Simply the best way to get a lazy carnivore out of bed.

The art of apology…how to get it into Lola’s head?

She just woke up grumpy and told me she missed the school disco last night because she is at my place.

I said “I am sorry you missed the disco”.

She said “yeah right”. And then something to the effect that she is only interested in solutions. Time machine?

In fact she finds it impossible to apologise if she thinks she is in the right. And it’s just difficult for her to apologise otherwise. It’s going to be a tough twenty years ahead for her

Last night we were talking to the grumpy old Irish neighbour. He was complaining about the “kids” that smashed his car mirror. I happen to know that he did it himself whilst driving past a truck the other day; he didn’t notice.

I told Lola the story. She said “that’s lying”.

I said “No its not – it’s just withholding the truth. If I had told him he would have been upset with himself, maybe me and he may not have believed me. And he still would have had a broken mirror to fix”.

I think this set of interpretations represents two sides of the same coin.

Lola currently believes in absolutes. She hasn’t fully comprehended how much we really live in the grey.

All you can really do as a parent is tell them what you have learnt and believe. And then wait for life to catch up with their prejudices.

The good news is that Lola is already bending the truth for her own ends. Incipient analog life philosophy!

Most of the ringtones that are commonly available for incoming calls really start to annoy me after a while.

So I got clever and now use the lovely sound of Australian magpies.

The trouble is, there’s a lot of magpies in Sydney. I can hear one as I write this.

Is meditation the opposite of “being present”? If you hybridize the two are you are dead or just normal?

Last weekend I caught Lola designing a robotic teacher.

I suggested that she add a remote control with a mute and pause button. She liked that idea.

Like me, Lola is a very abstract and non-linear thinker. As a result she is incredibly bored and frustrated with the school system, which despite decades of efforts to the contrary is essentially a linear sausage factory.

Hence the image of the robotic teacher.

I tell Lola that we live in a world dominated by linear thinkers and, as painful as it is, she is best advised to figure out her own Rosetta stone by enduring the 15 or so years of schooling.

Does gushiness mask superficiality or is gushiness just superficial?

You can take the girl out of the suburbs but you can’t take the suburbs out of the girl.

A root cause analysis for sausages suggests squeamishness.

A hipster is a gen Y with a beard.

The service still sucks.

Car manufacturers generally market the power and torque of their engines.

However the boy racers, after working over a car, only care about the power that gets to the road.

Which they measure with a dyno, which is a sort of a treadmill for cars that measures the power and torque at the rollers that are rotated by the car wheels.

Similarly, I often meet very intelligent people with powerful brains (engines) but fuck-all ability to get that power to the ground.

They would fail the dyno test.

Passionfruit and mangoe are my two favourite fruits.

Or is that passionfruits and mangoes are my two favourite fruit?

Or passionfruit and mangoes?

The more I look at the word fruit the more it seems wrong.

The bats don’t seem to have a problem with any of them.

The word prototype derives from the Greek πρωτότυπον meaning “first impression”.

The word stereotype derives from the Greek στερεός meaning “solid impression”.

They forgot the word monotype meaning “single impression”. It does have two useless technical meanings in printing and biology.

Odd that the first version of product is a prototype but the final version isn’t a stereotype.

Similarly a well-entrenched racial profile is a stereotype but a new one isn’t a prototype.

My monotype of the stereo-type is that its a prototype of a mistype.

Today The Australian government “accidentally” released names and other details of asylum seekers in detention and in the community.

This puts lives at risk for families of asylum seekers that are still in their home countries.

I don’t believe this was an accident at all. Our government agencies are mad about it security so a leak like this looks very suspicious.

It’s akin to our navy “accidentally” drifting into Indonesian waters. With multiple redundant global positioning systems this is also very unbelievable.

It looks as though our government is prepared to risk international relationships and people’s lives in the interests of local political gain.

When did our conservatives become so absent of morals? Or have they always been so? Whichever, they have my condemnation for a lack of morals and/or the lack of a duty of care.

Sans conscious thought, if prompted, if I would have said cannibalism followed death or murder.

Not so.

It’s the consumption of body parts. There’s nothing in there suggesting that the donor is dead.

So when Kay Bilson served up a blood sausage constructed from her own blood…does that make me a cannibal?

