Exams

I was supervising some year twelve exams the other day. They're final year of high school exams that help to rank the kids across the state for university entrance etc. They don't examine anything we've actually taught, just generalised thinking ability.

Here's a sample:

"Philosophy is like a blind man in a dark room looking for a black hat that doesn't exist"

This statement is closest to ...

And four similar sentences follow from which you have to choose one. Unfortunately "pretentious wank" wasn't one of the options; it certainly would have been the most accurate.

Don't stress - I'm not giving away important pedagogical secrets - it was only a practice exam.

As I wandered around, manning the watchtowers to make sure that the inmates remained in solitary confinement for the full two hours of torture, I was brought to wonder about the nature of our species; can you imagine other animals doing this?

I had visions of adult wildebeest, patrolling in grim silence while their progeny spent two hours on their backs, putting their legs through routines performed by synchronised swimming teams at the last Olympics; nothing they'd ever use in migrating across the savannah or clambering up crocodile infested riverbanks but related to it in some tangential way.

Or branches manned by solemn kookaburras, gazing down their beaks in stern majesty while their little ones analysed the puns in Shakespeare or described the humour in an episode of the Goon Show. You might get to a laugh eventually but it would take a while.

In all fairness, there is competition in the animal kingdom for precedence - a position in the pecking order - but the rewards for victory are usually mating rights. There isn't a school board anywhere in the world offering that kind of pay-off for topping their exams, although the students might be more inclined to study if we did. Were we, in fact, to offer your choice of washboard stomached triathlete or buxom beauty, according to personal preference, I think our streets would be denuded of juvenile delinquents because they'd all be neck deep in differential calculus homework.

But talking about sex and school students is way too icky. A good bit more than half the year 12 students in Australia have certainly had sexual experiences of some kind but the powers that be can't have anything to do with it officially; official sanction it might encourage them to be more enthusiastic about it than they already are. As if that was biologically possible!

So what do we offer? We offer the possibility that, if you complete this torture session and many others like it, you might get entry into a university, at which you can work for another 3 - 8 years subjecting yourself to further pain and at the end of which you'll have a degree that might, if the jobs still exist and haven't been sent to India, get you employment and a career which could, if you work even harder and luck is on your side, get you enough money to pay off the debt you incurred paying your torturers. Then you might be able to get married, have some mating rights for a few short years, buy a house and then spend the rest of your useful life raising and paying for the next generation of inmates.

I wonder why they put themselves through it, to be honest.

Remember - Sound and Fury is published every Monday and Thursday morning (Australian Eastern Standard Time). I hope you're enjoying it and, if so, please share it with your friends.

Notes

Kookaburras are an Australian bird species in the kingfisher family. Instead of calling or singing, they laugh. It's probably why Australians don't take themselves too seriously; there's always someone up a tree ready to laugh at you.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qix6oUxim3Q

The Goon Show was a radio comedy show from years ago. Absolutely brilliant.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wVrgmwWHqo8

It's OK son, we're all mentally ill

Son, don’t worry that you think your mind is like a flock of flamingos; all settled and calm and doing productive things one minute, startled and flying off in all directions the next, and kind of gangly and pink and weird in either case. We’re all like that. We’re all twisted and delusional, it’s the only way to survive. A sane, rational person would be driven instantly insane by the world around them. We all have little neuroses and self-delusions that get us through the day. Take these for instance:

Red hair fixes your personality problems. There is a pod of thought amongst some overweight women with no fashion sense, no humour and an F-cup chip on their shoulder that dying their hair fire-engine red will make them into Jenny Gross. The character, played by Melissa Bergland in Winners and Losers, is large and sexy. But that’s because she’s fun. She smiles, she has conversation and makes the body she has look beautiful. It’s a package deal. The budget option that comes out of a box from the beauty section at the supermarket isn’t working. But the pod thinks it is.

Sunglasses hide our perving. Men of all ages think this is true and no woman yet has fallen for it. Sitting at the coffee shop or posing against the handrail at the beach and admiring the geometry of the ladies is something we do but we’re not supposed to. What we think is that, if we put on the sunnies and turn our heads to be ostensibly gazing off to the far, blue horizon, then the owner of the geometry won’t know that our eyes aren’t aligned with our heads. This is crap. Women have an inbuilt perv-detecting radar that is not fooled by sunglasses. Damn!

