Welcome to Australia – and welcome to our
language
Congratulations on your decision to come to
live here in Australia. It’s a fine country with much to recommend it. The
language will, however, present you with some challenges, even if you do
already speak English.
You’ll have learned by now that “How ya
goin?” is a greeting, not a question and that “too easy” is synonymous with
“yes, I can do that for you” not “please don’t insult me by asking me to do
something so basic”.
There are, however, more traps for the
linguistically unwary. Here are some of the things you’ll hear and the types of
responses that you might make.
“My how you’ve grown!” This is always said
in a highly surprised and hysterical voice to young children. Children grow
anyway and it might seem odd that an adult would be so surprised at the fact.
You might even take the comment as something of an insult because the only
circumstances under which a child would not grow is if they were malnourished;
it could be a reflection on your parenting (“I’m surprised at how much you’ve
grown, seeing how bad your parents are at feeding you properly”). It’s not that
at all. It’s just that the adult speaking isn’t very good with children and
doesn’t have anything else to say. The child won’t have anything to say either
because the only responses that make any sense are “Yes” or “Obviously”. The
first one sounds odd and the second one sounds rude. So the kid just smiles and
you say something like “I know. Eats me out of house and home.” That phrase
doesn’t make any sense either but it covers over the awkward moment and allows
the mutual embarrassment to pass without further comment.
“What are you looking at?” It is rarely a
good idea to answer this question. The honest answer would be something like
“I’m looking at you making a drunken fool out of yourself” or “I’m learning
something from your appalling parenting skills and the unedifying spectacle of
an adult and an 8 year old having a screaming match over an ice cream”. Honesty
is not, despite a popular cliché to the contrary, always the best policy. If
you’ve come from a totalitarian state then treat this question like police
brutality – just pretend you didn’t see the anything.
“Can I help you?” This is the shop
assistant’s question and, again, don’t take this question at face value. The
only sensible answer would appear to be “I don’t know, you tell me, are you
capable of helping me?” It’s actually an offer to do something for you. Word of
warning! If the person uttering the phrase is not in a position of minimum-wage
servitude, it’s probably synonymous with “What are you looking at?” – i.e. this
is none of your business and only by leaving now can I guarantee you’ll do so
with all your fingers still attached.
“That will be $4.50 all together.” And
you’ve only bought one thing. What do they mean by “all together”? Have they
added an extra immigrants’ tax to it? Did you accidentally give them the secret
sign and they’ve slipped a packet of ribbed ticklers into the bag? No, it’s nothing
like that. All it means is that the shop assistant is suffering from Siri
Syndrome: they only know a small handful of fixed phrases and if you try to
communicate with them using anything else you’ll get a blank stare and a repeat of
the “Can I help you?”
Finally, if someone asks you “What was your
name?” it’s not a sign that they suspect you have a multiple personality
disorder or are living a secret life – they just can’t get their verb tenses
correct and adding “at all” to the end of a question is not offering you part
of an apparently indivisible object (“Would you like the raspberry muffin
instead, at all?” or “Would you like a smack in the head, at all?”) it’s
probably just verbal filler designed to make what would otherwise be a fairly
abrupt question sound softer and the asker sound more stupid.
Go on, share that with the world. Tell them how funny it was.
Thursday, 10 April 2014
Monday, 7 April 2014
NCIS - Mem Fox
Here is the torso
And here are the fingers.
Here is the liver
And here are the gizzards.
But where is the culprit?
Here are the kneecaps
And here are the eyeballs.
Here are the elbows
And here are the gimbals.
But where is the culprit?
"Not me", said the thief.
"Get stuffed", said the pimp.
"Say what?" said the whore.
"Bird legs", said the tramp.
"Not sure", said the mole.
Here is the Goth chick
And here's the new science.
Here are ten minutes
And here is the outcome.
But where is the culprit?
Here is the heart throb
And here's the Latino.
Here's the strong, silent, sexy
Boss with wry humour.
But where is the culprit?
"Wasn't there", said the thief.
"Can't prove", said the pimp.
