Names (I know, but I can't stop)

More on names. The highlight of this, of course, is:

Fashion labels were also on some people's minds, with 19 children named Chanel, eight named Armani and eight named Diesel.

And she's never even met me...

Hello, gentleman!

If you have it (Love), you don't need to have anything else, and if you don't have it, it doesn't matter much what else you have.
I am dreaming about you, my love [i've deleted a link here]
When you slip into my dreams, you set free my spirit.
Nobody except you can bring out the best part of me, because just love is powerful enough to do that. I wish you were here, with me, I wish I could reach out and touch more than empty space. I know you will be gone by the time I awake, but in my dreams I will always find my way back to you and I am ready to wait for eternity until my dreams come true.

Warm hugs
Tatti V.

Names. Yes, I know.

If it weren't for the sunday Herald-Sun I wouldn't have anything to write about at all:

Shaelyse is Danielle and Michael's first child. Danielle thought up her daughter's unusual name.

And a couple of weeks ago there was a Krystal and a Zavier.

Attention to detail.

Outer suburban Melbourne.

World's Worst Job, surely

In this morning's Australian there was an intriguing little article about how Microsoft are going to open retail stores. The first one will be in Scottsdale, AZ, which I think says a lot already. It's hard to imagine a place more bland and style-less. (Unless it's, say, Tyson's Corner VA. Which is where the first Apple store opened.)

So what can you expect in a Microsoft retail store? Well, there'll be gadgets. There'll be PCs and laptops and Zunes and whatnot. But the best bit is that, at least according to The Australian, there'll be a microsoft equivalent of Apple's Genius Bar, where people who are having issues with windows-based machines can go to get themselves sorted out. Ouch!!!

Tiger and ambulance

I fly back and forth to Melbourne a lot. I think I've been there 4 out of the past 5 weekends or something like that. So there's no glamour, no mystery about air travel.

I know the layout of the airports very well and I know exactly where I'm going. Which means I end up elbowing people out of the way as they stand and dither. I know what the process is like. And even though I know it's completely unreasonable, I'm vaguely contemptuous of people who don't.

Sunday night I was flying out of Melbourne on Tiger. My flight down on the previous day had cost me $28, which however you slice it is pretty good. $28 for an hour and a half is cheaper than psychotherapy, tennis lessons, a massage or piano lessons. After checkin, you wait in the usual line to go through security. They scan your bags, you walk thru the x-ray thing or whatever it is.

The line was long, about 30 people, and moving slowly. Every couple of minutes there'd be an announcement, saying that you had to place any metallic objects you were carrying (keys, phone, belt, whatever) in the trays provided. Laptops were to be taken out of cases. Some palaver about aerosols and umbrellas. The usual...

But almost without exception, people who'd been in this line for 15 to 20 minutes - who'd heard all the these announcements, and had even watched as the people before them (and the ones before them, and so on..) took off their watches, emptied their pockets of coins, unzipped laptops - these people when they themselves got to the business end of the queue seemed to be completely taken aback by the whole thing. They'd appear surprised at the idea of putting their phones and their coins into a little tray thingy. They'd walk though the metal detector with spoons or metal bars or whatever in their person, and appear genuinely surprised that the buzzer would go off and the security guys would explain again about metal objects.

We got through all that, then started boarding the plane. One fun thing about flying Tiger out of Melbourne is that they don't have a terminal. It's just a shed. Then, you walk from the shed to the plane. It's quite agreeably primitive. Anyway. We got almost the plane, we were about 100 metres from it and we could see it through a wall of grimy plastic sheeting. And then we stopped. A nice young woman from Tiger closed the gate and told us we had to wait, there was a medical emergency and they were waiting for an ambulance.

After about 20 minutes an ambulance showed up, during which time the Tiger woman (as I'll call her) explained to us that there was a passenger still on the plane, and we all agreed that a medical emergency is a pretty big deal, especially with an ambulance, and that under the circumstances waiting wasn't all that bad. (But why did it take the ambulance so long to show up? I thought airports had all that sort of thing on hand. On those fly-on-the-wall docos on airports there's medical emergencies all the time - women having babies, a drug mule inadvertently overdosing as the cocaine-stuffed condom in their stomach is worn through by gastric acid and so forth).

We watched the medics get the guy off the plane, and we all couldn't help noticing that he appeared quite sprightly, even walking down the steps to the ambulance unassisted. Then an announcement, which I'll try render as accurately as possible "Tiger Airways wishes to apologise to the passengers on TT688 for the late boarding of this flight. This was due to a passenger in the arriving flight being unwell". Unwell? Is that all it was?

Cleaner

I did some cleaning yesterday. I vacuumed and then mopped the floors. It had been a while and we'd had a dust storm a couple of weeks ago and all the floors were covered in a thin layer of red dust. This didn't trouble me much at the time, but when I came back after being away for a week I noticed it.

So I vacuumed. Then mopped the floors.. bathroom, living room, kitchen. And then, after all that, I found myself standing in the door of my bedroom and I started thinking that maybe I wouldn't mop the floor in there just then(floors here hardwood, just to clarify.). Maybe another time, I found myself thinking. A better time.

