Seems to be a common refrain from the young one. I have tried to explain that the exercise of internally filling your brain when external stimuli is lacking leads to advanced mental faculties. No luck.

It possible and doable, the two step.

Left. Two. Foot. Step. March on.

I have come to the conclusion that it might be less stressful to tune out, and simply watch a replay when the wobblies finally beat the all blacks.

I do note that, due to inexplicable skull-duggery,  I am eligible for a kiwi passport. It’s all black…

At ten the hormones have kicked in. I
In response I am oscillating between grumps and giggles. And you have to love the calm moments.

And on the seventh day man did pull the Sabbath card…

I should not offend the gods…

Just lately, in a couple of articles, I have bagged the Hills Hoist, calling it a useless piece of junk and not a prime example of Australian innovation.

Mum and Dad have just moved into a new house and they asked me to fix (you guessed it) the Hills Hoist.

So I just wasted half a Saturday afternoon, and in the end it is still rooted. But now I can say without any skerrick of a doubt that this thing is a piece of shit.

So fuck you gods.

The disciples of the prophet wrote many letters that appear to be just illiterate compendia of tweets. Maybe there’s a cipher that will reveal the horny love letters hidden within.

The trick to working in the backyard, if you’re not used to it and prefer more entertaining pastimes, is to put some music on out there.

I have a friend who has a theory that the scorn of women has its roots in the inevitable comparison of the consort to the father.

So he went and found the girl with the most fucked-up father that he could find.

And her scorn surely followed because he wasn’t fucked-up enough.

That’s a lot not to like about doing business with the Chinese. One good thing though, they really don’t care what you wear.

It was the father that was in so much pain.

My parents, at their advanced age, are ten times more sensitive to their dog’s needs and emotional well-being than they were to me at the same age (eight). Its really lovely to see that they have evolved.

Oddly though they have also lost a necessary sense of ‘setting boundaries’ along the way, which is why they have a collie-x-kelpie than can’t jump onto a ute but jumps at its own shadow.

A labyrinth, from the entry, has an unambiguous route to the centre and is not designed to be difficult to navigate. A contraption that tests your resolve and not much else.

A maze, on the other hand, is designed to confuse and trap, and this is what most people find themselves in. Only the lucky find the trapdoor behind the mirror.

The labyrinths have been invaded by termites but fear still keeps the inmates from escaping.

Why is it that some people can see opportunity where others see despair. Do we train ourselves, Pavlovian style, while we are very young?

I am seeing my daughter get sympathy-results when she is feeling ‘low’; she gets to watch television. I worry that this might become a lifelong habit.

You have to laugh. My hairdresser, who bares an uncanny resemblance to Boy George, was complaining that the club scene in Sydney is almost dead, because all that the kids want to do is see live bands.

Ambition, love, heartbreak and sadness. Somewhere in that cycle there is time for sex, scorn and semantics.

.

Wheels magazine is fearless in its critique on its advertisers products. It’s quite unique amongst Australian media outlets in this regard.

Except for the fact that it goes soft on the locally produced efforts by Ford and GM.

They label the Falcon a ‘world class car’. Anyone who regularly gets into a cab knows that this in not true.

I just got car-sick typing this in whilst in a Falcon cab. Driver or car? I blame both.

Our government agencies speak for themselves…on wiki

“In addition to the National Highway 1 designation, the freeway at one stage carried the Freeway Route 3 (F3) designation. This route numbering system, introduced in 1971, was to provide distinctive route numbering and signage for freeways in Sydney and the surrounding areas. Although the route was never signed with the F3 route marker (the numbering system was removed in the late 1980s), the route is now widely known as the F3 Freeway, with this title being used not only colloquially but on all state and federal government documents and web sites. The median crossover signs (located every 1 km) feature an F3 identification sign; in addition, various directional signs also read “F3 FREEWAY” alongside the M1 or National Highway 1 route number.”

This week there are digital flashing signs all over the F3 alerting drivers to the name change from “F3”. But no mention as to what the new name is. From Wikipedia we can infer that it might be the “Pacific Motorway”. Why?

How fucked up is this sign on the F3 freeway?

Why live in a caravan when you can have a whole RSL club?

It’s a collection of advertisements occasionally interrupted by advertorials.

