My Blog is Another Blog

In which I make a vain attempt to get Bob Ellis to post on my blog.

2011-07-06T23:09:00.000+10:00

It has recently come to my attention that Bob Ellis appears to be posting on John Birmingham's blog. As I type this Birmingham himself hasn't responded or anything ... but I don't suppose that A) John Birmingham, or indeed anyone, would be in need of my help in defending themselves against Bob fucking Ellis or anything or, of course, B) either of them are likely to read this anyway. So what the hey, I guess....

First of all, let me just say that I like you, Bob. Well, actually ... that's a blatant lie. You're a complete dick and I can't but help have that inform my opinion of you at least a little bit, but just let me say it anyways, because it will make what follows a little bit easier for both of us. The point I'm trying to get across, and this one I really do mean, is that I think it would be a shame for you to be dropped from the Drum. Not, I suppose I should make clear, because you have anything all that compelling, interesting, well-thought out, internally consistent or, well, intrinsically valuable to say about anything. Rather the opposite in fact, I think you're generally entertaining for much the opposite reason and, well, it's the Drum we're talking about here so it's not like we're parlaying over prospective loss of standards or anything.

Thing is, though, whether or not I, or indeed if most people think it would be a bit of a shame if the Drum refused to publish a single future solitary word you write in future is not, I submit, a particularly good criterion in and of itself on which to base such a decision. It is, I would submit however, a far far better criterion on which to base that decision than it would be to base the decision on, say, whether or not you should be free to, oh I don't know, rape people with impunity. I would have hoped we could agree on that point, Bob, but the demands of your being consistent with the article you wrote would seem sadly to dictate that this isn't to be.

I'd like to introduce you to a friend of mine, Bob. It's called the rule of law. I like it. It was, in it's day, a profoundly revolutionary and progressive idea. A lot more progressive than, just to pluck a few examples from your article, let's say the next French president, JFK, John McCain and even Arnold Schwarzenegger. Honest. What makes it so important, Bobby, is that without this kind of principle there really isn't any point at all debating the ethical questions like, you know, whether or not my clubbing you in the head because of something you wrote on the Drum is a bad thing to do - because if the answer isn't the same whether I'm me, Adolf Hitler or Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, well, it probably isn't really an ethical principle, is it? It's probably just a subjective 'people I, personally, like should be accorded with rights other people aren't because, well I like them' statement.

I mean.... people really shouldn't have to point this sort of thing out to you, Bob.

And with that, I'm going to sleep.

On Poker Bots

2011-03-19T11:09:00.000+10:00

Sorry Dave¹.

¹May actually write more later. The above represents the fruits of my morning, however.

Mark Sharma Mark Sharma Mark Sharma.

2011-03-14T12:05:00.002+10:00

So, apologies to all (of, like, three of you) about my tardiness in posting in this new year of ours. Busy, and all that.

There are two things which have conspired to bring this hiatus to an end, and they're kind of where I left off last year anyway.

So, if one mosies on over to Andrew Bolt's blog and scrolls down .... some distressingly high number of pages¹ .... one will come across the remnants of him and Tim Blair probably thinking they've just pulled off the great Australian culture-war version of the Sokal affair or something.

Imagine I am now wearily wiping a tear of laughter from my eyes while I just take a moment to congratulate them on uncovering this dirty secret that no-one has ever noticed before: that it is really, really easy to get dumb shit published on Unleashed. Congratulations, fellas. You Rock. No, seriously, you do.

Dickheads.

Anyway, this brings me nicely to my next subject .... which the astute reader may well have inferred from the title of this post. Because that story was in fact broken wide open by one Mark Sharma on the 26/11/2010. Unleashed articles will, I submit, never get dumber than that one. And that guy wasn't a fake. He is, in fact, running for the seat of Strathfield in the upcoming NSW election:

He seems pretty proud of this sign, too. He posted it on Twitter.

Which brings me to my Fitz-the-blogger plays public service announcement moment to the good people of Strathfield. I'm not dis-endorsing Mr Sharma. Quite the contrary, from my point of view Australia gets just that much more hilarious in the, I'd have to think highly unlikely event, that he actually gets in. So by all means, please do vote for him.

I just think that you should probably know that he wrote, then subsequently deleted, the following comment on this blog, though²:

VOTE 1 MARK SHARMA!

¹Which is kind of the way he works, I guess. It's actually a good thing, in as much as it promotes a massive stream of comments, to go around publishing non-researched demonstrable falsehoods and thinly-veiled wink-wink, nudge-nudge incitements to racist bullshit when you publish like 50 posts a day anyway and have a readership which looks like what might happen if you collected all of the head trauma victims of a hospital into one room or something. Anyways, I guess you've got to hand it to him, his business model works.

²Sorry, Mark. It turns out screen-shots are really easy to take in this day and age.

In which Jindabyne tourist info earns a place on my hit list.

2010-12-03T17:48:00.001+10:00

Jindabyne is a lovely little town. Really, it is. I quite like it. I would even go so far as to say I like almost everything about the place. I cannot, however, dock the 'almost' from that last sentence. Is it because there is a malfunction of some sort in either blogger or my computer I hear you ask? I thank you for your concern, but no. It is because I must contractually¹ reserve a brooding hatred of at least one part of Jindabyne.

The information centre.

Superficially, it's not such a bad centre. It looks nice enough. The staff certainly seem friendly and helpful enough. "Seem" is, however, the operative word in that last sentence. I don't know what your definition of 'helpful advice' is, dear reader, but for my money it should preclude advice such that, in following it, you materially increase the probability that you will die in the near future. But, hey, maybe that's just me. I wish to relate a conversation which occurred on the morning of Saturday 27th November. This is pretty much how I remember it, at any rate, and I will not be moved on its veracity.

Adriana: We were hoping to do a walk from Charlotte's pass to Kosciusko today.

~~She-Devil~~ Information centre employee: Lovely! There are basically two routes you can take ..... (we choose one ... anticipating about a 7 hr walk)

We chose this route..... longer than it looks.

Adriana: So what are the conditions like?

Information centre employee: Well it's a little misty. And there is a little snow over some parts of the path .... but that shouldn't be a problem.

Adriana: Anything we should take?

Information centre employee: Well, you might want to take a spare pair of socks to cross the Snowy river..... or you could just take your shoes off. You want to cross that in the morning, too, because it rises during the day.

Adriana: And how cold is it? Last time we went we took way more warmth than we needed²....

Information centre employee: Well at the moment it's 11°, but the wind-chill is taking that down to 10° .... the key is to take layers.

Adriana: Should we take a map?

Information centre employee: Well, we can give you this one (same degree of detail as the above picture ..... they had other, actually good, maps for sale also). You shouldn't really need one, though. The path is clearly marked.

So how did the walk itself go?

Well, to start with, there was a bit of this sort of thing:

....... but things ended up a little more like this:

O.K. so the picture I was going to put here, but didn't on account of Ads not wanting it put up(understandably I guess), was a selfie Ads took in which she believed she was likely to die³.

MATTERS TURN AWRY

What happened to us was pretty much as follows. A few kilometers short of Kosciusko the path kind of disappeared. This, in and of itself, wasn't necessarily a big deal. For a start, mist had gotten very thick in places and it was raining from time to time, so it wasn't that rare for us not to be able to see more than a five meters in front of us anyway. Actually, this leads me to my first favourite line of the day:

Ads: This *referring to very light precipitation* isn't rain .... it's just that some of this mist is condensing and falling.

Me: Ads, ah, you do know what rain is, right?

Ads: *pauses*... Shut up.

So .... when I say 'mist', I should perhaps really be saying 'cloud'. Also, there'd been some snow across the path before now ... and by that I mean great big stretches of it. But up until now it had always been pretty clear where the path actually was and, excepting a little nervousness about walking across slightly sludgy/slippery snow while being lightly rained on, it was easy enough to cross. What occurred here was a little different. What we saw now was a bank of snow resting on a sharp incline which, in its recently rained-on state seemed far to steep for us to feasibly climb up. In addition there were rocks immediately to it's left which could conceivably have been the edge of the path.... the possibility of which we decided to investigate.

It became reasonably clear, by virtue of the fact that the only way forward on these rocks rapidly became to climb downwards, that we were moving off the path. The question was whether we could traverse around this great big pile of snow and find the path on the other side. Ads, who was walking in front reached a dead end of sorts ... which is to say an end of rocks and a start of steep snow bank. This leads to another favourite line:

Me: If you slide down that, do you think you can get back up it?

Ads: No.

..... and, at that point, Ads slides down.

Perhaps because I thought she must have seen something path-related I came down to follow suit instead of, as I probably should have done, left Ads there and gone back to fetch help. Help, in this case, being represented by a group of well-equipped people on a 20 day hike who couldn't have been much more than 1km behind us. As I said, however, what I did instead was follow her, almost sliding down the entire slope in the process. And it turned out she hadn't seen anything at all.... she'd just slipped.

From where we now were, we certainly couldn't have gone back the way we came and, while we could actually see the afore-mentioned hikers moving along a peak behind us (we think, based upon a previous conversation, that they must have been looking for a place to camp), actually getting to them directly from where we were would have been even harder. With the levels of mist drifting around it didn't exactly very likely they'd seen us.... and what's more, we were now under a great big bank of snow we had reason to believe had already moved in previous rain. The only real option seemed to be to move forward and hope to find a way back onto the path.... which is what we now did.

In the distance, I could actually make out a structure and what was probably a path. Between us and them, however, was a valley, a small river and quite a steep ridge. It was highly doubtful we could get to them easily (if at all ... while there was no snow blocking our path, all slopes were very slippery due to rain and probably pretty treacherous at the best of times) via a direct route. I was only going to be able to make these out for a few more minutes, too, before mist and rain intervened, but their existence became increasingly important to us as it became impossible to move forward without also moving downwards into the valley.

While there was a constant threat of slipping... we were at least grateful that it wasn't raining. This gratitude lasted a few minutes. The sky then pretty much opened up on us with a truly heavy downpour, and while we were prepared for light rain walking upright, we simply hadn't gear that could keep us from getting completely wet through crawling around the side of a mountain and, when one factors in a now significant wind-chill, border-line hypothermia cold ... which is where we eventually got. Ads was in a far worse situation than I was too, since she depended upon glasses to see and subsequently had visibility of maybe a metre.... She was probably nowhere near as fit, also⁴. My phone, unsurprisingly, had no reception. Yay team!

It turns out that adrenaline is a pretty wonderful thing. So long as we kept moving, I found the only real indication that I was really fucking cold came when I grabbed a rock and felt pins and needles all the way up my wrist. On the downside this probably happened at least once every 10 seconds or so.

The story between here and when we found the path probably isn't all that interesting to tell. The important details are that we decided on a course of action, which is to say which way we would approach the distant path .... and I should probably point out that Ads' way turned out to be right⁵, and that we eventually made it on the other side of what was a pretty scary experience in light of the knowledge that we probably wouldn't have lasted the night if it came to that.

THE POLICE GET INVOLVED.

Oh, wait. The other thing I should mention is that is that after getting significantly higher, still being uncertain whether or not there existed any way to get onto the path we knew existed or whether there was a path at all on our side of the ridge that we were on .... and at a point when Ads' legs were kind of giving out on her ..... I realised my phone had reception. I now made the following awkward phone call.

000 person: Police, fire or ambulance?

Me: Umm.... rescue? *I explain, somewhat awkwardly, our situation*

000 person: What's the nearest suburb?

Me: Jindabyne, I think.

000 person: I'll put you through to Jindabyne police.

There was now a little phone hockey and awkwardly long waiting for people to call me back and such-like, which would have been a whole lot more amusing if we didn't feel like we were freezing to death on the side of a mountain (I particularly liked when they asked 'can you shield yourself from the wind there, we can't quite make you out?' .... No, actually we can't.... that's kind of the problem here). All of this took place while we were, unbeknownst to us, a few hundred metres from the path which had now emerged from under probably around 1 km of thick snow cover. Turned out that big bank of snow above us kind of was the path. Hey ho. Having made contact, been reassured ..... eventually..... by police that what we were doing would definitely see us reach the path at Rawson's pass and being assured that someone, somewhere knew enough of our predicament we made one final push up the steepest most foreboding piece terrain above us and.......

WE FOUND THE FECKING PATH!


.... and this is what it looked like from the other side.

Found it.

There are probably now only a few things worth mentioning. Firstly that we made our way to a toilet block and shelter. It was at this point that we made use of one of the few pieces of advice we got from the information centre lady and changed our socks to nice, dry ones. Thanks so much for that tip! They even stayed dry for, you know, a minute or two! That was awesome!

Rain, wind and light hail had now gotten to the point where reception was completely shot again so I couldn't let the police know we'd made it, and when we finally did it turned out that they were on their way to pick us up. The path from Kosciusko to Charlotte's pass now in front of us, it turns out, is wide and stable enough to qualify as a road if you happen to be a 4wd.

We met with a few people who'd made a fire in Seaman's hut, and got to chatting with them. One of them had come the same way we had, except over the snow on the path⁶, and who now delivered another of my favourite lines of the day:

Hiker-girl: Yeah, if you lost the path you're gone.

Me: *pause* .....

Anyways, after a smallish break near a fire, we moved to make the final dash back to Charlotte's Pass, eventually seeing a pair of headlights in the distance which we rightly assumed represented the police who had come to pick us up. It was still raining at this point. We were freezing and hobbling/limping along the path now when Ads delivered what was, hands down, my favourite line pf the day:

Ads: I wish they hadn't come to pick us up.... now we can't say we did the whole walk.

Me: *long drawn out pause, then I point at my face* Ads, this is my unimpressed face.

Our trip back was spent being mildly lectured to, which wounded Ads' pride a little, but didn't bother me in the least:

Policeman: Did you have a first aid kit⁷? GPS? A map? A compass? Did you know that you we have the highest density of brown snakes in the country around here, and that they're prolific at the moment⁸?

Me: *singing* It's good to beeee alive, to beeee alive.....⁹

Anyways ... I guess the moral of the story is that if you're going to do a walk like this you should come prepared for the worst, and as the police advised us, be prepared to spend the night.

Also, if you happen to be in the Jindabyne tourist info centre...... say 'hi' from me.

¹You think I enjoy getting angry about stuff and ranting all the time? You think this makes me happy? Honestly, you have no idea how much of a drain this puts on me psychologically.

²Around the beginning of Autumn.

³If you're friends with Ads on Facebook, though, it's actually been put up there.

⁴Readers who have actually met me may be surprised to learn that, owing to a regular fairly serious ride to work, I'm actually reasonably fit now. Honestly. No ..... really.

⁵My way had the upside of being such that, based on what we knew at the time, being certain to get us there, but the downside of being a lot more arduous. Ads didn't think she could have made it.

⁶We'd met various people coming the other way who mentioned what seemed to be, based on their tone, a smallish snow drift around Kosciusko also which simply didn't seem to gel with our experience of it. Either a large amount of snow was shifted and deposited there in the rain, or the rain ate away at the edges making it harder to climb on to.

⁷While we didn't have a first aid kit, we had betadine, bandaids, hand sanitiser and such-like... which, let's face it is about all that the average person could actually use in said kit anyway.

⁸Christ I'm glad we didn't know that.....

⁹I actually was singing this in the car....

Mark Sharma talks in third person. Mark Sharma sulk now. Mark Sharma say everyone at Unleashed racist. Unleashed turned into bigger farce.

2010-12-01T11:19:00.001+10:00

This post is probably beneath me.

Actually, who am I kidding here, of course it isn't.

A friend of mine, who shall remain anonymous unless they choose not to be, quipped recently that I'd hit the big time by getting an Unleashed author to post a comment on my blog. One way of putting perspective on that is to point out that, well, I got the Unleashed author most likely to open a post with "So whats up fa-gots? How are things in ur lil Gay Land?". Another is to point out that that post is, as I type this, the second result to come up for a Google search of the man in question, after his own web site. So not exactly big time prominent writer, here....

However. This dude is apparently going to contest a state seat in the next NSW election. And it'd be pretty funny if I could maintain anything like that level of Google prominence when that happens, so.... let's just all take a quiet moment of appreciation for the following extract from his spirited and rational defense (a summary of which is written over the above picture in red):

But clearly this is not going well with Left Labor- Greens Communist alliance and their supporters. A quick look at the said article shows how every comment on the page is against me.

Oh dear.....

If one then moseys on over to the original post one sees firstly that, well, commenters have not been altogether kind to the unfortunate Mr Sharma. Happily, one also sees a few supporters bravely standing against that evil communist tide. Rather like King Cnut.... only with Margaret Thatcher underwear, an "I ♥ Mark Sharma" t-shirt and .... well, probably lobotomy scars. Take completely disinterested random bystander Jamie:

Well that certainly sounded natural and un-forced, didn't it? I found the "These questions have been raised by Independent Mark Sharma and people like me" bit especially convincing. Almost like..... Look, 'Jamie', I'll level with you. It's not that I'm saying you are Mark Sharma, necessarily ..... it's just that I'd be very surprised if he didn't more or less tell you what to say in some way. If there were actually a way of actually settling the matter, yes I'd be quite happy to put up money there.

In any case, if one can believe his rants about the Indian/immigrant community of Strathfield needing better representation than they currently have I really hope, for their sake, they can find a better candidate to represent their interests somewhere and soon. Also, what the hell is with the publication standards at Unleashed?

Mark Sharma for a regular friday slot!!!!

Update (6/12/10): I have, sadly and rapidly, lost my place of Google prominence apparently after posting my latest. Suspect my prominence there (or anything like it) was only ever going to last as long as a Mark Sharma post was my latest. Woe :( ... I guess it's nice to learn a little about Google's search algorithm, at least.

News just in: Sydney suburb of Strathfield uncovers dire existential threat to Australia.

2010-11-26T10:08:00.007+10:00

Mark Sharma.

Mark Sharma. Maaark Sharma. Mark. Sharma. Repeat these words, dear reader. Savour them. Let the sweet, sensual, seductive sound of Shaaaarrrmmmaaaaa.... make love with your tongue, vocal cords, nasal cavity and lips to mark this fine day.

The day the prophet spoke to us.

Who is Mark Sharma, I hear you ask? Why, Mark Sharma is Strathfield, dear reader. And Strathfield is he¹. He speaks its thoughts. He lives out its wants and desires. And today, dear reader, which some day will be recorded as the first day of year 0 in a newer, more enlightened calendar, Strathfield spoke to us.

It was not a message of comfort, dear reader. Rather, it was a terrible vision of the future. But fear not, my friend, for in this vision lies hope. If we can but heed this call, if we sinners can but repent, become conservatives and joint this great movement Australia may once again become a land of prosperity, heterosexuality and economic liberalism.

Why do Gillard, Swan and Brown hate freedom so? The prophet would not tell us. Perhaps it is because they are not conservatives, and as we all know, freedom is a conservative value. Perhaps it is because they are brainwashed vessels of leftist hate. Who can say? But hate it, they do. And as much as we might like to tear these hate-mongers limb from limb in the name of Australian freedom, dear reader, let us instead let the soothing words of the prophet stay our righteous hands:

.....it will be a waste of time if we spent our entire energy targeting them. Instead of that it would be more productive to focus on their hidden agenda.

Indeed.

Their hidden agenda? Why it becomes only too obvious if you are but willing to look with clear eyes. Consider, first, what they have already done.

If the shock of another tax was not enough for the Gillard Government, now there is a foolish debate going on in Canberra on same same-sex marriage. The ceremony of marriage might be different in different cultures but the institution of marriage is the same no matter where you live. Marriage can only happen between a man and a woman. There are no "ifs and buts" or grey areas to it. It doesn't matter whether you are Christian, Muslim, Hindu, Jewish or belong to any other faith. The concept is the same everywhere. Just because we live in the 21st century, it doesn't mean we should destroy our way of life for delusional people. There is no possibility of any debate on this issue and it should be kept out of our sacred parliament.

Why should we ruin our way of life for delusional people, indeed? For people so wrapped up in their delusional mindset as to disbelieve such manifest truths as the existence of bronze age gods, transubstantiation and his elephantine majesty Ganesha?

OUR SACRED PARLIAMENT MUST BE DEFENDED FROM SUCH FILTH!!!

But why must they do this, dear reader. Why? My god, man, but isn't it obvious?

But despite all this, the Greens are relentlessly bringing up gay marriage and attacking Australian families. Why is Senator Brown doing all this? The only assumption one can make is that the Greens want to weaken our economy with a carbon tax and destroy our social fabric with gay marriage. A weakened nation would serve as a perfect launch pad for communism.

Don't you see? Don't you see you fools!? First they introduce flouridation of our very water suppy to dilute our precious bodily fluids. Then, using their cunning sham of 'global warming', they tax carbon to cripple our great nation's economy. Finally, to weaken our defenses by tearing the social fabric in two and turning our defense forces camp, they let gay people marry each other. Why else would you do these things? Isn't the next logical step that we find ourselves a satellite state of the ~~Soviet Union~~ communist UN world government?

WAKE UP AUSTRALIA!

¹It's just a bit of a shame he isn't the rest of Watson, really.

In which I lose sleep over being called an idiot on Andrew Bolt's blog.

2010-10-28T10:52:00.001+10:00

How can it have come to this? I only wanted to join in.... to take a small place amongst the intellectual giants who come to sit in awe of the greatest living Australian...

Instead I have been cruelly shot down. PWNED, if you will¹.

I feel so small. How did I C You know I wasn't one of the idiots form some block of 200,000 he'd counted already? How was he even able to work that out? That's just the thing about people over at Bolt's blog I guess..... they really are just that friggin smart.

¹Although, just quietly, and on a serious note to Mick. I would much rather that some random group of people dumb enough to take Andrew Bolt seriously on any issue at all think I am a 'soft touch' than to know with dread certainty in my more honest and quiet moments, that I am both a racist and a coward. I should also probably just say that it's been pointed out to me that 111 is the number of boats, not people. Just so you know I realise that now and that I still don't care (it's true, I'm afraid I don't usually bother to read Andrew Bolt's posts very carefully and this was no exception).

Kites, the Remix: Or in which I wish to beat my brother to death with a rubber pigeon.

2010-10-14T11:17:00.002+10:00

Henry, Henry, Henry. You are a bastard. I've realised for a while that ANU film group reviews have to be read through the lens that they've gone out of their way to track down someone in their ranks who either actually likes the film in question, or is at least willing to pretend they did. I've always expected a little more from you, though. You once wrote this review of Synecdoche, New York. Thanks for that. I mean, who knows? I might have otherwise seen it unprepared or something.

The point being, I've come to think of you as a reviewer I can trust. When you wrote this review of this piece of shite, though Henry, you broke that trust. You broke it hard. You gave me the impression that the movie could conceivably be enjoyed on some level. You made me think it was possible to get to the end of it without wanting to beat to death every last person who was involved in the making of the movie. You lied, man. You robbed me of 90 minutes of my life. You even have the balls to open as follows:

I'm not sure it was necessary to edit down the Bollywood original (which, at 130 minutes, was already remarkably short by Bollywood standards) by 40 minutes.

