Invention of the day; a new algorithm to electronically match people for online dating purposes.

The algorithm matches people based on their feedback and complaints to online websites and services.

All you need is some Google-like big Brother to gather all that feedback and all those complaints, then automatically catalogue it into types (polite, outraged, inventive, caring, etc).

People would be matched based on the closeness of the their whining.

My thinking is that if you can match the whine, the rest will be a pushover.

What about my terabyte of data, all my photos, in the cloud? 

They won’t survive a zombie apocalypse.

But either would a bunch of printed photos.

Sitting in one spot guarding the past, it’s a formula for living in it.

Also worth noting…

Today I saw two kids from the Hillsong church next door, one wearing a t-shirt that said ‘justify everything’ and the other ‘question everything’.

Not hard guessing who’s going to have a hard time of it.

Yesterday I had a nice call from an Indian fellow claiming to be from the ATO.

After the first five minutes I finally understood his name, Henry Martin.

Thereafter I learned that the ATO is taking me to court for tax fraud undertaken between the period of 2011-2015, totally $768.

Well, I said, that much? I’ll see you in court, I’ve never cheated on tax.

He said it will be a very expensive process and I would be better off either transferring the outstanding amount electronically, or they could send someone around to pick up the cash.

I said, no mate, I’ll defend myself, that’d be fun. And very cheap.

At which time we agreed to disagree. He could see his commission vanishing, and so did he.

Guileless: devoid of guile; innocent and without deception, usually used to describe the youth of the first world, protected species that they are.

But lately I have observed that mid to late teens from the Australian private school systems don’t look that guileless.

The evidence; the cast of their faces. There is a certain wariness hidden behind bravado but offset by a look of superiority.

It’s an odd mix that you’d recognise if we had a sample in front of us.

It’s probably born of affluence, transferred parental expectations, a grafted heritage of school elitism, all very confused with the social nicities as espoused by the curriculum.

I expect that they’d be very guileless outside of their own environment, which is usually a sign of a species that has evolved to be over specialised into a niche.

Usually, extinction follows.

Ponder closely the cycle of optimism and despair below; this is the sequential contentment ratio for Nic’s choc chip muffin events. The art of acquiring wisdom is in noticing these patterns and getting thoroughly sick of them, as well as the muffins.

This morning I was pondering along on my bike; why does cycling to work cheer me up whereas driving anywhere, the opposite?

Then it struck me, it’s a ratio problem (or a ratio opportunity, depending on how you’re wired).

Consider this…

If there was magically no traffic one morning – you know, a neutron bomb went off, or there was a zombie apocalypse without the zombies, that sort of thing – then, on my bike, I would be able to shave off, say, 10% of my travel time, at best.

In a car, however, I would be able to get to where ever in about 10% of usual conniptions. A 90% savings in time!

So back to the ratio. Here’s a new definition of contentment … the ratio of what you actually receive over what you expect.

A little maths for you – these are the ancient Greek definitions for:

1. Contentment is αὐτάρκεια. So α = contentment
2. Receive is δέχομαι. So δ = what you receive
3. Expectation is ἐλπίς. So ἐ = what you expect

The contentment ratio is defined as:

In the case of road momentum, my contentment ratio for cycling is 0.9. Whereas my contentment ratio for driving is 0.1.

To be clear, when I’m driving my unrealistic expectation, which I can’t shake for the life of me, is that the trip will take 10 minutes. It actually takes 100 minutes on average. So if assign ἐ = 100% to the 10 minutes that I expect, and what I receive is 100 minutes, which is only 10% as good as what I expect, then δ = 10% and α = 0.1

On the bike, my more realistic expectation is that it takes 20 minutes. In fact it takes 22 minutes. So α = 0.9 by the same maths as above.

(oh, by the way, if you receive more than you expected then that just means you got a contentment ratio of unity (1). This limiting value is applied because you will quickly adjust your expectations for next time. It’s the average that counts, not the value of a single event. Us humans, tricky little minds that we have!)

Overall contentment in life is then just the sum over a period of time:

Now when you think about it, this is pretty cool because you can address your contentment ratio with respect to any individual subject matter in two ways:

1. You can change what you receive, for example, by cycling to work instead of driving. This is the better approach as compared to …
2. You can modify your expectations. This is a little harder to do. A Google search returns very little of use – plenty of people telling you to reduce your expectations but precious little on how to do this. My initial thoughts include hypnosis, drugs, self-delusion, personality disorders, validation by equally deluded friends, & zen mantraism.

Another option is just a little self-honesty in the context of the contentment ratio.

For example, let us pick the classic example of the choc chip muffin.
Your expectations are high because a choc chip muffin looks the bees knees of diabetes-inducing euphoria.

But in reality the muffin tastes like shit and you can’t finish it.  You can record your estimate of the contentment ratio somewhere on your phone.

After a few morning teas, simply calculate the average of your contentment ratio values for the choc chip muffin events.

If the average is really rubbish and below your target threshold value (say 0.7 if you are an optimist, or 0.3 if you aren’t) then you can use this to convince yourself to change what you receive (option 1 above).

That is, stop eating the bloody things!

And, bingo, you will be a more content person.

6. Lie

Works a treat.

A reviewer in The Monthly on my all-time favourite book:

“Such is Life remains a classic that nobody reads and even fewer comprehend.”

Maths is clearly not the reviewer’s strong point. 

Nor literature for that matter; it’s deadly simple to comprehend, and bloody funny at the same time.

How do people eat sugar, heaps of it, all through their lives without getting seriously bored with it?

How do so many blokes remain addicted to the attraction of the button-nosed Barbie, when the evidence suggests that they are nothing but sand in your bed.

And the list goes on.

Sometimes, just sometimes, it’s not the pain that’s the problem. The upside, it ain’t that up, but we’re too slow to notice.

What is this data telling me?

Company tax cuts, when the budget is under water. Makes nonsense.

The fully discredited trickle down effect is based on one data point; communism, where there is no up or down. The water went splat and the deluded said ‘a-ha, a counter example!’

So why the cuts? Well, they’re fucked anyway, so this is a self-serving thankyou to their friends with future consultancy gigs to hand out.

Nothing more, nothing less.

In the last three or so (plus actually) years I’ve managed to think up and record over 4,000 of these blog entries.

Previously I’ve described all sorts of reasons for doing so.

But now, that’s all redundant. This blog serves two new purposes.

Firstly, I’m looking forward to repurposing these blogs as original prose. All I have to do, in order to write a book, is to treat these blog entries as bricks. I simply have to provide the written cement; which is a much less daunting task than starting from scratch.

Secondly, I’m going to run some Grounded Theory software over the blog.

A study using Grounded Theory can just begin with a collection of qualitative data (my blog).

As the software chews through the blog, repeated ideas, concepts or elements will become apparent, and will be tagged with codes, which will be extracted from the blog.

The software will then magically re-reviews the blog, and the codes will be grouped into concepts, and then into categories.

These categories will become the basis for new theories. On what, nobody knows…

Alternatively, the Grounded Theory results will show that it ain’t got wings. Your choice as to which, the blog or the original sin.

Question: Is it actually possible to ask a question without inferring an assumption or a hypothesis?

Answer:  Is it actually possible to ask a question?

When a friend that you know well is very disappointed with something, anything, that you did in the past, here are your options…

1. Do nothing, say nothing. It’ll either blow over, or your friend will.

2. Apologise profusely, even if there is no need to. This approach runs the risk of repeat events based upon your gullibility.

3. Use facetiousness to pointlessly make your point. You know, ‘I’ve bought a time machine to go back and fix things’. Bound to never work.

4. Sit down with the pig in an attempt to teach it to think. You won’t be thanked and it won’t work.

5. Send in a village elder as a proxy, to fix things. This is the only strategy that has any merit.

When is diversity a bad thing?

When you don’t like any of them.