What about the common sharing of bodily fluids through the oral channel.

It has me a little confused. Maybe we need an Australian standard on this.

Reading wiki on the subject I learn this very disturbing fact; in Melanesia they used to have body-parts food markets.

One of my young colleagues introduced me to his girlfriend this morning.

The thing I noticed, amongst other things, was that she has incipient stumps for legs.

Should I say something?

I love surface tension. And surface tension loves me. Doodah.

How many light bulbs does it take to change a human?

One very fucking bright one.

I have had more than nine near-death experiences. It’s a good thing I am a Gemini because that gives me 18 to play with.

Is it a infinitely small dot or a non infinitesimal time sequence or a bloody event?

English is odd. Period.

apology + excuse < apology

Me and the world’s largest kale plant.

It’s a race between me and the bats for the mangoes.

The bats are the night shift and I am the day shift.

They eat the mangoes up the tree but invariably the mangoes drop half way through each mini-feast.

So every morning there is half-eaten squished mangoes all over the yard.

Plus lots of orange bat poo.

Nice.

Who knew that society puts us all into one of two boxes, man or woman?

I had never thought about this until just over-hearing a conversation in a cafe, mainly from a woman who prefers to be a man.

Apparently we have all fallen into the trap of viewing each other through the lens of reproduction. A view gleaned, ironically, from studies in feminism.

We humans only do what we do by having little sand castles of complex hypotheses that enable fast and effective decision making.

God help the odd angry exception.

That’s 1338.

One of the most annoying thing about men, according to women, is that they won’t properly listen to a woman’s problems.

Apparently all men want to do is fix things. And they get frustrated with the dialog if they can’t.

But turning this around girls, if a man is depressed or down, all you have to do is give him a problem to solve.

If you are the cause of his depression then make sure the problem is about you.

That’s a two-fer.

All my life I have wondered why people suffer what I call “hypotheses feedback bias”.

Basically it is when people make up a hypothesis, act as though it’s true, and then get some positive feedback.

This then convinces them that they were right and brilliant to guess it so in the first place.

Try and convince your average person with this feedback bias that there may actually be a more useful hypothesis than the first so guessed, and you are generally wasting your breath.

Medical practitioners and data analysts come to mind.

Waiting for Lola….outside the newsagent in the mall.

An older couple walk past.

The woman spits (per the poster below) “Emma Thompson is looking very blonde these days”.

She sorta huffs off leaving the old bloke to peruse the poster. Which he does for some considerable time.

He then walks in and buys the mag. Apropos of nothing that I understand.

And besides I didn’t even recognize Emma in the photo. I smell rats, miss.

I have a shopaphobia.

Only unjust water torture from, say, a mother will drive me into, say, a kid’s shoe shop.

I was asked to guess what the humidity was.

And I said 76%.

And it was.

Serves ’em right.

How does one extrapolate from the loss of two pairs of sunnies to a life philosophy, as some would call it?

Too much behaviorally reinforced abstraction. Blog diary stops in April.

I lost two of my favorite pairs of sunglasses yesterday. Both to mechanical failure. What’s that about?

Once upon a time I had one pair of sunnies at a time. Now with increased affluence I have a dozen pairs, maybe more, hanging around.

This makes moments like these non-issues. And yet is this a good thing?

Possibly life should be a series of little crises. Rather than just plain sailing until, totally unprepared, you hit a rock.

Quote….”It is a margherita … except for the salmon, bocconcini and the capers”

He who has the least to lose probably will.

Two odd incidents today…

A complete stranger just bailed me up and suggested I go to the Hillsong church across the road because it’s ‘very good’. I blanked out and just ignored her totally. Unlike…

A fellow cyclist this morning literally abused me (nasty names) for having the temerity to go through a red light, very carefully after slowing down to check that there were no cars.

I rode off ignoring him. But after the lights went green he caught up to give me a second dose of vile.

So I decided to king hit him. Total regression to the childhood hood. You should have seen him panic when he realized what I was up to. He had gears and I did not. So he escaped.

The media would have loved that one. Road rage – cyclist rammed and king hit by another cyclist… it’s got everything.

To be fair, if I accuse our unions of being in-bred rent seeking dinosaurs then the same must be said of our corporate-sector owners and managers.

A pox on the lot of them.

