the music goes round and round (*)

Around the newspapers today.

The SMH carries this article about political polarisation in the US. When you have participants in rallies apparently calling out for the other candidate to be assassinated, and it doesn't seem like a joke or heat-of-the-moment stuff, that's pretty scary. And not only is the real, suburban, world increasingly partitioned, but the media both mainstream and alternate. Admission: I don't visit blogs I find to be extreme, although I'll trawl some those whose views I don't share. But my living in a self-imposed cocoon isn't good.

Update: It's worse than I thought. Nothing like a mix of ignorance and arrogance to bring forth the worst in human nature. Whay aren't these people at work, one might ask (listen to first clip). Courtesy of Club Troppo.

Irwin Stelzer in today's Courier Mail more than hints that we are moving into a protectionist era. He's sad about this, naturally, but he employs the same glib dismissal of real impacts that I used to read from (Australian) Treasury in the early 1990s, about the same time as Michael Pusey identified the cult of eco-rationalism.

"Defenders of free trade...have failed to develop a defence of the way free trade's benefits have been distributed."

Plasma TVs and cheap t-shirts, is my glib interpretation of Stelzer's answer.

Which he then follows by "Meanwhile, globalisation has increased the opportunities for members of the managerial class: they can spread their talents over larger enterprises. Result: Rising inequality, with trade the apparent villain."

I wonder who the real villain is? When the ratio of American CEO salaries to average weekly incomes has gone up by some phenomenal extent (read it last night, can't find it now, google not helping, must have wrong search terms), I assume the real villains are in hiding.

And, btw, doesn't Pusey still cop it?

Let's be slightly serious for a tick: we have been hearing non-stop for some decades that markets are the answer and anybody who now is seeking to qualify, in any way, what they have been saying over that period is really indulging in a little revisionism. And yes, markets were the answer to a period where structural rigidities in various areas including trade and labour relations indeed stifled growth. So we got real growth, far larger than during the 'long boom' after WW2.


Then, inevitably, some of the unintended (yes, I'm being charitable) consequences started to rear their heads including a widening gap of income. The answer, equally inevitably, has been: reform. Code for: more of the same.


You know that definition of stupidity? The one about doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different outcome?

Hmmm.

Finally, the Courier Mail's Paul Syvret relates a letter to the editor from an unrelated paper which in essence blames the prolonged drought - which we didn't use to have when t'writer were a lad - on less moisture in the atmosphere because of one more hour of daylight due to - you guessed it - daylight saving. As Syvret says, "How can you argue with logic like that?"

Enjoy your weekend. I have to go and give the TV a work-out, it's Bathurst weekend. Haven't been there since 1974 but I read about a bloke who's been there annually for 40 years. That's dedication.

(*) In this case, it's the music of the V8!

songs from the south

I ran across an excellent blog - here it is, this is truly brilliant storytelling - and wanted to add it to the blogroll. Except in this new format, when I went to the html template I couldn't find the list of blogs I had laboriously typed in for the previous template.

Apparently they are now contained in a widget. I went to blogger help, I'm not a real man because I actually looked in the manual! I found this:

Widget content is contained in "includable" sections, which have this format: [insert whatever content you want here]
The attributes are as follows:
id: (Required) A unique identifier made up of letters and numbers.
var: (Optional) An identifier made up of letters and numbers, for
referencing data within this section. (See the data section below.)
Each widget must have one includable with id='main'. This will usually contain most or all of the content that will display for this widget, and in many cases it will be all you need.If you make more includables with different IDs, they will not be displayed automatically. However, if you make an includable with id='new', then you can reference it in your main includable with and it will display that way.

and

The 'identifier' part can be any name you choose, and will be used to stand in for each new item in the list, each time through the loop. A common convention is to simply call this "i". The set of data you specify for the values can be any piece of data described in the data tags article as being a list of items. For instance, in the blog posts widget, posts is a list. Code like the following will loop through each post, printing out the title for each one, with header tags around it.

Notice how "i" takes on the value of each post in turn, so you can get the title from
each one.

I hadn't noticed, but then again the entire global financial system is crashing down just outside my window, so arguably I could be excused.

And that's why Laurie is not in the sidebar blogroll. Nor will anyone else ever be, nor will the current list ever be amended.

Oh, and I found Laurie via here (Sit down man, you're a bloody tragedy), another one of those islands of amazing complexity you find in the 'sphere.

Update: Yes he is. Now. I figured it out. Blogger had made it simpler. I was looking for love in all the wrong places.

Comme d'habitude.

something stupid

In a world turned crazy, there's little that can raise eyebrows. Except mine got raised a couple of centimetres today - twice in fact.

The world's leading economic commentator told us on the world's most authoritative TV program that computers, rather than 23-year old cocaine-addicted screen jockeys, manipulate these enormous flows of international capital. Seriously, no wonder we are in such an (emerging) pickle. Pre-set algorithms, sell, buy, fuck 'em right off. How bloody insane is that? Oh sorry, cost of labour, 23 year old screen jockeys cost maximillions more than computers and only do the same job.

We don't need a Rubin tax, we need legislated common sense and capital punishment for deviation.

Second, Scottish schools go into public-private partnerships with consortia that borrow from Icelandic banks. If ever you needed a single example of why simple State-funded debt is not a better and undoubtedly cheaper (by the time everyone takes their cut and shifts the risk on) of raising finance for public infrastructure, then this is it. Ever since 1989 the world has gone into an intellectual void, no one even remarks that the "peace dividend" hasn't passed anyone's lips since 1991, everyone's been too busy "leveraging" everybody else while simultaneously "going forward." Now they're "rolling out" programmes, with two ems and and a superfluous e, everywhere you look.

Shit, that's enough, it's Friday for fuck's sake.

sweet blindness*

I came home from work just thinking that I needed to write something, anything, and then Kevin-oh-seven and ten months pops up on 7.30 Report. I listened for about 30 seconds and then went off to do the dishes. I am so over politicians dodging the questions or responding with "Now Kerry, what I need to tell you.." and so on. According to today's Crikey (subscription only and -disclosure - I'm currently on a freebie) it's called conversational blindness:

Rating political performance. I have a new way of putting interest into those
essentially dull and boring presidential television debates since reading the work of two American academics called Conversational Blindness: Answering the Wrong Question the Right Way. What Todd Rogers and Michael I. Norton from Harvard set out to discover is how politicians get away with not answering questions when appearing on television. What happens, they wondered, when people try to "dodge" a question they would rather not answer by answering a different question? They conducted two experiments demonstrated this conversational
blindness - listeners' surprising failure to notice such dodges – and explored the interpersonal consequences of this phenomenon.

They found that listeners viewed successful question-dodgers as positively as speakers who actually answered the question they are asked, but were not blind to all efforts to dodge: They both noticed – and punished – particularly egregious attempts. More troublingly, listeners preferred speakers who answered the wrong question well over those who answered the right question poorly.

