Kevin Rudd is in hospital having his gall removed.
I'm fairly sure for this removal, the knives go in the front.
30 July 2010
29 July 2010
Arts And Crafts For The Paranoid
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None of the furniture is falling over. Nothing's out of place. Everything is working and this piece of wood just appeared. It's like the one extra bolt left over after rebuilding an engine... except it just arrived in my life with no rebuilding having gone on. What's its caper? Where does it belong?
So I did the only logical thing I could. I gave it some added features and now it's just a square pig looking for a round hole.
27 July 2010
Yes, Catchy
I found myself listening to a commercial radio station recently and was amused to hear that a certain bank is referring to itself simply by saying what the acronym spells. I don’t know if this has been going on for a long time and I’m just very late to hear it, but I just need to point something out:
Nab: verb. To snatch or steal.
Nab: verb. To snatch or steal.
22 July 2010
Wake Me When It's Over
Joe Hockey pleaded with the crowd at a public address yesterday not to trivialise Australian politics by preferring to watch the MasterChef finale, to the debate between the two political leaders. (This comes from a man who raised his political profile by appearing on Talkin’ ‘Bout Your Generation.)
I want to have a quick glance at cause and effect here, Joe (or even 'affect' in this case). Are you accusing me of trivialising Australian politics to the point that I’d prefer to keep a dinner-date than listen to more vacuous, sound-bite drivel? Pull your giant, empty head in. And talking of empty, I’m not reserving my distaste just for you. A whole bunch of people might be really pleased that Gillard’s in, but has she actually said anything concrete yet? I might have missed it, but all I’ve heard so far is carefully managed nothings.
The one small mercy is that the election isn’t too far away.
I want to have a quick glance at cause and effect here, Joe (or even 'affect' in this case). Are you accusing me of trivialising Australian politics to the point that I’d prefer to keep a dinner-date than listen to more vacuous, sound-bite drivel? Pull your giant, empty head in. And talking of empty, I’m not reserving my distaste just for you. A whole bunch of people might be really pleased that Gillard’s in, but has she actually said anything concrete yet? I might have missed it, but all I’ve heard so far is carefully managed nothings.
The one small mercy is that the election isn’t too far away.
20 July 2010
What's In a Name?
An Irish acquaintance of mine was getting all riled up at the television news. He didn't feel that it was newsworthy that Kylie had come home to visit Danni and her new baby. It opened up a new topic, though.
“Oh, dat’s fascinatin’ dat is. Bet it’s got some stupid fookin’ name, sure enough.”
I answered, “Actually, I think this one’s not too bad. I think it’s Owen or something like that.”
“Aye, but you know what I mean, roit? Dese stoopid celebreataes an dere fookin’ cockeyed fookin’ names for dere fookin’ kids. Jaysus!”
“Yup.”
“Me daugh’er, roit, she rings me up and says, ‘Fook Dad, you’re a Grandad now, so you are.’ and den she tells me the name o’ da kid and it’s some stoopid fookin’ ting like Barrel or some state in America. I said, to ‘er, ‘fookin Jaysus, why didn’t give it a proper name loik Paddy or Sean or sometin’ and she says, ‘Jaysus Dad, it’s a fookin’ girl, so it is.”
“Oh, dat’s fascinatin’ dat is. Bet it’s got some stupid fookin’ name, sure enough.”
I answered, “Actually, I think this one’s not too bad. I think it’s Owen or something like that.”
“Aye, but you know what I mean, roit? Dese stoopid celebreataes an dere fookin’ cockeyed fookin’ names for dere fookin’ kids. Jaysus!”
“Yup.”
“Me daugh’er, roit, she rings me up and says, ‘Fook Dad, you’re a Grandad now, so you are.’ and den she tells me the name o’ da kid and it’s some stoopid fookin’ ting like Barrel or some state in America. I said, to ‘er, ‘fookin Jaysus, why didn’t give it a proper name loik Paddy or Sean or sometin’ and she says, ‘Jaysus Dad, it’s a fookin’ girl, so it is.”
