Putting the letters "THEY"after your name

Congratulations on your masters degree in marketing. You are now entitled to append the letters "THEY" to your name on official correspondence, business cards and the like to celebrate your new status and humble and intimidate all before you.

You are now officially "they" and your professional output is now known as "that's what they say".

The most important thing for you to take away from your studies is that there is no such thing as "society". The great unwashed and uneducated bandy about phrases like "society expects" and "society promotes" as if an abstract concept could have it's own opinions; rather like a standard deviation having a preference for blondes. Deep down, they know this and use the phrase "society is to blame" as a way of palming-off responsibility onto no one. This idea is synonymous with an enquiry into an Oscar-winning cock-up by a government official returning a finding of "systemic failure" - resonates as a sound conclusion built on thorough analysis but is really just a way of blaming it all on the dark side of the force and defining transparency to mean "you can see right through to the other side without allowing inconvenient culprits to get in your way."

Other than this special case,  the public will use societal expectations to assuage their conscience when they do something terrible,  or to support their frankly alarming decision to inflict that pair of pants on passers-by or to attempt to subsist on a diet of sea-water and recycled wheat germ.

But there is no "society", no carefully considered body of collective wisdom,  no omniscient government agency that wouldn't let them publish it if it wasn't true.

There's just you.

While people are desperately casting around for an opinion, hoping with sphincter-clenching anxiety that you don't notice them doing it and fending off others with mocking laughter and sly sideways glances at their own particular choice of pants,  you step in with the wholesome, pre-canned soup of social expectation,  ready to eat right out of the microwave. They'll love you for it.

Tell them what their body shape should be,  what car they should drive,  what they should eat to prevent cancer and live forever.  You can even give them fashionable ailments to suffer from; there's nothing as affirming as being able to blame your inadequacies on a new syndrome that all the best specialists in Hollywood are treating the stars for.

And have fun doing it. Have a few glasses of chardonnay and get into a bet with other THEYs about how stupid a thing you can get people to think is expected of them.  Previous winners of this informal professional contest have included lycra, bubble skirts,  mullets, anorexia,  stilettos, plating up and the paleo diet.

You're the next generation of THEY;  the future's in your hands now.

Good luck.

Quizonesty

I wonder what sort of feedback you'd get from social media quizzes if they weren't trying to sell you something?

What sort of person are you?

Dull. Based on your Facebook posts you haven't had an original thought in the last 2 years.  You just share other people's stuff and mildly funny YouTube clips.  You're probably one of those people in the pub whose sole contributions to the night out are carrying the ice bucket and laughing at other people's jokes.

Alcoholic. Liberal use of the acronym "lol" is not fooling anyone.  Three times a week you make jokes about how much wine you need to get over the day, and your spelling after 9pm degenerates from bad to teenager before sliding further into that green text from the Matrix as midnight approaches.

Single.  Two thirds of the photos you post are of cats.  There's no way anyone is living with you surrounded by that much fur and malevolence.

Aggravating. Lay off the preaching. No one is going to be converted to Zoroastrianism through Twitter. Holy writ has to be longer than 80 characters.  And your god is more or less defunct anyway.  He's on the verge of being downgraded from "polite respect" to "embarrassing lunatic fringe" and seems well on his way to "B-grade Marvel hero".

Whippy. (A portmanteau word for "wishful hippy"). You work in an accounting office preparing tax returns but there is a part of your soul that would like to be, robe clad, on a mountaintop in Nepal -  provided you could still get a good latte each morning. Your profile is littered with vague truthlets and obvious aphorisms masquerading as profundity, backlit by the rays of the rising sun or the fairy colours of the rainbow. Not that it's doing you any good. Your blood pressure is still 140/95 and your spelling is still deteriorating after 9 pm (xref Alcoholic).

Chris Lilley. You think you're funny but you're not.  It's painful to watch. I'm sure it's hilarious in your head but your stream of consciousness seems badly polluted and if Facebook had a "buttock clenching cringe" button,  your friends would use it liberally.

Insincere. Sure, you click "like" on the photo of someone's kid getting a ballet award on Pinterest or their story of woe on Facebook but you never comment do you? The truth is you couldn't care less. Social media for you is just another Machiavellian way to make yourself seem less sociopathic, isn't that right?

Illiterate. Being generous about it,  you probably think that overusing z to make plurals and 'a' instead of 'er' (e.g. sista) makes you sound like Oprah in the 'hood but you aren't an annoyingly asinine black American woman nor yet a bling bro - you're a weedy 21 year old apprentice from Dubbo. You graduated from primary school; please write comprehensibly.

Creepy. You're peeping at far too many people through the e-keyhole. Be honest.  How many people's profiles have you browsed without befriending them? Would your partner be happy to know you'd looked up all those men?  I thought not.  The police are opening a file on you tomorrow morning.

Temporary. Post one more minion meme, "elf yourself" video or remind me one more time of the number of shopping days 'til Christmas and bad things will happen to you.  That's not a prognostication,  it's a promise. That's not the sound of Santa coming down the chimney, that's the sound of ruthless, trained killers rappelling down your wall, about to smash through your windows.

Merry Christmas!

Our thoughts and prayers

In the aftermath of anything tragic, it is inevitable that someone will say "our thoughts and prayers are with them." Now that many people do not believe in a god or practice any religion, it can - and often is in a lily-livered quaking in fear of offence kind of way - be abbreviated to "our thoughts are with them".

What the hell does that mean?

A thought, considered from the biological viewpoint, is a series of electrical impulses and neuron firings. No great amount of voltage involved, very little current, not enough to illuminate an actual lightbulb - let alone make one manifest in the air above your head. And not the kind of energy that one can transfer to a person in need - even if I did have jumper leads attached to my ears. My thoughts are not with them in this sense.

Perhaps my thoughts are with them in that they share my mental imagery? I sure hope not, for their sake. In particular, when tragedy strikes some people, if my thoughts were shared with them, their self-esteem might take a hit because they would start to believe that it couldn't have happened to a nicer person. Even if I do like them, my thoughts at any given time are unlikely to be uncomplicated as regards them - or indeed as regards anything. If our thoughts were with other people,  I don't know that it would do them much good in their time of need - or indeed by conducive to ongoing friendships.

Taking the less literal and more empathetic view, it seems to mean that we care and are concerned. If this is the case, then why "our thoughts and prayers are with them"? Someone making sympathetic noises at you is, on the whole, fairly useless and, beyond a momentary feeling of mild human warmth, doesn't do much to solve the actual problem. Much less so if the person isn't making the sympathetic noises at you but are informing others that they would, if you happened to be present, be making sympathetic noises at you. Or, perhaps, that they've thought hard about the kind of sympathetic noise that they might make, were you to be present. And they've done so with a sincere expression on their face.

Someone hoping I get better soon is at least directing their ineffective, childlike wishes in my direction. Saying "our thoughts are with them" is like saying "I hoped he gets well".

Even if we add "and prayers" back into the original phrase, it doesn't get much better. What that amounts to is "I have asked a possibly mythical being who, apparently, has the power to intervene and do - what I'm not sure but something vaguely interventiony, to conduct such an intervention despite the fact that she didn't, or couldn't, or wasn't motivated by sufficient toadying to intervene in the first place to prevent the catastrophe from happening". Given the inherent changeability of such a deity, one might equally fear that drawing attention to the crisis might just as readily bring down further catastrophe on the heads of the victims as solve the problem.