I think it is one of those research papers that everyone interested in politics
should read for it helps those of us who hate politicians dodging the hard
questions from getting angry. Instead you can marvel, like I did yesterday, at
the skill with which Barack Obama employs to take advantage of conversational
blindness. That man has to be one of the best ever at sounding great while
saying absolutely nothing.

Well it may pass other people by but it gets right up my throat. On the other hand I had by this time already remarked to Mrs VVB that Red Kez was giving Kevin a much harder time than John (spit) Howard ever got until the dying months of his reign, and maybe it was time for the ABC Board to be purged of its ultra-conservative stackees.

Then I came back from the kitchen sink to hear Kerry asking about housing affordability and whether house prices will come down and the PM got visibly hot under the collar. Now we never saw this in Howard until close to the end so I have to say it wasn't a good look, but on the other hand it accompanied some straighter responses, in more everyday language, than the PM usually seems capable of managing. Even had a "you betcha" in there, he's obviously been into the reporting about Sarah Palin.

He really needs to dumb down the language just a smidgin though, even on the ABC.

So does

Miz Pants's observation hold? Well, it came before Christmas - in fact it's been coming for a while - but I'm not scorned, just a bit disappointed. But not all out of hope.

And of course, you just have to keep remembering the alternative.

And while I'm here, I guess, a couple of observations on the global financial crisis, about to become a global real economy crisis.

First, and I don't think I ever mentioned it here, America's debt overhang with China has been possibly the major structural imbalance that could not be sustained, regardless of any other factors that have contributed to us beingf where we are ("us" being the world, in this case, ie a very broad us).

And second, regardless of coordinated or individual action taken by governments or up-until-very-recently 'independent' central/reserve banks, the actual action is still in the hands of 23 year old screen jockeys with a very narrow mandate for action and absolutely no understanding, or more importantly duty of care, about the wider societal implications of their actions. That is very wrong and that is why we need regulation.

And an end to neoclassical economic responses to absolutely any and every situation, btw :-)

But it's also why jokes like this are so good at this time:

"What's the difference between a Wall Street banker and a pigeon?"

"A pigeon can still leave a deposit on a BMW."

Boom boom. And no BMWs at this year's Sydney Motor Show, where I'll be next week for the annual three amigos reunion.

On a more domestic note, it's raining, Whacko!

(*) Someone called Laura Nyro, it seems.

natural born woman party

As VVB has more or less disintegrated into a weekly, I was scratching around for something of interest. Something I thought I had noticed over recent weeks and months was that some blogs which I had previously thought either apolitical or only mildly 'conservative' in outlook had seemingly gone ferally rightwards. Australian blogs that barely seemed to mention politics have gone stratospherically supportive of Sarah Palin. Maybe because the liberal/left blogs have gone for her throat?

Then today this comment appeared this arvo at Larvatus Prodeo, about an apparent lowering of the volume at the 'leftist' blogs, because the 'enemy' (John Howard, doncha know) has gone.

There's something to it I think but I always struggle with perception vs reality. The easy way would be to leave a comment and check, but as a lifelong wuss who had regrettably had more aggro in recent months than he cares to think about (not here, another part of my life), I just honestly don't feel up to it. Even though I would hope that an evenly-worded, non-judgemental inquiry should elicit a fair and honest answer.

If it's true, what has brought it on? With the predictable result in WA, the short 'halcyon' period of coast-to-coast Labor governments has come to an undistinguished end. Do the supporters of the 'natural party of government' theory feel so wronged during those periods when the 'natural party' is not in power?

And other questions, such as do they not realise that have any party in power for a long time is a Bad Thing?

At times like this I'm glad that VVB has no academic pretensions beyond its proprietor's meagre intelligence and is simply free to ask the stupid questions.

on the road again

Have just done the Capricorn Coast to Brisbane and return road trip thing. Chateau VVB was up for auction on Saturday, someone needed to be there (so it seemed, anyway). Left after work on Friday, a bit of a bugger really as I'd been in Gladstone anyway, but had to bring a work colleague back and then swap the office car for the yellow Saabmarine, as offspring no 2 calls it. So an extra 280 km or so just for fun.

It being a late departure after a full day, and a few full days before that, I didn't feel up to going all the way (I'd be in Adelaide if I did that, ha ha) so stopped in Maryborough. Still arrived late, after reception had been closed a while, they left the key under the doormat. Cute. I had a small bottle of vino collapso from the well stocked bar and hit the sack.

Awoke early, before reception was operational so I left the cash for the vino on the table, put the key back under the mat and hit the frog and toad.

It was just on 6, the sun was up and it was brilliantly clear. I came out of the 60 km town limit but saw a car coming up over my right shoulder on the Bruce Highway at the 100km mark. Thought briefly, not so good as I wasn't utterly awake but then floored it and pulled out in front of him. Turned up the radio, it was Bob Seger with Hollywood Nights which is a great driving song, so I cranked it up further and awaaaay we went. Life is just extra grouse sometimes, you can't foresee it. The early morning sun on the canefields, the green hills in the background, the open road...ah yup, I was extremely alert and it was all good.

The auction was a damp squib, no registered bidders although the agents (cough spit) had led me to believe we had at least one. So Chateau VVB is still for sale. Amazingly, the original architect turned up to have a look and may in fact be interested in putting in a bid. Had a yarn to him about what we had liked or not about the place. He hadn't seen it since about 1976.

Took it much easier coming home as I knew there would be police everywhere. There were. Just as well I wasn't driving one of these. You'll enjoy Jeremy's take on modern Britain, there are lots of things he doesn't like about modern life, eh?

simply the best

It would be highly inappropriate for a little blog that's been drifting closer to the centre since the departure of the littlest liar to make any comment about the death of capitalism.

So we won't, although you might want to follow that thread for a while if you're interested.

But we were mightily taken by a pronouncement we read over the weekend about Australia's "world-class" system of financial regulation, leading to a reassurance that because we were "word-class", Australians had little to fear for the future of their savings and investments.

Being "world-class" is important in Australia. We could debate until the cows returned to whence they came whether it's because we have been so far away from Europe, or some innate convict-mentality writ large, or whatever, but it's always important to be "world-class". I guess I've written the phrase more than once in my work roles over the last decade or so.

Its derivation aside, the phrase does indicate a recognition that effort needs to be put into regulatory structures, or indeed whatever, if we are to compete.

But it struck me as passing strange that at a time when the regulatory mechanisms of the acknowledged world leaders in finance were shown to be somewhat lacking in nearly every respect, that someone would still want to compare us with them, as if this was a good thing.

"We're different, we're better" might have had more clout. Waddaya think?

diamonds are a girl's etc

Etc indeed.

I dunno how much spare time you have to do your blogcrawling, maybe you have the 'ole RSS going so you it that way, maybe you subscribe (?) to delicious and all that stuff, whatever it does.

