It's just not right.

Number one son, who's 12 and about to start secondary school is about to embark on a huge life-changing event. No, I don't mean puberty, it's bigger than that. He's going to switch his football allegiance.

(Those of you who are in Ukraine, Texas or Queensland will have to stop reading now because none of this will make any sense to you.)

There's a pretty decent rule of thumb that says that after the age of 10 you can't change teams. There's a few exceptions: if you move cities you can change, or if you are severely mentally disturbed you can (my cousin, for example, went from being a life-long Melbourne supporter to being a rabid Collingwood supporter at the age of about 40. But that just shows you how unbalanced he is).

So Number One Son really should stick with his current choice. But after a fair amount of soul-searching on my part I've worked out that he gets a dispensation from the rule. We were living in London when he decided to go for Brisbane and so I think he can be excused on the grounds of poor information. Unless you're in Melbourne you can't possibly know enough about the teams and, more importantly, the cultural stereotypes around their supporters to make an informed choice. (Pies fans don't have their own teeth, Demons supporters live in map59 and go to Falls Creek, Dogs supporters are pessimistic and long-suffering, St Kilda supporters don't really follow football at all, and so on..)

On the weekend he said he was going to go for Hawthorn. I suspect this was just done for effect because he knows how I feel about the Hawks, but I did point out to him that if he goes to Scotch AND barracks for Hawthorn he'll be a walking stereotype and everyone's going to hate him.

Mad

Quote of the day (so far): Number 2 son's face suddenly lit up, and apropos of nothing in particular, he said "And I got a new cricket helmet, from Santa. It's mad!"

Which I like because 2) he doesn't believe in Santa, and 2) the way he suddenly came out with it and started the sentence with "and" made it sound like we'd stumbled midway into some private conversation.

Death

I was chatting with an acquaintance earlier today and whingeing (as I do) about how I don't know anyone in Melbourne and how my entire life is ruined for ever because I have to stop going out for a couple of nights in a row, and I wondered out loud whether there were any parties that would be fun to go to (he's someone who would know).

He was quite firm in his response. "Nobody will hold a party in January. Having one before February is social death".

So there!

More Melbourne

This morning, my ex (no, not A. I mean my ex-wife, the mother of my children) asked me if I could do her a favor. She wanted me to go to Philippa's for her, to pick up a few things. Now, going to Philippa's mid-morning on Christmas eve is non-trivial (I know this because I had been there earlier in the morning on an unrelated mission). The parking situation on High Street is dreadful, then when you get into the shop itself it's mostly full of braying yummy-mummies each of whom wants something special, with a smattering of clueless dithering husbands. I'm not a ditherer there, by the way. I go in very purposefully.

So as I was considering this request I was thinking it'd take a short but nasty drive in thick traffic, ten to fifteen minutes to find a park, then a fair amount of aggravation in the shop itself.

So I said "Yes". Because, I quite literally have nothing better to do.

Xmas parties, and my annual morose whinge about being in Melbourne.

It's official: the next person who whinges to me about how tired they are of going out to all these christmas parties - the 'silly season' - is going to be thumped.

Why? I hardly go to any, unless you count a tepid booze-up with a law firm or an insurance company. So don't go complaining to me about how dreary these parties all with all the PR people are, or advertising, or even consulting. It could be much worse.

On a procedural note it's that time of year, so here's my annual existential misery rant. I'll summarise this time, it's quicker and it's all ground I've been over with you.

1. I have two lives (yes, only two now, settle down). In Sydney I'm a man-about-town; in Melbourne I'm a father-of-four. The separation works nicely.
2. It breaks down when I'm in Melbourne with time on my hands, as I am now
   
3. I don't live in Melbourne, so I'm effectively homeless when I'm here
4. I don't have many friends in Melbourne
   
5. The few friends I do have here don't appear to like me at all

So I can't stay home and relax because I have no home. And I can't go out because everyone hates me. Or they might as well. If this year follows the usual pattern, by the day after christmas I'll be sitting in a car in the parking lot at the 7-11 on the corner of Springvale Rd and Blackburn Rd with a slurpee in my hand, banging my head against the steering wheel and wondering where it all went wrong .

Which of course is ridiculous - my life at the moment is a thing of great beauty and joy. It's just being here in Melbourne that sets me off.

Spam Poem

I was checking the spam file on my gmail account and I noticed some very evocative headers. I can't resist it, I'm making them into a poem. Be grateful it's not interpretative dance.

I need you urgently

We have you been, honey?
Don't reject my calls!
I'm in trouble, where are you?
I had to stop after 8 inches

Why did you leave me?
I don't know where you are
We need you here, now!
I lost your cell number

Dont go home now!
Let's meet as usually
Have you changed your number?
It's cold, don't keep me waiting

I need you urgently

Cars of Glen Waverley

The suburb my mother lives in in Melbourne used to be a very anglo-celtic whitebread suburb but in the last generation it's become a favored destination for middle-class chinese (for those who don't know, 25% of Australians were born elsewhere, and if you include people who have an overseas-born parent it's over 50%). What does this mean for the neighborhood? A couple of things. For a start, the high school, which was a mediocre suburban high school when I was there a thousand years ago is now one of the best in the state and is the biggest feeder school to Monash University (when I was there they thought I was strange, and they used to throw things at me). And, of course, the culinary landscape has changed a lot. The local dining scene is incredibly competitive and fad-driven and generally excellent - for some types of super-authentic Asian foods its the middle-class suburbs on the far fringes of the city that really produce the goods. The New Territories.

But what I love most is the cars. The picure above is a good example. Notice the cartoon characters everywhere? This car also had a tissue box in the back, for extra points.

BBQ me

Me in very uncharacteristic pose: outdoors with a beer in hand. Having said that, I've been a bit of a lush lately. Four beers last Wednesday night (but I was out with a headhunter!) and three last night.

As for the outdoorsy thing, I've resolved that this summer I'll go to the beach. I seem to be the only person in Sydney who doesn't and they can't all be wrong. It's just that it's a bit hot and sandy and boring.

Counting

When I see Quentin, my personal trainer, he pushes me hard. He makes me do things that are difficult, things I wouldn't do if it were just me. And he encourages me; half-way through a set, for example, he'll say "strong" and I'm never sure whether it's a command or an observation, either way it seems to have some effect.

One thing in particular used to nearly drive me crazy. If I'm doing, for example, 12 shoulder raises and there's a fair amount of weight so that I'm struggling, he'll as often as not do some helpful subtraction for me. So that when I get to ten, he'll helpfully say "two more". Now the first few times this happened I found it difficult not to be offended. I know that twelve minus ten is two, and because I'm so acutely defensive (I'm the sort of person who automatically thinks that unsolicited advice is criticism) I found it hard to resist the notion that somehow he thought that I couldn't do even basic arithmetic.

But, you know what? It actually does help.

"... meat fall"

There was a headline in one of the papers late last week which caught my eye. The article turned out to be about a compensation settlement in an industrial accident. Nothing special about the article, but the headline's superb:

"Payout in meat fall"

"..Nation's worst job"

For serious news it's hard to go past The Onion:"Black Man given nation's worst job"

I was at function here in Sydney organised by Democrats Abroad, and during the McCain and Obama speeches I was right at the front, up by the giant video screen. There were photographers there and I'm desperately hoping that in today's paper there'll be a big photo with a caption "Emotional American expats watch acceptance speech" but it'll be me. I was, however, looking American, with a decent haircut and a Brooks Bros shirt. As usual.

Overheard

At the Under-11s cricket this morning, someone shouted out "Who put pretzels in my pants?". And it wasn't me.

Jamie does what?

You'd think that with this financial crisis - and the talk about him being the next Secretary of the Treasury - that Jamie Dimon would be a busy man. (For those of you hand-knitting organic yoghurt as you read this, he's the CEO of JPMorgan Chase). But, at least according to the Telegraph, he's got time on his hands.

Headline reads "JP Morgan Chase chief Dimon sent death threats". I was afraid to read the article. He's supposed to be saving the world's financial system, not sending nasty notes to people.

Helen from Hurstville

There's a daily giveaway newspaper here, the Mx, and if I get the train home from work I often grab a copy to read. My train journey is one stop, it takes about two minutes, but that's usually enough.

There's a letter in there today, from Helen, who (if she exists) lives in Hurstville. That's a suburb of Sydney that's about as appealing as it sounds. She writes:

VOTERS don't care who former Secretary of State Colin Powell is going to vote for, or who former Secretary of State Colin Powell thinks voters should vote for. Voters choose who they want, not who former Secretary of State Colin Powell wants them to vote for. That type of pressuring should be illegal.

