This would have been the front five pages of the paper if it had happened in the US. Inclusive of a rant either way on the right to bear arms. How about the need to practice humanity?

JoJo would say there is nothing to understand. It is what it is. Family and place is all that matters. The rest is salad dressing.

Now that’s a simple short cut that proffers up a few redundant neurones, for pickling.

They is nothing good I can say about flying. Once upon a time I used to enjoy the quiet time when I simply couldn’t be interrupted. Nowadays I can get that any time.

What’s left is cramped space, shit food, bad sleep, colds and flus, and a low levels of anxiety.

I just found the best treatment for Achilles tendinitis; striding down a thirty degree hill backwards. It stretches and strengthens all the right bits.

What is a broken soul?

The answer may reveal more about the soul than the direct question.

A broken soul is real and not an illusion.

Self awareness…and external awareness, i.e. other people’s awareness of each of us.

I have a hypothesis that our own self awareness is inversely equal to the weighted sum of the awareness of each of us by other people. It has to be true because I haven’t fixed the weighting factors…

Just perusing through Linked-In it’s pretty clear to me that a lot of people spend a lot of time trying to get noticed.

It’s a zero sum game guys!

Lola seemed to like Lyttleton as much as I did. I was slightly surprised.

It seems Lyttleton has attracted all the Christchurch residents that had an immune response to the suburban mall donut effect.

As horrible as Christchurch is, there is the lovely Lyttleton harbour over the hill.

Chocolate.Congrats.Colgate. Cogitate on it…fuck this phone annoys me.

That there is me and the wizard. This is weird, but it turns out that he is a fan of mine, based on three articles I wrote for the Christchurch Press.

Are you sure? My head agrees but my heart does not and my body doesn’t care and my soul doesn’t have an opinion. However I do see a suspicious anagram in illusion – nil soul – but there is the small matter of the missing me, myself and I.

There are now band aids with kids cartoons all over them.

It’s not as though parents need to pacify kids on the subject at the time of purchase. And at the time of use, kids will take any band aid. Giving them choice just slows down application and it also adds to the general spoiling of their temperament.

This is a case of parents being totally sucked in by marketing with only negative outcomes.

Body, brain and soul. Or body, brain and mind. Or body and brain, with illusions? Or body with mental bits. Or just one big illusion?

If you are confused then aim for Gestaltic holism, rather than confusion by parts.

And yet I do have to remember that most people have a limited understanding of themselves and the world around them.

This leads to, in the worst case, fear and loathing.

But usually it just results in self imposed limitations, both physical and mental.

Yesterday was a reminder of the weaknesses of the human mind.

Family…issues…pride…anger. All that stuff. Fortunately it was once removed for me – the in laws.

And we managed to get them altogether in an alcohol free environment and, it started icy, but was warm by the end.

Generally, people just aren’t emotionally smart enough to figure out what’s most important to them. Or good for them.

Little issues can quite stupidly become big issues and then the most important people can be isolated from each other for years.

I recall being eighteen years old; the world looked so big and complex. I felt like a pawn in a very big game.

I also had a burning desire to understand the human systems around me so, at the very least, not to feel like I was being played.

That program had just about completed and I have pretty much succeeded. There isn’t much that goes on in the world or my head that I don’t understand.

Loony, loopy, random, hostile and barking mad. I have had five of them…and I like all of them.

When I think of US culture I think of a money pyramid made of glass bricks which has an optically reflective outer surface.

The people at the bottom can look up to the top of the pyramid and idolise those that have ‘made it’.

They can also see a reflection of themselves, a symbol of their mythical ability to reach the top of the pyramid. Shame about all those glass ceilings in the pyramid…

I just walked past the design and arts college of NZ.

I am wondering if you start out doing both and then you major in art if you have no real intentions to eat and you like sucking up, or if you do design if you aren’t talented enough and hate conforming?

Similar raw technical talent but very different personality types. Odd that they coexist.

Hollywood hits a new low. Distilled and concentrated American bullshit. Just like at Maccas, kids have no resistance.

When I think about it, the issue is that in America emotions don’t seem to exist unless they are expressed out loud and in great detail. Subtlety is simply beyond mainstream America. And there is a curriculum for emotions, apparently.

The end of the Smurfs 2 movie was indistinguishable from that in the End of the World, Bollywood meets hip hop, except it was blue not white.

Proof positive that shiny yellow metal is a silly idea.

It occurred to me tonight that stage plays, along with opera, classical music, painting etc, are suffering the same fate as most old pre-electronic art forms.

