I get grumpy when I am doing something that I would prefer not be.

I have spent a lifetime and considerable energy trying to engineer this scenario away.

It’s about time I gave it away since I am bumping up against diminishing returns.

Sneetches and Nietzsches. The cat beats the hat every day.

I was taught at a young age the rigorous scientific method. When new ideas come in the first reaction of a pure scientist is to test that idea rigorously which requires a posture of disbelief.

This is all very good in science but it doesn’t go down so well at home or in the workplace where an openness to the ideas of others is surely part of a successfully strategy in life.

So I have had to curb my scientific method. I now express wonderment at the ideas of others and quietly test the hypothesis in my head.

The NSW police motto is Culpam Poena Premit Comes, which means Punishment Follows Closely On Guilt.

Gee what happened to rehabilitation and a fair trial?

Have problem, will shoot it. Weird fuckers.

Ok, so here is a new hypothesis – you heard it hear first.

The simplest and cheapest observations or measurements that humans can make are with our born senses – ears, eyes, nose, taste and touch.

Over history, as we attempted to observe things on a smaller and larger scale, typically those measurements have become more expensive. That is we had to first do a lot of R&D and then engineer-up some equipment that could make the measurements.

As example on the small scale would be the microscope which is an expensive little device when it was first made, or a particle accelerator. On the large scale think of a Mars satellite mission.

Science up until the late 20th century was very much focused on explaining observations and less about creating new things. New things occasionally were invented but this wasn’t the primary focus of academic science – they tended to happen by ‘serendipity’.

Initially the observations of interest were of nature, but after a while this transitioned to observation of complex man-made systems.

As the building blocks of scientific knowledge were laid down – starting from the Newtonian human scale and then working into the very small (in distance, say mm, microns, molecules, atoms, sub-atomic particles etc) to the very large (meters to the edge of the universe) – we were building up layers upon layers of knowledge and understanding.

By the end of the twentieth century many scientists had switched from ‘explaining observations’ to creating ‘new complex systems’ (petit-engineering or nanotech) and this is because interesting new observations were getting too complex and expensive. Unfortunately most of the science at the more readily understood (and cheaper) scales (in distance, time, whatever) had been well documented and modelled so it wasn’t of much interest.

And this is where my hypothesis comes in – I believe there is an exponentially increasing cost (in time, resources, effort, dollars, whatever) in making scientific observations as the scale departs from the everyday (to both the very small and the very large). So for most scientists it was simply a matter of diminishing returns if they followed the old scientific method. Which is why they switched to Nanotech.

There are a handful of scientists still working away at scales very far removed from the everyday. For example some astrophysicists and particle physicists – and these guys struggle to get the massive funds they need to create the observations they need to progress their modelling. Most people realise they have one life and look at the odds of making a useful contribution in these areas and go elsewhere.

I have another hypothesis and that is that the probability of being able to create useful everyday spin-off technologies from new modelling or observations also decreases exponentially as the scale departs from the everyday (to both the very small and to the very large).

So its a double-whammy – the costs go up exponentially and the probability of useful spin-off technologies go down exponentially as the as the scale departs from the everyday (to both the very small and the very large). No wonder the few remaining pure academic old-school scientific method-type scientists are having such a hard time of it. I expect them to disappear entirely over the next 20 years or so.

Wisdom is knowing what’s right for you or those you love without having to think about it.

I met an old woman today who was optimistic to the point of moronic.

A new word is born. I only need 1,999 more to catch up with Shakespeare.

I am trying to make sure that my daughter respects herself.

I tell her that if she doesn’t respect herself then she can’t expect any one else to.

I have a love-hate relationship with knowledge.

This blog is just me trying to get rid of it.

Therefore I can’t be a philosopher.

So, in summary, it’s possible that I will but it’s not very probable.

Perhaps things will change, perhaps not.

I am going write some warning messages very blackly on my lid.

Perhaps comes from “per happenstance”, which means by accident or by chance.

We take it to mean “possibly” or “maybe” when what it really means is “I have no fucking idea but if the gods will it, yes”.

It is very probable that you will not be able to please all the people all of the time.

In fact there won’t be a single person that won’t be displeased with you some of the time.

But when you have a nett negative pleasure effect on another it’s time to do yourself, and them, a favor.

Behavioural attenuation is all very good, but not at the cost of your soul.

As I walk around this city that I live in, and meet the eyes of others, it appears to me that a lot of people are constantly seeking possibilities.

You can see it in their eyes.

You can tell a crap technology by your own feeling of a lack of confidence when approaching it.

For example I never assume a Sydney parking meter will just work.

Especially if you suggest a credit card to the beast.

You will be standing there, punching buttons, squinting and swearing, all before you get a ticket. Or not.

I wonder how our federal politicians, if caught stealing money through their expense accounts via non-compliant travel, can simply hand the money back?

Could we apply that principle to all thievery in the nation?

If we import 1.4m bicycles into Australia every year then that means roughly 1 in every 20 people get a new bike very year.

