The Urban Wilds

I might have finally hit upon something useful to do with myself - Come up with PhD thesis subjects for perpetual students who can’t think of one themselves. I know, right? How much more useful to society could I be?

This brilliant idea came to me today as I was driving to work and I noticed a new phenomenon.

Recently a giant, multinational, Swedish, flat-pack-furniture retailer opened up on my route between home and work. I don’t want to give too much away, but it rhymes with Ikea.

Anyway, what I have noticed is the gradual but uneven migration of trolleys into the surrounding suburbs. I take many different routes to and from work dependant on influences such as:  Traffic. School Days. Angle of the sun. The soreness of my back versus the number of speed-humps. Boredom. Visions. Hallucinations. Revelation. Whether I want to turn left more than right or vice-versa. Number of gear changes. Radio reception to small, independent radio stations. Shopping needs. Parking direction coming into main shopping strips. Needing to keep a check on the hoarders up the road from my place. Whim. And some others that I can’t think of right now. Point being though that I can take an almost limitless number of ways home and I get to observe the suburbs that neighbour the furniture store in some detail.

These trolleys are spreading, but clumping. I observed four in a heap in a street some distance away from the main car park. Someone needs to track them somehow and observe what is going on. Not only would it be an interesting exercise to compare it to other networks and natural migrations, I bet there would be some advice there for future town planners and urban environment designers. At the very least, the impoverished student-about-town would stand to make a couple of extra bucks as “This month’s champion Trolley Tracker”. I understand you can win nearly a hundred dollars for finding a few trolleys.

I'll Fix Your Vampire Problem - I'd Stake My Reputation On It

I’ve been watching a new current affairs program from the deep south of America. It's called True Blood and it's been keeping me abreast of some horrifying social developments in that neck of the woods.

Being a solutions kind of guy, I have made some observations and I think I can help Louisiana, and therefore America, with its problems.

First, to some facts as I have understood them:

The vampire virus has some very specific behavioural outcomes. One of them is that the afflicted have to be invited over the threshold to enter the dwelling of another. At first I thought that was silly, but I have noticed with some of my human colleagues that the merest hint of the common-cold virus makes it impossible for them to enter the workplace.

If you un-invite a vampire already in your house, they are dragged out the door like there’s an invisible bouncer holding their collar. Always the door. It’s very specific that way.

As far as the vampire virus is concerned, the ownership of the house is entirely a legal matter. In one article I saw a vampire, called Mr Northman, buy a house that he had previously been un-invited from and after he had taken possession, he no longer needed permission to enter. With a stroke of the pen down at the conveyer’s office, the virus relaxed and was not concerned that the previous occupant’s family had lived there for generations.

The virus also makes vampires susceptible to extreme physical damage from silver.

Now, America, let’s use these facts to your advantage.

Every fly-wire door should have a few strands of silver woven through the mesh. You have a vamp in your house who looks a bit hungry or keeps changing the channel on the TV to something you don’t like, un-invite them. There’ll be a scraping noise as they’re dragged towards the door, a splorchy noise as they are forced through a silver wire mesh and then all you have to do is hose the vampire gazpachio off the veranda in the morning.

But let’s, as they say, kick this up a notch. If the notion of un-invitation from legally owned territory is enough to push a vampire out the door, I would suggest that we only need to speak to five people and the whole shootin’ match is over.

A majority decision from the US Supreme Court (5 from 9) that the borders of the US are the legal homeland of the US citizenry, followed by an un-invitation from America to the undead, and I would say you’ve only got two more things to consider; whether to do it in the day time or night time.  

(Maybe some spinning, silver blades at all immigration points for entertainment’s sake and an apology letter to Canada and Mexico for the mess, but that’s it.)

Now, I’m obviously going to have to make a speech at my inauguration and the conferral of the Public Health Distinguished Service Medal and that’s where I will outline my ideas for housetraining werewolves with electrified flea-collars.

Bending Space, Time and the Truth

Actors standing around in white coats telling us if pain persists, insult your doctor. Institutes conjured out of nowhere to give the illusion that it’s more than just shampoo. Charts with no values on the X and Y axis and CG to convince us it really can drive out toxins while enhancing elasticity.

I truly dislike pseudo-science in marketing. My hatred is reinforced by a mate who has a similar dislike so we get to bolster each other’s righteous rage. His bete noir is made up chemical names in cosmetics.

The snake-oil salesmen down at L’Oreal have lathered so much foundation on the acne-scarred face of truth that, glancing at their advertisement on the back of a magazine this morning, I spat my sachet porridge* out in laughter.

On the back of a monthly glossy, I saw an ad for a product called New Lash Architect 4D.

“Be magnetic with the power of lash sculpting fibres! The false lash effect steps into 4D!”

Holy 1.21 gigawatts – four freakin’ D!