But you have to visit VVB-the-the-sea to get your Sinfest interpretation of the Wall St meltdown and I can assure you, it's very different to what Commmmmmsec or Kocccchie or Terry McCrann will be telling you, let alone what rubbish Kev'n Mal might decide to spruik, whether bipartisanly or in violent opposition.






There...doesn't that feel better?

Multiple blogger failures yesterday. I had a really nice cheap shot that comprised extract from a letter to the Editor of the Age in which someone, probably a City trader, in the UK seemed to rail against people railing at the financial meltdown (you still with me?), saying just to leave it to the experts, along with a story from Friday's AFR in which a young Sydney trader, over a beer on Thursday night as the financial world imploded, noted that some of his firm's clients had lost a lot of money ("there was blood") but the firm itself had done outstanding business, "best for months" in fact. Wonderful.

So that was the cheap shot. It's because of highly numerate but utterly amoral people - a phrase I've used several times this year, you'll note - that much of what has happened, has happened.

Along with a whole bunch of people with a deep-seated, but irrational, belief in one particular answer to all the world's problems.

I'll leave you to guess what it is, thus avoiding yet another cheap shot.

For something more substantial on financial stuff, I recommend today's Peter Martin.

And for something more substantial again, I give you the JM Toys white metal 1/43 scale model of the Austin A99. The A99, which took the A95's mechanicals and wrapped them in bodywork by Pinin Farina, was a hulking great lump of a thing yet spectacularly well proportioned. A car for the upper middle class who couldn't afford a Daimler.

Hmm, LStg79. What's the current exchange rate? Looks like it's going to cost me $185 plus postage. Might wait awhile.

rarities

I can see where this is going to lead...



No, more obscure videos, you mofos.

underneath the radar

Underneath the radar...that's where Canada mostly flies. We have views of Canada, probably not very well formed: they're mostly like us, they don't like being mistaken for Americans but they have a dependence on their large neighbour as their biggest market. They're pretty much small-l liberal in the views, it's a stable place.

The Canucks I've known while overseas were all good company, particularly because they shared the Aussie fondness for beer (although one older couple were indeed quite conservative and refined, stangely enough they tolerated my crudities and occasional excess enthusiasm). One bloke from Newfoundland exhibited all the extreme behaviourial traits that often distinguish people from remote areas.

So this Slate article, via Bookforum, came as a bit of a shock. Some of this news had penetrated the mainstream media here, but only on rare occasions...it's not a narrative. Hmm, well.

But some of the similarities to Australia are disturbing. The global financial shockwaves seem only to be one element of some kind of widespread unravelling of what we thought to be certainties, or at least solid long term trends.

Canada will bear some watching, I think, over the next few years and may provide some insights into our own little corner.

the times they are

You'll love this here.

No more words nee

Oh all right, it's the best take on the Murkkn election that you'll see for a long time (or the longest time, I believe it is also said).

Courtesy of a commenter at the inimitable Gorilla Bananas.

houses of the holy

In the (well, relatively new) tradition of VVB bringing you blogs you most likely haven't got around to discovering yet, I bring you sit down man, you're a bloody tragedy.

I really wish I understood a lot more of this interwebbby stuff, but the latest post there mixes current affairs commentary with popular music references, rather like a blog not too far from around here which modesty forbids us from mentioning by name.

And I can relate to that, as indeed I can to one comment on the latest post:

Disco Inferno! Can you think of another British indie band from the last 20 years whose music could seriously be used to frame a discussion of this sort? DI have been effectively rescued from critical obscurity over the last few years but it still seems like few people grasp their true import. The fact that those legendary five EPs remain out of print is a crime.

Anyway for those of youse who are interested in the don't mention the sub-prime word current market meltdown, have given up worrying about your disappearing super, don't get apocalytically angry about how the rich/captains of industry types seem to escape from all of this unscathed apart from a yacht or two and just want to get an alternative perspective, I think that SDMYABT might just meet a need. Just look at the blogroll: months of new fun.

Enjoy, as they say.

money (*)

I seem to remember banging on some months ago about the structural weaknesses engendered by unregulated financial flows and the risks associated with the unfettered growth in complex financial instruments that no-one but their creators could understand. And the additional risks because the creators had no interests beyond their carefully constructed mechanisms.

Now it's all unravelling, there'll be the inevitable overcorrection in levels and types of regulation and we'll all be back at square 1-n.

Around these parts, the one thing that Mrs VVB and I always agree on is that you need someone to blame. Looks like we're not Robinson Crusoes.

Rather than fail at matching the bucketloads of analysis and similar codswallop elsewhere, VVB is pleased to bring you Harry Hutton and his friends' take on it all:

Not a bad idea to fatten yourself up before the second Great Depression starts. I never understood what was great about the first one.

Enjoy.

(*) And we also mourn the passing of Richard Wright. What would all we 60s and 70s tragics do at parties without someone to crank out Wish you were here? Or at those parties where the punters never left the 60s, See Emily Play, Interstellar Overdrive and Careful with that axe, Eugene.

silvery moon

That bright dot you can just see in the background is a new rising star for the Liberal Party. Oh all right, it's a moon then. Think of it as a metaphor. It's going to shine light over all it surveys. But being a moon, it'll be reflected light, yes?

So whose light will it reflect?

I really think it's hard to see Malcolm Turnbull as a stalking horse for any others in the Libs: he is his own man (quite apart from all the other things he owns, yeah cheap shot). To all appearances he is ideologically distant from the current eminences grises (extremely grise in the case of Nick Minchin) so how is he going to keep them down on the farm happy? Yeah sorry, it's the other lot who are down on the farm.

I had accumulated a whole truckload of snarks for a post tonight, but spending a couple of hours thinking about distributing responsibilities for the big bits ("deliverables", yuk yuk) of the business plan amongst the willing team has torn my poor ole brain to shreds.

John McCain said something diabolically funny, might have been about the US economy. But I think Kevin Rudd said exactly the same thing about the Australian economy today too.

The view of the moon of course comes to you direct from the viewing balcony here at VVB-by-the-sea. Which I might call VVBC in future. Hilarious, isn't it. My neck hurts, too much typing at an inappropriate desk - goodnight.

another side

Well I snarked about the amount of attention being paid to the Sarah Palin phenomenon by Aussie blogs, but I'll definitely now have to eat that particular piece of humble pie flavoured hat.

On the other hand, I bet there aren't too many Aussie blogs bringing you the Sinfest strip version.

Oh, it is to enjoy, nicht war? And I recommend you visit Sinfest regularly - it's outrageously good.

diamond head

A little light entertainment from one of my fave bands ever (more popularly spelt 'evah', I am led to believe): 801, featuring Brian Eno and Phil Manzanera who were also a major part of Roxy Music.

Enjoy:



Knew you would.

even in the quietest moments

I can't recall reading much other comment on the role of credit ratings agencies - apart from breathless reporting of their "warnings" and "announcements" in the mainstream press - than at Possum and here. The link is, to my recollection, the first questioning in the MSM of their modus operandi, role and impact on things.

