Curious

They're building a new freeway not far from my place, or, to be more precise, they're building another one of those underground freeways that aren't free and that idiots will drive in at 50 when the limit's 80 because, apparently, it's so scary being in a tunnel.

That's meant a lot of surface roadworks near where the tunnel joins the freeway leading down to the Sydney Harbour Bridge.

Last week, they put up a new sign. It reads...

Pedestrians Animals Prohibited

Um. Ok. But, what exactly do they mean?

Are they talking about Pedestrians' Animals, which means you can't take your dog for a walk on the freeway? Ok. But why would you want to?

Or do they mean Pedestrians Or Animals, which raises even more questions. I didn't know that was a problem. Really. I mean, I think the last time someone rode a horse across the Bridge was DeGroot in 1932 when the thing opened. I'm pretty sure there isn't an Elephant Sacturary anywhere in Lane Cove either.

Do they mean animals on their own, orALL animals, even the ones inside the car? What if the cat's coming for a drive, and is curled up on the back window ledge? What about the dog in the back of the ute? (For the language challenged, that's pronounced "yoot", short for "Utility Vehicle" and it's what a pick-up is really called.)

And are the animals supposed to read the sign, in which case, it should be like this one I spotted in a park near Vancouver a few years back (and which I know you've probably seen before).

I am reasonably sure they meant "Pedestrians And Cyclists Prohibited", but the way this place works, thats the sign we've got, so that's the sign we'll keep.

A Very Long Time

I had a call from Dad a few days ago, reminding me that it's Mum's birthday on the 23rd & their 58th Anniversary this week.

I'm really glad he called. I am utterly useless when it comes to remembering stuff like that. I mean, I knew they were towards the end of January sometime, but the exact date? Nah. Just never been able to hold it in my head, even after forty some years.

58 years. That's a bloody long time to be with anyone, and it's a tribute to both of them that they've stuck together. Of course, it was different for their generation. "As long as you both shall live" really meant it. It didn't mean "until you get sick of each other", or "until one of you falls on hard times", or even "until someone more fun comes along", which is what it seems to mean today.

It started me thinking back, again, to that uncorrupted, very different time, when the world stretched for about a suburb and a half, and mum and dad were everywhere, filling that space, larger than life.

We're talking the 60s here, and not the London/New York/Paris swinging 60s, but backwater provincial Sydney 60s, when the place we lived was little more than a conservative, overgrown country town, and the breadwinner worked hard so his wife could stay home and do what wives did then, which was to raise children and provide domestic back-up that would, today, define 'anachronism'.

That was their life. Dad was, to use the yiddish term, "in the schmutter business", which meant he had a clothing factory. It was originally my grandfather's company, but the real drive behind it was dad. He worked hard, often leaving for work before I got up, but he was nearly always home in time for dinner, especially on Friday nights, which were designated 'family dinner' time. And you know, thinking back, I don't ever recall him having to work on a weekend. Not real work anyway. Occasionally, there was maintenance to do around the factory, but that was a family outing. No. Weekends were weekends.

Mum, on the other hand, had the three of us to contend with, and I'll tell you that this was no easy task. My brother, eight years older than me, tall and strong, and two years behind him, my sister, a rebel for as long as I can remember, and then me 6 years later and a good bit frailer than the other two, but smart to distraction and always wanting to know why.

Dad fought hard for our family and he was king. He ruled us with a velvet covered iron fist, which meant discipline was strict-ish, in that what dad said was the law. He was all puff, of course. I only ever recall him striking me once, and in retrospect, I think I might have deserved it. It didn’t matter. Dad was boss, and when he called, we jumped. ‘How high?’ was unnecessary. And mum was his policewoman, liberally interpreting that law and delivering on the whole domestic back-up thing. Mums the world over are always the soft touch.

Mum was a great cook too, by the standards of the day. Her chicken soup and meatloaf, recipes handed down from her mother, were legendary, and her corned beef, thick slabs of it… woo… talk about a reason to stay home for dinner. Then there was her piece de resistance, pavlova, smothered in cream, banana, strawberry and passionfruit. She was so good at whipping those up that she was often asked to make them for friends for special occasions.

I still recall one time when she made one of those... it was for one of her best friends, 12 eggs, maybe more. She left it on the dining room table and then came to pick me up from school. When we got home… gone… our magnificent Great Dane, Dean, had scoffed the lot. To this day, mum swears the dog must have learned how to open the door. That’s ok. Her pavlova was strong motivation and there was one very highly motivated (and now rather happy) dog.

And hard as I try to recall, through my childhood and teen years, I can not remember mum and dad having a real fight. Today, we're supposed to think that's unnatural. Then? I don't know.

They stuck together through some pretty tough times when recession hit too. Very tough, but when dad bounced back, mum was by his side, his new business partner. We'd all flown the coop by then, or maybe I was about to, and those 50s stay home wife values were starting look out of place. Mum would try to tell you it was a decision driven by economic necessity, but deep down, I’m sure she was pleased to be back at work.

Now don’t get me wrong. This wasn’t domestic paradise modeled on the Dick van Dyke Show, and growing up was full of those tired wife/husband/life sentence type jokes that might raise an eyebrow or two these days. Times have changed.

So what is it that keeps people together for 58 years? Here’s what I came up with…

• Those different values helped.
• They had mountains of great friends and a social life that seems, at least in my memory, to have been way too social to be real.
• They were both really active in the community, dad with the Lions Club and mum with the NCJW (when she had time).
• They did stuff on their own. Dad played golf. Mum, tennis with the girls, cards… the usual stereotypical stuff. That time to do your own thing is so important.
• They did family stuff together. We were always going on picnics, outings, excursions and trips somewhere and if it made life interesting for me, it must have made it interesting for them too.
• They made sure they had their own time together. We were always being palmed off to grandparents so the two of them could have time away from us.
• They were a team.

And I really do think they love each other though as they have grown older, they do allow themselves to indulge in occasional petty bickering. That’s ok. After 58 years, they’ve earned the right to indulge in whatever they want.

How Dumb Do They Think We Are?

Or maybe that headline should ask "How Dumb Are We"?

I was indulging in my morning read-the-Herald-on-line ritual yesterday and was distracted by a flashing ad for Dell. It said something like "Super Dooper Deal On Dell Custom Built Computers - Hurry, Offer Strictly Limited". Of course, they weren't the exact words. I'm sure Dell's copy writers are more sophisticated than that but you get the gist.

Hurry? Why? You've ALWAYS got a super dooper deal running. Ok, it might not be THIS deal, but it will be another deal and frankly, there's only a limited combination of deals you can offer that involve upggrading memory, hard drive, DVD player or flat screen.

Strictly Limited? Oh please... I think you mean strictly limited to anyone who lives on Planet Earth, don't you?

Custom Built? Oh... ok... so I'm going to place an order, and someone in China is going to read my order and personally assemble my machine for me? For me! Yeah. Right. And I suppose that after that, they'll get in a cab, head for Shanghai Airport, get on a plane with it, and personally deliver it to my door. All for $699 with the bonus 17" flat screen monitor and Blue-Ray upgrade.

I have nothing against Dell. It's just another company making computers. Actually, I think the computer we bought dad for his 80th last year was a Dell, and it's been fine.

I'm starting to grow weary of tired marketing though, and especially of advertising that shouts at you about a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity that would really only be true if you were a fruit fly.

TV here used to be filled up with ads for one or other Persian Rug seller "CLOSING DOWN - ALL STOCK MUST GO", and the ad would run for months and in one case, years.

Car dealers are notorious for this stuff... "THIS WEEKEND ONLY. FREE AIR". Yeah. And when I turn up to the dealership next week with cash in my hand, you're going to tell me I can't have the free air because that sale was last week. Look bozo. The air conditioning comes with the car. It's already there. Stop trying to make a big deal out of giving me something for free that comes as standard anyway.

Or what about the ads that say "Sale Ends Tuesday" which should really say "And starts up again in two weeks time". (Actually, it should really say "Sale Ends ON Tuesday", but that's a blog for another time.)

Sadly, the answer to the question, though, must be "Very", because they keep trotting these offers out as though there's someone left who actually believes they're special...
...and we keep falling for them.

What Can You Believe II

I'll bet you've switched to Low Fat milk. I'll double up by betting that you switched because you thought it would be healthier and "less fattening"... and something called "Trim" that's still milk seemed like a great alternative.

Wrong. Go HERE to read that "Full-fat dairy products have a more slimming effect than low-fat foods".

And I promise this will be the last health rant.

People Who Drive White Cars

I think I must have taken a grumpy pill this morning, and I don't care if I get accused of being carist. The fact is, some drivers suck.

Survival on the roads relies on one's ability to form an almost instant stereotype view of other drivers according the the make or colour of car they're driving. Here's a little list, not complete, so add to it at your leasure...

