Classy-Fication

I watched a documentary last night called Race and Intelligence: Science’s Last Taboo. It did alright in rounding up a big, fraught subject and it reminded me of something quaint. In the scientific context, the words idiot, moron and imbecile used to mean specific ranges of IQ (or lack thereof).

This illustrates the sloppy science in the field of human intelligence that has been tolerated for far too long. The appalling consequences of such wilfully inhumane categorisation are hard to stomach. There are huge gaps to be filled in on that spectrum, and refinement with sub-categories ranging from spazimodo to fucktard and weaponhead to knucklescraper would make it a far more useful as a classification system.

The Upside To Being Down

"Do these grasses make my head rook fat?"

I’m glad I’m not in Korea right now. I am happy to be accused of being hopelessly unadventurous but I am pleased I am not all alone in a hotel somewhere near the DMZ, not being able to understand the local news readers and worrying myself a new ailment.

I was supposed to leave for South Korea on business last Sunday and be there for eight or nine days. Just between you and me, this is a damning indictment on the sanity of my seniors and betters. Not that they misread international politics, more that they insist on sending me places to do stuff. If they had any idea how woefully poorly equipped I am to achieve their ends, they wouldn’t be sending me off with quite such glee or regularity. The phrase, ‘wind in my hair, hope in my heart and nothing on my mind’ feels apt. Now add the corporate credit card and you’ve got the Keystone Cops do South East Asia.

Anyway, as I may have mentioned, my international career as a Tim Carey face-double is on temporary hold while I get over a case of Bell’s Palsy. I decided that trying to communicate across a De-Linguicised Zone in Korea was going to be doubly difficult when I couldn’t even speak my native tongue without dribbling or swearing. I also didn’t feel like being in a really foreign place while I wasn’t totally well. The idea of checking myself into a Korean hospital and half-mumbling, “No, not a stroke, but can I have more steroids, please? Oh, don’t worry about them. I’m sure you can just walk off an artillery bruise,” just didn’t bear considering. So, I’m not there.

Screw you, Hanz Brix.

Every Grey Area has a silver lining.

When The AGA Hits The Fan

Anyone who gives consumerism a nanosecond’s thought will be aware of the importance of freshly invented needs that give freshly invented products niches to fill.

I like to sum it up as, ‘Answering the questions no-one was asking.’

I want to get three invented needs off my chest and while I’m at it offer some friendly advice to a famous domestic appliance manufacturer.

I’ll start with proximity-sensing-liquid-soap-dispensers: Obviously for those of us who are using too few batteries around the house. The justification for this ‘invention’ is that a normal pump that you might (shiver) come into contact with harbours killer germs and bacteria. First of all, I haven’t died much yet and I don’t think it’s just the luck of having only ever used clean soap dispenser buttons that has kept me alive. This product is so pointless its existence actually cancels itself out. Essentially, it is admitting that it doesn’t work, “This soap is so crap it won’t help remove the germs you get on your thumb after pressing the top of the pump-pack.”

Next, Glade and Ambi Pur and any other manufacturers of whiffy things. This niche reaches its moronic apotheosis in the motion-tracking-air-freshener department. A real bubble came off the top of the think-tank that day. Plus their ads are unforgivably American. The badly lip-synced Australian voices over the top are not fooling anyone, and I have never seen a house of that interior design in Australia. I have never seen four women, one of them an African-American who’s not Marcia Hines, dressed like that in Australia. Even the film/video quality is instantly recognisable as American. Go away you stinky Americans. Ponginess is not a national problem of ours.

Lastly, one that’s in a slightly different category. It’s the one that makes me a bit sad as well as angry. This product could have a place in our lives if it was just properly defined: The Dyson fan. (Pictured) It makes me angry because someone thought that rather than calling it a “fan”, they should call it an “Air Multiplier”. I want to meet this person and introduce them to a cricket bat or, as the Grey Area Marketing Department call it, a “Bruise Multiplier”.

It makes me angry because they have invented a need that is so ridiculous, it’s kind of post-ironic. Apparently, the Dyson Air Multiplier is saving us from the ‘buffeting’ our normal fans put us through. I want to meet the person who has suffered buffeting from a standard fan and take them out to a buffet lunch. Or as the Grey Area Marketing Dept call it, “Surf and Turf You Off Something High”.

It also makes me sad because I will stand by our Dyson vacuum cleaner and say that it is a really good bit of kit, but they have tarnished the brand by being so spectacularly stupid.

I reckon if they’d been more honest about it, I know that a few of us would have had a completely different reaction.

