Ideology Drives An Awful Wrong (Or Two)

In what can only be described as a stunning, sickening decision, a court in Melbourne last Friday granted a twelve year old girl permission to begin hormone treatment prior to a sex change operation.

Lawyers for the girl's mother successfully argused that the girl, at twelve years of age, had a full understanding that she was actually a man trapped in a girl's body. Those lawyers were paid for by the Victorian Government, heavily supported by ideological special interests.

Are they mad?

Look, as far as I'm concerned, once you're 18, do whatever you like with your body. It's none of my business. Change it from female to male. Change it back again. Even change it into an elephant for all I care. It's your body and you're an adult, making your own decisions.

But is a twelve year old really equiped to make this decision?

The story's here.

Which brings me to the other furore involving a twelve year old this week... a photographic exhibit at an art gallery in Sydney featuring photographs of nude male and female 12 year olds.

Furtunately, the police reacted swiftly, impounded the offending "art works", and are pressing child pornography charges against the gallery and the "artist".

Let's leave the issue of what the children's parents were thinking when they granted permission. This is bigger than that.

What's amazing about this is that the art elite are incensed. They believe "art" is somehow "pure", and "artists" are above the law.

I'm sorry. There's something not right about taking full frontal photographs of a naked 12 year old girl or boy, even in the name of "art".

It's stunning that the "art community" doesn't get it. Their warriors, some of them curators at the biggest publicly owned art galleries in the country, bombarded the media in defence of the artists right to express his creativity. Somehow, they thought it was ok.

Really... they just don't get it. What's the difference between their "artist" taking pictures of naked children and selling them for tens of thousands of dollars in the name of "art", and some low life taking pictures of naked children and posting them on the internet? As far as I'm concerned, there is no difference.

And I'm sorry, even if I buy the "art" line... I don't care how pure the art is... some sick bastard is going to look at that "art" and get his jollies. You might not be a paedophile, but you're certainly feeding them.

The ideological left is screaming. "Censorship", they cry. Yes. It bloody well is... because you start drawing that blurry line between "art" and child pornography, and you're on a very slippery slope.

*SIGH*

Is the world going mad?

Human Global Warming Now Apparently Effecting Jupiter

Jupiter's Three Red Spots Credit NASA, ESA, M. Wong, I. de Pater (UC Berkeley), et al.

This picture, taken by the Hubble Telescope, was published on the NASA website a week or so back, along with the following description;

Explanation: For about 300 years Jupiter's banded atmosphere has shown a remarkable feature to telescopic viewers, a large swirling storm system known as The Great Red Spot. In 2006, another red storm system appeared, actually seen to form as smaller whitish oval-shaped storms merged and then developed the curious reddish hue.

Now, Jupiter has a third red spot, again produced from a smaller whitish storm. All three are seen in this image made from data recorded on May 9 and 10 with the Hubble Space Telescope's Wide Field and Planetary Camera 2. The spots extend above the surrounding clouds and their red color may be due to deeper material dredged up by the storms and exposed to ultraviolet light, but the exact chemical process is still unknown.

For scale, the Great Red Spot has almost twice the diameter of planet Earth, making both new spots less than one Earth-diameter across. The newest red spot is on the far left (west), along the same band of clouds as the Great Red Spot and is drifting toward it. If the motion continues, the new spot will encounter the much larger storm system in August.

Jupiter's recent outbreak of red spots is likely related to large scale climate change as the gas giant planet is getting warmer near the equator.

Of course, Al Gore has already issued a statement blaming the increaseing storm activity on Jupiter on Global Warming, and the UN International Committe on Climate Change has recommended further drastic cuts in greenhouse gas emissions. Bureaucrats are already drawing up appropriate protocols, and climatologists have again altered their modelling to accomodate these new Jovian variables.

Do I need to say any more?

Chester At War

It's official. In response to repeated incursions into my privacy and sleep, Chester formally declared war today on his two neighbours.

This is a real David and Goliath struggle, because on one side, the neighbour is a BP service station and convenience store, and on the other side, it's a construction compound operated by one of the largest builders in the country.

"You live where?" I hear you ask.

It's kind of a long story. When Dr J bought her townhouse twelve years ago, it backed onto a mechanic's workshop. About 6 years ago (before I met her), BP acquired said workshop and built a mega "BP Connect" centre there. At the time, Dr J was distracted by other things and didn't pay attention to the Notice of Proposed Development stuffed into her mailbox.

So now, right over the back wall, we have a 24 hour petrol station lit up so brightly you could, I'm sure, see it from space. Compounding the problem, the actual convenience store closes at 10pm "for security reasons", and customers pay for their fuel at an outside "pay point", which, of course, means that at all hours, said customers shout something like "pump number 4 mate, and can you get me a pack of Benson & Hedges Extra Mild, a carton o' milk and a sausage roll with sauce" through glass about a foot thick.

A few weeks ago, another Notice of Proposed Development l0bbed into the mailbox. BP has decided it wants the site seen from other planets and not just low earth orbit, so it needs more illuminated signage.

Not on your bloody life, and the first shots in the war were officially fired in response to this callous provocation.

Before that, we've had border skirmishes but nothing you'd call real war. We regularly complain about deliveries at 11pm, or 5am on Sundays. They've pretty much ignored the complaints. We regularly complain about the shouting customers. They ignore us.

I even regularly poke my head over the back fence and shout something pithy and eloquent at roudy customers at 3am... usually something like "hey dickhead... shut the fuck up". This generally doesn't work because as anyone living in Sydney will know, those who are awake at 3am have most likelybeen clubbing since about 9pm, and are therefore too pissed to respond with anything more intelligent than "fuck off".

So in response to the Notice of Proposed Development, the Bear penned a nuclear tipped strategic missile and aimed it right at the local town council. The weapon went through BPs application with surgical precision, citing case law and slamming the applicant's callous disregard for human life (aka, my life). It also contained lots of big words and a few important sounding expressions like "amenity of the adjoining property", and "failure to organise their business activity to ensure minimal impact".

Boom. Round one to The Bear, and a shocked council planning inspector was forced to come to my back yard and actually look at the devastation first hand. Now irrevocably drawn into the conflict, he responded the way only bureaucrats can... with a letter back to BP.

Round two happens on Tuesday when I meet with BP's lawyers. They expressed "shock, distress and surprise" at the war declaration. They wish to sue for peace, but they'd better come prepared to meet our terms.

Across the street, the guerilla war's been raging for years.

The construction compound was created to build a new underground tollway, and while the land's zoned residential, they have planning exemption to use it for what can only be described as "neighbourhood destroying activity".

The compound created two problems. The first, during the day, is the incessant "beep beep beep" as assorted bobcats, back hoes and dump trucks flit around the site. It's an extremely annoying distraction, but there's not much I can do about it.

The second is far more important. They sometimes do it at night, and unlike the BP station, which is on the other side of the house to my bedroom, the compound is right at the bedroom window.

This week, they escalated, turning the occasional incursion into full blown war games. I say "games" because that's clearly what's happening. The workers on the site have obviously been briefed about the grumpy neighbour with the sharp and offensive tongue, and so they sneak onto the site at 4.30 am, do some beep beep beeping, and then bolt as soon as they see my flowing white bathrobe appear at my front door. One brazen truck driver actually turned towards me and gave me the finger this week as he gunned his giant two megawatt diesel motor.

Fortunately, they're nearly finished, though their "decomissioning" process involves lots of jack hammers, after which, they'll sell the site to a property developer who, I'm sure, will deliver another year of hell.

After that, if the world if still here, it should be quiet.

Familiar, Comfortable World

Over at my other blog, Chester Writes A Book, I wrote a piece a few days ago about the need to create a comfortable, familiar, consistent and contiguous world in which to set my story.

What I didn't realise was how important that idea is to my other great creative endeavour, Wroof! (Or maybe deep down I did but just hadn't been bothered to do anything about it.)

Wroof! is an internet Content Manager. A what? Ok. It's a way to make a website look like a magazine or on-line newspaper... sort of a bit like Blogger only a)it works, and b)it does way more.

Wroof! has been 95% finished for a very long time, but it's now so big and so complicated that each time I try to smooth out the edges so that anyone other than me can use it, I break a bit.

Last week, for instance, I broke the shopping cart, which was bad because customers could order something and pay for it, and instead of ending up back at a web page that says something like "thanks for ordering", they got an error message that went something like "No $to parameter in line 47 of mailer.php". Bad.