Medicine sans frontières. Caravans without walls.

Marketing killed the prophet.

Yesterday it took centuries.

Today it happens live time.

I just realised. When I was watching “this is the end” I was the old bloke watching “a clockwork orange” in 1971.

Just after I passed the Ute at 140 k’s or so there was a bunch of cars all parked and congregating around an intersection.

One of them had hit the biggest deer stag I have ever seen.

The poor thing was down on its rear legs in the gutter roaring in pain. Very sad.

I didn’t stick around to see the consensus on the mode of death.

Sitting behind a tradie in his Ute sitting on sixty on a quiet country road.

He probably has one point left. I feel your pain brother.

I just took my monthly dive into the world of Facebook. Things haven’t improved. In fact it looks dire.

Thirteen year olds don’t think its cool and are finding alternatives. My FB version seems to be dominated by women with causes, a couple of blokes pretending to be women with causes, some women who need causes, and some very odd advertising posts apparently chosen just for me (useless algorithms).

Google got their strategy all wrong with Plus. Instead of building a better Facebook they should have created a set of tools that enables people to create their own private social networks but just using the bits they want to.

I just found another gear, playing squash. I didn’t even know that it was there to be had. It just goes to show, never stop trying to improve.

Surely someone in the marketing department must have thought of pinning the idiot’s ears back?

Cabbie said “can you direct me to Surry Hills”.

I said “nuh. Use your GPS”. I couldn’t talk. Sore throat. Cold.

He filed me under the rude Australian folder.

Ok I have thought more about it.

If government seriously wants to do something about equal opportunities in senior roles in our listed companies then the way to go about it is through empowering shareholders.

Now that’s an easy thing to write but goddam awfully difficult to implement. With compulsory superannuation in Australia there are a zillion layers of aggregation and management between the shareholders and the boards. Its hard to know where to put in the big stick.

As a result the boards rarely truly represent shareholders interests other than in a vague undefined share-value way and it takes a share price disaster for a board to get removed. Which is why they can all pay themselves so much to do so little. And this is why every wannabee running around the edges of the finance sector desperately wants to get onto a public listed company board, a.k.a. a junket.

The issue is bigger than equal opportunities. Back to an earlier comment – the only reason this works is that most of these companies work in an quasi-cartel environment serving the Australian domestic market. You could put a bunch of poodles on a board and not much would happen. A management team at least has to be competent and not fuck up.

I fall back to my earlier statement – it doesn’t matter who is on these boards. So I don’t care if they are all men or all women. A pox on them all for wanting to be there in the first place.

Tony; I suppose that his spouse’s suppositries were shoved up his repository. Where his brain lives and sort of breathes.

Seriously though, that mob at the Rhodes scholarship temple need to start thinking about preserving their brand value. If they can even spell it. Not the inferred it, but it itself, you half-it.

I find that the best way to annoy my neighbour is to burn all my garden waste. It drives him nuts.

It’s all I have in retaliation to the Chinese yelling, banging gates, endless piano lessons and shading trees which don’t get trimmed.

I just had a 9 pm burning session whilst also barbecuing some sausages. Felt good.

A final word on government compelling companies to have a mix of people in senior roles more representative of the general population (compared to the current old boys club).

This shouldn’t be achieved by mandating outcomes. Outcomes and opportunities are two very different animals.

The role of government is to ensure unnecessary barriers to equal opportunity are removed, for example by introducing mandated paid maternity leave.

It’s the role of shareholders to decide if the old boys club is sub-par. And it usually is.

But if the shareholders are represented by large super-annuation firms that have the same old boys in charge then there is a problem.

I must think more on it.

I have wanted to say something about science for ages but the words have escaped me.

For many people that I know, science is this mysterious world of complexity and rigour which they can only but admire from a distance. But with a certain disdain as well, based on the constant media feed of false negatives and positives from the scientific world. Think; margarine, no, butter, no, margarine, no, butter,…

I love it when eager Gen-Y’s start posting science-based information on their FB pages (see ‘I love Fucking Science’ for example). Its a case of not knowing what they don’t know, in that they have no wherewithal to distinguish the good stuff from the bad stuff. And no awareness of this lack of wherewithal either. And since their audience doesn’t either, whadya?