18 July 2010
Safe Az
In my work car park, the Hazardous Materials Spills Kit has fallen off its rotting posts and landed on its face. It has been there for weeks and has collapsed in a way that exposes lots of nails at odd angles. Even better, if you park you car just right, you can force people to walk within a couple of inches of some of these nails, or maybe even have to walk on the rotting wood of the collapsed safety kit itself. Most of these people will be wearing thin soled shoes with medium to high heels. (No women work at my place, we’re just really open minded.)
This relaxed approach to safety is being brought to us by the very same people who insist on taking up a subcontractor’s morning by getting them to do an online OH&S induction course before said subcontractors are allowed to go and turn up the thermostat on the busted air-conditioning.
You can get it holding a bare wire
You can get it setting yourself on fire
A big open wound deserves a tiny, butt covering bandaid
And the best old bandaid is corporate OH&S
Matter o' fact, I’ve got it now
(Anyone who's not experienced the full glory of a VB ad circa 1980 will be mystified by that.)
This relaxed approach to safety is being brought to us by the very same people who insist on taking up a subcontractor’s morning by getting them to do an online OH&S induction course before said subcontractors are allowed to go and turn up the thermostat on the busted air-conditioning.
You can get it holding a bare wire
You can get it setting yourself on fire
A big open wound deserves a tiny, butt covering bandaid
And the best old bandaid is corporate OH&S
Matter o' fact, I’ve got it now
(Anyone who's not experienced the full glory of a VB ad circa 1980 will be mystified by that.)
15 July 2010
Wall Eye
There’s an interesting phenomenon going on at my work. I tried out sitting in someone else’s seat while they were away. It's the seat that's in the mirror-position to mine on the ‘pod’. Looking back at my seat, it was quite evident that my seat is further away from his, than his is from mine. I went back to my old seat to confirm, and yes, from my seat, he's a long way away. From his seat, I'm in his lap. It’s got me spooked.
Maybe it’s a wishful thinking effect. Maybe it’s a case of, “Objects from this person’s perspective are larger than they appear.” Whatever it is, I need to investigate.
Not taking these things for granted, I’m going to take a tape measure to work and measure the distance between the two seats, just to confirm that one’s not closer than the other one. Then I’m going to see if I can borrow a gravimeter to see that there aren’t some local distortions in the space/time continuum. Then, as a last resort, I’m going to look at the colour of the walls that are behind us. He’s in front of a white wall, I’m in front of an avocado coloured wall. I know, it sounds stupid, what’s the wall got to do with it? But I’ve got to take everything into account.
I am a rationalist, after all.
Maybe it’s a wishful thinking effect. Maybe it’s a case of, “Objects from this person’s perspective are larger than they appear.” Whatever it is, I need to investigate.
Not taking these things for granted, I’m going to take a tape measure to work and measure the distance between the two seats, just to confirm that one’s not closer than the other one. Then I’m going to see if I can borrow a gravimeter to see that there aren’t some local distortions in the space/time continuum. Then, as a last resort, I’m going to look at the colour of the walls that are behind us. He’s in front of a white wall, I’m in front of an avocado coloured wall. I know, it sounds stupid, what’s the wall got to do with it? But I’ve got to take everything into account.
I am a rationalist, after all.
14 July 2010
Paul The Octopus
The most eagerly anticipated back story in the sporting world, is of Paul the Octopus, or Paul die Krake as he calls himself in his adopted tongue, German.
Here are the dot points that I think should summerise “The Paul Story.”
- Paul was born in 1975 to lower-middle class octopuses, Brian and Shirley.
- Brian, a frustrated B-grade entertainer, lived a little vicariously through Paul, and wanted him to be a musician.
- Although living off the east coast of Africa, Brian’s love of Scottish music meant that he bought the young Paul bagpipes. (They reminded him of his son.)
- Paul, a loyal and obedient son, practised the bagpipes for many years, secretly despising them but not having the courage to tell his parents.
- Shirley suspected that his hearts weren’t in it, but also wanted to keep the peace. (This hints at some internal tension. Research for the screenplay.)