On the whole, "our thoughts and prayers are with them" is just another one of those things we say to prove to our fellow human beings that we are not psychopathic; that we share some basic level of empathy for other people. It's not doing the victims any good.

Just for fun

In a post-purpose first world where all our real problems have been solved and the angst of knowing where our next meal is coming from has been replaced with agonising non-decisions about which coffee cart makes the best cappuccino, and guilt ridden recycling of paper cup (with those baby-sipper-cup lids on them for the fundamentally maladroit) the search for meaning and reason to our everyday activities has become somewhat desperate. It is fairly unlikely that our children will go hungry, that our country will be invaded or that any of Pauline Hanson's strange mindless rants will evolve into a genuinely threatening fascist ideology. There's not much left to do that means anything or that would matter to the fundamental heart of the universe if we didn't do it.

So we have to find a way to assign meaning to even the most banal activities and, to that end, we have come to the point of banning doing anything just for fun.

Want to go on one of the those pilgrimage style, find yourself in the silence, long walks around the country or across the desert as a bucket list item? Just because you can? That's the kind of silly self-indulgent thing that men your age do just to get away from their responsibilities for a while. That kind of thing is not acceptable. You need to assign it some meaning. So find yourself a charity -there are something like 60,000 of them in Australia so you can take your pick - and use the activity to raise money. Now it's gone from pilgrimage to crusade. You're selflessly dedicating your free time and effort, sweating your way across endless miles of shimmering asphalt - all for the kids (or the puppies, or the old people or the scientists or some other minority, under-funded group). You've taken indulgence and given it purpose. Well done!

Thinking of a bit of physical activity. A mind-freeing amble along the seafront? Perhaps just go an chuck the frisbee around with a few mates? I don't think so. That's purposeless fun and you need all the meaning you can engineer into your life. You need a personal trainer, 50g or so of strap-on guilt (aka a FitBit), and a plan with goals and milestones.

And it's not just adults. Kids can't be allowed to play any more. Childhood was, once, that brief period of joy before the real, meaningful work of adulthood kicked in and you had to take up the yoke of bitter responsibility and necessary toil. Now, if we let them just play - given the inherent meaninglessness of modern adulthood - they might just play for the rest of their lives. We need to get them into retrofitted meaning and artificial purpose right from the get go. To that end, develop an early years learning framework and note their ability to build block stacks as evidence of gross motor skills, their ability to sort paper circles into piles by colour as gross numeracy skills and their ability to pick their noses as just plain gross. Childhood play now has meaning and purpose. Our children can be proud that they have started as they must continue - learning to pretend that there is a necessary and higher purpose to the things they would otherwise do anyway.

Certainly fun is out of the question

Putting two and two together and coming up with Hallelujah

When I started working, back in the pre-cappuccino hell of the 1980s, my father gave me some basic advice, which I have often thought worth heeding, that, while at work, you should do what your boss asks you to do.

Seems fairly straightforward.  I give them four hours of my life and do the things they ask me to do during that time and, in return, they give me a pay packet. And yes, you young fellows, it was actually little yellow envelope containing cash. What's cash? Those things you saw pictures of in your primary school maths lessons and which, on odd occasions, your parents have in their wallets for more than 24 hours. They're used at the start of cricket games too.

And this model worked fine for a while but then came the day when the boss didn't actually tell me what he wanted done. I was there, bedecked in my red vest, "can I help you" badge and equally sincere smile but there was nothing to do and no suckers customers that required my help.

Parental advice (advanced class): Initiative. Grab a broom and sweep something. Tidy up a bit.

Good. So I do that. Worked OK for a while.

Now, due to some miscalculation on the part of the authorities, it seems I've become an adult and I work in a professional type occupation and the situation has become massively more complicated.

Firstly, it appears that, if the boss tells you what to do, it will only be in the most general terms. They're far too busy to be spending time giving you instructions in detail; you're a professional now and one of the skills of a professional is to "fill in the gaps" - ostensibly in the space between where you are now and what the boss wants but, often it's more likely to be the gaps in the boss' thinking (she didnt' think it out properly) or the holes in the fabric of spacetime and causality that would need to be created to get what she wants done in the time allotted.

Secondly, you can't count on the fact that the boss has asked you to do something meaning that she, or indeed anyone else in the company, is going to support you. As a professional, you need to "own the project". This often means that the project was about as popular as a shipment of nuclear waste at a tourist resort to begin with and that "taking ownership" translates as "taking blame". By becoming a "champion" or "advocate" for your project, it basically becomes your problem and you need to be ready to defend the project against all comers, even the boss herself.

So here you are with goals that you can't understand, or which you can understand but which are impossible to implement, or which could be implemented if this became a hero project of the Soviet Union and you could kill a million peasants to get it done. But, as the project champion, it turns out that Stalin in High Heels isn't going to supply peasants to you and that you're going to have to raid the gulag for resources along with everyone else.

But even that's not enough in the modern corporate world. You have to believe! You have to truly believe!

Work used to be a financial contract. I work, you pay. Now, it's a church. The company has to have a philosophy, a mission, a vision and values. And you, the supplicant, need to show how you are living the values and aligning your work to the corporate vision splendid.  Your annual performance appraisal being your opportunity to confront your sins and to seek absolution; "Forgive me father for I have sinned, it's been six months since my last performance review."

And, like all churches, it has a clergy. Trained at the Harvard Business School, or other leading theological colleges, these vicars are imbued with the spirit of the gospels according to Kellogg and the Letters of St Covey to the Plebians  and will gather the faithful about them and lead them to the promised land of corporate success, flowing with cheap coffee and empty promises of bonuses.

But remember that other great truth of all religions - the faith changes. When certain bits of the holy scriptures become a bit too unmarketable, they become metaphorical and what you need to believe is whatever your priest tells you is a tenet of the faith - this week. And, for God's sake, don't remind them of what they said you were to believe last week. That was never true and she certainly never said that and any suggestion that she's anything other than fully orthodox is just malicious gossip that she won't put up with.

And the priesthood are not bound by the rules. The faithful must abide by the commandments but the clergy can do as they please; whatever is necessary to advance the flag of the faith and deliver widgets across all the Earth.

So, kids, I'm sorry. As far as I can see, work in the modern world is a cross between MiniTrue and an apocalyptic cult. What can I say?

Hallelujah.

But did you check?

A colleague of mine spends a great deal of her free time rehabilitating injured native animals. It's a worthy pursuit and in pursuance of that pursuit she recently bought 2000 worms to provide as food for an injured plover - which I'm led to understand is some kind of bird and not, as I first thought, an assistant tractor driver. And I asked her, in a moment of "oh God, it's still only Tuesday" ridiculousness whether she had, in fact, actually counted the worms to ensure that she'd been given full measure for her money.

And she vouchsafed to me that she had not, in fact, counted the little fellas but had estimated, based on the fact that the quantity was about twice as many as she'd been previously sold as 1000 worms, that she'd got what she paid for.

The obvious failing in that check mechanism will be immediately apparent.

As we discussed these weighty matters, it occurred to me that worm vendors are probably not the only people counting on the fact that we don't count. Or measure. Or check a before and after state to see if we have, in fact, gotten the benefit that we paid for.

Are your teeth noticeably whiter in only 14 days? Did you take a photo at the start of the treatment and then, in comparable lighting conditions, take another photo at the end of the fortnight to check? Or, have you, like most of us, kind of done it most days in the two week period then stood, turning to catch the light, in front of the mirror so that you can delude yourself that the caffeine and nicotine stains are half a shade of putrescense lighter?

