The Politics of Plenty

Election day today with the polls suggesting that Western Australia may buck the national trend and actually increase the liberal vote. If so, one can't help but conclude that the resources boom - the biggest and potentially most long lived the country has ever seen - is a lot to do with it. Enough has been written about the election without me adding to it here. It's just interesting to see how our children of recent voting age are reacting to it all - bored mostly but I do wonder if they think of it in similar terms to "Australian Idol" or "Australia's Biggest Loser".

There is a lot of money floating around in Perth right now - literally floating in some cases since much of it is spent on the next big boat. Times are so ridiculously good that I suspect people will be leery of rocking said boat when entering the polling booth (I seem to be stuck in a nautical language rut, becalmed in a sea of salty similitude !) Not that a sudden injection of cash into the economy necessarily makes life better for anyone: boom towns aren't always nice places to live - even if they aren't razed to the ground by earthquake and fire as San Francisco was after the Californian gold rush. The public transport system, the shops, the roads the health and education infrastructure are all groaning under the strain. Boom towns are good places to make money and get out - bit of a problem if it's your home town.

There is a tide, in the affairs of men, if taken at the flood etc etc. Not sure if that's Will Shakespeare..sounds like him. Anyway, time to turn the box on and see if that tide has turned. I don't have a strong preference either way but, if the status quo remains tomorrow, I do hope, at least, that it's not because the Australian people lack the courage to chance a change.

Sport and the battle with the "Auld Enemy"

The Australian Rugby Union team (the "Wallabies") has inexplicably just been bundled out of the World Cup by England. Sporting aberrations of this kind move me to a scientific investigation of why a nation of ~ 20 million can produce sportsmen and women, on average and by any non-partisan analysis clearly superior to those springing from the loins of a nation of 50 million. (we may speak of the Olympics if nothing else):

1. The seed of the present day Aussie population were filtered by the extreme hardship of their convict settlement origins. Take a population of artful dodgers, cunning spivs, forgers, Irish political agitators etc, kill off the ones who aren't as hard as nails and who lack the ability to adapt to the most topsy turvy of environments. Then breed like rabbits (kangaroos ?) from the rest of them.

2. Add to this mix, in the 20th century (a) all those Europeans who didn't fit in the place of their birth for one reason or another or were smart enough to say "sod this for a game of marbles" in response to the tumultous events in their pan-european homes (b) a liberal sprinkling of pacific islanders sharing one overiding characteristic: they knew how to kill people efficiently by hitting them with wooden objects and throwing things (think about what the Maoris did to the brits in NZ for one. If that's not enough, try to force your way into a King's Cross night club and think about it while you pick yourself out of the plate glass window across the road)

3. Put this fizzing bucket of genes into a country with plenty of space, abundant meat to eat, lots of sunshine and bugger all else to do once the business of survival against bushfire, drought, flood and every kind of poisonous and biting creature is sorted and let them get on with it while nurturing a deep cultural insecurity and brooding over numerous injustices inflicted by their colonial overlords.

4. Disperse the children of these pioneers to numerous remote locations where failure to participate in the local footy or cricket team meant complete and utter isolation from all social intercourse (and frequently from the other kind of intercourse too !). Allow none of that poofy culcha and litricher stuff to get in the way of the Saturday arvo biffo and booze-up.

Is it any wonder what the outcome is ?

So I say to our English friends: We have sport. You have Shakespeare. Tell your press to stop wringing their hands over this and give your lads a bit of support instead of a slagging them when they're NOT winning Ashes and World Cups and everyone will be happy :). Occasional reverses in Australia's sporting fortunes simply mark the progress of our nation toward a more diverse and culturally mature society. Take "Neighbours" for example. Oops..I forgot…you already do !

Cya

If we save daylight, is that a credit or a debit in the energy books ?

I have just been changing light bulbs.

Again.

It's part of the Sunday morning ritual due to the fact that the electrics in our house appear to be haunted. We had an electrician around to look at it and the shrugging of the shoulders and the evasiveness of his answers (as related by my wife) are a dead giveaway for the supernatural influence. Light bulbs in our house just lose the will to live. The murky light that we live in half the time certainly creates the kind of eldritch atmosphere that spirits clearly prefer.

In an effort to reduce the energy footprint of our family (We have teenagers who are, I think, trying to make our house visible from space) I am replacing incandescent with fluorescent at every opportunity. Wife did her bit by coming back from a visit to Daughter No. 1 in Wagga Wagga with a clutch of energy efficient fluoros given to her personally by Al Gore, who happened to be visiting that weekend.

