The Cranky Crackpot

Richard Dawkins vs. The Magnificent Robyn Williams Extravaganza!

2010-03-10T00:26:00.000-08:00

Dawkins couldn’t get a word in at his own talk, and everything devolved from there.

Robyn Williams is the world’s foremost expert on evolution. Or that’s what it seemed like at Friday night’s discussion, when an uncharacteristically meek Richard Dawkins was swamped by the motor-mouthed, name-dropping, painfully star-struck Radio National host.

The audience – naively under the impression that they were attending a Richard Dawkins lecture – soon realised that the Oxford Don was merely an entree to the main event: Williams, Williams, Williams! In over an hour of 100% structure-free rambling, Williams managed to sabotage all potentially interesting avenues by waxing lyrical about anything – absolutely anything – inhabiting his brain at that moment. Williams on his “mate” Andrew Denton. Williams on how Christians made him mad. Williams on... well, any old crap. There was the odd little chirp from Dawkins, but this was Williams’ night and he wasn’t about to let anyone forget it – least of all an audience who paid to see someone else.

This might not have been a problem if Williams possessed any interviewing skills. However, he proved to be not only appallingly egotistical, but also incapable of asking questions that made sense. They twisted. They turned. They collapsed inward like black holes with self-esteem issues. To make things worse, RW was clueless about most of the audience’s level of background knowledge. Those who expected to hear Dawkins explain evolution’s magnificence with the aid of illuminating examples were instead treated to RW’s screeds about the origins of “messenger RNA” and other esoterica. It was needlessly arcane, but who cared? That awfully clever Robyn Williams chap understood it all perfectly!

To quote a typically incisive RW question: “How did you get through last year, Darwin’s year? Did you get through that alright?” (Subtext: “ol’ buddy ol’ pal?”) RW became so toxically unbearable after a while that I started wondering about totally irrelevant stuff: what’s “self-replicating molecule” in sign language? Where did Dawkins get that snappy suit (Saville Row, surely)? How long did it take to build that kick-arse pipe organ? And (most urgently): when, oh when, will RW shut up for five bloody seconds?

What Dawkins did manage to say was very entertaining, especially when unfairly taken out of context (which he fortunately didn’t have time to provide): “When you cross a male with a female, you don’t get a hermaphrodite”; “If you wanted to breed champion high jumpers, you could do it”; “There might come a time where you can cross a Labradoodle and a Labradoodle and get another Labradoodle”; “God made the venomous eastern groin groper”; “If you had 100 St. Bernards and 100 Chihuahuas, I don’t think you’d see any interbreeding”. Glorious as all this was, I was hoping that Dawkins would get the chance to become more than a surrealist quote generator. But nope.

The closest the night came to a real discussion was when Dawkins tried to come up with an evolutionary explanation for homosexuality. According to Dawkins, homosexuality might have come about because cavemen might have needed some guys who were really crap at hunting to guard the women without wanting to shag them. (This was about as plausible on the stage as it is on the page.)

It was left to question time to salvage the night’s entertainment value, and there were a couple of doozies. My favourite preamble was: “I’m going to ask you a question that I don’t want you to take the wrong way. The question is about giraffes.” The man then asked what we’ve all been dying to know, namely: Why are some giraffes’ necks longer than others? Doesn’t that mean that the cute little giraffes can’t reach the treetops? And doesn’t that therefore disprove evolution? (Ha! Checkmate!) Dawkins despatched the hapless guy by lobbing the following grenade: “There will always be some height of tree that, if you were a little bit taller, you could reach; and if you were a little bit shorter, you couldn’t.”

Damn straight, Richard. That’s what we pay you for!

Mossad Little Story

2010-03-03T19:56:00.000-08:00

Scene: Deep inside a top-secret Mossad training camp, a LEADER is talking to two SOLDIERS.

SOLDIER #1: ...it’s just not working anymore. People recognise me when I go down the street. I buy a litre of milk and the guy at the counter’s, like ‘hey, did ya whack Mohammed whatsisname yet?’

SOLDIER #2: Yeah – I thought we were meant to be, you know, a secret assassination service.

SOLDIER #1: And whose idea was that nude Mossad calendar, anyway? I can’t face my mother-in-law after that. She keeps glancing at my –

LEADER: Sorry, sorry. We were running low on funds and –

SOLDIER #2: It’s the principle of the thing. I shot a guy in an elevator last week and he made kissy-faces at me before he hit the floor in a pool of his own blood. It was embarrassing for both of us. And my daughter only sold ten packets in the Mossad lamington drive. Who thinks of this stuff?

SOLDIER #1: Yeah. We’re just not as secret as we used to be. I was out with my wife in Tel Aviv last month seeing Andrew Lloyd Weber’s Mossad!, and –

SOLDIER #2: Oh, cool – how was it?

SOLDER #1: Great. Steve Martin did an awesome Netanyahu. But Omar Sharif as Arafat? Ham. Anyway, the whole cast clapped me at the end. I was stage-whispering: “secret service! secret service, remember?” – but they just weren’t listening. I’m telling ya: fame’s a double-edged –

LEADER: Ok, ok, point taken. We’ve got a whole raft of new tactics to implement, and –

SOLDIER #2: Don’t give me that management talk. I thought the whole deal was going to be, like, all exciting espionage-type stuff, with grappling hooks and all. This is nothing like that Spielberg movie: there were no porta-loos in that. This is the worst training camp ever.

LEADER: Just listen. This is the next generation of disguises. How would you feel about becoming a citizen of a country so utterly insignificant that most of the world is utterly unaware of its existence?

SOLDIER #1: Canada?

LEADER: Better, much better. Somewhere a million miles from bugger-all. [He upends a cardboard box on the desk. The contents spill out, including two Akubras, two Driza-bones and two pairs of R M Williams boots. The two soldiers gaze in awe.]

SOLDIER #2: That is just –

SOLIDER #1: Brilliant. Utter brilliance. Where did you get all this stuff?

LEADER: Someone left them in the storeroom of their Parliament House for some reason. [Shrugs]. Here are your passports.

SOLDIER #1: Awesome, that’s – wait. You stole me a woman’s passport? Oh, for f**k’s sake.

LEADER: Look, it’s not like we can go in to the airport cafe and say “Oh hello, I’m a Mossad agent, can I please have a soy latte and some passports, please?” Always such ungratefulness!
[Soldiers look at each other in utter disgust.]

LEADER: We can change the photos later, or you could grow your hair a bit

SOLDIER #2: I always thought you’d look good with tits anyway. [Sniggers. SOLDIER #1 punches him.]

LEADER: We thought very carefully about this. It’s a country with worldwide cultural invisibility: the perfect crime. It’s incredible, actually – their Minister for the Arts used to be a rock star! [All laugh]

SOLDIER #1: But that’s impossible. Surely they have, you know, a national cuisine or something?

LEADER: Nup. They ripped it off...wait for it...the English! [LEADER and SOLDIERS erupt into laughter for 5-10 minutes.] No, quieten down, boys, I’m serious. It took them one hundred and fifty years to realise how badly English food sucked.

SOLDIER #2: So what did they do then?

LEADER: They ripped it off everyone else – including us.

SOLDIER #1: The bastards. So how do they talk? Do we need to learn how to speak like them, too?

LEADER: I have taken the liberty of learning their, um, ‘dialect’. [Looks at sheet] Please listen to the following sample sentence and repeat. “Daryl went to a B&S in his lowered Torana. Met a sheila and got a root. Drank shitloads of tinnies and had a prang. Pigs went ballistic. It was a total balls-up.”

SOLDIER #2: And that refers to – ?

LEADER: Mating, gustatory and legal mores.

SOLDIER #1: Wow. I really don’t think I could learn that much in such a short –

SOLDIER #2 [looking at the sheet]: Belt up, mate. Cop it on the chin.

LEADER: That’s the spirit! Soldier #1, why can’t you be more like soldier #2?

SOLDIER #1: There’s something that bugs me about this.

LEADER: Yes?

SOLDIER #1: Aren’t they sort of our...allies? I mean, don’t they just say ‘go for it!’, whatever we do?

LEADER: Yeah, so?

SOLDIER #1: So, why are we stealing their passports and all? Isn’t that, well, mean?

LEADER: Don’t worry: their Government won’t do anything about it.

SOLDIER #1 Ok. [Looking at sheet, speaking hesitantly]: Blood-y...rip-per?

LEADER: That’s the spirit!

The ASIO Connection

2010-03-03T19:54:00.001-08:00

Scene: KEVIN RUDD is delivering a press release about the new refugee measures.

RUDD: ...and so it’s ‘no more Mr. Nice Guy’. These imposters don’t stand a chance. We’ll throw the book at them. This is our finest hour. [Pause] Alrighty then, folks! [Cheerfully] Any questions?

REPORTER 1: Mr Rudd, do you really think it’s appropriate sending ASIO crack forces to spy on defenceless people who desperately need our help?

RUDD: More than appropriate. It’s fantastic.

REPORTER 1: What do you mean, ‘fantastic’?

RUDD: For the economy. This will cost the taxpayer an absolute bucketload.

REPORTER 1: But...isn’t that a bad thing?

RUDD: No: it’s all part of the stimulus.

REPORTER 1: How does that work, exactly?

RUDD: We throw stacks of your money at useless stuff. The more useless the better!

REPORTER 1: Yes, but...

RUDD: And that gives us stacks more money to buy lots more useless stuff from other countries. And then they buy even more useless stuff from us. Round we go! It’s a great system – have you not read Keynes? [Pause] Oh, you simply must. Hilarious guy! [Chuckles, then quickly assumes sober face] For further details, I refer you to my essay in –

REPORTER 1: Uh, that’s ok, thanks.

RUDD: Anyone else?

REPORTER 2: But isn’t the whole motion highly unethical?

RUDD: Everything that we do is ethical. [Smiles benevolently while interlocking fingers together in ‘joining’ motion.] Absolutely everything. We’re the ALP: the party of the people. Of you and me. Us.

REPORTER 2: The more cynical among us would say that you’re trying to repeat Howard’s trick of demonising refugees for your own political gain.

RUDD: Well, that simply isn’t true. I don’t even like cricket.

REPORTER 2: Does the phrase, “We decide the people who come into this country and the circumstances in which we come” ring a bell?

RUDD: This is totally different. Gee whiz, folks!

REPORTER 2: So why ASIO?

RUDD: They are among our greatest Australians. [Under breath]: Those reffos should be grateful. [Aloud]: We look forward to a co-synergetic relationship evolving between these two valuable communities.

REPORTER 2: Are you worried about the fact that ASIO are notoriously inept?

RUDD: I have no idea what you’re talking about.
[The meeting is interrupted by an ASIO operative descending from the ceiling on a rope. He is wearing a burglar’s mask and a black-and-white striped shirt.]

ASIO OPERATIVE: K-man! [Attempts complicated secret handshake, which is rebuffed by a frostily unreceptive RUDD.] Whaddaya think of the new uniform? [Modestly] Designed by moi, natch.

RUDD: Roger, this is not an appropriate time.

ASIO OPERATIVE: Sorry. Could you offer your advice on a...certain departmental matter?

RUDD: Well, I suppose this might be a good opportunity to discuss this complex new policy at a valuable public forum.

ASIO OPERATIVE: Totally. I have, uh, several alternative policy outcomes I would like you to examine.

RUDD: Well, ok. As long as it’s strictly related.

ASIO OPERATIVE: [Excitedly opening a packet of false moustaches]. Oh, I love this. This is awesome.

RUDD: I don’t see how this is –

ASIO OPERATIVE: Ok. Ok. Which one do you like the best? [Rapidly puts on each moustache in turn.] Curly? Bushy? Straight? Hitler? Strongman? Walrus?

RUDD: You’re wearing fake moustaches on board refugee boats?

ASIO OPERATIVE [nervously]: Yeah. [Long pause.] Uh, isn’t that what we’re supposed to be doing? [Pause.] Does that mean we have to ditch the tea-towels as well?

RUDD [hurriedly]: What have you found out?

ASIO OPERATIVE: So far, our reconnaissance missions have revealed lots and lots of important facts.

RUDD: Facts? What facts?

ASIO OPERATIVE [changing subject]: Hey, look: my pen turns into a flick-knife. Cool, eh?

RUDD: Please. Discuss your findings to the gallery.

ASIO OPERATIVE: OK. All on the QT, mind.

RUDD: Of course.

ASIO OPERATIVE: Well – for starters, they’re pretty skinny.

RUDD: Whom?

ASIO OPERATIVE: The terrorists, of course!

RUDD: Refugees. Call them refugees, Steven.

ASIO OPERATIVE: You said that they would blow the place sky-high if we let ‘em off the boat.

RUDD: That’s enough. What else?

ASIO OPERATIVE: A lot have scary beards. And a high proportion of them seem to come from...

RUDD [eagerly]: Yes?

ASIO OPERATIVE: Overseas.

RUDD: ‘Most’?

ASIO OPERATIVE: Well, some of them were from Australia. [Long pause] Actually, now I think about it, all the ones from Australia were ASIO operatives.

RUDD: Anything else?

ASIO OPERATIVE: Yes. Something very important. There’s a serious problem at Christmas Island.

RUDD: A riot?

ASIO OPERATIVE: Worse. Much worse.

RUDD: How could it be worse?

ASIO OPERATIVE [in stage whisper]: Santa’s gone missing. [Long silence]. There is a Santa, isn’t there? [Longer silence].

RUDD: Well...

ASIO OPERATIVE [crestfallen]: Worst. Day. Ever. [He shimmies up the rope and disappears into ceiling cavity, leaving RUDD alone on stage.]

Cabinet Reshuffle

2010-03-03T19:50:00.000-08:00

Scene: A Liberal Party ‘cabinet reshuffle’ meeting. In attendance are ABBOT, BISHOP and JOYCE.

ABBOTT: Now, we’re all here to talk openly. This isn’t the Labor Party, you know, where the leader –

JOYCE: – Shut up, Tony.

ABBOTT: Sorry, Barnaby.

JOYCE: This meeting is eye-poppingly redundant, a point which I will demonstrate by popping my eyes out of their sockets and subsequently reinserting them. I am – quite literally – gobsmacked that such a ridiculous meeting is occurring right now.

ABBOTT: I don’t think you mean literally –

JOYCE: – Enough, college boy. Not all our mummies were flush enough to send us to Ye Olde Oxford Towne. [Sniggers bitterly].

ABBOTT: Barnaby, Julie has something important she wants to say. First, though, Julie, could you be a dear and iron this –

BISHOP: No, Tony. [Glares at him with utterly inhuman coldness and ferocious intensity.] I. Wish. To. Speak.

ABBOTT [wincing]: Meee-owww!

BISHOP: What has recently occurred is deeply unfair.

ABBOTT [in a professional tone]: Now we’re making progress. Why, Julia?

BISHOP: Because Barnaby gets to be Finance spokesman and I don’t.

ABBOTT [patronisingly, soothingly]: But you’re Deputy Leader, Julia. That’s the second most important position in the whole wide world. What more do you want? You’d get to be leader of the party if I ever went under a....truck.
[There is total silence. Abbott’s face turns ashen as he contemplates this possible future.] Of course, you could choose a more, well, ‘traditional’ portfolio.

BISHOP [sulkily]: Like what, Tony?

ABBOTT: Well, you could be minister for whaling prohibition, for example.

BISHOP: We don’t have a minister for whaling prohibition.

ABBOTT: We can make one! [Quietly]: That’d stop the sun from shining out of Bob Brown’s –

JOYCE [seething]: – The only proper place for a whale is in a fucking tuna can.

ABBOTT [agitated]: Barnaby, please. At least try to cooperate.

JOYCE [muttering]: Chowing down on those giant useless grey water-loving bastards is pretty much the only thing the Japs’ve done right since WWII.

ABBOTT: That’s enough. You just can’t say things like that anymore.

JOYCE: You thought it was piss-funny before –

ABBOTT: – I became leader. Julie?

BISHOP: Barnaby doesn’t know the first thing about economics.

JOYCE: I was an accountant before I came to this dump, Julie. You might not have heard of us: we eff about with bloody complicated numbers all day and make ‘em add up, whether they like it or not.

BISHOP: Running a country’s economy isn’t like running a household budget, Barnaby.

JOYCE: Too right it is! When my kids waste their pocket money on crap, I send ‘em to their rooms. So when Kev pisses my money away on total crap, I –

ABBOTT: Not total crap, Barnaby: climate change is total crap, remember. Except when we’re speaking in public. Then it’s –

JOYCE [mockingly]: – ‘the greatest human challenge of our time’, yeah. I read your brown paper about it.

ABBOTT [incensed]: It was a white paper, Barnaby.

JOYCE: Not after I wiped my arse on it. [Laughs uproariously while vigorously nudging Abbott.] Your Uncle Kevvie won’t let you say stuff like that anymore, Tony Boy, will ‘e? That mongrel’s got yer balls pickled in a jar beside his –

BISHOP: – I really don’t appreciate that kind of hyper-masculine language, Barnaby. And besides, we’ve both seen plenty of Tony’s –

ABBOTT [flustered]: – That’s quite enough from both of you. Julie, Barnaby knows plenty about economics: watch this. Now, Barnaby, if you have 5 oranges and I take 3 oranges, how many oranges do you have?

JOYCE: Hands off my fucking oranges, you grasping Bolshevik bastard.

ABBOTT [wearily]: It’s only a theoretical problem, Barnaby. We discussed this, remember? Nobody’s going to take your oranges.

JOYCE: You’re just like the other mob. Bleeding me white. Sucking me dry. Taking my oranges and giving them to Japanese refugees.

ABBOTT: Our refugees don’t come from –

JOYCE: Whose side are you on, anyway? All I know is my oranges are gone and now I’m bloody hungry. I know the other mob are saying that I can’t tell my squillions from my zillions. Fine. The important thing is, they’re both bloody big numbers, and there’s one thing I do know.

ABBOTT: Oh? What’s that?

JOYCE: Ten hap’orth farthings’ worth of bloody oranges won’t cover more than three pissteenths of a bushel of twice-fathomed acreage. Not within a bee’s franger – especially when the barometer’s dropped clean under threescore bars!
[ABBOTT and BISHOP glance at each other worriedly].

JOYCE: That’s real maths. For real men. Bloody metric system made everyone soft in the head. Kids don’t know how to count without taking their electric arithmicators out of their baggy pockets. Pants down round their arses of course. As usual.

BISHOP: This is what I’m talking about, Tony. Barnaby clearly presents us with a PR liability.

ABBOTT [grave]: Julia.

BISHOP: Yes, Tony?

ABBOTT: Do you remember when you were finance minister?

BISHOP: Oh, yes. I learned...so much that week.

ABBOTT: Yes. But what did you actually achieve?

BISHOP [fishing crumpled diagram out of pocket]: I educated the public about the fiscal benefits of the Laffer Curve.

JOYCE: Pointy-headed crap –

ABBOTT: Give it a chance, Barnaby. [Hesitantly]. Ah yes, the ‘Laffer Curve’. Remind me, Julia?

BISHOP [increasingly confident]: Well, the ‘Laffer Curve’ is a mathematical formulation that dictates the inverse relation between taxation and revenue.

ABBOTT [intrigued, despite himself]: The inverse relation?

BISHOP [in schoolmarmish tone]: Yes. You see, Tony, if you tax rich people, they get angry.

ABBOTT: Ah.

BISHOP: And if you give all the rich people’s money to lazy poor people, they get even lazier!

ABBOTT: Right-oh. [To self]: All single mothers, no doubt.

BISHOP: The rich get too angry to make the money. The poor get too lazy to do the work. And we get –

JOYCE: – screwed, I’ll bet. Bloody poor can’t get lazier than they are already, if you ask me. Sponging little parasite Whitlamites sitting in their raggedy jackets drinking Chai Teas off scummy little saucers –

ABBOTT: Shhh, Barnaby. Go on, Julie. What’s the alternative to taxing the rich?

BISHOP [beaming]: We must let the magnificent businesspeople of this nation replenish the coffers of plenty with their overflowing bounty of beneficent public generosity and charity.

ABBOTT: So we stop taxing them?

BISHOP: Yes.

ABBOTT: And we’ll get lots of money out of this?

BISHOP: Oh, lots. It’s all been worked out by people in America!

ABBOTT: What about the poor?

BISHOP: The Laffer Curve will instil them with the cleansing desire to be absolutely all that they can be!

ABBOTT: By taking away their food stamps?

BISHOP: Of course, Tony. The Laffer Curve therefore increases State revenue as well as delivering the priceless gifts of spiritual and moral victory to the less ‘achievement-inclined’ among us.

ABBOTT: Now that’s the kind of Christian charity I can relate to. You’re re-hired, Julie. [Long pause.] Barnaby?

JOYCE [awkwardly]: Yes?

ABBOTT: Give me back my wallet.

They stole my invention.

2010-02-08T02:07:00.001-08:00

It's happened to all of us. You're innocently watching TV, walking past a shop, or reading the paper, when you notice something that looks really cool. It does the thing that you have always wanted to do, in the best possible way. This is fantastic for the world, fantastic for everyone! Hooray!