So it's kind of reassuring to learn that other people are asking the very simple questions that should have been asked yonks ago. The agencies subscribe - at least in public - to the usual 'neoclassical' (you have to be so careful with labels and descriptions) economics: lower public debt, big surpluses in any circumstances, tiny spending on any program that smells of 'social' and even of supposedly desirable expenditure such as hard infrastructure (very blokey, isn't it?). Yet at the same time as they hold themselves up as 'independent', so that governments can point to them and say to the punters "look, we told you, we have to do what these people say", they fall prey to the usual, inbuilt weakness of the market system: if you pay enough, you can get what you want, although the broader outcomes will be decidedly suboptimal.

Surely their role and influence will have to change as this information becomes more widely understood. Too much to hope for? How would you do it? Yes, start up a competitor, a genuine one. Won't help the punters who want governments to spend, though. Unless you could start a triple bottom line ratings agency? Look, I've discovered a market niche!

Meanwhile, without additional commentary from me, one person's reflection on 9 September 2001, popularly known as 9/11.

Then before you can move on, you catch the title and first few lines of his previous post and you just have to read it. AA Gill and co, eat your collective hearts out.

the rascals

Not just Mr Brown. Add Bush, Benanke, Cheney and all those other manipulaters from treasuries around the world who are colluding with rascals from the futures, oil, gold and currency markets!

Could Barclays really not wait a bit longer for their £10 million?

Indeed... a measly ten mill. Why on earth not? What apack of rascals!

Also, what Alistair in Turkmenstan said.

nevermind

So it's a Friday night and after watching a bit of the footy I thought I'd turn the new bigscreen over to Mrs VVB so she can watch whatever it is she watches and I'd come and look at a few blogs. As if this was different to...oh yeah.

Anyway, the 'sphere is alive to the celebration or condemnation, depending on your point of view, of Peter Costello and Sarah Palin. Just remind me, where do we live again?

So, Costello it is, then. Yawn. The AFR today does a fairly respectable deconstruction/ demolition of the Liberal Party "World's Greatest Treasurer" myth. At last, but what a pity it wasn't in the Telegraph. Maybe it was, but buggered if I'm going to go looking.

As for the "will he or won't he" for leader of the Libs: yawn. A confected media light breeze in a thimble. The only thing that gets me going - and no surprises here - is this thing about what a great leader he would have been. A brilliant Parliamentary performer. Well yes, exceptionally good with the snide, the sarcasm, the outrage, the put-down. Just what a nation wants in a PM. Look how useful and relevant to the job in hand the voting public thought those same qualities (only more erudite!) were in Keating. The great unwashed voting public actually do want a broader list of abilities in a PM. Most of them in fact don't watch Question Time. Amazing. Does the paid commentariat not realise this?

Answers on the back of a piece of paper that's been in Ian McLachlan's wallet to Liberal Party HQ, behind the bike sheds, Tuesday after school. And where's that other Costello fellow?

So instead I started fiddling about with the colours on the VVB template, then I started fiddling about with the new (well, new-ish) tools that Blogger has added and before you could say "eejit" I'd lost my old template.

Hence this new look. I think I quite like it, I'd be interested in any views. For those of you who really don't have a life :-)

The picture? That's the paternal grandfather sometime after he emigrated to Australia from Poland, so early 1900s. What a fine fellow he looks, although the stories seemed to indicate something different. Only met him once, I was about 4 or 5.

On which note, it's about time to check the footy scores.

A toute a l'heure.

Oh yeah, the picture. It's Afghanistan. Apparently everyone's going to send more troops to defeat the Taliban/al Qaida/"bad guys" there. I'd really be thinking hard about this, at least as long as the words complete victory figure in the political speeches that presage such actions. The politicians, and we've got 'em in Labor ranks, who make these statements really ought to go and read some history. Yes, times have changed, weaponry and technology is on our side (except for what can be bought on the black market etc etc) but it's a formidable field of battle. Just think twice, then a few more times.

what shall we do with a drunken sailor?

I shouldn't be, but yet I always am, amazed by the inconsistencies that the media, pundits, opinionistas (and opinionistos, I s'pose) exhibit in their attempts to get the rest of us to see things their way.

Today's example is the editorial in the AFR, not on line free. It's about the rotten state of the State of NSW and why it's important to the economic well-being of the rest of the country that NSW get back on its feet. Quite rightly, it focuses on the varied misdeeds of the Carr and Iemma governments and the Labor political machine behind them that is, to all intents and purposes, the actual government. Quite rightly again, it then goes on to argue that the entanglement of half-arsed political jockeys is not necessarily a sustainable basis for good governance, and so on and so on.

Then it decries the fact that NSW hasn't competed for investment, jobs and so on. Now if NSW, rather like some other States we could name, started throwing incentives around like a...oh, I dunno, a drunken sailor...how do you reckon the comments would go? Misuse of taxes, distortion of investment into optimal sectors, crowding out of private investment, and so on and so forth. You can just see it, can't you?

Well? What makes the current environment so different? NSW actually had an agreement with Victoria and SA that they wouldn't compete for investment: after all, the Productivity Commission produces a boilerplate text book each year lambasting precisely this practice. Should be a Good Thing, then, eh?

Because of course part of the structural reason that NSW is in its $1b black hole is that it hasn't privatised its electricity industry, according to the usual neoclassical economics rule book. So Standard and Poors, the people from whom you could until recently buy an investment rating in return for a quick sniff of your sister's underpants, is going to downgrade NSW to AA+? Smells a bit like two bob each way to me, to carry the olfactory metaphor a bridge entirely too far.

Not only that, but this whole story omits the role of the recent federal government, whose leader moved most of the functions of national government from the national capital, where most countries locate theirs, to Sydney, and spent no little effort building up Sydney as Australia's only global city, unquote, financial capital, unquote, and so on. So why would the State government throw money at attracting investment when the Commonwealth (and I do love that word) is doing it perfectly well on its behalf, I ask you?

Finally, is it not truly amazing that, with only a little effort, the blame for any bad thing that has happened anywhere around these realms since the year dot can be ascribed to John Howard? I mean, it's perfectly freaky.

So it must be true.

baby you can drive my car part CMXIV and a half

It's been aeons since a cars-I-have-owned post. So here's another one.

I've had several cars that classified as most unreliable car in the world, a 1976 VW Passat was certainly right up there. It was about 10 years old when I acquired it and it had been subjected to ten years of Burmese mechanicking, which meant that (a) it always got going again but (b) the niceties of the workshop manual would have been honoured only in their absence.

It actually went very well when it was going and did make it up to Mandalay and Maymyo with the whole fambly aboard without mechanical mishap, although I recall we did have a small accident coming back to Rangoon. Sharing a narrow, potholed road with buffalos, ox-carts and sundry other natural wonders made for interesting drives, the like of which we really don't get here in godzone.

