By some filthy shenanigans, I missed my one and only chance to see the inside of the colosseum.

I mean, I was the only one in the party that had a genuine interest in the subject.

As they say, no good deed goes unpunished.

Inspired by the worst of American culture, aka Inside Out 2, …

Imagine having to tell yourself;

“I’m a good person”

I beseech me, cunt.

But I like the idea of blaming something else, e.g. the little people in your head, for all your issues and actions. It means you never have to take responsibility for yourself.

Great stuff America!

Scene; hipster cafe in the city

Barista: “What are you having today?”

Wounded little chick with stamps all over her: “We’re a we”. Very huffy too.

There I was thinking she would be annoyed with the “today”, as if she changes coffee order each day.

Just for completeness, it was a decaf almond milk latte.

The barista actually apologized but I was left wondering what he was supposed to say …

“What are we having today?”

That’s no good because it includes himself in the drinking.

So it would have to be: “What are youse having today?”

“Wellbeing has been commoditised and is often performative, often presenting a singular, superficial image.”

By singular, I think they mean swings. In Ubud.

It’s a bad translation of an Indonesian portmanteau, which is derived from two loan words from Dutch.

Neuk je

Just think, if they hadn’t named it after the innards it could have been YouBox.

I’ve been to over 20 hospitals. Here are 10 carrybag essentials I never visit a hospital without.

A Bible

A priest’s phone number

A phone

A cherryripe

A handmirror

Spare undies

Ear plugs

Eye mask

Sunscreen

Crocs

If they were serious about GPT they’d introduce typos.

Scene; poolside Ubud, nude Viv, pool egress, little piles of clothes here and there.

“mum, where’s my clothes?”

“Viv, clothes are where you find them”

“fuck off dad”

At what point does it become attractive for Australia to de-federalise?

Think of all that income tax saved. The states can live on stamp duties, mining rents, and excise charges.

They can each charge their own GST if needed. GST is a state based thing in the US, and that works.

We could de-federalise into a euro model and keep the same currency even.

And just think, we wouldn’t have any federal politics to endure, nor a chief scientist.

Thoughts for other chiefs of Australia…

Chief gaming officer

Chief bogan officer

Chief Aboriginal officer

Chief technology Officer

Chief gambling officer

Chief sporting officer

“The name Yakult was coined from jahurto, an Esperanto word meaning yogurt“.

There’s a movement for Australia to get it’s first poet laureate, or possibly they’ll call her a poet lorikeet they jest.

It’s a little bit like the Chinese zoo that painted dogs to look like pandas, no?

But a real vote winner I reckon.

What do you get off you cross a Liberal with a vegetarian?

A libertarian.

There’s a snake in Madagascar that burrows into an ants nest and gorges itself on ants. It gets so fat it can’t get out and is then eaten by the ants.

That’s a good metaphor for humans on this planet.

If you can’t find any absolute purpose for living or dying, then it makes sense to fall back to relative measures, such as doing better than all your peers.

At least these you can measure.

For example, did all your peers make it to Nirvana?

How exactly does it work?

There’s a moment in a nation’s evolution, and only the USA and Australia have had this moment, where you have enough consumption per person that more consumption doesn’t require any economic gains.

It’s like magic. Your trading partners keep sending you shit on credit because they can’t afford for you not to consume.

That’s because there’s this critical point in manufacturing called % utilisation – the actual production over a period compared to the maximum possible production. Below a certain point of utilisation, they lose money. That’s equally true for one factory, and for a whole country full of factories. Which is why we have to keep consuming their shit.

When I say they provide credit, it could be of the type where you print the money and they pretend not to notice. Or they buy your national bonds at a price that far exceeds any reasonable valuation.

Same, same.

In Australia’s case, being a smaller fish, we have had to provide security for this credit. This provision of debt is effectively underwritten by our continued provision of cheap raw materials to our trading partners.

The US just uses its military as security. They sort of promise not to use against their trading partners, at least for now, as long as they keep sending their shit over.

So in Australia, it’s money for nothing and cheques for free. Which is why our dumbarse politicians can be such fuckwits and get away with it. It doesn’t matter how much expense they waste, or how ineffective their investments are, there’s always more to eat.