And yet it's not fantastic for quite everyone, is it? Because you have been storing this vision - now inexplicably made flesh - inside the 'to be invented' sector of your brain ever since you were twelve. Just planning, sequestering it away essentially. You were sitting on a gold mine, to be opened up when you had a lazy couple of grand to swing the plan into action.

And now Fischer and Paykel, or Sony, or whichever upstart you care to name, has gone and somehow excavated your brain contents when you were sleeping and fed the output into their Inventomatic-3000. Because here it is. Your invention. Your Golden Ticket to the nerdy version of Euro Disney.

This happened to me last week when walking through Myer's electronics department. I was looking for something I didn't need, when I was confronted with something I needed even less: I had to have it. But it was...

A Risotto Machine.

No, hear me out. [Guards: cover all exits and bolt doors]. The risotto machine that I invented when I was about 16 consisted of a paddle-type contraption that was designed to constantly stir the rice, evenly and thoroughly. Suspended above the rice was a drip-feed contraption that would gradually release the stock into the rice. Seeping, stirring. Seeping, stirring. So simple, yet so profound.

The Sunbeam Risotto maker - $99 decimal point ninety bloody five bucks - had all of these things. It's criminal and wrong. The company obviously had a complex network of spies in my high school quadrangle, listening to my every brilliant utterance.

I feel like the guy who invented the phone before Alexander Bell: Elisha Gray. After years of inventing, he went down to the patent office with his 'personal electrical dual-way voice communicator', or whatever he called his phone, one arvo.

Gray: 'I would like to patent my personal electrical dual-way voice communicator, please.'

Receptionist: 'Sorry, Mr. Gray, some guy patented one of those this morning.'

Gray: That's a jolly shame. Oh well, bye-bye!

Actually, that's not what he really said. This risotto's for you, Elisha!

Out of key?

2010-01-31T06:07:00.000-08:00

Figuring out whether most bands are playing out of key is a science. It's not difficult to detect when, say, The Living End or - well, insert post-1970s-band-that-I've-never-heard-of-here - drop a semi-semitone on a hangover.

But AC/DC are different. Not because of the backing - there are few things more unambiguous than the perfect E-major in-keyness of Malcolm Young every day of his adult life. Rather, because of the vocalist - or 'vocalist' - Brian Johnston.

I know this is not the first time that this blog has raised the spectre of a band more associated with Triple-M listening, Hooters-frequenting, Bacon-Busting subscribers* than with vegetarian nerds with macho dreams. Who still watch 'Thriller' on a regular basis. But still.

Procrastinating for a few hours like I generally do on Sunday nights, I noticed that The Australian's website contained footage of AC/DC's 'Black Ice' tour, recorded in Auckland last week. The exerpt was 'Rock n' Roll Train' - another piece frequently discussed on the blog.

So, what was wrong with the performance? For the first 10 seconds, I couldn't put my finger on it. The performance sounded like two songs playing at the same time. Then I realised that the problem was with the singing: Brian started off in no key at all, then gradually moved up to something approaching the 'correct' key.

The most disturbing part of the whole experience was the fact that Brian's unusually heightened musical ineptitude creating a kind of Brechtian alienation effect - that is, it enabled me to sit back and listen to AC/DC with my ears and brain instead of my testicles for a change. Figuratively speaking.

They are all alarmingly old. And ugly. Has anyone else noticed this before?

What's more, as Robert Forster said in The Monthly a while back: a 50-year-old Angus looks quite strange in school uniform.

It's all sacrilege, I know it is, but it was only temporary!

The other members suddenly (and temporarily!) looked like geriatric old men who had wandered into a film casting session for the 'Rock Band: AC/DC' computer game. Cliff Williams, the bass player, was caked in makeup. Phil Rudd, the drummer, looked as if he was trying to remember where he put his slippers. The fact that there is a gigantic mass of the world's population - including, and especially me! - who loved these odd little old men totally mystified me in that brief instant.

But then I listened to an awesome version of 'War Machine' in Berlin on YouTube, which made it all better. That lurching, 30-second thicket of self-realisation was quickly banished.

*i.e. the restaurant, not the actual biological formations. (Apologies for Mark Dapin for the use of asterisks: sometimes it's the only symbol that will do).

World's Gayest T-shirt

2010-01-17T17:46:00.000-08:00

The escalators at Flinders Street Station now seem to be my primary Human Folly Observation Point. I'm not sure whether this is because so many people use the escalators, or whether there is something about Flinders Street that makes people act oddly. Nevertheless, it is indubitably true.

Yesterday, as I was about to catch a train, I noticed a man (approximate age: 50) at the top of the escalator wearing a pink T-shirt. There's nothing unusual about that. Case closed.

Or is there?

The back of the man's pink t-shirt was decorated with a large love heart, including an arrow pointing to the wearer's right. Inside the heart were written the following words:

"I love this man with all my heart".

This meant, of course, that anyone standing next to Mr. Pink t-shirt wearer - willing or no - would be temporarily thrust into the shoes of his beloved.

I thought I was the only one who noticed the t-shirt. However, a man ahead of me (who was in a hurry) noticed it too. Although Hurrying Man desperately wanted to catch a train that was just about to leave the platform below, the only available position on the crowded escalator was the one right next to Mr. Pink t-shirt.

Hurrying Man, realising that he had just been forced to assume a position for which he considered himself unsuited, tried to diagonally push ahead of Mr. Pink to escape the t-shirt's accusatory motto. But his passage forward was blocked, and he was forced back beside his newfound true love.

Hurrying Man's next - and brilliant - move was to move backward. Although this would place him further away from the train, it would also put a dampener on the situation's incipient homoeroticism. But it was no good: by this stage, there were a bank of people behind Hurrying Man, preventing an easy escape from ManLove's granite-carved, accusatory message.

For the rest of the escalator trip (all this, miraculously, happened at lightning speed!), Hurrying Man assumed the posture of a laboratory rat in a cage who had suffered repeated electric shocks. That is, he demonstrated behaviour that Psychologists have termed 'learned helplessness' - the name given to the despondent and submissive behaviour that develops in lab rats after they realise there is nothing they can do to evade randomly-administered punishment.

I am not sure whether Pink T-shirt man was aware of all this, or whether he was completely oblivious. However, it was worth it to see Hurrying Man being hoisted out of his comfort zone for 15 delightful seconds.

The Bicycle Thief

2010-01-16T21:57:00.000-08:00

If you are lucky enough to be in possession of my brain - and I don't mean in a 'jar beside the bed' sense, so don't get any ideas - you may have the unique experience of losing and regaining your faith in humanity on a rapidfire basis. Let me explain.

Nothing makes me more upset than theft. When you leave something somewhere with a reasonable degree of security, I think you have a right to expect it to be there when you get back.

Imagine my disappointment, therefore, on Tuesday afternoon. On getting to Yarraville Station after work, I went to unlock my bike, only to find that it had vanished. This unexpected event allowed me to tap the deep, dark reservoir of cynicism that I generally try to keep a lid on in order to function relatively normally. Some of the questions I asked (silently) of the world were:

- why are people so dishonest? I'm not dishonest, so why is everyone else?
- why did the bike lock company make such a shitty lock? Is it just something that looks tough but is designed to crumble in a real conflict situation, like Mr. T?
- is the bike lock company more or less culpable than the thief himself?
- why did the thief spend so much time sawing a huge lock off a crappy bike? Does he hate me personally?
- does he in fact know me?
- and what's happening to Yarraville, anyhow? Last time I looked, it was a shiny, newly-gentrified yuppie paradise. What's with the horrific (bike-related) crime rate?

I brought up all of these issues to anyone who would listen over the next week. Uniform reaction: disappointment in humanity. When someone else shares your disappointment in humanity, it's - well, how can I put it? - really quite a lovely and satisfying feeling. It almost makes getting the thing stolen in the first place worthwhile.

My parents, all things considered, were very sympathetic. Inured by now to my habit of, well, losing stuff, they almost seemed pleased that I had something stolen for real this time. Walking through Yarraville with Mum and Dad, lamenting my misfortune to the tune of soothing parental tut-tutting, I saw something chained to a No Standing sign that looked familiar.

"Why, that bike is just like the one that was stolen!" I thought, amazed at the coincidence. "And the helmet is the exact same colour as..."

Oh.

Where's My AM Radio?

2010-01-15T23:59:00.000-08:00

I recently purchased an MP3 player from Dick Smith. Being a cheapskate who is convinced that the Apple Corporation ranks at the very bottom of the bottom-feeders (despite its talent for making lovely shiny things), I purchased a series of inadequate MP3 players until I found this one. It's perfect and it only costs $40. Oh, it's not cool - Dick Smith is never cool - but it is sleek and compact and mine.

It has everything: except, I just found out, an AM Radio. Being at least 10 years' out of touch in terms of musical matters, the main radio station I listen to is Radio National. It rends my heart to write those words, but there you are. Becoming one's parents is never a pleasant process.

So, I am now wondering - why do MP3 players lack AM radios? Although a significant proportion of people who purchase these items are 'cool', an equally significant minority - namely, me - are not. And I bet Dick Smith, of all people, spends a large part of his radio-listening quota listening to Radio National.

As far as I can tell, it would not cost anything extra to include an AM receiver with all MP3 players, as AM radios are more low-tech than FM ones. (And they're both pretty darn low-tech these days). Is this a conspiracy to drive us all into the arms of FM, whose main benefits seem to be Hamish & Andy (admittedly divine) and RRR blues Marathons?

Roman DNA

2009-12-08T04:30:00.002-08:00

Are we the same as the Ancient Romans, deep down?

Of course, we're not exactly the same. But still - are we pretty much the same? If you took the average guy, swapped his shirt and trousers for a tunic, and put him to war against Carthage, would he behave like a Roman, i.e. utterly ruthlessly?

I went to Rome recently and was stuck by the single-minded militaristic nature of the Ancient Romans. (Modern ones are quite nice). That probably sounds obvious - everyone knows that the Romans were bloodthirsty bastards. But historians are fond, these days, of saying that nothing has changed: it's the same old human nature, just dressed up a little and made to look nice. Our inner Roman is still there.

At first, this seems crazy. We're not particularly violent, after all. But the historian will point to similarities. Look at sports festivals: they're just like Gladiatorial contests! etc. But I am more of an optimist, who likes to think that we somehow managed to tamp down the violence a while back. To support this, I've jerrybuilt a dodgy social Darwinist theory to back me up.

First: think of how pale a facsimile ball sports are of blood sports. We have got to the point where watching someone pass a round object to another person quenches the bloodlust that could only have previously been quelled by witnessing the bloody deaths of brutal fighters in the ring. Isn't that odd?

This may sound crazy, or even borderline eugenicist, to others, but: what if we have had the violence systematically bred out of us over the years? To see what I mean, think of this: most extremely violent people, in Roman times, had the opportunity to rise to the top levels of power. Where are the people with violent tendencies now? Unlike in Rome, in Australia far more of them are in prison than in the military. Being aggressive towards others, in a secular democracy, generally gets you incarcerated rather than revered, except for a few small subsets (bikie gangs etc.). Now, if you're in prison, you have fewer opportunities to have children. Could a society like ours, that generally condemns violence as a vice, therefore, instigate a kind of genetic 'feedback loop' that steadily breeds violent tendencies out of the population? Or is it obnoxious just to ponder this?

I realise that a good argument against this theory is the recent existence of totalitarian states such as Nazi Germany or Soviet Russia. These obviously contained many extremely violent people, and they were only a few years ago - too short a time for any significant genetic change to occur.

But still - we're so much less violent these days than we were that it's hard to believe nothing's changed. Has our 'genetic temperament' changed at all since Ancient Rome? And if not, how do we manage to be so darn peaceful to one another most of the time?

An escalating conundrum

2009-11-29T11:29:00.000-08:00

Being processed through the intestines of an international airport recently, I noticed a strange phenomenon: traffic flow on working vs. non-working escalators. Let me explain.

When pedestrians are presented with a choice between taking the stairs or taking the escalator up to the next floor of a building, I estimate that 10% take the former, 90% the latter. Those who take the stairs when the escalator is working are generally fitness freaks or masochists. This makes sense.

However, when the escalator breaks down, something unexpected happens: the percentage of people taking each form of conveyance is reversed: that is, 90% of people now take the stairs, while only 10% walk up the broken escalator. Why should this be? If neither option offers an advantage over the other, the percentage should be split equally, surely?

The answer seems to be that people who are walking up a broken escalator automatically deduct the escalator's expected speed from its actual speed - that is, walking up a broken escalator feels like you are going backwards; whereas walking up stairs doesn't. This is the opposite phenomenon to the strange sensation of jumping off a trampoline and onto unexpectedly unyielding ground: the ground feels unnaturally hard as our brain has adjusted to the bounce.

Incidentally, the escalatorial behaviour of Europeans is far superior to that of Australians. The reason? Europeans instinctively know that it is polite to stick to one side of an escalator when stationary, so that people who choose to walk up can do so unimpeded. Australians seem to have no concept of this. It annoys me so much that I've been tempted to pitch a series of community service announcements to the Government, aiming to raise public awareness. But that's probably a bit obsessive.

The Monkey Speaks

2009-03-28T14:19:00.000-07:00

Those privileged enough to see the New York Times' Head Performing Monkey, Tom Friedman, on Lateline the other day were in for a treat. Beginning the interview with his trademark lack of humility - "And I'd just like to say hello to all my fans in Australia" - Friedman, disconcertingly resembling Dr. Phil in appearance, content and delivery, went on to offer his scarily off-the-planet analysis of the causes of the US financial crisis.

Friedman, who writes about global economics with all the subtlety of an ADD child playing Hungry Hungry Hippos against himself, told the host the following (I'm paraphrasing, as usual):

"This year, the world hit not one wall but two. The first was financial; the second, environmental. This year, the earth hit its carrying capacity. The US business model is unsustainable. We borrow money from China so that we can borrow more of their junk, devaluing our currency in the process by stacking the Chinese treasury with US dollars. Then we do it all over again. When the US lost the ability to pay for the junk, the system collapsed.

Now that other developing countries are starting to consume like Americans, the earth could no longer sustain what we all were doing and it said, 'enough'."

This is true in a sense: the US-based model of growth is unsustainable all right. But Friedman effectively blamed the rising middle class in the developing world for what was going on. Of course, this is nuttier than feeding time in the elephant enclosure. The world didn't suddenly hit an 'environmental wall' in 2008, and the developing middle class's increased resource consumption didn't cause the crisis.

The crisis occurred because - and this is something that the frantically pro-US Friedman is congenitally blind to - the US financial system is run by criminals. I don't mean that in a bug-eyed Chomskian way, but criminality is really the only logical definition of what was going on. The US, like Russia, had become a society based on gangster capitalism. And now that Obama and co. have done their best to ensure that this clique of suited psychopaths will be able to continue pretty much as they were - albeit with a few mild spanks on their Armani-cosseted botties - we can all look forward to a Dow Jones recovery curve flatter than Boris Karloff's head.

The conversational low point was Friedman's assertion that "the time for fairness is over" - as if 'fairness' was something that only know-nothing NASCAR-appreciating Joe Sixpacks wanted. By denying the need for a massive, exhaustive purge and nationalisation of the US banking system and shifting the blame onto those nasty poor people screwing up the environment, Friedman confirmed his status as the most hilariously over-promoted source of authority since Prince Charles.

So, please allow me to present my alternative analysis of the causes of the financial crisis (note: metaphorical representation only):

They shoot elephants, don't they?

2009-03-14T23:32:00.000-07:00

According to its bloviating media cheerleaders, the United States is a Leviathan guided by two warring and equally profound spirits (one oddly represented by a Donkey and one by an Elephant, but let that pass). The two-party system - or so the theory goes - ensures that one of these folksy animals doesn't get too large a share of the public's attention. If either voice dominates the political landscape for too long, everyone will end up either a. making bead necklaces and singing Kumbaya with a bunch of gay kindergarten teachers (Donkey dominant) or b. shooting immigrants for fun while levelling national parks to get the oil underneath (Elephant dominant).

From this unending process of struggle between the Voice of Tradition and the Voice of Progress, a great nation is forged. Or so the theory goes.

But US politics is funny, in a terrifying way, because one of the guiding spirits has Mad Elephant Disease and should have been taken out into the back paddock and shot in the back of its wrinkly grey head a fair while back. That would be the logical way to quell the rabid, paranoid rantings of a political party seemingly unencumbered by humility, compassion or logic.

That's why it's so funny to see the conservative journos weep tears of blood at Obama's dramatic left-wing-isation of the economy over the past few weeks (and don't get me wrong, he really hanged, drew, quartered, cremated, exploded and danced on the grave of post-Reagan politics pretty enthusiastically). Representatives of the Southern Baptist Convention, gun nuts and little else, Republican party members are slowly starting to realise that most people see them as a bunch of nasty, crazy, greedy, racist, rapacious nut jobs, fit for little but toenail harvesting.

'Reaching across the aisle' in this situation to reach some post-partisan agreement - as recommended by self-fellating hicks like Rush Limbaugh et al. - would be like awarding joint custody of a child to a charity worker mother and an axe-murdering father (caring Mom on Mon, Tue, Wed; psychopathic Dad on Thurs, Fri, Sat).

It won't work, blowhards, because people all around the world are really, really scared of y'all.

Questions for Nokia

2009-03-14T22:50:00.000-07:00

Dear Sir or Madam,

I am the proud owner of a Nokia Mobile Telephone, circa 1998. It has served me well during the time that I have been using it. Last week, however, when I was lying in bed, I decided to play one of your company's built-in games for a while rather than getting up and going to work.

The game that I chose was called 'Nature Park'. Although the gameplay itself was quite entertaining, I have several questions that I would like to ask you in relation to this product.

In case you no longer include 'Nature Park' with your new mobile telephones, allow me to refresh your memory: the game is a Tetris-like challenge, in which the player must arrange a series of coloured shapes neatly into a grid as they fall.

Here, then, are my key queries:

1. I do not fully understand why the game is titled 'Nature Park'. The grid seems to be located in some kind of 'space' setting, with a background of stars and galaxies. The most curious item in the background, though, is probably the Chipmunk-type animal that levitates next to the grid. The Chipmunk is housed in a small flying saucer. Although I realise that many nature parks do contain chipmunks or similar animals, I am also quite certain that few of these transport themselves in personalised flying saucer-type machines.

(n.b. I did, briefly, form a hypothesis as to the 'nature park' title: the omnipotent flying-saucer-travelling chipmunk could be seen as a comment on human fallibility - in which case the earth itself could be seen as a kind of 'nature park' for the omniscient chipmunk's benefit, with the human species as the main attraction - a Nietzscheian reversal of fortune, if you will. Please let me know if this alternative hypothesis is valid.)

2. The allegiance of the chipmunk in relation to the human player is unclear, or at least unstable. The chipmunk looks pleased when the human player scores points (i.e. his flying saucer starts jiggling up and down rapidly, and he starts smiling, insofar as this is possible for a rodent). But when the human player completes a level of the game, the chipmunk's flying saucer appears to crash. I cannot understand why the chipmunk would be happy at the player's success if the player's completion of a level results in the destruction of the chipmunk's primary mode of transportation. Further, the chipmunk's eyes begin to widen in agitation if the player is in danger of losing the game. But surely the chipmunk would be glad, not agitated, at the failure of the human player if this were the only way to save his saucer. (To further complicate matters, the chipmunk smiles when a point is scored. Why is this?)

3. On level 2, Chipmunk #1 is replaced by Cat #1 (also besaucered), whose prominent eyelashes and red, full lips lends it a feminine appearance. Again, Cat #1's attitude towards the human player's success or failure is unclear. Cat #1 licks her nose with her tongue when the human loses points. Does this mean something?

As I have not yet progressed beyond Level 2, I am unable to comment on further animal observers included in 'Nature Park'. However, I would be most grateful if you could address my current issues.

Kind regards,

Tim

The Moral Centre of Rugby League

2009-03-12T04:05:00.000-07:00

For those who are used to piss-takes on this blog: this is a bit more serious.

The news tonight was full of a story about a Rugby League star who has (I was going to say 'Fallen From Grace', but it should be obvious that Rugby League stars begin from a place a fair bit lower than that) screwed up, made a mistake and been a naughty boy - a bit of a wild lad, really.

That's how the press is treating it, anyway. For the record, the guy (whose name I can't remember, which might save me from some legal implications of writing about him) is alleged to have raped a teenage girl last weekend.

Of course, because he's a sportsman, and a famous one at that, the unctuous soft-pedalling by his emotionally retarded cronies begins immediately.

The dilution of the alleged crime is assisted by the news networks' insistence on using the term 'sexual assault', which is to the term 'rape' what 'prisoner abuse' is to 'torture'. (Technically correct, but not quite as, well, you know, indelicate. Do we have to use the 'R' word? He's such a great player...)

And the excuses start immediately for Mr. Fallen Hero. There are the solemn denunciations of the code's unhealthy affection for alcohol, with Mr. Alleged Rapist as an innocent victim (Chastened teammates: "If only he hadn't drunk so much! If only that bottle shop hadn't been open! If only that girl hadn't dressed like a...sorry, is this microphone on?").