It was customary in Rangoon to have domestic staff to help around the house, as much a way of getting some money into the community as to actually help although the houses tended to need a lot of care and maintenance anyway.

We did have a driver for a while and when he left we got a young bloke who seemed too good to be true. Indeed. He had great English and a facility with all sorts of things so, even given the unique nature of the economy under the Burmese Way to Socialism, it seemed odd that he was just a driver for a foreigner.

Anyway the car was so unreliable that he eventually gave that as his reason for leaving us and we really had no reason not to believe him.

semi charmed life

All right, the ennui lasted a day, as it always does, and because I can't be arsed preparing for a workshop tomorrow I thought I'd do a little light skimming.

Just as the fascination of golf is one good shot in a round (*), I just love articles wherein one sentence makes the whole thing jump. Such as:

Footnotes and pages are studded with semiotic -- or, more properly, semi-idiotic -- insights from Foucault, Derrida and like-minded obfuscators.

(*) Unless you can actually play, of course.

kraftwerk

The Business Review Weekly carries an interesting article about how de-industrialisation in some developed countries, Oz included, has led to the 'financialisation' of the economy which is now out of balance because so much wealth, and dependent economic activity, is tied up in residential and commercial property. We make money by selling it to each other. Taking in each other's real washing, so to speak.

Whenever I read arguments against support - of any kind - for manufacturing, I'll now think of this.

It may be economic illiteracy on my part but if as a country we can't make things, we're doomed.

Yes, clever financial people can devise ways of financing things that might not ever get done otherwise. It's a skill and it requires intelligence and effort. Public-private partnerships and so on.

But you still need to make things, because eventually we'll have nothing.

Actually not only doomed, but stupid.

more

So they interviewed this bloke on TV tonight about the fireworks and he said they were "awesome". Then they interviewed this other bloke and he said that they'd put on a free breakfast this morning after the fireworks the night before and the breakfast was "awesome". They showed a picture of the breakfast and it was sausages and eggs and stuff. So all in all I reckon that the description of it being awesome was pretty much spot on.

All this awe about. I'm lost for words.

You know, I skim through the excerpts on OzPolitics but I find myself opening fewer and fewer posts. The intro lines on some would put you right off - hey, no prejudices being jumped to around here, folks (as if...) - and for some all you need is the title.

The gloss appears to have worn off Kevin07 even amongst the true believers, some cling to hope, some detect a deeper strategic vision and it'll all be OK in the long run. Those who never believed are ramping up the snarking. There's academic and semi-academic analysis by the truckload, but somehow I feel that there's a bit more real life outside this new study in Villa VVB that needs to be attended to.

Actually it's not really a villa because it doesn't have a wall around it - that's what's missing. I'll get on to it one of these years.

So I predict a year or so of blogennui as the first Rudd Ministry continues to learn the ropes - and boy, do some of them need to - while we watch the international economy either get itself back into balance or continue to slowly unravel.

Of course so much depends on the US and while I'm not such a political tragic to expend acres of space on analysing the Presidential election (you'd swear we really were the 52nd state by the depths some local blogs get into) the fact remains that the scale and nature of the US's economic relationships with the rest of the world are key to our own economic health. That debt, man, all that debt. All those arcane financial instruments, who's got their hand on the levers? Who's looking at the screens?

Enough of the conspiracy, this is just a cheap stream-of-consciousness substitute way of saying that unless VVB finds something else interesting to write about (and I know I haven't finished all the car stories) we're going to sink into what I did on my holidays.

Except I haven't had any for a really long time and none on the horizon except the annual boys' weekend away at the Sydney Motor Show.

Look out.

horse house with no name

It must be the calming influences of those sea views, but the urge to whinge seems to have totally departed. I mean, you never got considered analysis around these parts so spiteful whingeing seemed just so...I dunno...adequate.

VVB-by-the-sea (I must come up with a shorter and more atmospheric name) at last entered the final bit of the 20th century today by acquiring a large, well large-ish, flat panel TV. It's great, I could almost watch for...minutes.

We did. We watched Riverfire. It was...oh, I dunno, how about awesome? Awesomeness seems to spring up around one nowadays.

We were particularly taken with the Victorian lady who was interviewed. She had come from Victoria to see the fireworks. It gets you wondering, really it does. Don't they have fireworks in Victoria? I mean, back in the gold rush the place was seething with Chinese people - Chinamen in fact. Surely some of them stayed on to become fireworks technicians?

Anyway it was awesome - well the first and last 2 minutes were, the middle 19 were extremely ho-hum. As one might have predicted.

And all the buildings with lights ablaze! What a wonderful night for the electricity generators. Just an awesome way to use some non-renewable resources.

Also, Channel 7's commentary was awesome.

Actually, no it wasn't. It was - like virtually everything else that 7 now does - tedious, amateurish, laden with cross-promotion and over-exposure of its stable of awesome stars and slightly forgettable.

As I may or may not have explained previously, VVB switched from 9 to 7 when Steve "Judas" Leibmann took John Howard's 30 pieces of silver and appeared on TV, all serious and businesslike, to warn us about all the terrorists in our midst who were hell-bent on destroying all the things we hold dear like freedom, democracy and liberty and all those things.

They weren't, of course, but it cruelled for me that carefully nurtured persona of Steve Liebmann as reassuring man of the news. And it pretty much paralleled the decline of 9 and rise of 7 although I suspect this is more correlation than causation. Except in our case, of course.

And then the nation got terrorism fever and we got Border Fucking Security whose popularity was hung on the perceptions of evil terrorists infiltrating our grfeat nation but in fact was more about dodgy visa-evaders, smugglers of exotic African diseases and general flim-flam men.

Anyway channel 7 has had several years of well deserved popularity and mega ratings - awesome ratings, in fact - which has inevitably ended with it believing its own popularity and that of David Koch, who has passed awesomeness into ubiquity. So ubiquitous in fact that I fully expect to see him in Bunnings on a Saturday.

So this has not been so much of a whinge - hmmm, well maybe just a little - as a reflection on how awesome everything is. In pursuit of which, here is a photo of a minor alteration to the horizon courtesy of the people who dig stuff up to sell. This is the bit that they don't.

Big, isn't it?

I hope you agree.


Anyway, back to names for the new Chateau VVB. Is it a bungalow? Could be. Is it a villa? Potentially, nearly everything is nowadays. Is it a ranch house? Hmm, probably not.

So we'll have to go with what sounds best. Villa VVB has a nice alliterative feel, we should go with that, yes?

i do like to be beside the seaside

It has no waves worthy of the name and it doesn't smell very salty, but it is the sea.

And this is what you see of it from VVB-by-the-sea.

I can't see us ever tiring of it.

australiana

I think I'll be glad to get back to regular blogging, eventually. The arrival our dedicated line got me all a little, er, thing.

It's also because things are starting to annoy me again. Having a whinge to no-one in particular seems, to me, to be one of the greatest benefits that blogs confer on their proprietors.

