The Importance Of Being Harpo

The essence of taste

2010-07-06T11:40:00.027+10:00

Commonly, we acknowledge five flavours: bitterness, saltiness, sourness, sweetness, and savouriness. When I grew up there were only four but we have finally caught up with the Japanese by acknowledging their umami.

Umami, as we all know by now, is the meaty, brothy taste found in good stocks, mushrooms, seafood and indeed cheese and tomatoes. The reaction on the tongue that fires up the umami flavour receptors is triggered by salts of glutamic acid in the food. So, to give some food a bit more of this tasty flavour you just need to find a pure source of these glutamates and sprinkle it on.

This is exactly the same as happens with the salty flavour: the saltiness receptors on the tongue are triggered by sodium ions so we find the purest source of these ions — sodium chloride — and sprinkle it on our chips. Yum!

And indeed with the sweet flavour: add sucrose.

The pure source of glutamates that provide the savoury flavour is monosodium glutamate — MSG. This is a white crystalline powder first isolated by a professor of chemistry in Japan in 1908. Today it is produced by the bacterial fermentation of sugar beet or cane sugar (yoghurt, just so we're on the same page, is produced by the bacterial fermentation of milk).

This compound is under deep suspicion: restaurants advertise that they don't use MSG; everybody checks the labels of things they pick up in the supermarket and if it has “flavour enhancer 621” we put it back on the shelf; when I was in Shanghai we went to restaurants that had little bowls of powdered MSG on the table as a condiment, I certainly didn't go near them.

This suspicion started in the late sixties when reports started coming in of some people suffering a collection of symptoms like headaches, numbness in the arms, facial pressure or flushing suffered in the hours after eating at Chinese restaurants. These symptoms would fade after a short time with no other effects. MSG was used generously in these restaurants and was then named as the culprit.

In the forty-odd years since, MSG has been one of the most studied food additives and yet researchers have been unable to demonstrate a link between MSG and these symptoms.

“Although the prevalence of CRS [Chinese Restaurant Syndrome] has been estimated to be 1–2% of the general population it is not clear what proportion of the reactions, if any, can be attributed to MSG. The vast majority of reports of CRS are anecdotal, and are not linked to the actual glutamate content of the food consumed. Furthermore, when individuals with a suspected sensitivity to MSG are tested in double-blind challenges the majority do not react to MSG under the conditions of the study […]. Many individuals may therefore incorrectly be ascribing various symptoms to MSG, when in fact some other food component may be the cause.”

— FSANZ. Monosodium glutamate — a safety assessment, June 2003

So between one in every fifty and one in every hundred people sometimes suffer somewhat uncomfortable sensations after eating Chinese food when it has MSG in it and then they get better. And sometimes they don't suffer them. Particularly when they're taking part in a double-blind, placebo-controlled trial. And the cause of these symptoms may not be MSG. These symptoms would certainly be unpleasant and, if they prefer, then these people should certainly avoid food with MSG added if they believe it's responsible but I didn't know that this was what all the fuss was about.

There is a world-view in this country that MSG must be avoided at all costs. It is a dangerous additive in any dose. It is a world-view that appears to me now to be hysteria far beyond what the dangers involve. Salt has been shown to have a long-term effect on blood pressure and people are aware of this danger and in general wouldn't put huge doses of salt on a dish as a result but there is no horror at the very name of it, no restaurants saying they don't cook with salt. MSG has never been shown to have a long-term effect on anything. The dangers of MSG so far have been shown to be that it may or may not cause 1–2% of the population to feel a little uncomfortable.

So, then, why all the fear? The common belief in Australia, as far as I know, is that “MSG is bad for you” but why is that what everybody believes? Memes get national acceptance when they are easy to believe and there are two things about MSG that make it frightening: first that it is used by Chinese people and Chinese people are foreign and foreign things are unfamiliar and therefore frightening; second is the name. It doesn't have a familiar, homey name like “salt” or “sugar” but goes only by the name of the chemical compound and that sounds artificial and therefore dangerous.

While it is easy to say “Oh yes, Harpo. I know that the names of things is not the thing itself. I know that the map is not the territory” but the truth is that, despite how evolved you think you are, you are still influenced in your attitude to a thing by what it is called. You can't help yourself. You are aware that the “surge” in Iraq was the same as an “escalation” but your reaction was, nevertheless, affected. The names of things matter more than you are willing to admit to yourself.

If sodium chloride (a substance that is precisely as much a chemical compound as monosodium glutamate) can hide behind the friendly, familiar word “salt” then monosodium glutamate ought to have its own street name. If the Japanese can coin their Japanese-sounding “umami” for the name of the flavour and have us all use it then I am going to coin the Australian-sounding “mate” for the name of the compound and will use it to refer to MSG in the future.

Food tastes delicious with a good veal stock but if you haven't time to make one then a sprinkle of mate gets you well on your way to a scrumptious dinner. If the fears of Australians — particularly the 98% of them who suffer no symptoms whatsoever — make it hard to find then I will just have to look harder for it.

Harpo starts saving the world

2008-07-27T19:15:00.003+10:00

Passing lightly over that bit where I didn't write anything for nine months, I want to take this opportunity to make a difference to the world. I want to give a little back, to make my mark, to make the world a better, greater place.

The first step in bringing about change, I understand, is to acknowledge what is wrong and, ladies and gentlemen, this is where I come into my own. Criticism. Oh yeah.

To start this project of bringing about world peace, I present, in chronological order, Harpo's Top Ten of history's greatest mistakes.

Emperor Honorius executing his general Stilicho leading to the Sack of Rome in 410
The destruction of the library at Alexandria
The British losing their American colony through overtaxing
That thing where we chopped all the trees down
Napoleon's invasion of Russia
Hitler's invasion of Russia
Basically anybody trying to invade Russia, it seems
Iraq
Facebook letting people use verbs other than ‘is’ in their status update
Again with the trees. Chopping down trees isn't working out well

So there we have it. All we have to do learn from these mistakes, because — as we know — those who do not study history are doomed to repeat it.

…next semester.

Connections

2007-10-03T21:15:00.000+10:00

I have fond memories of watching a music video when I was a lad of some old-timey diva-ish kind of jazz bar song with this funny animated video and a magnificent piano solo in the middle. What struck me particularly at the time was that the video showed the innards of a piano — the actual hammers hitting the actual strings — as the solo was being played.

This song was ‘My Baby Just Cares For Me’ by Nina Simone. She had recorded the song back in 1958 but the video was from 1987: the single had been re-released after the track was used in a TV ad or something.

Whenever I hear the song I am struck by that great piano solo and I've long wanted to know more about the session musician they roped in to play it. I would have thought some faceless dude — who would have been paid a quick $15 to play on a timeless recording we're still listening to half a century later — deserved some fame. But the cool thing is — and I learned this only a couple of days ago — it was Simone herself who played it!

It turns out that her dream was to be the first black concert pianist and she only took up singing to continue to pay for her piano lessons. That's fabulous.

In 1966 she recorded ‘Lilac Wine’ which is, of course, a song now associated with Jeff Buckley. While many others have covered the tune, Buckley based his version on Simone's, saying of it “that's the only one that matters. That's the be all end all version. She's the king.”

One of the versions Buckley discounted was the 1953 recording of Eartha Kitt. Dubbed by Orson Welles as “the most exciting woman in the world,” Kitt, the Emmy-winning singer and actress, with her throaty voice and exotic looks was the Material Girl of her time. She reached her peak of hip groovihood, surely, when she guest-starred as Catwoman in the final season of the Batman TV series.

But the original Catwoman on the show — the archetypical, the definitive, the greatest Catwoman — was Julie Newmar and, if you'll excuse me, let's just have a look at a photo of her:

Oh yeah. Here's another:

Heaven help us all.

Newmar — not content with being stunningly gorgeous, not content with her strikingly high IQ, not content with her successful business dealings and property developments — has several patents in her name. One is a solution for that dreadful problem plaguing us all, being how to find pantyhose that'll flatten the stomach without flattening the bottom.

Newmar's leg coverings marketed as ‘Nudemar’ (“pantyhose with shaping band for cheeky derriere relief”) sold successfully through the 70s and 80s particularly after she herself modelled it in a revealing photo for People magazine.

There have been other celebrities with the inventor's bug: Jamie Lee Curtis invented nappies with pockets to hold baby wipes; Marlon Brando has the patent for a tool that adjusts the tension on skins of drums; Gary Burghoff brought the ‘fish attractor device’ into the world. I don't know what this device is — it's something to do with fishing, I presume. Fishing must have be one of his hobbies, along with the philately and jazz drumming.

There's an episode of MASH — in which Burghoff played Radar O'Reilly — where he gets to play a drum solo. The sound for it is not dubbed on which is the usual thing directors do but you hear the actual performance Burghoff did in front of the camera which is pretty cool. You've got to enjoy seeing that sort of thing.

Burghoff was the only regular cast member of the TV series to have performed in the earlier Robert Altman MASH movie. Altman's film was released in 1970 and of the five Oscars it was nominated for that year, the category it won was Best Screenplay which amuses me as I'm not sure it had one: so much of the dialogue was improvised. Altman claims that MASH was the first major studio film to use the word “fuck” so there's one for your next trivia night. The cast included Donald Sutherland as Hawkeye and Elliot Gould as a cracking good Trapper and Sally Kellerman as Hot Lips.

Regular readers may know how much I love talking about Star Trek. Oh yes. You can't stop me going on and on about Star Trek, so here's some more for you: Gene Roddenberry made a pilot episode of Star Trek in 1964 called ‘The Cage’ but nobody picked it up so he made a second one called ‘Where No Man Has Gone Before’ which got the TV series into production. This episode featured the same Sally Kellerman playing a Starfleet psychiatrist who gets kidnapped by the baddie in the episode.

I've not seen this pilot but reading synopses of the thing make it seem twee and quaint. Here's some dialogue:

“You fools! Soon I'll squash you like insects!” — Mitchell (the baddie)
“Do you like what you see? Absolute power corrupting absolutely?” — Kirk to Kellerman's character.
“Hey, man, I remember you back at the Academy… a stack of books with legs!” — Mitchell to Kirk

and so on. I don't think this would have won any Oscars for Best Screenplay.

This Mitchell character was played by Gary Lockwood who is most famous for his role as Frank Poole in 2001: A Space Odyssey. Lockwood's first scene in that film — one of the movie's most famous (if not one of cinematic history's most famous) — shows him jogging through the ship's centrifuge, shadow boxing, to keep in shape, while Kubrick has the soundtrack play a lugubrious, dreamy cello piece from Khachaturian's ballet Gayene — music evoking how slow and boring the routine of months in space would be.

Aram Khachaturian was an Armenian composer, a contemporary of such people as Prokofiev and Shostakovich — writing honest, uplifting, Soviet music at Stalin's pleasure. His piano concerto is a real corker. Of all pieces in the piano repertoire it is my favourite to listen to. Keep your Bachs, your Beethovens, your Rachmaninoffs… this is my pick.

While I'm sharing, I'd say Shostakovich's fifth symphony would be my favourite orchestral piece. Some may say it is a clichéd choice but those people can get stuffed. It's solid gold. That march? Eerie and disturbing. The slow movement: heart-stopping. Play it at my funeral.

As Ian MacDonald pointed out in his book The New Shostakovich, Dmitri Shostakovich, while writing a symphony that would be easy listening for the Simple Russian People and cheery, good-willed stuff to make Stalin not want to have him tried as a traitor, left musical “coded messages” throughout the piece describing an oppressed soul raging against the tethers of the dictatorship.

Ian MacDonald's book, a controversial one when it was released due to its sudden, Western-friendly rewriting of the Shostakovich legacy, has now become the most trusted reading of the maestro's works. Another MacDonald book was a study of The Beatles' output and perhaps his fusion of writing and music was encouraged by his fellow students at Kings College, Cambridge when he was a lad. Among these fellow students he met at Kings were composers Andrew Davis and John Eliot Gardiner and writer Salman Rushdie.

Rushdie enjoyed both popular and critical success with his 1981 novel Midnight's Children winning that year's Booker prize, and in 1989 Ayatollah Khomeini went on radio in Iran, announced that Rushdie's book The Satanic Verses was blasphemous against Islam and proclaimed a fatwa requiring Rushdie's assasination. At least one attempt on Rushdie's life is believed to have occurred and today the fatwa has still not been lifted.

The most famous celebrity to have been condemned for what people took as his defence of the fatwa (he merely described the fatwa from the Islamic point of view — he was vehemently against applying it to Rushdie) was the singer-songwriter Cat Stevens. This guy somehow sold bucketloads of albums in the late 60s and early 70s: millions and millions of albums like his Tea for the Tillerman and the triple platinum Teaser and the Firecat were sold. The song ‘Katmandu’ from an earlier album (which sold a shipload) featured a 20-year-old Peter Gabriel playing the flute.