Then there are the 'hard hitting' angles from the ABC news room, including the Suggested Punishment. And what draconian punishments they propose. A sporting 'personality' of some sort said on the 7:30 report (I'm paraphrasing here, of course): 'You have to hit 'em where it hurts - a fine won't deter 'em. You gotta ban them from playing - that's the only thing that'll teach these lads!'

So, let's get this straight. A Sporting Hero allegedly rapes a girl. A bunch of his friends go on a Government-funded show and tell us:

a. People don't rape people - beer rapes people; and

b. If he really did do it, well, gee - maybe he shouldn't play rugby for a while.

A sanctimonious suggestion. One thing that would work rather better than being deprived of some mano-a-mano combat for a fortnight would be an extended stay in, oh, I don't know, a prison? You know, with criminals who aren't famous.

This may sound pretty obvious for those who have not been lobotomised repeatedly with a dirty trowel, but what other profession on earth allows its members to get away with such appalling excuses for alleged criminal behaviour? (Movie stars don't even get a look-in in comparison, nor do any of the other absurdly privileged professions.)

A couple of random memories of the same phenomenon:

- Andrew Denton's appalling interview of the charmer Wayne Carey, who proved that you don't have to be a League player to be a violent criminal, although it does help. Denton, bless his heart, brought out the compassionate side of Carey for his audience - which was understandably obscured at the time, as Carey had recently assaulted some cops. Oh yes, and...ahem, allegedly...glassed his wife in the face.

- The SMH's bleeding-heart coverage of the, ah, alleged rape scandal that engulfed the Bulldogs a few years back. Headline: "Shattered", over a shattered bulldog logo. Yep, the SMH was sorry for the club, not the woman.

- The mysteriously restored reputation of Gary Ablett Snr. ("Hey Dad, wasn't there something with him and an underage girl who died and some ecstasy tablets-" "Shut up, son, he was a great player, ok?")

A Great Party Rebuilds

2009-02-27T05:14:00.001-08:00

Speaker: Bobby Jindal, Gov. Louisiana (Repub.)

Good evening, Ladies and Gentlemen. [Applause].

I'll cut to the chase. Speak plainly. We got whupped out there last November. [Pause - no response] More whupp-oed than Jesus! [Pause]. Y'know, in 'The Passion of the Christ'!
[EVANGELICALS applause. The other person in the hall is silent.]

So - here we all are. The Republican party base. And to think those Dems said that we could hold our conventions in a phone booth! [Loud boos, jeers]. Well. I'd hardly call the Lynchburgh Pre-kindergarten Recreation and Rumpus Room a f***in' phone booth, would you?!

I'm sorry, mother.

I have been called upon to reconstruct the party's philosophy after - I'm speaking carefully here, y'know? - after that b****ard stole the f***in' election. I'm sorry - won the election. Are them words perty enough for you, Frank Rich?

In order to win the next election, we have to reaffirm our principles. Go back to what made this party great.

VOICE IN CROWD: Slavery? [confused murmurs]

JINDAL (flustered): Ah, no, no. Calm down.

VOICE IN CROWD: Gays out of the army!

JINDAL [amidst wild cheering]: I want, uh, real suggestions here. What are we gonna do next time? We can't just front up to the American people and say: 'No more gays!', can we? Folks? (Laughs nervously).

CROWD: No more gays! No more gays! No more gays!

JINDAL: Ah, yes - four more days! Four more days! I hear ya. Be quiet now. What do we like? Let's try and get a basic framework drawn up here. I'll draw a mind map. Republican Party: For. Anyone?

CROWD MEMBER: Playstation 3!

CROWD MEMBER: Twinkies!

CROWD MEMBER: Penthouse!

CROWD MEMBER: Han Solo!

CROWD MEMBER: Fartin' in my jacuzzi!

JINDAL: Right, right. Do we have any more, well, more policy-based suggestions? [Silence]. Ok, what don't we like? Reach deep into your conservative hearts - in the grand tradition of Edmund Burke and William F. Buckley Jr. - and tell me what we're AGAINST!

CROWD MEMBER: Hard words!

CROWD MEMBER: Weird food!

CROWD MEMBER: Spectacles!

CROWD MEMBER: Pussy little asian cars!

JINDAL (writing furiously): Hang on...pussy...little...cars...ok. We have, well, a lot of material here. A heckuva lot of material. We are gonna be a force to be reckoned with again. Hands up who want some Robin-Hood-equal-opportunity guy stealing our money while we're asleep? Huh?

CROWD MEMBER: You mean Jesus? [Hysterical whoops and screams. All hands go up.]

JINDAL: No - that's not who I meant, people! Hands up who like bad democrat man? [All hands go down].

That's the ticket. Those dems and their 'brains trust'. All that thinkin'! Well, we got a brains trust, too! Our very own brains trust! I am excited about the future of the Republican Party, people. Very excited. You'd better watch your back, Democrats!

CROWD MEMBER: I'm hungry.

Rock n' Roll Morals

2009-02-23T05:02:00.000-08:00

SPEAKER: Good afternoon. I'm speaking live from Harvard University, where I'm attending a conference panel entitled 'Artistically-inclined Rock Singers Heinously Outraged at Liberal Explicitness' (ARSHOLE).

On the panel are ex-Poison singer Brett Michaels; ex-Soundgarden singer Chris Cornell; and current AC/DC singer Brian Johnson. Greetings, gentlemen.

ALL: Good afternoon.

SPEAKER: Let's start with you, Brett. How did ARSHOLE start?

BM: Well, we in Hair-metal, Hard Rock and related subgenres are tired of being willfully misinterpreted, and hence marginalised, by an increasingly coarse public.

SPEAKER: Care to elaborate?

BM: Certainly. I'm talking about the alarming tendency of the mainstream media to read unintended messages into our lyrics.

SPEAKER: Could you provide an example, Mr. Michaels?

BM: One of Poison's records, 'Open Up and Say...Ahhh!', was purposefully (I believe) characterised as a reference to an - in my view - deviant sexual practice.

SPEAKER: I see. And what was the record intended to be about?

BM: My desire to become a doctor.

SPEAKER: A...doctor?

BM: Yes.

SPEAKER: How long have you had this wish?

BM: For as long as I can remember. Since I was a child, definitely.

SPEAKER: You got waylaid, then?

BM: You could say that. I 'fell in with the wrong crowd', as the cliche goes - a crowd that seemed to think that injected illegal substances and cheating on one's current partner constituted a valid life plan.

SPEAKER: Did you find that your personality was altered as a result of the company you kept?

BM: Yes, regrettably. There is a certain post-performance demographic known as the 'groupie', for example...

SPEAKER: Please go on.

BM: ...a term which refers to a tradition where members of the band retreat to their trailers for meaningless sexual encounters with uncommitted women. After these experiences, I invariably felt cheapened. None of them wanted to discuss the music. There were times when thoughts of my poor wife almost prevented me from going on stage.

SPEAKER: Mr. Cornell, would you care to comment on this disturbing trend?

CC: I had a similar experience during the recording of our album 'Louder Than Love'. I spent several months crafting a song about the difficulties of empathy.

SPEAKER: What was the song called?

CC: 'Swallow My Pride'. As should be obvious from the title, it's about the desire of a caring partner to inhabit their loved one's subjective experiences.

SPEAKER: And the media attacked you?

CC: They distorted the song's meaning to suit their own perverted ends. [Transcriber's note: voice starts to quaver at this point]. I can't even say out loud what Kerrang! magazine claimed it was about. Sometimes I think Axl Rose was right about them. They misinterpreted him, too.

SPEAKER: And these misunderstandings dogged you throughout your career?

CC: Of course. There was a song called 'Mailman' on our album 'Superunknown', which contains the couplet:
'I know I'm heading for the bottom/
But I'm riding you all the way.'
That song was never the same for me after the critics got to it.

SPEAKER: What was 'Mailman' intended to be about?

CC: I would have thought it was obvious: it is a song about my appreciation for the good work done by the US Postal Service.

SPEAKER (Hesitant): So...how would you explain the 'riding' reference?

CC: That part is a dialogue between a postman and his van, spoken while riding down a hill. When I used to watch 'Postman Pat' as a child, I always thought that Pat looked happiest when riding down a hill in his smiling van. It's a love song, I guess.

SPEAKER: Thank you. Finally, Mr. Johnson: You believe that your quartet has been especially hard done by?

BJ: Without a doubt.

SPEAKER: Ok. I'll read out several of your song titles, and you can tell the audience what the actual - as distinct from the perceived - subject matter is.

BJ: I'd be glad to.

SPEAKER: Let's begin. 'Givin' the Dog a Bone'?

BJ: That's about my toy poodle, Latifah.

SPEAKER: 'Big Balls'?

BJ: That's about my ten-pin bowling career.

SPEAKER: 'Sink the Pink'?

BJ: That's about my hobby - billiards.

SPEAKER: 'Let me Put My Love Into You'?

BJ: That's about sharing cupboard space after getting married. It's a difficult issue.

SPEAKER: 'Cover You in Oil'?

BJ: I like to cook roast chicken. It's self-explanatory.

SPEAKER: Thank you, Mr. Johnson. May I ask you all what you're working on at the moment?

BM: I'm writing a concept album about the urgent need to reform the American Medical Association.

SPEAKER: Do you have a title?

BM: 'Spreadeagled'. That's a reference, of course, to the American Eagle - standing in for the country as a whole - and how thinly its resources are currently spread due to lack of healthcare reform.

SPEAKER: Mr. Cornell?

CC: I'm trying to repair the damage done by the previous reaction to my work, by recording a rock opera about the doomed love between a horse and a unicorn.

SPEAKER: What is this album called?

CC: Its working title is 'Impaled on my Massive Horn'. I think that brings the pathos of the subject through quite well.

SPEAKER: And you, Mr. Johnson?

BJ: AC/DC are recording a new single especially for ARSHOLE.

SPEAKER: Entitled...?

BJ: 'Tits Tits Tits'.

SPEAKER: What is this one about?

BJ: The joys of ornithology.

Rejected Inauguration Speeches

2009-01-22T18:56:00.000-08:00

Although Obama's inauguration speech was co-written by the 27-year-old Jon Favreau, a number of speechwriters were reportedly under consideration for the task.

An envelope with two speeches, apparently rejected, was found on the lectern by an observant cleaner after Obama had finished speaking. They are reproduced in their entirety below.

REJECTED SPEECH #1:
'A Happy Day for Rapacious American Imperialist Dogs'
By John Pilger, author of 'Napalm America!'

Welcome, Americans, and thank you for taking time off from your sweatshop-exploiting purchasing frenzies to attend today.

I am being sarcastic, of course: I do not wish to thank any of you. This is because you have not participated in the democratic process.

Last November, you voted for, and "elected" [remember air quote gesture here] one candidate only: the dollar. None of you participated in anything resembling a democratic process. Voting, for you appalling bottom-feeding scum, is simply a process of electing your favourite mass murderer. Every ballot cast was like a dagger in the heart of someone from South-East Asia that you don't care about, and who probably made your shoes.

You all disgust me, but worse - you profoundly scare me. A goose-stepping cavalcade of heavily tranquilised matrix-monkeys would show more independence of thought than you violent, somnambulistic, bloodthirsty goons.

I stand before you as the perfect Manchurian Candidate. I will dedicate myself to achieving your depraved, violent goals - shovelling cash into the gaping maws of murderous client states.

The slogan for my presidency should have been 'Yes, I can' - as you have no wills of your own. And do you think electing my Doppleganger would have made any difference whatsoever, you Imperialist pawns?

So, repeat after me, automatons.

Overthrowing democratically elected governments? [Crowd will respond: 'Yes, you can.' Pause for laugh here.]

Cutting swathes of destruction through the ranks of our "enemies"? [again, remember menacing scare quotes here. Crowd will respond: Yes, you can.]

Using the blood of innocents as a delicious breakfast condiment and licking your lips afterwards? [Crowd will respond: Yes, you can.]

Thank you, rabble. You disgust me.

*

REJECTED SPEECH #2: 'Stop Voting for Nazis, you Pussies!'

By Daniel Pipes, author of 'Can't We Just Move the Arabs to Syria or Someplace?: Notes Towards a Solution to the Middle Eastern Conflict'.

Thank you, fellow Americans, for electing a closeted Islamo-Fascist to the White House. A 'negotiator'. [sneer here].

As everyone knows, negotiators love the Nazis. Underneath my stars and stripes lapel pin is a swastika - but you were all too appallingly stupid to notice. Blinded by your lazy liberal love of hummus and falafels.

Well, I love a falafel as much as the next guy - but you can't run foreign policy on the principles of a delicious deep-fried vegetarian chickpea-based snack.

The fact is, residents of the greatest country that the universe has ever known, you've been sold down the river by a bunch of liberals. Again. Idiots. All that stuff about 'love' for other countries - is that what you were expecting today? There are no other countries - only enemies. And most of these enemies speak other languages. Funny languages that don't make sense. And you should never trust someone who speaks funny. Have you people learned nothing from Liberace?

To my solutions. Our defence budget is far too small. Next year, every child will get a free handgun, their parents a free F-16. For America's strength cannot be summed up in its people, or its ideals, or its diversity. Our strength is in our military, eggheads. You know, in strong stuff. Made of steel. (I honestly can't believe I have to explain this.)

For those who think 'the pen is mightier than the sword', or some other defeatist crap: watch this. [Take bic cystal ballpoint pen and machete out of briefcase here; pulverise former with latter.] Bullshit!

We have been losing wars because we are weak. Korea? Not enough guns. Vietnam? Not enough choppers. Iraq I? Not enough remote controlled missiles. Iraq II? Not enough Hummers.

It's time to get real, America, so we can win this thing. [Spit in disgust here.]

See ya.

Bring me your tired, your huddled....

2009-01-11T04:47:00.000-08:00

And now for another excerpt from the collection of odd accidents that was my childhood.

My elder brother was having a Barbecue at his place - an event that I, a devoted and practicing carnivore at the time, was understandably excited about. This time, however, I was at - there's no easy way to put this - cricket practice (a story for another post) - and I wasn't able to get to his place until everyone else had already arrived.

'Tim!' they all said, with that warm tone of welcome that adults use on children, and which children inevitably love (even if they pretend they don't).
'I just have to get changed, and I'll be right out', I said, greatly looking forward to the awaiting succulent hunks of charred meat.

I went into my brother's room (I had, with unusual foresight, brought a change of clothing for the occasion). Halfway through changing, I looked in the corner of the room and saw... a mysterious black bag. Can you, in your heart of hearts, blame me for opening it?

The bag contained a big, red, heavy bowling ball. Most children, on finding such an object, might think: 'wouldn't it be fun to roll this across the floor for a bit?'

Not I. Instead, I thought: 'wouldn't it be fun, and even a little flattering, to pose with the bowling ball in front of the mirror?' (I had a rather strange body image at the time, I think.)

So, I gingerly took the ball from the bag, and slowly walked towards the smoked full-length mirror, my posture resembling someone who had just gotten a gigantic arm made of lead unexpectedly riveted to their right side.

It looked pretty cool, I must say. With my index and middle fingers lodged in the holes, I preened awhile and imagined myself as the junior 10-pin champion of the universe.

Next, I truly went for the epic. Imagining myself as a perfect (and non-hermaphroditic) hybrid of Michaelangelo's David and the Statue of Liberty, I slowly extended my right arm above my head, and held it aloft with ball attached.

I should stress at this point that my brother used a 16-pound ball. 16 pounds is around 7 kilograms - approximately the mass of an adult human head.

Triumphant, reveling in my own titanic strength, I looked proudly at my straining, wiry, right bicep-tricep combo, capped with the magificent red sphere. But I let my marble/copper sculpted daydream run away with me, lost concentration for a small interval, and closed my eyes.

When I opened them again, I noticed that the ball was forcing my ball-gripping fingers into a direction that they probably weren't supposed to go. Without support, the bowling ball surrendered custody to its old master - gravity.

Or, to put it another way, I dropped the bowling ball onto my face. Which is not quite as much fun as it sounds.

Regaining consciousness on the floor in a pool of my own blood, I opened my eyes to a closeup view of the blood-covered sphere and thought: isn't that funny: my blood's exactly the same colour as the ball!

Just switch to everyone else's perspective for a second: quiet boy goes into room to change out of his gym gear. Emerges with mild concussion, smashed lips, and bloodied face.

I couldn't talk for several hours, which did make explaining rather difficult.

The Saint

2009-01-02T16:10:00.000-08:00

The Obama photoshoot in the GoodWeekend a few weeks back was a little bit concerning, I thought. It was a great set - I spent about 15 minutes swooning over it - and it reinforced my crush, as it probably did for other readers.

But one photo stuck out: it showed Obama sitting with his crossed feet resting on a table. The caption described the holes in the bottom of his shoes, which had been made by all the walking that he had been doing during the campaign. It was the hardship that he'd been through that we were encouraged to see. The worn-out shoes became a shorthand for the man himself.

A similar thing happened with the 'news' that Obama is going to purchase a tuxedo for his inauguration. He only has one beaten-up one, apparently, which he purchased years ago. This is appealing, of course, but it's also fairly irrelevant.

Looking at the photos, I found it very hard to slough off the sense of awe that I felt, and feel, towards him. I don't think it's an exaggeration to say that a large section of the population - me included - is 'in love' with him, insofar as one can fall in love with a stranger. This is a helpful attitude to have when you're supporting a campaign, but perhaps not so helpful when you're dealing with a sitting president.

It's hardly Obama's fault that he is, well, not exactly aesthetically or charismatically deficient. However, I think it will be a challenge for the world to judge his presidency in a disinterested manner. The Republican Party's 'Obama = Celebrity' ad worked, in part, because there was some truth in it.

Of course, the fact that it was nasty, paranoid & racist gave it a little help, too. God bless the GOP!

$10 Chardy

2008-12-29T16:24:00.000-08:00

I probably should add that I watched Alfie while drinking a bottle of rather cheap wine - a fact that might explain a few of the confusing thematic leaps of the last two posts.

American booty

2008-12-29T05:29:00.000-08:00

The previous post made me realise that 'the film of the 1990s', American Beauty, will suffer the same fate as Alfie. American Beauty is the Alfie of our time.

If you watch AB now, you'll see how it's one of those films that's already dated appallingly. Just think: when we were teenagers, we cared about the disintegration of Kevin Spacey's marriage. He is JUST like Alfie. Mark my words: the film will turn up in the 'well made Hollywood Bombs of the 90s' series - just beside cutthroat island.

What's THAT all about?

2008-12-29T05:07:00.000-08:00

I just finished watching 'Alfie' with Michael Caine, one of my favourite movie stars, in the genuine sense of the word - i.e. someone with such a magnetic personality that you become obsessed with them against your will. e.g. Ben Kingsley isn't a movie star, he's an actor, while Michael Caine isn't really an actor (zero range) but he IS a movie star.

Anyway, 'Alfie' is about a hansome chap, who, due to a combination of looks & confidence, is able to have sex with lots of beautiful (& also homely) women. Hurray, you might say - but Alfie's life is as empty & desperate as yours or mine, perhaps even more!

Unfortunately, Alfie is a nasty, misogynist, extremely limited comedy that has gained its status because of the absolute magetism of its star, as well as its novel (for the times) themes and its clever technique of addressing the camera directly.

It's amazing, though, how tame it is compared to Hollywood films of the 40s. All 60s films are like this: hey folks, suddenly we're allowed to talk about issues! Let's talk about smoking dope and having sex with the next-door neigbour!

Of course, the problem with the above is that it dates really fast. The concerns of the central 60s Hollywood films (even The Graduate, which plays like a quaint, frivolous actor's showcase these days (a whole generation-defining film about having sex with the hot older neighbour? Wow, what a profound statement!). In this day and age, who cares? In contrast, 40s films noir are the closest thing that we 20th century moderns have to Macbeth (and I mean that seriously, not 'hey kids, I'm gonna be cool be comparing movies to Shakespeare!') It's only when a medium takes its subject matter seriously that the audience can become completely immersed in the work. The director of Alfie may have done so, but that doesn't mean that we have to.
What's it all about?
Sex, according to you, Alfie.
Who cares, according to the rest of us.

The Last Cricket Ball Artisan

2008-12-14T02:49:00.001-08:00

It is said that dreams are the key to a person's soul. Very well, then, Dr. Jung: please explain what the corker that I had last night 'reveals' about my mind's innermost workings.

*
In this dream, I had started running a small shop in a busy arcade, selling only one product: cricket balls. These were not just any cricket balls, though - they were all hand-made by me. As the customers would walked into my shop, I would sit on a tall stool, lovingly stitching the meticulous seams. The balls were stuffed with straw, which I had harvested myself. For my customers and me, it was a pretty nice arrangement.

As I sat on the tall stool, I would sing a song to my customers. In a helpful bout of meta-commentary, the song was about the joys of stuffing and stitching cricket balls by hand. The song was sung to the tune of Outshined by Soundgarden (some things never change), and the first two lines went something like this:

I'll show you the cricket balls, I'd like to say
That they've all been hand-stuffed with hay. (Yeah)
*

Why is my brain thinking these things? Am I channeling a cricket-themed prophet? Answers, please.