White Cars
What is it with people who drive white cars? Why are they always doing 20kmh less than the speed limit? Why are they oblivious? I really don't know the answer. I just know that people who drive white cars are really really bad drivers.

BMWs
Arseholes. The lot of them. Arrogant and pushy in that childish nouveau riche "look at me, look at me" sort of way.

Ferrari Drivers
The universal law of inverse proportionality applies here... and those Ferraris seem to have very big exhaust pipes.

Taxi Drivers
Oblivious, and they own the road. Oh? They Don't? Really?

Greenies Driving Really Old Cars
Saving the environment, apparently, means keeping your old car until it disintegrates around you. It's belching acrid smoke, burning twice the fuel as something with a little more technology under the bonnet (hood) and dropping oil all over the road that, the next time it rains, finds its way into the eco-system you're trying so hard to protect. Doesn't matter. You're making a stand against the evil, wasteful consumerist world we live in.

Volvo Drivers
What more can I say. The stylist might have moved in since Ford bought the place, but a Volvo driver is still a Volvo driver.

Old Men In Hats
Is driving so much more confusing now than it was back when radial tyres were still on the drawing board at Goodyear? Or is it just that, as soon as you put a hat on INSIDE the car, it somehow has the same effect as putting a phone up to your ear?

Young Chicks With Mobile Phones
Here in Oz, it's illegal to use your mobile phone while driving (unless you've got the hands free thingmy). That doesn't stop pretentious 19 year old femmes in their little Mazda 3s that daddy gave them for finishing high school. Talk, text, drive fast, change lanes, talk some more. They're proof that natural selection doesn't work. Stuck up little bitches.

Idiots Who Panic In Tunnels
A few years back, someone in Sydney decided that we should put our freeway system underground (and then charge a toll so that it's not free). Come on people... the speed limit in here is 80... can you give me any reason why you're only doing 50? At this speed, by the time we get to the other end, I'll have died of carbon monoxide poisoning.

People With "Magic Happens" Stickers
The only magic likely to happen around this lot involves the piece of crap they're driving actually making it safely to wherever they're going.

People With Ixtheus Stickers
If you keep driving like that, He's not going to save you, and while you're keen to meet Him really soon, some of the rest of us aren't so sure.

The Best
By the way, the best drivers in the world are in LA. You have to be good when you're heading South in the HOV lane on the 405 at around 6 on a Friday night at 70mph, and you're off at the next exit. Those 6 lanes of traffic you have to cross make life worth living. For readers unfamiliar with LA, they used to have a "High Occupancy Vehicle Lane" (I think it's gone now... maybe someone there can tell me). "High Occupancy" = Driver +1, and I'm sure that on the Hollywood Freeway, your dog counts.

The Worst
The worst drivers in the world are in Manilla. NFI. Nothing more to add.

Here?
Sydney drivers aren't bad... actually, they're pretty good. They have to be to navigate their way through the mess we call a road system. I know there's a piece of cheese at the end of the maze somewhere, and one day I'll find it.

Perth drivers, though, seem to think lane choice is a life commitment. Changing lanes isn't in the driving paradigm. You're just going to have to wait until the driver returns to his parked car. Sometimes, Perth drivers have been known to wait days.

Just What Can You Believe Anymore?

I try and keep business stuff out of this blog because

1. it's largely boring unless, like me, you like learning about science stuff,
2. if there's any danger it could be interpreted as an ad for one of my companies, that's not proper etiquette, and
3. we have such stupid regulations in this country that I can get into trouble saying stuff here about something we sell because there's a link to my company on this page.

Today, though, I'm going to make an exception, and try to expose a few "lies-held-as-truths" that might just save your life.

Cholesterol.

The Lie is that if you have "elevated cholesterol" you have to do something about it and that something usually involves a drug called a statin.

The Truth is that there's virtually no difference in mortality between people with 'high' cholesterol and people with 'normal' cholesterol. (Curiously, people with 'low' cholesterol have a slightly higher mortality rate.) There's also virtually no difference in mortality between people on statin drugs, and people not on statin drugs, even though there seems to be an imperative to hand a prescription over to anyone with even slightly elevated cholesterol.

In addition, while those statin drugs are effective at lowering your cholesterol, they're also extremely effective at lowering your body's production of something called CoEnzyme Q10. This enzyme is so essential to body function that if your heart runs out, it will stop, which explains why the exception to the 'no difference' above is that if you're on a statin drug, you're 4 times more likely to die of congestive heart failure than if your're not. Watch this space... people who know more about this than I do are predicting that the legal fall-out for this is going to make the whole Vioxx thing look like a day at the zoo.

So why, as a society, are we obsessed about cholesterol? Easy... it's about money. Here in Australia, statin drugs account for 52% of all of the money our over-generous government spends subsidising prescription medicines. Worldwide, we're talking about a drug that generates billions of dollars in sales.

Cholesterol is a symptom of other things. The other things can be bad, so when your cholesterol tests as 'high', look for the other things. If your doctor just wants to put you on a statin drug, go and find another doctor because the one you've got is killing you.

Slip, Slop, Slap

That's the slogan the Cancer Council in Australia uses to get us to slip on a shirt, slop on some sunscreen and slap on a hat. It's supposed to lower skin cancer rates by 'protecting' us from 'harmful' UV rays, right?

The Lie is that those UV rays are killing us.

The Truth is that more than 70% of us are now chronically Vitamin D deficient. Vitamin D is produced in your skin by photosynthesis... that is, it's produced when you go out in the sun, into those UV rays.

Vitamin D deficiency has been linked to at least 16 cancers, all of which have increased in incidence over the last 15 years or so because we've been doing what we've been told. And the incidence of skin cancer here in Australia, where we have the highest rate in the world? HASN'T CHANGED!

There are two reasons...

First, sunscreen is effective, ONLY if you don't rub it in. As soon as you rub it in, whoosh... blocking ability gone for the spectrum of UV that causes melanoma. However, the spectrum that causes your skin to go red, which is your body's warning to get out of the sun, is very nicely blocked so we think we can stay in the sun longer.

And second, Vitamin D also helps protect you against melanoma. It's made by the same spectrum that makes you go red.

So why do governments all over the world persist with this? Money. There's a very rich and powerful lobby making sunscreens and anti-cancer drugs, and getting grants from governments and even the UN, to run ad campaigns telling us to Slip, Slop, Slap.

Is it ok, then to go back to the beach and go sunbaking all day? No. Absolutely not. We're past that tanned 80's look now aren't we? But to cover up and use a powerful sunblock every time you're outside... you're killing yourself.

"Diet" Soft Drinks

The Lie is in the name... "Diet". We're all supposed to cut down on our sugar intake, right? That much I agree with. But those "Sugar Free" diet soft drinks are NOT the answer.

The Truth is that as bad as a can of sugar-filled soda is, it's still better for you than it's sugar free version, which is sweetened with something called "Aspartame". At last count, there were some 90+ dangerous health consequences DIRECTLY linked to Aspartame from brain tumours and MS to chronic fatigue syndrome, depression and poor memory.

And if you want to know which lame idiot in the government approved it as an artificial sweetener in human food, then blame Donald Rumsfeld, who was then CEO of the company that makes it, and in classic Rumsfeld style, pulled off one of the grandest con jobs over the US congress in history. It's a long story for another time, but if you're interested, go HERE and order yourself a copy of a DVD called "Sweet Misery".

Why? Money again, and the cynic in me is starting to believe agencies like the FDA in the US, and the TGA here in Australia, are captives of Big Pharma... and the only winner from Aspartame is the pharmaceutical industry which gets to sell you lots more drugs to make you better from the side effects of Aspartame.

There's so much more about Aspartame, but I'm ranting and you're already bored, so I'll let you find it for yourself.

Sugar Is Bad

The other related Lie is that sugar is bad for you. Agreed, excess sugar is bad, but in a study released a few months back, researchers took a group of obese women and put them on calorie restricted diets to lose weight. They divided them into 2 groups, one where sugar was totally removed from their diet, and the other, where a small amount of sugar was allowed. Calorie restriction = weight loss, or at least it should. One of the two groups lost weight during the trial, and the other didn't. No prizes for guessing that it was the group which was allowed sugar that actually lost weight. When deprived of sugar, your body switches your metabolism into famine mode, in which it upregulates the processing of the food you put in, and takes every opportunity it can get to store away any unused calories as fat. And once you're in famine mode, it's extremely difficult to switch back irrespective of the size of the feast at the buffet.

Incidentally, if you're in the USA, those sugar sodas are not actually sweetened with sugar, they're sweetened with High Fructose Corn Syrup, which is cheaper than sugar, but which is also linked to a raft of health problems including your obesity epedemic. Thankfully, the rest of the developed world hasn't been as accepting of the safety data, so it's banned in Australia, Canada, Europe and most of the other places that matter.

