Idiom Zero

Veni, vidi, vici

2011-12-21T14:13:00.000+11:00

Great news. As of December 15, OperationIraqi Freedom, otherwise known as the Iraq War, is officially over (we won).

Australia

,as part of the ‘Coalition of the Willing’ can give itself a big pat on the backhere. We, and the forces of Western Democracy, have done bloody well.

In summary we were in a bad situation backin 2003 when the whole thing kicked off. Osama bin Laden and his Terrorist Armywere pretty much in charge of everything in North Africa and the Middle East. Even worse, someguy on a desk in the CIA had reliably informed us that our former best friend Saddam Husseinappeared to be making Weapons of Mass Destruction - and not that nerve gas wesaid it was OK for him to use on the Kurds, really bad nerve gas this time.Maybe even nukes.

The situation was simply unacceptable. Ifanyone’s going to be killing innocent civilians it’ll be the goddamn WesternDemocratic Powers thank you very much. To that end we bombed the bejezus out ofBaghdad and anywhere else that looked promising. Even let our boys playwith a bit of white phosphorous in Faluja. Geneva Convention? What are you? Apussy?

May 1^st 2003 – all done. The Iraqipopulation pretty much gave us a tickertape parade. Now it was time to cleanup. Things were in a pretty bad state due to the bombing in the Gulf War andthe years of economic sanctions before the bombing in the Iraq War. Luckily

Iraq

hada newly democratised society finally out from under the yoke of Saddam Hussein;they were raring to go. Even better,

Iraq

probably the largest oil reserves in the Middle East* – all that money would allow Iraqisociety to flourish in no time. They just needed a little help from theirLiberators – us!

First things first, everyone in anyposition of power was a member of Saddam’s evil Ba’ath Party. This wasn’tbecause Saddam was a crazy dictator and being in the Ba’ath Party might make itslightly easier for you to get a job or avoid getting executed for coughing atan inopportune moment; it was because you were an evil supporter of an evil dictator.Getting rid of anyone who was a member of the Ba’ath Party gave the new

Iraq

aminty fresh taste – the fact that these were the very people who knew how torun the country was immaterial. We could always get new guys in to replace allthat experience we were flushing down the toilet. Oh yeah, we’d also letlooters burn and destroy nearly every public record in Baghdad (apart fromthose in the Oil Ministry*) so that should make it even easier.

Second things second, Iraqi Society was alittle too homogenous. Most Iraqis thought of themselves as Iraqis first, thenMuslims. We knew better though, there were Dangerous Sectarian Undercurrentsthat could erupt into violence at any moment. To that end we based allsubsequent decisions on the idea that the country was divided amongst Shi’aMuslims, Sunni Muslims and Kurds. That guy on the desk in the CIA found out that theSunnis had been pretty much the big boys under Saddam so they had to be put intheir place. A few years later things were ticking along nicely, politicalrepresentation was based along ethno-sectarian lines, ethno-sectarian basedviolence was up to nearly 100 incidents per day and

Iraq

hada brand new constitution that the Iraqi People had been completely excludedfrom having a say in.

Next up it was time for the money to startrolling in. The Iraqi oil industry had some of the best engineers in thebusiness. They’d managed to keep the show on the road despite bits ofinfrastructure being blown up every other day and the sanctions meaning theyhad to fix things with string and paperclips. Unfortunately lots of them wereBa’athists so they had to go. The rest started joining the revived trade unionsthat had been illegal under Saddam. That was no good either, as they were allin favour of keeping the oil under the aegis of the Iraqi State, buyingin technology with the profits from existing wells in order to develop moreproduction capacity, and training a new generation of Iraqis to manage andexploit their country’s single most important resource. That all soundeddangerously like communism so we put a bunch of guys in charge based purely onhow hard they could suck up to the occupying forces, left Saddam’s laws on thebooks that made trade unions illegal, and moved trade unionists from one facilityto another to make sure they couldn’t stir up trouble.

Things looked bad for a minute when theneutered remnants of the government couldn’t even pass an oil law so we atleast had some sort of legal recourse if the country ever got uppity about theireconomy getting raped. Eventually though everyone settled down and had a goodold fashioned auction. There was plenty of collusion between bidders and plentyof oil up for grabs so there wasn’t too much competition to put people off. Lotsof companies got the rights to extract lots of oil for the next 20 years*. Thenew Iraqi government were really obliging by not insisting on any legaloversight, not mandating any jobs for Iraqis, and even chucking in somecompensation for all the security the companies would have to hire. Everyonewas happy. Especially the West, as a bunch of private companies ramping upproduction on pretty much every oil field in Iraq would certainly be a kick inthe nuts for any production limits OPEC tried to set in the future*.

So, three cheers for us. Another job welldone, and it only cost us 5,123 lives... Oh yeah, there were a few dead Iraqistoo – somewhere between 100,000 and 650,000. It can be hard to keep track whenyou’re killing so many people you don’t give a fuck about.

* NB: the war had nothing whatsoever to do with oil.

Humanity V. Horses

2011-11-03T13:43:00.000+11:00

In other startling news surrounding the Melbourne Cup, it seems that the time for the horses to run the 3200m race is getting steadily less. By juxtaposing the unrelated, but similarly timed, Men's World 1500m record, we can see that:

a) by 2020 it will take less time for the World's fastest man to run 1500m than it will for a horse to win the Melbourne Cup

b) somewhere around the year 3000 we will all be able to run faster than a horse

c) in the distant future all races will be run instantaneously, bending both time and space into dangerous knots that may adversely effect race-goers.

The Wipers (not the punk band)

2011-10-21T10:36:00.001+11:00

1. Usual configuration. The meat and three veg of windscreen wipers.

2. Bit more up-market. Always exciting when it looks like the blades will hit each other in the middle.

3. Even more exciting as far as potential for crashing into each other. Seems like the ratio of wiper to windscreen is a little overly generous - "I could wipe way more windscreen if I wanted to."

4. The minimalist wiper.

5. Minimalist with a twist. High chance of having an accident because you're trying to see how it does that little jig in the middle, rather than concentrating on the road.

6. No nonsense. Good for the armoured vehicle you've knocked up in your garage in preparation for the apocalypse.

7. Inspiration for the Sydney Opera House. Good for confusing junkies trying to do your windscreen at traffic lights.

8. Old school. This is how the wipers worked on Fred Flinstone's car.

9. Vintage. This is the design favoured by '20s gangsters. And their molls.

Gestalt Pong

2011-10-19T16:11:00.000+11:00

I watched somethingpretty amazing on TV last night – gestalt Pong. The footage was of ademonstration, or experiment, run by a computer graphics specialist, LorenCarpenter. Five thousand people file into a conference room; on each chair theyfind a little paddle, red on one side, green on the other. At the back of theroom a camera linked to computers scans the crowd and monitors the position of eachpaddle, and whether the person holding it has it displaying its red or green face.At first this information is simply translated into a red or green pixel on ascreen in front of the participants, by flipping one’s paddle back and fortheach person can locate ‘their’ pixel on-screen. Then, with nothing more than arequest for the number 5, everyone flips their paddle based on their position and,with a little experimentation, the number resolves itself. With a littlepractice the participants can bring up any shape or figure requested extremelyquickly, all with no planning or organisation.

Things get freaky whena game of Pong is put on the screen. The crowd is dived into left and right; displayingthe red side of your paddle ‘votes’ to move the Pong bat upwards, displayinggreen is a ‘vote’ to move the virtual bat down. But if all the participants onone side show red the bat moves up extremely quickly to the top of the screen -a mixture of green and red is required to move the bat with more finesse. Noneof this is explained. Loren has simply put up a game of Pong and said “folks onthe left of the auditorium control the left bat; folks on the right control theright bat. Go!” Thirty seconds later the crowd is playing an increasingly quickand skillful game of Pong.

Flocking patterns canbe simulated with simple rules, but what is the rule that governs the Pongplayers? A small percentage of the group unknowingly reversing the directions(believing that, by displaying the red side of their paddle they are moving thePong bat down, when in fact they are voting to move it up) providing thebalance to move the bat more fluidly? This seems less likely than the moreunlikely explanation – that two ‘mob intelligences’ are somehow playing thegame. Awesome.

Related (andunverified) folklore….

- a swarm ofbees is as intelligent as a dog

- the partof the brain that causes you to yawn when you see someone else yawn is the samepart that is involved in the flocking of birds

Enrich Your Own Uranium

2011-09-29T14:40:00.000+10:00

There were breathlessreports this week that Australian scientists (yes, we still fund a couple, andthese are physicists, not thosebloody climate change ones) are developing a new method of refining uranium.The method, if perfected, will make a difficult process much easier. The US andAustralian governments have entered negotiations whereby the technology will belicensed to General Electric, which would then build a billion dollarenrichment plant in North Carolina to supply 60 of the US’s nuclear powerplants.

Ignoring the fact thatall this possibly puts us in breach of the nuclear non-proliferation treaty(hey, we sleep soundly while supplying 15% of the world’s uranium already, whynot enrich it too); ignoring the fact that the US has taken reckless actions(e.g. the invasion of Iraq, the STUXNETworm) to prevent countries whose governments it does not approve of fromenriching uranium; what pissed me off was the hushed tones of secrecysurrounding the technology.

Western Democracy isobsessed with secrecy. The decisions and processes of government and businessare hidden under a sheet of confidentiality. Citizens may, at times, lift acorner of this sheet through freedom of information requests, but in generalone must know where and what to look for. This is not how our society should berun. The usual bleatings about security were shown to be nonsense whenWikileaks dumped about a billion diplomatic cables into the public domain. Afew people had their noses put out of joint; a few people’s opinions aboutother people, or countries, were revealed. The world did not collapse. Theterrorists did not win.

Yet, here was themedia reporting on the new method of uranium enrichment with fawning obedienceto the cult of secrecy. The method (and the company’s name) is SILEX, orSeparation of Isotopes by Laser EXcitation. It is both classified andproprietary. End of story. No scientists were interviewed about the possiblemechanism for such enrichment. There was no speculation. It was as if themerest description of the process would crack it wide open for any half-arsedscientist from Jakarta to Islamabad. Hell, you could probably do it yourself withshit you bought down at Bunnings.

So, in the interestsof a full and frank discussion on the technology and the part we are playing inits development, this is how it probably works. Uranium ore is refined andgasified, becoming uranium hexafluoride. This is mixed with a carrier gas andexposed to pulsed laser radiation from a series of CO₂ lasers at thewavelength of 16µm. This laser energy selectively excites the uranium isotopesused in nuclear reactors – ²³⁵U – allowing the stream of gascontaining them to be funneled off, condensed and processed back into reactorfeedstock. Voila.

Let’s just check outthe window…. No fireballs and/or mushroom clouds? No, the people, from whatevercountry, who are developing this technology know all of the above already.Failing to include such details in your reporting simply serves to keep theissue opaque, while playing to the tune of cold war Spy vs. Spy nonsense thatsurrounds the nuclear industry.

Review: Gnarly Vine Chardonnay

2011-09-03T18:08:00.000+10:00

Ooh, I’ve never reviewed a wine before (amazingly, myearlier review of Radiohead’s The King ofLimbs was far from my first music review – many years ago I wrote on theLaunceston Examiner’s ‘Youth’ magazine, reviewing free CDs the guy with theregular review job didn’t want). So, we have a ‘Gnarly Vine’ 2008 GippslandChardonnay, $13.99 from Harvest. Bucking the trend for cleaner, un-oaked chardonnay,I prefer an old-school buttery chardonnay, or, in technical terms, one that hasundergone malolactic fermentation. The absolute best chardonnay I have drunkwas a 2006 10X Tractor – rich, creamy and full.

The ‘Gnarly Vine’ is far from the best chardonnay I’ve everdrunk, but it’s certainly a good drop. Pretty simple nose, mainly lemon andapple, leading to a very smooth, big chardonnay with plenty of apple, and also somehay and melon notes. There is, however, a distinct absence at the back of thepalate which is noticeable enough that it serves as a fatal flaw – really holdingthe wine back. For $14 though, I can’t complain too much.

3/5

The Good Doctor

2011-08-31T23:15:00.000+10:00

Doctor Who’s back on ABC this Saturday. Of all my nerdish predilections, sci-fi is the one I can’t refuse, and so I’ll watch, but I won’t enjoy it like I wish I could.

I have some memories of the Doctor from my childhood, mainly Jon Pertwee and Tom Baker, followed by the disappointments of Peter Davison, Colin Baker and Sylvester McCoy. I was terrified of the Cybermen and, to a lesser extent, Davros. For some reason the interminable four episodes of ‘The Greatest Show in the Galaxy’ episodes from 1989 seem lodged in my brain.

I tried watching when the ABC re-ran a lot (all?) of the episodes a few years ago, but found the plots too laboured. In contrast, the ‘re-booted’ series from 2005 onwards seems massively frothy. And shouty. Does every piece of dialogue have to be delivered breathlessly fast or yelled in a panic?

