That's not your bandwagon

Pulling up at the petrol station (gas station for my US readers) the other day, I was surprised to see that they offered free WiFi. This is a nice gesture but, as far as I know, I'm not supposed to use the phone near the fuel pumps or I might make my cares and those of my fellow motorists disappear in a column of incandescence. Which means I'm either using the WiFi in the shop or whilst powdering my nose. The latter doesn't bear thinking about too much but the former doesn't seem that much more likely, either. At a cafe, sure, I can see people who are devoid of friends or entirely sick of the one they are sitting with using the WiFi to ameliorate their FOMO but at the servo? Are you going to hang around the motor oils, catching up on Twitter or reading the news? A little Facebook perhaps? Status update "Buying fuel. Might grab a bottle of milk and a pie that's been in the warmer for a month and a half. LOL"

What is it with "LOL", by the way? I used to think it meant "laughing out loud" and was a way to convey emotional responses in an environment devoid of body language. But words change their meanings and now, divining meaning from context, it seems to be synonymous with "over" at the end of a radio broadcast.

"Just off to bed. LOL"

"Sorry to tell you but your grandmother died. LOL"

"It doesn't look good from here. I think the whole lot's going to blow and leave most of eastern Asia uninhabitable for the next thousand years. LOL"

Still, I've seen more ridiculous Facebook statuses. And requests to follow too, for that matter.

My butcher is inviting me to follow him on Facebook. Why? What is he going to tell me that I would want on my news feed?  He could share a recipe with me. That would be original. There are no recipes on Pinterest or anything like that. Perhaps he might upload some photos. Tell one of those endearing little back stories that Maccas seems to favour using in an attempt to assure us of the wholesomeness of their ingredients.

Follow Beverly the cow as she goes from pasture, through sale yard, from execution through abattoir and butchering. Admire her entrails and see how Beverley becomes prime rump steak on your BBQ this Sunday.

Equally puzzling is the TV station's adoption of car manufacturer's marketing lines. A car that is "all new" is impressive - new engineering of every component. A TV show that is "all new" is a statement of the obvious. "All new episodes of NCIS start this Tuesday, only on ..." Has anyone ever seen a TV show that isn't either "all new" or not new at all; viz a repeat. Is anyone making TV by splicing some new stuff into scenes recycled from previous seasons and hoping the viewers don't notice? It's a bad mismatching of ideas; rather like my surgeon offering me a free set of steak knives with my appendectomy.

Coming back to fast food outlets; they are not selling more product by pretending that they are on the side of healthy living. Mining companies don't get to be greenies and junk food shops don't get to be Tinkerbell's assistant - a parent's conscience buddy. Putting "don't forget to go outside and play" on the side of the box so that the kids can read it while consuming their monthly calorie intake all in one sitting is not fooling anyone. You can't sell type 2 diabetes - with a free non-biodegradable toy - and be a partner to parents in getting the kids up and going. To make the cognitive dissonance even worse, how on Earth did Maccas get to become the official restaurant of the Olympics?

Sex sells, sure, but not everything. The most amazing example of misplaced cleavage I've seen recently was in a calendar called "Babes and Boars" which, as the name suggests, shows pictures of women in bikinis posing, with firearms, next to large, feral and almost certainly deceased pigs. A fairly close second was the curvacious brunette who was, apparently, making me tongue-hanging-out desperate to buy industrial tarpaulins with which to cover my semi-trailer. And running a respectable third is the ongoing meme of women in bikinis carrying dead fish trying to sell me boats, fishing lures, cruises or, presumably, a peg for my nose.

What's the unspoken message here? In car ads it's

"You bring the car, I'll be here waiting with the legs and the lingerie."

In chocolate ads, of the licking-the-last-bit-from-your-fingers kind, it's

"You bring the chocolate, I'll bring the tongue."

Are they trying to lure me into buying fishing paraphernalia with a subliminal

"You bring the boat and I'll bring a disgusting fishy smell that you won't be able to get your of your skin for days"?