That the world revolves around us. We are the centre of the universe and our desires and plans are the most important things. It follows, therefore, that all occurrences are evaluated against those desires and plans. If the lights are green and a parking spot is available then it’s God / Gaia / The Universal Spirit affirming our plans and telling us we’re going to win. If the driver in front is slow, if the rain falls on our garden wedding, if the key decision-maker pulls out of our big meeting then it’s aimed at us; it’s done just to thwart us and to make us into losers. “Why me?” we scream at the sky, knowing that the rain fell because we planned a wedding. It didn’t. Almost nothing is about us and our desires. But we think it is.

The checkout chick is impressed with our veggies. Look at the amount of fresh food I’m putting on the conveyor compared to the chubby parents with the chubby kids in front. Look at all the processed food in their trolley! Admire my three kilos of apples and 9 litres of milk. Envy my children their wholegrain bread and go green that I can get my kids to eat that spinach. See? I’m a great parent. They bleep the barcodes. They couldn’t care less.

We could survive in the wilderness. If civilization ended tomorrow, every man knows that he could survive out there. But for our family responsibilities, we’re all Bear Grylls – conquering nature with nothing but a pointed stick and a four man film crew. Like fun! How could I start a fire in the wilderness if I couldn’t watch an instructional YouTube video? Getting all wet and cold and doing all that trekking is fine provided there’s a warm shower and a cold beer somewhere. Most of us would be eaten by the first lizard, but we need to believe we could be Hiroo Onoda to keep our self-image of rugged masculinity alive.

That I’m right. That the world would be a better place if everyone was more like me. When people say that they want to “change the world”, they rarely specify what they want to change it into. I suspect that they want to change it into a world that’s perfect for them; not because they want to make it miserable for everyone else, they just genuinely believe that people would be happier if they were more like them. 

Patrick O’Brian put it well (from The Surgeon’s Mate)

“Every man is a hero of his own tale. Surely, Dr Maturin, every man must look on himself as wiser and more intelligent and more virtuous than the rest, so how could he see himself as the villain, or even as a minor character?”

It’s OK son, we’re all mentally ill, it’s just the degree that varies.

Sound and Fury is updated every Monday and Thursday morning (Australian Eastern Standard Time). Please share this with your friends.

 

Notes

Hiroo Onoda was a Japanese soldier that refused to believe that the war had finished and hid in the jungle in the Philippines, still fighting World War 2, until 1974.

Improving our pharmacies

New standards for Australian pharmacies have been announced that make it easier for consumers to make informed choices.

From 1 July next, all pharmacies will have to be laid out and signposted in the following fashion:

Area A: This area is reserved for products that are both medicines and are proven to work. Proven, in this case, means “having been subjected to long term, peer reviewed, double blind studies”. In most pharmacies, this area is already clearly designated by being ‘behind the counter’; the general public can obviously not be trusted to have unsupervised access to anything that actually works. Pharmacies that choose only to have Area A will, of course, be able to operate out of a fruit barrow on the side of the road.

Area B:  This area is for products that, while not medicines, have honesty of purpose, proven efficacy and some relationship to health or hygiene. Tissues, toilet paper, toothpaste, soap, shampoo and nail scissors fall into this category. 

Area C: For products that, while having honesty of purpose, have no link to health or hygiene. Makeup is likely to be the biggest component of Area C in most pharmacies. Lipsticks, foundations, blushers, cuticle tools of no apparent purpose and those strange foam things that push your toes apart will feature heavily on the shelves.

Area D: Already nicknamed “The Pit of Despair” by the designers of the legislation, access to this area will be carefully controlled to ensure that those taking anti-depressant medication are not admitted. Any product that clearly broadcasts the message “You are beyond repair” will be sold here. Mobility scooters, walking sticks, those “you really should be in a wheelchair” walking frame things, off-prescription reading glasses and day-of-the-week labelled pill boxes will all be sent to Area D.

Area F: “E” has been deliberately bypassed in the standard to allow the appropriate “F” to be initial for this area. “F” for “What the F$%k?”. Where a pharmacy has decided, for principled reasons of profit, to sell dog worming pills, cat toys, chocolates and other junk food (great for diabetics), children’s playthings or luggage, they will all be in Area F. Area F is where the consumer may wander in wonder that anyone allied to the health profession would stock this stuff.

Area 51: Making up the bulk of most pharmacies’ offering, Area 51 is reserved for products aimed at the crackpots. Entry to Area 51 will mandatorily carry a sign reading “All reason abandon, ye that enter here” and will have a three drink minimum. A large majority of the stock carried in many pharmacies will, after 1 July, be relocated here. Homeopathic, naturopathic, traditional Chinese or other hocus pocus potions will reside here. On the next shelf will be copper bracelets, magnetic mattress overlays and essential oils. A whole aisle will be devoted to vitamins. Space will be allowed for joint support braces made out of pants elastic, anything promising to boost the immune system and objects with a relationship to Feng Shui. Chiropractors, naturopaths, acupuncturists and faith healers will be allowed to set up shop in small niches in the walls. In place of verified or verifiable health benefits, products in Area 51 will simply carry a label asking “Do you believe?”