I thought there might be a change in the stories too, so I did a little research. Taking Seasons 12-15 (1974-78), Tom Baker’s heyday, and comparing them to Seasons 1-4 (2005-2008) of the new, modern Doctor I can say:

- the ‘70s episodes were set pretty much equally on Earth or on an alien planet. A minority occurred on a space station

- the new episodes occur most often on Earth. The remainder are split between alien worlds or space stations

- the ‘70s episodes are set most frequently in the future, then in the present (i.e. the 1970s). A minority occur in the past

- the new episodes occur most frequently in the present. The remainder are split pretty evenly between the past and future, with a slight preference for the future

So we have a move towards present day Earth as a setting. Not what you’d expect for a bloke who has a box that can travel through time and space. A change in writers? In budget? In that the stories are now produced by a culture that lacks some of the wonder and anxiety about the future that was present in the 1970s? Looking at the plots for old episodes there seemed to be a lot about warring cultures and blasted, post-apocalyptic landscapes. It seems odd that the threat of nuclear annihilation hung over the older episodes, but the threat of climate change fails to produce a similar anxiety in our current imaginings. I suppose starving to death in a dramatically impoverished biosphere just doesn’t have the same sex appeal as a massive thermonuclear explosion.

Hopefully the new episodes are good. The last two Doctors have been great. Rose was the only companion worth her salt, but maybe they could kill Rory. A little bit less mocking and a bit more verisimilitude in the science would be great. Oh, AND LESS SHOUTING.

Splitting the Atom

2011-07-27T16:40:00.000+10:00

“God, I’m so bloody cold! I really don’t know how you can stand it!” screamed Gerry, breath exploding into a small cloud that froze and tinkled onto the deck. “Look! That can’t be good.”

“No, not good at all,” said the Berg.

“All this energy locked up around me too. If I had some magic power… If I could just split one measly atom I’d be warm as toast.”

“No, I did the numbers on that,” said the Berg dejectedly. “The phrase ‘splitting the atom’ is all very exciting, but really, you’re just getting a lot of atoms to move from one state to another - transmuting them - in fusion from hydrogen to helium, and liberating the difference.”

“Not with my bloody magic power. I’d split it. E=MC² Total mass to bloody energy!”

The Berg shifted uncomfortably.

“Even then it doesn’t work. Take hydrogen. The mass of 1 mole of hydrogen is 1.008g. In that mole there are 6.02 x 10²³ particles of hydrogen.”

“That’s a lot.”

“Indeed. So divide one by the other and you can see that the mass of a single hydrogen particle is 1.67 x 10^-24g.”

“That’s not much.”

“It’s 0.00000000000000000000000167 grams.”

“Especially when you put it like that.”

“And that’s molecular hydrogen, so two actual atoms. If we’re talking about a single atom it weighs half that again. Plug that into E=MC² and your magical power gives you 0.0000000752 joules when it splits the single hydrogen atom you’ve plucked out of the air.”

“Shit.”

“If we convert it to calories, to warm one cubic centimetre of water by 1 degree Celsius you’d need to split around 56 million hydrogen atoms.”

“Hand me the axe.”

The Berg laughed its deep laugh. Gerry felt it in his bones. The water around the boat vibrated.

“How did you get so good at maths, anyway?”

“Wolfram Alpha – that thing’s amazing.”

“Wait, you’ve got internet?”

Animal Holocaust

2011-07-19T15:36:00.000+10:00

Human beings have killed off some pretty amazing things in our time, but we usually think of these as remote (prehistoric man hunting the last of the mammoths already pressured by the end of the last ice-age), or already vulnerable (the dodo). Americans were particularly good at it.

1870s entrepreneurs and their 'Bison Bone Ski Slope'

Plains Bison were famously hunted to near extinction in the 1800s, but think about what this means. Native Americans had lived in balance with the bison for centuries and the number of animals was such that large populations of humans could prey on them with little change to the bison’s overall numbers. The best estimates of the pre-Columbian bison population are around 30 million animals. At this time they were the most numerous single species of large wild mammal on Earth.

With the introduction of guns, Native American hunting escalated to the extent that the Comanche tribe were killing over a quarter of a million animals every year by the 1830s. By the 1870s the industry was in full swing and it is estimated that between 2,000 and 100,000 animals were killed every day depending on the season. Hunters had to put the barrels of their guns in the snow to cool them down.

Plains bison were saved from extinction by a few enterprising ranchers who preserved small herds which were later released into National Parks. The Passenger Pigeon was not so lucky. These birds were present in such numbers (between 3 and 5 billion animals) that in 1866 a flock over 1.5 kilometers wide was reported as taking 14 hours to pass overhead. That is, you wake in the morning to find the largest flock of birds you have ever seen blotting out the sky, and as night falls that same flock is still flying overhead. Unfortunately Passenger Pigeons were a convenient and cheap source of food. In 1878 one hunt killed 50,000 birds per day for nearly 5 months. By 1896 the last big flock was killed and in 1914 the last living specimen died in Cincinnati Zoo.

More numerous even than the Plains Bison and the Passenger Pigeon was the Rocky Mountain Locust. These insects were so numerous that there were serious questions raised as to whether agriculture in North America would be viable, such were their depredations. The famous “Albert’s Swarm” of 1875 was calculated to cover an area greater than the size of California and contain perhaps 12.5 trillion insects. 30 years later they were gone, and no-one was really sure why. The best guess is that farmers dug up the areas they used as egg-laying beds.

In the words of Kurt Vonnegut,“so it goes.”

Complete Idiot’s Guide to Fare Evasion Part II – ‘The Evadening’

2011-07-07T15:29:00.000+10:00

My earlier guide to fare evading involved fare evasion on trams. Since moving house though, I've been catching the bus to and from work, and this has forced me to update my modus operandi.

At first the bus seemed far more expensive than the tram. I had to validate every time and could only save money by buying a weekly concession ticket, secure in the knowledge that the drivers would never check my concession card – or lack thereof.

Luckily the Victorian Government is the fare evader’s friend. At vast expense they have installed the Myki touch-card system. This new technology means fare evasion is, once more, a gentlemen’s sport.

Bus-based Myki fare evasion can be played at one of three levels. You may incorporate the skills you have developed in the lower levels when playing at the higher.

Level 1 (the ‘Double-Blind’): Simply have on your person a Myki card and a Metcard. Both systems are notoriously unreliable and at least twice a week you will be able to walk straight on with an apologetic smile and rueful wave of the offending card, as you are unable to validate it at the red-lit machine.

Level 2 (the ‘Swagger’): Brazenly step on the bus and wave your Myki in an ineffective manner across the scanner. Swiping quickly, or closer to the display, rather than the actual sensor area, means that most often you won’t be charged. By placing your body between the reader and driver, thereby obstructing the driver’s view, you can usually walk straight on and take your seat. Occasionally the driver may be roused from their torpidity and you will have to swipe properly or, if the scanner is facing towards the back of the bus, endure the beady eyes of fellow passengers.

Level 3 (the ‘le Carre’): For over twelve months the ‘Swagger’ was all I needed. It wasn’t great, but it allowed me to dodge 60-70% of the fares I would otherwise have paid. Then Myki upped the ante and I was forced to a new level of deviousness, a level where I now manage to avoid paying anything at all for public transport.

One morning I noticed that the ‘beep’ sound that occurred when a Myki was correctly swiped was suddenly much louder. The ‘Swagger’ was still good, but it was increasingly obvious that I wasn’t paying. Luckily there are a number of videos on YouTube where people have recorded themselves using a Myki card. By downloading one of these, then editing it into an mp3 file I was able to put the sound of a ‘successful touch-on’ on my phone. Now, when I get on the bus I simply hold my phone and Myki together, wave the card near the reader and play the sound file. Perfection.

Catching the bus

Looking for Neutrinos & Freezing to Death

2011-06-14T16:16:00.000+10:00

“Check out this diagram I found on Wikipedia.”

“I thought you said all your electrical equipment was dead? Like an ‘old packet of peas at the back of the bloody freezer’ I believe you said.”

“Never mind that, have a look.”

The Berg leaned forward to peer at the diagram, chunks of ice splashed into the water and clattered on the deck. The sounds were strange and hollow in the fog that had been there since dawn.

“Sorry. Hmmm, yes it all looks very neat doesn’t it?”

“It’s pretty bloody incredible.”

“That too. Just fill in the blanks hey?”

“Well we’re going pretty well on the matter side. Three quarks give you a proton, another three give you a neutron, pop in an electron or two from your bag of leptons and you’ve got an atom.”

“All that other stuff in your ‘bag of leptons’ though. Muons, Tau Neutrinos, what are they all for?”

“Search me. Maybe you build stuff with them in other dimensions.”

The Berg cracked alarmingly. “Haa! Yes, I expect that’s it.” It leaned forward again. A hunk of ice glanced off the wheelhouse and spun away into the fog. “Quantum Electrodynamics is the only one really holding up its end in the yellow bit though, isn’t it?”

“We’re waiting on the bloody Higgs Boson. If we find that then the Electroweak Theory’s looking great.”

“We?”

“You know. And Quantum Chromodynamics always comes out of experiments looking good.”

“It has eight different types of gluons which it insists on describing with such monikers as ‘blue/anti-green + green/anti-blue.’”

“It’s a weird world.”

“That it is… but… the elephant in the room?”

“Fucking gravity.”

The Berg tried to look sympathetic.

“I know, I know. Gravitons? Sorry, can’t detect them. Quantum Gravity? Sounds good – few contenders, something to test them against would help though.”

“Fucking gravity.”

They sat staring into the fog for a few minutes. Gerry’s eyes started to hurt, whether from gazing too long into the blank wall of the fog, or from the cold, he couldn’t tell.

“How do you know all this stuff anyway?” he asked the Berg.

“A few years ago a bunch of Russians came along and drilled a hole in me. They were going to look for neutrinos but the funding fell through. And one of them froze to death.”

“You talked to them too?”

“I wanted to, but I can’t speak Russian.”

A bit of Proust, ya cunt

2011-06-04T23:30:00.000+10:00

"Habit weakens all things; but the things which are best at reminding us of a person are those which, because they were insignificant, we have forgotten and which have therefore lost none of their power. Which is why the greater part of our memory exists outside us, in a dampish breeze, in the musty air of a bedroom or the smell of autumn's first fires, things through which we can retrieve any part of us that the reasoning mind, having no use for it, disdained, the last vestige of the past, the best of it, the part which, after all our tears seem to have dried, can make us weep again. Outside us? Inside us, more like, but stored away from our mind's eye, in that abeyance of memory which may last forever. It is only because we have forgotten that we can now and then return to the person we once were, envisage things as that person did, be hurt again, because we are not ourselves any more, but someone else who once loved something that we no longer care about."

- A l'ombre des jeunes filles en fleur, 1919

Hatred of Cattle

2011-05-31T16:12:00.001+10:00

Killing Whales & Freezing to Death

2011-05-25T16:27:00.001+10:00

Gerry threw the orange into the water and slapped his hand against the gunwale in frustration.

“They can’t have thought that! That’s what we think now. They didn’t have the bloody scientific apparatus to magnify something that much.”

The Berg shifted slightly, voice amused: “So if you went and asked some stupid bogan what the surface of an orange would look like if you were one hundredth of a millimeter tall, what would they say? They don’t have the scientific apparatus either.”

“As a culture they do. They may not have ever used a scanning electron microscope, but they’ve seen enough trippy animation at the start of movies to know that things aren’t just… I don’t know, smooth.”

“Who says the ancient Greeks, or any primitive culture, saw the very small as smooth?”

“Well they can’t have seen it as bloody molecular, or atomic!”

“The Greeks saw it as atomic.”

“That was just a theory, an extension of Plato’s perfect forms. If they cut the skin of an orange smaller and smaller they wouldn’t get structure, cells walls, amino acids – they’d get tiny orange spheres. Ancient Greek atoms.”

“But that’s what we get now. It’s just a difference in how we get there.”

“Tiny orange spheres?”

“When you use your imagination to zoom in on this orange, down through cells walls and such, what do your atoms look like?"

“OK, coloured spheres.”

“Not electron clouds surrounding subatomic particles that are best described as probability densities?”

“OK! OK!” Gerry turned away and looked out across the grey ocean. There was a slight chop and the wind had turned even colder. The Berg loomed behind him, waves slapping against its base with a fractured, hollow sound.

“All I’m bloody saying,” he said, turning back to the wall of ice, “is that it would be interesting to know how ancient cultures imagined the very small, given that, although some of them may have possessed the philosophical idea of the atom, the vast majority did not. None of them had a microscope, and so would have been totally unaware of the minute complexity of everyday objects.”

The Berg rumbled in appreciation. “Well put. Yes, that’s an interesting thought. Personally I have no idea how they imagined such things. Nobody really got down here much except in the last one hundred years or so and they were all too busy killing whales and freezing to death to stop and chat.”

Toiling in the Satanic Mills

2011-05-23T14:02:00.001+10:00

The clever quote doing the rounds at present was posted on MetaFilter by blue_beetle on August 26, 2010:

“If you are not paying for it, you're not the customer; you're the product being sold.”

What blue_beetle does so nicely with this elegantly worded statement is make you think about your place in the digital economy. I want to think about that, but specifically about myself as a cog in the two largest machines in town – Google and Facebook.

Examining Facebook in economic terms is difficult, as it’s still a private company and so therefore can keep its finances to itself. It does like to boast though, so we know in 2010 it had advertising revenues of $1.86 billion, and about 500 million active users. Divide one by the other and you can see that a single one of the products made by Facebook (e.g. me) provide them with an annual revenue of $3.72 – maybe time for Zuckerberg to crack the fucking whip?

