Perpetual Calendar

Twenty eight days has September

Beryl, June and November

All the rest have 28

Every 28 years we do December twice

Which puts the Equinox right and because holidays are nice

Every month should look like below. Thirteen months with 28 days in each and a new month called Beryl which will be the first month of the year. This gives us a year with 364 days.

Mon 1	Tue 2	Wed 3	Thu 4	Fri 5	Sat 6	Sun 7
Mon 8	Tue 9	Wed 10	Thu 11	Fri 12	Sat 13	Sun 14
Mon 15	Tue 16	Wed 17	Thu 18	Fri 19	Sat 20	Sun 21
Mon 22	Tue 23	Wed 24	Thu 25	Fri 26	Sat 27	Sun 28

After thinking about this in the small hours I finally looked into it and, like any good idea, I didn’t come up with it. The proposal has been called other things: The Eastman plan or Rolling Calendar to name two. But I don’t like the way these others go about it. They have floating, unnamed days in every year and there appears to be forelock tugging in religion’s direction. Now, if the idea is so simple I can think of it on my own... it’s worth looking at.

Here are some of the selling points of my plan, along with challenges that’ll have to be surmounted and hopefully turned into winners.

Selling Points:

ü  You can actually learn by heart the dates for the rest of time

ü  If you don’t want to do it that way, only learn the first week (or the first set of Sundays which correspond to your seven-times-tables anyway) and count on your fingers from there

ü  No more monthly variations that fool cheap watches and anyone who can’t learn the poem... or do that thing with their knuckles... which for the record, is harder than learning the poem. (There’s the “are the dips in the knuckles intuitive or counter-intuitive?” moment)

ü  No more Friday the Thirteenth

ü  Being “at sixes and sevens” will develop the spicy connotation of being away for a dirty weekend

ü  Monthly meetings can be defined with a number, rather than “last Tuesday of every month except February this year...” guff

ü  Forget leap years and all that rubbish. Every 28 years we do December again. That’s so irregular many will never live to see it, even more won’t get to see it twice and you’ve ample time to book the second holiday if you think you are going to be here. You can also re-gift all the First Christmas presents you didn’t like for Second Christmas before they get dust on them

ü  Think of all the formatting in reports, calendar pages and all sorts of extraneous activity we’ll be able to do away with if the month is a standard length

Cripertunities:

X     Everybody who had a birthday on the 29^th, 30^th and 31^st of anything will have it moved to a date that is equal to the number of days from the first day of the year. For example: September the 29^th is day 272. This puts it at September the 20^th once you’ve counted through Beryl as the first month. Cheap parents can pretend the birthday went missing altogether

X     Some will complain that it doesn’t relate as closely to what they are used to with traditional farming. In the long run, who cares? They are a small proportion of the population and most of us neither know nor care where the moon is, when the harvest should come in and when the Fall of Nineveh should be celebrated

X     Some will complain that it will mess with their Zodiac sign. Ignore them, they are pinheads. In fact, Pinhead can be the thirteenth sign. If they persist tell them it makes no difference as the Gregorian Calendar had nothing to do with sidereal time to start with. The stars have moved in the heavens well out of where the original zodiac would have them anyway so anyone who protests in the street about it can be safely herded into the sea

X     All the crazy arguments you hear around daylight saving will rear their heads with renewed vigour. Again, who cares? We already cope with those who can’t deal with the change of the clocks. What difference will it really make? Besides, a good proportion of the clocks around us now get auto-adjusted and it’s not like that’s going to decrease

X     Calculating Easter in relation to the moon as though that is important and relevant to an already badly mangled myth is madness and should be dispensed with. Just set and forget

X     Some will complain that the slide towards the leap-month every 28 years will mean the seasons will shift too much across the year. I would politely suggest that I haven’t been able to make sense of the weather for quite some time now: what’s a day-a-year shift going to do?

X     If it’s a fashion industry concern with the above, the industry doesn’t appear to have any discernable grounding in reality anyway, so why worry about the little things

So there you have it. A plan that makes sense and one I need to get off to the bosses by the Numpteenth of Cocktinember at the latest. 

Sound Advice

There’s an acquaintance I bump into semi-regularly that has a slightly irritating way of making conversation. They believe the best way to engage someone is to ask them to make a list.