Gabriel had been playing for a number of years with a bunch of schoolfriends in a band he'd named Genesis and they were starting to earn some notice with their flamboyant stage costumes and unusual lighting and whatnot. By the mid-70s Gabriel was coping badly with being the leadman of the band and quit. The split inspired his song ‘Solsbury Hill’ (“my friends would think I was a nut”) which would be my favourite Peter Gabriel number.

Coming second would be ‘Sledgehammer’: great bass sound, the head-nodding outro lasting a good third of the song's running time, and of course the award-winning video clip produced by Peter Lord's company Aardman Animation.

This was back in the days before Lord hired Nick Park who brought the company all their Wallace and Gromit fame but after the success of the ‘Sledgehammer’ video Peter Lord and his team were commissioned to do a number of video clips including — 12 months after the Gabriel song — the 1987 re-release of Nina Simone's My Baby Just Cares For Me I was watching as a lad.

Thanks to YouTube, here it is:

Presents cricket melons

2007-09-25T09:25:00.000+10:00

In yet another of those you-know-you're-getting-old-when moments that seem to be cascading past in staggering numbers at the moment, I'm pretty sure that my birthday last week was the first I've ever had where I received no presents at all.

The birthday was lovely and I spoke to lots of family and friends and the crew at the office made a fuss and we all had cake. Delightful. But dammit, I would have liked a present.

Certainly nothing elaborate: maybe a cute Harpo mug, or a nice little picture frame, or even some deodorant or an old shareware copy of Doom or something. I'd have been thrilled…

The cricket club had a practice match on the weekend. It was the first time I'd had a cricket bat in my hand since an eye operation I underwent earlier in the year and oh my god what a difference it makes. I admit I was facing some rather toothless bowling but the ease with which I could pick up the pace of the ball and get to the pitch was thrilling. Sport hasn't been very enjoyable these last few years but I am really looking forward to this new season now.

The practice match itself was a pleasure. Sunday was a beautiful afternoon. A number of players from another club we get on well with joined us and we had a couple of games on neighbouring fields going. The other crowd gave us an afternoon tea and we put on a BBQ after the game. It was good-spirited, slow-tempo, relaxed and thoroughly enjoyable.

I haven't posted with any particular point this morning. So what's new, eh?

Does anybody know any jokes? Why did the melons get married at home? Because they cantaloupe.

This was the reason the internet was invented

2007-09-16T15:10:00.000+10:00

Spa and a sauna

2007-09-06T10:15:00.000+10:00

I'm really not much of a skier. I have had a day or two on the snowboard each of the last few winters and rather enjoyed it in much the same way as you rather enjoy helping your friends build decking in their backyard.

Last weekend I went to the snow with the sole purpose of being extremely lazy.

I managed to achieve my goals through a strategic use of the Lying About maneouver followed by the power one-two of a long read of the paper and a long bath with book and a glass of wine. I was able to cross off a number of items from my 'next action' list such as: take a short stroll, sit on the couch reading some more of my book, bake some scones, yawn and stretch, carry snow from one spot to another, sudoku.

Bugger the snowboarding. This is how you're supposed to spend your time at Hotham.

Tumble

2007-08-24T09:45:00.000+10:00

I have received a friendly injunction to post a little more regularly.

I will post when I'm goddam good and ready.

I've been silent mostly due to the fact that I don't much fancy the thought of whinging a great deal on my blog and that's basically all I'd do at the moment.

For example: I took a tumble on the bike this morning. Some dude was turning right and the ute behind him — as you do — zapped around the dude by veering into the empty bicycle lane and parallel parking bit to the left. Except, as you'd have guessed, it wasn't empty: I was riding my bike through it at the time.

No harm done. I have a little bump on my elbow and a pedal is bent which I'm not fussed about — the pushy needs a fair bit of work anyway — and the driver was genuinely concerned and apologetic.

That sudden rush of shock and adrenaline you get at those moments is quite tasty, though. I basked in its afterglow for the rest of my ride to the office.

At such times it is common to get all militant about car drivers and rant about how irresponsible and dangerous they all are and then repeat the spiel about how bicycles don't waste fuel and fill parking spaces and cause traffic jams yada yada yada. People get so uppity about things. Bikes are better than cars. Cyclists are menaces. BMXs vs road bikes; Holdens vs Fords; Fitzroy St vs Brunswick St; Australia vs New Zealand; black vs white.

Get over it.

The driver of the ute could have looked more carefully for me, but then I could also have been more active when I saw the car stopping to turn right: that's a big flashing neon warning sign for a cyclist.

It's not a question of cyclists vs drivers. It is merely me versus the rest of the universe and that's true of each of us.

2007-08-01T16:25:00.000+10:00

Having strained my voice on the weekend I am trying to recover by speaking as little as possible.

People come up to me at work and say “Yo ma homey ma homey yo dope punk da Harpmeister.” Yes this is exactly how we talk in the office “Yo da H-man yo ma Marx bro ma homey ma homey etcetera. Yo lay down some o dat mad phat linked list library shee-yit on me ma homey ma homey. Word.”

And I would like to reply “excuse me, there is no longer any requirement for a linked list library as I can just instanciate some objects and store them in a Vector. To rewrite such functionality would be a waste of everybody's time and I need to finish this GUI I'm working on by EOB tomorrow.”

But I'm trying to speak as little as possible so I say “sure.”

People stop me on the street and say “Prithee stay young ruffian. Whither thou on such a blustery and foreboding post-prandial hour? Dost thou not espy a loathsome tempest upon the lowering horizon? Get ye within yonder taproom and 'scape the fearsome bluster.”

I usually reply, when stopped in this way, “I wouldn't go in that pub if lightning was setting my clothing alight and the path to it was strewn with gold. And more than that, nobody ever spoke in that stupid ‘prithee’ way. ‘Whither thou’ for God's sake! Leave me alone. Freak.”

But no, rest is vital for a strained voice so I reply “yep. Thanks.”

It's all about drinking lots of warm water, avoiding dairy and being extremely compliant.

Harpo gets to do something fun

2007-07-24T16:00:00.000+10:00

We are playing at the Barleycorn on the weekend which is a gig I've been looking forward to for some time. It has been much too long since I've been on stage and I do enjoy it so. The People too have been deprived of our particular brand of hot rock and are starting to get restless. The Spanish civil war started in much the same way.

So, anyway, it should be fun.

Sporting capital of the world

2007-07-23T12:45:00.000+10:00

I gathered with some mates at a pub in Richmond to watch the quarterfinal between Australia and Japan.

A footy game at the MCG had finished only a few hours earlier so obviously the room was full of beefy lads with overdeveloped foreheads, product-filled hair, upturned collars, bourbon and cokes and brilliant bon mots about fat chicks, car theft and homos.

I'm glad they were getting into the soccer. Good on them. Naturally the only thing they could think of to encourage our tiring representatives as the game wore on was to cry out “Aussie Aussie Aussie” at the TV screen at which some others answered with the clever reply “oi oi oi” which struck almost everybody in the room as pure genius. I was certainly cheered by such a creative display of pride in one's homeland.

They howled as one with surprise and indignation whenever somebody fell to the ground after a tackle. They were endearingly bewildered by the red card as if we were never going to suffer harsh decisions. One of them wittily described the referee as a homo. Oh how everybody laughed.

The game itself was an entertaining spectacle. The Japanese were as well-organised and sharp as expected and Australia had a few good patches. The Aussies played a valiant last 45 minutes a man down in difficult conditions and the draw after extra time was actually a good result against a team better and ranked higher than us. A couple of guys gave tired penalties at the end and out we went. After the dreadful, dreadful displays in the first two games, this match I rather enjoyed.

My footy-loving neighbours in the bar were not so generous. When they were finally able to remember his name they had same things to say about Graeme Arnold and how quickly that homo should be fired.

Like a native

2007-07-19T15:00:00.000+10:00

I get down, out of kilter and bored from time to time, it's true. When that happens I like to start teaching myself a new language.

This winter I've been giving Chinese a go and it's certainly a challenging language to try. I stroll down Little Bourke St looking at all the signs and saying to myself “wouldn't it be nice if I could read that” which is essentially the level of my current fluency in the language.

In fact I know only a few phrases.

Immersion is certainly the name of the game when you try to learn a language so I am culling my DVDs (does anybody want my Gary Oldman collection? I also have some of the Jeremy Brett Sherlock Holmeses you can take) and replacing them with Chinese language ones.

I have a number of the Hong Kong Jackie Chan movies dubbed into Mandarin now and after watching them, these are the Chinese phrases I know:

Stop!
Don't hit my glasses
We're chasing drug-peddling pirates with handguns
Ring my insurance agency
Get him!
This soybean curd is off
Explosives? Explosives!?
Guarded by an electric fence, trained killer henchmen and a shark tank? No problem. Watch this!
Let her go, you fiend
I need more stuntmen
That police officer has foiled my evil plans once again
Gosh those Mitsubishis are good cars

and, of course:

Hhhyyyaaaaaa!!

Oh rats

2007-07-15T17:45:00.000+10:00

My black heart is still filled with hate and the searing weight of my fury is today about to land on freakin' lab rats.

I can't stand lab rats. I hate their unnatural lack of disease with their own special breeding programmes and whatnot, I hate their status as the last word before you get to humans when scientists are testing theories, I really hate that whole rattier than thou attitude they have going. I hate them.

Worst of all is their lack of imagination. Make one go through a maze and offer it cheese at the end and your work is done. It'll power through that freakin' maze until the end of time expecting some more cheese. The stupid lab rat is not going to stop occasionally and contemplate Kierkegaard or write a string quartet or even just take a random left-turn because it's a Wednesday. No. It'll just go straight for the freakin' cheese. Stupid lab rat.

The thing that brought these miserable creatures to mind was seeing people driving this afternoon. Light goes yellow? Accelerate. Here's a clue: it doesn't make a difference. All it does is say to the world “I am well aware that I was supposed to have stopped but I'm going anyway.”

The cheese hypnotises the lab rat and all thought ceases.

It's only a little thing — and I'm in a sufficiently mad funk at the moment to get worked up about little things — but if you're going to run the light just sail blithely through the intersection. Save fuel. Don't look like a freakin' lab rat.

Leave me alone

2007-07-12T15:30:00.000+10:00

Here's a tip. If you are sneezing you don't actually need to vocalise at the same time. It is perfectly possible for you to sneeze by simply expelling air without engaging the vocal cords at all.

Try it.

Please just try sneezing without your loud, shouty accompaniment.

Please.

Just try it.

Harpo just making a wild, general statement.

2007-06-28T08:50:00.000+10:00

It is a truth universally acknowledged that, when behind the steering wheel, people are idiots. But when they're behind the wheel when the weather is bad, people are particularly stupid idiots.

Seriously, take care on the roads in this wintry weather.

The Dawkins meme

2007-06-15T10:00:00.000+10:00

The ever-enjoyable I'm Not Craig has tagged me in a post he has entitled “I still don't know how to pronounce ‘meme’”. This comes after he ended a post last week with the line “I promise to shut up about Richard Dawkins for a while” — Dawkins's TV show about religion had provoked some discussion — which is fine and all but here's a nice coincidence: it was Dawkins himself who invented the meme!

He didn't invent these “6 wierd things about me” blog posts as such, rather the meme was introduced in his first best-seller The Selfish Gene as an example of the power of self-replication.

The book is, of course, about evolution and describes the mechanism of genetics: how processes that promote the propogation of almost perfect copies of genes from generation to generation are more likely to continue than other processes. It is a well-written, entertaining, rigorous read that attempts to share some of Darwinism's beauty and magic.

At one stage in the book Dawkins wanted to make the point that genes need not be the only type of replicator that does that and suggested that cultural ideas act in pretty much the same way. Popular songs, views on Julia Gillard, jokes about Damir Dokic: they live in one person's mind and can be passed on to the mind of the person next to him through the mechanism of speech.

As with genes, some memes are better at propagation than others. Dawkins elegantly describes the example of the lyrics to Auld Lang Syne. The refrain is almost universally sung ‘For the sake of auld lang syne’ when Burns actually wrote ‘For auld lang syne’. Why has this mutation survived so well in the meme pool? Dawkins suggests that as most people learn this song by listening to other people singing it rather than by looking it up in their copy of the Scottish Student's Songbook. If you are unsure of the words and are nervously singing along with a large group of people belting out this old classic and, no matter how loudly the people who actually know the correct words are singing, if there is even only one person erroneously throwing in the ‘for sake of ’ bit, you will hear it loud and clear — the S and the K really cut through the sound and that's what you hear and, thus, you think that's how the song goes.

This idea of a cultural unit acting as replicating entity entered the language shortly after the publication of Dawkins's book (acting memetically as he himself later noted) and some blogger must have applied the word to this idea of taking some rules about what to post and passing them to one of your blogfriends. The rules are replicated, you understand.