I'm trying to put myself in her shoes here, and it's not easy. Let's assume this is a real mail from a real person - Helen, who lives in Hurstville. As opposed to a university student with too much time on his hands. Somehow she's managed to get very upset about Colin Powell endorsing Obama, and I do notice that each of the three times she mentions Powell she calls him 'former Secretary of State Colin Powell', which is nice, at least. If a little clumsy.

She starts with "Voters don't care..", and then there's "voters choose...". By which I'm guessing she means that she doesn't care, and she's happy to generalise from there. (But of course the whole point is that she does care, otherwise she wouldn't be writing this, surely.) And which voters is she talking about exactly? The ones in her street? Other people stuck in Hurstville? More worryingly, is she under the impression that she and her neighbors are going to be voting in the US Presidential Election?

And then the final desperate flourish. "That type of pressuring should be illegal." She's seen a 15-second thing on the TV news about Powell endorsing Obama and she's feeling like she's being pressured. (I'm discounting here the possibility that Powell showed up at her house and kept badgering her about her voting intentions in some inappropriate way.)

Speaking of the US Presidential election, my sons will both be eligible to vote in 8 years time. So look out.

Nothing

There's a horrifying interview with Levi Johnston (father of Bristol Palin's daughter). First the good bit. He talks about the pressure of appearing at the republican convention, and says

"At first, I was nervous," he said. "Then I was like, ' Whatever'."

This is brilliant, of course. Superb use of 'whatever'. But then the bad bit. They ask him about Barack Obama. He says...

"I don't know anything about him. He seems like a good guy. I like him."

Yes, read it again, carefully. He doesn't know anything about Barack Obama.

Croc

Great headline in the Australian today "Human remains inside crocodile". Well he would, wouldn't he?

Bailout

There's an article in today's NYT about how the bailout's shifting towards direct capital injections into banks. So far so good, and it is interesting how the focus of the bailout has changed over the last week or so. It's a nice, lucid overview piece. And then it has this...

"Industry executives .... also begged Mr. Paulson not to impose tough restrictions on executive pay and golden-parachute deals for executives who are fired." Well they would, wouldn't they?

Your

I was browing some profiles on a personals site - purely for research purposes - and I found a real gem. A woman goes on and on about the sort of man she wants and then she finishes off with:

IF YOU FIND YOURSELF BLOCKED ITS NOT MY FAULT YOUR ILLITERATE

Their fault

There's been an interesting theme in The Australian the last couple of days. Bit of background: the government (it's since lost power) changed the tax laws so that there was a window of opportunity where people who were cashed-up could put unusually large amounts of money into superannuation schemes (like a pension, or a 401k). It was a one-time deal, a temporary increase in the amount of money that could be put aside in a tax-efficient way.

Many people did this, and if I had had a decent amount of cash I would have too. Between April and June last year people put $15billion aside like this. Of course, with the benefit of hindsight this probably wasn't a great time to put money into the market. But that's only with the benefit of hindsight - at the time it seemed like a good idea, especially because everyone else was.

So what's happened? Well, the market's gone down. It does that - it goes up sometimes, it goes down sometimes. In today's Australian, on page 2, there's an interview with a bloke who put $900,000 aside in this fashion. He's lost just over a quarter of it, which isn't that unusual.

What I love about this is that he's blaming the government for giving him the tax incentives in the first place. "Mark Amdur.. was among the thousands of Australians who ploughed $15billion into superannuation between April and June last year to reap the Howard government's generous tax concessions" (I query the use of 'reap' here, but that's a separate issue.)

He goes on to say "I took advantage of the tax concession, realising it was a one-off thing, a sop to the electorate before the 2007 election. I've since lost a bit of money but that's the way it goes... the market's down, everyone's down."

No, of course I'm making that up. The interviewer says (and I so wish this was a direct quote) that he said he thought it was what the government wanted him to do. So in other words, he wasn't doing it because he thought he could make money by squirreling away assets in a favorable tax environment, he was doing it because the government wanted him to. And now that it's all gone a bit wrong, it's their fault for leading him on.

So there. I don't want to sound mean, and I have a great deal of sympathy for people like Mr Amdur. I've lost money too, and I don't like it either. But I'm not going to blame it on voices in my head.

You put what in what?

Another kitchen-related whinge. I was making breakfast this morning for my kids, cooking up porridge (or oatmeal, if you prefer). Number 2 son was having cereal, which he was going to follow up with a bowl of porridge. He takes after me.

The porridge smelled a little strange. I'd noticed this at one point last week, I thought it had smelled a bit fishy; number 2 son differed, he thought it was chicken-y. This happened two days in a row, then I noticed the oatmeal was about a year past its use-by date and I threw it out and bought some new stuff. I appreciate that oatmeal might get stale, but how would it get fishy? A mystery. All was fine for a few days.

Then this morning I went to the supermarket early with number 2 daughter, we'd run out of milk. I sent her to get it while I bought some fruit. I noticed that she'd come back with what was advertised as "kids' milk", which, judging from the label is regular milk that's been boosted with omega-3. I didn't care.

So this morning I noticed a vaguely fishy smell to the porridge as I was cooking it. Then number 2 said his cereal tasted strange. Then I realised. They had put fish-oil in the f&*cking milk.

Toaster

I'm staying in my ex-wife's house this week and I'm going to have a whinge about the toaster. Yes, that's what I'm reduced to. I know you're doing that rolling-your-eyes thing but bear with me.

We got this toaster as a wedding present (I think) which is fine. You'll notice it's quite wide (or maybe long, depending on how you look at it). It's quite a lot wider than, say, a slice of bread. So it looks as though it was designed to toast two slices of bread at once. NO! It's not quite wide enough. If you put two normal-sized slices of bread in it they jam together in the middle, and when you push the lever thingy to make then go down they get all jammed together in a very disagreeable way.

When I use it, I try to imagine what the process was like for designing it. Did they deliberately create a toaster that was designed to toast something that's long, but not quite as long as two slices of bread placed next to each other? What would that thing be? And why not give it, say, an extra inch of width while they were at it? In my mind's eye I see a meeting at the toaster company, the young edgy guys from design are showing off this new model that's designed to toast longer bread, and some been-around-the-traps executive (in my revisionist toaster fantasy it's ME) waves his hands to shut them up and tells them to lengthen it just a little bit more. They're struck dumb, his wisdom is so obvious, so humbling.

Or maybe it wasn't like that at all. More likely it was just all a bit haphazard, the toaster's an evolutionary backwater. On the other hand the toaster's worked fine for 14 years, which is longer than the marriage.

Beer

You'll thank me for this later, I know. I discovered today that if you have a beer that doesn't have a twist-top (and the Peroni pictured here is a perfect example, given that it's exactly the beer I had in my hand when I made this discovery) and you can't find a bottle-opener, you can use a kickstand from a kids' bicycle.

Perfect!

Bad analogies

I was browsing on snopes, and there was a thing that went around which was allegedly a collection of really bad analogies and metaphors taken from high school essays. (Of course, it was nothing of the sort, they were all from the Washington Post, where they were part of a contest. They were deliberately bad.) Some of these were really good:

The revelation that his marriage of 30 years had disintegrated because of his wife's infidelity came as a rude shock, like a surcharge on a formerly surcharge-free ATM.

McBride fell 12 stories, hitting the sidewalk like a hefty bag filled with soup.

He was lame as a duck. Not the metaphorical lame duck either, but a duck that was actually lame, maybe from stepping on a landmine or something.

New favorite

I have a new favorite website. Have a look.
PassiveAggressiveNotes.

Too good to check

From Crikey.com.au, in the letters and comments:

"Geoff Russell, Animal Liberation SA, writes: There is an interesting statistic that is relevant to both the Garnaut report and climate change. It comes from a large European cancer and nutrition study group of about 60,000 meat eaters, vegans and vegetarians in the UK --- 41% of vegans are single, compared with 13% of meat eaters and 25% of vegetarians."

Sitcom

In Crikey, Guy Rundle describes some especially insipid music as being "..like.. the theme to a cancelled sitcom". I love it.

Crisis

Korea isn't suffering a Financial Crisis, Vice Finance Minister Kim says <-- great headline on bloomberg yesterday.

Cheap

I'm watching 'Four Corners' - a current affairs show on our state-owned broadcaster - and the story this week is that the two big supermarket chains here in Australia are using their buying power to strike aggressive bargains with their suppliers, which they then pass on to consumers. I know, I'm as horrified by this as you are.