Although it is acknowledged that most of the profits of a pharmacy come from products that will be sent to Area 51 post the implementation of the new standards, the sane and scientific regulators hold out some hope that the public will see and understand the reference and start doing some kind of thinking.

Yeah, fat chance !

Worldwide Queen Experiment

How connected are we by just one song?

I imagine you're here because you're adding your line to the "Bohemian Rhapsody".

Thank you for participating. Please include your country, city as well as the next line of the song - whichever line the song it up to when it gets to you. You can include your name if you like but it's not required.

On the Thursday after Easter, I'll post the results back on this blog.

This Easter Weekend experiment is designed to see how connected we all are by just one famous song; Queen's "Bohemian Rhapsody"

Starting out on Facebook with the first two lines, it has been passed around the world through whatever electronic means people choose. They add the next line to the song, post it here along with their country and city and pass it on.

No terrible things will befall if you don't pass it on - no bad luck, black cats or extra taxes. Equally, I'm not promising beautiful women, handsome men, good looking people of indeterminate gender or a cave full of pirate treasure if you do participate.

It's just a bit of fun and a little bit of science.

Thanks for participating.

Chris Young

Service, advice and the right price

Shaun,

Thanks for your letter. It was great to hear from you and great to hear that one of my best media graduates for many years has gotten a job so quickly.

You’re right in what you say, we don’t cover locally produced television ads in our course. That’s mostly because there’s not much you can do with them or about them. What follows is not official university teaching, just from my own experience.

The biggest problem you have is that there’s nothing really to differentiate one local business from another. Auto-parts shops are auto-parts shops and the ream of A4 is the same no matter who you buy it from. With a big national brand or a new product you can find a truth, an angle or a facet of the product to seed your campaign ideas. With local guys, you’ve only really got three things: service, advice and price. The fact that they rhyme is something you can work with and you can always stick an adjective in front of them to pad out the thirty second spot: “professional service”, “friendly service”, “the right price”, “the best price” etc etc.

The voice over can help break the monotony. “Service, advice and the right price” is a dreadful piece of primary school writing but put it into the mouth a female voiceover artist who puts the little laugh into “the right price” and you’ve improved it somewhat. Christ only knows what’s supposed to be funny in that phrase but it’s something no-one ever questions. Use a female voice-over too. For female services, like beauty treatments etc, they don’t want to hear it recommended by a man, and for manly things – when’s the last time a man wasn’t suggestible to something unlikely when the voice suggesting it is low pitched and female?

Visuals will also be a problem for you because you’ve got bugger all to work with. Frankly, it’s a two room shop with a fridge and a kettle out the back, and a showroom full of carpet samples out the front. There aren’t that many opportunities for the moving picture so necessary to television. The standard solution is to use the panning shot; if you’re filming the product range, pan the camera across the shelves. Vary the direction, left to right, top to bottom. You could film the staff serving a customer or two. Try to pick the better looking staff or get some attractive models in for the shoot. If the proprietor insists that you use real staff because one of them is his wife – and she’d be rejected as a camp follower to the armies or Mordor for being too ugly - make it a wide angle shot. If it’s a beauty parlour then you’re going to have to hire models. The customers and the staff are probably trolls but no-one wants to be the troll or be massaged by one. There are plenty of local wannabe models who would be happy to get a few bucks for posing with half a dozen rocks on their back.

There are some absolute no-nos that you need to be aware of:

Don’t let the proprietor appear in his own ads. Running a small business, being king of their own little fiefdom, gives some people a bloated sense of themselves and they become deluded that they are photogenic, funny or engaging. NEVER let them talk! There isn’t a proprietor anywhere that looks any good in ads, has any sense of timing, voice volume, speed or any of the other basics. In fact, it’s better to arrange for them to go away on a couple of weeks’ holiday while you do the shoot.

Don’t do funny! Local ads are never funny. Middle aged rug salesmen in boot polish and a turban, blokes who think they sound like John Cleese, Benny Hill scenes of incompetent off-siders or buxom women being chased through the showroom in video fast-forward mode. It makes the audience cringe to the point where they do themselves a mischief that requires surgical intervention. You could wind up getting sued.

Don’t do special effects. You don’t have the budget or the equipment. He won’t look like he’s riding a magic carpet or on his way to the moon or whatever other God-awful gimmick he’s come up with. Just triple the cost estimate on the computer work; that usually does the trick.