Paintball Tycoon

2008-12-12T03:36:00.000-08:00

Going to my friend's paintball-themed Buck's night was the best chance I'll ever have to make good on the dream of playing Bond (see 2 posts ago for the origins of this long-held, yet tragically destined to be unfulfilled, dream). The man in question is a Federal Police Officer.

Let it be known: there is something deeply wrong with a paintball hall.

Fill a derelict warehouse with approximately 50 men, all in the advanced stages of foaming bloodlust. The closest Australia comes to Cledus's family on The Simpsons, hardcore paintball fans look, well, different to the rest of us. It's the expression of pure joy that spreads across their foetal-alcohol-syndrome-ravaged faces that does it, I think - it's the type of joy that I only experience when I open the freezer door and realise that I've forgotten to consume the litre of Toffee-Pecan icecream that I bought the night before. It's far, far worse than you think. I am talking about a place where it is deemed necessary to politely remind the patrons of the following in the instructional video:

Please do NOT bring real firearms into the venue.

I just love the 'please'.

As soon as I was given the regulation snazzy 'outfit', I realised that paintball was not for me. Paintballs are small, hard and very painful when they hit you at speed. Yes, that is the idea. Very well - but it is a deeply flawed idea, and it's important to understand that. It is not, despite what the evolutionary psychologists might tell you, in our genes to express our basic urges in this way.
*
I have the rare talent of vagueing out at the most important moments of a conversation. Before the paintball shoot, everyone else heard a detailed analysis of the hazards of paintball. But I heard:

"Vitally important that you....necessary that your mask remains on at ALL times, or massive trauma will...vital that genitals protected to avoid haemoraging...under no circumstances...otherwise your testicles will be reduced to rubble..."

A guide said something vitally important about the safety catch - either to NEVER leave the orange bar showing or to ALWAYS leave it showing - and we were off. My team hid behind a big wooden barrier. I went out to have a look - a reconnoitre, as I wittily told my team - and got shot in the neck. It really, really, really hurt. 'Fuck!' I said.

Then I got shot in the nuts. I didn't say anything then, because I was bent over in silent prayer, thanking the Lord that I spent the $8 on a box protector. This was an optional extra. Pay some money and 'choose' to keep your reproductive organs intact. Excellent choice, sir.

I have to mention that I am a lover of films that resolve themselves by violent means. Not modern ones a la Tarantino; I mean Westerns & films noir - where the law of the gun is an accepted part of life. But that day, I found out that I wouldn't make a Western hero - I couldn't pull the trigger on someone.

So if a Western were made of my life, I'd be the city journalist who tags along with the hard-bitten gunmen saying things like 'golly!' and 'that'll be a scoop!', peeing his pants when the actual fighting starts. In this way, I identify with the Gary Cooper/John Wayne, WW2-dodging model of manhood: big fan of on-screen violence, not so much the real life sort. I spent the rest of the day in the paintball bar.

Best. Movie Blurb. Ever.

2008-12-11T23:31:00.000-08:00

"Where's Dolph Lundgren these days?", I hear you say.

People, at the video shop yesterday I found the answer to your question.

Missionary Man
Full of vengeance and out for justice, a mysterious stranger with a score to settle rolls into a small town unannounced, forever changing life for its citizens caught under the oppressive thumb of a local tyrant. Armed with his Bible, his motorcycle and his thirst for revenge, the stranger faces down the evil dictator in true vigilante style, proving that justice still packs a mighty punch.

Written, directed by and starring Dolph Lundgren (from Rocky IV), Missionary Manis an action-packed, modern-day Western in the tradition of films like 'Walking Tall' and 'Roadhouse'.

Now we know who Bush's policy adviser was.

P.S. I did not make the above film synopsis up. Honest.

Living tissue over titanium endoskeleton

2008-12-11T23:19:00.000-08:00

I wasn’t allowed to see Terminator 2 when it was released. Due to my natural abject subservience to all authority figures, in what was possibly the worst decision of my life I obeyed my parents and went to see a Richard Greico vehicle entitled If Looks Could Kill instead. (When I say 'vehicle', I'm talking 'Holden Camira'). I’ll leave it to future anthropologists to mull over which work of art was more enduring.

The T2 ban didn’t deter me for long – I had already seen part one on video, and had gotten the taste for robots. Rather than sneaking in to see the movie, however, I decided to do something even better – to become the Terminator.

This is a difficult task for a primary school child. Actually, I repeated the same mistake I had made with Bond: I got it into my head that my then pre-pubescent facial features bore some uncanny resemblance to the Terminator’s. (Those who are sniggering – not very kind).

In art class one day, while the other students were making printed t-shirts with pretty patterns that resembled what Jackson Pollock might have come up with had he been forced to use a spirograph, I came up with the following design:
• A disembodied pair of sunglasses in middle of T-shirt, topped with a menacing cactus-like crop of spiky hair.
• Within each lens of the glasses: the red, glowing furnaces of the Terminator’s electronic eyes.
• Under this portrait, I had written the words: ‘Hasta la Vista….Baby!’ (Actually, my T-shirt originally said ‘Asta la Vista…Baby!’, but my art teacher despairingly corrected me, perhaps figuring that teaching a cretin who spelled correctly was better than teaching a cretin who couldn't).

The t-shirt was made slightly less menacing by my grade 4-6 propensity to draw the dots over my I’s and J’s as little circles. (Fortunately, we weren’t using puff paint that day.) I also drew a wavy green double underline under the word ‘baby’, which might not have been altogether wise for someone trying to cut a figure as an unstoppable titanium killing machine.

My t-shirt was made even less menacing by my choice of clothing accompaniment during my utterly sartorially retarded youth:
• A bow tie (navy blue, with red polka-dots)
• Corduroy pants
• 2-tone grey and black zip-up shoes

Even thinking about me in this getup makes me want to punch myself.

But a mere t-shirt wasn’t the piece de resistance of my youthful Terminator-ness. I also used to entertain the notion that I could complete the terrifyingly unsustainable Tim=Arnold illusion by creating a kind of electronic device to simulate a glowing red Terminator eye in my own head.

This was done with:
• a pair of gigantic wraparound sunglasses
• a 9-volt battery
• a battery connector
• an LED from a Dick Smith electronics set

To terrify and astound my vulnerable younger brother, I put on my newly Terminator t-shirt (ignoring the fact that real Terminators would be unlikely to wear white t-shirts featuring crude texta drawings of themselves, let alone bow ties). I hooked up the battery to the LED, fastened it with blu-tac, and started walking slowly, colossally and robotically towards my supine brother. To take care of all possible contingencies, I asked my mother to utter the following brilliant line to him just before I showed up:

“Have you seen Timothy recently? Well…I think he’s a robot.”

This was supposed to be delivered in the half-crazed tones of a parent who had just realised that they had been rearing a little Terminator in their nest for the past twelve years. So, the plan went as follows:

1. I would shuffle towards brother, LED-eye glowing furiously.
2. Brother would scream, become scarred for life, contract PTSD.
3. Mother would begin to wonder whether they might, in fact, have been some deep truth in her words…

Unfortunately, the mini-Terminator forgot one crucial fact: it is physically impossible to utter the words, “I think Timothy’s a robot!” without laughing. I lumbered toward my mother and brother, both of whom were doubled over. “You didn’t say it properly!”, I screamed at my mother, furious with robotic indignation.

There was a lesson learned from the attempt, though: I quickly found out why people don’t place Dick Smith electronics kits extremely close to their eyeballs. The battery wires had gotten so hot that I was lucky not to have permanently blinded myself with my pseudo-robot contraption.

I won’t be back.

The Bonds of Childhood

2008-12-11T23:17:00.000-08:00

As an impressionable youth, I saw the opening sequence of a James Bond film. I don’t know which one it was, but it was definitely my first Bond, and mighty exciting it was too. Bond was running around a jungly obstacle course, being attacked by people with paintball guns for some reason. Bond rolled, ducked and dived with such Bondlike efficiency that his pursuers never had a chance. At the conclusion, Bond opened his violin case (he was carrying one for some reason – perhaps auditioning for the Philharmonic after the casual slaughter), pulled out a Tommy gun or something similar, and started brutally killing his paintball opponents with it. Hurray! Not very nice, not very fair – but dynamite when you’re four.*

I was very excited when I discovered that the Bond role was something of a moveable feast – in time, anyone could, in theory, get to play Bond. (If you’re white and male – which I fortunately was). Being of an impressionable primary-school age, and prone to massive egotistical delusions, I thought that perhaps…I could play Bond one day!

Of course, some natural disadvantages were working against me – if there’s a spinoff series featuring weedy 5’7’’ Bonds, I’ve yet to see it – but that particular fantasy stands as concrete proof of my fertile imagination.

Still waiting by the phone.

* I know there's probably no Bond movie that starts remotely like this. I was four, for god's sake. Cut me some slack.

This could be the very last AC/DC post

2008-11-28T02:55:00.000-08:00

‘Rock and Roll Train’ Reconsidered

How is it possible for two AC/DC songs to be pretty much identical – in terms of chord structure, timing and thematic focus – and yet the first song is good, the second almost unlistenable? Such is the mystery posed by Rock and Roll train, a superficially simple – yet deeply awesome – track at the beginning of AC/DC’s new album Black Ice.

I seriously underrated it on the first listen. It’s not sexist (much, really); it’s not even nasty – it’s a chunky, hearty throwback to better times.

But it's more complicated. Rock and Roll Train has completed the journey begun by AC/DC over 30 years ago, i.e. it has entirely evacuated the referent from the lyrics.

The lyrics aren’t about anything at all.

I hear you, cynics, naysayers and curmudgeons: AC/DC perfected that years ago. Yes, granted. But there is a kind of purity about the intense nothingness of R&RT’s lyrics. They are about the following three-part process:
1. Picking up a thing
2. Moving it somewhere else
3. Putting it down again.

In R&RT, Brian Johnston sounds like a cross between an overenthusiastic building site manager and Deepak Chopra. Lines such as:

‘Pick it up and move it, baby give it all you got,’

speak for themselves. Brian doesn’t say ‘try really hard, folks!’ or something lame that your parents would say when they wanted you to take out the garbage or some crap. Instead, he says:

‘Shake it up, move it, Jammin’ up the agency.’

Let's be honest. Who the hell wouldn’t want to jam up the damn agency if they had a chance? That’s what men do (and plucky women, too!): They jam up the agency – and then refuse to un-jam that agency until the job’s done.

Seriously, though – there are a lot of great songs on this album.

Exhibit A: I am now listening to a song called ‘Smash n’ Grab’. It should be a typical, late-career throwaway AC/DC piece of crap. Its chorus runs:
‘Smash, grab and take it.’
It’s silly, wrong, boneheaded and irresponsible, yes, and children probably shouldn’t be provided with the lyrics sheet. But it just works.

If you don’t want to purchase the album, here’s a brief summary of the content by track listing:

Track 1. Trains are cool (Rock n Roll Train)
Track 2. Thunderstorms are cool (Skies on Fire)
Track 3. Bigshots are gonna get killed one day (Big Jack)
Track 4. Poor guys can get rich and get the girl (Anything Goes)
Track 5. War is scary, yet cool (War Machine)
Track 6. Shoplifting is cool, and essential for a healthy society (Smash n Grab)
Track 7. Fighting is cool, and fun too (Spoilin’ for a Fight)
Track 8. Fast, illegal cars are cool (Wheels)
Track 9. Loud music is cool (Decibel)
Track 10. Thunderstorms are cool (Stormy May Day – see #2)
Track 11. Sex is cool because it’s sort of like rock n’ roll (She Likes Rock n’ Roll)
Track 12. Money is cool, but work sucks (Money Made)
Track 13. Rock and roll is cool (Rock and Roll Dream)
Track 14. Rock and roll is cool (Rockin’ all the Way – see #13)
Track 15. Causing grievous bodily harm is cool (Black Ice)

I recommend Black Ice to everyone. It has reaffirmed my conviction that there are only two types of people in the world: AC/DC fans, and AC/DC fans in denial.

Which are you?

The Criterion Collection Audiobook Series

2008-11-27T23:57:00.000-08:00

At Criterion, we are dedicated to presenting you with the finest in World Cinema. That is why we have decided to release several masterpieces of the 1990s in Audiobook format. Purchase the leather-embossed collectors' edition boxed set today.

The Criterion Audiobook Collection presents:
The Films of Michael Bay

Volume I: "Transformers"
Novelisation by Jodi Picoult
Narrated by Sir Ian McKellan

*

I...am Sir Ian McKellan, and I will be your raconteur for tonight.

For tonight...you will hear a story of robots. Good robots. Bad robots. And robots...in between.

(Sir Ian sighs contentedly before continuing).

Optimus Prime stretched his full, blue, metallic arms to the warm caress of the morning sun. Delicately brushing a loose patch of rust from his gleaming, robotic forehead, he looked fondly at his human assistant sitting cross-legged on the plump duvet below.

Optimus: You...helped me, John.

Thick, dark tears rolled very slowly down Optimus's precisely machined steel cheeks.

(And here I must affect a working-class American accent, listeners, so do forgive me.)
John: Yo! It ain't nothin', Opt!

(And here I must remind the listener that Optimus knew that this child was not worthy of his majestic protection, yet to the very end, he did not shirk his duty).
Optimus: It meant the world to me. How you saved us Autobots from certain destruction. And if...

(Optimus pauses, then haltingly continues)

...if love between a human and a robot is possible, then I believe we have gone some way towards achieving that love, John.

*

Other titles in this magnificent series:

"Con Air", from the novelisation by Rick Moody; narrated by Ralph Nader

"The Rock", from the novelisation by E Annie Proulx; narrated by Harold Bloom

Price:

$199.00 (cloth bound)

$599.00 (Moroccan goat chamois)

Please note that gold edging is $49.00 extra

Barack Toughens Up

2008-09-23T05:10:00.000-07:00

Over the past month, Barack Obama has been undergoing an intensive training regime at the hands of his newly-elected Vice President, Joe Biden. The following is an edited transcript of one of the training days.

In deference to the White House transcription convention first established by Richard Nixon, all expletives and potentially incriminating remarks have been permanently erased from the tape.

BIDEN: We’re gettin’ creamed out there, Barry.

OBAMA: If we tell the truth, the public will –

BIDEN: That’s bulls**t, Obes. F***in’ bulls**t! Howya gonna take this old man on, man?

OBAMA: By methodically and systematically dealing with his points as they are made, preferably in an official setting.

BIDEN: Oh, f**k me. [He picks up a piece of wood]. See this?

OBAMA: Yes, of course, Joseph. I – [Biden smashes the wood violently across his knee.]

BIDEN [satisfied]: God damn! That’s what I’m talkin’ about! See how that p**sweak Motherf***er shattered like a b****h? That’s what ya gotta do to the old man, Barry!

OBAMA: I hardly think that –

BIDEN: Just… pow! Can’t ya feel it runnin’ through ya?

OBAMA: I’m not sure I fully –

BIDEN: You gotta talk the talk, Baz. I talked to a buncha Hicks yesterday, Baz. Know what I said to ‘em? I said:

“If that Barack guy tries to take my f***in’ guns, I’ll kick his skinny little ass. I got 6 fully auto 9mm Berettas under my pillow. My mattress is stuffed with the f***ers, too. My kids use ‘em to shoot bullies and teachers who give ‘em s**t. F***, I’d shoot my own dawg if he barked too f***in’ loud! Goddamn I love shooting stuff!”

Ya just give ‘em a little red meat, Obes. That’s what ya gotta learn.

OBAMA: Just where is this all coming from, exactly? I didn’t have an inkling of this when I nominated you.

BIDEN: Gotta get mad, man. Hicks f***in’ love mad. And we love Hicks – cos we need ‘em. And if you talk to a Hick right, he doesn’t know you’re sh***in’ him. ‘Bitter’ my ass.

OBAMA: That’s hardly a respectful attitude to take to our constituents, Joseph.

BIDEN: Respectful? These guys gave us eight f***in’ years of Monkey nuts in the Oval Office! Have you seen ‘Bloodsport’?

OBAMA: Is that the delightful Daniel Auteil comedy where –

BIDEN: It’s Van Damme, Barry. VAN-god-damn-DAMME! And that’s the last European name you’re gonna utter during this campaign. You gotta get Bloodsport on McCain. Dip those f***in' kid gloves in broken glass!

OBAMA: Do you mean…physically?

BIDEN: You know those goddamn town hall debates they make ya do? Poke him in his sunken chest. He won’t be able to touch ya, ya wiry b****** - he can’t even raise his arms, man! Vietcong got those, you gotta go for the rest. Ya gotta crush him, man – you seen ‘Karate Kid’, even? S***, you even watch TV? Just keep pokin’ him till he explodes. Like Ralph Macchio.

OBAMA: This is ridiculous.

BIDEN [Holding piece of wood aloft]: I wantya to destroy this, ya raky wimp.

OBAMA: Are you serious?

BIDEN: Just snap one of those little girl hands down on it. (Sniggers). That oughta do it.

OBAMA: That’s a sexist slur.

BIDEN: Girl hands.

OBAMA: That’s quite enough. I’m beginning to think you were a bad choice of –

BIDEN: Girly hands.

[In a sudden rage, Obama splits the plank of wood with the edge of his palm].

OBAMA: I… don’t know where that came from.

BIDEN: That was beautiful. You just won South Carolina with that psycho s**t. Now: I’ll be McCain, and you can be you. [Clears throat]. Why the hell should the American people let you run this country, you dainty little p***k?

OBAMA: Because our tax policy will –

BIDEN [Whispers]: You f****in’ crazy, Baz?

OBAMA: The Democratic Party will reform –

BIDEN [Aside]: F***! You wanna lose this or somethin’?

OBAMA: In these uncertain financial times –

BIDEN [Whispers]: One last f****in’ warning, Dead****.

OBAMA: Call me that one more time, and I’ll rip your f***in’ ornamental arms off, McS**t!

BIDEN: Woah! Yeah!

OBAMA: Shrivelled old Mother*****.

BIDEN: Woof!

OBAMA [coming to]: I can’t understand it. Please don’t make me angry like that again.

BIDEN: Channel it, baby, channel it! Red meat, pal!

OBAMA: Kindly desist.

Broken Connexion

2008-09-20T18:03:00.000-07:00

Flinders St station is bedecked with billboards saying something along the lines of:

‘We are making this station carbon neutral’.

Well, thank you for lighting the vending machines with fluorescent globes, Connex. I’m sure that’s a much better way of saving the planet than purchasing enough trains to prevent the disintegration of the Melbourne rail system. But that would be expensive and hard. I'm sorry for even mentioning such a proposal.

Never fear - these seemingly intractable problems are nothing that a pretty girl with a windmill won't fix!

The most annoying part of the ad is the woman on the poster, who looks like the type of person that would have confidently ticked ‘human rights lawyer’ on her year 7 vocational questionnaire. The courageous, defiant expression on her face evokes Abraham Lincoln delivering the Gettysburg address, rather than (as it should) a feckless shill for an incompetent transport company.

Her dignity is further undercut by the fact that she is holding a lightglobe in one hand and a small plastic windmill in the other. Now, pardon me for being skeptical, but I have seen few – in fact, no – wind turbines under construction on Flinders Street station’s roof. I can only assume, therefore, that the customer will have to bear the windmill cost.

CC, I hear you say, you’ve got it wrong. Connex is using that powerful image to illustrate their energy plan – to purchase more of their electricity from renewable sources. The girl holding the little windmill is only a powerful visual representation of this fact.

But this ad is not a representation of Connex’s new energy plan. It is their new energy plan.

*

SCENE: A young man of 29 walks up to the ticket counter in order to buy a train ticket.

YM: I’d like a weekly zone 1, please.

Ticket Guy: Certainly. That will be $34. And here is your small plastic windmill. That will be $150.

YM: $150 for a plastic windmill?

TG: It is a regulation Connex windmill.

YM: What is the difference between this windmill and, say, a regular plastic windmill that I might purchase at, say, a school fete?

TG: This one has been painted in Connex’s colours.

YM: That seems a bit steep.

TG: They are hand-painted by the girl in the ad. Her painting is so exquisite that she can only do 3 windmills an hour.

YM: Why are you selling me a plastic windmill with my ticket?

TG: It will help us to meet our greenhouse target.

YM: How does it work?

TG: When the train is in motion, we would greatly appreciate it if you could stick the windmill out of the window.

YM: Why?

TG: This will enable the small windmill to generate electricity.

YM: For what?

TG: Enough electricity… to power this light globe! (Ceremoniously holds out light globe and extension cord). The light globe is $45. The extension cord is free.

YM: Huh?

TG: Stick the windmill hand out of the window – right or left, it doesn’t matter – so that the lightglobe can function. The faster the train goes, the brighter the lightglobe gets.

YM: That’s a bit counterproductive, don’t you think?

TG: Whatever do you mean?

YM: Well, these windmills aren’t doing any good. They’re not powering the train, are they?