And, finally, undertakers should not be asking us to follow them on Twitter - my phone isn't a virtual ouija board and I don't wanting to be getting tweets like "Drk in here. LOL".

Sound and Fury is published every Monday and Thursday morning, Australian Eastern Standard Time. Please share with your friends.

We really are stupid

As a father of a soon-to-be-teenaged daughter, I share the common angst of worrying that my girl is worrying about how close her appearance comes to the archetypes portrayed in the media. The fact that every image is carefully constructed, edited, air-brushed and blow-dried is neither here nor there; the teens want to look like our publicly produced images, viz:

That's right. Every young woman should be doing something vaguely pornographic to a palm tree while her boyfriend plays the bongos on her back and a large, out-of-context national monument emerges quietly from the ocean in the background. Happens all the time!

But the monument in the picture started a train of thought. Have we always been this stupid? Have we always thought that we should actually look like our public art?

It must have been hell for women in the stone age.

This kind of look is possible with a deep commitment to fast food but not so easy to attain when drive-through means that the men have scared the bloody prey back towards the camp again. Calories were in short supply for these gals. Did mothers comfort, by the dying light of the campfire, teenage daughters who just couldn't get enough food to look like an inflated dugong and were sure no boy would ever love her?

Worse yet for the youth of Egypt.

I studied some history at university many years ago but I don't claim expertise in Egyptology. Did they have chiropractors back then? Certainly if misguided Egyptian adolescents were doing that to their spines, they were either the beneficiaries of some excellent cosmetic surgery or were setting themselves up for a lifetime of deformity that would make wearing stilettos look positively benign. And, as for getting those horns on their heads ...

Across the Mediterranean, things weren't all that much better - even amongst the great civilizations of Greece. I think we can discount even the most desperate-for-acceptance teenager doing whatever illegal thing it is you need to do with a cat to achieve the sphinx look

But, for the athletic adolescent of Athens, it would take a fairly specific training regimen to get thighs like a shot-putter, calves like a ballet dancer and feet like a set of diving flippers - to say nothing of the amount of damage you'd get from enough sun exposure to get skin anything like that colour.

Much later, evidence emerges of the invention of the cosmetic pencil sharpener by the Vikings. Apparently HB-head was de rigueur for the Vikings sacking Lindisfarne in 793

 While the same race had developed a fashion for legs that end at the kidneys by the time they were involved in the events of 1066.

And Africa and Europe are not alone in setting very poor role models for their youth. Can you imagine the kind of mischief a young Australian Aboriginal male might have done himself if he walked around for any length of time in this pose

with what appears to be a goodly amount of his skeleton visible? You can just hear his father now, "You young people have no idea. You'll regret it when you get older, you know!"

 And if you think I've excluded Asia, you're wrong. I won't show you any here - it's not that kind of blog - but if you look at the membrum virile on some of the men in the more adult Ukiyo e art from Japan, you can see how so many of the males of that culture might have developed nasty, lifelong inferiority complexes.

No, it would seem that only in this period - when the full gloss photos and moving pictures of our various media make it seem more real - have we become stupid enough to believe that we should actually look like our public art.

And we're the enlightened ones?

Notes:

"membrum virile" is the a polite old Latin term for penis. The use of the term was recently made famous in Australia by a very funny TV series called Rake - recommended viewing. Be careful not to get the American remake; it's nothing like as good.

Here are some outtakes: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ud0G9YnqjG8

If you'd like to watch an excellent talk from an A-list model on just how fake it all is, I thoroughly recommend this TED talk

http://www.ted.com/talks/cameron_russell_looks_aren_t_everything_believe_me_i_m_a_model

Sound and Fury is published every Monday and Thursday morning - Australian Eastern Standard Time. Please share this with your friends.

The tragic death of forgetfulness

Big data - a revolution in our understanding of our society or just another buzzword?

For my money - neither. Big data represents the end of the world as we know it - and I do not feel fine.