“I am emailing you because I need to ensure you receive the news that reluctantly we have decided to cancel our UN Day Ceremony and associated activities tomorrow.  We have felt compelled to do this given the Bureau of Meteorology predictions of heavy rain and high winds.  We have no capacity for our students to prepare for the National Dress and Flag Parades under cover in our School Hall and they would therefore be open to the weather in moving to and from the Hall.  We also have our food stalls and a lot of activities in the open under marquees which we believe would not be safe in high winds.  Further, several of our guest performers and event presenters have cancelled in response to the predicted bad weather.

This is such a special day that I am sure our students will be very disappointed.  I can assure you that staff are equally sad.  An enormous amount of preparatory work has been carried out by staff, students and parents, particularly with regard to the food stall delights and it is so regrettable that we will not all be able to enjoy the results of that work.

As UN Day is so special to our school community, we will try to include a slightly reduced event in our calendar in term 3.  We would not be able to include the food stalls again but we could have an Opening Ceremony with Flag and National Costume Parades.  It is should still be possible to have a concert as well.  Further details will be provided next term when we have a chance to liaise with our wonderful EALD Department whose members coordinate our UN Day celebrations.

As I said to students, we hope that the serious weather conditions anticipated for tomorrow do not eventuate and that our decision to cancel UN Day was a mistake.  However, in the event that the predictions translate into reality, please take care and I hope that you remain safe and secure as the weather front passes over.”

Nothing to add here…

“If you were to tally up all the food eaten by the world’s entire spider population in a single year, how much would it be?

Martin Nyffeler and Klaus Birkhofer published their estimate in the journal the Science of Nature this month, and the number they arrived at is frankly shocking.

The world’s spiders consume between 400 and 800 million tonnes of prey in any given year. That means that spiders eat at least as much meat as all 7 billion humans on the planet combined, who the authors note consume about 400 million tonnes of meat and fish each year.

Or, for a slightly more disturbing comparison, the total biomass of all adult humans on earth is estimated to be 287 million tonnes. Even if you tack on another 70 million or so tonnes to account for the weight of kids, it’s still not equal to the total amount of food eaten by spiders in a given year, exceeding the total weight of humanity.”

I recall a day, about a year ago, in Brisbane where I was offended, insulted and intimidated, not once, but thrice!

Just for the record, I can’t be humiliated because I don’t care that much what other people think of me.

All three incidents occurred whilst pedaling my bike. 

Incident one was par for the course. A tradie blew his horn at me and then yelled some abuse at me as he accelerated past me. 

He was attempting to insult and intimidate me, ostensibly to make me re-think my inconvenient (to him) mode of transport. 

Of course he was really just indulging in his own personal addiction, reveling in the anger at the recognition of his own individuality.

My response? I smiled at him, knowing that would him make even crazier. My sport, his loss.

The second incident was far more interesting. Cruising along the bike path next to the river I was passed by a bunch of pot-bellied corporate types, dressed to the nines in le Tour Lycra.

The last of the pelaton, as he passed me, screeched ‘bloody fixie’. To which the pelaton snickered.

Factually incorrect, by the way, not even close to a fixie. My bike is a free wheeler and has a hidden second overdrive gear in the rear hub, activated by a kick back mechanism.

This was an attempt at offence and insult. I responded by engaging said second gear and riding straight past them. That is, I responded with humiliation.

The third incident was by far the best. At a quiet cross roads with no cars in sight I decided to cruise through a red light rather than wait for no man.

Another commuting cyclist, that I was completely unaware of, decided to catch up with me in order to share his mania.

‘You’re the type of fuckwit that gives us cyclists a bad name’ he shouted at me from behind.

In his stupidity this one was attempting to offend, insult and intimidate, all at once. The trifecta!

It goes without saying that I responded with complete intimidation, to the point that he become worried for his personal safety.

Which was my point. Fools need to be concerned with their own safety rather than the salving of their need to share their personality disorders. 

I like to think he might have learned a lesson. Probably not.

Section 18C makes it unlawful to publicly offend, insult, intimidate or humiliate anyone on the basis of their race, colour, or national or ethnic background.

Note, there’s no mention of their choice of transport. Clearly an omission.

Being unlawful, this means that the party that is offended, insulted, intimidated or humiliated, can take the other party to court in a civil action.

Which is an expensive and difficult process that can lead to even further humiliation. Not for the feint hearted.

There needs to be an ‘eye for eye clause’ inserted into section 18c. That is, it is not unlawful to respond to attempts at ‘offence, insult, intimidation or humiliation’ with the same.

There are some personality types that seem to be unable to be content.

These people aren’t mad in the DSM sense; they aren’t a danger to society or themselves.

But they suffer just for being themselves.

I suspect there’s an option to diagnose and treat them with modern psychiatry, as if they were over the DSM line 

CBT and drugs. It’s worth a shot.

My guess. 

She’s got a character trait anyway. High maintenance and high volume. Probably a borderline personality disorder.

She feels less loved than Jamie. And now there’s a new sibling coming along. She could slip even further down the totem pole.

Mum tries to love her. Dad just tolerates her and tells her to get in line, or else.

The step parents? Well I do my best to be nice to her and not be harsh or tough, within reason. My sanity is more important. 

Interestingly, she doesn’t like me. Probably because I let her know that her style doesn’t work with me. It disempowers her.

The other one? Ella. I’ve never met her but I’m guessing that she’s somewhat less tolerant than I.
The Little Girl, she’s seeking love and attention and making it worse at the same time. 

She’s already, at the age of seven, aware of the fact that she’s in the grip of an addiction.

She knows that her attention seeking behaviour, that which she can’t control, is making her unliked.

She needs help. Proper help. 

Assimilation and Merger question of the day.

In ten years time, will all Australian women be using sun umbrellas, or will the second generation Chinese have tossed the habit.

Touch and go, I reckon.

Related to my last blog is the issue of love.

I now have a woman that seems to love me completely.

First time ever.

How to trust this love? Which must be a pre-requisite for reciprocating without fear.

The answer is simple. Just do it!

What’s the worst thing that could happen?

Alone, unloved, shamed … Trailer Park.

You’d be there anyway, if you weren’t here. It’s your character, as we can see.

Make what you can of this. Time is short. This is it. Don’t waste your chance.

Enlightenment is the reward.

Cherish this opportunity. Treat it carefully, far more carefully than you have done up until now. 

Fear not it’s loss, but do realise that this opportunity is unlikely to appear again.

The equation will solve itself in your favour if you do these things.

Shakespeare said “This above all: to thine ownself be true. And it must follow, as the night the day, thou canst not then be false to any man”

I say “This above all: to thine destiny be true. And it must follow, as the night the day, thou canst not then be false to yourself or any man”

In the enneagram system there are 9 personality types which match pretty much anyone you know. A useful shortcut.

The personality types are supposedly formed when we are infants, when we become aware of our individuality.

There are three types of responses to this early awareness of individuality; shame, fear and anger.

The are three responses to these; denial, change and justification.

Hence the nine enneagram types.

The enneagram people say that we aren’t trapped by our types. That we can become enlightened and move above our types.

No one knows anyone that has done this though.

My own type is a 5.The Intense, Cerebral Type: Perceptive, Innovative, Secretive, and Isolated.

I have a wing of a type 4.

Here I am – http://structuralenneagram.com/?page_id=177

Five-wing-Fours are continually creating new and original works in order to make something of themselves and distinguish themselves from others.

They want to be loved but think they have to prove themselves worthy of love; to that end, they can be seductive and anxious to please.

My personality arose from the fear of being alone. I reacted with denial. My wing says I also had a shame of being me, and I reacted with change, away from my character.

The key question is how to move on from this? How to become enlightened?

The first step is to accept the contents of this blog and then be aware of how I am trapped in my feelings, behaviour and thoughts by this formative template.

Like any addiction, I’ve revelled in it until the point that I am nauseous. Time to move on.

My mantra for any change; be the change that you want to see in yourself.
Step one; revel in your addiction.