You aren't? You weren't possibly swayed by the remaining 90 minutes still actually feeling like about, oh, 3 long hours being taken to tell some puerile story you could have done justice to in 5 minutes, after which the story-teller would probably be forced to apologise for injecting that kind of stupid into your head? Only you wouldn't accept that apology. I mean, you would say you had for form's sake, but over the years it would knaw at you and, one morning when you wake up dreaming once again of this stupid tale and convincing yourself that it was the only way to drive it out of your head, you'd track the storyteller down and torture them to death. You'd then offer the story in your own defense at trial (which would see you released on humanitarian grounds), only to end up infecting others with its banal odiousness, thus starting the same vicious cycle again and possibly bringing about the end of civilization as we know it!

Am I exaggerating? Well, yes. But I hope I have, at least, prevented anyone reading this from actually thinking for even a second that seeing Kites, the Remix is an idea they should actually entertain. This is to say, Henry, that I just did what should have been your job for you.

I swear what they must have actually done with this movie is take their initial stupid idea for a movie then defaulted to a six year old to actually flesh the story out. We'll call this six year old 'Chuckie'.

Producer: O.K. so, how are our two lovers re-united?

Chuckie: Um, so Jay is, like scuba diving in this awesome coral reef, when he sees her swim right past him without recognizing him .... and, and, she looks kind of like a mermaid and stuff. Then, when they drive back to the house of the family they're both marrying into they, like meet up again.

Producer: Hmm... O.K. I guess that might work..... yeah, they both make independent trips to the same coral reef on day-trips from LAS VEGAS, NEVADA!?!?!?!

Chuckie: Yeah. And then after they go out on a date the night before her wedding to the brother of his fiance, she gets found out.... and, and, there's a fight and stuff. And we finish the scene with her fiance, who is like the brother of his fiance, like firing a gun right at Jay! Jay's the name of our hero, by the way. Awesome, right?

Producer: Ummm... O.K.

Chuckie: And then we get some flash-backs and shit, and we replay the scene, only this time it's like 'hey, I changed my mind, there are no gunshots at all, Natasha hits her fiance over the head with a bottle instead!'

Producer: Right..... I mean, it seems like they're going on the run rather early here, Chucky. How do we pad-out the remaining 75 minutes?

Chuckie: With, like awesome chase scenes and stuff! Like, they'll be running away from all these police cars, and it'll be like 'Oh no, they're caught!' ... but, but then they'll see these .... HOT AIR BALOONS! And, like, they'll jump onto a rope from their car and climb up it and get away!

Producer: O.K.... so I guess that'll work. I mean, a brightly coloured, slow-moving hot air balloon would be a really difficult thing for the police to follow......

Chuckie: Yeah. And they'll get into these other cool chases and then get to Mexico and get married. And it'll be really funny, cause earlier when he asks how to say 'I love you' in Spanish, she'll teach him to say 'I'm shitting my pants' instead ... which will be a really funny thing for him to say instead most of the time, cause it has the word 'shit' in it, lol, but it'll be extra special funny when he says it at the wedding.

Producer: And then her evil ex-fiance will catch up with them?

Chuckie: Yeah, and there'll be this big awesome chase scene and he'll get shot..... and, and she'll put him in a train and we won't see what happens to her. And, and we won't find out until he goes back to Las Vegas after getting all better 'cause this poor Mexican family performs surgery on him.

Producer: I see. What does happen to her?

Chuckie: Oh, it's really sad! They chase her to a remote cliff , and she drives off of it.

Producer: Wow.

Chuckie: Yeah, and then he like finds out after running away from a gunfight after being saved by Jamal, who is like the family's servant who becomes their friend because they're awesome, only Jamal's been shot and he whispers it to Jay before he dies. Sad, hey?

Producer: Yeah....

Chuckie: And then Jay will be all, like, hard-arse and he'll have an uzi and, and, when all the bad men catch up to him he'll be, like, shooting them ALL in slow motion and it'll look really cool 'cause it'll be raining really heavily.... it rains a LOT in this movie, by the way. Rain's dramatic. It says so right here.

Producer: in Las Vegas?

Chuckie: Yeah. And things get even sadder, too, 'cause, then Jay's ex-fiance appears behind him, cause she was following him all along or something and, like shoots him in the back, crying. We feel a little sorry for her, too, 'cause she's been used like a doormat. So Jay doesn't shoot her back, and she doesn't shoot him again, she just, like, cries as he staggers off.

Producer: Wow, so what happens, then?

Chuckie: Um, so he drives to the cliff where Natasha died and he jumps off it.

Producer: O.K.... so he drives back to Mexico with a bullet in his back and...wait, how did he even know where the cliff was? Did Jamal whisper the GPS co-ordinates to him when he was dying or something?

Chuckie: Maybe... Umm, it's like a really sad ending, though, hey?

Producer: I guess.... assuming the audience doesn't feel like they would have gladly pushed Jay off the cliff themselves 5 minutes into the movie... Look, Chuckie, I'll tell you what I'm going to do. Here's a suitcase full of money. You make that movie.

Chuckie: Awesome.

News Just In: Andrew Bolt is trying to kill Bob Brown.

2010-10-13T15:41:00.000+10:00

ZOMG! See for yourselves! How many times have we heard this tired old story? Two-bit hack outs murderous plot by evil communist harpy, hack gets rare brain-wave and turns the device against gay eco-fascist?

When will society learn!?!?!?!?!??!?!

Australian Ride to Work Day: you are hereby cordially invited to go fuck yourself.

2010-10-13T12:40:00.003+10:00

Currently being in my 3rd week of riding to work daily, I'm sure you can imagine my sense of joy at learning that, on the 13th of October, there was to be a free breakfast at work for anyone who rode in on the day in question. On the off-chance you can't, well, take a look at this and work from there. I have never gotten over my student-days joy at free .... anything¹. A free breakfast for riding to work? A ha ha HA!! I was going to do it anyway you fools!!!!!!!

My joy, however, was short-lived. Well, actually, it wasn't in the sense that I'd learned of this like 3 weeks ago. In the sense that this makes for a good, solid opening to a paragraph about how everything went sour ... and also in the sense that I could possibly have been even more delirious with joy, like, the night before or something .... we can all agree it was. You see, it was raining pretty heavily this morning. Finding myself suddenly thrust into the ranks of those whose decision to ride may actually be determined by the provision of a free breakfast, but being the complete out-and-out hard-arse you all know me to be, I bravely donned my Gore-Tex^TM and made my way to work through near² to impossible odds after only umming and ahing for around 20 minutes. Like people who went to 'Nam and stuff... I'm afraid I'm rather reluctant to talk about the horrors I then experienced on the way to work. I am prepared, however, to talk about the horrors that greeted me when I got there. You see...

There was no fucking breakfast left!

Well, O.K., so there was in the sense that there was some fruit and a little cereal lying around amidst people packing up and stuff. After stepping out of a much-needed (to wash all the mud and blood and shit off) shower, and arriving at 9:20 to an 8:30-9:30 breakfast, I expect a little more than a few hairy pieces of fruit and the dregs of the cereal, though, you bastards. I expect danishes. I expect coffee. I expect sausages, hash browns and young, nubile serving-folk looking to anoint my tired feet.

Congratulations 'National Ride to Work Day', you just earned a place on my hit-list.

¹Hmmm. Perhaps a disclaimer is in order here. Anyone now thinking to send my joy circuits into overload by offering me a free kick in the testicles is advised to stop being such a pedantic smart-arse.

²Assuming a rather broad definition of 'nearness'.....

News just in: Dumb Opinion Piece Published on The Drum.

2010-10-01T17:18:00.002+10:00

Acknowledging that the above probably reads like a headline from The Onion, allow me to say that I am nonetheless shocked. Why, oh why can't Clementine Ford and Virginia Haussegger unite and fight against the common enemy~~, The People's Front of Judea~~, I hear you ask?

Well, in a sense, they can. Virginia Haussegger's article (abridged from a speech given in a debate) is a thoughtful enough kick in the pants to western feminism regarding it's (I think) cowardly cultural relativism and the resulting moral crisis she claims it finds itself in. Enter Clementine Ford, who says 'Waaaa! All this nasty stuff not our fault! We do plenty! P.S. I'd like to subtly hint that people who agreed with Hausegger are all Islamophobes, if I may', thereby ~~neatly demonstrating Haussegger's point~~ presenting a devastating rebuttal.

Ford's was, I think, the most mind-bogglingly silly piece of writing I have seen on the Drum. This is a highly competitive category.

A few ~~rants at~~ points of consideration for Ford, in the highly unlikely event she reads this blog:

Considering how often in subsequent comments you show frustration at people misconstruing comments about males perpetrating violence against women as meaning all men are violent towards women, you might like to take a moment to reflect on how ridiculous it is for you to take any criticism of Islam or Middle Eastern culture as an indication that the speaker thinks all Muslims are inherently evil. There is nothing at all inherently wrong with cultural criticism or even vilification, and I would submit that Islam, as it is currently practiced today, is quite profoundly misogynistic. I think that is bad. I would also like to submit that any culture that accepts honour-killing as a part of it is a culture that contains some profoundly shit elements. You might also remember certain evil acts of vilification regarding such cultural practices as disallowing women the vote and maintaining that a woman's place is in the home. I know, hey? They shock me too.
If you title an article Stop blaming feminists for the world's problems, you might like to consider indicating or referencing a single, solitary instance of someone actually blaming feminists for at least one problem in the world. Haussegger sure as shit didn't. She did seem to imply that systematic gross human rights abuses against women should be of special interest to those who would consider themselves feminists. I, too, was shocked by this scandalous assertion.
You write "Her argument is so fundamentally flawed that it's difficult to know where to begin." Might I suggest you begin with something she actually fucking said.

In any case, Clementine, on the off-chance that I'm currently coming off as too reasonable or sane or something I thought I might just sign off as follows:

Clementine, we live in a world that has walls, and those walls have to be guarded by men with guns. Whose gonna do it? You? You, Clementine? I have a greater responsibility than you could possibly fathom. You weep for Santiago, and you curse the marines. You have that luxury. You have the luxury of not knowing what I know. That Santiago's death, while tragic, probably saved lives. And my existence, while grotesque and incomprehensible to you, saves lives. You don't want the truth because deep down in places you don't talk about at parties, you want me on that wall, you need me on that wall. We use words like honor, code, loyalty. We use these words as the backbone of a life spent defending something. You use them as a punchline. I have neither the time nor the inclination to explain myself to a woman who rises and sleeps under the blanket of the very freedom that I provide, and then questions the manner in which I provide it. I would rather you just said thank you, and went on your way, Otherwise, I suggest you pick up a weapon, and stand a post. Either way, I don't give a damn what you think you are entitled to.

Where have you gone, Wilson Tuckey? A nation turns its lonely eyes to you.....

2010-09-23T14:23:00.002+10:00

Oh wait..... there you are, buddy!

I have to say that I was disappointed with his first two posts. Sure, with his second there were tantalising hints that he thinks Marius Kloppers should bugger off back where he came from with his liberal ideas ..... but where was the fire, Wilson? What was with all the reasonably coherent posting?

Imagine my joy, then, at his third post. This beastie reads a little more like a comment on Andrew Bolt's blog. This is more like the Wilson Tuckey we all know and...... know! This is the Wilson bravely showing the Coalition the way through the wilderness, in stark contempt for the opinion of others, coherency, actual parliamentary influence and growing senility. But why are you all wasting time listening to me? Take it away, Wilson....

Greg Combet interview with Kerry O`brien on Gillards broken election promise to not introduce a Carbon Tax reminded me of Paul Keatings LAW broken election promise. Tony Abbott should now introduce some LAW to the Parliament banning such a tax making it clear he will attend any Divisions involved.

This initiative will test Gillard and the Independants both in the debate and the vote. In particular to match their rhetoric with actual evidence as to the ECONOMIC¹ and ENVIROMENTAL BENEFITS of such a measure.

Lastly, however, reader ..... I must ask you to imagine my visceral sense of horror when I realised what many of you are no doubt realising after reading the above. Wilson Tuckey is ..... me. Given a few years of disillusionment and the onset of early senility .... is it really such a stretch to go from here, here or here to .......here?:

Whilst a Gillard promise has a 24hr USE BY DATE she might just be prepared to provide a guarunteed (sic) figure as to the reduction in CO2 emissions per 1% of tax imposed excluding of course those emissions that are exported to other countries.

Having seen what lies ahead, dear reader..... I'm really not sure I can go on.....

Update: title corrected.

¹Possibly Abbott could stand in parliament with a sign reading 'Where is da money, Ms Gillard?'

In which I propose a competition.

2010-09-10T09:38:00.002+10:00

Who among us remembers our search for the saddest man on the internet? Why do I bring this up? Well, firstly because I find myself idly wondering whatever happened to dancing Mario man ..... ah, good times ..... and partly because I wish to propose another race through the dregs of humanity.

Where else should we begin such a race than on the blog of the great man himself? I propose two categories for this endeavor:

The funniest act of crazy-baiting/affirmation. The leader in this category is currently 'he who shall not be named', and for an example I would advise moseying on over to that blog that doesn't exist.
The more challenging category. The prize here shall go to whoever manages to get published the craziest piece of opinion in broad agreement with the blog's author. The winner here should ideally write something more glaringly insane than 'serious' posters..... but we must be probably prepared to waive such a condition on account of its setting the bar way too high .... You must, however, get at least one 'serious' or 'real' poster to agree with you.

Any takers?

For Wes Anderson, if he's interested. Part 3.

2010-09-08T21:50:00.001+10:00

We find ourselves in a Canberra pub, where a trio of be-suited men sit in consternation. All three are wearing hats indoors. One is sporting a cream akubra, and the other two wearing red caps with "I ♥ ALP" written on the front of them.

Katter: So here it is, gentlemen. Exactly what we've been holding out for. A pledge from Mr Abbott to firebomb Filipino banana crops into oblivion.

Oakeshott: *cough* ..... Yeah, ah .... sexy. Naughty.

Katter: And it doesn't stop there, either, gentlemen. Abbott's prepared to meet our demands on fishing and to give us all the ethanol we can drink.

Windsor (scratching his head): Yeah, about that Bob....

Katter (holding his hand up in a manner conotating 'just wait'): Lastly, though, me-lads.....the Piece de Resist-once...... who do you think will be setting the value of the Aussie dollar this time next year? I''l tell you who, lads: "Bob Katter!".

There follows a long pause as Bob allows the gravity of those last two words to settle in. Oakeshott and Windsor answer Katter's manic stare with a pair of vapid ones. Finally they are unable to meet his eyes at all, and each develop an intense interest in their drinks. Bob appears oblivious to this.

We now notice, as Katter pats him consolingly on the shoulder, a fourth figure at the table. How we failed to notice Kevin Rudd's¹ existence up until this point appears mystifying to us, but fail we did.

Katter: I'm sorry, Kev.

Rudd (exhaling): That's O.K., I guess.

Katter: If it were you, buddy, I'd-a gone the other way. No question.

Rudd nods in the kind of endearingly pathetic way only Owen Wilson really can.

Katter: Now, gentlemen, we've got an adoring nation to talk to.

Windsor: Yeah.... we're right behind you, Bob.... we'll just finish these beers and meet you outside.

¹Owen Wilson.

In which Chris causes me to make a fool of myself.

2010-09-06T13:19:00.001+10:00

To be found here.

According to the source that never lies, it's "backwards from Bourke", Chris. I feel like such a dufus.....

For Wes Anderson, if he's interested. Part 2.

2010-09-03T12:14:00.004+10:00

DREAM SEQUENCE

It is election night, if a little hazier around the edges of our vision. Bob is by a TV set in a small beach house in between a banana plantation and the ocean. He is wearing only a pair of Bananas in Pyjamas boxer shorts, gum boots and his trade-mark hat. He is holding a remote in one hand, a beer in the other. Kerry O'Brien¹ is presently announcing ".... thrusting Bob Katter into a position of kingmaker".

Bob switches the TV off, nodding. "Bob Katter!" he says, with conviction, before reclining back in his chair and throwing his head back to take a hefty swig of his beer.

A knife darts in front of his now-exposed throat. Panning out, we see a small Filipino man in a wet-suit, his face concealed. "We burn banans now, Kat Kat, you big gayfaglol!" he says.

Bob's face contorts into a snarl as he responds. "You picked the wrong beach this time, Kimosabe..."

As if in answer, there is a low, deep, blood-curdling howl in the distance.

Outside, we see a small surfaced submarine flying the Filipino flag and rocking around in newly disturbed sea. We make out a panicked voice slightly distorted by radio static. "Large object come in fast, general Makabulos!". The wave immediately behind the sub appears to form a giant pair of fruit bat wings.....

Focus back on Bob Katter, who is laughing maniacally. Enraged, our wet-suited Makabulos forces the knife into Katter's throat....

Bob snaps awake. He is sitting on the toilet holding the latest copy of Mt Isa Bush Pig. There is a knocking at the door as a feminine (but very Ocker) voice enquires "Mr Katter?". "Strewth, hang on a tick, Gillard, Bob's on the job...." he replies. The voice becomes more insistent "Mr Katter!". "I told you, Bobs on the....."

Bob snaps awake again. He is in Canberra, in the office of Prime Minister Julia Gillard².

We focus on Gillard's face. "Could we focus on the ..... job, here, Bob?"

Katter: Musta dozed off, there.... you were saying something about bananas?

Gillard: Well, I wasn't....... but while we're on the topic why don't we shoot down to point 16. Bob, I just don't think that you've thought that one through.

Katter: Which part?

Gillard: Well.... for starters, even if they couldn't count on some degree of international support and us.... none.... the Philippines has quite a substantial standing army. And ..... well, they're just bananas, Bob.

Katter: Just bananas? Look. You've killed off manufacturing in this country, you've killed off agriculture. You're trying to kill mining and porn... all we've got left are bananas!

Gillard: .... we're going to have to say no to the 'Bob Katter bridge to nowhere³' and orchestrating a joint Australia-US naval bombardment on ...... "Fruit-bat-zilla", too, Bob. We might be able to move on farm subsidies, though.

We can just make out a sharp, muffled "communist" emanating from a cabinet directly behind Gillard. Gillard motions Wayne Swan to the cabinet with an economical motion of her head. Upon opening the cabinet a large-eared figure leaps out in a vision of startled kung-fu fury. Swan leaps back in fright. Waking up to himself, Tony Abbott⁴ straightens first his posture, then his tie.

Abbott (coughing): Ah, hello Bob.

Gillard: Tony, this isn't exactly what I'd call professional.

To be continued.............

¹George Clooney?

²Tilda Swinton

³I got her in, Chris! I got her in!!!!

⁴Ben Stiller.

For Wes Anderson, if he's interested. Part 1.

2010-09-02T13:08:00.007+10:00

Opening shot: we follow the top of a large, cream coloured akubra hat as it slowly and deliberately makes its way towards a set of ornate double doors. Upon reaching the doors the hat pauses. It's¹ slow, rocking movement seems strangely evocative of its encasing a head chewing tobacco. Or hay.... or, I don't know, whatever country folks like to chew on these days.... possibly their own tongues or something.

Without warning a pair of grizzled, wiry old arms fly into the doors like two North Queensland crocodiles taking prey and, with a deft synchronous flick of each wrist impel the doors to fly open.

While we can almost feel the oppressively humid North Queensland heat now pouring in from outside, more oppressive still is the ominous ranks of reporters, cameras and microphones that greet our hat on the now-exposed² doorstep. There is a brief moments pause as though, caught in their own private conversations, these ranks of slick, southern filth have been caught by surprise at the unexpected emergence of their prey. It doesn't last.

A veritable chattering cacophony, (surely enough to kill a lesser hat) now assaults our senses as surely as it assaults the hat. "Mr Katter, blah, blah, blah Latte-sipping-elitist loaded question!?"

As the camera swivels around and pans out we make out first the purposeful, grizzled face beneath the hat, which begins nodding up and down, laughing. Our figure's right arm is motioning the crowd be quiet, which obeys as surely as has many a wayward steer before it.

Katter: One at a toime.... please!

Faceless reporter: Mr Katter, why did you not meet with Garnaut and Stern today?

Katter's face³ stares impassively back but his chewing slows, offering us the only clue that this question may have caught him off-guard. His eyes dart briefly towards his watch, then back at the offending reporter. His face contorts first into a wince, then a scowl as his arm makes to swat the question away as surely as it has swatted many a North Queensland fly before it.

Katter: Ah, they're lightweights. Stupid. Wrong. I mean, you know, they don't even seem to realise the unassailable scientific fact about a major problem coming out of our oceans.

Reporter: ........ acidity?

Katter: Fruit-bat-ZILLA! I mean, you all come here from down South.... You people have been slitting our throats for years, when all the time we've been living under the shadow of that monster. And he'll come for you, too, after he's done with us, but none of you even listen or care! And then you go and rape and kill our livestock, destroy all our industry and force homosexuality on us.

Reporters: .................?

Katter: Look, I've answered your questions, I'm gonna go have a beer now.

________________________________________________________________________________

SCENE 2.

Bob is reclining at his desk drinking a beer, his muddy, booted feet sharing his desk-top with a WWII vintage Enfield rifle. He reaches slowly down to his desk draw and opens it to reveal a single object. It is a banana with a note tied to it with thick, coarse string and the unmistakable stamp of the Phillipines on it. Zoom in on the note, which says:

How you lik them banans? Ha Ha Ha Gayfaglol!

Focus now on Katter's face, whose eyes cagily dart around the room then lock upon the ashtray at on a far-off bench. The cigar in it is still fresh.

He snatches up his rifle and darts around the room opening cupboards and upturning objects, face contorted with rage and pointing the rifle accusingly into each empty space he finds. His eyes now dart towards the bathroom door. Forcing his way in, we now see two tell-tale signs: the toilet seat is down, and the window is open. Outside we see a diminutive figure in a grey pyjama suit just disappearing into the distant banana trees as Katter takes more pot shots at it than we would have thought the rifle capable of without reloading.

Gayfaglol!!!!! we hear it cry defiantly in the distance.

Focus on Katter's enraged face, end scene.

¹Apostrophe crime!

²Do you like that hyphen, Dave.... do you like it, buddy?

³ A heavily made-up Bill Murray? Jacko? Owen Wilson, even (Royal-Tenenbaums type role, sort of)?

I am an idiot, too.

2010-08-27T18:13:00.002+10:00

O.K., so I didn't check that the listed primary voting percentages added to 100 (and are already a percentage of valid counted votes, not ballots returned). Probably around half of Arkan's primary preferenced Labor, after all.

It is my melancholy duty to inform you that Andrew Bolt was right. The Sikhs in Cowper really are the thin end of a Labor-boat people wedge insidiously started by the Labor movement in the 1830s and only now bearing fruit. It's really no surprise they're such pansies on the issue of burning asylum seekers alive for fun these days, really, is it?

By way of apology to Bolt, allow me to present the world with irrefutable proof, courtesy of ~~your~~ the Maoist's ABC that muslims are stupid:

... and that "our" ABC is, in fact, run by rabid atheistic communists out to make decent, hard-working Christian folk out to be bigots or something...

