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

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.

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.

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).

I am an idiot, too.

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.

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.......

An ode to Salient

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 language<sup>3

3</sup>But 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....

First years say the darndest things.

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:

1. Any number that is not a fraction.
2. Any number which can be expressed as p/q where p,q ∈ ℝ and p ≤ q. ³
   
3. A number that exists rationally.
4. Any number that is not irrational.
5. A number that makes scence(sic).
6. Any number that doesn't believe in fairy tales⁴.
7. 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.

The end is nigh? Don't be silly.

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......

Covers

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.....

Stupid lyrics

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.

1. 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.
2. Drop kick me Jesus through the goal posts of life ..... about which there can be nothing to add.
   

Marking

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".....

........ 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

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.

Penis penis penis.

lol.

Judicial activism, NZ style

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 real call to arms.....

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)

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

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.

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

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?

A call to arms

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.<sup>*

*</sup>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!!!

The hardest logic puzzle ever....

....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.