"Want some?" said the whore.
"Pie paint", said the tramp.
"How much?" said the mole.
Here is the husband
And here's the red herring.
Here is the thinking
And here is the ending.
But where is the culprit?
Where is that culprit?
Look he's there in the crowd.
He's been under your noses the whole time.
Please share this using the buttons below
Note: Mem Fox is a children's author from Australia. She writes good stuff, it wins awards and the kids love it. Unfortunately, she's long on repetition and, as the parent forced to read it over and over again, it becomes a bit much and the mind wanders off into all sorts of possibilities.
And here are the fingers.
Here is the liver
And here are the gizzards.
But where is the culprit?
Here are the kneecaps
And here are the eyeballs.
Here are the elbows
And here are the gimbals.
But where is the culprit?
"Not me", said the thief.
"Get stuffed", said the pimp.
"Say what?" said the whore.
"Bird legs", said the tramp.
"Not sure", said the mole.
Here is the Goth chick
And here's the new science.
Here are ten minutes
And here is the outcome.
But where is the culprit?
Here is the heart throb
And here's the Latino.
Here's the strong, silent, sexy
Boss with wry humour.
But where is the culprit?
"Wasn't there", said the thief.
"Can't prove", said the pimp.
"Want some?" said the whore.
"Pie paint", said the tramp.
"How much?" said the mole.
Here is the husband
And here's the red herring.
Here is the thinking
And here is the ending.
But where is the culprit?
Where is that culprit?
Look he's there in the crowd.
He's been under your noses the whole time.
Please share this using the buttons below
Note: Mem Fox is a children's author from Australia. She writes good stuff, it wins awards and the kids love it. Unfortunately, she's long on repetition and, as the parent forced to read it over and over again, it becomes a bit much and the mind wanders off into all sorts of possibilities.
Thursday, 3 April 2014
A history of the modern economy
A history of the modern economy – Chapter
1, The Rise from Heresy
The heresy of the pre-modern economy threatened to destroy the very basis on which Western societies operate. The greatest champion of the Independence Heresy was Robert A Heinlein who wrote
A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects.
It gradually became apparent to economic planners in the early part of the twentieth century that this heresy was undermining the establishment and had to be stamped out.
The modern economy cannot operate if people are capable of doing things for themselves and certainly not a list of things as comprehensive as that.
If you reflect on your own experience, you will understand why. If everyone was capable of making a coffee, reading a prospectus, mowing their lawns, choosing their own clothes, understanding a sporting match, replacing a frayed electrical cord or developing an opinion, where would the employment be for baristas, financial advisers, mowing services, fashion columnists, commentators, electrical safety inspectors or pundits? These people would all be out of a job.
In the special case of my barista, if she doesn’t learn to stop yelling at her staff and trying too hard to be exuberant with her customers, thereby ruining the ambience of my morning coffee, I will take it upon myself to ensure she no longer contributes anything to the economy (or the production of carbon dioxide, for that matter).
The modern economy depends entirely on the consuming public getting others to do things for them that they could perfectly well have done themselves.
The first step towards ensuring doctrinal orthodoxy was the rise of Standards. Where previously people could decide for themselves if a product or service was good enough, Standards took that power away by insisting that it was all too complicated for the average person to understand and that only the experts could differentiate poop from clay. The Standards were written in language that was impenetrable, given code numbers to disguise their subject and stored in a locked filing cabinet behind a sign reading “Beware of the Leopard”.
Government regulation supported the rise of Standards. Written in another language entirely, the Regulations couldn’t be interpreted by anyone other than a lawyer. Given that there were more lawyers than scientists in the economy, it was important to find work for them all. Once the Regulations were understood (in part, subject to certain caveats and no guarantee at all that the lawyers had read them correctly) it became apparent that a Standards Expert was going to be required to ensure that the Company was compliant with the Standards. Big companies employed a Standards Manager, others engaged contractors and the money supply went round and round.