“What’s your favourite…? Who’s your top ten…?” It drives Emergency Contact spare and when confronted with it, the dirty stopout usually treats it as an excuse to find a new glass of wine or chase someone’s cat. I find the style of interrogation a strange way to engage anyone over the age of 16, but treat it as an excuse to talk about myself and that’s always fascinating.

My serious objection only comes later. I become consumed. I find myself thinking, “Right, if Thingo asks me what my top ten books of 2010 are, I’m going to take the Mighty Boosh approach. “The Charley children’s books, of course: Charley Takes a Trip. Charley Goes to the Shops and Forgets His Change Purse. Charley Ponders the Existential Nature of Things. Charley Eats a Banana, Wha’ you haven’t read all the Charlie books?”

Not content with this, I find myself thinking of riposte lists: Favourite reptiles under five kilos that can eat cheese. Top six post-match interviews with Rugby League players. Best lingering disease.

I have to be careful, though. It’ll backfire if I don’t have contenders for the lists I’m creating so I’m working on them backwards. I start with the things I like and try and work out what list they should go into. Genius.

For instance, I heard an old Elbow song recently with a lyric I have always loved.

“Don’t play Coltrane, you will sleep at the wheel.”

I love it because there’s always emotional advice in pop music like, “Leave him alone ‘cause the boy’s bad news” and “Hit me baby one more time” but good, solid, workaday advice is rare. That Elbow lyric won’t go in the Top 11 Lyrics of All Time list. No, it will go in the Best Advice Given to Cab Drivers in Melody list. Number two on that list will be George Michael’s Flawless. “You’ve got to go to the city. You’ve got to reach the other side.”

Once you start thinking like this, it’s addictive. Thingo’s in trouble the next time I see them. “Hold the line” is timeless trout fishing advice from Toto. The unemployed could do worse than listen to BTO. “Get a second-hand guitar; chances are you’ll go far.” (They do add the proviso that you have to fall in with the right bunch of fellows, though.) But, my number-one position holder for Great Abseiling Advice in Popular Music From the Last Thirty Years list, comes from Grand Master Flash and the Furious Five.

My How The Eye Becomes Tainted

I was at a do on the weekend with a Bond theme. Most people took the theme to mean they should dress elegantly. Some actually went for dress-up and this led me to a moment of confusion that illustrates how badly fashion has messed with my head.

A woman arrived painted in gold and my immediate reaction was,

"Well, it's not the worst fake-tan I've ever seen, but you can definitely see the smears."

Tennis 101

During the Australian Open I saw a professional tennis player do the following:

1)    Hit a fuzzy ball

2)    With a tennis racquet

3)    Over a net

4)    Into an area defined by white lines

The player standing at the other end was unable to replicate the task, due to where the first player had hit the above mentioned ball.

To highlight the first player’s excellence at this placement, Jim Courier (adding his professional excellence to the commentary team) said,

“He’s a man who is really familiar with the geometries of a tennis court.”

Hearing this, I realised I’m halfway to becoming a professional tennis star without ever having drunk enhanced-water.

The first two points might be tricky and I will admit I’m not certain I’ll always be in the right place at the right time to perform those steps. I am all over numbers three and four, though. I’ve glommed onto that stuff partly because ‘the geometries’ are not subject to regular revision, but mainly because in a deep and Euclidean sense, they are not complicated.

I’ll let you in on the secrets of the ‘geometries’ of a tennis court.

The rectangle or “oblong” if you will, is as mentioned, clearly marked. Even if your memory goes hazy under performance pressure  (familiarity does breed contempt, Mr Courier) it’s like there’s a cheat-sheet right there on the ground. You should never be caught screaming at an umpire, “You have got to be kidding! Given an amorphous, blob-shaped court of identical surface area, that ball was clearly in!”

You only have to get familiar with one face of the two-dimensional, rectangular playing area. Tennis players in the professional world tour call it the “ground” or “surface”. Unless the competition organisers had Möbius or Klein help design the court or there’s been an increase in gravity which folded the Euclidean geometry in on itself, you can always expect the ball to stay on one side of it. For the non-technical, we call this “bounce”.