Ha, so they’re proposing to build high speed railways in Australia so as to meet emissions targets. So they reckon.

For example, the flying of 7.92 million passengers between Melbourne and Sydney in 2023-24 produced about 1.5 million tonnes of CO2 emissions.

But the estimated cost of a relatively low-emissions high-speed railway between these cities is currently about $200b. So by the time they built it that would be a trillion dollars, minimum.

You can get a hell of a lot of very expensive clean & green jet biofuel for a trillion dollars.

Geez those emissions targets are making a few cunning rats very wealthy.

The Northern Territory of Australia now has a minister for Advanced Manufacturing.

Kid you not.

There’s no direct translation in Chinese for “goofy”.

The concept just doesn’t exist.

It’s their Achilles heel.

You don’t need a trillion dollars of military equipment to beat them. You just gotta laugh at them.

Forget amnesia. The readers are believing a lot less than before.

35% to be exact.

I seem to have at least 2 Mygov apps on my phone. I don’t know what they do.

Neither of them ever works and each of them continually asks me for my password to be renewed every time I use them.

Sometimes I have to type a code from a browser into one of the apps to get further in whatever process I am involved with.

It’s always a headfuck and I would prefer to do just about anything else.

Whatever fuckwit designed their security oughta be sentenced to life in the worst prison we can find.

Those big trucks that get around, we call them semis which is short for semi-articulated.

The front part is the “cab” and the rear part is the trailer.

The “articulated” is because they have two or more sections (cab and trailer) connected by a flexible joint.

The semi is because the trailer only has wheels at the back.

So the “semi-articulated” is nonsensical – there is no half articulation going on.

Well there is actually, but it’s the trucker English that’s the culprit.

It strikes me that the Chinese manufacturers, as a rule, follow the edicts of Henry Ford.

That is, make something so cheap that no one can not afford it.

In the solar panel industry that’s what the Chinese have been doing since 2012. Making the same product cheaper and cheaper.

Sure, panels have got more power per panel, but all the consumer cares about is the dollar per watt, which keeps going down. And the thing looks identical from year to year, to the untrained eye.

Where the Chinese and Henry depart though is in the use of debt. Henry just wouldn’t because he thought bankers were wankers.

The Chinese always use debt. However they do so because it’s cheap debt and sometimes even free. That is, their government makes sure it’s available on great terms, repayable at will, zero interest and forgivable if needed.

On those terms even Henry would have been tempted.

The power and mystery of the missing comma(s).

“Hyundai’s hottest electric car yet caught on camera”

Option 1.

Hyundai’s hottest electric car, yet, caught on camera.

The car model is named “yet”. I like that, and yet.

Option 2.

Hyundai’s hottest electric car yet, caught on camera.

They’ve had more than one. But who cares?

Were I am archaeologist I’d focus on plastic waste. No one’s doing it.

There’s this grey-import minivan getting around that’s made by Toyota and it’s called the Alphard.

That’s a portmanteau of alpha and retard. I can’t explain it, but there it is.

The only alternative explanation is that they’ve misspelt aphid. But who’d name a car after a parasite on a rose? Not even the Japs are that crazy.

If I was in the business of making up new words I’d suggest that an Alphard is a Japanese oxymoron.

Having said that, I know a couple of people in the bureaucracy (what they call management) at UTS that think they’re alphas but they are really retards. Most of them really.

So maybe Toyota’s onto something. But I still wouldn’t name an minivan after them.

Just getting this down for the record.

Albert didn’t do much maths and there’s the strong suggestion that his first wife solved all the equations for him.

He wasn’t the only one who came up with an equivalent to E=mc**2. Dozens of scientists came up with that, just read the wiki.

In fact Albert didn’t even write that equation until it had been derived from what he did write by others. He essentially did a “vulture” on them, 40 years after the fact; swooped in and took all the credit.

Albert didn’t think his equations really worked in all the really interesting ways they actually did work e.g. as used to predict the energy released when splitting atoms, quantum effects or the big bang.

Albert urged the US President to build the first atomic bomb after he realised he was wrong about splitting atoms and the energy this would release.

