's tailfin like a volley of red-hot mini-meteorites, rendering his steering vanes useless.

Truly classic literature. Absolutely no gross-over-use-of-these-things. Or any unecessary itallics, or extremely long run-on sentences that just keep going and going and going that get broken up by a last minute dash - a dash so powerful that it can turn one sentence into an entire paragraph, breaking right through established literature convention and making the reader forget what you were writing about at the start of the sentence, rendering the entire work useless.

So anyway, I was at Castle Towers Greater Union, walking out from a session of Tom Cruise in Mission Impossible 3: Convince People I'm Straight By Ruining Joey From Dawson's Creek, when I spy a MASSIVE line to get into the cinema. I'm talking a double decker line, half after the forbidden line of ticket-ripping, half before it. It was massive like Ving Rhames.

And I was a little confused, because Greater Union have that bullshit allocated seating thing, which means you don't have to line-up to get into the cinema because you have reserved seats. So why were these people lined up?


And how come they were all brown?


Zoom in on Tommy.

:O

Oh my god, they're all Arab!

*Tommy sees poster for Persian Film Festival*

Oh my god, they're all Persian!

But didn't Persia cease to exist? Isn't 'Persian' just code for 'Iranian'?

AREN'T IRAN IN THE AXIS OF EVIL?!

An artist's impression of what a Persian film festival would look like if it was a cat

I was scared enough to reach for my taser (Mr McZapALot), but I wasn't scared enough to run. Instead, I did exactly what 'these people' weren't expecting me to do - I walked straight through them. Oh yeah, that's how I roll.

They were there with their children, with their parents, with their grandparents. Yes, they were multiplying. Not in the cinema line, although it is a good way to pass the time (does anyone want to see X-Men 3 with me?). But worst of all, these people were SMILING. These axis of evildoers were happy that they were lining peacefully in a suburban shopping centre.

So, needless to say, I informed ASIO and the whole business was resolved peacefully.


And so ends today's story. I'll let Matthew Reilly take us out.

He turned to The Bug. The Bug's face was a mask. He slowly kicked back his chair and came over to Jason, stood on his tiptoes and whispered something in Jason's ear.

Jason smiled.

'What did he say?' Syracuse asked.

Jason said, 'He says your race computer must be broken. His race plan was perfect. Then he said "When do we leave?"


The End?