Farting through my Fingertips

Some lovely XtremeIce pics from Lake Geneva if you click thru these:

[For Australia Day.
Intended to be posted yesterday-- it took me longer than expected to track down the draft. Which turned out to be only half-written.]

You know, as time goes on, I see the Norstrilian culture dissipated further and further, pushed farther and farther away from the cities, eroded and white-anted steadily by the socially striving, socially conscious, parasitic posturing pouring out of the south-east.

I can see where the weight is; I can see where the dynamics are going. I don't like it, but it's real.

But I can be snapped out of my long-range back to the sheer bulk of the here&now. The quiet well-spring on which the more-visible posturing stands and shines in reflected remembered glory, is still there, is still real.

Just watching now on TiVo-delay a TV show, an Olympics Special guinea-pigging various volunteers with steroids and legal "performance-enhancers" to get a feel for what the actual effect is.
OK, it's a ratings-driven concept, but the program makers made the mistake of doing it in Australia with "sleepy" "back-woods" local academics and sports coaches setting up the experiment. As a result, they unwittingly ended up with a well-designed unbiased valid scientific study, albeit one of little power due to the small sample set of subjects. But given the TV/ratings context, it was impressive that the professor and the coach managed to make the programme unbiassable.

(Is that a word?)
(It is now. Welcome to the world, everyone, please: "unbiassable"!)
(One of the beauties of English is that it's a tool to an end, a mechanism not a prescription, a toolset which a foreigner both in jest and in creation can simultaneously use and comment upon and extend when he validly says, with all those hearing him knowing precisely what he means at the same time as their own toolset is subtly extended:
"the beauty of English is that any word can be Verbed."
Cheer that man. (did you see what I did there?) )
("English" is itself noun, adjective, and adverb, and something you can add to a pitch (which you can both stand on and hurl, and deliver to a client).)

Hmmm. What would happen if I gerunded an adverb?

OK, moving right along, in response to popular demand and yours.

---

The programme was structured thus:
24 volunteers, drawn from Australia, England, and America but matched on age, bodyweight, training history, and ability, competed at 2 "mini-Olympics" games of various sports, once before and once after an intensive training programme, and their improvements were measured. Half the group were on anabolic steroids during the training; half the group were on random other "performance enhancers" ranging from caffeine to creatine. None of the experiment designers, the drug administerers, and the experimental subjects were aware of which individual was receiving which performance enhancer.

Dr Robert Weatherby of Southern Cross University, Lismore designed and ran the experiment; an ex-Olympian coach named Jim Cowan designed and ran the training. Based on SCU's significant over-representation in the published research I've seen and based on some people I know who've gone to SCU and now based on Dr Weatherby's performance, I suspect SCU, a near-new no-reputation uni stuck out in the middle of some of the most beautiful beachside countryside in the world, may be one of the Sleeper universities that it's wise to keep your eye on. Like UQ (used to be?), it has better facilities and better lifestyle and fewer pure Social distractions and no pretensions, and as a result, like UQ, it punches far above its weight in the international arena.

Dr Weatherby made the observation, incidentally, that there have been virtually NO well-controlled scientific studies of androgenic anabolic steroids' effects, merely anecdotal, until the first published in 1996 and the second one that "we ourselves" had published.

---

Twinges of recognition and home-sickness and pleasure from the backgrounds-- it's my home town. And the initial wry amusement for the slow "country" pace of the primary experts' speech, contrasting with the quick realisation that with NO verbal fat or rote words or stock phrases cluttering their speech, they were speaking much much faster than anyone else there, in terms of content, in terms of semantics, in terms of time taken to say something. Noticeable even with the Sydney-siders, it was hilariously apparent with the Queenslanders.

The academic, set up to be silly with grey fluffy hair and scruffy miscellany-littered office and uncool clothes, speaking so slowly and thoughtfully the English would giggle, but then absolutely dominating the programme by virtue of saying more with 10 words than the scriptwriters could with 10 minutes. Exemplary concision, a very real mind..

"Vigorous writing is concise.
A sentence should contain no unnecessary words, a paragraph no unnecessary sentences, for the same reason that a drawing should have no unnecessary lines and a machine no unnecessary parts. This requires not that the writer make all his sentences short, or that he avoid all detail and treat his subjects only in outline, but that every word tell."

Strunk & White
"The Elements of Style"
(whose only error therein was in attempting and failing to define distinct and exclusive uses of "that" and "which"-- they overlap)

---

The big and final test, their second "mini-Olympics," was somewhere very near where I grew up, judging by the GCCC sign and the look of the mulga in the background.

