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.