What I realised, though, after my CWAB piece over the weekend was that this philosophy probably more applies to Wroof! than it does to some as yet unwritten book. I realised I need to make the whole Wroof! environment familiar, consistent and contiguous so that navigating your way around its control panel (blogger calls it a dashboard, which I rather like), needs to be comfortable and intuitive.

It's something Microsoft has known for a very long time (though they seem to have forgotten with Vista and Office 2007) and it's something I bleat on about whenever I look over what other people do, but applying that to something I've done... it just didn't occur to me.

The best part is that once I started going through Wroof! screen by screen to make everything look familiar and comfortable, the whole process of finishing the bloody thing got easier. I shelved plans to rewrite it from scratch with a better design, because I realised that, other than a few bugs that I've been fixing along the way, what I have actually works. The reason I didn't think it did had more to do with the look and feel of the thing than the actual functionality.

It's a very big leap forward.

AGW Skeptics Gaining Momentum

I know. I sort of promised that I wouldn't rant about global warming any more because it's getting boring. What I really meant is that I was getting boring, because the Global Warming debate is really hotting up.

For years, the champions of Anthropomorphic Global Warming (AGW), that is, the "Humans-Did-It-Evil-CO2-Emissions" crowd, have had ascendency. It's an easy sell for the media... doom and gloom, and apparently, you're responsible. Politicians have staked their careers, not to mention the future of nations on adopting it as Dogma too.

Sadly, there is more and more evidence that we humans don't have much to do with it. There's an excellent website, www.climatedebatedaily.com, that has two columns... one on the left for the AGW Champions, and the other on the right for the AGW Skeptics. What's becoming more and more clear is that world climate is influenced by two core factors. The first is sunspot activity, as mentioned in my last posting on this issue, and the second is variations in our orbit around the sun. I add a third, which is geothermal forces, though I suspect these are linked to orbital position.

Many of the scientists who have been shouting unheard for years are now finding listeners. They argue that rather than catastrophic global warming, the earth's headed for a rapid transition to a new Ice Age. We're talking rapid, imminent transition... that is, within our lifetimes.

For example, each previous Ice Age was preceeded by thirty or so years of increasing temperatures, rapid retreat of glaciers and melting of ice caps, followed by a few years of climate instability. And then whammo, the Ice caps started reforming, and just kept growing.

Some parts of the Ice Caps have, according to some of the data, begun to reform.

Do I believe we're headed for an imminent Ice Age? I don't know, but the scientific evidence is compelling, in that there is a direct straight line correlation between our orbital position and global climate, going back more than a million years.

I'm not going to say much more on this issue... but please stay informed by going to sites like ClimateDebateDaily. (Who am I kidding... I can't stay silent, but I will be less frequent.)

Changes Afoot

I know I've been slack lately, not just in updating my own blog, but also in visiting blogger friends. You already know what sort of month I had in April, but this trend's been apparent for a lot longer than a month so I'm not sure the dramas of the last 30 days are the real reason. Instead, I'd rather admit that I've been distracted in ways only someone with ADD will understand.


And besides, I've written just about all I can about bloody global warming and it's probably getting boring. I mean, how often will my readers be bothered with my sanctimonious tirades.

Therefore, I'm making changes. Chester's going to share his pontifications a little less often. Exactly why I'm cutting back brings me to the focus of my ADD. I know. That's an oxymoron. Focus and ADD can't go together... except that, bizarrely, they somehow do.

You see, I've decided to write a book. A novel.

There's been an idea running around in my head for years. I even wrote a chapter a very long time ago, but that draft is sitting deep in landfill somewhere making a very nice home for worms. Over the last few months, the idea's been bubbling back to the surface, distracting me from just about everything.

So the other change is that, I'm going to share the process with you in a new blog... Chester Writes A Book. Don't worry. I'm not going to spoil the plot, or reveal any part of the story. All I'll tell you is that it's actually two books, the first set in World War II, and the second more or less now. It's nothing high brow or noble. Rather, it's a rollicking adventure story unlikely to win any literary awards, but if I'm any good, it will be a page turner. Either that, or it will be what most who set out to write a great novel end up producing... which is a badly written, rambling and predictable story full of cliches, bad grammar and awful prose. Time will tell.

Whether the new blog's interesting enough to read, only you can decide. That's not the point. What I need is a way to focus, and setting down progress in a blog will both organise my thoughts and motivate me to get the book written.

Which isn't to say this blog's dead. Far from it. I'll still update, but posts will perhaps come a little less often while I focus my limited creativity on something more useful.

I invite you to join me on my new journey.

Understatement (Again)

A front page story on the Sydney Morning Herald's website this morning tells of a 93 year old woman found dead on her couch. Apparently, she'd been dead for months, while others continued to live there.

Police, who had been called to the house by a neighbour to do a welfare check, also found a dead dog in another room.

Dallas police spokeswoman Janice Crowther said months have passed since anyone apparently last saw the elderly woman. Electricity was still on at the home and the lawn and exterior were well-kept, but police described the interior as "messy".

"Messy"? So leaving dead people and animals lying around the house is "messy"?

That's an interesting redefinition, and makes me feel a whole lot better about my study.

Another Nail or Two

I watched a few grinding minutes of Al Gore's "An Inconvenient Truth" the other day, not by choice, but because Dr J wanted to see what all the fuss was about.

It didn't surprise me that this film was made by a politician... you know the joke... how do you tell if a politician is lying? His lips are moving. So it was for An Inconvenient Truth. In one staggering scene, Gore stands before a world audience and shows a Powerpoint slide proclaiming that not a single scientist now doubts "humans-did-it" global warming. Seriously? Not one? People, he won a fecken Nobel Prize for this bullshit.

I have said before... beware anyone who uses lies, deception and untruth to try to control your life, and I don't care how worthy the cause. When truth is sacrificed, the end does not justify the means because you just never know which truth is next.

Which leads me to a few more nails in the coffin of this global warming myth...

The first is HERE. It's a story about Sunspots, and how they effect Global Climate. Apparently, according to the story, the more sunspots, the less cloud and rain. And at the moment, there are no sunspots, which explains the really shitty weather we've been having here in Sydney.

Astronaut and geophysicist Phil Chapman was the first Australian to become an astronaut with NASA. His observations show that the world cooled quickly between January last year and January this year, by about 0.7C. This, he says, correlates to a drop in sunspot activity to zero.

According to Chapman, "this is the fastest temperature change in the instrumental record, and it puts us back to where we were in 1930."

He goes on to say that "if the temperature does not soon recover, we will have to conclude that global warming is over". He even suggested that if sunspots don't fire up soon, we might be headed for another Ice Age.

And here's more...

I was trawling about the web the other day and came across a paper written in 1999, that looked at rises in sub sea floor temperature off the US coast. The researchers were trying to extrapolate that the increase in temperature deep in the mud of the sea floor was a result of an increase in water temperature at the sea floor, and, like all scientists who care about their research grants these days, they were trying to pin those increases on global warming. What they actually found was an increase in mud temperature of between 6 and 10 degrees over the last 150 years, far beyond anything that could be explained by increases in sea temperature. They also found that the geothermal gradient, which is the increase in temperature as you drill down into the earth, had not changed. (If the temperature increase was coming from the water, the gradient would have decreased.)

Sadly, they didn't reach the conclusion that maybe the Earth might be heating up from the inside, but if they had stopped to think about it for a bit, that makes perfect sense because many geologists believe the molten core of the earth is sustained by a low level nuclear reaction caused by radioactive material under pressure.

Temperatures go up. They go down. Sea levels rise and fall. Ice Ages come and go. It happens. Get over it. Forces way more powerful than mankind are at work here, forces so great it's near impossible for us mere mortals to comprehend.

Sunspots, fluctuations in the brightness of the Sun, and geothermal activity are the core drivers of climate on Earth.

Yet Governments around the world are committed to spending trillions "fighting climate change", as though bureaucrats might be able to regulate the climate to stay the same. Here, we even have a "Climate Change Fund" splashing money around on "measures to protect us from inevitable warming", all overseen by the "Minister for Climate Change".

One day, soon I hope, we'll look back on this arrogant buffonnery for the silliness it is because much as we might like to think otherwise, whatever humans do to our climate is insignificant by comparison to those forces of nature.

An April To Forget

Whew! Can anything else go wrong? I suspect not!

And before I go on, let me include a spoiler right here in case you're unduly concerned for my wellbeing. Everything's fine. Ok? Just fine.

So let me tell you why everything needs to be bloody fine, because this April has been one I'd rather forget.

First, I rolled over on my ankle. Sprained it and got to limp around for a few days eliciting some small degree of sympathy from those who crossed my path. As sprains go, it was pretty bad, but nothing compared to the time I did the same ankle on a cobblestoned street in Istanbul.

