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.