TG: Powering the train?

YM: Isn’t that the aim?

TG: The point, actually, is to offer a purely symbolic contribution to global warming in order to distract customers from our appalling level of service.

YM: That was a remarkably honest answer.

TG: I was fired this morning. This is my last day.

Cruel Inventions - Part 2

2008-09-14T02:52:00.000-07:00

Household inventions are the cumulation of a long process of gradual perfection. They have been improved incrementally, and these improvements can be undone at a stroke.

Unfortunately, not all inventions are capable of wreaking vengeance as effectively as our friend the pyramadine grater. Here is a short list of everyday inventions that have been destroyed by designers' meddling hands. For your reference, I have also included the specific ways in which I would use these inventions to harm their wretched progenitors.

1. The Torqueless Fork

My workplace possesses forks whose handles have a perfectly round cross-section. Now, forks usually have a handle that is somewhat flat. This allows for manoeuvrability, allowing the user to apply torque to the handle, in accordance to the formula Torque = Force x Distance. As the distance across the handle is about 0.005 cm, and the force applied by an average human hand is around 30 Newtons (I made that up, but it sounds good), the torque generated by a regular fork is 0.15 Newton Metres (Nm).
PHWOOOOAR!, as a reader of 'Street Machine' magazine might say.

But with a circular handle preventing cross-fork leverage, a fork generates no torque. It is the Toyota Celica of forks - a hairdresser's fork.

Vengeance method: Designer to be forked repeatedly.

2. The Nubless Tap

My parents use to possess taps with perfectly smooth, round handles. Again, the evidence suggests that the inventor had not tested invention thoroughly enough: taps worked fine in the dry, but lost traction in the wet.

Vengeance method: Put a well-soaped designer in a small room which is gradually filling with water. The only means of turning off the water is by means of a nubless tap, the handle of which has also been thoroughly soaped. Get out of that one, McGuyver.

3. The Unnecessarily Complex Corkscrew

If, like me, you often wish to empty a bottle of wine of its contents in a hurry, you will be in no mood for corkscrew shenanigans in this time of need.

Corkscrews are simple machines, made even more delightful by their resemblance to a Robot doing starjumps. (Try it at home, and see how many starjumps you can make the little robot do in an hour.)

The complicated corkscrew is designed to increase the status of the head male in the house by making him the sole person capable of understanding its fiendish complexity.

*FLASHBACK*

YOUNG ME: Dad, can you please open this?

DAD (dripping scorn): Can't you open it? Simple turn camshaft A until it re-engages with the friction plate. Then, rotate notched cog B until it initiates the starter relay sequence.

*
Vengeance Method: Inventor is made to walk through desert with a knapsack full of water-filled wine bottles. To overcome thirst, inventor must successfully operate corkscrew. As this is impossible, inventor will perish.

Cruel Inventions - Part 1

2008-09-14T01:32:00.000-07:00

Whenever I come across a humdrum household object that has been needlessly 'updated' in order to make it more 'interesting', I become utterly consumed with the idea of causing the inventor's untimely death - with the very object that they have so foolishly destroyed.

I once had the pleasure of owning a pyramidine cheese grater (most are oblong or cylindrical, for those readers who have their cheese grated for them by servants). 'Cool!', I hear you say.

No. It is most definitely not cool. It is not cool to destroy a useful object in order to serve the whims of fashion. There is a reason that graters are oblong or cylindrical: i.e. to prevent cheese from becoming stuck in the top of the grater. As I think of the impending, violent confrontation with the black-clad, turtleneck-wearing grater updater, catharsis rushes through me.

*

SCENE: A late 19th-century inner-city warehouse, converted into a trendy clutch of studios. Aforementioned black-clad designer sits in original 1960s egg chair at a lustrous Nicholas Datner redgum table. He is talking on his mobile phone. It is, of course, an iPhone. You are supposed to hate him.

DESIGNER: ...And so I said to her - 'Wheatgrass is amazing for your Chakras.' Well, I have to rush, Pantene - I have an appointment with my Iridologist. What's that? No - the cat's still at the acupuncturist. Yes, he's doing quite well. I really do believe that animals respond best to non-invasive techniques.

(THE massive Victorian-era wooden door is forcefully kicked open to reveal a lone figure standing silhouetted against the windswept street. His expression is not visible under his low-brimmed hat. He coolly smokes a cigarillo. The street lights halo the smoke around his head. He looks angrily at the floor, as if to repress some violent inner torment. Losing composure, he advances to the table. His metal heels clink eerily on the floorboards; his poncho swishes behind him like a tattered victory flag.)

DESIGNER: Uh - can I help you?

MYSTERIOUS FIGURE: That's for you to decide. You most certainly have not helped me in the past.

DESIGNER: Who...are you?

MYSTERIOUS FIGURE: I am the angel of vengeance. I speak for household objects that have no voice.

(Mysterious figure unsheaths glittering object from his utility belt.)

MYSTERIOUS FIGURE (Holding grater aloft): And - this? What is this?

DESIGNER: I-I-I-I-it's a grater.

MYSTERIOUS FIGURE (in low, guttural whisper not unlike Batman's): That's what it said on the label. What's wrong with this picture?

DESIGNER: I don't -

MF: It. Doesn't. Grate.

DESIGNER: But it's -

MF: Ok. It grates. All right. But there's a problem.

DESIGNER: I don't underst-

MF: BRING ME A BLOCK OF CHEESE. You do have cheese here, dontya? Hmm?

TERRIFIED DESIGNER: Y-y-yes. (Departs, and re-emerges with CHEESE).

MF: Grate it.

DESIGNER: But I've never-

MF: That's right. You've never grated cheese in your life. Grate it. Grate it. Grate it.

DESIGNER: Ok, ok, I'm grating! (He GRATES).

MF: Enough. Pick up the grater and remove the cheese.

DESIGNER (Shaking and tapping grater: It's not working, sir.

MF: That's because you destroyed something beautiful when you made that grater. (Background music swells: Barber's Adagio for Strings.)

DESIGNER: I had no idea.

MF: You have become death, the destroyer of graters. You took something perfect and you crushed it. And now: it's time to get to know Mr Pyramidine grater just a little better.

FADE TO BLACK. SOUND REMAINS:

DESIGNER: What are you doing? Stop - ouch! He's grating me! He's grating me!

MF: The only thing that's grating here is your hubris.

END

Phonetic Riff Transcription System

2008-09-12T21:21:00.000-07:00

Let's face it - the riff is in terminal decline. The 70s, 80s and 90s were all generously served by the bespangled riff gods - but today's bands seem to think that designing a riff is as simple as following one chord by another. Like most of the world's problems, this is mainly U2's fault. What's the matter, 'The Edge'? Your distortion pedal broken or something? Badass nickname, by the way. (I sincerely apologise for just having alienated the entire Noonan family with that comment.)

One of the main problems with riffage is the lack of an objective method of comparison. Fact: the best bands have the best riffs. So, it shouldn't be too difficult to come up with a notation system that allows you, the consumer, to evaluate riffs on the page. This will allow you to make an intelligent and informed purchase: i.e. to choose the albums with the awesomest collection of riffs.

Fortunately, I devised just such a system while on the train today. My system has an advantage over guitar tabulature: it requires absolutely no musical knowledge to understand. In fact, the less musical knowledge you have, the better.

What follows is a transcript of ten of my favourite riffs, using my patented 'Phonetoriff' system (patent pending).

1. Black Sabbath, Paranoid

Intro:
Bow, wow, wow, do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do!
Bow, wow, wow, do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do!

Main riff:
GUG-gug-gug-gug-GUG-gug-gug-gug
GUG-gug-gug-gug-GUG-gug-gug-gug
GOG-gog-gog-gog-GOG-gog-gog-gog ba-ba, BA. (ba!)

2. AC/DC, Back in Black

Ba. Ba-da-da. Ba-da-da.... Be-do-be-do-be-do-be
Ba. Ba-da-da. Ba-da-da. Bompow, bompow, bompow, bompow,
Ba.

3. Rolling Stones, Jumpin' Jack Flash

Intro:
Nung, nung, nung; ving, ving;
Nung, nung, nung, ningningning ning, ning;
Nung, nung, nung, ving, vinggggg;
Nung, nung, nung, ningningning ning, ning
Nununung.
Nununung.
Nununung.
Nununung.

(Jagger: Onetwo!)

Main riff:
BAAMP BAAMP, ba-na-na, ba-na-na, banana
BAAMP BAAMP, ba-na-na, ba-na-na, banana...

4. Metallica, Bridge from 'One'

Dubodabudobadah. Dubodabudobadah. Dubodabudobadah. Dubodabudobadah.
DubodabudobaDAH-NAAA, DubodabudobaDAH-NAAA, DubodabudobaDAH-NAAA, DubodabudobaDAH-NAAA,
Dubodabudobadah. Dubodabudobadah. Dubodabudobadah. Dubodabudobadah.

5. Jimi Hendrix, Voodoo Chile

Intro:
Wuk-o-wuk-o-wuk-o-wukka-wukowuk-a!
A wuk-wuk-wok-owuk-o-wuk-wuk-wukko!
Wuk-wuk-WUK-o-wuk-a-wuk-wuk, ah!
A-wuk-o-wuk-o-wuk-o-wuk-o-wuk-wuk-

Main riff:
Beowwm, ba deoww-deoww bamp-wamp wanna-wanna
Beowwm, ba deoww-deoww wanna. (Wicka)
Beowwm, wa deoww-beoww bamp-wamp wanna-wanna
Beoww, wa beoww-deoww wanna (badoom-chish)
Beowwm, ba deoww-deoww bamp-wamp wanna-wanna
Beowwm, ba deoww-deoww wanna.
Beowwm, wa deoww-beoww bamp-wamp wanna-wanna
Beoww, wa beoww-deoww deeeuuw deeeeuuw dreuuuuw woo...

6. Soundgarden, My Wave

Rababa.
Rababa.
Rababa-screee!
Rababa-screee!
Rababa-screee!
Ranana BA.
Ba, ba, da-wa-na
BA. Bap, bap, da-wa-na
BA. Bap, bap, da-wa-na
BA. Bap, bap, da-wa-na...

7. ZZ Top, Tush

Vam-va dumva-dumva, va damva dumv-aaaa,
Vam-va dumva-dumva, va damva dumv-aaaa,
Vam-va dumva-dumva, va damva dumv-aaaa,
Vam-va dumva-dumva, va damva dumv-aaaa....

8. Guns n' Roses, Paradise City

DUG-a-dug-a-DUG-a-dug-a-DUG-a-dug-a-DUG-aaaaaaaa,
DUG-a-dug-a-DUG-a-dug-a-DUG-a-dug-a-DUG-aaaaaaaa...

I am also developing my patented bassline transcription system. Here are 2 prototypical examples:

9. Pink Floyd, Money

Bom, BOM-be-dom, bom pom bom pommmmmmm
Bom, BOM be-dom, bom pom bom pommmmmmm
Bom, BOM-be-dom, bom pom bom pommmmmmm
Bom, BOM be-dom, bom pom bom pommmmmmm
[Guitar in]: Waaab-waaaaba!

10. Curtis Mayfield, Superfly

Dommmmdo-do dom dom,
Dommmmdo-do dom-dom,
Dommmmdo-do dom-dom,
Dom.... DOM!...DUM!

If anyone would like to use my system to transcribe their favourite riff, they are most welcome. Royalties will be waived during the 30-day evaluation period.

The Large Hadron Collider

2008-09-11T06:22:00.000-07:00

The recent debate within the scientific community (or to be more precise, between the scientific community and a couple of mescalin-snorting hippies who happen to own lab coats) sounds suspiciously like an episode of Futurama. For those who haven’t been paying attention, they opened a machine today called the ‘Large Hadron Collider’. (This is not to be confused with the ‘Large Hardon Collider’, an equally imposing structure which had its funding cancelled at the last moment by anxious parenting groups).

The LHC is the biggest particle accelerator ever built, straddling the French-Swiss border. It is therefore the most exciting thing to come out of Switzerland since the Kinder Surprise. As far as I can tell, it is basically a racetrack for atoms, half of which are driving the wrong way.

The aim of this machine is to recreate the conditions that existed at the beginning of the universe, some 14 billion years ago. (Previously, the most accurate means of doing so was to imagine John McCain as a small boy).
With luck, the resultant explosions will generate a hitherto-unproduced particle, called a Higgs Bosun. Scientists’ enthusiasm for this particle is remarkably undiminished by the fact that its name sounds like a drunken Scottish sailor.

If such a particle is able to be produced for the first time on earth, I predict that it will soon be co-opted by the fashion industry:

Rich Lady 1: Esmerelda, I couldn’t help but notice – your scarf – is it…Higgs?
Rich Lady 2: It’s one hundred per cent bosun, Martine! Organically farmed, too! And your blouse – (shocked) oh, it’s –
Lady 1: (downcast): Yes, I'm afraid. It’s *sigh* just cashmere.
Lady 2: Oh I’m so sorry – but if your husband can’t afford bosun, it's time you found one who can!

The debate between the two professors on Radio National this morning was interesting: to say that they held ‘divergent views’ would be like saying that Paris Hilton and Osama bin Laden hold ‘divergent views’ on the virtues of miniskirts worn without underpants.

To summarise this healthy disagreement:

Professor #1 thought that the Hadron Collider was ‘perfectly safe’, and

Professor #2 thought that the Hadron Collider would create an exponentially expanding black hole that would suck the earth up its own orifice in an micro-instant.

Listening to each über-nerd state his position, I couldn’t help but feel a little cheated at my choice of university course. My lunchtime conversations were never quite as important as the professors’, e.g.:

Me: Do you think that Dickens’ novels warrant a deconstructive reading?
Colleague: No, not really.
Me: Oh. Could you please pass the cheese slices? Thank you. I quite like these.

The particle physicists’ lunchtime conversation, meanwhile, may have gone something like this:

Professor #1 (to roomful of lunching scientists): The collider is perfectly safe.
Professor #2: Don’t listen to him!
Professor #1: The collide…is perfectly…safe.
Professor #2: He’s lying!
Professor #1: His words mean nothing. The collider will crush you all like the insignificant ants that you indeed are.
Professor #2: See! I told you! He must be stopped! (Lunges at #1).
Professor #1 (effortlessly sidestepping attack): Crush you, I mean, in a perfectly safe and efficient manner. Fools! Midgets! Untermenschen!
Professor #2: It’s hopeless. Nothing will save the world now. Seize him! (Grabs brass candlestick from science lunchroom mantelpiece) – We must immobilise him and destroy the collider before it’s too late!
Crowd of supportive, lunching Professors: Kill the Prof! Bash his brains! Smash his quarks!
Professor #2 (charging bravely at #1, brandishing candlestick): Yaaaaaargh!
(The heroic Professor #2’s words are cut off suddenly as he accidentally rushes past Professor #1 and flings himself headfirst into the open collider, which has been sitting quietly by the water cooler. In a burst of flame, he explodes dramatically into his constituent atoms.)
Professors: Oooooooh. Aaaaaah.
Professor #1: I think we’ve all learned something today.
Crowd: What?
Professor #1: Particle colliders are cool.

All aboard!

2008-09-09T08:01:00.000-07:00

Someone told me something really scary once: people's taste in music doesn’t change significantly once they hit about 20. How horrible, I thought at the time – fancy being stuck with your late-adolescent musical taste for the rest of your days!

Now, though, I realise that this advice was wrong. My taste in music stagnated once I hit 14. Radiohead, Jeff Buckley, the Smashing Pumpkins, Nirvana, Soundgarden. All of these bands were meaningless distractions from the real deal. The band. I'll give you a clue: there's only one time signature worth worrying about in music, and it ain't 5/16, you fancy-arse Conservatorium graduates.

Today's headline on the Yahoo! email website was:

"The new AC/DC album, ‘Black Ice’, will be released next month."

Now, my often-bored friends will tell you that I’m not the most enthusiastic person about anything much at all. But this event excited me in ways that less important ones, such as Russia's recent invasion of Georgia, failed to do. I realised how deep my affection for AC/DC went when considering how excited I was about the superficially unpromising material at hand. Let us look, for a moment, at the thin soil from whence my newfound happiness sprang.

The new single from Black Ice is called ‘Rock and Roll Train’. This title is, to be polite, not particularly promising. ‘Rock and Roll Train’ (henceforth R&RT) is the type of phrase that a lenient mother might be mildly proud of - mildly, mind you - if it was the very first phrase formed by her beloved two-year-old infant out of alphabetic fridge magnets. It is the type of phrase that one might expect to be created if the Teletubbies formed an AC/DC cover band, with Tinkie Winkie on lead, La-la on vocal duties, and Po smashing the skins into the ground. (I thought of it first). Even the neglected Bon Scott classic ‘Big Balls’ ranks higher on the grammat-o-meter. Lynn Truss, and other grammarians, would choke on their Royal Doulton cups of camomile tea at the mere mention of this song. Noam Chomsky may have considerable difficulty applying his theory of universal grammar to this song. It is, in short, a brain-slayer of a song.

Other titles from AC/DC’s back catalogue have their charm. ‘Rock n Roll Ain’t Noise Pollution’, for example, sounds tough and old-school working class – something a blackened Pittsburgh steelworker might say when his poncy, starched boss asks him politely to turn down his portable radio. (“Hey – screw you, man. Rock n’ Roll ain’t noise pollution, man.” Cue whistles & cheers.) ‘Rock and Roll Train’, meanwhile, brings to mind a dim-witted yellow cartoon boy pulling a large plastic train behind him while yelling ‘I choo-choo-choose you!’

But despite these rather deep-seated structural difficulties, R&RT succeeds quite nicely on its own terms. It’s good to know, too, that the band haven’t become slaves to fashion. That is a slight understatement: Brian Johnston still dresses with all the panache of someone who might expose himself to schoolchildren in a public toilet. Angus Young still dresses like someone who may fall under the 'high risk' category of being flashed by Brian Johnston in a public toilet. And the other people in the band, whoever they may be, still look like Australian Pub Band Extras from Pugwall (look it up). So – all aboard the Rock and Roll Train, kids!

Those who know me will realise that the above statement is not meant to convey disrespect in any way. R&RT succeeds excellently on its own terms. But more importantly, AC/DC’s terrifyingly genuine air of moral degeneracy – i.e. the feeling, when looking at publicity photographs, that something is actually ‘wrong’ with them in some fundamental way – make the current batch of 70s Rock-revival bands seem about as immoral and dangerous as the Obama Family Barbershop Quartet.

The lyrics. Well, I think it’s safe to say that Peter Carey needn’t look too nervously over his shoulder at this year’s Miles Franklin awards ceremony. I have only heard the song once, but I will try to recreate some of the magic (it helps here to think of R&RT as AC/DC’s Finnegan’s Wake, as compared to Back in Black’s Ulysses):

Well, I’m on a big train (real big train)
A really fast train (real fast train)
It’s a big, fast train (big big train)
It’s a rock and roll train (rock and roll train)

CHORUS Rock and rock and, rock and rock and rollllllll…..
Train. (Train. Rock and roll train)
Train. (Train. Rock and roll train)
Train. (Train. Rock and roll train)
Train! (Train! Rock and roll train!)

While the second verse violates the UN charter for the protection of the child, it is also the lyrical highlight.

Now schoolgirls wear short skirts (real short skirts)
And they wear them on the train (train. Rock and roll train)
They wear them till it hurts (hurts. Rock and roll hurt).
I like going on the train (train – the rock and roll train!)

REPEAT CHORUS 13 TIMES, TO CODA.

Here’s the link to the song:

http://www.acdcrocks.com/

Comments welcome.

Thoughts on Artificial Intelligence

2008-08-04T20:07:00.000-07:00

I was having a conversation with my dad the other day, who tends towards the optimistic end of the spectrum as far as scientific progress goes. He was arguing that computers are bound to acheive self-awareness in the near future, given that they are advancing at such a great rate. I've included my response below, for anyone who's interested (be warned that many of the thoughts therein are pilfered from Raymond Tallis, Kenan Malik, Nicholas Humphrey and other techno-skeptics). Also, be warned - it's pretty long....