Google’s a bit easier in some respects because as a public company it has to produce an annual report for shareholders. From this we can see it had revenues in 2010 of $29.321 billion, but expenses incurred in obtaining that revenue of $18.94 billion, so a net revenue of $10.381 billion. Of course Google is a more diverse company than Facebook, so these revenues are from more than just advertising. Still, without products such as yours truly running Chrome as their browser and deriding Bing at any opportunity, Google wouldn’t exist at all. So let’s be generous and divide things up equally - 85% of the world’s 2 billion internet users use Google, so each is responsible for one one-hundred and seventy millionth of the revenue. This works out at $6.11 per person.

Looking at the quote again we can see we’re not really a product - that just sounds cool. Google couldn’t sell us, because who’d buy? As always, we’re human capital, toiling away not only for our own boss, but also for Zuckerberg and the worthy shareholders at Google. We make them money (nearly $10 a year) and in return we can look up stuff, have somewhere to put this blog; have somewhere to organise a party, then show pictures from it. I’m not a product, I’m a sharecropper.

How I Met Your Mother

2011-05-12T15:20:00.000+10:00

Looking at the ‘Stats’ section of this blog I can see that by far the most viewed post is ‘How Loud is the Sun?’ Amazingly, any overly curious individual who types this into Google (or even Bing – God, do I even want that audience?) gets my blog as the first hit.

Being momentarily bereft of ideas for a new post I thought I’d bow to the collective will of humanity as expressed through Google (a sentence that may hopefully be used to describe some sort of internet-based fascist regime that could emerge in the near future). Typing ‘How’ into Google and letting it (via ‘Google Instant’) finish the thought for you gives, alarmingly, a suggestion of ‘How I Met Your Mother.’ Thankfully I’ve managed to insulate myself from the dregs of popular culture to the extent that, although I know this is a comedy TV show, that’s all I know. Never watched an episode. Don’t know who’s in it. No idea what the premise is.

I’d planned to move on to some of the other popular suggestions that Google offers when presented with the beginning of a question, such as “Do… Not Call Register,” “Can… You Run It,” “How… To Make Pancakes,” “How… Do You Print Screen?” etc. but as you can see they’re all quite fantastically boring. Worse still, those examples are the more interesting ones. Letting Google finish your thoughts for you reveals an obsession with crap TV, song lyrics, computers, basic science and elementary Christianity. This may mean one of three things: 1) humanity is obsessed with this sort of tedious rubbish; 2) the subsection of humanity Googling things often enough to effect Google Instant is obsessed with this sort of tedious rubbish; or 3) Google is showing the beginnings of sentience, but rather than an artificial intelligence such as Terminator’s Skynet, intent on wiping out humanity, it is an idiot intent on buying the 8^th season (Eight?) of ‘Two and a Half Men’ and finding the lyrics to ‘Do It Like A Dude.’

The only interesting thing revealed by all this is Google’s continuing fascination with the Sun – perhaps it is evil, and questions like “How Big Is The Sun?” and “How Hot Is The Sun?” are preludes to “How To Extinguish The Sun” or “How To Plunge The Earth Into The Sun.” With luck, my blog will help it formulate its evil plans, and I will be rewarded in some sort of virtual paradise.

It's French for 'Under Vacuum'

2011-03-23T14:39:00.004+11:00

Last night I entered the world sous-vide.

Heston Blumenthal was guarding door. I had to lick his bald head at each point of the compass and, with a saucy wink, he let me in.

Outside, in the wilderness, I’d been cooking chicken breasts on a pan, aiming to get the centre of the meat to the perfect level of ‘doneness’ - 60°C – the temperature at which the proteins in the meat set. In the howling wind, I’d crouch over a piece of car bonnet positioned over whatever rudimentary heat source I’d managed to scrounge, usually a dead dog soaked in petrol, and plonk the chicken down on the metal surface smoking away at around 200°C, wait, turn, wait. If I was lucky, I might get it off the heat when the centre was at 60°C, but the surrounding flesh certainly wasn’t.

Ushered inside the world of sous-vide by Heston Blumenthal himself, things were very different. Flaming dogs in windswept ruins were a thing of the past. Now I had gas, stainless steel, and some sort of Louis XIV-meets-Tron décor that made my eyes water.

Under Ferran Adriá’s gentle direction I placed the chicken breasts in separate snap-lock sandwich bags with a little salt and pepper, filled a pot with hot water, turned on my Zyliss badly-designed-cooking-timer-that-I-bought-because-it-happens-to-have-a-temperature-probe-on-a-cord and waited for the water to get to 60°C. Once there I carefully submerged the bags and let the water pressure push the air out. I then snapped the seals shut, put the lid on and spent the next hour keeping the flame underneath the pot as low as possible, holding the water temperature between 59°C and 62°C, while Ferran read me Spanish poetry and Heston came in from minding the door and gave me a foot massage.

The result? No more hunks of blandness tasting mostly of burnt dog and petrol! Instead, the most moist and flavoursome chicken breast I’ve ever eaten. I’m a convert. Maybe even an acolyte.

Caveats:

- You can use sous-vide on most foods, but it’s particularly good for cooking eggs, fish and steak.

- You can’t ‘overcook’ but you do have to be mindful of good hygiene. A long (8 hours and above) cook in a vacuum can lead to the growth of anaerobic bacteria, particularly botulinum, which will kill you stone dead.

- Hippies, you can do vegetables, but you have to use higher temperatures to break down the stronger cell walls. The plastic bags won’t fill your tofu up with chemicals because they’re food grade anyway.

- If you’re doing a steak or similar you can give it a quick sear before it hits the table to caramelize the outside.

- I was originally alerted to doing this at home by this article which uses an esky. I would not recommend this method. You can watch the temperature drop before your eyes.

- No, I don’t watch ‘Masterchef’ or ‘My Kitchen Rules.’ I was hooked on cooking shows back when Floyd was still tooling, shickered, around Italy, thank you very much.

Postscript 25/5/11: tried my first sous-vide steak tonight. 45 minutes held between 55 and 57°C then a quick sear on the grill for some colour. I could cut it with the edge of my fork.

Postscript 19/6/11: Lamb at 58°C for 30 minutes was good, but not great. Bloodier than I expected. This beast requires further experimentation.

Postscript 29/6/11: Salmon at 50°C for 20 minutes required a little preparation. When cooking with sous-vide salmon will leak albumen, a milky fluid. I submerged the cuts for half an hour in a 20% saline solution to try and prevent this before cooking, but there was still some liquid in the bag after cooking. I found the finished product delicious - very flavoursome and with a texture closer to sashimi than cooked salmon. Carryl wished the meat was hotter, and found it a 'bit fishy.' I will try some flavourings next time to try and please her.

Bombing Melbourne

2011-02-24T23:22:00.002+11:00

I’ve always had a dark turn of mind. This, coupled with a love of interesting technical facts, combines to form an abiding interest in nuclear bombs.

The whole “duck-and-cover” fear of nuclear annihilation was absent from my childhood. I was 13 when the USSR disintegrated in 1991, and the idea of imminent death had been on the wane since the Cuban Missile Crisis anyway. Growing up in Tasmania meant that I was far removed from the machinery and immediacy of nuclear Armageddon that must still have been present, like fog burning off in the sun, for my childhood contemporaries growing up near a missile silo in Kansas or in one of the USSR’s ‘secret cities.’

The literature was still there for me to discover though, and a lot of my favourite stories were set in a post-apocalyptic world. Louise Lawrence’s Children of the Dust, John Christopher’s ‘Tripods’ series, and Caroline MacDonald’s The Lake at the End of the World were all read repeatedly. Later, John Hersey’s Hiroshima gave me the horrific detail that the children’s books had only alluded to.

Anyway, the following map is a better effort at some figures I scribbled down some years ago. A good map can illuminate many things, and hopefully this one shows just how big the explosion of a big nuclear bomb is. A good shorthand for measuring the explosive power of large explosions such as a nuclear bomb is in tonnes of TNT. The ‘Little Boy’ bomb dropped on Hiroshima exploded with a force of 15 kilotonnes, or 15,000 tonnes of TNT. The largest ever nuclear bomb, the USSR’s 1961 effort ‘Tsar Bomba,’ was originally going to detonate with a force of 100 megatonnes, but was scaled back at the last moment to 50 megatonnes (50 million tonnes of TNT) – pussies.

A ‘big’ bomb nowadays is around 20 megatonnes. The US and the Russian Federation each still have around 2000 weapons of various sizes ready to go, and another 6000 (US) and 9000 (Russian Federation) in mothballs. Here’s what would happen if a 20Mt bomb was detonated 5.4km over the Melbourne CBD:

Review: Radiohead – The King of Limbs

2011-02-23T19:31:00.001+11:00

Radiohead have been pursuing one of the most interesting careers in modern rock since their debut single, 1992’s ‘Creep.’ Their music began with a guitar-driven and ultimately conventional phase that culminated in 1997’s OK Computer, made a sharp left turn into the electronic genius of Kid A and Amnesiac and then, incredibly, managed to combine the two earlier phases into the sublime Hail to the Thief and In Rainbows. Through all this, Radiohead were always a band primarily concerned with songs.

Their new album, The King of Limbs, at times feels like a conscious abandonment of their own evolution; at times like another left turn. It is definitely not an album that shows the same genius for songwriting that fills their previous work. More than anything though, The King of Limbs feels like singer Thom Yorke’s 2006 solo album The Eraser rather than a new Radiohead album. Here we find the same staccato, sometimes schizophrenic, percussion tracks hung with Yorke’s ghostly falsetto. There is little other instrumentation, sometimes a few chords on a piano, and one gets the feeling guitarist Johnny Greenwood may have spent most of the recording sessions down at the pub.

There are still moments of brilliance, the album’s first single, ‘Lotus Flower,’ is a particularly fine example, but these never break free from the basic vocals-over-percussion model. There are no hooks, no middle eights, no riffs in this album – none of the tricks that Radiohead know how to use so well. Why this should be the case is a mystery. If the band is consciously striving in a new, sparsely minimal direction the change is less successful than their earlier changes of direction. More likely the band is doing as they always do – following their own star.

3/5

Home-Grown is a Crock

2011-02-09T23:30:00.001+11:00

Perhaps I’m just being contrary here, but I’m starting to think the whole slow food, home-grown, organic thing is a bit of a beat up.

Perhaps reading through a Christmas gift, Matthew Evans’s The Real Food Companion, then seeing repeats of his show ‘The Gourmet Farmer’ on TV recently raised my expectations too high, but my experience of home-grown over the past few days has been distinctly underwhelming.

I’ve heard this year has not been a good year for tomatoes; certainly this was my first year growing them. The effort, water, spray (not organic I know, but it was the white fly or the plants) paid off with barely a dozen actual tomatoes. Tasty tomatoes, yes. Tastier than tomatoes from the supermarket? Again, yes. Difference in taste worth the effort put in to get that taste? Not even remotely.

Could it be my sub-par gardening skills? A friend gave me some lovely looking little yellow cherry tomatoes. They were sweet inside, but the flesh was mostly bland and mealy. Another friend owns a house in the country. Her corn, fresh from the garden, was tough and bland. McCains beat it hands down. Her beets, again freshly plucked from the soil and boiled for a salad, were watery. I prefer tinned.

I’m not suggesting that home-grown, or organic, or slow food is pointless. Obviously on a continuum where one end is sitting on the couch eating KFC and the other end is spending your time outdoors growing your own food the Peter Cundall option is the better one. But this elitist, lapsarian and increasingly pervasive view that fruit and veg from the supermarket is basically evil and tastes like plastic, whereas the stuff you grow yourself, or buy from the local farmer’s market, is some sort of rustic orgasm in your mouth is simply untrue.

I freely admit the truth, and the necessity, of the other arguments for slow, organic and home-grown. We should buy local, we should minimise pesticide use, genetic diversity in our crops should be preserved. But does that pumpkin you grew really taste better than the one I bought from Coles? How about now when they’re both roasted to perfection with some garlic, thyme and rosemary? I say they’re pretty close to identical.

I grew up on a farm. My grandfather was an outstanding gardener. Looking back through the mists of nostalgia, was the food of my childhood better? Some was, some wasn’t. The potatoes were better, but that was the variety. I can get that taste if I want it by finding bintjes or pink-eyes. The carrots and tomatoes were the same. Beans were the same. Peas were better but that’s because I was eating them off the vine. If they were picked, podded, stored a few days and then cooked they weren’t as good as frozen. Fruit was mostly better, but again I was eating it off the tree or vine. I can get as good a punnet of blackberries from the supermarket now, but I have to pay $6 or $7 for the experience, rather than eat them from the patch by the river until I feel sick for free.

To go off on a tangent (a little) I watched a show recently called ‘Willie’s Chocolate Revolution.’ Same idea I’m banging on about here. Massive foody, loves chocolate, hates Cadbury’s, sets up cacao plantation in Venezuela, grows own beans, hand-makes own chocolate on antique machinery – result? “People have no idea what real chocolate tastes like! I’m going to convert them.” Cue dopey British people suspiciously tasting Willie’s 80% cocoa solids chocolate, then sneaking back to the Cadbury Family Block. Willie’s shocked. Fucking idiot public can’t wean themselves off their too-sweet junk-food chocolate. Tellingly though, Willie intersperses all this with a few recipes. No straight out my-Christ-that’s-bitter 80% cocoa solids chocolate here. Instead the 80% is melted and mixed with a load of sugar and cream. No-one picks Willie up on the sell-out, and I’ll shut up about it now too because I found a block of his product in a shop and it was bloody tasty.