They found a guy who owns a company that makes ice-cream, and he said that he buys the milk that goes into the ice-cream from the supermarket at retail price, because if he asks the dairy companies for a wholesale price it's higher. So to source this crucial raw ingredient he drives to the supermarket, buys milk and saves about 30%. And he was whingeing about it.

Naive.

I was having dinner tonight in the local Japanese (actually Korean) noodle place when I overheard a conversation that I just have to share.

A young man and a young woman, mid20s, by the look of them. Not a date, maybe just friends. He started telling her that he'd been to see some sort of therapist about his allergies, and went on to describe how they put a vial containing a possible antagonist in your hand, then see whether you can generate any force with your arm (they push down on your arm gently, you resist). The idea is that if the vial contains something you're allergic to, you won't have the strength. They do this over and over again with different allergens.

He said to her that they'd told him this was because the electromagnetic field of the allergen interfered with the electromagnetic field of the body (which seemed to him to be entirely reasonable, I guess).

They'd tested the things he knew he was allergic to, and sure enough he was indeed allergic to pollen and dog hair. But then, he told her, they had tested for other things and it turned out he was allergic to things he didn't even know he was allergic to! And even better, not only could they cure the allergies he knew he had, they could also cure these extra ones! And only $85 each!

There's something almost touching about this sort of naivite. He didn't stop and think "hang on.. this guy's in the business of selling allergy 'cures', so it's in his interest to diagnose lots and lots of allergies". And before you jump in, yes, I'm sure your cousin Vicky was cured like this and has never looked back.

He said that part of the cure involved being hooked up to a machine (which, I can imagine had a few dials and stuff, probably a couple of LEDs too) which did something that neutralized the electromagnetic field. And then, no more asthma, no more hay fever. And no more of those allergies he didn't even know he had.

Flooded

A little thing in the Australian on Friday caught my eye, and before you ask, no I won't provide a link. Two reasons. 1) I'm lazy, and 2) the Oz is strangely hard to search.

Page 5. An article's first sentence is "The Department of Immigration has been flooded with 85 applications from World Youth Day pilgrims seeking to remain in Australia - and that number is predicted to rise."

How's that flooded, exactly? Is 85 more than expected? Clearly the sub-editors at the Oz want us to feel like it's a lot. If all we have is the number - 85 - then you could just as easily write "Only 85 of the hundreds of thousands of pilgrims have applied to stay in Australia, relieved Immigration officials say."

If this keeps up, I'll have to go back to the Fairfax press.

Less is more.

There was a thing in the Australian on Friday that was mind-numbingly stupid, and I just have to share it with you.

It starts out by saying that the share of the nation's wealth held by older people has increased. Which you'd expect. Then it says..

However the escalation in the share of wealth of older Australians has offset a falling share held by their younger counterparts.

Err.. if the share held by older people has gone up, then the share held by younger people would have gone down. There's no 'however' about it.

More Olympics

Useful rule: Any sport where people wear makeup isn't really a sport.

Medal Tally

I've not been following the Olympics much - I'm interested, but not that interested, and I'm a little uneasy about the way that the coverage we get here assumes that we're only interested in the Australian competitors. Now I don't want to sound too effete and metropolitan here - and I especially don't want to sound un-Australian - but I can't help thinking there are other great stories, some raw human drama, in the Games that doesn't necessarily involve Grant Hackett or Stephanie Rice.

I was looking in the paper today and I caught sight of the Medal Tally. There's two ways to represent this. You can say that what matters is the total number of medals that have been won (Gold = Silver = Bronze = A Medal), or you can do it by ranking the countries by the number of Gold Medals won, and using Silver and then Bronze as a tie-breaker. The second method makes a lot more sense to me. I mean, when we talk about Michael Phelps we say he won 8 Gold Medals in this olympics, not that he won 8 Medals. Had he won silver in that one where the other guy got really close it would have changed the story completely.

Of course I'm sensitive to the argument that this sort of strict ranking implies that a Gold is worth more than any number of Silvers. And you could conceivably work out some sort of exchange rate to allow for that (5 Bronze = Silver, 5 Silver = Gold) but we'd all have different ones, and it'd be just arbitrary.

Anyway, I was looking at the medal tally today and I was shocked and dismayed to see that Great Britain is ahead of Australia. Yes, you read that right. Great Britain. I don't begrudge them this, I'm just a little surprised. China, yes. US, yes. But Britain? If they had medals for comedy, littering, drinking, vomiting, being cross and looking sick I could understand it.

Top Model

I was glancing through the TV listings for the weekend (I'm with my kids, I need television. Color and movement distracts them). The blurb for 'America's Next Top Model' says, in its entirety:

A contortionist teaches the models how to strike extreme poses, which they later use in a circus-themed photo shoot. Back at the house, gossip leaves one girl in tears.

Bingo!

You know I always love it when people stumble upon this blog because of some random search in google. Some of my favorites have been...

- Chunky and muscly
- crisis how to kill the last monster
- my lovely older lady
- very refined place to live
- deborah hutton ruined
- dry cleaner wonthaggi

And of course I get lots of hits when anyone googles 'lawyer by day, bacardi by night', and you'd be amazed at how often people do google that. Or maybe not. I was.

Today, someone found this by googling 'i hate myself mid life crisis'. I wonder if it made it worse?

House of Meetings

I finally got around to reading a couple of the novels that have piled up on my bookshelf. I buy them because I think I'm a reader, but then, in the cold hard light of day I realise that there are many other things I prefer doing with my spare time - piano, sleeping, daydreaming, reading magazines... I like the idea of books, and I really like that feeling of having read something. I love talking about books. This last one particular, it makes me feel cultured and sexy. Which, as many of you know, I'm not.

I read "Salmon farming in the Yemen", which was much lighter than I had expected. And all the better for it. I identified strongly with the emotionally-repressed protagonist (he's like me, but a bit fishy) and I especially loved some of the language that was used to describe the riverbanks in scotland. His wife was hilarious.

Then I waded through "House of Meetings". There are some things I really love about Martin Amis. Give us some examples, I can hear you cry. Ok.. This one from "Night Train", not a great book, but it has this bit about our heroine:

"I was a bad drunk too, the worst, like seven terrible dwarves rolled into one and wedged into a leather jacket and tight black jeans: shouty, rowdy, sloppy, sleazy, nasty, weepy, and horny."

And in "The Information", there's a passage where he talks about domestic servants, maids, who've arrived as though in crates from Vientianne and Bogota, with names like Ming and Atrocia. Atrocia??!!?? I liked it so much I almost persuaded my best friend to name his daughter that.

But the other thing I really remember about The Information was that towards the end I just couldn't care less what happened, I'd lost interest. I didn't care about the characters and the story was... well, I don't know. Have you read The Information? What did happen in the last chapter? I read it, but I couldn't tell. The language is fizzing all over the page, as it does, and it all seems terribly significant but you can't actually figure out what's happening. I still have no idea. And I don't care much.

I got to within about 20 pages of the end of 'House of Meetings' and realised that I'd lost interest. And I'm quite strict when it gets like that. I just put it down.

Music

There was a staggeringly funny article in this morning's SMH (a surprise really), about how you can use teenagers' musical tastes as a useful diagnostic tool for mental illness or various forms of social dysfunction.

Music style......Associated Behavior
---------------------------------------
Pop................Struggle with sexual identity
Jazz...............Misfits, loners
Rap, Metal.......Unprotected sex, drink-driving
French Rap.......Theft, violence and drug abuse

I especially liked the one about pop. Kylie fans?

Then they found someone who disagreed, and said "The key to understanding any teenager is to treat them with respect by listening to what they have to say, rather than typecasting them according to the type of music they listen to". Which is, of course, sensible, but does also rather take the fun out of it. I'm off to listen to some French Rap, really loud.

The A-word

I went down for coffee this morning at my usual place, the nice cafe downstairs in my building. The nice italian girl (who lives on my floor) was making the coffees, as she has been for a year or so. Very good coffee too. As she handed it to me, she said "there you are, Andrew". Andrew? What does she know? Those of you who know me well will remember that the name has a particular resonance for me. And there are, in fact, a number of people in Sydney who knew me as 'Andrew'. But her?

Dinner. Friend.

I was supposed to go visit my friend Ian tonght for a couple of beers and a wide-ranging discussion about everything, but I'm feeling a little under-the-weather and decided to stay home. An early night. I have a sore throat and a mild cold. And am generally a bit miserable.