Fat On The Lips = Fat On The Hips

The Lie is that eating fatty foods will make you fat. For girls especially, this seems to be accepted as holy truth.

Let me say this in the strongest terms I can use without incurring the wrath of censors in Singapore... There is NO relationship between the fat you eat and the fat you are!

Eating ONLY fatty food will make you fat, and it will probably make you dead, but the Truth is that fat is essential to your health and well being. In what seems like a paradox, some fats, like CLA and Omega 3, are actually imperative for good health, and for anyone trying to control their weight.

Yet as a society, we're pre-occupied with "Fat Free". I was in our local supermarket this morning and noticed a bag of lollies ('candy' for you Americans and Canadians). Emblazoned across the front was "99% Fat Free", as if that somehow made it ok.

That Fat Free mentality was at its height in the 80's, and doctors like the good Dr J are just now starting to see the long term damage caused in people who followed a fat free diet.

Therein endeth my rant, though if any of this has interested you, go HERE to read a very tongue-in-cheek article about the US FDA banning Vitamin D.

And if you're interested in evil pharma, ask me to tell you the story of a herpes drug you'll never get to see called 'Amexcin'.

Way Too Much TV

Dreams. No... not the "I want to be an Astronaut when I grow up" type dreams, or even the "I wish the world was more like Star Trek" type dreams. I'm talking about the "images that flash through your head while you're asleep" type dreams. We all have them. Every night, apparently. (Unless you rely on Rohypnol, which I'm told knocks you out so deeply you don't.)

Mostly, our dreams are just disconnected images, over-interpreted to bring order to the chaos.

Occasionally, there is order in there and we can wake up remembering a dream so vividly that it was hard to know whether it really happened or not... and then a few hours later... nothing... just a faint memory that there was a something... you can't recall what... "and yet it seemed like I was there".

Very occasionally, there are dreams that stay with us for ever. You know what I mean, when the line between dream and reality is so blurred in your brain that you'll never really know which was which.

There's the implausible too... I still recall one I had when I was too young to remember much else. I think I must have been 6 or 7, and if I created the scene on film, you'd think fire and brimstone Hell. I can still smell the smoke even now, forty plus years later. And I can still feel the giant trilobites eating my ankle. I remember waking from that dream and going to my wardrobe to get my dressing gown. All would have been fine if it hadn't been for the slipper overhanging the edge. The scream was so loud as it brushed the front of my ankle, and it was at that moment that I "knew" those trilobites had been real.

I've always been a vivid dreamer, and for most of my adult life the dreams have been so real, so coherent, that occasionally they'd have end credits. I'm not kidding. Some of the best films I've ever seen were dreams, complete with titles, characters, dialogue, plot, sub plot, special effects and, at the very end, credits.

Some of the music has been sublime too... try Trumpet Voluntary played two or three octaves lower on a concert hall organ with full orchestral backing. (When I've got far too much money I'll pay someone to do that... it was so beautiful I woke up sobbing.)

And I'd pay just about anything for a ticket to see one particular dream again. It was stunning, and for days, I couldn't stop talking about it. I might tell you about it one day, though like all really personal experiences, it is bound to lose something in translation.

Very occasionally, my dreams come true too. If I ever I tell you "I had the weirdest dream last night", pay attention, because track record would suggest that sometime in the future...

Ah... how I long for the good old days of great dreams... because lately...

Stargate (copyright MGM) has featured prominently in The Bear's dreams

Readers, I like Stargate. I've always been a sci-fi nut, but if I have another all night Stargate dream...

Seriously. Every night for the last week... bloody Stargate. Sensational movie length episodes, by the way... I hope the writers are telepathic because some of those stories were fab... great dialogue too... but they go on ALL night. All friggin' night! I wake up exhausted from fighting Wraith, Goa'uld or Ori, or stretching the brain into implausible science to find a technological solution to the problem/puzzle of the day. This morning, I even woke up "knowing" how the damned thing works. It had all been figured out in an especially long episode about... oh bloody hell... GO AWAY... I need to get some sleep here.

And a couple of weeks ago, I played out the entire Season 7 of Hogan's Heroes... which is a good trick, because the show only ran for 6.

Oh please. Brain, haven't you got better things to do while I'm asleep?

I want my old dreams back. The original screenplays. The coherent and intelligent plots, the stunning special effects, the profound and sometimes faintly disturbing glimpses into my future... where did those dreams go?

I don't know what drugs I need to be taking to get them back, but I am smart enough to know that if I want to watch re-runs of 60's sit-coms I should just get up and switch on TV1.

Perhaps I just watch way too much TV.

Daisy? What Sort Of Nancy Boy Flower Is That?

Hmmmm.

At the suggestion of CAW and Mrs Mouse, I took the "What Flower Are You?" test.

Here's what I got...

I am a Daisy What Flower Are You?

"You are just a sweet person. When a friend needs a shoulder to cry on, you are happy to offer yours with a box of tissues as well. Once in a while, you wish you could be a little more dramatic but then sensibility sets back in and you know that you are perfect the way you are."

Let me simply say this...
a) The last person to describe me as "sweet" was gorgeous, brunette, and about 3 seconds away from breaking up with me.
b) With two notable exceptions (you know who you are), the shoulder is closed.
c) There are no tissues. There are no handkerchiefs either.
d) It isn't possible for me to be more dramatic.
e) Yes. Perfect.

Bah!
I feel like I've just been tricked into reading a girlie mag at the doc's office.

The Scent Of Christmas

I was musing over the weekend, during the long stretches of time between customers, about the true meaning of my Christmas, and the innocence of a simpler time.

Remember, I'm Jewish, so your traditional "Offspring of God born to Virgin in Manger because the King David was booked out for a gynacologists convention" thing doesn't hold much sway with me, though I have to say it's a more compelling story than the "lamp in the Temple burned for eight days when there was only enough oil in the lamp for one" Hannukah story, which, on the Miracle scale, would barely rate a 2, as against a 7 or 8 for the Virgin.

No. When I talk about Christmas, I'm really talking about "Fat-Man-In-Red-Suit Day", which I believe is also celebrated with enthusiasm in Japan and Singapore and is spreading across an increasingly consumerist China. (Like many things in Asia that they've tried to import from the West, they'll get it right soon, but the Santa at Singapore's Changi Airport a few years back handing out Chocolate Easter Eggs to random passing children demonstrated that they still have a little way to go.)

In adulthood, FMIRS Day tends to get lost, both in the baggage of our lives, and in the pressure we put ourselves under to get exactly the right presents.

I remember Christmas better as a time when kids could play at the beach without their parents watching for paedophiles with cameras, or when we could get on our bikes and ride off to wherever just because it was there. A traffic jam was something that happened around road works, and neighbourhood dogs would wander into the front yard on their own just because they could. Our garden especially. They'd wander in, wee on a patch of grass that must have had a big sign in doggie that said "marking spot here" and then wander off again.

We would spend hours walking on our own around the streets of Dover Heights where I grew up. No kids disappeared. No unspeakable crimes were committed. We were unsupervised and relatively safe. The world was a different colour. The sky was more blue and the trees and grass were green. We had a drought then, too, of course. This is Australia, there's always a drought, but there was a faith that sooner or later the rain would come and if it didn't, the government would just build another dam (I know, there's a certain logic void in that but hey, we were eight... what did we know).

The only really dark cloud on the horizon was that nuclear apocalypse clock, ticking perilously close to midnight, but even in that, there was rational reservation. "We could go and hide in the cave", we say to each other. My best friend Johhny J and I would sit on the edge of the park they'd built over the top of the water storage reserviour (known universally as "The Rezza") and stare out over the panoramic view of a very different Sydney, arguing over just how big the blast would be. It'd reach Rose Bay, I'd say. No, Double Bay. It didn't matter. After all, Christmas was summertime... 6 weeks of school holidays, a 5 speed dragster bike and a whole world to explore.

There was the mocking laugh of the Kookaburras who clearly knew a great deal more than we did about the time ahead, and the cacophany of cicadas, as far as I know a uniquely Australian phenomenon. I don't remember the last time I heard cicadas and while a part of me is thankful for the quiet, I do wonder what happened to them. And then there were the smells... the fresh cut grass, the lingering sea salt in the air, and a world without air conditioning or unleaded petrol. Even now, the slightest whiff of pina colada can transport me back to Bondi Beach, not because of the drink, but for the scent of coconut in the suntan lotion and an oblivious ignorance of the need for a real sunscreen.

Christmas time was also the season of the backyard or beach cricket match, which I was never really good at because for reasons of genetic destiny I can't catch, can't bat and can't throw. My job, therefore, was to do what all unathletic kids did, which was to sit on the sidelines and commentate, or worse, stand behind the stumps and umpire. These days, it wouldn't matter so much because athletic ability isn't a prerequisite for X-Box.