There's bilateral symmetry in the playing area design, too. The incidental by-product of the rules of tennis allow for more mental shortcuts while remaining ‘familiar with the geometries’. To help yourself, put a mental mirror up at the net. Very broadly, what you know about your end of the court will be true of your opponent’s end of the court (it only appears to get smaller at the other end). Relax. You will swap ends during the match. Any vagueness you experience about the opponent’s territory can be dispelled with a visit every third game. For the more advanced among you, I would suggest that there was bilateral symmetry to be found within your own end of the court as well, if you put the mirror up lengthways…  but this is to ignore your forehand/backhand paradox and is not important. Players of the modern game do not discriminate between the forehand and the backhand.

The above point is also true of the net itself. Again, broadly, the net should be perceived as being the same height from either/both ends of the court, so you really only need to remain familiar with half of the court and transpose what you know onto the other half without actually having to remember any fresh information.

And there you have it. You are now familiar with the geometries of a tennis court having done less than half the work of your average tennis pro.

In Tennis 102, I will explain the relativistic issues Jim Courier presents us with, when he describes a ball that is moving fast as “heavier” than a ball moving smelly… I mean slow.

Increased Insecurity

One of the addle-headed elder-statesmen in a neighbouring department came blustering into the office yesterday, carrying on about increased security measures around the building and how we were going to have to get a rectal scan to enter the building.

I’m pretty sure he’s misread that memo and it’s a retinal scan. We’re going to be in for a dose of pink-eye if we’re not careful.

When It Was Hip To Be Hip He Was Hep

Like a character from a William Gibson book, I have certain talents when it comes to identifying true, underlying, structural coolness.

I don’t have any cool myself. When I was a teenager I worked out that I was never going to be cool. I have too many clashing, un-unified personality traits mixed in with fussy tendencies and blended with a propensity to giggle to ever be a cool person.

It is actually an enormous relief when you work out you aren’t cool. It allows you to get on with doing fun stuff… like giggling. Sadly, unlike a William Gibson character, the cool does not rub off on me. I can only point at it and say “yay” or “nay”.

I never go looking for the genuinely elusive cool, so my opinion is always going to be lagging behind the people who aim to industrialise it by marketing, producing, recording, filming, programming, coding or cooking it. Doesn’t make my opinion wrong, though. In the 90s, someone in New York said to me, “Hey, come and see this band. They are the best. They’re going to be bigger than U2.” And I thought that sounded like something fun to do. Tiny little music venue near the Lower West Side of Manhattan. Cool. Thirteen seconds in the same room as Matchbox 20 and I knew they weren‘t. I told my host that they might be big, but they were never going to be “it”. He didn’t agree. I stand by my judgement.

The upcoming review is well behind the release date. I just want to say that I have witnessed it and it pinged away at the cool gland in my brain like no other film in the last twelve months. It wouldn’t matter what decade you watched it in.

Scott Pilgrim vs. The World: White-hot-cool.

The first time I watched Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, I got this excited, wee-wee charge in the pit of my bits that let me know I had seen something very cool. Something that was going to be defining. I wasn’t first on the bandwagon but I certainly wasn’t late, I was smack in the middle of its arrival across the English speaking world.

Scott Pilgrim gave me that kind of kick. It fits together, it looks a bundle, everybody’s gorgeous and it is funny. Oh, and cool. Don’t forget cool.

The Fly

Killing flies was a perfectly acceptable pastime when I was a kid. If we had a few spare minutes to fill in at Granny’s place on the weekend, we’d grab the swatter and go and lay waste on the back veranda until someone called us in for lunch. It was an analogue of Space Invaders I guess, but I also felt I was part of something larger.

(A great aunt had entertained me with the story of how Mao had attempted to rid China of pests by ordering that all comrades had to kill nine flies a day. I don’t know how accurate the detail of her story was - there was certainly a “Four Pests” policy during the 1950s where flies, mosquitoes, rats and sparrows were targeted. As young as I was, even I could see the problem with a plan that demands a set number of tiny corpses per citizen, per day. What happens as you approach the thin edge of the fly population-wedge? I saw an opportunity for an enterprising fly breeder right there. But, details aside, I was fascinated with the story of a monumental manual task being undertaken and achieved through consistent, tiny increments. When I was on the back veranda at my Grandmother’s, flattening flies, I was having a little run up to my own Great Leap Forward.)

At school on a hot summer afternoon, there was always something to do. ‘Fly on a leash’ was always good. I’ve told other adults about this and they don’t believe we used to do it, but we did, often, and I have witnesses.

