School - missing the target by a mile

We teach some absolute garbage at school. Think back to the last time you used almost anything you learned beyond year 9. Do you make daily use of how to solve a system of simultaneous equations? How are your skills for arranging for jazz quartet going? Do you dissect a lot of frogs anymore? Perhaps your knowledge of the rules of basketball is making your living for you? Jane Austen?

No. None of that is making a rodent's posterior's worth of difference to your earning capacity or the richness of your personal life.

Let me guess. You are getting where you ar,e not due to your literature criticism skills, but because of your skills with people. Maybe we should teach more of that kind of thing:

Perhaps old Flashman knew what he was on about. Recognise and kowtow to authority. The manager is always right, even if she's wrong. Does it matter if your argument is based on the best science? Does it matter if you can prove that she's wrong? Not on your career! You are going with what she wants for no better reason than that she is the manager. The boss is always right. Of course, this logic got the French into a continent wide war in Europe - which they lost (Napolen), the Americans into wars in Iraq and Afghanistan - which they are in the process of losing (Bush), and the British into thinking that the swamps of Botany Bay were a great place to start a colony - which it wasn't (Joseph Banks). You can learn from history, and avoid the condemnation of repeating its mistakes, provided those mistakes are not something like "we followed the leader". Never learn that lesson. Your job depends on your ignorance.

You will also never learn at school that most people - most of us - are stupid. This is because of universal education. The obvious implication - that 80% of the classroom are designed to be repeat consumers of weight management programs - is far too ugly to be included in any curriculum. But it's a useful lesson nonetheless. The conscientious media are fighting an increasingly futile battle trying to get us to maintain the rage about the lies that politicians tell - the broken election promises. Why is this news? There seems to be a deal; that we expect our leaders to make promises about the future, thus assuming that they have crystal balls (I'm going to leave that joke alone), so that we don't have to deal with any uncertainty or surprises. So we vote for them. Then we get all righteous when they fail to deliver. Every election cycle in every democratic country goes through this process. Why do people believe that politicians can foresee and manage the future any better than another human being? Why are we so surprised when, yet again, it turns out that they didn't tell us the whole truth about their intentions? Why? Because most of us are stupid.

The third lesson your science teacher will never teach you is that appearance is more important than function. This is the lesson of Betamax. For those of you not old enough to remember the VCR, Betamax was a tape that was smaller and better quality than its main competitor, VHS. Who won out in the end? Well, no one, because we got DVDs, but, for a few short years, VHS was supreme. Those of us whose parents, falling for the lie that the public would choose the better quality product, bought a Betamax machine, were condemned to the three shelves of videos available at the local store while everyone else's parents, who knew that quality never triumphs over good marketing, got to choose from a warehouse full of fascinating titles. Why are science and maths compulsory to year 12 and marketing is only taken as a small element of media studies? What good are facts? No one cares very much! What we care about is:

1. Is it going to get us laid? and
2. Is it going to get other people to be envious of us?

If the answer is no to both of those questions, then expect to spend the rest of your career, like Jodie Foster in Contact, begging for scraps from the table to do your research and fighting tooth and nail to get your message heard above the sexy saxophone soundtrack of your well-heeled competitors.

The only conclusion I can draw is that the curriculum is written by dreamers; people who hope that , one day - one beautiful, perfect, day - we will all awaken from our drug induced slumber and realise that thought is better than instinct and that the truth is better than an eternally disappointed promise of sex.

And we wonder why kids disengage....

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The Flashman reference is to "Tom Brown's School Days". He was the bully in the story. If you would like another laugh, try George Macdonald Fraser's "Flashman" series. They pick up where "Tom Brown's School Days" left off. Very funny.

Sound and Fury is published every Monday and Thursday mornings, Australian Eastern Standard Time.

Coffee blends for the 21st century

Coffee has replaced money as the commodity that makes the world go round; nothing is happening in the western world without caffeine.  At the very least it fuels the people that earn the money that makes the world go round and that's what I call ultimate cause.

And I love mine 5 bean + strong.  If it doesn't lift the top part of my skull off and cause electricity to discharge from my fingers, the barista is at risk of serious bodily harm.

Now I know that not everyone enjoys Defibrillator blend so here are some proposals for some new blends for the 21st century:

NOT YET. The capital letters are mandatory. This coffee blends the strongest roast Arabica with just a tiny taste of Valium. Designed mostly for parents, this coffee is the one you have when your kids have woken you, yet again, from your most erotic dream at 5.30 on Sunday morning. Whatever they want at that time, the answer is NOT YET - Arabica to kick start your heart and the Valium to calm you just enough not to kill anyone. Also likely to be popular with people forced by work commitments to be in departure lounge at the airport before 6 AM.