Lets assume half of the population will never ride, then that means the rest of of the population (that might ride) gets a new bike every ten years or so (assuming most of them only have one bike at a time).

Which seems about right. After ten years in the garage doing nothing the thing will look old-school and be pretty rusted.

Circa 95% of sales are vanity sales to people with resolutions, that will probably only use the product once. Its an evil marketer’s wet dream.

The Australian population grew by 58% between 1986 and 2006 and the daily average number of bicycle trips grew by only 21%, representing a net decline in cycling trips per person. This trend apparently continues to this day.

However last year we imported 1.4m bicycles into Australia continuing a decade long growth of typically 20% per annum.

This implies that there is a lot of resolution out there and fuck all constitution.

Two lines from the Whitlams;

“If I had three lives
I’d marry her in two”

I am not sure that is a compliment or not.

What the fuck is he planning to do in the third life?

Yesterday I had to sit through 3 hours of girls doing contemporary dance because my daughter was in one 4 minute effort out of the three hours.

Ground hog day, 40 dance-lets. Some were great, some were terrible, But 10 would have seen me right for the next lifetime or two.

The oddest effort was by the intermediate contemporary tap girls. It was tap dancing in Scottish kilts with Irish dancing mixed with hip hop and tap. Totally bloody surreal.

It was 100% Eastern Suburbs, 99.5% white-bread anglo girls, no boys, perversely American in flavor and unrelenting in the sexualisation of the girls.

I wisely kept my opinions to myself. I would have been stoned to death by the mothers if I had uttered one single less-than-gushy comment. Some were actually crying during the performances, so moved they were.

Thus the freight train thunders on.

A bottle of red and…

After a heavy session in the gym I get very aggressive.

Around home the working hypothesis is “testosterone”.

I am not sure that naming a molecule really answers any questions. It simply transfers the mystery.

Taking offence is a choice, and, I think, a projection of unresolved fears.

I often find that other people take more offence to minor matters or misunderstandings than I do.

Is it because I care less or because they are more insecure?

Maybe I attract the offensive or readily offendable types because they know that I’ll put up with their shit.

And that is the first time that I have realised that being readily offendable is just as bad as being offensive.

Both require a lack of empathy.

We can buy very toxic and expensive insect sprays but I know that window cleaner is more effective.

I wonder which combo of the ingredients does the job on the cockroaches, and how?

4.0% isopropyl alcohol (a highly volatile solvent)
1% ethylene glycol monobutyl ether (a less volatile solvent),
0.1% sodium lauryl sulfate (a surfactant),
0.01% tetrasodium pyrophosphate (a water softener),
0.05% of 28% ammonium hydroxide,
1% of a dye solution,
0.01% perfume

I saw a report today that smart phones and their apps are making narcissists out of us all.

D’oh.

At the end of the street the only house with any real character in the neighborhood is meeting its doom after about 130 years of existence.

It had been re-clad in asbestos cement at some stage in its life, so this had to be removed.

Get this, the guys that removed it put up a fence so no one could see it and then waited for a rainy day so that dust would be less likely to drift, and basically they tore and hammered the asbestos sheet right off the frame.

This process is a little agricultural me-thinks. I could imagine an air-tight tent, like they use in the US for termite chemical spraying. Or a large sprinkler system with a proper drainage system. As it is, the dust they make simple gets to dry out after the rain and annoy the neighbors later.

I don’t think our regulations are tough enough and this is partially because the claims for Asbestosis are being settled by James Hardie and CSR, so the government has a lower than usual incentive to fix this.

The ugly woman wore her ugliness with pride. It was the only way she could deal with the pain of it – overtly.

The odd thing is that I don’t think she is that ugly. Not overtly pretty or anything, but if I met her I wouldn’t think ‘ugly’.

So by defining herself in the negative she is in the same trap as those that define themselves in the positive

I think the real trick is to define oneself by other things such as family, goodness, intelligence, etc. When one excels at these other people won’t and don’t judge one by looks alone, or at all.

It’s that attitude that one takes, i.e what is important to oneself, that people pick up on and run with. If ugliness is your issue, in the positive or the negative, people will focus on that naturally.

We can all naturally sniff the fears and phobias and emotional indolences of others.

The bus and cab just drifted into each – both went out of their lanes. The bus hit my side, busted the doors and windows.

A lot of noise and panic but no biological damage at all, unless you count the scarring that occurred in my brain.

I wasn’t ready for it since I was drifting off myself, along with the two drivers I suspect – it was late.

It cost me a lot of time because the Indian driver begged me to stay otherwise the cops may assumed he was at fault. I am not sure I knew otherwise but I think I helped him.

He has been driving for a total of six months in his career. He came to Australia as a skilled immigrant with his family but couldn’t find a gig as an engineer.

The bus passengers didn’t hang around, they got the next bus. the bus driver was surly and didn’t speak to me at all.

The police were wonderfully professional and polite but they must have half a tonne of junk around their belts. You have to wonder how they can sit comfortably with all that on.

My only regret was that my camera had run out of battery hours before so no pics of the drama.