Andrew Bolt is an Idiot.

2010-08-26T13:49:00.003+10:00

Look, Jethro, those two numbers is equal, hic..

The results in Cowper hardly provides strong evidence that the Sikh community votes in a bloc (relative to the Coalition or Labor at least). Hell, the very reference he quotes seems to inicate that the majority of Arkan's primary vote can't have been Sikh anyway. Worse, if you assume that all Greens preferences and no CDP preferences went to Labor in Cowper, approximately 3/4 of Arkan's supporters must have favoured the coalition rather than Labor.

One wonders how some of the nasty little racists commenting would feel if they realised that, if anything, the 'Sikh voting bloc' in Cowper probably favours the Nationals.......

A post which promises, at some point, to be about the NBN.

2010-08-18T12:36:00.001+10:00

Imagine a ball. In as much as I would like, in this story, for someone to be picking it up and this to be considered a legal move, imagine it is a rugby ball. Let's make it gray. With a red duck on it¹. Now let us imagine a game of rugby proceeding on a field around the ball. This game has become rather scrappy. So scrappy, in fact, that everyone has pretty much forgotten about the ball's existence in their determination to beat the crap out of anyone wearing different colours from them. Hell, some are even attacking even members of their own team with eye-gouging fury. I suppose I really could have just said it had descended into a brawl. I didn't, though, because I'm trying to be all evocative and shit. You O.K. with that, Mr 'Get the fuck on with the story'? Hey, man, fuck you.

Anyways, into this farcical scene steps a diminutive, bespectacled man in a suit. He makes his way over to the ball, dodging the odd fist, elbow and knee attached to various combatants who appear to be paying little attention to him. He stands over the ball, glances furtively in a number of directions then, tentatively, he picks the ball and holds it wonderingly for a while. He now has the power. He can decide the outcome of the game. With a new-found air of superiority and contempt he looks around him at a field of stupid, narrow-minded neanderthals in rugby uniforms who still haven't noticed that the kind of bespectacled nerd they used to beat up in high school has just taken control of their game. He smiles, shuts his eyes, and runs. So taken with the sheer joy of his situation he fails to notice the single nondescript tree standing just outside the playing field he has inadvertently plotted a course directly at. Again without anyone paying any attention to him, he runs directly into it with a soft, anti-climactic thud and falls unconscious on the ground. The ball rolls quietly away where it lies waiting......

Why, you may ask, did I bother with writing the above when I simply could have said that Chris Berg appears to have picked up the ball and run in a startlingly dumb and counter-intuitive direction with it? Not sure, really. Deal with it, buddy. He has, though.

In all the debate over the NBN centering on such matters as which side is right, who can be trusted in this election campaign and why are we doing this anyway ... an elephant, it seems to me, has been trying to hide in our room. That elephant is ~~Mr Reginald Grey-Trunks~~ the privatisation of Telstra. I'm surprised, especially given how depressing I found the whole affair at the time, that I'd forgotten about it. Thanks for bringing it up, Chris .... even if you are an idiot.

Let us assume that we may take his characterization of history as gospel:

But think back: just a few years ago Telstra was begging the government for permission to build its own super-fast broadband network. At no cost to taxpayers. Completely free of government subsidy. If the previous government² or the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission had allowed it, there's a good chance the private sector could have been building the broadband network already.

...............................................

There was a stickler of course. Telstra was asking for a regulatory holiday - that is, to exempt its new fibre investment, for a time, from the requirement to share it with its competitors.

So, faced with the rather bleak choice of allowing a private Telstra from building and owning the entire NBN, thus guaranteeing both the NBN's existence and a private monopoly over it, or risking having Telstra not build the NBN itself, but disallowing anti-competitive behavior - the latter was chosen. Disallowing a single private company from crushing all opposition is over-regulation in Chris Berg's world, and the fact that no NBN was built by any set of telcos was not a failure of the market, but of government. He makes some strange conclusions but he is, at the end of the day, a zealot devoted to a rather strange god so I suppose we must forgive him for being blind to a rather obvious conclusion that privatising Telstra, at least in the manner in which it was done³, was a terribly stupid idea without which the above bleak choice dissolves and we have a functional NBN already.

It was predicted at the time, for rather obvious reasons, that privatizing Telstra meant cutting the public purse off from future profits, but not from future costs (i.e. that if we needed any major telecommunications infrastructure upgrades, we'd still have to pay for them ourselves and we'd still have to bail telcos out if they needed it, precisely because they provide an essential service we cannot do without), and there was never really any solid reasoning presented for the privatisation apart from a 'public bad, private good' mantra and a wide-eyed, salivating hypnotism with just how much that mother fucker could be sold for. Realising that private monopolies are demonstrably not in the public interest (especially over essential services), Telstra may well have been forced to play with one hand behind its back post-privatisation, and this may well have been why they never leveraged their monopoly of old infrastructure to a monopoly of new infrastructure.... but the privatisation demonstrably screwed almost everybody. Telecommunications development floundered - meaning the public lost out, share-holders lost out, and Telstra itself lost most of its value & is now a 2nd to 3rd rate telco.

Being temperamentally more of a Labour than Liberal voter myself, I was nonetheless finding it hard to find any good articulable reason why the ALP should be preferenced above the LNP apart from the fact that Abbott is a freakin' cunt, and that on climate change and asylum seekers the ALP have a rather forced hand,even if they're not really in practice distinguishable from the LNP at present, but I rather think that Chris has given me one. That we are now having this debate at all, and that the LNP seem to be the party that put us in this fucking mess in the first place and now don't seem to have any fucking idea how to fix it .... well, they really haven't as yet been punished enough for that yet.

Thanks again, Chris.

¹I like ducks

²The 'previous government' being, though being from the IPA Mr Berg can't bring himself to say it, the Howard government.

³You can, I think, make a case for separating the retail section of Telstra from its wholesale/infrastructure and privatising that alone.

An ode to non-boredom

2010-08-02T09:45:00.005+10:00

Dave raises, I think, a fair question when he asks if a boring election campaign is necessarily a bad thing. To put matters another way, there is a reason that 'May you live in interesting times' is considered a curse. Given, however, that we do live in interesting times - I would submit that if a country finds itself failing to have an interesting election campaign, then the chances that this is due to a bi-partisan consensus having been struck on a discovered set of policy decisions that is actually most conducive to the long-term happiness of the country are very, very, slim. As far as Australia is concerned I would be interested in seeing anyone maintain, with a straight face, that this is the reason we are currently facing an election of coma-inducing dullness.

Politics is a game. It does not exist to safeguard our happiness. It does not exist to discover the best solution to the problems the people effected by it face. It just exists. Some countries play this game by rules which are more conducive to the well-being of its participants¹ than others, democracy being a pretty good innovation along those lines, but all dull contests really mean is that dull tactics are sufficient for the goals of those most actively playing it. Stability is a very, very different thing from optimality.

In the Australian context, we see two major parties in a state of near alliance, and I would submit that this is because they have reached a point of equilibrium where they feel, with good justification, that any major divergence on either of their parts will be penalised, not because they've struck policy gold.

¹And in all countries, the list of participants in the game extends to the entire population, whether they like to admit it or not. In Australia, for instance, we don't. We pretend that the manner in which politicians consistently behave (and the manner in which politics is reported) in the long term has absolutely nothing to do with us.

Srsly, Dave?

2010-06-22T09:25:00.005+10:00

French propaganda poster c. 1870

You were lied to as a child.

2010-05-10T20:55:00.004+10:00

My palms were sweaty¹. I was nervous. I had, however, once more avoided an awkward encounter in a lift.

"I made it" I announced to Ads,who had once again, just moments before, initiated an inane phone conversation having exhausted all constructive work and communist tea party related activities at work. "Well" she quipped, her voice quavering in that 'I am about to say something really clever' kind of tone. "What goes up must come down".

What goes up........ no, I'm sorry dear reader, but this is Bullshit. Why do they do this kind of thing to you when you're young³? Leaving aside the fact that 'up' is such a completely relative term anyway... what about clay pigeons? Hmm? What about if we, say, made a really big cannon and fired Sol Trujillo into the sun?

I realise that this is the day after Mother's day and all..... but I see through your lies, mum.

So kids, what goes up does not have to come down⁴.

¹Mom's spaghetti².

²O.K. Sue me. That was American spelling.

³Watched kettles do fucking boil.

⁴This is a metaphor for life⁵.

⁵Ads made me write this.

In which I stop traffic.

2009-04-21T15:44:00.006+10:00

I wish to relate, dear reader, the events of some nights ago which characterise nicely that emotional roller-coaster I will charitably call 'my life'. It was a cold and windy night. I say this not just as a cliched story opener, but because it fucking was, O.K.? There was one of those southerly winds you get here that both chill you to your giblets¹ and remind you that winter is a-comin'. Did my poor mitten-less hands freeze solid, I hear you ask in a tone con notating the deepest of concern? While I am touched by your evident worry, dear reader, it is my happy charge to inform you that no, they did not. I have, in short, been re-united with my mittens, and in the subsequent reveling I have, I am ashamed to admit, failed to inform you, my fellow mourners, of this happy news. How did this joyous event take place? Well, it all started with a conversation with one Adriana Siddle². Knowing me as well as she does, dear reader, allowed her to ask of me question of such startling simplicity and breathtaking brilliance³ as to warrant an appreciative "ah" from you, the audience⁴. Whilst I was wallowing in some characteristic and well-deserved self pity, I was asked the following (and brace yourselves): "Have you ..... checked the pockets of all your jackets?". I had not done this. As a result of so doing, however, I have been united once again with my mittens of awesomeness +3.

Anyways, I was walking home on the night in question with a satisfied strut and a hankering for fish and chips. It was while I was closing in on the noble fried-fishmongers that a curious thing happened. I was bitterly disappointed whilst strutting across the zebra-crossing opposite to realise that the day was what can only be described as 'a monday'. This is important in as much as the fish and chips shop on Aro Street is closed on Monday. My mood rapidly improved, however, upon realising that the mitten-accentuating strut I adopt whilst sporting these lovelies had finally paid off. A driver who had stopped to let me pass casually leaned out the window so as to say (and this seemed to be the only possible explanation) something along the lines of "what fine mittens you have, sir! Wherever can such items of apparel be purchased (indeed, I had not thought such wonders possible in this world)?". Once again, however, I was both forced to taste bitter disappointment and consult this chart. I had mis attributed the cause for this arse's communication with me to be my mittens, when I should instead have linked it with that kind of second-long pause you only really get from realising that a fish and chips shop is closed. What he actually said was the following: "Hey, mate, if you're going to cross a road fucking cross it, alright? Don't fuck about". Such situations piss me off mightily. What the fuck is one to do? In the time it takes for you to even realise what has been said, the bastard is already a few hundred metres away from you and your response of "I know you are, but what am I?" can no longer avail you of anything. Curiously, but two nights before my office-mate had a cigarette stolen from his mouth in similar circumstances when an expert kick-boxer sucker-punched him in the face, took it and walked off. We have since concluded that the only adequate answer to such circumstances is to constantly carry a loaded gun⁵. Even Michael Moore could not possibly argue with this clear and present need.

In the mean-time I must satisfy myself with the knowledge that he caused himself more of a delay in yelling at me than I did. Just so you all know where I'm at. With my life.

¹I am now crossing the word 'giblet' off of my Stuff to use in a sentence - Urgent!! list.

²It needs to be pointed out for various reasons that myself and Adriana are at the moment officially together. I love her very much and she needs to stop being silly.

³~~Alliteration~~ This is satisfying....

⁴ And, just quietly, my people are everywhere. Those of you who fail to do this will be crushed. As you were.

⁵"Oh, yeah?" bang "well, one of your tyres is flat, arsehole".... "An expert in kick boxing, is he?" bang " It didn't seem to help"......

In which I am in Mourning.

2009-04-16T16:43:00.003+10:00

I have lost, dear reader, some very good friends of mine and wish to default to the (paraphrased) words of a soul greater than mine to express my resulting sorrow...

Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone,
Prevent the dog from barking with a juicy bone,
Silence the pianos and with muffled drum
Behold my cold bare hands! Let the mourners come.

Let aeroplanes drone up high at public cost
Scribbling on the sky the message They are Lost
Put crepe bows round the white necks of the public doves,
Let the traffic policemen wear black cotton gloves¹.

They were my North, my South, my East and West,
My working week and my Sunday rest,
My noon, my midnight, my talk, my song;
I thought my gloves would last for ever: I was wrong.

The stars are not wanted now: put out every one;
Pack up the moon and dismantle the sun;
Pour away the ocean and sweep up the wood.
For nothing now can ever come to any good.

A few days ago, dear читатель, when the weather had gotten sufficiently cold & windy, I sought out the welcoming warm embrace of some old friends. I have not until now felt strong enough to relay to you the following truth: Alas! Alack! Woe and despair, they were nowhere to be found! However shall I now survive the winter? Without them, I am not sure I want to....

¹Dual Fingerless gloves/mittens, of course. As a sign of respect.

Why, oh why did I not think of doing this before....

2009-04-09T10:18:00.005+10:00

On a good day, it is fair to say that Geoff's mind works a little like this. However, just as a room full of monkeys typing randomly on keyboards may one day come up with the script to Murder She Wrote, so too does Geoff occasionally un-wittingly hit upon an idea so awe-inspiringly profound as to warrant a partition of human history into pre-idea and post-idea eras. In his comments to my previous post, dear reader, just such an idea was had.

Ladies and gentleman, I give you the next logical step of all of human endeavor. A post-modernist essay generator essay translated from English to Korean back to English via Babel Fish:

Expression attention reform: Neotextual paradigms of the agreement which is to work of rules of spelling.

Martin E. Brophy literature, father Catherine Abian politics of university of Illinois and father of Berkeley University of California

1. Smith and capitalist poststructural theory

" Is one part of style of ceremony art, " Says Bataille; But, Cameron [one part of style of 1 art is] according to, purely ceremony, but rather is not rubicon of ceremony. The subject becomes connection in neotextual paradigms of the agreement which includes an actuality with actuality. , The consequently, about preconstructivist dialectic theories many discourse does not know being revealed.

In compliance with Abian [2] we must select from between capitalist paradigm of neotextual paradigm and expression of agreement and we are preserved the fact that wears out. About mythopoetical paradoxes some theory exists with what kind of meaning.

Preconstructivist dialectic theories served art colonial attention person perception of record identity selling the trench the fact that wears out imply. Therefore, about neotextual paradigms of agreement, many desublimations does not know being discovered.

In compliance with the critique of Bataille capitalist poststructural theories the culture impossibility is preserved the thing, but only the actuality culture and is equal; It is not fact, the model of neotextual paradigms of Baudrillard agreements " subdialectic discourses " And therefore is one of part of truth bravery. As the theme song whole includes a sexuality was interpolated the possibility of saying that wears out was.

2. Context of the flaw which is fatal

The high position one concept with creation between destruction is distinction from Smith work. The capitalist poststructural theory catches and in case, the Smith work is the modern attention person. Consequently, neocultural paradigms of Dahmus discourses [prenarrative the subject which 3] analyses is unique is not talk, knows is.

The person examines a capitalist poststructural theory in case, the person confronts with selection: Refuses preconstructivist dialectic theories and in order to use the ethnic minority ten:00 five or the culture being used, does not know, end [mayc] ten:00 five. Prerequisite of neotextual paradigms of agreement the government implies the fact that also the importance wears out. Therefore, from pursing Amy, Smith preconstructivist dialectic theories deconstructs; From Mallrats, he negates a capitalist poststructural theory.

Derrida was promoted the use of preconstructivist dialectic theories in the attack type father. About role of the author some deconceptualisms exists but with the artist.

Bataille with duration etc. is not same narrative and in order to indicate neotextual paradigms of agreement, neonarrative uses `but. Consequently, about capitalist poststructural theory materialism, the abundance does not know being revealed.

The important subject of Smith work is difference of the society and sexuality. In compliance with Baudrillard essays was preserved the possibility of saying that wears out the actuality which is strengthening a class structure in neotextual paradigms of agreement wearing out.

Sartre in order to indicate the actuality which supports oneself duration `capitalists poststructural uses theory. Consequently, Baudrillard record identity proposes the use of neotextual paradigms of deconstruct agreements.

3. Capitalist poststructural theory and capitalist narrative

" Basically responsible to ceremony capitalism, " Says Derrida; But, according to McElwaine [basically responsible to 4 capitalisms,], purely ceremony, but rather stasis of ceremony and finally the dialectic is not. Baudrillard in order to indicate the role of the participant with the duration `capitalist individuals uses narrative. Therefore, Debord was promoted the use of capitalist poststructural theory in attack class structure.

The person examines a capitalist narrative in case, the person confronts with selection: Receives and Derridaist reading capacity boils or the prerequisite of capitalist poststructural theory is effective the thing truth intentionality degrees as to give the fact that wears out, end [mayc] ten:00 five. The Smith work hinted Tarantino Wilson [5] implies the fact that wears out. But, neotextual paradigms of Tilton agreements [the subject which 6] critiques is unique is economy of neocapitalist societies.

" Is one part of the failure of cultural actuality, " Says Baudrillard; But, Finnis [one part of the failure of 7 actualities is] according to, purely culture, but rather bravery of culture and the collapse which is continuous is not. , Sartre essays disempower arts being used the proletariat, do not know in capitalist poststructural theory and they assert. But Bataille proposes the use of neotextual paradigms of deconstruct agreements to change the society.

Gaiman analyzes a capitalist poststructural theory from Stardust; But, he repeats a capitalist narrative from Sandman. Important subject of Gaiman works, actually, discourse, but is not postdiscourse with what kind of meaning.

Lyotard in order to indicate duration `capitalist poststructural paradigms uses theory, some will reveal the style of main text record identity. Consequently, paradigm of capitalist narrative and therefore the collapse which is depicted from Gaiman Stardust also is clear from the black orchid.

Capitalist poststructural theory 1 of long [8] critique the subject which is to Debord because being it, is not situationism but presituationism. Derrida in order to indicate the role of the artist with poet duration `postcultural main texts uses theory with what kind of meaning.

Neotextual paradigms of agreement catch and in case, Madonna works are the modern attention person. Therefore, the important subject of Madonna works between the society and language is point of sameness.

The subject as the whole includes a culture becomes connection. But, Bataille was promoted the use of neotextual paradigms of agreement in the defiant type father.
_____________________________________________________________________

1. Cameron M.U. D [syen]. (1983) neotextual paradigms of agreement and capitalist poststructural theory. Yale University pressure

2. Abian, M. (1971) circular sky: Capitalist poststructural theories and neotextual paradigms of agreement. University 3 of every matter tendency [chu] pressure. Dahmus W.M.U. D [syen]. (1980) neotextual paradigms of agreement and capitalist poststructural theory. Harvard University pressure

4. McElwaine, Z.S. (1999) Subtextual Dematerialisms: Neotextual paradigms of the agreement which is to work of separation. Schlangekraft

5. Wilson N.D [syen]. (1986) agrees, capitalist libertarianism and libertarianism neotextual paradigms. Loompanics

6. H.Y.L of Tilton collapses. (1973) narrative: Capitalist poststructural theories and neotextual paradigms of agreement. Cambridge University Press

7. Finnis W.D. D [syen]. (1988) neotextual paradigms of the agreement which is to Gaiman works. Loompanics

8. long and V. (1990) pebble ocean: The capitalist poststructural theory which is to Madonna works. O' Reilly & Colleague

An ode to Salient

2009-04-07T16:20:00.005+10:00

If the loyal reader of my blog¹ had been wondering about my tardy posting record of late, they would be well advised to read on².

I once, you see, had a high opinion of both all opinions of mine other than the one I am currently expressing⁷, and of my rapier-like wit, my subtle but deeply incisive insight into the tragedy of the human condition, my bard-esque mastery of the English language and a certain red pair of underwear I own that no-one else on Earth can muster up the courage to call anything other than 'hideous'. In all of these talents, dear reader, I have discovered myself bested. Were it by a single, special individual I could have lived with my resulting sense of disappointment. Were it even by two individuals I likewise would have evaded the depths of depression into which I sank (provided, of course, these individuals were famous wits, poets, philosophers or possibly taxi drivers⁸). As it turns out, however, I find myself a distant second to a vast number of individuals drawn from a cadre of intellectuals who see fit to rub my nose in their superiority on a regular basis. I am referring, of course, to the letter writers to the otherwise pedestrian student magazine of Victoria University: Salient. But why would I waste more of my readership's precious time with my own inferior scribbles when I could instead elevate my blog to true greatness through the humble repetition of their literary and philosophical greatness? It is to this noble end that I now turn. The reader should note that the greatness they are about to witness is drawn but from the single latest issue of the publication.

Dear N-N-C-lient,

Big ups to the S.M.B!

Chur!

..... Hammer ......

________________________________

dear salient

i wasted an hour doing the damn crptography by yes i am really a campus coach it was such an arrogant way to write a letter but as i thought i was intellectual superior i completed it yes cc i did

your poem needs some work so here i decided to write you a lil story

she walked in the door eyes so sweet staring down as if afraid to meet I looked a second too long and in that second our eyes met and she blushed as her eyes followed mine i was confused what should i do? what could i do. this drove me to do the one thing i never thought id do ..... smile the cheesyiest smile you'd ever c and hope no expect one in return the anticipation was killing me as at first there was the confused look quickly turning into a rushed smile as she triped lucky that i was there to catch her as she stared straight at ny eyes again as if trying to analyse who i was? what type of person i was and just then i smelt the most esquisite smell i ever smelt it paralyzed me from head to toe i could only do one thing in that moment ..... to be continued⁹

from forever and ever hun xoxo.... miss ya long time!!!!

________________________________

Dear INFO 101 tutor,

Sorry I'm 15 minutes late. I got hit by a car.

So give me my attendance bastard!

Yours,

The sly and sneaky fox.

________________________________

Hey! Hey Salient!

Nice rack. Way-hey!

Michael "I-Like-Girls" Hempletine

________________________________

Dear So-it-was-okay-lient,

Today I waited for two buses for agest, then two came at once. But one of them was full, so it was okay¹⁰.

onelineletters

________________________________

Dear Salient,

It's been a while.

But did you see me in Craccum?

I'm so famous.

Love wellybabe87

That sound you are currently hearing, dear reader, is the contented silence of an entire nation. Sleep soundly, New Zealand. The hands of your future leaders are firm, just, wise and true.

¹Purposeful singular. You know who you are, and may cease hitting 'refresh'.

²As, indeed, would anyone who values a gripping read constructed by a true master of the English language³

³But who is also first and fore-most one of those rare connoisseurs of the bitter taste of disappointment⁴.

⁴.............. and don't kid yourself, buddy, they're out there⁵.

⁵..... I wonder..... would a foot-note to a foot-note to a foot-note to a foot-note to a foot-note be going too far do you think⁶?

⁶Not that that would have been one, of course. This one is, though. The reader is left to infer for themselves the degree to which the author really values their opinion....