The ankle took about four days to shrink to tennis ball size, and as long as I didn't try running or skate boarding, I was fine.

And then, a week later, I rolled on it again. Crack. Down I went, leaving a near perfect face print in the mud. That snapping sound was so loud that a dozen or so people in the dog park came running over, certain I'd broken something. I was sure I'd broken something too, and it took all musterable strength to load Zac back into the car and drive the few blocks to home.

I cried. Really. I know it's not a manly thing to do, but the pain was pretty fierce, though I do suspect the tears were, in part, out of frustration for having done something that stupid again.

Dr J and I talked about rushing off to hospital but with the state of the public health system in Sydney, we decided that sitting in Emergency for 12 to 14 hours just for the privilege of being seen by an overworked, tired first year intern probably wasn't a productive use of time. It's just lucky I had a hidden stash of Panadeine Forte to get me through the night.

The next day, the ankle was grapefruit sized, but I could walk on it so I figured it probably wasn't broken after all. It still warranted a trip to the local GP though and that's where the real problems started.

It had been two years since I'd seen my doctor. She'd actually wondered if I'd perhaps died or moved away. Whatever. All that meant was that while my ankle was rather large and warranted immediate X-Rays, she was more concerned about my off the cuff "short of breath with chest pains" answer to her otherwise innocent "how have you been feeling?" question.

We'll get back to those chest pains later. In the mean time, the X-Rays were fine, but she was concerned I'd snapped a tendon so she ordered an MRI and casually declared that my snow boarding and mountain climbing careers were over. I'm picking up the MRI results on Monday, and I'll let you know. It's probably academic. "If you were an elite athlete, then we might consider surgery. You're not, so we won't." Thanks doc, for reminding me once again of my athletic inadequacy.

As it turned out, the MRI and the appointment with the cardiologist were on the same day. I've been seeing the heart guy for 20+ years to keep an eye on a dicky aortic valve, and the last time I saw him, he basically said "Go away. I don't want to see you for another 5 years." If that hadn't been good news, I suppose I might have taken it a little personally.

That he remembered me was nice, and that he remembered that I was seeing him two years too soon was nice too, I think. He was unamused that my heart appeared to have deteriorated, which didn't make my day. He ordered an echo cardiogram, basically an ultrasound of the heart valve, where the main thing they look for is the speed at which the blood is squirted out of the left ventrical. This, I'm told, is important because in a stunning design flaw, if the blood comes out of the heart too fast, it misses the little inlet arteries that actually take it into the heart muscle, which makes the heart want to beat harder, which means the jet of blood is moving faster, which means even less of it gets into the heart. Eventually, the hearts just throws itself over on its side and says "screw this, I'm outa here", and you die.

Which is not to say I died, or even came close to dying, mainly because the ultrasound showed the jet at about half the speed it would have needed to be for me to be dead (though, come to think of it, if I was dead, then presumeably, there would be no speed at all).

The raw number was 38. Don't worry about what 38 means. Just know that in the last fifteen years, it's deteriorated by just 8. In normal people, it would have deteriorated by about 30 in the same timeframe. Hooyah! Score 1 for Chester.

That didn't deter the cardiologist though. "Chest pains and shortness of breath. Damn. I was sure the valve would explain that... I think we'd better do an angiogram next week."

Oh. Ok then. Next week it is.

So it's Thursday. I'm scheduled for a day in hospital next week with a potentially clapped out heart, and I get a phone call from my bro'.

"Mate, I just got a cryptic call from Dad's travel agent. He's been taken off the cruise ship and rushed to hospital in China with internal bleeding. I don't even know where in China."

There's nothing like a crisis to focus someone with ADD. I guess the imperative speeds up one part of the brain so it matches the speed of the other part, and we ADD people become super efficient. It took ten minutes to track Dad down to a little hospital in Tianjin, and another ten to get enough of the story from his travel insurance company to know that he was being looked after. Unfortunately, dear Mother hadn't signed the release forms before they left, so the good people at the insurance company couldn't actually talk to me about what was wrong with Dad, they could just tell me where he was.

Think it can't get much worse? You're wrong.

On Sunday night, I felt a familiar twinge behind my right ear. I won't go into the graphic details... suffice to say that every six months, I get swelling inside my ear and it's excruciatingly painful. I knew that within 36 hours, I would be in agony, and doped to the gills on the aforementioned Panadeine Forte, unable to sleep and barely able to function at all.

Thirty six hours would make it Tuesday... the very day I'm scheduled for the angiogram.

So there I was, off my face on very nice drugs, and about to have a test that's supposed to tell me how my heart's going, and whether I'm going to need heart surgery. I still can't walk properly, Dad's bleeding to death in a foreign hospital where no-one speaks English, and my ear is agonising. Really agonising. Think of how it would feel to have someone drive a really big flat blade screwdriver into your ear drum and twist. That's not it. It's worse than that.

This was not fun people. I didn't want to tell the family about the angiogram because no-one needed the additional worry, and I was reasonably sure it would be fine. Unfortunately, this meant bro' kept calling to co-ordinate Dad's evacuation from Beijing (he moved to a shiny new hospital there on that same day). Seriously, if I'd been able to take the phone into the operating room, it wouldn't have stopped ringing.

So here's the wash up...

Dad's problem ws a bleeding ulcer... bad, but not nearly as serious as first thought. He and Mum are due home today thanks to the very fine work of his insurance company.

The ankle's only a bit swollen now. I'll pick up the MRI results on Monday, and I suspect there's not much I can do about it other than being more careful. I have cancelled the Extreme Adventure Sports Vacation scheduled for August, and have promised to go somewhere a little quieter.

The ear has a way of fixing itself that I won't describe in case you're eating.

And the heart? Perfect. To use the cardiologist's own words... "surprised as I am to have to say it, especially given your self confessed poor diet of deep fried take-away, and your flagrant disregard of your cholesterol levels, your heart is more like the heart of a 30 year old than a fifty year old."

So that's been my April.

I do suspect things will improve... the sun came out for the first time in 17 days and the superstitious remnant left in my more evolved brain thinks this might be a sign.

Neanderthal Speak

There was a curious piece this week on one of the many on-line news sites I waste time with.

Apparently, according to the story, research anthropologists at Florida Atlantic University in Boca Raton reconstructed a Neanderthal voice box to find out what they would have sounded like.

Ok. Um. So they got a research grant to listen to Neanderthals. Hmmm.

Here's the really curious bit... apparently, they discovered that the shape of a Neanderthal larynx meant that they would have had trouble with "e"s, so "beat" would have sounded more like "bit".

So... um... they think a Neanderthal sounds a bit like a Kiwi? Yeah. I can see that.
The article also describes Neanderthals as "a dead-end offshoot of the human line". So... um... someone sounding like a New Zealander is a dead end offshoot. Yeah. I can see that too.

Perhaps they could have saved all that research money and just had a holiday in Willingtin.

Freedom Of Thought

There's a new movie opening this week across the USA that stirs up some very important soup.

Ben Stein's "Expelled" is a doco about the politics of science, and the lack of freedom of academic thought. Specifically, Ben's got himself in a lather over the Darwinism v Intelligent Design debate, a real with-us-or-agin-us stoush where "mainstream science" accepts one view as fact and villifies anyone who promotes or even contemplates the other.

If you haven't been following it, Darwinism states that life evolved by trial and error. Who or what we are is the product of a series of accidents, starting from the very moment life appeared on earth. Intelligent Design proponents believe there's a greater hand in there somewhere. They don't dispute evolution per se, they simply say "maybe the evolution is the result of some intervention somewhere".

Intelligent Designists point to the one question Darwinists can't answer, which is "how was life created?"

Now I don't want to get bogged down here in any creationism v evolution debate. Intelligent Designists don't believe the world was created in 6 days, after which God went off for a beer. All they say is "maybe there was a Hand of God in the evolution of life somewhere".

I don't mind that view. I really have no opinion one way or another, and if they're right, they certainly answer a few hitherto unanswerable questions without challenging a core, scientifically provable fact, which is that life has built within it, a magnificent self replicating, self programming structure called DNA with which it can change (or be changed?) to suit whatever is happening to it.

What does concern me is that, once again, one view, in this case Darwinism, is accepted as unimpeachable truth such that anyone holding an opposing or questioning view is labelled a heretic and figutatively burned at the stake. Don't take this the wrong way. Darwin was a brilliant thinker, and he's on my hero list because he observed and spoke out against the mainstream.

However, what the mainstream Darwinists are now doing to their Intelligent Design colleagues would make Darwin spin in his proverbial grave.