The conversation that we had about computers got me thinking: it was difficult to think on the run about the computer intelligence issue, so I’ve refined my thoughts on it a little.
I think it helps to think back to the first calculators. Let’s say, for the sake of argument, that in 1950 there was an autistic maths genius who could calculate pi to 100 decimal places in only 3 seconds. This was a lot faster than anyone else in the world.
Then the first decent calculator was invented. It could calculate pi to one hundred decimal places in 2 seconds. When everyone heard about this, they were terrified. A computer had knocked man off his perch, threatening all that made him superior to the beasts!
Soon, though, people realised that they were mistaken. The calculator was better at calculating pi than the maths genius, but this did not make the computer ‘human’. The computer and the maths genius were performing an identical operation: feeding numbers into a simple algorithm. Using an algorithm is not a human trait; a computer that can do algorithms quickly cannot be said to be ‘human’. (It also shows how easily human-type words infect how we think about computers, making them seem more human than they are: the calculator wasn’t ‘feeding’ anything into anything, because it has no agency. Its ability to get the answer was simply the result of electrons being forced through a bunch of switches in a chunk of silicon by the laws of physics.)
The chess case is more complicated than the pi case, but not for the reason that I first thought. The reason why a Grand-Master-beating computer freaked everyone out so much is that the computer and Gary Kasparov – unlike the calculator and the maths genius – were not playing the same game.
Kasparov was playing chess. The computer, however, was only playing ‘chess’. To all observers, ‘chess’ was indistinguishable from chess. There was a real chess board in the room, with real pieces. Every time the computer printed a move on the screen, the attendants would physically move the chess pieces on the board.
‘Chess’ also looked like chess because Kasparov was in the room, sweating, becoming increasingly agitated, and generally acting human. We are used to seeing human-like things interacting with human-like things. So, by inference, the spectators assumed that Kasparov’s opponent was also a human-like thing.
But in fact, for a computer, playing ‘chess’ is just like calculating pi: numbers are fed into an algorithm. The computer, in a sense, did not beat Kasparov at chess, because it was not playing chess at all. It was only playing ‘chess’.
Kasparov, however, was playing chess. If he was playing chess against another Grand Master, his success would rest largely on his ability to second-guess his opponent several moves in advance. To win at chess, chess masters must construct a psychological profile of their opponent. This requires an understanding that the opponent is a thinking being, with his own self-contained intentions and desires. Only conscious entities can do this.
When two chess masters play each other, there is a circulation of thought between them:
‘If I do X, he will do Y; but if I do Z instead, he will still think that I am going to do X, because I know that he doesn’t know that I know that he will do Y if I do X’. This is not just number-crunching: it requires multiple levels of intentionality. Not only do you have to understand that your opponent is a thinking being, but you also have to understand that your opponent knows that you are a thinking being. And so on. This requires empathy with your opponent.
If the players know each other beforehand, this circulation of empathy becomes more obviously ‘human’. So, the famous Bobby Fisher vs. Boris Spassky match in the 1970s was highly dramatic, because each player knew the other, and could use their previous knowledge to second-guess the other man’s technique.
But even if the players don’t know each other, they have to quickly construct a complex, evolving sketch of the other player’s mind. This requires building a set of assumptions about the opponent’s future behaviour that can be violated if the player does not meet expectations. For example, if I know you as a reckless player, it may take me some time to realise that you are playing cautiously.
It’s true that chess-playing computers can use strings of human-like moves that seem to demonstrate an understanding of human psychology. But such moves have been put there by human programmers. In these cases, the computer functions as a simple container that has been filled with the products of human creativity (i.e. millions of moves). The computer uses an algorithm to select the most suitable string of moves, and uses that string to do the job: just like calculating pi.
The difference between Kasparov and Deep Blue was also invisible because humans are hardwired to ascribe intentionality to objects. We rely for our survival on interacting with other people, and we have an innate tendency to ascribe consciousness to non-conscious things (e.g. the wind blows a potplant over, and I think there is an intruder). So, we assume that Deep Blue was doing what Kasparov was doing – i.e. constructing a psychological profile of its opponent – but it wasn’t. They were doing totally different things.
Kasparov, meanwhile, couldn’t obtain a psychological profile of his opponent, for the simple reason that the computer has no psychology. A computer doesn’t ‘change tactics’ in order to psychologically intimidate its opponent – it just crunches more and more numbers. Another reason for the confusion is that the language of chess is hopelessly biased in favour of human agency: the computer is not really performing a ‘move’; it does not really put Kasparov in ‘check’; it is not really playing ‘aggressively’. All of these human terms are illusions based on our past experiences with humans. The computer is not ‘playing’ chess: it is performing algorithms.
Another reason that Deep Blue’s victory was seen as overly important is because of the strange nature of the game of chess. Chess comes with an incredible amount of cultural baggage. The powerful imagery of medieval battles gives chess an emotional dimension that it does not really have.
Imagine if chess pieces were identically shaped, and distinguished only by number. For instance: all the pieces are numbered squares. Call the Knight ‘piece no. 3’. Rule: Piece 3 can only move in an ‘L’ shape. Call the bishop ‘piece no. 4’. Rule: Piece no. 4 can only move diagonally. The game would be exactly the same, yet much of the effect would be lost. The rich connotations of battle are not part of the rules – we bring these feelings to the game because we are human, and are affected by the emotional connotations of battle.
This change to the game of chess would make the nature of the computer’s ‘victory’ a lot clearer. Computer chess is distorted by the same illusion that makes a Windows operating system seem more ‘human’ than a Dos system, even though they are performing identical operations.
This makes me think that the predictions about increased computer ‘intelligence’ have come to exactly nothing. Computers are faster at calculating pi than they were in 1950, because humans can now cram more logic gates on a silicon chip than they could before. But that is all computers are better at. They are no closer to achieving consciousness now than they were when the Chinese invented the abacus a few thousand years ago. Same principle, same result – just more beads on the abacus being flipped faster. The illusion of ‘intelligence’ is all in the interface: we supply the ‘human’ dimension and falsely ascribe it to the computer.
I can’t see how a supercomputer could be seen as anywhere near as ‘intelligent’, in an emotional sense, than, say, a mouse. The false promise of AI is even clearer when you think of how much better computers are than mice at lots of things (e.g. mice can’t calculate pi), yet how much worse they are at others. A mouse can experience a primitive form of affection for its carer – not because it can do more algorithms than a computer, but because it has a dim awareness of the existence of another being with separate intentions, even if this awareness is very limited.

Post-life

2008-08-04T04:16:00.000-07:00

Some months ago, my friend – who is turning out to be a frequent source of unconventional wisdom these days – gave me some advice about managing anxiety. True to form, the advice was pretty much out of left field; when I first heard it, I was inclined to take it with a rather large chunk of salt. But as I think more about it, his theory sounds more plausible. I’ll paraphrase him here (although, due to my partial memory of the conversation, he’ll just have to grin and bear it if I heinously misquote him).

“A few years ago, I noticed that I was having quite a few panic attacks. When I spoke to my friends – who were also in their mid-20s at this time – it turned out that they were having similar experiences. For a while there, it seemed like everyone I knew was suffering from panic attacks. This made me realise that our mid-20s are a pretty intense time for such feelings.
This got me thinking: why is it, at this age, that anxiety hits people so hard?
I began to realise that this type of anxiety could be caused by our growing awareness of our mortality.
In our teenage years, we think that we’re pretty much invincible – and by and large, we are. But when you notice yourself aging a little bit, you begin to understand that this kind of attitude can’t be sustained. We all get older, of course; when we start understanding that we’re on a continuum with our elders, rather than being totally separate from them, we suddenly stop thinking of ourselves as a ‘special case’.
I stopped feeling anxious about the future once I began to think of mortality differently. When I was younger, I thought about the fact of death a lot differently than I do now.
In our teens, we find it hard to think of the fact of death in a genuine way. It’s simply that we don’t really understand it. We all have moments when we – even fleetingly – imagine what it would be like if we were no longer around.
The difference between then and now is that these imaginings of the end of our lives are based on a failure of imagination. When we are feeling very sorry for ourselves (for instance, when we feel unappreciated by our peers) we ask ourselves the question: ‘what would they do if I wasn’t here?’ This idea is based on the selfish idea that all children have – i.e. the world won’t be able to function without me.
Although it may not seem like it, this is a comforting thought. But it’s also a destructive one.
When we are young, we find it impossible to think of a situation when we are ‘not here’. This is because we can’t help seeing it from our own perspective.
Think back to when you were a child, when you were angry with a parent or friend for not appreciating you. You probably thought, ‘what would they do without me?’
If we travel forward in time until after our deaths, we sometimes tend to imagine people grieving for us at our funeral. It is a type of revenge fantasy. The people in attendance will be saying, ‘I wish I appreciated him when he was around.’ In this common childhood daydream, we are watching our friends as they mourn for us. We feel validated by this fantasy, because we are able to maintain the same perspective that we have in our everyday lives. We stick around as observers, just so that we can say, ‘I told you so.’
But if we can only think of death by including our own subjectivity, we have not properly faced up to it. The challenge of mortality, for an adult, is to think of life going on without you. This doesn’t mean thinking of life going on while you are watching it from a nice spot in heaven. The conventional Christian idea of an afterlife is flawed, because it can’t take the ‘self’ out of the equation. When we imagine ourselves in ‘heaven’, we are still ‘alive’ in the sense that we retain our own identity. It is a comforting denial of the fact of death, rather than an acceptance of it.
Thinking of death in a purer sense is more difficult, but it helps to dispel anxiety about our future. We have to be able to think of the time after we are gone as lacking our selves, not just our bodies. Getting rid of the ‘observer’ also rids you of the thought that your friends and family only have meaning in relation to you. Forcing yourself to imagine a state of the world where you no longer have a perspective to view things from may sound scary; however, I found that it was a very effective way to come to terms with the limitations of my own existence.
After I learned to jettison the notion of ‘afterlife’ as a time in which we can only helplessly observe the world, I found that my anxiety was no longer such a problem. You can only accept your finite lifespan once you realise that the end of life also entails the end of subjectivity.”

Not bad for a half hour at the pub, eh?

Latent Content Warning

2008-07-07T15:55:00.000-07:00

Earlier this week, after sleeping soundly on my friend’s superbly comfortable couch, I awoke from one of those dreams that I am convinced only my brain could think up. I have included a transcript for your amusement.

* * *

FRIEND: OK, Tim – just a few points about the house before you go to sleep. Now, it’s true that we’re renting, but the rent only really includes the furniture.
ME: What do you mean?
FRIEND: Well, we rent the furniture, but the floor is on a time-share arrangement.
ME: Ah. Hmmm?
FRIEND (Energetically picking up a chair in each arm): Well, we share the floor with another family. They have half the floor area, and we have the other half.
ME (Baffled): Right. So how does that work?
FRIEND: It’s complicated. Although they have half the floor area, it’s not always the same half.
ME (With bafflement rapidly intensifying): I’m lost.
FRIEND: OK. Well, here’s the diagram (unfurling immense blueprint on kitchen table): Now, you’ll see here that on Monday nights, the ‘floor rights’ change throughout the evening. It’s about nine o’clock now, so we have access to here – here – and here.
ME (Miraculously understanding complex schematic blueprint): But...we don’t have access to the piece of floor right underneath us.
FRIEND: That’s why I have to move the chairs.
ME: Where are you taking them?
FRIEND: (Pointing to blueprint): Here. We are allowed on this, this, and this piece of floor at this time.
ME: Do we have access to those pieces of floor all of the time?
FRIEND: No. It changes hourly. (Friend puts both chairs down on vacant floor section. While he is doing so, the floor area on blueprint starts moving, thus redistributing floor ownership rights).
ME: It just moved!
FRIEND: Oh. It does that sometimes. Where is our available floor space now?
ME (helplessly pointing): Where the chairs were before.
FRIEND (admirably taking situation in his stride): OK. I’ll move the chairs back there, then. Can you please grab the couch and move it to that other piece of floor over there?
ME (Warily): OK.
As I drag couch to available floor area, I nervously glance at kitchen table. Blueprint design continues to move of its own accord.)
ME: It did it again.
FRIEND: Did what again?
ME: Um, now the bit of floor that we’re allowed on is where it was before.
FRIEND (suspiciously): Are you sure you’re reading the blueprint correctly?
ME: No, not really.
FRIEND (In tone that strongly suggests that it was all my fault):
Just help me with these chairs, Tim.

* * *

Although this dream probably lasted minutes, it seemed a good bit longer. When I woke up, I felt as if I had been moving chairs for hours. I walked across to the nearest chair, grabbed a firm hold of it and thought: “so, it’s 6am: this chair goes….where exactly?”
And it was only then that I felt really stupid. (I sincerely hope that I wasn’t moving the chairs around in reality while I was asleep, but I can't completely rule this out.)

So, brain, my question to you is this: Just what the hell are you playing at?

Reposting 'Graffiti Junction'

2008-07-06T22:45:00.000-07:00

I took this article off because it was mean and unfair. But now I've decided, with the help of a friend's advice, that taking posts off blogs just because you don't like them anymore is chicken. So here it is again. I'll get the hang of this blog thing eventually.

* * *

I saw an article the other day about a man whose house had been graffitied. Or, to use the singular form, he discovered a large Graffito on his wall. Of course, he wanted to do what most of us would – i.e. scrub it off – only to find that it had been heritage-listed in the interim. (That’ll teach him for holding fire with the Karcher!) Accompanying the article was a picture of the ‘redecorated’ house. Sure, the graffiti was colourful; it might even be called ‘competent’ if you were feeling generous. But the fact that people were seriously proposing protecting an afternoon’s misadventure with a spraycan seemed a little odd to me.
This isn’t a paranoid argument about all the 'thugs who are threatening our private property', as Andrew Bolt might say. I don’t really care about the man’s house, and anyway, the Graffitied wall looked perfectly OK. But I want to discuss why our expectations are so gutter-level low when it comes to assessing the aesthetic merits of Graffiti, to the point where a marginally competent glittery logo on someone’s house can spark a call for its preservation.
Anyone looking for a rock-solid argument against artistic relativism is invited to visit a place in St. Kilda called ‘Graffiti Junction’. It is a comprehensive refutation of the wishful argument that if we only provided legitimate places for graffiti artists to express themselves, our surroundings would be awash in colour and beauty.
Let’s be blunt. ‘Graffiti Junction’ is a piece of irritating crap. (Go on: admit it to yourself as you’re forced to walk through it. Hating a piece of bad art will make you feel better, I promise.) Despite their lack of talent, its contributors have achieved quite a feat: they have made something significantly uglier than the butt-ugly concrete underpass it conceals.
To figure out why this is, it’s important to remember that Graffiti Junction is actually an ‘artwork’ in two distinct parts. The (tiny) ‘Jekyll’ part looks like a typical mural painted on the inside of a train station walkway. You know the ones I mean – they’re all pretty much the same, even in the US and England, and probably everywhere else in the world. The archetypal ‘train station mural’ is painted with honourable intentions, bright primary colours, and (usually) comically crook execution. Diego Rivera does not, at any stage, spring to mind when looking at it. But despite this, train station murals actually improve most people’s lives. This is because they are painted by good people, with sincere faith in humanity, for good reasons. TSMs are nearly always about one of two issues:
a. Saving the environment, and
b. Achieving worldwide racial harmony.
Both are obviously noble causes. TSMs won’t win any prizes for artistic excellence, but they are uniformly honest, positive and direct. And faith in humanity is sorely needed when you’re being squeezed through the godforsaken bowels of Sydney’s Central Station.
Graffiti Junction Part A. is part of the TSM school. It contains a cartoon version of a tram, an Aboriginal flag, and (from memory) assorted Australian flora and fauna. It reminds you what a nice city Melbourne can be; makes the underpass look more cheerful; and perks you up when your hangover threatens to destroy you. Job done.
Graffiti Junction Part B. is a very different beast. Here, we have the graffiti ‘artist’s’ dream – finally, a legal place to express one’s inner thoughts, within the cosseting embrace of a government-funded social improvement project!
It’s probably too kind to call Graffiti Junction B a two-dimensional representation of a Technicolor Yawn. Walking through the brain-fart-art of the underpass is oppressive to the point of nausea.
There is a glimmer of artistic hope in a figure that looks like the Monopoly Mascot, complete with cigar, bowler hat, and monocle, standing pompously against a wall, brandishing a whip. The sentiment’s inane (Capitalism’s bad, m’kay?) but I like the Monopoly man.
But the rest! Did a vast graffiti artist convention pass an unbreakable decree that its every member must paint like a degenerate? The walls of the underpass are full of that bubbly, bespangled lettering that has somehow become the official letterform of the Graffiti movement.
The standout picture - and I mean that in a bad way - depicts a comely, green, be-warted Martian woman in a low-cut haltertop top commandeering a personal flying saucer, which she controls via a ‘Space Invaders’ joystick. Remember: an adult painted this.
I have come up with a theory on why people praise Graffiti ‘art’. When you’re on, say, the Frankston line, and you see an ornate tag – such as ‘Wozza ‘D4ZA!’ or some other witty jibe – why are you impressed?
It’s not because it’s good. It’s because such art forces us to imagine the circumstances under which it was produced. i.e. the spraypainter’s manic foray at the wall before fleeing from the cops. And we think: ‘Wow! Just imagine what he would have had time to do if he wasn’t a criminal!’
But at Graffiti Junction shows, more time doesn’t help. Ripping off the bandaid of criminality only exposes the suppurating wound of basic artistic incompetence. Seeing Graffiti as a rebellious act makes the juvenile, emotionally stunted, glittery crap that constitutes ‘Graffiti art’ seem much better, ‘edgier’, than it really is.
For now we know what happens when Wozza gets the chance to express himself. Gaining an outlet – a patron, I guess you’d say – doesn’t improve on the first products of his artistic urge, i.e. carving of ‘I H8 Fags’ in his school desk with a rusty compass. The official version of Graffiti looks shoddier than the rushed, illegal version, because you know that the artist wasn’t dodging Police when adding the last sparkle to the ‘A’ in ‘Wozza’.
Perhaps I take the Graffiti too personally. But I have friends who are seriously talented fine artists who take immense care with their work. I don’t hear, however, any arguments saying: ‘Just imagine what they could do if they had a massive piece of government-funded, weather-protected canvas to express their views!’ Sure, perhaps my upper-middle class background, and that of virtually all of my friends, is clouding my empathy for the misunderstood graffitist, but I doubt it. Criminality is Graffiti’s reason for being. It automatically turns an illegal act into a political and/or artistic statement. (The officially-sanctioned pseudo-rebellion of the title ‘Graffiti Junction’ is a desperate attempt to maintain an antisocial pose in the face of government-funded evidence to the contrary.)
But there’s also the ‘different in kind’ argument, which distinguishes noble, exulted Graffiti from mere ‘tagging’, the pastime of degenerates. This false distinction is based on the idea that adding borders, three-dimensionality and basic shading to illiterate slogans is sufficient to ‘art-ify’ it. The difference between a tagger and a Graffiti artist is one of degree, as both art forms exist for the same sole purpose: to escape law enforcement. (Granted, some graffiti displays a level of low-level dexterity – but so do compulsive masturbators, and I don’t see anyone giving them government grants. Perhaps that’s because they’re all in government themselves.)
Lest I be accused of being an elitist bastard, I want to finish with a case in support of stencil art, a phrase which I’ll allow to escape my terrifyingly sharp scare quotes.
Unlike graffiti, stencil art enriches its surroundings. This is because stencils are created, of course, away from the ‘scene of the crime’, giving the artists time to craft something of aesthetic worth before illegally depositing it. There is not the same obsession with naming in the stencil as in graffiti, where the perp’s greatest wish is to let people know that he has metaphorically pissed in a spot he shouldn’t have (I’m using the male pronoun out of respect for women). The stencils around Melbourne often suggest that their creators are capable of thinking a more complex thought than ‘Tracy = Slut’ or ‘Lebs: Go Home’.
To sum up, then: stencils = art, while graffiti = mild scourge. Society isn’t duty-bound to provide a ‘space of expression’ to everyone, least of all people whose sole claim to artistry is the possession of an opposable thumb to grip the spraycan with.
Posted by Timothy Roberts at 9:04 PM 0 comments

Early misgivings

2008-07-06T15:59:00.000-07:00

It struck me, when reading over the last two posts, that the tone of this blog is overly grumpy. Doing a bit of research on Graffiti Junction, I read the following:

"Work on 'The Junction' started in April 2005 with over 100 individual stakeholders involved in the project. Especially deserving are the 50 volunteer artists. These included primary school students, members of the local indigenous community, respected Melbourne Street and Stencil Artists and the young people in Whitelion juvenile justice system serving community orders."

I've decided that in light of this, my comments on the graffiti wall were unduly harsh and mean-spirited. So, from now on, I'll try to tamp down the cranky and rachet up the crackpot.