I decided that what I really needed was a laksa, and as luck would have it there's a very good little malaysian place near me. I went there looking superbly sporty in my tracksuit pants and fleece (not, I hasten to add, a bogan tuxedo, but close).

I went in, they showed me to a table, I sat down and ordered immediately. "A chicken laksa", I said to the waitress. "Anything else..?" she asked, in a way that seemed to me to suggest that I really should be spending more than $10. I'm normally pretty immune to that sort of thing (or maybe I'm just imagining it - you know how over-sensitive I am in restaurants) but I did want something else.

"Belachan kangkong, if you have it".

She looked at me as though I'd suggested she lie down on a linoleum floor naked while I rolled hard-boiled eggs at her. I said it again slowly and tentatively, "Belachan kangkong". She stood there, mystified. I grabbed the menu from her and pointed, by which time the proprieteress had joined us. I jabbed at the menu with my finger "there.. belachan kangkong.." They looked at each other. "Belachan kangkong", they repeated to each other in surprised tones, and it sounded exactly the way I'd said it first.

And before you start, Malay's not tonal. So let's not do that whole blame-the-victim thing.

Anyway. They brought it all out and it was superb. Then, as I was paying the bill I chatted a little with the proprieteress, a middle-aged cheerful chinese woman.

Her: "Did you enjoy your meal?"
Me: "Yes, very much indeed.. just what I needed"
Her: "You are all alone tonight, where's your friend?"

I've been there maybe five times over the last year, and always alone. Which friend? Or was it a metaphysical question?

I hate myself for this (and you will too)

I was at the gym the other morning, and as always at the gym I wasn't looking very fabulous. Scuzzy shorts and tshirt, I'm not really a gym-bunny. I got on one of the elliptical trainer machines and started off. It asks you what sort of program you want, how long for, your age and your weight. I'm used to all that.

On the machine next to me was a young woman in her mid-30s (to me that's young. Maybe not to you. I have a larger range now). I noticed her out of the corner of my eye. Picking up someone at the gym is the last thing on my mind, I wouldn't even know how to start. I'm not there to impress anyone, I strictly mind my own business. But as I was starting up this elliptical trainer, inputting what sort of routine I wanted, how long I wanted it for, I found myself hesitating when it asked me my age. And I did it. I lied to the machine. And as I did it I knew (there was a sinking feeling deep down in my soul) that I was doing it because of her. Aaaargh...

Portland

There's a great little piece in Crikey today, where Guy Rundle's in Portland. He describes a coffee shop:

"...the clientele it does have are standard issue Pac-Northwest, like a meeting of plaintiffs for a class action against a particularly inept tattooist.."

You can guess, of course, that I love this.

Tuxedo

There was a piece in one of the weekend papers about a shooting in Melbourne one Monday morning, and they described the gunman's attire as being a nice new adidas tracksuit, the one with the stripe on the top and the three stripes on the pants. Or, as the journalist described memorably described it, a "bogan tuxedo".

As luck would have it, I was at Luna Park yesterday (in Melbourne) and as I was lining up to get a coffee, the guy in line in front of me was wearing the exact outfit! I surreptitiously took a photo.

He also had a soul patch!

Kiwi

I heard a New Zealander, a colleague, use the words "less pessimistic" today. I couldn't even begin to write it down the way he said it; you can imagine it for yourselves.

Harder

I had a session today with Quentin, my personal trainer. His job is to make me into a man-mountain, the sort of man that other men will fear and that women will admire. It's a big job, as you can imagine.

Today he announced, just as we started, "today we're going to go heavier". Well I couldn't just let that go by. "You mean", I said, "that you're going to make me go heavier, while you just watch, right?" He thought that was funny.

Revenge

There was a great article in yesterday's NYTimes about a custom that's dying out in rural Albania, where historically there was a shortage of men (wars, disease, fueds) and so sometimes women would take on male roles. Head of household, defender of the extended family's honor and so on. They were sworn to virginity, and by local custom were treated exactly like men. They had property rights and whatnot that women didn't normally have.

But there was one paragraph that caught my eye, part of an interview with one of these sworn virgins:

'Being the man of the house also made her responsible for avenging her father’s death, she said. When her father’s killer, by then 80, was released from prison five years ago, Ms. Keqi said, her 15-year-old nephew shot him dead. Then the man’s family took revenge and killed her nephew. “I always dreamed of avenging my father’s death,” she said. “Of course, I have regrets; my nephew was killed. But if you kill me, I have to kill you." '

Of course I have regrets; my nephew was killed.... This is exactly why I'm not in a hurry to go to rural Albania.

Rebel

I found this gem in an article in the NYTimes:

"About 10 percent of the adult population in Britain has a non-earlobe body piercing. Prevalence estimates in the United States are harder to come by, but the 2002 report, published in the Mayo Clinic Proceedings, found that 51 percent of the college students surveyed had some sort of piercing, not counting pierced earlobes among the women. "

So there you have it. It's not radical, it's not tough. It most certainly doesn't make you look like a wild-eyed loner at the gates of hell who makes his own rules and whatnot. So take it out.

Semicolons

Nice piece in Slate about semicolons, and it includes this lovely bit..

Semicolons do have some genuine shortcomings; Slate's founding editor, Michael Kinsley, once noted to the Financial Times that "[t]he most common abuse of the semicolon, at least in journalism, is to imply a relationship between two statements without having to make clear what that relationship is." All journalists can cop to this: The semicolon allows woozy clauses to lean on each other like drunks for support.

I like semicolons and I'm sure I overuse them; this is bad.

QF494

I was on the usual QF494 tonight, the 2100 from Melbourne back to Sydney. As the plane was taxiiing out I was engrossed in a magazine as the cabin crew were going through the usual safety spiel, and I could have sworn I heard them say something about a "sly draft". This has an agreeably whimsical tone to it, for sure, and also for me has a nice echo of something my late father used to say. He had been a farmer and had a lot of fairly agricultural turns of phrase, and a cold and especially biting wind was usually described as "a lazy wind", the idea being that it went through you rather than around you, and I momentarily had an idea that the cabin crew were telling us to rug up a bit; next thing you know we'd be singing songs.

But a second's reflection was enough to realise that what they'd said was actually "slide raft".

Bad.

Reader: I've been neglecting you. It's not that I'd found someone new, just that I thought we'd gotten a little stale and needed a rest from each other.

In the meantime, here's a picture of me as I was a few years ago. More to follow...

Gold Coast

There's a great article in this morning's Sydney Morning Herald, about how the chamber of commerce of Surfers Paradise is worried that their town (??) is becoming a dowdy dump full of night-time drunks. So far so good.

It goes on to describe how the local council disagrees, and the councillor quoted, Susie Douglas, says that it's quite untrue, and that in fact the Gold Coast council plans to establish "the world's best dining precinct". This is such a great quote, and in so many ways: the hubris, the pathos, the sheer unlikelihood of it. Fat men in flip-flips, real estate spivs in double-breasted suits and shirts with french cuffs, women in high heels and jeans and too-tight faces. It's all there.

For those who don't know what I'm talking about, a good start is this article from 2005, in which the SMH uses the phrase "every inch the Gold Coast funeral".

I took my sons to see "Iron Man" today and it was quite a lot better than I expected (partly as a result of my not actually expecting much). Worst bit was the magazine cover where they say "reigns" for "reins", but the best bit was Robert Downey Jr., who's always entertaining and suited the whole thing a lot more than you'd expect.

There was a female character, Pepper Potts, who was Downey's PA and not-quite-love-interest. She was gorgeous in a very refreshing kind of way, and she looked vaguely familiar, so I insisted we stay for the credits so I could see who it was that I'd found so enchanting. It was Gwyneth Paltrow(!!??!!). Who knew?

Seatbelts

I was on a morning flight again yesterday, Sydney to Melbourne (which someone told me the other day is the 3rd most heavily trafficked air route in the world, presumably after NY-Boston and NY-Washington). Nothing eventful except that it was 45 minutes late taking off, which I didn't care about too much as I had plenty to read and I didn't have anything super-urgent to do at the other end.

After you land, and the plane's taxiiing in, and well before the fasten seatbelts light has gone off, people start to surreptitiously unbuckle their seatbelts. There's an art to doing it silently, but once people have unbuckled they still just sit there, usually with the seatbelt still in their lap, the two ends sitting there unjoined. I'm guessing this is so you get the thrill of being bad, you can, for a few seconds enjoy the idea that you're the sort of person who makes their own rules. I of course don't do this; I love following directions especially on aircraft. And at some level I think it's a sign of people who don't fly much.