There is a saying in science... "first they ridicule you, then they revile you... and then they adopt your ideas as though they are their own."

Science has no room for dogma. Webster defines this as "A doctrinal notion asserted without regard to evidence or truth; an arbitrary dictum". Yet isn't this what we now see in mainstream academia?

Ask yourself... is "Humans-Did-It Climate Change" provable science or politically motivated dogma?

Is "High Cholesterol Is Bad For You" the mantra of a vested interest, or is it also just more dogma?

None of this is new, of course. Medicine use to think washing hands before surgery was quackery. Physicists used to think matter was made up of solid stuff. And Astronomers used to think the Sun revolved around the Earth

I don't care what the issue is. No Thought Police State is acceptable under any circumstance. Scientists must be free to follow the evidence, and not the money, fashion or vested interest.

To watch the trailer, click HERE to go to the Expelled website.

Signture Stuff

Is your signature unique? No... I', not talking about that particular quirk of personality that you've somehow set to define you (mine's cartoon socks... doesn't matter how important the business meeting, just look at my socks).

I'm talking about your actual signature. The one on the back of your credit cards. The one on your loan documents, driver's licence and passport. I'll bet you though it was yours. I'll bet you thought no-one else could have exactly your signature.

My signature's pretty flamboyant. It's got long sweeping strokes, stylised letters and curvy bits that make it look more like a logo than a way to pay for something. It truly is unique... or at least I thought so... until yesterday.

We were at the Sydney Bridal Expo and a customer handed me his credit card. I turned it over and... knock me down with a feather... it was MY signature on the back of his card. Seriously.

I did a real double take. For a second or two, my brain actually tried to remember how I eneded up with my credit card between my fingers. "What slight of hand is this?" I thought.

I looked at the customer and said something like "Mate, you really have to see something". Out came my card and we held the two side by side. The signatures were identical. Different names. Even a different letter starting the first name. But absolutely identical signatures.

Now I'm depressed.

Us v Them

I was looking for a picture of a FedEx box this morning, and as is usual in any search, I found myself just a few curious clicks away from another web gem.

It's called GoogleFight, and all it does is measure the number of results in one search against the results of another.

Here's where I ended up...

And other great fights are just a few clicks away, like this one...

...or this one... You can even make your own. Allah v Jesus. Rugby Wallabies v Rugby All Blacks. Macdonalds v Burger King. Coke v Pepsi. Sydney v Melbourne. Reebok v Ferragamo. Chester The Bear v King Kong. Whatever. It's minutes of fun for the whole family.

Seriously... people (like me) need to get out more.

Moon Walk

56%

Just for fun, and to take my mind of the pain of a severely twisted ankle, I spent a few minutes taking the Moon Survival Challenge this morning.

The basic premise is that my little space ship has crashed on the moon, about 200 miles from base camp. I've been able to scratch around in the wreckage and salvage a few tings that might help me survive.

The challenge is to arrange the list of those items in order from most important to least important. The test then compares your score to NASA's score.

As you can see, I only scored 56%... an "F".

I won't spoil it for you. Take the test, then go to comments to read my lame excuse for failing so dismally.

Night? What Night?

A couple of posts ago, I wrote a piece of how misguided Earth Hour is. I haven't changed my mind about that, but several readers availed themselves of the opportunity blogs deliver to point out that for them, the real driver behind Earth Hour is not the fight against Global Warming, but something called "Light Pollution".

LP (as those in the know like to call it) is the excess light thrown up by human activity. It floods the night sky right across the industrialised world, playing havoc with ecosystems and consuming huge resources. It can be as basic and personal as your neighbour's garden light shining into your bedroom, or as complex as the permanent glow over night time America and Europe.

Either way, it wastes enormous resources, and however you look at it, that's a bad thing.

I actually wish that's what Earth Hour was about, because I'd support it 100% if it was. Sadly though, the vast majority of people who will be participating in Earth Hour are blissfully unaware of LP, and will remain so when they switch their lights back on 61 minutes after they switch them off.

It's not their fault. If Earth Hour really is about Light Pollution, then those behind it have done an appalling job at getting the message out there. People will switch out their lights thinking they're somehow making a contribution to reducing carbon emissions. Blame the organisers, or, more probably, the media for dumbing down an important message.

I do thank my contributors, though, for giving Light Pollution a little oxygen in my blog. They have suitably educated me to an environmental issue that's worth the effort. We waste an enormous amount of energy indiscriminately spraying light out into the night, and in the process, irreparably interfere with the natural order of things.

Fetch

Misguided

In ten days time, it will be Earth Hour. Apparently, this Sydney event has gone global this year, so even if you don't live here, you might have heard of it. For one hour, we're supposed to turn off our lights to show we care about greenhouse gasses and global warming.

Sounds like a worthy idea, right? You're probably thinking "that's gotta be good for the environment", right?

For an hour, everyone pulls out their candles, goes ooooh, and aaaahh, has a romantic dinner and feels better now that they've made some real statement and saved the earth from all those evil greenhouse gasses. How much better does it get?

Except for one thing...

A 100w incandescent light globe uses electricity which, if it was created in a coal fired power plant, created about 13g of carbon dioxide. A 2.5cm diameter candle will burn down about 5cm during that hour, and create 15g of carbon dioxide. One candle. Of course, to light a room to the equivalent of a 100w light globe, you'd need 1500 candles, and it would be so hot you's have spontaneous combustion in your lounge room, but that's not the point. Just one candle produces more greenhouse gas than a standard 100w light globe, and if you've ever had to wait it out through a blackout, you'll know that one candle isn't enough.

It gets worse. If your candle's replacing a fluorescent light or one of those energy saving flouro bulbs, you need to compare the candle's 15g with just 3g of the dreaded CO2 made by the electric alternative.

So let me get this right. We're going to get everyone to switch off their electric lights and burn candles for an hour, producing MORE greenhouse gas so we can save the environment from... um... greenhouse gas? Really?

And while I think of it... last year's Earth Hour resulted in a drop in demand of just 1.7%, which actually made ZERO difference to the amount of greenhouse gas produced, because coal fired power stations aren't like the engine in your car where you can just press or release the pedal according to the demand you want to place on the engine... all of which means Earth Hour actually adds a staggering and unnecessary load to the total green house gas emission (if you believe in this sort of thing). In short, Earth Hour's a big con.

Next, they'll be telling us to forego our cars and ride horses for a day, conveniently forgetting to mention that the envirodamage done by the methane the horse will produce will make our internal combustion engines look like environmental saviours.

Don't believe a word of the global warming scam. Just start asking where the money trail leads.

Things I Hate

It seems there's a glut of "lists" kicking around at the moment...

Things I Want To Do Before I Die
Things I Like About Myself
Things I Would Change If I Could
People I'd Like To Meet
You know... there's a long list of them.

I thought I'd start a list of things that piss me off. Not BIG things... just little things that, mostly, piss me off for a nonosecond before my life moves on. They're the sort of things you can really take some comfort from being pissed off about because a)you can't fix them, and b)it doesn't matter that you can't fix them even if you wanted to.

The first thing on the list is that really stupid set up before the punch line on 99% of jokes that arrive in my inbox. Come on... you know... they go something like this;

A blonde walks out to her mail box blah blah blah and
(You're gonna love this)
blah blah punchline.

Fuck off. I don't need whoever wrote the joke to tell me whether I'll like it or not. Make the bloody presumption. If it's a funny joke I'll laugh. It not, I wont. The author telling me I'm "gonna love it" isn't going to make the slightest difference to whether I do or not. In fact, I find it more than a little patronising.

I hate sports journalists referring to sports teams in the plural too. "Arsenal are playing Man U this weekend." No you Philistine. Arsenal IS playing Man U this weekend. Arsenal is one team. Singular. Saying it are playing would be like saying Chester are pissed off at illiterate journalists. For the purists, it's called a "collective singular", which simply means it's a singular term for a group of things. "Company" is a collective singular, and that includes a company name, so Nike IS just doing it. "Team", "church", and "country", are also collective singulars, and they too include organisational names. America are not looking for Bin Laden. America IS looking for Bin Laden. Would you say "The church are having a fete this weekend"? (Please... it's rhetorical question... if you felt a need to answer "yes", then perhaps you aren't ready for this blog.)

Next on my list would be those stupid web ads that go on and on and on for pages telling you how great a product is, such that you have to scroll ALL THE WAY to the bottom before you find the "order now" link, and you still don't know the price. Am I an idiot? Do they really think that just by clicking "order now" I'll buy it irrespective of the cost? Do they think the act of clicking "order now" signals some emotional commitment to purchase such that concepts like "value" and "trust" are no longer relevant?