There's a smattering of locals drafted in to sit in the stands of one of the local public athletics tracks, and cheer and wave the irritating little flags obviously handed them by the production staff; each country represented in the sample has its flags on show.

I don't like flags.

Guns don't kill people. Flags kill people.

And they're clearly just there for a laugh and a fun afternoon out and a bit of a novelty. Your local mums and dads and some old buffers from the RSL and kids and 20 and 30 year olds -- a real mish-mash of locals who could take the day off, amusingly presenting a sartorial catastrophe to the perspective of English or Americans. The production crew are set up in the middle of the field and they've hired in a well-known (in Australia) sports commentator to deliver the announcements and running commentary over the tannoy. And a lot of it's rather painfully artificial: the voiceover, the sweaty breathless but sound-bitey interviews on the track after each event, the no-idea English crew insisting that cups of water are held out to the runners as they go by (for 5km?! grow up), the general smell of people showing off for the cameras. (Some local wanker posturing pointlessly and self-aggrandisingly on the finish line was parTICularly teeth-grittingly annoying.)

And then something happened.

It was the 5km run, which for those of you proceeding under steam is near enough to 3miles as makes no difference. 12.5 laps round an athletics track in around 20 minutes. And there's a few pre-race recorded interviews, and some mid-race viewers-only comparisons of particular runners' performances versus their actual performance enhancing intake, and some post-race on-track wheezing and over-excited interviews, going on while the slower runners are still coming home.

And it's during the last of these that you notice.
As the show cuts from a separately recorded commentary back to the on-track interview, the background noise from the crowd has changed.
It's not just that it's louder.
Its tone is utterly different.

The simple random individual fun of before has gone.

The crowd's become a group, with single voice and coherent purpose.

"Come awn, Denham!!" bawls someone who knows him, but no one else does and they're all chanting his shirt-number.

And, off-balance, surprised, realising, there comes the announcer's tannoy-tinnied:
"I think they're saying 'Go sixteen'...?"
And you can hear his smile spreading as he does.

And they are. On their feet and calling in the last man. He's not fit, he's bulky, he's not a natural runner: he's hurting. Calves on fire, hips and stomach and throat on fire, and each step stabbing, dragging. An asymmetric arrhythmic jogging plod as brain pushes body further than it wants. He's 7 minutes behind the others and was lapped repeatedly by all.

The crowd's now completely ignoring the cameras, the commentators, the context. They're clapping together, sharp cracks underscoring each quick chanted syllable:
"Go! Six!-teen! Go! Six!-teen!"
They're smiling and waving him on. The flags are forgotten, or at least what's on them has been. This pasty English stranger's having 3 countries' flags waved at him because that's what they have in their hands.
He's trying. He's battling. He won't win, he can't win, he's hopelessly last.
But he won't not finish.
He won't not do his bit.

He's the last man home, but by god he's coming home.

And for his last lap, they're standing, and they're whistling, and they're cheering. Helping out the underdog. Supporting the guy who's weak but who's trying.

And he comes round the final curve on to the last hundred metres, his head's come up straighter than his body can, and it fails, and his right side locks from foot to forehead, and he lurches for one stumpy step, for two stiff rolling hops.
And then the crowd lifts him, lifts the underdog --the others forgotten--they were good, they could take care of themselves, right?-- and his body becomes his own again, and he steps out into a spent but high-kneed plodding sprint, whole body punching dully with each step, trying with his shoulders to move his legs faster, lips grimaced back and teeth rictus bright as he falls across the line in one last effortful effortfilled jump. He staggers on then hits the ground and rolls and curls and clutches his calves. And the crowd's applause is real and the cries are triumphant congratulation.
"Woaa haooo!!"

And the commentator comes out with an only slightly slimed line while the other competitors are coming up and thumping his back "well done" while he's curled on the ground round his pain:
"And he finishes in 26 minutes 20, but,
  he finishes!
  ...Wel'look, if the awards were given out for courage, Denham Noake, would get, a gold."


And I find myself on my feet in my lounge room as he crosses the line, 3 months later and half a world away, fist punching the air and "Yeah!"'s echoes dying too-swiftly in this claustrophobic little English space. There's mist in my eye.

These are my people.

THESE are my people.