For there to be big data there have to be big databases. Googolplexes of data, tabulating our lives in minute detail. True, they have some benefits. They keep my medical records - obviating the need to repeat my medical history to every doctor I pick up, facilitate my online banking - further minimising the number of interactions I have to have with real people and remember my passwords - because they're the only entities that can.

And there, in that last example, is the problem. They always remember!

As has been discussed in previous posts in this excellent publication, lies and deception are central to our lives. Anyone who has successfully navigated the minefield of finding a mate will know that. As an early teenage amateur you go out there, full of confidence that your real self, if boldly presented, will be your ticket to eventual reproduction. And you realise, head-on at about 120 kph, that you're driving on the wrong side of the road. There's a game to be played here. You have to lie. Perhaps not exactly lie, but you have to present a version of yourself that is compatible with the delusions that your prospective mate has about his/her ideal companion. He or she also has to play this game for you. It's only after you're comfortable with each other's PR departments that you can get the heads of state together for a real meeting. The advice to "just be yourself" is the kind of thing you get from people that don't like you very much.

There's usually some trial and error in all this and the only way it works is for other people to forget, or at least choose to ignore, the person they thought you were before. And it does work. Pop stars reinvent themselves and make comebacks. Tom Hanks got over BIG and Turner and Hooch to become a heavy hitting serious actor. CEOs keep getting plum jobs even though they drove their last two companies into the ground so hard that civil aviation authorities are still trying to piece together the wreckage and all the victims are yet to be identified. The world works because people forget.

But databases don't forget. They know and will always know. And when they talk to other databases they share what they know and there you are, a grown adult, naked as the day you were born with all the things you hoped would be forgotten out in the open, clearly documented and backed up in three separate off-site locations - and probably an undeclared fourth just in case you and the Semtex find the first three.

Australia doesn't have a bill of rights and, on the whole, I think we shouldn't. Most of our rights are "understood" and are a central part of our national character . And one of those rights, inalienable in my view, is the right to gently defraud the tax office. It is my duty to fill in a tax return and my right to have them believe what I tell them. And, as Kerry Francis Bullmore Packer said, "as a government you're not spending it that well that we should be donating extra".

The Australian Taxation Office has become scary. It's a waste of time filling in my tax return because they know everything already. They know my income, my tax, my bank interest (all 55c of it), how much I've spent at the doctor - the lot! Why ask me to fill it in? Is it some kind of twisted honesty test? Some way of checking my loyalty to Big Data and the Party?

I tell you a story, you believe my story. That's the social contract Australians used to have with the tax office.

Employment has gone the same way. The art of CV writing, as I have previously mentioned, is a form of creative art not unlike portrait painting. It's understood by both audience and artist that the laugh lines will be touched up, the eyes made less close set and the weird mole just off to one side of the cleft in your chin will be conveniently removed. The result is still you, just a version that you're happy for people to see. That's what a CV is -  you as an oil painting.

And, as Neddie Seagoon said, I'm no oil painting.

Enter iProfile - Big Data's invasion of the recruitment sector. It's a database on which the claims you make to one recruiter are stored and then accessed by other recruiters - not just in the same firm but any recruitment company that subscribes to the system. So much for artistry. When I give you my CV, it's carefully crafted for that job and de-emphasises, air brushes or just straight omits certain facts that I think are not in my best interests for you to know at this stage. Except that you can know them - all those things I foolishly disclosed - because they're all there - stored in perpetuity. That was not the deal.

Apart from the need to stay warm, clothing will no longer be necessary in the near future. Clothing, like our CVs and our mating persona, is designed to project an image we imagine others are happy with - to disguise the lumps, bumps and weird little bendy bits that make up our real selves. Big Data is stripping us naked and revealing us for who we really are and, worse still, who we really were. Every time we try to set the record wrong on important parts of our history, a Party apparatchik will jump out with a data-derived report and say "No, that's not how it was!" and, thereby, ruin our futures. Every date we ever botched, every bra latch we ever fumbled, every Tweet we ever hung our head in shame over when we sobered up and every career decision we ever lived to regret will be there, projected on a billboard, for the world to see.

