‘I owe you an apology’ is not an apology.

Think … “IOU one apology, to be redeemed only if you are smart to notice that this is not a ‘sorry’ and insist on a real apology.”

Desire is to want and be wanted.

Love is to need and be needed.

Being wanted and needed by the same person at the same time is fairly oxymoronic.

That is, you have either eaten your cake or you haven’t yet.

Us geminis do oxymoronic dichotomy best, and that is only a relative statement. I think I am pretty rubbish myself.

Lola is very distracted this afternoon. All teenagey and reading her kindle.

Getting out of the car I asked “come with me to get the fish and chips”.

Vague shake of head. Nup.

“If the car starts rolling backwards just panic, OK?”

“OK dad….. Huh?”

At 840 am my daughter’s school is deserted. They all get there in the final five minute before 9 when their mothers drop them off.

I recall being very motivated to get to school before 8 am to maximize our footy time. Most of the boys were there before 8. And we all walked to school

How times have changed.

If I had a day to enjoy before the apocalypse arrived then (excluding harrowing moments with family members and all that) I would like to spend my last hours having a beer and a smoke will some old mates. Probably the setting would be somewhere nice and relaxed, like the waterfront hotel in Dili, or the Mandorah Pub in the NT, where we could view the apocalypse as an extra special sunset.

There are no anagrams of cycling. Plenty of angry emails though.

Look what I found…still going surprisingly.

John Furphy the company founder, was the brother of Joseph Furphy – the author of Such is Life. One of my all time favorite books.

Joseph wrote the book in his retirement, at the Furphy engineering works. It is a treatise on life, the universe and everything, set in the context of bullock droving in rural Australian in the 1860’s or thereabouts.

Let me roam where the garbage trucks don’t
Make my communications free of captive electrons and photons
Free me from the entitlements of strangers
Let me furnish the interior of my head as I please
And the outside as well

I have spotted a problem with Australia being a constitutional monarchy and it is this:

The Queen may have a particularity bad dream about, say, Tony Abbott, and wake up the next day and say ‘fuck this’.

Email to whoever is the governor general that morning; “Dear xxxx, I can’t do it any more. You are on your own”.

Our problem is that we have no way of replacing the Queen if she ducks out like this.

We can’t force the poms to replace her with a son or a daughter.

We can’t appoint the governor general as head of state since that would be unconstitutional.

We would be forced to change our constitution to fix the problem and that would take months, possibly years (because we can never agree on such things and have a weird state-by-state requirement to enact these changes).

I am surprised we can live with a head of state that only remains in their position through their own good will and can pull out any time, at a whim.

Whereas we cannot pull out of the deal at a whim, nor can we replace the queen with another if she isn’t doing her job well, or at all.

It’s very ironic that all the Australians in the world can’t build a republic but our Queen can, with a single email.

[Scene: on the day of the apocalypse. White horses, black clouds and general Hollywood mayhem]

God: Bow before me son and I am your god.
Me: Yeah sure, and what are you the god of?
God: I am just God. God of everything.
Me: Sure, sure. Then who is your god?

Genius can be found in the oddest places.

I just figured out that penis rooms is an anagram of spoonerism. But nox linging swim its.

[scene: riding past the new Haberfield UTS rowing club, which is being built in Iron Cove. The builders are setup on one side of the path, and the building site is on the other. The path is combined walking/running/cycling/commuting effort and is very heavily used. The builders, rather than build a bridge over the path, have erected ‘Dismount from bike’ signs, which the cyclists happily ignore]

Incensed mother: Didn’t you see the sign
Me: What sign?
Incensed mother: The one that says you have to dismount from your bike.
Me: Look love, I can’t read every sign on the path
Incensed: It says you have to dismount
Me: Who says? It isn’t an official council sign (now looking at the sign)
Incensed Mother: You are endangering people’s lives by riding through here
Me: I don’t think so – I am riding through here at walking pace you know. No real difference at all
Incensed Mother: I have half a mind to call the cops to see what they would say
Me: You haven’t been listening have you? FYI, what you just said wasn’t English
Incensed Mother: If everyone thought like you there would be chaos in the world
Me: There is. If everyone thought like you love, life wouldn’t be worth living

Many, many people think that looks are the most important aspect of attraction between two people. I disagree.

