I wonder how many times you’ve had sex and I wonder if you know who’ll be next?  However, asking the questions isn’t anywhere near as interesting as providing the answers. But therapists believe that the only answers that stick are ones that you arrive at yourself. Either that, or this takes more time and they get more money.

I just got knocked off my bike by an harassed working eastern suburbs mother in a brand new Volvo station wagon.

A cliche by a cliche in a cliche.

I was unharmed and was very polite given the circumstances.

In this city, I wonder how many real blondes there are over twenty years old?

No bottles, no chemicals, no assistance, nothing.

The philosophical questions that most puzzles the millennials; if it isn’t photographed, posted, commented on, or liked in Facebook, then did it really happen?

Is there a bucket called ‘sex’, where all your emotions can be tossed?

To be loved, liked and needed; all to be compressed into, and proxied by, sex.

On one hand this short-cut does proffer efficiency.

And yet, on the other, it may lack complexity and richness of experience, and also add guilt.

As in all things ’emotional’, there is no such thing as a free lunch.

For every selfish action there are natural and undeniable consequences.

For example, if you ride a pushie to work every day you will have to live with skid-marks in your undies.

A few years ago Napster was the biggest thing in peer to peer file sharing.

Then it was brought down; and this was possible because it used central servers.

Similarly Bitcoin has just been brought to heel by an attack on its central servers by the US feds, who are shit-scared of a monetary system outside the control of a central government that they can bomb the fuck out of, if necessary.

The next step, as night follows day, is the development of non-government, electronically trade-able money system that uses a distributed peer to peer system with no central servers.

The US has just set the Aspergers kids a nice challenge.

The alarm system at my office is constantly going off at odd hours, or malfunctioning.

Even the cleaners managed to fuck it up this weekend.

Combined with the dodgy doors on the place, which interact with the alarm, I can’t imagine why I have put up with the vibe of the thing for so long.

It’s like having a very annoying external conscience. Whadya?

My body had finally told me to stop partying for a while. I am listening.

A club for lost and lusty people.

Skulking and scrumping around Surry Hills, picking mulberries, I overheard two twenty-something girls, dressed up to the nines, and upon seeing me, an “ooo yuk”.

There will be a “de rekoning” one of these days me thinks.

Some futurologist recently made the claim that modern society will splinter into two groups; the techies, who will represent the wealthiest top fifteen percent, and the rest who will be on subsistence earnings.

Farewell middle classes.

It’s probably bullshit but it does make me wonder if, at some stage, information technology will get so invasive and obscure that we might face a second Luddite movement?

According to the newspaper it’s not cockroaches that thrive during a nuclear winter, but pigs.

The evidence is that wild pigs have taken over the exclusion zone around Fukushima and are multiplying.

Japan is short of hunters and in any case they wouldn’t want to go into the exclusion zone. But the pigs are pretty keen to come out.

Only in Japan. Note to self…eat not pork on the next trip to Japan.

The word “party”  arrived around the thirteenth century from an old French word that meant “that which is divided”. Think “partition” or “party wall”.

The political sense of “side in a contest or dispute” evolved by 1300.

Later, a party as a “gathering for social pleasure” was first used in 1716, originally for some specific purpose,
e.g. dinner party, hunting party.

So we went from a group of politicians, divided from their opposition, to a group just having fun and getting pissed.

It’s a shame we didn’t come up with a new word for the latter.

When you think about it it’s no surprise that the former Labor Party used the Hills Hoist in its advertisements for its policies to accelerate growth in the high tech industries.

Technically illiterate, functionally corrupt, American sycophants and socially conservative; that’s them. I don’t for a second think any other party is any better, BTW.

We in Australia badly need a centre left political party that isn’t named after a work activity or the colour of a forest.

Which is to say, I think we need a centre left party that is pro-growth, anti-rent seeking, economically dry, socially conscious and environmentally proactive.

On the flip side of giving, there is an art to receiving.

