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.

West

There was a nice article in the Australian today about the expansion of the AFL into western Sydney. They quoted Dale Holmes, who runs the NSW branch of the AFL, who said, among other things, "Any new club that comes into western Sydney needs to be domiciled there, truly have a look and feel of western Sydney".

As you can imagine this caused a bit of a ruckus at work today, with lots of speculation about how best to catch the look and feel of western Sydney. I won't go into detail, you can imagine most of it. On a related topic it ocurred to me when I was at the rugby on saturday night that I really should go to a League game.

Something else: in today's SMH there was an article on page 3 where they had the word "towards" as toward's. This really is a sign that we're nearing the End Times.

CDS

There's a spectacularly ill-informed article in the New York Times about credit default swaps.

Bus

I had a dream last night, one of those especially vivid ones you have when you're catching up on sleep deficit. Part of it involved me being on a bus, very late at night, due to some transportation mixup along the way - being late and having flights cancelled and whatnot is a common theme in my dreams.

I was on this bus, and next to me was a young woman who I'd had a perfunctory chat with earlier in the trip (but dreams being what they are, I didn't dream about having the chat, but I knew that we'd had it). I was sitting in the window seat, worrying about being late, not entirely sure where I was. I turned around to see something inside the bus and I realised that she'd moved her head next to mine and was clearly expecting me to kiss her. I was surprised, but quickly recovered my composure and kissed her. I put my arm around her, she put one leg across mine and we just sat there like that as the bus went along the dark streets of wherever the hell it was. We didn't say anything.

There was more, of course. A strange confrontation with my best friend, a lost child, a very small hotel room. But every so often I'd remember what happened on the bus and I'd remember how right it felt, but also, of course, on a more blokey level marvelling that I'd been able to somehow work some magic on a woman in her 20s. Who looked, now I think about it, like a better-fed version of Justine Henin.

Something new

As part of my general policy of trying anything once (well, just about anything) I ended up going to see a game of rugby tonight. I'd been invited as a guest of a company I've been doing some business with.

It was fine, but I can definitely cross that off my list.

Paul

I feel sorry for Paul MacCartney (or Sir Paul, as I guess we're supposed to call him now). He's going through a very messy divorce with a one-legged nymphomaniac and former call-girl who's accused him of beating her up, and everyone still thinks of John as the interesting Beatle.

Edgewater

This is a building in Melbourne, on the beach in St Kilda near Luna Park. I've always found it very evocative - even 25 years ago it still had the same feel to it of faded 60s glamour. Melbourne doesn't really have a beachy thing about it at all, nor for that matter a high-rise feel, so this building and others like it along the beach seem like they've managed to escape from Melbourne in some fantastic way, and I always imagined they'd be full of people who led interesting and possibly debauched lives. Doomed novelists, sensitive women poets, larger-than-life cabaret artistes, that sort of thing. Over the years I've had friends who've lived in pretty much every building in St Kilda but noone had ever lived in there, which added to its mystique. For me, anyway. I did once manage to get in, when I was looking for a flat. (Buy or rent? I can't remember.) It was scuzzy on the inside but not in quite the same agreeable way, and the only people I saw were clueless surfers (why so far from the surf beaches?).

Money

I was at a supermarket yesterday in a nice leafy Melbourne suburb. I only had one or two things so I cleverly avoided the "12 items or less" line, and not just because it's grammatically suspect. You see, it's not really the scanning that takes time, it's the end transaction. Especially if people use loyalty cards and credit cards. Also, in this particular supermarket there's sometimes 2 cashiers in the fast lane, but invariably as soon as you get on the line one of them goes.

So I got behind a woman who had quite a few things in her trolley. As I'd suspected, they were all scanned quite quickly, so I was quite a ways ahead of where I would have been had I got on the fast lane. But then, of course, it all came unstuck.

The cashier finished scanning, and said to the woman, "sixy-five dollars seventy" (or something like that). The woman looked surprised. She then swung her handbag around in front, rummaged though it incredulously and found a purse. She opened the purse and looked inside. There were notes and coins in there, which seemed to throw her.

