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:

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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?