Some notes of explanation to my foreign reader are needed (Howdy - you appear to be in Houston by the little red dot on the map) :

1. I was kidding about Al Gore
2. I was not kidding about Wagga Wagga. There really is such a place. GoogleEarth it if you don't believe it. The name is aboriginal for "the farthest I can be from anywhere and still be somewhere"
3. Wagga Wagga is in the state of New South Wales (NSW) whereas we live in Western Australia (WA). They are two hours ahead of us most of the year and three hours when we don't have daylight saving (and boy is THAT another story).

Time is a very funny thing, even without Stephen Hawking to explain just how funny it is, but even he didn't tackle the thorny issue of daylight saving. I have tried to explain it to my dear wife on several occasions, with and without recourse to quantum mechanics. She just doesn't get it. Energy saving light bulbs are all very well and certainly replacing two hours daylight with two hours 75 W fluoro light must be making a huge impact. But do you think I could get dear wife to undersand that using light bulbs from Wagga Wagga in Perth means that they are going to switch off two hours too early ? No ! Irish women are just so stubborn.

Tot Morgen

The Big T moves in mysterious ways

Within minutes of recording my frustration with our national telecommunications provider, I had a call from them and this one wasn't an attempt to sell me one of their products. My wife, who doesn't believe in coincidences, would say that this is either evidence that the Big T monitors all mentions of it in cyberspace or evidence of a more mysterious karma at work. In other words, she would say that, if Big T isn't watching, the "universe" at large is.

The contrast between the attitudes of "Campbell" and "Nizam" couldn't have been starker. "Campbell" started by apologising, then listened, then accepted responsibility for the problem and said what he was going to do about it. He even said he would sms me his direct number so that I could contact him if my mobile was "cold called" again (although that didn't eventuate). What am I to make of this ? Well, I guess it shows that people with very different attitudes can work for the same company. I am strangely comforted that corporate ethos, whether on the whole it is good or bad at the Big T at least is not all pervading.

CUL8R

To Rant or not to Rant, how about that for the %^%&^ question ?

A blog, I find, serves many therapeutic purposes for its author. Thoughts that would otherwise rattle around in the head bumping into more productive mental process, get launched harmlessly into cyberspace. Some thoughts are more poisonous than others, of course, and the ones in my head right now about our National Telecommunications Provider (The big "T") are particularly vitriolic.

So far I've resisted to the tempation to vent my spleen about various injustices here because I don't want to turn the blog into a rant. Even worse, I don't want to provide evidence of (or perhaps even accelerate) the slide into grumpy old man-dom.

You know there is a "but" coming don't you ?

In a previous post I spoke about "living in other people's worlds", the "worlds" in that case being those created by famous authors. In the course of a conversation I had with "Nizam" of the big T yesterday, it occurred to me that every one lives in their own world. Furthermore, differences in culture, age and attitude to life can create impenetrable barriers between them. You know this is the case when two people fluent in a common language are nevertheless unable to communicate.

Big T has been harrassing me by repeatedly calling my mobile phone with offers which I don't want and even if I did would reject out of anger at the practice of "cold-calling". After the third interuption in two days, I rang the telecommunications omsbudsman to complain (isn't "Omsbudsman" a great word ? Sounds like a Buddhist Gardener. We should have omsbudsmen and omsbudswomen for all kinds of things. A moustache omsbudsman for example would be a great boon to society. It could even be David Boon ! Hah !).

Anyway... the Telecommunications Omsbudman directed me to a complaints line at Big T where I ascended via a staircase of lesser complaint fielders and on-hold muzak plateaus to Nizam. I explained that I wished Big T to desist from cold calling me and that I had already asked to be removed from the lists they wantonly distribute to their marketing company lackeys. He said it would take up to 30 days for this to happen. I said "that isn't good enough because I want you to stop calling NOW !" He said that, firstly, it wasn't him that was doing the calling, and secondly that he couldn't do anything about it. I said "Yes you can, you can stop doing cold calling altogether, as it's offensive, intrusive and does not encourage people like me to embrace their services any time this side of...say...infinity". He said " I can't do anything about it". I said "Yes you can and furthemore...(insert your own piece of logic laced in increasingly acerbic wit HERE). He said more words to the effect of "it's not me" and "I can't"

You get the picture.

Reflecting on this interchange, I realised that my failure to communicate with Nizam was due to our differing fundamental assumptions about the world. He seemed to be saying that anything it was possible for Big T to do it was legitimate to do, so where was my problem ?" I started with the naive assumption that, as a potential customer, they wanted to make me happy. Even further than that, I assumed that, when Nizam came to work in the morning, his general aim was to add to the sum total of human happiness, not subtract from it.

