Getup Australia has around 600,000 members and around the same number of people have used the ABC’s Vote Compass.

What chance they are the same 600,000? That is, social liberals that are economically left leaning, and all living in half a dozen inner city seats just to ensure they have the minimum electoral impact.

Interestingly, today I have tried to eat my way out of a hangover. Sorta worked.

Last night I went to a ‘Females in Engineering’ awards night primarily to meet up with some old friends for drinks afterwards. One was organising the affair because that is the sort of thing you do if you are stuck in academia.

The night was a wonderful flashback on times past. I recall myself, the young student, going to these types of affairs and wanting to get the medal, or get noticed, or even just to be part of the club.

How things have changed. Nowadays, to be part of that club would be my version of hell. Fortunately we had some good drinks later and this morning I resembled a slow motion version of a Parkinson’s sufferer. I have just come good at 4pm and just now I am remembering these details. All good.

A friend on FB let us all know that yesterday was International Female Orgasm Day. And it was World Cat Day too.

Its hard to know where to start with this one.

In order to explain away my rude behaviour to an academic stranger last night my two ‘mates’ suggested to him I have a touch of Asperges syndrome. Fuckers.

In fact I was deliberately rude to the bugger because he represented a distilled version of a whole bunch of things I don’t like. I was having fun at everyone’s expense, so i suppose I will have to cop it sweet.

I have just been drinking with mates, yakking in code on the subject of prostate cancer. One has had it for two years, been right through some agonizing choices on treatments (simply no complete data sets and lots of conflicting advice and side effects), and only told us after it was all done.

Fuck me, bring on the females.

The treatment, by the way, was a bunch of radioactive titanium rice grain sized iotas that stay with him for life – the alternative is the knife with all sorts of subsequent issues related to men’s business.

What to do when your brain has too many thoughts swimming around in it, and these are getting in the way of things you want to achieve?

Well if thinking is your problem then think a little less. But, you say, the thoughts are subconscious and you have no control over them.

Well that’s a little trickier. The female approach is to: 1.Meditate (and other related activities). These act as a sort of dampener that are meant to slow down and calm the mind by attenuating the thoughts, or offering some level of ‘control’ over them. 2. Women also love to read books on the subject – I think the rationale here is that by feeding the conscious mind with information and structure, that some control over the sub-conscious can be achieved. 3. Talk endlessly about their problems and get useless advice off their friends as to what to do about it all.

The male approach is to do one or more of the following: 1. Exercise a lot (helps empty the mind). 2. Drink a lot (further helps empty the mind but also strips away the conscious mind’s gate-keeping role so you can peek directly underneath). 3. Yak to mates in strict code (easier and more fun than reading books but it does depend on the quality of your mates). 4. Categorize one’s thoughts and excise one or more of the troublesome categories once they are described, e.g. lose the girlfriend. 5. Never meditate. 6. Never read a book on the subject because that just introduces more thoughts.

Each to their own, but I wonder if both parties could a learn a little from the other, or whether the brain function is different enough to warrant the totally different approaches?

I have a cousin whose wife writes for the Daily Telegraph. Nice girl but functionality illiterate.

If ASIS is having trouble hiring spies then maybe they oughta employ the asylum seekers. A clutch of birds with one fucking rock, in a great big glass house.

I wonder what is going around the minds of our political head nutters?

Is it the job at any cost? Or is there some genuine social or economic belief structure driving them?

My guess is that years of cartoon-like existence has left them with some vestige of a political philosophy from their youth, a veneer of rationality but with an over-stewed morass of fried white matter underneath which serves no purpose and never could.

My flight today was delayed by a whole hour. The captain announced over the Tannoy that there was a screw loose. Indeed.

But wait there’s more. The Australian Financial Review today says it’s not the NBN, rather it’s (parsing) just Rupert being a grumpy old prick with no imagination and no wife. The myth is waning.

I know you all, and will awhile uphold the unyoked humour of your idleness: yet herein will I imitate the sun, who doth permit the base contagious clouds to smother up his beauty from the world, that, when he please again to be himself, being wanted, he may be more wonder’d at, by breaking through the foul and ugly mists of vapours that did seem to strangle him.

The HR ad for Australia’s spy agency went “iQ + eQ = ASIS”.

Do you reckon they are after liars or fools?

Its just freakin’ embarrassing to see Lycra-clad fat-bellied corporate types ride their bicycles around in groups pretending they are team jockeys. But apparently not to them. In their mind’s eye (love that expression) they are magically transformed into sylph-like leprechauns, all covered in corporate tattoos. If only that marketing power could push those bikes along a little faster than the walking pace they generally puff along at…

If you don’t care and you don’t want to know then you deserve whatever is coming.

If you do care and you sort of want to know but don’t have the wherewithal to figure it out, then I suppose that is just bad luck.

If you care and you can figure it out then get the fuck out of there before its too late.

There are two types of people that buy a house across the road from a pub.Those that think it’s very handy and those that shouldn’t.

Upon leaving my parents ‘farm’ for the last time (they have sold it) Lola was pretending to be sad. It was the order of the day apparently.

I said “Lola, really, are you sad?”

She smiled cheekily and said “not really”

Chip off the old block.

I just rode past the lovely new government flats that have just been built on the site of an older block of government flats.

Its odd, but no matter whatever the era, a government block of flats is instantly distinguishable from any other sort.

It must be key differences in the selection of architects and their work, as well as a different process of monitoring and controlling budgets.

Somewhere in this is a lesson that might provide the key to better government processes me-thinks.