Anyway, for INC's pleasure I'll quote the paragraph where it makes its first appearance:

We need a noun for the new replicator, a noun that conveys the idea of a unit of cultural transmission, or a unit of imitation. ‘Mimeme’ comes from a suitable Greek root, but I want a monosyllable that sounds a bit like ‘gene’. I hope my classicist friends will forgive me if I abbreviate mimeme to meme. If it is any consolation, it could be related to ‘memory’ or to the French word même. It should be pronounced to rhyme with ‘cream’

And to join in with this particular meme I'll say that one of the wierd things about me is that I tend to write pompously when the subject turns to something I once read about.

The Good, The Bad And The Ugly

2007-06-13T15:40:00.000+10:00

The movie opens with a panorama of empty desert. Your focus is on the hills in the distance. Suddenly a tired, pock-marked face moves in front of the camera filling the screen. The contrast between the wide-shot and the close-up is dramatic and stylised.

The opening scene consists of this aging hired gun slowly riding into an almost empty town, slowly getting off his horse, he sees some other unsavoury types slowly arriving in town. They slowly approach each other and the camera follows them slowly walking through the dusty street. A dog runs across the road. It all happens slowly, silently but for some heavy footsteps clumsily dubbed on. They all slowly stare at each other as the point of view changes from close-ups to wide shots. Slowly, you understand. What are they meeting for? Are they all about to shoot each other? Are they all about to sit down to a nice game of backgammon?

They meet at the door of a building, all pull their pistols and suddenly dash through the door. Suddenly you hear a volley of pistol fire cranked up full volume on the soundtrack and suddenly a figure with a napkin around his neck, a half-eaten lamb joint in one hand and a gun in the other bursts through a window. This is Tuco, the “Ugly” of the title. The contrast between the suddenness of this action and the slow build up to it is dramatic and stylised.

The Good, The Bad And The Ugly is very much about style in this sense. Other scenes include a long sequence where Tuco is riding through a desert holding a dilapidated parasol where each shot is framed like an oil painting; or when Angel Eyes (the “Bad” played by Lee Van Cleef — who is awesomely cool in this movie) menaces some retired soldier by staring at him and eating soup; the final showdown between the three main characters is a brilliant sequence consisting of what is essentially three dudes just staring at each other for four minutes while Ennio Morricone's deliciously good soundtrack bangs from the speakers. These scenes and others are deliberately slowed down — a conscious extension of time for the purpose solely of style.

The story of the three main characters takes place through the American civil war. Almost from the start to the very end the actions of the war affect the plot of the small group of money-grabbing gun-slingers. They get caught in artillery from time to time; they steal some uniforms and get captured and stuck in prisoner camps; they converse with soldiers with arms or legs missing; they move through towns abandoned by the locals and taken over by soldiers; even the final showdown takes place in a war cemetary. If the movie has anything to say about that is that neither the North nor the South is any better than the other: the whole war was a catastrophe. All the soldiers just seem to stroll about shooting each other.

The film is not so much about this kind of message, though. Certainly not one about plot (a bunch of guys take it in turns to gang up with each other and then betray each other in the hunt for a case of coins) or about character (Tuco is pretty much the only person in the movie to have one) but it is a string of great scenes, humour and action. Sort of like Princess Bride except with rather more murders than romance.

There are just cool bits throughout like where a pistol barrel is pointed right at the camera which becomes a mortar that destroys a building; a mammoth set-piece showing a battle over a bridge of which Blondie says “I've never seen so many men wasted so badly” (one of a very small number of examples of him earning the “Good” name — he's good only in comparison to the other two); the scene where Tuco searches Sad Hill Cemetary for Arch Stanton's grave — it is just two and a half minutes of Eli Wallach running in a circle to another Morricone masterpiece and it is utterly superb.

I don't suggest that some of the crappier bits couldn't have been cut out but it remains one of my favourite movies.

The Good, The Bad And The Ugly airs at 11:30 Friday night on Channel 7.

Tea hints

2007-06-07T09:45:00.000+10:00

Some people here are about to suffer a shock from my outrageous, bohemian, aberrant lifestyle but I don't drink coffee.

Yes, I know. Sorry for springing it on you like that; just take a deep breath and try to recover. But it's true: I no longer drink coffee.

I have no wish to present you with a long spiel about the health dangers of habitual coffee intake — I don't know whether there are any and don't particularly care. My choice is not one of health nor one of morality, vegan-style, rather one of deliberate self-abnegation.

Being a software developer I was living the cliché: drinking my long blacks happily and with merry freedom. Nothing better than sitting in a café reading a recent Wired, perhaps, with a slice of cake and a tauntingly bitter espresso with strong body and impressive crema. Mmmm.

Our development team were working on a particular project a couple of years ago and the company rented a room for us several suburbs away from the rest of the office which was delicious and very productive — just the three of us in this one tiny room with three laptops, a test server, a big sheet of butchers paper on the wall with lists of tasks and the woman running a freight company on the phone in the room next door (“Or moy gord. Did he really? Or moy gord” every minute and a half. Christ, she drove us nuts). But there was nothing to do when we wanted a break except to make ourselves more coffee and or moy gord were we floating on the ceiling by mid-afternoon every day. I would go home and suffer dizzy spells and strange heart palpitations. I would wake up in the morning awash in sweat and with shaking hands: it was actually kind of groovy.

And in the midst of this my girlfriend, a lass I was particularly fond of, dropped my sorry ass leaving me a crushed, self-hating, shell of a lad. I lived the cliché again: standing at cliff-edges staring mournfully out to sea with biting offshore winds pulling at my hair as the orchestral soundtrack swelled and the camera swooped in a helicopter around me etc.

I guess that in order to regain the sense that I had some sort of control over myself I decided to give something up of my own choice. There was, of course, no way I was giving up the smack so given our recent experiments in coffee insanity I just stopped drinking it — cold turkey — and have been enjoying my Earl Greys ever since.

Now, as much as I enjoy rambling endlessly and in dull detail about my own history there was a point to this: there are a couple of hints in making a decent cup of tea which I would like to share:

The water must be boiling when it hits the tea leaves. Not merely having recently boiled but actually boiling. That's the secret.
Get everything hot beforehand and keep it hot. Warm the pot with a splash of boiling water before you put the tea in; warm the cup too; tea cosies… the whole production. So yes, heat: it's all about the heat
The whole cuppa tea things works better when your conversation is about show tunes. I don't try to explain it; it's just true.
Full cream milk. I may have ranted about low fat milk here before. I predict fat is making a comeback — fat is the new black.
A good cup of tea is a little harder to make with teabags but certainly not impossible: just remember to let the teabag steep before you add the milk. The fat (see above) will coat the bag which obstructs the infusion.

So. Yes, indeed: tea hints. Don't say I never do anything for you.

A long weekend.

2007-06-05T14:10:00.000+10:00

I just had a delightful weekend visiting my brother and his family in Perth.

A few days leave from work made it a long weekend which was a brilliant idea given that we Victorians get an extra day off next weekend: the Queen's Birthday holiday.

Surely many of you know that it is not the Queen's actual birthday; she turned 81 back in April, bless her cotton socks, etc. Apparently her birthday is celebrated publicly in June because the weather is better in England in June than in April and is that not utter genius.

I hereby wish to celebrate my birthday both in September, which is the actual anniversary, and let's say the second weekend of February, just for kicks. The weather will be better, to borrow Liz's excuse. A day off for everybody: Harpo's Birthday Holiday.

And while we're at it, let's move Christmas Day to late April in order to liven up the start of the footy season and get the religious festivals over together. We could move Cup Day to the Wednesday just so we don't have to spend our day off bothering with that horse race they have. And, dammit, the Dawn Service on ANZAC Day is just too early. Let's make it Comfy Brunch Service.

It turns out that they don't have the Queen's Birthday holiday in Perth — they had a Federation Day off yesterday, celebrating the birth of Western Australia — which is a surprisingly republican move for a state that voted 59% no in the referendum.

How the rest of Perth celebrates Federation Day I can't say: I didn't see a great deal of enthusiasm for the concept. But in my brother's family it apparently involves bribing small children with icecream and reading about Gruffaloes — and perhaps some of the “jumping game” you see us playing here.

Can there be any better way of celebrating?

It is either good or it is bad

2007-05-30T15:40:00.000+10:00

The sculpture here is supposed to be of Aristotle, the famous Greek philosopher from the 4th century BC and teacher of Alexander the Great. Lauded by some as the “father of modern thought.”

Rubbish. Aristotle was a chump.

Have you seen modern thought lately? I sat on the train yesterday and both the woman next to me and the guy on the seat across the aisle from me were reading about Angelina Jolie in the MX and were, no doubt, only moments away from drooling and moaning. One of them had presumably just got some clever person to tie their shoelaces for them.

This is clearly Aristotle's fault because his three main laws of logic are stated as:

A is A — an apple is an apple
Everything is either A or not-A — it is either an apple or not an apple
Something cannot be both A and not-A — you can presumably plug in your apples yourself by now.

Now this was fine for Aristotle back in his day. But we have new shit now. Heaps of things are both A and not-A. Is that light a wave or is it a particle? Well, it depends on how you measure it, I guess. Is that house painted green or brown? Well, it's a sort of greeny-brown isn't it? Do you like living next to a train station? Well, I like it because it's handy having public transport so close but I don't like it because I end up with MX readers gibbering incoherently all over the footpath.

If you feel like a bit of light reading for your own trips on trains pull out your copies of Descartes and Einstein. You will read that there is more to life than either-or. We have points of view, we have fuzzy logic, we have nuances, we have imperfect perceptions.

Light bouncing off an object goes in all directions. That which hits your eye reacts with cells causing a chemical reaction that triggers an electric response that travels along the optic nerve to the primary visual centres of the brain. Then the brain constructs a model that represents the object that the eye is looking at. And then it puts a label on it: a blue teacup. All these processes are at various levels of abstraction and if we forget that then we start living in a bizarre dreamworld where our assumptions start ruling our lives and we end up reading MX to keep up.

Either-or thinking is one old-fashioned way of thinking; another is the verb ‘to be’ which I have already used twice this paragraph. The use of that verb in the language sets up an Aristotelian identity — an A is A kind of thing — in your abstractions that may not need to be there. The teacup is a cup (‘is’ joins a noun to a noun). This particular teacup has angles, six panels, a delicate handle, a pleasing curve as it widens from the base, thin walls but a substantial weight and it has a great many other qualities denied by the identification of it with a mere ‘cup.’ The teacup is blue (joining a noun to an adjective). This seems to make its blueness some sort of integral essence of the teacup as though they were one and the same thing. No, the teacup appears a soothing light-blue colour to me.

Suspect the verb ‘to be.’ Watch it closely. If you were to cut this word out of your vocabulary you would find your entire perception change. Items you perceive are not lumped together under categories that deprive them of all detail. You would begin to notice things for what they actually are. You would become more conscious of the assumptions you make from the abstractions you have of the world about you.

But you won't drop this word from your vocabulary — certainly not from reading this badly edited ramble. I haven't and I wrote it. But still I find it interesting to think that this one word has so much power.

So, yes. Aristotle's three laws of logic? Bollocks. If Aristotle were alive today he would surely revise them. But then again, maybe not: he was a chump. He'd probably just be reading MX.

The lazy callback

2007-05-21T18:45:00.000+10:00

One of the techniques that comedians use is the ‘callback.’ This is where they make a joke that references a joke used earlier in the set. Go and watch some Ross Noble if you still aren't sure what I'm talking about (or just go and watch some Ross Noble anyway — you could not spend your time better).

For we civilians the callback can often add a humorous twist to a conversation but there is one particular abuse of it that we sometimes make:

A: “Did you see the FA Cup final? My lord, that was dull”

B: “Yeah, like watching synchronised swimming”

A to Z: “Ha ha ha”

It's the lazy callback to a joke made, not earlier in the conversation, but just in assumed common experience — in the received popular culture. As though it were an established fact that synchronised swimming is so dull that the mere mention of it should elicit nothing but derisive laughter.

One popular example of this phenomenon from a few years back was Damir Dokic — the Yugoslav-born father of tennis player Jelena Dokic. All you had to do at the time was say the word ‘Dokic’ and you would expect the eager crowd gathered about you to collapse giggling to the floor, incapacitated with the biting humour of it, without you actually having to go to the effort of actually thinking up an actual joke.

I was at the time rather fond of Dokic. Do you remember he was once thrown out of Wimbledon for alleged drunken and disorderly behaviour? He had approached a British journalist Mark Saggers, working for Sky Sports at the time, and asked to use his mobile. Saggers handed it to him; Dokic looked at it saying “I used to have a phone just like this and the stupid thing never worked!” and hurled it to the ground, smashing the phone into a very large number of very small pieces.