Movie.

The Sydney Film Festival's just started, and I was trolling through the program to see if there was anything good. And there is, for sure. But there's also some stuff that just sounds a bit ghastly, for example:

"A young boy works in a water bottling factory. A rare glimpse of everyday life for the poor in Myanmar".

Coffee.

There's a coffee place downstairs in my building, and I've taken to bringing my Economists and New Yorkers along with me when I have my coffee, and if I've finished with my magazines I surreptitiously hide them in the stack with the fashion and celebrity magazines. I figure it's a small thing, but I have a fantasy that it might open someone's eyes.

Star

I got this today from a woman I was flirting with in a chatroom. "But u cute and have a funny profile - oh yeah i guess u scorpio cos they dont believe in star signs".

She was wrong, of course.

Trinny

I was watching Trinny and Susannah Undress the Nation, which apart from the fact that it has Trinny in it is a bit awful, and she at one point said to the cameraman "please don't do me from behind again". I won't be able to sleep now.

Worldview

Sometimes I find myself thinking that I should get a nicer place to live. My flat - and I know one or two people who read this have been in it, so I'll try to stick to the truth - is very much a bachelor pad. The walls are bare, with just a few recriminatory picture hooks. The kitchen is.. well, really just an alcove off the living room. As an aside, I realised the other day that I didn't have an oven. But what was fun about this was that it's taken me 18 months to realise it. And that was only because I had a houseguest who asked me whether I had an oven. I told her that I was pretty sure I did, then started looking for it.

On the other hand, it's got great light and it's in a fabulous location:

View Larger Map

Of course if I did live in a nicer place I'd be able to impress people with what a swell apartment I had. But this troubles me a little - do I want to impress people who are impressed by that? Should I buy a nice car? What next? I console myself with the thought I'm better off with people who are impressed with the grandeur and complexity of my worldview.

Packing

I was in the middle of a discussion this morning with a colleague, and he told me that what I'd just been saying was the verbal equivalent of the foam that they put in boxes when they ship stuff, to stop it moving around. I thought was a lovely analogy. Especially since he'd said it in an approving way.

Lol.

For reasons that are a bit too complicated to go into, I've been spending a lot more time online lately. And clearly not spending much time at all writing stuff in here. I've ended up chatting with people in, well, chatrooms.

It's fascinating, especially the 'adult dating' ones. There's a bit of everything, comedy, pathos, rage, jealousy.. the works. I've even found myself getting caught up in some of the intruiges (Chatter A asks me to surreptitiously check up on chatter B, that sort of thing. Chatter C asks me to have a look at Chatter D's profile to see whether I think D is hot.)

Some people's profiles are mercifully short: "I want to meet someone [with these characteristics] for [some activity]". Others are almost a chronicle of hurt and heartbreak, and love-gone-wrong, as the person (usually a woman) describes the characteristics of people she doesn't want to meet, and you know that these are based on bitter experience. And then, often as a series of postscripts, she goes on to describe other people she doesn't want to meet too, and you can just tell this is based on recent experience. It has the feel of something being constructed in real time.

But the chatrooms get me. Every second sentence ends in 'lol'. Or, sometimes, 'pmsl'. I can understand using lol to soften the impact of a sentence that might otherwise risk being read as too harsh - tone's hard to convey. (I would never use lol myself in this way, naturellement, but I sympathise.) But it ends up on sentences that are at no risk of being misunderstood. It's like the rising inflection you often hear at the ened of sentences (especially in Australia, it's our gift to the world). I think the message it sends is "I'm pretty unsure of myself, so I'm going to put this lol marker on the end of the sentence so that if anyone disagrees I with it, I'm not putting myself on the line".

Someone in a chatroom yesterday took me to task (not surprisingly, I must come across as a really fusty and mean person) and said 'lol', 'pmsl' and 'ffs' were just easier than typing it all in full. Exactly. What sort of moron would type "laugh out loud" at the end of a sentence?

Bad.

I've been bad - but not in a fun way. I just mean that I've been neglecting my blog. Two reasons 1) I'm tired and 2) I don't have much to say. And yes, I know what you're about to come back with: I never did have much to say.

New word ..

I was reading something this morning on Slate and I came across the word "conversate", meaning (as I could tell from context), converse or talk. Nice... apparently it's been around for a little while. Just new to me, I guess.

Great

Check out this headline. I'm indebted to a friend and former colleague for this one.

Global

People complain about globalisation, that it destroys jobs and livelihoods and traditional ways of life (why is this a bad thing anyway? subsistence farming doesn't look like much fun either) but it does mean that I can go into a 7-11 and buy a folding umbrella for $5. What's so remarkable about this, when you think about it, is that when I'm in the 7-11 I'm right at the very end of the value chain. The guys who runs the 7-11 (a franchisor?) is making money, 7-11 is making money, there's a guy who drives a truck who brings the umbrellas to the 7-11 and he's making money (or his employer is), the company that owns the ship that brought all the umbrellas here is presumably making some money from transporting them, then there's probably half-a-dozen middle-men and, ultimately, a factory in China that's making them. And everyone in this chain is making money - that $5 goes partly to costs (the plastic and steel in the umbrella, the shipping and trucking and whatnot) but also to profit. And they can still get this umbrella all the way from a factory in China into my wet hand here in Sydney for $5! Granted, it's not going to last a long time, it's not the sort of umbrella I'm going to expect to hand down to my sons like a Patek Philippe watch, but then again, it's only five dollars!

The alternative, I guess, would be to produce umbrellas here, and it's hard to see how that could be done at a reasonable cost. And what about those $40 DVD players?

Gentle and Natural

From time to time my kids get lice, and I go to the pharmacy to buy lice treatments. A lot of these treatments brag on their labels about how they're gentle and natural, and have no harsh chemicals. Which is fine, but for these f$*cking lice I want harsh chemicals, I want to see a bottle of licewash that has a skull and crossbones on it, or the biohazard symbol. I want it to glow in the dark.

Sucker

There was a throwaway article in the Age today about the 30th birthday of spam, from AFP. They interviewed somecalled Brad Templeton, and all they can tell us about him is that he "...has thoroughly researched the subject". Not great, but it's a filler article. Then we have this...

"Pete Barnum was right when he said there's a sucker born every minute," said Templeton. Errr... that'd be P.T. Barnum, and he probably didn't even say it. I suspect this isn't Mr Templeton's error - it's the journalist or a clueless subeditor.

On other matters, I'm recovering. Its day 11 and it's all settling down, thanks for asking.

VIP

Just near me is a pub/club called the Bourbon, which these days is a fairly ordinary downstairs bar (in the 80s, when I lived in Sydney last, it was like the bar scene from Star Wars, and they did a sensational hangover breakfast too). Through a separate entrance is what I assume is the gaming room. The sign says "VIP Lounge", then underneath "everyone's welcome". Isn't that a contradiction?

Cabs

I'm watching 'Sunrise', the morning show on channel7 and there's a story about cab drivers in Melbourne blockading the corner of Flinders and Swanston streets to protest about the increasing levels of violence they're experiencing. In a couple of hours they're going to march up to Parliament House.

How are they going to find it?

DPRK

There's a great story in the Murdoch press today about how the North Koreans have built an one-mile-long runway, embedded into a mountain so that only the end opens out. In effect, the planes just fly out of the mountain. The Times, hilariously, characterises this as very 'thunderbirds'.

I once played the piano for an audience of appreciative North Korea children, at the Children's Palace in Pyongyang.

Station to Station

In Slate today, there's an excellent article about how banks' capital raisings dilute the stakes of existing shareholders, and to anyone who knows a bit about bank capital and corporate finance none of this is a surprise.

I clicked on it because I like the guy who writes finance for Slate, Dan Gross, and I'm interested in bank capital and I was hoping for some new insight, which is what we often get from Mr Gross. But the first thing I noticed was the title, "The Age of Grand Dilution". So what, I can hear you asking. Settle down, this isn't going to be fun.

It's clearly a reference to "Word on a Wing", a song on Station to Station, which has as a first line, "In this age of grand illusion, you walked into my life out of my dreams". Or maybe it's delusion.

There are very few people in the world, I bet, who are intensely interested in bank capital raisings AND who know all the words to David Bowie's great 70s albums. (Especially this one.. my all-time favorite record). It's not all that often that I get to feel special so I relish it. Thank you Mr Gross!