There are supposedly seven (or so) intelligences (visual-spatial, bodily-kinesthetic, musical, interpersonal, intrapersonal, linguistic, logical-mathematical) and similarly I believe there are seven factors in interpersonal attractiveness.

The obvious one is Physical Attractiveness, made up of symmetry, feature type and distribution, body type and all the rest. Over time, the social agreement on what is physically attractive does change with fashion, so this is a bit of a moving feast. But in all eras certain aspects remain physically attractive (like symmetry of the face).

The less obvious dimensions of attractiveness are:

Intelligence – a sum of the seven intelligences above. There is no absolute scale here, but a person is typically less attracted to someone further away on this scale. At least in the context of looking for a mate (as opposed to a root).

Chemistry – this I believe is a proxy for a good genetic match, which some believe is a mix of physical appearance, pheromones and god knows what else. Its the collection of messages that makes one believe great offspring will result. This is mostly a result of subconscious thought processing.

Socio-match – when you drop someone new into your pond, i.e. your circle of family and friends, the pond can either love them or hate them. If they hate them this is like an biological antibody attack to an invader. The more attractive people to you are the ones that best fit into your circle.

Time and life – life is quite long and we are much more comfortable spending it with people that like doing similar things. And I don’t mean the odd trip overseas; I mean on a daily and weekly basis does your mate prefer to work all weekend in order to keep the house clean and tidy, or say ‘bugger that’ and spend the time down the pub instead. There is a dimension to attractiveness that is time well spent, together.

Greed – money, power and status; we all feel comfortable with a certain level of these in ourselves or a mate. It is often joked (by men) that all women are gold-diggers; this not true. Some women are gold diggers and I think they are a sub-set of the physically attractive minority with weaknesses in the other attractiveness dimensions.

Bad habits – we all have habits that are deemed on the negative side of ‘good’. From nose picking to snoring, laziness, a liking of junk food, a lack of empathy or awareness, loudness; no one gets away without developing what can be grating habits (to someone else). On this dimensions, some people simply don’t see another’s bad habits and these are then NOT an issue. This is an odd, and sort of ‘in the negative’, attractiveness – -a natural immunity to the bad habits of another.

When you add it all up, the seven dimensions of attractiveness give us the ‘vibe’ – the thing that makes each of us more or less attracted to someone else.

Strengths is some area seem to automatically lead to weaknesses in other areas, and the end result is that we are mostly, all of us, equally attractive enough to some others. Which is why there are more than 7 billion people on the planet. An example of this effect can be seen at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B6ztq8nBfBU

The key message here is that attractiveness is subjective and relative, and not absolute. And when all seven dimensions are tallied the spread isn’t that great.

There is a flaw in current thinking that physical attractiveness trumps all others driven primarily by the marketing and media industries. But most smart men, by the time they are thirty or so, know that the most attractive women are the less physically attractive (in general) because they are far more attractive in the other six dimensions. This simply because these other dimensions have been developed. Of course there are exceptions to the rule (there always is) but so?

This morning the Herald taught me that:

The queen is out of cash. She still has a few assets though.

A general has been made governor general. Double dissolution anyone?

Abbott is going after what is left of the unions. But not the cartels of course.

Age is not a character flaw and youth is not an achievement. That from a violinist.

It’s hard to police one-punch laws. For example, someone might throw two.

Most people don’t want sharks killed. A poll in western Sydney.

The rest of the world barely exists. Except for Nigella and Jude.

The stock market did something or other.

There is a ‘money’ section for the sort of people I really don’t like.