If you were Saggers you'd be livid and would want to see Dokic man-handled off the Wimbledon grounds in front of his teenage daughter. But for the rest of us, that's pretty bloody funny.

My heart warmed to the big old lunatic after that and yet to this day we still hear people mindlessly reaching for the Dokic callback.

But it's true: the FA Cup final was like watching synchronised swimming.

A little bit of surgery

2007-05-08T20:40:00.000+10:00

I can recommend eye surgery to anybody thinking of giving it a try: it's a barrel of good times.

This morning I was able to take the eye-patch off and see with my miraculous new vision. It was deliciously exciting: for the first half-hour or so, before my brain got used to it again, my whole house stood out in vivid, even exaggerated, 3D — like those magic-eye pictures that used to be popular. I mooned about the house with a stupid grin on my face: “oh look at that bottle it's in front of that other bottle! Bwaaa haha!” etc.

The procedure itself, on Monday, was a breeze. Firstly, nurses rock. Seriously. Nurses are just ace. If you are a nurse then you have my good opinion and if you know any nurses you can tell them from me that I think they're lovely. It's all about blankets: they just looooove giving you blankets. If you want to pamper a lad just give him some blankets and then inject some sedatives into his arm. Secondly, unlike the dentist, say, where you have to jack your own jaw open and breath through your nose and forbid yourself from swallowing and so on — and I still struggle with that — you don't have to do anything once your eye is anaesthetised. You don't have to keep your other eye closed or stop yourself blinking or anything: I was naïvely thinking I might have to do something of the kind.

The actual anaesthesia I mentioned might have been a bit of a test of nerves, though: two needles directly into your eyesocket either side of the eyeball. The staff there, however, didn't seem to make much of a fuss about it and I was all relaxed with my blankets and my sedative so I was perfectly happy.

The procedure involves cutting a small slit along the side of the eye, inserting a probe that chops up the lens of the eye, inserting another probe that sucks the bits out and then sliding in a plastic lens and I was able to watch it all from the inside! Very blurrily, of course, but I thought it was interesting.

Took today off work and spent the afternoon relaxing and just looking at things. Oh yeah, car coming up the street, I see you. Yes book, I'm reading you. Yeehah!

It wasn't cheap though. That private health insurance stuff is actually some pretty cool shit.

Ultimate

2007-05-02T11:50:00.000+10:00

I had never seen a game of ultimate frisbee before I volunteered at the annual national championships last week.

Yes, indeed: competitive frisbee. The game is sort of like netball, in that it is non-contact and the person with the frisbee can't run with it — only pass it to a teammate — and also sort of like gridiron, because you score by getting the frisbee to a teammate in the endzone and that the idea in general play is to gradually make yardage up the field as you have possession.

The sport surprised me in a number of ways. Firstly, the higher-seeded matches displayed a great deal of skill: those guys can really throw with speed and accuracy and have superb control, when it's needed, over the way the frisbee swings to the left or right; and they were quite competitive as well: teams made a lot of noise when they scored and there was fierce support from the sidelines as games were on. And secondly, the lower-seeded matches were much less skillful: the participants were clearly just having a pleasant little run about in the park with their mates. I knew it was an amateur sport but at rare times I found the national championships just a little bit surprisingly amateur.

My task was simply to assist the organising committee with whatever was needed to aid the players. I helped prepare the lunches, man the bar, keep the bins empty and the water barrels full and also just point at stuff for people — all your standard volunteery things. They gave me a T-shirt.

The kicker was that I went five days straight without email and internet! How I am still breathing, I don't know.

Change of career?

2007-04-20T12:15:00.000+10:00

Morose in the office. Everybody is quitting. All the people I like here are resigning; it is wholly depressing.

Perhaps it's time to give the programming away. Here I am a shit-hot, gun coder — but is it time to try something else?

A few thoughts:

Deckhand on a trawler?
Work in a donkey shelter?
Fashion model — obviously
Hairdressing (“And so, how would you like it?…” “How is your morning going?…” I'd be a natural!)
Run for mayor
Gonzo journalism
Firefighter
Watchmaker (there's a career that's going places)
Actuary
Usher — no, what about a butler!

So I guess there are always plenty of options.

There's a musical playing the comedy festival at the moment about one of our previous prime ministers. Those bastards stole my idea! I was already half way through writing one hell of a musical when I heard that those bastards had stolen my idea.

But then, to give them credit, they've gone for Keating which, looking back, is a stroke of genius. I wish I'd thought of it: mine was about John McEwen.

I might just stick with the coding.

Idle hands

2007-04-16T13:25:00.001+10:00

If you should ever feel the desire to feel butch and manly you could do worse than spend the weekend removing a gearbox from a car.

Not being a particularly car-mechanicky chap, my idea of fixing cars is to wait until one of the wheels falls off and then take it to the local repair shop. But, happily my housemate loves to tinker with cars and from time to time buys an old wreck, parks it in my backyard, fills my backyard with tools, ignores it all for about three months and then makes the car roadworthy and sells it. Good on him.

Over the weekend he and I replaced the clutch on the Ford which was oddly satisfying. I can sort of see what he finds so enjoyable about it: mostly it's how good you feel when you finally stop — much like jogging…

The task involves a great deal of lying underneath the body of the car on my brickwork which is now blanketed with oil mixed liberally with the dirt. Your hands and forearms are black with grease. The only conversations you have either are about socket wrenches or are just incoherent strings of F- and C-words.

Replacing a clutch involves removing in a particular order a number of parts that are all placed in awkward positions, buying a new clutch from a wrecker's (wreckers' are great fun, by the way — like those R-rated adult shops except with old radiators instead of crotchless knickers), putting it where the old one was and then bolting everything back on. As you would expect.

We were half-way through the last step when one of the bolts sheared off as we were tightening something.

Once again I have a car abandoned indefinitely in my back yard.

A Play

2007-04-10T11:30:00.000+10:00

Pinched from Daniil Kharms by Harpo

CAST:
Sir Robert Menzies, Prime Minister of Australia 1939-41,49-66
Kate Grenville, Author

SCENE:
Spanish seafront. Day.

Curtain. Stage is empty. Enter Menzies, strolling. Perhaps muttering an early draft of some speech. Menzies trips over.

Menzies: Oh!

Enter Grenville with a notepad and pen. She trips over Menzies.

Grenville: Oh, damn, Menzies!

Menzies stands up. Goes to leave but trips over Grenville.

Menzies: Oh! Grenville!

Grenville stands up. Goes to leave but trips over Menzies.

Grenville: D'oh! Again!

Menzies stands up and trips over Grenville.

Menzies: Oh! Curse you authors!

Grenville stands up and trips over Menzies.

Grenville: Damn! Menzies.

Menzies stands up and trips over Grenville.

Menzies: Grenville!

Grenville stands up and trips over Menzies.

Grenville: Bugger!

Curtain falls as both are on the ground.

Menzies: (off) Grenville!

Grenville: (off) Menzies!

I give and I give

2007-03-28T19:10:00.000+10:00

A Happy Mr Harpo strolled off to donate blood at the Red Cross, as he tends to do on occasion. I have my screening and haemoglobin test (the nurse said my haemoglobin was “very good” which is wonderfully pleasing. Indeed they usually say something like that whenever they see my haemoglobin levels. I feel it is one of my best features). So Our Hero Mr Harpo lies down on their padded table listening to the nursing staff joking about a girl who had just fainted and made a hole in the wall with her head as she fell — people are always fainting, they get two or three a week but they hadn't had anybody making a hole in the wall before and they were being quite witty about it.

So Mr Nurse takes my blood pressure and inserts the needle and they have a machine there that the weighs the blood as it comes out and measures the rate at which the blood is leaving the arm and mine was coming out really slowly so the nurse was moving the needle around trying to get the vein properly and nothing he tried worked. Usually a regular donation of 450ml takes ten minutes or a little longer. After more than twenty minutes my uncooperative circulatory system had given up only about 250ml and the nurse decided to call it a day and was doing his little manipulations with test tubes and moving around my needle again.

My arm was quite blue because of the cold and the tourniquet and suddenly my arm started gushing this almost black blood — all quite dramatic — and I had three nurses holding things and being witty at me: the staff there at the donation are a particularly jovial crew. So OK I apparently had a blood clot which was why the donation was so slow and caused this problem for the nurse. My nurse had to go into the other arm to get his tests (extra test tubes from each donor to test for all the bloodborne diseases which means that as of my previous donation I officially don't have hepatitis which is certainly a relief).

So now at the end of the process I have a bandage around each elbow and I sit down at a table in a different part of the room where they give you a bite to eat and a cup of coffee and I'm looking at the wall which has a humorous little head-sized hole in it and I can't bend either of my arms because of the bandages so I'm trying to drink orange juice and my Earl Grey like some bizarro goof, stretching my neck and bending over strangely — so the whole experience was rather amusing.

My week

2007-03-23T17:30:00.000+11:00

Trying to get some PHP to do DNS delegatation
Eating badly
Massaging client numbers for a report to the board
Watching Deadwood series three
Preparing the annual report for the cricket club
Catching up with a friend or two at the Gin Palace
Cricket stats scripting in Jython
Riding the pushy
Rehearsing for our band's gig. (Do come and see us and please say hi)
Sleeping late
Dreaming about holidays in Europe

I was serious. Everybody here is warmly encouraged to drop in on our gig if you're nearby — I'd be thrilled to meet any of the hard-core bloggers. I was also serious about the Gin Palace: every time I walk through that door I take three years from my life. Death by Long Island Iced Tea *shudder*

That's a moray

2007-03-07T13:50:00.000+11:00

Channel 31's Fishcam, that great Melbourne institution, has been cancelled.

If anybody didn't catch it, the show merely consisted of a camera placed in front of a fishtank and was used as overnight filler when regular programming ended for the day. It ran for over a decade and gathered a sort of cult status.

The quote being run in today's press is from station manager Greg Dee: “The station felt that after 13 years the show had started to flounder”

They must have had a whale of a time coming up with that one, they would have been falling all over the plaice. I can see how they've been angling to have the show axed. I say station management have lost their sole.

A show in that much trouble could only be saved by an act of cod.

Blind faith

2007-03-02T13:00:00.000+11:00

I suffer from an eye condition and as a result I have progressively lost vision in my left eye.

For the last 12-18 months I have been effectively monocular which is fine, really. My other eye works a treat and my Quality Of Life has not been much affected.

The main problems I've had have been when playing sport. My favoured summer pastime involves judging the flight of a ball hurled at you from 20m away and with only one eye it is much harder to determine the pace of it. Another facet of the game involves trying to get some part of your body behind a ball travelling at speeds that would be illegal on any highway in the country — over turf that hasn't seen a drop of rain since 2004 — I have found this harder with only half the average number of eyes.

Last year, my brother organised for me to take an introductory flying lesson. It was unbelievably awesome. The instructor gave me a lecture about the mechanism of flight and the controls on the aircraft and then we did a pre-flight check of the light aircraft and then we jumped in and he said “here's your throttle. Push it up. Here's the yoke. Pull it back when your speed is above this,” and I pushed it up and pulled it back and I had taken an aircraft off the ground. It was the coolest. We flew around a beautiful valley east of Melbourne on a perfect, still morning: the Sugarloaf dam to the north, the Dandenongs to the south. I was doing turns and climbing and diving. The feeling of being in control while flying through the air! was an utter treat. I, as you may gather, loved the flight. I urge everybody who reads this to find a flying school at your nearest airfield and try it.

To progress from the introductory lesson to get a pilot's license requires a physical certificate and the doctor could not give me one because of my eye. Bugger.

Surgery will be in May. This morning my ophthalmologist, who has been closely following my progress, was pleased to announce that my cataract was now “quite a bad one” which I thought was fantastic. No puny, wimpy-ass cataracts for me. I will get that removed and, get this, I get to have an intraocular lens implant! How groovy does that sound! Glee!

Tattoo You

2007-02-26T16:00:00.000+11:00

I've never been particularly keen on tattoos.

The current fad for them — all those stupid celtic runes and flowers over your sacrum and so on — has left me cold. Your body is your canvas, eh? Recreating yourself as artwork, eh? Just staple the fucking Mona Lisa to the leg of your pants and go about your day. There are plenty of other bandwagons to jump on. I don't actually say that, by the way. Do what you want; I'm just thinking it as you wave that wolf on your shoulder at me.

However I did see a tattoo last year sometime that caught my imagination. Stopped at a set of lights in La Trobe Street a girl on the bike in front of me simply had a bass clef tattooed over her right scapula. No notes on it, just a pure declaration of bass-hood. I admired the understatement of it. We exchanged a few words about the tattoo before the lights went green and we rode off on our separate ways.