If you can detect the difference between dross and gold, as proffered up by a giver, then you have a very useful mechanism by which  to practice selective positive feedback.

If you can follow that last paragraph then you are well on the way.

Another tip for a happy life; giving can be more fun than receiving.

Unhappy people are takers. Take, take, take. Think Rupert Murdoch.

And I don’t means gifts either. I mean giving whatever it is that you are good at.

Also, note that there is absolutely no point giving dross or commodities, no matter how much time or effort you put into it. It’s quality, not quantity, that matters.

A tip for a happy life; expect nothing and then it’s all upside.

I have always hated the word should.

It smacks of a deep sense of personal entitlement.

If you are writing an opinion piece you should not use the word “should” in the title.

It’s a crap way to go about converting people with opposite views. And there is no point preaching to the converted.

Instead, first focus on the problem and then subtly offer up your wonderful solution.

So, rewriting the first sentence of this blog correctly we would have; “Do the readers that you really want to get to never actually get past the titles of your articles?”

I have just re-learnt for the millionth time that I can be self centered, lazy and careless.

Aren’t we all to some extent though?

At least those of us that are aware of it can moderate these traits if we care to.

One side impact of being an individual that is aware of these traits is that they tend to be more obviously paraded on the surface.

Not like those unaware types who keep their self centeredness, laziness and carelessness behind carefully constructed firewalls, behind which these traits beaver away in the dark.

I wonder why it is so rare for women to be able to laugh at themselves?

I do know that the ability to laugh at oneself has three sources; one, cultural and picked up through early development, another is based on self-confidence, and, finally, an understanding that humour is the most efficient stress release mechanism around.

Girls please note, inter alia and if this matters to you, being able to laugh at yourself makes it much. much easier for men to be with you.

Of course if men aren’t important to you then, knock yourself out and take it all very seriously by all means. But there are other, probably more important, benefits to being able to laugh at yourself.

Sydney is just getting rid of its monorail because it was getting in the way of the plans of a few developers.

It is being dismantled and sold to a Chinese city. They are cutting the support beams at the top of the plinths that they sit on (see below) which means the thing will be ten feet lower when it’s reinstalled in China.

By the time it gets to Russia or Mongolia on its third internship it will be head height.

On the fourth effort in Nigeria it will be a train.

I am just in the Hilton eavesdropping on a conversation between two American businessman.

The whole conversation is about their personal wealth and what they spend it on. They are competing, in code.

Wouldn’t it be lovely to have such meaning in life?

In economics we have micro- and macro- economics.

Similarly we need to introduce the concept of micro-libertarianism and macro-libertarianism.

I am for the former and rabidly against the latter.

I was clearing out my mail this morning for first time in weeks, and I found this (below).

Numbers one and four are fluff since they are stuff all governments do and the results are subjective.

Number three is immeasurable.

Number six will probably be taken care of by general growth in the economy, but they know they won’t be there by then anyway. Note, they didn’t say if it was the net or gross number of new jobs…

Number two is a reiteration of Tony’s crusade. But it might be harder than they realise to get this through the Senate. A double dissolution election would really piss off the electorate, so maybe they would be better placed to soften their stance on this.

Number five is political suicide.

They had the election won anyway…why bother hanging yourself I say? Fuckwits…

Since the Australian people didn’t get to countersign the contract they could argue the contract isn’t enforceable I suppose.

In the photo there is also six ministers in waiting; I guess this implies one goon responsible for each of the six clauses in the contract.

Have you ever wondered why some people, as they get older, get more and more set in their ways? These people are often anxious when anything around them changes or is out of routine.