Step two; recognise the resulting boredom with yourself, and become nauseous

Step three; observe your repetitive behaviours.

Step four; use that observation to correct your behaviours in real time. Learn new habits.

Step five; eventually these habits become you.

The new habits, in no particular order.

In my case:

1. Try to become less detached from my environment

2. Fear not rejection by others

3. Do not try to prove my worth with my intellect and creativity

4. Don’t get bogged down in negative emotions

5. Don’t be provocative.

6. Have not contempt, even in private

7. Lay off seductiveness and be not eager to please

8. Trust in the love of someone(s)

9. Practice analytical thinking and procedural planning

10. De-emphasise irony, surrealism, pessimism, and nihilism. 

11. Focus on the agendas of others rather than my own.

12. Seek company even when you are exhausted by company

13. Say this mantra. “There is nothing to fear, soon it will be over. Enjoy what time you have left. Don’t waste it by re-living that infant fear of being alone. You aren’t.”

I do believe that I’ve found proof that immigration leads to a merging of cultures and not assimilation of the incoming into the general morass.

Driving. Cars. Roads. You know…

When I was young the general level of technical driving skills in Australia was just that much higher.

The speed limit was seen as a guideline and no one drove at it or under it.

Rain did not weary them, nor slow them down.

Lane changing did not come with the risk of coronaries.

In fact lane changing always occurred from the lane closest to the turn and at speed, not from the middle of the road at near zero velocity.

Wing mirrors were used prior to pulling out from the parked position.

Reverse-parking was a one-handed art-form, and not a cause for the prescription of Valium.

Noisy and distracting kids in the backseat were slapped into submission.

Cars drove straight in lanes and didn’t wander about seeking external guidance.

Acceleration and braking was smooth. Jerking was reserved for home.

Awareness of others on the road wasn’t limited to the view through the windscreen.

Driving with no hands while eating a hamburger and changing gears was unnoticeable to anyone outside of the car.

Turning right at busy traffic lights meant sitting out on the middle, waiting for the lights to change for a quick turn. Now they stay behind at the line; probably still there since last Christmas.

Cyclists had no rights.

Being tooted was a social faux pas, avoided at all costs.

Social norms meant that we worried about those behind us getting through the red lights, so we made sure all was done to make this possible.

Merging was a non issue.

Despite the fact that cars were agricultural, brakes that faded, all manuals, no power steering, only a vague connection between cornering and what was happening at the steering wheel, the rate of accidents was much lower. If you take alcohol out of the equation.

Overtaking was a sport.

It wasn’t ok to just stop in the middle of the road to ponder your next move, if confounded by place, time or whatever the fuck else runs through their minds.

Taxi drivers were the best on the road.

The cops just fined those that were a genuine danger to themselves and others.

Just about everyone could drive on dirt with no noticeable change in velocity. Now it requires a 4WD guided at 10kph.

Look what we have now. It’s a disaster that barely moves. I know this because I discovered some time back that cycling is a far more efficient means of transport. This can’t be explained away just by congestion, unless you are completely deluded.

I track the decline and fall of driving skills to the influence of immigrants from countries where driving is rare. They learn to drive at mature age and, thus, their level of skill is what it is.

There’s enough of them to influence the rest. It’s been a slow decline. We are frogs that have been well and truly boiled, skinned and stewed into a ragout of indeterminate origins. But it tastes bloody awful.

Thus you see, we have a merger of cultures, not assimilation. In the case of driving, we lost out. But in almost every other aspect, we gained by assimilation.

Before cars we had horses. Same, same.

Joseph Furphy in “Such is Life” made the same point, that a lifelong adherence to the skills is required to make the grade.

“For it should be known that the perfect rider ‘nascitur, non fit’, to begin with; that his training must begin in early boyhood, and be followed up sans intermission; that his system of horse-breaking must be the Young–Australian, which is, beyond doubt, the most trying in the world.”

And then after being suckered into breaking a colt.

“The chap draws the handkerchief from the colt’s eyes, and walks backward. The colt catches sight of your left foot, and skips three yards to the right. In doing so, he catches sight of the other foot, and skips to the left. Then everything disappears from in front of the saddle — the wicked ears, now laid level backward — the black, tangled mane — the shining neck with the sweeping curve of a circular saw — the clean, oblique shoulders — they have all disappeared, and there is nothing in front of the saddle but a precipice. There is something underneath it, though.”

“And yet you’ve been riding all manner of horses, on and off (mark the significance of that expression) since you were a mere kiddie. However, you have stuck to him for a good solid sixty seconds; now, one of your knees has slipped over the pad, and your stirrup is swinging loose. Good night, sweet prince.”

Proposition(s): “do you think that being a high achiever makes you happy? If not, why do you do it?”

I see ‘happiness’ as a social emotion, one shared with others. Also it is transient, here one minute and then gone. It is not a state of being.

So I would say that happiness can’t be brought about by directly by achievements, but contentment may (more on this later).

I believe that there are three reasons why people seek high achievements. Either they succumb to direct pressure from parents, or they care greatly what other people, known to them or otherwise, think of them, or they worry that they may miss out on something (they know not what) – a mix of envy and fear.

They may fail to achieve highly, or they may get there and stop, or they can set new agendas for even greater greatness and never stop.

Dealing with the last mob first; they aren’t ever content because contentment would ruin their drive. Usually, any displays of happiness are fake.

The ones that sit back and rest, they get to learn the lessons of life, and may move on from their early life emotional driving forces. They may even become wise. These are the lucky ones. Once having achieved some goal these people can often maintain their position with very little effort, especially if they aren’t focused on the next great leap of achievement. I call this cruise control, and it’s very relaxing.

If someone has set their sights on high achievements, and failed, this may block one from being happy from time to time, through a general depression of mood. But note all the double negatives in there carefully. They can also just put it all down to learning and move on.

I’m not sure why, but this image is compelling. To me.

The woman next to me on this flight is, firstly, elderly. My guess is that she’s had six or seven kids, maybe nine even, and looks ten years older than she is.

Mottled skin. Dark red patches everywhere. Short grey bowling club hair, intermittently interspersed with brown. White pants. A curtain fabric blouse, home made.

She’s quite over-weight. Incursions left and right into the air space of innocent others. Me, being one. 

Her many rings are going with her to the grave. They are half lost in flesh.  

There’s also a horizontal stomach projection that prevents her tray table from doing what it should.

Working class, she is, in the old fashioned sense. When that term described what it was, had genuine meaning.

Conniptions. She’s out of her comfort zone. She can’t get her tray down properly. She’s pinned in by unknown assailants that are busily looking the other way. The free food’s coming and she isn’t ready.

Her solution? Keep trying with the tray, getting agitated, short and sharp movements in all directions. No help is coming love; we, me and the unknown hipster, aren’t here, not really. We’ve flown the coop. Care factor none.

The empath is learning. Slowly but well, as is my wont.

My Uber driver today is a personal trainer.

Upon interrogation I revealed my physical activities, cycling and indoor climbing.

Silence.

Then this; “Possibly the best combination ever. You don’t need me.”

Envy, controlling, self-entitlement, glory-seeking, second-hand greed and ignorance.

What a irrational mix. How does one counter such a brew?

With a straight bat or a quick egress, or both.

Watching Californication one couldn’t help but notice Hank Moody’s steadfast refusal to defend himself in any number of situations where others proclaimed his guilt or poor character.

This despite the fact that his life could have been much easier with the odd sharing of facts or feelings.

But it wasn’t that easy for Hank.

He was just being himself and didn’t want to get dragged into being the respondent to someone else’s Gestalt.

From Shakespeare in Polonius;

“This above all: to thine ownself be true. And it must follow, as the night the day, thou canst not then be false to any man”

Hank was being authentic, and letting others own their version of truth and trust, and whatever else was eating their innards.

Also, once in the whirlpool, Hank knew that there was no getting out. It’s just down and down until you eventually drown, many years later.