To be honest I'd forgotten about that exchange until I saw the tattoo again on a friend of a friend at the Espy on Friday. Same girl. Aren't those sorts of “this town ain’t so big” encounters delicious? As you can see, I took the chance to grab a photo of it on my phone.

If somebody buys me a tattoo parlour gift certificate, I might just get that one myself. It looks pretty comfy on that bandwagon.

Archie “I don't think four is enough, I might as well get another goal” Thompson

2007-02-19T18:10:00.000+11:00

Chock full of happy after this weekend.

Go Victory! Go Victory. It is such fun being part of a large crowd identifying so passionately with a team that is winning on an important occasion. I leapt to my feet and threw my hands in the air and cheered and yelled and whistled and called the players by their first name (which I suppose is a little rude — we've never been introduced: we should all be saying things like “oh well played, Mr Brebner.” “That's a jolly good effort there, young Mr Storey” and so on). I grabbed the guy next to me and lifted him celebratorily in the air once or twice. We all high-fived strangers in the seats around us. It was huge.

The weekend began cheerily with a kind word from Gigglewick on her post and continued with an utterly kicking 6fthick gig at the Tote. Those boys put on a good show. I was powermoshing my way through the night and then the Harpo Massive put in a superb team performance the next day and guaranteed ourselves our finals spot for the season. My demeanor clouded a little after falling for a duck but at least it was a genuine duck. I was out LBW a lot. I've dollied catches up to mid off and been less out than I was on Saturday. When I fail with the bat I don't do it by halves which is something to be proud of. But it's delicious celebrating a good win with your teammates.

I eventually got home from the utterly fabulous night on Sunday feeling like a winner to find that my globetrotting housemate had just got home from Shanghai. It was excellent to see him and on top of that he brought me a gift of the three seasons of Deadwood. Bonus!

What a top weekend. Go Victory.

Stop with your romance and get out of my path

2007-02-15T11:00:00.000+11:00

Finished up at work a bit later than usual yesterday and went across the road to sit in the pub and write some stuff.

The local here at work is at the far end of New Quay which is a water-fronting, swanky restaurant precinct.

Last night, the walk up the length of the quay was excruciating. There were so many freakin' couples. Many of the lasses were dressed up and looking fine which was good and all, and people were all walking slowly and holding hands and looking at the sunset behind the Bolte Bridge or strolling in groups and everybody was being so conspicuously coupled up.

Norm from Cheers once said: “ah, young love. Never fails to make me sick.”

A man of his word

2007-02-14T16:00:00.000+11:00

For no particularly good reason, I decided last Friday to go for a stretch of time having only so many drinks in a week.

So what did I do Friday night? Yep. Eight hours solid of beer. Was cheerily dancing at a dodgy pub in Collingwood until a late hour. And then spent the next day standing in a paddock for the length of the afternoon. What do you do after a day of cricket? Yep. Beer. It had been a particularly difficult but satisfying day fielding so we had earned a celebratory drink or three. Rosco the cheery housemate and I obviously needed a relaxed cold one watching Jason Bourne and laughing at the Aussies losing to England on Sunday and naturally you need a quiet sip from a can when you're mixing up some hot shit with the bandmates just as we did last night.

Harpo: the will of iron. Of iron.

Now, what other resolutions can I ignore? I hereby resolve to wear hats, to read more books about Spanish agriculture and to eat kebabs every Michaelmas. Bwaa hahah!

Yay for the police!

2007-01-29T18:20:00.000+11:00

I am a big fan of the Victoria Police. They get a bad rap in general for being police officers and so on. But if you remember that they haven't shot any mentally ill people for a while perhaps your own prejudices may be overcome. Perhaps they may seem to overreact to things at times and I guess sometimes people may not like it when there's a little bit of lying in court and all that sort of thing but really what does that matter in the scheme of things?

I was reminded this morning just how marvellous our Victoria Police are when one of their hard-working and, no doubt, stunningly beautiful officers rang me at work to tell me that The Stolen Falcon had been found.

The car was exactly where the professional and, no doubt, witty and good-fun-at-parties officer told me it would be: in a side-street off Sydney Road, with no more than a busted driver-side doorlock, a missing rear quarter panel window and an empty fuel tank.

I admit that when I got there I saw no evidence of the mammoth forensic examination of the crime scene I was expecting. There wasn't any tape roping off the area; no crowd of dashing red-headed detectives keen to further their careers scrabbling under the seats wearing rubber gloves and yelling “A hair! Take this to the lab. Stat!”

However my own sleuthery managed to uncover the clue that the perp (see! I'm so down with the lingo) was a shortass. I was able to deduce this vital evidence by having to move the seat back when I got in and then having to re-adjust the rear vision mirror. In your face, Sherlock Holmes!

So, I'm a big fan of the Victoria Police. When you next see a helpful and, no doubt, riot-in-the-sack officer I want you to form a parade and give three cheers because they've made at least one Harpo very happy.

The world was round last time I looked at it

2007-01-24T08:40:00.000+11:00

This Friday is Australia Day and that excites me. There may be some people reading this to whom this is news so I guess I had better explain the significance of this celebration to them. A couple of hundred years ago a bunch of people fell off a boat and decided that this country was theirs and that they would set up shop. The fact that people had already set up shop here was ignored because they didn't have muskets or a conservative fiscal policy and so Australia Day was born.

Celebrations include fireworks, barbecues, citizenship ceremonies and — the one thing that stops a nation — a speech from our prime minister.

Throughout the land little children will be filled with joy as their loving hearts swell with pride for their country and crowds will spontaneously gather on footpaths to wave little flags and cheer and swap stories about civic duty and national fervour.

As I say, Australia Day excites me. I shall be wearing an Akubra and Blundstones. I shall be wearing Stubbies and a blue singlet. I shall be singing in joyful strains about waltzing Matildas and how women glow and men plunder. I shall be draped in the flag of the southern cross, our beloved federation star and the union jack. Oh I am so thrilled to have our colonial subservience to our Queen (I did but see her passing by but I shall love her till I die) acknowledged so prominently. I shall be dodging canetoads and making racist comments. I shall be eating damper and pavlova. I shall be planting banksias and dying of thirst in a desert. I shall be winning gold medals in swimming and beach volleyball. I shall be getting eaten by sharks and stung by stingrays. I shall be mining uranium with my hand over my heart, crying “Australia, it is to you I give my fidelity. To you I give my faith. Oh, fair homeland, accept my humble praise.”

And so thank heavens we are celebrating Australia Day. Otherwise I would forget that part.

Care factor

2007-01-22T18:00:00.000+11:00

I've been in a sort of holding pattern for a few weeks now. Lazy. Careless. Useless. I haven't been bothered to keep the house tidy. Couldn't be arsed to do any shopping for myself, to do the dishes. I have a letter I keep telling myself I should write for at least one of my friends. Bugger it — she can wait. I did a course last year and to graduate I need to complete some final assignments and send them in: not the slightest bit interested right now.

I presume we all get these little spells occasionally and frankly I'm not that fussed about it. Meh. Whatever.

You must be thankful, however, that I don't work in airspace control, say. Or emergency:

Dude In White Coat: “Harpo. The Dalai Lama has a contusion in the thoracic-femoral cuboid. He needs twenty CCs of biothorene, stat!” (that's right, punks: I've seen ER. I know how these people talk)

Harpo In White Coat: “Meh. Whatever.”

Every summer I enjoy playing cricket with my club, the Harpo Massive (not actually the club's real name). My average this season so far has been very poor but thank you for asking. All cricket clubs have their own atmosphere and ours is no different in that it too is a little different (oh man I'm writing really well today. Meh. Whatever). It is traditional at every club that slips fielders spend the afternoon telling the batsman how badly he's playing, what shot is going to get him out, how much better than him the bowlers are and all that sort of thing. We at the Harpo Massive spend the afternoon talking about whether Herbert Van Karajan's Beethoven's cycle is better than Sir Neville Marriner's and we discuss Blake's Innocence and Experience with reference to Shakespeare's sonnets. After the game all cricketers gather in the rooms or out in the sunset with a beer and chat. We at the Harpo Massive have wine tastings and play board games.

Just one box of match balls cost $400 so to raise funds this year we are having a condiment sale. A few of the lads have prepared a magnificent collection that includes tomato chutney, apricot jam, tomato sauce, green bean chutney, and BBQ sauce. Won't that be splendid!

My contribution is my Chennai Sun Chilli Oil. For your chilli oil-quaffing pleasure I might as well post a recipe:

Chennai Sun Chilli Oil

A bottle of some half-decent olive oil
A bottle of some other oil like vegetable or canola if you feel like being cheap. No stress.
A few fresh chillies
A packet or two of crushed dried chilli
A clove or two of garlic
A sprig of rosemary from your or your neighbour's yard.
A bottle of whiskey

Find a pot large enough to comfortably hold the oil. Pour in the oil. Add the dried chillies, roughly chop up all but one of the fresh chillies and throw them in. Slice the garlic and drop that in and put the pot over a low heat and let the oil warm up. This will take a little time and you will be tempted to go and watch Wheel Of Fortune but if you do you will become hypnotised by that spinning wheel and the flashing lights which would be bad because you really do not want the oil to boil. If it does the oil will not keep as well and the garlic will fry and impart an unpleasant tang to your infusion. After anywhere between ten minutes and six hours of some gentle heat turn off your burner and let it all cool. Buy a vowel. Try to complete the famous phrase. Sterilise a bottle (put it in the oven or fill it with boiling water or just breathe some condensation onto it and rub it with a cloth) and pour the concoction into it. Drop in the rosemary and the last of the fresh chillies for prettiness and then top up with a splash of whiskey. Drink the rest of the whiskey and cheer when the wheel lands on top dollar.

This recipe is more involved than it should be (it should just be “put some chillies in a bottle of oil and then go back to what you were doing”) but I wanted to share.

On the weekend I was supposed to put my batch into all the jars that the club has given me to fill. But I didn't get around to it. I spent Sunday lying on the couch. Meh. Whatever.

Not a vegetarian

2007-01-10T11:00:00.000+11:00

If I can wind our minds back to ancient history for a moment, the day my housemate left to spend Christmas and New Year's with his family in country South Australia he gave me a Christmas gift: a leg of smoked ham. OK I spent the Christmas break in a house by myself with four-and-a-half kilograms of smoked ham.

Four-and-a-half kilograms. What are you supposed to do?

It has been several weeks now since Christmas and I am still eating ham. Ham on toast for breakfast. Ham sandwiches for lunch. Ham in my noodles for dinner. Ham on Ritzes in front of West Wing DVDs before I go to bed.

“Hey guys,” I tell my friends, “come over to my place and we'll have ham.”

Ham béarnaise.

Trifle with ham.

Gin and tonic and ham.

Lobster Thermidor aux Crevette with a mornay sauce served in a Provençale manner with shallots and aubergines garnished with truffle paté, brandy and with a fried egg on top and ham.

Just between you and me — I think that's too much ham.

Arguments under the mistletoe

2006-12-27T19:20:00.000+11:00

My Christmas was lovely except I got in a bit of a fistfight.

I was telling some guy that Gödel's theory of the incompleteness of first-order mathematics was not the upheaval of modern logic that commentators say and he was getting all worked up about it and countered with how Turing's halting problem was just a ‘neat trick’ and had nothing to do with the development of computing and, I admit, I lost my temper and said something rude about Hegelian dialectics and he hit me in the face.

My very best wishes for all of us. Have a lovely New Year's.

Oh being fabulously popular is such a chore

2006-12-18T15:10:00.000+11:00

A year or two ago it was the week before Christmas that was outrageously busy and full of social engagements and parties and drinks and stuff.

This year for me it was last week — that is, the week before the week before Christmas that was the busy one. Six dinners out, two sessions of drinks in our backyard; throw in a cricket game and an exam as well and I've been left a little fatigued. But it was the consumption, I think, that is killing me.

Do you remember Mr Creosote from Monty Python's Meaning Of Life? Or perhaps Jabba The Hut from Return Of The Jedi? Cross that with eight days straight of the alcohol intake of Oliver Reed at an Irish wedding.

And then end the week with a family do full of two-year-old nephews getting tired and cranky. By that stage I wanted to hurl myself to the carpet and grizzle with them.

Anybody got any parties this week to invite me to? I want to do it all again.

The very best of the season to everybody.

The wheels on the bike go round and round

2006-12-12T12:15:00.000+11:00

Was able to ride my bike this morning for the first time in more than a month. What cheer. We are so lucky to be in a city that lets us ride our bikes so much: we have much to thank Bicycle Victoria for — every time you see a bike path by a river or a bike lane painted on the road, do think of BV and praise their pretty cotton socks.

I went all engineer on my fair chariot¹ last night and cleaned the drive-train and oiled up the chain and tightened bolts and fiddled with knobs and everything and this morning it ran like a sweet, sweet dream.