We're either all going to have to become Gattaca perfect or get used to each other's unvarnished selves.  Big Data destroys forgetfulness, the basis of human relationships. Only loyalty to and love for Big Data can be tolerated. If you want a vision of the future, Winston, imagine a human face without makeup - forever.

Notes:

For the ATO - this is a satirical blog.

Kerry Packer - Australian media mogul - famously delivered the quoted line to a Senate inquiry into print media in 1991. The quote comes right at the end of this video
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LnwYoOeWZGA

Neddie Seagoon was a character in the Goon Show. The reference is to the episode called "The Mystery of the Fake Neddie Seagoon"

What astrology offers

Astrology offers its adherents glimpses into their futures and advice on how to make the most of the opportunities that the future will bring. In my experience,  however,  it suffers from Disney syndrome;  a tendency to assume the best and presume that the future will be ripe with opportunities,  optimally to be harvested, each in its due season.  Life experience teaches us that this is just not the case:

Gemini: Your stars are aligned directly with the  Singapore stock exchange's main sewage outlet pipe. Today is the day that all of your hard earned life savings will go to hell. It's too late to do anything about it - the future is written in the stars. Go looking for a minimum wage job at which you can work until death.

Cancer: The next person you sleep with is going to give you a venereal disease.  This is a rock solid certainty. You now only have two paths open to you in life: celibacy or endless itching and creams.
.
Sagittarius: The Hubble Space Telescope is in your constellation this month and it's time to do some deep soul searching. You will discover that you, like most of space, are mostly a void with the odd ball of inert gas scattered here and there.  After all these years,  you have become a vapid, superficial being whose Twitter postings are the only remaining vestiges of personality and intellect.

Libra: Your constellation is being occluded by the moon this month which means that your balance will be out and that mental illness and instability will follow. It's probably worth learning the etymology of "lunatic" at this point. Book a psych appointment now.

Aquarius: Orbiting space junk dominates your sign. Nothing you start this month is going to amount to much; new books you start will just add to the unfinished pile on your bedside table, companies you invest in will never grow and veggies you plant won't fruit. It's just going to be one of those months. I'd stay in bed if I was you.

Aries:  There is absolutely nothing in your sign this month. no planets, comets,  meteors or little green men. This will be reflected in your life.  It will just be ordinary humdrum with nothing special to distinguish it from any other month. You can go on that special holiday if you want to but it won't have any zing to it: you are condemned to tedium for the next 30 days.

Capricorn:  The Deception Nebula is in your sign this month but it will look like a star. Someone close to you will turn out not to be who you thought they were. The best course of action open to you is to develop an attitude of advanced paranoia and spend the month scanning anxiously for the first tiny sign of betrayal.

Pisces: The rare eruption of a supernova in Pisces this month presages certain food poisoning with explosive diarrhea for you and your children - probably all at the same. Avoid seafood if you life but it won't do you any good - it might just as well be the pies.

Leo: The arrival of the annual Leonid meteorite shower will ensure that your month is full of stuff being chucked into your schedule at the last minute. Free up some space on the credit card right away. A school fete your kids forgot to tell you about is likely, the dog is probably going to need some kind of surgery on his front left paw and the boss is almost certainly going to send you on a business trip to Hell and back - don't forget to get a receipt from Charon to claim expenses when you return. On the plus side, having your immediate supervisor turn into a pillar of salt or disappear forever on the way back could create a promotion opportunity.

Taurus: As the latest ESA probe to Mars passes through your sign this month, you can expect ongoing niggling hassles with your ICT equipment. Nothing major - no blue screens of death but updates that won't install, driver changes that make your printer stop working - that kind of thing. Block out some hours each evening to spend on the line to various help desks in India.

Virgo: The absence of planetary activity in your sign this month bodes badly for your love life. If you don't have a partner - you ain't getting one and if you do then they're going to have headaches for weeks. Don't forget to check in with your optometrist at the end of the month.

Sound and Fury is published each Monday and Thursday morning, Australian Eastern Standard Time. Please share and enjoy.

Love your body?