What you did was lean forward and pull a hair out of Donna’s head. Her hair was perfect. Long, straight, good strength and owned by someone who wasn’t much of a squealer. Once the ruckus had died down, you’d tie a simple knot in the hair, close to one end, leaving the loop about a centimetre open. You’d then leave that on the desk in a position easy to get at but not easily blown away by the overhead fan.

Step two was to wait for a fly to land on the fleshy part of your leg, or the desk if you weren’t too heavy handed. I personally found them easier to stun if they were on something with a bit of give.

Once you had your stunned fly, you’d loop the knotted hair over its head, tighten it a little, stick the other end of the hair into some chewy and wait for the fly to come round. Hey presto - Fly on a leash. They’d fly around at the limit of the hair’s travel and when boredom set in, you’d pull the knot all the way tight and the fly’s head would fall off. Hey presto – Ex-fly on a leash. You could even re-use the hair.

I reminisce about this delightful trick because I am wondering if we aren’t reaping the whirlwind. Millions of Aussie kids, over decades, casually swatting at flies have been positively selecting the fly population for flies that are faster, smarter, harder and less easily put on a leash. Last night, I did battle with a fly that was nothing short of an evil genius.

He started bugging us around dinner time. He landed on everything we didn’t want him to, and nothing we could hit him on. Delicate vase lips or the top of the chicken. You don’t want to swat the fly when it is on the top of the chicken. He wouldn’t shoo away, either. Tip of the wine glass. Oh how I’d love to smash down on that with the palm of justice. I went and got the fly swatter. I was going to smack him out of the air with my patented two-inch-backhand-of-death. That was when he decided to only fly against dark backgrounds.

Usually in the hunt for a fly that has caused you grief and needs some revenge meted out on it, you can reliably go to a window and just wait for it to bat around the closed half and you can swat it at your leisure. New, Uber-Fly didn’t do windows.

He also didn’t do that thing where the fly is flying in a set volume of air. The old style flies didn’t necessarily fly to a pattern, but they would settle into a defined volume for a bit and you could sort of focus on one part of it and wait for the insect to fly into your kill zone. New, Mega-Fly does high-speed, unpredictable, curving runs that can take in a couple of rooms and a hallway. He seems to get more points for getting really close to a human’s ear during each pass, as well. He was un-swattable.

Like all good guerrillas, he ramped up the harassment once it was bedtime. The only room of the house with a light on attracted him and high-speed passes over the bridges of Emergency Contact’s and my noses were the order of proceedings. This got worse when all major lights were turned off and the only source of illumination was my tiny Kindle light. It casts a cone of light a hand span long and half as wide. Super-Fly took that as an invitation to do some hyper-fast, close-quarters combat flying, and, every now and then, landing in my ear or peeking over the edge of my book to look at me just inside the cone of light. Turning over to change the environment and perhaps offer some other way of dissuading the bastard, he decided to keep landing on EC’s pillow. Even I won’t squish a fly on her pillow. He’d land, look at me for a bit, then fly off into the darkness and line up another attack run.

Near midnight, Homo Sapiens Sapiens, king of the primates, the upright ape capable of abstract thought, introspection, language and problem solving, was reduced to shining a light into the corner of the darkened room, waiting for the approaching buzz from over the shoulder and spraying a light cloud of insect poison into a volume of air the Ultra-Fly was going to hopefully fly into. Third go and he did catch a dose… and then disappeared.

This morning I got up to find him dead in a little puddle in the shower. He’d even had the presence of mind to try and rinse the poisons off himself before he finally succumbed.

He was a worthy adversary and I salute him.


This is the new fly and we are in trouble.

You Can't Hug Your Children With Bear Arms

I have only the most fleeting interest in a multiple murder that occurred in Arizona and involved a politician. I have received what I have been told through ABC radio news and not gone looking for any more detail. I don’t feel my life would be improved with it.

One thing has stood out to me in the coverage I’ve heard, though: The hand-wringing within America has all been about the nastiness of political debate inciting this kind of crime.

To me that seems backwards. I want my political debate to be as nasty, seditious, illuminating, forward, unafraid, derogatory and honest as I would like my politicians to be. I would also like to know that it can be done without the danger of being shot.

Why has the gun debate not reared its head properly in the shake down after this? Isn’t the US sufficiently sick of its absolutely ridiculous gun homicide rate yet?