I suspect that Hank would have been very happy to discuss just about anything, so long as it wasn’t in the context of justifying being himself.

You see, Hank was a thinker and an observer. He needed time to absorb the so-called facts so he could run a million scenarios and cross check them with his own models of everything.

The wife, Karen, she never gave him that chance. If she didn’t get immediate satisfaction then another dart was permanently fired into the narrative of the bad Hank.

She was desperately trying to kill the very thing that made Hank unique and compelling. If she got what she wanted, she wouldn’t have a Hank. 

He didn’t try to edit her, knowing that it was a hopelessly flawed idea. She couldn’t edit him and have him, but she tried anyway. 

And he knew this the whole time, and loved her despite this.

It’s what you would call tragic comedy, doomed to fail.

Shakespeare said this a tad more eloquently in As You Like It;

“For your brother and my sister no sooner met, but they looked; no sooner looked, but they loved; no sooner loved, but they sighed; no sooner sighed, but they asked one another the reason; no sooner knew the reason but they sought the remedy.”

“Lord, what fools these mortals be”

The etymology of the word “meeting”; it is derived from the expression “I’m eating”.

As in “what are you doing in there” – “m’ eating”.

That is, a bunch of people sitting around a table with either a good or a very poor excuse for communing.

Any explanation of the causes of human behaviour that refers to the ‘truth’ is probably false.

A truth could only be proven by statistical analysis of data collected from a number of alternative scenarios of a single event relating to the human behaviour in question.

You’d need to run the scenario more times than there are variables (like Infinity minus one, or so) in order to get enough data to avoid over-fitting your model.

Without wormholes and time machines this is not as yet possible.

In the meantime, anyone is free to interpret human behaviour and assign semi-rational explanations as to the causes. 

But these are guesses at best, and most probably only ever correct by accident. When, you’d never know.

This is especially the case if the observer is another black cat in the same box, impacting the results of the experiment.

It is worth noting that, in reality, explanations of human behaviour are usually derived from patterns of repeat behaviours rather than a single event.

The human brain then runs a Fourier transform over the morass of data to derive a result that is improved by using the square root of the signal to noise of the data, but the result is most likely still rooted because of the black cat problem.

The word conniption arrived on our planet in the mid eighteenth century. 

It has no known source and is believed to have been invented by an individual, as opposed to evolving from earlier words.

In essence, it was an act of reverse-essentialism.

Someone noticed a set of attributes to something unnamed, which lacked identity but had plenty of function, and set about to correct the situation. Probably inspired by watching his or her pet cat failing to catch a cockroach.

Unusually, although defined in the singular it is just about always used in the plural. No one has ever had just the one conniption.

Essentialism is the philosophical theory based on the concept that for any specific entity there is a set of attributes which are necessary to its identity and function. Proof: how else could we communicate via language?

Empericism is the philosophical theory that hypothesises that all knowledge is based on experience derived from the senses. Proof: computers have none.

Existentialism is ​the philosophical theory based on the existence of the individual person as a free and responsible agent determining their own development through acts of the will. Proof: why else would certain Parisian cafes have been full after the war?

Extensionalism is the philosophical theory based on the principle that the true meaning of life is the acquisition and retention of real estate. Proof: just ask any Sydney-sider.

Essentialism is the view that for any specific entity there is a set of attributes which are necessary to its identity and function.

Which would explain, for example, why we use language to describe things (an interesting proof of Essentialism, that) and also why Enneagrams flourish, especially among those with diminished identity and function.

I was once accused of mansplaining.

That is, I was accused of being a man, explaining something to a woman, in a manner that yet another woman regarded as sexist and patronizing.

Implied in this accusation was the groundless assumption that this was a systematic defect in my character resulting from some inherent disregard for the intelligence and/or education of half of the planet’s population of people.

It’s all in the eye of the beholder.

In my mind, l was being a person, explaining something to a moron, in a simple-to-understand manner that another moron, one that I had little regard for, regarded as sexist and patronizing.

Implied in this was an unstated conjecture that there was a systematic defect in the second moron’s character.

What we need, clearly, is an equivalent to Section 18C of Australia’s Racial Vilification Act. Something along the lines of:

“It is unlawful for a person to have an offensive thought;
(1) In the hypothetical circumstance where that offensive thought were to influence an action, and
(2) Where said action would reasonably likely, in all circumstances, to offend, insult, humiliate or intimidate another person or a group of people
(3) Regardless of whether the action takes place or not.”

So much of what I read misses the complementizer, that.

An example; “At fifty, they say, a man has the face he deserves” or “At fifty, they say, a man has the face that he deserves.”

In speech, short cuts do we take. It works because intonation and context imply the missing special subordinating conjunction, also known as the empty complementizer.

The complementizer can be inserted between the verb and the embedded clause without changing the meaning, or not.

In reading, well, the absence can jar. But sometimes so does the complementizer. One word too far, that.

In which case the sentence just needs rearranging. 

Consider; “Ultimately, that using the word ‘that’ as a conjunction is often superfluous cannot be denied.”

I say; using the word ‘that’ as a conjunction is often superfluous, and sometimes not. 

If you happen to be caught betwixt, then engineer yourself a solution without.

Pomposity. It’s an odd affliction.

Built on insecurity, misplaced humour and a lack of empathy, it is also flavoured with good intentions, gone awry.

Sad, sort of funny, and a little infuriating; there’s no known cure other than death.

At fifty, they say, a man has the face that he deserves.

At forty, a woman has the man that she deserves.

An eyebrow trimmer that cuts eyebrow hairs to a fine taper, rather than a blunt cylindrical edge. This imitates the appearance of naturally growing hairs.

Unlike all previous inventions of the day, I have absolutely no idea how to solve this one. Lasers, nanobots, superbugs, quantum enzymes; one of these might work.

The Hansonites of Australia have any number of issues that motivate them. A biggie amongst them is ‘assimilation’.

They say that they aren’t against immigration, they are against immigrants that don’t assimilate. Such as the Muslims. Well, the ones that don’t assimilate.

The Hansonites want all immigrants to become like ‘us’, or don’t bother coming here. 

Which is an incredibly conservative position; they want us to remain as we are. For how long? Maybe forever.

These are people that hate change and, because of their insecurities, they are scared of anything or anyone that is different.

The history of immigration in Australia is one of a merging of cultures, not assimilation. Well, except for the first effort which was neither.

The Greeks and Italians, for example, they changed Australia oh so much for the better. And the Asians are very busy modifying us right as we speak, all the way to the Down syndrome farewell handshake.

I don’t think many Australians want to see enclaves of culturally isolated immigrants. But the argument against this would have greater support if debated in the context of a merger rather than assimilation.

But it does beg the question; what exactly is so scary about cultural enclaves? 

I suspect that there’s a confirmation bias going on here. Many disputes around the world are between different cultural groups with entwined borders. Hence it is easy to assume that all such groupings lead to disputes.

But maybe there’s many more that we don’t hear about, simply because they are all happily getting on with each other. This isn’t very newsworthy.

Some data on the subject word be useful. And then a little insight into why some mixed cultural enclaves have disputes whereas other don’t.

Who knows, it might not be that scary after all.

I think of immigration like a salad dressing. Oil and water with a bit of balsamic vinegar. Mix it and it merges. Or so you think. Wait a while and it separates again, highlighting your first generation delusions. 

Add some mustard and honey, surfactants for the chemically minded amongst you, shake again and, presto, you have a second generation merging. And it tastes that much better. 

But there’s still globs and blobs of this or that in there. Unmerged bits that don’t really spoil the salad. 

Its worth remembering that childlike souls won’t touch anything green anyway. So you can’t please them all anyway. Just ignore them, I say.

Proposition over-read; The Donald has Narcissistic Personality Disorder. As opposed to just having a few narcissistic tendencies.

The prognosis isn’t good…

The penny just dropped. On the subject of CEO salaries, that is.