When all else fails, revert to those classics you learned in first year. “Full range of parts”, “Locally owned and operated”, “Proudly Australian owned”, “Part of the local community for 20 years”, “Staffed by qualified professionals” and, for the newbie, “Under new management”. That last one seems to suggest that anyone who liked the old management should treat the business with suspicion, which wipes your existing customer base, but it’s something they all seem to want to trumpet, so go with it. It’s their funeral.

Kind regards and best wishes

Professor Bob Griffith.

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The seven ages of man

Age 1: Obliviousness. From birth to age 5, there is no concept of mess. When an object is no longer of immediate interest, it is discarded there and then. Why not? There are plenty of other baubles out there to interest us and we know where to come back to when we want this particular plaything again. Unless, of course, our pesky parents or one of the other great voices in the sky rearranges our world – yet again. Our gods are capricious and sometimes we can find the things we want, other times they have been moved in mysterious ways.

Age 2: The elderly parent in the nursing home stage – out of sight, out of mind. This phrase was famously translated by a computer program from English to Russian and back again to English and came out as “Blind Insanity”. For the age group 5 – 11, this seems about right. By this age, we have realized that our parents have an emotional reaction to seeing “stuff all over the floor”. The only logical solution is to make sure they can’t see it. Tidiness, for this age group, involves hiding as much as possible under the bed or in a wardrobe and then putting a heavy object against the door to keep it closed. Parents of children in this age group can be satisfied that their offspring have met their developmental milestones if they have mastered the art of making sure nothing is left sticking out from under the sheet, draped in a suspiciously lengthy way off the side of the bed.

Age 3: Mi casa, mi casa. From ages 12 – 17, as the nascent identity develops, the child becomes obsessive about the tidiness of her own stuff and completely oblivious to the state in which anyone else’s space is left. Bras can be left over the back of the couch, shoes hidden treacherously in shadows in the hallway and school bags left vomiting blackened apples and antique excursion notes on the dining room table but God help you should you venture beyond the sacred portal and move the diary, the drumsticks or the celebrity photo from their assigned positions in the sanctum.

Age 4: Born again. After leaving home and moving into shared housing, the child matures into a holier-than-thou young adult that chastiseth their housemates for their slovenly ways. No matter how often, in the bosom of their family, they left the lid off the toothpaste, the toilet seat up, the dishes unwashed or the wine glasses evolving intelligent civilisations under the comfy chair, once in a flat with others, this person becomes a model of motherhood. No transgression can go unnoticed, no skid mark uncriticised.

Age 5: The Neville Chamberlain age. Married, settled in a modern, three bedroom home in a new housing estate, the maturing adult has discovered the cost of carpets and furnishings and has developed an almost unholy obsession with the maintenance thereof. Shoes must be removed at the door, the good, white lounge never sat upon and the chairs of the seven piece dining setting in the most modern of styles, returned lovingly to their assigned places at the completion of the meal. “Tidiness in our time” has been achieved. The bedroom is the problem in this model. His sperm is going to invade Poland any day now and all hell is going to break loose.

Age 6: The age of Sisyphus (read that again, carefully). Sisyphus, founder of Corinth and con-artist, was, as legend has it, condemned to roll a stone up a hill only to watch it roll down the other side again, up which side it would have to be pushed … and so on, for all eternity. Enter the age of children. The exhausted parent sticking bills to be paid anywhere a flat surface can be found, the child in the early stages dumping baubles under cushions or pulling cereal boxes out of pantries and playing Hansel-and-Gretel with the contents. Tidiness is now an impossible dream. It replaces women in lyrcra outfits as the fantasy of choice and the parent is made feel insecure about it by the endless advertisements showing angelically clean children playing on polished tiled floors alongside dogs with seemingly irremovable hair. No matter how hard they work, parents can never achieve tidiness.

Age 7: The museum or Return to Eden. The children have left, the grandchildren only visit occasionally. Tidiness can rule. As a reaction to the curse of Sisyphus, mementoes of holidays, photos of idealized grandchildren and other valuable items are carefully and tastefully displayed on what was, until now, unaffordable furniture. The smallest speck of dust is quickly and ruthlessly dealt with and even petals falling from floral displays never even make it to the ground. Tidiness has finally been achieved. Just in time for the whole lot to be handed out to the relatives in the aftermath of your funeral.

For some, the first age returns as the mind takes an early taxi home, leaving the body to party on alone. Objects again become of fleeting interest and the baubles, much more expensive now, are just as elusive.

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