The Beast reviews 2004's Top 50 Most Loathsome Americans:

"3.   You

Crimes: You gaze idly at the carnage around you, sigh, and go calmly back to your coffee and your People magazine. You can’t stop buying useless crap, though you’re drowning in a deepening pool of debt. You think you’re an activist because you bitch all day on the internet, but you reelect the same gangsters at a 99% rate. You consider yourself informed because you waste a significant portion of your life watching the same three news stories cycle over and over again on your gargantuan, aerodynamic television set while you eat processed food. You really thought everything would be okay if Kerry won. Not only do you believe in an invisible man who magically farted out the universe, you also excoriate and marginalize those who disagree. You have a poorer understanding of your country’s foreign policy history than a third world peasant, but you can’t wait to see what Julia Roberts will be wearing at the Oscars. You cheer as Ukrainians challenge an election based on exit poll data, but keep waiting around for someone else to fix your problems. You can’t think, you can’t organize and you won’t act. This is all your fault.

Smoking Gun: You’re fat.

Punishment: You’re soaking in it."

via Be-Square(d)

Good heavens, is that the time? It's Australia's National Day today, which we celebrate by taking the day off to forget why it's actually on that day.

I think it might have been the day of the first successful home-brew in Australia's fearsome sun. Or possibly the anniversary of the invention of the esky. There may or may not have been a boat involved. I wouldn't like to say. Actually, that's wrong; I would like to say, it's just that I don't have a clue. Or give a fuck, really. The choice of the day is not relevant, the fact of the day is.

The Ultimate Esky!
Actually, I did this myself once in london with my car's rear boot (it had boots front and back-- "where's the engine?") for a party.

Pulled up outside OddBins, and got OddLooks as I poured the boot full of bag after bag of ice. Then drove it home round the corner and backed it up to the front door and Lo! The world's best party esky.

Subject: Whine & Cheese night: Fri

Hi All,

This Friday, we're having a rough'n'ready wine'n'cheese night at our place (69 Park Walk).
We'll be bundling it with yet another in the ongoing series of L's Farewell Nights as she is clearing off on Sat.
Those of you who wish to attend are most welcome.
Those who don't, aren't.
So there.

Bring a bottle and something to nibble (cheese, biscuits, dip, swimsuit model, whatever takes your fancy), thirdparties are welcome so long as the crucial alcohol:person ratio remains in the safety zone. We will provide stainproof carpet and our extensive range of bean bags and cushions.

Due to the meticulous nature of our preparations (K. will be fluffing one of the bean bags), kickoff time is wildly flexible but probably shoot for 7-8. People arriving earlier will be forced to start earlier, people arriving later will have to start later. I will be starting at 4 just to be on the safe side. If you get there really early and can't find us, check out the Man In The Moon pub on the corner.

Sal


Directions: either catch bus to Bluebirds,KingsRd and walk 50m or else catch tube to Gloucester Rd, turn right out of tube and walk till you hit Fulham Rd, turn right and walk to Goat in Boots pub, which is corner of Park Walk. We're down by the school, easily recognised by my disintegrating red Fiat X1/9 out front. Those of you present at the housewarming will remember its boot as the beer chiller, and yes, it did short out the brake lights when the ice melted.

Australia's an odd little country. It's bigger than all of Western Europe and most of Eastern Europe combined (drop it on top and it covers the whole continent. so watch it.), with a population around the size of London and New York. It's the driest country in the world, after Antarctica. Its standard supermarket food is more organic than the achingly priced, officially organic food in Europe or the US; when a single sheep station is up to 10,000 square kilometres (Australia's largest), drenching it in pesticide or GM fodder is not economic, and all our animals are as nutritious as game, since they spend much of their lives essentially wild compared to the stationary static fertiliser-fed lives of American and EUKopean animals. Something NOT generally known is that it's actually 2 quite distinct countries culturally: south-east, and rest-of. A lot of the apparent contradictions of Australia stem from this divide. Charles Darwin's chapter dedicated to the Australians in his (fascinating) book "The Voyage of the Beagle" remains a startlingly accurate portrayal of the south-east culture to this day. The idea of a cultural difference was something which I ran across as a concept for the first time in the fiction of one of the world's more insightful anthropologists. This was the man who single-handedly shortened the Korean War by half a decade or more and whose "Psychological Warfare" remains the leading textbook to this day. His fiction described Australians but spoke of only North Australians --Norstrilians-- which I didn't understand at the time and it was only when I started working with, then in, the south-east that I realised how sharply different a culture it is, and then remembered his distinction.