It might surprise them that science only teaches us to ask the questions, to catalog information, to make and test hypotheses, and to agree on useful generalizations. When science is used to draw definitive conclusions or to make things, it has become engineering. Or, alternatively, it has become abused.

At this week’s event, the ‘Woman in Engineering’ awards for the UNSW I managed to annoy more than one academic.

The stated goal of the event is to help get their female numbers up above 20%, where they have been stuck for some time, and preferably to 50%.

I suggested that they could achieve this goal overnight by cutting their student intake by 60% but also by keeping all their females.

Apparently that is absurd even though less than 50% of their graduates go on to practice engineering. Maybe, I suggested, that their real problem, like much of our tertiary sector, is that they train way too many graduates for the given job market.

I will be voting for Wikileaks in the Senate. I think Julian Assange is a dick head, but just think of the entertainment factor if he gets in.

I also wonder if an Australian member of parliament has some sort of protection against prosecution or extradition in the UK? For example, in Australia, parliamentary privilege extends to members not being compelled to attend a court case whilst parliament is sitting. Since we have the same head of state, this right might stand up in the privy council.

An experiment. We take the four banks and convert two of their boards to groups representing the Australian population mix.

That is, a mix of men, women, seniors, ethnic and religious minorities, socio economically deprived, indigenous types, bogans, children, dwarfs, handicapped and gay people and the like.

My guess is the two banks with the odd boards would out-perform the other two, primarily because these boards would be less successful at annoying the management teams.

I tell you what though, if your replaced a bank’s senior management team with a mixed nut team, then that bank would be out of business within a week.

More on the vote compass….

‘Social liberal’ means that one is less likely to want to tell someone else what what they must do with regards to social and moral issues. That is the opposite of moral arrogance, say non-judgemental.

‘Economic left’ means one is less likely to vote for ‘what’s in it for me’, money-wise. That is the opposite of greedy, say generous.

So why then are our political parties called green, labor, liberal and national?

They should be (in order) the liberal left, central left, mid right and far right. Or soft’n’cuddly, union-confused, greedy arrogant shits and fucking nutters.

One of the vote compass questions was “The commonwealth should pass laws requiring more women in senior positions”.

The social liberal in me agrees, but my experience suggests that passing laws on such matters can be quite ineffective or even counter productive. Simply stated, equal opportunities are not created by mandating the outcomes; just the opposite in fact.

In any case which senior positions do we refer to? I am guessing business and the public service? Boards or management?

For the public service it probably doesn’t matter who is in charge; you could put a dog in charge of Ausindustry and no one would notice.

It’s a pretty slippery slope telling a business that there are constraints on who they can employ. But again for the larger businesses with local markets (think Coles, Woolies, the banks,etc) it doesn’t matter; they are cartels and could make profits with a computer in charge.

So it only really matters for exporters competing in global markets. If you start telling them they have to employ women, seniors, ethnic and religious minorities, socio economically deprived, indigenous types, bogans, and handicapped people into their senior management teams, then Australia has really lost the plot.

My editor and I just had a mutual whinge about the encroachment of the tertiary education sector into vocations that used to be informal apprenticeships.

In her case she says there are lots of kids with great qualifications but they can’t edit. In my case I see corporate types getting MBA’s with a major in ‘entrepreneurship’ that simply couldn’t and can’t.

For the unis it’s a case of convincing government to step up regulatory and licensing controls of the employment sector so they (the unis) can grow bigger and have more revenues. But whose role is it to push back on them if it doesn’t make sense?

Getup Australia has around 600,000 members and around the same number of people have used the ABC’s Vote Compass.

What chance they are the same 600,000? That is, social liberals that are economically left leaning, and all living in half a dozen inner city seats just to ensure they have the minimum electoral impact.

Interestingly, today I have tried to eat my way out of a hangover. Sorta worked.

Last night I went to a ‘Females in Engineering’ awards night primarily to meet up with some old friends for drinks afterwards. One was organising the affair because that is the sort of thing you do if you are stuck in academia.

The night was a wonderful flashback on times past. I recall myself, the young student, going to these types of affairs and wanting to get the medal, or get noticed, or even just to be part of the club.

How things have changed. Nowadays, to be part of that club would be my version of hell. Fortunately we had some good drinks later and this morning I resembled a slow motion version of a Parkinson’s sufferer. I have just come good at 4pm and just now I am remembering these details. All good.