⁷Yeah, I've always been a little luke-warm on that one. I suppose if I had to score it out of 10 (on an opinion-ometer, if you will) I'd give it about a 5.673. Incidentally, are all of these foot-notes giving you a head-ache yet? I'd hate to think I was going to all this trouble and you weren't getting a head-ache....

⁸Note the way I put that digression into a set of brackets rather than a foot-note? Yeah, I relented on my desire to wreak destruction on your head. Oh, wait.... bugger. Sorry.

⁹Nooooooooo! And I thought Dostoevsky finished chapters with cliff-hangers! Why must this tortured genius leave me in such gooey anticipation for the next installment? Why must life be so cruel? Never since Shakespeare have we witnessed a genius more deserving of the license he takes in breaking all rules of spelling, grammar and punctuation!

¹⁰I recall, with shame, my own clumsy attempt at conveying such an epiphanous tale....

A friendly exchange takes the inevitable turn...

2009-03-26T09:45:00.005+10:00

WOE!! My genial exchange with my fine Greek protege has, I am sorry to report, taken a turn towards the seedy. I just received this:

Thank you a lot my friend for your advices. Charm in you now I will think better my each movement in the poker. However exajtj'as the world economic crisis I do not have enough money in order to buy chips from somebody. You I ask one last charm and it believed with apogoi'teftw if him you do not satisfy after you gave enough time for me. It could me you give few from your money in order to I can make a good beginning?

The ingrate! That cretinous cur!

Ah Babel Fish......

2009-03-24T10:41:00.004+10:00

Hello. My name is Andrew Fitzgerald, and I play too much Facebook (well, Zynga) Poker¹. At the time of writing this I have around $2.5 billion in chips. There are many curious things one could write about the Facebook poker economy. The fact that people actually sell these chips potentially, it has been pointed out to me, has implications for 'real' inflation, for instance. One thing I really like, however, is the mirror it holds up to society's sexual politics. See that hot girl who just sat down at the table²? In a few moments she will be inundated with drinks, flowers, 'poker-buddy' requests and possibly (if she's lucky) a few gracious offers of a good boning. Conversely ... you see that ugly-as-fuck but terribly (virtually) rich guy that just sat at the table? Yeah, in a few moments he'll be getting much the same treatment from a bevy of virtual gold-diggers. Sadly, however, much of this stops at the truly big tables where such vixens cannot even afford to sit. All I get nowadays are hackers trying to phish for my account password, and constant friend requests from people begging for chips. WOE! It makes, then, for quite a refreshing change when one receives correspondence from someone truly interested in the game, as I did today:

I am worshipper of game poker and I would want you to ask that you accomplished to gather as a lot of money in this game. For example who at your opinion is the secret of your success. Your advices with will be precious, for this reason you will request with answers.
Have one splendid day!!

Thank-you, random babel fish user. This friend request I think I shall accept.

¹Hi Andrew.....

²Well, O.K. .... the person whose profile picture is a hot girl. Christ knows if it's even a she, let alone whether or not the picture corresponds in any way with the person in question.

For Ben

2008-12-07T14:34:00.004+10:00

Most of this post will not, in fact, be for Ben exclusively (although perhaps I'm crediting myself with a little too much forward planning, here), but it's as good a title as any¹ and I open with a poker video which will probably be appreciated by no-one else:

This is, apparently, the largest pot in (professional) high stakes poker history, and it's the kind of hand you just live in dread of. You can't fault either player, the poker gods merely arranged the cards such that, barring any excessive stupidity on the part of either player Gus was always just going to double up against Daniel. Paradoxically, if Daniel had played a little more stupidly pre-flop he might have won ... although, of course, if Gus had played more stupidly he might have won less. This is precisely like the draw from Casino Royale, where Bond's poker brilliance consisted of being extraordinarily lucky and not playing like a dufus-brain.

This brings us to the topic of A Quantum of Solace. Why? It just does. That shittily named² sequel (and, a first for Bond, this really is a sequel) to Casino Royale. We were told, by no lesser personage than Andrew Bolt that they had killed the Bond franchise with this movie. This, of course, prompts one to question whether or not Bolt actually contends there have been no bad Bond movies before now. One must also point out that if On Her Majesty's Secret Service failed to do this, all indications are that the Bond franchise will be the only edifice of human civilisation likely to survive a nuclear holocaust, and that Bolt should go fuck himself with the nearest available high-friction object. Apart from that, the movie isn't actually bad at all. It's obviously influenced by the Bourne movies, and he grunts and exerts himself a whole lot more than he used to. Sure, we could do with a little more of the stylish, quiet lethality of previous Bonds but the tone is much the same as Casino Royale and I think that a good thing. His only gadget is a really cool phone.

You should also see In Bruges. A movie about hit-men in which you actually like all three killers involved (in a 'I'd have a beer with that guy' kind of way, no less) without actually glossing over the fact that they all do rather evil things. It's full of nice, slightly surreal happenings. Probably the one thing I liked the most about it, though, was the fact that they did this kind of obvious (if you look out for this kind of thing ... which I do) foreshadowing of future events near the beginning.... but when they get to these future events (probably the best scenes in the movie), they end up not actually occurring as foreshadowed. Things such as this , well, they just make my life worthwhile. Rather like ducks, long walks on the beach and ponies.

While on such a topic, I'd like us all to take a quiet moment of appreciation for the first 10 minutes of The Departed. Firstly because it's just as great example of exposition and drawing you into the movie as you're ever going to see (think how much un-rushed information you digest). But also, because I just realised how much more poignant and cool Jack Nicholson's speech becomes in light of the recent US presidential election. Srsly.

P.S. I will be in Brisbane from Dec 11 - Jan 1.

¹Assuming, of course, said title does not include such words as 'midget' and 'sodomy'.

²Though not nearly so shittily named as Body of Lies - a passable movie whose title and brief plot synopsis gives the impression that it's the anti-Iraq/Terror war propaganda movie that it just isn't.

I wouldn't want to call the Saudis sexually repressed or nothin', but...

2008-11-11T10:50:00.007+10:00

... apparently, that was an interpretation some chose to scurrilously derive from a previous post of mine¹. I can see, in hind-sight, how this conclusion could have been drawn. It is, of course, possible that I am merely making a desperate attempt at back-pedalling having heard news which proves this position wrong. Actually ...... yes, dear reader, I am sorry to report that this is precisely what I am doing. You see, it turns out that the Saudis have seen fit to hold a beauty contest. Upon hearing this news I was gleefully expecting that all contestants would be wearing, like, burkas or something which would have allowed me once again to poke fun at those wacky Saudis. In actual fact, it turns out that the contestants were all so immodestly dressed even by western standards that I am finding myself forced to order a large serving of my own hat for dinner this evening. Anyways, without further ado, I give you the winner:

Oh, yeah. Work it, baby, work it....

¹And I don't want to sound bitter or nothin', but I thought this was one of my better posts. I enjoyed writing it, giggling all the while like a giddy schoolgirl in the process of delivering comic gold to the ungrateful masses of arse-cunts, only to receive, like, 4 comments, three of them mine .... and furthermore²...

²Look, I'm sorry. It's my problem .... I'll deal with it.

First years say the darndest things.

2008-10-25T08:43:00.006+10:00

I have just finished marking 1/4 of the questions of a first year exam. But before I begin on what little meat there is in this story¹, perhaps a little explanation is in order about the paper² in question. It is a 'discrete mathematics and linear algebra' course. There are two such courses (covering exactly the same material) running simultaneously. One takes a year, and the other one half a year. The half year version begins half way into the full year version. The reader is perhaps under some misapprehension that the latter course, covering the same material in half the time, is full of the really bright and/or hard-working people. This is, sadly, not the case. In fact it is full of individuals who originally enrolled in the previous course who then took a long hard look at their assessment results and, looking down the barrel of an epic fail, decided to drop out of the full year version and enrol in the half year version instead. The reader is perhaps also under the misapprehension that they tend to put more effort into their second attempt.

Anyways, I want to talk to you about question 3 a): Write down the definition of a rational number. Most people answered this incorrectly, and here are some of the responses I received:

Any number that is not a fraction.
Any number which can be expressed as p/q where p,q ∈ ℝ and p ≤ q. ³
A number that exists rationally.
Any number that is not irrational.
A number that makes scence(sic).
Any number that doesn't believe in fairy tales⁴.
Definition of a rational number. There is a chap in class who I always thought was an ace but he has written less than I. I guess I am not the only person who was either stumped by this course or who didn't work on it hard enough & is now compelled to write Ramayamas in the answer sheet. Yay! 15 minutes to go. Actually 20 mins but I think I am going to make a run for it. Have no clue what I am writing and I think am simply allowing all thoughts to spill out onto paper. Possibly my constant scribbling is leading the guy next to me to get very worried as he isn't writing anything either. I wish I could go home for a bit. Really wish I could go home if only it wasn't 18 hours away.

¹Which may be safely characterised as being to world literature what a ham bone stew is to world cuisine. P.S. Fuck you, yes, this is a footnote. Despite your endless pay-outs on this front, I still like the fucking things.

²In New Zealand Universities 'courses' are called 'papers'. This caused some confusion for me when in casual conversation a great number of people started casually talking about papers they did in first year. I thought I was surrounded by geniuses. P.S. Yes, this is another footnote. Go to hell.

³I had to at least acknowledge internal consistency here. When asked to prove that √3 was irrational they said: √3 = 3/√3 and, since 3 > √3, √3 is irrational. The correct answers were kind of cute, too, actually (& not the way I've ever seen this answered). They reasoned as follows: Let p,q ∈ ℤ. Then the prime factorization of both p² and q² contain an even number of terms. Thus p²≠ 3q ² and so √3 ≠ p/q.
⁴This guy got marks.

In praise of the term "Douche Nozzle"

2008-10-14T12:52:00.002+10:00

Why, oh why can't more political advertising look like this?

A brief message for Anita

2008-10-14T07:41:00.003+10:00

DO YOUR TAXES!!!!!

The end is nigh? Don't be silly.

2008-10-12T15:18:00.006+10:00

There's an election a-comin' up in New Zealand which, I have to confess, I have neither been following nor thought about all that much. This is, as my office-mate points out to me, rather silly in that it is probably going to have more of a direct effect upon my life than that of the upcoming U.S. election which I have been following, and which scares me a great deal. Or at least, it used to dear reader. And, strangely enough, it was Andrew Bolt who made me see the light on this one.

You see, up until now, my sympathies very much lay with Sam Harris' appraisal of the situation. I found, amongst other things, the thought that a half-witted pentecostal who looks rapturously forward to the end of days is reasonably likely to, in a few short years, possess nuclear launch codes to be a little disquieting. But Bolt has forced me to re-think my opinions on Sarah Palin. Yesm. Allow me to illustrate. Take, for instance, the following (and I beg some indulgence here) video:

Now, if you're like me, you probably thought that Kellie Pickler was pretty stupid based on this video. Be honest, now, you did. Well then, Mr Clever-Dick, feast your eyes upon this one.

Pretty confronting, right? Clearly, Kellie Pickler isn't stupid at all.

Feel better now? I know I do......

I'm not one for hyperbole........

2008-10-06T11:08:00.006+10:00

...... ~~but~~¹ and this .... is like Nazi Germany. First, dear reader, they moved my office 10 metres down the hall for no good reason at all - and you did nothing, for it was not your office. Then they took away our coffee beans for Christ's sake²!!! - and you did nothing, for you did not drink our coffee. I'm not sure exactly what they're going to do next .... but I'm sure we can all agree that the writing is on the wall and that my entire readership is .... well, don't be expecting me to stick up for your rights when things turn really nasty, O.K.? Basically, you've let me down. I am currently drinking the very last cup of free, real coffee as supplied by the school of mathematics, statistics and computer science to graduate students on up. It is a sombre moment marking the, I think we can all agree, first step down that slippery slope towards nuclear Armageddon. It's been nice knowing you all......

But moving along ..... this does seem like a good place to ask the question: What makes people vote republican? I do not pose this question in a topical "Dear god how could anyone want to risk giving Sarah Palin the nuclear codes?" kind of way - but in the more general sense as posed by the author at said link. See also an online book here. On the one hand, well, surely what makes people vote the way they do is as valid an area of social research as any other.... and, well, I tend to agree about the existence of people of a certain mindset to actively vote for parties who are demonstrably acting in manners contrary to said voter's interests and that there are substantial numbers of conservative voters that fall into this category. On the other hand, though ...... I get an uncomfortable feeling that someone approached a grants committee and said something like "basically, my research will be on how people who vote Tory suck more balls than Annabelle Chong - slip me some dough, brother". How would Today Tonight deal with this, I wonder? How do I feel about the fact that I just asked that question? It's a thorny one.

DISCUSS!

¹Happy, Dave?

²Bean-counters are stealing our beans, if you will. My office mate and I have thoroughly scoped out the administration building to find out where they hide theirs (it being our solemn duty to return the favour) ... but thus far to no avail.

In which our ingenious amphibian adopts a cunning disguise, and is yet robbed of 3rd place by having fewer points than 3 other teams.

2008-09-17T07:11:00.004+10:00

In a tribute to Dave's tribute to Joseph Heller, and in no way because the team had grown sick of the title Ethel the Frog, our ingenious amphibian adopted the name The dead man in Yossarian's tent last night as a cunning ruse by which to sneak up unawares upon our arch-nemeses (who had yet to be identified) and open this blog post with an inordinately long sentence (which I feel I have achieved).

Within a few moments of declaring this alias, the team a few places down from us on the big excel spreadsheet display had changed their name to Major Major Major Major, thus announcing to all and sundry that it was on, dear reader, like Donkey Kong. Also on our hit-list was a team calling itself Brian Slept with a China Man, ¹who clearly felt the need to resort to such underhand tactics as bringing a team of 15 people in order to beat us. Arse-cunts. Another name worthy of note, being the Fudge Packers. Fudge Packer, dear reader, turns out to be New Zealand slang for gay. And they call Australians crass and un-couth .... to which we respond by joking that they like to shag sheep, thereby demonstrating their point.

By the end of the night, dear reader, you will be pleased to learn that we had crushed both the Fudge Packers and, more importantly, Major Major Major Major underfoot. Brian on the other hand, no doubt due to having the answers supplied to him by that China man in return for his fudge packing services, went on to win the night on 78/100. Two other teams tied on 72, and we got 68.

Questions we failed to suck at.

What U2 song was dedicated to Billie Holliday? But for my somehow managing to mix Billie Holliday up with Buddy Holly, we would have gotten this a whole lot sooner.....
The flag of Ethiopia consists of of what three colours in vertical bands? Thanks go to Helena for inducing me to look at that flags web-site.
Who spreads herself over a piano in The Fabulous Baker Boys?
What European team won the 1982 World Cup(the real one)? I just felt the need here to point out that there are sports questions I actually know the answer to.

Questions we managed to suck at.

Who played the title Role in the 1980s Cop show T.J. Hooker?
What land carnivore is said to be able to smell humans from 20 miles away?
What is the only animal born with horns?
What is the highest altitude capital in Europe? A useful one to know, since it's not the one you'd (probably) suspect. Also, my office-mate is currently disputing the answer, and apparently has some grounds to do so....

¹A claim over which some doubt was expressed.

Concerning Ethel the Frog's worthy ascention to the top of the trivia pack.

2008-09-10T08:28:00.004+10:00

By which, of course, I mean the top of the Bell curve. With a team of three, we came 7/15. A great many things worthy of note occurred at trivia last night, let me tell you dear reader. Unfortunately, it is my melancholy duty to inform you that as far as I could tell they all happened to other teams.

To what should I direct your attention, I wonder? The manner in which the noble Sancho managed to confuse a stilson wrench with a monkey wrench in round one? This was, I admit, high drama indeed .... but up to the usual standards required of a trivia post concerning our most excellent of frogs? I think not.

Without further ado, then, let me just relate that the night's themes were as follows:

Tools
Military matters
Western Movies
The written word¹.
History²
Science and Nature
Pot luck
Grammy winners³.

And while we're on the topic of lists, let us see what manner of questions I can recall.

Questions such that, by virtue of supplying a correct answer, our noble frog earned at least 1 point.

What U.S. military unit goes by the motto "semper fidelius"? My thanks to the movie Rushmore, for the fact that the words 'semper fi, soldier, semper fi' (spoken in a Scottish accent, which I want you to imagine I'm imitating it right now, 'cause I am) were used in Max's play.
The polaris missile is used by which branch of the military? I knew this from an episode of "Yes Minister".
What battle tank was named after some general from the Vietnam war? Should I be ashamed of knowing the name of a likely, and it turns out correct, candidate?
Spell "brochure". Yeah, there's quite a range in question difficulty....
What is the difference between the words "flammable" and "inflammable"? Look, so most of the interesting questions I remember we fucked up....
2007 best pop performance by a group 'My Humps'? Mentioned as an excuse to link to this.

Questions of such unparalleled dastardly cunning and insurmountable difficulty that our ingenious amphibian was incapable of supplying a correct answer, and was thus forced to go pointless.

How many branches of the U.S. Military are there? There's an obvious line of reasoning related to a famous building which occurs to you only when you know the correct answer.
What two actors starred in the 'trinity' western movies? For fuck's sake....
Who created the comic book character Dick Tracy?
The first working model of which device was invented in 1960 by Thomas Maimam?
Citius Altius Fortius is the motto of which organisation? Guessing roughly what he last two words meant, and reasoning that 'citius' was related to 'city' in some way ... we guessed the Freemasons. I wish we were right..... although, just quietly I think we were close (the organisation in question is fooling nobody, *touch nose*).

¹This category should not, I assure you, be confused with a literature round.

²For which a question about The Monkees apparently qualified.

³Where a "when unsure, just write 'Keith Urban'" policy earned us a point.

Covers

2008-09-03T14:30:00.005+10:00

A recent conversation I was involved in turned its attention to cover versions of songs. Specifically, cover versions which are better than the original. This category turned out, unsurprisingly, to be very small. We could all agree, for instance, that Gary Jules' version of Mad World is better than the original by Tears for Fears. Yes, all agreed, Eminem's Ice Ice Baby is indeed superior to the original by Vanilla Ice¹. Things got a little more strained over whether or not Hendrix's version of All Along the Watchtower beats Dylan's (it does, damn you)..... but where things always get a little hairy (for me) is when we get onto Leonard Cohen's Hallelujah. It's not that I think the original is, well, a good arrangement per se (dear god that awful eighties backing) .... it's just that Jeff Buckley gives me the shits. In point of fact, I would submit that no-one has yet covered this song properly². It's a great song. It sounds to me a little like a drunk finding god in a pool of his own vomit (in a good way, though .... honest).... but when I hear Buckley doing it, well, I find myself saying (unfortunately, and as far as social decorum is concerned) "oh for fucks sake why don't you just shoot yourself already". Matters inevitably take a hairy turn from this point onwards. It was lucky, then, that I was able to produce the following video. However we may differ as human beings, I offer, we can all agree that Avril Lavigne must never, ever be allowed to sing³ Coldplay's The Scientist ever again.

Ladies and gentlemen, live and off-key I give you perhaps the greatest piece of butchery ever performed by a diminutive Canadian pop singer on the work of a contemporary British band:

¹Of course, this is true in a rather trivial sense. It really doesn't matter how good or bad you think Eminem's version is .... what's good about it is the simple knowledge that Eminem is covering Vanilla ice. If just knowing that such a thing exists in the world isn't enough to make you smile, well, I guess you're one of those people who didn't cry when Bambi's mother died.

²Which actually adds to its charm. If the version you end up hearing never quite matches up to the version in your head, well I mean, .... listen to the lyrics. This is .... appropriate.

³It was very, very tempting to stop typing on that word.....

Concerning the manner in which our most excellent frog acquired a dvd player, in addition to other events worth relating.

2008-08-27T08:03:00.004+10:00

Was having coffee in the maths/comp-sci common room yesterday. Almost as though that alone wasn't enough to pique the interest of the discerning reader¹, I happened to overhear a conversation in which the man in the office next to me (who is uncannily like Peter Adams) was attempting to rid himself of a TV set. I volunteered my services. Is this really worth bearing in mind when I relate my brief trivia tale? Perhaps not.

Anyways, Ethel the Frog consisted of a team of but two last night. Myself and another who, for the purposes of our tale, we shall refer to only as Sancho. Actually, we won't be referring to them again at all .... but let's think of them as Sancho, shall we? I know I do.

The questions were substantially harder this week, even without a sports round, and we finished 6th of 11 on 61 /100. Do I remember enough questions for it to be worthwhile to submit a trivia post? Well, no. I did, however, win a draw for a dvd player. Ha ha HA!!!!! It appears that New Zealand, after first making attempts to reject me as a dangerous foreign body² was now signaling its acceptance by showering me with electrical appliances. So if you're reading this NZ, I've always rather wanted a death-ray and a small army of robot monkeys. Kthnx.

Questions I remember......

Notable gets I can remember:

Which Canadian car company manufactured the DMC-12? Yeah, I didn't think there were Canadian car companies either.....
What country owns the world's largest merchant fleet? Meh.
What land mammal can go for longer without water than the camel?
What fruit do you place in a buck-eye martini?
In poker, what is a hand consisting of both black aces and a pair of eights known as? It's a colloquial title, not the hand rank. I thought, I guess for obvious reasons, that this was a fairly easy question ...... but the room seemed to disagree with me.

Fuck-ups I remember:

What instrument is also known as the 'Cor Anglaise'? This was pretty funny. I don't want you to think I'm stupid for mis-translating the term ..... I inferred the correct translation just fine, thank you very much. I just thought it was a question with an ironic answer so I wrote down 'French Horn' instead.
Name the Rolling Stone who drowned. Sancho should have known this one. Oh, hey, I lied.
The Westinghouse company was founded to manufacture what device that drastically improved rail safety?

¹And seriously ..... it's about time that fucker started reading this blog.

²I was stung by unknown insects three times in the first two weeks of being here. I came from fucking Queensland, too.... I mean, I had thought to be leaving things that wanted to sting and bite me behind.

A Dog and a Duck perform the fish slapping dance..... the dog forgets his lines.

2008-08-27T07:58:00.002+10:00

Ahem:

Stupid lyrics

2008-08-25T09:38:00.004+10:00

Some people reading this entry of Chris' blog saw a funny post. I saw a challenge along the same lines as such previous titanic battles as The saddest man on the internet and Which country has the worst national anthem.

Now, I lost both of the above contests. The first because I couldn't find the stomach to go on. The second because Chris managed to bag Australia's right from the outset. Will I win this one? Well, probably not ...... but I'd like to at least add the following two honourable mentions. Ahem.

Sex in the Kitchen by R. Kelly. I like this live performance. It speaks to me. What I like most about it is the point when he says "I'm just makin' some shit up .... we're gon' do a remix" bit. This brought me to the dread realisation that he wasn't just making shit up before that. That shit was written down. I have to credit him with some sophistication, though, because frankly the stuff that followed his 'you're going to have to read between the lines' request ... well, it went completely over my head.
Drop kick me Jesus through the goal posts of life ..... about which there can be nothing to add.

In which Fitz has a rant on a topic about which he doesn't really care all that much.

2008-08-20T14:06:00.006+10:00

Are there, dear reader, too many sports and events at the Olympics? I say yes.