("The Vice-Chairman" was the head of the government; there had been no Chairman of the Temporary Commonwealth Government for some thousands of years. Norstrilians did not like posh and they thought that Vice-Chairman was high enough for any one man to go.

That was late 50s' fiction; here's a current actual quote from our Hansard, which fer yew furriners is "the official report of the proceedings and debates of a legislature in the Commonwealth of Nations":

Last week I received a phone call concerning the member for Burnett. The caller was asking about workers compensation. I said, "Mate, according to protocol, you should go to your local member." Do honourable members know what he said to me? He said, "He's never home." He said, "He's about as handy as an ashtray on a motor bike."

Hon. Mr PEARCE, MP. 9 Jun 1999 Legislative Assembly 2271

We have all sorts of little political and institutional oddities which you discover upon study and thought and growing age to be incredibly intelligently designed with an eye to human behaviour and the long term. Most of the socialist institutions were torn down by the Labor governments, but the political ones remain. A good example is the Queen. The Australian Queen is not the British Queen, as anyone who studies the Australian Constitution will realise, existing primarily as a concept and a reminder to politicians not to get too up themselves. Technically, the British Queen has all sorts of legislative and executive powers, but has no practical authority to ever exercise them. The Australian Queen, though having only one power, is actually more powerful than the British Queen. When's the last time the British Queen sacked the parliament and forced a new election? In Australia, the Australian Queen did this in 1974.
(The then-opposition were elected as government by the population in a landslide result with one of the largest majorities in the history of Australia. The population overwhelmingly rejected the previous government's bid to retain power. And did so again at the next election.
Interestingly, the pseudo-republicans railing against "monarchists" don't mention this very much. It conflicts with their campaign's fiction. They prefer to paint the sacking as abuse of archaic monarchial power, rather than essentially irrelevant if the population had actually wanted that government. They prefer people to think that removing a brake on politicians' power is in the interests of the thus-disenfranchised voters.)
(Australia is closer to a democratic republic than America or France, just as our legislatures are closer to the Westminster system than is Westminster, just as we used to be more socialist than the USSR. It's easier to get it right when you come in late after everyone else has shown what mistakes not to make. It's just that our "president" is deliberately crippled and we don't use the word "Republic" -- the "Republican" movement in Australia is pure political powergrab cynically attaching itself to an artificially created, faux-emotive fantasy strawman)

It's an interestingly useful powerless institution, our Queen. Useful primarily for banging her head on the backs of coins, she also has a "representative" who is the Australian president or head of state: the Governor General.

Now, the nice thing here, in the old tradition of egalitarianism and don't get your head shoved too far up your own arse, mate, is that the Notional Sovereign has all the power and the G-G merely exercises it on the Notional Sovereign's behalf, someone whom he can never be. Our head of state is not the source or the residence of the power, a legal fiction is. And you can never ever be that legal fiction, that symbol of Australia. Because it's just a legal fiction.
Nice little constant ego-pricker, that one.

The Governor General is extremely limited in authority, despite being the Australian Head of State. His/Her/Its/Thems sole exercisable power (excluding some minor accidental abilities to procedurally delay some legislation and open new shopping centres) is to force democracy. I'll repeat that, it's important. The sole power of the Australian Governor General is to force democracy. Should the government of the day get out of control, the Governor General sacks the government and calls an election: returns the authority to the population. Voting is compulsory, to prevent disenfranchisement of the jaded by the obsessed, and so the newly created government is a more accurate reflection of the actual wishes of the people they are nominally supposed to represent. And if the population doesn't agree with the Governor General, why, they just vote the same guys back in and no harm done.

Governor. I quite like the word itself, as a job title. Strong historical overtones of full responsibility but proscribed independent power: the governor always answers to a higher power. In Australia's case, a fictional one. No presidential egotisms and powerplays for us. We'll leave that to you fascists.

Governor. The primary safety mechanism on a steam engine is also called a governor. When the pressure gets too high, it lets the steam out. I quite like the consonance of this name and function with the title and function of the Australian Head of State. In both cases, the governor spends most of the time sitting on top doing nothing, about as useful as a nipple on a nun.
And every so often, he lets all the steam out of the system to stop it blowing up.
That's the only function of the governor, in a steam engine and in Australia.
Like a parachute or insurance, it's a complete waste of time and space, until you need it.