It’s been a subject of media abuse for some time now. Over the last 30 years CEO salaries, as a multiple of the mean salary, have gone up and up, and up.

The issue for many of the envious and the entitled is that quite a few of the CEOs of Australia’s large entities still get multi-million dollar salaries and bonuses, even if they oversee massive corporate losses.

It has the sniff of self-serving entitlement to it, enabled by a lack of proper governance.

The counter-argument is this; CEO packages are set by the market, and markets aren’t wrong, or are the least wrong. Further, if you pay peanuts and you will get a monkey.

Back to the penny that has dropped.

The incremental value of a CEO to an entity is easily at its greatest when there is a large transaction such as merger, acquisition or trade sale. The good CEO, being a great negotiator and strategist, will add large percentage benefits to such a transaction thus easily justifying multi-million dollar packages.

Thus is the market for CEO salaries set.

However, here in Australia such large transaction are rare. The CEOs get the large salaries but don’t need or have the opportunity to justify them. Nor could they in most instances; the skills are missing.

The argument against their salary packages would be much more effective if the protagonists were to have this particular insight.

However, I suspect that most of them don’t even know enough to understand this argument. Which only highlights the root cause of their ineffectiveness, upon which the pig-trough classes rely in order to reward themselves so generously.

See exhibit below. I would counter that ‘luxury’ is the wrong adjective.

That which is desirable is now unique, rare, novel or refined. But not luxurious, which implies comfort, flashy and expensive.

The underlying motivations of envy, and entitlement remain in place. 

But there’s too much wealth sloshing around these days, so ‘expensive’ has become a poor proxy for uniqueness.

The engendering of envy can only be achieved with a far more subtle approach.

Innovation is anything that’s new to you, love.

The less you know, the more innovative you are. Naturally.

I bet you didn’t know that!

I have quite a few friends and I’ve noticed that about one third of them can’t listen.

And I mean can’t and not don’t.

They have absorbed whatever is currently floating their boat from some dickhead drunken mate, YouTube or Life Philosophy class, and they are usually very eager to shout you the details.

Their cartoon-like theses are usually rooted in the emotions of their envy, entitlement and alienation. But indirectly mind you; this is all about crafty projection and sublimation.

Not only are they completely disinterested in anything that you may have to share, they don’t even want your feedback on their sharing. You learn to say “that’s good mate.”

They are simply protecting their house of cards by deflecting feedback and avoiding anything but the most facile and spurious application of logic, when it suits them, to make a point.

In a way, I have empathy for them. It’s usually a sign that things have got away from them. At some point they have lost the plot for some reason or another, and couldn’t find it again.

I’ve yet to see one remediate. I’m not saying it doesn’t happen, I’m just saying I’ve never seen it. Partly, I suspect, this is because they rarely accept their own situation.

They build a facade of reasonableness and even superiority, based on their rare insights. They are the seers, enlightening us poor deluded wage monkeys.

Without any recognition of their own clanging inconsistencies and shrillness, whence comes any motivation to get well? 

And I say ‘well’ because it’s a sickness; they are all mentally unwell and this I know because it’s making them all unhappy. Quite unhappy, all the way down to the yellow in their eyes.

It’s very tiring, engaging with them. You do it because they are old mates and you don’t just abandon mates when they’re not well. 

But in fact you do, slowly. If they show no inclination to get well, it’s too easy to decrease the frequency of your chats and beers. Until you don’t.

I had no idea why I was recording these thoughts until just then. Clearly, the path to their redemption is writing. 

Writing forces one to a logical construct, if one has any formal qualifications or intelligence. 

If I could just get them blogging then I’d have the ammunition that I need to viral into their system and inculcate the unraveling of their madness.

But the buggers won’t write. In fact they won’t even read the writings of friends. Their madness has its own cunning, and it avoids the illumination of its own delusions.

I find it all very sad.

My solution for the current ‘free range’ versus ‘caged’ debate that is raging on Facebook (and the like) is this:

1. Add a little treadmill to the chicken’s cage so they can move around unhindered
2. Cover the 4 sides and roof of their cages with 5 little 30″ computer monitors
3. Play a nice farm scene on the so-constructed holodeck
4. If needed, for extra reality add a fan (for wind), a spray nozzle (for rain) and a speaker (for farm noises). The smell comes for free.

This is the Matrix for chickens. And they are so, so dumb that even the RSPCA couldn’t argue that they wouldn’t be happy chooks.

The eggs from these chooks would be good enough to chuck at your best mate’s cheating ex-husband’s house.

Scene: Thailand – a good luck coin-chucking wishing-well pond, complete with a 25 year old turtle for extra good luck. Or to be more precise, the promise of long life for the coin chuckers, and not the turtle it would seem.

Why? Well you’d have to be Asian to understand this one. Maybe the idea is to see if you can get the coins to bounce off the turtle’s shell. And if you pull off that feat then magically you will live to a hundred or so.

The turtle has been eating the coins for some time now and just had emergency surgery to remove 5 kgs, or about 1000 coins, from its gut. It was just about to kark it.

Me, I do the same with the washing machine.

“ISO 37001 is the first international anti-bribery management system standard designed to help organizations combat bribery risk in their own operations and throughout their global value chains.”

Facetiousness is not required for this one. I’d like to see the Australian Parliament run this one.

She means ‘ashamed’. At being caught out, that is.

The discipline of science includes:

1. Gathering data
2. Regathering data to check it was done right the first time
3. Refining and improving the techniques used to gather data
4. Analyzing data for any unexpected results as compared to current mythology
5. Analyzing data to show that current mythology is just OK, thanks very much
6. Cherry-picking data in the interests of point 5
7. Explaining unexpected results in a qualitative way – hypothesizing
8. Testing hypotheses in a quantitative way – development of models
9. Reducing models to limiting cases – the development of theories
10. Finding more general theories compared to the current theories
11. Summarizing periods of recent science in review articles and books – otherwise known as wrapping-up and moving on
12. Using unexpected results to find inventions than can be exploited for gain
13. Messing around systematically in an experimental space hoping to find an unexpected result that can be exploited, sometimes even using models and theories to guide one through
14. Messing around randomly in an experimental space hoping to find an unexpected result that can be exploited
15. Lying to the world and yourself about the potential value of any such results from 14
16. Aiding and assisting the engineers when they exploit any such unexpected results from 12-14
17. Not teaching science to high school students
18. Teaching science to undergraduates and post-graduates
19. Climbing the greasy pole of acceptance in a research peer group
20. Communicating science information to a general audience when one gets tired of all the above
21. Becoming a university administrator when one gets tired of all the above
22. Becoming a business manager when one gets tired of all the above
23. Retiring when one gets tired of all the above
24. Not teaching any undergraduate or postgraduate student any of the details above

 ​​

Rule of thumb; gurus are, at best, only partially enlightened. It’s self-defining.

“To mix a metaphor, it was fucking painful.”

“No mate, that’s abusing verbs.”

LOL, they are…

This came through the ether and into my inbox.

A conference with this byline: “Reimagine the way you learn, lead, and work”.

Is that a sneaky Gen-Y way of saying “How to earn more money without looking like a self-absorbed twat?”

Or maybe it’s how they meet potential partners, having failed at Tinder?

Who knows…

Unsolicited and dumb questions of the day:

1. What do you think of Pauline in power?
2. Why do we exist?

My answers were…

1. Who?
2. How?

Politicians have two motivating forces:

1. Material self interest, and
2. Much attention from others in order to assuage their deep insecurities

And that’s it.

Here is my basic set of rules for negotiations…

There are two extreme ways to approach a business dispute (or any other sort of dispute for that matter):

1. The confrontational approach otherwise known as the Scorched Earth angle. As in, “I’m warning you that if I don’t get what I want then nobody gets anything.”
2. The consensus approach.