I had one of these yesterday... it was a link in one of the health emails I get, a mostly useful daily that, this time, linked to a blathering web page about some "secret" forex trading system. Apparently, "only those in the know" have this secret and if I was very fast, the advertiser would share that secret with li'l ole me. It talked about "bank's secret codes" and "the secret only the true insiders know"... all without telling me the price. Ok. I'll bite. I clicked on "Order Now", and the price was $1,770 plus $9.95 postage and handling. Pffft!

Which leads me to the next thing... $9.95 postage and handling on a seventeen hundred dollar item. Fuck off. For $1,700, the postage had better be free. In fact, the bloody CDs it was trying to flog had better be hand delivered by semi naked virgins.

Then there's food labels. Don't get me started on the content... that's for another blog. I'm talking about the size. 4pt. Do you know how small 4pt actually is? It's so small that most people over 40 can't read it. What lame idiot bureaucrat set that standard? If the information the government wants on the label is so important, then at least make it big enought o read.

Trucks piss me off too, but only when they're going backwards. What is it with that "beep beep beep" sound? All right, I know it's a safety thing. I know it's only there because some moron probably walked behind a truck that was reversing, which meant some demented bureaucrat came up with the beep beep solution so he could tick a box the next time he did a site inspection.

But here's the problem... we have a construction site near my office. There's so much beep beep beeping coming from all directions that it would be impossible for anyone to know if they're about to be run over or not, which, of course, means no-one pays attention any more, thus rendering the beep beep beep totally useless. One piece of equipment has a beep beep beep so load I'm sure they can hear it in Auckland, which makes me wonder what they'll do for "safety" to replace the sound when everone within a city block of it goes deaf.

Get rid of those beepers, I say, and let natural selection take its course.

More Special Than Any Of Us Imagined

These days, the mail that gets delivered into the letterbox by the front gate usually isn't anywhere near as interesting as the stuff flooding into my cyber inbox. Most often, it's bills, department store catalogs, menus from local restaurants that deliver, and the occasional reminder from the Office of State Revenue about some forgotten parking fine.

Friday's mail was a little different. It contained a gem in the form of what was supposed to look like a typed letter... old fashioned enough to somehow give it credibility in an increasingly cynical world. It started with a kind of preamble, "typed" above the addressee details, and the worth of the experience to come ought to become evident once you read this opening paragraph...

"Chester Bear, please forgive us, but we have just taken a closer look at your profile. It turns out you're more special than any of us imagined! Chester Bear, did you know that you posess some very rare hidden traits? In fact, there is a famous person (someone you would instantly recognise, he's on TV every night) who posesses these same special, incredibly rare traits. ...It turns out that people who posess these same rare and often hidden traits that you do are some of the most famous and successful people on this planet! Chester, you are indeed blessed! I know those around you don't know this yet, but they will! Deep down, you sense it, too. Right? I'm so excited for you!"

It gets better (or worse, depending on your perspective, and how much you value purity in the English language). I'll let you decide which it is...

Dear Chester Bear,
This is a personal letter just to you. Notice; this is not a mass mailing; this letter came to you by first-class mail, not by third-class bulk mail. This is not a solicitation for money. In fact, you will get something of immense value from us absolutely free with no strings attached. So, read every word very carefully because you will never get another letter from us again.Chester Bear, please keep what I tell you secret, because this information is confidential. These words are meant for you only.

There has existed for many years an exclusive association, a secret society, of the world's most famous and powerful people. These include renowned actors and musicians, leading scientists and intellectuals, self-made entrepreneurs and artists, even some of the rare genuine astrologers and psychics.

The bloody thing blathers on like that for EIGHT pages of diamond studded content, each paragraph measured and targeted... so that by the end, you really want to believe you are special, and that

• you will lose 30lbs overnight
• you will have the perfect relationship with a partner who adores you
• you will be able to see into the future so that you'll always win at gambling and you will know where the stock market will be tomorrow
• you will be rich
• you will be popular
• you will be sexy and desirable

There's even this...

Chester Bear, you'd be amazed to know just who these particular world-renown members were who chose you! But, alas, it's a secret society and although everything I say here is true, their identities must remain anonymous.

Those who chose you, though, do realize your special qualities. YOU'VE GOT IT! You just have not fully realized your special qualities yet.

We know people around you may not see it, but we know that you, Chester Bear, have experienced moments in which you feel spiritually gifted. In those euphoric moments, you know you are special, you absolutely know it, and you feel you are here to do great things with your life. Right? Well, we know it, too, Chester Bear. And yes, you are meant to do great things, exactly as we are going to show you.

How do we know? Be honest: have you ever felt like God or some higher power may be communicating with you, giving you a sign? If you answered yes, and we know you did, then you are indeed that special person we are looking for. And this is your calling. It's as simple as that.

It finishes with this absolutely priceless sign off...

Chester Bear, a Grand Council Member in Greece asked me to give you a personal message. He wrote his message to you in Greek, which I have posted below along with an English translation.

English Translation
"Chester Bear, when I saw the history of your name I instantly knew we had to contact you! There truly is buried treasure lying within you. I can sense this first atom of success and immortality in every new member. Yours is one of the best! With your special, hidden talents, well, let's just say spectacular things will soon open up for you. Few people posses the potentials you do. I can barely stand the anticipation!"

I have no idea what the Greek says, but I'm reasonably sure the translation isn't entirely accurate because the Greek clearly mentions the NT (short for Nouveau Tech) Society, which is purported to be the organisation sending this mountain of sheep poo.

It's kind of sad, really. Even a little depressing. Let's leave aside the fact that it was addressed to a 14" tall stuffed bear for a moment... whoever wrote this deliberately and specifically targets the weak and vulnerable... people who feel their lives do not match some as yet undisplayed potential.

And lets face it... who doesn't think, at some point in their time on this earth, that something in their life, relationship or finances couldn't use some mystical intervention. You can just imagine an overweight, lonely 30 something, working a menaingless 9-5 job, sitting in front of Oprah waiting for a partner who doesn't care any more to come home from the local pub, and "believing" she (yes, she) really is special, if only she had a personality, was thinner, had a better job, and was... well... someone different to whoever she is right now.

I googled the thing and found the whole thing to be mostly harmless. The "free stuff" is a 56 page booklet with a whole bunch of meaningless advice, with an invitation to buy a self help book so you know what it all means.

Ah well. Do I need to quote PT Barnum?

The Wrong Demographic

I'm going to do something I don't do very often. I'm going to make an admission...

I was wrong.

Not "might have been mistaken", or "possibly in error". No. I was wrong.

Two weeks ago, we opened a little teeth whitening kiosk at a major shopping mall here in Sydney. All of the projections said it would do well. All of the "outside" counsel we sought before we committed said it would do well. And the location I picked within the mall had an average passing traffic of more than 3,000 people an hour.

The sad truth is that it's bombed. I was wrong.

We'd budgeted for 4 treatments a day. On average, we're doing less than 1. Financially, we'll hurt with this one, so when something like this happens, smart businesses take stock and try to figure out what went wrong.

And all we can figure out is that the location within the mall is wrong. Actually, we didn't figure that out... some of the other kiosk owners figured it out for us, because four or five of them have come up to take a look and they've all said "great concept, but what are you doing HERE? This is the LAST place in the mall anyone wants to be. Being outside Big W is the kiss of death in ANY mall."

Last place? Kiss of Death?

I decided I'd try to figure out how could I have got it that wrong? That meant I spent much of yesterday playing passive observer... not at the kiosk, but watching it from afar. It wasn't too hard a task. People watching has always been one of my favourite pass times, and I wanted to take a closer look at those 3000 people to see if observation might offer a clue.

Was it that they were on a mission, and didn't want to be diverted?
Was it that they're all maxed out on their credit cards and were heading into Big W for a bargain to save a little on their household budget?
Or was it that they just couldn't care less about whether their smile was white or chocolate brown?

The truth might be a combination of all three, but after an hour of watching, I came to the conclusion the main reason was the last. I don't care who I offend here... overwhelmingly, the people heading into that store are peasants with no sense of style, appearance, or even manners. Worse still, at least for the future of humanity, is that they seem to be prolific breeders, thus compounding the problem for generations to come by handing down dubious values and a lack of sophistication that threatens who we are as a nation. I'm not exagerating. These people vote!