Get this, kids have a new verb, versing, from versus.

As in, [subject; sport] we are versing team x this week.

Vi veri universum vivus vici.

I am writing this as a memo to myself.

Venture Capital (for a keyword search).

If you want to partner with a corporate for investment into a start-up you have to work with creators/vendors of technologies and not users of technology.

That is partner with Intel or Google, not Coles, Fairfax, CBA or Westfields.

Individuals are not allowed to represent in the federal parliament if they have been convicted of a crime punishable by a year or more in prison, but that ban is only while they are serving or awaiting sentence.

That seems pretty lenient to me; probably reflecting the fact that we are a federation of formal penal colonies, and it also makes sense since one extra glass of wine before driving makes one a potential criminal; on that basis we would run out of candidates pretty quickly if we banned anyone with a criminal record.

We are pretty short of sane candidates already.

However if anyone is attainted (they mean sentenced) of treason then they are banned for life. Treason is defined below…

You could probably gun down Tony Abbott and claim it as a Humanitarian act and then be free to get elected on the goodwill thus created. Probably call yourself Shooters and Roooters party – that would be a dead cert to get a senate seat or two. Then you could form a coalition with Clive and be set for life financially, so he can get rid of all taxes on mining and make annual attendance at Gold Coast theme parks compulsory for all children.

“A person commits an offence, called treason, if the person:

(a) causes the death of the Sovereign, the heir apparent of the Sovereign, the consort of the Sovereign, the Governor-General or the Prime Minister; or

(b) causes harm to the Sovereign, the Governor-General or the Prime Minister resulting in the death of the Sovereign, the Governor-General or the Prime Minister; or

(c) causes harm to the Sovereign, the Governor-General or the Prime Minister, or imprisons or restrains the Sovereign, the Governor-General or the Prime Minister; or

(d) levies war, or does any act preparatory to levying war, against the Commonwealth; or

(e) engages in conduct that assists by any means whatever, with intent to assist, an enemy:

(i) at war with the Commonwealth, whether or not the existence of a state of war has been declared; and

(ii) specified by Proclamation made for the purpose of this paragraph to be an enemy at war with the Commonwealth; or

(f) engages in conduct that assists by any means whatever, with intent to assist:

(i) another country; or

(ii) an organisation;

that is engaged in armed hostilities against the Australian Defence Force; or

(g) instigates a person who is not an Australian citizen to make an armed invasion of the Commonwealth or a Territory of the Commonwealth; or

(h) forms an intention to do any act referred to in a preceding paragraph and manifests that intention by an overt act.”

A person is not guilty of treason if their assistance or intended assistance is purely humanitarian in nature.”

Once or twice a week I get on my bicycle for the 40km round trip to Clovelly to have breakfast with my daughter.

The only time I might be tempted to believe in a god is when the wind is against me both on the way there and on the way back.

Evil prick!

According to her mum Lola, at ten, is practicing her girly whiny flirty bloody annoying thing on her dad, me.

This is a prelude of things to come, where women torture boys and men with this crap for as long as they can, preferably twenty or thirty years.

Men only put up with it because (a) their dad’s did, (b) they want sex, and (c) they haven’t got to the point of being sick of sex with the woman in question yet.

Of course Lola doesn’t know any of this so I told her to go use the cat as a crash test dummy.

I had hoped that with early intervention I could talk her out of this sort of rubbish but it seems she is right in the middle of girly demographic.

I will keep talking to her though. You never know, one day she might realize that I am right and become one of those rare sane women.

I just realised that they have turned an adjective into a noun and I never noticed.

Time stopped.

My 19 year old niece borrowed some pants off Joanne and they never came back.

When asked, some time later, to return them, she claimed she didn’t know where they were but that they were probably at Margies (my mother’s).

There was no sign from her that she should take any responsibility in tracking them down or for replacing them.

I just watched the movie Francis Ha. It’s a very good but agonising insight into gen Y mentality. Geez, they have issues.

I am glad I watched it in a cinema because I would have never made it through otherwise.

Here are four versions of the same photo…

For newly minted leaders in any job where there are lifts and/or cubicles and/or gypsum ceiling tiles and/or windows that don’t open and/or instant coffee in a tea room.

When communicating anything with anyone junior or peer-like in the workplace, first think about what you are about to say.

Then distil it to the core message in your brain.

And then decide if you still want to say it

If so, make it as simple and short as possible so as to avoid misinterpretation.

Communicating upwards to anyone senior is very simple; just ask questions and only offer opinions in writing.

You can still talk non-work stuff, off the cuff, but make sure people know that you aren’t communicating in code when you do so. Sometimes you have to be very explicit about this because people see communists under every rock, or tea leaves in every cup.

Last year, wandering around the Victorian country side I had the pleasure of attending Ned Kelly’s official funeral.

I just accidentally landed in Greta at same time that his descendants had scheduled the funeral after finally getting his body out of a pauper’s grave, 133 years after he was hanged.

If you had a quarter acre block in the middle of the Simpson Desert I doubt that you could give it away, especially if the new owner had to pay rates on it.