In a sci-fi novel read long ago (can't recall the details) the author hatched a sinister plot whereby dark, conspiratorial forces gained control of the nation's communication infra-structure by stealth, in order to ...well profit I suppose but the general thrust was to spread evil in all it's forms and seize power.

I think it's happened.

Comments by pigeon post only please. If you would like your phone numbers added to the telemarketers "do not call list" managed by the govt, go to http://www.donotcall.gov.au/. If you could make particular mention of the Big T, that would be just peachy.

Is a niche opening up for providers of hard and boring FACT ?

The editor of our local newspaper has been caught out extravagantly embroidering the truth in order to conjure some moral high ground out of a tiny mole-hill, climb upon it and deliver a po-faced sermon about our health system. This is fairly typical behaviour for this newspaper, which leaps breathlessly from one moral crusade to another in order to fill its pages and portray itself as our guardian.

I wish it would stop.

I just want a newspaper to tell me some facts. Good, solid, reliable facts based on sound and impartial research. I can do the rest myself. I am quite capable of getting indignant on my own. I can see a conspiracy in a set of random and disconnected events without any assistance thank you very much. If I do have a problem, there is always the web, where every variety of sensationalist puffoonery is just a click away if I feel in the mood for a few oooohs and aaaahss and well-I-nevers.

The web is wonderful and I do love the power it brings to find out anything about anything quickly - as long as I'm prepared to take that anything with a large grain of salt. I don't expect everything I find there to be literally, or sometimes even remotely true. We get our news now from www.perthnow.com and, because it doesn't indulge itself in the low form of "investigative journalism" it's paper cousin favours, we feel better informed. What I'd really like to happen though, is for somebody to work out that a niche has opened up for a newspaper with rock solid credentials in providing unadulterated, gold plated facts and nothing else. It would be even better if there were two such papers, competing to be the most accurate. Then, I could feel really secure by comparing one with the other. The research needed to produce a paper like this would mean that it couldn't come out more than about once a week but that's OK. We probably have only about a weeks worth of news in a week in Perth anyway - when none of it is being generated by the paper itself that is.

Camouflage for verbal misadventures

Today, at work, I had to give a talk on my technical speciality, to a bunch of local and foreign business people. As each of these people represented a host of unseen shareholders, poised with their cheque books over my company shares, my instructions were 1. Duty of care disclosure: tell them everything we know or could reasonably be expected to know and don't leave anything out under pain of ASX investigation, but...2. Don't dare tell them anything that could erode our competitive advantage. The mutual exclusivity of these instructions makes for a fine edge of concentration and short fingernails I can tell you.

Like many people I can react to stress by letting the leash of my tongue in the most bizarre and unpredictable ways. In fact, the situation may resemble riding one's bike towards an inconveniently placed tree in the middle of the path - the more you focus on it the more likely it is you are going to hit it smack on, arms, handlebars and manic grin frozen in place until the moment of ignominious impact. Why do we do that ? It can't have evolutionary survival value.

So..I began to worry that I would blurt the company secrets out (or equally damning, not blurt them out). How could I recover from such a gaffe ? Given that the words, once spoken, can't be plucked back out of the air, it seems to me that the only way would be to camouflage them: If I were to sprinkle my otherwise lucid, focussed, ruthlessly logical yet urbanely witty talk, from the start, with completely out of context and loony statements - well nobody would know which were the real gaffes and which were the products of technical tourettes syndrome.

I think I got away with it.

Catchya

Books that never get put out in the garage sale

Which books go on the "keeper" list ? That is, which ones never get put out in the garage sale or taken to be recycled at the second-hand book shop ? In pondering this question in the fuzzy hour (the one between waking and sleeping on a Sunday morning) I find there is no universal quality that one can point the finger at. However, looking at the bookshelves I do recognise some common elements:

1. Breadth AND depth. In other words, the subject matter ranges far and wide geographically and historically and yet manages to provide detail which rings true and makes one want to know more. Obviously a lot of research must go into such books, O'Brian's masterpiece series being a case in point.
2. The characters are complex, often slightly flawed and have human qualities that are cross-cultural and eternal - i.e. recognisable in those around us today and (dare I say it) even in ourselves
3. Beauty of language: clarity and economy of expression and of course the skill of being able to build a word picture. This takes many forms and, for me, is most attractive when most quirky. Douglas Adams in his "Hitchhiker's Guide" series is a master of this (I say "is" rather than "was" because the best books make their authors immortal). Numerous examples possible but let's settle for the Vogon spaceships (big, yellow, oblong, malevolent) hanging above the English countryside "in exactly the way bricks don't". Antonine de Saint Exupery is also brilliant at this and his best work somehow survives translation from the French. He describes a gentle French brook winding its way across a grassy meadow as "a snake in the grass lying in wait to transform his force-landing aircraft into a flaming candelabra". With such expressions he shows how perceptions of a scene or object are coloured by circumstance.
4. A resistance to classification: In our local library books are now arranged on the shelves according to "genre" rather than alphabetically by author in the Dewey system. This means someone has to decide what the genre is. The best books frustrate such classification. Again the Aubrey-Maturin series of Patrick O'Brian is a good example. Our librarians can't seem to decide if they are "historical", "war" or "classic literature". They could equally be placed in natural history, biography or maritime technology or something like that.