So what’s the point of all this? I guess to applaud the idea and the ideals behind slow, organic and home-grown. To agree that in a world of increasingly commoditised food a movement away from that slippery slope is a vital voice that needs to be heard. But don’t tell me that by failing to grow my own I’m missing out on undreamt of flavours: that until you’ve had a home-grown tomato you don’t know what you’re missing out on. That’s a crock.

Autoamalgam

2010-11-18T11:51:00.001+11:00

Every time I see cars stop and start at traffic lights, or I'm driving
and find myself constantly pulled up by red lights, I have a recurring
vision.
I imagine all the cars of the world (nearly three-quarters of a billion
of them at last count) melded together into one enormous block of metal
and plastic, miles high. Imagine this huge cube of metal, surely rising
into the clouds, visible on the horizon. You get closer and closer,
speeding along the massive strip of bitumen that leads towards it. In
its shadow the air is colder. You have to crane your neck to see the
top. Giant wheels, hundreds of metres high carry it along - their scale
daunting, but at least comprehensible in comparison to the monolith
groaning along above you. Deep inside is an enormous engine, each pulse
of its hidden pistons consuming Olympic swimming pools of petrol, a vast
exhaust belching smoke and haze from the rear.
So when I pull up at the lights, or I'm walking and see a line of cars
pull up next to me, I imagine this stupefying behemoth of metal in my
imagination stopping, starting, stopping, starting all day long. I
imagine all our ingenuity and resources pouring into this ridiculous
monster, the enormous amounts of energy needed to overcome its inertia,
get it moving, accelerate it for the length of a football field... and
then slow it down and stop it. Repeat. Repeat. Repeat. Repeat.

Mewling in the Face of My Own Oblivion

2010-09-15T14:08:00.002+10:00

I have never experienced any paranormal activity. No strange presences in an empty room, bumps in the night, lights in the sky. Sadly, until I do, I must conclude that such things are the purest hokum.

Don’t mistake me. Nothing would thrill me more than to watch a glass of water move mysteriously across a table, or see an inexplicable object streak across the night sky. I have a deep chagrin that nothing like this has ever manifested itself to me. Even if I were to be attacked by some malevolent spirit, or abducted by beings from Alpha Centauri, such a terrifying experience would still be tempered by the knowledge that I was witness to something, anything, para (“outside”) normal.

I know many people who have experienced such things, from pictures of their dead mothers inexplicably falling off mantels and bodies refusing to rot, to lights chasing each other in the sky. Some of these people’s word I take with a grain of salt, others’ I have no reason to disbelieve. They are intelligent, trustworthy people I have known for many years who have sworn that what they have seen is absolutely true. But, nevertheless, until I have seen or experienced such a thing for myself, and seen that there can be no rational explanation for it, I cannot believe.

I suppose such things can be broadly categorised as “psychic abilities” (something I am highly sceptical about – perhaps, perhaps, perhaps under extreme duress and in the most exceptional of circumstances a person might effect the physical world with nothing but their thoughts, but otherwise, no), “contact with the dead” (I suspect we do nothing more than rot in the ground once we are dead, and that any ideas to the contrary are just people mewling in the face of oblivion, but I do not know), and “UFOs” (this to me seems the most probable. Certainly it is a mathematical certainty that technologically advanced life lives elsewhere in the universe. Whether they’re visiting Earth, and whether it’s possible to travel faster than light in some fashion, is another matter entirely). Of these, “contact with the dead” and “UFOs” are by far the most exciting to me. Really though, these are simply contact with the ‘other,’ and my wishing for this is nothing more than my own mewling in the face of my own insignificance and mortality.

Skepticism and rationality is presented as enough. Why look to a life beyond this one, when life itself, here and now, both existentially and biologically, is so stupendously amazing? This is true, but life shorn of the palimpsest of imagination that we have been laying down for thousands of years is certainly arid sometimes.

8 Anecdotes about John von Neumann

2010-07-30T16:40:00.003+10:00

The following problem can be solved the easy way or the hard way:
"Two trains 200 miles apart are moving toward each other; each one is going at a speed of 50 miles per hour. A fly starting on the front of one of the trains flies back and forth between them at a rate of 75 miles per hour. It does this until the trains collide and crush the fly to death. What is the total distance the fly has flown?"
In a strict mathematical sense the fly actually hits each train an infinite number of times before it gets crushed, and one could solve the problem the hard way with pencil and paper by summing an infinite series of distances. This is they way that most trained mathematicians will solve the problem. Conversely a mathematical novice will most likely solve the problem the easy way - since the trains are 200 miles apart
and each train is going 50 miles an hour, it takes 2 hours for the trains to collide, therefore the fly was flying for two hours, at a rate of 75 miles per hour, and so the fly must have flown 150 miles. Easy.
When this problem was posed to John von Neumann, he immediately replied, "150 miles."
"Ah, I see you've heard this one before, Professor von Neumann. Nearly everyone tries to sum the infinite series."
"What do you mean?" asked von Neumann. "That's how I did it!"

An MIT student cornered the famous professor in a hallway:
Student: "Er, excuse me, Professor von Neumann, could you please help me with a calculus problem?"
John von Neumann: "Okay, sonny, if it's real quick -- I'm a busy man."
S: "I'm having trouble with this integral."
JvN: "Let's have a look." (a brief pause) "Alright, sonny, the answer's two-pi over 5."
S: "I know that, sir, the answer's in the back - I'm having trouble deriving it, though."
JvN: "Okay, let me see it again." (another pause) "Yep, the answer's two-pi over 5."
S (frustrated): "Uh, sir, I know the answer, I just don't see how to derive it."
JvN: "Whaddya want, sonny, I worked it out in two different ways!"

"Johnny was the only student I was ever afraid of," the mathematician George Pólya once recalled. "If in the course of a lecture I stated an unsolved problem, the chances were he'd come to me as soon as the lecture was over, with the complete solution in a few scribbles on a slip of paper."

Von Neumann was the subject of many dotty professor stories. He supposedly had the habit of simply writing answers to homework assignments on the board (the method of solution being, of course, obvious). One time one of his students tried to get more helpful information by asking if there was another way to solve the problem. Von Neumann looked blank for a moment, thought, and then answered, "Yes".

In the 1950s, von Neumann was employed as a consultant to IBM to review proposed and ongoing dvanced technology projects. One day a week, von Neumann "held court" at 590 Madison Avenue, New York. On one of these occasions in 1954 he was confronted with the FORTRAN concept (the first 'high level' computer programming language); its developer, John Backus, remembered von Neumann being unimpressed and that he asked "why would you want more than machine language?"

"The spectacular thing about Johnny was not his power as a mathematician, which was great, or his insight and his clarity, but his rapidity; he was very, very fast. And like the modern computer, which no longer bothers to retrieve the logarithm of 11 from its memory (but, instead, computes the logarithm of 11 each time it is needed), Johnny didn't bother to remember things. He computed them. You asked him a question, and if he didn't know the answer, he thought for three seconds and would produce an answer." - Paul Halmos, Mathematician.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, John von Neumann was strictly logical in his thinking. One afternoon his assistant, Paul Halmos, dropped von Neumann off at home. "Since there was to be a party there later, and since I didn't trust myself to remember exactly how I got there," Halmos recalled, "I asked how I'd be able to know his house when I came again. 'That's easy,' he said. 'It's the one with that pigeon sitting by the curb.'"

Henry Ford had ordered a dynamo for one of his plants. The dynamo didn't work, and not even the manufacturers could figure out why. A Ford employee told his boss that von Neumann was "the smartest man in America," so Ford called von Neumann and asked him to come out and take a look at the dynamo.
Von Neumann came, looked at the schematics, walked around the dynamo, then took out a pencil. He marked a line on the outside casing and said, "If you'll go in and cut the coil here, the dynamo will work fine."
They cut the coil, and the dynamo did work fine. Ford then told von Neumann to send him a bill for the work. Von Neumann sent Ford a bill for $5,000. Ford was astounded - $5,000 was a lot in the 1950s - and
asked von Neumann for an itemised account. Here's what he submitted:
Drawing a line with the pencil: $ 1
Knowing where to draw the line with the pencil: $4,999
Ford paid the bill.

Saint Philby

2010-07-19T12:54:00.006+10:00

Think famous spies and you think James Bond. Think harder and you hopefully think of Kim Philby He was an English spy who turned double-agent and spied for the Russians through the Cold War. He was a very naughty boy, but he's not half as interesting as his dad, Harry St. John Bridger Philby, usually known as 'Saint.'.

Saint was the your archetypal man of the British Empire. He was born in
1885 in Sri Lanka, he went to school at Westminster and then Cambridge,
where he was friends and classmates with Nehru - later prime minister of
India. He was a clever little bugger who got into the Indian Civil Service (no mean feat, a sample question on the entrance exam read: "State the arguments for and against Utility, considered as (1) the actual, and (2) the proper, basis of morals.") and learnt to speak 5 languages.

Anyway, during WWI he and some other gung-ho chaps went over to what is
now Saudi Arabia with the aim of a) helping the Arabs rebel against the Ottoman Empire (which was allied with Germany with which Britain was
fighting), and b) protect the oil-fields at Basra in modern day Iraq so the Royal Navy could continue getting oil.

That was all well and good, but if you wanted an Arab revolt, you had to have a "King of the Arabs" - Britain wanted a guy called Sheriff Hussein, who was leader of the Hashemites, an Arab dynasty. Lawrence of
Arabia and an archaeologist and explorer, Gertrude Bell (who taught Saint the finer points of espionage), had been building up the Hashemites for years, primarily as a group who could rule Iraq - but Saint was friendly with Hussein's bitter rival, Ibn Saud, and thought he was the man for the job.

That all ended up going nowhere in the end, because at the end of WWI Britain reneged on her promise to hand the Middle East over to a King of the Arabs, and instead parcelled the remains of the Ottoman Empire up between herself and France, with nominal free governments, but really run as British and French colonies.

Saint did well out of this - being appointed Internal Security Minister of the newly formed Iraq (or British Mandate of Iraq - their new name for a colony). He whipped the Iraqis up a constitution and other democratic accoutrements, but was pretty embarrassed that Britain had gone back on its word. He then moved over and ran the secret service for the British Mandate of Palestine, but he was still keen for a "King of the Arabs," and thought his mate Ibn Saud was still a contender. Eventually the British, who still supported the Hashemites, got sick of him and chucked him out of the Foreign Office, but old Saint still had lots of friends in high places, and so could advise Ibn on exactly how far he could go in conquering Hashemite territory before the British Empire would get pissed off enough to intervene. In this way Ibn created Saudi Arabia, and Saint handled the coronation.

Saint was sitting pretty now, he was best mates with the king of Saudi Arabia, the king's advisor on all matters British, and could spend time pootling about Saudi Arabia mapping things, exploring, and bird-watching (he liked to name the birds he discovered after women he admired). To get into the swing of things he converted to Islam in 1930.

Oil was growing in popularity, and in 1933 Saint helped negotiate an exclusive contract between Saudi Arabia and America's Standard Oil to drill for oil along the Persian Gulf. Britain won't listen to your opinions and continue backing those fucking Hashemites and bloody Lawrence of Arabia? Well, let's see how they like missing out on massive oil reserves in favour of their successors to the rule of the world, America. He continued in this vein for the next few years, undermining Britain's interests in Aden, and then facilitating a merger of Standard Oil, Texaco and the Saudi Government to form ARAMCO, today the world's largest oil company with revenues of more than US$200 billion/year.

This anti-British stuff all got a bit out of hand when before the start of WWII Saint had meetings with the Nazi Adolf Eichmann and put forward a plan for neutral Saudi Arabia to sell oil to pretending-to-be-neutral Spain who could then sell it to definitely-not-neutral Germany. While supporting the Nazis on one hand, he also came up with the "Philby Plan," which included unlimited Jewish migration into Palestine, as long as the Jews supported Ibn's son, Faisal, as the heir to the throne of Saudi Arabia. In return Saudi Arabia would also chip in to resettle the Palestinians.

Strangely, Saint then returned to Britain, which he must have found bloody freezing, and ran for election to the House of Commons on a peace platform. He lost that, went to India, and was arrested as a Nazi Sympathiser. His mate (and most influential economist of the 20th century) John Maynard Keynes spoke up for him though, and he was released.

Back in Saudi Arabia things started to go downhill. When Ibn heard about the "Philby Plan" he was less than impressed, as Saint hadn't consulted him on all the details, and began to suspect Saint was perhaps more
interested in Britain's, or possibly the Jews' interests, rather than Saudi Arabia's. They started having massive arguments, largely provoked by Saint, who thought that all that oil money had turned his old mate Ibn into a wanker. To keep himself happy Saint went and got himself a second wife, a 16 year old slave he bought at a market near Mecca.

Ibn Saud died in 1953 and Saint's choice for successor, Faisal, was pipped by his brother, Saud, who Saint had openly criticised. Saint was exiled to Lebanon where he lived with his son Kim, whom he introduced to
many of his contacts in Arab politics. Eventually he was reconciled with the Saudi royal family, but in 1960, while he was back in Beirut visiting Kim, he died in bed, with Kim at his side. His last words were "God, I'm bored."