The young with something to say are avoiding these art forms altogether. So only the middle and older classes attend. They are living dinosaurs, these art forms.

We just scandalized the petit bourgeoisie of Christchurch by taking a ten year old (who looks eight) to a mid-week stage play.

You have to think their main issue was trivialisation of their collective social oeuvre.

Lola meets the world’s only official wizard and just about the only front wheel drive type 1 beetle. The wizard describes himself as an AC gyroscope. The beetle speaks for itself.

Great marketing from the Japanese.

So the bloke has just about finished the design of his humans when he realised that he had forgotten reproduction.

Short of free space he decided on a compromise solution; he would double up on the waste removal and reproduction units.

Those creationists are fuckwits.

Someone oughta correlate companies that make road signs with the financial interests of state and local politicians.

There’s an awful lot of both of them, they don’t do much and they appear pretty random at times.

The kea is the most awesome bird.

I watched this one sneak up behind some lunching skiers and  extract food from a backpack via a pretty neat incision.

The entertainment was simply too good to intervene.

More and, logically speaking, redundant proof that I survived skiing today.

It was touch and go a couple of times.

Great snow, sunny spring weather, virtually no people, no phone connection and no companions. My only worry today is sunburn.This is skiing.

Then she opened up a book of poems
And handed it to me
Written by an Italian poet
From the fifteenth century
And every one of them words rang true
And glowed like burning coal
Pouring off of every page
Like it was written in my soul from me to you
Tangled up in blue

Gotta love the modern suburbs.

Somehow I doubt it.

I wonder why we give people “latitude” and not “longitude”? Possibly because we learnt to measure the former centuries before the latter? Strange  though, that a little more technical nous could have landed us with a lot more teen ongitude.

I can’t believe that I just dropped my phone and cracked the screen, again.

As much as I hate the idea, it’s time the beast got a cover.

All I want is a phone with shock absorbing corners, not a bloody cover that makes it too bulky for my pocket.

The greatest crime ever committed against your correspondent was trapping him in a banal environment.

Can’t remember right now when it was, but it was way back when when I used to politely put up with shit.

I once saw Elvis Costello interviewed.

They asked him which was his scariest moment. He replied that it was a cold and rainy Sunday in Christchurch in 1984. He walked out of his hotel and the streets were empty with not a soul to be seen.

After a while, in the distance, he saw someone on a bicycle disappear around a corner. And he said he had never felt so lonely or scared.

Christchurch has improved a lot since then but the earthquakes have taken away most of the gains. It’s now a suburban donut, not a city. What life there is, is in malls. Just like most of the U.S.

I once lived in Holland.

Although, socially, I was quite busy, there were times in winter when I went underground and spent a couple of weeks in my own company

And I was content with my own company; books, painting, the odd bike ride and a few drugs. Time passed very slowly.

Who was I?

The first victim of lust is the truth. And yet, oddly, lust also extracts many unspoken truths.

Net, net; it comes back to whether you believe that an unspoken lie is still a lie. Or whether the smallest lie trumps a million truths.

People differ wildly in their opinions on such matters.

One of the big issues with modern Australia is flag-fall.

There is so much government and private regulation that the entry cost for any activity, buying a house, staging a play, setting up a cafe, you name it, is super high.

As a result  nothing is spontaneous and everything must be super profitable. Slick and commercial is what we get.

Apparently rice is the perfect bug factory. Micro-porous with the perfect water content, once it’s cooked you’re goosed, if you let it sit for a day or two.

Never eat on planes, and always wear a sunscreen.

Lola told me that when she wishes, upon blowing out birthday candles or a dandelion flower, or upon seeing a shooting star, she wishes that all her family members are safe and live forever. Wow, how’s that for caring at the age of ten?

An act of kindness to a stranger is a lovely thing. But an act of kindness to a friend or family member is much better, especially when it’s unexpected and against the rub.

Grace; it really takes practice to get it right and to make it automatic. It’s becoming a bloody rare commodity in today’s stressed-out society because if you are stressed or feeling like shit, grace is the first thing to go. This is because people tend to externalise their issues rather than deal with them.

The OP rule is most important when it comes to boats.

Those Koreans aren’t the brightest sometimes, but the name is just about right for this car.

Madness in a pan. No that was geraniums. Wrong again, probably it was datura stramonium.

Socrates supposedly muttered that “The desire of the lover is the desire of one who delights in learning and loves knowledge”.

Actually that’s a crap translation from ancient Greek to Latin, then to French and finally to English, a.k.a. Chinese whispers.