I got annoyed a few days ago about the usage of "pinkie" for little finger. And today I read in the paper that the government's otherwise admirable, if a little misguided, series of advertisements in which ladies wave their little fingers at blokes to admonish them for being speed fiends, is known as the "pinkie" advertisement. I should have have known it.

I'm not even sure that an advertisement should have a name, but as episodes of TV shows seem to have them, why not?

I think the ads are misguided, most genuine speed freaks would simply...well, drive on by, I suspect.

That'll also be other speed fiends, too, just to be clear.

I bought a doover in a shop yesterday. I can't quite remember what it was, hence a doover. But the packaging got me going, in a slightly understated way. It said that the doover was made by a "wholly owned Australian company."

I found this oddly reassuring. The last thing we need are little orphan companies, especially Australian companies, wandering around all alone because they have no owners. All incorporated entities need a mummy and daddy, for sure.

Now, whether the wording meant to imply that the company was Australian owned, is a whole other kettle of fish. I certainly hope that the wording was inadvertently poorly constructed, rather than - as I suspect - a deliberate attempt to mislead.

Anyway if you go into a K-mart and look at the rack of doovers you use to connect telephonic devices with other telephonic devices, you'll see what I mean.

We're big on made in Australia in VVB-by-the-sea (well, sort of). Offspring no 1 has the symbol tattooed on one shoulder blade. It's rather misleading advertising in its own right because, as anyone with a passing acquaintance with human biology and a calendar could figure out, while he was born here he certainly wasn't made here.

We rest our case.

Because it's tired.

i got rhythm

I also got connection. We got the box, we got the cables, we got the cables trailing from the hallway to the study, we got the old Pakistani rug over the cables so we don't trip over them, we got the intermodal gizmos, we have liftoff.

You can go to the post office before opening time and they will give you the stuff that is waiting for you. Who says the regions lack services? (CP, a comment is required on this, you can't read for free forever you know).

I was worried about the photos posted to date because they are on the old pooter, not flickr (because I once tried to set up a Picasa account, I think Picasa is like flickr, but having set the account up I failed to actually figure out how to use the flamin' thing) but the old pooter - well it's actually newer than this one - is coming soon.

How all these different hosting variations affect bandwidth usage is something else I've never been able to work out.

I like wheels and gears and ratchets and things you can see so you can figure out how they work. Bloody sad it is.

So Ms Pants will have to wait for a picture of VVB-by-the-sea. And even then she'll get a picture looking out, not in.

music from big pink

Actually, little pink. Sometime over the last decade, we stopped referring to our little fingers as...little fingers, and they became "pinkies". Little toes, I read at the weekend, are now pinkie toes.

What I want to know is why.

Similar to an ad on radio every morning as I drive to work, which says if you buy a bed from a local shop you will soon be pushing up "zees". All delivered in a perfectly standard Aussie accent.

Dog help us.

This exercise in tired reflexive anti-Americanism brought to you courtesy of VVB-by-the-sea which, because its inhabitants haven't really understood the consumer world since since the word "pinkie" was unknown in Australia, signed up for a new Tesltra broadband service at a Telstra shopfront, thus condemning us to getting our modem delivered by Australia Post who course expects us to come to the post office to collect it, which will be difficult given new workloads and so on. Because we didn't know you could go into a shop, a Harvey Norman for example which wishes to help you push up "zees", and buy a bloody modem and sign up for a bloody account and go home and get operational i-bloody-mmediately.

I wonder how we manage to get by at all, sometimes. We is out of touch, to be sure.

The next hurdle will be how to maintain access to Blogger and VVB after our e-mail address changes. I'm sure it's doable, but then I also once tried to get RSS feeds going.

That's another story.

I'd say watch this space but it'd be more realistic to suggest you go and watch grass grow.

oliver

We are in the house. The cat is settled.

I'm busier than a one-armed paperhanger.

Oliver Sudden blogging doesn't seem quite so...necessary.

I'm not sure whether this is a Good Thing or whether working an extra four hours a day is actually good for me.

the move

Is done. We are all in house, with cat.

I like looking at the sea and find myself on the balfalcony quite frequently doing just that. It's a longer hike to the shops than at Chateau VVB and it's a harder climb back up, so we won't be doing that as frequently as we useter.

Now I just have to organise my working life so I can enjoy more of VVB-by-the-sea.

a place in the sun

It's a placemarker post, as the pooter at Chateau VVB gets packed up - yes, right after these words - and will, ceteris paribus, be unpacked and unleashed at VVB-by-the-sea sometime later this week.

And as we have to negoitate a new contract for broadbandery, maybe a couple of days after that. It depends on who is around to do it, whether they have time and how access stacks up priority-wise to everything else that will need attending to.

Cripes, you accumulate a lot of shit over the years. And it's so hard to say goodbye.

But goodbye Chateau VVB, you have been our home for longer than either of us ever had a home before. We loved you (the exposed brick, the beams in the cathedral ceilings, the delightful new spots around every corner, the ups and downs, the convenience to shops and what-all, the views of the incoming storms, the fireplace on a winter night) and hated you (the leaves, the fucking leaves, in the pool, all over the roof, everywhere, the fact that you were not a low maintenance house, the bloody leaves).

VVB-by-the-sea, here we come.

A tout a l'heure, mes petits.

oh lord please don't burn us (*)

After a week when all things religious have dominated the Australian media, it's reassuring - actually no, it's more like terrifyingly bizarre - when similar themes appear elsewhere.

Even if it is Aberystwyth. And it's not quite on the same scale.

Weird.

But not as weird as this - all things are relative (ha ha), it seems. I wonder what they study at the Pontifical Gregorian University? I mean, it's not as if there have been any new discoveries, have there? The textbook is still the sdame one they had...oh, a couple of thousand years ago (or some time in between once the blokes decided it would be a spiffing way of keeping the sheilas in second place for all time).

* Oh lord please don't burn us.
.

cq skyline

The post title is the name of a song, I've linked to Halfway before and will do so again.


Because this is a picture of a CQ skyline. Nice, isn't it? As the sun sinks you get a fantastic depth and texture in the folds of the hills, with the trees and stream valleys.


Another thing I love about this new adopted home is the wide streets. On a Sunday arvo there isn't a lot of activity, although Maccas, KFC and a couple of cafes were doing good business.


But the streets stretch into the distance, and in between each street is the little back lane for the 24 door saloon.



It's very restful and settling - always a good thing with another working week in the offing. Speaking of which, I have some reading on supply chain gaps to get into.


Bonsoir.

morning has broken

So has England.

Discuss.

(he ain't heavy), he's my brother

Looks like he is heavy after all - one of the seemingly endless throng of Jensens lets loose on the Catholics.

Tell me, is at all possible to take these loonies seriously? I believe this, you believe that, they believe something else, I'm better because my belief is better than your belief and way better than their belief.