Another time? A better time? I caught myself thinking this and had to have a stern word with myself. What would be a better time to mop the floor? What would that look like? I was, after all, standing in the door of the bedroom with in one hand a bucket of hot water with floor cleaning crap in it, and in the other hand a mop and I had the crushing realisation that there just wasn't going to be a better time. And that the only possible reason for not mopping the floor right then and there was if I had a massive coronary, or the earth was hit by an asteroid or something.

It only took a couple of minutes.

Area

This at the back of Chadstone shopping center, as you walk over to the oval and the cricket nets (yes, my life is incredibly glamorous). This sign would once have said "Assemby Area" and someone's had a go at it. On the one hand, it's not clever and it's not funny. On the other hand, it actually is.

NCIS.. where?

Channel 10 here is about to show NCIS Los Angeles, which I only know because I've been watching some tv this week with my kids. And so what?, I can hear you ask.

If you watch anything on channel 10 you get endless promos for the show, which doesn't look half bad. But what gets me (and you know me well enough to know there's always something) is the voiceover guy. "NCIS... Los AngelEEZ", he says.

Smarter.

Ollie says I'm just like Homer Simpson, except a bit smarter. Could be worse, I guess...

More on names.

Yesterday's Sunday Herald-Sun. There were 17 babies featured. Take a deep breath... the list included:

• Sydnee
• Maddison
• Mitchall (no, I didn't get it wrong, that's how they spelled it)
• Mikayla (again)
• Morgan
• Hudson
• Eden
• Sienna

Names again.

And speaking of names (pay attention), I've trained my sons to answer to Brayden and Jayden. I'm less sure about the girls; I tried Krystle and Chardonnay but they don't have the same oomph. Also, of course, they don't rhyme. Suggestions?

Names

Sunday's Herald-Sun has a section towards the back where each week they feature a dozen of so babies. A little photo of each one, a couple of sentences. My kids and I are unhealthily interested in this; it's a little family ritual we've developed over the last couple of months.

It's the names of the babies that are fun. This week, for example, we found a Jaxon and a Mikayla. Bullseye!

Located.

I know you think I have too much time on my hands (and it's hard to argue with that) but just stop for a moment and think about the word "located". In most instances it's just a filler. This sign here (FF, Kings Cross) is a good example.

If it just said "Fitness First / On the 8th Floor" would it lose anything? I know that using "located' like this sweetens it a bit, gives it better rhythm, but it's meaningless. It's like, as someone once said to me in similar context, the polysterene beads they put in boxes when they're packing stuff. (RC - thank you.)

I've become sensitised to this (yes, I really do have too much time on my hands) and as a result I'm quite disciplined about it. If I'm on the phone making an appointment to go somewhere or whatever and I'm about to say "... and where are you located?" I steel myself and just say "where are you?", or, if I'm feeling especially louche, "where are you at?"

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Postcript: While I'm on the subject of signs and Fitness First Kings Cross, there's a sign in the men's shower area warning about "inapropriate behavior" and we all know what they're getting at. But context is everything, surely. What's inappropriate in a gym in, say Chatswood might not be at all untoward in the postcode 2011. Quite the opposite, in fact.

tagline

I treated myself to a new laptop this week, a lovely sleek 13" macbook pro. It's to replace my current white macbook, which I'm donating to some needy kids who live in an isolated and economically deprived area.

Anyway. One of the things I really like about unpacking any Apple product is that every piece you unpack will have somewhere on the packaging the tagline "designed by Apple in California". I find this immensely reassuring.

Tax.

There's an otherwise-unremarkable story in today's Australian about the remote possibility that the capital gains tax exemption for owner-occupied housing might be scrapped. But the really great great part about it was left out of the online version. It's a picture of the young couple who are quoted towards the end of the story. They're on the terrace of their North Sydney apartment and behind them you can see the bridge and the harbor and whatnot. And then there's the caption:

Thomas and Katherine Ko, who are selling their apartment at Milsons Point, Sydney, for upwards of $3 million, oppose the idea of a capital gains tax on high-end family homes.

Well they would, wouldn't they? I don't blame the Kos for this, by the way. I'm opposed to anything that disadvantages me too. But who's the genius at The Australian who found this couple? It is the same person who finds a struggling family out in the Hills and puts them on the front page (always a front-lawn shot) when there's an interest rate cut?

Speaking of which, I expect that when interest rates start to rise again they'll have a picture of a semi-employed ex-banker on the front page, someone who's living on investment income and who welcomes a rate rise. That'd be me. They can find me at the Gazebo on a Thursday afternoon when the time comes.

Bananas.

I was walking down the street early this evening carrying a banana peel. By way of explanation, I'd eaten the banana as I was walking, and was hoping that on the way to the bank and the supermarket I'd find somewhere to put it.

I heard a woman behind me say "excuse me" and I turned around. She was in, I'd guess, her 60s. Eccentrically dressed but not - at least at first glance - barking mad. "Yes?", I said, expecting she'd tell me that my shoelaces were undone. I get that a lot.

She pointed to my hand "can I have your banana peel?", she asked. Then, by way of explanation, she added "it's for the worms".