We are told by many - inspired by good intentions, corporate profit or a hope that if larger people buy soap (with one third moisturizing cream) that they'll use more than skinny people (just on a square meterage basis) - that I should love the beautiful body I have.  Numerous Facebook posts assure me that all I need to be bikini-body, beach-ready beautiful this summer is to put on a bikini. Honestly, I'm not so sure about that - and nor is my wife. In fact,  I'm not sold on the idea that I should love my body at all; it's a complete bastard.

For a start, it keeps lying to me and no relationship of love can exist without trust. It tells me things like, "You could really go some Maccas right now" or "That felt good,  pour yourself another red wine; it'll make you feel even better!" And it doesn't and I don't.  So I vow that I'm not falling for that kind of visceral manipulation ever again.  Then it waits for a moment of weakness and plays me like a harp. It's like the psycho ex your father warned you about. How can I love it?

And when it's not being manipulative, it's behaving like a six year old.  Just settled in for some study, glasses on, chair comfortable and it comes up to me:

"Dad, I'm hungry."
"Not now,  you've just had dinner."
"But dad, I'm really hungry now!"
"You're not,  you're just bored."
"No! I need a chocolate. Dad!"

And so on until I give in for the sake of piece and quiet.

Or my libido gets bored. At the seminar, settling in to listen or circulating to meet some interesting people. A tap on the shoulder:
 
"Hey", tap tap tap, "She's cute."
"Not now."
"Yeah, but check her out!"
"This is not the time and place.  Just settle down."
"Let's go and talk to her."
"Just shut up."
"All right, all right but you're missing out.  I'll be back later in any case."

And what about those bad days when the black dog is scratching at the back door?  A true friend would give me some good advice like "go for a walk" or "get some gardening done" - anything to get the blood pumping and some natural light on my face. Not my body, though. Its friendly advice is to climb back into bed, curl up in the fetal position and hope that everything goes away. With friends like these ...

While on the subject of the brain, I'm sure my body is sneaking in at night and screwing with the wiring. Stuff I thought I knew has disappeared. Faces and names don't match up any more; I can confidently call my daughter Bruce and the dog keeps telling me to stop calling him Shirley.  Psychologists tell me that I might have vivid memories of things that never happened and will forget almost everything that actually did. The only things that are stuck there, apparently,  are traumatic things that are soldered in place.  In all other cases, my body is functioning like a switchboard operator with a drinking problem and too much time on its hands.

Good or bad friend,  my body has been with me for forty odd years now (never you mind about how big  the 'odd' is) and, at the very least,  we should have a mutual respect for each other and an understanding of and support for each other's goals in life. Forty years and, just as I've started to get my act together,  it's heading off to do its own thing - some friend!  Confident and personable,  able to talk to the ladies at last and my body is sticking its stomach out and streaking my beard in unfashionable colours. I'm ready to run, play and climb with my kids, my knees have put in an application for long service leave. I finally have time to do a twelve week weight loss program and my metabolism laughs at me and goes out on strike, demanding an extension of time to twenty weeks and a pay rise of 30 minutes extra running a day to achieve the same productivity goals.

Ours is not a healthy relationship.  Before I agree to love my body, I think I'll get one of those government vouchers for some couples counseling - there are issues.

Pause for thought

There are pauses with which we are all familiar; the menopause - when the hormones take over in a way they haven't since adolescence, and the partner hides behind a door, and the tropopause - the barrier between the troposphere and the stratosphere. When storm clouds get high enough to hit the tropopause, they spread out giving them that famous anvil shape.

But there are many other pauses in our lives that we all experience but for which we don't have names. Well, didn't have names - until now.

Sucropause - when you lift a spoon of sugar from the bowl, you take the sucropause. This allows the stray grains to fall and the little cone of sugar to form a stable enough structure to get the spoon to your coffee without spilling. Parents know this with medicine too. You've poured the medicine into the spoon and pause to ensure that the surface tension will keep the dose stable long enough to convince the patient that it really will taste great this time, despite it tasting like a combination of aniseed and hydrochloric acid on all previous occasions.