This is a way of saying that real estate is only worth what people are prepared to pay for it. That is the value of real estate is entirely subject to supply and demand factors.

In Sydney right now a 300-1000 square meter block of land within 15 km of the CBD is worth at least $0.8-1.5m. Given that the average cost of building or replacing a house is $0.3-0.5m, this means that working professional couples spend $1-2m on a block of land and a house.

These working couples are prepared to mortgage themselves to the hilt whilst interest rates are low, and roughly speaking $2m seems to be the natural limit of affordability for two professional incomes. Low interest, interest repayments only, 30 year terms, up to 70% of all income on loan repayments; it’s all very tenuous. And they then become asset/loan rich and cash poor.

They don’t want to go too far out from the CBD because that would mean excessive travel times and hence the focus on that 15km range where there actually is public transport or other feasible options.

Its odd, if you get to $3m you often get more than twice the ‘value’ of a $2m house and land, i.e. more than twice the area of land and house. At $3m you are in a much less competitive market.

When I was in my last corporate role the organization hired professional HR psychologists who put us all through 360 degree reviews.

I was interviewed about how I thought others (i.e. my boss, my peers and my direct reports) all perceived me. In other interviews the ‘others’ were all asked how they perceived me.

The differences in these perceived perceptions was startling and very depressing. The overall feeling I got was that everyone hated me.

Of course we are all naturally very sensitive to the things about ourselves that other people don’t like. Human nature made me focus on the negatives and under-weight the positives.

After time, and a little counseling I got these results out of this process:

1. I stopped worrying so much about what I thought other people thought about me (just through sheer desensitization to the pain of it all). That is, I hardened up.

2. I started playing my inter-people relationships with a ‘straighter bat’ and stopped do anything that could be construed as trying to ‘manipulate’ other’s perception of me. This included telling stories to make people feel temporarily better about things.

3. I started addressing my weaknesses which in my case was a poor effort at reporting up. This showed up as a category that I was weak on, although I did allow for experimental bias (bosses being more likely to say what they thought even in a blind survey).

4. I recognized that leadership is a lonely business and that I better get used to this. There is no use trying to be everyone’s best mate because this just made the intermittent tough messages or decisions all that much harder to deliver.

5. Whilst constant and comprehensive communication to the workforce is a desirable thing, it can be time consuming and often counter-productive at times. People hear what they want to hear and often misconstrue communications in order to confirm their internal biases. The message must be simple and intermittent in order to have impact.

6. Eventually I left the corporation because I realized that part of the issue was that I was in a workplace that depressed me. Simply stated it was a large organization where many senior people spent more time worrying about their status and income, rather than the quality of their outcomes or the satisfaction of a job well done. Hence the shit atmosphere and the need for 360 degree reviews.

I have a rule of thumb now as to what I need in order to be happy in my workplace:

1. I need to be the boss or a consultant
2. If I am the boss then the organization needs to be no more than 20-30 people strong. After this its hard to keep a lid on the BS.
3. Also I practice all the six useful outcomes as described above.
4. And I have to be inherently interested in the outcomes of the business or work activity; I won’t just do things for money or for keeping busy.

The UN says “By 2025 the number of nations experiencing “water scarcity,” which is when each person has access to less than 1,000 cubic meters of water for an entire year, will nearly double to 30 compared to 18 in 1990. This issue is predicted to be most prevalent cause of all international armed conflicts.”

The World Health Organisation estimates that “depression will be the number one health concern in both the developed and developing nations by 2030.”

Yeah and I will be fucking depressed when there is no water and we are at war with New Zealand over the same.

The Black Dog Institute says:

“Depression has a high lifetime prevalence – one in seven Australians will experience depression in their lifetime…The World Health Organisation estimates that depression will be the number one health concern in both the developed and developing nations by 2030”

Well, firstly they must be measuring depression quite differently to Sane Australia which says 1-in-4 have depression at any time. So you have to wonder if there are different categories of depression?

I mean there is obviously very bad depression that can lead to suicide or significant medical issues, but then there is the response to the external environment which is supposed to act as a stimulus to change things. That is, a natural and sensible part of human behaviour.

My guess is that, between now and 2030, we are all going to get quite depressed while the do-gooders, scammers and the medical industry ram depression down our collective throats to ensure that we part with as much money as is humanly possible, in order to get rid of our depression.

Sane Australia released this nugget today;

“Almost 50% of Australian workers who had taken time off work because of depression kept the reason hidden from their employer according to a large scale national study released today by SANE Australia involving more than 1000 workers.”

Sane Australia is confused by these results since in Europe only half as many people kept Depression hidden from their employees.

Maybe, just maybe, the reason is that the cause of Depression is the workplace itself!

The entire history of Darra (QLD) according to Wikipedia:

“In 1954, the Darra RSL Memorial Hall was opened. Sumner was known as Darra until 1969 when it became a separate suburb. Vietnamese refugees began to settle in the area in 1975”

My pain threshold has certainly changed over the years.