The corporate fuckers think they are being clever to get their goons in Canberra to drive a stake through the heart of the union corpse, via a royal commission into union corruption.

But once the unions are gone these fine fellows will be exposed for what they are by their lack of performance and lack of other excuses.

They are setting up the guillotine for the unions, but they themselves will be next up the steps.

Over the last 25 years union  participation had fallen from 40% to 20% of the Australian workforce.

This is usually ascribed to the decrease in unskilled labor and an increase in the aspirations of the middle classes. Plus a very aggressive anti-union media.

A good fraction of the service jobs in Australia are artifacts of government legislation and bureaucracy. This is a great way to distribute our wealth even if it’s at the expense personal freedom and happiness… (joke).

A great many jobs which used to be considered unskilled are now requiring university degrees, primarily driven by government. I always thought the incentive was to keep unemployment down by keeping youngsters in Uni and out of the workforce.

But it just struck me that the ‘skilling up’ of the service industries also drives these workers away from unions. These guys don’t aspire to the perception of lowly paid uniformity.

Unions need to rebrand themselves as industry associations. Which makes sense since everyone wants to be a successful contractor.

As Industry associations they can focus on wealth creation in the sector as well as wealth distribution in the sector. That would be far more helpful.

Buy how painful will it be? Generations of in-bred rent seeking…that’s a tough habit to break.

This is a worry. Or is it a boon for those silly BBQ discussions?

“The precise Gregorian times and dates for the Zodiac vary slightly from year to year as the Gregorian calendar shifts relative to the tropical year”

One of my favourite flowers is Viper’s Bugloss. Its all over the dry parts of the South Island of NZ. A noxious weed to the locals.

The viper part of the name came about from a perceived resemblance between the seeds and a viper’s head. The bugloss part is of Greek origin, meaning an Ox’s Tongue, which was correlated to the roughness and shape of the leaves.

But note its Viper’s Ox Tongue, not Ox Tongue’s viper. Apparently the plant often grows near large patches of marijuana which probably explains the odd name with more clarity.

In the middle ages Viper’s Bugloss was thought to be a useful antidote to snakebite based on the fanciful logic that the appearance of a plant indicates its use to humanity.

Now there’s a great example of why all hypotheses should be carefully tested.

More recently, statistics and soccer have met head on.

In the nineties stats were used to find correlations between players and their habits, and winning.

But all the attention was on the ball. How many times a player touched it. When they did, what they did with it. Etc.

Then some genius correlated winning to the habits of players off the ball. He found strong correlations to all sorts of things like how many kilometers a defender ran in a match. This helped them hire defenders.

Obviously the coach and ref are next. Then the crowd.

When this is over they will be able to simulate the whole thing in computers and we won’t know the difference.

The latest big insight amongst the intellectually challenged US venture capitalists is survivorship bias. Geez they make me giggle. I was in a meeting with a handful of Silicon Valley idols discussing this concept. You might have thought Einstein had just dropped in with the missing tablets from the mount.

Just for the record this is the example they used for their seance. A study had been made of the damage to returning bombers in WWII and it had been proposed that extra armour be added to those areas that showed the most damage. Some guy had the insight that the holes from flak and bullets on the bombers that did return represented the areas where they were able to take damage and that extra armour should be added to where the returning planes had no hits. It worked.

This evening I picked 120 mangoes off the tree. There are hundreds more up there. Fuck me, how to get rid of the things?

Sometimes the universe has a way of surprising the hell out of you. In a nice way. Such a thing happened today.

And then I glance at the AFR and purview the most asinine commentary I have seen for some time.

Parsing…. Toyota leaving Australia should be a wake up call for or federal pollies to put more money into NICTA.

Really…that just just about ruined my day. Ignorance and greed rule my country.

One form of planned obsolescence is where the cost of repairs is comparable to the market value of a product. Note the market value and the replacement cost are very different things. When the market value is less than the cost of a single repair many people simply buy a new & improved replacement, whether that is a car, a laptop or a mobile phone.

An example is my spare laptop which could be purchased, in its current crap condition and age, on Ebay for about $100. I just fixed the battery latch issue on this laptop with cable ties whereas Toshiba’s service agent had quoted me $300 for the job.

