Never get between an academic and a dollar.

friends and lovers
I know you well
and will awhile uphold
the unyoked humour of your
idleness
regrets
forgets
someone else’s life
it is all really going to end

In the old days one could get past any security in the world simply by carrying a clipboard and adopting a busy attitude.

Today the trick is to wear a plastic badge (backwards), a big Bluetooth headset, a polo shirt and the self-same busy attitude.

Fear and prayer. Fist and glove.

Is Julia Gillard the worst prime minister we have ever had? I think so, at least in my tenure.

Today she unexpectedly lobs in a new policy, via press release, that hundreds of millions of dollars of university funding is going to be diverted to our schools.

‘For the benefit of the kiddies’ she says.

I would really like to see a more factually supported argument as to why, in a relative sense, education funding is skewed unreasonably towards the tertiary level. It is not obvious to me.

And I am very, very unsure about the benefits of the new federal primary school curriculum, with its focus on keeping our national standards up with the tiger mums of Asia.

And why doesn’t this government ever learn that they can’t just announce major policy without months of behind the scenes consensus efforts? By lobbing policy as they do, the losers (and their are always losers to any new policy) simply get angry and vocal. The media has a field day.  And the opposition, shutting their collective mouths, will laugh all the way to the bank.

Although I should note that the opposition did open their mouths last week to announce their ‘NBN-lite’. Sweet be-Jesus, the other side of politics is just as bad…!

I am hoping that when they get in, someone old and wise just says to them ‘no new policies – just say and do nothing and you will get re-elected’. Maybe it will be more fun if they go the ‘Julia’.

I have been at it for ten years now, and it would be fair to say that in Australian gyms, women are far less courteous than men.

Today, an older woman asked for a machine back because unbeknownst to me she was using both machines (in her mind).

There was not a towel to claim ownership, nor any recognition that it is probably bad manners to hog two machines in a crowded gym.

Now, a statement like that is a statement of well-considered and direct opinion, but it could be construed as sexist or worst.

It is not, but the fear of such claims probably mean that these sorts of observations are not noted nor feedback given, and problems are not resolved.

Whadya?

I have just been aurally assaulted by a Hyundai. You know, the noise that tells you that you have just turned off the ignition but the thing is still in reverse. Well bugger me, I almost panicked, the noise was so offensive.

There goes any Korean auto purchases.

My BMW sounds like a U-boat about to dive. It must be some sort of German joke. Or not.

I like the soft chimes that the Japanese propagate. But I wonder why they chime inside the car when you reverse? Surely it’s others (on the pavement) that have no idea that you are reversing.

I must take note as to what the Americans do when I am next over there.

The ideal situation is as per my Subaru where I have managed to fuck the chimes altogether. Sweet silence. I may just have to keep that car forever.

Riding through the Haymarket, daily on the tram tracks, I just love the ‘Chinese Dodge’.

For some reason the Chinese simply refuse to look before walking across the tram tracks.

I am not sure why but its very odd. Occasionally they get hit by flying cyclists, and sometimes even a tram.

You would think the price of failure might focus their attention on the odd prophylactic head-turn.

I have tasked myself to stop and do a survey one day. I will report back.

The one issue with riding is that I have thoughts and I can’t very well stop to blog them.

Hence, I make up mnemonics like ‘Collateral Lactic’ to capture my gems.

Sometimes I like the mnemonics more than the thoughts 🙂

Flying down Lillyfield Road on the limit.

The nice bloke in the car behind me draws even to tell me I have been averaging 50 km/h, and says ‘well done’.

Little does he know that my body, the vessel, is a boiling cauldron of lactic acid.

When they started promoting private school participation as part of the culture wars, I bet you the coalition had no idea that traffic congestion would be the price to pay.

It is school holidays and the roads are magically clear.

It doesn’t worry me, I am on my pushie, as ever. Nor do the culture wars worry me – a pox on everyone silly enough to buy into this shit.

How about Australian Class? Or just classy? Our just leave out the superlatives altogether because we aren’t insecure?

We saw her 25th win yesterday, me and Lola. Through the fence at Randwick, with thousands of others.

It’s wonderful to see a horse that good. And to forget all the media rubbish that obscures the pure pleasure.

It’s way too easy to blame the neighbors for all that goes astray. She almost blamed the aphids on the neighbors. Fortunately, she caught herself and had a laugh.

Racism works in much the same way.

If you run out of bedroom interest then what you have is a friend. Or not.

Is there anything less interesting than sex after sex? Just wait 5 minutes for God’s sake.

Once you sift out the suburban and bush efforts, and delve into modern poetry, all abstract and minimalist, it’s very hard to detect the good from the innocent. It would take years to detect the subtleties. And I do not have years.