We had a pool when I was growing up too, in a time when hardly anyone had a pool, so each Christmas our place was the centre of the neighbourhood universe. (That pool, by the way, was less a reflection of our economic status and more a tribute to my dad's lateral thinking ability, but that's a story for another time.)

I really mean "centre" too. EVERYONE used to drop in to our place. On some days in summer, there were enough lilos, inner tubes and other assorted inflatables in the water that you could walk from one side of the pool to the other.

Dad's standing joke was that he should be charging admission. It was a permanent open house at Christmas time and on Christmas Day, we knew we had until about 11 to get the presents opened and either hiddden away where the other kids couldn't break them, or placed stragetically where they'd be seen. After 11, Central Station would have been a quieter place and getting a space for the towel by the pool would, today, be an elimination challenge on reality TV.

Of course, to get to Christmas Day, you had to get through Christmas Eve, and like children the world over, there was a determination to stay awake so that I might catch a glimpse of the sleigh. Then, as now, this was futile, because it's well known that parents the world over drug their children on Christmas Eve, and have done so for generations. How else can you explain the impossibility for any child young enough to believe in Santa remaining awake for the entire night before Christmas?

I never did see the Fat Man, though I am sure I heard him once, and the next day, the evidence of his passing through was right there in my room... a model fort, complete with cowboys, indians, Davey Crockett and a long list of other very un-Australian cultural icons, all set up and ready to play right there next to my bed. I've still got those little plastic figures somewhere.

And in Sydney, the day after Christmas is Boxing Day, which meant more people, another barbecue and the start of the Sydney to Hobart Yacht Race, one of the toughest open ocean yacht races in the world. We had an uninterupted view of the Sydney Heads from our place, and we'd catch the start of the race on TV, then head outside, binoculars at the ready, to see the boats come out of the Harbour.

The barbecue was dad's pride and joy. And we're not talking about some mamby pamby stainless steel gas fired thing with a hood here. If that's what you've got, you might as well just cook in the kichen. We're talking about a REAL barbecue, with charcoal that you'd need to light an hour before you wanted to start cooking, and that you'd need to nurture until the flame and heat was just right before the meat was thrown on the grill.

Yup. That's was Christmas for me... Fat Man in Red Suit Day for a family of clearly not very religious Jews living in what, then, was a predominantly White, Anglo Saxon Christian Australia. About the only concession we ever made to our non-Christianity was that mum and dad refused to have Christmas decorations. I actually suspect they were more concerned with cleaning up post tree, but I do recall an itty bitty little one I bought one year, about ten inches high (they were still inches then), all cone shaped and covered with something that looked almost exactly not unlike snow (for those of you who recognise that phrase, my apologies to Douglas Addams). For years after that, my little tree did its job, right next to the fireplace where it was supposed to be.

Snow? Fireplace? It's a curiosity here in Australia, where Christmas falls in the middle of summer, that we still decorate cold climate pine trees with fake snow and send each other Christmas cards with pictures of white landscapes more suited to my skis than my surfboard.

We even dress some poor guy up in this wooly fur trimmed red suit, make him put on a fake bushy white beard and wear a fur lined hat, just to sit with screaming children on his lap in 35degC (90+F) heat. Not that this matters if you're 7. Or maybe it's 5 these days... I don't remember how old I was when I figured out that Santa wasn't real, but I do remember that defining moment, hand firmly held by my mother as we crossed Oxford Street at Bondi Junction, when my brain said "hey, didn't I just see Santa over at David Jones, and here he is again at Grace Brothers... now that's not right."

Aussies even persist with the traditional English Christmas dinner with a menu definitely more suited to a dark mid-winter's evening in front of an open fire with the snow gently falling outside than it is to a blue skied, balmy, summer twighlight when you're hoping the cool change arrives before the pudding...

...which is why my family ditched the heavy meal and opted for a lunch menu of barbecued cow and sausages (that may or may not have contained cow, but certainly didn't contain spicy Thai seasoning), all served by the pool with charcoal potato and salad on the side, and followed, of course by pavlova instead of pudding. My favourite was the carrot and pineapple salad, which I think mum found in a recipe book somewhere and which, back then, was about as exotic as food got if you weren't at our local Chinese restaurant.

"And no-one's allowed to go swimming for the next two hours!" It didn't matter. Bing was still singing White Christmas and there was some umpiring that needed doing in the afternoon sunshine...

Rocky II

For those of you who are even remotely interested in Rocky, here he is with his owner, Manuel de Silva, in Town Hall Square today after getting his bravery award. De Silva put it rather well I think... "Rocky would be proud, if only he knew what was going on. Unfortunately they don't realise these things." The story's HERE.

And no, I didn't get to the ceremony. I really do have a life.

Heroes Come In All Sizes

Meet Rocky.

He's described by people who know him as "definitely not a guard dog... he's the sort of dog who'd lick you to death", but a little while back, he stepped up and did what all great dogs do... he defended his owner's home.

Rocky took two bullets for his trouble, and I hope the low life bastards who pulled the trigger rot for eternity.

It's been a long, hard road to recovery... surgery to remove the bullets, blood transfusions and two months in hospital, but on Monday, the City of Sydney is presenting Rocky with a bravery award. The story is here.

I don't know Rocky or his owner, but stories like this warm my heart, and this bear may well be a face in the crowd at that ceremony.

Climate Change - Maybe The Bear Was Right!

A mid-ocean smoker... a mini volcano where the centre of the earth oozes out at the bottom of the ocean. Is this the real global warming culprit? (Photo courtesy of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute)

It's not often I'm wrong (about just about anything really), and a couple of blogs back, I wrote that I might have been wrong about volcanoes and global warming. Deep down inside, I had this nagging feeling that this admission may have been premature, and that my original thinking was close to the truth.

In a way only synchronicity can explain, a few days after that 'retraction', a doco popped up on National Geographic Channel that added some clarity and evidence to the debate that fills up the empty spaces inside my straw brain.

Let's do a quick recap...

Do you remember that I'd dredged some stats out of the Smithsonian archive that showed that the rate of volcanic activity appears to be increasing? Ok... and I made the retraction based on the fact that those eruptions pump gasses and dust into the atmosphere that might, in fact, actually cool the world. Chester may have been wrong! Except that he may not be...

Let me explain.

Have you ever heard of the mid-ocean rifts? These are the places on the floor of the ocean where the crust of the world is cracked. The plates on either side of those cracks are moving apart, which makes the mid-ocean rifts the most volcanically active places on the planet.

Wait... don't yawn yet... this is important...

The activity at these rifts means 90% (maybe more) of the world's volcanic activity happens on the bottom of the ocean, well out of sight. So well out of sight, in fact, that only a handful of people have ever been down there to take a look.

What those who dared found when they got there was astounding, and the energy output (in the form of heat) at the place where the inside of the world oozes out into the ocean is estimated as greater than all of the energy production of all of mankind, and that's based on old, incomplete estimates of just how much volcanic activity is there.

The temperature of the water down there is thousands of degrees. It's hot enough to melt the aluminium in the submersibles they've sent down to take a look, and this molten goo bubles out of the centre of the earth 24/7/365, right along the entire length of the rift. We're talking about places so deep that the pressure is so great the water can't boil.

Think this through people. Here's a little experiment for you to think about. Take two buckets of water, and two heating elements. With the first one, just put it over the top of the water, and with the second one, immerse it, all the way to the bottom of the bucket. Now switch both heaters on.

Which bucket do you think might heat up quicker? (If you said the first one, then stop reading because this is clearly beyond you.)

So...

What causes most of the weather on earth? The oceans.

And what do the climatologists say is happenng to those oceans? They're getting warmer.

Why? "Oh, because humans are heating up the world." Yeah, right. Little insignificant humans. And an increase in the heat at the bottom of the ocean has nothing to do with it? Pfft!

Remember, the amount of volcanic activity has doubled in the last 200 years. Is this reflected at the rifts? They don't know, because these rifts are so poorly studied that the first photos were only taken in the late seventies, and the number of submersibles in the world capable of going there can be counted on less than your fingers.

Like I said in my original post on this, there's no doubt we've been reckless in the way we've treated the world around us and there's no doubt we need to change our habits, but to blame climate change on humans?

I think not.

Boring Is Relative II

This week, we all need to get ourselves to the Sheraton College Park Hotel in Beltsville, Maryland, where they're having the "National Carcass Disposal Symposium", organised by the University of Maine's School of Compost.

It's 4 days of rivetting discussion about what do do with all those animal carcasses we have lying around in our garages.

I want to be there just after lunch on Wednesday for Road Kill Composting in Montana - a Seasonal Rotation Approach.

Really. It's all true... America, this is where your tax dollars go. Go HERE.

And while we're on disposal issues, you've just gotta love professors Al-Houty and Al-Musalam of Kuwait University for a paper published in the so-rivetting-I-can't-put-it-down Journal Of Arid Environments (Vol 35 #3).