Watching my daughter react to sunburn, bindi-eyes, mildly hot asphalt, dried salty skin, sand in her bed and cracked lips; I recall that these things used to hurt me, or at the very least annoy me. Now they hardly register a blip.

My guess is that as we age our brain decides to attenuate the signal resulting from the processing of nerve responses. When we are young the brain has yet to determine whether these signals are from life threatening events, but later on it knows that they are not.

Also, once we have reproduced maybe the brain thinks the outcomes are less important and then we can choose to give ourselves a break. I don’t think this choice is conscious and clearly not everyone makes it.

In the Gatsby there was a large billboard, an old advertisement with a pair of large optical glasses watching the carrying-ons, which represented a higher spirit observing and maybe judging, but not acting.

Back in the day an optometrist was called, not called an optician but an oculist. Not to be confused with a occultist

One wonders when and why the name change? Maybe they were sick of being accused of dabbling in the eye arts.

Dreams usually slip away from me unless I happen to recall them just after I wake up, which only occurs if I tell myself to do so whilst in my dream. And this only occurs if I think the dream is novel enough to warrant recall.

Even so, last night I got the message and I don’t know why.

The dream involved me being some sort of government agent and heading to Finland where a nuclear reactor had gone critical and then into melt-down. I was over there doing god knows what.

I checked and Finland has two nuclear plants with four reactors. If something does happen you heard it here first.

Last night I was forced to watch Luhrmann’s take on the Great Gatsby.

It’s a book I haven’t read since I was at school. But as it was a key book in one year of high school I must have read it at least three times and I studied it deeply, wrote essays on it, etc. So I know it well.

About the movie, it does demonstrate that purveyors of video clips don’t do ‘subtle’ very well. Every emotion in the movie was verbalised and the whole thing was over-acted.

The book was written ‘off-beat’; the real story was slyly hiding in the barely noticed percussion and not where it was expected. Also the book created an overwhelming feeling of an other-world story, re-told in an almost dream-like narrative fashion.

The movie did not create any of these feelings probably because the director never felt them in the first place.

I sent to a dinner party on the weekend on the twentieth floor of a Pyrmont apartment block.

I am not scared of heights as such but I hate the feeling that I want to jump. It’s probably the same thing?

I am writing a summary article on blood cholesterol for Chemistry in Australia.

This subject is the ultimate rabbit hole. The further I look into it the weirder it gets.

A quick summary is that for some people with a genetic weakness the use of drugs probably makes sense but for many it does not.

Even for those for which it is does make sense a better treatment is a nuts, vege, fruit and meat diet…but who would do that when there a pill?

Despite what the optometrist tells me I can’t help feeling that using reading glasses accelerates the dependence upon them.

It’s hard to verify this hypothesis since I only have one of me.

I suppose I could have used a reading monocle and compared my eyes. Too late now but I would have, you know.

My massage therapists tells me that I have a high pain threshold.

I always suspected so. The only time I complain is at the dentist and there it’s not the pain I complain about but the discomfort. A different thing.

He, the massage guy, was telling me, as he was releasing my Achilles-related strips and straps, that some people can’t handle the pain of this process. I was completely perplexed and said ‘what pain?’.

Shortly after I fell asleep. Caught myself snoring…

Uncorrelated symptoms noted and simply lived with; sore Achilles especially in the morning, one leg 7 mm longer than the other, very stiff neck at times especially when turning to the right, and sore lower back.

Variously treated and independently diagnosed as (in order); tight calf muscles and hammies (stretches from physio), shoe inserts as part of sore arch treatment (podiatrist), wholly untreated, bulging disc (initially treated unsuccessfully by physio and then mostly sorted by gym work).

The untreated stiff neck led me to a genius remedial massage/osteo/physio, who diagnosed the whole thing as one incident, a former shoulder reconstruction.

Even the leg length as measured by x-ray is an artifact of hip rotation which has now been fixed. The Achilles was fixed entirely in two sessions. The neck needs one more session. Even the lower back gets a look in.

The basic chain of events; shoulder reconstruction led to me protecting it, which led to muscle imbalance around the neck rotator joints or some-such. That ended up putting stress on one side of the spinal muscles which exacerbated that back problem, which led to a shortening of the muscle joining the lower rib and the hip which caused the rotation which led to the artifact of leg measurement, which pulled up on the leg causing more pronation which led to the achilles issues.

Starting with the fascia on the feet, my guy has been moving up my body undoing all of this. He is halfway through, and only two sessions in and I am already pain and niggle-free.

Who woulda guessed?

And finally there was the garden elf. A very naughty one with tonnes of attitude. So sweet and pretty in the visual but so sassy in the verbal.

I am bored silly this morning.

I know this; I am rubbish at hanging around home on a rainy Sunday no matter what company is keeping me.

And then a bunny.

I found my Lola dressed up as Frieda Kahlo.

Life imitates art, accidentally.

Lola and the kale plants. Not quite as snappy as Josie and the Pussycats.

Someone, the homeless or the backpacker, has left an offering outside our office door.