I wanted to lean forward and say to her "It's money. It does three things. 1) it's a medium of exchange, 2) it's a a unit of account, and 3) it's a store of value". There's an eipsode of the Simpsons where Homer reminds himself "Money can be exchanged for goods and services". And you have to figure that if Homer can intellectualise that, anyone can.

She didn't look as though she had anything wrong with her, but she was spectacularly unprepared for the business end of the shopping trip, the bit where you hand over money. I've been behind people like her - or, possibly, her - at ATMs too, where having gotten to the front of the line they look helplessly at the machine for a while before remembering they need to get their ATM card out and stick it in the slot (meanwhile, I'm hovering behind, incandescent with rage, flicking my ATM card between my fingers).

I need a massage.

Deli

I spent 5 or 6 years in New York, and it seems like a lifetime ago. But sometimes I get reminded of the city I used to love... On the way to my oldest son's under-11 cricket match today I spotted this, and I think that nearby there's a Carnegie Hall too.

Outback

Whenever there's any talk about communications infrastructure in Australia - broadband, mobile, anything - it's always constrained by the idea that whatever is provided has to be provided to everyone. Which means that we can't get high-speed broadband (or, as it's known everywhere else in the world, "broadband") in the densely-populated suburbs of Sydney until and unless it's provided to farmers in the remote reaches of the interior.

This is ridiculous - they've chosen to live in the middle of nowhere. It's part of the deal. They get vast empty landscapes, lots of quiet. We get coffee, newspapers, excitement. What next? They want equal access to avant-garde theater? Experimental cocktails? Fabulousness?

On a barely-related note, a week or so ago there was a news story about the distribution of obesity in New South Wales, by local government areas. The skinniest part of the state (meaning the local government area with the lowest proportion of adults who are obese) was, of course, the eastern suburbs. Where I live. Closely followed by the North Shore. Highest was around Newcastle. Then you have Penrith and whatnot. It's almost too good. The SMH sent a reporter to Windsor and interviewed a woman in a supermarket who said something like "there's not a lot of pressure to look good out here". Or maybe she didn't - the reporter may well have just made it up. Then for a couple of days, there were lovely mean-spirited letters in the papers from skinny people in the eastern suburbs and the north shore along the lines of "westies should lay off the chips and the coke".

Obama

There was a profile of Barack Obama in the New Yorker early last year, which I read and loved. I read it again today (prompted by D, who reads this blog, funnily enough). It's a lovely piece of writing, and there's a sentence in it which is just so exquisite that I remember when I read it the first time, almost a year ago, I felt an almost physical pleasure. I'm sure you'll think I'm mad. She (It's Larissa MacFarquar) writes, nine pages into the profile:

When most politicians speak to a crowd, they give the impression that that is what they live for; Obama at town-hall meetings appears engaged but not fervently so, as if there were several other things that he would be equally happy doing that day.

It's perfect, isn't it?

(For the avoidance of doubt, I'm an Obama fan. A politician who can write! Whahey!)

Bachelor cuisine

As you no doubt have picked up, I have exquisite taste in food. I'm adventurous and have a finely-wrought palate. But when I'm fending for myself, as I am tonight, it's like the worst parody of bachelor food you can imagine. Here's a sample.

Ingredients:
a can of (cooked) lentils
about half a can of spinach
quite a lot of tabasco sauce (or similar)

Method:
put it all in a bowl, give it a cursory stir, put in microwave till barely lukewarm. 30 seconds is fine.

Total Preparation time: 2 minutes, if you're quick. Yumminess: 9/10.

Ana

When I had my tennis lesson during the week I was discussing with my coach, Jono, the relative merits of the leading women players. It turns out that I'm not the only one who thinks Ana Ivanovic is the standard by which all other women must be judged. He had even had lunch in the same room as her, which is something I expect I'll never forgive him for.

His idea for how to resolve this impasse (does she pick Jono or me?) was that he and I have a tennis match. You'll be relieved to hear I didn't fall for it.