It’s a continuing collective madness that grips the US on gun ownership. I saw a guy in The States wearing a T-Shirt that said, “Blaming guns for crime is like blaming spoons for making Rosie O’Donnell fat”. It’s cute, but not actually an argument that survives inspection. (If you leave a spoon lying around and your kids start playing with it, you aren’t going to come home twenty minutes later to find one of them dead on the floor from cholesterol induced heart failure.)

You often hear the NRA say that guns don’t kill people, people kill people. They sure help, right?

To be fair to the complexities of the argument we can’t just blame guns. Total gun ownership per capita does not have a direct relationship to total murders. Canadians own twice as many guns as Australians but murder each other in similar amounts. They own a third as many guns per capita as Americans but murder each other at only 0.05% the rate Americans are offing each other. What can we take away from this?

Well, firstly, Canadians are lousy shots, but secondly that Americans have got psychological problems and a lot of them seem to be enshrined in law. Here’s the thing, though, it’s just law. It’s artificial. You made it. You can change it. Just ‘cause it’s old, doesn’t make it right or good.

It’s interesting to note that the murder rate in Washington DC is the highest in the country, so you’d think that’d be ample incentive for the pollies to go and make some sensible law around gun ownership, if only to save their own hides. (Speaking of the right to bear arms, ol’ Mama Grizzly’s home state, Alaska is number two with a bullet, there on the chart. Arizona - number 5.)

Well, That Didn't Take Long

One of the nice things about the Christmas/New Year break from work is coming back to the office and revelling in the extra-special cleanliness of the place. Before the cleaning staff go off for their holidays, they put in that end of year spit and shine that really makes it a pleasure to return to the ol’ grindstone.

Hello desk, you look very clear and white. Look at your dust-free surface. You have come up a treat. Hello carpet, look at your fluffy loopiness and pristine, industrial-grey expanses. Hello whiteboard, the last time I saw you, you had all that 2011 forward planning and release dates and holiday scheduling and now you’re a flawless, polished white. Not a jot of writing on you. Isn’t that terrif… wait.

Head Out On The Highway

2011... and I thought I’d start the new year on an optimistic note and make a reasoned request of you.

There’s a mood of suicidal desperation out there. Take that photo on the left. That’s a lake that Emergency Contact and I drove past recently, down on the Victorian border. I  think it’s called Lake Melanoma or Dishwala or something. Anyway, the point is that it’s big and spooky. That’s what made us pull over and stop to look at it. It is populated with dead, silver trees that emerge from its glass-like, shimmering surface. There are also as many trunks underneath as ones above. They hide below the glittering waterline, looming up from a sylvan underworld as though you are a hobbit on the way to Mount Doom and you have fallen into the marshes of… ahem. Fill in the clichés where appropriate.

Why is this worthy of mention? Well, it didn’t strike me as odd at the time -  it‘s not documented in film. I just wanted a shot of the spookiness and deliberately avoided getting… wait for it… all the water skiers in the shot. The water skiers on a lake that is studded randomly but regularly with trees, both below and above the waterline. What is that, if not a desperately suicidal thing to do? On our way out, there was line of cars towing powerboats ready to join in the aquaplaning death-match.

It’s not just the humans who have decided to end it all, either. Similarly inexplicable, but still popular, is fauna’s insistence on hanging out on the road. I think they just want conversation.

A lot has been said about road-kill and how tragic it is and what number to ring to report injured fuzzies and how much it costs to fence a highway etc. But, my first question is: Why are all these animals throwing themselves under your wheels? It’s not just the wild ones. If you drive past any paddock or huge tract of land, all the farm animals are crammed into a tiny area, sometimes having a meeting under a tree, but usually within ten feet of the road. Why? Are they automobile aficionados? Are they people watchers? All that space and they’re hanging out by the side of the road like bored teenagers on a Saturday night. The phrase ‘as free as a bird’ doesn’t seem to mean anything to birds, either. All that sky, all that land, all those trees to roost in and yet seemingly the most attractive thing to do is to fly at bonnet height across that deadly black ribbon and land with your head just resting across the tar line.

You can’t do anything about Australian people. They paid their money, they takes their ride. But, Australian animals are bored and they’re desperate for your company. Pause (paws) and have a chat with a few fuzzy or feathered things as you traverse the wide brown land this year. You might just reduce the road toll with a few choice words.

Yup, Thanks