On the surface, I don’t always ‘know’ what I mean but if I dig a bit then I find out there’s some thoughts sculling around on the ocean floor of my mind like some poor angler fish in the dark depths with nowt but a small luminescent light on the end of a stick to keep it amused.

The desire for commitment in a relationship is clear – it’s a support mechanisms for the tough things in life, like having kids. That might be the justification, but I would also argue that for many people the desire to be in a committed relationship is in fact ’emotional’, not rational.

Evolution is a sneaky beast – it takes a whole bunch of environmental factors, parses them in the context of how to best propagate the species, and the distils them down into ’emotions’. Its no mystery that there a hundreds of psychological conditions that end up in ‘abnormal’ sexual behaviour; nature is having us on!

Observations. I observe carefully and catalogue trends. In relationships I have observed that probably more than 90% fail despite an initial sense of commitment. The number might be lower for married couple, but so? Of the couples that survive forever, I see one single correlation; they keep their world ‘constant’. That is, by minimising change they remove the forces that challenge their commitment to each other.

And if individuals in a committed relationships want to actively explore exciting ‘change’ then its illogical for them to think that their committed relationship will survive. And I see the idea of living in a constant world as quite irrational. But I always liked a challenge.

“I just really live in pain I just don’t even know it”

What matters most, the absence of logic, emotion or clarifiers?

The SMH today reveals that Rupert’s reason for attacking Labor is because of the NBN. Open access to it by all service providers, say Netflix, with on-demand content threatens his revenues from Fox cable. He wants Malcolm Turnbull’s cut-back version which won’t properly allow on-demand content.

A universal truth: retards see the problem and not the opportunity.

Maybe Malcolm, if he gets in, should re-neg on the deal and build the full-scale NBN anyway. I sense that Rupert is pretty close to the end of his influence (and life) and all it will take is one push by an enterprising politician to destroy the myth forever.

Jealousy and commitment are, at best, first cousins. One is irrational and the other is just illogical.

Staying at the folk’s place…

My dad farts in the shower. It sounds like the distress call of a beached dolphin.

Some things never change.

I have just been given a copy of ‘Things Bogans Like’, probably on the basis that I would find it amusing. I did.

The book fails to define a bogan, preferring to define the beast by all the things they like.

What is clear though is that well over 90% of Australia’s population sneaks into the category.

My personal definition is that a bogan is anyone that likes watching morning TV.

On the subject of dumb bogan trends, when did a selfie become a photo and not a solo erotic event?

Apparently a onesie outfit refers to the number of articles of clothing required to fully clad a person and not the inferred mental age of the wearer.

However I am not so sure whether the same can be said of the retarded mother that instigates a onesie party for their ten-year old.

I pulled over in the no stopping zone outside my daughter’s school. I was just about to leave the car to go and get her when a copper tapped on the window.

He said I couldn’t stop there and I had to move on or he would book me. I told him I wasn’t stopped and that because I was in the car it was more of a pause.

I pointed out to him that all music players have separate stop and pause buttons, and that parking was just the same.

He looked a little confused, decided I was an idiot and told me to move or else. Geez it was fun.

My daughter’s school is having a trivia night fund-raiser, combining two of my most hated events.

I told them ‘Not a chance. Why don’t you try a barbie down the pub for all the normal people?’

The coven of mothers smote me in their minds and with their eyes. I smiled back.

The further my thinking drifts from mainstream, the more I feel like I am looking at a movie screen and not real-life humanity.

I have been trying to get the Gen-Y-Fish to stop just blurting out his random thoughts as they come into his head. He has a bad habit of voicing these very annoying non sequiturs.

The best I can do in such a short period of stewardship is to suggest that this is ineffective; hoping that this works away in his sub conscious and eventually he becomes aware of the issue and does something about it.

I also gave him a summary of how effective communication works, namely to think carefully before talking, and to ensure whatever is coming out is useful. I note to him that people who randomly ramble also suffer a similar problem to the boy that cried wolf, namely that people only vaguely listen to them on the basis that whatever is coming out at any particular moment is probably rubbish.

Remember this – kids don’t work it out for themselves very quickly, and we can offer them years of short-cuts if we just observe them and open our mouths. Too many people think they are being nice to kids by not ‘criticising’ them because they think such activity would destroy their ‘self-confidence’.

Well why then does the Gen-Y-Fish have such low self-confidence? I smell a rat and that rat is the modern parent’s false justification of the avoidance of conflict and parental hard-work, as well an over-indulgence in re-living and repairing their own childhoods. To put it bluntly – it is weak, lazy and self-centred behaviour.

Would you believe there are still people in this world who think that a steady job equates to job security?

In the modern era any steady job is just one dip in cashflow away from disintegrating.

I explained to the Gen-Y-Fish that any business, be it government, private or loopy, has customers who represent the source of revenue.

The only modern means of maximizing ‘job security’ is to reduce the number of people between yourself and the customers.

Ultimately, by this definition, being the boss or, better still, owning your own company represents the best job security.

Of course your financial security can still be threatened by circumstances, but less so than otherwise.

Personally I think financial security is over-rated; it becomes an excuse to just consume more of the same. However, many of those with inherent job insecurity (even if they don’t know it) simply consume less of the same, so they are no better off.

How about we start ‘anti-months” before all the fools in the Finance sector find themselves in a yearly rotation of mindless fads. I am being nice here.

For Dry-July we can promote Binge-July.

For Movember we can start Smoothember (sounds good that one).

There’s a Febfast. I would do Fat-Feb.

There’s a few competing Octobers but they haven’t caught on yet.

Lent; we can forget about it since they don’t have a marketing budget.