Here's the abstract...
Adult dung beetles, Scarabaeus cristatus , consume the fluid components of dung and bury whole dung as food for their larvae. When dung from three herbivorous animals, horse, camel and sheep, was offered, the beetles preferred the more fluid horse dung to the others. Sheep dung was preferred to the camel dung. The dungs of two carnivores, dog and fox, were also accepted but to a lesser extent than the herbivore dung.

Thank you for sharing that with us.

If you'd like the full text, you can buy it on line for the bargain price of US$58.93 (+ tax). Really. Go HERE, though I think I'll wait for the National Geographic doco.

Oh God. I really need to get out more.

Brain Branding

You'll recall, a couple of blogs back, that I wrote a piece about perception, In it, I described how marketers take advantage of your preconceptions to sell you stuff.

If you're interested in this sort of thing, there's a fascinating study reported on the Science Daily website that explains some of the brain function associated with brand familiarity.

Researchers at at Ludwig-Maximilians University in Munich monitored the brain activity of test subjects with an MRI while they showed them images of "strong" (very well known) and "weak" (not so well known) brands.

When the subjects were shown strong brand images, the parts of their brains responsible for familiarity and positive emotional association lit up. When they were shown weak brands, the parts of their brains responsible for memory retrieval and negative emotion lit up.

Of course, if you understood the power of Form over Substance, this will come as no surprise but now, it's measureable. Scientists can now quantify in hard data what focus groups could only guess at. The consequences are both fascinating and terrifying.

I wish Pandora wouldn't keep leaving so many boxes around for guys like these to open.

Secret Mens' Business

Ever since I was old enough to realise that girls who can't (or won't) be your girlfriend make really cool friends, these buddies of the opposite sex have often turned to me for advice on catching (or keeping) that elusive 'perfect man'.

Maybe that's because, when I'm not distracted, I can be a good listener and my keen ADD enhanced powers of observation allow me to dispense some pretty solid advice. I'm also brutally honest, not necessarily because I'm brutally honest, but more because that same ADD means that, at times, the filters on my brain that should stop me from blurting out what I really think don't work so well. (Like the other day when I told our new PR person that she should take a tub of whey home because "it's a great way to shed a few kilos"... oops!)

If you're female, single, contemplating being single again, or in a relationship that involves the half of the species that has a dangly bit in the front, then pay careful attention, because I probably won't let you in on any Secret Mens' Business ever again.

Are you listening?

WE'RE DIFFERENT! Our brains are wired differently to yours, and are actually a little bigger (which doesn't make us smarter, by the way... but more on that later).

We're also EXTREMELY PREDICTABLE, and that you are constantly surprised or disappointed by our behaviour only underscores the fact that YOU'RE NOT PAYING ATTENTION.

So stop judging the behaviour of the men around you as though they are your girlfriends. We're not, and it's time you learned why not.

I'm going to preface this advice with a warning. If you're easily offended, or if you can't accept harsh reality, please stop reading, switch off the computer and head down to Borders, Angus & Robertson or some other purveyor of fine books. Buy yourself a Jackie Collins Bodice Ripper and be done with the whole courting thing because if you don't understand some of this, then you're never going to be in the game.

Really. I mean it. What follows here has no judgement or moral assessment attached to it... it's just the way it is, because that's how we're wired.

The FIRST RULE...
Men are basic creatures, driven by a very small, reptillian brain that is remarkable in its simplicity...

...because all straight men, from the age of around 15 or 16 to so old it's no longer relevant, perform a stunning little "cost/benefit analysis" on every female they meet. It's a subconscious thing, and it happens in a blink, but its outcome dictates much of our behaviour towards women.

What we're talking about here is the cost/benefit of sleeping with you.

STOP. I know what you're thinking, because I've had this conversation too many times and the initial reaction is always the same so before you judge us by your girl standards, just stay with this a little while longer.

The cost/benefit analysis goes something like this...
Will the benefits of getting to sleep with you outweigh the cost? Notice that I said "benefits of getting to sleep with you" and not just "sleeping with you".

The assessment might be that in order to sleep with you, the guy would need to court you, date you for years and eventually marry you. The cost, therefore, is extremely high. The benefit, though is that not only does he get to sleep with you, he gets to marry you as well.

Or... The assessment might be that in order to sleep with you, the guy just needs to buy you a drink. The cost, therefore is low, but the benefit, being an hour or two of gratuitous sex, may be perceived to be higher than the cost, in which case he'll buy you that drink. If he doesn't have that perception, take it personally... he just not attracted to you. I know. I know. I've heard it before... not all men are interested in gratuitous sex. Wanna bet? Those that you think are not are just pretending, and often pretending to themselves, because that's the way our reptillian brains are wired.

This cost/benefit thing works on all sorts of levels, sometimes simplistically...

...she's 17, gorgeous and the boss's daughter... so the cost is likely to be far higher than the benefit. Or she's 60, overweight and lives in a caravan (trailer) park... so while the cost might potentially be very low, the benefit is extremely low. Or it might be that you live 50km away, which means his cost is the $20 on fuel every time he comes to pick you up for a date. If he doesn't continue to perceive a greater benefit in getting to sleep with you (whenever that might be) than that $20 in fuel, he won't keep coming.

Somethimes, though, there are so many layers of what construes cost and/or benefit that it's no wonder our brains are bigger than yours.

The trick for you, girls, is to know what this cost/benefit means, and how it works. It's to understand that your job is to make the benefit greater than the cost, whatever that cost might be, because the cost/benefit analysis isn't what we use to decide whether or not to stay in a relationship... it's what we use to decide whether we want to be bothered chasing it in the first place.

This means you have to set the benefit high enough to keep him interested long enough to really get to know you. Brutal honesty coming here and I don't care what your pesonal morality is. The cost of getting to sleep with you can NEVER be higher than the perceived benefit. Therefore, if you're a fifth date kind of girl, make him think it's the third date until the benefit justifies the fifth. You can take that literally or figuratively... just understand what it means, which is that even if you're a marry-me-first girl, you're unlikely to be able to draw that boundary on the first date... you have to paint the benefit that justifies the cost and that's going to take time.

The SECOND RULE...
Men do NOT live in the now. We live some little way into the future, and expend a great deal of brainpower exploring the world that might be instead of trying on endless pairs of shoes or reading about why Jennifer and Brad will never get back together.

Yes... we have a different set of priorities when we're devoting brainpower resources, which is frustrating for you because it sometimes means we don't want to talk about some of the stuff you want to talk about, especially if it's trying to over-analyse some past event.

For example, generally, we don't need to be told more than once that we've screwed up. Talking about it over and over does not help us undetrstand it better. We've moved on, ok?

It also means that if you talk to us about a problem of yours, no matter how personal, we'll try to come up with a solution. So many of my female friends say something like "I didn't need him to try and fix it, I just wanted to talk about it." Sorry... for us, talking about it IS trying to fix it... otherwise, what's the point of talking about it?

The THIRD RULE...
We don't like to be ambushed. It's biology. We didn't like to be ambushed by that sabre toothed tiger when we're out hunting for dinner, and we sure as hell don't like to be ambushed at home even more.

Therefore, don't set us up to get into trouble by asking some leading question. We'll only fall for that once, after which our answers to your questions will become more and more obtuse.

The FOURTH RULE...
It is possible for a man's brain to be completely blank. It's biology. We expend a great deal of brain power just keeping our model of the world in our heads (see below). Sometimes we don't feel the need to overlay that with anything at all. Therefore, just because we're quiet doesn't mean we're thinking about anything in particular and it especially doesn't mean we're thinking bad things about you. If we say "nothing" when you ask us "what are you thinking?", the chances are we're telling the truth.

Or if we are thinking about something and don't want to share it with you, it's almost certainly not because it's about you. The reality is, if we tried to tell you what we're really thinking, you're a)not going to believe us, and b)aren't going to understand or be interested in the boy things we think about (which often involve speculative engineering or tomorrow's hunt).

The FIFTH RULE...
While it IS possible for a man to multi-task, often we choose not to. In other words, don't try to talk to us while we're watching the football.

And FINALLY...
Our brains are bigger than yours not because we're smarter, but because we have superior spatial and temporal perception. That is, the model of the world we hold in our brain has more geographic detail than yours, and we're also more aware of how that geographic detail relates to time. It's just biology... we are the hunters, so it's important for us to track the animal through the forest, kill it, AND find our way back to the village with it before you starve to death.

Ok. I'm done. This was your first and only opportunity to get a glimpse into the complex world of male psychology. Ignore it at your peril.

Boring Is Relative

Our weekend "store manager" at our little baby retail store has finished her law degree and has headed off to do whatever it is young lawyers do these days, and until we find a replacement, that means the duty falls to moi.

Being there has given me an opportunity to contemplate the meaning of "boring job". You see dear reader, this store, quite deliberately, isn't in a high traffic location and there's a limit to the amount of shelf cleaning and stock filling we can do before it's all done. After that? Well let's just say the internet connection at the sales desk gets a bit of a work-out.