Nothing gives it away more than thin and tight lips, contracted through a lifetime of fear and loathing.

Waiting at international airport for OS guests to arrive. An inane waste of time.Surely the fools could come up with another way to extract money off us, and keep us occupied. Maybe a TAB.

Unfortunately thought bubbles often lead to speech bubbles.

Filling the vege chiller drawer up with beer. Geez

There is an art to arranging flowers. And I don’t have it.

The 5 all-time worst inventions:

The shopping trolley
The splade
The fondue set
The CD cover
The steam mop
Honourable mention – the wine bottle pump

How is it that we put up with shopping trolleys with club-wheels or that are virtually impossible to steer once outside the smooth confines of the supermarket floors, i.e. in and on the way to the car park? We know that this is not a serious technology challenge. Supermarkets, you need to concentrate on the customer experience! Smart trolleys anyone?

The splade (or spork or spoves or splayds) was an attempt to merge a fork with a knife AND a spoon. It’s a great example of combining the worst features of all elements. However some great marketing to consumers (like my mother) meant that plenty of kids managed to pierce their cheeks with these things while gobbling their ice cream. I still have a good chuckle when someone whips out the splades at a dinner party. Embarrassingly the splade was invented in Sydney.

The fondue set is a classic example of the ‘use once and box forever’ consumer problem. Its appealing in a ‘Peter Sellers’ sort of way to imagine a nude chocolate fondue party, but the reality is a sticky mess with hours of cleaning up for the host. Some years after boxing, and after the capital loss has been emotionally accepted as a reality, these things end up as unwanted garage sale items.

I once saw an article highlighting that Philips was throwing a 20th anniversary bash for the invention of the CD cover. Really! Was there ever another piece of consumer technology less fit for purpose? In the days when I still had CDs I did not have a single cover that was not chipped or broken, and with the little bit in the middle stretched to the point of not holding the CD in its place. And didn’t we love trying to get the sleeve out of the cover for a read?

The steam mop simply does nothing. Never did. Despite this most people think that it really should. Cheap marketing campaigns always find hopeful cleaners looking for a short cut.

The wine pump (and associated ‘corks’) is supposed to suck out the air and thereby seal a wine bottle between uses. The partial pressure in a wine bottle created by a wine pump is pretty minimal although it just might be enough to stop air flow, if it stays sealed. But do you trust one enough to lay the bottle on its side in a fridge? I have always thought it more advisable just to finish the bottle.

Many times I have seen people subconsciously engineer themselves into a life crisis. Done it myself.

It sure beats genuine courage.

The new Indian management that have taken over at the local supermarket clearly don’t understand the concept of loss-leaders. Deleting all non profitable stock items is such first-order thinking. Pretty soon they will have 5 items and 50 customers.

An opportunity for learning algorithms I suspect. It’s too complex a task to leave to people who actually want the job.

Supermarket. 13th April. 1433 hours. My favorite cheese is missing. This means war.

Cheap carbs are the enemy of expensive thoughts.

Before the industrial revolution there was no spare time; subsistence was a full time job. Now we are laying the planet to waste just so that we have spare time. Use it wisely, while it lasts.

I wonder why my parents generation are often nicer to strangers than they are to family. I admit that their generation has had to wear a lot of change and they probably feel short-changed in life as a result of their own fears of engaging in life. Why not blame the kids eh? The buggers have had it so easy.

I fear the insecurity of strangers. It’s fucking dangerous.

I rarely meet smart people that impress me. Typically the ‘smart’ is one-dimensional and has become a party trick that defines their real life interactions. Often they seek the company of peers and they reinforce their own whirlpool of conceit. When circumstances temporarily bonds me to these characters I immediately start scouting for the exit doors.

Whistling is never taught. Kids either decide to figure it out, or they don’t. What odds that gen x and beyond manage to toss the art into the garbage bin of history?

Ancient Rome peaked at one million people. They just didn’t have the transport systems to provide food for more people on a daily basis.

Planet earth is blessed with any number of transport systems now, but we are going to run out of paddocks sooner or later.

The point of cars is two-fold; to get you there quicker than the alternatives (e.g. walking, riding, etc), and to get you there dry. In Sydney we seem to have lost the first of these advantages.

Great word, compassion. And a great antidote to anger. Yours.

Art is simpler and more fun too.

But it’s way too easy to get stuck in a rut. There is no compass of thought to guide you out.

Nothing good comes from striving to meet the expectations of others.

Art is a vaguely-conscious version of this blog.