Question

You know if someone says to "Can I ask you a question?", the only possible response is to say, flatly, "you already did". You'll find this useful.

Ripe

If you don't wash for 4 or 5 days you pretty quickly end up smelling like a homeless person. In some ways this isn't surprising. How do I know this? I had some surgery on Monday and as a result have been trapped in my apartment ever since, and until the tape comes off (69.5 hours from now, Tuesday morning) I can't bathe. It's nasty. I can move about, with some difficultly, and if I'm standing up (as I am now) I can stay standing for quite a while, mostly because I know that if I were to sit or lie down, that would mean that I would, inevitably, have to stand up again at some point, and the business of getting from lying down to standing up takes quite a bit of doing. I need to mentally prepare, I need to think through exactly how I'm going to do it, I need to summon up all my feeble reserves of courage...and then I can stand up, usually with a bit of colorful language involved.

The is some bruising visible above the bandage and we have today moved into autumn colors, a quite striking yellow-y brown.

Awesome

I read recently a saying "the adjective is the enemy of the noun", and of course this at first seems counterintuitive. Adjectives help nouns, surely? They describe things, they add color. What can be wrong with that?

There was a lovely example of this in today's Crikey. The editor of an Australian regional newspaper sent an email to all staff asking them not to use Anzac Day as an excuse to write mushy rubbish. He said, "Anyone who includes two or more adjectives in a sentence will be shot (metaphorically)...".

I remember years ago, watching a travel show with my then wife, and one of the presenters was a childhood friend of hers so we were hoping he'd do well. He was having problems finding enough words to describe how great everything was on some trek, and we knew he was in trouble when there was a shot of him looking out of the window of a bus, at a mountain range, and all he could some up with was 'these mountains are... awesome'. In a similar vein, there's a lovely video of the Pope finishing a speech on his recent trip to the US, and President saying to the Pope, "awesome speech".

Eggs

People who say 'eggzit' for 'exit' shouldn't be allowed to vote. Same for lug-zhury instead of luxury.

JWH

One day during the week - Wednesday? - I was crossing the road in front of my office, a busy Sydney street. I crossed against the lights, as one does, and as I fetched up on the other side a bit breathless from dashing through the traffic I realised that the elderly gentleman standing there waiting patiently for the pedestrian light was, in fact, the former Prime Minister, John Howard. I nearly bowled him over. We were used to seeing him in the neighborhood during his tenure as PM as his office was in the building next door, but back then he'd have a few bodyguards and some scruffy protesters. This time he was all by himself and seemed a little bewildered.

A couple of weeks earlier, on the same corner, I'd seen the former Treasurer, Peter Costello. He has chatting with someone quite animatedly and seemed very pleased with himself. I always thought he was ok - he was my local member for a while. (Now I have Malcolm!)

Back!

Finally got my ADSL back up. What a nightmare...

Wreck

This is part of an F1-11 that was shot down over VietNam and which is now displayed in the Army Museum in Hanoi. It's been reassembled as a pile of junk, and this bit (an engine, by the look of it) has a pleasantly geiger-esque feel.

South by Southwest

There was a piece in The Australian today that caught my eye (and it takes a lot to engage my interest when I'm on the 0645 SYD->MEL). It was about how the residents of a street called "Bogan Place" are petitioning the local council to change the name of their street to something more euphonious. Old story, I know. But I liked this sentence:
"There are six other Bogan streets in greater Sydney, in the southern and western suburbs." Well, they would be, wouldn't they?

I ate a rat!

I haven't posted anything on here in a few days due to 1) Telstra doing something with my ADSL line which now means it goes into someone else's place due to some incredible cockup at the exchange, which I expect they'll try to tell me is really all my fault, and 2) I haven't got anything worth saying really. (So what's new?)

I have to share this with you. I ate a rat on Friday last week, here's a picture of it.

Reportedly

On the front page of today's SMH online, there's a link to story in the Beauty section (which I never read, and I'll certainly not read the article in question). The teaser on the front page of the SMH says 'Victoria Beckham is reportedly fighting gravity with essential oils and "natural Botox"'. Now this is just plain awful on a number of levels. What Mrs Beckham does with her time and money is her own business, and you can't help but noticing that celebrities seem to be especially gullible about a lot of things - I assume this is because they have so much money that they don't have to care , so long as it fills half an hour in their lives and gives them a sense of purpose they'll do it (I'm thinking for some reason of Ms Paltrow and the cupping thing - it's positively medieval).

But what's it with the SMH? Notice the teaser doesn't say " Victoria Beckham is fighting gravity with essential oils and "natural Botox". It's worse. It says she's reportedly using this natural botox. So to get this straight, the SMH isn't telling us that Mrs Beckham is using some 'natural botox' snakeoil; all they're doing is passing on to us the fact that someone somewhere says she is. I can understand this, up to a point. It would have been on the newswires (why? why on earth?) and whoever makes these decisions at the SMH - a poorly-trained chimpanzee, I expect - decided to put it in, but recognised at the same time that it wasn't something worth wasting any resources on fact-checking. How about this one? "SMH journalists reportedly too lazy to write stories".

Durian

We were on an island yesterday off Nha Trang and it was hot. I'm pretty much incapable of walking past an ice-cream vendor in hot weather and sure enough I found one. I had a very nice green bean ice cream for VND6,000 (!!), which I picked pretty much randomly; she had a big freezer chest full of icecreams of the same type but in different flavours, but with the flavours themselves written in vietnamese so I had no way of knowing what I was getting. I quite like this russian roulette approach to eating, it's served me very well in the past. Still hot, and encouraged by my success with the green bean ice cream I tried another. As soon as I took off the wrapper I realised I'd made a terrible mistake.

It was durian flavored. I like to think of myself as someone who'll eat just about anything, but I've always avoided durians. I've smelled them enough when I lived in Singapore, and I always thought it was significant that there were those signs on the MRT which prohibited 4 specific things, and one of them was durians. That said a lot, I thought.

I manfully ate the whole thing (even my sons were telling me I didn't have to, but noone understands my complex relationship with food). Then I drank half a can of coke to wash away the taste. Bad mistake - for the next hour, every time I burped (coke = gassy) I'd get horrible durian flashbacks. Eeeewwwww.

ATM

I'm in Nha Trang, and it's stinking hot. But just outside the hotel I'm in is an ATM, and in typical Viet style it's in a little stand-alone booth, and this particular ATM booth is fiercely airconditioned. My ATM card has stopped working (half the magnetic strip on the back has abraded off - overuse?) but I still can't resist ducking into the ATM booth once in a while to cool off.

Some hot countries have a fetish for a/c, and it's to do with showing off how developed they are. I remember in Singapore, offices and - especially- movie theaters were very aggressively airconditioned, so much so that going to the movies usually meant taking a coat or a sweater. And I think part of that is also to do with being able to show of the nice winter clothes that people bought in New York and London, and which they'd never otherwise get a chance to wear. And once in a while there'd be a night where it low 20s outside, so you could drive around with your car windows down. Or at least expats did.. the locals all had their windows up and the a/c on. Someone explained this to me as being the locals being unwilling to look as though they didn't have airconditioning in their cars.

Fishing

I went fishing today. It's not something I'd ever tried before, for a couple of reasons (short attention span, no friends) but I had a chance to take my sons fishing and they were keen to try, so we got up early and went out on the river by Hoi An, with anther father and son, a guide and a cheerful boatman with leathery skin and bright yellow teeth who at first glance appeared ancient but was probably about my age (which varies, of course, as some of you know).

We motored out along the river into the estuary, cast anchor, then the guide and the boatman baited our hooks and showed us how to cast. I got my line into the water, then, predictably, after about a minute could feel myself getting restless. What happens now, I asked, and the response was that just sit there for a couple of hours and maybe we'll get a fish. It reminded me of why I've never been keen to go fishing. I have acquaintances who do it, and they always say that the whole point of it is precisely that it's so boring. It gives you an excuse to do nothing, that sort of thing.

This is just plain ridiculous. I don't need an excuse to do nothing; I'm already very good at it. And if I'm going to spend some time doing nothing I'm much more likely to do it in on my couch with a magazine and the tv on, rather than on a small smelly boat halfway up the Hoi estuary on a hot sunday morning.

We didn't get any fish either, but that's not the point.

Fruit

Papaya is overrated.