- While delving into Scottish lore of the pipe, Paul accidentally came across the Scottish Premier League and quickly became a Rangers fan.
- Shirley and Paul started to share a passion for ‘the beautiful game’ (They felt an affinity for all the focus on legs.) When Brian was out, they would watch the Scottish League. Shirley became a Inverness Caledonian Thistle FC follower.
- At his majority, Paul gathered his courage and told his parents that he was moving to Scotland to become a chartered accountant (his grades at the local polytechnic were good.) and to follow his beloved Rangers.
- Brian took it remarkably well. Shirley, sad and happy at the same time for her son, tells him to be good, and write often.
- Paul’s transport is attacked by slavers, Paul is cudgelled and wakes to find that he is in a marine exhibition in Germany.
- His extensive knowledge of European football eventually garners him a worldwide following.
- And the rest, folks, is history.
- Oh, and Paul still sometimes wears a Rangers tea-cosy around the house.
In “researching” this, I found that the German word for hedgehog, is igel. Now, it’s quite easy to soar with the igels when you’re down here with the hedgehogs.
Here are the dot points that I think should summerise “The Paul Story.”
- Paul was born in 1975 to lower-middle class octopuses, Brian and Shirley.
- Brian, a frustrated B-grade entertainer, lived a little vicariously through Paul, and wanted him to be a musician.
- Although living off the east coast of Africa, Brian’s love of Scottish music meant that he bought the young Paul bagpipes. (They reminded him of his son.)
- Paul, a loyal and obedient son, practised the bagpipes for many years, secretly despising them but not having the courage to tell his parents.
- Shirley suspected that his hearts weren’t in it, but also wanted to keep the peace. (This hints at some internal tension. Research for the screenplay.)
- While delving into Scottish lore of the pipe, Paul accidentally came across the Scottish Premier League and quickly became a Rangers fan.
- Shirley and Paul started to share a passion for ‘the beautiful game’ (They felt an affinity for all the focus on legs.) When Brian was out, they would watch the Scottish League. Shirley became a Inverness Caledonian Thistle FC follower.
- At his majority, Paul gathered his courage and told his parents that he was moving to Scotland to become a chartered accountant (his grades at the local polytechnic were good.) and to follow his beloved Rangers.
- Brian took it remarkably well. Shirley, sad and happy at the same time for her son, tells him to be good, and write often.
- Paul’s transport is attacked by slavers, Paul is cudgelled and wakes to find that he is in a marine exhibition in Germany.
- His extensive knowledge of European football eventually garners him a worldwide following.
- And the rest, folks, is history.
- Oh, and Paul still sometimes wears a Rangers tea-cosy around the house.
In “researching” this, I found that the German word for hedgehog, is igel. Now, it’s quite easy to soar with the igels when you’re down here with the hedgehogs.
13 July 2010
The Kindle Diaries - Part 5, Complete With Snacks
It’s been a week of disappointments, and some of them I am duty-bound to share with you.
For those of you who were interested in The Kindle Diaries, I have an update.
One of our Kindles died. Emergency Contact got one as a present and it needs to be replaced after only making it through five months of, not particularly strenuous, use. The mode of its demise I find interesting and will be handing on to Amazon.
She was sitting on the apron of Bangkok airport, waiting to take off, when the reader went into an uninterruptable software update. Mine did one at much the same time in Australia, and it was most annoying. I was reading and it just flicked over to a ‘busy’ screen and there was nothing I could do about it for some minutes. Hers flicked over to the busy screen and then she got thrown into the sky and out of range of the update by a couple of healthy jet-engines. The Kindle never recovered. It just got stuck and she had no book for the entire leg between Thailand and Australia. Now, if Amazon warn you that it might happen and give you the option to delay the update until you’re safe in your home territory, that’d be alright, but we didn’t get a say. It just went and did it. (The wireless connections weren't even on.) And there can be no excuse in the fact that she was out of her home Whispernet territory for the update (Whispernet is what they call the 3G connection). The thing is designed to be ideal for travellers. That’s the whole point of being able to get a ton of books on one small contraption. No good if it’s completely baffled by changing locations.