Don't get me wrong. I'm not saying retail is boring. I used to do Thursday nights and Saturdays at our local department store when I was in high school, and it seemed like an ok life, even if it wasn't going to be my career. I just started wondering, though, about "boring" and "interesting" jobs.

If I'd asked you to describe life with the US Military fighting the Taliban in Afghanistan, you probably wouldn't use the word "boring". There are lots of words you might use and your choice will probably be influenced by your political perception, but I'm reasonably certain that without first hand knowledge, "boring" isn't on your list. However, before you decide, read this blog from a soldier on the front line. (It will open in a new window or tab.)

Ok. Maybe fighting the Taliban is an extreme example. It's not so much a career choice as a policy position for whatever politician sent you there, so what about a career behind the camera in TV or the movies?

Our office is right next door to Fox Studios in Sydney, which means we often see film crews out and about doing whatever it is they do. From the outside, this looks like not much at all. There's a lot of people standing around and by the look of them, each has about 5 minutes of very specialised work to do at some point during the day-long shoot. The rest of the time.... hmmmm... apparently you can't even whip out a book because you're supposed to look interested and be alert in case your five minutes comes up in the next five minutes.

A friend of mine used to be what's loosely described as a "top fashion model", except that she had (has) a brain, which, if you're a model, isn't a great asset. Her common description of her modelling career is "tediously boring", which she acknowleges is a tautology, but which she uses anyway to somehow add additional emphasis.

And can someone tell me what an Astronaut does? I mean, career "astronauts" get to fly into space maybe two or three times in their lives, IF they're lucky. That's maybe twenty or thirty days tops. The rest of the time is spent on terra firma with the rest of us, training, and going to parties where you get to tell people you're an astronaut.

These are supposed to be the cool jobs people... glam, exiting, dream jobs that always get a "wow" from whoever asks the "what do you do?" question. Bah!

Ok... so let's look at the slightly more mundane... at what my parents would have called "a real job", like being a 747 pilot flying between Sydney and LA? Sounds great, yeah? I'm sure it gets the right reaction at those same parties but let's see... you arrive at work, spend forever going through a tedious but very necessary pre-flight check list, and then you drive the bus out to the end of the runway, push the throttle forward and whoosh... off you and your flight computer go. The next 30 minutes climbing to cruising altitude would go by rather quickly and...

... for the next 13 hours, there's really not much for you to do. You can't even sit back and watch a movie or play chess with the co-pilot. And post 9/11, you can't even talk about gladiator movies with young cockpit guests. At the end of the flight, you have 30 minutes of being told "descend", "turn left", "turn some more", "climb", "hold", "change radio channels", "turn right", and then you land. Doing rolls or loop-the-loops isn't allowed under any circumstances. The job generally only gets "not-so-boring" if you're not doing it properly, or if some idiot in maintenance didn't do his properly, but on balance, this doesn't happen nearly often enough to keep things interesting. Of course, you get paid quite well, which is the only reason another friend of mine keeps doing it.

An ex girlfriend is a "plant pathologist". When she first told me, I had this image flash into my straw brain of a tree walking into her office to get a sap test. She used to get really excited about plant pathology. For me... well let's just say I have difficulty deciding if the plant in my office is real or plastic. She spends her day staring down a microscope in some CSI style government agriculture lab trying to decide if the Wheat Blight came from the field to the north or the east. Exciting huh?

Our recently departed law grad isn't going into law. To quote her... "are you serious? Can you actually see me processing damned property contracts for the rest of my life? I think not." She hasn't decided what she wants to do... she just knows it won't be either law or retail. I think she wants to try a modelling career.

A guy I went to school with is a procedures analyst for a major supermarket chain. His job is to look at the day-to-day procedures of running a store and make recommendations that are supposed to make the stores run better.

Seriously. This is what he does... He observes how a store runs and writes up store manuals that stay stuff like "Twenty Dollar Notes shall be removed from the register and folded so that the picture of Hargraves faces out. This will allow for easier counting when the cash reaches the store's counting room." Clearly, he hasn't spent any time standing at the checkout that's emptying its register because otherwise he'd know just how pissed off those of us standing there get while the check out chick takes the time to properly turn and fold the cash. Actually, he's now the Procedures Analysis Manager, which means he trains and runs a team of people formulating these policies. Inevitably, of course, local store staff just think it's all a joke, which means he suffers terribly from depression and feelings of insignificance.

I was at the local Police Station the other day (perhaps a story for another time) and the officer was complaining about the amount of admin she has to do each day. I asked her how much of her time is actually devoted to catching bad guys or running crowd control duty at some local event. "Oh, about 5%". The rest, she said, is just boring paperwork. "But at least I'm not the security guard standing outside the local bank", she added, as though the tedium of others somehow made it all ok.

The most boring job on the planet was, in my estimation, that of a toll collector on the Sydney Harbour Bridge. At least that's what I thought until just after 9/11 when some great mind in the Government decided that we'd better put a security guard on the pedestrian walkway to guard against a terrorist attack.

This, of course, is an utterly failed strategy because if a terrorist was going to hit our most famous icon, they'd probably just drive onto the bridge in a truck filled with something that goes boom, about which there's little a lone guard could do because a)trucks can't get onto the walkway and b)he's not going to last long wandering across the lanes of 70kph traffic checking trucks for people who may or may not be terrorists. He's therefore left to spend his day wandering aimlessly backwards and forwards among the walk-to-workers, joggers and tourists.

At least, sitting behind this sales desk, I can ramble on in a blog to kill a few minutes.

A Thanksgiving Travel Tip

Here's a tip for anyone who wants to go to Disneyland or Universal Studios. Go on the Monday after Thanksgiving... there's absolutely NO-ONE there.

Dr J and I were in the Excited States this time a couple of years back, and went to Universal on the Monday. Seriously, Hamas could have detonated a suicide bomber in the Back To The Future queue and not hurt anyone. The place was empty.

You know the big signs that say "Wait Time From This Point". Zero Minutes. We'd get off Jurassic Park, and just get straight back on. A couple of times, they didn't even make us get out of the boat. Waterworld was about as well patronised as the Monday of a NSWvSA Pura Cup Cricket Match (4 people and the ubiquitous cocker spaniel routinely turn up to day 4). On the Studio Tram Tour, they actually suggested that we bunch up into one tram carriage. No-one paid attention of course.

We went to Disneyland the next day. Same thing. No-one there. Well, hardly anyone anyway. The longest we stood in line for anything was at the Churros stand. (I have a bit of a weakness for a good crunchy Churros. Fortunately, they're hard to find in Oz.) Imagine turning up at the Indianna Jones ride at 11am and walking straight on. Or being able to have your photo taken with Mickey at Mickey's house twice in the same session. Or being the only people in the stretching room at the Haunted Mansion. Or not even having to get out of the Splash Mountain log/boat thingmy.

Speaking of which, here's me at Splash Mountain.

I have no idea who anyone else in the log was. Dr J hates roller coasters so she wouldn't come on this one (she'd had quite enough of Jurassic Park the day before). And notice that I was the only one in the log who went over the waterfall with their arms in the air. So there!

I was talking to one of the park managers on the way out. Her name was Bobby-Joe. Really. It said so on her badge. She said the few days after Thanksgiving were their quietest days of the year, and she said it was the same for every park and major tourist attraction in the USA.

So there's a tip for you.

I Can See! I Can See! Oh... Never Mind.

It's one of the curses of growing old... you just can't see like you used to. For me, it's not the distance stuff that's deteriorating. I've worn coke bottle glasses (can I say that without incurring the wrath of the coca-cola company?) since I was in the 3rd grade and without glasses or contacts, I absolutely can not see the clock next to the bed without physically picking it up and bringing it to within about two inches of my nose.

Actually, without my contacts, I think I'd be legally blind. I'm wondering whether that qualifies me for a diabled parking permit... you know... being blind is classed as a disability.

No, it's not he distance stuff. Like most people in their 40's, it's the close up stuff that starts to disappear. You start grumbling about why there's an inverse relationship between the price of the meal and the size of the type the restaurant writes its menu in. Or you start to wish you'd bought the street directory with "NOW IN EXTRA LARGE PRINT" emblazoned across the front.

So a few years ago, my friendly local optomestrist suggested that I try "dual focus contact lenses". Now before you get all excited, what he really meant was "let's put a contact in your right eye that's great for distance stuff, and one in your left eye that's not quite strong enough, which means the distance stuff will be a little blurry but reading will be easier". "Ok", I said, let's give that a try.Just to put you in the picture, here's what I've been seeing when I look out of my window.

Apparently, the brain figures it out, overlays the blurry image with the sharp image and I end up with "acceptable" vision.