Hide My Face. This combines very light roast with a shot of Irish Whiskey. Hide My Face is loved by people going into long meetings with idiots. Make up a huge plunger of Hide My Face and you can raise your cup to your mouth as often as you need and the look of disgust and ridicule on your face will be effectively disguised. The whiskey works to help control your violent urges.

Good Excuse. Meeting an old fiend for coffee? Something like an old friend but one of those people you thought you got rid of years ago. They just keep popping up, unaware that you were happy for them to remain a half remembered name in the yearbook. Good Excuse is your blend. Go to a little street cafe - one of the ones without toilets. Good Excuse maximises the diuretic effect of caffeine and, after one cup and about ten minutes, you will need to make your excuses and wander off in search of a department store at which you can pretend to be shopping.

The Boss. There's a fad, amongst some real connoisseurs, for a coffee brewed from a bean that's passed through the digestive system of a cat of some description. The Boss is just like that - coffee for the powerful person in your life, the one you really love to hate. The beans of The Boss haven't passed through the cat, however, they are just mixed with dried manure. Buy it for the CFO and, when she says, "This coffee tastes like sh*t", you can explain how it's the latest thing in rare flavours, drunk by the most discerning.

Apollo 11. Fly me to the moon. Strong coffee and hallucinogenic mushroom powder. If you're stuck at a family gathering for the next three hours and Uncle John is going to spend that time talking to you about motorbike engines, brew yourself a large cup of Apollo 11. You'll appear happy, interested and pleasant while soaring through worlds of your own imagination. Of course, if your personal Cloud 9 is strewn with mechanical parts then you're in heaven already and you and Uncle John can find an isolated corner of the table at which to enjoy your perversions in peace.

_Post Orgasmic Bliss. The underscore isn't a typo, it's very much part of the name of this blend. No drink could pretend to be as good as the real Bliss but it can be the next best thing, thus the underscore. This is the coffee that you always wish you were having. The one that could take two hours to drink because you don't have anything else to do. It's certainly drunk in front of a glistening ocean and is probably followed up by another cup and accompanied by a fine plate of crepes or a friand (I think that's a kind of cake - or is it a girlfriend without benefits?) or something equally indulgent. This is a medium roast blended with a mild opiate. Even if you can only take five minutes to drink this cup, your session in paradise will be assured.

We welcome suggestions on new blends you may like.

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Sound and Fury is updated every Monday and Thursday morning, Australian Eastern Standard Time.

Anxiety and self-esteem: Australia's growth industry

Much is made of the epidemic of obesity in Australia. At least once a week my news screen features carefully constructed body-only shots of fat people wearing inappropriate clothing walking down the footpath (sidewalk, for my American readers), consuming yet more trademark labelled sugar. Apparently we're all at risk of contracting contagious chubbiness.

Which is what "epidemic" means - the widespread occurrence of an infectious disease. Flu and ebola and measles come as epidemics. There are times, particularly while watching football on TV, that I can believe stupidity comes as an epidemic - spread by tiny particles called morons. I've yet to be convinced, however, that obesity is an airborne pathogen. Not that I don't think some of our major fast food producers haven't tried, in some dark basement of their R&D departments, to develop a tiny twisted virus thing to make us all crave their high salt offerings constantly. Just the sort of thing that can be spread via those auto-air-freshener things in the toilets.

This is why it's important to get out in the fresh air regularly - they'd need a air freshener the size of a grain silo.

Less inappropriately dressed and, so, less visible, is the growing problem of anxiety and low self-esteem. Maybe it's not so noticeable because we all suffer from it these days and there's no "normal" to contrast it with. We're all constantly on edge waiting for the next inevitable sign that we're inadequate and not meeting expectations. And I think I've found the culprit.

It would be easy to blame the media or bloggers - especially bloggers, opinionated bastards! - or the high pressure corporate society of today. Sure, they all make a contribution, but the real offenders are our appliances and our technology.

6.50 AM and I'm already feeling like I should be a multi-armed Hindu god given the number of things I'm trying to juggle; uniforms, teeth, baby breakfast, school lunches. There's some bread in the microwave to defrost. That should take care of itself, at least. Nope. When it's done it beeps to let me know. Great. Then every twenty seconds or so thereafter the bloody thing beeps again; a guilt laden tone that says, in one short second, "there's something you've forgotten".