As an example, my elderly in-laws took us out for a bushwalk recently. In order to catch the ferry to the start of the walk we had to be at the wharf by 10am. The ferry wharf was fifteen minutes from where we were staying. At 9am they were panicking that we would be late because I was still casually crafting up a latte in the kitchen in my pyjamas. There was no penalty for being late since there was a ferry every hour and daylight was twice as long as our walk, and also there was nothing planned for after the walk; so we had all the time in the world. Basically they had told themselves that we were aiming for the 10am ferry (it being the latest possible compromise for people who got up at 6am and those of us who arise at 9am). By 9am the anxiety hit as the deadline approached. Wow.

The majority of people on this planet are not free of mind. They do not question their existence. They do not challenge their behaviors. They accept their inherited constraints. They do not develop wisdom and as they get older they become little tiny eggs in a very tight silos, scared and often unhappy, if not obviously on the surface. They seek the comfort of the known.

Do yourself a favour; question your birthrights, challenge orthodoxy of the mind, use logic to be not scared of consequences, understand human systems so you can place any situation into context, do things that scare you, realise that most consequences are imaginary, fear not the opinions of people you know not, and remove yourself from the safety blanket of groups of equally deluded like-minded people.

That is, be an individual and develop genuine wisdom. It will make you happier, independent and you will also be free of the self-made constraints that hold people back in their endeavours, be they love, work or play.

It’s not that I hate lifts, it’s just that I don’t want to work or live in a building with them. They correlate to a bunch of things I don’t like.

I am just having a quiet beer and dart.

The pub has the old song “to sir with love” playing. What a great song.

It would make a great hip hop cover, much the same way that the Fugees did “killing me softly with his song” or whatever it’s called.

[Photo below is random]

I just played my first squash comp match in a decade and won three love.

Truth is I played like shit but the other guy just wasn’t that good.

He looked ok but got himself all out of position so I could just play it away from him with ease.

I am going to have to go up a few grades to make this worth while.

I have to slow my self down since I was rushing shots and also getting too close to the ball.

No message. Just a note to self.

Lies, obfuscation, hyperopia and dyslexia. The opiate of the masses, for the masses, by the masses.

Since the truth has not been lost, since it was never found, I myself will just go to Brazil.

A pox of both sides of the culture wars.

The desire to win this game is driven by inherent personal insecurity, which leads to a desire to be validated by being part of a majority.

The best way to achieve a majority is to engage in efforts to maximise the government funding to causes aligned, and to actively cut the grass of the efforts of the unaligned.

It would be cheaper and easier if we just all (via the govt) paid for psychology sessions for the lot of them…so that they can seek their validation internally. However both sides of the culture wars would gang up to defeat that one.

It’s not a maze nor a labyrinth because as far as I know there is no center surety. It’s a case of what I see, you get.

In fact, the innocent bystander, armed with these offshore insights may in fact be ahead of me, on the subject of my head.

I may have mistaken my head for a hat or its heart.

Every now and again I read the Australian to see what Rupert said at breakfast.

Now that the election has been won and his boy is in the Lodge little warning signs are being sent. Namely that “I put you there and I can tip you out”.

Oddly, the Australian has gone quite neutral on the IPCC report. There is no thundering editorial proclaiming the lack of direct evidence or the presence of political bias.

In fact there is no editorial at all, just a long article with no clear summary position. What means this?

I suspect that Rupert has figured out that he will in fact be dead by the time this issue bites, economically. So his job is done and he has probably lost interest.

The minions at the Australian are seeking guidance by reporting neutrality until some smoke signals are received from New York.

Tony Abbott will follow suit and will be the last in the chain of serfs to know what his stance should be.

Libertarians…they focus on reducing the impact of governments on our daily lives. You have to think this battle has been lost.

In the west we are now in the era of high daily intervention, upon our good selves, by government.

However, if we view countries as football clubs competing for the same prize (wealth) then it is imperative we have an organised and aggressively interventionist government. Especially in a small economy like Australia.

Unfortunately we have the worst of both worlds. An over regulated government when it comes to screwing with our daily lives, but a bunch of free market fuckwits when it comes to economic football; we rely entirely on the goodwill of the corrupt ref, the US, who continunally makes side bets.

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.