Time for coffee and then a visit to the plant nursery to reinforce the ranks of plants in the "Plants vs. Weeds" battle waging around our house. I will also help the Plants with a bit of chemical warfare against their opponents. "I love the smell of Roundup in the morning"

Cheerio (belongs with Toodooloo).

Living in other people's worlds

Unfortunately finished reading the last book of Patrick O'Brian's Aubrey-Maturin series - very sad. For the past few months I've been able to spend a little part of every day in another world and I miss it. It would be good to say something about the joy that great literature brings here but I don't have the skill to do it. I realise that it must be a very difficult thing to be a literary critic or commentator; to find words to describe something that, in it's perfect form is indescribable. By its very nature, the best books bring us something that is utterly new, and therefore impossible to describe by simile or analogy. Anyway, these ones go on my list of treasures along with the books of Antoine de Saint Exupery, P.J. O'Rourke and..hmm..this going to require more thought than I'm capable of near bedtime.

Toodooloo (isn't that a long lost word well worth reviving) ?

Graffiti

Controversy about aboriginal art sites on the Burrup Peninsula (or rather about their preservation on sites allocated for LNG plants) makes me wonder how the original artists, and their contemporaries might have felt about it. Did they consider them sacred in the way some do now or were there ancient aboriginal parents lamenting irresponsible youth going around with the paleolithic equivalent of the spray can ? On the same theme, if Chinese society continues to "westernise" at the present rate, will the Great Wall of China turn into the world's greatest canvas for angsty Chinese gangstas wanting to remind everyone that they exist and have something to say ? Come to think of it, much of what I see on Perth streets may as well be Chinese for all I can make of it. Whatever happened to Foo ? At least he had personality.

Beautiful morning in Perth. Cold, clear and crisp. Dog has had his run and sniff. He gets so much obvious pleasure from this, I might try it out. We are all neglecting our sense of smell I feel and society is the poorer for it. I may stick to trees, bushes and posts for the time being as I think people might not be ready for the butt-sniff introduction. Waiting now for teenage step-son to work himself up to glacier speed and get to school.

Start HERE

That's directed at me, not you. Nothing was happening so I felt a simple instruction might help.

I really don't know about this blog business. I've always had a vague suspicion that having the time to write about one's life is automatic proof that said life has no content worth writing about. Well, time will tell I suppose. If this is the only entry ever made, you (and future me) can assume that I've bravely gone about pushing back the frontiers of science, making people laugh, cry or more likely just getting mildly amused and mildly irritated but making some kind of bow wave anyway, and so not possibly having time to come back and add anything more. Other people seem to manage it however - having an interesting life and nevertheless having time to record bits of it I mean. There's plenty of interesting stuff out there and not all of it to do with quilting and model trains. Oh bugger. I've only done one paragraph and I've offended 6 million people already. And then there's also the ones who are offended by the word bugger. Perhaps I should explain that the literal meaning of this word has been lost in Australia and it really is just a stronger version of "bother". Did that help ? I thought not.

The name "Peripheral Vision" comes from the realisation that most really important things in life are only seen from the corner of the mind's eye. This seems evident more and more as time goes on so I figure there needs to be some place to write stuff like this down. In one of Douglas Adam's Hitchhiker's Guide series, the process of learning to fly is described as "throwing oneself at the ground and missing". This is accomplished by arranging to be distracted at the crucial moment so you forget to complete the process by actually colliding with the ground and just end up bobbing gently a few feet above it. The point, I guess, is that surprises open up channels in the mind that aren't there otherwise. While travelling on a very fast train between Paris and Den Haag, having arrived in Europe for the first time a few hours earlier, I was enjoying the fast-forward views of Belgian backyards when I saw an Emu. This was such a bizzarre thing to see in such a context that my mental train left the tracks completely for few seconds - roughly the time it took for my stunned brain to rummage through the archives and drag up something about Emu farming in France. Anyway, there was a pleasurable little period afterwards when all wonders seemed possible and I enjoyed the rest of the trip very much more thereafter.

Not sure where this is going so I'll leave it there and come back (or not) later.