Uniforms in the spin drier; they'll be ready to go tomorrow morning. Settle down for some sleep and the drier cycle finishes. Job done! Dad of the year! Just getting into the bliss of the hypnagogic state ... the drier starts again, runs for 10 seconds ... and beeps. It's got a little subroutine that does that to "keep the clothes fresh". Yeah, like fun! The whole thing was designed by an engineer that had come to hate the customers. It's timed so there's just not long enough to go to sleep between occurrences of the little reminder. My laundry is outside and downstairs. @#$%@#!

It's not enough that my smart phone wakes me in the middle of the night to remind me that I didn't plug it in to the charger, it has to become an instrument of third-party guilt by conveying me messages from other machines. I made an appointment and took a card last time I went to the dentist. That's as far as I wanted to go - conscience satisfied. I never intended to actually go to the follow up. A card is easily lost and that excuse is always valid. Now the computer at the dentist's colludes with my smart phone to keep reminding me of the appointment until I acknowledge by return of post. Another expectation that I have to live up to.

And so it goes. The car reminds me that it needs a service every time I start it. The computer tells me how many updates behind it is when I log on. My Outlook calendar fires up little reminders of appointments coming in the next 2 years and Facebook tells me all the birthdays I've forgotten. Then someone gives you a lifestyle monitoring band that can drive you to a twitching nervy by tapping you on the shoulder every half hour to remind you how far you haven't walked, how many hours of REM sleep you didn't get and how much body fat you've still got. Just bloody marvelous!

So I'm inadequate and anxious before I've even factored into my day time to worry about my income, my mortgage and my kids' reading ability or adequate space to feel guilty about being a middle-class white heterosexual male without a significant disability.

I'm sure there are some dark forces at work; some clandestine collusion between the manufacturers of anti-depressants, psychologists, software engineers and the alcohol industry. It's a mutually profitable arrangement.

"Hypnagogic", if you haven't come across the word, is descriptive of that heavenly state of being almost asleep.

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Sound and Fury is published every Monday and Thursday morning, Australian Eastern Standard Time.

Shampoo

It tells me that it contains no soap, no phosphates, no arsenic and is BCP and asbestos free. It's dolphin friendly, child safe and ISO 9001 compliant.

It informs me that it contains essential oils, optional fats, totally unnecessary perfumes and rare seahorse extracts with no known benefit to anyone.

It's adorned with pictures of molecules - to show that the graphic designer has heard of them - and signatures of some random person - to show that even people I don't know can sign their names.

It assures me that it will prevent my ends from splitting, my colour from fading, my curls from flattening, my skin from wrinkling, my kids from taking drugs, my shit from stinking and my eyesight from failing.

Which is just as bloody well ... because

NOWHERE, except at the very bottom in 3 point font which is completely unreadable through the steam in the bathroom and the water in my eyes does it say "Shampoo"

I hate to admit it, but ...

I'm a geek. Anyone that knows me will confirm that much. I have post-graduate qualifications in maths, I watch science documentaries for fun and think that knowing the Latin and Greek roots of words is one of the best things a person can do.

What many people don't know is that I am also very contra-society. Not sociopathic - I don't dislike people or the society I live in - I just find myself swimming against the current all the time. Well not against the current. Being a good Australian boy, brought up on the beach, I would never swim against the rip - just diagonally across it.

For an apparently smart guy, I was dumbfounded to realise how many years it took me to get that Harry Potter joke: Diagon Alley. Apply heel of palm to forehead at speed - repeat.

Anyway,  here's my confession:

I didn't like Steve Irwin. I didn't wish him ill and I have an enormous amount of sympathy for his family but I just didn't like the guy and I certainly don't think he is a great Aussie Icon. He was loud and unkempt and uncouth. As a TV persona, he was everything the world has come to expect of our national stereotype. He may well have known what he was on about but he came across as ridiculous and reckless. I refer you to Sir David Attenborough if you want to see how nature TV is done properly.

Sport is a closed book to me. I understand the need to remain in reasonable physical condition and do a distressingly modest amount of exercise to attain that goal but that's as far as it goes. The sheer visceral joy that so many experience just by watching sport, let alone participating in it, is entirely mysterious to me. I live in North Queensland and if any anthropologists would like to study primitive tribal customs, come up here when the State of Origin is on. For those of you who are mercifully spared this annual circus, it's a three game football competition between New South Wales and Queensland.  Queensland wears maroon and NSW wears blue. If you've seen old footage of tribes in Papua New Guinea or the Zulus from Africa banging their shields and preparing for war, imagine that with a beer gut and a maroon football jersey and you'll have a pretty fair mental image of North  Queensland at Origin time. Even people with university educations seem to get involved. Why?