Like L’Oreal suggests, let’s step into this. We can arrange the Ds in any order, even the fourth when you really get your head around it, because it is literally, all relative.

The space-time continuum.

First dimension: Width.

Second dimension: Height.

Third dimension: Depth.

Fourth dimension: Time.

The geniuses (not overusing the word here, obviously) at the L’Oreal labs, the one where they spell Paris PARiS, have moved women’s eyelashes out of the constraints of everyday, physical laws and have somehow introduced quantum effects into a bottle of mascara. I bet the guys over at the Large Hadron Collider are pretty embarrassed?

It’s all totally backed up and legit though, because Milla Jovovich puts her name to it and I’ve seen a documentary where she saved the planet armed with nothing more than a multi-pass and orange dreadlocks. Because she’s worth it.

The boffins at the CERN facilities (Division L’Oreal) haven’t finished with their comedy stylings just yet, though. There’s a small-print disclaimer. “Photographed with lash inserts for consistency.”

In other words, our Hawkings-Neutrino Mascara is terrific, but here’s a photo of Milla with falsies on.

Milla opines, “My eyes stand out from any angle! Captivating…” but when someone says their eyes can stand out at any angle, I think of snails or cubism… but back to the photo of Milla. The more I look at it, the more it could be anyone. The photo is so shopped it’s as meaningless as the rest of the bullshit on the page.

This ad is not in itself important. I don’t think they test make-up by forcing it into the eyes of bunnies anymore and it helps people to be good looking and I find good looking people intrinsically entertaining. If I ignore the amount of money that leaves the household budget to buy it, I am not anti-make-up. But these ads are an excellent example of how the rot sets in.

We are currently in the middle of a relentless public brawl about climate change. There are dodgy claims being made in every direction you care to look, from Abbott saying that carbon is weightless; so how could we measure it, to the unfair amount of media time those on the fringes of the debate get, compared to the vast majority of considered scientific research. The appearance the argument is balanced is wrong.

We don’t help ourselves though, by inuring ourselves to credible science and reasonable argument by allowing the type of dross that L’Oreal peddles to surround us.

In case you were wondering, according to L’Oreal the fourth dimension is, and I quote, “Curl”.

Strangely enough – that could turn out to be true when the real scientists get down to it, but it won’t be because of the ground breaking research done at the Ponds Institute.

*Sachet porridge. Nearly a third of its weight in sugar, but according to the man who slows down time in the TV ad, it helps you get your kids to school punctually because you are too busy to cook real oats.

Ducks

After sitting quietly behind the wheel for some hours recently and pondering the nature of things, I have arrived at the following conclusion. Ducks are the funniest birds.

They are funnier than other birds for a number of reasons. They are a very birdy sort of bird. They are an archetype. They play it straight, which makes them excellent for jokes of all sorts.

 “But AGA,” I hear you say, “there are so many other stand-out funny birds. Why ducks?” Well, let’s look at this scientifically. 

Penguins are bunging it on. They are comical but overcook the act - you look at a penguin and you start thinking of little men in tuxedos. There’s also that thing they do with the useless wings, the walk, and all the physical comedy of bouncing off rocks and falling over on the ice. They yell, “look at me”. Overkill.

Pelicans are arguably very funny, with their little, punk back-of-the-heads and serious expression. However they are a caricature, and that’s a distraction in a joke. You are forever expecting something to happen with the beak. The penguin is also a large animal which, unless you are presenting a gag in the vein of elephant jokes, is no good. It’s not typical.

Vultures are not good because there’s no cuteness. A certain amount of likeability is important in your comic bird. Vultures are only liked by Texas Rangers looking for a lost body in the desert.

Chickens are a close contender because there’s something so hopeless about them. Pathos plus bird-feed equals comedy. But chickens don’t fly, don’t have nice round heads and their eyes are a bit psycho. There’s also that creepy weirdness with the combs and fleshy bits above and below the beaks. I also feel that lice are part of the bargain with a chicken. Ducks are clean. Look at the amount of time they spend on the water.

I could invoke a Daffy and Donald versus Foghorn Leghorn logic here, but that’s not really where I’m coming from. I want there to be a purity to this; none of that fictional stuff.

Ducks aren’t all straight-men. They are able to bring an element of the surreal to the party. They quack. That can be funny, and it can have a mysterious quality. One of the great modern myths is that a duck’s quack doesn’t echo. Ducks can also survive being shot with arrows - there are numerous cases on record. They have lived that classic comedy: arrow-through-the-head.

Duck. The word is good to say, which helps. Duck. It’s sharp, it rhymes with things that make it good for punning, and where would you be without the bit on the front of their heads? Whenever a duck walks into a chemist and asks for chap-stick, you know it’s going on his bill.