Or, even more likely, did you go one step of self-delusion further an ask a person whose sex life depends on being supportive and sympathetic about it?

While we're on "noticeable", what about those abs? Only 15 minutes a day. Are your abs noticeably firmer? They're certainly noticeably completely unlike those on the man with with the rigor mortis smile who was using the thing on TV,. but are they noticeably anything at all other than that? Did you take some photos to support you claim for your money back (less postage, handling and shipping to the warehouse in Zaire)? Hmmm

Of course, there are times when not checking is a self-preservative - such as when you give a gift. On the rare occasions when we select a gift carefully - and don't grab the least inappropriate object at Target and, post purchase, convince yourself that the receiver will love it - you don't really know if it's something that they will cherish.

The conveyed first impression is no guide as I've yet to come across a person who tore through the wrapping and greeted the contents with an honest "Well, I hope that didn't cost you much." They say it's wonderful, we feel the self-righteous glow of giving. We do not need that glow to be diluted by the reality that the receiver's life has not been transformed by a kind-of-hand-made bright red coffee mug with Santa bells on it - so we don't go back and check.

Government grants programs work in a similar way. The minister announces something - a nice big headline number with the word "millions" after it, there's a launch and the relevant rent seekers stakeholders are there for the photo op. No one but no one wants to know if the money achieved what it was earmarked for. That wasn't the purpose of the program.

We don't check because we don't want to know. Subconsciously we fear that most of the things we spend money on are pointless, useless, ill-received, misguided or rip-offs.

Better not to know.

Juvenalia

Peter Pan was the eternal child - much like Jack Sparrow. In fact it seems that the whole pirate milieu is pervaded by the quest for eternal youth, or at least eternal immaturity. The evolutionary benefit of this approach seems to be that if you take nothing seriously then nothing serious will happen to you. The sword will always be a miss and your one-liners will always be a hit. Perhaps it's unsurprising that the pirate genre would be pervaded by this surreality, as the rose coloured glasses of narrative peering through the celebrated mists of time appear to have transformed rapacious, violent, marginalised criminals into rollicking, witty, just slightly salacious ratbags. The passage of time and the magic of the story teller are amazing in that regard; just ask Ned Kelly.

International Talk Like a Pirate Day is an intrusion into the 'real' world (and I use the inverted commas advisedly - just check out the title of the blog) of this fetish for eternal and protective immaturity. But it's only one of many manifestations of this phenomenon.

One of things that has surprised me most over the last couple of decades has been the rise of adults who take themselves seriously and also give themselves the title of "Gamers". Computer games are - or at least were - for children and adolescents who hadn't, as yet, developed the social or intellectual skills necessary for things like cards. It's a kind of eternal backyard in which you run around with your friends pretending to be soliders or ninjas or car thieves or whatever. This kind of thing for adults used to be limited to "Historical Re-enactment Societies" who, at least, had the decency to try to make what they were doing sound grown-up and meaningful. Calling yourselves "Gamers" is just shameless!

And cosplay. Don't give me "cosplay", it's dress-ups. The only difference is that you, as an adult, are hoping that you look kind of sexy in the Catwoman outfit. And getting yourselves together at a Comicon, dressed up like storm-troopers and getting a selfie with or your butt signed by the actress that played the engineer on Firefly is just a dress-up party taking itself way too seriously.

The final surrender appears to be colouring in. I'm now being told that there are protective benefits to my mental health - in the form of mindfulness - from making sure that my sky is blue, my grass is green, my house has a chimney and I stay inside the lines. Sure, you're trying to make it feel like something meaningful by throwing in some kind of Tibetan mung-bean, organic, vegetarian mandala thing but it's still colouring in. What's next? Join the dots.

It seems like it would have been better not to have graduated from primary school.

And the trouble is that none of it is giving us the real benefits that we want to bring back from childhood The clothes I dropped on the floor of the bathroom are still there in the morning, my shirt doesn't appear magically ironed next to my bed in the morning, I don't get to just scream and yell when I have problems and, worst of all, I can't just curl up and take a nap anytime I feel that it's all a bit overwhelming. 

Which I think would be the thing that would provide me the most mental health protection of all.

Just give up

I'm not a great one for quitting. Keep trying until you get there, all that sort of thing. But there is a limit and I think there are some things that have gone beyond that particular pale and which we should all just give up on.

The office kitchen

No, my mother doesn't work here but nor does my wife live here. I don't have to start washing it up ten seconds before I start thinking of using it. The place doesn't have to be ready to pass royal inspection at any point. And some of the other guys that work here with me are still living at home with their mothers - who take care of it for them - or in share houses with other blokes who think that nothing needs cleaning until it is actually condemned by the health authorities (aka one of their girlfriends). There is absolutely no way that people are going to wash, dry and put away every teaspoon they use, as they use it. Frankly, I don't do that at home either. It just builds up on the sink until my wife gets sick of it then I pack the dishwasher. Why does anyone think that work is going to be any different?

Toilet paper

Sarcastic little internet videos of girlfriends showing their boyfriends how easy it is to replace the loo paper after use are going nowhere. It is up to the person taking a seat to make sure that they have all the accessories in place. And, in all honesty, how many times is a person really leaving a completely empty roll? The coincidence - that there was just enough left on an almost empty roll for my needs - is a little difficult to credence. What you're probably really complaining about is that there wasn't enough left for your needs; that I didn't anticipate your wiping requirements. Which seems to suggest that you want me to spend time thinking about your toilet use. That's taking empathy WAY too far!

Toilet seats

While we're talking toilets , no I'm not putting the seat down. Do you honestly walk in and sit down without looking? Are you incapable of pulling the seat down yourself? The way you go on about toilet paper and seats, it's like you walk in and sit down with your eyes closed. I might do the same thing, if you like, but don't blame me for the aim-related consequences of that.

Reading your ads

I, like many internet users, am a sucker for lists. The top 10 things not to do when building your own rocket. The 25 funniest real estate agent photos. Love it. So I'll click through ... and I might read ONE ad as payment for your services in providing 30 seconds of relief to my day. Loading 9 ads for Filipino singles and two for things that will shock me when I see what happens next then, after thirty seconds, loading the first photo in the series is not going to get me to read any of those ads. I'm out of here. It's made worse by burying the "Next" button below the digital fold, right under the first row of ads. I now hate you and your advertisers. I will avoid any Letterman Lists with your URL attached.

And, for the love of the almighty, I'm an adult of the internet generation. I'm not shocked by anything!

I am the Doctor

I have come to a startling but flattering realisation: I am the Doctor. Not "a" doctor, "the" Doctor. As in the man with the Tardis.

How do I come to such a conclusion? Have I been drinking too much or not getting enough sleep? Has the mind numbing tedium of Minion Memes finally driven me over the edge? Well maybe, but the justification I'm giving myself in my head is that I am a father, ergo, I am the Doctor.

Start with the screwdriver. Fathers are never without one. It should be something you're given at the hospital when your kids are born. The first thing you realise, as a father, other than that you never want to see the woman you love go through that again, is that you need a screwdriver. The first toy your kid gets will need batteries - not included, of course and needing to be replaced every half hour or so - and you can't get at the battery case without a screwdriver. I can understand why in the case of those little lithium things but when it's a D size,  I think the chances of junior imbibing it are fairly low. Nonetheless, you need a screwdriver.