A friend on FB let us all know that yesterday was International Female Orgasm Day. And it was World Cat Day too.

Its hard to know where to start with this one.

In order to explain away my rude behaviour to an academic stranger last night my two ‘mates’ suggested to him I have a touch of Asperges syndrome. Fuckers.

In fact I was deliberately rude to the bugger because he represented a distilled version of a whole bunch of things I don’t like. I was having fun at everyone’s expense, so i suppose I will have to cop it sweet.

I have just been drinking with mates, yakking in code on the subject of prostate cancer. One has had it for two years, been right through some agonizing choices on treatments (simply no complete data sets and lots of conflicting advice and side effects), and only told us after it was all done.

Fuck me, bring on the females.

The treatment, by the way, was a bunch of radioactive titanium rice grain sized iotas that stay with him for life – the alternative is the knife with all sorts of subsequent issues related to men’s business.

What to do when your brain has too many thoughts swimming around in it, and these are getting in the way of things you want to achieve?

Well if thinking is your problem then think a little less. But, you say, the thoughts are subconscious and you have no control over them.

Well that’s a little trickier. The female approach is to: 1.Meditate (and other related activities). These act as a sort of dampener that are meant to slow down and calm the mind by attenuating the thoughts, or offering some level of ‘control’ over them. 2. Women also love to read books on the subject – I think the rationale here is that by feeding the conscious mind with information and structure, that some control over the sub-conscious can be achieved. 3. Talk endlessly about their problems and get useless advice off their friends as to what to do about it all.

The male approach is to do one or more of the following: 1. Exercise a lot (helps empty the mind). 2. Drink a lot (further helps empty the mind but also strips away the conscious mind’s gate-keeping role so you can peek directly underneath). 3. Yak to mates in strict code (easier and more fun than reading books but it does depend on the quality of your mates). 4. Categorize one’s thoughts and excise one or more of the troublesome categories once they are described, e.g. lose the girlfriend. 5. Never meditate. 6. Never read a book on the subject because that just introduces more thoughts.

Each to their own, but I wonder if both parties could a learn a little from the other, or whether the brain function is different enough to warrant the totally different approaches?

I have a cousin whose wife writes for the Daily Telegraph. Nice girl but functionality illiterate.

If ASIS is having trouble hiring spies then maybe they oughta employ the asylum seekers. A clutch of birds with one fucking rock, in a great big glass house.

I wonder what is going around the minds of our political head nutters?

Is it the job at any cost? Or is there some genuine social or economic belief structure driving them?

My guess is that years of cartoon-like existence has left them with some vestige of a political philosophy from their youth, a veneer of rationality but with an over-stewed morass of fried white matter underneath which serves no purpose and never could.

My flight today was delayed by a whole hour. The captain announced over the Tannoy that there was a screw loose. Indeed.

But wait there’s more. The Australian Financial Review today says it’s not the NBN, rather it’s (parsing) just Rupert being a grumpy old prick with no imagination and no wife. The myth is waning.

I know you all, and will awhile uphold the unyoked humour of your idleness: yet herein will I imitate the sun, who doth permit the base contagious clouds to smother up his beauty from the world, that, when he please again to be himself, being wanted, he may be more wonder’d at, by breaking through the foul and ugly mists of vapours that did seem to strangle him.

The HR ad for Australia’s spy agency went “iQ + eQ = ASIS”.

Do you reckon they are after liars or fools?

Its just freakin’ embarrassing to see Lycra-clad fat-bellied corporate types ride their bicycles around in groups pretending they are team jockeys. But apparently not to them. In their mind’s eye (love that expression) they are magically transformed into sylph-like leprechauns, all covered in corporate tattoos. If only that marketing power could push those bikes along a little faster than the walking pace they generally puff along at…

If you don’t care and you don’t want to know then you deserve whatever is coming.

If you do care and you sort of want to know but don’t have the wherewithal to figure it out, then I suppose that is just bad luck.

If you care and you can figure it out then get the fuck out of there before its too late.

There are two types of people that buy a house across the road from a pub.Those that think it’s very handy and those that shouldn’t.

Upon leaving my parents ‘farm’ for the last time (they have sold it) Lola was pretending to be sad. It was the order of the day apparently.