Sport is more important than all of the above. Naturally!

The oceans are becomings deserts. Death by a thousand plates.

There’s a lot to be said for not saying too much, if you don’t feel like it.

There, I’ve said too much.

Cephalectomy.

Nola across the road is ninety this year.

She is one of the most amazing people that I have ever met. She refuses ever to see the negative in a situation, no matter how dire, or how trivial.

I have no idea how she does this. Like Bradman she is a one-off freak, never to be repeated. Right now she is on morphine for an arthritic back and she still won’t complain or stop smiling.

I do wonder though if she has put herself at a slight disadvantage in life by not creating the emotions that drive change?

Time weights for nobody.

What a great day to hold the Australian king hit championships, eh? To be held at Cronulla. The winner gets the O’Farrell trophy and an OAM.

I was thinking there could be different events with various categories of king hit targets. Like asylum seekers, north shore private school types, random bogans, lebs, photographers, bouncers and even cyclists.

Is there even an expression in Italian for ‘nanny state’?

A trip to Luna Park today was enlightening.

The last time I was there was over thirty years ago.

It’s like it’s been frozen in time. Not a thing has changed except…

Now we have nanny state madness. Safety concerns gone mad. 10 minutes to start a ride while they do whatever they do.

On top of that, the workers are all part time gen-y’s. No care despite the mandated responsibility.

A perfect storm; I really feel sorry for the kids today. ‘Just for fun’ my arse!

I am all  responsibility and no care.

Irony is alive and well in the commentary section of the Australian today…

So the media jumped onto Sydney’s recent spate of king hit deaths and injuries and blew it up.

They pretty much gave all the nutters a ‘what to’ and a ‘how to’ guide. Of course the frequency of reportable events increased.

Our premier did nothing until he panicked and made up some policy on the run; that is to close the pubs and clubs at 1am. Thereby screwing a lot of businesses and our nightly entertainment

Of course every king hit was after 1 am by, or at, people that got drunk after 1 am. Nothing to do with the drugs either.

Any good old-school politician would have called a forum of interested parties and drawn the whole thing out and made it so boring that the media eventually lost interest. And then they would have done nothing. Or better still have used the cover to implement some dodgy provisions desired by the AHA.

Now that the media has flexed its muscles my prediction is that cycling deaths will be next. God knows what the premier’s over reaction will be this time. Probably he will ban cycling during peak hour.

It’s a Friday night. It’s lightly raining and slippery on the roads. Everyone is frantic and driving like shit. Half of them are on their phone while they drive.

It’s hell on wheels for one such as I who cycles. One fellow cyclist has already bitten the dust tonight just ahead of me. RIP brother.

I could have just gone to the pub and waited for Saturday but I blew my load last night.

Cycle craft to the rescue.

I always said an Audi TT is a hairdresser’s car.

Assuming that most (business) leaders are lazy but articulate frauds, we can then ask ‘what makes a great leader?’

I have meet the odd character who appears like the rest but, under severe organizational pressure, doesn’t panic.

Further, they understand their business environment, listen to the music and make the big calls when they have to be made. That is, they correctly bet the farm when there is no choice.

These people are as rare as hen’s teeth.

Another trait of leadership that should be well learned is delegation.

Everything should be delegated, even things that you are better at than everyone else.

If you practice doing nothing you will automatically rise to the top.

Especially if your work vacuum is then filled with good humor, vaguely intelligent contributions to strategy meetings, and tons of networking.

The troops will take care of themselves so long as you make sure your delegates hire and fire aggressively and build a meritocracy.

Perfume, a blood substitute that smells nice and a nasal decongestant.

I am raising an alchemist.

I noticed two Double Bay dames parking their Audi near Danks Street (arguably the interior accessories capital of Sydney).

They were out with their tape measure, lining up their car.