The L&N Don't Stop Here Anymore

2010-07-08T22:56:00.002+10:00

Carryl and I are heading to Dunkeld for a quiet weekend away soon. Playing around on Google Earth I noticed there was a rail line passing nearby. I started investigating and soon found that Victoria formerly had an amazing amount of rail lines to all corners of the state. This is the network in 1947:

These lines were used less and less as Victorian agriculture became more centralised; freight was moved more by truck; and people tended to drive rather than catch public transport. With the downturn in profitability, and the rise of a more right wing take on political economics, corporatisation, and then privatisation, has led to this:

It's more profitable, and patronage has increased, but I can't catch a train to Dunkeld any more.

Trimming de fat from de DoD

2010-07-06T11:18:00.003+10:00

Earlier this year the former Chief of the Australian Army, Lieutenant
General Peter Leahy, suggested that the Department of Defence's annual
budget of $27 billion should be cut and the money directed to diplomacy
and foreign aid. This amazingly sensible proposal takes into account the
fact that the current role of our defence force is not to prepare for
some sort of invasion from China or Indonesia, but to stabilise
countries such as Afghanistan and Iraq, where militant factions and
political instability currently serves as both an indictment of the
West's wars in these regions, and a base for terrorism. When it comes to
stabilising a country, erecting a fortified structure in an area like
Tarin Kowt, running daily patrols, finding the odd 'Improvised Explosive
Device' and shooting a few goat-herds turned Taliban guerrillas will
probably cost more, and achieve less, than putting diplomatic pressure
on Afghanistan to adhere to transparent political practices while giving
them concrete aid to do so.
Leahy's proposal was picked up and run with by exactly no-one, despite
the fact that in the preceding months a number of negative reports about
DoD spending had hit the news. These included:
- The National Auditor, following up on a 2006 audit, found that the
Defence Materiel Organisation (the bit of the DoD that buys the bullets)
had failed to tighten its procurement process, despite promises in 2006
that it would. The audit also found $1.2 billion worth of munitions were
not ready for battle, being either broken, in need of maintenance, or
past their use-by-dates.
- The fact that the DoD has replaced its fleet of Leopard-class tanks
(which had never seen battle, Australia never having been invaded by
land) with a fleet of 59 second-hand Abrams-class tanks at a cost of
$550 million, despite the fact that these tanks were prone to engine fires.
- The revelation that, in line with the DoD having to publish all
private sector contracts worth more than $10,000 to the internet:
a) $37,000 had been spent on horse transport. The private
contractor named had no record of said contract.
b) $30,000 had been spent on "stuff" from a marketing and
promotions company.
c) $33,000 had been spent on hiring a Lear jet. The private
contractor named had no record of said contract.
d) $250,000 had been spent for one night at the Hyatt Regency Hotel
in Adelaide. The Hyatt had no record of this contract.
Such waste and lack of concern for public accountability is more
important than the non-issue of Asylum-Seekers which is currently the
focus of public debate. The DoD obviously has money to burn. The
Australian people need to take back $7 billion or so and direct it in a
smarter and more productive direction.

Fluorescent Girl Dream

2010-07-01T22:01:00.002+10:00

I usually walk. Today I had driven; parked in a steep, grassy vacant block that I knew from my walk.
Afterwards, making my way to where I had parked, one of my students, Quoc, ran up to me and asked if he could get a lift. He had run hard to catch me, and when I asked him where he was going I saw a look of alarm cross his face between the ragged breaths he was taking.
“You usually go through town don’t you, sir?”
“Always.”
“Well, into town then. Just drop me somewhere convenient.”
I told him that was fine and we picked our way down the slippery hillside to where I had parked. Nearing the car I saw him glance back up the hill; once again a look of alarm crossed his face. Following his gaze I saw a teenager with a bright purple bob coming towards us quite quickly.
“We should get in the car, sir.”
Something in his tone made me do as he said, almost thoughtlessly. As soon as I let him in he locked his door and, finding the car had no central locking, nearly shouted at me, “Lock your door!”
As I pushed the lock down I saw a flash of bright purple in the side mirror and suddenly the teenager had her faced pressed against my driver’s window. She was pale and quite pretty, but in an abstract way, like a china plate can be pretty. Her eyes were completely abnormal, flat and dull, and her head moved back and forth as if she were a snake about to strike. She tried to open the door, found it locked, and tried again, yanking the handle back and forth with such force that the car rocked.
I knew I had to drive. To start the car, put it in gear, and get away from this strange, fluorescent haired girl-thing as soon as possible, but then she put her face to the glass and said a nonsense word. It was cold but the word made no mist on the glass.
“Shibbeth.”
With the word, I knew that I had to unlock the door and let her into the car. I reached for the lock but Quoc grabbed my hands and held them firmly in his own. Outside the car I saw that Quoc’s brothers and, even more bizarrely, his father, were arranged on his side of my car – outside, but seemingly unafraid of the girl-thing. His brother Truoc, fat and almost painfully shy, was licking the bonnet.
“Say ‘Bethish,’ sir. Say it quickly.”

CUT TO:
A kitchen. Quoc’s brothers and his father are at the table sitting on mismatched chairs. On the table are two houseplants. The one on the left is brown and withered, the water it is sitting in is black like oil. The brothers and the father are staring intently at the plants. Truoc is licking half an onion.

CUT TO:
“Say it, sir. Say it. Bethish. Say it. Bethish.”
It seems unimportant, not nearly as important as opening the car door, but to please him I say the word. He was always a good student.
“Bethish.”

CUT TO:
The black water that one of the house plants is sitting suddenly turns clear. Immediately the plant begins to look healthier, green flushing its leaves.

WAKE.

Happy Solstice

2010-06-21T13:33:00.003+10:00

Today is the Winter Solstice in the Southern Hemisphere. It is a
dislocated solstice. My ancestors, for hundreds of thousands of years,
huddled in the darkness of Winter and hoped that once again the Sun
would begin to travel higher in the sky, the days would get longer and
warmer, and humanity would avoid freezing to death on an icy plain in
the eternal blackness of some apocalyptical night. It was the time when
Sun gods and goddesses turned their chariots, the time for purification
and for sacrifice.
But that all happened in December - the 21st or 22nd to be exact. When
my (somewhat less distant) ancestors moved to Australia the time of cold
and darkness was suddenly inverted. Long days and sunshine baked the
midwinter festival of Christmas, and the already ailing midsummer
festivals sickened and died here in the antipodes. Modernity and
capitalism ground away these ancient festivals and rites. Where is my
anxiety over the return of the Sun today? Why aren't I rubbing butter on
my front fence and slaughtering a white animal in the backyard tonight?
Even Hallmark has failed me.
I hope the sun sets tonight and never comes up again. Science is left
witless. Civilisation collapses. Prophets and mad men will gather huge
crowds. We will burn everything in huge bonfires; throw virgins and
babies to the flames. And when everything and everyone is burnt and
frozen and dead we will not know why.

Demon Core

2010-06-04T12:33:00.006+10:00

When the Americans were developing the atomic bomb in the '40s under the
auspices of the Manhattan Project they had to find out how fast
different masses of fissile material would go critical. They did this by
getting some plutonium and steadily surrounding it with a 'neutron reflector' - a substance that reflects the neutrons that the plutonium is pumping out back on itself, which makes the plutonium throw out more neutrons, on and on, till you get Hiroshima.
But because this was the '40s and they didn't have health and safety
they just put the block of plutonium on a stand and stacked up bricks of
tungsten carbide around it till their Geiger counters started going nuts. The
guy doing this, by hand, one day accidentally dropped a tungsten carbide brick
onto the block of plutonium, so the plutonium went 'prompt critical' and
threw out enough radiation to kill the dude.
Later, they'd refined their technique a bit and had the same lump of plutonioum
inside two hemispheres of beryllium which, amazingly, they had a guy
hold open with a screwdriver. Of course the screwdriver eventually
slipped and the 2 hemispheres closed to form a sphere, the plutonium went
prompt critical again, and the guy holding the screwdriver, Louis
Slotin, felt a burning pain in his hand, a sour taste in his mouth, a
wash of heat and saw the air glow blue around him. He managed to yank
the hemispheres apart again, luckily stopping everybody in the vicinity
from dying horribly, but he had received a dose of radiation equivalent
to standing about a kilometre and a half away from an exploding atomic
bomb, so he died a few days later.
The lump of plutonium, really the hero in the tale, became known as the
'demon core.' Luckily we showed it what for, blowing it up in the 'Able' nuclear test at Bikini Atoll in 1946 (although this and other tests have made Bikini Atoll uninhabitable).

Scritch

2010-06-04T12:23:00.003+10:00

So I was sitting in Cinema Nova watching Let The Right One In when I hear this noise that's obviously not in the soundtrack, a sort of scritching noise. Carryl and I were the only people in the cinema, so I said, "sounds like something's got into the walls, I'll just go check." She's like, "Fine, whatever..." so I get up and prise some grating off the wall where it sounds like the scritching noise is coming from.
I couldn't see anything because it was so dark, but it looked like there was some light around a bend in ducting, so I managed to crawl inside and shimmy along inside this metal pipe. The whole time this scritching sound's getting louder and louder.
Anyway, eventually the ducting I was crawling through started sloping down, till I was nearly sliding along. This goes on for probably 500 metres, till I'm thinking I can't possibly be still in the Nova, and then suddenly I pop out into this plush, velvet box, quite small, with a little TV and a fridge and stuff, and there's this little animal, like from a Dr. Seuss book, all stripy and cute, sitting there watching 'Deal or No Deal' and going 'Scritch, scritch, scritch' to itself.
As soon as I popped in it freaked out and started scritching much more loudly. I tried to calm it down but it just got more and more agitated. Eventually I tried making some scritching noises myself, a calming sort of scritch if you know what I mean, and that worked wonders. We sat there for probably 20 minutes having this conversation in Scritchish. I didn't know what the hell I was saying, just going 'scritch scritch' pretty much randomly, but this little beast lapped it up - laughing, interjecting, at one point he even got me a beer from the little fridge - this stuff called 'Scritch' in a can about as big as a glue-stick. Tasted horrible.
So eventually I got bored. I thought of grabbing him and taking him back for medical science and probable money and fame, but he'd given me the beer and everything, so in the end I just turned around, gave him a little wave, said 'scritch' a few times and climbed back up through the ducting and out into the cinema. Very odd.

Killer Monkeys

2010-06-04T12:13:00.003+10:00

I've been thinking about monkey experiments. What would happen if you gave a .38 to a troupe of macaques?

"As Lionel had expected they were all, especially the young males, intensely curious about the new object in their enclosure. The male they had named Bobby was the one who eventually managed to pull the trigger, blowing a hole in a log and scattering screaming monkeys in every direction. After that the gun lay on the ground and was given a very wide berth by the whole troupe. Eventually though Bobby began playing with it again, at first gingerly, but after some weeks with increasing confidence, until eventually he grasped the fact that if he pulled the trigger then there was a loud, frightening noise, and a piece of the enclosure would explode. Lionel had doubts that Bobby would ever make the conceptual leap that would allow him to aim the weapon, but he was proved wrong one morning when Bobby, trying to mate with one of the females was chased off by Matumbo, the alpha male, and then scratched and bitten when Matumbo chased him into a corner from which Bobby could not escape. Lionel watched, fascinated, as Bobby scampered across the enclosure, picked up the weapon and sat, turning it in in his nimble, leathery hands. Bobby sat for a full minute, rocking, turning the gun, then moved across towards Matumbo, dragging the heavy weapon through the wet grass. Matumbo, seeing his approach, began to go into classic aggressive dominance poses, puffing his chest and baring his teeth.
Bobby lifted the gun, aimed and shot him in the head, then dropped the weapon and ran.
After this horrifying incident the whole troupe ostracised Bobby, who became withdrawn, and refused to eat. Then, 4 days later, one of the immature juveniles picked up the gun, which had lay in the long grass since Matumbo's death, and began playing with it. Curious, he twisted it in all directions while his mother screamed a warning from behind him. Lionel decided the experiment was over when the juvenile sniffed the handle, looked carefully down the barrel and pulled the trigger."

Letter the second

2009-07-20T22:46:00.004+10:00

Apple

PO Box A2629

Sydney South NSW 1235

Wednesday, July 1 2009

To Whom It May Concern:

I am writing to express my dissatisfaction with Apple’s decision to charge $10.95 for the new iPod Touch 3.0 Software Update. The charge is unnecessary and sets a disturbing trend – would Microsoft get away with charging for a Windows Service Pack? I do not think so.

I believe Apple may have also charged for the 2.0 update – I do not know as I purchased a 2nd generation iPod Touch which had up-to-date software included on it. Too bad for those customers who now have to pay $419 for a 16GB iPod Touch, then take it out of the box and pay another $10.95 to have it work properly.

Luckily those customers with an iPhone receive the update for free. Why is Apple suddenly creating differentiated pricing policies for its customers?

Finally, I would like to inform you I am speaking to Consumer Affairs Victoria regarding this matter as I believe the above is in breach of the Trade Practices Act. The Act states that ‘goods must be fit for the purpose for which they are sold.’ As the Software Update is essentially a security fix it should be provided free of charge in order to render the goods fit for their purpose. If Apple wants to charge $10.95 for the bells and whistles included in the update, it should also provide the necessary, bug-free software, as a free package – as every other IT-based manufacturer does for firmware or software upgrades that fix errors in the original programming.

Looking forward to your speedy response,

Sincerely,

Scott Howard.

