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.