The weather is delicious here in Melbourne today and riding a bike could not have been more enjoyable. The sun was fingering my face, there was a hint of a breeze to let you know you were outside, the traffic was rider-friendly, the other riders were all cheerful and wearing shorts and looking hot.

Bike-riding. A simple pleasure but isn't it good.

¹ I actually have a name for my bike: Statler, after the Muppet. Go ahead: call me a freak.

Mum, your dog is lovely.

2006-12-11T11:15:00.000+11:00

Family drinks yesterday at my aunt's place when the very welcome cold change came through. Roughly two-thirds of the people there were lawyers.

I discovered during the afternoon that there were more readers of this blog there than I actually knew about and, as a result, regular readers here may notice that I have edited all references to blow jobs and porn out of my archives.

And I've completely removed that story about the vacuum cleaner.

Take-away makes me go all poetical

2006-12-08T23:20:00.000+11:00

Sometimes you feel like things are all going just nicely. Like you've just found a shiny $2 coin on the footpath, like an awesome song is playing on the radio, like somebody else has cleaned the dishes. Everything is going nicely.

Sometimes you feel as though you are firing on all cylinders, tuned sweetly and you are just humming down the highway.

Sometimes you feel like everybody you meet are good friends who have big smiles and warm greetings.

Sometimes you feel as though you can handle anything. Whatever is thrown at you, you can gobble up and spit out and still have cycles free to file your nails.

Sometimes you feel like a walk in the sunshine is the best thing in the entire world.

Sometimes all it takes is a slice of pizza and I feel cheerful.

The last day of November

2006-11-30T12:55:00.000+11:00

The last gasping death throes of this miserable month, thank deity. November's not that bad, you say? Pffft:

Car, obviously
That whole wallet thing I mentioned
I've lost my iPod.
An Irishman won Idol.
Thieving bike shop refuses to return my wheel to me — “The part will be here in a couple of days” for just short of three weeks now.
The previous point and the first mean I've been on public transport everywhere and that's just crap.
The previous point meant that I arrived late for a test on Monday and rescheduling costs me $60
The Yellow Wiggle retired.
Apparently Billy Thorpe retired.
My friends voluntarily join Nanowrimo and then complain about how much writing they have to do. Bless them.
Muscat has been out of the side for much of the month and the Victory have kept dropping points.
My chilli plant seedlings died. I am the original weapon of seedling destruction.
One word: Movember.

December is upon us. Hooray. Hooray for barbecues, hooray for Christmas drinks, hooray for getting about and being social, hooray for more cricket, hooray for bushfires, hooray for Sunday mayhem at the local shopping centre, hooray for friends flying in from other countries to see everybody, hooray for everything in the office that has to be done before the end of the year, hooray for seeing your family, hooray for December. Hooray.

An unhappy confession

2006-11-22T12:40:00.000+11:00

I have friends who are dog people and several have lovely pets. A joy is given to them which sadly is denied me because I have to say that it seems I am not a dog person.

Being a Not Dog Person as I am I miss out on the companionship, the unconditional love and the pleasure of nurturing.

But dog people appear to be oblivious to the unstinting motion, the poo, the way the dogs eat everything, and the noise oh the noise. My god. Stop barking. These dogs bark all the time. They bark and they bark. Barking whenever they see other dogs, whenever they see other people, whenever they don't see their owner, whenever it's time to get in the car, whenever the moon's out, whenever they're outside, whenever they're inside, whenever they're breathing. The little bastards bark. Dog people appear to be oblivious to it.

“But ah,” say the dog people who may be taking this as a criticism of their own beloved and well-behaved pet and perhaps of their entire way of life, “but ah, dogs can be trained to be perfectly behaved.” And they are certainly right. But the thing is the dogs never are trained to be perfectly behaved. Dogs tend to be well-trained up to a point and that point is where dog people feel happy with the behaviour of the dog. The dogs usually come back when they're called for except when they're frolicking with some new dogly friend on the far side of the park, the dogs are quiet docile little chaps but when their territory is invaded by some strange dogly intruder they'll bark and the dog people have to shrug and say, “whatever, it's just dogly behaviour”. Sadly — and it is a fault in ourselves, certainly — we not dog people are cursed with less tolerance.

I have many pleasures available to me. I am capable of enjoying many things — a book with a beautiful ending, a long summer's afternoon on the porch, a cracking cover drive, holding hands with a Pretty Lady — it's this one I fear I just never got.

Oh, what to do?

2006-11-14T13:45:00.000+11:00

What do people do in Sydney? I've never been to Sydney and I'm off next weekend to visit some friends. I presume we'll just drink and talk rubbish but if there were specific things to do while I was in Sydney, what would they be? Ferries, obviously; hanging out with the homosexuals, sure; are there pubs there or are they all RSLs?

Further thoughts

2006-11-08T10:55:00.000+11:00

OK. In my last post about my wallet getting stolen I was writing in a sort of whimsical manner but I was then and am still pretty cross about it all, but you know most of us lose wallets and it was just my turn etc etc. Nobody died, I'll get my cards replaced and it'll be as if nothing happened and so on.

So I rode to work on Monday and laboured to the best of my endeavour for my employers and their shareholders and then I went home.

And discovered that the car had been stolen.

I've been forced to consider the nature of property these last few days. I spent Cup Day meditating on the meaning of ownership and its place in identity and I was looking about my home and I asked myself ‘which of the objects here do I actually love? What here, if it were taken from me, would I mourn like a lost lover?’ I could not truly think of anything that way, the closest I came to were my box of photos, my Highway 1 Fender bass and the power amp that I built. But I can do without them sure. In the past I would have said my piano but that's been at my parent's place for a couple of years now (my home is not very big, you see) and I'm still living.

That is not an invitation for the universe to come and deprive my of my stuff though. I would prefer to keep my gear because I have some nice things and I really did like the car.

If anybody spots a faded blue '82 Falcon (shown in the photo up at Hotham last winter with my neighbour, Andrew) with lowered suspension and rust patches on the roof abandoned in a supermarket carpark perhaps or a nearby creek, do consider dropping me a note.

And if you stole it, fuck you.

Some thoughts on the crime problem in modern society that occurred to me this morning.

2006-11-06T10:45:00.000+11:00

There are some people that have more limbs than they deserve. Drag them off, I say, and chop off an arm or something. Cut open their belly and remove their pancreas with a blunt fruit knife.

I can only hope that the cash that was in my wallet when it was stolen in the early hours of this morning is enough to buy the hit that fucker who took it ODs on.

The fact that he is stealing from me basically means that there is a hierarchy and I am higher on it than him. This may engender pity among some and in me on other days perhaps but I am in no mood for looking at it from his point of view. I am looking at things from my point of view right now so I say screw him.

May his finger get cut off by a rusty hacksaw and shoved in his eye. May a sharp edge on my debit card give him a cut on his hand that festers and turns gangrenous. May his haircut be effeminate and inappropriate. May taxies never stop when he hails them. May his home furnishings be poorly made and uncomfortable.

I hope he had an unhappy childhood and was unpopular and bullied. I hope he has an unsightly mole somewhere that embarrasses him.I hope his toast always burns and his coffee is always cold. I would like him to be strapped to a chair and forced to listen to Boyzone for eight hours or perhaps Howard's IR legislation being read by John Laws.

Wouldn't it be cool to see him tethered by the ankle to the landing gear of a 747 during take off? You may think that is going a bit far but what if I could video it: a prize on Australia's Funniest Home Videos would cheer me up no end.

Wasting time during exams is stupid. Discuss.

2006-11-02T10:40:00.000+11:00

There is, as I trust you all know, a standard technique for taking exams. Read through the paper first, answer the easy questions before the hard ones, go through it all afterwards to confirm your answers and always pick C for the multiple choice questions.

I had done all that last night for a test I had and I was still only about a third of the way through the available time so I took a blank page on my answer booklet and wrote out Coleridge's Kubla Kahn for my examiner's entertainment. Having finished that, still unwilling to leave the room—all my exam-taking friends were there working hard and there was nothing at home except pasta and The IT Crowd—I took another blank page and wrote out the lyrics to a Queen song.

My worry is that I might lose marks because I went for ‘We Are The Champions’. Wouldn't the examiner prefer something like ‘You're My Best Friend’? ‘Gimme The Prize’? Obviously I wasn't going to use ‘Another One Bites The Dust’.

Connections

2006-10-17T22:30:00.000+10:00

Gene Rodenberry, the creator of Star Trek, seemed to have a thing about flight. The TV series that he wrote, starring William Shatner as Captain Kirk, was all about travel and boldly going where no man had gone before but before that he had qualified for a pilot's license and then gone on to fly combat missions in WWII. By his own request his ashes were launched into orbit around the Earth after his death. His remains were among those of 24 people on the first such mission in 1997 and there have been only three such missions since.

Another passenger on that first flight was Timothy Leary—or at least, a sample of his remains. I don't know what condition the remains were in: we all know what Leary was famous for: “Turn on, tune in, drop out.” Leary was a doctor of psychology at Harvard when one of his mates took him to Mexico and fed him some mushrooms. The experience, which taught him more about the brain and its possibilities in five hours—he later said—than 15 years of research in psychology had, led him to start a program studying the effects of LSD on graduate students back at Harvard.

Swiftly the program was dropped in favour of tripping parties and the research got some bad publicity and Leary was sacked from the university and in 1966 LSD was made illegal. After several arrests for things like possession of marijuana and a lecture tour promoting LSD and psychedelic drugs as a way of opening the mind and freeing the nervous system, Leary ran for Governor of California against Reagan in '69 with a campaign slogan of “Come together, join the party.”

From that phrase, Leary's friend, John Lennon, wrote a campaign song. It didn't actually get to be used in the campaign which came to an abrupt end when Leary was again arrested for marijuana possession but Lennon reworked the song for the album Abbey Road released later that year. ‘Come Together’ is a cracker of a tune with lyrics rewritten to contain digs at McCartney (who provided one kickass bass line) and Harrison.

The Abbey Road album, of course, contained some outstanding songs—it is surely among the greatest records ever—‘I Want You (She's So Heavy)’, ‘Something’, ‘Golden Slumbers’… such magnificent material.

Harrison's ‘Here Comes The Sun’ came after he had been playing around with a riff that he and Eric Clapton had earlier used for the bridge in the song ‘Badge’ that Cream used for their final album Goodbye. Clapton and Harrison were good friends—Harrison had Clapton play on his song ‘While My Guitar Gently Weeps’ for the White Album and on All Things Must Pass, Harrison's first post-Beatles album.

Eric Clapton's own post-Cream project was Derek And The Dominoes (the name came from a compere who kept getting Clapton's first name wrong when introducing them at a gig) who recorded only one studio album. But what an album! Duane Allman plays some magnificent slide guitar through all four sides of this double LP and challenged Clapton to raise his game with some stunning fretwork. Their version of ‘Little Wing’ (recorded only eight days before Jimi Hendrix's death) is, in my opinion, better than Hendrix's and it is forbidden in rock music to say anything is better than Hendrix. The title track from the album, ‘Layla’ with Allman's riff over Clapton's chords and lyrics about his unrequited love for George Harrison's wife, proved to be a mammoth hit and is now an evergreen Gold FM favourite.

The piano-driven coda was written by (and on the recording the piano was played by) Jim Gordon who was the drummer of Derek And The Dominoes. He had been a Los Angeles session drummer before joining Clapton. He worked with such people as the Byrds, the Monkees, Frank Zappa. You can hear his drumming on the old Carly Simon classic ‘You're So Vain.’ Gordon suffered from acute paranoid schizophrenia and in 1983 he murdered his mother with a hammer. Sentenced to 16 years to life, he is currently serving his time in California Men's Colony.

The CMC is a prison designed to hold about 3900 inmates; today it holds over 6600. Overcrowding of American prisons is a well-known problem and the reduction of overcrowding was one of Arnold Schwarzenegger's policies for his run for the position of Governor of California (the same position Leary ran for, three and a half decades earlier).

Exactly what Schwarzenegger is doing running California, I don't know. Reagan? Schwarzenegger? Perhaps there is something in the water in California. This isn't the forum to speculate. Schwarzenegger—the star of such fare as Kindergarten Cop,Junior, and True Lies—got his Hollywood breakthrough in the film Conan The Barbarian.

OK, so Conan is no Citizen Kane but it is still a terrific flick. The Riddle Of Steel, The Tree Of Woe… “There comes a time, thief, when the jewels cease to sparkle, when gold loses its lustre, the throneroom becomes a prison, and all that is left is a father's love for his child.” You can't help but love it. The film has very little dialogue; the narrative is often carried by Basil Poledouris's dramatic and brilliant score.

The producer really liked Carl Orff's Carmina Burana but the makers of Excalibur had used it for their film a year earlier so Poledouris was told to write something that sounded similar. Bits of “Dies Irae” from the requiem mass and of Ravel's Bolero were inspirations and a huge orchestra and choir employed for the recording. It is one of my favourite movie soundtracks.