They do look sort of English or Irish, don’t they?

Having traveled in many third world and developing countries I know this; the basic rule of the road in these countries is ‘might is right’.

That is, the larger and heavier vehicle, of a clutch, does what the fuck it wants and the rest get out of the way.

The lowest in the pecking order of vehicles are the pedestrians and cyclists, who are well advised to keep alert and be prepared to duck left or right at any moment when a larger vehicles decides to occupy their space, for convenience sake.

Trouble occurs when drivers trained in this simplistic system arrive in Sydney as skilled migrants (doctors, engineers and the like) but end up driving cabs.

They generally treat cyclists as they did at home and this can cause issues. In truth they have trouble even perceiving cyclists and often get quite confused when the cyclist in their cross-hairs doesn’t magically disappear.

Cyclists are very good at demanding their equal rights on the road often at the expense of their own safety. They can also get awfully angry when someone applies the ‘might is right’ rule against them. As they did to me this morning.

Oddly thought the self-same cyclists, when it suits them, have no compunction about breaking many other road rules for the sake of maintaining momentum. Hypocrites or super-sized pedestrians? I know not which but guess both.

Contrary to popular opinion a little red dress does not resolve that many issues.

There’s a chalk artist at work in Surry.

Woodrow, it isn’t fair.

A horse is a horse
Of course of course
And no one can talk to a horse
Of course

But even so
Mine has a few questions
To answer
Off course

Stop distracting me
For fuck’s sake
I wonder if the chair
is leather
I will soldier
ad nauseum
Then with questions
when we twine together
But instead I wonder
if your eyes are still blue
You are the pirate
I club you in review
How to compartmentalise
You never wondered too?

Slum art thou
found
and lost

This had to be one of best texts I have received. Ever.

I wonder if evolution cares if we all look different to each other? That is, is there an advantage to the species of each of us being unique to look at?

It’s possible that our differences are a by-product of other evolutionary requirements.

Or that natural selection is actually trying to homogenize us. Come back in a million years and we might all be sneetches.

Just possibly we are a species of train-spotters. To dogs we might already look like sneetches.

My mum is an odd one.

She tries to be wise in an intellectual fashion but her major asset is really that she is just nice is an old fashion working class manner.

Does this sign mean that drivers of vehicles over 6 metres can park any way they want?

And what happens if you park exactly at 4pm. Do you have you leave by 6, 8 or 10 pm?

And why didn’t they replace “4P 6 pm -10 pm” with “14P 6pm – 8 am”?

The idea of rear-to-kerb parking makes sense on a busy road, sort of.

But getting a ticket in a quiet back street, for accidentally ignoring a partially hidden sign proclaiming the same, is madness.

I told the parking officer so.

“Mate, the rules are the rules”

And with that, Australia checked out for good.

Worse track ever. Watermelon Man by Herbie Hancock.

Adoration at a distance exacerbates subsequent contempt in confinement.

It’s November in Surry Hills and that means the start of Christmas get-togethers.

People are drunk at lunch time. Cabs are harder to get. Pubs are full after work. Skirts are getting shorter. And work is all about survival for many.

Is there anything more annoying than trying to type on your smartphone’s touch screen whilst riding in a Sydney cab?

My current driver is from Kabul (nice bloke I should add) and it’s a fair bet he hasn’t ever driven a car before his current gig. He is vicious on the pedals.

I think I have repetitive strain whip lash. And I am about to throw this phone out the window.

One of my favorite cars is the Nissan El Grand.

It’s an accidental cult car/truck. A slab of Japanese utility gone viral.

When pimped and dropped on their tits they are the bees.

Surry hills is, tonight, very full of twenty somethings running around in Halloween gear, getting very drunk.

Messy. Messy.

It’s a whole generation of kids that are in denial about growing up.

And it’s the first batch of Australian adults who have properly bought into this American festival of sugar.

The top floor of the South Juniors club oughta be on every tourist circuit. It’s old Sydney at its best. A veritable cultural oxbow lake. And a total shambles.

First there was the old blokes playing chess. Then the Asians doing water colour class. Then a dodgy isolated bar. The squash courts on the right (my excuse). And to top it off, a night of boxing.

Those little pamphlets at the bottom of the picture are adverts for a Buddhist retreat amidst a wall of Mexican gangster horror.

There’s a lot of babies and toddlers in Clovelly.

Which means a lot of blokes rooting a lot of wives that they are sick of rooting.

Blondes mostly, wagon driving (Volvo, Subaru, Rangies VWs or BMWs), a nod to a hippy past, holidays in Byron, helicopters at school, the ubiquitous ponytail, and a pretend part time job.

It’s the men I don’t get…what goes on up there?

This pub owner is quite confused…

I said to a friend, an aging beauty, that crying as means to get a bloke to fix up her problems only works while the bloke still wants to root her. She looked confused.

A last word on the gay marriage debate.

The conservatives are mad for thinking they have the moral right to stop gay people getting married.

And the gay people are mad for thinking they need government approval to consider themselves married.