I said “Lola, really, are you sad?”

She smiled cheekily and said “not really”

Chip off the old block.

I just rode past the lovely new government flats that have just been built on the site of an older block of government flats.

Its odd, but no matter whatever the era, a government block of flats is instantly distinguishable from any other sort.

It must be key differences in the selection of architects and their work, as well as a different process of monitoring and controlling budgets.

Somewhere in this is a lesson that might provide the key to better government processes me-thinks.

On the surface, I don’t always ‘know’ what I mean but if I dig a bit then I find out there’s some thoughts sculling around on the ocean floor of my mind like some poor angler fish in the dark depths with nowt but a small luminescent light on the end of a stick to keep it amused.

The desire for commitment in a relationship is clear – it’s a support mechanisms for the tough things in life, like having kids. That might be the justification, but I would also argue that for many people the desire to be in a committed relationship is in fact ’emotional’, not rational.

Evolution is a sneaky beast – it takes a whole bunch of environmental factors, parses them in the context of how to best propagate the species, and the distils them down into ’emotions’. Its no mystery that there a hundreds of psychological conditions that end up in ‘abnormal’ sexual behaviour; nature is having us on!

Observations. I observe carefully and catalogue trends. In relationships I have observed that probably more than 90% fail despite an initial sense of commitment. The number might be lower for married couple, but so? Of the couples that survive forever, I see one single correlation; they keep their world ‘constant’. That is, by minimising change they remove the forces that challenge their commitment to each other.

And if individuals in a committed relationships want to actively explore exciting ‘change’ then its illogical for them to think that their committed relationship will survive. And I see the idea of living in a constant world as quite irrational. But I always liked a challenge.

“I just really live in pain I just don’t even know it”

What matters most, the absence of logic, emotion or clarifiers?

The SMH today reveals that Rupert’s reason for attacking Labor is because of the NBN. Open access to it by all service providers, say Netflix, with on-demand content threatens his revenues from Fox cable. He wants Malcolm Turnbull’s cut-back version which won’t properly allow on-demand content.

A universal truth: retards see the problem and not the opportunity.

Maybe Malcolm, if he gets in, should re-neg on the deal and build the full-scale NBN anyway. I sense that Rupert is pretty close to the end of his influence (and life) and all it will take is one push by an enterprising politician to destroy the myth forever.

Jealousy and commitment are, at best, first cousins. One is irrational and the other is just illogical.

Staying at the folk’s place…

My dad farts in the shower. It sounds like the distress call of a beached dolphin.

Some things never change.

I have just been given a copy of ‘Things Bogans Like’, probably on the basis that I would find it amusing. I did.

The book fails to define a bogan, preferring to define the beast by all the things they like.

What is clear though is that well over 90% of Australia’s population sneaks into the category.

My personal definition is that a bogan is anyone that likes watching morning TV.

On the subject of dumb bogan trends, when did a selfie become a photo and not a solo erotic event?

Apparently a onesie outfit refers to the number of articles of clothing required to fully clad a person and not the inferred mental age of the wearer.

However I am not so sure whether the same can be said of the retarded mother that instigates a onesie party for their ten-year old.

I pulled over in the no stopping zone outside my daughter’s school. I was just about to leave the car to go and get her when a copper tapped on the window.

He said I couldn’t stop there and I had to move on or he would book me. I told him I wasn’t stopped and that because I was in the car it was more of a pause.

I pointed out to him that all music players have separate stop and pause buttons, and that parking was just the same.

He looked a little confused, decided I was an idiot and told me to move or else. Geez it was fun.

My daughter’s school is having a trivia night fund-raiser, combining two of my most hated events.

I told them ‘Not a chance. Why don’t you try a barbie down the pub for all the normal people?’

The coven of mothers smote me in their minds and with their eyes. I smiled back.

The further my thinking drifts from mainstream, the more I feel like I am looking at a movie screen and not real-life humanity.

I have been trying to get the Gen-Y-Fish to stop just blurting out his random thoughts as they come into his head. He has a bad habit of voicing these very annoying non sequiturs.

The best I can do in such a short period of stewardship is to suggest that this is ineffective; hoping that this works away in his sub conscious and eventually he becomes aware of the issue and does something about it.