Anyway, this all happens as my boss strikes up an arrangement with me to sign for his replacement Kindle. I need to open it, re-register it from Australia and post it on to Singapore, where he can go back to downloading his books onto his computer and then onto the device. His stopped working as well, but Amazon don’t ship, or have Whispernet, in Singapore. In my book, that’s not a good week for the eReaders.
In fairness, the customer support and interactions with Amazon have been very positive. I will wait with interest to see how this all pans out.
But that leaves me with the real bummer of the week. I bought a packet of Burger Rings with no flavour on them. It was really weird. They were the templates of Burger Rings. Just the shapes; no colour, no flavour, no nothing. I saved them. I was going to complain and keep them as proof, but now they sort of interest me. It’s like wanting to keep the runt of the litter, or something. Maybe a kindly spider will come and write advertising on my roof eaves and people will come from miles around to see the amazing albino burger rings.
Come to think of it, I think eight legged creatures are the ticket, here. What I need, before I make any rash consumer decisions, is an octopus. They never get it wrong.
For those of you who were interested in The Kindle Diaries, I have an update.
One of our Kindles died. Emergency Contact got one as a present and it needs to be replaced after only making it through five months of, not particularly strenuous, use. The mode of its demise I find interesting and will be handing on to Amazon.
She was sitting on the apron of Bangkok airport, waiting to take off, when the reader went into an uninterruptable software update. Mine did one at much the same time in Australia, and it was most annoying. I was reading and it just flicked over to a ‘busy’ screen and there was nothing I could do about it for some minutes. Hers flicked over to the busy screen and then she got thrown into the sky and out of range of the update by a couple of healthy jet-engines. The Kindle never recovered. It just got stuck and she had no book for the entire leg between Thailand and Australia. Now, if Amazon warn you that it might happen and give you the option to delay the update until you’re safe in your home territory, that’d be alright, but we didn’t get a say. It just went and did it. (The wireless connections weren't even on.) And there can be no excuse in the fact that she was out of her home Whispernet territory for the update (Whispernet is what they call the 3G connection). The thing is designed to be ideal for travellers. That’s the whole point of being able to get a ton of books on one small contraption. No good if it’s completely baffled by changing locations.
Anyway, this all happens as my boss strikes up an arrangement with me to sign for his replacement Kindle. I need to open it, re-register it from Australia and post it on to Singapore, where he can go back to downloading his books onto his computer and then onto the device. His stopped working as well, but Amazon don’t ship, or have Whispernet, in Singapore. In my book, that’s not a good week for the eReaders.
In fairness, the customer support and interactions with Amazon have been very positive. I will wait with interest to see how this all pans out.
But that leaves me with the real bummer of the week. I bought a packet of Burger Rings with no flavour on them. It was really weird. They were the templates of Burger Rings. Just the shapes; no colour, no flavour, no nothing. I saved them. I was going to complain and keep them as proof, but now they sort of interest me. It’s like wanting to keep the runt of the litter, or something. Maybe a kindly spider will come and write advertising on my roof eaves and people will come from miles around to see the amazing albino burger rings.
Come to think of it, I think eight legged creatures are the ticket, here. What I need, before I make any rash consumer decisions, is an octopus. They never get it wrong.
07 July 2010
Wait For It...
Faux Paw.
Thank you, and goodnight.
Let's Make Lots Of Money (Do It Like Pet Shop Boys - It's More Fun That Way)
The local cafe owner has ear wormed me.
This is not something I need to go to the vet for. The cafe was just playing a catchy song. I had a German friend who once described a song stuck in her head as “ear worm”. Actually, with her accent, it sounded more like 'air firm' and we had a couple of confusing minutes where I was imagining the company that manufactured air-guitars. Even more confusingly, air-guitars are not amplified by air-marshals. They're something else entirely... but I digress. I felt that ear worm was a lovely saying and it has stayed with me.
While I'm talking air-guitars, let's get into some evolutionary theory.