In terms of participants in a negotiation you have these 4 general behavioural types:

1. Declared (real) consensus types
2. Declared (real) confrontational types
3. Consensus types pretending to be confrontational types
4. Confrontational types pretending to be consensus types

Working through game theory, these are the likely outcomes:

1. Two declared consensus types in a negotiation makes for an efficient and fair outcome.
2. A confrontational type, declared or otherwise, should always win over a consensus type, declared or otherwise.
3. However the confrontational type risks all if he or she is up against another confrontational type, declared or otherwise.

In reality people don’t fit in such neat boxes. They often drift around the categories, subject to how they think they are going in the negotiation. For example, they may be genuinely all consensus-like, until something causes them to become emotional and completely confrontational. Later on, when they have calmed down, they may switch back.

Even so, it pays to dig into the psychology of your opponent in order to come up with a working hypothesis as to what type they are. And here is what you do with said results:

1. If the other party is a consensus type, real or otherwise, then you need to be a confrontational type, real or otherwise.
2. If the other party is a real confrontational type then you also need to be one, real or otherwise.
A. If you are both real, then the deal is off anyway.
B. If you are both fake, then the best faker will win, or you will both revert to a consensus decision.
C. If you are real and he/she is not, then you will win.
D. If you are fake and he/she is not, then you need to ensure they never find out and then the negotiation will naturally revert to a no-deal unless you lose your nerve.

Today I talked to a business colleague about an upcoming negotiation that could be quite heated. I said that at the age of 52 I would not be part of a confrontational approach anymore because I don’t like it and I want to enjoy life. The irony being that I was practicing a second order confrontational approach – if the other party couldn’t promise to act as a consensus type, then I would walk away.

A final word – if there are three parties in a deal then they had better all be consensus types or you are all wasting your time. The chances of this happening accidentally are pretty low, so you need to be very careful in these cases. And this is true even if that third party is a mediator.

Another public company CEO just got busted having an affair with his PA.

This CEO got ‘seriously’ penalised by his board; he received a one-off annual pay cut of 20%.

And the PA, she resigned. Presumably she’s being looked after by the CEO out of the residual $5m or so that he picked up.

The penalty wasn’t for having the affair, but for not declaring it, as per company policy.

On one hand this approach has merit. You can’t legislate against stupidity so you may as well work around it.

But had the CEO declared the affair, one of the participants would have either lost their job or been unhappily redeployed.

And that someone would have been the PA.

So the outcome would have been the same for her, no matter what. 

It still doesn’t work to have your CEO this compromised, or this compromisable.

This character flaw of compromisability must flavour many of his (I’ll stick to this gender for the purposes of this hypothesis) management activities. Not to mention the inherent dishonesty and lack of discipline.

In fact, assuming that most of the CEOs of Australian listed company are this compromisable, dishonest and ill-disciplined, one can assume that this doesn’t matter, solely because they are all as afflicted as each other, but all are also protected from foreign competition.

No competitive disadvantage then!

If I were on your board, mate, you’d have an app on your phone which would ask you to confirm daily that you aren’t having any sort of affair with any employee of our company, or even that of any supplier, customer or partner.

At the threat of full repayment of all renumeration you have ever received as CEO. After all, part of the justification for those big ticket salaries are your honesty, uncompromisability and discipline.

I suspect this would do the trick.

The starfish was always innocent.

So was the ovary.

Simply the happiest I have been since, well, last night…

This is why trademarks were invented.

Affluence just about always leads to boredom, which often gives folks the breathing space they need to ponder the past and the future, and the not-here, which is otherwise known as curating curiosity.

Curiosity can lead to many things and one of them is depression, if the curiosity is accompanied by genuine intelligence and a certain social gullibility. 

Time loves the active verb. The Black Dog is loved by no one.

Today I just have to admit it; I’m happy, content, or whatever you want to call it.

There’s hardly a thing that anyone or anything could do to seriously dint my positive demeanour 

It’s worth noting that I got here with a combination of thinking and experiencing, often not clearly aware of my goals.

Sheer dogged determination, mixed with the amalgamated insights of thousands of wonderful authors that have shared their own.

There are no short cuts. It takes energy and time to rewire yourself, and you can only do so if you set in mind a thermodynamic driving force of good.

Affluence; the root cause of the problem is also the gift that supplies the solution. Don’t waste it and don’t chase it, grasshopper.

Boredom is the mother of curiosity.

Coincidentally boredom is the enemy of Indooroopilly State School.

Or so they believe.

Fortunately they aren’t inclined to question their own beliefs, so it’s all ok.

A curious mind. That is the stated target for the Indooroopilly State School. They like stating things.

They want their graduates to have curious minds. Curious indeed.

Applying my very curious mind (and not the product of any curriculum) and my well-trained rational skills (something they actually could teach and that is becoming very short in supply), here are some of their built-in assumptions:

(1) curiosity is deemed as a necessity for innovation, 

(2) innovation is the future of labour in our post-tech world, 

(3) curiosity is in short supply,

(4) graduates with curious minds will do very well in this world,

(5) curiosity is very hard to teach,

(6) but we can do it,

(7) so, please admire us,

(8) and don’t you dare use your dodgy home-grown curiosity to question our institutional model of curiosity.

As ever, their delusions don’t matter because everyone else has them. 

So their graduates are at no competitive disadvantage with their cargo-cult curiosity skills, sans rational skills.

This is in fact just a marketing program designed to feed everybody the lies without which they would feel unworthy. 

Bloody curious indeed.

Chickens, free range or caged, that is the question.

Or is it?

Have you noticed that many people are very concerned about the welfare of chickens, or at least they claim so.

Mostly I believe them because so many of them fork out extra dough for the eggs from the less constrained hens with frequent flyer points.

But, and this is important, you don’t hear the same debates raging about the chickens that we eat. 

Free range or caged? No one cares.

Odd really. 

My bet is that even the dullest concerned person would be aware of the hypocrisy inherent in worrying about the welfare of the animals that we are about to eat.

Which only serves to highlight the hypocrisy associated with worrying about the ones that we don’t.

What is that? Nothing comes to mind. No possible explanation makes sense. It’s a she, I’m sure. But, well, how did she track it down, the horizontally striped onesie? And where did the concept arise? Who, who, who thought this was a good idea? And why? Is there an alternative universe, wormholes, the Matrix? I don’t understand and I’m starting to go mad.

Truly odd that our crystallised politicians would pick sides in the middle east. I mean, don’t they have enough issues already without making up new ones that have no potential gain? There’s either hidden flows of brown paper bags, or they are hubris-ridden retards. Probably both.

In matters of fictional reading, I get especially annoyed by the presence of a ‘God the narrator’.

In order to highlight my point, here is a random sentence out of Patrick White’s Voss (my favourite go-to book for all literary things disliked) – “Unlike other men, English officers stationed there, or young landowners coming coltish from the country for the practical purpose of finding a wife, he did not consider himself under the obligation to laugh. Or perhaps it was not funny.”

Ignoring the broad and unsubstantiated generalisations about English officers and young landowners, this quote clearly describes the thoughts of a God looking down at Voss and deciding that he pretty much didn’t have a sense of humour (neither did Patrick for that matter).

We know this because Voss, a social retard just off the DSM scale, was far too stupid to even consider analysing himself, or others. Ironically, White’s God wasn’t omniscient; observe that he wasn’t sure why Voss didn’t laugh. Thus further highlighting that Voss wasn’t doing the narrating.

White accidentally invented a defective God, one that could narrate away but wasn’t sure of his facts. I am sure that he, either one – God or Patrick, didn’t even notice.

Back to my narrative. I view the use of the ‘God the narrator’ mechanism as equivalent to the horrible situation where someone keeps responding to your statements with an emphatic ‘correct!’; i.e. an arbiter of the truth, and not an agreeable person.

But in the case of fiction the author is an arbiter of reality, and still not an agreeable person.

You, author, I find it cowardly of you to hide behind unexplained supernatural forces and imaginary friends, in order to conceal the fact that you have nothing to write about except your own deluded daydreams!