I carefully observed their teeth, which is not to suggest that the colour of one's teeth can reflect your station in life, but there certainly seemed to be a pattern here, with the average tooth colour more resembling a strong flat black than pearly white. Not that they'd have noticed, because judging by the way most of them were dressed, there's a clear shortage of mirrors in their lives anyway.

Call me a snob. I don't care. It's probably true, because I have little time for the great unwashed, for people who have no understanding of who they are, where they're going, how they're going to get there, or how they need to treat the people around them along the way.

I watched four different people walk up to the shelves on which we have some of our product, and casually slip a tin of tea or bottle of fish oil into their bags. One woman even stashed her ill gotten bounty under baby's pillow. When I challenged her, she looked me square in the eyes and, without so much as a blink or increase in heart rate, she told me she'd bought it at another store. When I told her it wasn't available at any other store, she told me to f*%! off, and then she walked away. Charming. I the USA, they call them trailer trash. Here, I don't think we've got a pejorative. "Housing Commission" would be about as close as we get.

I then spent the next hour doing the same at the other end of the mall, watching the spot management has suggested as an alternative. All I'll say is "different". The people were different. They had a different quality about them. They seemed to be going about their day with more purpose, yet they were far more relaxed. I watched them interact with a kiosk offering chiropractic referral. I watched them being polite. I heard them say "no thank you". There wasn't a scowl among them.

We'll move to that spot this week. Will it make a difference? Maybe, or maybe not, but it couldn't be worse than where we are right now.

Another Ew!

Thanks to Dr Mercola's website for this one.

Couldn't Have Put It Better...

A Few Facts

It's easy to get confused by Middle East politics, and it's very easy to feel a great deal of sympathy towards the Palestinian people. Their leadership has so comprehensively failed them that they are almost certainly condemned to poverty and misery for generations to come.

It's then sometimes easy to point the finger at the Israelis but before you do, I urge all of my readers to take a little history lesson.

Please go here...

L'opera De Les Desserts

Every now and then, something arrives in my inbox that's bloody brilliant.

What Are The Odds

I was driving Dr J's car today... I had a series of pick-ups and frankly, the little Smart's too small for all but the groceries.

She has a personalised number plate... JAE002. Her initials (with 002 attached).

My round trip took me to the four corners of Sydney.

And on the way home, I pulled up behind a car with the number plate JAE003. There are probably two million cars in Sydney. Calculating the chances of pulling up behind a car with a consecutive personalised number plate will make my brain hurt, though I suspect it's probably a number with eight or nine, or even ten zeros on the end.

It's not important, but I tend to notice these things.

Wow.

Photo courtesy of AP. A missile launches from the guided-missile cruiser USS Lake Erie. It wasn't this missile, but today, one like it did the near impossible.

I hope this story didn't pass you by, because the achievement, even in today's hi tech soup, is impressive indeed.

Today, the US Military shot down a satellite. From a ship... at sea.

Think about this... here's a satellite about the size of a bus, hurtling through space at around 20,000kph. It's 210km up... in space.

Someone on an Aegis Class cruiser pushed a button, and a missile launched from the ship. A few minutes later, it scored a direct hit and blew that satellite out of the sky.

Do you have the faintest concept of how hard that was. Let me put it in perspective for you. Imagine taking a rubber band sling shot and firing a ball bearing at a Mercedes driving along a road 20km away at 16okph, and so precisely aiming it that you hit the key hole on the driver's door, exactly as intended.

Stunning.

Of course, they still can't find Osama but hey... a hit is a hit.

Monkey See, Monkey Do.

I understand it started out as an Arby's commercial. Now it's so much more.

Fidelity

I'd like to ask you some serious, confronting questions.

I read a few statistics today, one of which smacked me over the head.

• The first... 50% of marriages end in divorce. That's sad, but not surprising.
• The second... 60% of men cheat in their marriage. That's disappointing, but also not surprising. My observation is that men just have trouble keeping it zipped. That there is a difference, though, between the male cheat rate and the divorce rate is a little surprising, and I'll ask you a question about that in a moment.
• And the third... 40% of women cheat in their marriage. Now that IS surprising. It's been my observation that women aren't like men. Men will have sex with a total stranger, as long as she has a pulse. Women usually require some emotional connection before they can get physical (though I have met one or two exceptions).

Now I don't want to enter into a debate about the wider issues of morality in this post. No. For me, cheating on your spouse is about trust, or, more precisely, breach of trust. And once that trust is breached, it's broken forever.

Allow me to bare a little of my soul....

Have I ever cheated on my wife or long term partner? No. Absolutely not. To deliberately do something that has the potential to hurt the one you (supposedly) love is unconscionable.

Have I ever had sex with a woman who I knew was married (to someone else)? Hmmm. Now that's a less comfortable question. The short answer is "yes, once". At the time, I thought I was providing "comfort"... hubby had been away on business for about a year and she knew he was cheating on her so she just wanted to be in someone's arms. I was wrong though, and I have vowed I will never do that again.

Has my wife or long term partner ever cheated on me? Sadly, yes.

And finally, could I ever forgive a partner who's cheated on me? No. Like I said, it's the ultimate breach of trust. Nothing they could do or say could ever make good. Nope... you cross that line and it's all over.

The statistics tell me there's a different view out there, so maybe it's me who's out of step. Therefore, I'd like to pose a few questions to you, and you can answer anonymously if you like.

• Does that figure of 40% infidelity among women surprise you? Come to think of it, is the 60% infidelity rate among men surprising? Would you have expected more, or less?
  
• Have you ever cheated on your partner?
• Have you ever had a relationship with a married man or woman (other than your spouse, of course)? Did the partner ever find out? Would you ever do it again?
  
• Has your partner ever cheated on you?
• What would you do if you found out your partner was cheating on you?
  
• And is infidelity something that can (or should) be forgiven?

Again, let me stress, this isn't about sex. If you're single and you feel like a casual bonk, then that's between you and the bonkee (provided he/she understands the intention).

What I'm concerned about are the statistics... 60% of men and 40% of women think being unfaithful in a long term relationship is ok. That, to me, seems just a little wrong and I'm starting to think we've got some conflict between promiscuity and integrity happening here.

Maybe it's because we live in such a sexually free society. If you're single, you're expected to be sleeping with him/her on the third, second, and sometimes even first date. Go beyond the third date and you're considered just a little weird.

Sex has become a recreational activity, as much a part of the weekend as dinner, a few drinks and a movie. By the time you get married, you're expected to have had multiple partners, and you're considered a bit odd if you haven't. That's all fine. I don't have a problem with any of it... except...

You then choose a life mate and you're expected to have a 180degree change in your behaviour. Probability says it's just not going to work.

I once dated a girl who openly told me that she expected me to be unfaithful. "That's just the way men are", she said. "Just don't ever let me catch you." I actually felt sorry for her. What caused her expectations to be so low?

My ex told me she thought her affairs were ok too, and apparently, 40% of her female colleagues would agree with her.

Has the pendulum swung too far? Am I being an old fashioned relic who, as the statistics suggest, has lost touch with prevailing opinion?

Or is it that we tend to just draw the lines of "normality" in society today in all the wrong places?

A Fresh New Look

Dr J bought a new laptop yesterday, an ultra light Sony VAIO with Windoze Vista and security that scans your fingerprint/iris/bank records/license/dental records/dna/whatever, just to make sure it's really you switching it on.

At first, I was awfully jealous, not so much of the computer but more of the new look and feel of the operating system thingmie. I'm just a sucker for a whole new look... it goes with my "form over substance" mantra... and after gawking at it over lunch, I sulked upstairs to my little office and my extremely boring looking Windoze XP.

In the next ten or so unproductive minutes, I scanned the web for something that might make my XP look cooler. After all, it was supposed to be designed to be re-skinned, though the only skinning I've ever seen from Microsoft involved extracting money from my wallet.

"I'm not that clever", I thought. "Someone who actually knows what they're doing must have had the same thought as me, and then actually done something about it."

The problem, though, is that it seems like the people who really know what they're doing aren't the nerdy geeks they used to be, and now they're not only tech savvy, they're also money savvy. Just about everything I found that would do what I wanted it to do either a) cost money, b) came with scumware, or c) both.

Bastards! What happened to the open, sharing, caring spirit of the internet? I remember a time when you could get just about anything you wanted for free. People, out of the kindness of their hearts and a solid sense of the greater good would blow huge chunks of their time creating a little program that did whatever, and then they'd upload it so everyone could enjoy their cleverness.

No-one even remotely thought of adding in a few lines of code to steal my email addresses and then turn my machine into a zombie to send out a gazillion emails, or relay my private web habits so that I can be "served" ads that might be of relevance. Such underhanded behaviour was a capital offence.