I also gave him a summary of how effective communication works, namely to think carefully before talking, and to ensure whatever is coming out is useful. I note to him that people who randomly ramble also suffer a similar problem to the boy that cried wolf, namely that people only vaguely listen to them on the basis that whatever is coming out at any particular moment is probably rubbish.

Remember this – kids don’t work it out for themselves very quickly, and we can offer them years of short-cuts if we just observe them and open our mouths. Too many people think they are being nice to kids by not ‘criticising’ them because they think such activity would destroy their ‘self-confidence’.

Well why then does the Gen-Y-Fish have such low self-confidence? I smell a rat and that rat is the modern parent’s false justification of the avoidance of conflict and parental hard-work, as well an over-indulgence in re-living and repairing their own childhoods. To put it bluntly – it is weak, lazy and self-centred behaviour.

Would you believe there are still people in this world who think that a steady job equates to job security?

In the modern era any steady job is just one dip in cashflow away from disintegrating.

I explained to the Gen-Y-Fish that any business, be it government, private or loopy, has customers who represent the source of revenue.

The only modern means of maximizing ‘job security’ is to reduce the number of people between yourself and the customers.

Ultimately, by this definition, being the boss or, better still, owning your own company represents the best job security.

Of course your financial security can still be threatened by circumstances, but less so than otherwise.

Personally I think financial security is over-rated; it becomes an excuse to just consume more of the same. However, many of those with inherent job insecurity (even if they don’t know it) simply consume less of the same, so they are no better off.

How about we start ‘anti-months” before all the fools in the Finance sector find themselves in a yearly rotation of mindless fads. I am being nice here.

For Dry-July we can promote Binge-July.

For Movember we can start Smoothember (sounds good that one).

There’s a Febfast. I would do Fat-Feb.

There’s a few competing Octobers but they haven’t caught on yet.

Lent; we can forget about it since they don’t have a marketing budget.

As I rode past the building site a worker scowled at me “Can’t you read the bloody sign”

(the sign says “Dismount Your Bicycle in Work Area.” As if.)

I said “What fucking sign?”

He says “The fucking sign that says you can’t ride through here.”

I say “Mate I can’t read every fucking sign in the world, there’s millions of them. I wouldn’t do anything else if I did.”

What is is about Australia that every time someone or some government department wants to control the world around them, they feel justified enough to annoy others with yet another bloody sign.

Yay, our currency just went through the 90 cent barrier. As an exporter I want the Pacific Peso back. Self-interest rules. Besides I hate travelling OS for holidays; I get on enough planes as it is.

A few of my friends have had a Dry July. Both women and men. I really should consume more idiotic media content so I know about this shit ahead of time. There is nothing worse that trying to enjoy a schooner and a durry while the miserable sod on the other side of the table is nursing a soda water and a false sense of well-being.

Two thoughts come to mind…

1. Why do people need a heavily-marketed mandated period to do anything? Whether it’s Moustachio-March, Liver-April or Anal-September, all of this can be done without the approval of others and without wearing the fucking thing on your sleeve.

2. On the specific topic of drinking, if you feel like you are drinking too much, then drink a little less. Going cold-turkey for a month and then going back to the binge doesn’t really achieve anything other than to annoy people like me.

ps Dave is drinking and smoking below so I don’t wish to infer he is silly enough to fall for Dry July. But he did FB us all on a pretty weak attempt to pack in the durries 🙂

For some reason I woke up with ‘The Ballard of Lucy Jordan’ in my head.

Better than ‘Here’s to you Mrs Robinson’, I suppose.

I also took the gen-y-fish through the entire dark history of the families.I thought I might offer him a short cut of a few years.

Because, as I explained, when his current 2-D take-it-as-you-see-it world starts getting a little complex and multi-dimensional, and his wheels start to wobble, he will want to go all over this stuff.

I explained to the gen-y-fish that counselors, psychologists and psychiatrists all exist because, no matter how good we are at understanding others, we are shit at understanding ourselves.

They are a mirror, the inferred specialists, on ourselves. And a pretty bloody crazed and cracked one at that.

Is it just me or are the prams getting bigger?

The salesman said to me “no deposit, no interest, no repayments”.

I said “so it’s a gift then?”

He looked confused.