Adipause. The adipause is the few seconds you take to let the calories vanish from a cake, biscuit or other sweetmeat.. It comes between "Oh, go on, have another one" and "Well, maybe just one more." The recipient knows that they shouldn't eat it - their waistline has been discussing this issue with them for some months now - but they have very little self control. The adipause of indecision allows all the calories to evaporate so that it doesn't count towards their WeightWatchers points.

Popopause. A little archaic now, the popopause is the time needed to ensure that all the popping of corn that's going to happen in the pan has finished - then you can take the lid off. Get the popopause wrong, and you'll have your own little Chernobyl as the popping grains, uncontrolled, set off a chain reaction that contaminates your kitchen for months to come.

Lovapause. Is the time taken gazing into someone's eyes before the mutual chemistry has gotten to the point where the first kiss is now going to happen. Or not. I don't think it's actually possible to gaze into someone's eyes from that close to, is it? I've only ever managed one eye; I can't focus on both at the same time. Is this a universal truth that we only don't discuss because there is limited romance in a statement like "I gazed lovingly into her left eye"?

Ejacupause. Gentlemen - you know whereof I speak.

Bankrupause. At the supermarket, you pay by card, key in your PIN and then you experience the bankrupause - the irrational dread that your transaction will be declined and you will have to make some lame sounding excuse to the cashier. You could have three quarters of a million dollars in your savings and be buying $11.50 worth of apples but you will still experience the bankrupause. It's the reason for the popularity of self-service checkouts around the world.

Pumpause. The time taken between squeezing the trigger on the petrol pump and the fuel starting to flow. In some parts of the world, this can be as long as half an hour. I think the fuel is being pumped up from deep underground and refined in real time at my local servo.

Monkeypause. When you have to tell someone something that you know is going to enrage them, you will experience the monkeypause. It's the time between the end of your explanation and them climbing down out of their tree and going ape at you. If you don't get your explanation out fast enough, they monkeypause could, in fact, be of a negative length as it starts before you've even finished blushing.

Loadupause. Has the click you made on the "Confirm payment" button worked or not? The weird little spinning "loading page" circle thing isn't going around but it doesn't always do that for Javascript. Did it not register my click or is the server just thinking about it? If I click again will I be billed twice? Does the vendor I'm buying from even really exist or is it a sideline for people selling Russian brides? This is the thought process of someone experiencing the loadupause.

Twittapause. This is the time, measured in microseconds, between an event happening and someone tweeting about it or posting a picture of it on some form of social media. It has become a real problem in metaphysics these days: cause and effect are being disrupted because no one actually has time to be involved in events, we have become a race of chroniclers. To pose the problem from the neo-Zen viewpoint - if something happens and no one is there to tweet about it, did it really occur?

Pause a moment for thought - can you think of some more that I've missed?

Note.

In inimitable Australian style, "servo" is an abbreviation of "service station" - what Americans would know as a "gas station". We can abbreviate almost anything and stick "o" on the end. Arvo, sambo (not a racist term, slang for sandwich), bottle-o  (a bottle shop, liquor store or off licence) and avo (short for avocado). What can't be abbreviated with "o" can be shortened with "y" as in footy, chippy (fish and chip shop or carpenter), sparky (electrician) and brekky (breakfast).
 
Sound and Fury is published every Monday and Thursday morning, Australian Eastern Standard Time.

Please share with your friends.

Tourist Attractions

The Great Barrier Reef is a tourist attraction. So is the Great Wall of China.  Suborbital flight courtesy of Mr Branson is something I'll save my whole life for and, if someone comes up with a way to give my wife and I a romantic weekend on the moon, we might consider selling off one of the kids. A tourist attraction is something that you'll go out of your way and potentially mortgage a relative to experience.  Put a few attractions together and you've got a tourist destination.

Now let's talk about what is not a tourist attraction.

Your bizarre hobby or lifetime obsession. Sure, if it does something for you, spend your life putting together the world's largest collection of historical spy cameras or novelty gear stick nobs but you're not getting $40 out of me to see them. You wanted them, you pay for them.  I'm not helping you get out of trouble with your wife.