These battery latches are an example of rubbish engineering; they have been a problem in Toshiba laptops for a long time and there must not be a feedback mechanism to the engineers. I say ‘rubbish’ because the problem can occur in the first week of ownership which is not good for brand reputation.

However, any close observer will know that a heavily used laptop is unlikely to get past 2-3 years before niggling or fatal issues prompt the owner to replace the device. I know, for example, that when a laptop starts displaying certain characteristics (like blue screening, hotspots, excessive fan use, etc) there is little use getting it fixed. Its a goner. This despite the fact that ‘repairing’ usually means replacing whole slabs of it’s guts (like the motherboard).

But to be fair the cost of a new laptop is very low. High production volumes have enabled the investment, by manufacturers, into product development of billions of collective dollars. Unconstrained by product life issues or repair-ability, the focus has been on getting cost out (near to incoming material costs), weight and footprint down, and specs up.

I wonder how much extra people would be prepared to pay to have a device which is infinitely repairable? Given the rate of technology improvements people would also need infinite upgrade-ability of key functional components. But even then they would be the victim of ageing style. You can see the problem.

The only real solution is to put a price on both non-renewable carbon and other diminishing and unrecoverable resource inputs, via a tax, and let the ecosystem figure out the best solution.

If love can be a series of tick boxes then is it any surprise that life can be a series of purchases?

Is the term politically correct thus because politicians were the first to display such behavior?

Wiki says sort of.

Various communist parties were in the habit of creating the correct social policy positions and the term was created by their witting but variably willing constituents.

When a  mathematician develops a model that can be tested against experimental data then we have in our midst a very old school scientist.

It’s probably just a figment of your imagination. Or it is a climate change engineer busily over fitting the data.

When a  mathematician develops a model that can never be tested against experimental data then we have in our midst a philosopher.

Loves knowledge but truth is a first year ethics debate.

This entry is very mundane and posted in the context of good netizenship.

My spare laptop is an oldish Toshiba. Now these Toshiba’s are good and robust laptops except in one regard; they have battery latches that are prone to disappearing of their own accord. Whence they go, nobody knows.

Losing one latch of the two is only annoying since you only really need the one. But when you lose the second one you are in trouble since the battery can fall out at any time.

You can try gaff-taping the battery into place but this won’t keep the battery power connector in place in a reliable enough fashion. You will find that you have no charge even though you were plugged in all night.

The latches are tricky to install and normally replacement of one of the two latches requires that the laptop needs a whole new cover since the latch is so-integrated.

When you talk to Toshiba and get a quote you quickly find that the repair costs about 3x the current market value of your old laptop.

So I turned to the trusty old cable ties. Two holes in the (extended) battery case and two cable ties as per the pictures below. Voila.

It must be said that cable ties are probably the most useful fix-it item of all time.

My last word on the subject…

Some dude, who probably should be in a wheelchair, has a hypothesis that everything in the universe is connected, but to maintain the connections requires energy. To find an energy minimum, he claims, the dimensions of connection collapse down to our familiar three.

He is mostly wrong. Everything is connected but only because it is all always the one and same thing.

Our perception of the dimensions and time is an artifact that only exists in an imaginary set of dimensions that are a self-fulfilling mirage.

Essentially our imaginary existence couldn’t exist if we truly understood that God is all of us and we are all the same.

But our imaginary existence is just as real as the singular one. And there are many more realities than these two that we can not even imagine.

I am fairly sure that we are too limited by our own perception of reality to perceive this infinite set of alternative realities with any clarity worth owning.

I am actually a relatively slow learner. But I learn very well; in the sense that I can do more with knowledge and skills than most.

At the Grounds in Alexandria. I just left America only to return to it immediately.

100% contrived. And the acoustics are shrill, and blonde.

The Americans have discovered acrylamide in everything.

The monomer is a neurotoxin but the polymer is harmless. Maybe they just need to figure out how to polymerize it in situu

Now this would drive the suburban mothers quite mad…

After 3 hours sleep and with a force 8 hangover (care of the IMF) I thank the god of vacated seats (are youThor?) for his  magnificence and fucking benevolence.

The question arose as to how the finance and corporate sectors manage to pay their senior management so highly?

I know how it works… it’s a club of self serving and like minded types patting each other’s backs.