Albert married his cousin after unsuccessfully chasing her daughter. Incest and paedophilia!

Albert left Germany the first time to dodge national conscription when there wasn’t even a war on.

All up, there’s a credible argument to just wipe Albert’s name from the records altogether, all Harvey-like.

It just goes to show you can’t believe anything that is effectively the subjective collective truth, that which is repeated ad nauseam.

Some bloke in Newtown is mourning the loss of verandahs on the shopfronts in Newtown, Sydney.

They were banned and removed in 1908 after a concerted campaign by a bunch of haters.

That’s right, 116 years ago. Seems like haters have always been a thing.

But why would you hate verandas? My guess is they didn’t, but being haters they simply chose something that others liked. Haters…

Can you actually mourn for something that’s been dead for 116 years when you yourself are only 56 years old?

I would call that some new and special form of fuckwittery masquerading as conservatism.

Political bullshit at it’s very best;

“Marles strips medals from Afghanistan war commanders

Opposition defence spokesman Andrew Hastie choked with emotion as he said “our soldiers must tell the truth, and those in leadership must seek it out”.”

Corporate bullshit at it’s very best;

“Earlier this month, a spokesperson at Mt Buller said the decision to close the Victorian field followed not one but two challenging snow seasons in a row. Despite the warm and windy conditions, he was “proud everyone kept striving” throughout the winter period.”

Tools are where you find them.

I’ve decided that Amazon, with their Alexa home assistant, have the perfect tool to identify mental health issues.

In 1941, before WWII, all 32 million American families collectively owned 30m cars. One each effectively.

After the war the number of cars was down to 22m, due to oxidation mainly. They weren’t built to last forever and did not tolerate not being used. Also, obselence was built into design by then, reducing residual value and accelerating write-offs over repairs.

So for a little while, between 1946 and 1950, the car companies could sell everything they built, no matter how many cars that was.

A sales and marketing dream.

Of course you’d build the most expensive cars you could right? Surprisingly not, they mostly went the other way.

You simply can’t underestimate corporate stupidity.

“Plastic recycling is failing to scale anywhere near fast enough and remains a marginal activity in the sector”

Rightly so too. In general, plastics just aren’t suitable for recycling. That’s a chemical problem and there’s no use pretending otherwise.

So you either stop using plastic or get really good at capturing it as waste and sending it to deep landfill, from whence it came.

It’s worth noting that it’s estimated that 78% of all microplastics in the environment are from wear and tear on car tyres in use on vehicles. Not shopping bags that are chucked away.

So those concerned people better stop owning cars.

I expect you can piss on citrus trees because they have had to get used to acidic soil from fruit drop.

These days, when asked what I did my PhD in, I reply “microplastics”.

Recently, someone, it doesn’t matter who, but they are vaguely famous, broke up with their partner.

She had this to say;

“Dan is still my best friend and we have love and respect for each other. Ultimately we decided that in order to be the best parents we can be, we have to live apart.”

You’ll notice that none of that makes sense; best friends and parents that love and respect each other stay together and make great parents. It’s clearly the lies and bullshit of a self-centred person attempting to control the narrative.

Far more interesting though was my use of the singular pronoun “they” in that first paragraph, even though I clearly knew it was a she. It just hadn’t been revealed at that point in my narrative by the “She”.

Funny old language, English. And it’s all good even though I wrote “they are” when it’s clearly singular. Why not “they is”? I demand a Royal Commission.

I guess Dan might be a fella?

Noting that people like her, that probably use exotic and agrammatical personal pronouns are the sort that can’t handle anything out of order, they like the world to magically make their lives a carpet ride, and demand that the gubment fix every botheration that furrows their brows.

I’m pretty sure Dan wasn’t getting any. Probably because of the stress resulting from perceived microplastics in the rescue dog’s brain. So he found it somewhere else.

Dan’s a man!

The federal gubment is committing $4.2 billion to combat domestic violence against women and children in Australia.

They’re going to spend it on legal services for the victims, they say.

That’s $4,200,000,000. Which is a lot of legal fees, you’d have to agree?