I should probably hasten to add that I'm not saying 'yes' for the trivial reasons Chris or Sam would, either. I have trivial reasons of my own.

Michael Phelps, we are told, is the greatest Olympian of all time based solely upon his medal count, for instance, which is just plain stupid. Could, pray tell, a javelin thrower have possibly managed to get 8 gold medals based upon javelin throwing prowess alone I ask? Of course not. Michael Phelps, on the other hand, gets to enter 8 variations on much the same event and he's just instant Captain Fancy-pants. Is it coincidence that the previous record of 7 medals was also held by a swimmer? Are the Illuminati involved? It's not even as though swimming is all that interesting to watch anyways.

I propose, in future, that winning a swimming event be only worth 1/8 of a medal with each such winner having to compete in some manner of free-for all involving crocodiles and rotating blades. The first to manage to construct a complete gold medal gets to keep it. Then that sucker would be worth something.

Team sports, also, are for the most part kind of dodgey. Synchronized swimming? Bizarre floor routines involving a ribbon, ball and a bola hat filled with plum wine in which a single apple floats? Scrap them, I say. Walking shall stay, but only if snipers are placed at random positions around the track. Let's see the bastards maintain their silly "walk-not-run" discipline then, shall we?

In which our ingenius amphibian is confronted with an obnoxious American.

2008-08-20T08:54:00.009+10:00

Trivia posts from me shall henceforth be titled, I have decided, as though they are chapters of Don Quixote. Various other difficulties shall, I feel, present themselves - not least of which being that you don't get to keep your answer sheets where I go (questioning and marking occur simultaneously .... efficient!). This means I have a hard time remembering questions. Which rather defeats the purpose of trivia posts.

Anyways, our evening begins somewhat inauspiciously with el capitano of team Ethel the Frog reserving for his fearless charges the one remaining table in view of the stage - which, as chance would have it, was the table immediately in front of the stage. This was, it turns out, very very bad. Before very long our hero was approached by a random American girl who, declaring team-less-ness, craved that most sought-after of boons: membership in our elite froggy cadre. To my lasting regret, I answered this request with the following fateful words: "yeah, sure, why not?". In a few further moments, the rest of the team arrived.

Said American, whose name shall remain anonymous lest a future news story of disappearance in mysterious circumstances be linked back to me, turned out to be pretty damn annoying when sober. When drunk .... well we settled into the following routine: Team Frog gets the points, Team Frog's drunken American mascot proclaims to all in the room how much more awesomely her team was doing as compared with everyone else's. The top 3 teams receive bar tabs. Prior to the third round we were comfortably in 3rd place. It began to dawn on us that winning a bar tab, however, meant sharing a bar tab.... which would be a badness of truly bad proportions¹. It was not without relief, then, that we learned that the last round involved matching television game shows with their hosts. We came a respectable 4th on 82/100.

Notable Gets that I remember getting:

In what sport are the dimensions of the pitch precisely those of the town square of the Iranian city in which it was originally played? Thank you, educated guess. We got 6/10 on a friggin' sport and leisure round. Yay team Frog.
What chemical element is archaically referred to as Brimstone? Notable because I hads to fight tooth and nail for this one.... otherwise not hard, I think/thought.
The dried leaves of which plant are used to dye leather? Probably there were other distinguishing features given in the question, there ... I just don't remember 'em.

Notable fuck-ups I remember fucking up:

Something about an Austrian formula-1 driver involved in a crash in 19 friggin 77. Sorry.
After a cover version of Roy Orbison's "Crying", who was dubbed the voice of the century by the big O? Not that we would have gotten it right otherwise, but our American ring-in somehow convinced us to write 'Steve Tyler' from Aerosmith. She was very convincing. Also very wrong. It was a little like sharing a table with Hazzy-K only not as funny.
Who made their name as the lead singer of a group called 'The Miracles' in the 1960s?

Probably there are better ones. I just don't remember 'em.

P.S. a big hello back to Anita, Sam, Geoff and Adriana. I were asleep. Sorry.

P.P.S. I'm a little curious to know the names of both individuals who voted for Full Metal Jacket.

P.P.P.S. Does having both P.S. s and footnotes seem odd to anyone else? Only it does to me.

¹My little tribute to Dave.......

Marking

2008-08-15T13:16:00.009+10:00

To all those who think they know marking pain I would ask the following: Have you ever marked a first year linear algebra exam where they weren't allowed a calculator¹? If not, well let me just say that it's still full of the usual "hmm... I have no idea how to do this question, but if I waste the marker's time by asking them to painstakingly verify that this page of formal-looking statements is, in fact, gibberish .... well, this can only bode well for me"-type answers. In addition, you get people who write statements such as : "no calulator! ....1/52 ≈ 1/50, 1/50 ⋅ 102 = 2.04 ... so I'm going to write 1/52 ⋅ 102 as 2.04". Anyways, if ever you find yourself in such a situation I would advise you to do as I have. Print out a small pile of this comic, mark the offending answers down as harshly as your mood takes you, then staple a copy of said comic to their answer sheet.

¹Strictly this isn't true. They weren't allowed a graphics calculator, since they were being tested on (amongst other things) Gauss-Jordan elimination. Unfortunately, almost half the class in the exam I was supervising interpreted "not allowed a graphics calculator" to mean "allowed a graphics calculator", and so had to do the exam with no calculator at all. The questions weren't really such that you really needed one .... but there seems to have been an unfortunate correlation between those who owned only a graphics calculator and those who were scared of non-decimal fractions.

"This is Al-Harbi to all units. The people at number 47 Shara Jareer appear to be having a good time".....

2008-08-12T13:09:00.017+10:00

........ in a nearby Riyadh street, the camera zooms in on an Arabic version of the Übermensch so rapidly that when it gets there time appears to stand still. Our hero is idly tossing around a toothpick in his mustachio-ed mouth sitting on a chiseled-featured, designer-stubbled face when the call goes out. He tosses aside his generic piece of Saudi take-away type food¹ and intones in a deep, purposeful manner: "Not on my watch......"

The opening credits play.

The next day we find ourselves looking in on a meeting with all the top brass (the Council of Senior Islamic Scholars), which is already in progress when we get there.

Learned Scholar 1: I ..... hear ..... that pretending to be gay .... can be quite effective.

An un-easy murmuring flows through the room....

Learned Scholar 2 (shrugging): Perhaps .... but actually being gay is already illegal, so...

The murmuring is replaced by a mixture of "ah"s and nods of agreement. There is now a long protracted silence broken only by the occasional cough and the sound accompanying the scratching of a learned chin. Eventually, our attention is drawn to a weaselly-looking scholar in one corner of the room who stares into the table as he speaks.

Weaselly Scholar 3: Well..... A .... friend of mine ..... informs me that walking a dog is how the "hip cats" do it....

A thoughtful silence overtakes the room.

The next shot is of a news headline.

......................................................................

Anyways ........ switching the channel, we catch an exciting arrest in an episode of the Saudi Arabian version of Cops:

¹Yeah .... there's only so much research I'm willing to do here......

LOL

2008-08-04T12:50:00.004+10:00

A conversation from my office:

Adam: I've just made an infinite injury argument in which requirements injure themselves.

Me: So, that would be an infinite self-injury argument, then ....... Wow. Recursion theory goes emo.

In which I conduct an experiment.

2008-08-03T10:54:00.003+10:00

Penis penis penis.

lol.

The post previously known as ""

2008-07-29T08:38:00.005+10:00

I was about to begin this post with : "You probably don't remember this, but", but then I remembered just who my readership was...... Anyways, there was once this episode of Red Dwarf where the crew of said vessel met up with alternate versions of themselves from other dimensions. The humour from said episode deriving from the fact that Rimmer's opposite number turned out to be the Übermensch. I bring this up because I seem to be living with a similar happenstance. Readers may note that in the past I have mentioned that my current supervisor looks like John Bunnett. What I didn't mention before now was that, well, he kind of acts like John Bunnett too.... only with a few crucial differences.

Let's say you're sitting in a seminar or summatt when the speaker makes a statement that seems either innocuous or goes completely over your head. It is not unknown to hear an "ahhhhh" or "cool" emanating from your left such that, with your eyes closed, could fool you into thinking you're sharing a room with Gomer. Then a question will be asked of the speaker by said individual which, at first, no-body really understands. The difference being that, after a similarly long and painful exchange it will invariably turn out that the questioner has actually spotted some fundamental flaw or implication that no-one else did, and isn't merely asking to be convinced, at the freaking end of a Galois theory course, that you can't express all roots of a quintic as radicals.

This leads me to the inescapable conclusion that my supervisor is, by some bizarre cosmic trick, the man that John Bunnett was meant to be.

It's creepy.

Judicial activism, NZ style

2008-07-26T11:20:00.005+10:00

Recently, my august colleague harbored a discussion linking judicial activism to bills of rights. Now, it seems to me that with or without a bill of rights the community will always, well, expect a certain level of judicial activism anyways.... or at least they should do. The separation of powers is, for rather obvious reasons, a damn good thing. Further, even competent and just governments cannot be expected to foresee every circumstance to which a given law may be applied - and so cannot possibly be expected to draft law, the interpretation of which will fail to be ambiguous in every possible circumstance to which it will be applied. Thus, at some point or other it will become inevitable that judges will find themselves staring down the barrel of multiple interpretations of the law to a given circumstance - one of which they must pick guided only by (we would hope) their reason and their conscience. Lastly, requiring that law-makers face a hostile judicial environment is, I rather think, a good thing for the democratic process in the long term anyway.

I would like, then, to take a quiet judicial-activism appreciation moment. I would like us to reflect that, on occasion, it can fall on the shoulders of judges to act as those that stand on the wall as our last lines of defense against a descent into barbarism. Perhaps we can all recall at this moment our favorite instance of such a moment. Much of my pinko-commo readership will, I imagine, be thinking of, say, the Mabo decision at this point. I am not. For me, there will always be the one definitive moment of an instance where, with the barbarians at gates of the courthouse a single judge stood firm and said .... "no. Here is a line that society simply must not cross. I cannot, in good conscience, allow such a pernicious blot on the name of humanity to stand." Further, I am pleased to say that this case occurred right here in my adopted home of New Zealand. Wiping away the tears, dear reader, I refer you to the details¹.

¹Make damn sure you read the readers comments. Oh, yeah, and thanks Helena.

A moment in the day in the life of Fitz

2008-07-24T07:48:00.003+10:00

"Why" I found myself asking myself "does nobody ever take me seriously?". Shaking my fists at an uncaring universe for effect I asked once more "Why????"¹.

I then took a long hard look at the hands before me. "Ah", I said. "Perchance it's because I'm the kind of person who'd wear those."

On said hands were a pair of bright red (wind-proof) mittens. And not just any mittens, either. With these mittens, you can fold the portion covering your fingers back so as to render them into a set of fingerless gloves² with large flappy attachments on the back. Flappy attachments which ... and get this ... can be folded over to make you fingerless gloves into mittens!!! Picture the scene, if you will. It's cold and windy, and I find myself stopping off for a point of business in a corner store. I fumble clumsily for some change with my bright red mittens on, then in frustration make as though to take them off. "But sir!" the good store-keep exclaims. "Quite apart from the obvious chore involved in removing then replacing such lovely mittens over such a trifle, you run the risk of accidentally leaving them behind!!". I smile and offer a rejoinder "worry not, noble store-keep, and observe!" Then, to the wonderment of all in the store I simply fold the top mitten-portion back to reveal my naked ever-nimble fingers. I conclude my business and carry on outside, where an icy wind bites at my poor bare fingers - but do I care? No sir! with a simple flick of the flap, so to speak, my fingers return to toasty goodness.

An unfortunate side-effect, however, is that I look like a dork.

¹At this point the universe appeared to slow down so that, to my ears, the above exclamation sounded a little more like Whuuaaaayyyyy..........

²The kind you see on the hands of sad old drunks clutching a half-consumed bottle of cheap whisky in one hand with which to drown the reminiscences of broken dreams whilst singing, oh I don't know, Brother, can you spare a dime? and warming said hands over a fire in a 44-gallon drum.

A real call to arms.....

2008-07-20T11:14:00.006+10:00

Up until this very morning I had thought that my favourite Wikipedia article was the entry on the neenish tart, which wins this accolade for its public interest, accuracy and the obvious wealth of research that went into it (click on the one cited reference ... it's awesome).

After reading the latest xkcd, however, I have another one. That no-one on the talk page appears to notice the obvious, if unintended, satirical humour in the fact that the pre-amble has tags stating that "This article may require cleanup to meet Wikipedia's quality standards" and that "All or part of this article may be confusing or unclear" is itself, I think, note-worthy (although, I really must tip my virtual hat at whoever left the "It seems to me that the added publicity won't hurt this article -- in fact, nearly any edit to it will have no choice but to improve it. For example, the entire "Logocentrism" section could be replaced by "PENIS PENIS PENIS LOL" and it would greatly improve the overall clarity." comment)

What really brings a sense of sorrow to my heart as regards this article, however, is how disappointing the history section is. I was rather hoping that a "find: 'vandal' " type search would reveal a little more than it actually did. To be sure, there have been some noble efforts¹..... only not, I feel, nearly enough. For the most part, the 'vandalism' history appears mostly to refer to people trying to link to the xkcd comic in question, or something similar.

And then I thought to myself, well, that something can be done about this.... and, damn it, we're the people to do it. We have but to take the energy we put into our chalking war on that retarded 'we killed god: you don't care' campaign by these people and combine it with both our prior wiki-vandalism cunning and the fact that it's really, really hard for wikipedia to ban ip addresses that correspond to entire frickin' universities. What say you, dear reader? Shall we fuck this page up or what? I dream of a day when it becomes untenable for wikipedia to maintain a 'deconstruction' page consisting of anything more than a brief entry such as:

Deconstruction is a term used in contemporary literary criticism, philosophy, and the social sciences. Originally coined by Jacques Derrida, he apparently took the actual meaning of the word with him to the grave.

A single tear makes its way down my cheek as a contemplate the possibility that my blog may now become a force for good in this world.

¹Others .... not so noble, exactly, but cheers Gemma just the same. And who are 'we' to talk here, anyways (I'm talking to you, here Martin)

Ethel the Frog rides again..

2008-07-17T08:38:00.005+10:00

...or, as I like to call it, From New Zealand's heart, I stab at thee¹. It had occurred to me recently, yon reader, that I should probably be looking for a trivia competition here in sunny Wellington, what for tradition's sake and all. As it turns out, it's kind of difficult to find a pub here that doesn't have a quiz night. I opted for one in a nearby Irish pub. Irish pubs in Wellington, based on a sample size of one, can be distinguished from those in Brisbane in at least two ways:

Most of the people behind the bar were actually born in Ireland, or at least lived there long enough to develop a very convincing accent.
It is not considered sacrilegious to fail to have Guinness on tap.

I'm not at all sure how I feel about point # 2. Anyways, Trivia appears to be taken about as seriously as at Harry's..... and there were 15 teams there including my own, many of whom made up of some serious trivia freaks. All other teams were (it seemed to me) veritably chomping at the bit in their desire to bring about the complete annihilation of all that lived..... or at least as close to this as could be achieved by way of answering more trivia questions correctly than any of their opponents.

Into this grim arena stepped a single frog². Ethel the frog. Me.

Why was there only a single frog, I hear you ask дорог reader? The answer to this is two-fold. One potential team-mate felt it more important to discover that theirs was the best student band in Wellington (drawn from the poxy set of 10 bands who decided to enter the relevant competition at short notice .... not that I'm bitter or nothin'). The other had no good excuse whatsoever, and shall be duly punished with a bucket of soapy frogs and a pipe-cleaner³. In addition, there were various .... odd .... questions asked. Like "In which state of Australia is Alice Springs?" and "If Superman is Clark Kent, Who is the Phantom?". My answers to these questions commended me as a pedantic smart-arse, and they were duly marked wrong. My revenge shall be swift, cruel and probably imaginary.

To cut a long and terminally dull story short... I didn't actually come last. No sir, I came 14th. I managed to miss the entire last 'round' (there were 8), too, when the puzzle sheet in question was handed out at at a time when my entire team was in the toilet.

Notable Gets:

Managing 4/10 on my own in a fucking sport round.
Which South American country is a member of OPEC?
Hmmm... that's about it, really.

Notable fuck-ups:

Who is Cupid the son of? Notable because A) they were marking as correct only a single parent answer, and B) there are apparently 3 different accounts of Cupid's parentage, none of which I actually gave.
Who had a hit in 1974 with the song "Billy don't be a hero"? This was asked in a "Heroes and Villains" round, for fucks sake. Not happy.
Look, there were probably more, but I'm lazy.....

¹It has been pointed out to me that this is silly. I mean, "as I like to call it..."? I'm writing this, for Christ's sake. If that's what I like to call it, that's what I should have called it, hey? Actually, there is a lie involved here .... it wasn't pointed out to me, exactly, it's more that it just kind of occurred to me. I thought that "it's been pointed out to me" sounded better, though.

²And I like to think that's the first time anyone ever committed that sentence to writing, incidentally. As it happens .... google backs me up. So there.

³My punishments tend to be cruel, creative, completely dis-proportionate to the gravity of the offense ...... and just that little bit silly.

Left-leaning social engineering gone MAD!!!1

2008-07-14T08:56:00.008+10:00

Look. So, let's just get out of the way the rather reasonable premise that what two (or more) consenting adults do in the privacy of their own home is no business of you or I. This is, I feel, a principle even the Bill O'Riellys among us must pay at least lip service to..... and where Bill leads, dear reader, I follow. But .... when a group of pomo, "progressive", pinko, cafe-latte-mixed-with-chardonnay-in-a-bucket swilling, chattering class elites claim the right of certain individuals to force their lifestyle choice upon an innocent child .... well it's then that decent, hard-working ~~Americans~~ Australians such as you and I need to stand up and be counted. Especially when this lifestyle choice represents an abomination in the eyes of GOD himself².

Which brings us to the case in question, involving a homosexual couple who identify themselves only as 'Roy' and 'Silo'³. Roy and Silo made a lifestyle choice, dear reader. And fair enough, says I. I mean, if they want to condemn themselves to eternal damnation well, that's just their choice. Unfortunately, however, those social engineers on the left (represented here by one Robert Gramzay, may this fag-enabler burn in HELL!!!!) just had to step in, didn't they? They gave Roy and Silo a child to raise. Yeah, that's right buddy, a poor innocent child. It's time the silent majority stood up to be counted here, and declared that enough, dear reader, is ENOUGH!!!! According to no lesser authority than GOD himself, children should be raised by a father and a mother. Yeah, you heard me Gramzay. Give my regards to Satan when you see him.

Roy and Silo .... or possibly Squawk and Milo shamelessly
flaunting their unholy relationship in the fag-enabling
pit that is Manhattan.... Cute penguins? Or an abomination before
god himself? I'll be the judge.........

¹Let's see if this one works, hey.....

²Such as, say, the heinous decision to subsist on shellfish. And don't kid yourself, buddy, such sick individuals are out there.

³Or is it 'Squawk' and 'Milo'? I'm confused. Not happy, Scientific American.

Let the honeymoon phase begin

2008-07-07T12:21:00.007+10:00

Chris and I find ourselves trapped, it would seem (dear reader), in our own private cycle of violence. Not knowing how, exactly, to make it stop I'd just like to usher in the honeymoon phase in the traditional manner ..... with silly youtube videos.

Let us begin with a classic:

... before considering the plight of that most under-appreciated of instruments, the kazoo:

Lastly, let me just say that Chris, honey, it'll never happen again.....

Never one to let a pointless smack-down go .....

2008-07-05T11:53:00.007+10:00

I come to bury Chris' blog, not to praise it;
The crap that bloggers write lives after them,
The good is oft hard to find, though one doth spend many an hour clicking "older posts"
So let it be with myblogisagoodblog ... The noble Georff
Hath told you Chris was pompous and sarcastic:
If it were so, it was a grievous fault,
And grievously hath Chris answered it ...
Here, under leave of Georff and the rest,
(For Georff is an honourable man;
So are they all; all honourable men)
Come I to speak in myblogisagoodblog's funeral ...
It was my friend, faithful and just to me:
But Georff says Chris was pompous and sarcastic;
And Georff is an honourable man….
It hath brought many bizarre prattlings of Christopher Pearson to our attention,
Whose ramblings didst suck smart from our heads:
Did this in Chris seem pompous and sarcastic¹?
When the ukuleles played, Chris hath wept:
Sarcasm should be made of sterner stuff:
Yet Georff says he was pompous and sarcastic;
And Georff is an honourable man.
You all did see that on March 14 2008
Chris didst write a trivia report as epic poetry
Which, when bested by a cheap cock joke, didst lead to much dummy spitting: was this pomposity?²
Yet Georff says he was pompous and sarcastic;
And, sure, he is an honourable man³.
I speak not to disprove what Georff spoke,
But here I am to speak what I do know.
You all did love his blog once, not ..... completely ..... without cause:
What cause withholds you then to mourn for it?
O judgement! thou art fled to brutish beasts,
And men have lost their reason…. Bear with me;
My sincerity is on the floor there with my broken dreams of getting work done today,
And I must pause till it come back to me.

¹Well, yes, actually....

²Well, again .....

³O.K. so, I have to admit here that the effort involved in saying that so many times with a straight face .... well, I'll be sore in the morning.

I love XKCD

2008-07-03T10:58:00.006+10:00

Just a brief note to say that today's XKCD speaks the truth, and that my links have been adjusted accordingly. Also, while I'm here, might I just add that I think this entry sums the Dave's Livejournal experience up for me better than any other I've read or been involved in.

And while I'm on a random link-fest, find here a new, compelling reason for Americans to vote for Obama.

Small talk in a lift

2008-07-03T08:06:00.006+10:00

I was just in a lift with a view to getting back to my office with a cup of coffee I'd just made. The coffee room is on level 3. My office ........ is on level 4. Having absent-mindedly pressed the button I said to myself "why aren't you walking, dufus?" when, horror of horrors .... the door opened revealing a disgruntled passenger. I paused. In the few moments it took to scan my immediate vicinity for another individual who could conceivably have pressed the button the passenger in question asked me (my check confirmed no other plausible candidate - also, note that I have written this aside in brackets, and not as a footnote) "are you getting in?". Noting that my mouth was now too dry to speak, I mutely nodded and darted in keeping my eyes on the floor and hoping against hope my co-passenger would speak to me no further. It was not to be. "I'm going to level 5" he said (and there are only 5 levels), pointing toward the buttons by the door as though to politely check whether I needed a button pushed - but I could sense that tone of accusation in his voice. Like Phillip Ruddock and Anakin Skywalker before me ..... I had become the very thing I was sworn to hate.. "Me too" was all I could think to say.