Curious, I looked into the matter and this is what I found…

I sent an email to a mate in the gub’ment in which I swore and I swear I did not make up this response:

“This notice advises that your email to [deleted]@austrade.gov.au was captured by Austrade’s email protection system and was not delivered. The profanity filter checks the contents of the email message and any attachments, and word/s in your message were deemed inappropriate.

Please amend your message and resend if required.

Please do not respond to this advisory as this mailbox is not monitored.”

Pain shared is pain diminished, according to some.

I suspect it is just pain, multiplied.

But we can’t ignore the fact the ‘fellow traveler’ effect may be quite an effective placebo.

But as I told Lola ‘Go and practice on the cat – I am not a crash test dummy’.

One aspect of the art of leadership is knowing that panic simply accelerates the the rush to the inevitable.

She who panics last, laughs last.

I believe that it’s really worth while inserting a lucidity pause into your sentience prior to asserting anger.

Be the change that I wish to see in the world.

Be the change you wish to see in the world.

What starts out as a great insight is debased into a Facebook cliche.

Unless of course the change that you want to see is is everyone with a cliched Facebook posting.

Seriously though, because our emotions are being continuously manipulated by sophisticated marketing campaigns we are becoming immune to the message. Any message

Its called survival.

A lot of people are asking me for the ‘narrative’ these days on subjects that I didn’t even know had one.

I think it’s hipster-speak for the ‘vibe of the thing’, derived from marketing types over-doing the party drugs in the company of their barista mates.

It has no actual meaning that is related to its vernacular currency. The bard would have been proud.

However it’s use is becoming uncool literally seconds after it emerged from the Surry Hills (or maybe that was Brooklyn) slime because of its instant over-use by all sorts of less than super-cool suburban tree-people.

For prayer, I wonder how many ways there are to point to Mecca?

Considering that the earth is an eccentric sphere you could start out in any direction in a linear fashion and eventually get there.

The Muslims do have a Quibla compass but that seems a little agricultural for my liking.

Let’s hope there is an app which uses one’s GPS position to give the exact direction of the shortest overland route (post note; there are a few but they give worryingly different answers).

The smartphone selfie is now the subject of essays, blogs and even a selfie olympics (trade mark ignored, I am sure).

Technically, a selfie is a relatively low resolution image taken at no more than an arm’s length away (unless it’s a mirror rebound effort) by a low-tech (front-facing) fixed focus lens and sensor (combined, a camera). It is a technical challenge to make this work, and an art form in itself.

One saving grace is that users can actually see the image they are about to take and adjust the positioning and lighting accordingly.

This is done by moving the body and arm simultaneously, relative to the surroundings and light sources. This requires a combination of both artistic/aesthetic and kinaesthetic intelligences; possibly one of the few activities that uses just these two.

Given this, I think the art form that is the selfie is much under-appreciated. Training the use of these two rarely co-joined intelligences might have amazing beneficial side effects. I have no idea what these might be though.

Images below; mirror rebound (controversial whether this is a true selfie), true selfie, selfie plus extra, selfie failure, selfie with unsuspecting bystander.

What’s at the end of the bridge? Or, more precisely, who is under it?

I just calculated that I can buy 200 grams of smoked salmon at Aldi (near my office) using the proceeds of about two minutes of my work compensation.

My grandkids will not believe this.

There is nothing to get…

A supercritical fluid is a dense gas which has enough short range molecular interactions to be a solvent.

Most lay scientists accept stuff like this simply because they are familiar with it – that is, it is ‘knowledge’.

A higher level of ‘understanding’ is an abstraction, via linear thinking, to another level of ‘knowledge’ (e.g. in the case of a supercritical fluid, a thermodynamic model of the molecular interactions).

But there are always more levels one can go to, e.g. statistical thermodynamic model, or a quantum level approach.

But by going to these deeper levels all one is doing is taking the mystery to another level where one simply have to accept another bunch of assumptions as truths.

There is no end point

Therefore its easier to think of it in the Newtonian scale – i.e. a supercritical fluid is a dense gas which has enough short range interactions to be a solvent.