Home owners and average people were also brought into the economy of learned helplessness. Regulations were made and public safety campaigns launched to either force or scare people out of building, installing, fixing, cleaning, painting, servicing or altering pretty much anything around the home. The rise of trades and sub-trade businesses offering “Standards assured comprehensive service packages” for everything down to and including wiping the baby’s bum was guaranteed.
The final piece of the modern economy, again aided and abetted by lawyers, came in the form of “no user serviceable parts”. Manufactured goods were hermetically sealed at the factory door and any attempt by the user to make them work the way they were supposed to was thwarted by threats of unspecified punishments for breaching unfindable clauses of the end-user warranty contract - which usually ran to three densely typed pages of 5 point font. Engineers did their part by inventing ever stranger screw heads that no living person had the right tool to undo.
By the early years of the twenty first century the modern Insect Economy was in place and the world’s economic planners expressed hope, for the first time in nearly a century, that orthodoxy had been established.
The heresy of the pre-modern economy threatened to destroy the very basis on which Western societies operate. The greatest champion of the Independence Heresy was Robert A Heinlein who wrote
A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects.
It gradually became apparent to economic planners in the early part of the twentieth century that this heresy was undermining the establishment and had to be stamped out.
The modern economy cannot operate if people are capable of doing things for themselves and certainly not a list of things as comprehensive as that.
If you reflect on your own experience, you will understand why. If everyone was capable of making a coffee, reading a prospectus, mowing their lawns, choosing their own clothes, understanding a sporting match, replacing a frayed electrical cord or developing an opinion, where would the employment be for baristas, financial advisers, mowing services, fashion columnists, commentators, electrical safety inspectors or pundits? These people would all be out of a job.
In the special case of my barista, if she doesn’t learn to stop yelling at her staff and trying too hard to be exuberant with her customers, thereby ruining the ambience of my morning coffee, I will take it upon myself to ensure she no longer contributes anything to the economy (or the production of carbon dioxide, for that matter).
The modern economy depends entirely on the consuming public getting others to do things for them that they could perfectly well have done themselves.
The first step towards ensuring doctrinal orthodoxy was the rise of Standards. Where previously people could decide for themselves if a product or service was good enough, Standards took that power away by insisting that it was all too complicated for the average person to understand and that only the experts could differentiate poop from clay. The Standards were written in language that was impenetrable, given code numbers to disguise their subject and stored in a locked filing cabinet behind a sign reading “Beware of the Leopard”.
Government regulation supported the rise of Standards. Written in another language entirely, the Regulations couldn’t be interpreted by anyone other than a lawyer. Given that there were more lawyers than scientists in the economy, it was important to find work for them all. Once the Regulations were understood (in part, subject to certain caveats and no guarantee at all that the lawyers had read them correctly) it became apparent that a Standards Expert was going to be required to ensure that the Company was compliant with the Standards. Big companies employed a Standards Manager, others engaged contractors and the money supply went round and round.
Home owners and average people were also brought into the economy of learned helplessness. Regulations were made and public safety campaigns launched to either force or scare people out of building, installing, fixing, cleaning, painting, servicing or altering pretty much anything around the home. The rise of trades and sub-trade businesses offering “Standards assured comprehensive service packages” for everything down to and including wiping the baby’s bum was guaranteed.
The final piece of the modern economy, again aided and abetted by lawyers, came in the form of “no user serviceable parts”. Manufactured goods were hermetically sealed at the factory door and any attempt by the user to make them work the way they were supposed to was thwarted by threats of unspecified punishments for breaching unfindable clauses of the end-user warranty contract - which usually ran to three densely typed pages of 5 point font. Engineers did their part by inventing ever stranger screw heads that no living person had the right tool to undo.
By the early years of the twenty first century the modern Insect Economy was in place and the world’s economic planners expressed hope, for the first time in nearly a century, that orthodoxy had been established.
Monday, 31 March 2014
First aid for parents
First aid is a set of skills that any parent should have.
This course is designed for new parents of young children and presents, in
order, an approach to dealing with almost any childhood medical emergency.