Then there's the toy you have to fix. Usually about an hour after it was unwrapped on Christmas Day and the shops aren't open to get a refund. But it's my favourite Santa present, dad! Screwdriver again.

I just wish I had the "twiddle the end and it will do everything" model. Who came up with those triangular headed ones? And the little cogwheel ones? Listen, you toy engineering people, when it's 10.30 on Christmas morning and my kid is upset, there are always user serviceable parts inside!

What else convinces me that I am the Doctor?

Well, I have a Tardis. I guarantee that my house is bigger on the inside. It's the only way I can account for the quantity of stuff that seems to find a home in it. Under the couch, behind the toilet, up one of my offspring's nose. And the space under the kids' beds is in another set of dimensions entirely. No matter how often I clean under there, I can still reach in and pull out two school shirts, a left shoe, a friend we thought we'd lost last time they slept over and about three and a half tonnes of Lego pieces that "are lost forever Dad, we'll never find them!"

The final things that convince me that I am the Time Lord are my nemeses; aka my children.

My three year old is a Dalek. There are two things that are known constants about Daleks:

1. They have no facial expressions so they have to articulate every single thing that they are thinking about, planning to do and actually doing "You are a huuman. You will be exterminated!"; and
2. They will go on and on in the world's most annoying voice until you pay them the attention they want.

That's my three year old. He can't even defecate without giving me a running commentary about what's happening and how noisome the production thereof is. And as for nagging ...

My next two boys are Cybermen. Obsessed with upgrades - in their case of the versions of the apps on their tablets - and warfare. All they want to do is create chaos and delete each other. Every opportunity to sneak in a quick fraternal deletion in the form of a punch to the stomach, a kick up the bum, a dob-in or a filling your house on Minecraft with lava is taken. They might have been human once but now ...

And finally my teenage daughter. She's The Silence. You don't get much communication from her when she's in the mood but you can sure get the look. Parents of teenage girls, you know the one? The one that follows a suggestion that she might not wear that pair of shorts or she might just tone down the use of Netflix a little and, perhaps, just perhaps, do some more study for her upcoming exams.

And, after you get the look, you know that Silence Will Fall.

I only wish that I could manipulate time the way the Doctor does. I might get an extra hour or two to myself during the day!

It's SMTT Day

There has been, in the last month or so, a strong focus in Australia on mental health. It is an important issue and the change in community attitudes and improvements in treatment options in recent years have been excellent.

In support of this noble cause, in acknowledgement of the tragically irrational nature of many of our dislikes, and with tongue firmly in cheek, Sound and Fury is proud to inaugurate International Shits Me To Tears Day.

As a celebration of what is perhaps the strangest construction in the English language and to give us all a good laugh, Shits Me To Tears day is a way to vent. Not about the big things. SMTT isn't for rants against refugee policy or gun control or the ongoing existence of Alan Jones, but for those little things - innocuous or perhaps even slightly beneficial in and of themselves - that just shit you to tears.

So, dear reader, I will start with a couple of my own and I invite you to spread the good word about SMTT day and share tear-jerkers of your own.

Lane filtering.

Motorbike riders do it. They ride up between lanes of stationary cars at traffic lights to they're first off when the lights go green. In NSW at least, it's perfectly legal and doesn't really harm me but it shits me to tears. Stay in the bloody queue like the rest of us! You too should know the frustration of a neutral-at-the-lights driver that causes you to miss the change. Suck it up!

From, to, to, to

"We can meet all your flooring needs from carpet to tiles, to lino, to floating floors and lots more". Aaagh! Journeys are from, through (or via) and, ultimately, "to" as a final destination. "I traveled from Sydney, via Newcastle and Tamworth, to Armidale" not "I traveled from Sydney to Newcastle, to Tamworth and to Armidale". This particular construction isn't the worst abuse of the Queen's English that's out there in the ether but it just shits me to tears.

And a quick recap of our main advertisement.

The habit of TV stations to run an advertisement at the start of the ad break and then give you a little recap of that ad again at the end - the 15 second version. Some genius with a PhD in Marketing or some other thing that's not a real discipline that you should be able to get a PhD in, probably thought that it was a way to keep the product fresh in the viewer's mind. No, it isn't! It just keeps the tears fresh in my eyes because the whole thing shits me to tears!

And now it's your turn. Remember, dear readers, SMTT day is about the little things, the small stuff that you know you shouldn't sweat but gets so far under your skin that you're beyond sweating - it just shits you to tears.

I get the look!

If you've got four (or more) children, you know what I'm talking about. Tell someone how many children you have and ... you get The Look. The Look is more than just a facial expression, it's a full narrative of someone's mental state from "Stop joking", through "You're kidding me", through "Pity for the insane" and then a facial expression that doesn't have an adjective you'd use in polite company but is probably one that lepers used to know well and is summed up by "I feel sorry for you but don't get too close in case some of it (or some of whatever's coming out of that kid's nose) rubs off on me".

That's The Look.

But I tell you it's nothing compared to the facial expression you'd get if someone who doesn't have kids at all had to live in a home with four of them.

We don't get much time to watch TV, my wife and I, but we always get a good laugh at cleaning product commercials. I think you know the ones. Mum's at home in a sun-drenched open plan kitchen, kids come bouncing in from school - miraculously remembering to wipe their feet and not already half-way through round one of the afternoon bicker - and they line up their improbably clean faces at the bench, ready for their healthy afternoon treat.

(Why do organic people always have curly hair?)

The funny part comes when a child spills something - say a small blob of pureed organic watermelon in a suspiciously small quantity on the clinical benchtop and mum leans over, with a wry smile, and wipes it away with a mere flick of the cloth and a spray of the magic spray.

Funny because I don't need the magic spray and a cloth - they are for naive beginners - in a house of 4 real actual children, I need to be kitted out like Lara Croft - ready to deal with the mummified grave goods that will emerge from the bowels of the school bag - like a cursed menace from the First Dynasty - which are just vaguely recognisable as morning tea from Tuesday on week 4, two terms ago. 

BTW - why is is that ad-families always seem to have angelically clean homes other than one thing - a floor, a toilet - which has been allowed to degenerate to a state of cleanliness more usually associated with abandoned-public-housing-project chic.

Even funnier are people who opine on how much better families would be if only the birch of law and order was wielded more firmly by parents.

Let me tell you that there is certainly law and order in my house. I give the orders and the law - or at least the four lawyers my wife seems to have given birth to - find ingenious ways around them. The cases for the defence include:

1. I'm still carrying out the last order. Which was to pick up a pair of socks, and was issued sometime around Michelmas in the Year of our Lord 1573.

2. I didn't hear you. But I did hear when you whispered "Would you like ice cream" with your head deep in the freezer.

3. It's not fair because [other sibling] doesn't have to do exactly that thing at exactly the same time as I do it and I will be subject to ridicule by said sibling as they lounge, eating grapes, and mocking my servitude.

4. I am physically / psychologically / emotionally incapable of carrying it out. I can carry twice my body weight in Lego to any destination you like but the specific gravity of my school shoes prevents me from moving them even slightly out of the kitchen doorway.

5. It would traumatise me. In fact, I'll show you right now - with a quick burst of slammy door - just how traumatised I would be if I had to have a shower and clean my teeth.

6. Eating that would be a breach of my ethics and beliefs - formed just this instant past - to be a vegetarian, a meat-i-tarian, sauropod, theropod, have a deep and abiding conviction that I'm allergic to peas or have a general and non-specific stomach complaint what would prevent me eating anything that isn't at least 50% sugar.