I'm finding it very hard to log on to this site (ozsleepy.blogspot.com) from Vietnam, and I'm wondering whether it's because there's something wrong with the site (which is unlikely, it's run by google), or whether... the government of the Socialist Republic of Vietnam doesn't like its citizens reading blogs. Sure, I were running a Leninist political system (which, luckily for you, I'm not) I wouldn't let people read stuff that might destabilise the regime, but this blog? Funny signs, food, oblique references to my complex private life?

We're in Hue, which is nice and quiet after Hanoi but - because we've come from Hanoi - seems a bit underdone. Yesterday we all got on motobikes (as passengers) and went off to see a whole bunch of tombs and whatnot. Aparently when you do this the manly way is to hang on to the back of the motorbike, hands behind you. The alternative is to wrap your arms around the rider, but I get the impression that that's a bit girly. The other Dads (we are three families traveling together) did it the manly way. But because I'd already showed my colors as a complete coward by being unable to jump off the roof of the boat a couple of days earlier I figured I had nothing to lose, so I did the wrap-around one. They're not sure what to make of me. I eat a lot, I'm not physically brave, I'm good with numbers and I can give the stock market run-down every morning.

The hotel in Hue has this interesting feature where the two machines that have internet access are in a little corridor off the lobby (a stout frenchman shouted at me here yesterday because my sons were using both machines). The corridor must be above a stagnant pond because sitting here means being attacked by mosquitoes. Perhaps this is a way of rationing the time? I remind myself that Malaria's rare this close to the coast.

In the Army Museum in Hanoi there's quite a bit of stuff about Dien Ben Phu, including a picture, which is, according to the caption, 10,000 french soldiers surrendering. Which gave me a bit of a giggle in a how-many-men-does-it-take-to-defend-Paris sort of way.

(Answer: Noone knows, they've never tried.)

Phone

I didn't bring my usual phone with me to Vietnam; instead I have my old Nokia. First night I was here, in a fit of boredom, I went through all the old text messages on the phone. It's a little time capsule, my social life preserved in minute detail.

Most of the messages were from around a year ago, Easter least year, when I was having an awful time in Melbourne and then ended up meeting A. Who, strangely enough, I got a text from today.

It's like that fun thing at work when they give you a phone that used to belong to someone else and the first thing you do - or should do - is to go through it and scour all the text messages saved on the phone for incriminating detail. I learned to text this way - when I started a new job in Singapore in 2001 I was given a phone that had belonged to someone else, and it turned out that despite being married he had carried on a fairly hectic social life, most of which was organised via text messages. As the new holder of the phone I ended up getting the messages (but not his social life). I learned how to text people back.

A year or so later I met him when I was on a business trip to London. I told him I'd inherited his phone and that I'd received lots of interesting messages. He went pale.

Vn

The first morning we were in Hanoi we were at the top of the lake, by the Old Quarter, and we were approached by 4 shy young women, who explained in halting but well-structured english that they were university students, and that as part of a class project they had to approach foreigers in the street and ask them questions. Fair enough, I thought, after a split-second of scepticism. (It's Hanoi, not Bangkok. And even if was a scam I couldn't see how they'd work it, and most of those things rely on people being too polite to say 'no'. I don't have that problem.)

They produced a tape recorder and asked us where we were from, how old the boys were, how long we'd been in Vietnam (about 12 hours at thgat point), what we liked and what we didn't like. It was quite fun, and predictably, I liked the attention. But in case anyone from the Vietnamese government is montoring this, here's my two suggestions for making Vietnam better:

1) stop all the racket
2) get some decent coffee

Other than that, I think it's great here.

50 mins

Water-puppet theater in Hanoi = longest 50 minutes of my life.

Culture Shock, Hanoi

We had a moment of profound heart-in-mouth culture shock yesterday in Hanoi. We went down to breakfast yesterday in our hotel, and as we were busy chowing down on our rice porridge and noodles, I noticed to my horror that the people at the next table (Spanish? French?) were enjoying a leisurely cigarette. In a confined space. At 7am.

BKK

I had my experience yesterday of the new Bangkok airport, and about the only nice thing I can say about it is that it makes the old Bangkok airport look good.

It's massive in scale, but it has that not-quite-finished look you often get Thailand. Exposed wiring, wall panels that don't quite join up, that sort of thing. And nothing quite works, of course, but in the old Bangkok airport you expected it: it had low ceilings and a vaguely makeshift 50s aesthetic. The new one, on the other hands, screams modern, or at least until you want to do something that's actually modern, like, say checking your emails. We had to go from one arm of the beast to the other, which seemed to be about a mile.

The other thing I miss (apart from the bizarre touch of having people playing golf between the runways, or was I just imagining that?) was the delightfully named Terminal Restaurant, where you could get uncompromising Thai food. It was the first place I ever experienced that thing they do with the baby eggplants, which I had never heard about before and thought may have been mutant leathery peas.

The food situation at the new BKK airport? Well, there are any number of places that will do antipasto, or sushi, or even gourmet hotdogs. But thai food? No! Is there some cultural cringe at work? Is this something to do with the fact that in Stockholm every restaurant is a Thai restaurant and it's actually quite hard to find swedish food? (I did however have a sublime lunch at the Riksmusuem. Herring with mustard; potatoes with dill. I felt very Scandy.)

The airport did remind me of something. Its doomed hubristic scale, and the way that it'll never be finished.. it reminded me of the Pyongyang pyramid. "Mr Lee, what's that huge building over there, it must be over 100 stories high.." "Err.. what building, Mr James?" (It doesn't officially exist, so we were supposed to ignore it. I must write more about my visit to the DPRK.)

EP

I saw that Anthony Minghella, who directed 'The English Patient', died. For some spooky reason I was thinking about this movie the other day, and I rememered a line from King of the Hill, where Hank says:

"You don't have to be English to watch this film, but you sure as hell have to be patient."

Needless to say, I didn't actually see the movie.

A highlight - no, the highlight - of last night was hearing someone at a dinner table describing a trip to India, and telling the rest of us that the Taj Mahal was "world-class".

Black Tie

Wrong way.

Late night; mild hangover. I noticed that someone found this blog by googling:

wrong way to deal with life crisis

Theater.

I went with a friend to a preview of a play tonight, she had free tickets. It was "The Kid", an early 80s piece by Michael Gow (and no, I hadn't heard of it - or him - either). Edgy, controversial and whatnot.

I didn't get it. And when I talked with my friend afterwards, we agreed that the problem with theater generally is that it's so... well, theatrical.

DJ895

There was a young man on the flight sitting next to me this evening who was wearing a baseball cap AND who called me 'bro', which normally would have set me off into my usual silent frenzy of disdain, but he was quite polite (and a south african) and I was just grateful to be on the flight, having realised halfway through the afternoon that I had, in fact, booked for the wrong day and was scheduled to fly tomorrow instead of today. Which then cost me to more to change than it had cost to buy the ticket in the first place. I consoled myself by buying a can of diet coke for $2.50 which, when you think about it, is actually a pretty good price. In midair.

All other things being equal, I tend to fly Virgin Blue rather than Qantas for a couple of reasons: 1) DJ have a slightly better on-time departure and arrival record than QF, 2) I do like that thing where you can board and disembark using the rear stairs, which involves walking along the tarmac and seeing all the planes up close, which in turn appeals to my inner 9 year-old and has a vague Beatles-at-Idlewild thing going, and 3) Qantas is Telstra-with-wings in some respects.

Russian

I was watching television today with my kids (I'm a very lazy parent) and there was an ad for Domino's pizza. They were advertising, among other things, a 'Russian' pizza. The voiceover was a woman with a Boris-and-Natasha russian accent. The selling point for this pizza? It had lots of tomato, and various other things, none of which were remotely russian. If you don't believe me, here's a link.

I've been to Russia and there was hardly any food there at all, as far as could see. But a 'russian' pizza, if you were to make such a thing (why? why on earth?) would have... well, caviar, vodka, more vodka, borscht, cabbage, black bread. When I was in Russia in the early 90s the people looked as though they'd be happy to eat the bark off trees. So maybe you could throw that on as well.

Extra: as I was writing this I had a flashback to a fantastical menu item they had at Domino's for a while last year, the 'Meat Pie Pizza'. It's no longer available, but you can see a picture of it here. This is wrong in so many ways I can't even begin to start but at the same time it has a certain exuberant charm.

Busted

In Melbourne this morning, I crossed Spencer Street against the lights, on foot (of course). There was a break in traffic and I went half-way across, as one does, and waited for another break in traffic to go all the way across. I was thinking at the time how very Melbourne-y it all was; trams, slate-grey sky, a bit of wind and rain, agreeably chilly and whatnot. The light changed, I continued crossing the road.