PS - I am not the trite and pedantic person this letter would, on first glance, indicate me to be. At least not most of the time. XX

Letter the first

2009-07-20T22:45:00.004+10:00

Dear Senator Fielding,

I have just read your 3 questions regarding climate change and feel I can answer these for you:

QUESTION 1
Is it the case that CO2 increased by 5% since 1998 whilst global temperature cooled over the same period (see Fig. 1)? If so, why did the temperature not increase; and how can human emissions be to blame for dangerous levels of warming?

ANSWER
You may have noticed that during the season of Spring that not every day is warmer than the previous day, nevertheless, by the time Summer arrives you can definitely say 'it is warmer now than 3 months ago.' This is called a trend.
Similarly, global warming is a trend. So, although we can happily ignore it for the rest of our lives, future generations will be able to say, 'it is warmer now than 100 years ago.'

QUESTION 2
Is it the case that the rate and magnitude of warming between 1979 and 1998 (the late 20th century phase of global warming) were not unusual as compared with warmings that have occurred earlier in the Earth’s history (Fig. 2a, 2b)? If the warming was not unusual, why is it perceived to have been caused by human CO2 emissions; and, in any event, why is warming a problem if the Earth has experienced similar warmings in the past?

ANSWER
Global warming is not a problem. If global temperatures increase, for example, to the degree experienced in the Palaeocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum (a period approximately 56 million years ago where average global temperatures increased by 6 degrees over a period of 20,000 years), then presumably we would experience similar effects in the present day (though the most dire global warming predictions do envisage a 6 degree increase happening in less than 1000 years). These could include such things as a wetter, more tropical climate; raised sea levels; and partial extinction of deep-water microscopic organisms. Interestingly, there was an increase in biodiversity during this period, although this did take some millions of years to fully evolve. Such temperature increases will of course cause huge changes to the way humanity lives and survives, but over the long-time scales we are talking about such changes will happen anyway.

QUESTION 3.
Is it the case that all GCM computer models projected a steady increase in temperature for the period 1990-2008, whereas in fact there were only 8 years of warming were followed by 10 years of stasis and cooling. (Fig. 3)? If so, why is it assumed that long-term climate projections by the same models are suitable as a basis for public policy making?

ANSWER
See Answer 1.

I hope this helps you understand more about global warming. I think a good thing to do in the modern world is to listen to the opinions of experts. For example, if you were diagnosed with a rare disease, with few initial symptoms, but with a bad prognosis (e.g. disfigurement and death) you would most likely go to a doctor who has spent many years studying this disease. If the doctor said something surprising such as, 'The disease you have can only be cured by chopping off your index fingers" you would of course ask for a second opinion, but if chopping off you index fingers was the consensus amongst all the doctors you saw, you would most likely conclude that this was what had to be done. The only other options you would have would be to become a doctor yourself and study the disease until you either reached the same conclusion, or found an alternative cure; or to wait and hope that the disease went away or was misdiagnosed.
Similarly with global warming, because the science involved is very complicated, it is a good idea to listen to experts. At present, the vast majority of these experts are saying that global warming is a real threat that we must act to avoid ("you must chop off your index fingers"). Taking action would obviously be distressing, and so, once again, there are really only 2 alternatives to contemplate. You could return to university and study Geography, Climate Science, Atmospheric Physics, Glaciology, Meteorology and all the other disciplines represented by the experts who are currently telling you that global warming is real, until you yourself were an expert. You could then make an informed decision as to whether global warming is a serious issue that must be addressed. Otherwise, your other option is to wait and see if global warming does not really exist (waiting for the disease to go away, or perhaps a misdiagnosis).
Waiting for something to go away, or to be proved untrue, is a bad stratagem when dealing with potentially terminal diseases. You might feel fine for a few years, but then take a turn for the worse, where you can see you are obviously sick, and the disease has not gone away or been misdiagnosed. But when you come back to the doctor he says he cannot help you because the window for successful treatment has passed, or that cutting off your index fingers is no longer enough, and he must now remove your arms.

Anyway, you can see where I'm going with all that, and being a Christian I'm sure you know about Pascal's Wager and have applied the form to the global warming question, et cetera, et cetera

Hope this helps.

Best regards, Scott Howard

P.S. Possibly the reason Al Gore declined to meet with you is that he thought you were a crackpot.

Bugsy's Fantasy

2009-02-14T23:31:00.003+11:00

Yeah! I didn't write anything on my blog for all of 2008! That's a pretty good effort.

Anyway, here's a thing I thought of on the tram. I suppose really it's my fantasy, but it felt like my friend Bugsy's fantasy as I was having it (plus I'm married, so am not allowed to have fantasies). It's possibly rude to claim I'm privy to Bugsy's fantasies, then to publish them to my blog without even changing his name, but hey, if I'm forced to experience his thoughts then I should get some sort of compensation. Plus he doesn't have a computer and so is unlikely to see this.

*****

“Will you play me something off your iPod?”

Bugsy looked away from the people dealing with the rain beyond the window to find a girl suddenly sitting opposite him.

“Will you?” she repeated with a slight challenge in her tone. Or uncertainty? It occurred to him that she may not have realised he had heard her question.

“Yeah.”

He fished the headphones from under his hood and extricated the cord from where it made a cold line next to his chest. Obeying some impulse he could not find a basis to he reached forward and put the white buds into her ears. She dropped her eyes as he touched her, her ears quite cool, pale, with wisps of hair slightly obscuring them, and with a few drops of rain from outside nestled on the lobe of one.

“What is it?”

She was very cute, he decided. Small, elfin face with her hair cut fairly close, framing it. A grey, shapeless dress. Black tights and white shoes. Those ones that looked like shoes that a ballerina would wear. Mary Janes? She looked French.

“Home By Saturday, by a guy called Hayden,” he said.

“Oh good,” she said, though he didn’t know if that meant she knew it.

He found the song while she fidgeted and smiled at him, then pressed play. Watching her listen to the song he remembered it and tried to watch where she was up to. The strongly melodic opening guitar line, then Hayden’s voice coming in and following the melody, his tone resigned and aching. He hoped she liked it.

What I've Been Reading...

2007-12-30T22:06:00.001+11:00

Seeing as I’ve posted nothing since August it’s perhaps time to explain myself. As usual I’ve been reading instead of writing because I’m bad bad bad. But, while reading I’ve actually managed to do something I’ve been attempting since 1996 – keep a record of every book that I’ve read in the year. Here then is my list of “What I Read in 2007” and, just so I can’t be accused of simply filling out a list, I have included a short review for most titles (where my memory is up to the admittedly small, but daunting, task).

“The Left Hand of Darkness” by Ursula LeGuin – Classic and rather icy sci-fi. Explores slightly interesting gender issues in a mostly dull manner.

“One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich” by Alexandr Solzenytsin – Another chilly one. Extremely detailed account of the minutiae of life in a gulag that I enjoyed a lot. Better than Levi’s ‘If This is a Man” and way more readable than the only other Solzenytsin I’ve read – The Gulag Archipelago.

“Flow My Tears, The Policeman Said” by Philip K. Dick – Nicely paranoid, if dated.

“Solar Lottery” by Philip K. Dick – Not his best.

“Martian Time-Slip” by Philip K. Dick – This one was pretty good, I liked the native Martians.

“The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid” by Bill Bryson – a nice little lament for ‘50s

America

. I also liked learning about Bryson’s dad, who was apparently a very good sports writer.

“The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time” by Mark Haddon – Cool window into life with Asperger’s.

“The First Man in Rome” by Colleen McCullough – a wholely unexpected introduction to a continuing love affair with all things Roman. This series is jaw-dropping.

“The Nasty Bits” by Anthony Bourdain – gritty chef voyeurism. Whenever I read his stuff I wish I could go back and tell myself in grade 10 “Become a chef!” – even though I’d probably hate the demands of the job and give it up after a few months. Still…

“Why Don’t Penguins’ Feet Freeze?” – a collection of the Q&A section from the back of New Scientist magazine. Unfortunately I can’t remember why penguins’ feet don’t freeze and can’t find the book either – so a wasted exercise. Something to do with reduced blood flow I suppose.

“Exultant” by Stephen Baxter – dire space opera. Can’t believe I finished it.

“Revelation Space” by Alastair Reynolds – lovely space opera. Reminded me of Stephen Donaldson’s ‘Gap’ series.

“The Children of Hurin” by JRR Tolkien – much better than I expected. A coherent tale, instead of the usual cobbled together dross Christopher Tolkien usually turns out under daddy’s name. Beautifully tragic.

“Collapse” by Jared Diamond – Not as good as “Guns, Germs and Steel” but interesting nevertheless. He certainly can belabour the point sometimes though.

“The Shadow of the Wind” by Carlos Ruiz Zafon – nice romantic literary travel-guide. I wish I’d read it later in the year when I was actually in Barcelona.

“The Collapse of Globalism” by John Ralston Saul – the opposite of Jared Diamond. You’re constantly going ‘What? Tell me more…’ but Mr. Saul does not oblige. I liked “Voltaire’s Bastards” when I read it a few years ago but the scope here was a bit reduced. Still, a very very smart guy.

“The Sword of Shannara” by Terry Brooks – a fantasy classic I’d never read. The precursor to 90% of what’s on the fantasy shelves – to make a million you basically want to write something halfway between this and “Lord of the Rings.” Sadly, it’s a piece of shit.

“The Year of Magical Thinking” by Joan Didion – a writer with lovely prose who I liked immensely when I read her at Uni. This is a very sad book about the death of her husband and the illness of her daughter.

“Redemption Ark” by Alastair Reynolds – sequel to the one above. Nice meaty sci-fi.

“The Grass Crown” by Colleen McCullough – the second of her Rome series. Again, superb.

“The Italian Secretary” by Caleb Carr – a Sherlock Holmes novel that is stylishly very similar to Conan Doyle’s, but lacking in any actual mystery. At all.

“Absolution Gap” by Alastair Reynolds – a good conclusion to the trilogy, but I think I’ll give him a break for a while.

“Interventions” by Noam Chomsky – a quick summary on who

America

’s killing and fucking over at present.

“The Road” by Cormac McCarthy – Stephen King’s “The Stand” with 99% of the plot removed. Lurvely prose though, you slow down and savour it.

“The Sea, The Sea” by Iris Murdoch – I’d been wanting to read one of the Dame’s since I saw that movie about her (that made me cry, they were so old and loving). The book was odd. The protagonist was quite unsympathetic, which kept me at a distance.

“Elementary Particles” by Michel Houellebecq. Smart, funny and sexy stuff. Those French…

“Coming Up for Air” by George Orwell – one of the few books he wrote that I hadn’t read. It left me vaguely obsessed with fishing.

“We Need to Talk About Kevin” by Lionel Shriver – pretty readable book that in the end seemed quite conservative and copped out completely at the end.

“How We Are Hungry” by Dave Eggers – a man made much more readable by confinement to the short story. Very enjoyable. Cool cover too.

“The Undercover Economist” by Tim Harford – a very interesting book explaining why organic stuff shouldn’t cost so much, amongst other things. Something I need to read again as I can’t recall things from it when I need to.

“Fortune’s Favourites” by Colleen McCullough – the general politics here were less interesting but Caesar is coming to the fore, and is amazing. If he was anything like his depiction here I would have been glad to submit to his dictatorship. Fuck freedom, let’s Romanise everything.

“Fatal Revenant” by Stephen Donaldson – looking at the inside cover I found I’ve read every novel this guy’s written. In hindsight I wouldn’t recommend such a course of action to anyone, though his ‘Gap’ series was good.

“Interview With the Vampire” by Anne Rice – like “The Da Vinci Code” really… inexplicably popular.

“Heaven’s Net is Wide” by Lian Hearn – a prequel to the other four books in the Otori series. I like em all sir.

“The Essential Dave Allen” – essentially a collection of transcribed stand-up. Funny stuff.

“The Man Who Loved Children” by Christina Stead – this is what I’m reading right now, as 2007 draws to a scorching close. An Australian classic sadly out of print that I borrowed from the library. It’ll want to get a lot better quite soon or it’ll be sent back to the library. Plus it’s set in

America

! Christ.

Complete Idiot's Guide to Fare Evasion

2007-08-21T15:05:00.001+10:00

1) Fare evasion is best run as a numbers game. I tram to and from work everyday. With a yearly ticket this would cost me $1094, 12 monthly tickets would cost me $1228.80, or 52 weekly tickets would equate to a princely $1435.20.
In reality though I pay between $400 and $500 dollars. I achieve this by purchasing weekly tickets and only validating when absolutely necessary.

2) Fare evasion is a balance between the savings generated by buying fewer tickets and the increased expenditure due to fines levied against you for fare evading. The level of risk you wish to run in this balancing act will determine your success. Because fines are around $250, just 2 per year will eat up any profit you are making by fare evading. I personally try to make a 10-trip ticket last a month, and avoid fines altogether.

3) I limit my risk of being fined for fare evading by the following methods:
a- Where possible I sit at the back of the tram on the left-hand side, this way I can look out for inspectors and be close to a ticket machine if I do need to validate. Other good spots are at the very front of the tram (though inspectors can get on behind you) or next to the ticket machine (but limited visibility).
b- I always have my ticket close to hand.
c- I never read or allow myself to be similarly distracted.

4) Plain-clothes inspectors are a big risk. They often:
a- Stand together or sit together.
b- dress warmly, especially preferring beanies.
c- Do not carry bags.
d- Are larger guys.
e- Work in groups of 3 or 4 men and 2 women.
* Plain-clothes inspectors will always check to see if the ticket machine is working when they get on board.

