I remember when I was growing up I used to spend a lot of time with a family around the corner.

In this family there were four kids – three boys and one girl. The dad was a plumber who lived permanently in a pair of King Gees and a blue singlet. The mum was always at home or at the RSL with her husband. The house was a chaos of clothes in piles and there was stuff just lying around everywhere. The backyard was a homage to a clutch of working-class hobbies – greyhounds, pigeons and off-road motorbikes, with the ubiquitous Hills Hoist centrally positioned.

I used to spend more time around there that at my own, very sterile apartment. My mother was always studying at university, or when home, writing an essay. My brother was five years older and was out doing his own things. My dad was a cop and when he wasn’t at work he was out playing various sports or drinking with his mates. So this gave me plenty of time to be around the corner and not at home.

I did all sorts of stuff with this family – prawning at Abbotsford (in Sydney harbour for god’s sake), fishing at the Cook’s River (even worse), cricket, footy, speedway and I even used to go on holidays up to Forster with them, where they had a fibro coastal classic.

My memories are old and my young awareness may have been limited, but I strongly recall this lot being extremely happy. They didn’t have a lot of goods by today’s standards but they had enough and very little interest in matters outside their immediate daily experiences. Notably, everyone in this family always did things together – they didn’t sneak off to their own corners like my mob.

I cannot think of a single family I have met since which has even a semblance of their inherent happiness. In fact, the contrast to the modern families that I know is remarkable. I would say the families I know now are anti-happy; not necessarily unhappy, but a sort neutered neutrality on the subject of enjoyment. They are just grinding it out whilst trying to tick all the boxes, the ones that the global marketing machine assures them brings universal happiness if all ticked.

How do you judge a person? By the good things they do and say, or by the very predictable and intermittent ‘dog bites’ you are going to receive from them?

If you understand someone can you forgive them their faults? Especially if you know they developed their faults through no fault of their own.

How much do you give and how much do you forgive? All relationships have to be balanced to be healthy – an equal sharing of the giving and the forgiving is ideal. If one is doing the taking and the other is doing the giving then the survival of the relationship depends on even further emphasis of entrenched character traits which do the owner no good at all. In fact relying on these is like feeding an addiction.

Passing over a lot of thought to get to the end point, any relationship (and I am not just talking about couples here) depends critically on both people having, and further developing, the mirror they have on their own behaviours and on their own souls. Self-awareness and caring in both people in a relationship – that’s the starting point.

Yet another bloody TV show set in inner suburban Australia (I suppose this is so the cast has a short daily travel). It’s all angst and anxiety in the context of a group of family and friends.

I think there is something rotten at the core of our affluent society. I guess that’s why this show makes me so squirmy.

Having said that, the show is overdone. It’s like a weird dream version of reality, where all the issues are over-emphasised and the background mood is very dark. It’s like “the slap” without the slap.

Everyone in the show seems to be in survival mode, at best. There is no real joy in their lives just fear, loathing and suffering. And the fear of losing what they have, which in any case appears to be shit. I don’t get it.

Why is this stuff made?

You would think that a farmer’s market is all about cutting out the middle man, Coles and Woolies for example, and offering produce at lower prices. But not at this farmer’s market; the prices are through the roof.

The people attending seem to have the wherewithal to underwrite the farmers lifestyles. Although I doubt there’s many real farmers amongst them.

Back to the consumers; they have money in their pockets and fear in their eyes. And they seem to have a magnetic attraction to rootsy, organic food. Possibly they feel disconnected from reality? They all dress in this casual manner that doesn’t reveal their relative wealth, except for their glasses and sunglasses. No one skimps on these.

And, get this, hundreds of them are prepared to queue for an hour to get a roast suckling pig roll. What’s that about?

Back in the mid-eighties I had this Benetton t-shirt that I was very proud of.

It had written on it, in multi colors, “warm, sunny, colorful and no pollution”.

I still like the sentiment, but I wonder who I was that cared about communicating banalities to the world?

Of course, it was all driven by insecurities and the desire to be liked and wanted.

It is possible that removing the whales from the ocean might just counter the effects of rising sea levels, resulting from global warming. The Japanese might be onto something.