They’ll have to also invest in judges and gaols, assuming those legal fees are going to result in a few more prisoners.

Assuming, generously, that each case will cost say $100k in legal fees, then that’s 42,000 extra inmates.

There’s about 10m couples in Australia, with and without children, married and defacto.

So they’re suggesting that about 1 in 200 coupled-up fellas are going to cop it, at tax payers expense.

I’m thinking it might be more effective just to offer those blokes the $100k as a cash incentive not to practise domestic violence.

The alternative to just give the money to the lawyers, as if that will do any good.

If your solution to a problem is the legal system, then you don’t have a solution at all.

The Oxford comma has eluded me, all my life, recently, and right up until yesterday.

Although, to be honest, I always do, which I need to stress, use the Oxford comma regularly, but not always.

I just didn’t know it had a name, was even catalogued as a thing, and that people used it in general conversation.

My latter-life introduction to the nomenclature was due to misadventure, caused by my laziness, and a half-arsed exploration of the limits of chat GPT.

Add they say, no good deed goes unpunished, and nor should it

October 17th is the international day dedicated to celebrating gender-neutral and nonbinary personal pronouns, to recognize and promote the use of pronouns like ze, hir, E, per, xi, ip, thon, heesh, co, um, le, and the singular they.

While these pronouns might seem unfamiliar, the singular “they” has been used in English for over 700 years.

It is claimed by many to be the only gender-neutral pronoun that occurs naturally in the English language. They, not it, Viv.

I’d counter that by noting that I’ve used “it” as a singular gender-neutral pronoun in the past. It might be argued that it was colloquial and not correct. But no less correct than heesh, eh? Familiarity breeds Oxford insemination.

I’m also called “Dr” from time to time by the less educated fraction of the population. What do you call that?

Other gender-neutral pronouns, many of which are more recent innovations, are used by smaller groups of people and often in specific contexts. Like my use of youse as a personal pronoun.

So get over it, Sherlock.

The dumbest ideas involve seawater, microplastics, energy, a patent, exotic pronouns, and/or an app.

Flat chat, as in very busy or right at the limit, is shortened from the Australian expression “flat out chatting”, meaning just the opposite.

My kids as catalysts, they accelerate my perception of the passage of my limited time.

Initially you’re indespensible, then useful, and finally, if you’re lucky, an ornament to nostalgia.

I’d call that bitter sweet

Someone, no one cares who it was, wrote:

“Education is the point at which we decide whether we love the world enough to assume responsibility for it and by the same token save it from the ruin which, except for renewal, except for the coming of the new and young, would be inevitable.”

You ever get that creepy feeling?

I’ve come up with some new food concept as listed below. Can you create some new items like these?

Bake bean pie 

Chicken nugget sausage roll

Chip buttie pastie

Peas in a cone

Chicken sushi wrap

Bacon egg sauce jaffle

Nuggets in a cone with Dutch sauce

Rabbitto rabbit burrito

From Gemini…

“Food Concept Ideas
Based on your creative food concepts, here are some additional ideas:

Main Dishes:
Steak and chips spring roll: A hearty and satisfying snack or meal.
Fish and chips samosa: A twist on the classic British takeaway.
Taco pizza: A fusion of Mexican and Italian flavors.
Sushi burrito: A larger, more filling version of a sushi roll.
Mac and cheese hot dog: A comforting and cheesy street food.
Sides and Snacks:
Pretzel nuggets: A crispy and savory twist on a classic snack.
Sweet potato fries with maple syrup: A healthier and sweeter alternative to regular fries.
Avocado and feta bruschetta bites: A light and refreshing appetizer.
Fried rice balls with teriyaki sauce: A portable and flavorful snack.
Buffalo chicken wings on a stick: A convenient and spicy treat.
Desserts:
Ice cream spring rolls: A sweet and refreshing dessert.
Donut holes with cream cheese frosting: A miniature version of a classic donut.
Chocolate chip cookie dough balls: A gooey and indulgent treat.
Fruit kebabs with yogurt dip: A healthy and refreshing dessert.
Cheesecake bites: A bite-sized version of a classic dessert.
Would you like me to elaborate on any of these ideas or explore other food concepts?”