Sympathy. Provision of sympathy is your first recourse. Adopt a position in front of and slightly to the side of the injured person. Bend down to their level and, while patting the near shoulder, utter “There, there” in a concerned voice. For more advanced practitioners, you might consider expressing specific sympathy for the injury in question; “Ooh! You hit your head. That hurts, doesn’t it?” Avoid, if you can, stupid questions such as “Did you hit your head?” when the child has a lump like a grapefruit blossoming over one eye.
Kiss It better. Purse the lips together and apply to the affected area. Remember, however, to make sure that the affected area is not covered in blood or some other nasty childhood bodily fluid or is not, in fact, in close proximity to a source of any of those fluids. It’s important to remind the child of the efficacy of this placebo by following your kiss with the words, “There, all better now!”
Appeal to maturity. If you feel like a great deal of fuss is being made about nothing, or you just don’t really want to deal with the situation right at that moment, the next step is to stand up straight, chest out with a meaningful and mature look on your face and then say “Come on, big boys/girls don’t cry about things like that.” Of course, if your little darlings are regular watchers of soccer on TV, they’ll know that you’re lying and you might have to skip this step.
Plaster, Band-aid, whatever you call it. Nothing works like a Band-Aid. It not only stops bleeding and prevents the ingress of infection, it removes pain, wipes away tears and gives the injured the feeling of credibility that comes from having their injury taken seriously. A Band-aid, especially if it has a prominent picture on it in bright colours, can be worn with pride like a war wound.
Ice pack. An ice pack can serve the same purpose as a Band-aid. Particularly at school, there is a great deal of healing power in the attention you get walking around with a hospital-looking object clasped to your head. It helps if the injured party is being supported around the playground by a friend or too. This will cure everything up to and including a fractured skull – or at least make the complaint go away for a while.
Convince the child that the injury isn’t real – or that it isn’t as bad as they seem to think it is. “No honey, it’s not broken, you’ve just bruised it. A night of sleep is all you need.” Of course, you’re going to feel really stupid when she comes back from hospital the next night with a plaster cast and a crutch but we’re only interested in first aid here, you’re not expected to deal with serious stuff like that.
And none of this applies after 9pm. The only possible response to a childhood injury at that time of the night is a 5 hour wait in the emergency room stuck between a drunken bum with a nest of rats in his hair and breath that’s stripping the paint off the furniture, and a psychotic houso who’s wailing in an attempt to convince the doctors that the pain in her bruised foot is bad enough to require large doses of morphine and a private room.
Sympathy. Provision of sympathy is your first recourse. Adopt a position in front of and slightly to the side of the injured person. Bend down to their level and, while patting the near shoulder, utter “There, there” in a concerned voice. For more advanced practitioners, you might consider expressing specific sympathy for the injury in question; “Ooh! You hit your head. That hurts, doesn’t it?” Avoid, if you can, stupid questions such as “Did you hit your head?” when the child has a lump like a grapefruit blossoming over one eye.
Kiss It better. Purse the lips together and apply to the affected area. Remember, however, to make sure that the affected area is not covered in blood or some other nasty childhood bodily fluid or is not, in fact, in close proximity to a source of any of those fluids. It’s important to remind the child of the efficacy of this placebo by following your kiss with the words, “There, all better now!”
Appeal to maturity. If you feel like a great deal of fuss is being made about nothing, or you just don’t really want to deal with the situation right at that moment, the next step is to stand up straight, chest out with a meaningful and mature look on your face and then say “Come on, big boys/girls don’t cry about things like that.” Of course, if your little darlings are regular watchers of soccer on TV, they’ll know that you’re lying and you might have to skip this step.
Plaster, Band-aid, whatever you call it. Nothing works like a Band-Aid. It not only stops bleeding and prevents the ingress of infection, it removes pain, wipes away tears and gives the injured the feeling of credibility that comes from having their injury taken seriously. A Band-aid, especially if it has a prominent picture on it in bright colours, can be worn with pride like a war wound.