They must occupy a special place in the hearts of us all. Think about when they are used in language. Water off their backs, taking to things like one of them to water, being lame when your presidency is timing out, and of course, not getting down off an elephant. You get down off a duck.

So there you have it. Ducks win. The mighty duck. I like a good duck.

On The Road Again

A Grey Area hit the road again recently and racked up over 3,500 clicks in a week. That’s not bad going for someone with attention deficit look over there! As usual though, such trips raise issues and questions that need addressing.

First, the planking craze has reached our wildlife. We saw hundreds of different animals planking on the side, sometimes even in the middle, of the road. When will the madness end?

Second, when are lambs supposed to appear? We saw thousands of little lambs and it doesn’t feel like spring to me. Has someone been telling me porkies about when lambs spontaneously generate? Is it like that horse’s birthday thing where someone just nominated a date but it’s not actually the day that all horses were born?

And talking of horses, third, how do you know when to put a jacket on a horse? I saw some horses that were fairly formally dressed with coats on, and others that were just standing around in their all-together.  What was the difference? Are these the horse latitudes I‘ve heard so much about? And what are ponies for? We saw quite a few ponies and I can’t work out what you would do with them other than maybe put a few of them on a skewer and make pony-kebab.

We saw quite a few llamas. One of them looked like he was wearing shorts. He was all white except for black hind-quarters and a bit down his back legs. Brilliant. The llama led to a conversation where nature helpfully pitched in with props to illustrate my point.

I mentioned that I’d read somewhere that llamas make good watch-animals for sheep. Apparently they’re inquisitive, territorial and not particularly afraid of stuff. Emergency Contact said, “But wouldn’t a fox just jump on a llama’s back and bite its head off?”

“They’re not wolves, they’re only that big,” I answered, as a fox ran across the road in front of us. It was the first fox I’d seen that wasn’t flat out planking and his timing was immaculate. Thank you, Mr Fox. Buon appetito.

Shower Scene From Monsters Inc

Yesterday in the shower, an animal fell out of my navel, danced around for a bit, and then made its escape down the plughole.

Well, that’s what it looked like anyway. What it actually was, was a really good sized bit of navel lint that fell out, then got hit by individual droplets of water that made it move around like a small animal dodging a predator, and then inevitably got washed away.

I’m glad I’m not going to be surprised by this again, because it’s fuzzy sheet weather here in Sydney and the navel lint production ramps up to a whole new level at this time.

Ibis - The Other Other White Meat. Maybe

I wonder if ibis are tasty. I wonder because I think I may have the answer to a couple of persistent problems.

I drive to work through a street that is entirely made up of flats. I reckon they’ve got to be largely housing commission. There are just too many adults, with not quite the right number of teeth, hanging around during working hours for it to be anything else. I’m trying not to come off sounding like a snob here (kept a straight face for one second, typing that) but it’s chockers with the type of people you see over represented on A Current Affair because of a neighbourhood feud involving a car, a fence and a large dog.

These flats have rubbish-bin areas that resemble something you see Indian orphans sifting through in documentaries. Since the arrival in Sydney of what I like to call The Ibis Plague or TIP, the bins are now topped by off-white feathers and thousands of emergent long, black necks topped by bald, wrinkly black heads. Those ibis just stand around on those bins, communing with each other in a way that reminds me of long distance shots of the crowd at Haj.

Here’s the answer: why not start ibis farming? We’ve obviously got the appropriate environment. We’ve got local labour on tap. At first it could be a subsistence effort for the unemployed while they get the tastiness sorted out through selective breeding, then they could go to market once the ibis crop is tender and delicious. Iburger, anyone?

(Had my first flu shot ever, today. Think that’s why I’m so thoughfully considering issues around feathers.)

Ceiling Fans

The other night, I was in the lounge watching a TV show when Emergency Contact started yelling at me from the bedroom.

“Baby, there are…” pause and pause. More pause. I started to wonder if she’d forgotten what she was doing. Pause. The reason for the pause then became apparent.

She started again, “There are 21 spiders on the ceiling!”

My first thought was that she’d started some drinking song I didn’t know.

(To the tune of It’s Raining It’s Pouring)

Twenty one spiders on the ceiling

You know that’s not a good feeling

What we should do

Is kill one or two

Twenty one spiders on the ceiling

Twenty spiders on the ceiling

Only slightly better feeling

What we should do

Is splat just a few

Twenty spiders on the ceiling

Nineteen spiders on the ceiling

Make me nervous when I’m kneeling

What we should do

Is spray till they’re through

Nineteen spiders on the ceiling

… and so on.

But turns out she didn’t want to get into a long-distance-drive time-waster. We really did have 21 spiders on the ceiling.

A lot unlike Indiana Jones, I didn’t go barrelling down the hall, whip in one hand, fly-swat in the other, to face tarantulas looking like brown tennis balls with legs. Rather, I finished my very important show and sauntered in when it damn well pleased me. I figured if she’d had time to make a headcount, it couldn’t have been that bad.