Around sunset in my part of Surry Hills we get the taxi crush. A good fraction of the taxi drivers in Sydney must be Muslim and they all seem go to the Surry Hills mosque around sunset. It’s this tiny mosque squeezed in between a few Chinese terrace houses in this tiny, former slum street which still contains a brothel or two; its really quite a perplexing place to put it.

There is no parking in Surry Hills and the parking inspectors here are vicious – I think they have a block each and are on very good commissions. So the whole experience of getting to the Mosque on time and avoiding a parking fine must be pretty stressful for the taxi drivers.

I do believe that they must believe in their god. There is no other rational explanation for anyone going through this daily hell.

Goget, my local car sharing outfit, has an eclectic taste in cars. But I would say there is a definite penchant for Hyundai’s and i30’s in particular. The i30 is the ‘fast-food’ effort of the auto-world. It’s well built to a price, but it’s not driver’s car. In fact it handles like a fridge on wheels. But mostly it works. Mostly.

For the last few months I have noticed that not one of Goget’s i30”s has had the right time on the internal clock. And, trying to correct this, I found out why. I couldn’t figure out how to change the time, nor could anyone else, especially considering that the manuals have been removed.

Now I am pretty good techie so I tried every hidden combo known to mankind. Eventually I gave up and Googled it on the run and it turns out that, while the radio is on, you have depress the power button for a few seconds and then a very complex menu pops up. Now, who in their right minds would have thought that one up?

I have just been perving at some lovely photos taken by Ansel Adams in the 1940s. People pay a lot of money for the original prints, which are virtually indistinguishable from copies. If these photos were taken today they would struggle to get into a toilet-door calendar.

Adams is collectible because he was (sort of) the first to do what he did, and I argue that the value of his prints is purely historical and hysterical. Value only exists if a lot of people agree that the subject is valuable.  And people, oddly, tend to want to agree with each other – people, in general, are very eager to please, especially when there is vested interest involved.

Two of my favorite things, unexpectedly found conjoined this morning. What joy!

Gears on a bicycle; it’s an odd thing. They have been around for more than a hundred years and yet still they are shit.

After more than a hundred years of engineering, gears in cars will last for 200,000 kilometres or more without servicing.

Gears on bikes, on the other hand, need servicing every 1,000 kilometres or so and the major parts, the chain and chain rings, often need changing every 10,000 kilometres. This is because the drive-train is a chain that is shifted from one cog to another to make a gear change, which leads to uneven wear all over the place.

This system survives because bikes have such a weight constraint on their engineering. An extra kilo on the gears is like 10 kilos of fat on your arse; I am not sure why but it’s something to do with unsprung weight versus sprung weight (the legs being the springs). All the alternatives to dérailleur gears that have been imagined all weight substantially more.

Bike engineering has also got stuck in a rut; there has been little incentive to figure out a system that works properly when there is so much money to be made by polishing the turd. And also when there is so much money to made made by selling the wear parts.

I keep changing the rear change-ring on my single speed bike to gear the thing higher. My rate limiting hill is Lilyfield hill, which is a real heart starter in the mornings. My journey to the current high ‘gearing’ has been in a few increments, each new chain-ring being adopted only when my legs adapt to the stress. They, the legs, are getting pretty strong. The issue is, that after a few durries and schooners, the plan all goes to pot; I can’t get the bike over a speed-hump.

Toughen up and Suck it up.

These are two common phrases being thrown about by the Gen Y’s as they pretend to be as tough as a baby boomer’s parent.

It doesn’t work and we can all see through the fraud. They could’t toughen it or suck it up if their life depended on it.

When my daughter was young I coined an acronym for the pre-bed activities. It is PTTB which stands for pyjamas, toilet, teeth, bed.

Ok, its an initialism not an acronym but who gives a fuck?

In any case, for some reason neither of us could ever get this acronym right. It variably came out as PTBB, PPTB etc.

So I wonder is there a descriptor for Spoonerisms of acronyms and initialisms? I know the answer to that one already.

I had a debate last night about on-line retail. I pointed out that shops are doomed and she disagreed because she doesn’t like on-line shopping.