Ice pack. An ice pack can serve the same purpose as a Band-aid. Particularly at school, there is a great deal of healing power in the attention you get walking around with a hospital-looking object clasped to your head. It helps if the injured party is being supported around the playground by a friend or too. This will cure everything up to and including a fractured skull – or at least make the complaint go away for a while.
Convince the child that the injury isn’t real – or that it isn’t as bad as they seem to think it is. “No honey, it’s not broken, you’ve just bruised it. A night of sleep is all you need.” Of course, you’re going to feel really stupid when she comes back from hospital the next night with a plaster cast and a crutch but we’re only interested in first aid here, you’re not expected to deal with serious stuff like that.
And none of this applies after 9pm. The only possible response to a childhood injury at that time of the night is a 5 hour wait in the emergency room stuck between a drunken bum with a nest of rats in his hair and breath that’s stripping the paint off the furniture, and a psychotic houso who’s wailing in an attempt to convince the doctors that the pain in her bruised foot is bad enough to require large doses of morphine and a private room.
Thursday, 27 March 2014
Signwriters of Australia - save us
From the cave paintings at Lascaux through the hieroglyphs
of the Pharaoh to the mystery of Linear B, what we write on our walls will be,
in centuries to come, how archaeologists come to understand and judge our
civilization. what will they think of us? Sign-writers of Australia, I call on
you to secure our posterity.
Billboards are also advertising to travellers. When I roll into town, I could conceivably need petrol, food and accommodation. Unless I've brought a posse and an iconic tune that will be whistled badly for generations to come, I'm unlikely to need legal services, and there are no conceivable circumstances under which I will need help with my tax return. God only knows what the PhD students of the future, writing about our road trips, will believe we were doing.
Retail is not exciting. Sport is exciting. Roller coasters
are exciting. Maths - particularly calculus - is exciting. Yet another chain
store selling cotton-so-thin-it’s-water-soluble "fashion" is not
exciting. Please don't paint signs saying
"Exciting new retail experience opening here
soon!"
I don't have an endless series of problems; not everyone
needs "solutions" in their business title. Waste management
solutions, tile and bathroom solutions, sex deprivation solutions, crime
management solutions, sobriety solutions. Also known as bin men, tilers,
whores, cops and pubs. Save us from "solutions", I implore you.
I don’t want to go on about spelling and apostrophes –
you know whereof I speak – but please take special note that store names are
singular- even if they end in ‘s’. "Mathers has moved" not "have
moved".
Billboards are high speed experiences. At 100 kph the
best you can expect is that I will get a business name and a logo. My wife has
never said to me,
"Honey just
double back a second, I need to get the phone number, web address, full product
list and insanely complicated directions to the fish and chip shop in the next
town."
Billboards are also advertising to travellers. When I roll into town, I could conceivably need petrol, food and accommodation. Unless I've brought a posse and an iconic tune that will be whistled badly for generations to come, I'm unlikely to need legal services, and there are no conceivable circumstances under which I will need help with my tax return. God only knows what the PhD students of the future, writing about our road trips, will believe we were doing.
Thai restaurant names are not funny. "Thai me down", "Thai
Riffic", "Why Thai", "Thai the knot" or "Tongue
Thai'd". Our distant descendants will find that the lifetime of effort
spent understanding our language will have been to no avail other than to read
cheap puns. Please save us from being relegated to the Benny Hill category of
ancient peoples.
And, if you're going to use a tiny font on a roadside
sign, at least have the honesty to write "you are about to have a very bad
car accident".
Please share the joy using the buttons below.
Monday, 24 March 2014
The Doc Martin Protocols
I am a great fan of the Port Wenn medic and
my wife thinks that there is more than a little of him in me. Fair enough, I
can accept that. That being the case, I would like to propose a new set of
social protocols to make conversations clearer, more effective and to prevent
people taking unnecessary offence; the Doc Martin protocols.
SBI. If I flag SBI, then the conversation
that follows is a Strictly Business Interaction. Just fill the prescription. I
don’t want to know about your kids, I have no interest in village gossip and
the weather is a matter of sublime indifference to me. We are not, in this
case, interacting as two human beings; I have a business need that I think you
can fill. End of story.