Stupidity on Tap

2008-07-06T15:53:00.000-07:00

There's been a lot of talk recently about bottled water, the latest cause celebre of the Australian media, for some inexplicable reason. It’s been amusing, in a tragic sort of way, but – enough! Let’s end the bottled water ‘debate’ here and right-bloody-well now.
Bottled water is disturbing in the way that it reveals how some factions of the environmental movement (all the ones that write for newspapers, apparently) can develop severe ADD at moments when their attention should be on genuinely terrifying problems, like the possible ensuing destruction of the entire planet by negligent Governments who cheerfully let us burn whole valleys of brown coal to fuel our knick-knacks.
Anyway, ‘experts’ at The Age and the SMH have recently discussed the environmental impact of bottled water as if it made a detectable, even alarming, contribution to global warming. Their argument goes like this: the bottles that entomb retailed water are made from oil – true. Also, the fossil fuels needed to transfer this heavy product from, um, mountain to shop, cause further damage. This is trivially true – as Dad always told me, a cubic metre of water weighs a whole damn tonne) – but utterly negligible by any reasonable definition. It makes as much sense as attacking shoelace manufacturers for their industry’s devastating contribution to land degradation caused by the cultivation of cotton
More importantly, the above bogus argument overlooks the clear benefits of bottled water, which performs a valuable service that is almost never discussed in polite circles. Like homeopathy – a highly sophisticated, soothingly ancient and completely non-invasive system of medicine which is also 100% water-based, and therefore useless – I see the bottled water industry as an indirect system of redistributive taxation which steadily takes money away from the cretinous, eventually making it available to the rest through stimulating the economy. (Admittedly this trickle-down effect, so to speak, must occur via the overstuffed coffers of unscrupulous multinationals, but let’s look at the positives for now).
The fact that someone can voluntarily pay for this stuff is one of the quirkiest aspects of modern life. Sure, we don’t have nearly enough water in Oz; but, at least in urban areas, it gushes prodigiously out of that wonderful device that we blithely call ‘the tap’. (A free pearl of wisdom for bottled-water connoisseurs: there’s one of these magnificent oracles in your kitchen…and another in your bathroom, O happy day!)
Even funnier than watching people buying the clear stuff for exorbitant prices is watching advertising companies trying to flog it – which they do with spectacular and depressing success. The meagre clutch of arguments deployed to this end can be broken down into a few distinct groups:
• The ‘healthful’ argument, i.e. bottled water is better for you than tap water. This argument is easily demolished due to its being such out-and-out bullshit. Bottled water is tap water. And putting it into a bottle doesn’t make it magic – only Jesus can do that, children. (Biblical scholars please note that His disciples, bless their pragmatic souls, became awed only after He turned water into wine. Working the miracle circuit would have been much, much easier for JC if the shindig at Canaan was populated with today’s water-purchasing yuppies. He could have easily convinced them of his Godliness in a jiffy, simply by pouring water from a large amphora into a slightly smaller one. End of miracle. Cue gasps, applause, cries of ‘Why, that was a good one, Lord!’)
• The ‘tasty’ argument, i.e. bottled water tastes better. Sorry: it doesn’t taste better, it tastes worse. Much worse, actually – almost as if it’s been distilled from the synthetic urine of a gigantic inflatable llama.
• The ‘picturesque source’ argument: the bottled water that you buy is taken directly from pristine sandstone repositories in the [insert photogenic mountain range here]. Bullshit again in most cases, I’m afraid: most of it comes out of the good ol’ tap, augmented with a bit of Capitalist wand-waving to provide it with its shiny commodity-aura.
• The ‘portability’ argument: although this is by far the most hilarious tactic, I often become stricken with worry for the human race when I wonder if this has ever actually influenced anyone’s buying habits. This quasi-Dadaist selling point emphasises the fact that the bottle of water you just unforgivably purchased for 3 bucks ‘moves with you’. (What’s the cheapo alternative, I wonder? A bottle of water that stays on the counter when you leave the shop?) As I found out to my intense disappointment, so-called ‘portable water’ still requires you to physically carry it, rather than, say, gliding serenely beside you on a velvet-lined Rickshaw held delicately aloft by a bevy of nubile Arabian Princesses. Oh well.
• The ‘lifestyle’ argument (also featured in every other ad ever made for anything): Drinking Brand X bottled water will make you sexy. (Tried it. Didn’t work. Beer is infinitely better for this, and for most other purposes to boot. The best thing that can be said for water in this respect is that it doesn’t Provoketh the Desire while it Taketh away the Performance, as I learned in my Year 10 English class.)
So, next time you see a misguided person serenely sipping the elixir of life from their translucent-blue Mt. Franklin bottle, don’t lecture them on their implicit support for the Military-Industrial Complex. Spend the money that you save on Beer, the real elixir of life – then laugh drunkenly at their precisely-measured, acetic, spuriously-carbon-neutral sippings from the other end of the bar, preferably while passionately making out with a beautiful, and equally tipsy, person whom you just met.
Them Yuppies’ll break eventually.

Urinal Etiquette

2008-07-01T15:47:00.000-07:00

What’s that, ladies? An oxymoron, you say? Not a bit of it: just as exquisite tendrils of bathroom mould can flare up violently behind sodden towel rails, unexpectedly intricate social mores can bloom in the most inhospitable of places.
So it goes with urinal etiquette.
While having a Monday night drink with a friend at a cosy Fitzroy pub, the more delicate branch of my excretory system reached its endgame. Now, a striking fact, of which few women are aware, is the strange effects that ‘personalised’ urinals (a.k.a. ‘horizontal basins’, if you will) have over the communal, stainless-steel variety (a.k.a. ‘hog troughs’, whether you will or no). I will try and explain this concept to you as clearly as I’m able, using my own experience as a template.
On entering the men’s room, I was forced to wait for one of the three uri-cubicles (i.e. a personalised, wall-mounted urinal – ‘uri-cubicle’ is my second, preferred coinage for this heinous invention, the formal name of which escapes me).
The first person to finish was the occupant of the middle uri-cubicle. (I hope you are paying attention: you may think this detail is insignificant, but you would be dead wrong.)
Thus begins the first impossible trial of The Soon-To-Be-Urinating Man: i.e. to discreetly position himself between two currently urinating men while not seeming intrusive. A hard task at the best of times, this is made infinitely more so when dealing with Uri-Cubicals. (This effect has something to do, I think, with the fact that each man’s Uri-Cubicle effectively becomes his ‘private property’ when in use, while Hog Troughs derive from a more Marxian tradition. But I digress).
On moving into the middle position, the two men flanking me moved slightly, grudgingly sideways, crablike, as you would if a new, hostile urinator in town – The Urinator With No Name, if you will – had positioned himself between you and your buddy.
Things continued quite uneventfully for a few seconds. (A blessing. No news is good news at this particular time).
And then problem #2 arrived. (It gets a little complicated here, so please pay attention – it may help if you draw a (tasteful) diagram for your own reference.)
If the middle urinator arrives at the uri-cubicle after the left and right urinators, they will of course tend to finish before he does.
But the ‘changing of the guard’ ritual forces the urinator-intruder to commit a second imposition even worse than the first.
For if one of the outermost urinators leaves his uri-cubicle before the other (which is usually the case, unless the two outermost urinators are perfectly synchronised, which is unlikely.), the two remaining urinators – the newcomer-intruder in the middle and the remaining veteran on the edge – find themselves in sudden, unwelcome proximity. (The distance between them of course remains the same, but it feels closer, due to the loss of the counterbalancing force of the recently-departed outer urinator. That’s relativity – although I forget whether it is the Special or General theory).
Anyhow, who is blamed for this situation? Why, the urinator-intruder, naturally – even if his motives be as pure as the driven (yellow) snow!
But, I hear you say, surely there is a way out of this impasse. Yet state your case, and I will refute it.
There is, of course, no chance of either one of the unwillingly adjacent urinators relocating to the outermost uri-cubicle at this late point of the game:
As for the middle urinator, a hasty relocation is deeply suspicious – possibly disastrous, if the execution is bungled.
For the rightmost urinator, relocation is logically impossible, as he already occupies an outer position in the uri-cubicle complex: how would it benefit him to move around the central urinator?
The intruder, on committing his second faux-pas by no fault of his own, is falsely viewed as the willing cause of this awkwardness.
Finally, bladder capacities being equal, the remaining of the two initial urinators eventually leaves his post.
But the final – and most egregious – indignity suffered by the middle urinator-intruder has yet to occur. For remember: both outermost urinals are now vacant.

The following scenario commonly ensues. Two friends, both soon-to-be urinators themselves, enter the room. In a perfect world, they would each take up an outermost uri-cubicle, leaving the middle uri-cubicle vacant. (A vacant middle urinal makes conversation between men possible by minimizing genital proximity).
But of course, the initial urinator still occupies the middle uri-cubicle. His presence beside the two usurpers, brief though it is destined to be, achieves three things, all undesirable from his perspective:

i. It cuts off the possibility of conversation between the two friends, again causing the middle urinator to become the (hopefully figurative) target of resentment on both sides.

ii. It introduces an element of unanticipated genital proximity that strains the jovial, yet emotionally remote, atmosphere that is essential for a thriving uri-cubicle atmosphere.

iii. It forces our protagonist, the middle urinator, to perform a delicate ‘reversing’ movement in order to extricate himself from the middle position without committing an unnecessarily exhibitionistic ‘swivel’ manoeuvre.

(N.B. It is important to remember that our hero is no longer a urinator-intruder in relation to the two newcomers. It is they who are the urinator-intruders; although in the bitterest injustice of the whole experience, it is he who is treated as such.)
So, the interloper – who has now been thrice-disgraced for a single transgression! – must slink out of the uri-cubicle (a cruder, but not strictly inaccurate, writer would have said that he must do so, moreover, with his tail between his legs).

So please take note, ladies. It is not all beer and skittles when you are a member of the privileged gender that is permitted to fart with relative impunity at ceremonial occasions.

DISCLAIMER: Do not, under any circumstances, on the basis of the above article, attempt to verbally remind the two outer, replacement urinators that it is you who are the rightful and original (yet obviously still temporary) occupier/overseer of the uri-cubicle complex. Doing so may result in the painful and unexpected loss of urination apparatus.

Swede vs. Turnip

2008-06-28T17:58:00.000-07:00

I like to think that I’m the sort of chap who is quite at ease with seeing Gay couples shopping in supermarkets (or anywhere, for that matter.) In fact, to commit a massive generalisation, there is nothing that says ‘Domestic Bliss!’ quite like two men going supermarket shopping together. (Conversely, heterosexual couples always look so damned miserable in supermarkets. Why? I, for one, always seem to have gone supermarket shopping with someone shortly before breaking up with them. Is there a connection? Now there’s an interesting thesis topic.) I realise that this impression is hopelessly superficial, and based on a very small number of cases. But this is all the better for the story.

Yesterday, an apparently blissful Gay couple were at the checkout in front of me. I noticed them immediately, because one of the men resembled Elliot Gould in the Robert Altman classic The Last Goodbye, with a sprinkle of Sir Bob Geldof thrown in. I envied his world-weary, jaded handsomeness, and unsuccessfully tried to find a vein of similar ruggedness in myself, gazing longingly at my reflection in the semi-polished metal strip of the checkout conveyor belt. The other man looked like a young Jean Reno in a trucker cap.

So. Geldof-Gould dropped a mini-tin of Dine Cat Food on the floor. I picked it up for him without even mentioning my view on the stupidity and waste of buying such a small tin of food for a cat, when the cat wouldn’t know anyway, unless you got it accustomed to Dine by weaning it off Snappy Tom, in which case you’ve only got yourself to blame – and you only get one serve per tin, as opposed to at least four from a regular can.1 (Actually, this tin of Dine was so comically small that at first I thought it might be some kind of high-end Paté supplement that people scoop onto the top of the regular blob of Dine, like a garnish for cats! But then I thought: hey, that’s insane. Only Blofeld’s, or Dr. Claw’s, cat are pampered enough to have a garnish, and they’re both fictional.)

I said nothing, in any case – I just handed Bob back his funny little can. He smiled appreciatively. It was a nice moment, and I briefly thought about being less judgemental about people who purchase premium brands of cat food.
Sadly, this synergetic moment was shattered by the sentence below, which was spoken by the checkout guy while holding an unidentified root vegetable aloft:

Excuse me – is this a Swede or a Turnip?

Because neither man was listening, he had to say it again; this time with feeling:

Excuse me, Sir – is this a Swede or a Turnip?

Now, Ladies and Gentlemen of the jury, is this not an intrinsically funny sentence when one lives in a heavily industrialised country in the 21st century? In fact, I’m willing to bet that the last period of history when this sentence wasn’t funny was during the transition from serfdom to industrialised farming in 18th-Century England – shortly before the Swede/Turnip differentiation permanently lost its pressing relevance to the general populace.2

Oh, sure, there are modern exceptions: the Russians would have had plenty of opportunities to say something like this in earnest during the Soviet Experiment. (Even in pre-Revolution Russia, one of Chekhov’s late short stories was called Is This a Swede or a Turnip, And Even If we Knew, What Would it Matter Anyway?) But nevertheless, both of these foodstuffs are now utterly removed from our everyday eating experience that the distinction is rarely an issue. (Incidentally, the whole thing got me wondering: how can a swede and a turnip cost significantly different amounts? If they’re so similar as to be indistinguishable to a supermarket employee, I bet it would take an identical effort to grow either of them. Surely a resourceful employee would have just scanned a swede as a turnip, or vice versa? Who would know?)

The more I thought about this taxonomic confusion, the funnier it got. I started shaking with silent mirth, causing Jean Reno to glare at me murderously. I realised then that he probably thought that I thought that the sight of two gay men in a supermarket was intrinsically funny, when I actually thought that the sight of two gay men in a supermarket arguing over the provenance of an archaic root vegetable was intrinsically funny! (Actually, the sad irony is that it would have been just as funny if they were a man and a woman: the gay part was a red herring – but Reno the Trucker couldn’t have known that).

The problem was, I couldn’t just blurt out the following explanation:
“Oh no, I don’t have a problem with you two – it’s the turnip, you understand, and how easily it can be confused with other veg – oh, never mind.”
Instead, I had to outstare Reno the Trucker and learn the difference between a turnip and a swede. It was a fun and educational trip.

FOOTNOTES

1 N.B. I don’t actually say this to people in the Supermarket under any circumstances – God forbid! – but I do think about it at length.

2 In this period of history, this exchange would of course have taken a somewhat different form, i.e.:

DISTINGUISHED, YET MOST PROBABLY LECHEROUS, LANDOWNER: ‘Prithee, my faire Wenche, canst thy pray take the Trouble to tellest me whether yon vegetable possesseth most strongly thy features of thy gentle, nurturing, swede, or of thy robust, healthful turnip?’
BUXOM PEASANT GIRL, TILLING FIELD (WITH SLY, KNOWING SMILE): ‘Why, Sire, I know not! The taste of each is much the same to me ‘umble palate, it is though, so God ‘elp me.’

D'oh! D'oh!

2008-06-28T17:39:00.000-07:00

I have just signed up with Dodo – a company so appallingly incompetent and ruthlessly cynical that I think it may actually be a sophisticated money-laundering operation with a small and unconvincing Telecommunications front, probably run out of a small office in a men’s toilet in the basement of a Hungry Jack’s. (Moral: Do not sign up with companies named after extinct animals. I should have learned this from my past experience with Giant Two-Toed Ground Sloth Mortgage Brokers.)

After expressing my dissatisfaction, Dodo put me through to a section called ‘Finance’, which is obviously Dodo code for ‘unleash second-rate Mafia Goon Impersonator onto the under-prepared and increasingly nervous customer so that we can keep all our money’.

What follows is my reconstruction of our conversation.

Me (cautiously optimistic): Hello, I’d like to get my money from Dodo refunded, please.

Goon (slow and menacing, yet somehow also stilted – similar to how Christopher Walken might sound if his acting career stalled and he had to take a second job as a Dodo telephone sales representative): Oh. (pause). Why would…you want…to do…that?

Me (faux-chirpy, foolishly expecting empathy from Goon): Well I purchased a wireless Internet card, and when I tried to install it, I found out that the password had been used.

Goon (switching to the “I am the Plenipotentiary of Total War” tone): So you… want another…

(gratuitously long pause, in my opinion) – password.

Me (helpfully seeking to redress misunderstanding): No, I would like my money back, please.

Goon: And why is…that? (Last word of Goon’s utterances invariably drips with scorn and half-heartedly repressed violence).

Me (in chipper, Gatsby-esque, “Well, isn’t it obvious, old chum?” voice): Because I am no longer confident that Dodo will be able to meet my requirements.

Goon (audibly ruffling his (presumably) irrelevant and/or pornographic sheaf of papers with his (presumably) terrifyingly strangle-hardened fingers¹ as he shifts his (no doubt) mean, pinhole-sized,² illiterate³ eyes lazily over them while (presumably) intricately picking his (no doubt) hideously misshapen nose (from his illicit and unsuccessful boxing career)⁴ and (quite possibly) eating its contents as well)⁵:

But according to our records, you signed a…contract with us.

Me (rapidly sensing lines of escape being cut off by part-time criminal): Yes. That’s true. But my experience over the past week suggests that these mistakes –

Goon (switching from his Walken impression to his “I’m the dumbest, and hence the most blissfully psychotic, member of the Corleone Family!” voice): Are you satisfied with the outcome of this call?

Me: What do you mean?

Goon: If you choose not to honour the contract that you have signed, then… (B I G – B L O O D Y – P A U S E, followed by Goon audibly shrugging a Cheops-sized pyramid of dandruff off both shoulders of his (presumably nylon-polyester blend) suit…well, that’s up to you.

Me (apprehensive): Uh, ‘well’ what?

Goon: Well, if you break the contract, and the service continues to be charged to your account…that’s your…choice. (The word “choice”, in this case, is pronounced like evil scientists in 1930s Hollywood/Universal horror films always utter the phrase “World Domination”).

Me (now confused): My choice to what?

Goon: To break the contract. And your contract is. For. Two. Years. (Pronounced as someone instigating a protection racket would pronounce the line: “Real nice store you got here. Be a shame if anything happened to it.”)⁶

Me: Um –.

Goon: Thank you for calling Dodo.

¹Not that there’s anything wrong with that.

²Ibid.

³Ibid.

⁴Ibid.

⁵Unlike the above, this is not a genetic trait, and hence comfortably falls under the umbrella of ‘inappropriate behaviour.’

⁶I think this sentence may be taken from Steven Pinker’s The Stuff of Thought. Thanks, Steve. Don’t sue, eh?

Filer Verite

2007-07-29T08:19:00.000-07:00

Now for something that actually happened to me at my place of employment.

Last Friday, as I was dragging myself out of the basement with my five free tentacles, I came across an amazing thing: other people! The employees were all standing in the kitchen area, milling about, drinking champagne, snacking on free antipasto, etc., as the proletariat are wont to do. I thought that since I hadn't seen anyone in a while, I would go and say hello. Hey, maybe I could get into a conversation - after all, permanent employees talk to temps sometimes, right? And I'm wearing pants, which makes me look pretty classy, right? Yes, despite a week of sensory isolation and white-out induced nosebleeds, everything was going to be o.k.

The kitchen is separated from the corridor by a glass partition, which meant that everyone (approx. 50 employees) could see me walking towards the kitchen, just as I could see them. Some looked at me and smiled. I smiled back, flicking my hair back from my face with my left index finger, to give those in the know a hint of my devastatingly debonaire nature. This was great - this was what made filing all worth it.

In full view of absolutely everyone, I sauntered quickly through the doorway, which was blocked by an unexpectedly closed glass door. The remainder of my work week went as follows:
1. Bounced off door with a rather loud 'clonk'.
2. Reeled.
3. Did a 360 degree turn for some reason. It was not suave, no matter how it may sound on paper.
4. Rebalanced, assumed innate 'combative' stance, glared at door accusingly.
5. Looked imploringly at the watching employees, as if to say "Look what that fucking door did to me!"
6. Suddenly understood that I had hit door, not vice-versa.
7. Slunk off, dazed and hungry.

The Faster Filer in the West

2007-07-29T06:30:00.000-07:00

Filing. It's a word that seems somehow bound up with the East India Company: melting sweaty starched shirts, neat round glasses, obsessive overorganization, unseen ex-pickpocket Coolies darting around with dextrous fingers while fat Englishmen hassle them for another James Squire and a palm-leaf fan. The practice seems bizarrely out of line with the supposed weightlessness of the information economy: the idea that there are actual pieces of paper that correspond to a company's information is comically archaic, sort of like finding out that currency trading between countries is still done by wheeling piles of gold around Fort Knox on little motorized vehicles nicknamed 'gold buggies.'

But while the gold standard was canned last century (correct me here, economists), and the gold buggies were melted down into Oscar statuettes, the practice of filing, I'm glad to say, is alive and well in early 20th Century Australia. I know, because I file for a (temporary) living. Death certificates, mostly: oh, sure, there's the occasional affidavit or bank statement, but these patches of excitement are fleeting (though undeniably exquisite!).

* * *

A FILER'S MORNING

N.B.: All intellectual games take place over a steady background noise of superefficient filing ('swish clack swish clack ow swish clack clang swish').

After approximately four hours of filing, it is virtually impossible not to invent nasty little games to make it more fun. A typical filer's activities are outlined below. (Please note that this does not refer to any specific filer. Rather, it speaks for all filers in the universe.)

1. "Life Expectancy!" (usually played from 9am - 10am)

Who will win? Morris Walsh from Monbulk (b. 1931), or Susan Smith, from Mentone (b. 1925)? Go, Morris! Go, Morris! Go, Morris! (Adds up numbers in head) Oh, damn you, Susan! (Morris is barely pipped at the post by Susan, who manages to keep on the perch till 2006, 3 years longer than Morris). Filer throws manila folder onto floor, in frustration at forgetting that women tend to live longer than men for some unknown reason.