Where does the bit about Jesus's love figure in all this? Poor bloody Mary gets a hammering too, doesn't she? What did she do wrong?

Aaaaargh.

Mind you, tomorrow's letters to the editor should be enlightening.

comes a time

Here is the post that should've been 600, an article by Andrew Sullivan in the Times (via Bookforum) on the conservative response to societal breakdown.

The Chateau must be getting more centrist by the second, I broadly agree very much with Sullivan's tale. You can't go on squeezing people by giving them no alternatives to both parents working two jobs with the mother returning to work as soon as possible after a baby's birth.

Of course, in any discussion such as this you need to talk only in generalisations - there will always be individual choices and in some cases this will be two parents working regardless of any inducement that government might offer.

For others, well whether it's seen as top-down dirigisme or a "nudge", the challenge facing government is how to send a message that will, over time, change the culture.

I was taken by Sullivan's relating the squeeze - fast, widespread liberalisation of social norms in the 60s (well, it happened, you don't need to put the former Deputy PM John Anderson's particular pejorative interpretation on it) - alongside the reality of a globalised economy and how that has translated into our current working and home lives.

While my mother chose to be a stay at home mum (although she ran her own business until her marriage), I couldn't have imagined that Mrs VVB would be anything other than a working mum. Although that doesn't explain why I chose a job which then precluded her from being one, until we returned to Australia.

Individual choices. Government sends its messages, some respond, some don't, you get a sort of result. How to structure an inducement for people to have a stay-at-home parent without that inducement resulting in lots more babies. Cardinal Pell's imprecations aside (we need more white Catholics and fewer brown Muslims is what I imagine he's saying), sooner or later we are going to have to get serious about population growth.

Let's leave aside the whole "growth" model for the moment.

Providing assistance in kind would prevent inducements being misspent on plasma TVs, but would mean more public servants, or you contract private providers to help out home parents. The service society.

let's call the whole thing off

"You say tomato" and so on.

Last night I wrote: "On which thought, time for dinner. I defrosted some cooked meat, can't tell what it was so I've added some tomato paste. Works every time - I hope."

Which I did. Cooked up a little spiral pasta and poured the meat, with added tomato paste, over. The meat turned out to be a strognaoff and the addition of tomato paste definitely did not work this time.

I had it as stroganoff tonight, it was...a lot better.

And so, on which trite, domestic note, we celebrate post number 600 here at pied-a-terre VVB.

Actually, speaking of pied a terre, I'll need to brush up la francaise as I am attending a Bastille Day dinner on Saturday night. Several years of learning French at school didn't really leave me with much facility in the language as I was always too embarrassed to give it a real go when we had to speak. Teenage boys, etc, I would put it down to.

On the other hand, as soon as we got off the plane in Algiers in January 1977 there was no choice. I eventually did acquire some ability and several instances stand out in my mind. I once answered the phone at the office and, as part of the conversation, gave out our address. Our Algerian receptionist then appeared, listened to the performance and applauded.

In another example, I was in a corner shop buying some stuff when the shopkeeper asked me where I came from and guessed that I was Spanish. I was quite chuffed, at least Spain is in Europe (sort of).

The best one was trying to explain to the tellers at the bank that in Australia we have 4 codes of le football, ie we have le football (which everyone understands) and we have 3 others that Algerian bank tellers can't even imagine. Especially Aussie Rules.

speak no evil

Cardinal Pell says "it's one of the worst things that can happen to a young woman."

He meant her suicide, not her rape by a priest when she was just a little girl.

And as for the church's spokesfool who suggested that her parents stop "dwelling crankily on old wounds" : to the media training room, immediately.

Anyone who still pays obeisance to this lot of criminals needs a good firm whack to the back of the head.

And here are just the people to do it. Oh, it's them again. A broad church, you might say.

Meanwhile, some good news: the Sheffield Shield name is back. Maybe now we can see some other names reverting - Lang Park, perhaps.

I note that many of the "leftard" blogs are condemning the Government's emissions trading green paper. Must be just those of conservative disposition who can't seem to bring themselves to criticise anything their 'side' does. I do like generalisations, it makes writing ill-thought-through blog posts so much quicker.

On which thought, time for dinner. I defrosted some cooked meat, can't tell what it was so I've added some tomato paste. Works every time - I hope.

jump in my car

Just a quick post of tonight's Top Gear, which mostly examined the ability of several of British Leyland's finest products to confirm why British Leyland became a spent force so long ago.

As background, I grew up with British Leyland and its forerunner, the British Motor Corporation. We (the fambly) were the BMC agents in a NSW country town. The Mayor, a staunch conservative, was the Holden dealer. The newspaper was the Daily Liberal. The old man had different beliefs that must have seemed odd, it was only when he went to uni a few years later that he figured it all out. Get the picture?

So, Top Gear and 3 of BL's finest, all evidently Monday builds. A Triumph Dolomite Sprint. Well, I had a Dolly in Singapore, not the Sprint but a car that had been owned by the Managing Director of the BL agents there. It went better than any standard Dolly motor had any right to, it certainly had a distinctive, fast loping idle that indicated head and cam (only one) work.

It broke its timing chain about a kilometre from home after a high speed run at night down the east coast of Malaysia, Mrs VVB wide-eyed in the front and offspring numbers 1 and 2 asleep in the back. Talk about good timing - ha ha. When I came to sell it a mate from the Hash House Harriers expressed interest in it as a car for his wife, took it for a drive and came back to say it was far too powerful.

The Austin Princess? Never released in Australia although there a very few personal imports. On our first posting, to Algeria, I couldn't reconcile myself to not having my own car. Then a bloke in the UK Embassy decide to sell his Princess. I took it for a drive and was hooked: quiet, comfortable and every square inch was covered in velour. Buying it would have been a disaster because of the Algerian regulations on ownership of cars, but fortunately he decided to take it back to England before I could dothe deal.

Finally, the Top Gear fellows tested a Rover SD1. I never had one of those (but I did have a P6B). I once drove an old, bright lime green SD1. Again, covered in velour - except for all the bits that had fallen off - and as slow as a wet weekend.

Sorry, no pictures, I'd need to start a flickr account or something. Most readers won't care anyway. As for the others, they know what these beasts look like but may be interested in committing some comments about the Australian Top Gear, still to grace our screens. How could you now have presenters mimicking each of Jeremy, Hammond and Captain Slow? It's formulaic, character-driven and predictable and you'd need to replicate that model, yes?

Now, for those two others who, with me, were going to audition: who of us was going to take which part? I kind of fancy myself as a more compact Jeremy but my driving skills are more James May. Not a good mix.

magic by numbers

This fascinating article, via Bookforum, lays out in sufficient detail the inexorable desecration of supposedly impartial statistics gathering and dissemination in the US. We know a little of similar activities here - eg the usual one cited that if you work for an hour a week, you're deemed to be employed.