I had a fly trap in the back yard. It was one of those ones with one-way holes with an attracting liquid in it.

After a little while the mass of dead flies in it just about took up the whole container. Then I realised what had happened; the flies had laid eggs in dead flies. And there was a trapped population hatching and dying in there, complete with maggots.

Gross.

The things I need to do again; eat suikerbrood from Friesland, spend another week or two in Valencia and return to Dili.

One never knows when it’s the last time. For example, I have probably played my last game of soccer, years ago, and never knew at the time. This saves a lot sadness.

I was talking to the old bloke across the street and was wondering if he realised when he had his last root.

The big truths come with a winged keel…

And besides there ain’t no sanity clause, and there ain’t no truth that isn’t false.

It is cruel, beyond belief, to be totally honest.

When it comes to ingestion, whether this refers to food, pharmaceuticals, natural therapies or social drugs, I have always ignored the experts and trusted my gut feelings. So far this has served me well, of course.

Tasked with buying milk and bread I will often also buy a pack of Tasmanian smoked salmon and gobble the lot, on the seat outside the local supermarket. It just seems so right. Do you agree?

Being my lovely daughter, she transcends all my unwritten MO’s. And I know not how.

I am not interested in owning, controlling or even partnering with the souls of others. But I do love to understand them.

10 parts ethanol, 3 parts caffeine, 4 parts nicotine. Stay away with you, pill head, I know not what molecules you peddle.

Humility is an image of guilt, reflected though the plane of the present.

Bird FM. Birds without the poo.

The only time I like the fuckers is when I whip through them the wrong way on the pushie.

Frank Blackmore, of the UK Transport Research Laboratory, invented the modern roundabout in the 1960’s.

Now that’s a story that needs telling!

If a majority of non-fiction books could be shoe-horned into essays, and if a good many essays could be condensed into blogs, and if any blog can be parsed into a twit, does that mean the x-gen are very well read?

Wine and kids have this in common; slow maturation results in better outcomes.

You have been warned, tiger mothers! (and just about all of the north and east of Sydney).

I have a plan for a new political system in Australia.

First we start taking state elections more seriously by giving them back a little of what they have lost in influence. We know they are rubbish but if the commonwealth keeps extracting portfolios from them, then who do we think would be interested in the job?

Second, in each state the parliament of the day needs to elect a governor by two thirds majority, renewed after each election.

Third, the governers form a board to oversee the federal bureaucracy and there are no federal politicians. This board also holds reserve powers over the state parliaments.

Sweet and simple.

We may as well ban collusion between politicians while we are at it. Let’s make them represent their seats and not their parties for a change.

Video may have killed the radio star but the poets fucked themselves. They should have picked up a guitar.

Why not Facebook instead of blog? Even a bigger problem. People I know might actually read my thoughts. And in any case aren’t we judged by the company we seek?

Why not twit? Well occasionally 140 characters just doesn’t cut it. Actually most of the time. Besides I wouldn’t want to belong to a club that wouldn’t want me.

And for the techies who are not reading this, I know it’s not exactly 140.

I hate it when thoughts just slipaway. This one almost did.

It’s curious that there is no clear antonym for “waste”. We are so much more articulate in the negative.

Haste is the friend of waste.

I was born in the mid-sixties and can just remember a time when people had very few goods, not much to do on a Sunday, and expected much less from life.

How quickly and dramatically it has changed in forty years!

In some areas of life we are better off, but measured in other ways we are definitely poorer for the transition.

I fear for the future if this rate of change perpetuates. I sense a trend lately where the negatives are starting to dominate the benefits.

My mate is convinced that there is a global financial conspiracy going on. Parsing, I gather that the goal of the perpetrators is to extend the wealth disparities in the world. Who can argue with that?

Gold, apparently, is the answer. It’s here that I lose the plot. Are we to assume that the masters of the universe are most effectively killed when beaned with bars of very heavy yellow metal?

Personally I prefer the warmth and patina of copper; it makes a much nicer club.

Conspiracy theories arose with the development of societal complexity.Today, fewer and fewer people feel that they understand what is going on. Combined with the natural greed of people in roles of influence this leads, in a very straight line, to conspiracy theories.

Cleverly, this problem has been countered by the devaluation of conspiracy theories through the promotion of an over-supply of the buggers. This ensures that the odd conspiracy theory with legs does no harm.

They are more conspiracy theories than there are people.

Why would a parasite want to kill its host? Which is what the government is doing when they only give us twelve points on our drivers licenses. The repeat offenders are their best customers!

My guess is that the points system is their long term solution to traffic congestion. It’s a plan to get us all off the roads…

But, hey, the fuckers aren’t that smart.

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.