And so the long court case wears on. Most of the time it would be quicker just to have an extra shower myself and console myself - in the way that guilty parents do - that there is a universal balance in these things and that I'm just doing it - this once - because the kids have had a tough day.

Our opiners are not asking for law and order, they're asking for militant dictatorship. And only someone who doesn't have kids would think that that was a possibility. Saddam wouldn't even get the first statue up before he was ousted, roasted, toasted and beheaded by the righteous citizenry. You can take a child to water but you can't make them wash.

There may be some justification for The Look!

Proofreading

One cannot deny the importance of proofreading. Take this gem from Renault.

Which leaves you wondering what's under the hood and if your husband will ever be able to find it.

Or take Coke's famed Chinese disaster in which an attempt to render "Coca Cola" phoenetically into Chinese (make it sound like "Coca Cola" when you said it out loud) wound up inviting citizens of the middle kingdom to "Bite the wax tadpole"

But it is possible to take it too far - as anyone who has ever worked in an office will know. This little gem of advice for Pooh Bear managers (manager-of-very-little-brain) is a classic case:

There is no resort more certain for the feeble mind than the resort to paperwork. If your wetware version is still at Commodore64 and you absorb information at a rate suggesting that the only way to get data into you is to stick hole-punched cards up something fundamental,  then critiquing of documents is for you.

Let's face it.  You've got almost no hope of actually understanding what the document is talking about;  you were promoted based on your mastery of style over substance- and your ability to kiss other people's card reader.  You certainly don't understand what the author is talking about and you don't want to appear stupid. So don't go for substantial critique - we're looking for critique in a vacuum here - and if you stand side on to a mirror, contort yourself into an odd position and shine a torch in your earhole,  the extent of the vacuum will become obvious.

Start with font. You probably have a corporate style guide hidden somewhere that no one can easily find. If the document's font doesn't comply with the 12.5 sans serif New Moron that is only installed on a tenth of the computers in the company,  put a snide little note at the top of the document and make sure you imply that any competent employee would know these things intuitively and that your precious - or at least overpaid - time should not have been wasted by intern level mistakes of this kind.

If the font is ok then the heading style probably isn't.  Or the line spacing. The bullet style on the dot points perhaps? Thickness of the underline? You can't be too pedantic in executing your sacred duty as the Defender of the Corporate Image.

Every so often you'll get a smart-arse. There's always someone who will not only dot the 'i's but will have measured those dots to make sure that they are exactly .05 the size of the i - just on the legal limit.  This clown thinks he's going to get a document through without an edit.  As if! Where would the pleasure in your workday come from if you couldn't keep them dangling;  striving futilely to write just one single draft document before they retire.

Now you need to bring out the big guns.  The novice manager tries to correct grammar at this point. Mistake.  Why?  Because grammar is either right or wrong.  The author has grounds for appeal if you make a mistake about their participles. The seasoned pedant at this point starts to rearrange sentences and paragraphs at random.  Justify the changes in vague, subjective terms like 'polish' and 'tone'. You can never be wrong about those.

And,  if you get the corrected draft back too soon, correct your own corrections and
send it back again.

The B@titudes

And Jesus gathered his Twitter followers together and spoke to them most solemnly, saying:

Blessed are the slacktivists, for they shall shall dwell forever in the house of self-satisfied ineffectiveness.

Blessed are they who do not scroll past without typing "Amen" for God will care just as much as they do.

Blessed are the mememakers for trite shall be their lot in heaven.

Blessed are ye when you share all sorts of calumny without checking your facts, for righteousness sake,  for you shall get the justice you deserve.

Blessed are the misquoters for they shall have their words twisted also unto them (Albert Einstein).

Blessed are the atheists for theirs is the kingdom of heathen.

Blessed are the drunk for their Revelations will last for all time, haunting them even into Armageddon.

 Blessed are the cat lovers for they have misunderstood the popularity of pussy on the Internet.

Blessed are they who rub our noses in their family holiday to Hawaii for so many days shall be deducted from their eternal paradise.

Blessed are they who pour their righteous ire out upon hoaxes for they shall be ridiculed.

Blessed are they who post veiled complaints about their lot in life for they shall be called fishers of sympathy.

And, ye verily, before Jesus had finished speaking, his video had gone viral and he had been flamed by Gentile and Jew alike.

Real-erata - or an attempt at morning meditation

Go placidly amid the noise and - Alex, for the third time get out of bed

And remember what peace there may be in - no, Liam, you are not having a choc-mint bikkie for breakfast - there may be in silence.

As far as possible, without surrender, be on good terms with - sports socks, Alex, it's sports day - all persons.

Speak your truth quietly and - we are late! You don't have time to experiment with hair styles. Get some breakfast!

And listen to others - no Liam, I don't have time to glue pieces of refuse together this morning to make a spaceship.

Even to the dull and ignorant - no, you can't put your shoes on without undoing the laces. Give them here! - they too have their story

Avoid loud and aggressive persons - Eamon, don't hit him with that. I don't care what he said about your Pokemon cards. Alex - they don't suck! - they are vexatious to the spirit.

If you compare yourself with others, you may become - Eamon, Liam is 3 and he's managed to brush his teeth, why do you always give me a hard time about this? - vain or bitter.

Enjoy your achievements - right, do you have your lunch in your school bag? No you don't Alex, it's still here on the bench - as well as your plans - we needed to leave five minutes ago!

Keep interested in your own career - I need to get to work guys. We don't have time for Weet Bix now - it's toast in the car this morning - it is a real possession in the changing fortunes of time

Beyond a wholesome discipline - oh F@#K how difficult could it possibly be to put your hat in your bag every afternoon - be gentle with yourself.

And whatever your labors and aspirations, in the noisy confusion of life, keep peace in your soul.

Yes, it's been one of those mornings. Triple shot with whiskey, please.

Families against white male oxygen breathing, social media using shooters

An out-of-style post today in support of the efforts of those dealing with Families Against Autistic Shooters

Families across the United States are rallying to support our new cause "Families Against White Male, Oxygen Breathing, Social Media Using Shooters".

We're not saying that every white male that breathes oxygen and tweets is a mass murderer but almost every single mass shooting in the United States in the last year has been carried out by these people.

It's time to take a stand to protect our families and our way of life.

Do you have white males living in your neighbourhood? Do you let your kids play with them?

I don't and I won't! There is too much risk.

What about your friends. Are they married to a social media using, oxygen breathing white male? If so, you need to choose your friends more carefully. Don't invite them to your home! They are putting your children at risk.

And here's an emotive image and a link to a credible sounding website to support my contention

http://www.politicalresearch.org/2014/06/19/mass-shooters-have-a-gender-and-a-race/#sthash.94H7BEKK.dpbs


Do you know anyone on social media? Are your kids talking to someone on social media? Are they oxygen breathing white males?

I call on our congressmen and our senators to crack down on this menace to our society. We must stop white men accessing social media now!

And shut off the oxygen supply.

Things your parents shouldn't have told you

Parenting wisdom is passed, like genetic propensity for disease, from generation to generation as we each,  in turn, try to set our kids up for a future we can't see and demands that we can't imagine ever being made. And we'll get it wrong because the special bag of free baby stuff we got at the hospital didn't include a crystal ball and, one day soon, someone is going to reveal us for the fakers we really are and take our children to be given to real parents who have been endowed with the first half of a clue.