Its a two-edged sword, is jealousy.

On one hand it is a display of love.

And on the other it’s a display of fear.

As with all emotions the trick is not to delete it, but also not to let it delete you.

I also think it is important not, through your jealousy, to set a higher standard of behavior than you practice yourself. The more jealous someone is by nature, the more they break this rule.

Jealousy is like disappointment – the best way to deal with it is to slowly roast it, juice it up, and then eat it slowly, savoring ever mouthful until it’s gone.

I just had a realization that this blog is my notes for the book that I am going to write one day.

The working title is the ‘A Philosophy of Life, the Universe and Everything’.

That way I can fulfill the old Czech proverb and go to my grave a content person.

When someone gets cross with a friend or relative what they are doing is a bit of Pavlovian training (reference to Pavlov’s Dogs).

You can teach a dog to sit and lie and wait by getting cross with it (amongst other things), but you shouldn’t do it with people.

If you try this on people that you are supposed to love then you are really just treating them like dogs.

You might get your way, and your life might be a tad easier. But there is a lot to lose in this approach.

What you will find is the that obedient person has to kill something inside of themselves to quell the anger. And that thing is somewhere in the bit of the mind that allows them to love; to love you and to love themselves.

My mum has been a very linear thinker.

I think she suffered some childhood psycho-traumas and reacted by adopting a Socratic view on life and mind methodologies.

She very much over-did it and it has been sort of painful to be brought up by someone who is so one-sided, and rabidly so.

However, in her mid-seventies there are signs that, finally, the left brain linear domination is weakening. She is letting go of the forced linear disciplines.

And she is a much nicer person for it too.

I guess you could say that this blog is a collection of linear-thinking written communications based upon a diverse set of non-linear thoughts and accompanied by a group of non-linear photos that are designed to lead the linear viewer to the more insightful constellation of non-linear positions.

What is abstract thinking? Well you would think (in a very linear fashion) that abstract thinking would come out of an abstract brain, which has been described to me as non-linear and sometimes non-verbal and also something that I display in bucket loads.

Well most thinking is non-verbal except for the most plodding of the plodders who have to spell it out step by step. So I will pass over this one.

I found (through Google) that linear thinking is ‘a process of thought following known cycles or step-by-step progression where a response to a step must be elicited before another step is taken’. The Socratic method follows on from this.

I also found that non-linear thinking is ‘human thought characterized by expansion in multiple directions, rather than in one direction, and based on the concept that there are multiple starting points from which one can apply logic to a problem’. This means nothing to me (no joke intended) other than a restatement of the question. All this describes is the everyday set of complex problems that we face and the exact reason why linear thinking was invented; that is to have a uniform and agreed method of making decisions that can be effectively communicated between different people.

My view is that all people have non-linear thinking going on; this is because the brain is a huge non-linear computer. Dreams are a clear example of non-linear thinking that we all have.

I recently ran into a cousin of mine having a quiet smoke after a busy day – he was deep in contemplation, a form of less-conscious non-linear thinking, and when I interrupted him and asked what was on his mind he had already forgotten because he has no mechanism to link his ‘daily’ brain with the guts of his brain.

The difference between the majority and the minority (of people) is that the former do not have a conscious manifold connecting their everyday more-linear GUI brain to their non-linear core. Their loss.

The trick of course is to run both linear and non-linear processes simultaneously and have your own Rosetta Stone so that there is a very efficient and effective transfer of information between the two. I solve problems in both parts of my brains but it is far more effective to dress up the chook in linear feathers (i.e. pretend the thought came solely from linear thinking) before trying to flog it to the general public.

Except of course if you are an artiste. Then you can do what the hell you like and sometimes even pretend to have a linear part of your brain when, for example, discussing why a piece of art is a social commentary on some matter or other.