I was right, but so was she. All over our ceiling, were baby huntsmen. They were large enough to recognise as huntsmen, but small enough for it not to be a scene from Arachnaphobia.

Twenty one was an estimate because there wasn’t a reliable way to get an exact count. They were randomly yet equidistantly spaced across the perfect white expanse of the ceiling and in constant motion. Not all of them at the same time, but always one or two. What was really cute, though, was that one would get the rabbits and take off in a crazy spider run, and every time he came within the zone of one of his mates, they’d take off in a ziggy zaggy to avoid being inside his  zone. It was one of the most perfect and furry-faced little examples of chaos theory in action in nature… then we killed them all.

More Fun With Roadkill

We're on another quick jaunt in the lease car as Emergency Contact desperately needs to get the mileage up. Surely the need to hit a minimum on lease cars is driving global warming. It is just ridiculous how much we have to find excuses to drive it. I have mates who have lease cars and when they hear I'm going somewhere, they're clamouring to give me their keys. Quite the opposite to what we should be doing, really.

Anyway, it means we're out on the road again and, driving into the state of Victoria, I noticed a change going on with their warning signs. They've evolved to a more realistic representation of the things you can hit: the animals you know and love in black silhouette have been replaced by blobby shapes with comical detail and I can't really be sure about what I'm in danger of killing. The signs are probably more accurate, but they're not visual icons I instantly recognise.

Koalas have had the worst treatment. There are two signs for them and you can sometimes see them side by side in counterpoint argument for your attention. One has the koala in tree gripping pose... minus the tree. It's still in silhouette black and looks like an overweight deer wearing Mickey Mouse ears.

The other koala sign has the more standard shape, but has added facial details in white. They've given him eyebrows... and they are stupid. For the next eight kilometres you are in danger of running over Groucho Marx.

In addition to the signage, crows have provided roadside entertainment as well. I admire crows. I think they're kind of majestic and I've been told in many documentaries that they are ferociously smart. You most often see them out in pairs, which is kind of cute 'cause you get the sense of a husband and wife team out for a nice scavenge. But I saw a lone one yesterday, and no wonder. He was huge, hunch-shouldered and creepy. As we blew past at 110 my split-second reaction was that I'd caught Danny DeVito picking over roadkill. I've always had the feeling that you shouldn't be surprised if you did see Danny gumming through a carcass on the side of the road, he's always given me that impression, but it all happened so quickly that I almost wanted to turn around and go back to check and maybe get an autograph.

Screw The Stars, I'm Looking At The Gutter, Too

Got a phone call two days ago,

“G’day, this’s Bruce from the gutterin’ mob. I’m just orderin’ the fuckin’ gutterin’ for your place.”

“Hi Bruce. Ok good. Thanks for getting back to me.”

“Yeah, no wuckers. Is jasmine alright?”

“Jasmine? That’s... it’s…she… uhm. Can you tell me what jasmine is in bloke-speak?”

“It’s brown, mate.”

“Well, the bricks on the place are…”

“It’s not as dark as mission brown. Lighter brown. Still brown, but.”

“Sounds good. Order away. Do you need entrance into the place to do the job or can it all be done from outside?”

“Nah mate. She’s an outside job. I’ll get ’em ordered and we’ll go from there.”

Having dealt with tradies before, I then put it out of my mind. What’ll happen is he’ll order the guttering, return the guttering because it’s the wrong type, get the right guttering, use that guttering on another job he promised a mate to get done, receive reminder call from strata management after strata management have received reminder call from me, re-order new batch of guttering and so on. I won’t see the guttering guys until April at soonest.

At six o’clock this morning, they appeared on our roof and started ripping the old guttering off. That’s a less-than-48-hour turnaround. I was impressed in a sleep deprived kind of way. These guys don’t muck around, unless of course they’re actually doing our job with the wrong set of guttering because they owed a mate. There’s probably some other guy down the street thinking it’s been a while since he’s heard from the guttering mob.

Anyway, all this efficient gutter removal has presented me with a mystery. As the old stuff was being ripped off, they were emptying a ton of leaves from every section. Loads. I mean, I couldn’t understand how the gutters hadn’t just fallen off from the weight of leaves building up in them.

So what? Cleaning leaves out of gutters is one of those jobs you hear about all the time. Well, yes, if there are trees overhanging your place, but there are absolutely no trees overhanging our building. The roof-line is taller than the neighbour’s foliage. I think that leaves spontaneously generate in gutters like corn spontaneously generates in stomachs.

(For those of you wondering why I say that, it was held in popular wisdom for some time that there was a gland in the body that produced either corn or diced carrot. This was suggested because if you threw up, one of them would always be there, even if you hadn't eaten any.)

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. 

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.

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.

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.