How times have changed in the few short years the web's been other than something spiders make.

Then I struck gold. I found and installed something called "Vista Anthracite Pack" by Nekh Art Studio. This seemed to fix the window borders but the cursors were still the same old boring XP cursors so the job's wasn't done. That required an "Aero-cursor" package.

Ok... now we're getting somewhere, but it still looks like the proverbial mutton dressed as lamb*.

Enter a little package called "Vista Start Menu" which comes with something called "Yahoo Wigets". The widgets give you the nice big clock, the weather report, and all the other goodies Microsoft has built into Vista, while the Start Menu changes the Windoze XP start menu.

Nice. I now have this shiny, new looking interface that works just the same as it did before.

I didn't realise just how important that last bit was until I spent a few hours with Vista on Dr J's new toy this morning. I came away drained, frustrated and with one overwhelming reaction. "Vista is a load of crap."

While it might look very nice, Windoze Vista takes more clicks to do just about anything, and half the things we wanted to run aren't "Vista compliant". It was disappointing, more for the fact that a)Microsoft built an empire on eye candy so I expected better than this, and b)I didn't think "wow" was short for "wow, this is truly awful".

Ah well. Dr J will get used to it.

I should mention that the VAIO also came with Norton pre-installed. You get a "free" 3 month subscription, after which, the Symantec folk put their hand in your pocket. No thanks. Let's uninstall and get something that actually works. Big mistake!

We clicked "Uninstall", went through the process and rebooted the machine. When we tried to install AVG, we got a warning saying Norton was still installed. Bah! A quick check of the registry showed Norton still there, hogging resources after re-installing itself at boot time.

I went to the Symantec website and searched for "uninstall". I found nothing, so I tediously went through the registry deleting, line-by-line, everything with "symantec" or "norton" in it.

We rebooted, but... yes... you guessed it... like the most persistent of viruses, Norton was back! Didn't the US Department of Justice fine Microsoft about $600mil for doing this with Windoze? I'm sure they did... so how come Symantec gets away with it?

Thank your deity for Google. A quick search on uninstalling Norton yeilded a utility buried deep in the Symantec website... really deep, because I'm sure they don't really want anyone to know it's there. It occurred to me that most people would just give up and re-install the thing. It also ocurred to me that Symantec's counting on it!

Doean't it make you yearn for a simpler life?

*For my non-Australian friends...
"mutton dressed as lamb" - coloquialism. origin unknown. usually refers to a woman well past her prime trying to dress and present herself like a 19 year old.

My Failing Brain

While driving home a few minutes ago, I heard a great piece on the radio.

I immediately thought to myself "oh, that's fabulous... must look that story up on the web when I get home, and then blog it.."

And now I'm home... and I have absolutely no idea what the story was about, or what I was supposed to be looking up.

Bugger.

Clever

A friend of mine was given this book yesterday. It comes complete with magnifying glass. Like Wally, Osama is hidden in about a dozen locations. Particularly challenging is Egypt.

I love creative people (the authors, not the terrorist).

Green & Clean

I had a call yesterday from a business buddy of mine in New York. Let's call him "Ed". That's not his real name, but you know how it goes... "everything you are about to read is true... only the names have been changed to protect the innocent".

Ed wants to involve me in his latest venture and while my first reaction was "no, sorry, too busy", I did give him the courtesy of listening to the proposition. After all, there's nothing like a "Plan B".

Like many others who know what's good for them, Ed's jumped on the Global Warming bandwagon, and like those others, he's not there because he shares some deep communal concern about the future of our planet... no... he's there because there's a buck in it.

Let me explain...

You've heard about Global Warming, right? About how "greenhouse gasses" are allegedly making the climate heat up, and about how those evil fossil fuels upon which we all rely are eventually going to kill us, and about how coal is the evilest of all. (Those of you who are regular readers will already know my views on this... and if this is your first time here, then take a little time reading my archives.)

You've probably heard about "carbon credits", and "green energy too", and you might even have checked the little box on your power bill opting for "Green Energy", even though it costs a few dollars more.

So here's the deal...

Ed recently bought a piece of land somewhere in the Excited States. It's "contaminated" land, in that it used to be a coal mine, so it's covered with mine tailings. They're the bits left over after you pull out whatever it is you're pulling out of the ground. When you mine coal, you end up with a great deal of what used to be called "sub-optimal" ore... that is, coal that's in bits too small to be useful. Miners have been in the habit of piling that coal up in big piles, perhaps thinking that one day, the technology would be developed to make it valuable.

So Ed now owns this huge mound of coal dust, and the technology DOES now exist to make it useful. In simple terms, you crush it up and make it into little briquettes.

On January 1, a new law came into effect in the United States. Now before I explain that law, let me say I'm not beating up the 'Americans' per se, because their new law is no better or worse than anyone elses.

Under that law, the US Government gives Ed a subsidy for making the coal dust into briquettes. The power stations love the briquettes because they're about a third of the price of regular coal and their uniform size means they're about 20% more efficient.

So far this is pretty boring right? Yeah, I thought so too, but here's where it get's cleaner and greener...

...because the bureaucrats decided that if Ed adds 20% biowaste to the briquette, it stops being "coal", and turns magically into a "green, zero emission bio fuel". In this case, Ed's "biowaste" will be a type of flour, though he could use wood chips or even human poo if he wanted to. It's still coal, of course, with all of the same emmission profile that it had before, except that now, by the stroke of a pen, it isn't, and is deemed to have zero emissions that won't count towards America's carbon emissions score.

And "green" fuel attracts an additional subsidy from the US Government. Governments and entrepreneurs all over the world are rushing into this loophole. Ed will make a fortune.

I love the simplicity. Everyone makes or saves money. The company that owns the land can now clean it up for profit, the energy producer pays about 70% less to generate the same amount of electricity, the flour producer gets to save money on disposing of its inedible flour, and the US Government gets to save on carbon emission fines by turning coal into something it isn't.

I know what you're thinking. "Surrely our governments wouldn't try a stunt like this. Aren't they there to actually fix the problem?" No. They're not. They're there to come up with processes by which things can go on much as before. They just have new names.

I did warn you about bureaucrats and global warming, didn't I?

Ew!

When they talk about naked flights, I thought they were talking about 'planes with no markings.

I'm no prude. In fact, I suspect my ideas on sexuality, nudity, and other such issues would probably condemn me to a flaming eternity if my faith believed in that sort of thing.

But this is just plain icky...

The Guardian reports that a German travel agent has come up with "the ultimate in no-frills flying"... a charter flight for passengers who want to fly naked.

Apparently holidays to places where one gets down and naked are particularly popular among east Germans, who like nothing better than to stretch out on a beach in their birthday suits.

Spokesman for the travel agent, OssiUrlaub gets my award for quote of the week. "The flight can be enjoyed as God intended." Really? I would actually have thought nothing about the whole flying thing would fall into the category of "as God Intended".

"For the first time, passengers in Germany can fly completely in the nude," he said.

Whoa. Slow down... put down that phone... you're not quite ready to make a reservation yet. First, you'll need to get yourself to somewhere called Erfurt. The flight will take you to the Baltic island of Usedom, but you'll be returning the same day so a bit of naked sightseeing probably isn't on the agenda. Tickets cost 499 euros ($831).

All passengers will travel naked but will only be allowed to get undressed once on board, the company said.

They don't say whether you get can get naked before the pilot switches off the seatbelt sign. (Hey... maybe they could replace the smoking light with a nakedness light.)

They also don't say whether nakedness is compulsory, but I guess you wouldn't take the flight unless you were that way inclined.

Pilots and cabin crew will remain clothed "for security reasons". Thank God. The time I flew in Germany, I had to resist the desire to say "thanks Nana" each time one of the flight crew served me a drink.

There has to be a sit-com in this somewhere... and no... I didn't make this up. How could you make something like this up.

For the original story, go HERE.

Absent Bear

It's ocurred to me this evening that I've been a little slack, not just with my own ramblings, but also in my less than frequent visits to some of my favourite blogs.

I'm sorry. Really. I've just been... um... what's the word... oh, yes... "busy".

Ok. I know it's a lame excuse. "If something's important, you make time for it", my dad used to say. But I really have been busy.

Take yesterday as an example. I had to create a colour 3D rendering of our new little project for the mall managers. To do that, I had to download Google SketchUp, learn how to use it, then trawl through the Google on-line 3D model bank to see if I could find models of the various bits and pieces we want to put in the space. It took much of the day, or at least what was left of the day after a meeting (actually, a long lunch) with a great mate and lawyer extraordinaire to talk about that impending legal problem we'll have once we open.