In both cases a root cause analysis screams ‘insecurity’.

You don’t increase you’re own sense of security by increasing the sense of insecurity in others.

Nor is your sense of insecurity abated by adopting the insecurity of others.

I was talking to a bloke the other day about his current settlements with his former de facto wives. Yes, plural.

It appears he had two girlfriends and he spent enough time at both their places for a period longer than two years to be considered in a de facto relationship with both of them.

When the girls discovered the existence of each other they both simultaneously pulled the plug and they both took him to court for his assets.

And there is nothing in the law that says you can only be in one de facto relationship. So he had to settle twice.

In this instance it actually is better to be married since you can only be married to one person at a time.

In other words it is legal to practice de facto polygamy. Isn’t that strange?

One of my pet hates is accidentally consuming a bug whilst riding my bicycle.

I don’t mind the protein but I prefer to presciently approve the domain prior to ingestion.

Fortunately, bugs have a high surface area-to-volume ratio and my stomach pH is around unity; meaning that I don’t get to see bugs crawling out of my arse.

As an aside, when I was about 4 years old I accidentally swallowed a marble (a little round glass ball for those ignorant of such) which I naughtily (i.e. against strict instructions) had in my mouth as my parent’s 1959 VW beetle (i.e a bug) went over a bump. Sometime later and much to my relief I found it at the bottom of the toilet bowl unscathed by the very same medium that dissolves and dissipates my wayward bugs.

I wonder how the Internet will change the power of the state over the individual? It’s too early to tell as yet.

In the the previous era, the one since the start of the enlightenment, a fascinating battle has been won and lost by us all.

We managed to overthrow the hegemony of monarchs and the churches only to be captured by an artefact of the systems that we set up to ensure our own freedoms. That is, the processes that ensure our basic freedoms and rights are now being used against us all, by us all (although by some more than others).

Bentham’s Utilitarian rule of the ‘greater good for the greatest number’ has been used to justify a continuing tightening of what is acceptable behaviour in life. And this has been accompanied by a massive increase in life’s complexity because the controls in place to sheep-dog us into the acceptable windows of behaviours are so complex as to require continuous and universal education for at least the first twenty years of our lives.

So we have gained freedom from continual persecution by oligarchs only to land in the Truman Show.

The Internet will change this. On one hand it offers uncensored information and on the other unparalleled access, by any individual or agency, as to what we are doing and thinking.

My guess is that the Internet will simply accelerate the trend towards 1984 because there is more incentive for the few that profit in this scenario, and also because, with 8 billion people on this planet, we may have no choice.

I am not sure I would call Rupert’s media ‘right wing’. That is a political position and I am not sure his is.

Rupert seems to believe in the separation of wealth (to the few and hence not to the many), the ascendency of the West over the rest, and the control of politicians.

Its just so happens that right wing politicians are easier to control than left wing politicians, and hence people make the assumption that Rupert is right wing.

As an aside, right wing politicians are easier to control because they inherently are driven by conservative social views which are usually illogical. Finance and politics serve their social agenda. But their social agenda usually does not stand up to logical purview and hence they themselves don’t bother with complete thinking. This makes them more susceptible to practising lying and deceit in order to achieve their goals, which in turn makes them more corruptible by media (& other) interests.

A by-product of all this is that Rupert’s media interests tend to adopt a conservative view on social issues despite the fact that I don’t think Rupert himself cares about these issues. Its just part of the pact he has with his right wing political flunkies. A quid pro quo you might say.

Which is a shame because today the Australian is full of rubbish about gay marriage. I simply do not understand why these people get so worried about this issue. Marriage, by law, is some artificial and relatively recent-day artefact of legislation – just another part of the modern movement towards control and measurement of us all by bureaucracy. Legal marriage is a piece of paper and a few entries in an electronic database, whereas true marriage is a daily event.

Firstly, shame on the idiots on both sides of this debate for taking it so seriously. But it’s not surprising, very few people have the strength of mind required to remove themselves from the vanity fair of the vox populi.

And, secondly, for those opposing gay marriage so vehemently, they really need to get out of other people’s lives. That battle has been lost. Wherefore comes the desire to tell other people what they can and can’t do? I think it’s driven by fear and insecurity on the conservative’s part which can only be assuaged if they have the control to tell people explicitly what acts are permitted and which are not.

Clive Palmer variably has said;

“Wendy Deng has been spying on Rupert for years giving money back to Chinese intelligence.”

“It is just a beat-up by old Rupert because he is upset that I said Wendy Deng, his wife, is a Chinese spy, and he doesn’t like that”.

“How much did you pay your wife to get her to marry you?”

“And rather than Rupert come out and say anything or make a statement, he doesn’t do that, he just gets his flunkeys to come along, or he sends Skype messages to (The Australian Editor in Chief) Chris Mitchell at The Australian, Chris says ‘go down there, give Palmer a hard time.’ That is all it is about.”

“You know the best barometer of my wealth, if you like, is the Murdoch press”

Two rich, vain, insecure and stupid men – there isn’t going to be any conciliatory moment here until one of them is dead.