When I was a younger lad with a bit more spare time than I have now, I made a tape of all the musical cues from a videotape I had of the movie and I often listened to it in the car. I did the same for Ennio Morricone's unparalleled score to The Good, the Bad and the Ugly which is probably the best thing ever. Go and rent GB&U tonight and listen to the score. Watch Clint Eastwood if you like, the movie is cool, but listen to the score. The scene where Tuco has found Sad Hill Cemetary is, thanks to Morricone, the finest scene in film history.

The composer Michael Nyman provided some of film's finest scenes when collaborating with Director Peter Greenaway in movies like Prospero's Books and The Cook, the Thief, His Wife & Her Lover. One of Nyman's few ventures into Hollywood was for the Andrew Niccol film Gattaca staring Ethan Hawke. It was a movie about genetic predetermination with Heinlein/Huxley themes of utopia and destiny. It left me somewhat bored but it was kind of cool. In order to invoke an Orwellian-Big Brother style of soulless newspeak the world in which Gattaca was set had all public announcements read in Esperanto.

This language was constructed by Ludovic Zamenhof in the late 19th century and is generally now thought to be a failure. Zamenhof's vision was that everybody would know a common second language thus solving “the language problem” that hindered communication, caused misunderstandings, distanced people and ultimately caused wars. The language is easy to learn and has been used to communicate between most countries of the world but only by a small minority, almost all of which have already learnt English to some degree.

A common criticism of Esperanto is that it cannot be a real language as it has no culture. This criticism seems to be belied by the amount of material, fiction and non-fiction, written natively in Esperanto. An Esperantan poet has been nominated for the Nobel Prize for Literature. A couple of Asterix books have appeared in Esperanto and if that is not culture, I don't know what is. There has even been a studio movie written and performed entirely in Esperanto.

Made in 1965, the film Incubus tells a timeless story of good vs evil and so on, shot in stunning black and white by Conrad Hall who went on to win Oscars for Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid and American Beauty. The movie starred a 33-year-old classically trained Shakespearean actor—speaking Esperanto in his French-Canadian accent—who, a year later, would gain fame as Captain Kirk in Gene Roddenberry's new TV series Star Trek.

And that is where we started.

Do I work in Sunbury?

2006-10-17T12:45:00.000+10:00

I was sitting in the crowd at Telstra Dome on the weekend, watching a team I follow. As you do, you get to the ground, you pick your spot and spread yourself out trying to look proprietorial over as many seats as you can. My mates only turned up right before the start of the game and by then my demesne had shrunk only to the two seats beside me — I have not the commanding presence I wish I had. Shortly before they got there, the chap on the other side of the spare seat to my right leant over.

“Do I know you?” he asked.

Never seen him before as far as I could tell but my answer left the door open.

“I'm sure I know you,” he continue. “Do you play soccer?” This was very encouraging. My athletic build and sporting prowess were apparent at a mere glance to this stranger. I'm not often confused for sportsmen, it's usually movie stars: Brad Pitt, Orlando Bloom… I still constantly get mistaken for Johnny Depp. But, to his query, I had to answer in the negative.

“I know,” he continued. The fellow wasn't being intrusive or unpleasant. He was just a bloke who wanted to connect. “Do you work in Sunbury?”

Do I work in Sunbury? Where did that come from? As I'm sure you will understand I was non-plussed by this and repeated a sterner assertion that I'd not met him before.

I bring up this commonplace interchange — which pretty much ended at that point — only to announce to everybody: I do not work, have never worked and will never work in Sunbury.

Should anybody from out of town stumble upon this page, for their benefit I say that Sunbury is a charming hamlet on the distant Melbourne outskirts that boasts many attractions like wineries, historic buildings, an agricultural show. It calls itself the birthplace of the ashes — the perpetual trophy, shown in the picture here, awarded to the winner of test cricket series between Australia and England. The people who live and work in Sunbury all bake. That's all. They just bake. Cakes mostly, a few biscuits, some bread. Baking. That's all they care about. How good is your oven? What flour do you use? Do you use low-fat butter? If you have any self-respect you will not move to Sunbury or baking is all you will ever care about.

I do not work, have never worked and will never work in Sunbury.

The ankle bone's connected to the shin bone.

2006-10-09T17:10:00.000+10:00

I spent the morning looking at body parts. Not something I usually do, I'm prepared to admit. But my class and I were at a lab looking at cadavers of people who had generously donated their bodies so that students like me could see genuine iliotibial bands and brachioradialis muscles, diaphragms and pancreases, carotid arteries and scapulae…

There were half-a-dozen trolleys in the lab. One had a couple of arms and a few more shoulders after various degrees of dissection so that we could see the different muscles in different layers. Another had legs all the way up to the waist; another torsos with hearts that had bits of the wall cut out so you could poke your fingers into the different chambers; another had brains — nothing else, just brains.

I guess I should have expected it had I thought about things at all beforehand but the muscles on the bodies themselves looked just like any other meat straight off the cow or the lamb. I can't say what I was expecting; perhaps because the human body is ‘special’ in some sort of speciesist Great Chain of Being-style we-are-at-the-top-of-the-heap way. In the lazy kind of thinking I happily indulge in, I suppose I assumed that it would somehow be different.

Why is it that the thought of eating human flesh is so repugnant. I am certainly not advocating it: the thought revolts me but I'm just asking why? A morning looking at body parts for civilians like me is a little bit of an odd way to spend time and does leave a lad thinking about wierd things like this.

I could try to lighten the tone of this post with jokes about carrying bits up to the north tower in a lightning storm with my assistant Igor and so on. Yadda yadda yadda. Frankenstein. “Give my creation life” etc but I'm just not in the mood after today, really.

Bladdergate.

2006-10-06T15:20:00.000+10:00

I did not intend to put up another post here about the chess but Unrelenting Tedium has brought up the subject of last weekend's farce.

By Thursday the score was 3–1 to Kramnik in the 12-game match for the world championship and Topalov was looking in a lot of trouble — a two-win lead is a big gap in such a short match (until the last decade or so world championship matches were best of 24). Topalov's manager, chap called Danailov, sends a letter to the appeals committee pointing out that Kramnik was going to the toilet far too many times during the games. Topalov threatens to abandon the match.

There is a rule in chess that you are not allowed to disturb your opponent in any way whatsover. Not by smoking over the board, not by tapping your foot, not by shouting “what kind of a crappy move was that, imbecile. You deserve to lose like the clueless patzer you so clearly are.” If Topalov was disturbed by, I don't know, the sound of the flush perhaps then he may be justified in filing a complaint but the actual letter was not to do with disturbance. The implication was that Kramnik had been checking the position against a computer and getting illegal assistance while tucked away in a room where nobody can spot him.

This accusation is completely absurd in a world championship match and the letter should have been handed back to Danailov with a facetious chortle but, astonishingly, the appeals committee — filled with FIDE cronies given the cushy, well-paid job as reward for ‘services rendered’ and one of whom is a personal friend of Danailov's — went and upheld the decision. The separate bathrooms were off-limits and the conditions of the match were thus changed which is expressly forbidden in the contracts both players signed.

Match-play chess is a contest in which the psychological side — the feeling that things are going your way — is very important.

Kramnik's team protested the implied insult, the decision, and the bias of the appeals committee and refused to appear for the game on Saturday. The arbiter started the clock which expired two hours later and he awarded the game to Topalov.

This is all just wrongtown and Kramnik comes out the worse in just about everything. Topalov has a point he doesn't deserve and now has the momentum on his side — after a couple of draws he won last night to tie the match at 4–4 — the appeals committee have all been made to resign, indicating that their decision was wrong, but the forfeit has stood: the arbiter should never have started the clock in such a situation but having done so the result has to stand.

Fifteen minutes before game 7 started Danailov put another letter to the press comparing the moves made by Kramnik to those suggested by the strongest chess computer program and finding 77% of the moves corresponded — again suggesting that Kramnik is cheating. This is simply farcical. Today's chess computers predict Bobby Fischer's moves from '72 with the same accuracy. Grandmasters pick the best moves 77% of the time, just as chess computers do: because they are the best moves.

My position is a fairly simple one: Topalov is a prat. Either for making these miserable accusations or at least for allowing Danailov to perform them on his behalf. A pity, really, because he's been playing some killer chess in this match.

So, that was just to let you all get up to speed on that one. Of course, it's been all over the papers already…

(kudos to Mig for the photo and the headline)

Forty-eight

2006-10-03T08:45:00.000+10:00

I had my practical assessment last night on the shiatsu component of my course. This was the first subject I did with no practice at all but what I had in class and I got the highest mark I've got all year.

If anybody doesn't know what I'm talking about, I'm studying massage therapy. I work my gainful way through eight hours for my employers and their shareholders and then drive through the worst that Melbourne's peak-hour traffic has to offer to the far reaches of human inhabitance in the north eastern suburbs and then I'm supposed to provide relaxation during class? Pffft.

Still. If anybody needs a massage, we students—me included, regardless of the assessment last night—keenly want practice.

The big story

2006-09-25T10:55:00.000+10:00

The big story that is dominating the national press at the moment—bigger than Steve Irwin, bigger than the failures of Iraq, bigger than the footy finals—is the match for the chess world championship between Veselin Topalov and Vladimir Kramnik currently being played in the Russian republic of Kalmykia.

Topalov, after cutting down on the clubbing and partying, has been in blistering form over the last year or two and Kramnik may be returning to the quality of play that saw him defeat Kasparov back in 2000. I suspect it is the contrast of styles—the aggressive Bulgarian against the Stalingrad-style defence of the Russian—that has the Australian press so enthralled.

This morning Melbourne time the pair played the second game of the 12-game match and saw Kramnik take a 2:0 lead. The public fervour that met Kramnik's second lucky escape after Topalov was playing all over his ass (and even had a forced mate in three he didn't spot at one point) was almost electric.

The entire nation awaits the third round on Wednesday with the kind of anticipation not seen since Armstrong's moon walk. Topalov has black. Stay tuned.

It's all about the presents

2006-09-20T16:20:00.000+10:00

My brother gave me a watch for my birthday. It tells the time in binary (that's base 2). It is the most ridiculous thing ever since ever. I have not worn a watch for years — you don't need to these days — and here I now have the world's geekiest watch, and probably one of the ugliest, but I am not going to take it off. It is awesome.

I can recommend to you all that you get yourself a brother. Brothers are groovy.

Reasons to be cheerful (part 3)

2006-09-19T09:45:00.000+10:00

Here's why I am happy: I had a good weekend seeing my friends and they're a cool bunch; I tracked down a copy of a Kashmere Stage Band album on vinyl and it should be arriving in the mail today or tomorrow; I watched the soccer team I support (go the Victory!) win their fourth game in four rounds and get to the top of the ladder; I enjoyed riding in to work this morning through an invigorating, gusty, hot northerly; I've got a groovy new housemate to fill the empty room in my house; the band I play in has a gig in a couple of days; and today, kittens, today is my birthday. That's why I am happy.

Mmmm. Waffles.

2006-09-11T10:50:00.000+10:00

Something a little odd is happening to me right now. Just this last half-an-hour I've developed quite a strong craving for waffles with a generous drizzle of genuine maple syrup. I never eat that facile, overpoweringly sweet, goopy mess but right now I suddenly find I want some.

You probably don't really need to be reading about this. There are many things you could be doing rather than reading about what some guy wants to eat. Not even what he's actually eating, mind you, but merely the food he is thinking about.

Here is a list of some of the things you might be doing instead:

Walking in the sunshine
Cleaning your house
Writing a novel
Jägermeister
Attempting a sudoku
Planting rosemary seedlings
Flirting with people
Performing the productive endeavours for your employers and their shareholders to which you are contractually bound
Having tea with your parents
Driving to the beach
Signing up for cryogenic suspension
Ringing your friends and talking to them
Sleeping
Singing along with trashy radio
Frolicking with a pet dog
Learning another language
Filling in your tax return
Buying clothes
Eating waffles with maple syrup
Playing a musical instrument — the glockenspiel, perhaps
IM
Practising your putting
Dreaming up lists of things to put in your own blog

But instead you read this. Thank you.

Harpo's Famous Canadians part XXIV

2006-09-06T15:30:00.000+10:00

John Davison played for Canada in the 2003 World Cup in South Africa. He thumped a century in only 67 balls against the West Indies which was a record for the fastest century in a world cup match and the fifth (now the sixth) fastest century in one-day internationals. He followed that with the third-fastest (only 25 balls) world cup fifty against New Zealand a few days later.

Davison was born to Australian parents in Vancouver Island and lived there for a total of five weeks before he returned with his parents to Australia where he has lived ever since. He played state cricket for Victoria and South Australia. He captained Canada in their first first-class match in over fifty years in last year's ICC Intercontinental cup in a match against USA when he took 17/134 bowling his right-arm offspin (which is what I bowl, although I've never taken seventeen wickets in a match) — the best bowling figures in first-class cricket since Jim Laker in 1956.