I handed it over and crossed the road in case she was, in fact, a nutter. And as I crossed the road I realised I'd missed my chance. My chance to say something like "Banana peel? My kids get worms and I usually give them those worm tablets you buy at the chemist".

Your dog's called what?

I was downstairs having a coffee and reading the increasingly-feeble SMH and I couldn't help notice that both of the other outside tables were occupied by people who had brought their little dogs along. One of the dogs was called Brooklyn and its owners were - of course - New Zealanders.

My neighborhood's overrun with these little dogs. An acquaintance of mine was at a dinner party near here recently and was introduced to a couple who described themselves to her as dildoes, which took her back a little until they explained that it stood for "Dual Income Little-Dog owners".

Unneeded Complexity.

This morning, in between driving around to take number one son to soccer and number one daughter to hockey, and trying to schedule the thee or four other things that have to be done today, I almost ran out of gas. No, I don't mean in some figurative sense, I mean literally. (And I don't mean literally as in not literally, as it often does - see this blog.)

The car was almost empty; I pulled into a gas station (and I do say 'gas', by the way. 'Petrol' makes me wince. As, for that matter, does 'capsicum'.) I put $50 worth in the car and went inside to pay, and that's where it all started to get confusing. I told him "Pump 7" and handed over a $50 note and he said to me that if I bought $5 more I'd get 14c a litre cheaper, or something like that.

This stopped me cold. I don't really have much of a sense for how much a liter of gas costs, so is 14c lot? I asked him, and he said that on my $50 worth, I'd save about $1.50, which to me sounded like something worth investigating. But then he said that this saving only applied if I bought something in the convenience store for $5. Now clearly, if I was already going to buy something in the convenience store that cost $5 or more this is an unqualified good deal - by expressing a preference to buy the $5 item I've already said I'd rather have the item than have the $5, so having the-item-plus-$1.50 rather than $5 is a easy call.

But there was nothing in the shop that I really needed to buy for $5 or more. I could buy something I didn't want for $5, but then does the $1.50 I'd gain from the saving on the gas make up for the negative utility on the thing I wouldn't have bought anyway? Something I wouldn't pay $5 for, but which I'd happily pay $3.50 for? It's not easy.

And then I remembered than the man in line ahead of me had bought one of those protein drinks (and, I couldn't help noticing, a pack of winfield cigarettes - but he was that sort of guy) and I thought that might do it. I'd been to the gym yesterday and I need protein. The protein drinks were $4.65, so all I had to do was to buy something I didn't want at all for 35c and I'd still be up. Some gum or something, I don't know. They'd be paying me to have the gum and I could throw it in the bin as I went out. Gum, of course, being an absolute disgrace.

But this side-deal wasn't as straightforward as that. They were also offering these protein drinks as a deal: you get two for $6. I could, of course, buy 2 for $6, but then I'd probably leave the extra one in the car for a day or too and it'd get a bit too funky to drink. But I'd feel like a chump paying $4.65 for one when I could have had the extra one for only $1.35. I couldn't justify buying a second one... (This happens to me in the supermarket quite often. I need one of something, but they have some deal on where you could also buy 7 for the price of 13 or so and I end up not wanting to buy any. It's my professional training: if you can't tell who the sucker is in a deal, it's you.)

By this point my brain had just completely seized up. I meekly gave the guy $50 and walked out, feeling like I'd been defeated and had left money on the table. I should point out that I have a good undergraduate degree in physics and that for most of my professional life I've been dealing with complex financial structures. I'm not an idiot. I just behave like one.

Postcript: After wrote this, I saw the obvious solution. I was, I think, indifferent between $4.65 and one protein drink. $6 for two protein drinks is really $4.50 for two, so the second one would cost me negative 15c. I could just discard it as I left the shop. Or I could put it in the car on the off-chance that I remembered that it was there and that I needed it. I think though, that at a subconscious level I did evaluate all this, and realised that the extra fuss of having to manage this inventory wasn't worth the 15c I'd gain. I have quite a bit on my plate today anyway.

Airport Security. And wine racks.

On Badscience there's a link to a superb article in the Atlantic about how airport security is as poorly thought-out as it is annoying. Which is saying something. As an aside, last time I was taken aside for a random security check I asked the guy exactly how random it is, and he said 'continuous random'. Which means, he explained as he got out the glove and the car battery, that when they've finished doing someone they grab the next person who walks past.

Anyway, this article would be a great find anyway, but it also has this superb paragraph. Note the past sentence, the one in parentheses:

During one secondary inspection, at O’Hare International Airport in Chicago, I was wearing under my shirt a spectacular, only-in-America device called a “Beerbelly,” a neoprene sling that holds a polyurethane bladder and drinking tube. The Beerbelly, designed originally to sneak alcohol—up to 80 ounces—into football games, can quite obviously be used to sneak up to 80 ounces of liquid through airport security. (The company that manufactures the Beerbelly also makes something called a “Winerack,” a bra that holds up to 25 ounces of booze and is recommended, according to the company’s Web site, for PTA meetings.)

See! (Oh, and if you don't know the colloquial meaning of the word 'rack' in American I suggest you get out more.)