Reality TV is a waste of time and, worse, it's boring. Like sport, though, it appears to hold some level of unholy sway over even reasonably clever people. As a ruse, I would have thought it would not fool people who have figured out that there really isn't a creepy old guy watching and judging you every sleeping and waking moment and awarding toys accordingly. It's clearly not real; there's no way two soccer mums with no training or advice are plucked from their four wheel drives, given matching aprons and attitude problems, and then turnout Michelin quality meals with no more than a turnip, two sticks of asparagus, some butter and an annoying French judge. Equally, two indistinguishable police officers who've never handled a hammer are not magically finding that perfect lampshade to complement their Art Deco bedhead in the first shop they come to - with only twenty minutes to spare. Someone who bought a Jeep wouldn't fall for it. It was all filmed months before broadcast but people whose job it is to run the country or educate our children seem to find it fascinating enough to waste a half hour's conversation on it most days.

I'm probably of an age now when being in a nightclub would seem badly like I was hoping to form an extra marital interest in a 19 year old. Even before my beard needed a little colour support, I never really liked them (nightclubs that is, I had a very healthy interest in 19 year olds back in the day). What's the point?  The purpose of a club, presumably,  is to socialise. A chance to meet with and, if the night goes well, mate with one's fellow human beings.  How are you supposed to achieve this when you can neither see nor hear said hominids? Certainly I'm a musical sort of chap and can dance to a beat. So one does this. Perhaps a potential mate approaches and is impressed with my well shaken tail feathers and rhythmic stamping. What next? It's not like pigeons - you can't progress to congress there on the dance floor. You can somehow communicate through sign language that drinking alcohol at adjacent bar stools is an option.  Provided she understands my cryptic gestures and we are set up with two Tequila Sunrises at $25 each, we're still no closer to the end game.  Screaming at each other usually comes later in the relationship but there's no other method of communication possible amongst the industrial levels of noise. Maybe things are different in these days of smart phones; the boy can just text his bad pick up lines. How she gives him a disgusted look via SMS I'm not entirely sure, but they can do great things with emoticons these days.

So I swim across the current.  I know there are those who enjoy such things and I don't judge them for it but I remain baffled - even after 40 years.

Just wrote my CV - now unemployable

I've just gone through and rewritten my CV and am now unemployable due to the mental state in which the process has left me.

There is nothing more likely to reduce your brain to a gently spreading pool of pink goo than trying to write a CV.

First is the process of remembering everything you've done. I always dread the idea that I will be a witness to a crime one day,  because I struggle to remember what I was doing this time one week ago, let alone what a person said to me two years ago last Tuesday. The detective would say to me:

"Can you describe the offender?"

And I would say something like

"Well, he was a man. Maybe tall. Probably brown hair ..."

And then I would be taken out the back and subjected to a little rougher than usual handling, just for being so bloody useless.

I can't even describe what my kids are wearing on any given day. That's why they have locator beacons surgically implanted; I would be no use providing a description if they got lost.

I'm pretty sure that anything on a CV older than two years is at least 50% made up.

Next is the painful process of customising your CV to the job description. This is fine, provided that you can understand the thing in the first place.

You pull up the position description and you read something like

"To be successful in this role, you will have at least five years experience as a strategic business analytics change specialist in a leading ICT organisation"

Which more or less rules everyone out of contention. No one even knows what a strategic business analytics change specialist is, other than a winning card in Buzzword Bingo. Hunting around on the internet, you can't see any evidence that this type of job even existed six months ago and so the idea that someone out there has been doing it for five years defies belief. In reality, the odds are that someone in HR somewhere, following a few budget cuts, has taken two job descriptions and smelched them together like two bars of soap - which, as we all know, never works (and, yes, smelched is a real word - at least in my house). Having given it a good flerching (another real word, thank you) they've wound up with an amorphous blob of uselessness onto which they've whacked a title and made believe is a real profession.

Which is why it's always best to be at least halfway down a bottle of Cab Sav when you start writing these things. With a little of the Barossa Valley's finest in your veins, you can elevate your mind above these mere words and, in a moment of blissful enlightenment, realise that it's $120K + super for setting up a whole lot of Excel spreadsheets and staying awake during strategic planning meetings.