WIA. Well Intentioned Advice. Children can
be given advice on such matters as unsuitable friends, inappropriate clothing
choices or bad financial decisions, why can’t adults? I am more than happy to
receive such advice if offered in a spirit of honesty and generosity and, if I give
it under the banner of WIA, it comes in the same spirit. Adulthood does not
guarantee omniscience and there are far too many people sitting around,
cringing at the disaster someone, who is supposedly a friend, is walking into,
and doing nothing about it. WIA them. You are welcome to do the same to me.
Offence not intended and none is permitted to be taken.
JDC. Simply I Just Don’t Care. If you a
raise a topic with me that is of passionate interest to you and I have listened
for more than three minutes, I have the right to call JDC. You have the same
right with me. It’s a direct way of saying “You can talk about this for the
next hour and I won’t be any more interested than I am now.” It doesn’t mean I
don’t like you as a person or that your interests are not important, it’s just
that they mean nothing to me and we would have a mutually more fulfilling
interaction if we moved on to another topic of conversation.
NTA. I Need Time Alone and lots of it. That
doesn’t make me a sociopath it makes me an introvert. Sometimes I don’t feel
like talking to people, particularly people I don’t know well because that’s a
lot of hard work. Other times, even people I know well are liable to be
eviscerated if they want to talk to me. I neither need nor want to interact all
the time. The purpose of this protocol is to, without offence, allow people to
decline social invitations or leave parties early because they have just had
enough of other people.
OHD. In some interactions involving
technical matters, One of us Has a Degree. If you continue to offer your
inexpert opinion on something I have studied for some years, you are going to
make a fool of yourself. You are also going to try my patience to the point of
meltdown. You do have a right to an opinion but that’s not to say that your
opinion is right. If one of us has expertise and the other doesn’t, I think we
can call OHD and move on to the next thing, can’t we?
IGA. Is this Going Anywhere? I know we are
fellow human beings, we share many of the same joys and sorrows in life as
countless billions have done before us and doubtless many will into the future.
Children, work, money, spouses, health etc. I don’t need half an hour of small
talk to re-establish our mutual humanness. After a couple of minutes, I’m going
to call IGA by which I mean, “Are we going to get to a deeper level in this
conversation or start to have an informed debate?” If the answer is “no” then I
want to move on to the next interlocutor; there’s nothing for me here.
TOV. If I have been forced to listen to an
idiot talking for too long then I will get up and leave. Why? Because it’s That
Or Violence. Chickens that cluck and cluck and never actually lay anything tend
to get their heads chopped off. If you witter away, never saying anything,
never challenging my opinions, never providing inspiration for my thoughts to
go off into unexplored territory, then I’m going to cut the conversation short
before I do something similar to you.
Thursday, 20 March 2014
I'm just not that noble
Why is the environment movement doing so badly? Their
gains are made at a snail's pace and are undone like a kindergarten kid's
shoelace the minute a neo-con government gets into power?
Is it because the messages of the greenies are bad? No. Most of them amount to
These are perfectly reasonable and sane messages of the kind comprehensible by most primary school graduates. The problem is not the calibre of the messages it's the assumption that people's actions are driven by reason and sanity.
In fact, let's take driving as an example. Hybrid or electric cars are offering me the soft, warm inner glow of morality and about 0.75 horsepower. The powerful V6 on the other hand, is offering me the chance to be admired by, and therefore possibly to sleep with, leggy women in body hugging evening wear or - and sometimes this might even be preferable - the chance to drive a car through gorgeous countryside, without my kids in the back seat fighting or my wife checking my speed all the time. There's no contest. If the Prius isn't going to get me laid, then the future of the planet can go hang.
I feel for the orang-utans, they're cute! But the tropical islands of SE Asia are also offering me beach resorts at Cosco prices, every third drink free and the chance to delude myself that the sultry beauty massaging my back might actually be attracted to me. Even if she does find me irresistible, the ape's not getting her jokes laughed at over cocktails in the Sunset Bar.