But as to how it emerged? The opportunity was always there but over time, since the ethical revolution of the sixties, moral responsibility in business has contracted to the legal minimum requirement. And the same guys have even been able to influence the legal requirement.

It wasn’t always thus. It happened gradually as greed (the motivating force) drove incremental changes in behaviors. In order to remain competitive everyone was dragged along, again incrementally.

Four decades later and we have the situation where the maximum personal gain is extracted from asymmetries in control and information.

However I do think the process is nearly at its peak. The internet will eventually disintermediate the asymmetries.  One should expect troubles when the toys are removed from the children though.

The view out of the window of my Singapore hotel bellies the absence of authenticity in this city state.

I learn that the IMF is a sheltered workshop for academic economists, masquerading as a second-millennium style investment bank for sovereign states.

M&A activity is limited but quite  entertaining when it does occur.

Oh to roam where the doodlers groan…

Wouldn’t you love to work in this Singapore factory…?

I just skipped through the Linda Lovelace biopic  on flight QF81.

Frightening thing for a father of a young girl to watch.

Believing the story as presented, the issue was an over-strict and over-bearing mother and a weak but loving father. Both parents believed in just pretending the world was how it should be.

This pre-disposed Linda to rebelling and to getting hitched with an amoral control freak who led her into the den. She also got very unlucky in her geography, timing and being in possession of certain unusual skills.

The other day my mum gave me some free advice…

On hearing me wondering aloud why it takes Lola’s school takes 4 days to figure out what class she is in for the year (inclusive of a pupil free day), she admonished me for talking about school in a negative fashion. She claimed Lola will pick up on it.

I countered, quietly in my head, that with kids you need to be yourself. They see through the facade anyway so you are just wasting your time trying.

This is an intriguing little number…

I have tried and tried but I have decided to give up.

I am just not interested in owning music. Hearing it, yes. But not in owning it.

Basically I like to be surprised by what I am going to listen to next.

The entertainment display on my Qantas flight is only slightly larger than the one on my phone. And it certainly has less pixels. Reading glasses do not improve the clarity.

I was chatting to one of the hosties and complimented her on the new uniforms. It turns out they hate them because they are polyester. The  fabric  doesn’t breath and it also breeds odors.

The inflight advert focuses on inflight entertainment and the new uniforms. I think Qantas needs a new board and new management.

Have you ever wondered why the conservatives work so hard to bifurcate wealth in society?

Partly it’s so there is always a supply of an underclass for servants, since not all services can be automated.

But mostly it’s because wealth is relative. Without an underclass the wealthy don’t know for sure that they are wealthy.

We the living, in black and white, and read all over.

My own private paradox is that I am getting more and more able to do the things that I have always dreamed of, and yet I don’t dream those dreams any more.

A tweenie separating out the ‘edible’ bits from the yucky bits … she is my daughter but sometimes …

So the coalition’s solution to stopping the water-loving asylum seekers is to put them in submersible life boats, bound for Indonesia.

They are letting them go as close as they can go to Indonesia so as to avoid an embarrassing situation where one of these boats sinks or just floats out into the Indian ocean. With lots of deaths for TV to focus on.

They are even prepared to go into Indonesian waters to do this. This is risking poor relationships with our neighbor.

On two counts it’s a high risk strategy. I can feel some wheels coming off soon.

Lies, rabidly self-centered opinions and fluff… that is the Murdoch Press’s Daily Telegraph today.

The only truth is in the sports section. But even there they have wasted two and half pages trying to get us to be sympathetic towards Ian Thorpe.

It’s not happening.

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

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

Desire is to want and be wanted.

Love is to need and be needed.

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

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

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

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

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

Vague shake of head. Nup.

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

“OK dad….. Huh?”

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

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

How times have changed.

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

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

Look what I found…still going surprisingly.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Genius can be found in the oddest places.

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

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

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

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

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

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

The less obvious dimensions of attractiveness are:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This morning the Herald taught me that:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The stock market did something or other.

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

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

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

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

There, I’ve said too much.

Cephalectomy.

Nola across the road is ninety this year.

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

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

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

Time weights for nobody.

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

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

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

A trip to Luna Park today was enlightening.

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

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

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

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

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

I am all  responsibility and no care.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Cycle craft to the rescue.

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

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

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

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

These people are as rare as hen’s teeth.