I like to think that when I disappear down a rabbit hole that the light at the end of tunnel is a rainbow that leads to a pot of gold.

Electronic and communications technology is a wonder. It enables us to be so much more productive especially when that productivity is all about the tasks of organization and information creation and sharing.

Which is the case in my case.

In fact my own ‘time and motion’ study shows that I have the following activities only.

1. Laptop
2. Phone
3. Talking to people
4. Fluffing off at a cafe, or squash or something. I claim I am always ‘working’ during this category, but its subconscious…
5. Transport – cycling mostly. The odd cab.

Query to self. Is this what I really want to do? [pondering]

Back to IT and related technologies. There is a trap in becoming very efficient at their use, namely the temptation to overload yourself with activities, simply because you can. It’s all good when things are going well but just occasionally the wheels wobble and then you find out that you have taken on far too much. I suspect it is best to leave a 30% headroom for spare capacity just so there is a safety margin.

The closed captions on the TV said ‘calorie cap’. I think they meant salary cap, but they could be onto something…

School sports carnival; I have just watched the sixth class boys go around the 800m. Only three boys ran the whole distance – the rest either pulled out or walked part of the way.

My daughter ran the whole 800m because I was watching. The furthest she has run by a factor of 8.

Bourke St Bakery….Gen Y central. The goldfish behind the counter asked me three times if she could help me while I was waiting for my sausage roll – the one that I had ordered off her the first time. She also got both my name and my order wrong.

The next time you call something “quintessential” you may need to consider that it’s equivalent to saying that it’s too good to be true.

It refers to the fifth element, ether, which doesn’t actually exist. But neither do the other four, at least as the alchemists intended them to.

It’s all quite boronic.

Machiato. Sunday rag. Breakfast. Latte. Tip run. Daughter haggling. Machiato. Ferrari Minimus. Tip run. Schooner. Dog walk. Survived a foreign dog attack. Kicked a labrador. Weed run. Stinging nettle nurse. Stubbie. Soup. TV. Drive home. Maccas hit and run coffee. Home. Bed please.

A tip these days is not the random pile of rubbish of my younger days. All the incoming is sorted into goods of various categories for on-sale, and a small fraction of genuine rubbish that goes to some hidden landfill.

At the Berry tip you pay for the privilege unless your load is deemed to have enough commercial value, whereupon you are let in, in the best case scenario, for free.

The local council and their employees are profiting from an asymmetry of information and resources, and all paid for by the very people they are ripping off.

I sincerely hope Freecycle destroys their business model.

How useless is a border collie-x-kelpie that can’t jump onto the back of a ute without assistance?

Lola just called to give me a bollocking for not being in attendance at the school band performance. I told her way in advance that I had to help my mum and dad prepare for their house-move instead.

But she decided to ignore all of that and practice the female cycle of heartbreak, love, sadness and ambition. I am doing my best to get her to attenuate it (for her own sake), but it’s so hard with the influences that abound.

I just spent three hours on the Ferrari Minimus. Apparently I am now the Charles Manson of the edible weed world. Given that some of the survivors will end up in the pot, I’d say I’m more like Hannibal Lecter.

Newspaper columnist; no matter how good they are, they will let you down. Especially when they run out of something to write about, and opine on a subject of which they only have a passing knowledge. Deadly.

I have a purchasing rule. For everything I buy one of my previous acquisitions must go (roughly of equal value or importance). By such means I avoid the accumulation of goods, fear and loathing.

If I ever need to transition to a caravan park all I have to do is change the ratio to ten-to-one.

Berry. Dad. Ute. Machiato. Long conversation with my daughter.Transport run. Machiato. Squash. Lunch. Tip. Machiato.Tip. Pub. 6 schooners. First D&M with dad ever. Shower. Dinner. TV. Sleep.

n.b. they were doubles so that’s six shots and six schooners. Nice symmetry

If you ever want to see the ‘poverty of the mind’ inherent in Australia’s underclass then just catch the Friday night train to Nowra.

Mostly it’s a bunch of nice people, but just enough absolute arseholes to make everyone very nervous.

What has changed over the last few decades is that this latter mob have got off the leash; an unexpected and unwelcome side product of social liberalization.

The government is running a series of TV ads in Australia warning would-be boat people that they will be settled offshore.

How stupid is the average Australian, do you reckon?