In the meanwhile,  there are a few things that our parents told us that we can safely remove from the cannon of advice we give our kids:

"Don't make a song and dance about it". Absolutely guaranteed to make you a loser. There are no merit certificates in adulthood.  No one is noticing your careful and diligent work,  your righteously straight back and neat handwriting.  If you want to get noticed and maybe even promoted,  you are going to have to make a song and dance about it. In fact,  in today's increasingly competitive job market,  you are going to have to make a fully produced West End stage show about it with professionally written lyrics, an all star cast of post graduate qualifications and a website. You need catchy,  you need loud, you need costumes,  make-up and lights.  Teach your kids to be showmen.

"If everybody else jumped off a cliff,  you wouldn't do it,  would you?" Yes,  you would.  When is the last time a successful person at work looked at her fellow lemmings following an executive over the corporate precipice in some hare-brained scheme and said "Nope.  Not for me."? No matter how suicidal the stupid idea is, you're going over that cliff with the rest.  Better to be a dead team player than a live trouble maker. This has been true since the trenches of the first world war and the first ever game of rugby league. Teach your kids to jump if the team screams "geronimo!"

"Just sit quietly and concentrate". Another non life skill. Unless you take up solo round the world yachting,  you will never get a chance to use this.  You will never be alone and uninterrupted for long enough.  Concentration is like a stripper - it's all about the tease. Just when you think you're going to get some,  there will be the summons to a meeting from someone too insecure to make a decision about donut flavours on their own, or email from the boss demanding all your attention and none of your intellect. And you'll get more of that at home.  Three paragraphs into the rich fabric of the story in a good book, the clarion call for parental attention will sound forcing you to drop a mental stitch and adjudicate such ponderous matters as who had the truck first or who mouthed a naughty word at whom from under two sheets, a blanket and several layers of corrugated iron roofing. You'll be lucky to end up being able to follow the gist of a Minion meme.

"If you can't say anything nice,  don't say anything at all." Your kids will be mute for their entire adult lives. People can say nice things about each other - on Facebook. A quick "Love you hun" with a cute photo of you and your beloved is perfectly fine. Beyond that, you're an adult now! Start complaining! I have a very wise nephew who, when he was 8, asked me "why do adults always complain?" I nearly contradicted him but then found that I couldn't. in all honesty. Don't believe him? Check your next conversation and tell me how much of it involves complaining, gossiping, maligning or just getting stuff off your chest. People over eighteen who say only nice things are a bit twp. The sane and intelligent amongst us know that Hanrahan was right.

"Good things come to those who wait". I don't even have to write anything here. You're laughing already.

Good luck with that parenting gig! I know I need it.

Notes:

"twp" - pronounced something like "toop" (take the 'oo' from 'look') is a south Welsh word meaning stupid or daft. Used, I gather, to describe someone who is a bit simple.

Hanrahan is the protagonist in this poem http://users.tpg.com.au/dandsc/job/job01.htm

Save the Australian Electoral Commission

Morale at the Australian Electoral Commission (AEC) has hit rock bottom following recent ructions in the nation's capital which saw Australia join the likes of Italy and Japan in the league of Disposable Paper Cup Prime Ministers - no refills, no second chances.

The AEC has spent years trying to force people to vote, having early given up on the notion that people will get off their plump posteriors and tick a few boxes once every three years simply on the basis that they might like to have some say over who governs them. Apparently the chance to decide how much we pay in tax, what the laws regarding marriage are, what kind of environment we live in and what kind of schools our kids go to is just not motivation enough. The only reason people vote is that they want to avoid a fine.

Even then, there's an increasing percentage of people who scrawl juvenile obscenities on the ballot paper in the hope that someone other than an underpaid, casual returning officer's assistant will take notice of their political manifesto and call a double dissolution election based on the voter's expressed sentiment that "You're all f@$kin d*!kheads"

The sense of joie de vivre at the AEC, never very high, has taken a further dive in recent years as it has become evident that people are quite happy to pay to vote for people on restaurant, home renovation or singing shows - people who if they win will never affect the lives of the voter ever again - but can't be bothered to vote for free for someone who could make their lives miserable for the next three to six years.

A recent proposal to turn Australian elections into a reality TV style program was unfortunately blocked in the Senate.

On the surface of it, the proposal seemed to have some merit. Prime Ministerial candidates would be selected at the start of the electoral season and set to making cupcakes, cooking bbqs, kissing babies, making stump speeches and competing in contests in which they try to make the viewing audience believe the most preposterous and audacious bullshit. Australians could vote one candidate off every week and the last person standing at the end could get a record deal and the office of Prime Minister for the year - which, on current form, is about as long as anyone is going to get to stay in that job anyway.

On current reality show trends, the proposal would have been self funding and then some because people will happily pay 55c a go to vote on these things and there's no need for all that mess with little cardboard booths, strange people with disapproving frowns asking you if you've already voted in this election and the very real chance of dying of asphyxiation under the torrent of "how to vote" slips that are rained on you as you enter the school yard.

It is widely believed that the proposal was voted down by some of the uglier, unhandy politicians who could neither sing for their supper nor manage baked beans on toast if they had to make it themselves. However, recent leaks from sources close to the Prime Minister (whoever he may be) have suggested that it was really kyboshed by political strategists who knew that they could never get their guy elected if the public were allowed to scrutinize them and their apparent intelligence for longer than a 30 second sound bite per night.

However, it's clearly all irrelevant now that the people's choice of prime minister appears to be about as binding as cheap band-aids after a bath. Dissatisfaction with performance, poor polling numbers or just the ennui of being a member of the Australian legislature seem to be reason enough to given the current incumbent some free time to write his narky memoirs and a new guy a chance to experience something to be narky about.

The AEC has asked me to finish this post with a reminder to all that there are good jobs going there - particularly in their PR department - the occupants of which resigned en masse last Wednesday.

Drinking games for the modern world

Drinking games played while watching Eurovision are clichés now. It’s far too easy to knock back the schnapps or the grappa every time you think another singer will be killed by an angry mob when they return to their home country following the national embarrassment of their performance.  And Eurovision only comes once a year. We need some newer and more frequent opportunities to pretend we’re still in our early twenties.

As reality TV is now taking up 90% of the free-to-air TV time not already devoted to sport, it seems a sensible place to start.

Let’s start with home renovation competitions. Like most TV made for people so stupid that breathing is an exercise in concentration, there is a need for the producer to include little commentary moments wherein the competitors explain what just happened or make emotive yet vague statements about their motivations, at least those that can be expressed before the 9.30 watershed. You can drink when they pad out their required 60 seconds of commentary with a statement of the blindingly obvious:

Someone says, “I want to win”. Equivalent phrases include

• “We came here to win”;
• “I didn’t come here to lose”;
• “Winning my mortgage would just be a dream”; or
• “We’re not going home losers – well, any more of a loser than I already am.”

You can also drink when a contestant recognizes that they’re in a competition. Equivalent phrases include

• “The other teams are going to be working hard”;
• “We need to work hard to win this week”;
• “The other teams won’t be making it easy for us”; or
• ”Hey, I’ve just realized that the other people in this house aren’t helping me all that much,”

And you can drain the rest of the bottle in hair-tearing despair when one of the hosts explains, at about a word every three seconds, that, in this elimination style competition, one team will be eliminated as a result of the elimination process.  The key phrases here are “Someone’s dream will be over”, “One of the teams will be going home tonight” and “We’ll be saying goodbye to one of you”.  You can take a double shot on that rare occasion when the host forgets themselves and adds “and I hope it’s opinionated ditzy one that never shuts up and her hen-pecked husband” to the end of his or her remarks.