The anti-fur campaigners have the right idea: “I’d rather go naked …”.
"Hey, there's no fur on her, at least as far as I can see, so I'm sure as Hell not going to wear any."
Job done! But fur is a battle won isn't it? Maybe we could get the girls to move on to leopard skin? Banning even faux leopard skin - in fact especially faux leopard skin - is a cause I'd happily support.
Alcohol gets me access to good parties full of beautiful people - I can see it on TV, must be true. From what I see of the environmental movement on TV, saving wilderness areas gets me access to mud, leaky tents and strange hairy people who are boycotting soap, shampoo and probably deodorant and who are very difficult to distinguish from the primate inhabitants of the forest they’re protecting. Just hand me that beer.
Look at the mining industry. All those impressive big machines, important looking men in hard hats holding blueprints and pointing at bits of the landscape.
That says money, it says professional, it says respect and a six figure income. I say, "Yes, honey, become an engineer." Adorable though the turtles and dolphins are, they aren't bringing social prestige to my daughter or private education to my grandkids. There are WAY too many marine biologists doing the filing or making excellent coffee and as for some of the aforementioned hairy fellas, don’t even think about bringing one of them home.
What the environmental lobby needs is a naked 5'11" woman in a hard hat, driving a hybrid car to a solar powered resort and handsome, well groomed men socializing with other beautiful people at the picket line cocktail party. Then you've got a hope of saving the spotted owl.
Is it because the messages of the greenies are bad? No. Most of them amount to
- Don't poison the air you breathe;
- Don't flood your own basement; and
- Don't eat all the popcorn now, save some for later in the movie when you might be hungry.
These are perfectly reasonable and sane messages of the kind comprehensible by most primary school graduates. The problem is not the calibre of the messages it's the assumption that people's actions are driven by reason and sanity.
In fact, let's take driving as an example. Hybrid or electric cars are offering me the soft, warm inner glow of morality and about 0.75 horsepower. The powerful V6 on the other hand, is offering me the chance to be admired by, and therefore possibly to sleep with, leggy women in body hugging evening wear or - and sometimes this might even be preferable - the chance to drive a car through gorgeous countryside, without my kids in the back seat fighting or my wife checking my speed all the time. There's no contest. If the Prius isn't going to get me laid, then the future of the planet can go hang.
I feel for the orang-utans, they're cute! But the tropical islands of SE Asia are also offering me beach resorts at Cosco prices, every third drink free and the chance to delude myself that the sultry beauty massaging my back might actually be attracted to me. Even if she does find me irresistible, the ape's not getting her jokes laughed at over cocktails in the Sunset Bar.
The anti-fur campaigners have the right idea: “I’d rather go naked …”.
"Hey, there's no fur on her, at least as far as I can see, so I'm sure as Hell not going to wear any."
Job done! But fur is a battle won isn't it? Maybe we could get the girls to move on to leopard skin? Banning even faux leopard skin - in fact especially faux leopard skin - is a cause I'd happily support.
Alcohol gets me access to good parties full of beautiful people - I can see it on TV, must be true. From what I see of the environmental movement on TV, saving wilderness areas gets me access to mud, leaky tents and strange hairy people who are boycotting soap, shampoo and probably deodorant and who are very difficult to distinguish from the primate inhabitants of the forest they’re protecting. Just hand me that beer.
Look at the mining industry. All those impressive big machines, important looking men in hard hats holding blueprints and pointing at bits of the landscape.
That says money, it says professional, it says respect and a six figure income. I say, "Yes, honey, become an engineer." Adorable though the turtles and dolphins are, they aren't bringing social prestige to my daughter or private education to my grandkids. There are WAY too many marine biologists doing the filing or making excellent coffee and as for some of the aforementioned hairy fellas, don’t even think about bringing one of them home.
What the environmental lobby needs is a naked 5'11" woman in a hard hat, driving a hybrid car to a solar powered resort and handsome, well groomed men socializing with other beautiful people at the picket line cocktail party. Then you've got a hope of saving the spotted owl.
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