Idiot Creationists (or the disingenuously re-badged Intelligent Design brigade) quite often use the argument from irreducible complexity. Put simply, it says, “What good is half an eye? Full eyes must have sprung fully formed onto the planet, so therefore there's a god.” This ignores the fact that there are plenty of “half eyes” on other species and even quarter eyes and three quarter eyes. What it actually says about the person espousing it is, “I can't imagine how evolution would work in this case, it must be god.” They call it Intelligent Design, I call it lack of imagination or qualification.
To drive another nail into the tyres of the Intelligent Design bandwagon, they can watch evolution at work - if they care to pay attention. I was mentioning air-guitars above, well, I saw on telly a thing called a “Paper Jamz”. It is a paper-thin electronic guitar that plays by some touch sensitive conduction... or something (I can't imagine how it works... god must have invented it). They are shaped like guitars, but don't have any strings. They are a half-guitar. The step between air and something else. I predict that within the next few millenia, we will see fully formed guitars, with strings and everything, roaming the planet.
So, anyway, my cafe ear wormed me with Go West's, We Close Our Eyes. I've been humming it since the weekend and I had one of those moments that I wanted to share. Those crazy little Go Westies make an oblique William Blake quote.
We are tigers in the night
We are burning
To me now, that is an obvious corruption of:
Tyger, tyger burning bright
In the forests of the night
I feel quite differently about Go West now, and seeing that Men at Work just lost the court case brought against them by a kookaburra, I can see some opportunities for some vexatious money making.
01 July 2010
Cold As Charity
It’s a little nipply in Sydney at the moment.
I’m originally from Melbourne. The winters there make a mockery of Sydney winters, but I have spent a huge majority of my life in Sydney and have not retained the thick blood required to weather the weather, without complaint. I’m too tropically acclimatised.
It was filthy cold in my little flat last night. I mean, I had a woolly cap-type-thing on, but it didn’t get to my ears. I had to wrap a scarf around my head. I looked like Wilfred. I don’t own a beanie. That’s how tropical I am.
I put all four of the stove burners on and placed a fan next to them to blow the heat into the room. The little radiator was just not cutting it. I don’t own a proper heater. That’s how tropical I am.
Walking down the street, the cold air blowing through my clothes and around my gentlemen’s area kept on making me think my fly was undone. I must have checked it three times between the car park and the door. No thick pants. That tropical.
My nose started bleeding from the cold. Tropical as, lady.
I had proper ice and frost on the windscreen. I didn’t even know what that was or what to do with it. The windscreen wipers were too tropical to even get underneath it. Trop fest.
Here’s my trump. I had been reading in bed (Warmest, safest place to be.) but my hands, by necessity, had to poke out. I got up to check my mail and I couldn’t move the curser because my hands were too cold to be registered by the touch-pad on the laptop. Topical, tropical, conductive madness.
I’m originally from Melbourne. The winters there make a mockery of Sydney winters, but I have spent a huge majority of my life in Sydney and have not retained the thick blood required to weather the weather, without complaint. I’m too tropically acclimatised.
It was filthy cold in my little flat last night. I mean, I had a woolly cap-type-thing on, but it didn’t get to my ears. I had to wrap a scarf around my head. I looked like Wilfred. I don’t own a beanie. That’s how tropical I am.
I put all four of the stove burners on and placed a fan next to them to blow the heat into the room. The little radiator was just not cutting it. I don’t own a proper heater. That’s how tropical I am.
Walking down the street, the cold air blowing through my clothes and around my gentlemen’s area kept on making me think my fly was undone. I must have checked it three times between the car park and the door. No thick pants. That tropical.
My nose started bleeding from the cold. Tropical as, lady.
I had proper ice and frost on the windscreen. I didn’t even know what that was or what to do with it. The windscreen wipers were too tropical to even get underneath it. Trop fest.
Here’s my trump. I had been reading in bed (Warmest, safest place to be.) but my hands, by necessity, had to poke out. I got up to check my mail and I couldn’t move the curser because my hands were too cold to be registered by the touch-pad on the laptop. Topical, tropical, conductive madness.
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