I started off this post intending just to paste in an old groaner of an email that did the rounds last night. But it was pretty poor and I've started rambling so you'll have to miss out.
Some excerpts though:

And there's Queensland. [I'm a Queenslander] While any mention of God seems silly in a document defining a nation of half arsed sceptics, it is worth noting that God probably made Queensland, as it's beautiful one day and perfect the next. Why he filled it with dickheads remains a mystery.
...
P.S We also shoot and eat the two animals that are on our National Crest. No other country has this distinction.

Difficult for Brits to do, for example, as one of their Crest's animals lives only in Africa and the other only in the imagination.

Hmm. I have to push on and get some stuff done, but I think I'll dig out and dust off an old post that was delayed by life and a wish to actually make it decent. But I think today's a good day for it, regardless of quality. Back to normal afterwards.

But I'll leave you with a couple of excerpts from a book everyone should read who has the misfortune of suffering contact with Aussies:

"The Xenophobe's Guide to the Aussies"
"The Xenophobe's motto: Forewarned is Forearmed" A surprisingly accurate little book actually. Certain things are taken from the Book of Received PC Preferred Myths, but on the whole he only makes a couple of serious mistakes.

Class:
This is a very class-conscious society. None of this upper-class, middle-class, and lower-class stuff, though. Class is based on character. ...
How you relate to others is everything.
How you dress is up to you. ...
It is a brutally honest class system. There is nothing to blame social acceptance on but yourself. On the other hand, social acceptance is without trial or waiting period for anyone with an honest nature.
You are not likely to be addressed as Mr., Mrs., or Ms. If someone went to the bother of giving you a first name, why not use it? If this causes you any discomfort, it must be because of some hang-up of your own, and if you think that's a problem, wait till you discover your nickname.

...
Being pretentious is thus the most severe form of social bad manners. If you display such a failing, beware of the Aussie response. It's not enough for them merely to get the dagger in -- they like to turn it and turn it.

...
Xenophobes, this is the land in which to indulge the perverse pleasures of your phobia. The more you discover about the Aussies the more you will realise that all your worst fears of foreigners are totally justified.
Aussies share one common bond that binds a collection of fiercely individual and independent people together. They are all stark raving mad. ...
Never make the error of underestimating the Aussies. They love to portray a casual disregard for everything around them, but no-one achieves a lifestyle as relaxed as theirs accidentally.

Happy Australia Day, all.

I read three articles yesterday which I regard as being a bit special, and I thought I'd quickly throw them out in the interests of timeliness:

EUSA :

Via irreversibleelbisreverri's new site, this is a powerfully written review of some US vs EU features and their possible near-term consequences:
1: Europe vs. America

There are actually a heap of fascinating changes happening in the USA right now that I want to put together, like the weird economic twists and the prospect of Roe vs Wade being overturned by the Supreme Court on "medical grounds." But that'll have to be for later.

Productivity/Procrastination :

2a: Time Management: Get More Done in Less Time now at: Triple Your Personal Productivity
2b: Micro-Management: Procrastination
ALL self-employed people should read at least the former.

Actually, the former was like reading in the mirror, if you see what I mean, as I've been broken-record-ing in almost exactly this theme since at least 1991, after several years of learning it the hard way. (It was actually quite spooky to read it on a third-party site.) I found it particularly interesting that the research cited re Number of Hours Worked Daily almost exactly tallies with my old observation that most people do about 2 hours work a day, and if they really push themselves perhaps 4.
The latter has some excellent micro-habit notes, particularly re accidentally but powerfully Actively Encouraging Yourself to Procrastinate --which is something I hadn't thought of before and am going to do some hard thinking about (not right now though)-- and his lovely replacement of his homepage with this, to head off one of his own personal timewasting startingpoints:

related:
primary inhibition for some is inappropriate perfectionism
how some people work

(I think I originally got there from somewhere else, but 43folders also has it)

It's not as simple as Black & White :

An interestingly observed review of how Jamaicans are viewed very differently in different cultural contexts. Quite old, but still particularly interesting from a Londoner's perspective, a city well populated with native and immigrant West Indian and African blacks from a dizzyingly wide range of backgrounds.
3: Black Like Them, by Malcolm Gladwell.
I didn't realise Malcolm Gladwell had a whole writing career before The Tipping Point. That was a book of two halves, the latter essentially disconnected from the former and really letting the whole work down. But not bad, and it helped me slightly clarify internally part of my own theories/framework about deep vs shallow subcultures/event-cultures, which are kind of a superset of the tipping point. Plus it was a nice re-gathering of a lot of the old psychology research I'd done in uni --which was what I filled my time with instead of studying Law and Commerce like it said on my enrolment form-- but not bothered keeping citations for (twit).
This article I therefore read with some surprise and pleasure.
He is a good essayist.