2. "Life's Big Questions!" (10am-11am)
Why do women live longer than men? Is it because they have periods, thus cleansing the blood supply somehow? (My friend told me this in year 8 sex ed class. He knew what 69ing meant, so why would he be wrong here?) Or, is it because men do more home renovations than women, wantonly sticking their fingers in fuseboxes? (5-10 min. digression: is this 'fusebox' theory a clever sexual metaphor? And is it ethically right to diverge from thinking about life expectancy to thinking about sex?) Come to think of it, aren't women asking a bit much with all this equal rights racket, when they live longer than us? Don't they make it up in quantity? (end with 10 min. quasi-Catholic penance for un-PC direction interior monologue has taken.)

3. "Woman walks into room!" (11-11.02). Followed by 1 hour 58 min of 'thinking' about woman (11:02-1:00).
INT. CONCRETE BASEMENT. DAY. LIT BY SINGLE, FLICKERING FLORESCENT TUBE, ATOP OF WHICH IS STREWN ASSORTED FRIED BUGS. HUNCHBACKED FILER SHUFFLES BETWEEN FILING SHELVES, MUTTERING AND SCRATCHING TESTICLES WHEN REQUIRED.

Enter first WOMAN who has come into the filing basement that week.

WOMAN: Hello there, I was just wondering if you could find this file-

FILER looks at woman, a kindly glint in his one remaining eye. The bolt through his neck glimmers appealingly. He attempts to unstoop his shoulders, which make an alarming cracking noise as he does so. His hands are covered in paper cuts. He has not shaved in days, and may have slept in the filing basement on Tuesday and Wednesday nights after everyone had gone home. He can't really remember: every room looks like a basement to him now. He smiles affectionately at the woman, but the filer's basement-enforced lack of social graces make his expression seem comical and strange. Moreover, the light is rather unflattering, and does not do justice to FILER's moisturizing regime.

FILER (speaking rapidly, yet articulating his words quite clearly, considering the circumstances):

HellomynameisTimandI'monlydoingthistemporarilyandafterthisIhavemanyexpensiveplansinvolving
- *hunchbacked filer takes deep, jagged, gasping breath* -

takingyoutoexpensivecountriesinfirstclassandoffsettingthecarbonwecreatebybyplantingtrees -

Exit WOMAN, pursued by FILER.

FILER re-enters basement. For the next two hours, he can be heard to mutter fragments of a language that does not sound very much like English at all.

1:00-2:00 Lunchtime!
FILER exits office, clicking heels of hobnail boots as he does so. Tries to use coffee machine, burns hand, curses extravagantly, eats donut, goes to sleep on conference table. Mutters random numbers as company director and several secretaries try to roll him onto the carpet. After a while, a tablecloth is laid over the filer. The permanent employees try to ignore him, but he smells so bad that they fail.

EXHAUSTED FILER: 16....132....*burp*.....2885.....*snore*.....

OTHER EMPLOYEES: Eww.

Sight

2007-07-29T06:17:00.000-07:00

It lies on the end of my index finger: a tiny jellyfish which has been eviscerated, possibly by a miniature melon baller made specifically for the purpose.
I look closer, and now its membrane is amplifying the tiny tremors running through my hand, which I hadn’t noticed before. They tell a predictable story of lack of sleep, bad diet, anxiety. The wobble of the membrane atip my finger seems so finely-tuned that I wonder if it is translatable, somehow – as a stylus extracts information from plastic, this plastic extracts it from my skin. The flexible disc amplifies my hands’ hidden signals extravagantly. It will need decoding now, from physical signals into sound waves. It's written in the language of stress.

Now the invertebrate’s border spreads outward, coating my visual field in plastic, soaked sheen. Closer to the surface, the shape loses its pristine appearance: no longer an animal that man has not touched, as I look closer at the spreading circle I see the encrustations on its concave arc. This is “protein” – an inappropriately positive name for hardened eye sludge, congealed blindness. The positive connotations of the word are sucked down under its newfound halo of contaminants. This beige silt gilds the rim like a dirty margarita, speckled blotchily along the semisphere’s central point. As I notice them, I feel slightly less calm, and the tremor-music spikes suddenly, flinging the disc off my finger. It flattens out as it spins laterally through the air, before its flight is broken by the table. The jellyfish lies there, prone and ridiculous and defeated, dented and lopsided. Its juice – a mixture of eyegum and saline cleaning solution, forms a sticky pool on its dimpled underside.
Squeezing the creature gently to pick it up, I notice that when the two sides of the disc are pressed together, they slip so eagerly as to crease the membrane. This is not a problem, as it springs quickly back into shape, a perfect eye-cast.

The first day I wear them, something changes. Students no longer have muted white borders, as if they had been shot through a diffusion lens. Now their sharp outlines prickle the retina, the diluted sunlight flaring their cheekbones. Before, their intelligence was hidden under a haze, which allowed me to associate them together in a homogenous mass. The carefully-stacked youths stare. Now, as my eyes pan jerkily across the room, I am forced to take each of their characters into account. The period of adjusting my gaze from one to the other is strange, because one’s gaze must change according to the new knowledge imparted by the stark detail of the face. If I fix an appropriate expression on the first student, I find that it is usually inappropriate for the next.
Soon the lenses rub and itch. A dirt particle edges its way into the sealed section on the iris. The gladwrap clinging feeling on my eyes ends the comfortable feeling of leadership. I am no longer the powerful, impermeable presence I was before; instead, I look shallow-focus at the students, their forms now utterly indistinct. Savage tweaks of pain cry through me, squaredancing in stilettos across the cornea.

They sense that I need to be helped. I know that this has to be concealed if I am to maintain control.
“I can’t get these fucking things out of my eyes.”
Usually, swearing in class would raise titters or eyebrows, but now the students understand that something has changed. Usually edgy or irritable, this early in the morning, they are suddenly receptive to my words. I need their help – not in a bureaucratic sense, but in a human one.
“Can someone please help me get them out?”
My voice shudders between hysteria and shyness. I look - or feel, at least - like a blotchy blind mongrel pup. The students are poised and impermeable, and my streaming face makes me seem cornered and wounded.
“Does anyone here wear contacts?”
This third appeal is gentler, as I try hard to modulate the noises in my throat, breathing flecks of warmth into jagged clumsy words. I think of protein: dark mud trodden into the silky white lens.
A student from the back of the class stands, stares briefly, and walks towards me. He is African-American, about 6’ 7”. His open face looks down into my gormlessly scrunched one.
“Ok, Professor Roberts.”

He walks out the door, slowing his pace so that I can follow. I look over at them, apologetically. I lose them the moment I'm led out out the door by a student. For the rest of semester, they are no longer my class.

Is it Possible to be Spurned by a Cat?

2007-07-13T22:35:00.000-07:00

Two weeks ago, I would have said no (or would have, had the issue ever crossed my mind). After all, a cat’s cortex is simply too small to generate the complex emotions that animate human relationships: love, hatred, jealousy, remorse. Or so I thought.

Now that I am the temporary custodian of a cat, however, my opinions have changed. I am house-sitting for my friend, who lives in Richmond. She owns a rather lovely tabby, which shall remain nameless. Suffice to say that she is tiger-coloured (the cat, not my friend), which is my favourite type of coat. Although she is fatter than any known tiger (I’m still talking about the cat), she gives the distinct impression that she could unleash the compressed power of her limbs any time she feels the need. As Darwin might say, The Cat still retains the indelible stamp of her lowly origin.

I have been rather busy this week, and have spent little time paying direct attention to The Cat. I have been performing all the obligatory ‘cat-maintenance’ tasks – food bowl filled, water bowl filled, kitty litter emptied, window left open – but beyond that, admittedly, there hasn’t been much quality ‘Tim and Cat’ time. Although I was planning on spending an extended scratching session with the Cat (that’s when I scratch the Cat and she purrs contentedly, not when we both scratch the furniture together, which isn’t allowed) this never eventuated.

Too late. I came back at 7 pm the other day, an hour later than usual, whispering ‘Here, Puss’ in my guilty-as-hell falsetto voice. No answering meow. I looked outside. No Moggie hunched up soggily in the courtyard. I rattled the dry cat food container. No Cat at all.

Fine, I thought, as I schlooped the miniature rotten-fish-smelling cat food into the bowl. Be that way. I heard jingling (The Cat has a belled collar), and looked up expectantly.

The Cat was back!

But The Cat wasn’t back. Not really. She simply stood in the doorway to our room, staring me down with those reflective eyes. There was pain in them, but also a hint of malice, as if she knew how much I wanted her to be a Nice Cat again, and how much it would upset me if she wasn’t. Using all her powers of restraint, she refused to scamper across the room and eat her Dine: she had bigger cares than her own hunger. We looked at each other for perhaps a minute; I felt as if I was supposed to say something comforting, but couldn’t think straight. An invisible line divided us, where the corridor ended and the living room began. She wouldn’t cross it. Why did The Cat have such a hold over me? Did I need to get out more? More to the point, did I need a girlfriend?
‘Puss, I –‘
She cut me off.
‘Meow. Meow. Meow.’
It doesn’t come more straight-down-the-line than that.
‘But I had to go and get some –‘
‘Meow.’
Every excuse I could come up with was swiftly murdered in its cradle. With a (feigned, in my opinion) stately walk, she slowly vanished into the bedroom, her tail flickering around the doorway one last time, a final stinging barb.

At this point, I was tempted to leave The Cat to her own devices, but I – O quintessence of dust! – crumbled. Slinking like a mutt with the family’s leg of lamb in its jaws, I crept into the bedroom. She looked straight at me as the door opened. When I stretched out my arm to stroke the fuzzy patch on the top of her head (which she used to like, when things were good), The Cat growled. Then, these low growls would unfurl into meows, her shallow surface anger parting to reveal the cool depths of sadness beneath.
‘Grrrrrreeoww. Grrrrreeow’, she cried. It was wrenching.
My hand was paused in midair. Would she bite it? Or claw it? Should I just back away, and leave her to forget about me, heaping her food bowl high enough to keep her going? After all, I’d be gone on Saturday, and then she –

We made eye contact, and The Cat started head-butting my hand, hard. I thought it was a fresh assault, and sprung backwards off the bed. But I soon realized that it was a gesture of peace, and sat back down again.
'Butt, butt, butt, butt', butted her little head into my hand. ‘Meow.’
'Butt, butt, butt, butt'. ‘Meow.’ This blissful, simple little dance continued for a while.
I tentatively scritched behind The Cat’s ear. She smiled. (Cats can smile: forget what you’ve been told). I smiled. Everything was perfect again.

And to keep it that way, now I have to go and feed her again. But it’s worth it, and I'll miss her.

Conversion

2007-07-11T21:53:00.000-07:00

The Book of TIMOTHY

Chapter I
1. My change of heart did come while reading the Holy Book, The God Delusion. After reading this sacred tome, I learned that it was intended to turn people away from the Lord; however, its sweet, plummy, well-articulated words only brought me closer to Him.
2. The prophet Dawkins was in error. He wrote, ‘there is just as much reason to believe in the Flying Spaghetti Monster as there is to believe in God.’ Yet this message did evade me, just as wisdom evades a blonde heiress to a massive hotel fortune.
3. I did read instead, I confess, ‘one should believe in the Flying Spaghetti Monster instead of God.’ This message I understood; but accepting the Spaghetti Monster as my saviour, regrettably, caused me great hardship.
4. Being a devotee of the wise biologist, I underwent a great Conversion on the road to Delicious.
5. My path to faith was strewn with briars and nettles, which is why it is usually left to the insane. There was a grave absence of churches in which to preach.
6. After much thought, I realized that the best place to set alight the flame of belief in the Holy Church Of The Flying Spaghetti Monster was at the nearest Safeway, where the relevant ingredients would be ready to hand.
7. Venturing forth, I established my church in the pasta aisle. Unfortunately, the materials available to me were the work of Satan (durum wheat being not suitable for construction).
8. Nevertheless, there was much work to be done, but there was not time to find substitute ingredients.

Chapter II
1. Well aware of the urgency of my task, I hastily constructed a primitive altar from Lasagne sheets, gluing the holy corners together with pesto, as willed by the Lord for the Ark of the Covenant:

And thou shall make an ark of shittim wood: two cubits and a half shall be the
length thereof, and a cubit and a half be the breadth thereof; and a cubit and a
half the height thereof (Exodus 30:2).

2. And you will note that it was Noah’s ark that was made of Gopher wood – not out of Gophers, as is commonly thought, as they were saved, because they were cuddly. (Moses’ ark was made of shittim wood, which is why it was unsturdy).
3. Yet my Tabernacle was a lot smaller than that specified in the book, as the Lord did not provide puff pastry cases for the purpose.

4. And I was forced to make one from two conchiglio rigates, united together with sacred tomato paste.
5. And I did simulate incense by burning grated parmesan cheese, and swung the censer enthusiastically from a strand of cooked Spaghetti.
6. But this device soon crumbled, as the cooked pasta was flimsy.
7. And the censer did whiz off the spaghetti and splatter on the lino, and the staff did give me a most grievous look.
8. There was also much trouble obtaining the bone of St. Paul Newman for the altar, as he is not yet departed.
9. And I was most unjustly slandered and mocked, at first, as with all the chosen, but soon there arose a small yet dedicated following. (The supermarket was to be entered after dusk, so as to avoid encountering heretics.)
10. But the supermarket was a most excellent site for a pilgrimage, as there is little hardship: one can buy beer, get cash out, and have one’s prescription filled in between prayers.

Chapter III
1. All things must pass, alas, and the peaceful gatherings in aisle three did subside.
2. Soon there arose a great schism within my church. A rival faction grew, claiming that my teachings had become detached from the lives of everyday shoppers.
3. And the chief heathen did believe that representing the pasta on the box was idolatrous. 4. And this man set up a congregation to rival my own, and rechristened his deity the ‘Macaroni and Cheese Overlord.’

5. He concealed his God’s face from his followers, replacing it with the Holy Text, ‘Home Brand’.
6. This man represented his grievances in the ‘95 Artichokes of Faith’, which he endeavoured to display at the temple’s entrance.

7. However, nailing even a single artichoke to an automatic glass door is not easy.
8. Every time he did swing the hammer, the door opened and he fell over, causing much laughter among his flock. After much wailing and gnashing of teeth, and an occasional breast-beating, he did cut a deal with a checkout maiden.
9. And he did stick the artichokes on a pizza base, and she did duly hang it above her cash register, for all to behold. And our warring houses were at peace.

Chapter IV
1. For a time after the Great Schism, our two churches coexisted peacefully.
2. But there soon came another group, who refused to witness the pasta-based nature of the Godhead.
3. And we understood that we should smite them most unpleasantly.
4. This church was not at first apparent, as it was located down the other end of the aisle. Yet I soon found their leader, met him, and broke ciabatta with him, and we did dip it in HOMMUS.
5. He soon told me that their God was made of long-grain brown rice, and most strenuously denied my retort that he was of the 4-minute microwave variety.
6. His heathen ways did offend me grievously. I thus made my peace with the Macaroni overlord, in the name of pasta-based solidarity. The great war between the two faiths also caused great consternation among non-believers in the temple.
7. This was mainly because we were blocking their trolleys.

Chapter V
1. The alliance against Rice was unstable, because my flock could not long remain united with the Home Brand Church of the Macaroni and Cheese Overlord.
2. And the Macaroni followers did believe that the ‘End Times’ would soon arrive, at which point a great discount would be offered on all the products in the Kosher aisle.
3. Some souls even said there would be up to 50% off; but these unruly heathens were shouted down by the more reasonable elements of the Macaroni congregation.
4. Those of the Macaroni faith claimed that when this great discount arose, a great flock of shoppers would be able to return to the Kosher aisle, from which they had fled, having been driven out by unaffordable Bagel prices.
5. After returning, this flock would realize that kosher food was most unpalatable; and they would begin to devour Macaroni and cheese most gladly.
6. But the Macaroni flock hoped that the kosher aisle would then be taken over by the pasta, and the rice section would be relocated to the back of store, near the baby food.
6. And this event would be heralded by four toddlers in trolleys, as has been foretold.
7. The kosher shoppers were wandering in the dairy section, and they were waiting for the chosen time, and they did have more than 12 items in their baskets. And the express lane was blocked to them.

Chapter VI
1. The dispute did soon descend into great civil strife, and much fear and loathing was expressed between Spaghetti, Macaroni, Kosher, and Rice.
2. And the Macaroni Overlord’s followers projected flaming anchovies at the followers of Rice, who responded in kind with scalding spoonfuls of curry sauce. And there was much hardship, and much stinging of eyeballs, and a scandalously tasty aroma.
3. And bagels were thrown also, and they did hit the followers of Rice with much force, especially if the bagels were TOASTED.
3. And watching quietly when this was occurring was the Church of the Earthly Noodle, which was located next to the freezer section.
4. And the church of the earthly noodle was peaceful, and they did not participate in cereal-based violence, and Richard of Gere did listen to them, and many bad Hollywood actors did follow him.
5. But this was only because they were located next to the ice cream.

Fatuosity

2007-07-08T21:27:00.000-07:00

Hi all,

Well, everyone else has a blog, so I decided that I should have one too. This is partially to encourage me to write - something that I don't do nearly enough - and partially to force my friends to read my rantings when I can't rant at them directly (for an earful, please call 1-800-crankyrant).

At the moment, I don't really know what type of thing will pop up on here. I think I'll try to tackle the big, controversial issues, because that will be a good way of encouraging people to read and comment on my writing. This may have its dangers, but I am famous for living a caution-free life.

I've just returned from the Adelaide Festival of Ideas. Adelaide, for those who haven't been there, is a city around the same size as Boston, but there the resemblance ends. It is alarmingly quiet, especially in the morning, like a 19th-Century Canberra with fewer public servants.

Anyhow, the most interesting talk that I went to was on the ethics of eating. Marion Nestle's talk, entitled 'What to Eat: Personal Responsibility vs. Social Responsibility', prompted a huge volume of responses - most of which took place during her speech.

Nestle (it's pronounced like the word, not the brand of chocolate) focused on the dire threat that junk food advertising poses to our health system. Fair enough, too: flogging choc-marshmallow breakfast cereal in the 8am cartoon TV slot is more than a little cynical. But Nestle's theme struck a massive stomping AC/DC-inspired power chord with the audience.

Nestle sought to blame the media for the obesity 'epidemic' (surely a slightly alarmist label?), thus removing it from individual families and shifting it onto corporations and government. While this social approach is warranted, as it's less aggressively personal than blaming parents for their children's eating habits, I couldn't help feeling that this social constructivist approach wasn't quite what the psyched-up crowd was looking for.

Whenever Nestle made a point linking obesity to individual behaviour, the crowd leapt on it like cheetahs stripping an antelope carcass. It's easy to see why: fill a hall with people who obviously pay minute attention to diet & exercise micromanagement, offer a convenient figure of evil (ostensibly the corporations, but essentially the chubby), and watch the fur fly.

At one point, Nestle made the point that McDonald's (aka the Antichrist) sold junk food in - gasp! - hospitals! To sick children! One might as well hire Ronald and the Grimace to suffocate the poor tykes with pillows and carve ashtrays out of their bones! After she said this (well, not the last point), a strange noise welled up in the hall. It sounded like the nocturnal clicking of frogs, but was in fact many skinny people saying 'tut tut tut' in unison, shaking their heads in synchrony as they tutted responsibly. Now, I didn't realize that it was de rigeur to actually say 'tut tut tut' - it always seems a bit Victoriana to me, something that belongs in Mrs. Beeton's Household Manual. But here was a veritable orchestra of tutters tutting.

Fairly obvious points - such as the fact that crappy, fatty fare like McDonald's actually has a miraculous ability to cheer miserable children up, or that we are genetically predisposed to like fatty and/or sweet food - were ignored. To hear Nestle talk, you would think that banning junk food advertising would lead to children ploughing gratefully into mountains of apples, carrots and broccoli, instead of deep-fried mars bars. (Oh please do pass the nutritious, life-saving steamed broccoli, mother!)

Nestle often undercut her 'blame the media' approach by using humour to criticize the aesthetic of fatness, which was of course the talk's major drawcard. She showed a slide in which the famous Uncle Sam recruitment poster had been transformed into a bloated old guy in striped pyjamas, imploringly holding out a hamburger towards the audience, saying 'I want you to eat fast food!' (much laughter: Look how fat he is! Just like those other Yank Fat Pigs!) I half expected an overweight child to be wheeled in on a charcoal spit, apple in mouth, for the slavering audience's delectation (one small helping per person, of course).

Although I saw a lot of talks, on issues ranging from terrorism to climate change, none recieved as manic a reaction as Nestle's. Why? I think it's because gleefully condemning the fat gives the skinny the unique opportunity to be visibly beyond reproach, because the signs of virtue are worn on the body. This is impossible when enthusiastically condemning those responsible for, say, climate change. After all, your carbon footprint is invisible, and extremely difficult to calculate, while your BMI is right there in plain sight. 'Don't blame me - I eat organic boiled miso rolls', say the bony of thigh and taut of skin. 'And, uh, you?'

While it would be nice to think that these people had developed a sudden burning desire to ease the burden on our public health system, I would be surprised if any other 'health issue' prompted an equivalent response: can you imagine a crowd of people gleefully clucking about the rise of Golden Staph infections in hospitals, for example? Or the burden caused by the aging of the population?

Fat chance.