Upon arrival at the 5th floor I paused at the staff directory on the wall. Initially, this was out of habit, since this allows me to dart through the swinging door accessing the rest of the floor just before it closes behind the second to last person in the lift. But as I did so, I now thought instead to wait until my silent accuser had left before just walking down the stairs. After a brief uncomfortable pause, I realised I was being watched. My lift-mate was holding the door open for me. "Are you coming?" he asked me, knowingly it seemed. "Oh. Yes." I walked calmly around the corner where I found and read one of those Maths is really useful, kids! signs they rather inexplicably put around maths buildings even on such floors as are occupied exclusively by people engaging in research ....... until I heard the tell-tale sound of a door closing that said to me that, barring another trick from my lift-using tormentor, it would now be safe to make good my exit. It was. I slunk quietly downstairs with my tail between my legs.

How was your morning?

Never enter an arse-kicking contest with a hedge-hog, Chris....

2008-07-02T07:10:00.006+10:00

There are people you pick fights with in this world, and then there are people you don't. In the first list we find bunnies, ducks and .... you, Chris. In the second list, we find weasels, ferrets, maniacal axe-wielding thugs and ..... me.

Anyway ... so it turns out that The Australian publishes pointless columns, the reading of which I find saps valuable time from my day which I might otherwise employ in reading Tolstoy or Jane Austen novels.

I mean, I ask you....

Watching them, I could see the degree to which many of us are often not really arguing with the people we’re arguing with; rather, we regress to a place where we are playing out our relationships with our parents.

...............................

The boss telling you to do something may trigger feelings of disempowerment not because his request is unreasonable but because you hear: “Son, do what I say!” Even the cleaning lady putting your socks in the wrong drawer can anger you because Mummy used to confuse your things with your older brother’s.

Perhaps I can make my umbrage a little more clear, though, if I give voice to my objections in iambic pentameter. Ahem.

Ruth Ostrow, and just quietly, she knows
says of life's ills ..... repeated childhood woes!
Forgive me maam, as I replace my rib,
if I suggest that you are trite, and glib.
I hope that this request will not annoy......
Could you, perhaps, call me a naughty boy?

I've said it before, and I'll say it again....

2008-06-30T16:00:00.003+10:00

.... Japanese people are strange. Really, really strange. Often in an endearing way. This .... is not quite one of those times. Also, to borrow a line from Chris ... they should call Ben Mario, 'cause he just got 1-upped.....

In which I am in a bad mood about being in a good mood1

2008-06-28T14:17:00.006+10:00

In a manner of speaking, that is. It's just that, well, I feel I'm at my best when I'm ranting about something .... only at present I've kind of got nothing to rant about. Which has left me a little annoyed, to be sure, but not enough to rant about it. I can't even summon up the vitriol to rant about that, either come to think of it. Or that. Or even that, for that matter.

Now, while I like sitting around all day recursively defining arbitrarily large sequences of stuff I just don't feel like ranting about, I guess it's time to let it go and move on. This is not the kind of thing I'm very good at, so you might want to all take a moment to drink in this personal-growth-of-Fitz moment. So, I purchased a bed today. It's a good bed. I got it on trade me which, for that majority of you who are hard of being in New Zealand is much like ebay, only better in every conceivable way. I bring that up, in the context of my general state of rantless-ness, because there was at least one petty vendetta I still held close to my heart, which was the systematic egging (or possibly leaving a burning bag of dog shit on the doorstep) of every house that had advertised a room to rent and arranged with me a time to come and view the place only to tell me upon arrival at said time that sorry, the room was already taken². I'm feeling a lot more well-disposed to such individuals now, however, and have decided that, on balance, I think I'll let them live on account of the fact that if I had gotten one of those rooms I wouldn't have found myself in possession of the room I'm going to be moving into on Wednesday.... which is far and away the best place I've looked at. It's on Aro Street. In the Aro Valley. The flat-mates seem fairly cool. The room is large, warm, surprisingly sunny and completely devoid of the truly unfortunate wall-paper pretty much every other house of comparable age I looked at sported with a perverse sort of pride. I'm about a 10 minute (tops) walk from uni. If I walk out the front door, turn left, and walk around 10 or so meters I find myself at arguably the best bakery in Wellington. If I walk a further comparable distance, I find myself at probably the best dvd shop in New Zealand. Why, only today was I sitting at the bakery in question having a conversation with an organic chemist about his conversion from practicing karate to taking up aikido. There was a long, drawn out explanation of the philosophical differences between the two martial arts and the kind of people who practice them, which I felt was getting a little too "what is the sound of one hand clapping?" for my tastes right up to this incredible point of stillness where I have to admit I achieved a truly Zen-like insight of my own into mysteries of the universe. "So," I said nodding thoughtfully, "what you're telling me ........ is that aikido is to karate.......... what Mr Miyagi is to the Cobra Kai". This, I feel, illustrates nicely not only the type of place I'm moving in to ... but just how far I've come as a person.

¹Also, in which I borrow my method titling posts from Jetta the dog, the failure of whom to update their journal for quite a while now has left a small 3-legged staffy shaped hole in my life. Come back, Jetta, we miss you.

²Arse-cunts!!!!! Seriously, on one occasion I trudged wearily up hills at 9:30 on a cold windy Sunday morning whilst fecking ill only to be greeted at the door by some chilled-out arse who took a few long drawn out nods of his arse-with-ears head before making such a statement. Not that I'm bitter. Actually, I'm fucking not. It's fucking annoying me.

Meetings with my supervisor, metaphorically speaking

2008-06-26T12:38:00.002+10:00

Rod: "Andrew, assume the position."

(Andrew gingerly removes pants and bends over the nearest available table.)

Andrew: "You may commence boning, now, master."

I'd like to talk to you about Sweden1

2008-06-23T07:25:00.008+10:00

Australia, as I'm sure you're all aware, has seen fit to go about purchasing billions of dollars worth of sleek, aerodynamic, awe-inspiring killing machines with money we could otherwise have ploughed into education, health, supporting under-privileged combinatorics PhD students² or .... I don't know ..... something we might actually end up using. Now, I'm wise enough in the ways of the world³ to realise that we're just never going to get over this desire to have cool tanks, ships and planes and shit .... so instead I've been thinking about something we could actually do with them.

Is there, I thought to myself, a nation on earth of such pure, unadulterated evil that invasion (or at the very least bombing back into the stone age) just for shits and giggles could be seen as justifiable, nay morally obligatory? It occurred to me, dear reader, that in fact such a country not only exists, but has been insidiously veiling its perfidy for years now with a cloak of high living standards, low crime-rates, silly accents and bad music⁴. I'm talking about Sweden, people.... Sweden⁵. They gave the world ABBA, and we said nothing - for we do not watch the Eurovision^TM song contest. They gave the world IKEA^TM - and again we said nothing, for no-one is man enough to admit that they have a small collection of strange post-construction-superfluous connective plastic thingies they hope like hell are not essential to the well-being of their cabinet. Then they gave us Hälge ... and there was nothing much to say, really. Would we stand alone, dear reader? I think not. I submit that the maiden mission for our shiny new F35s is clear......

Figure 1: proposed bombing route sticking to international
airspace and avoiding national boundaries⁶

¹You see, dear reader, it's occurred to me that Google whoring is for losers. I've decided to try my hand at a little crazies trawling. And methinks that the true crazy is of a mind to post first, read footnotes later.

²You think all of those multi-coloured pens and 3 hour lunches at 5 in the afternoon pay for themselves? Ask Geoff.... they don't. In fact, after this post I shall look into an 'sponsor a combinatorist' scheme. I submit that there is no heart so hard as to be supplied with Geoff's downcast visage and not give generously.

³Honest....

⁴Yeah, you heard me Dave. For Abba alone must the Swedes die....

⁵I'd just like to take this moment to forestall a few scurrilous insinuations. This maniacal desire of mine to pluck Sweden clean from the stream of history has nothing at all to do with the fact that a Swede kept me awake last night .... and not in a good way. I spit on such theories, sir, with the phlegm of righteousness.

⁶Norway doesn't count.

Here's hoping Tristan Dunning vanity searches.....

2008-06-21T11:46:00.003+10:00

I have been recently surprised, dear reader, to hear the details of a brief exchange which took place on the evening of friday 20/6. Sensitive as I am to my civic duties, and in order to preserve the privacy of the individuals involved I shall refer to the first individual merely as "Person A". As for the second ... I shall refer to them only as "Tristan Dunning". The exchange itself, then, dear reader, went roughly as follows.

Person A: Hi, so I heard about that article you're going to have published ... congratulations!

Tristan Dunning: Why are you talking to me? I don't speak whore.

Of course, there are many levels on which this exchange appeared, at first sight, perplexing to me. In the first instance, the sentence structure was significantly more sophisticated than I would have thought possible from Mr Dunning¹. I suppose, however, that where this exchange was truly world-view-changing for me was in as much as up until now I had been under the impression that, at some point in his life, Tristan had had sex. Assuming, then, that he is speaking the truth ...... this exchange begs a very real question: How? Was a translator involved? Do they communicate merely by his repeatedly placing fifties into their outstretched palms until reluctant acquiescence is achieved?

To any that can answer this most mind-boggling of conundrums, I offer a gold star and a chocolate frog.

¹Indeed, while I was not necessarily surprised to learn of his inability to speak whore, it was certainly something of an eye-opener that he could speak English that well.....

And so the game continues

2008-05-23T12:47:00.005+10:00

I guess at least two things have occurred to me over the last, oh, 48 hours what with the .... barrage¹ ..... of 'post something you bastard' messages I've been receiving. The first is that my life is not, it turns out, all that interesting. The second is that god (assuming he/she/it/Frederick actually exists) must, what with his/her/its/Frederick's constant state of omnipotent watchfulness over everyone, think that people are completely fecking loopy. I'm afraid I just can't imagine there'd be many of us who, if followed around for a day, wouldn't commit some act which, while completely reasonable and sensible in the confines of our own head, would make a casual observer believe us to be a nut-job².

Anyways, not having all that much else to post about .... rather than going and committing an act such as this travesty against human decency and in addition offering the excuse that, lately, my creative juices have been employed elsewhere, I'm going to dwell on the second thought for a moment.

So it turns out I am in the habit, dear reader, of .... darting .... through doors. Which is to say .... well, picture a set of revolving doors, or the kind of doors that are slowly self-closing. Imagine you are approaching such a set of doors which are just beating you, if you get my meaning³. Being as I am a student of human folly, I have noticed that most people negotiate their way through such a circumstance by simply extending their arm, opening the door a little further ajar and proceeding through the open doorway.

I am not such an individual.

I treat this circumstance as a kind of ....well, game. The rules are very simple. If it is at all humanly possible to get through those doors without touching either the door itself or the wall into which it is closing .... this must be attempted.⁴ Anyone wishing to understand the giddy thrill achievable through this game is directed to go to this video, fast forward to 1 minute 59 seconds into it and reflect on just how cool that scene really was.

There is, however, a moral to this story and it is this. Given the lengths to which I sometimes go to play this game, it is perhaps surprising that I would not have found the following piece of advice helpful before now. It is, we can all agree, highly likely to encounter someone else trying to get through the door going the other way. This being the case, playing said game while carrying cups of hot tea can be a very bad idea.....

Here endeth the lesson, grass-hopper.

¹Are we happy with this word "barrage"? I'm not quite sure that requests from 2 individuals should strictly count as a 'barrage' .... I'm going to run with it, though, on account of how it probably represents around 20% of my actual readership.

²Well, at least I hope this is true...

³Which is to say your rate of approach is just insufficient to beat the doors effort to close in front of you.

⁴This is important.

A picture is worth 1000 cock jokes.

2008-05-01T13:39:00.006+10:00

So, ordinarily, I don't really go in for religious paraphernalia, but..... there's something about this piece that speaks to me.

A call to arms

2008-04-29T10:29:00.006+10:00

It is a little-known fact that I have, in my time, seen an awful lot of Buffy the Vampire Slayer¹. Indeed, having derived a good many moral lessons from the Buff-meister, imagine my surprise to find that almost all contemporary social problems in Australia are of a surprisingly similar cause to that of the supernatural activity in this show.

Sunnydale was, of course, situated above the hell-mouth which, in a climactic final episode the high drama of which has yet to be equaled by any human endeavor, was finally sealed shut thus ending the woes of that fair dale. Australia, it seems dear reader, has a hell-mouth of its own².

THIS GATE MUST BE SEALED!!!!!

If someone else could see their way clear to bringing all the explosives and shit, I'll provide the nibblys.

¹This being due to the solid scripts and directing, and having nothing whatsoever to do with my wanting to bone Sarah Michelle Gellar. SCURRILOUS LIES!!!!!

²Damn it, Ben, if you're not going to put in that shameless plug this time .... I will.^*

^*Oh, wait.... you just re-plugged. Ah, well, in any case, this action allows for a new milestone on this blog .... a footnote to a footnote!!!

There are times when no cock joke can be as funny as reality

2008-04-27T09:36:00.004+10:00

I have to admit that I struggled a little with this one .... Up until fairly recently, my blog hasn't been the kind that finds funny/quirky stuff on the internet and points it out to people. Largely because I'm just not very good at it, but also because I've come to realise that what people are really after when they visit my blog is, as often as not, a borderline non-sensical rant about some completely pointless issue. This means that when I do find something I'd like to link to I feel a duty to embellish it a little.... but in the case of a story titled "Lynchings in Congo as penis theft hits capital", well, what the cock is there to add?

I thought at first that I might just fill a post with single/double cock-entendre action ... but, well, I feel I've already kind of blown my load on that front. Possibly, I thought I might just give a blow by blow account of the story, but it's fair to say that there is something of a premature climax to any article which opens with the sentence:

KINSHASA (Reuters) - Police in Congo have arrested 13 suspected sorcerers accused of using black magic to steal or shrink men's penises after a wave of panic and attempted lynchings triggered by the alleged witchcraft.

I suppose I'll I'd like to add to this is that, given the seriousness of the issue:

"It's real. Just yesterday here, there was a man who was a victim. We saw. What was left was tiny," said 29-year-old Alain Kalala, who sells phone credits near a Kinshasa police station.

I am appalled at the insensitivity of Kinshasa police chief Jean-Dieudonne Oleko:

"I'm tempted to say it's one huge joke," Oleko said.

For Chris

2008-04-16T08:58:00.004+10:00

I weep. Perhaps Abraham Lincholn said best what I now wish to convey when he said the following¹:

We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained it must not break our bonds of affection. The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battlefield and patriot grave to every living heart and hearthstone all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature.

In a show of solidarity with Chris, I post the following video:

I would urge other bloggers to do the same so that we may usher in a new era of humanity where our differences may be settled not by war or conflict, but by a simple viewing of .... the video. Surely there can be none among us who can view this and not be left staring off into a point in space feeling that all is right with the universe.

¹Thankyou, X-men 2......

The hardest logic puzzle ever....

2008-04-13T20:13:00.004+10:00

....is this, apparently. The problem being phrased there as follows:

Three gods A, B, and C are called, in some order, True, False, and Random. True always speaks truly, False always speaks falsely, but whether Random speaks truly or falsely is a completely random matter. Your task is to determine the identities of A, B, and C by asking three yes-no questions; each question must be put to exactly one god. The gods understand English, but will answer all questions in their own language, in which the words for yes and no are 'da' and 'ja', in some order. You do not know which word means which.

You can find various solutions on the page, so I won't detail the ones I came up with, exactly (the second of which being, I think not dissimilar to those found on wikipedia), in case you haven't seen it before and want to try and solve it yourself. I'm curious, though, about the following. To begin with, as a 'warm-up', I just attempted to find three questions that would work if the three gods spoke English. Having done so, the following thought occured to me: Why not just ask precisely these questions with "If 'ja' meant 'yes' and .." as a pre-amble to each of them. This thought shat me .... Do you think this is cheating? Settle (or at least expand upon) a discussion for me.

Human-chimpanzee wrestling: discuss

2008-04-09T08:29:00.006+10:00

As we all watch the dust settle from that smack-down we're probably all asking ourselves the same questions. How did it come to this? Who even won? Well, imagine I'm affecting the cold, disaffected cynicism of a seasoned war veteran as I suck down on the tail-end of a cigarette before tossing it away in an off-hand manner, staring off into the distance and saying "there were no winners here today ...... but I can tell you who lost. The biggest loser here today was human dignity". This makes for a neat segue which allows me to post on the front page the chimpanzee wrestling video I mentioned in the comments to the previous posts .... I feel it belongs there..... I feel I need to bring it to that vast untapped audience of three or so people who read all the comments for that last post but couldn't have been arsed clicking on all the links.

As you were, people.

Smack-down, would you?

2008-04-04T14:09:00.008+10:00

Hmmmmm....... it has come to my attention, dear reader, that I just got served¹. Much like Chris, I'm currently at Uni where ( also much like Chris) I don't have any access to sound I don't bring with me². This means that I haven't actually heard what the child in his video is saying. I can guess though...... Small child makes all manner of cutsie-pie mis-understandings and plot simplifications while an appreciative audience goes "aw", right?

Anyways, while many people would probably argue that I should go and listen to the damn thing before I reply, this would unfortunately contravene the regulations of good internet smack-down ettiquette - which calls for a rapid response. So, I'll just say this. You want cute mother fucker? I'll give you cute......

Take that:

...... and this!

And ........ that!

You sew the wind, Chris......

¹ Oh no he didn't....

²My internet connection is faster, though, so narnie narnie woop woop.

I &hearts Elephants

2008-04-01T10:08:00.005+10:00

I like elephants. I have always liked elephants. As corroborating evidence, I point to the fact that when I had to think of something to put as a gratuitous random picture 2 posts ago, I went straight to the elephant entry of Wikipedia. I bring this up because there is a cool video of an elephant I am about to post, and I don't want people to think that I'm jumping on the "I ♥ elephants" band-wagon because it now seems cool. Here it is:

Having said that, ~~I ♥ Youtube comment posters~~ ..... I will say no more.

How To: Cheat on the New Zealand Driver's Theory Test

2008-03-31T12:45:00.010+10:00

Google whoring is easy, it's fun and allows you to bask in self-importance with every visit to the slick graphs of your google analytics portfolio. Every now and then, though, you notice that someone out there came to your site due to a serious issue, but your blog let them down. While once I would have been inclined to let such a happenstance slide, I can do so no longer. After my previous post I have come to realise, dear reader, that I have a great power.... and after seeing Spiderman, I know that with great power comes great responsibility¹.

Anyway, whilst perusing the various misspellings of the word 'testicle' that people used to find their way here via google², I noticed the following keyword search: "cheat nz driver theory test".

Whoever you are, oh nameless study-hater, you did not come to the right place then, but damn-it you have now. I will run you through a few obvious strategies.

Make wild guesses. Pros: The probability of passing in such a scheme is not zero. Cons: It's pretty close. If you sat around 6480500300000000 tests, you'd expect one of them to be a pass. It fails in the cost-benefit analysis, I'm afraid.
When unsure of the answer, cunningly rub off enough of the scratchy-coverings of a guess to see whether or not there's a cross or a tick underneath. Pros: There are a finite set of answers, so you'll definitely find the right answer in finite time. Cons: Any question for which any covering is removed from more than one answer is automatically marked wrong. The AA have thwarted this masterly scheme, don't try it!!!
They ask you to hand your bag in, if you're carrying one, but they don't check your pockets. Nor do they supervise the test particularly stringently. Put a cheat sheet in your pocket. There are practice questions in the back of the Road Code book, and if you look up the answers to all of them and write them down you'd be unlucky to get more than three in the real test that aren't near identical to one of them. Pros: I can almost guarantee a pass, here. Cons: There are 250 questions in the back of that book. If you go through each one of them, look up the answer and painstakingly write it down on a piece of paper and haven't learned enough in so doing to pass the frigging test without it you need more help than I can offer here.
Get someone else to sit it for you. Pros: It's not your fault if they fail. Cons: They may not be smarter than you. Also, there's some serious and tricky identity fraud involved that falls beyond the scope of this "how to" guide. Wait for the next one.
Scratch any old crap off of the test and hand it to the marker. While his attention is on the test you thock him over the back of the head with a blunt object and assign your own grade. Pros: You'll "ace" the test. Cons: It's difficult to imagine a scenario in which you can do this and fail to get arrested. It's all down to how important passing the test is relative to how crap you are at memorising a few fecking road rules.
Give strategy 1 a shot but, if it doesn't work out you hand the test in, fail it but dispute the results in a court of law. Pros: You'll get to posture about in a court-room. You can pretend to be Deny Crane from Boston Legal and go through your "case" with Shatner-esque pathos. Cons: There's no way in hell it'll work. You'll get thrown out of court and possibly incur some kind of penalty for wasting its time.
Beg. Pros: .......? Cons: It won't work. What dignity you, who are looking up how to cheat a friggin learner's permit test, can be said to have will disappear like smoke.

All in all, the only strategy I can really recommend is #3. Should you choose to go through it in its entirety, can I just say Congratulations! You have passed the test, even if you do fail as a human being......

¹I can only be grateful to the insights of Stan Lee, here. Thanks to him, for me, Uncle Ben didn't need to die.

²I am gripped with a sudden hope that I will see a 'misspellings of the word testicle' in my keyword list at some point in the future. Just quietly, though, Martin... you're the only person I know in Tuscon Arizona ... I'll know if it was you.

I'm here for you, oh reader.

2008-03-26T13:02:00.007+10:00

It has come to my attention that my blog is not deep, and has too few pictures. Well. In order that you can further appreciate that I'm here for you, oh plebeian post purveyor, I present you with the following. Firstly, a gratuitous picture of an elephant:

Scary legal-type licensing language compels me to inform you that the original source of this photo is here, and that it was taken by nickandmel2006¹. Thanks nickandmel2006. I have decided I shall name this elephant Gerolamo in honour of mathematics' answer to Che Guevara. Gerolamo is, according to wikipedia, a member of the superfamily Elephantoidea. You thought the Corleone's were a force to be reckoned with? Maybe the Packers? Nuh uh. Elephantoidea is a superfamily. They will fuck you up.

Secondly, it would appear, dear reader, that members of my flock are hurting. Others still, it seems, have developed a nasty strain of mental illness. In this time of crisis I would like to offer my almost-Dr-Phil-like services. Firstly to Dave, I offer two points of advice: 1. No song has ever been rescued by being played on the bagpipes. The best most pieces of music can hope to do is survive the transition. The bagpipes were invented by the Irish, who on behalf of the rest of humanity fooled the Scots into adopting them as revenge for golf. 2. The instrument has yet to be invented that can rescue John Farnam, though at least one instrument exists to rescue us from him. Human ingenuity only goes so far!!! I'm sorry, man. Listen to Chris. Let it go. Secondly, to Anita: there, there toots. Better now? Kthnx.

I hereby further offer my services a-la Agony Aunt to the rest of humanity, or at least those 5 or so of them who are likely to read this.

¹ If that is your real name......

A Brief Google-whoring Update

2008-03-25T10:04:00.003+10:00

These are quirky newish ones. I'm not necessarily going by volume. I wouldn't want you to think that I'm no longer getting large numbers of "rate my " type searches, because I am. Ahem.