But it's reasonable to suppose that there are many more similar changes that have been made to our system of statistical reporting over the years. The death of a thousand cuts, you could say. Given that people put their hard-earned on the line to make investment decisions, both personal and business, on the basis of these figures you'd like to think they were reliable. However, public servants on contracts, the rise of a view that the public should support the government of the day, not be impartial, frank and fearless have put paid to all of that. It's all about the program, yes?

Maybe one of my fellow bloggers with access to the numbers and the intelligence could do the research?

Speaking of fellow bloggers, a random investigation this arvo revealed that Club Troppo - surely one of the more sane, serious yet readable blogs about - has not only redefined Chateau VVB from leftish to centrist, but I'm now a "long time blogger" as well. I feel all kind of...funky.
The centrist tag sits well. Since I first heard the term - in 1983 - I've considered myself "wishy-washy left" but my views were perhaps polarised by John Howard's unique view of how government should work, and what his in particular should do to Australians. Without a doubt the nastiest cabal of immoral arseholes you could imagine, they did their very best for over a decade.

Kevin 07 was a very good year. The machine might be looking a little brittle at the moment - and could certainly do without the daily help of the Milnes and other idiot commentators who never miss a chance to examine, or more likely concoct, some imaginary fault - but they'll come good and they certainly won't be worse than what we just disposed. Of.

But I believe, Howard and Co aside, that the Chateau reserves a slightly more sceptical view of what is (a) desirable and (b) achievable, and neither 'side' of politics has a mortgage on it here in Godzone.

And, gven that we are now a "great southern land of the Holy Spirit" - well, except for here in Squat VVB, I must say - we seem to be Godzone.

Look out.

revelation

I came to this article about the Book of Revelations and end-times enthusiasts in the Guardian expecting a trite put-down of believers and some smart-arse commentary on the final book of the Bible.

I did get a 'hook' for something that I was planning to write on another matter entirely:

"Furthermore, the mind is capable of artful compartmentalisations..."

But moreso, I found the article quite entrancing and well argued. As an avowedly secular household - well, bits of it - Chateau VVB has a popular, but unfortunately rather shallow scientific interest (as it might be described) in those who have deep beliefs and also in how books like the Bible come about, and come about their power. Maybe those bits of the Chateau should devote more time to reading and research, and less to ill-considered blogs. But that's one for another time.

There were a few bits of the article that really grabbed my attention. I particularly liked this bit:

"For many millennial dispensationalists, international peacemakers, who risk delaying the final struggle by sowing concord among nations - the United Nations, along with the World Council of Churches - have been seen as Satanic forces."

Which struck me as grasping at straws to express a political or ideological conviction rather than a religious one.

I liked the story of the Millerites - calculated the day the world would end and Jesus would return, it didn't happen, they cried for a bit and then an outside-the-square thinker amongst them decided that Jesus had returned, he simply was up in the sky somewhere. Problem solved.

And this, again reflecting what appears to be a group using religious imagery as cover for a political outcome:

"And so it came about that a cattle-breeding operation emerges in Israel with the help of Texan Christian fundamentalist ranchers to promote the birth of the perfect, unspotted red calf, and thereby, we have to assume, bring the end days a little closer."

Actually the article deserves far better than this random mud-slinging. It's undoubtedly so that end-timers will always be amongst us...until the end times. The references to Nazism, Marxism and the close brush with mortality that was the Cuban showdown between Kruschev and Kennedy - the author's comment that this incident has passed from general memory is telling. I can remember it, although being only 11 at the time and living in a country town, its importance eluded me.

So I'd be interested in what people have to say.

The compartmentalising comment I was going make was that many of us, if not most of us, have to compartentalise in order to get through, in particular, our working days.

So, for someone who has been working in economic development for quite some years now, I should be 100% behind the globalisation 'experiment' and all that goes with it.

But alas when I read in the Business Review Weekly that businesses should take advantage of the casualisation of the workforce in order to reduce their costs, I see red. Particularly when the way it is portrayed, it looks like casualisation occurred because, perhaps, workers demanded it: "For example, the casualisation of the workforce has created opportunities for managers to align their wage costs with revenue".

What, this had nothing to do with business lobbying government to change ("free up") labour market regulations? It happened all by itself? I have no doubt that some people like casual work, but the idea that thousands of people with mortgages and families would voluntarily trade security of income for - a freer lifestyle? - just defies commonsense.

Alright, it's just a magazine with deadlines rather than a considered journal, but the message is pretty clear: screw your staff and then, just when they think you're finished, do it again.

So, that's what I was originally going to write - albeit briefly - about. But the roads we follow to get where we were going are far more interesting.

The journey is the destination, yes?

my name is

Hours of fun, more bogan names for you.

When in doubt, double the letters.

Pphhiill.

That's got a ring to it.

cuts like a knife

It does.

I've noted before the increasing use of knives in street violence. It's not as bad in Australia as the story indicates it is in the UK, but we seem to have the same trend happening.

Quite a long time ago offspring no 1 told me that it was quite usual for kids to be carrying knives in the centre of Canberra on a Saturday night, so it may have been going on for a while.

I don't have a feel for why it has come about - whether it's an increase in violence in general or whether this is a trend within similar amounts of street violence.

Certainly as I get older I feel increasingly vulnerable when I'm out at night, to the extent that often I won't go.

Video violence? A generation of poor parents, inadequately brought up by their own parents and unable to pass on notions of what passes for responsible society? Are we about to return to a more authoritarian, unquestioning type of society? I noticed the comments about army service made by some of those interviewed. I've always seen this as a simplistic answer, but hyou always have to question. Does it have some validity?

walk my way

"Siobhan Moylan is a journalist with the ABC".

The ABC would be the televison broadcaster which tonight used the word "sidewalk" in one of its news stories.

You know what I was like? I was, like, you know, appalled.

say my name

I saw part of the 7.30 Report interview with George Pell. He kept talking about a "Jones." What does it say about Archbishop Pell that he can't use the simple honoric "Mr" or the full name, ie including first (or "Christian") name.

He sounded like he was talking about some kind of peasant underclass.

Oh...

here it comes again

Here's a brilliant - sort of - little article on catchphrases, how come into being, grow, mutate and either die or become part of the furniture. Courtesy of Bookforum which also regrettably threw up a couple of links I would have loved to follow but which drew the attention of the Unsuitable Site: Access Denied filter. Oh to be on my own ISP again - soon.

I know Mark Lawrencewill like it.

I was particularly taken that it covers a couple of currently most infuriating sayings: "my bad" and "teh" which has infested the blogosphere - or at least the left hand part I think - like a virus.

"My bad", a particularly obnoxious saying that, as the article says, trivialises its very meaning, is everywhere now. I blame commercial radio for importing most of the neologisms up with which we are forced to put - as it were. The usually sloping foreheaded types who make up the frontpersons of commercial radio depend on being "hip" and "with it"...hmmm, those are both a bit passe, no?

Anyway, for those of you who enjoy words - enjoy.