Of slightly lesser offence; occasionally an author will fiddle with time and tense as well. Unexplained wormholes in the fabric of their own fantasies.

For example, it (which, you must admit, is better than assigning a gender to the guileless thing) will be happily writing away in the first person-present tense, but will then throw in the odd all-knowing third person aside that draws upon the benefit of unexpected time-travelling hindsight.

You know what I mean; all of sudden you get a third person one-liner at the end of the chapter, such as – “He didn’t know then but he would come to regret this decision.”

And then without a moment’s regret at its self-spoiling, the author will flip back to the first person-present tense. You (the reader) are supposed to live in deep suspense, awaiting the shonky details of this literary bed wetting.

My guess is that most novelists don’t even know that they are playing any of these tricks. They are a cargo cult of readers turned typists, foisting their derivative imaginations upon the swill of less inclined junkies.

This one can say about Toyota; their design ethic has the utmost priority upon offending the least number of people. This is the lowest of the lows amongst all design principles.

So why do people buy them?

They are good value, well-engineered, inoffensive, and they, the people, simply don’t care.

For them, it’s all about losing the least amount of money and being mobile without looking like a complete twat.

They just don’t have enough aesthetic intelligence to be offended.

I would call this a life wasted. Cactus, in fact.

Living in the ‘now’ doesn’t mean just living in the here and now. 

How about living in the now, here and there?

Which is to say, imagine things elsewhere as well as where you are!

On a 1-10 scale, from marshmallow to concrete, this one, the bottom one, was an eleven.

It’s what the Chinese believe is a bed; they being of the mythological delusion that a slab of lead is good for one’s back.

Fortunately there was a spare one in the spare bedroom that quickly became less spare (the top one).

“Shapes and shadows danced in distorted cacophony making it difficult to focus”

Firstly, the ‘for Her’ is missing.

This sentence needs a subject because otherwise not a single living thing could have focused, due to the shapes and shadows dancing in a distorted cacophony.

No, it was just Her that had the focus issues.

I can see it now; there she was, trapped in the half light, thinking to herself “fuck, these shapes and shadows dancing in distorted cacophony are making it difficult for me to focus”.

If the focusing in question was mental and not visual, same same, but even more so. It might explain things though.

I’m only joking. We all know what she really thought was “fuck, its hard to see in the dark”.

Maybe it was God, a He, that was thinking in these fancy, fancy words. He’s been at it so long that its all he’s got to keep himself amused.

Or possibly it was just the author thinking that people would be more impressed if (a) God was narrating the text, and (b) He did in flowery and complex prose otherwise unknown to spoken English (not even in the worst poetry), and (c) all of these conniptions were passed off as the real-time thoughts of Her.

And just for the record; shapes and sounds are visual. A cacophony is aural. Just saying.

The only focus issue here is my ability to read such pretentious bullshit.

Correct!

His future was ashes but he didn’t know that then. 

A cacophony of darts and dashes silenced the choir that serenaded the collective, the community that shrouded and protected. 

[I give up. I can’t do it. It kills me.If I ever write a book I’ll make sure there is no God the narrator, nor a proxy buried in a character. There’ll be plenty of ‘I’s. Opinions will be labelled as such. And you’ll be reading in the Now.]

I don’t know why but I just remembered a dinner party event, many years ago, where I was perversely seated next to a loudly ticking biological bomb that said to me ‘​It does have a certain je ne sais quoi, doesn’t it?’

This in reference to je ne sais quoi; it was too long ago.

Unanticipated as this pearler was, Yellow Glen bubbly erupted from my nose.

No cigar that night.

This is apropos of nowt other than as a description of the contrast to the good fortunes that adorn my personal space, latterly.

Shoot up your plastic Kate and, abracadabra, you get a Margaret Scrotum. I sense the dead hand of Kafka.

In reference to this deeply philosophical query (exhibit below) I’m thinking that the pundit is pissing up the wrong tree.

Cause and effect, my friend. Why is Canberra?

Imagine that your non-homosexual partner is having a relationship with a third party. 

The key questions that you should ponder are:

1. Is your partner’s new friend your sex or the other?

2. If it is yours, is the relationship sexual or otherwise?

Let me explain where I am going with this…

Is it rational to have absolutely no jealousy if your wife has a non-sexual but deep relationship with a girlfriend, but then to get super jealous if she has a similar type of friendship with a male?

Not for me, it isn’t.

Is it reasonable to be not at all jealous if she has deep friendship with a male friend but then to get deeply jealous if they also put body parts into each other?

Makes no sense…

What happens if  you reasonably decide that there is no issue with her and her male friend not only having a deep relationship, but also deciding that it is OK if they fuck? Might you not eventually lose your spouse to the friend?

Possibly, but preventing something that should happen from happening isn’t a formula for happiness me-thinks.

In love and relationships the best approach is to enjoy what you have while you have it. But also, be prepared to lose it, and when you do, you can wallow in the pain of loss which will of course pass, as all feelings do.

Once you’ve been through these hoops a few times you probably won’t fear anything and coincidentally your relationships will be that much better for the lack of fear.

This is an example of using rational thinking, call it philosophy if you will, to breakdown an intuitive response that might otherwise lead you astray.

But even so, you have to keep practicing. We can’t just adopt new positions with a one-off declaration of will, derived with a flourish of logic.

If you tap into Google something like ‘how to get rid of an addiction’, by Jesus you get some rubbish coming back at you.

For example, ‘7 ways to get rid of an addiction’ starts with ‘1. Self-determination…’.

Others suggest starting with a pen and paper, with which to make lists. Lots of them. Nuh.

Here’s the real path:

1. Indulge in your addiction until you are destitute and/or physically sick. This will give you the much-needed motivation to change.

2. Talk to someone wiser than yourself in order to understand the root cause of your addiction. We are all shit at analysing ourselves, so don’t bother trying.

3. They’re slippery hypotheses, these on the subject of your own psychology. Keeping them in your mind just doesn’t work. Write the thing down and read it every day.

4. Buck up your pride; you have to talk to everyone in your life about it too. All of them, the people that is. Ad nauseum. Bore the fuck out of them.

5. Then, and only then, you start the avoidance habit. If drinking is your problem, drink a little less. Go for the record number of days. And don’t forget, bore everyone with the details.

6. Keep at it. Don’t get too disheartened when you relapse, which you will. Restart, reset, when you need to. All the way back to step 1 if needed.

7. Eventually you will get there. Or not.

8. Oh, and read Mark Twain on the subject. Some bad habits are very useful as they will save you later in life when you need to give something up to get well. And the way to quit is to quench the desire rather than the act. 

I have always distinguished between a debate and an argument.

For mine, a debate involves two reasonable and/or rational people that are prepared to consider and even adopt the position of another, even if the chances of this happening are very slight. Nothing is ruled out. Debates can be emotional, but the intent is never lost on either party.

An argument on the other hand involves at least one party that has no intention of ever adopting the position of the other. This of course infuriates the other party and emotions can spiral out of control. Arguments usually end in stalemate or false declarations of conformity, when one party becomes too exhausted to continue.

According to someone or other, there are three types of jealousy. I make it five.

(1) Symptomatic Jealousy is a consequence of a major mental illness such as paranoid disorder, schizophrenia, substance abuse, or organic brain disorders.

I call this Mad Jealousy. ‘Nuff said.

(2) Because of personality disorder or strong sensitizing experiences, some people who aren’t on the wrong side of the DSM are especially sensitive to self-esteem or relationship threat. They experience Pathological Jealousy.

I call this Addictive Jealousy because it’s actually driven by a desire to avoid psychological pain. Ironic that, because it’s counter-productive in many instances.

But, and this is key, the psychological pain caused by the fallout of Addictive Jealousy is, for the sufferers, preferable to the threat of experiencing whatever the primary psychological pain is that they are avoiding, no matter how unlikely this is.

(3) So-called Normal Jealousy occurs in people who are neither sensitized nor suffering from a major mental illness. I’ve broken this into three categories.

