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.

Waiting for Rajiv

"Dad can you help with this?"
"I can't"
"Why not?"
"I'm waiting for Rajiv."

"Honey,  can you get Liam down off the table?"
"I can't"
"Why not?"
"I'm waiting for Rajiv"

Has anyone guessed what I'm doing yet?  That's right,  I'm trying to make a change to my insurance policy.

I've been on the phone for 20 minutes now and,  despite being constantly reassured of the importance of my call,  I don't seem to be any closer to being allowed to spend more of my hard earned money. 

After twenty minutes, my wife's patience had given out and I have to make some contribution to the evening riot control that masquerades under the guise of family life.  So when someone asks who swept the floor,  took the clothes off the line or separated the warring parties who were joined tooth-to-buttock, you can answer a-la Harrison Ford: "It was the one  armed man." The other arm being occupied holding a mobile phone to my ear despite the harm I  know it's doing to my brain.

Not because the radiation is frying the little grey cells but because the hold music is liquefying my higher mental functions.  I am no stranger to minimalism and I have been known to enjoy a little Part or Phillip Glass - a man who never met a three note motif he didn't develop an unhealthy obsession with  - but the stuff bleating at me out of the phone is something else again.  12 bars,  three chords and two descending scales with a slightly flat final note do not a piece of music make - no matter how many times you repeat it.

It has the virtue - if such it can be called - of at least softening my mental acuity to the point where I almost don't notice that, in an attempt to make it seem like I'm getting somewhere and won't be stuck in this nihilistic nightmare for all eternity - that they're alternating the recorded apologies from "All our operators are busy" to "All our consultants are still busy" every thirty seconds or so.

The other ruse appears to be pretending that my audience with Rajiv - when it is ultimately graciously granted - will be made more efficient if I pre-enter some identifying details.  So I've entered by account number,  my PIN, my secret access code,  my date of birth and proven I am not a robot by solving the quadratic equation and I'm all ready for Rajiv to welcome me with a cheery "Good evening Mr Young". And what do I get? "Could you spell your surname please?"

Spell it? It's "Young". Without meaning to stereotype,  there's a good bet that three quarters of the alphabet features in your name somewhere.  How many ways are there to spell "Young"?

But I shouldn't be surprised. I've already fallen for the first con - I really believed that I could make my choices just by speaking.  In what way did "insurance" sound like "balance transfer"? I flatter myself that I speak fairly clearly.  Most of my interlocutors manage to comprehend my utterances without having to transfer me to an operator or get me to press 2, then 1, then 3, then hang up and call back on another number specifically set up just for landlord's insurance on properties with fewer than 4 bedrooms located north of 19 degrees south latitude.

Really none of this is anything I can change but I do wish that they'd stop thanking me for my patience.  I'm not being patient,  I would scream obscenities but you're a machine and my kids are within earshot.

So I wait,  quietly, fuming and waiting for Rajiv