Why not this approach:

Look, it’s a fan! It doesn’t do anything much more than a normal fan does, but just look at it! It’s the kind of industrial design that gets remembered. You know the Alessi lemon squeezer and the VW Beetle? Of course you do. Well, neither of them were spectacularly good at their stated tasks but they were the kind of thing that it was a pleasure to be around. They were fun for your eyes. It’s the kind of thing that says, “Not everything has to be the most efficient or powerful or the best way to get there. How about beauty for beauty’s sake? Oh, and it sort of does the job in a magical, invisible kind of way.”

I like a bit of whimsical stuff around the house. In fact, I take the safety guards completely off fans I own because it looks a whole lot better, it makes them quieter, they stay cleaner and I like the sense of daring. Emergency Contact looked on in horror the first time she saw me do this and predicted mayhem. I was breaking some sacred domestic covenant. But I think if you’re silly enough to insert yourself into a spinning blade, you don’t deserve the limbs you were issued with. (I should also point out that up to a certain size and power, domestic fans cannot take your finger off, no matter how inventively you stick them in. Don’t ask me how I know that.) But, my point is that the fan looks good and basically does the job – and there is a genuine need for a fan in our little flat, come a Sydney summer.

So Dyson, pick your game up, call it what it is – a bit of good looking industrial design for the desperately fashionable – and watch your sales go through the roof... or the Rain Diffuser... whatever. Don’t pretend it was answering any crushing need other than aesthetic.

Major Contributions To The Australian Music Industry

Powderfinger announced their retirement this week. After twenty scandal-free years they have decided to stop. I think this is a bit of a poor effort. For famous pop rockers, a properly disreputable exit is not just expected, it's required. They are supposed to burst into flames dressed only in their own vomit or drown horribly in a motel room wrapped around a telegraph pole.

But, they're not going to do that. You'll probably meet them down at the library fairly soon, promoting their books on cheese making and plugging themselves back into their own respirators. Powderfinger were an entirely professional moneymaking outfit. In fact an old mate of mine, The Right Dishonourable Loaded Dog, and I are probably responsible for their worst piece of public behaviour.

Loaded Dog is among the last of a dying breed. Not because times were better then and they don't breed them like that anymore, no, because most of them have died due to poverty and poor personal hygiene. He wouldn't mind me saying that. He only very loosely fits into that category now because he's got a job these days and that, for him, borders on personal tragedy and major artistic failing. He's a bone-deep pub-rocker.
So, as I said, he's an old mate, part time broadcasting partner and, by coincidence, a dead-ringer for Bernard Fanning, the lead singer of Powderfinger. (Emergency Contact thinks Loaded is much better looking, but I am never going to tell him that.)

Loaded Dog and I don't live close to each other anymore. Not because of any court decisions, just by the luck of the draw. When we get together, we tend to pick a pub halfway between us and they're rarely proper 'local' style establishments. They are usually something you'd classify as 'touristy'. So, one day we were in one and it's here that I need to round out the picture a bit.

Loaded D looks like a rock star the morning after, all the time. His "indefinable it" apparently depends on what kind of girl you are (and I ain't no kind of girl) but I am reliably told that he has 'it' in spades. He certainly wears the clothes to suit and has a certain presence. I used to call it BO, but again, I am reliably told that's probably me being jealous and uncharitable.

He is flamboyant and thinks nothing of wearing a tropical shirt tied at the waist set off with a sombrero that could double as a beach umbrella. I am peeved when I only get 15 years out of a black t-shirt and when those years are up, I replace the back T-shirt with a black t-shirt. He is the height and weight of a grumpy woman with a pint in her hand. I weigh 115 kilos, am 190cm tall and often have his pint and mine in one hand as I drag him away from a grumpy woman. I have short hair and have never tried to apply CPR to life-size but deflated Santa decoration "in the spirit of rescue and entertainment." As you may surmise, he usually has longish hair and has tried to resuscitate a sagging Santa while screaming, "Live dammit. Live. Come on Santy, don't go towards the light!"

We are very different, but have a lot in common.

So, there we were, giggling away at each other about important things in a pretty touristy sort of pub and three guys keep on trying to insinuate themselves into our conversation. On the way past they'd say something, or comment on the game on the telly, obviously trying to get us involved. They were looking at us way too much and it was getting on my wick, so I placed myself to block their view of us and put the physical barrier up.

I leaned into Loaded and said, "What's with this bunch of winners?"

 "It's happening again. They think I'm him and I'm 'out with my muscle'," whispers Loaded.

Oh goody. We were giggling even more.

Then the mood from the guys started to change. It got stroppy in only the way an Australian can get righteously stroppy if he thinks that another Australian is being a bit up himself and needs to be taken down a few pegs. LD and I had them pegged as Brisbane boys as well, so it was even worse. Imagine the gall of Bernard Fanning, a Brisbane boy himself, bunging it on and being all un-proletarian. Actually, Sydneysiders are snobs compared to Brisbanites and I wouldn't have it any other way. Who gives a fat rat's arse what a Queenslander wants and we certainly weren't going to start handing out fake Bernard Fanning signatures just to keep those yobbos happy.