All Canadians should know his name and cheer his efforts. Hooray for Canadians.

Breeding ignorance. Feeding radiation.

2006-08-30T16:50:00.000+10:00

Sure there are some good movies from time to time but how good is TV these days? Once upon a time there were shows that ran half-an-hour and were full of characters you knew well and something would happen and 22 minutes plus ads later the issue would be resolved and Maxwell Smart has triumphed over KAOS once more.

And then something odd happened. David Lynch made a TV series called Twin Peaks which had—along with crazy stuff like little people with backmasked voices in dream sequences (woooh! Isn't it wacky! And a woman with a pet log! The man is a genius!)—a story arc that ran across the entire run of the show. This kind of thing had previously been unpopular with the networks as it meant that episodes couldn't be shown out of order. A few years later The X-Files sort of dabbled with this idea with their Smoking Man subplot but they concentrated on more of the “Well obviously, Mulder, he killed her because of the inheritance” “But, Scully, what if it was actually a hyper-intelligent, super-evolved form of waterlily” kind of episodes.

And now the Twin Peaks school has grown into cool shit like 24 and Deadwood where there is almost no division between episodes. It's as though you're watching a movie that lasts for the entire winter, it rocks. You can watch an actual movie and it'll last for an hour and a half (although these days it's often closer to three hours. While I am being all archeological, I date this trend back to Dances With Wolves. That flick has a lot to answer for) but hire, say, a series of West Wing on DVD and you're entertained for weeks. TV is great.

What other cool things are there to see? Anything with Ricky Gervais in it. Anything Joss Whedon does. What else?

People omitting syllables

2006-08-25T12:20:00.000+10:00

Black verse white
Two thousand six
A couple days

Life is just so fast these days. I surely can't waste my precious time pronouncing things. Oh that one syllable just takes too freakin' long.

I'll need to see some ID, son.

2006-08-21T15:30:00.000+10:00

Yes, I got carded on Friday night.

I had spent the evening at Olympic Park with some friends watching the Melbourne Victory beat the Perth Glory 1-0 in a pre-season match (no, the game was not much a of a spectacle but thanks for asking) and we strolled up to the Richmond Club Hotel for a quiet one before we went home. OK, the group of friends I was with were a bit younger than me and if I was by myself I'm sure I would not have been asked, but still I was newly-shaved and my face is well-moisturised and exfoliated and etc etc and my youthful purity and innocence play across my boyish, alabaster features and I had to prove I was 18 or over before they let me in the venue.

The last time I was asked for ID was way back in the winter of 2000. Australia was playing Paraguay in a friendly at Olympic Park—again! Perhaps there is some sort of youth-bringing essence to that stadium—and one of the vendors there, when I went for my half-time pint, asked for my ID. Even back then the idea was comical. I didn't even reach for my wallet, we both laughed and I told this vendor she was delightful.

So, yes. I'll be going back to the Richmond Club Hotel. The staff there have won my good opinion.

Not a real blog

2006-08-15T10:20:00.000+10:00

I understand that my blogging license is shortly to be revoked.

I had a cold recently and utterly failed in my blogly duty to discuss it here. I also have not posted a photo of my pet: instant license cancellation. I have not written a tirade against George W Bush.

This is clearly not a proper blog.

I am not a number. I am a human being.

2006-08-09T11:00:00.000+10:00

We citizens of the Commonwealth of Australia—our home is girt by sea, if you weren't aware—were each required by law to fill out a census form last night. The government now knows how many cars I have, what language I speak at home, how I got to work (WTF?), how much my rent is…

But they failed to ask the questions that really matter:

Do you dress to the left or to the right?
How does one find true happiness?
Is it called soccer or football?
How do we bring peace to the Middle East?
What is the area of the finite region between the curve x = y² + 3y and the line x = 4y?
What is your current favourite conspiracy theory?
Is she thinking about me right now?
P Diddy. Genius?
What is a good recipe for pudding?

How to be nice.

2006-08-04T12:15:00.000+10:00

While I'm on my right-wing ranty bent I just want to say to everybody out there in Public Transport Land: Please let me get off the fucking train before you try to push your way onto it. Please.

Snowboarding

2006-08-01T16:20:00.000+10:00

Man I suck at snowboarding. I mean really, I suck at it. It's OK to suck at things when you're a kid: when you're a kid you love just trying things and you don't care whether you suck at it or not; when you are an adult you really don't want to suck at things. Maintaining a little dignity starts to creep up the list of priorities when you're an adult. You can't keep your dignity when you spend the day throwing your head at whatever snow is around you. Man I suck at snowboarding. Who was the genius who claimed this was fun?

Why do all 206 bones in my body ache?

2006-07-31T14:20:00.000+10:00

OK, so I've spent the last week or so at Victoria's biggest ski resort. There was no snow. Truly sod all snow. Our worst snow season for 30 years, apparently. There was I standing on my board looking at grass. It was crap.

Passing through Bright on the way to the snowfields (snowfields!? Bah) there was a banner across the road saying “fight global warming” in reference to our utter lack of snow.

Global warming? Is it really the cause? Was global warming the cause of the season 30 years ago that was apparently worse than this one? Did global warming cause the extremely well snow-filled winter last season? And the season before? And currently in New Zealand, for example?

Fighting global warming is an admirable cause and I urge everybody to join the fight, however temperature fluctuations have been occuring for years (four and a half billion of them at last count) and there is not necessarily a causal link between me looking at bare grass on the summit and me having driven to the summit in a car.

Saying that the bad snow season is due to global warming is interesting. Saying that the bad snow season is due to natural meteorological processes is boring. I am going to string up a banner that says “fight natural meteorological processes” just for the whimsy of it.

Cooking tips

2006-07-20T11:30:00.000+10:00

There are at least three reasons why the internet is the greatest thing ever.

I have a handy tip for you all and I share simply because I'm a giver; I want to spread my hard-won wisdom across the world:

If you ever come across any actual Swedes, don't say to them “oh, hey! I can speak Swedish” and then start talking like the Swedish Chef: “yang borshpear de yoom bedishkidoo yaybo de hrday der hmm bork bork bork!” They don't take kindly to it.

Are you looking at me?

2006-07-18T15:00:00.000+10:00

Welles was 25 when he made Citizen Kane

Warne was 23 when he bowled the Gatting ball.

Richards and Jagger were both 21 when they wrote Satisfaction

Maradona was 25 when he won the '86 world cup

Yeager was 24 when he broke the sound barrier

McCartney was 27 when the Beatles split up

So, who else spent their mid-twenties driving a taxi?

But it would need a catchy name

2006-07-10T09:40:00.000+10:00

I am no professional computer game designer, certainly, but I have a great idea for a new arcade game.

You're a parking inspector. No, it'd be great! You have to maintain your fitness to be able to ticket as many cars in a given time as you can. There's that “I'm not leaving my wingman” subplot where you're tempted to cross the street by a car parked up on the curb which would be worth megapoints but you have to stay with your partner. Then of course there are the fistfights with disgruntled car owners and when it rains you have to find a café and drink your coffee without staining your uniform.

Surefire winner. The kids would love it.

The more love in the world the better.

2006-07-04T22:30:00.000+10:00

I firmly believe that the more love there is in the world the better. The passionate union of man and woman is one of the most beautiful things on Earth. Just as is the sapphic love, and the more of the sweet man love there is then the world would surely be a better place. Even those who find their special joy comes from rabbits bring their own kind of happiness to us all¹.

However, there is one love that is not included. That is the love of my housemate for his girlfriend. I am so freakin sick of it.

The girl is lovely—don't get me wrong—she is a sweet, friendly lass. I have nothing against her except that she is always over at my house and the pair of them are so astoundingly irritating together. The noisy, slurpy kisses; his exaggerated laughter; their deafening sex. I'm sick of it.

He is leaving the country in a few weeks so they are getting as much “quality time” in before he goes so she will be over every night until his flight. The next person I'm getting into his room will be bright, bubbly, engaging and completely asexual.

Excuse me for ranting but I have had to leave the house tonight because of it. I was in a pub for a while but it closed. I'm now at the office. The office, for chrissake, writing an entry in a blog. I'm in a bit of a grump.

¹ It's the mutilation to death that rather goes against my argument here…

If pain persists, please see your doctor.

2006-06-30T16:00:00.000+10:00

Apparently trying to kill yourself with Panadol is the wrong way to go about things. It is a popular way for the ladies to commit suicide; gentlemen prefer more direct methods—gunshots, slit throats, that sort of thing. But in this case, for once, the blokes have it right.

The pills require a particular dose. Too much and the drug acts as a purgative and you puke it up and meanwhile it has done terrible damage to your kidneys and you die an awful, painful, humiliating death of renal failure a fortnight later.

But then not enough and you just wake from a coma with a bad headache—oh the irony.

So don't bother with the Panadols. Too much trouble.

Humour from two different wars

2006-06-29T19:00:00.000+10:00

“We were in ‘X Camp,’ soldiers under fourteen couldn't get in without their parents. Calling it ‘X’ for security was beyond comprehension because there, in foot high letters, was the sign ‘No 201 PoW Camp.’”
— Spike Milligan: Rommel? Gunner Who?

“Fuck Iraq and every Iraqi in it.”
— Found written on mirror in lipstick after Americans had gone through Falluja.

I don't know which I find funnier.

Robbed

2006-06-27T11:00:00.000+10:00

The day is only a couple of hours old and I've already heard several people tell me “we wuz robbed” and comment on the perverse injustice of the terrible penalty call at the end of the match.

This is the cry of the football novice—the bandwagon passenger. I am going to spend the day sighing through a number of these conversations getting relief in the thought that thereafter another word about football will not cross their lips for another four years.

It wasn't a penalty but Neill naïvely went down earlier than a cheerleader with a curfew (Neill had a superb tournament but he should know that lying down in front of a player with the ball at his foot is not an effective way of stopping him) and all Grosso had to do was to stroll up close to the body prone on the ground and then throw himself down next to it, at least eight out of ten referees would have given the penalty.

In a competition like this you are always going to get decisions like that go against you. You certainly don't have to like it. You can trudge home—as I did—fuming, aghast, not looking at the many hundreds of people milling about in the city as you pray you don't spot any celebrating Italians, but you can't pretend you were born with the right not to have such things happen to you.

Decisions were always going to go against Australia: think of the Japanese goal, think of the bizarre protection Brazil got—four times as many frees as Australia did—prompting Kewell's outburst, think of Poll's comedic genius in the Croatia game. But this is football and things went our way too: Kewell was lucky to get away with his little tizz, he was also lucky to get away with the equaliser in the next game when he was a metre offside, think also of Materazzi's soft red card this morning.

Referees get a lot of decisions wrong. It's that simple. If you happen to be an overwhelming favourite the mistakes often go in your favour. That is football. If you only notice it when it occurs in the final moments of a match in the knockout phase of the world's biggest sporting event then, I'm afraid, you've arrived late at the party.

Rev

2006-06-23T14:30:00.000+10:00

I'm at work and just made myself a soothing pot of tea. We only have low-fat milk in the fridge. OK yes I'm grateful that my generous employer provides me such resources but who the hell insists that I put low-fat milk in my tea?

Here's a secret, people: low-fat milk is just water dyed white. You have removed the only thing that makes milk milk. It is the fat itself that congeals in the tea, that cuts the harshness of the tannins and gives the smoothness to the feel in the mouth. Tea made from low-fat milk is shit. There I said it.

All you people who put low-fat milk in your coffee are deluding yourselves. You want to lose weight? It's not the 80mg¹ of fat in the dash of milk that's tipping you over the edge, Porkboy. We had pizzas put on for lunch here today and you should have watched how quickly those low-fat-milk-sculling weight-control-freaks snorted down those mozzarella-topped, saturated-fat-filled beauties…

If you will only drink milk if there is no milk in it then, here's a tip, don't drink milk. Soy milk and rice milk seem to be popular alternatives. Do what you want but don't make me drink your miserable, whiny, watery, low-fat, milk-simulating products with you.

¹ I made that up. You want accuracy? Go watch darts, I'm making a point here…

Fun times in Alice Springs

2006-06-22T15:50:00.000+10:00

I once spent an enjoyable three hours in Alice Springs. Yes, minutes of fun. Population of 28,178 in the most recent census. I didn't count them myself: I am such a damn fine citizen of the Commonwealth of Australia that I mindlessly trust my government to get such details right. However—and here, kittens, comes the killer fact—if you drew a circle around Alice Springs with a radius of 1,500 kilometres (that is, a diameter of 3,000 km) you would not find another 28,178 people in the area. This is the only area of land on planet Earth where you could do that.