Harry Kinsman. Now my second-highest referral search. I was going to say "thanks guys" about this one but closer inspection reveals that I should really say "thanks Martin".
Mc Pooh. Don't kid yourselves, this home-boy has a fan base.
testicles blog. Here's hoping this doesn't exist.......
Rate my ass man. Your ass man? Everybody knows there's only one ass man.....
coffee statistics. My apologies on way-laying your legitimate search, sir.
sexy mathematician(s) :)
"it's high time i" wow, what a disappointment you received....
another name for a frog Might I suggest Ethel?
funny trivia names cumming yeah, right up to the last word I might have been able to help you out, there....
google whoring how very 4th wall.....
i can put a picture on my rate my cock profile Yes, yes you can....
meaning for sole teammate I hope you found it...... I sure didn't.
my cock is located on my back sound byte so, apart from the fact that the word you wanted was "bite" ..... I'm genuinely lost for words. Congratulations!
nondescript blog names Should I be insulted?
ode to someone leaving aw....
petty theft in ca/ forum 2007 hmmm....
testicle boy photo Oh. My. God.
touch nose tell poker meaning Oh, that's easy. It means the player has an itchy nose.
where to put my cock It's a free country, sir, you can put it where you like....
where can you buy a ben 10 wock Given the obvious reasons this came here, it's pretty funny.....
winnie poo and beaver Yeah, he never got any..... he was only ever interested in honey.

While chasing a Daemon, Fitz inadvertently finds god1.

2008-03-19T09:33:00.009+10:00

On a point of business, dear reader, I recently found myself on the homepage of one Peter Gacs. This was, as it turns out, quite a timely visit. I had found myself, you see, at something of a spiritual impasse in my life. I mean, we've all heard the savage barbs in our time about mathematics research being a waste of time and having no relation to the "real" world.... and, well, I suppose we've learned to live with them². What was beginning to bother me, brothers and sisters, was this gnawing suspicion in the back of my mind that it also had no relation to the "not so real" world, or possibly "realer than real" world (depending on your point of view). The supernatural world. The spiritual world. I mean, sure, maths can teach you how to cheat at cards and pull chicks at parties .... but what has it got to say about witchcraft, magic and saving my immortal soul? I was beginning, com padre, with a deep and abiding sorrow to take the view that the answer to this question was "zilch". My interest was piqued, however, by the list of online publications of Mr Gacs which included the following titles: The Angel Wins, Clairvoyant Scheduling of Random Walks, The Clairvoyant Demon has a Hard Task³. Sadly, however, these just turned out to be cool titles. There were no concrete instructions to be found on how to actually summon such a clairvoyant demon. Via a tantalizing link on the same page, however, one learns that maths and physics can help you find god and rescue your immortal soul after all.

Yay team nerd!!!!!

¹Yeah, it occurs to me that this title makes the post sound a lot more interesting than it really is......

²Being mathematicians, we always come up with the wittiest of responses. "Your mum's pointless" I replied once. "Yeah, well ..... QUICK!!!! LOOK!!! BEHIND YOU!!!" is another favorite. Well, actually, Busty's wasn't bad.

³ Also on the list we find On playing "twenty questions" with a Liar. Another cool title, but I couldn't work it in to the current post angle, unfortunately.

Random Ramblings on Wellington Part 1 of at least 1.

2008-03-17T07:11:00.014+10:00

My first note will be, rather boringly, on the weather. I was informed, before leaving for the place that I should make good my farewells to the sun due to the fact that, if Richard Dawkins was born here, there might currently be a bestselling book on New Zealand shelves titled The Sun Delusion. I was also informed that Wellington is a very windy place. Now, I will grant you I've only been here a brief time in, well, summer but while I can certainly attest to the latter fact, the former one is bullshit. I've seen plenty of sun and there is good reason to believe that, given the truth of the latter fact I will continue to do so. I have, in point of fact, seen rain clouds racing across the sky that I like to think were having the following conversation¹:

Cloud Leader: Looks like we're going in full throttle!

Cloud one: Target's coming up.....

Cloud Leader: STAY ON TARGET!!!

Cloud one: We're coming in too fast!!!!

Cloud Leader: STAY ON TARGET!!!

Cloud one: Rain's away!!!!

Cloud five: Did you hit?

Cloud Leader: Negative. Just. Scratched. The surface.

My second note shall be about coffee mugs. This relates to Victoria University in comparison to UQ. More specifically, the tea room. The tea room at Victoria is, unlike that of UQ, furnished with the following:

Coffee beans, free.²
A coffee ginder, functional.
Tea, milk, sugar, etc.., long list thereof.
A fridge, frosty.
A boiling water dispenser, hot.
Plungers and coffee pots, aplenty.
A stove, also hot - but only when you want it to be.

Given that all of this is the case, I can find it in my heart to forgive the following omission:

8. Mugs, in large supply.

Now, up until now I had taken a similar attitude towards coffee mugs as I had to pens, umbrellas and wine knives. These aren't things you buy. There's just a common pool of the things. More are constantly being injected into the system as gifts and promotional items and people are constantly losing them, then subsequently finding another one someone else lost. But I needed a mug. Being forced to buy one, I resolved upon getting a good one. This was not, it turns out, an easy task. I wanted the kind of mug where, when pulling an all-nighter to meet the kind of deadline that, if missed, could result in your left testicle being fed to wild pigs, you could look down at it and develop the pleasing delusion that everything is going to be O.K. This was, it turns out, no easy task. I looked, and looked and looked but to no avail. Having failed to purchase a mug I then resolved upon stealing one. I would find a quirky cafe with interesting cups and make good my escape post-haste. Unfortunately, while I could find plenty of quirky cafes, they all had dull cups. I lost hope. I trudged dejectedly back towards uni, when I chanced upon a strange little shop. There were numerous flowers on a sign which read:

Fancy World
It becomes a dream....

Barely daring to hope, I made my way around a store filled with various Japanese Hello Kitty style objects. Finally, I saw it. It had a pig on it. In answer to the question on one side of said mug I answered, weeping tears of joy, "No, I do not know the story of cute pig 'lulu'." Wiping away the tears and presenting my stiff upper lip, I continued "But the tale of this pig intrigues me. I am hungry to know it. Tell me more, Oh muse......". Sadly, there was little in the way of hard facts to be had on the other side of the mug save to say that the pig was crying in that Japanese cartoon type stylised way that just screams Waaaaaa!!! at you. There was, however, a speech bubble which said "Why she don't like me?" along with a squiggle reminiscent of a pig's tail. It would seem that our unfortunate lesbian pig had taken a sadly non-reciprocated liking to another sow³. The sorrow of Lulu touched me deeply, dear reader, and I made good my purchase. It came also with a lid that doubles as a saucer and a porcelain spoon⁴! Having wasted an entire morning on this search, I took the directest route back to uni⁵.

My last note relates to the results of a survey widely publicised here. According to Durex, New Zealand women are the most promiscuous on the planet. It seems, then, that perhaps the time is ripe for an "irresistible force vs immovable object" type of experiment: Will New Zealand women sleep with mathematicians?

Only time will tell.

¹I am aware, of course, aware that there is at least one person who regularly reads this blog and hasn't seen the original Star Wars movies. Let us all take a moment to reflect in sadness on the reference they're missing here....

² A footnote is in order here about coffee generally in Wellington. It's good. There are, you are informed, more cafes per square unit of area here than in New York (assuming of course that your unit is not sufficiently large as to include all of New York). The thing is, though, they all know what they're doing. There is actually a distinction in ordering a flat white and a latte here, other than the type of cup you get it in, for instance. I recall once being thrown behind an espresso machine at QPAC when someone ordered a takeaway latte. I picked up the take-away cup, stared at it for a while and turned to my colleague quizzically: "What" I asked "is the difference between a takeaway latte and a takeaway flat white", to which my colleague replied "hmmm.... I guess there isn't one".

³ I have since devoted a good deal of thought to the 'why' question with which Lulu seemed so concerned. Possibly, of course, the sow in question just likes boar. Possibly she has various objections to Lulu's poor grasp of Syntax. Maybe, Lulu, you're just too whiney.....

⁴ I suspect it may have been intended for children.

⁵ This involved a staircase. A big one. Oh fellow Brisbane-ites, you have no idea about what a big staircase really means. Wellington, being on a fault-line has bits of the city which are just suddenly much higher than other bits, and the university is on a hill. There are staircases on which, while climbing them, you expect to see the skeletal remains of people holding flags who just didn't make it. It was just such a staircase I was forced to climb carrying my piggy treasure.

Here Breaketh the Drought

2008-03-14T11:10:00.009+10:00

There has, I will admit, been something of a dearth in posts on this here website of late. I have been aware of this and no amount of reminders, gentle prodding or rocks being thrown through windows on the part of you, the readership¹, was ever going to change this. It is now the case, however, that, were I Adam West playing batman, I might find myself tempted (or possibly contractually obliged by virtue of it being in the god-damn script Adam ... would you just for once drag your pathetic B-grade actor's arse off of the booze long enough to learn your fucking lines?) to say that the purpose for this pusillanimous posting paucity is past, my post-perusing pal.

You see, I was always aware of what many people would have been thinking sniggeringly behind my back when I left Australian shores last month: "He'll be back. Sure he's thinks he's going to do a PhD and all, but let's face it to get that far the son of a bitch is going to have to enroll ...... Oh, chuckle, chuckle chuckle, tee hee hee, hee hee hee." Now, while I was at least a little tempted before now to post about my administrative peccadilloes on that front, well, I was always just that little bit frightened that you might actually be right and hence I thought I'd just hide quietly in a corner² for a while. Anyways, I am now pleased to announce that I am now officially enrolled and, perhaps more importantly, am as of today able to actually log on to the fucking computer on my desk³. It is from said machine that I write this seminal post.

Having left Brisbane airport at 9:00 on a 3 hour flight which arrived in Wellington at 15:00 local time, I was feeling a little cheated. Assuming that I do so during another period of daylight saving, however, I suppose I will get to make that up on a subsequent return journey and take a 3 hour flight into a city 3 hours behind my point of departure - thus achieving the giddy thrill of feeling like I am arriving at the same time I departed. Anyway, perhaps because I was bitterly knawing away at this thought, I didn't just go straight to the university as it turns out I should have done - resolving instead to do so on the morrow. Let me explain why this turned out to be a terribly bad idea with a little aside, yes?

There is something, I think, rather endearing about the working habits of mathematicians. These being, to my eye, not dissimilar to that of composers or artists generally. In between sometimes feverish fits of work, they often find themselves just kind of tossing ideas about, taking long naps, coffee breaks, three hour lunches, wandering around and generally waiting for inspiration to hit them. Sometimes, for instance, they just need to up and go surfing on the south island for a couple of weeks or so. Funnily enough, this is precisely what my own principal supervisor found himself doing as of the day after I arrived - as I discovered upon checking my in-box on the 28th. There are a few more points which I feel are relevant to our discussion at this juncture:

Australian students are here treated as domestic - and thus have to enroll in person.
I discovered the above after sending all of my forms over in November 2006. Not to worry, though, the relevant documents (including required certified copies of academic transcripts, degrees and what-not the originals of which I was to subsequently leave in Australia) were, I was told, forwarded to my principal supervisor for safe-keeping, and all could thus be made well on my arrival.
Even if I had all relevant copies (which I was cautious enough, in point of fact, to bring with me), and acquired minty fresh new forms to fill in on arrival - I still needed my supervisor's signature on one of them.
The terms of my scholarship contract clearly required me to be enrolled by March 7 else there would be "no dineros for me".
My supervisor was to return on March 11.

As it happens, the scholarships office people were surprisingly (given my past experiences with administrative types) quite prepared to ignore point 4. Further amusement, however, was to be had on my endeavours to open a bank account into which the dineros mentioned in point 4 should be payed. I'd opened an account with HSBC Australia before leaving with a view to conveniently subsequently opening an HSBC New Zealand account on arrival here - having been assured that they did, indeed, have branches in New Zealand and would in the mean-time be able to access the Australian account through ATMs anyways. It was, on reflection, a mistake to assume that "branches in New Zealand" meant "branches in Wellington, the fucking capitol". Happily, however, there are three branches in Auckland through which, being the bloody minded son of a bitch that I am, I resolved to set up said account. To do so, I required various certified copies of various proofs of identity and of address. Of all the various options for identity proving, the only viable options for me were a passport and a New Zealand driver's license. To prove address, I essentially needed an official letter from a New Zealand employer to a New Zealand address⁴. My next step, then, was to acquire a New Zealand driver's license. To do this, I required the following:

My passport
My Australian driver's license
A proof of address⁵
To pass the theory test you do to get a learner's permit.

The proof of address could take the form of a utility bill, a bank statement, or some other ambiguously worded letter of proof the exact wording of which I do not remember past to say that the meaning of said wording was not remotely clear. The utility bill one was clearly out. Thus, it seemed, I needed a bank account to get the driver's license and a driver's license to get the fucking bank account. Yip-de-fucking-ha. Not to worry, though, it turned out that any official-looking computer generated letter correctly addressed would fall into the third category. Not knowing, at this point that they wouldn't even keep a copy of the letter, it is a source of deep regret to me that I didn't simply invent a bogus company and letter-head and write the damn thing myself. Instead, I got my Aunt (who currently works as a policy adviser to the police) to write a bogus letter on official New Zealand Police letter-head instead (note that I was doing this before the actions of footnote 4). Note that the address in question also happens to be her own address.

Anyways, I am officially posting again, and shall write more anon.

¹The little people

² Some might say that this is an apt characterisation of what not just myself, but the entire population of New Zealand finds itself doing.......

³This is not to say that I wasn't happy with the various fulfilling pastimes I was able to enjoy with my nerd-machine. Why, I could make the keyboard go "click, click". I could rest hot beverages on it and play with the log-on screen for, oh, hours at a time. I just felt that it was time to take our relationship to the next level is all....

⁴This last was achieved in a quaint manner via a conversation with Rob (my administrative supervisor) which went a little something like this: Me: "Ah, could you possibly just write a letter on official letter-head addressed to me at this address?" Rob: "What should the letter say?" Me: *shrug* Rob: "Why don't I just write to confirm you're doing a PhD here?" Me: "No, I don't want it to sound like I asked you to do it....." Rob: "How about I just inform you you were allocated that office I showed you to yesterday, and that you should pick up at the school office that key you have in your pocket?" Me: "Perfect."

⁵Seriously, though, what the cock is with all of this address-proving crap you have to do here?

Success!!!!!

2008-02-09T23:14:00.002+10:00

It's high time I put my cock where my mouth is ....

2008-02-09T23:06:00.001+10:00

Having displayed my cock proudly to the bush-league cock connoisseurs who frequently visit my blog, I thought the time ripe to take it to the wider, more cock-savvy audience of www.ratemycock.com. Also, I thought it might be nice to use the word 'cock' a few more times if at all I could. It turns out I can. Yay me. Now, while I have high (if wildly delusional) hopes that my submission will be displayed shortly, I am surrounded by nay-sayers and doubting thomases who tell me that the world may not be ready for a cock such as mine¹. This being the case, I post now on the preliminary submission process. We begin with the cockloader², which looks a little something like this:

I particularly like the advertisement for penis enlargement pills displayed above the, ah, cockloader, incidentally .... I mean, they haven't even seen the picture yet. Why not hold off on the judgement, there ratemycockers? Why the negativity? Anyways......

.... Done!

I eagerly await the sense of inner fulfillment and potency that can only be achieved by having random strangers view, assess, then assign a rating out of ten to my cock.

¹ And, ah, incidentally .... just in case anyone actually though I'd, well ..... look, I just thought I might say that yes, it is the picture of the rooster.
²While I credit the web site's noble efforts at jocularly inserting a cock into the uploading page, to me the term rather suggests, well ..... testicles, really. Or possibly tiny gnomes with 19th century artillery equipment and a wicked sense of humour.

Hail the conquering heroes, and what the cock is wrong with GA?

2008-02-07T09:27:00.002+10:00

In the spirit of my 'only blog trivia when you kick arse or suck balls'¹ maxim, allow me to report the greatest performance ever achieved by a trivia team (with me in it) at Harry's since the Gaussian eliminators somehow won the fucking thing the second time they went there. That's right, dear reader, it is my august privilege and sombre duty to inform you that our team somehow managed to beat every other team playing Harry's trivia last night. Trounced them, I say old chap. We kicked nine colours of shit out of them, Charlotte. We was awesome.

This achievement should, I feel, be in no way sullied by the fact that the statement is trivially true ....... on account of trivia not actually occurring last night due to flooding. Sure you might also just as well say that we were beaten by every other team to play last night too. You might say that. But if that's the kind of 'glass half empty' defeatist attitude you're going to carry around with you in life like an albatross chained to your neck, well, you can just sod off home with your negative vibes and leave my blog in peace, OK?

In other news, google analytics is informing me that I have had no visitors at all from the 1st-5th of February. Which, given comments posted, is clearly false. It appears that god continues to punish me to satisfy his petty vindictive urges.

¹Why the hell have I never received any web traffic from the constant use of that statement? I guess the 'suck balls' line is just too competitive a market, hey......

On god being a bastard.

2008-02-05T11:53:00.002+10:00

It has come to my attention that in a past lives I was possibly both Genghis Khan and Adolf Hitler. This is the only explanation I can come up with to explain current events which, in the immortal words of Millhouse, started off like Romeo and Juliet, but ended in tragedy¹.

My employer, you see, has just moved offices. I found upon arriving to work this morning that my new office was, on cursory glance, far superior to my old one in every respect. It's larger, it has a lovely view of Moreton Bay and there is no dentist on the other side of the wall. In general, in fact, the new offices are far better than the old ones. Life, I said to myself this morning, is truly sweet.

In a sadly short period of time, however, the minty fresh sheen evaporated from this new working space. The first thing which indicated to me that perhaps all was not well in the state of Denmark, as it were, was that my lovely view also includes a primary school, which means that if I stare too long at the bay I look a little dodgy. This, however, was nothing to the dread realisation that hit me like a lead pipe in the hands of a man named "Bubba" at approximately 9:30 this morning. You see, while it is certainly true that I am no longer next door to a dentist who hates me more than he loves life, I am now directly above a fucking gym. This is, apparently, not a problem for anyone else in the office in as much as for some reason the loud duff-duff style "yeah, let's work those abs!" music that drones on in the place doesn't reach any office but mine. This, I discovered, is on account of an open door to a fuse-box which cannot be fucking well closed!!! I've tried pushing, kicking, and alternately praying to every deity I could think of and rocking back and forth in a fetal position whimpering. All to no avail. The only thing I have yet to try is strolling into the gym with shotguns akimbo to explain calmly to the denizens of the establishment in question the benefits of working out in silence. This, clearly, must be my next step.

¹Given how often I use this phrase in everyday life, it is perhaps a little surprising that I only just now worked it into my blog.

Rate My Testicles

2008-01-31T15:05:00.003+10:00

Being not only a shameless google whore, but a shameless audience-satisfying tart open to whatever depraved request might come my way, I just thought I'd add this post. Ratings?

Worst. Trivia. Blog. Ever.

2008-01-31T14:19:00.001+10:00

Popular demand requires me to post a blog entry. Having 181 unique visitors since google analytics started recording them some time in December, the reader may assume that when I say popular demand .... well, that means something damn-it, by bush-league blogging standards. Sadly, I am fully aware that a large portion of these visitors came in search of cock or ass rating and left swiftly in annoyance (you know who you are). Approximately 1/3 of all unique visitors, in point of fact. Actually, an important part of my morning ritual involves having a look at the map overlay section of google analytics to see if any new countries have been highlighted (I have visitors from 23 countries at present)¹.

No. Actually, I am still sufficiently grounded in my own insignificance to accept that when two people demand a blog update, this is a size-able proportion of my real readership, and perhaps I should respond. There are 4 things, then, that I should make perfectly clear here. 1 We played trivia last night. 2 We did not suck. 3 We came 5th. 4 I left the trivia sheet at home. So rather than an in-depth breakdown of last nights frivolities, I will instead give a few tips that someone with a time machine and no better ideas on how to use it to make money than visiting Harry's trivia on wednesday night might find useful.

An octopus has three hearts.
The most famous explorer to work with Matthew Flinders on the Tom Thumb was not his cat. It was Bass. Knowing Flinders alone won't get you 1/2 marks.
Occasionally, Shannon Noel really is the answer.... sometimes even when it isn't.

Here endeth the lesson, grasshopper.

¹"What's this?" I ask myself "a new visitor from Cambodia, who visited a single page and spend approximately 0 minutes 0 seconds there? I wonder what they were looking for ... "

Rate my Ass

2008-01-18T09:44:00.002+10:00

I'm perhaps a little bit more self-conscious about my ass, as I feel it is somewhat amusing in appearance. I'd really like to have compared it to other people's ass off the internet, but people seem remarkably coy in showing theirs to me. This has always struck me as particularly unfair given how amenable I've always been to let friends ride my ass whenever they feel like it (provided, of course, that my ass feels up to it). A surprising number of people claim that they don't have an ass at all, which I must admit has always struck me as odd. Anyways, above is a picture of my ass. I'd very much like to know what you think about it.

Rate My Cock

2008-01-17T14:34:00.002+10:00

It is a little known fact that I am actually the proud owner of a rather large cock. After having such a lot of fun with it in the comfort of my own home, and boasting about it to friends and strangers at every opportunity, I thought maybe it was time to share its glory with the web community. I'd be very interested to hear your feedback.

I am a shameless google whore (and how!)

2008-01-14T09:48:00.001+10:00

Thanks to a timely suggestion by Dave, I now have a Google Analytics account tirelessly recording the details of every poor schmuck who got trapped on this site after the 31st December. The results, while not actually good in a "ZOMFG! Advertising Dollars!" sense, is perhaps better than I should have expected given my crappy posting record over the time-frame in question. I am, of course, less concerned with the raw number of visits as in the internet search keywords that led people here. I shall now give a brief account of such searches to date, in a shameless rip-off of Martin's idea. Ahem. Excluding people searching for "myblogisanotherblog", the list is as follows:

"i am a woman in love" song wikipedia Hmmm....
andrew loyal Boy, did you have to trawl through a lot of search results to reach this site.....
curried meat pie blogs I wonder how many of these there are.......
gaussian eliminators We're famous!!!!!!!
geoff ulrich blog So while using google to try and find the blog of some random friend of yours, you found mine instead. Whoever you are, I would greatly appreciate a critique of 1000 words or so as to whose blog is better. Happily, the entry this search leads to is my opus A brief message for Geoff. I sure impressed somebody there.
i got into uq bitches Congratulations.
my blog hello hello yourself, buddy.
only anagram of noiseless This suggests to me a potential niche market. Incidentally, unless Harry lied to us, its "Lionesses"
ratemycock After all that google whoring, the only porn-related search that came here instead owes itself to a comment Martin left. I have mixed emotions about this.
sexiest mathematician My blog, presumably due to this post, appears third on a google search for this, just above one entitled "Jessica Alba has the sexiest wiggle".

Google analytics, in short, induces just that little bit of turgidity for me. Now, back to work.