As I got to the other side a policeman approached me with an 'excuse me'. I wasn't anxious or upset, I quite welcomed the interruption. The last encounter I'd had with cops had been at a very convivial barbeque where there was a lot of discussion about various LACs and PQDs (or PDQ? Pretty Damn Quick?).

He said that I'd crossed against the lights, but that it was good that I hadn't in fact crossed all the way, and that I'd waited for the lights to continue my crossing (which was only because there were cars galore). I tried to look contrite. He told me I'd get away with a warning, and that I should watch out if I'm in the city around Grand Prix time, as they were planning on having a blitz on jaywalking. He was friendly, almost apologetic so I tried to make it as easy for both of us as possible. He then asked for my name and address (maybe he was a bit like the cops at Tony's bbq after all? I can never tell) which I gave, and while it ocurred to me at the time that I could just make up something "John W Howard, Wollstoncraft"). I was also wondering whether I really did have to give my details at all but I figured I wasn't really in a position to make a big deal of it, and he was quite polite about the whole thing.

I really don't want this blog to degenerate into one of those grumpy-old-men whinges about how everything was better and more authentic when I was a kid and whatnot, but what's the deal with Rogue Traders? It's painful to watch; she's a soap opera actress who's playing a rock chick and it has this prefabricated quality to it. Wear these clothes, Natalie, pout like this, growl when you sing etc. It's like those ads where they get chimpanzees to pretend they're at a tea party, and just as dreadful. I was especially perturbed they were at the Mardi Gras party (Rogue Traders, not the tea-drinking chimps. Although that's possible too, you just never know).

Partner

The good news is that I beat my new tennis partner, Dan, 6-3 today. I was exceptionally studly about it too. And yes, I know he had a hangover, and he at one point got all twisted up when he was doing a backhand and managed to whack himself in the head with his racquet so hard that he was bleeding, but a win is a win. And it's not like I hit him with the racquet to make him bleed; you could even argue that he only did it to himself because of my superb shot-making, so in that sense it's an integral (even though seldom-seen) part of the game.

The bad news is that he announced he's just bought a round-the-world air ticket and is leaving on Tuesday. Aaargh! I finally find someone I can beat and he skips the country! I have to say, if I see him anywhere around town in the next couple of weeks I really am going to hit him with my racquet. I'm slightly suspicious that he only mentioned this "ticket" after we'd played out the set and I was basking in glory, but in a fairly restrained and dignified way (I thought).

Celtic.

Recently I was talking to a friend, a woman who has two children, and she told me that she was thinking of getting a tattoo. The tattoo would have her two children's names, done in a fairly stylised way and in celtic lettering (well it would be, wouldn't it? Why not helvetica? Times New Roman?). She was planning on getting this on her upper back, behind her shoulder. This, apparently, isn't unusual.

So far so good. I couldn't resist though, I had to ask "why?". As I expected, she said it was to commemorate them, to give her something on her body to remember them by. I let this go, of course, but on reflection this just sounds all wrong. Without putting too fine a point on it, she already has some reminders on her body, and, for another thing, what's the risk that at some point she'll somehow forget she has children? And if she does, she's not going to be able to see this tattoo anyway, it's behind her shoulder. The only chance is that she's walking down the street and someone says to her "that's an interesting tatt, what does it mean?", at which point she'll presumably slap her forehead, d'oh!.

Gates

I switched coffee places recently (the old one was in a building that is about to be demolished!) and the one I go to now is a little free-standing booth that's manned by two Brazilian guys. They have a blackboard where they put every day a quote of the day. Today's was:

"It's from your unhappiest customers that you learn the most", and it's attributed to Bill Gates. Which is, when you think about it, hilarious.

The B-word.

I wasn't making it up, you really do see the word 'boffin' in Australian newspapers. It cropped up today in The Age. The article itself ("new supercomputer is a rack of PlayStations") doesn't use the word, but the teaser on the Age's online homepage says "Boffins have harnessed Sony's PS3 game console to create... "

In the same vein, there's a truly appalling article in the SMH about travelling on London's Northern Line, and how it's a rich tapestry of the human experience and whatnot. This is clearly written by someone who's grown up in Perth and has just gotten off the plane.

Who's the boss?

I had a piano lesson tonight with my new teacher, Alexander. This was only my third with him so we're just getting to know one another. Last time, we did some exercises that were very basic but also very hard; sequences that had to be done very slowly but with lots of control, and with a lot of physicality - something I'm not used to on the piano. I can really engage with a guitar, but I'd always thought of a piano as something much more passive - it just sits there with 88 keys and all you have to do is hit the right ones in the right order and you're Oscar Peterson. Or whomever. But Alexander was telling me that it's not enough, I can't just stand back from the piano and just idly play, I have to get more involved. Relaxed wrists and arms, but leaning forward to use bodyweight on the piano, and hitting the keys as though I really mean it. Or, to paraphrase, showing the piano who's boss.

Kiwi

There's something almost poetic about this.

Miracles

I'm about a week late on this, but I listening to last week's Gabfest on Slate and one of the gabfesters was talking about how Mike Huckabee steadfastly refuses to acknowledge that it's almost impossible for him to get enough delegates to beat McCain. When reporters try to get him to face up to this, he refuses to be swayed by the numbers. For example, this from Time:

None of this changes the bitter math that Huckabee faces as he struggles to force a convention floor fight with McCain. As it stands in the latest CNN delegate estimate, McCain leads Huckabee by a margin of 723 to 217, with only about 1,000 delegates left to be awarded. Under the party rules, 1,191 delegates are needed to win the nomination, which means Huckabee would have to win most of the remaining contests. It will, in Huckabee's own words, take a miracle. "I know people say that the math doesn't work out," the Baptist pastor politician said over the weekend. "Folks, I didn't major in math. I majored in miracles...."

The idea that someone running for office would boast about being beyond reason sends a shiver down my spine.

The gabfest was funny though. One of the participants said that they'd be frightened to live under a president like that, and another one then said very quietly "you already are".

Speaking of Huckabee, I was delighted to see that in the super Tuesday GOP primaries, Huckabee couldn't get double-digits in Connecticut and Massachusetts. I lived in CT for a while and my younger son (my mini-me) was born there. My favorite New England moment was when we had a carpenter in to fix something in our house, and I noticed that he said "acrost" for "across". Something I'd read about but had never - until then - actually encountered.

Health

I had an executive health check the other day. By which I mean that my employer paid for a comprehensive medical checkup (and no, it's nothing at all like executive relief). I did fine. In fact, they said my two biggest risk factors are my age and my sex, neither of which I can do anything about. They did, however, stop short of saying that my body was a temple.

Dons

The Australian (a fiesty broadsheet newspaper here in, of course, Australia) has been running a hysterical campaign to discredit Ishmael Beah, the author of "A long way gone". It's a disturbing and reasonably well-written book about Mr Beah's time as a child soldier in the civil wars in Sierra Leone, or maybe not as the case may be. I read it and liked it.

The Australian sometimes goes way overboard on one of its favorite causes, and for regular readers (like me) it can be quite good fun to tease out the manic foaming-at-the-mouth coverage on something - their campaign against Outcomes-Based Education in WA from last year was a classic of its kind; barely a week went by without one of their commentators getting stuck in.

They've got a real bee in their bonnet about Mr Beah. First, there was an interesting article about some factual problems with the book - fair enough. I tend to take memoirs with a grain of salt anyway, and part of me is glad when this stuff is tested and found wanting. But in this case they kept going after him like he was a Western Australian education department bureaucrat and it stopped being interesting or funny.

Today's contribution was this: Beah's Memoir to be Examined by Dons. The gist of it is that the book was chosen by the Multnomah County (Portland, Oregon) Library for the city's annual "Everybody Reads festival", and that as part of that the authenticity of the book, among other things, will be part of two roundtable discussions with local scholars. One of those scholars is, apparently, Portland State University literature professor and noted poet Primus St John.

So far so good, although you have to say if this is far as the scandal has gotten they're really scraping the bottom of the barrel. So why am I whingeing about this? (A blog being either a boast or a whinge, of course.)

It's the word "don". Bear in mind this is someone writing about American academics in an Australian newspaper. Don is a particularly English word. You occassionally see "boffin" in australian newspapers and it always grates, I always think it's journalists who've spent some time in London and just can't let go, but "Don" is much worse. We just don't say that here! And I don't think even English people would say it about academics from Portland State; it's an Oxbridge thing.

And yes, before you tell me, I know I do need to get out more.