What your town used to be.  Museums stuffed full of rusting mining equipment,  old photographs of long dead sporting teams or the one fossil ever found locally, padded out with piss-poor reconstructions of the dig and generic information about prehistoric animals generally are not tourist attractions.  If the only adjective you can find to put on your town signs is 'historic' then the place has had it and the only money coming in is the pension,  then it's time to shut up shop and let the tumbleweeds take over. The tourists aren't going to save you.

Arts and crafts markets. Everyone has one of those. They are all supposed to be faint echoes of imaginary kasbahs ( or something like that) on the Silk Road at which rare and unique cultural artifacts were discovered. In reality they are all exactly the same.  People who've taken four pottery lessons trying to foist their mugs on eponymoys customers, drifting around in a fog of market-hippiedom, local gardeners flogging highly suspicious tomato plants, craft stalls selling car key hooks in the shape of "Welcome", those bizarre crocheted tea-towel things that button over and are never in the right place when you need them because you wash your hands at the sink, not next to the oven and bloody dream-catchers, and, increasingly, packed stalls full of clothing that seems genuinely rasta until you look up close, read the label and realise it was indeed handmade - by slave labour in Bangladesh.

Streets full of olde worlde shoppes selling hand made lollies, over priced woodwork and 'collectibles' - which is another way of saying "any old rubbish - usually stuff that's been rejected by real antique dealers'. We all love the fantasy of village life - living in some perfect little place in the mountains where the air is clear, the vicar is friendly and the lovely old spinster lady with the rose garden is a part time expert in solving gruesome murders while she knits. And we all know that it's about as economically feasible as  Shyamalan's "The Village". I loved the Brigadoon feeling I got from the first one of those I visited but now the countryside is littered with these middle class communes and they only hold appeal for the terminally bored. And could someone please tell the local artist that three shades of blue inexpertly daubed on canvas and framed is not worth $300, no matter how Bohemian they felt while doing it.

In the end you need a wow factor if you want people to make a pilgrimage to your door otherwise it's just flies to ...

Goodness me,  is that the time?

Note: 'mug' is an Australian slang term for a fool or a gullible person.

Matters for judgment - a parenting dilemma

The plaintiff in this case, a nine year old boy, was the owner of an electronic tablet device. The plaintiff alleges that the defendant, a two year old, was wholly responsible for the destruction of said tablet through submersion in water, to wit: it being thrown into the bath. He is seeking compensation to the value of a new tablet, ideally with some cool games on it, and an opportunity to smack the defendant in the head. The defendant, through his legal guardians, acknowledges having thrown the device into the bath but pleads mental incompetence due to age. His assertion is that, for him, an object adjacent to a bath can be reasonably construed as a bath toy and, therefore, should be hoiked in that general direction. 

Expert testimony was heard by the court to the effect that the defendant has no idea what he's doing but tends to grin while he's doing it - evidence of mental incompetence. The plaintiff has asserted that the grin is evidence that he knows exactly what he (the defendant) is doing and how much he enjoys doing it and he, therefore, should be held fully accountable for his actions; "held accountable" in this case meaning subjected to various forms of corporal punishment.

In their judgment, the court decreed that the defendant was indeed negligent in having immersed said tablet but that the plaintiff was also at fault because he shouldn't have had the bloody thing in the bathroom to start with. Therefore, contributory negligence was assessed at 50% and the plaintiff is required to cough up $125 of his saved pocket money to buy a new one with the defendant's legal guardians paying the difference.

In his appeal, the plaintiff alleges that the defendant was 100% liable for the loss because he regularly took the tablet into the bathroom to listen to cool music while he bathed and that the defendant shouldn't have been in the bathroom when he was there in the first place. He argues that the judgment is manifestly unjust in that it leaves him without funds to cover the basic necessities of his life, such as a copy of the Lego movie.