What he actually said was “I desire a lover that desires me”.

I just watched the third in the ‘before’ series – ‘before sunrise’, ‘before sunset’ and ‘before midnight’ – the latter being the third.

Oooh, it makes one squirmy to watch this stuff. But is very instructional.

A few ideas come to mind though;

1. Affluence drives us to be very busy doing what are essentially non-critical activities, and in this time poor environment is created many relationship issues.
2. Matching the ‘big’ desires of two people in a relationship can often be very difficult and the less the differences the better. Big issues are ‘where you live’, ‘relationships with kids to ex-partners’, etc.
3. People, even those that know each other inside out, often talk around a subject rather than going to the core of it. Often because they haven’t even properly absorbed their own position. Much of what we think, feel and desire is sub-conscious. So to know oneself is a great starting point for a good relationship.
4. There are critical moments in a relationship that come and go, and if both partners are coincidentally feeling shit about themselves and the relationship, then a perfectly good partnership can dissolve simply due to unfortunate timing. It only takes one party to rescue a crap situation.
5. I keep going back to try and understand what makes couples tick. What makes two seemingly unsuited or suited people matched? I think its a combination of covering for each other’s emotional and developmental issues, security and convenience (the ‘core’ issues). The rest, the daily interest, the sex, the laughs, or lack thereof, is just filler.
6. The longer you spend with someone the more you compensate automatically for the differences between you. This can be both a good and a bad thing. If it’s just putting up with the differences, then emotionally and under the surface, resentment can build. However if people learnt to really let go then this compensation can really work.
7. Time spent together is as critical as time spent apart, which reminds you of what you have. However too much time spent exploring apart creates issues by offering one or the other person too many fundamental alternatives, which always look glossy on the surface. Also this individual development occurs without the attenuating influence of the other, and this lack of synchronicity can be fatal.

Point 5 sort of suggests what the good and bad reasons are for leaving a relationship. But it also is a good guide for getting the core stuff right, but then also minimizing the pain associated with ‘filler’ issues – one may as well get these irritants reduced to the max. But even then, time leads to contempt.

My inner city narrow street has atherosclerosis. Right at the moment, a coffee in the morning requires a meander down the middle of the street since the footpaths (pavements or sidewalks for you foreigners) are overflowing with the detritus of affluence.

You see, my neighbours buy a lot of stuff but then they find that an item either doesn’t fit in the house, or stops working, or they simply decide they don’t want it any more.

Cue the local council; they have mandated chuck-out periods where anything except building materials (exclusion due to the very nature of thieves in utes, aka builders) can be dumped on the footpath in breach of all the council’s usual environment, health and safety rules.

What follows is a fascinating insight into my neighbour’s susceptibility to marketing and a two-week long carnival of amateur and professional scabs cruising the streets looking for cash crops.

Its all great theatre but I need bat-like senses to avoid a pedestrian collision either on the footpath with some discarded item, or on the road with a ute.

Permaculture is happening in the backyard. For those of you that practice ignorance, this is a form of agriculture which has every known type of flaura and fauna packed into a postage stamp-sized backyard. That is, a petit-jungle.

One creates a complete ecosphere in miniature and in this balanced virgoan beast apparently no single bug gets out of control. And hence your edible plants are mostly left alone without the application of nasty life-shortening chemicals.

[Cue] copious numbers of lizards rustling around in the subtropical rainforest. [CC] ‘rustle, rustle’.

Well the question arose, as it does, what do the lizards eat? Are these skinks of ours, in the context of vegetables, bugs and mental health, a wanted member of the Lacertilla sub-order?

So I set up an experiment with a caterpillar and a lizard or six thousand. Buddha frowned, and I had to practice Zen because the lizards were full already (alright!). Jesus was good so long as sodomy wasn’t being practised on the lizards or the caterpillars.

In the corner the mad monk thought he was running the country, and his mentors were frowning at the experiment that the weird business type was performing in the garden of Eden. The gods take sides apparently, especially in Club Oz, and especially in the corridors of plover.

The guy said just buy the empty one and fill it at home.

He added ‘It’s really simple; you can do it with one hand in five minutes’.

Well half an hour later, and then another wasted and tortured half an hour to clean up the mess.

Take-home message. Never listen to the lies of a salesman and always buy your beanbags pre-filled.

Drunk, and taking a photo with a smoke in one hand and a beer in the other, I dropped the last Galaxy. It landed with a sickening thud onto the concrete. Initially it looked OK and I was praising Samsung's engineers. But then, from the indented corner a purple malaise spread across its visual cortex, until finally, later the next morning, its functionality ceased just as my head's returned. So praise god for his engineering and a pox on those Koreans for their built-in obsolescence.