That's all well and good, but I had the opportunity this week to try out a few different combinations. I'm getting older, so my eyes are getting worse, which meant the optometrist wanted to recommend a bigger gap between what I get and what I need. I hated it, so he gave me some different strengths to play with.

The last one I've tried throws away the whole dual focus thing and gives me 20/20 vision.
WOW!!! FECKEN WOW!!! I can see!

Basically, anything more than about a metre away is now in PERFECT focus. The TV, the clock on the clubhouse wall, the lint on my floor, the dead cockroach just outside my front door, the people sunbaking topless across the bay... oh... wait... one of them's a bloke. As long as it's more than a metre away... WOWEEEEE.

Then I sat down at the keyboard to do some real work. Ah well. I've been able to push the monitor to the back of the desk so it's almost a metre away, and who needs to see a bloody menu anyway... just bring food.

The Icecap Still Melteth

I'm still wrestling with this whole global warming thing, and the problem this bear has with the debate is twofold.

First, we're basing our judgement on changing climate using records that are only slightly more than a couple of hundred years old. That would be like trying to gauge the health of a human based on something that happens in their bodies for a nanosecond.

And second, yes, we're polluting this planet and there can be no doubt that we've had a significant and negative impact on the environment, but the total concentration of carbon dioxide pumped into the atmosphere by all of the industrial activities of humanity has resulted in increases in total atmospheric CO2 that's measured in parts per million. Maybe this is enough to tip a balance, maybe not. I don't know.

I want to take you back, though, to the "hole in the ozone layer" issue of ten or twenty years ago.

You remember... a big hole appeared over the Antarctic, and apparently it was growing at such an alarming rate that we were all going to die of skin cancer by the end of the millenium. Yes, THAT end of the millenium. (I'll bet you've still got that stockpile of candles you secretly bought because the Y2K bug was going to take out the power grid. )

So here's this hole over the ozone layer. We were told that it was caused by CFCs and other man made chemicals. We all stopped using spray cans for about a week because we were so concerned. Of course, once we found out how bloody inconvenient roll-on deodorant was, we went back to our bad habits but that was ok because by then they'd started using hydrocarbons instead of those evil CFCs, and even if this wasn't better for the environment, it was more fun because a spray can and a box of matches could now provide hours of entertainment for the whole family.

The story of the hole sounded plausible... except for one rather large detail that no-one has ever been able to explain... it was over the SOUTHERN hemisphere.

You may not know that the atmospheres of the Northern and Southern hemispheres barely mix. People in the US and Soviet militaries figured that out as a matter of priority at the height of the cold war when they were looking for some place to stash their families in a post nuclear apocalypse world. Sydney, Cape Town and Buenos Aires all looked pretty good, though the Soviets never did have much influence south of the equator. Anyway, as usual, I digress.

Atmospheres... don't mix... let me think...
Where were the CFCs? Hmmm... wait... I know I can answer that... just give me a second or two... ummm... they'd be in those places where most of the people and most of the industrial development was... places like... ummm... North America, or um... Asia or... wait... there's another one... don't help me... ummm.. ah... Europe. These are all in... ummm... [Chester reaches for an Atlas]... oh yes... there they are.

Now that line across the map is the equator, so that must mean all of those places, and hence nearly all of the CFCs, would have been in the NORTHERN hemisphere. So why was/is the hole over the Southern hemisphere?

Because NASA found it there. They sent up a satellite to measure the ozone layer and whammo... there it was... this bloody great hole exactly where no-one expected a hole to be. I wish I'd been at the press conference...
ME: Was it there before?
NASA: Well we hadn't ever measured it before.
ME: But wasn't this satellite equipped with all sorts of fancy new gizmos that had been put there just to measure the ozone?
NASA: Yes. That was the point. It was the first satellite we've put up just for measuring the ozone layer.
ME: So it could have been there before.
NASA: We've never measured it before.
ME: But it could have been there, you just hadn't measured it.
NASA: Our satellite has detected a growing hole in the ozone layer over Antarctica.
ME: Maybe I'll try another tack... how long has the hole been there?
NASA: We first saw it last year, and it's growing.
ME: But was it there the year before?
NASA: If we extrapolate the growth rate backwards, it first appeared in 1952.
ME: So you're confident that the growth of the hole has been constant.
NASA: We don't have any data. We first saw the hole last year, and this year it's grown.

They detected a hole, and made an immediate assumption that the hole wasn't there before. I know. I'm speaking herasy here, but think about it people... the bloody hole was over the WRONG hemisphere. There's still argument about the hole. It gets bigger. It gets smaller. It gets bigger again, and the longer we watch it (now that we actually can), the more we learn that we don't understand it.

Back to global warming. There is no doubt that climates change. The 16th century in Europe was described as being a "mini ice age". (Ok, it might have been the 14th... my knowledge of European Dark Age & Renaissance history is a little scratchy.)

We know sea levels rise and fall. There are entire cities and ports in parts of the Med that are metres under water. They didn't sink... the sea level rose. (Ok, maybe one or two of them sank, but mostly, the sea level rose, ok!)

The point is, the earth's climate is not some static thing we can absolutely rely on from year to year. That the last hundred years or so have been relatively stable simply underscores the point that we can only measure the last hundred years or so.

We don't really know what the weather was like the day Mark Antony started bonking Cleopatra. We don't know what the temperature was when Martin Luther nailed that proclaimation to the church door. We don't know what the weather was like when Leif Ericson first landed in Iceland, or when Ming took delivery of his first vase.

There isn't any dopler radar image or five day forecast for January 26, 1788, the day Arthur Phillip and the First Fleet sailed into Sydney. They just described it as "hot". But what is "hot"?

I'll tell you what "hot" is... hot is somewhere warmer than wherever it was that you were before. So if it was bloody cold in England, and warm and mild in Sydney Town, then 22C (71F) would be hot. Then again, if you've lived in Singapore all your life, and you arrive in Sydney on a mild summer's day, it's cold. You see? It's all relative.

I've seen it myself... go to the tropics... Cairns or Miami, on a cool day in the middle of winter. There will be dozens of tourists walking around wearing T-Shirts while the locals rug up.

So, back to global warming. Apparently, the last 5 years have been the hottest 5 years on record. Hmmm... age of earth is 5 billion years + (or 5 thousand years + depending on your religious belief). And accurate, objective records go back... um... about 160 years. So I'm happy to accept that the last 5 years might have been hotter than the 160 years before that, but what about the 4,999,999,840 years/4,840 years (pick one) before that?

Ok... I hear you... botanists tell us that they can get a longer measurement by looking at tree rings. Really? Just remember the piece I wrote yesterday about subjectivity. If you go into the forest looking for something to validate whatever it is you believe, you'll find it.

Ice core scientists tell us they can give you an accurate picture too... but that's over, say, a hundred years. They have to make assumptions about how much snow fell, not just in the period they're looking at, but each year since. They make educated guesses but the chances are those guesses will be influenced by the same subjectivity.

We may be responsible for global warming, or we may not. If we are, and if the politicians REALLY believe we are, then there's a simple solution... spend whatever it takes to develop the technology to fix the problem. The Americans did it during WWII with the Manhattan Project, and the world could do it again right now. Actually, the immediate job wouldn't be that difficult because most of the technology already exists for a short term fix.

If we're not, and I'm not convinced either way just yet, then this seems like a very convenient issue to allow politicians the world over to prance about and make us think they're doing something, because right now, they're not doing much more than prancing.

One more thought on the environment... back in the early 1500s, Henry the VIIIth was so concerned about preserving the forests that he enacted what is widely considered the world's first environmental conservation law. You see, back in those days, most of England was covered by huge and mighty oak trees. Henry was so worried about the rate at which the oaks were being cut down and turned into wood coke that he outlawed the felling of oak trees for fuel. Like many things back then, including stealing a loaf of bread or marrying the King, it was a capital offence.

That lead to two things... first, it meant that when Elizabeth I took the throne, there were huge forests of oak trees available out of which she could build a navy, thus setting up Britannia to rule the waves for the next 400 years.

Second, people had to find some other way to keep warm (remember the mini ice age?). They turned to a curious black rock that you could dig out of the ground in parts of Wales that burned hotter and longer than the wood coke. They soon found out it was a much better fuel, and because they could now burn the furnaces hotter, they could make stronger steel, out of which they could build the machines of the industrial revolution, which, of course, needed even more of that black rock to make steam so they could make more machines to burn more black rock to make steam.

Within a couple of hundred years, the acid rain from burning all that coal the peasants had learned to burn because some conservationist wanted to save the trees, had decimated the forests Henry's law was supposed to save, which, in turn, meant the British had to learn how to build their ships out of iron or steel, which meant they could build the ships bigger, which meant more people could now travel more cheaply, which meant ideas were more readily exchanged, which meant the pace of technology could accellerate, which, if we're responsible for global warming, caused the whole bloody problem in the first place.