I then countered with the clear trend towards on-line shopping and she countered with the concept that only certain categories of shopping are suitable for on-line retail, and that, for example, only retards like me would even consider buying jeans on-line.

I said that this is just a technology challenge and that in retail the lowest cost will always win despite constraints of practicality.

She retains the right to have a different opinion. I retain the right to be right. And I am.

I have two bikes – one with a zillion gears and one with one gear.

I randomly ride one or the other to work and back but I am increasingly finding that I am choosing the single speed. Which is odd because it is a lot less efficient to ride because I can’t keep a constant cadence by changing gears to suit the terrain.

However the time to work and back is about the same on both bikes because the single speed forces me to step on the peddles going up hills whereas I might coast up hills in low gears on the expensive option. This gain in time up hills is offset by the losses going down where the geared bike allows me to crack down in overdrive whereas the single speed is maxxed out and I just coast down.

The bikes weigh about the same (7.2kg) despite one being worth a fortune (the carbon fibre one with gears) and other costing me $175 on eBay; the gearing and associated engineering weighs and costs that much!

The very nice thing about the single speed is that it doesn’t need maintenance; I never have to adjust the gears when the cable stretches and both the chain and chainrings do not wear out. The chain never pops off the chain ring and I feel very secure that the machinery will stay in one piece and operational, no matter what I do to it.

The small challenge in getting on a single speed bike in Sydney is having enough torque in the legs to get up hills; but this is simply a choice of gearing and as you get better you can crank up the gearing by changing the chainrings.

All up, the single speed makes sense.

What’s the difference between thinking something and believing something?

Two things really; firstly, belief generally allows for less consideration of data, and, secondly, fucking semantics.

Bob Carr, the current foreign minister of Australia, recently admitted that, not only did he not write his own Tweets but that he had never even read them.

For politicians their Tweets are really micro-press releases each in an individual 140 character burst. Rather than a weekly press release there is a continuous stream of constructed dribble, each a little sketch point that in total is supposed to create an image of the majestic one that is lovable or at least not despicable.

The content of these micro-press releases is often inscrutable since they are constructed without arguments or reference points, and indeed are often very ambiguous.

I think the audience is two-fold – first, there are fellow spin merchants who are very busy reading each others smoke signals for a living, and, second, there are the faithful followers (for who else who bother with these missives?) who suck up all of this random bullshit as droppings from their god on earth.

I think its odd that the motivational calendar has found a new life as the viral philosophical-validations of the vaguely educated on Facebook. It could have been anything, but they latched onto the motivational calendar, probably because they used to have them on the back of their toilet doors. They probably still do.

Now why would anyone come to Australia seeking an asylum? Maybe our asylums are nicer than anyone else’s? They should march the asylum seekers into Parliament house and the mission will have been completed.

I don’t believe in a god but I do believe that some people believe in a god. It’s a start, isn’t it?

To be good at something takes both talent and interest. If one or the other is missing then it’s an uphill battle. And then of course it still takes lots of perspiration.

And yet, everybody can be good at something. It’s just that most people don’t know what it is. In fact most people incorrectly think they are good at a specific thing, when they are not. And this often stops them seeking the thing that they could be good at.

So I was a few days late paying my Telstra phone bill. And then I got a call from a robot and the first thing it asked me was for me to identify myself. I tried to explain that I knew not who the robot was and it rang me, and therefore this was arse about.Then I hung up and then the robot kept ringing back. On and on. Monty Python is alive and well at tech retard-central.

I can see a pattern; what used to give me pleasure does not necessary do so any more. Surfing and soccer are examples. Cycling is heading the same way.

I have finally realized this is a good thing if I just embrace it. It forces me to move on and seek new pleasures. That can’t be a bad thing.

Winter in Sydney is long enough, wet enough and cold enough for me. If you live somewhere worse then you only have yourself to blame, or your parents.

A Cooperative Research Centre (here in Australia) brings together second-rate researchers and second-rate managers with second-rate corporate R&D concepts in order to create third-rate outcomes. Only a government would be silly enough to invest in this proposition.