One problem with our education systems is that they almost entirely focus on teaching the ‘non-natural’ linear thinking approaches to such an extent that many people come out of school with a disregard for their non-linear functions. The non-linear part of the brain is not exercised or given nutrition and we end up with a bunch of people who make all their decisions with their linear GUI brain. Think of the single Sydney girls with their lists of things they want to have in a partner. The disconnection between the real non-linear core and the artificial (but very useful) linear GUI has to lead a bunch of the psychological issues that we see in society these days.

And after that little discourse on non-linear and abstract thinking and brains I suppose I can see why someone might think that my brain is abstract. Abstract not in it’s internal workings (but probably so) but in its appearance to others. I try to look linear (except in this ‘hidden’ blog where I couldn’t give a rat’s) but you can’t fool all the people.

Looking through my archives I note that I started taking photos when I got my first digital camera in 2002 or so. Back then it was a means to keep me busy during extended travelling holidays; I get bored easily.

In 2006 it looks like I got my first smartish phone with a camera in it. At that time I started taking daily pictures with an active editing and filtering (of the good from the bad) process.

Which means I have been a ‘photographer’ for 8 years or so.

I can now flip through 8 years of photos and, because of the high frequency of effort, I have a visual mud-map which triggers recall of the whole time-frame (or at least the bits worth capturing). This is pretty handy to say the least.

For almost a year now I have been pairing photos with blog entries. Initially I dug back into my back catalog of entries but now I pretty much exclusively use new images that I take around the same time as the blog entry. Which means I have to match the frequency of blog entries with good and relevant photos.

Writing the blog has taken ‘pressure’ off me to take great photos since my focus is on the written word and the image is there simply to engage the appropriate part of the brain that is not usually engaged during reading and contemplation. I do this pretty much subconsciously or in a Gestaltian fashion; I don’t over-think it – I go with gut instinct.

I think that the photos have got better since they have become a second priority, again because I am not over-thinking them and just going with my gut.

One of my skills that I don’t use is that I absolutely know how software engineers think.

To wit, I can manouevre around any software with ease simply by guessing how the fuckers were thinking when they wrote the stuff. I do this without effort.

Just very occasionally you see the hand of a sane manager that can control the buggers and enforce their will on them. In these cases the software is odd.

Apple is an example. Which is why I avoid Apple products; they force me to think and learn.

Life isn’t bigger than you and you are me. This I haven’t forgotten.

Situation: I still have to work to eat. Well sort of and mostly and kind of.

Complication: I am finding it harder and harder to get interested in work. There are just so many other things that I find more interesting.

Resolution:By the end of this year I need to figure out how I can spend my days thinking, writing and discussing matters of interest with interesting people.

Now there’s a challenge.

This from wiki ‘The islands saw no more Europeans until missionaries arrived from England in 1821. Christianity quickly took hold in the culture and many islanders continue to be Christian believers today.’

I wonder how and why the missionaries could work their magic so quickly? This I will have to investigate. Thoughtfully Amazon has just provided my Kindle with this title for the grand total of 93 cents, ‘Missionary Methods: St. Paul’s or Ours?’

On my way.

Maybe the ancient gods were just people with a genetic abnormality that left them with an abundance of stem cells in all their cell tissues, making them immortal (except to accidents and predation).

The early homo sapiens probably ate them to gain their mojo. Just like the fairies in True Blood.

After watching all the little Ned Kelly’s in Surry Hills for a couple of years I belatedly discover that they are Brooklyn Hipsters.

Just about every barista and waiter sports a long beard, short hair, black horn rimmed glasses, tight jeans usually rolled up at the bottom and worn slightly low, with individualism expressed through the personal choice of vintage shirts or T’s. They mostly commute via single speed pushies.

According to the Americans this movement started in Brooklyn. Maybe it did but these days there are enough people everywhere for most to believe that they are at the epicenter of all things cultural.

I suppose that for our hipsters it just doesn’t matter which pack they follow or where the movement came from. They are predisposed to conform anyway so they would not be embarrassed by not being at the center of their own universe.