On Why the Dentist is not Dead

2008-01-11T14:06:00.002+10:00

My much-publicised¹ vendetta against the dentist on the other side of the wall came, as some of you are aware, to an uneasy truce recently. This truce owed itself to the fact that the music seemed to have died down some time ago, which naturally made me very nervous that the tooth butcher in question was reading my blog. I was living daily in fear of his tracking down where I lived and giving me an involuntary root canal. It was a very trying time for me.

I have now realised the real reason for this decrease in volume.

I have been leaving the loovers near the roof closed.

¹ If you count this blog as heavy publicity, I guess....

Happy New Year, Mother Fuckers.

2008-01-02T13:39:00.001+10:00

As we all settle down to this new year and reminisce over those portions of our christmas/ new years period we might actually want Joe Public to read about ......... O.K., so as I settle down to do so, I thought I might just take a quiet moment to reflect on the strangeness of mother fucker as a term of abuse. Why, dear reader, should shagging a mother be considered so bad, I asks you? Almost everyone's father is a mother fucker, for christ's sake. A great many of us will end up being mother fuckers some day in such a circumstance as not being considered a mother fucker would be thought of as somewhat insulting. What's the deal?

Not happy, slang makers!

Well, Anyways, moving along........... I'd just like to voice my bitter resentment at the world at large that, despite my ridiculously non-subtle hint-dropping about wanting a certain novel by one Ulrich Haarbuste for christmas¹, a copy of this book failed to appear gift-wrapped in my hands at any point at all. Of the things that did appear in my greedy little hand in such a manner, however, there is one that deserves mention. Allow me to do so.

The present in question was given to me by an uncle who, presumably owing to the fact that he purchases gifts for possibly every human being he has ever met², is continually out-doing himself for the pure shite-ness of his gifts to the point that you actually find yourself in far more excited anticipation over his presents than over anybody else's³. When my sweaty, shaking hands ripped open my package this year⁴, I beheld the following. Imagine a clear plastic window sitting atop black cardboard packaging on which is written, in the same font as those top-secret stamps you see on folders in B-movies, the words Men at Work. What, I ask you dear reader, might you suppose to be inside such a package? A CD of music from the 1980's perhaps? A copy of Brokeback Mountain? Bzzzt. Sorry, but if you guessed one of the above, you have guessed incorrectly. The answer you should have given is a list of the three most important items any working man should have in his possesion, which (as I should scarcely need to add) is as follows.

A tube of shower gel, strange-smelling.
A pair of sweat-bands for your wrists, Men-At-Work emblazoned.
A pack of cards, witty-backing.

For the inclusion of a deck of cards alone ........ hmm, no ...... for the deck of cards exclusively, this would be arguably the best present I have ever recieved from the man. What makes it unquestionably the greatest gift ever is the picture on the back of said cards. Here we see a man wearing the kind of expression which might say "did I leave the oven on?". With one hand he is loosening his tie. With the other, he holds a cloth on his fore-head in a manner which gives absolutely no impression of movement at all. Below this picture we find the following caption: Feverishly mopping his brow, he glanced down to see that everything he owned was on the table. He could handle losing the wife .... but the car? Assuming you've now managed to get that side-splitting laughter under control, dear reader, it is now my melancholy duty to inform you that, no, I have absolutely no idea where the fuck you would go about buying this product. Possibly in the same dusty little shop you'd purchase mogwais or something. I just don't know. Wherever it is, however, it seems likely to be the same shop my uncle shops in every year. There are probably sundry other things I could be saying about the time-frame in question but this will, I think, do as a "no, I'm not dead" post. I should probably also just mention for anyone unaware of this that I ended up getting the scholarship and, while I haven't booked the ticket yet, I'll be leaving for New Zealand fairly soon. The point being that, while I think I have a solid repetoire of sheep jokes under my belt in preparation, I could always use more. If you know a good one, let me know.

¹What part of "please, please, please, please please get me the Roy Orbison wrapped in cling-film novel" is so fucking hard for you bastards to understand?

²Not actually that much of an exaggeration.....

³ Who will win the crappest present of the year this time around? Sometimes the anticipation is a little much for me......

⁴Yes this sentence is intended as google-whoring.

Plus Ca Change*........

2007-12-11T09:29:00.001+10:00

As I settled in for my morning coffee whilst perusing the latest offers of cheap viagra, new & improved penis enlargement techniques and an exciting new (and mysterious, unless I click on the kindly supplied link) product guaranteed to keep my woman satisfied in bed¹that I receive like clockwork in my Mac email account², I ruminated upon possible titles for this post.

This is a trivia post, incidentally.

I had initially considered something like: Name Changes, Ball-Sucking Continues. Not a very witty or brilliant one to be sure, but it's inclusion can only help people cotton on to the general class of performance we achieved last night more quickly than they otherwise would. Also, it helps google direct people looking for specialty porn to my site, so I just thought I'd add it³. The above title was settled upon instead to further my ongoing attempts to come across as a debonaire, witty, Oscar Wilde-type man of the world. I think we can all agree that this cause progresses nicely.

Anyhuckus, our night begins with your hero⁴ doing just that little bit of nail-biting. This owed itself to the fact that Sam and Geoff were, in order to get me to engage in such nail-biting, waiting around the corner until precisely 7:30 before entering the trivia-dome. Possibly that last was a lie, but that's how things seemed from my end. And if it's going to be me, Georff and Sam this week, I thought to myself, we're going to be the Gaussian Eliminators again, damn it. As it transpired, oh my brothers⁵, we did not bathe this name in glory. Adriana showed up slightly later, which made for a team four times the strength of last week's debacle. Unfortunately, this corresponded to a single goat-blighting point extra for fuck's sake. What, I am forced to ask myself, is the fucking point of it all?

So why, I hear you ask, did we suck so badly? Well, for one thing the puzzle page was harder this week and not just 4 easily recognisable characters/individuals . We got only 11/16. What really hurt us, though, was....... well, let me put it as follows. There was a real advantage to having Dave instead of me as el-capitano: Dave doesn't drink. This means that towards the end of the night his judgement doesn't get so appalling that the following scene might take place. You're given, as a five point bonus question, What Broadway Musical was based upon Puccini's La Boheme?. Fitz agonises as follows: "Look, it's going to be something like Rent. Something like Rent..... shit what could it be....... I'm thinking of a musical like Rent...... Fuck ! Think people! Like Rent, OK!!!" .... and so on. We ended up not being able to think of such a musical, and the space was left sadly blank. The correct answer was Rent.

Other Notable Fuck-ups:

Which singer was placed in the boot of a car in an Eminem clip? Also a bonus question. Our thinking: "Dido", since she wrote the music he was rapping over in the clip. Our entered answer: Christina Aguilera. Our reasoning: "When you absolutely, positively have to have a skanky ho in your boot: accept no substitutes." I maintain we would not have found such reasoning persuasive sober. Dido was the fucking answer.
Name the cocktail made of rum, lime juice and sugar named after a Cuban town? I immediately wrote "Daiquiri", knowing damn well that it is an originally Cuban cocktail the original ingredients of which are precisely: (white) rum, lime juice, sugar. We changed it to "Mojito". Why? Fucked if I know. Daiquiri was right.
What does a milliner make? My gut feeling "hats". Our answer: "linen". Same reasoning as in the last one. Hats was right.
Who wrote the Album Pet Sounds? I wrote down "The Pet Shop Boys", thinking it a good guess. Georff knew the correct answer to be the Beach Boys. It would have been nice, in hind-sight, if he'd fucking told me!!!!!

Notable Gets:

What is Mitch Buchannen's son's name in Baywatch? I'm not proud.....
What is the name of the mythical city of gold after which the spaniards lusted? Thank you Cities of Gold.
In what famous video series are college girls asked to take their tops off in exchange for cash? Thank you, Sam, for not only knowing the answer, but treating us to a long, drawn-out pre-amble of umm-ing and ah-ing that fooled no-one.

Notable questions we got wrong by virtue of just not knowing, the answers to which I'm sure some of you will get with laughable ease.... go on, you bastards, have a laugh

In what city will the next winter olympics be held? Go on, Dave/Martin. Laugh at the sports illiterate.
Name Othello's Wife One of those "shit, now people will realise I know a lot less Shakespeare than I'd like to pretend" moments, there. A bonus question, too.
Who will captain Australia in (I think) the next 20-20 match? Yeah, same commentary as before.....

Have fun. Over and out.

* I would just like to take this moment to voice my disgust at the terribly un-cultured status of Australian keyboards. Their failure to allow me to place the required cedilla on the "c" here fills me with a deep and abiding sense of shame in my countrymen.

¹Statistically speaking, I am informed, it is almost certain I'm just not doing it for her. I suspect the real reason here is that she doesn't exist.

²Seriously, though, I have to take my hat off to these spam-meisters. It took them ten minutes to discover this account had just been created, zero in on it and engage it in the email equivalent of carpet bombing. Bravo!

³ You probably don't want to read this footnote. I just thought I'd get some more google-whoring out of the way in an out of the way way, if you follow me. Ahem. titty fuck arse horny blow job donkey sex well-hung she-male goats on heat college girls who will do anything for a peanut nuts scrotum midgets midget sex porn porn star porn actress porn producer porn camera-man porn afficionado porn consumer porn distributor anti-porn protestor bondage S&M mistress whip who's been a naughty boy then bollocks right bollocking give the dog a bone wink wink.

⁴That would be me, just to forestall your smart-arsery. Smart-arsery being a word, incidentally, I would very much like to think found its way into a Dr Seuss book.

⁵Someone's been watching A Clock-work Orange recently...... by which I mean me. I'm not just parroting an obvious statistical near certainty.

I'd Like to Buy Some Tabouli (touch nose)

2007-12-06T10:53:00.001+10:00

It has come to my attention that, on a regular basis, unknown individuals contact my place of work to place orders for large quantities of tabouli. I can only assume, since I work for a geostatistics consultancy, that this is an error on their part. I bring this up because it seems , to me, a little odd that tabouli is the only foodstuff they ever order. Never anything else. Never even any other type of salad. Just tabouli. Large quantities of tabouli.

This has led me to the inescapable conclusion that somewhere there exists a warehouse in which there is a phone manned by a tall unwashed hippy named Leon. Leon's associates, following (almost?) having their fingers burned over that unfortunate Schapelle Corby affair have happily discovered an alternate means by which to both package their goods and cloak telephone conversations with an air of legitimacy. They now deal in crates the top section of which contains a thin layer of tabouli. Beneath this layer, however, the crate is packed densely with ..... "tabouli".

In any case, if anyone out there is looking to score a large quantity of "tabouli", it may be fruitful to try a few likely mis-dialings of the number of my employer. You should be warned, however, that your efforts may in fact end in your possession of far more of an arabic salad dish than you could possibly hope to eat.

Ethel the Frog Rides Alone

2007-12-04T09:08:00.002+10:00

I think we'll just draw a discrete veil over the double-entendre action in the title this time and just focus on the team name: Ethel the Frog. I had been of a mind yesterday that, whatever else we¹ might choose to name ourselves, Ethel the Frog was definitely out - carrying, as it does, a green, froggy curse. In this vein, other names I might well have chosen had been suggested to me. I thought of a few myself. There were a few factors which swayed my decision here, however. The first was an ominous silence in response to my last post, in addition to some cancellations from some of the more ...... reliable members of the team. As for the second, well, let's put it this way. Nothing, in the trivia world says "bend over, drop your pants and prepare to be boned" quite like the following 2 pieces of information:

This is grand final night you've walked into. Any team not in the top 5 could be drawn as the wild card to compete for the $1000 prize at the end. Hence every side brings both their A-team and as many warm bodies as they can muster.
You, on the other hand, came alone.

And if I'm going to be boned anyway, I thought to myself, I'm going to do it in style². I'm going to draw a big fat target on my arse and yell "Bring it on, Harry!" at the top of my lungs. I am, in short, going to call myself Ethel the Frog again, and damn the torpedos, sir.

In addition to the message of bonage, I felt that there were other little coded messages to be found in each round. The first round said, to everyone, "Sure, round one is usually a bit of a cake-walk, because in the event of a tie the prize-money jack-pots - which brings joe public back in search of that cheese. Tonight, however, is finals night. That jack-pot is going off, baby. This round is going to be hard". I came, I thought, rather respectably last on 10/16.

The second round, I felt, had a message specifically for me. The second round, for the uninitiated is always a music round. It is entirely song/artist recognition from fairly short sound-bytes. It is traditionally the lowest scoring round for most teams and, believe me sister, it's the lowest scoring round for us, too. Now, while round two hurts at the best of times, last night it was partitioned into three themed sections: B105, Triple M and 4BH Easy Listening. Harry was, I felt, sending a message exclusively to me, here. That message, dear reader, was as follows: "May God have mercy on your soul, little frog". I got 5/16 which, thanks to Harry's mercy rule, translated to 8/16. Two other teams got 8/16, too. God knows what they had originally.

Third round? Did O.K. here. Got 12/16 and beat 3 teams. I beat four teams in round four on a princely 10/16. This was a music-themed round and, frankly, I'm proud of not knowing some of the trashy answers I got wrong here. I got a perfect 16 on the puzzle page .... but so did every other team in the room. Of the four five-point bonus questions, however, I can't have beaten anybody. I got one right, for a score of 5/20 .... and that was the question Harry put up on the web. 61/100, people. Dead last. Did I get wild-card entry into the prize round? No. Would I have come even close to winning if I had? ....... no.

Notable Correct Answers:

What is the French word for cheese? Thank you, television.
The contestant from what country took out the Miss Universe title? Thank you ..... actually, how the fuck did I know that?
What airport corresponds to the initials LHR? Thank you wild guess.
What famous stunt-cyclist died recently at the age of sixty-something? Thank you person X for being the only famous stunt cyclist I could think of.
What West-End Musical is a re-modelling of the Puccini opera, Madame Butterfly? Thank you Leesa, for taking me to Madame Butterfly, meaning I knew the story well enough to guess the correct answer.

Notable Wrong Answers (of which there were many):

Insert random motor racing question here Christ, there were a lot of these.
Insert random crap musical sound-byte Oh, dear god, how this round hurt me.
In what sport do we get the quadruple Selchow (sic ?) Throw? This was a bonus question, too. I'll be impressed if you guess it correctly.
Where did the Spice Girls hold their first re-union concert? You're breaking my balls, here, Harry.
Who sang a cover version of "I got you babe" with UB40? Hint: It wasn't Cher.

Anyways, the thought has occurred to me that a lack of attendance was, in light of disclosures on my previous Ethel the Frog post, a bald-faced attempt by people to get me blogging trivia again. Bastards.

¹An odd choice of pronoun, as it happens.

²Also probably not quite the right word.....

Random Thoughts

2007-12-02T15:09:00.001+10:00

Hello, and welCOME to this latest instalment of my blog. This current post is destined TO be, I think, probably the winner in that most competitive of categories: pointless, TRIVIAl posts to be found on my blog.

This state of affairs owes itself either to the fact that I feel I have nothing much to write about, or to the fact that I feel I should be writing something ON this blog at the MOment rather than actually feeling like writiNgtoDAY, as such. I haven't decided which yet. Anyways, currently in the news we do have, of course, the story about that poor little teddy bear named Muhammed who's gone and caused such a lot of trouble in the Sudan. While I almost feel duty-bound to write on such a silly story¹, I rather feel that its ridiculousness sells itself a little too easily. It doesn't need my help, and the only thing I can think to add are the following two suggestions:

That the class in question correct this hienous act of blasphemy by re-naming the bear "Satan".
That the peoples of the rest of the world (this includes YOU, dear reader) henceforward adopt the custom of naming all stuffed toys after some prominent religious figure chosen at random.

Also making the news is Brendan Nelson's newfound status as leader of the Liberal (note use of capitals) party. On this I would say the following: to date, I have actually rather liked Kevin Rudd for precisely the reasons a number of conservatives have dis-liked him: I suspect that he may actually be the wolf-in-sheep's clothing they make him out to be (I knowingly I await my eventual dis-illusionment and slide to dependancy on the bottle and crack-cocaine on this front). Well, actually, that and because he beat John Howard .... and frankly, there were times there when, were I offered the choice between voting for John Winston Howard or Adolf Hitler, well, this would have been a serious moral dilemma for me². Anyways, Brendan, on the other hand, seems more of a BASTARD in warm-and-fuzzy-pillock'S clothing to me. In all honesty, this commentary has only really been inserted as the easiest way I could think of to throw in a use of the word "bastard".... but I do more OR less stand by it.
Hmmm.... possibly I'm stretching this out a bit too much now..... so fuck it: WILL CLAIM YOUR FIRST-BORN.

¹Which seems perhaps a little less silly if you happen to be either the British teacher caught up in the furore .... or one of those frighteningly large number of people in the Sudan who actually give a fuck about what a small class of children calls their teddy bear. Human history would be considerably less bloody if more people had a well-developed sense of the ridiculous. Ah, well.
² "Dilemma" is not really the right word here..... I know of a better word, but I just can't remember it. It can be found in Douglas Adams' Deeper Meaning of Liff and has the following meaning: "A situation in which you have only one choice, but you can't take it".

Ethel the Frog Goes Down.

2007-11-27T12:07:00.001+10:00

It occurs to me upon writing the above that I've just hit upon a wonderful title for that woefully under-represented genre of literature: porn for children. Sadly, such an opus must wait for other hands more capable than mine. This post is about trivia on monday instead. Those of you who find themselves now too disappointed with life to go on may excuse themselves quietly.

....................

Some portion of those of you who have not leapt out the nearest available window are perhaps wondering why I have not done this before, given my prior role as Red Room Trivia correspondent for Team Gauss - as relinquished by Dave for reasons of difficulties in commuting¹. But what, dear reader, would I have said? In all preceding weeks, we've done alright. Not brilliantly, not appallingly - just alright. Unfortunately, this blog is exclusively reserved for tales of mediocrity I can get completely and irrationally incensed about - and in the case of a mediocre trivia performance....... I'm sorry, I just can't do it. NO², my friends, when it comes to trivia there are but two reasons to blog about it:

You kick arse.
You suck balls.

Have a guess, given the following hint, which one occurred to us on monday. Our team name was Ethel the Frog.

Being a team of 2 1/2 members³, no-one could have really been expecting great things from us, exactly, it's true. Given that we've never done so before, however, I at least felt just that little bit disappointed when we came in stone, cold motherless last on 63 points.

What really let us down here were the big fat juicy points we missed out on from the puzzle page and the bonus section. On the former, we correctly named an octagon, a dodecagon and found the only English anagram for noiseless. We kicked ourselves⁴, however, for missing the only english anagram for aspirant. The bonus round (each worth 5 points) went as follows:

What country, out of China, Brazil and South Africa, makes 70% of the world's light-bulbs? Our thought process: South Africa: too stupid, China: too obvious, Brazil: just right. I even went into a long, drawn-out justification: what country surely uses more light-bulbs than any other? The U.S.A. - hence a major manufacturing centre in Brazil makes a hell of a lot of sense........ bzzzzzzt China was correct.
In what U.S. state is Fort Knox? This one was the question Harry had posted on-line, which I'd neglected to check like a big fat dufus. My thought process: In Goldfinger, they rob Fort Knox. I distinctly remember James Bond drinking Mint Juleps whilst being held captive. The Mint Julep is the signature drink of the Kentucky Derby. Let's answer Kentucky. Hmmm.... why would you put a big gold-filled fort in Kentucky? Let's go with a big state.... like Texas. O.K. Texas it is....... the answer was Kentucky!!!!!!!
What element, once common in hat-making, was responsible for inducing madness: hence the phrase "as mad as a hatter"? This one we got right.
Who successfully covered the song "Up-town Girl" in 2000 and something? I feel we should have gotten full marks for our answer: "trick question - this song cannot be successfully covered". Harry felt otherwise.

In other news, I was kind of impressed with my recognition of song and title: The Gambler by Kenny Rogers in the music round. I got this not out of any special love of country music, which I assure you I lack, but because they play it ad-nauseam at every fucking poker final I've ever been to⁵. It's nights like these that seriously cause me to question my status as a trivia god. You, and you only, dear reader, can prevent a repeat of this ignominy by coming to monday trivia..... and maybe reminding me to check Harry's web-site for that damn bonus question.

¹By virtue of his being in France.

² I like big letters. I also like shiny objects, and footnotes.

³ We had a 3rd member who stayed for 1/2 the night.

⁴Hmmm... or rather Adriana kicked me.

⁵ Actually, me and a friend of mine are in the habit of standing up from our allocated tables in a hands-on-heart salute. This is a lie. Actually, we meant to do so, but what actually ended up happening was as followed: I stood up, looked for my friend, who didn't, then made like I was stretching my legs or something and sat down like a pansy.

Kevin 07

2007-11-25T12:56:00.001+10:00

November 24, 2007. The day on which the Australian people collectively said of the previous decade:

WHAT THE FUCK WERE WE THINKING?

Ode to a Nondescript Bird.

2007-11-24T15:59:00.001+10:00

Every now and then we can have our lives drastically affected by outwardly minor events. Tiny happenstances, chance meetings or non-meetings which incrementally adjust the lens through which we see the world - taking a hazy, chaotic mess and leaving our sight clear if only for a precious fleeting moment. It could be a small, nondescript bird that flies into the cell of some prisoner locked in solitary confinement in some black pit of a dungeon somewhere that reminds him of a greater world that still exists outside his own torment. It could be a trusted friend informing us that it really isn't as socially acceptable as we had heretofore assumed to wear our underwear on our head. I am here today to inform you, dear reader, that I, too, was touched in such a way over the weekend. At precisely 19:35 on friday night I recieved the following text message from an unknown sender:
Are you fuckers coming or what?

The profundity of these words I have even now, quite frankly, failed to adequately come to terms with. There is, I feel, something in them for all of us as we sit here awaiting the outcome of today's pivotal federal election. Are we fuckers coming........ or what? or what, you fools? Only once before now have I been so affected by a mis-sent text message. This occured to me a little under a year ago when I recieved the following two messages involving three individuals who, in order that their identitys be left protected, I shall refer to as Scrotum, Wench and Slapper. The first went as follows:

Hey there scrotum im slapper younger sister. WENCH IM 20 N I HEAR YOU LOOKIN 4 A
GIRL FRIEND. GIVE ME A CALL TONIGHT. HOPE YOU DIDNT MIND SR¹ GIVING
ME UR NUMBER.

It was shortly followed by the following message:

Scrotum its sr¹ sis wench, id like to meet u my sister says ur a
really nice guy! send me a txt..

Needless to say, it has to this day been a great source of sadness and regret to me that I could not, at the time, think of a suitably pithy way to tell the hapless Scrotum, Wench and Slapper just how much their situation had touched my life and, of course, to inform Wench that she had the wrong fucking number². I do not wish, dear reader, to live with such regrets as regards Senor Are you fuckers coming or what? His or her words were simply too deep and world changing to go unheeded and unthanked. Should anyone reading this feel the need to thank this person³, just let me know and I'll send you their number.

¹This is intended to be a 2-word abbreviation of Slapper. A fact more apparent when real names are being used.

² I briefly considered pretending to be Scrotum, but this seemed kind of cruel, even by my standards ....... and also more than a little creepy.

³ Preferrably in a cryptic, non-sensical manner.