The final cue for the exit of any remaining sanity is the Sir Humphrey Appleby process. Named for the famous character in Yes Prime Minister who summed up the problem beautifully in this conversation with the Prime Minister, Jim Hacker, looking at the issue of whether having nuclear weapons was a good idea.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lre6gD4lbCw

Sir Humphrey: It's a deterrent.
Jim Hacker: It's a bluff. I probably wouldn't use it.
Sir Humphrey: Yes, but they don't know that you probably wouldn't.
Jim Hacker: They probably do.
Sir Humphrey: Yes, they probably know that you probably wouldn't. But they can't certainly know.
Jim Hacker: They probably certainly know that I probably wouldn't.
Sir Humphrey: Yes, but even though they probably certainly know that you probably wouldn't, they don't certainly know that, although you probably wouldn't, there is no probability that you certainly would.

And there it is. I don't know how I seem to myself, let alone how I seem to anyone else. Notwithstanding this lack of knowledge, I'm forced to consider how a person I've never met with a set of priorities I'm trying to guess will read a document in a style they've never seen about a person they don't know and, if that wasn't enough to take your breath away, on what basis they will then compare that document to other documents and then make a decision about who they'd like to talk to with a view to giving one of these strangers a job.

It's something like blind dating with very little change of a glass or two of wine and a meal of some sort and, unless you're applying for a very special kind of job, almost no chance of getting laid as a result.

So I'm unemployable on the grounds of insanity. Any intellectual prowess of which I boasted in my beautifully presented two pager is now sliding away across the floor, looking for a better life in a world where the laws of physics remain constant from one day to the next and the interactions with other beings of sentience have more basis in reason and logic.

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Sound and Fury is published every Monday and Thursday morning, Australian Eastern Standard Time.

We need to be far more careful

I volunteered to help out at my kids' school fete today. If "fete" isn't a word you know, it's that special day in the school year where you donate a whole lot of stuff to the school then go there at night and buy it all back again. They disguise the deception with show bags, jumping castles and garishly lit caravans selling three days on the toilet in a bun for $7.50. The teachers also take the opportunity to get revenge on you for inflicting your kids on them, by making you sit through hour after hour of performances by the school musical groups - many of them featuring recorders or brass instruments of some kind.

The particular brand of deception that I volunteered to collude in involves a tub of water, an indeterminate number of plastic fish and a small fishing rod, comprising a length of dowel, some knitting yarn and a magnet on the end. The patsy - let's call them a "child at the school" for the sake of the discussion - pays 50c and is then given the opportunity to retrieve a fish using said rod. Success is rewarded with a chocolate frog whereas failure gets you booted out of the school for being stupid in a manner dangerous to the public.

Now, in the old days, I would have just put my name on the roster for the most convenient half hour slot and that would have been that. I forgot, however, that we now live in the 21st century. Having agreed to be an accessory to fraud, I was then asked to go through the workplace health and safety induction and sign a form to that effect! Workplace health and safety !? What could possibly go wrong?

Clearly I'm naive and haven't given adequate thought to the possibility that I might try to scratch my eyeballs via my nostrils with the rod or could lose concentration for a moment, pitch forward in my excitement and drown in the shell-shaped pond in which is the native habitat for the fish.


Being careful is just something I'm not sufficiently attuned to. It's obvious.

The school did it properly - made me sign the form, helped me differentiate between my a*&e and a hole in the ground. Then, recklessly, I went ahead and endangered others without a thought for the paperwork.

I got in my car and drove. Two tonnes, kerbside weight, of metal propelled at unseemly speeds down the road. What if a sinkhole had opened up? What if a parachutist had fallen onto the road in front of me? What if the wheels fell off? Had I given adequate consideration to the management of those risks? I had not.

My next stop was a cafe for breakfast; also owned and operated by irresponsible lunatics. Where was the health and safety induction before they handed me a hot cup of coffee? Where was the personal protective equipment to go with the sharp pointed objects they gave me to consume my eggs benedict with?

So I've learned my lesson. The next time you come to my house for a BBQ, it won't be just "second door on the left down the hall if you need it", you'll get the full induction. We will go through an identify the trip hazards; front door mat, the join between the carpet and the tiles, the odd Duplo train. I'll give you a careful induction on which is the hot tap and there will be a short quiz to make sure you know your left hand from your right. Only those who have attained a Certificate IV in Tong Mastery will be allowed near the BBQ and all children will be confined to a specially penned off area with a pool-lock gate, soft fall on the ground and nothing they can climb above 30cm.

Then I can safely say I am a responsible adult!