Hydras are a genus of simple, freshwater animals that do not undergo senescence, and, as such, are biologically immortal.

Many animals have one or more tissues that are self-renewing, e.g. the skin of humans. These tissues consist of stem cells with a large or indefinite capacity for cell division. In humans only some of our bits have this stem cell driven renewal capacity whereas in hydras all tissues are self-renewing, that is all of their cells are part of one or another stem cell system.

It would appear to me that population control is taken care of by evolution. Birth, death, accidents, starvation and predators – all these things must be balanced to allow for short-term and long-term variations and stability in population control and survival.

A small handful of organisms, like the hydras, go for the rather eccentric solution to this set of kinetic equations, i.e. extremely long life. Probably because they have an unusual set of kinetic inputs (e.g. unlimited food or an ability to hibernate, no predators – not even themselves, a choice of sexual and asexual reproduction, etc).

The ‘thermodynamic’ driving forces behind the kinetic solutions for all organisms on this planet must be the same, i.e. abstracted and closed-system limiting cases of the physical thermodynamic laws of enthalpy and entropy.

(Therefore the governing equations for life of each organism are like a set of Fokker-Plank equations).

Humans, of course, are trying to figure out how hydras do it in order to copy them. I can guarantee you that if we are successful then our goose is cooked on this planet.

The latest word in my silly attempt to catch up with the bard; peppernaut.

I have no idea what it means but I like the sound of it.

A friend has suggested that it describes men who have gone through male menopause and have no sperm left. I like that.

The manufacturing incumbents see the fourth industrial revolution as automated customer-driven product customization in their factories. This is really the industrial revolution 3.b, improved by IT, in order to reduce costs and expand product ranges.

I see a fork in the path here where end-customers attempt to cut out the manufacturers altogether. That is, design and fabrication occurs anywhere and the machines to do so can be self-replicating. This is the true industrial revolution 4.0.

Let’s label the industrial revolution 4.0 as distributed ‘complex’ fabrication, in order to differentiate it from pre-industrial revolution distributed ‘crafty’ fabrication.

I feel an essay coming on.

Found on an Otago farm.

The current IT age in the west (apparently, and according to Forbes) is a people-based and knowledge-based economy which emphasizes social intelligence.

This supposedly gives women a natural advantage over men. Thus it also drives feelings of emasculation amongst the latter, which was previously (until this hypothesis was postulated) being erroneously attributed to the action of feminists (wtf?).

But only in America and also ignoring the data, such as the glass ceiling in corporations and partnerships. And that they are hundreds of other potential hypotheses. Plus there is no data that demonstrates that there is an uptick in the feeling of emasculation.

Any sense of the dumbing down of public discourse in America and the west?

I have just had two depressing discussions with two old mates, one male and one female.

It appears that people get boring, not sex. That is, they are both still very interested in sex but just not with each other.

Bugger Viagra and Lybrido, all we need is a sexual amnesia pill to sort this one out.

There are differences between equality and fairness. I prefer the sound of the latter since it is harder to argue against.

I wonder if FDR called called his time at Camp David a ‘retreat’. I doubt it.

To survive and enjoy you have to be either an optimist or an idiot.

The state does not see. People may be citizens. Commodities are consumed. Survive, if you can.

Just visited Steampunk HQ. It’s either reality denial or art or both.

I repeat it when I hate myself.

I am reading ‘what happened to Goldman Sachs’ by Steven C. Mandis, an insider’s view of drift in  organizational culture.

So far my take home message is that these guys can have their money and (self scaffolded) status; they lead no life that I recognize.

It’s a pretty conservative organization so they don’t even do the rich bad boy thing in New York. Poor bastards.

Accorded to Alexander Tytler from the 1700’s but tracked back to H. W. Prentis in 1943.

