Transparency - the curse of knowing

If we were to list the public morals of the Western world in the 21st century, in any top 5 list the word "transparency" would have to come up. It is usually paired with "accountability". This loving couple brings to us the message that

"everything about you should be known to anyone that wants to know and you should be able to answer, to that anyone's satisfaction, any question about your actions with a reasonable and rational response".

"anyone that wants to know" is often rephrased as "stakeholders". I often think it's worth remembering that Dracula had stake holders too and they didn't do him all that much good.

Is transparency truly a good idea?

I have a packet of chips next to me. I know they're not healthy. Pure fat and salt wrapped around a piece of potato of sub-atomic thickness. Do I really need to know that in every 50g serve there is 150% of my lifetime's allowance of sodium and enough fat to keep most of the population of the Horn of Africa alive for a month? No. Honestly, I don't want to know. It's not going to change my behaviour - I'm still going to eat the things.

I saw an autopsy once. All those squidgy bits packed so tightly in together. It's not pretty. If you've ever witnessed one it should be enough to convince you that seeing what goes on inside a person is not a good thing. Admire his well chiselled features, his high, academic forehead, and his manly biceps. You don't want to see how any of that is made, trust me. Anything south of the mouth and north of the .. and so forth, is best left to the surgeons. Opacity is our good friend in this case. I suspect that the darkness behind the eyes is also best left un-illuminated. Messrs Escher and Burton have nothing on my brain. And I don't think I'm unique. Men walking up inverted staircases and hands that draw each other are dealt with before breakfast. From then on it gets seriously weird. You really want this to be transparent? If you ask why I did something, do you truly think the answer will make sense? I'll tell you something I think you want to hear but I could be doing it because the little puppet figure with the big head fell off the self-sustaining waterfall and wound up stuck in a room full of prime numbers with a bad base of acalculia. For your sake and that of your loved ones, just take my explanations at face value and don't worry about where they came from.

Sometimes I think real business is like that too. I watch the latest scandal involving quasi-government Australian companies selling wheat to dodgy dictators or going through a suspicious amount of petty cash and brown paper bags and I wonder why I needed to know. Our guys are making a profit. Their guys are eating. Provided we're not burning children or funding another bloody zombie apocalypse movie or committing other crimes against humanity, did I need to look through that particular window? A discrete drawing of the blinds might have been better. The world isn't full of nice people and we have to do business with the world. Far better not to know what we had to wash off our hands afterwards.

If you're spending my money or pouring luminescent putrescence into my waterways as you produce your thneeds then I need to know what you're doing and why - here are my fifteen cents and a nail - but sometimes I think that we, as human beings, need to realise that there is a sane, rational and reasonable world that we need to pretend that we live in and then there's the darkness of real existence - chaotic, unpredictable, random, and existing in fractional dimensions. To take the wrong pill and wake up outside our comfortable Matrix might not be such a good idea - there be dragons.

Making your childhood dreams come true

I am very disappointed. A lifetime of twee kids movies and self-help books had led me to believe that, if I worked hard enough and truly, really-truly, believed with all my heart, that my childhood dreams would come true. I too could get an all-smiles freeze frame shot with my whole family and a jaunty little tune over the credits.

And have they come true? Have they what?

I have tried for years, man and boy, to make the swing go all the way over. It was the classic boyhood dream that one day I'd be strong enough to lean back super-hard on those chains and make the swing go so fast that it would loop right up and over and I would come screaming down the other side - the envy of all I surveyed. And it hasn't happened. No matter how big and tall I've become, how many of my greens I've eaten, it just won't work. I get to almost horizontal, the chain goes slack and my dreams sag with it.

And while we're talking about flying, I've never managed to get into space. My homemade rocket boosters - thoughtfully built using recycled materials such as toilet rolls and cotton wool with a touch of metho - did nothing. Not even so much as a creditable disaster on the launch pad. Absolutely nothing. So I upgraded the tube to empty paint cans, nailed onto the back of the cubby. Orbit? No. On reflection, it may be as well that this particular dream didn't work because my life-support system consisted mainly of a purloined length of garden hose but the principle remains! It was my childhood dream. And it hasn't come true. Even as a grown-up, I can't get the damn cubby-house off the ground.

Nor the car. Sitting in the middle of the back seat as a kid, I knew I was on a runway. The night was dark, the headlights illuminated the morse-code lines down the middle of the road and the runway edges were marked in flashing red and white. If dad would only pull back hard enough on that steering wheel we were absolutely going to fly all the way home. The only reason it didn't work was that dad just wasn't trying hard enough. Or so I thought. I am the dad now and, try as I might, I just can't get the DeLorean effect. Another one bites the dust.

2015 is next year, by the way. The bloody car companies have some serious R&D to get done.

If I couldn't get to the sky, the next dream involved getting the sky to come to me. I could attract lightning! My parents, dream killers that they are, were less than keen to provide me with a key and a kite so I had to work out my own plan. Metal attracts lightning so the more metal you have, the more likely you are to get yourself killed. So, get as much as possible. Lots and lots of nails hammered into a block of wood and stuck out in the rain? Rust. An old pineapple tin cut down the sides and opened up to look like a receiving dish then nailed to a block of wood? More rust. What's a boy got to do? Trees could do it all by themselves with no metal. I worked and believed my little heart out and not so much as a tingling feeling on the end of my tongue.

I was lied to. Were you?

Getting all medieval on my ....