Before all of that, I needed to translate what the bureaucracy said about cows into something one of our suppliers could understand, and then fax it off to him because him email was down. Yes. Cows. If you're a regular reader, you'll know what I mean. If not... sorry... I'll explain some other time.

Translating bureaucratese takes time... and then one has to check it... carefully... because if one leaves out the bit about Jembrana, which would be understandable because there is no Jembrana where my supplier is, the result can be very expensive.

It was also my turn to cook, and I needed a crusade to find the bocconcini I'd use for the salad (it was too bloody hot for real food).

And in between hunting and slicing/dicing, his royal highness, Zac the first, needed his six o'clock trip to the local park... which is where the day really got interesting...

...because at some point, when I wasn't watching and he wasn't charging around like the posessed with the dozen or so canine friends who gather on the green each afternoon, he ate something. I have no idea what, but within two hours, he was lying in his water bowl, drinking the thing dry, after which, he promptly staggered into the loungeroom, vomited, then fell down. The drive to the local emergency veterinary hospital involved some fancy low flying, the outcome of which was that the poor little thing spent the night with drip in leg trying to flush the toxin/poison out of his system. Don't fret. He's fine today... and well on the road to full recovery. The point is, the episode stole another three hours out of my day. (Not that I wouldn't do it again in a heartbeat, but I had things worked out for those three hours and those things didn't involve sitting at a hospital, veterinary or otherwise.)

I could also have done without Mini hobbling around with a sore front paw all day too, because it also takes time to catch the little darling, hold her down, and perform my Dolittle impersonation while rubbing said paw. "Is this where it hurts little girl? Don't worry, it's not broken", which is, of course, met with that vacant "yeah, whatever, where's my food" stare that cat owners know so well.

I'm not complaining, though All I'm saying is "sorry, but I've been a little busy". I'll make more of an effort after I get this week out of the way. I promise.

Intelligent Life

Thanks Ms Mouse for reminding of the brilliance and creativity of The Meaning of Life.

So Accurate It's Creepy

Thanks to Mouse and CAW for this "Which Tarot Card Am I" thing. For what it's worth...

I Am The Fool

The Fool is the card of infinite possibilities. The bag on the staff indicates that he has all he need to do or be anything he wants, he has only to stop and unpack. He is on his way to a brand new beginning. But the card carries a little bark of warning as well. Stop daydreaming and fantasising and watch your step, lest you fall and end up looking the fool.

What Tarot Card are You?
Take the Test to Find Out.

So accurate it's creepy.

Those Pesky Squirrels

Screen Genius

Have you ever watched a movie the first time and thought "what the fuck is going on?" And by the time you reach the end, you're hooked... so hooked that you watch again and again.

Pulp Fiction jumps into my head... but the only reason you might have felt that way is because it started in the middle.

This week, I took in "The Wrong Man" (released as "Lucky Number Slevin" in the US and elsewhere).

It's brilliant. Ben Kingsley, Morgan Freeman, Josh Hartnett, Lucy Liu and Bruce Willis make Jason Smilovic's stunning script lift off the screen. But it's Paul McGuigan's direction that smacks you between the eyes. It's fast, beautifully conceived and amazingly executed. (Sorry, I ran out of really cool superlatives.)

Watch the sets. Wow. The editing. Wow. The cinematography. Wow.

I'm not going to spoil it for you. All I'll say is that it's a gang war and Hartnett's character is caught in the middle... the wrong guy in the wrong place at the wrong time.. and that's somewhere someone with ataraxia doesn't want to be.

And after you've watched it, watch it again.

Another Scary Recruit Movie

While we're talking movies, I sat through the latest Kevin Costner stinker, The Guardian.

It's truly awful. Formula cinema at its worst... tedious, predictable, boring. If you haven't seen it and don't want to know what you're in for then warning... spoiler coming... stop reading now.

This film is "Officer and a Gentleman" meets "Top Gun" meets "GI Jane".
It's got all the elements...
The military style boot camp
The unreasonably tough sergeant
The recruits, each with some quirky personality disorder
The "you're in or you're out" challenges

Costner is a US Coast Guard "rescue swimmer", the most decorated of all time. He's the guy who jumps out of the helicopter to save you when you're boat's sinking. A real American hero... except that there's this accident and the rest of his helicopter crew, including his best friend, are killed... best friend dying in his arms, of course.

Now I probably don't need to point out that you shouldn't get Costner's performance confused with anything remotely associated with acting. It's more closely associated with a more honest industry... lumber.

So you're getting the picture, right? Rescue goes wrong... CO decides Costner needs some time to get his head back together again, and sends him to the Coast Guard's training facility as a guest instructor, where he vents his torment on poor, unsuspecting recruits. The focus of most of his nastiness is a recruit named Fischer, played by Ashton Kutcher, who was a high school swim champ with "a troubled past".

But wait, there's more. Add the marriage break down between Costner and his wife, played by Sela Ward. You'll remember her as Gregory House's ex. Costner's really married to the job, not the wife, which is very dumb 'cause Sela's one fine looking woman.

There's the obligatory bar scene, where the other recruits bet hero-in-waiting Fischer a hundred bucks that he can't pick up some chick at the bar. He does, of course, because said chick offers to pretend if he'll split the hundred with her. Of course, they end up having a "casual fling", because she knows he's a recruit blah blah blah. It is remarkable, though, how much Melissa Sagemiller looks like a young Sela Ward in this movie. Really. It's almost insulting.

Anyway... there's the other obligatory bar scene too, where the USCG recruits go to a "Navy" bar and get into a CG v Navy fight, which means Fischer stands up said girlfriend who's waiting patiently in a swank restaurant up the road for their first real "date" (as opposed to their frequent casual bonking).

The recruits graduate, of course, and Fischer is sent to the Kodiak Alaska Coast Guard Station, which just happens to be the home base of, yes, you guessed it, Costner, who, after his stint as instructor, is now ready to leap back into the ocean.

And at the end, Fischer goes back to the primary school where casual girlfriend's a teacher (oh, now wasn't that predictable) and says "I don't do casual", after which they kiss passionately in front of a class full of 7 year olds. This is after Costner dies, sacrificing himself for the life of his younger protege during a daring rescue where the USCG's inferior equipment breaks, again.

Oh please. Pass me the bucket.

Frankly, I didn't know the script writers' strike had been going on for that long, because it's a certainty that no professional script writer was involved in this movie.

Casino Bland

I've had an opportunity, over the last week or so, to catch up on a couple of movies that I missed during cinema release.

Without doubt, the most disappointing of these was Casino Royale, the James Bond flick starring new Bond, Daniel Craig.

Disappointing? Yeah. That's the right word.

It was very different to Bonds of old. More gritty, more realistic, though referring to the concept of "realism" when talking about a Bond movie ought to tell you everything you need to know.

The first thing you'll notice is that it doesn't start with the trademark Bond theme. What good is a Bond movie without that music? It sets the tone and the anticipation... I don't know... perhaps they didn't want to set the audience up for disappointment. (They do use it over the end credits, but that's too late.)

Daniel Craig as Bond is far too flawed. He's moody, ponderous and fallible. Yes, he's got a finely chiseled body, but he introduces us to a weaker, more vulnerable Bond. Ian Flemming will be spinning so hard in his grave that it's effecting the earth's orbit around the sun.

Of course, Craig's just an actor who's controlled by a script writer and a director, neither of whom seemed to understand what or who Bond is supposed to represent. There was no humour. No witty one liners, no improbable near superhuman heroics, just a the grinding tedium of the chase, followed by the even greater tedium of No Limit Hold'em.

The one thing that sets Bond apart from, say, Bourne, is the inevitable audience groan as our hero achieves the impossible. In Casino Royale, that was missing.

And it's impossible to watch a Bond movie and not imagine how the "other" Bonds might have done it. Connery would have been way cooler, and way more talkative at the table. Moore would have been far less athletic, but somehow more on top of who was who in the zoo. And Brosnan... I know he'd have found some drop sheet and sticks to whip up an improvised parachute to get down from that building.

It's summed up towards the end of the movie when a bartender asks Bond if he'd like his martini shaken or stirred and Bond replies "do I look like I give a damn?" Of course you do James, "shaken, not stirred" is your trademark.

I read somewhere that Director Martin Campbell wanted to give the franchise a makeover, bringing it into the 21st century. In doing so, he lost the cartoonish larger-than-life atmosphere that's made Bond Bond. If this had been the first James Bond movie, I actually doubt whether there'd have been any more.

Casino Royale was just bland. Very disappointing.