However, on reflection, I think the neo-Puritans of modern Australia – who seem to think that drinking so much as a shandy makes you a bad father and wife beater – might have a legitimate case against me if I set up that game. The entire country would be plastered 6 nights a week and productivity would plummet.

We need some fun without destroying the economy. Some of the more refined reality shows with lower audience numbers, then?

How about Antiques Roadshow?

You can take a good long swig every time someone comes up with an heirloom that is so Geordie Shore tasteless that:

1.   It’s a miracle anyone ever bought it;
2.  It’s even more of a miracle that the family has held onto it for all this time; and
3.  It’s a supreme miracle that someone is prepared to take it out in public and admit to owning it.

I always wonder about that. For every gaudy ceramic elephant that turned out to have belonged to the Maharaja of Luvakuri and to, therefore, be worth in the order of 50,000 pounds, there must be a thousand couples going home with their tails between their legs because grandma’s precious set of fire irons were cheap knock-offs bought from Woolworths and substituted for the real, ancient ones when times were a bit tough.

You could move on, gentile-ly from there and pick up Tony Robinson’s “Time Team” – you know the one in which Baldrick works with a team of local enthusiasts and digs up vast acres of the English countryside in search of a Roman villa or Saxon hill-fort?

If we limited the drinking to every time they found what they were looking for, you might as well be tee-total, so the rules are:

1.  Whenever they start a new trench, you can open a new bottle; 
2. Whenever it rains – you drink;
3. Whenever they cover their lack of discoveries with a 3D computer model of what they thought might have been there – you drink;
4. Whenever they find some pottery which might be Roman but is more likely to be buried dog bowl – you drink; and
5. When they finally give up, having found nothing despite having dug up three-quarters of the arable land in Herefordshire, you can drain the bottle in empathetic despair.

And wrap the night up with Kevin McLeod. There are so many disaster points in his shows that blotto is all but guaranteed.

Take Grand Designs. I think he goes out of his way to find people to mock. A couple – usually youngish – have saved a fortune and bought a barn in rural Shropshire that is a grade-2 listed disaster site, last occupied by cattle prior to Cromwell’s army using it as an ill-fated gunpowder depot during the civil wars of the 17^th century. And they want to turn it into a three bedroom designer dream at a cost so atronomical they’ll be lucky – even if it all goes to budget – to get out of with their shirts.

And it never goes to budget. The first drinking opportunity comes with a nip for every 1000 pounds they go over. On some of the more spectacular train-wrecks, you might need to make that 10,000 pounds so that you’re not too far gone before the first ad break.

Take another drink for every month of wet weather the family has to spend living in a tent on the worksite, cooking on a battery-operated lightbulb.

Grade the wife’s frustration from 1 (thinking he’s a bit silly but willing to back him) to 10 (thinking that his mutilated body might make a nice addition to the foundations) and, for every notch she goes up, have another drink.

Finally, divvy up what’s left of the alcohol based on how close you came to guessing the difference between the cost of the renovation and the market value of the finished product – or the market value of Windor Castle, whichever is the lesser.

And have one for me while you’re at it.

Milestones

I am proud to announce that my three year old has just met his latest development milestone: telling pointless knock-knock jokes.

It is a very important stage in the development of the human mind and parents should be concerned if their child hasn’t reached this milestone before they start school. The joke has to go something like

Knock Knock
Who’s there?
Monkey
Monkey who?
Monkey in your shirt!

 Followed by an uncontrollable fit of the giggles.

 The advanced practitioner will include some toilet humour

 Knock knock
Who’s there?
Bear
Bear who?
Bear poo!

 Then more boundless mirth – a true celebration of this towering achievement of wit and naughtiness.

 Pointless Knock-knock Joke comes along about a year after Hot Potato. A child figures out that mum and dad get angry sometimes for things that he’s done. They don’t like being left holding that particular tuber so they learn to point out that a brother or sister was also doing something naughty. In fact even naughtier which means that the hot potato can be passed up the chain. Listen to the story for long enough and the diversionary – and probably wholly imaginary offence – committed by said sibling will escalate from using naughty words, through pushing me, hitting me all the way up to insider trading in circumstances of special aggravation.

 Again there is an advanced practitioner level of this milestone – recommending a punishment.  The experience, from the parent’s point of view, will be like that scene from The Holy Grail where the righteous citizenry are trying to get Sir Bedevere to burn the witch.

If you’ve ever doubted the in-grained, wholly genetic nature of sibling rivalry, listen to a kid recommending a punishment for a sibling. You can keep your groundings and your withholding of dessert. The minimum mandatory sentence that the court can give is 12 lashes – and that’s for using the s-word. Physical contact requires a minimum sentence of keel-hauling and if there are any bruises or blood evident, the court must pass a sentence of death – and God have mercy on his soul.

 Hopefully sometime soon he'll get to Implied Blasphemous Indignation.  Follow this dialogue:

Bed time.
I can't
Why not?
There's a mess in my cot
What?
Look!
What is it?
Tanies (sultanas)
How did they get there?
They spilled.

Right now I just get direct answers to the question I actually asked;  "How did they get there?" When he reaches this next milestone he'll understand Implied Blasphemous Indignation and will realize that the question I'm asking is "What in God's name possessed you to put sultanas in your cot?" Of course I won't get a sensible answer but at least he might have the decency not to grin about it.

We are confidently, however, looking forward to our young man reaching his next but one milestone, which will be selective deafness - after all, his brothers have well and truly mastered this. As the nascent mind develops, a protective layer forms in the hearing centres of the brain which filters out a list of known provocative and unwelcome words and phrases. These include “washing”, “cleaning”, “shower”, “teeth”, “bed”, “school”, “table” and “volume”. It’s like a parental spam filter. If you listen to a message including any of those words, you’re only going to wind up falling for another scam which ends up with you being taken to the cleaners, or to bed, or to school, or somewhere like that. You can’t afford to waste your precious hearing ability on that kind of thing anyway because, given the volume you’re listening to your tablet at, you’ll need as much as you can get later in life.

And just before he hits school, he’ll put the advanced practitioner icing on that cake and stage mock-indignation scenes when punishment for not-listening-and-doing-as-you’re-told it meted out. Through choking sobs and a waterfall of tears, he will plead his innocence and swear, on his Halo Lego, that he didn’t hear you insisting he have a shower – ten times over a half-hour period and that, therefore, any punishment is at a level of injustice only previously experienced by the freedom loving citizens of Tiananmen Square.

And we were going so well

The evening held promise. After an unsatisfactory start to the day, following an evening of vomitous ruination the night before, the pleasant winter afternoon sun and family time at the beach boded well for a smooth lead-in to the week ahead.

Vomitous ruination was not, by the way, because my wife and I have joined a Roman orgy re-enactment society or are finally getting invitations to those sorts of parties, it's because our three year old either caught something unpleasant, ate something disagreeable, swapped spit with a dog or ... [removed in the interests of public decency]  and decided to share it with us over the course of the night.

In consequence, we spent most of the morning bringing the house up to the WHO standards for disease containment and control, washing or sanitising drinkware, flatware, silverware, Tupperware, manchester, dorchester and cheem. 