So blame Henry VIII.

Overwhelmed & Biased

I found myself an unwilling participant, yesterday, in a study into the nature of perception. Not that there really was a "study" in any formal sense of the word. No. It was more an observation following on from several real studies that took place around the world when nations were debating the whole WMD thing.

Back then, the research discovered something disturbing, especially to people like me who claim to have the power of objectivity. It discovered that when assessing evidence, our brains subconsciously assign "importance points", and the closer the evidence is to what we already believe, or the closer the information is in its presentation to the presentation we would expect from information that is accurate, the more importance points are assigned. Conversely, the brain assigns less points to information that contradicts what we believe, or is presented to us in a format that is not what we would expect for accurate data. In other words, when you come across information supporting your belief, or which conforms with your expectation of accurate presentation, you are more likely to see it and pay attention to it, not matter how unlikely it is, and when you come across information that contradicts what you believe, or is presented in a manner not consistent with your expectation of accuacy, you are more likely to miss it, or ignore it, no matter how likely it is.

Here's a simplistic example. You're handed information scribbled on a scrunched up piece of paper. The spelling is poor, the grammar worse and the handwriting is child-like. You're handed other information presented to you beautifully printed and bound, with an official looking insignia on the cover. If you have no preconception, you're more likely to believe the bound report. You are only more likely to believe the scribble if it supports a fundamental belief, or if the bound report contradicts some fundamental belief.

Let me give you another simplistic, though marginally more complex example. Let's say you believe the earth is flat, and you're standing on a high cliff looking out over the ocean. Your brain will not see the curve of the earth at the horizon, even though it is there and is objectively measurable. The person standing next to you believes the earth is round, and says "wow, look at that curve". Your most likely reaction will be "what curve?", and you still won't see it, even though it's been pointed out to you AND it's there.

I was doing some research yesterday, trawling through hundreds of research papers looking for links between whey protein and a beneficial effect in preventing or fighting cancer, and especially breast cancer.

Hundreds of papers.

And suddenly, I noticed that I was either subconsciously dismissing or glossing over papers which did not support the belief, or I was overly critical of such studies, and far more accepting of studies which confirmed the link, even though some of those studies were poorly constructed.

I realised that this sort of filtering happens every day. Our brains look for information that validates our pre-existing understanding of the world. We're far more likely to notice things that fit into the little model of the world that sits inside our heads, and equally likely to ignore things that do not fit into that model.

Even more important, is that our brains add more importance or credence to information that comes to us in a form that is either more expected, or more attractive than other information.

Think about that, and what it means to the way companies sell stuff to you. Many years ago, when marketing was more a dark art and less an evil science, a gin company had a leading brand. They were losing market share so they decided to find out why.

When they did a blind taste test, their brand ALWAYS scored higher for taste than the competitors brand. That is, more people thought their brand tasted better. They then repeated the experiment (with different subjects), but this time, those subjects could see the bottles from which the gin was poured. The competitor's brand ALWAYS scored higher. Finally, they repeated the experiment again, but this time, they switched the contents of the bottles, that is, they put their gin in their competitor's bottle, and vice versa. The one in the competitors bottle (theirs) now scored higher again.

The test subjects perceptions of what they were about to taste was influenced more by the way they saw the product, and less by the actual taste. The company changed their bottle and regained market dominance.

If you doubt whether this applies to just about everything we buy, take a look at the cosmetic industry. Here, form over substance triumphs, because the consumers' brains are far more likely to believe something in a beautiful package is going to make them beautiful than something in a plain dull package.

I read a book once called "Supressed Inventions and Other Discoveries". It had stories about a whole raft of "new technologies" that its author was suggesting had been supressed, either by government or by competing commercial interests. I will tell you that I have no doubt that some of the stories in that book were more likely to be true than not, but one less paranoid explanation may be that those evaluating the new technology simply couldn't see the evidence that it worked.

We see it in medicine every day. As recently as last year, an Australian doctor was being investigated because his patients were claiming that he had cured their incurable cancers. He was using microwave radiation therapy, and setting the wave lengths of the microwaves to specifically target individual types of cancers.

There were hundreds of patient files, almost all of which showed near miraculous recovery from cancer previously diagnosed by another, more recognised oncologist as terminal, Almost all of those patients were still alive, years after they were expected to have died, and almost all of them were cancer free.

The authorities charged with the responsibility of evaluating this radical new treatment ignored the patient files and instead focused on the mechanism. Their conclusion was that as there was no known mechanism by which this treatment could be killing the tumours, the treatment therefore had no validity and did not warrant further investigation. The investigative team did not talk to a single patient, and did not refer, in its final report, to any patient files.

For some, this was clear evidence of conspiracy by the evil drug companies. I think the explaination is a great deal simpler. The investigators just didn't believe the treatment could work (probably because they had been indoctrinated by the aforementioned evil drug companies), so they only gave credence to evidence that would support that position.

What I'm trying to say here is that the same mental processes are at work. We see stuff that we want to believe. That belief may be that a particular fact is true, or it may be that something more beautiful works better than something less beautiful.

Sadly, though, there's no solution. We're overwhelmed by input and all of it is subjectively dealt with in our brains. If you start second guessing your motivation for assigning validity to one piece of information, or one product over another, I suspect you'll go nuts. But maybe knowing why people don't see what you see might help keep you out of an argument or two.

Invitation to Sydney

If you don't understand just how stunningly beautiful Sydney really is, here are some pics of a typical New Year's Eve.

Seriously readers. If you don't live here, you just don't know what you're missing.

It's not too late. There are flights here from just about anywhere and we're coming into summer. Yes... summer... where the days are hot, there's barely a cloud in the sky, and the nights are mild and balmy.

If I've neglected to give proper credit to the photographer, please accept my apologies. The pictures arrived in my mailbox today as part of a powerpoint presentation, and had no crdits.

I Might Have Been Mistaken

This bear has never had a problem admitting he may have been in error. After all, it is only by recognising one's mistakes that we can learn and grow.

A few weeks back, I wrote a piece suggesting that an increase in volcanic activity rather than industrialisation might be the root cause of global warming.

What I've discovered since then is that geologists think the total CO2 released by volcanoes of all types amounts is anywhere between a half and one percent of the total CO2 created by anually by industry.

If you're remotely interested, there's a report from the British Geological Survey HERE.

I'm not going to totally concede just yet though. There are some significant inconsistencies in the data across a number of sources, bringing the total CO2 emission estimate into some question. For example, in that report, the total CO2 emission from Pinatubo was estimated at 60million tonnes, yet extrapolation of USGS data would indicate that it might have been 10 times that amount. And no-one seems to be able to explain the near parallel between increasing global temperature and increasing volcanic activity so maybe there's something missing in the puzzle.

However, I if my somewhat simplistic expose has caused any further damage to the environment by allowing people to think driving a V8 SUV was ok, then I wish to unreservedly apologise.

Screw You

A month or so back, I deviated from my usual dull and benign musings on every day life to comment on the over sensitivity and hypocracy of some in the Islamic world.

I'm sorry readers, but I'm compelled to do it again, because today, Iran's best-selling newspaper, Hamshahri, announced the winner of its deplorable, tasteless and disgusting "International Holocaust Cartoons Competition".

If you can be bothered, the Sydney Morning Herald ran a story. Click here.

Let me get this right...
It's ok to deny the holocaust, and make jokes at the expense of the 6 million Jews who were systematically slaughtered by the Nazis, but it's not ok for the Pope to make a comment that might reflect poorly in Islam.

Or it's ok for the Mufti of Australia, in a sermon last week, to suggest that women who dress inappropriately in public (that is, not covered head to toe by a hijab) deserve to be raped because they are akin to a piece of meat left outside uncovered and eaten by a cat, but it's not ok for those of us with any shred of decency to object. Yes... he really did say it, though at first he denied it, then when presented with the tape and transcript, said he had been misinterpreted. Yeah. Right..

You know what? Screw you. I'm sick and tired of the double standard. Whatever caused that chip on your shoulder, get over it. Devote your energy to making a positive contribution to the world instead of blaming the Americans and the Jews for your problems.

Sleep Deprivation

It's about two hours after "bedtime" and I'm still sitting here wasting time in front of this keyboard.

I'll eventually get to bed, and I'll get about four or five hours' sleep. Tommorrow will be somewhat wasted because my brain won't actually start functioning until after 11, which is about an hour after my first meeting ends.

I wish I could say this was unusual but I'm almost ashamed to admit that it's the norm. Yes... "ashamed", because the way I figure it, I don't have enough self discipline to know when to get some sleep. It's rare that I'm in bed much before midnight. 1 or 2 am is "normal".

They say most of the western world suffers chronic sleep deprivation. Then again, "they" say a lot of things, and the more I read what they say, the more cynical I get about their motivation for saying it.

See? Sleep deprivation also leads to mild paranoia.