“The average age of the world’s greatest civilizations from the beginning of history has been about 200 years. During those 200 years, these nations always progressed through the following sequence: From bondage to spiritual faith; From spiritual faith to great courage; From courage to liberty; From liberty to abundance; From abundance to selfishness; From selfishness to complacency; From complacency to apathy; From apathy to dependence; From dependence back into bondage.”

Where are we now?

I now wish that I had always kept a written journal. They are well worth the investment of time.

I particularly dislike Queenstown, NZ.

Take a beautiful spot and dump a Darling Harbour onto it. If you can imagine that, you have Queenstown.

All it has is mindless and pointless consumption of food, alcohol, clothes, household decorative items, and adventure experiences, complete with tourists and backpackers from the world over. And that’s it.

Hell on earth. And back again.

Advice to Maria at 22:

Don’t waste too much time wondering how you might live your life because you don’t have that much time to waste.

Maria has fallen far from the tree, values-wise, so she will need to spend a decade adjusting to her own reality.

But that isn’t really time lost for someone with a pure heart.

Gates that never close
A community that never meets
Fears that never abate
The gated community

The noun declarative has one sense;
a mood that represents the act or state as an objective fact.

We the it’s do declare.

Conversation today: supposedly there is an anti-correlation between mental illness and the belief that one can mold the world to one’s own view or ambition.

That is, the unbalanced are defenseless against the reality that they perceive. Whereas the well-adjusted simply change any realities that they don’t like.

Some marketing lies are outrageously annoying and some are simply funny.

This has no punch line. But I just caught my first barracuda, out on the Foveaux strait. Exciting.

Fourteen in and fourteen out but at least it’s not raining.

‘Food supplement’ is an oxymoron.

Truth /truːθ/ (noun); There is no beauty in knowledge but your faith may deny this.

Every mouthful of water that we drink has a least one molecule of water that passed through Julius Caesar.

Lend me your ears and your eyes. So long as you are listening I fear not the passage of the message.

From here to there, or there to here.

What do you call a hand-brake that is foot operated?

No, not a foot brake. That term is reserved for your main brake.

It’s a foot operated hand-brake.

Or in German the fuß-feststellbremse betätigt.

I think there needs to be a few insertions into the marriage vows just before the ‘so long as you both shall live’ bit.

One outlawing all acts of hostility.

A second pointing out that the ideals just sprouted by the priest/celebrant are guidelines (lassie).

And an explicit  acknowledgment that neither party has any requirement to freeze their world view at the time of the wedding.

Maybe a sunset clause could be added to the government contract where at, say, fixed 7 year intervals, either party has the right to discontinue the contract with one months notice.

That would make the divorce process a lot less traumatic but also force people to wait until the divorce windows was open, thus enforcing a review period.

Of course you would have to modify the vows to ‘… as long you as you both shall live or while the marriage contract is in force’. Not quite as romantic, that.

I just listened to a story told by women about women.

The consensus was that daughter-in-laws and mothers invariably end up competing for control of the husband/son.

I suggested that the primary problem was women trying to control men.

Icy stares all round.

All you have to do to get this synthetic lifestyle is wander into the shop and buy something.  Easy really!

Heaven on earth today.

St Clair beach, Dunedin. The salt water ocean pool is heated to 28 degrees!

Other than that it’s just like Sydney without the people or traffic, but it’s winter in summer.

It might be worth the trade off.

The ad up the road says ‘KFC opposite the Thai’.

Just lately I have been carefully observing old people, ones that I know.

Very few seem to enjoy life past 75 or 80. Around this age many also seem to lose a grip on their ameliorating social skills and revert closer to their core prejudices and characters.

I have been told by a psychologist that the best way to find out what a person will be like once the social veneer has been removed in old age is to get them very drunk, and observe.

Something to look forward to!

I have found that the best way to get through to climate change denialists is to point out that their insurance companies are factoring climate change into all their future planning and current pricing.

For some reason this gets through to all but the thickest flat earthers.

Is there anything worse than a ungracious host?