All my attempts to abdicate responsibility for life direction have failed today; I may be forced to to make my own decisions.
Archive for March, 2006
Don’t think
14 Mar 2006I find myself constantly infuriated by, but unable to stop reading, the Herald’s Sam and the City blog . . . to the extent that I’ve had email wars with Sam after she refused to publish one of my more outraged replies.
In today’s post, Sam quotes Doing it Down Under by Juliet Richters and Chris Rissel and claims that men have an average of 17 partners in their lifetimes while women have around seven. Given the numbers of women and men in Australia are roughly equal, how is this possible? So I posted:
Isn’t anyone else suspicious about the maths here? If men are having 17 partners and women only 7, who are men having the other 10 relationships with? Other men?
Nanny state
12 Mar 2006The nanny state is alive and sticking the boot into those hard-working, misunderstood folk in the advertising industry. The Sun Herald tells glowingly how the Advertising Standards Bureau received a record number of complaints about ads last month because ordinary, decent Aussie types are sick of all the dross they see on TV and aren’t afraid to say so. Viva people power.
But of the gazillions of complaints received, only three were upheld and the advertisers forced to do something about it. Two were ads for tasteless mobile phone wallpaper: one featuring some raunchy girl-girl action and the other encouraging parents to “smack the shit out of your children”. In their defence, the advertisers said:
The ad was published with sensitivity to the relevant audience, who in this case are intelligent and affluent women.
Uhuh. The audience in this case being readers of No Idea. Affluent, perhaps, but tens of thousands more of these apparently intelligent women bought a copy of the mag when it ran the sensationalist and misleading coverline “Bec packs her bags” implying the Hewitt-Cartwright monstrosity might be on the rocks (maybe because Lleyton was off playing golf with Pat Rafter instead of attending a maternal health check with Bec). Mensa better start printing some more application forms.
Evil twin
10 Mar 2006This guy I know, Dan, wrote an article where he used the power of the worldwide interweb to track down people who have the same name as him. Ugh, so ten years ago. Or at least that’s when I discovered my doppelgänger, a bloke who lived in Cleveland (and now San Francisco) and writes software for BSD. Nerd. And we don’t look alike. Or get along very well. We tried, by email, a couple of times, but the name appears to be the only thing we have in common. I didn’t even use Google to find him, cos, you know, Google wasn’t invented yet.
The annoying thing about this is when I go ego-surfing, the results that are actually about the real me are interspersed with unsightly links to my evil twin and his boring, boring life. (This of course refers to my real name. A vealmince ego surf only comes up with things I’ve said, which was the idea behind choosing the name in the first place.)
I remember there being a point to all this, but at the moment I’m just annoyed at Dan for giving neurotic Jewish men a bad name. We’re not all Woody Allen clones.
Transcendental, man
6 Mar 2006Had a total Koyaanisqatsi moment this evening on the way home waiting to cross King St from the station and watching a 747 bumble towards the runway passing the dark grey clouds seared red along the underside by the setting sun. It didn’t hurt that I was actually listening to the Naqoyqatsi soundtrack at the time, of course.
I remember once during a boring university lecture, the morning after having seen Koyaanisqatsi the night before, having first utilised the necessary mood-altering organic substances, having a minor epiphany about the movie.
There are natural shapes, it tells us, and there are human shapes, each instantly recognisable from the micro to the macroscopic. But within the human shapes there are natural shapes: waves of cars slowing down and speeding up in traffic; the busy escalator that resembles a waterfall. But most interestingly, human shapes become natural shapes through the process of destruction: the modernist nightmare Pruitt-Igoe public housing development that turns into a wobbly building-shaped cloud as it collapses; the atomic bomb.
Cheaper porn
6 Mar 2006Look, I know I’ve previously painted the Nationals as whingeing, handouts-addicted communist dinosaurs. But to be not entirely unfair, people in the country are among the most vulnerable when it comes to Corporate Greed vs The Little Guy. And the main point of regulation is a mechanism to balance when the free market doesn’t deliver social equity. Well, that’s the point of regulation in my little fantasy world, anyway.
It’s all a question of what you define as equitable, innit? I don’t believe there are great social justice issues involved that justify me being forced to pay higher prices for my internet connection in order to give people in Gilgandra and Yarloop cheaper broadband so they can download porn faster. But that’s just me.
So perhaps it’s worth listening when country types start complaining that relaxing the media ownership laws could well result in some regions being dominated by a single owner (there’s an older article from The Age or here in the Financial Review, if you have a subscription).
Ripped off
3 Mar 2006Have been too busy lately living life to write about it (cliché time) but a thought occured to me. I finally realised why I hate online dating websites. They are exactly life self-help books.
They make money by preying on your insecurities. You are wonderful, of course: look at all these hobbies you have and witty things you write when you fill in the profile. But you have a PROBLEM: you are single. It’s a BIG PROBLEM: you are lonely and your friends have partners and you have to stimulate your own genitals. But THIS website — with its handy 10-commandments guides to writing the best profile and finding a date and posting the ideal photo — can solve your problem. For a mere US$40 a month.
Yet, like self-help books, the best customers for online dating sites are repeat customers. In my experience of the things, there’s a constant flow of new people coming through and either pairing off or getting sick of it, but there’s also a core of regulars who sign up for the long-term deal and visit every day.
Isn’t the purpose of these things to get you married off and having kiddies or at least shagging someone on a semi-regular basis? Or is it to keep you strung out on false hopes and spririt-crushing rejections to make money? An online business that aims to make money, who’d have thunk it?