So I stood up, moved over and said, "Lads, give him a bit of peace, alright? It's been a long, tough tour and he just wants to have a quiet one without being bothered. Right?"

Loaded backs it up by putting his flat hand up against the side of his face to protect from prying eyes and says into the air, "There aren't any cameras or film crews, are there Nicky?"

"No mate."

At this, the three sneer and sigh all at the same time, finish their drinks and get up. On the way out, one says unnecessarily loudly, "I always said I thought he was a wanker!"

Baby, You Can't Drive My Car

If you thought that the world of insurance was a bizarre and unfathomable nest of fear-mongering leeches, well, you’d be right. I’m not here to make you feel better about that, though. I’m here to add to the confusion and doubt.

I rang my insurer to pay the insurance on the ute, and noticed that Emergency Contact is listed as the other regular driver. I can see that there might have been a time, in the past, where I had romantic visions of teaching her how to drive a manual car and maintaining a healthy, loving relationship. I’m all grown up now.

So, I asked the lady on the phone how much cheaper my policy would be if I was the only named driver. She took EC off the policy – and it came back $35 more expensive.

This just goes to show what gross miscarriages of justice there can be when a piece of software gets to run an algorithm on real life variables, like, “Who would you rather be driven around by: This guy with 15 years professional driving experience with no tickets or at-fault accidents, who has driven anything from motorbikes to articulated trucks; or Doctor Cloth-Eyes over there, throwing her coffee into her lap for the umpteenth time while driving on a freeway she swears she has never seen before in her life, but just happens to be the one that goes to her work?” (Yes. Emergency Contact has a PhD. Yes, her eyes are only painted on.)

What was trebly galling was it appeared while we had been talking, Emergency Contact was deemed to be getting safer. I asked the insurance lady to be put EC back on the policy and it came out two dollars cheaper than the initial quote.

Somebody needs a good kick in the actuaries.

Blind Faith Healing

I was standing at the counter of the Chinese medical centre after having been pin-cushioned and had one of those conversations with the ‘health care professional’, otherwise known as an acupuncturist, that always give me pause with this end of the industry.

He started the exchange with,

“Look at me. I am trying to remember your face.” Not three minutes before, he’d been driving pins into it for an hour. What had he forgotten?

So I looked at him. He then said,

“Ok. Now, this bottle of anti-inflammatory herb pills would normally last two weeks but I want you to take four of these four times a day. So it’s not going to last two weeks, it’s only going to last one week.”

I looked down at the bottle and saw that it contained 78 pills.

“It’s not going to even last that long, if you want me to take 16 a day. I’d need a bottle with 112 in it.”

He paused, assessing either my maths or his diagnostic skills.

“Ok. You take three pills, four times a day if you like.”

If I like? It can’t be that exact a science if it can be based on how many are in the bottle, divided by a week, rather than my overwhelming medical needs, but in the spirit of getting into the new modality, I relented.

“Ok. I’ll take three pills four times a day.”

“No. You take four pills, three times a day.”

“But… ok. Fine. Oh, and do you want this back?” I said, and pulled a needle he’d missed removing, out from behind my ear and handed it to him.

He laughed and said, “Oh yes. Sometimes I miss them. Especially in the scalp of ladies with the long hair. Sometimes they don’t find them until they are at home, washing their hair. I didn’t see that one because it was behind your ear.”

So at least I now had a reason for him to try and remember my face.

Eyes – check. Haven’t left any needles in them.

Nose – check. Does he have any needles in it? No, I don’t think so.

Yep. That’s it. Oh damn. He has ears. I always forget about the ears.

But here’s the thing that really gives the game away. If he can’t remember that he’s put a needle somewhere because he can’t see it, that implies there is no system to start with - that there is no end-goal in his actions, as he would be able to work backwards through the cause and effect to count off the needles he’d placed. The pretence that there is a carefully mapped out response to various ailments is kind of undone if he leaves needles in you. Either it’s a fairly random set of perforations, or he’s forgotten why I’m there and is just doing pin-placement-set-piece-number-28-with-fried-rice.

Go Away. You're Lowering My Property Value

Yesterday, I was witness to one of those interactions that really let you know you’re in a classy part of town.

I was at the counter of the local inconvenience shop, when an over-made-up slapper in a poor choice of boob-tube pushed past me and said,

“Gimme a packet of (brand) cigarettes and gimme one with a nice picture on it will ya, or he’ll send me back?”

Twenty one words that say it all.