My Lola is in a tweenie funk this morning. She has not moved from bed on the basis that there is nothing worth moving for. However one of her daily tasks upon which her stipend depends is bed-making. I swear that she made the bed while she was still in it.

In my dreams last night I had a million ideas for great blog posts. I plastered the interior of my head with yellow Post-It notes so as to remember these gems. And yet, they (the ideas that is my dear inferee) have all passed the way of the dodo. I do not mean to imply that I loved them the best but they were good, in my dreams.

My daughter is as pig headed as me. There are times when I am at a loss as to know how to influence her. I can see why corporal punishment was such an attractive option in days gone by.

As I was taking this shot an Eastern suburban mum in a Porsche Cayenne actually backed into me. Fortunately it was a glancing blow. She saw me and didn’t even stop. She just took off with a car load of spoilt brats, including her I suspect. Fuck me…Rake was spot on. Correct.

My daughter has an excessive concern for the opinion of others. It freezes her at times. I was the same at her age but somehow I worked my way out of it, all by myself. I have no idea how I did it and no idea if she will. It worries me.

So if there is a vague chance they will keep me alive into my decrepitude then I must keep the brain as active as possible. This way I may actually have something to offer even when my body does not.

I like to think there was a tribal time when old folks were respected as a source of wisdom and advice.

This is not the case today. Old folks, in our ever-changing world, are mostly dazed and confused by what’s going on around them. And this is clear to everyone.

Talking to old Fred & Nola across the road, it occurs to me that I can’t see much point living past ninety.

All Fred has is regrets, dying relatives and friends, poor health and a fear that Nola will go first, or last.

And he feels like a burden on society because he has no means to contribute.

If you have to make a choice is it better to be nice to strangers or nice to the people you love?

Gen Y’s still have magazines for some odd reason. With the internet you have to wonder why. In any case this one looks like remedial news for those who have missed out on vox pop gossip…great stuff.

The offshore westerly is my favourite surfing wind but my least favourite cycling wind. There is nothing worse than a stiff westerly in your face. Girls.I don’t know how you do it.

What odds that Nokia and Microsoft disappear into the back-end of internet technologies just like IBM disappeared into software services? This is not shameful but it does result in a lower PE ratio. Let’s just hope they don’t spend too much of their shareholders money trying to compete in the front-end…

The only task harder than coralling academics is shepherding investors.

Just when you think our political system is doomed, along comes a result like this to warm the hearts of all of us that care about Australian industry. It keeps the flame of hope alive, just.

More evidence that marketing types don’t understand politics.

For morning grumps like me there is nothing like a slow, lazy and solo morning breakfast to restore good humor.

It is true that the best lessons are the ones that are learnt painfully.

For example, I will never again store a razor, sharp side up, in my overnight bag.

At the polling booth on Saturday I chatted to my local MP, John Murphy. I asked him how he represented the local electorate in our federal parliament. Lots of gobbledygook later, his answer was basically that he doesn’t. The idea of a parliamentary representative in our federal political system is a furphy.

The federal government’s tax receipts are about 25% of GDP. Of this about 10% varies from government to government. That is, our feds effectively manage about 2.5% of our economy. Hardly “running the country” now is it?

If you plonked a large group of poor white trash onto a very large island full of space and natural resources then naturally they would (a) figure out how to exploit the island, (b) with minimum personal effort required, and (c) to the exclusion of other that might want to join the party.

Of course any pesky original occupants would be reclassified first as non-existent and then later on as mere custodians, awaiting the arrival of the true owners.

Who would have guessed that the poor white trash would then wrap themselves up in regulations, complexity and debt, to the extent that there was no joy on the island?

And the poor fuckers don’t even have a reverse gear.

I am pretty sure that the new Australian government will be much like the last. Hopefully, there will be less of a media witch-hunt around them, but don’t hold your breath. Budget-wise these guys are cutting here in order to to hand out there. I can’t see any policies aimed at actually growing our economy or addressing the long-term issues of diminishing resource and greenhouse gases. Basically they are a perfect Pavlovian response to the greedy and self-centered nature of the voting population of Australia. Collectively, we do get what we deserve, that is for sure.

My self-interest is limited to myself. How self-centered is that? Nuh, not true actually…just sounds good.

A sense of irony not shared may as well not exist, Fritz.

