Apparently you need a license to fish in Australia. When caught, I argued that fishing is when you pull in a fish, and all that I was doing was feeding the fish. Fish really are very adept at getting a prawn of a hook these days. Evolution has done that.

The inspectors weren’t buying my argument. How long before I need a license to ride my bike and pick mushrooms in the state forest?

I despair at the superficiality of news reporting. Even more so because I have very intelligent friends who do not see through the crap. Much of what I see is fiction, untested hypotheses, agendas and sloppy writing; all dressed up as information worth knowing and believing.

Does North Korea even exist? It has got to that point…

The reason that I do not share this blog is that the awareness of an audience would change my entries and feed the ego. And yet it is publicly accessible; I smell a hypocrite.

Guys, really, it’s worth working through this one. Once you liberate yourself from the honey trap, life gets a lot easier. You just have to see the tricks that nature plays on us for what they are. Nature serves itself, not us.

The ATM tells me I cannot exceed my daily withdrawal limit? Logically they must sum to an even number.

As we engineer risk out of life, so do we remove the flavour.

I have been tempted in the past to support an IQ test as a precondition for the right to vote. Nowadays I think that it  should be an EQ test.

People who should be banned from entering politics; lawyers, arts graduates, professional lobbyists, journalists, speech writers, trade union officials, farmers and anyone under forty.

The less we formalize the constitution the more it can be modified to suit the times. Otherwise we might just shoot ourselves in the foot. Twice.

How about an amendment to the constitution that says for every new law passed another has to be excised?

Sometimes I feel like the only one that cares. But its the national past time, whining. So maybe we just care about different things, you and I.

Is it that there are less lies in the sports pages, or just that the lies don’t matter?

There are three sorts of rules. Those that benefit the rule follower, those that benefit the masses, and those that benefit the rule maker. The latter should always be ignored unless the penalties are stiff and the risk of detection is high.

I love courtesy and increasingly there is less of it around me. I blame consumerism. Are we doomed to be that bacteria population that exploded and then exhausted all the food in the Petri dish? It leaves a very bad smell.

Laziness and chocolate are both regrettable and undeniable habits.

Why is a picture worth a thousand words? Because the truth is only revealed to those that care.

Death, taxes and the scorn of women.

Honesty is always subjective. Most people fool themselves into believing their own constructs. And they lie too..

Thoughts can be like butterflies. Beautiful but very hard to catch.

As tempting as it is, I must stay away from the subject of myself. It makes me a better person.

Coffee is exempt from the addiction rule.

You have to wonder why swear words are not in the standard dictionary in my phone. It must be the fear that they will accidentally pop up as a bad guess to user input. And someone will be offended, poor things.

Sometimes I can’t be arsed to wipe my arse.

Maybe, just maybe, I’ll give the link to this blog to my daughter, when she’s ready.

People I know, smart people, post links to the quotes of others on Facebook. Come on, post your own thoughts and stop hiding behind the facade.

300mm? Geez, better bring your tape measure.

I contemplated this for five minutes to make sure I could park. Admittedly I was hung over. But seriously, what is wrong with Australia?

I have read many non-fiction books that could have been usefully condensed into a three page essay. The vanity and the wasted effort – the  mind boggles.  Its a shame there isn’t an intelligent version of Readers Digest for non-fiction. I would subscribe.

Yesterday the Australian (Murdoch’s broadsheet) was full of articles praising Margaret Thatcher. Each of these took a different approach in praising her.  In this process they each used opinion to de-construct the arguments against her legacy.

This was fascinating to me.

First why do they care so much? Why are these people so attached to such an unimportant subject? Don’t they know the subject is so ugly that only its mother loves it?

Secondly, the journalists over did it. Anybody who could be bothered to trawl through their dribble clearly would have half an education and would spot that the protestations were over done.

However there was a purpose. And the purpose was here and now, and that was to bash the current Australian Labor party ahead of the looming election. One article compared Julia Gillard very unfavourably to Margaret Thatcher on the basis that Julia is ‘hiding behind her petticoats’ in discussing the subject of misogyny in politics, whereas Margaret never would have done so.

They even went to the efforts to praise Bob Hawke in a series of articles celebrating the 30 years of the original economic summit in Australia. The point of these articles was to praise Bob for his focus on consensus when introducing major new policy. Again the point was to bash Gillard for not having any sense of consensus.

However these articles did make me realise what Madam Thatcher lacked, and why she is so reviled by some, and that was a total lack of interest in consensus. It was her way or the highway.

Addictions have a purpose and it is central to the person and the journey.

Faced with an addiction one has three choices; to deny it, to contain it or revel in it until it sickens you.

Unless you face the demon it will always be with you.

The purpose of life is to unravel the mystery of yourself.

I can’t stop them, these thoughts. They pop up and I then spend a small period polishing them and then they submerge again, only to pop up in some other form weeks, months or even years later. This blog allows me to get them out of my head. I suspect it is going to help relieve the pressure in there.

There was a time, not long back when aircrew used to walk down the aisles of inbound planes to Australia spraying some sort of fumigant with the goal of keeping Australia pure. I can’t be arsed googling the subject, but can you imagine disinfecting a bunch of tourists without warning them, nor without getting their acquiescence? The mind boggles at the arrogance, not to mention the stupidity of thinking that this might achieve anything. I bet CSIRO was behind it…

What does it say about Australia when we have beautiful airport buildings, but they have really dodgy (small and dirty) public dunnies? I don’t understand.

As an intro to my PhD thesis I added a ‘vanity’ quote, as was the habit of the day;

“Allow me to furnish the interior of my head as I please, and I shall put up with a hat like everybody else’s.” –  Henri Bergson

Twenty five years on I have reduced this to “I will furnish the interior of my head as I please”.

Here in Australia, sports people are famous for talking about themselves in the second and third person.

In fact, one famous sports person (let’s call him, say, Fred Dagg) referred to himself in the fourth- or fifth-person (train spotters…help) in saying “I know a bloke who knows a bloke who thinks Fred Dagg should…”

Similarly, philosophers live life somewhat in the second and third person, analytically pigeon-holing their own lives and those of others into constructs of logic and reason. Real life, the first person version, is visceral, emotional and immediate; I prefer to live life  in the first person.

The key, I think, is to free yourself from the opinion of others.

That will take the first 40 years or so…if you work at it very hard.

I am not aligned to any “party” (what a misnomer eh?). They differ only  in whose interests they need to serve in order to serve their own interests. A pox on them all. I have tuned out.

My favourite wind; a wind blowing from the land (literally ‘off the shore’) on the East Coast of Australia (in this case) which smooths the faces of the waves and makes them more likely to barrel.

Such a contrast to everyday life…