The dilemma for the court is whether to imprison the plaintiff for backchat or admit the quality of his appeal as representing advanced logical thinking for a nine year old, presaging a bright future in the legal profession.

My learned friends?

Note:

The picture shows Edward 'Gough' Whitlam - the only Australian prime minister ever to have been sacked and Sir John Kerr (left) the governor-general who sacked him. The dismissal of the Whitlam government in 1975 remains a hot topic of Australian legal and political debate. Sir John Kerr's book on the subject was called "Matters for Judgement".

Stop screaming at me.

Even if I wasn't naturally attuned to classical music,  I think I'd listen to ABC Classic FM. Why? Because they don't scream at me. I've heard commercial radio morning DJs and I think they should all be drug tested before they go on air. Very few people are naturally that happy, that excited and that loud at any time and no one at that hour of the morning.  mornings are a gentle time - or should be - a chance to ease into the day,  gingerly opening one's mental eyelids while carefully sipping on that first cup of coffee.  I don't want to be awakened by people screaming at me - that's why my wife and I decided not to have any more children.  Emma Ayers - thank you for being the aural equivalent of toast with marmalade,  a fine cup of tea and the morning paper.
 

I don't want to end my day being screamed at either.  I am not in a state of gasping disbelief at the size of the discount on your vacuum cleaner.  I will not become orgasmic at the thought of a cheap used car. I am not driven to paroxysms of ecstasy by visions of discount potatoes. So stop screaming at me about them. In fact, as we move on past 8.30, a little gentle background music and a few discretely lit photos of the merchandise on offer will do nicely,  thank you.

And it's not just an aural phenomenon.  Your catalogue is exploding at me, blinding me with stars and call outs proclaiming the product to be hot  (the correct phrase, by the way, is 'bought from a bloke in the pub'), new, improved,  new and improved (an oxymoron) or limited stock (which is called bait advertising and is a breach of the Trade Practices Act). I can't see your product for you screaming at me.  This isn't a nightclub.  I'm not going to get caught up in the heat of the drug-fueled moment, stunned into insensibility by the stars and the exclamation marks, and wake up finding I've bought something that will take some explaining to my parents later; you're selling books and DVDs. Although ... if people did come into nightclubs with some literal tickets on themselves "up for it", "only in it for free drinks", "shag you and leave you type" or "going to spike your drink" we might all find the experience more rewarding.

I'm not really a hysterical type of person - probably why I was rejected as an audience member for The Voice. I have enthusiasms certainly but they are celebrated quietly with a smile of internal pleasure - not shrieked out like the foaming bezerker ululations of insecure 15 year olds, desperate for social acceptance and a share of the limelight. Speak quietly to me. Make your case in a calm, measured way and maybe I'll listen.

I think it's gotten to a point at which you're screaming so loudly that I can't hear you.  There are so many hucksters,  so many spruikers out there, all breaching the EU's noise hazard regulations that they've become background din. Just hand me those headphones.  Your strategy isn't working. 

Reminds me of a stanza from a poem by Banjo Patterson.

And in place of lowing cattle, I can hear the fiendish rattle
Of the tramways and the 'buses making hurry down the street,
And the language uninviting of the gutter children fighting,
Comes fitfully and faintly through the ceaseless tramp of feet.

Just shush. Your empire isn't going to grow any more. You can't motivational speaker me into a new TV; I have neither the need nor the money. Just be happy with what you have and sit quietly for a bit. You're just screaming yourself hoarse and me into a state of mental overload and breakdown.

Notes:

The poem is called "Clancy if the Overflow" - Banjo Patterson is a famous Australian poet in the bush ballad, folksy style - and you can read the full text at 
http://www.wallisandmatilda.com.au/clancy-of-the-overflow.shtml
  
Emma Ayers is the host of ABC Classic FM morning breakfast. She is mentioned here without her permission. If you'd like to listen to her, follow the links on this page
http://www.abc.net.au/classic/program/classicbreakfast/

Sound and Fury is published every Monday and Thursday mornings, Australian Eastern Standard Time. Please share with your friends if you enjoy it.