The trouble with affluence is that it breaks the cycle of life.

I remember moments in my twenties when for a short moment the madness stopped. Typically they were quiet moments, almost meditational.

In these moments, despite feeling lost and hopeless, for some reason I never felt despair. Thank Christ.

I always picked myself up and carried on. I never gave up. Sometime in my early forties I crossed the tryline.

The first one of many as it turns out.

Voice-to-text,typos, grammos and couldn’t-give-a-fuck-o’s. It leads to all sorts of weird and wonderful text messages and miscommunication.

I told Lola that, yes, I knew what a daisy chain was, and, no, I have never made one, and, yes, her one was beautiful.

I just noticed this after owning the stove-top for 5 years; someone at Smeg has a sense of humor.

Ideologically there isn’t a single party that is a match for me.

There are a hundred parties and, economically speaking, they are all based on serving the needs of rent-seekers.

I believe that this is the result of some fundamental flaws in our system of parliamentary representation. I must write this up an essay.

Plus I can’t think of a single parliamentarian that I respect and like.

They want more of them but I still don’t understand why psychopaths are green.

Whereas the useless upper house is purely for entertainment. So Julian, the ultimate dick head, gets my vote.

It’s feels like I have a choice between Holden and Ford when what I really want is a Ferrari.

The basics of city driving that Sydney has forgotten: if there’s a speed limit, do it. If there’s a space, fill it. If there’s a gap, close it. And never buy a Hyundai.

People don’t change their spots but they can invert over time.

I gave a talk to some 4th year graduate students yesterday on the subject of entrepreneurship. The oddest question I got was ‘where do I get my news from?’. Go figure…

The main impact of getting older is that, on average, other people start looking younger, better looking and smarter.

Actually scratch that ‘smarter’ – there doesn’t seem to be enough of the right sort of anxiety to drive kids to their maximum potential these days. I am not sure whether that is a good thing or not.

“Oh life, it’s bigger, It’s bigger than you, And you are not me”. How good are those lyrics?

post scriptum bene (12 hours later). Must have been pissed.

I have just been to the dentist and I was struck by this logical truth; either God is a dentist or there is no God.

Crowd-funding is essentially charity aimed at would-be entrepreneurs. In exchange for a copy of the company’s future products a backer gives cash to the entrepreneur. The only benefit to the benefactor, apart from the promise of a future prototype, is a little kudos. This model will lose its shine pretty quickly.

Changing laws to make equity investments possible via crowd funding will make things worse since, as an asset class, crowd-funding is absolutely guaranteed to be loss making. There will be a few winners and a long tail of losers. Committed investors will regress to the mean and lose money just as surely as if they were playing the pokies. Any asset class that doesn’t cumulatively return enough profit (risk-adjusted) will ultimately fail.

I have been to a few functions in Sydney lately where the key speaker says this NSW government prescribed intro; “I would like to acknowledge the Gadigal people, who are the traditional custodians of this land. I would also like to pay respect to the elders, both past and present, of the Eora nation, and extend that respect to other Aboriginals present.”

Well they must have spent a fortune on legal fees to get this right.

They carefully use the word ‘custodians’ and not ‘owners’, otherwise the issue might arise that they aren’t paying any rent or didn’t pay any purchase price.

And at not one of the events that I went to was there any aboriginal people present or even invited.

Fucking hypocrites the lot of them, pretending to be nice and new-agey. I suspect they believe their own bullshit.

Riding through Barangaroo (which used to be the Hungry Mile) a lollipop man insisted I stop along with the cars. I told him to fuck off and sailed right through. There’s way too many people in this world trying to tell us what to do.

Worth a mention;  when asked if her husband was religious, David Frost’s wife replied “Absolutely. He thinks he’s God”.

And now the do-gooders are going after caffeine. Not satisfied with annoying the fuck out of smokers and drinkers, they are looking for new targets.

The odd thing is, I drink four or five double macs a day and I don’t have one of the symptoms as listed in this article.

Especially worth noting is that my blood pressure is very low despite drinking, smoking and all that caffeine.

Health is a whole of life thing but these fuckers use academic arguments (of the greater good over the rights of the individual) to relentlessly impose their religions on us.

Truth is, they make a living out of it.

I read the sports pages thoroughly and then skim the front section for new lies. I bet you never knew that news is an abbreviated concatenation of “new lies”.

I can’t keep track of each fallen robin.
And the robins wouldn’t know me from Adam.

One thing about riding a single speed bike to work is that 30kms of Sydney’s hills really lets you know when you are feeling like shit.