But it’s very odd how democracy works though. Clive, under some circumstance is likely to have control of the senate, and a personal dispute between him and Rupert will be to the detriment of Tony Abbott and his coalition, Rupert’s boy in the Lodge.

In any case it’s not much use Rupert’s media going after Clive the way they are. The more they push this the more the 700,000 Bogans that voted for Clive will love him. They can sense a witch hunt and they love his funny and upfront approach to dealing with it. He isn’t stupid enough to a do a ‘Gillard’ and deal with it with a straight bat – he just uses humour to fling the mud straight back from whence it came.

I just got rung up by a head hunter on Collins Street. He wanted to know if I was interested in a dodgy CEO role for a listed Australian company.

I told him politely, no, I am not looking for jobs any more and haven’t for over a decade.

For some this reason this was an affront, and he started lecturing me about my career prospects.

I tried to explain to him that I liked working but had no interest in a career as such. No luck – it was like I was talking Martian.

I explained that a career implies an upwards trajectory within a pyramid, either within an organization or within a whole work discipline, and that I had essentially left pyramids behind in 2000.

It worked in one sense – I am pretty sure he thought I was mad and put put a mark, very blackly, on the lid of my box.

So the Labor party is not going to oppose the Coalition’s removal of the Carbon Tax but it will oppose its Direct Action plans.

It is what I feared; all they have learnt from their electoral loss is that Abbott’s very cynical negative approach to opposition actually seems to work. This is going to be a spiral, downwards.

The political thinking behind this move is this.

One, Labor won’t oppose the removal of their Carbon Tax despite the fact that they know, of all the options, it makes the most sense.They will say Abbott has a mandate to remove to it due to his election win and they don’t want to get in the way of the people. This will remove the grounds for a double dissolution on this issue.

Two, they will oppose Direct Action on the ground that it is ineffective and inefficient, and then they can say Abbott isn’t doing anything about climate change. Calling a double dissolution election because they can’t get Direct Action plan through would be a very unpopular move for the Libs (on one hand you can’t claim there is no climate change but then think its important enough to call an election on the issue!). In fact, Abbott, if he doesn’t get these plans through, will likely do nothing and then be exposed to this at the next election.

Despite Rupert’s media coverage it looks highly likely that Abbott is going to get hung by all the stupid things he said and did in order to get to the Lodge.

Simplot is in the news. This foreign-owned food-processing group is starting to look like the local car industry, bleating to the government to grant fund them (with our money!) so that they can compete against imports.

How does that work? They claim that their costs are higher because of our high labour costs and somehow that is the government’s fault. And they want a grant not a loan. Madness.

Clearly they need to get much bigger and invest in automation and supply chain management etc. But that investment should come from the private sector.

The minute any business resorts to getting money from a dumb source like the government it is doomed to fail in the near future because it is a clear sign that management simply has no idea or strategy, and therefore they have no plan that they can sell to private sector sources of investment.

Don’t believe me? Just think how much the former Labor government threw at Ford Australia – it has been hundreds of millions all based on the premise that Ford would keep manufacturing Falcons in Australia. Personally I would have made those loans, not grants, repayable with interest and immediately repayable in full if Ford pulled out, as they did. Governments really are financially quite silly when it comes to these things. In the worse case scenario the loans could always have converted to equity in the parent company at the government’s call.

[Observation, Horatio; there was a remnant of skidmarks on the white undies after the wash]

She says “people who ride bikes shouldn’t wear white undies”

He says “well they only come in Neapolitan packs. You can’t not have the odd white one”

She says “try another brand”

He says “I like these ones. It has taken me years to find undies I actually like wearing”

She says “well its not fair since I do most of the washing”

He says “that is simply untrue. It’s just that my turn at the washing goes via the Chinese laundry where, I might add, skidmarks aren’t a problem to remove”

She says “have it your own way. You always do”

He says “You can have the last word if you want”

Long evil stare…

Interesting. Today the Australian it’s starting a campaign to undermine Clive Palmer, fearful of his control of the Senate.

Since they need Clive’s consent to manage the senate and get their legislation through, this attack on him and his party can only imply that they are committed to pushing the repeal of the carbon tax through in order to force a double dissolution election. The purpose of this it to take control of the senate, subject to the will of the people.

An unwise move me thinks because if it backfires Clive will not hold back in being a prick. And it is likely to backfire because Abbott hasn’t appreciated that he was elected despite the fact that he is not very popular. There is no way Australians will give this government control of both houses; people simply aren’t that stupid.

In fact I would predict Clive and his PUP party to get even more seats under a double dissolution election, especially since minor parties are favored by such an event due to the smaller cutoff quota for seats.

I have just been sailing with old friends. I was noted as “quiet”.

Truth is, I didn’t have much to say.

I didn’t even take a photo…Jesus!

The truth is, I hardly ever wear a sunscreen.

I am pretty sure the chemical absorption is worse for you than the photon absorption.

I suspect that we are just one marketing campaign away from disappearing up our own arses.