I was highly distressed recently to realise that The Australian Bureau of Statistics has put me into the middle-aged cohort, Once you pass 40, that's officially "it", you've summitted. All that's left for you now is to make it safely back to base camp and write your memoirs in the hope that these will pay for it all.

Even more distressing and disappointing is just how much sympathy I haven't gotten from my nearest and (now formerly) dearest. My loud denunciations of this egregious mistake of categorisation are met not with rousing cries and exhorations to man the picket lines but with slight smiles, a shake of the head and softly spoken treachery in the form of statements like, "Well you are, dear". It's as if they are keen for my demise to begin. Well, I warn you all now, there's not that much there to inherit just yet so don't wish me gone too quickly.

And so it seems that I am now medieval. Not that I'm all that happy about it.

Firstly, the middle ages were characterised by the feudal system with older men at the top in positions of seniority and respect with all sorts of privileges including the droit de signeur. Tragically I find myself, at 41,  sans castle, sans vassals and with my wife keeping a close eye on any exercising of droits that might be in contemplation. Given some of the conversations I heard at the shopping centre this morning, however, I appear to be well supplied in the way of fools.

(How on Earth can you turn a metal tin, designed to store one's dishwasher tablets, humorously shaped as a dishwasher, into a ten minute conversation?)

I don't like the idea of middle age. I don't look at myself in the mirror all that much - probably because the answer to the question I might ask said mirror would almost certainly be "Well it sure ain't you, pal" but I don't think I look old enough to be middle-aged just yet.

Middle age always reminds me of the couple in the Meaning of Life

Struggling to find anything interesting enough any more to warrant talking about. And I just can't see myself in that hat.

It's a time of life when sexual attractiveness has faded to a pleasant reminiscence and that's not good. Middle aged people are probably sexually attractive to one another, but that's hardly the point. As any man will tell you, it's not a question of actually wanting to have an affair, it's just the knowledge that you'd be at the starting line with other contenders in the Golden Chase for 25 year olds, having blitzed through in the qualifying rounds.

It's also the time of life your parents were at in the earliest real memories you have of them. You were ten or twelve and they were 40 or thereabouts. And they were always old. Parents were always old and uncool and finding their joy in coffee and chat, not sunny beach and silly buggers. I don't want to think of myself as having reached the stage where my children will start at loving contempt and slowly graduate to doting pity and finally sympathetic visits and loud inquiries as to whether I've remembered to take my pills today.

There is also that first hint of gathering darkness, just out there on the horizon. I can see the distant flashes of lightning and know that the storm approacheth. Unlike the me of my adolescent delusions, this me will not live forever, hiding out in society and changing my name every eighty years so that people don't get all hysterical and burn me for a warlock. I will die at some point. This brilliant coruscation that is consciousness will one day be gone and I have no evidence at all that my being will continue beyond that point. I am not afraid but I'm not happy about it.

So I've decided that my own person medieval period will be short. Enter my personal Leonardo and my own Renaissance. Quite how that's going to work in reality, I don't know but I'll keep you posted.

Developments in the ultimate reality show

The public outcry has been predictably muted following the eviction of Zoroaster from The Deity following weeks of speculation that the ancient Persian god had been out of the A-league for too long to remain competitive. Something of a wildcard from the beginning, Zara - as he'd become known on social media - was never really expected to make the final cut but will probably not disappear into oblivion quite yet as the chat shows and gossip mags will want to listen to his commandments for a few weeks at least.

Zara joins a list of gods that have made the walk of shame from Nirvana - the show's glamorous set at MovieWorld on the Gold Coast - and out of contention to be the god of the world.

The Aztec's were the first to go when Huitzilopochtli got only four nominations in the first round of public voting. Pundits speculated that this was mostly because his name was impossible to SMS or pronounce for the viewers that call the 1900 number.

Zuul went in controversial circumstances following accusations that she wasn't a real god at all but just something made up for the Ghostbusters movies. The producers were rumoured to be upset by the loss because a little 1980's sex appeal was a good thing for the ratings and did something to offset the oversupply of men in beards and robes.

 As for Venkmann, he didn't even make it past the auditions after forgetting the famous advice that "When someone asks you if you are a god, you say YES!"

Thor looks unlikely to continue much longer either. The Norse thunder god is just not competitive in the various styles of godding that are required of the contestants. He started strongly with a great audition calling down the wrath of the weather and striking fear and awe into the hearts of the peasants. He seemed to be likely to go far after he incinerated Simon Cowell for being excessively facetious and annoying.  Since then, though, Thor has struggled to demonstrate versatility, unable to change water into wine, cure lepers, or move mountains as required.

The favourites in the competition, Jesus and Mohammed, continue to perform strongly but there are whispers on social media that Mohammed's support is waning as people are reminded that he never claimed to be a god at all - merely the prophet of the god. This is the same god that Jesus and Yahweh - the leading Jewish contender following the loss of Baal in the early days of the contest - claim to be and questions are being asked as to whether the big M has the hubris to succeed under pressure.

Zeus is the surprise challenger. The old man turns out to have versatility that no-one expected. When asked to show diversity in the Manifestation round, Jesus only managed tongues of fire. Yahweh looked to have taken the round with a pillar of fire and the same of smoke but Zeus came out of left field and blitzed the public with a goose and a golden shower. Always trust experience.

We are all looking forward to October when one deity will be chosen as god of all the world and will then bring an end to religious disputes for all time - thanks to the power of reality television.