(3A) Compulsive Jealousy is driven by an anxiety that the future will be different to the present, when it comes to personal relationships.

On one hand, this is completely defensible. And yet the habit can be quite compulsive because it requires a crystal ball.

Unfortunately we humans are randomly useless at forecasting on emotional matters; we usually don’t know this and tend to either be over-optimistic or under-optimistic. Compulsive Jealousy is of course an example of the latter.

(3B) Compulsive Jealousy can morph into what I call Prophylactic Jealousy. You can think of this as akin to some real world version of the movie, Minority Report. The sufferer imagines a future crime by, for example, a spouse, and then explains to the future criminal what their punishment will be if the crime does occur. This is an attempt to circumvent the future crime altogether. Proposed punishment can range from ‘I will be upset’ to ‘I will be angry’ or ‘I will leave you and take the kids with me’.

I believe that sufferers of Prophylactic Jealousy need serious counseling. They are suffering from a compulsive habit that crosses over into something from the DSM, and also causes a lot of pain for others and for themselves by placing much unnecessary strain on relationships.

(3C) Having said all that, I’d say that there is a fifth type of jealousy, Defensive Jealousy.

This one kicks in only after the damning facts are known and real, and doesn’t require the imagining of a crime of the heart.

This type of jealousy is a mechanism to protect the self against future harm, on the principle that leopards will almost always have spots.Of course, on rare occasions leopards get dipped into chlorine bleach. Getting it wrong on these occasions is a statistically acceptable risk to those acting upon the principle of Defensive Jealousy.

The definition of “future harm” here is critical. Each of us could weigh up the pros and cons of a situation quite differently. Some would go with their gut, and yet others would let to rational mind have a bat as well. Some might reason themselves into realizing that they have nothing to fear except fear itself. We are all different and we are all coming from different places, with different intents. There is no ‘right’ way to live, just better ways for you and me, as compared to what we are doing now.

Disclaimer: this blog is simply an attempt to describe what I have observed around me on the subject of jealousy. Nothing written here should be taken as evidence that I condone jealousy in any of its five forms. However it would be delusional to pretend that jealousy doesn’t exist; and hence, noting that it does, there is much merit in cataloging the types of jealousy so that one can more efficiently deal with it when it arises, in yourself or in others.

If you started a fling my gut feeling is that you wouldn’t be able to share it with me for fear of:

(a) hurting me and causing pain, or

(b) me leaving our relationship.

What do you call something that is addictively desirable until it is obtained, thereafter becoming less and less valuable until it is essentially worthless?

Well it’s not a thing at all. It’s a psychological condition. Let me explain in the context of a cheating husband.

If a husband cheats again and again, then it is likely that he’s got a deep addiction for something, and it is certainly not the thing that is addictively desirable until it is obtained.

On this, the holy side of the DSM, most people that have a sexual addiction also have substantive negative beliefs running around in their skulls.

They may feel unworthy or they may feel that no one can genuinely love them.

These feelings have causes. And effects. And they are the bullseye of the target, if change is desired.

A deep sense of insecurity drives addicts to compartmentalize their sexual and intimate lives, thereby avoiding intimacy altogether in some instances

After all, being intimate with a spouse requires that one feels worthy of such love.

In some cases, cheating can serve to temporarily make the addict feel more powerful and less insecure.

But more importantly, the addict feels that he has nothing to offer other than his sexual attractiveness.

He will be addicted to flirting and inappropriate behavior. He will be irresistibly drawn to people that find him attractive.

These addicts will continually seek to sexualize all relationships, even business relationships.

Each new affair will quickly become an unwanted intimacy. The addict will move on, and then on, and on again.

It’s just not the year for Leicesters.

It would appear that 13 year olds are now of the mind to pair up in a virtual fashion.

And when I say fashion, I do mean fashion; it is quite fashionable to have a boyfriend or girlfriend.

But the current interpretation of the conjoined ‘friend’ is rather virtual in nature.

A couple will communicate by text or through a messaging app, but actual face to face meetings are minimised or altogether avoided because they are yucky, messy, or something else altogether; I know not what.

This phenomenon has also assisted in the rise of vibisexuality in the matrix. Driven by images of female pop stars kissing other female pop stars, some young girls have decided to have their virtual affairs with other girls. There’s no feedback loop to hoop.

My prediction is that these 13 year olds will continue to have their virtual relationships even as they get to that age where something else could be desired.

You can see them now; 30 years old with virtual husbands and wives.

They will live apart but communicate continually through apps.

They may even each have virtual presence with the other through holograms that move and speak.

When it comes to sex, procreation and child raising, well, technology will allow this to be outsourced.

And the kids can be then be virtual, computer generated, thereby solving the world’s population problem.

So it’s not quite the Matrix that we are looking at it here. After the next generation everyone will be virtual with no messy bodies to look after.

It gives me great comfort, on the odd occasion that I find myself in a taxi, to know that the meter has been secured with copper wire and a lump of lead.

Heath Robinson at his best – “The One Piece Chromium Steel Dining Room Suite”. This one makes me laugh every time.

This is a true account of what just happened…

[Scene] in the gym. 

I’d just finished using the lat pull machine and got up to to use the bicep curl machine to my left. The woman on the cable rowing machine on my right said:

“I was going to use that machine next”

“?” I just looked at her in confusion.

“I won’t be long” she continued. Meaning that it wouldn’t be long before she finished with the rowing and started doing her planned bicep curls.

“Are you running late for a meeting?” Me, trying to be helpful.

“No, I just don’t like waiting”

At which point, without a word, I inserted my headphones, cranked the volume, and started on my bicep curls. Aka option (1).

I really do believe that some people are genuinely all worked up about the inhumane injustices wreaked upon some animals – chickens and dogs mainly, but also to the odd pig and cat, and even the occasional more exotic critter.

But whence comes such emotions? (assumption alert) Asymmetrical Anthropomorphism; that’s the problem here.

That is, people with psychological issues that are sublimating away their imbalances by assigning human characteristics to (thereby) unfairly treated animals; hence creating a facile diversion away from dealing with their own shit.

The only evidence that I have for this assertion is (a) the mad look in their eyes, and (b) their complete inability to rationally discuss such matters – see explanation below.

You can always tell when someone is mad. First, you pick a subject that they are passionate about and then start a discussion whereby the goal is to list the assumptions that they have made to arrive at their position, assuming that they did so rationally (which they did not).

Half-way through the process they usually lose their shit and storm out of the room. Or scream at you and hit you. Quod erat demonstrandum.

Now you can’t remove with logic what was not put there with logic in the first place. So if you find yourself dealing with someone that is suffering from Asymmetrical Anthropomorphism (or similar) there are only two options:

(1) You completely ignore them, or

(2) If that is not possible, then you have to consider violence. It’s a case of hurt or be hurt.

Now as a woman is like this or like that,
according as she acts and according as she behaves, so will she be;
a woman of good acts will become good, a woman of bad acts, bad;
she becomes pure by pure deeds, bad by bad deeds;

And here they say that a person consists of desires,
and as is her desire, so is her will;
and as is her will, so is her deed;
and whatever deed she does, that she will reap.

Whatever bad deeds she reaps, she will not do
and as she does not, by her will;
and her desire will follow;
and whatever she desires, that she will reap.

– Brihadaranyaka Upanishad, with mods by me.

​Overheard on the Tannoy…

‘He took a big risk and it came off. The American people like that.’ 

‘What? Taking a risk?’ 

‘No, the risk coming off. That’s seen as leadership.’

That’s so odd that it’s probably true. A whole nation that has no simpatico with regression. 

My guess is that we all have to worry when their luck finally runs out, as it just has.

What dribbles on the couch stays on the couch.

​He’s a thinker that Malcolm. Maybe we can line all of our roads with bollards and then tell the Kiwis that they are footing the bill.

A meal. Them’s crisp wrappers.