By lunchtime, the place smelt of disinfectant, the children were shining bright having had a layer of skin removed by the scrubbing brush and we were finally able to remove the ET containment tent from around the house.

The afternoon was going well. A family visit to the beach, a certain amount of amateur soccer, small talk with passers by and some odd experiments in photography seemed to indicate that we were on final approach to the week ahead with flaps down, landing gear engaged and all passengers returned to their seats with their seat belts securely fastened and their tray tables in the upright position.

And we got cocky and tried to do something clever, didn't we? Couldn't just let the whole afternoon run on autopilot. Sure, 13 year old daughter and 10 year old son, you can go up ahead of us. You're old enough now to cover the necessary 100m unsupervised.

There's just something subtle about the build-up in the writing that lets you know that the crisis point in this narrative is approaching, isn't there?

The 13 year old, flexing her fledgling independence and unwilling to be seen too much with parents so uncool that they still think Facebook is a good idea, wanted to head home with her brother,  leaving the very young and very old to fend for each other. But she had no house keys.  Arriving home with her brother, sans keys, she decided she needed to scale the crumbling masonry of the side fence and get into the backyard and, thence, in through a back door.

And the crumbling masonry lived up to its name. Down came the bricks - cradle and all - onto her left foot. 

Credit at this point to my 10 year old who held his calm, got into the house, got his sister into the house where we found her 5 minutes later, on the couch with an ice pack on a bruise that was certainly going to result in some awkward questions from a child support worker.

So my wife is off to the hospital and I'm left with the three boys, ready to demonstrate how smoothly I can superdad the evening onto the tarmac and in to a complete stop at the terminal.

Then the wings fell off. 

Baths seemed like a good first idea. 6 year old bathed? Check. 10 year old next? Uncheck. He's lost a Halo man that he'd been building up to buying for three weeks. So he's doing his vengeful Viking god impersonation, handing out lightning bolts, hammers and blame left and right. A Halo man, if you've never seen one, is just on 1 inch tall so if you imagine looking for a needle in a haystack in a thunderstorm while wearing a pointy, metallic helmet, you're not too far left of my experience at this stage of the narrative.

Now,  like most 10 year old males,  my son has a clinically diagnosed allergic reaction to tidiness. It's worse than nuts.  Traces of nuts are enough to trigger breathing difficulties in sufferers but even talking about tidy is enough to require an adrenalin shot and paramedics with my son. However,  it seemed like the easiest way for Thor to find the needle - and to protect the innocent from his wrath -  so I locked the god in a 4m × 4m room and told him to get tidying. And put the ambulance on standby. 

It was also a ploy to perhaps to return some regularity to the glide path.

But no. At this point, I discover that the 3 year old has been taking head lice on agistment for all his little school friends. In fact there is now so much carbon sequestered in these creatures that he can claim emissions trading credits.  Anyone ever tried to put a fine-tooth comb through a 3 year old's hair? Now I'm looking for a needle in a haystack in a thunderstorm with my mate Benjamin Franklin while fighting off a werewolf armed only with a comb in the other hand.

And I vow and declare that if I find the parents of those other kids, I will eviscerate them with that very comb.

At this point,  Thor bursts forth and,  in a voice like unto thunder,  says "It's not anywhere" and storms off to the lounge room to wreak his wroth on any Norse shipping that happened to be passing.

Thankfully for the Royal Danish Navy, they didn't have too many units stationed off the east Australian coast this evening so an international incident was averted.

Shipping will, however,  feature in the rest of my evening as Thor - once he finds his treasure and returns to human form - has a speech to write about the First Fleet and a significant personage attached thereunto. If I manage to achieve that,  I'll have added magician to my existing titles of warrior supreme, airline captain and short order cook of emergency dinners.

And, if I die tonight,  bugger smooth landings on runway 3, I want winged horses, I want busty contraltos and I want Valhalla - with all the quaffing that those things imply.

The bizarre world of quantum citizenship

The Australian government has just introduced a new law to strip Australian citizenship from dual nationals who fight with Australia's enemies - particularly terrorist organisations.

This is not really blog worthy except that the law operates automatically. If you fight with one of Australia’s enemies, you are, by that act, renouncing your Australian citizenship. No involvement by the courts. No process of investigation or finding of guilt. It’s just happens by magic.  No-one even has to tell you that it’s happened.

Which leads to some very strange possibilities.

How do you know that it has happened? Sure, if you know you’ve joined IS and you’re bombing police stations in Turkish cities then it’s fairly obvious. What if you’re in a bar fight in a Turkish city and the bloke who has taken up your cause is an IS militant on his night off? Do you remain an Australian if you and he glass a couple of the nastier thugs who are currently trying to knock you into the middle of next week? What about aiding and abetting? Does one lose a taste for Vegemite simply because the old lady you helped across the street in Baghdad turned out to be on her way to meet Allah and claim her virgins by way of a support stocking made of Semtex?

What if you don’t realise that you’ve given up on the green-and-gold and returned home to the country. Say you’re admitted to hospital. As a citizen, you’re entitled to be treated free on presentation of your Medicare card. But you’re not. Because you weren’t even a citizen at the time you were brought in, you didn’t have a Medicare card and, ipso facto, you weren’t admitted. Therefore, you don’t exist on the hospital records and you are not currently occupying a valuable hospital bed that is reserved for fair dinkum Aussies. Any conversations you had with the nurses didn’t happen, any medicines you received weren’t dispensed and the surgeon is obliged to re-insert any wobbly bits of you that may have been surgically excised. The net effect of all of this on the paperwork – and the subsequent internal investigation to find all the missing supplies – will drive the hospital administrator into the psych ward but that’s just the kind of price you have to pay for defending the homeland.

There is also the vexed issue of trees and forests. If one’s citizenship fails in the Middle East and no one but you is there to see it, has one in fact lost one’s citizenship? As far as you’re concerned, you know you’re not a citizen because of your dastardly deeds. From other people’s point of view, you’re still a citizen because you haven’t told them otherwise. There is also the possibility that someone, a Minister for example, has heard a rumour that you might have given up the citizenship ghost but can’t confirm it. All this leads to a very Schrodinger kind of situation where you could be both a citizen and a non-citizen at the same time. The Australian government should be admired, I think, for taking bold strides into this area of quantum legislation.

Then there are elections. Some of you might remember how close the Al Gore / George W presidential election was. It came down to how punched a punched card had to be if a punch card could be punched. That’s nothing compared to the unresolved quantum uncertainties that could follow a very tight election result. If allegations were made that a given number of voters in key seats were, in fact, non-citizens at the time they voted and not, as they claimed, real, breathing, pie-eating Aussies, then what does that do to the election result? If the people that voted for a Prime Minister may or may not be real then the government is probably going to be just as surreal; flickering in and out of existence as the nature of the citizenship of the key voters is wrangled by one side and the other.

Law enforcement is also affected. A house owned by an Australian is Australian soil and the writ of law runs there. What if the owner was an Australian but ceased to be one and was now only a foreign national? Does the house they owned become an extension of their country’s embassy? Can they deny entrance to the police who are coming to arrest them for the terrorist offences they allegedly committed because the police have no jurisdiction in a foreign country? I imagine that after the kind of in-camera session required to sort that one out, the barristers might retire from the bar and adjourn to an adjoining bar to get seriously rat-faced and discuss theoretical physics or string theory – anything that makes more sense than this bizarre piece of legislation.