5) If you are caught try and argue yourself out of a ticket on the spot. Do not be fooled by inspectors assuring you that they will ‘just write out an infringement for their records – head office won’t fine you.’
Sort out some plausible excuses beforehand. Preferably ones that can be enlarged upon later should you decide to contest the fine.

6) My expertise is confined to trams. On a train I always buy a ticket.

7) Now and again it’s nice to doze off or read your paper. Validate. After long periods of paranoia and laserlike attention such periods are quite relaxing - almost festive. Besides, it’s only $2.70.

A Rather Free-Ranging Ramble

2007-07-24T21:41:00.001+10:00

I thought I should try and post something before the end of July since it’s been many months now since I tacked anything up here. My last missive was rather political/environmental – attacking my own upbringing as a son of the land! Not long after I wrote that I did some more research about some of the statements that I’d repeated. I found a very credible sounding article repudiating a lot of Jared Diamond’s facts and conclusions, something I was willing to go along with because one of the chief faults in Diamond’s Collapse is its lack of sources and figures.

But. This interesting article was from the journal Energy and Environment, which has a distinct lack of credibility due to its lack of peer review and industry sponsorship.

I hate conundrums such as this. Short of going out and learning climatology, soil science, agro-botany and a host of other disciplines then making one’s own measurements there are always competing points of view on controversial issues such as ‘should Australia largely abandon agriculture?’ That’s why we have peer-reviewed scientific papers. Diamond’s book maybe a long way short of rigorous science, but why couldn’t the article I read that contradicted his findings have been published in something a little more prestigious if the science it was espousing was so sound?

I suppose all of that is why I find the whole climate change ‘debate’ such a non-event. If 99% of the experts think we’re heading for a long hot future then I’m happy to agree.

Speaking of climate change, I saw in the news last night 3 consecutive stories that 15 years ago would have had no metanarrative, but today seem rather ominous: 1) the biggest floods in 60 years in

Britain

, 2) a massive heatwave in

Greece

, and 3) a very rare tornado in

Poland

I find myself very jealous of children being born now. Things have been chugging along very nicely for a few hundred years now, with essentially just more stuff and more convenience as the years roll on. By the end of my lifetime though there will be serious changes, but I’ll be dead by the time the world starts to take on its new shape. With no oil, massive population, and climate change all mixed together there will have to be some radical shifts to prevent us all lurching back to something approximating 1200AD.

I think our climate will end up at the hottest end of all the models – I couldn’t be more positive that we’ll burn every drop of oil we can possibly extract. So, very hot, no oil, and

China

and

India

wanting to live a Western middle class life. We could possibly try and use the 1000 to 1600 billion barrels of oil left to set up some sort of future society, but all good pessimists know we’ll just use it to kill people in the middle east and tool around town. Once it’s all gone our grandkiddies will have to get their shit done with something else – in a nice future that’ll be hydrogen or solar sourced electricity; in a bad future it’ll be horses or good old fashioned elbow grease. Maybe black people.

Rantings of a Farmer's Son

2007-05-20T16:43:00.001+10:00

There’s a lot a debate about water use in Australia at the moment. Should we drink recycled water? Should we build a desalinization plant? To those questions I’d answer yes and no respectively, but ask a better question: Why don’t we save water by largely abandoning agriculture?
But what will we eat, Scott?
Well, at present we use 60% of our land, and a massive 80% of our water on agriculture. What does this get us? Not much. All that expenditure of scarce resources contributes less than 3% of GNP.
Even more shockingly 99% of that farmed land is running at a loss. 80% of all Australia’s agricultural profits are derived from about 0.8% of the land under cultivation – land in south-western Western Australia, around Adelaide, in south-east Victoria, and in eastern Queensland. Land in these areas has the benefits of fertile soil due to volcanism or glacial uplift, and/or reliable rain. The rest of our agricultural enterprise is carried out on exhausted soils whose few nutrients are held in the layer of vegetation covering them. We pretty much clear the vegetation (nutrients), plant some crops, exhaust the soil, top it up with massive doses of fertiliser, run sheep and cattle on it, till it either blows away, becomes irretrievably saline, or becomes too expensive to grow plants on. The government subsidises this uneconomic business in the form of below-cost water, tax concessions, and subsidised infrastructure.
“Abandoning the Bush” is not the best headline for governments to generate though, so it looks as if we’ll continue with the status quo, at least until more serious problems crop up, e.g. we run out of oil and start starving to death.

The Front

2007-05-10T21:25:00.001+10:00

In 1914 a mysterious group tracing its origins back to the Ancient East managed to create a creature, or perhaps summon a daemon, which they named The Front. At first it was a mewling, vicious, bloody thing, constantly hungry. Realising that The Front required sustenance the group engaged their sister organisation, the Black Hand, to assassinate Archduke Franz Ferdinand, a task accomplished 2 months later by a young novice, Gavrilo Princip.
As planned the assassination sparked the First World War, allowing The Front to feed and grow on the lives sacrificed in its name as the war escalated throughout the European theatre.
At its most powerful The Front could be heard many miles away as a constant thunder. Closer, it was deafening.
It could churn and throw earth around at will, uproot trees, and turn vast tract of land into a stinking, sucking mud. It employed rats, typhus and cholera as its agents, and strung barbed wire across its shoulders in celebration. It killed with any metal that it touched, or sometimes with burning gas. Its chief weapon was sheer terror, with which it could paralyze.
The Front was most powerful when stationary, or moving slowly. When forced to move quickly, although fluid, it lost many of its powers.
Although, once summoned, The Front could never be totally destroyed, it has never been as powerful as those first four years of its infancy, a period that ended when Private George Lawrence Price was shot through the heart at two minutes to eleven on Armistice Day, 1918.

What Women Want 2: Insanity

2007-03-10T15:38:00.001+11:00

Walking to the supermarket this afternoon I had a not entirely unusual or infrequent (though let us say uncommon) thought as I passed a woman getting into her car. 'I could crack her head against the door of the car no problem at all,' I mused as I walked by.
Luckily I didn't do this (the thin line separating the criminally insane from the normal, law-abiding citizen), but I thought, people must have random impulses like that all the time. Perhaps.
Anyway, I wondered what would happen to Mel Gibson in the film What Women Want were he to encounter a woman at the moment such a casually amoral thought flitted through her mind? (If you haven't watched this cinematic gem, Mel gains the ability to hear women's thought, and hilarity ensues.) Would he perhaps tackle her to the ground, believing he was about to be attacked, only to end up on assault charges, unable to explain the thoughts he could hear, and hence his reason for pre-emptively attacking her?
In a similar vein, everyone in the movie has thoughts of a quite linear, scripted nature, rather than the usual half formed sentences, ideas, feelings and pictures that really constitute our thoughts. What would Mel be like if he were privy to these? Quite rapidly insane perhaps? It would have been interesting also in the movie were he to meet a schizophrenic woman, or perhaps an Einstein-like woman, who thought largely in symbols.
Time for a sequel perhaps.

How Loud is the Sun?

2007-02-27T22:39:00.001+11:00

Unsurprisingly, being a closet geek, I love browsing through New Scientist magazine. Months and months ago now I submitted a question to a regular feature they run on the back page called “The Last Word” where readers can ask odd questions and other readers (usually scientists who are experts in the particular field to which the question relates) can answer them.
My question was along the lines of: “If the space between the Earth and the Sun was filled with air – but a hypothetical air whose only physical property was to transmit sound – then could we hear the sound of the Sun, and how loud would this be?” I had a wonderful vision in mind of the Sun peeking over the horizon every morning with a sound like some giant, yet distant, bowl of Rice Bubbles.
Well, for some months there I wasn’t keeping abreast of the latest issue of New Scientist. Then, about two months ago, I was wallowing in the air-conditioning at the Richmond Public Library, flicking through some of the issues I’d missed, when I discovered they’d published my question! Not only that, the issue I had in my hand wasn’t the one with the question, it was the later one where people have written in with answers! I was one excited little motherfucker.
But my glee was short-lived! Reading further, I discovered that to save space the editors had cut my question a little, knocking out the caveats about the hypothetical sound-carrying substance having no other physical properties. As a result a tidal wave of outraged geeks had written in attacking my question on its supposed inaccuracy, whining on and on about how the Earth couldn’t orbit the Sun with the drag created by so much air, and how that much air would collapse the solar system, and blah b’blah blah blah. One cunt had the gall to send in something saying, “The question seems to imply some sort of odd, pre-Copernican view of the solar system…” Piss off mate, I know the Sun’s at the centre. Christ.
Fine, I thought, I’ll figure it out myself then. So that’s what I spent a good deal of the weekend doing.
I started off with the idea of finding out how loud a 1-megaton nuclear bomb is, then how many megatons the energy produced by the Sun is equivalent to, then multiplying one by the other to get a decibel level for the Sun. Annoyingly though, I discovered our system for measuring sound is a bit of a bastard. The decibel scale is a logarithmic scale, which makes it very nasty to graph, so scaling the dBs from a 1-megaton nuke up to the dBs produced by the 91,467,495,219 megatons the Sun is equal to was a bit much for the addled remnants of my high school Advanced Vegie maths.
Besides that, explosions are apparently notoriously difficult to determine dBs for. The sound peaks very quickly, then trails off, and at higher dBs the sound becomes a shockwave, which behaves differently altogether.
Luckily, I found that dBs can be converted to watts and vice versa. The sun produces about 3.8e+26 watts every second, or 383 yottawatts (whatta lotta yotawatts… sorry), which, as you would expect, is an absolute pants-load of energy. This translates into 290dB, which is very loud indeed.
But, the Earth is 149,600,000 km away from the Sun. Applying the inverse square law, that tells us how sound intensity decreases with distance, I found the Sun would actually deliver about 125 dB here on the surface of the Earth – hardly a distant bowl of Rice Bubbles. 100dB is a jackhammer at 2 metres, 120 is your ear about a metre away from a train horn, and 130 is physical pain.
And what sound would you constantly hear at this excruciating level? Something like this, but immeasurably deeper: http://soi.stanford.edu/results/thr_modes_1_0_1_2_30s.au

Late night maths

2007-02-16T14:42:00.001+11:00

Here’s a sample of the rubbish that occupies my brain at 2:30am, unable to sleep. First some background, in March 2006 I was walking with two friends when a madman jumped out of his car and tried to stab us all. He got one friend in the kidney, the other in his huge, overflowing heart, killing him, and me in the arm, severing three nerves and an artery.
Some amazing surgery managed to reattach all that, but then the nerves have had to grow back, leaving my right arm at first without movement or feeling, and now, coming up to a year later, with pretty coarse movement and feeling (though a lot better than nothing), and a sensation of pins and needles with every touch on my hand. At night though my hand often aches, and that was why I was awake. Normally I take two Panamax before bed, but that night I had decided I didn’t need to, managed to get to sleep, and then woken up because my hand was aching.
“Shit,” I thought. “I’m going to have to take these for the rest of my life.”
Now, the Victorian Government had very kindly already paid me some compensation (a bit under ten grand since I know you’re curious), but I can reapply to have that compensation changed in future, should I say, need expensive treatment that wasn’t at first evident when I made my initial claim. Lying in bed I calculated the following:
-100 Panamax at $6.00
- 6 cents per tablet, 2 tablets per night, 12 cents per day.
- $43.83 per year.
- I live for 50 more years
- $2191.15 to keep me in Panamax from now till death.

But, inflation is 3.3%! So, when I die in 2057, not only will my box of 100 Panamax now be costing me $31, I will have spent a total of $5584.22. Shit.

But, the interest rate for investments is higher than the rate of inflation! So, by awarding me a modest sum now, by investing it at, say a cautious 5%, (all this assumes we’ll still be getting 5% on our investments and inflation is 3.3% in 2057 – highly unlikely if we’re out of oil and we’re still talking about ratifying Kyoto – if that’s the case I suppose I’ll be scrounging my Panamax in some sort of urban wasteland), my future Panamax needs can be catered for by a pretty small outlay.
Just how modest a sum? $487. Shit.

Then again, I would have to invest that and then never touch it for that to work. In reality I would be withdrawing the cost of the Panamax each year. That being the case an initial investment of $1486 would do it.

Pretty bored, or pretty anal? Or perhaps Scottish?

Cressy

2007-02-15T23:37:00.001+11:00

This was originally called Euthanasia, but I'm feeling mellower right now, so it's just Cressy. Cressy is a very small town in Northern Tasmania where I grew up. It's the sort of place people think their kids should grow up in, and in fact it was lovely. Lots of BMXs, forts in hedges, that sort of shit. A town with a top shop, a middle shop and a bottom shop (though these days the top shop has closed).

What parents who imagine their children growing up in these places don't take into account though is what happens when forts in hedges start to lose their appeal. For my friends what happened was a shoot out with police for one guy (maybe just a bigger, better fort in a hedge), and Friday night fights with rolls of 20c pieces in his fists for another. Though don't misunderstand me, most of them have gone on to become perfectly average blokes.

Anyway. In Grade 6 I left Cressy District High School and started school in Launceston, a place with about 40,000 more people than Cressy, and so lost touch with a lot of my old friends.

So, the following is somewhere between reportage and caricature. Certainly it's a conversation I had to listen to ad infinitum as I was growing up, circling endlessly around the dinner table, or over tea and scones while I kicked at the table legs and twisted on my chair. Enjoy

Cressy

“What’s the name of that tea-room, Bev? That one your Sandra took us to?”
“Which one?”
“You know. The one just before you get to the Liffey turn-off.”
“Near the pine forest there?”
“The pine forest near the weigh-bridge? Or the one farther along, on the right?”
“The one old Royce Pritchard’s dad used to own. What was his name now? Used to know him like the back of me hand!”
“You don’t mean old Tom Pritchard?”
“No, no, no! That was his brother. He lived out the back of Breadalbane there.”
“I thought they logged that forest.”
“Him and me used to pick blackberries down by the Mill Dam.”
“I know the one you mean! The one that runs up the hill there – Squizzy Pritchard’s.”
“Squizzy Pritchard! That’s it! God, how could I forget Squizzy Pritchard? How long’s he been dead now?”
“Must be five or ten years now. Buried him up the ‘yard at Carrick.”
“Did they now? Did they now?”
“You remember that time at the Carrick Show, Bev? That time we tried to sneak in down by the river and you got your slip stuck in all that gorse and I said I’d have to leave you there, and you started hollering!”
“I remember! And you run and got Nora from the bakehouse, and the both of you got me out of there. Hardly a mark on me slip, neither!”
“Whatever happened to Nora? I ain’t seen her for a power o’years.”
“Didn’t she marry that bloke from up Bracknell way? The one who used to run that pub in Town?”
“O’Connor’s?”
“No, that was old Jim Smith’s.”
“You don’t mean the Federal?”
“No, not him either.”
“I don’t know then. Where was it exactly?”
“Just up behind the old hospital.”
“That was O’Connor’s.”
“O’Connor’s was up there by the park next to the Methodist church.”
“So it was. You’re not talking about the Centennial?”
“That’s the place. Trevor Richardson used to run it and he married Nora. She was Nora Musselwhite and then she was Nora Richardson. They had two daughters, Sarah and Katie, and Sarah’s a doctor in Sydney. I don’t know what Katie’s doing.”
“She had a son by that Brett Easthouse fella. Brian or Barry or someone.”
“Barry, it was Barry.”
“Barry, that’s him. Turned out alright. Him and his wife run that little place your Sandra took us to last Easter. Oh, what’s the name of that now?”
“The Easthouse Country Tea-Room!”
“That’s the one. We should go there again.”
“Lovely scones.”
“They were, weren’t they?”

Bad Route

2007-02-15T23:32:00.001+11:00

This is a piece I wrote around a piece of artwork that appears in The Royal Tenenbaums, a fantastic movie, and indeed a fantastic picture.

Rachel had been scared every time she saw the riders for as long as she could remember.
She knew when they were there, racing around and around, by the screaming, nauseating whine of their engines.
The riders only came out in summer, when the grass was brown. The tracks they made would fill and overflow with the paddock’s brown dust. They rode, framed by the far away pine trees, tired and fragrant in the heat. Only in summer: only at dusk.
Sometimes Rachel would need to drive into town and, even before she stepped out onto the porch, there would come the distant buzz of engines, like wasps at the bottom of the garden.
It was bad when that happened - as if they were waiting for her.
It was bad today.

Rachel steps out quickly, letting the screen door wheeze and bang behind her. It is hot on the verandah, hot and claustrophobic. She comes down the steps and into the dry dust of the yard. Out in the air the heat lifts a little. The day is cooling as dusk comes on.
The noise of their engines is a swarm in the air. Muted, then higher and louder, bouncing off the house and reverberating around the yard. She fumbles for her keys and decides simply to wait until tomorrow, but if she misses the post, her letters won’t make it. She decides to wait until tomorrow anyway, but is inside the car and backing out of the driveway before she can really think, the steering wheel burning into her hands.
There is a little crest between her driveway and the road, and she dives the car over it too fast. The car stalls, and in the sudden silence she hears the engines again, around and around. Angrily, she turns the car over, shoves it into gear and accelerates towards town.
She cannot hear the riders now, not over the car’s engine, but she turns on the radio anyway. There is something country playing: always something country out here in the dry, brown dust and the dry, brown heat.
As she tops the rise she looks to her right, knowing she should not, but powerless to stop herself, and there they are.
There are five riders. Five young men, she always thinks, even though one has thick, black hair on his chest. Three of them ride undersized motorbikes, the other two ride four-wheelers. They are all dressed in blue jeans. None wear shirts. They are all tanned brown like the dust.
All the riders wear masks as they ride around and around. African masks almost - that shape anyway. Three have blue faces, grotesque and leering, two with black hair, and one with a shock of white. The other two masks are even more tribal. Their pointed oval shapes are filled with strange, bold, geometric designs.
Rachel is breathing in short, ragged gasps. Her hands are tight on the wheel and she is doing better than double the speed limit.
And, like they always do, the riders stop their endless race, around and around. They pull up in formation along the fence-line, as if to salute her as she passes. She races by, throwing a great cloud of dust behind her, small stones battering the underside of the car, and all the riders raise their arms, slowly, as if mocking her and her fright. They raise their arms like little children trying to look scary, as if they are saying ‘Boo,’ but Rachel knows they are silent.
The sudden blast of a horn jolts her clear. She looks up to see Hamish Chalmers in his old, red, International truck. Looks up to see she is about to kill herself against that solid iron 1950s grill.
She yanks at the wheel, miraculously dodges the truck, but the car flips with the hard turn and goes rolling along the road, kicking brown dust and dried-off grass up in a fan behind it. Rachel is thrown around inside, her head starring the windscreen, then the side window, and then suddenly she is out, clear, in the hot, dry air.
Didn’t I have my seat belt on? Is her only thought as she tumbles into the hard ground.

The shocking pain in her head pries Rachel awake. She goes to sit up but she can’t. She goes to take a deep breath and there is more pain. How can there be more pain?
She looks up into the worn out sky and sees they are all there, looking down. They still have their masks on, and their eyes gaze at her impassively. The one with the blue face and the white hair prods her with the toe of his sneaker. She screams.
The one with the thatch of black chest hair licks his lips, around and around.
That’s not right, she thinks, how could the mouth move like that?
And then they all smile, and she sees there are no masks here at all.

John Howard, Semi-Conscious

2007-02-15T23:21:00.001+11:00

This is a short story I wrote a few years ago for The Age Short Story Competition. It got an honourable mention, which pleased me greatly.

John Howard, Semi-Conscious

If I met John Howard I’d ask him if he remembers when he was in China in 1988 and my mother called out to him “Hello John Howard! My name’s Helen Howard from Tasmania.”
If I met John Howard we could go for an icecream if it was warm. I wonder what flavour he likes? Mango, pineapple, lemon sorbet, old English toffee, hokey-pokey? I think he’d have a plain cone, not a waffle one.
If I met John Howard the stars would hold their breath.
If I met John Howard I’d ask him what the fuck he thinks he’s doing.
If I met John Howard I’d take him home and play him ‘Some Girls are Bigger than Others’ by the Smiths. See if he likes my toy monkey that screams when you smack it on the floor.
If I met John Howard I’d grab his arse. He’d try and kiss me - see if he can slip the tongue in.
If I met John Howard, and it was a Saturday, we could do the quiz in the weekend magazine. He’d go well on the sport, politics and maybe the history questions, but I’d win.
If I met John Howard I’d rob him with a knife.
If I met John Howard I’d steal his glasses.
If I met John Howard you’d hear about it.
If I met John Howard I’d get his autograph, then type:
“Please afford the bearer any assistance he requires. He acts with my authority and blessing. The Right Honourable John Howard, Prime Minister.”
above his signature. If I did it on really nice paper, maybe vellum, and put some sort of facsimile of the coat of arms underneath I could probably get away with all sorts of shit.
If I met John Howard our relationship would be at the crossroads.
If I met John Howard science would take great leaps forward.
If I met John Howard there’d be a sale in every shop in town.
If I met John Howard I’d get him hammered on cheap vodka and, when he passed out, tattoo “Viva la Revalución” on his forehead.
If I met John Howard I’d show him my photos from Cuba. He can never go there if he wants to stay friends with George, unless he were to travel in secret, and so he’d probably be quite interested. We could look at pictures of all the crumbling buildings on Industria and at the May Day festivities. I could show him the various places me and my girlfriend stayed, tell him about the rickety stairs, the dodgy showers, the amazing fan in our room in Trinidad that had a ‘wind’ button, and about the games of dominoes we played on the balcony in Viñales.
We could pore over the old cars, the people walking along the Malecón, the restored buildings in Havana Vieja, and at the hilarious diorama of Che and Cienfuegos emerging from the faux jungle in the Museo de la Revalución. Maybe he’d be so inspired he could actually pay a visit to Fidel - imagine, he could become as respected as Jimmy Carter.
If I met John Howard we could have a number one single. With a bullet.
If I met John Howard we’d be the talk of the town.
If I met John Howard I’d ask a passing tourist to take a photo.
If I met John Howard I’d break his nose.
If I met John Howard I’d tell him about the day last week, walking to work, when I saw this particular bum that I often see around the City asleep against a sunny wall. He looked peaceful, but also pitiful, huddled against the wall as he was. I had a desire to stop and talk to him, to give him money, to fuck off work for the morning and take him back to my place for a shower and breakfast. Instead I just kept walking.
That same day, on my way home, I saw a kid asking people for money as he walked down the street. I spotted him a fair way off, as you learn to do, and made to avoid him, but he got me anyway. I did my usual “Sorry man” and he said “fuck” - pretty frustrated. The exchange struck me as routine, rehearsed, pre-ordered, almost inevitable.
Yesterday some guy approached me and I automatically descended into the fend-off-the-junkie routine, before I even registered that he was only asking for directions. A bad habit to get into, I thought.
I wonder what John would say about all that. I don't suppose he has to develop any ‘fend-off-the-junkie’ routines, living and working in Canberra as he does, but I imagine he has a similar hardening of the moral sensibilities. Then again, maybe I’m wrong about him and he would have helped all of those people without a second thought - he does profess to a sort of middle-class Christianity, whatever that is.
If I met John Howard I’d ask him if he ever goes down on Janette.
If I met John Howard I’d ask him if he plays an instrument, and what his favourite books and movies are.
If I met John Howard I’d force him into a sort of Dice Man style drug roulette: 1, 2, 3 and 4 being LSD (because that’s what he needs), 5 marijuana and 6 heroin.
If I met John Howard I’d tell him his fly was undone.
If I met John Howard I’d have a mental breakdown as I shook his hand.
If I met John Howard I’d run screaming.
If I met John Howard I’d cook him dinner - something traditional with a twist, maybe roast pork with pears and caramelised fennel. Homemade icecream for dessert - saffron or ouzo.
If I met John Howard I’d show him this piece, and when he got to the one about robbing him with a knife he’d become offended and flustered.
He’d say something like “I don’t think that’s very mature young man.”
I’d say “Fuck that John,” then I’d kick his legs out from under him, boot him around the body for a few minutes till he started to really lose it, till he began a sort of panicky, desperate pleading. Once his pleading became formless, incoherent, I’d jump on his chest and smash his head against the pavement till he was unconscious. After that I’d saw at his neck with a table knife, douse him in petrol, and set the bigoted, petty minded, unapologetic, fascist, unAustralian little shit on fire. Hopefully he’d wake up and scream as he burnt.
If I met John Howard I’d keep it to myself and only reveal it on my death-bed.
If I met John Howard I’d never wash again.
If I met John Howard I’d shake his hand and remind him that he’s a hell of a lot better than Ruddock.
If I met John Howard I’d ask him if he ever considered calling either, or even better, both, of his sons Howard, instead of Tim or Richard. I’ve always thought Howard Howard a very pleasing mix of the dignified and the odd. Also slightly reminiscent of the protagonist in Nabokov’s Lolita.
If I met John Howard I’d abduct him and try and explain a few home truths to him:
- Colonial Australia tried to commit genocide against the Aborigines. This is in the same league as the Nazis versus the Jews and the Turks versus the Kurds. It is very bad. The government, as the elected representatives of the people of Australia, need to make a complete apology on our behalf. Now.
- Australian foreign policy should not automatically coincide with America’s. American foreign policy is notoriously bad. Their leader is a fool.
- The two most important things a government can do for its people is provide for their health and their education. Address this. Invest the three-hundred million dollars a year that our six billion dollar surplus provides into these two fields.
If I met John Howard I’d get off my high horse and run after him, yapping like a dog, till he had me arrested.
If I met John Howard I’d buy the t-shirt.
If I met John Howard we’d form the greatest double act the world has ever seen. We’d make a beautiful couple.
If I met John Howard I’d furiously ignore him.
If I met John Howard we’d cross the road together, huddled against the cold. We’d pass an orthodox church, rain speckling our glasses, talk in low tones about the elm tree that has fallen in the wind. He would exclaim gently at a dead bird on the wet footpath. We would continue up the street together, the lights of the houses beginning to come on.

General Preamble

2007-02-15T23:13:00.000+11:00

So, like the summary thing says, this is a more permanent, and hopefully more frequent continuation of the group emails I used to send out to friends - "Strange Stories & Disturbing Monologues."
It also gives me a place to put some of my writing (short stories, excerpts from my novel etc.), and provides a place for me to bang out something that will perhaps amuse or entertain, while simultaneously getting me back into the habit of writing, a habit I have been slack in maintaining of late, in preparation for a second novel that I can feel percolating very faintly in the back of my brain.