He makes a key mistake in this particular article, to my mind, in assuming "racism" predominantly means whites versus blacks. This IS the Politically Correct Agreed-Definition of it in the Western World, but it flies in the face of reality. And to that extent his analyses of the bigger picture are hobbled. And in any case, I believe (and he implicitly demonstrates) that humans are not naturally racist per se, so much as viciously and fundamentally groupist, and race is just an easy group to spot.

But he doesn't risk his audience by presenting a Case: he proceeds by a beautifully smooth, beautifully slow, beautifully uninflammatory "i'm in the middle" gentle laying-down of facts --bringing the reader through their own thought process rather than laying out an argument-- such that it is difficult to see how ANYONE could pre-react to particular keywords and buzzwords and thereby derail his message. As is currently happening to the Harvard guy, who has overnight gone from internationally respected researcher to misogynistic neanderthal via a process I call "Prince Charles Syndrome.")
Definitely worth a read.

---

Just a laugh:

• Charles Bukowski vs Dylan Thomas: face-to-face drinking competition, only one can win.
  Clash of the Tightest
  Think they should have subtitled the fight: "No one's walking away from THIS one"
  (I've had a vague interest in/awareness of Bukowski ever since someone said on another site that I wrote in the spirit of Charles Bukowski, whom I'd not heard of before but assumed it to be some sort of compliment. So that was why I paid attention when I saw the name, and tapped in to try to get some feel for what the spirit of Charles Bukowski might actually be. And I think it's Night Train Fortified Wine.
  And I will hunt down that commenter and ask them for spare change.)
  
  
• quick and simple and you've probably seen it, but nicely done and worth a quick smile:
  One does not simply walk into Mordor
  
  
• A plaintive tale of the city, a cri de commuter coeur.
  Everyone download it and sing along:
  "Where the fuck's my fucking train? London Underground woo oooo"
  

Go on- say that fast.

Tip the First: I wanna hear old stuff!
The trouble with precreating PlayLists on iPod/iTunes is that you can quickly fall into ruts, of hearing the same sets of choons repeated just that little bit too often.

For those iTunes/iPod users who like hearing random shuffle stuff they haven't heard for a while, create a Smart Playlist where "Last Played" "is not in the last" say "3 months". Set it on shuffle and rediscover those golden oldies that made you exclude them from your favourites playlist in the first place.


Tip the Second: Give me Answers! Now!
I ran across a new combo Encyclopædia/Dictionary/Did-You-Know/Web-StartingPoint yesterday in my Referrals list, and quite like it. It looks fairly similar to, say, the excellent dictionary.reference.com, but note the better and context-sensitive JumpTos at top left, and the links to Search Engines just below that, including, for those so inclined, the ability to restrict your search to Blogs via Technorati.
Worth a look.
Answers.com

I think I've previously posted my normal search engines? They are:

• IceRocket.com: this is roughly twice as fast as Google as far as the user is concerned despite spending roughly 2-4 times as long in the actual search engine (~0.4secs), plus its clever low-bandwidth design means even I can get sub-second response times on my 44k boredband. Search, BAM, it's there.
  
• AllTheWeb.com: my previous favourite: a Norwegian start-up. A Google-alike --which I guess makes them a Google-ganger-- but with much improved algorithms. It's rare indeed to need to go past page 1 on any alltheweb query, whereas google often rewards rewording the query to trim dross.
  
• Teoma.com: Kiwi mob, I think -- at least it was a Kiwi who put me onto them. Excellent search engine with a different approach to normal, which complements alltheweb's deficiencies quite nicely and vice versa.

Few Europeans or Americans see real effects on their lives from the natural world. Oh, it might get cold from time to time, or windy, but there are huge societally created systems in place to prevent that having any real impact on people's lives: central heating, power grids, indoor water, indoor toilets, tins and refrigerators indefinitely preserving food, emergency services less than 15 minutes away at any time. (Before you laugh, stop and think what your life would be like without all those things automatically provided for you. We forget how rich we are.) As a letter to an editor I saw last week pointed out, the Christmas tsunami killed less than 25% of the Rwanda fatalities -- "why the fuss?"

Just got an email.

From: Ma <lactation@dis.org>
Subject: Adelaide news

Hi Sal,

Sorry it's been so long since I wrote. January always feel like holiday time to me, and I become slacker than ever!

Hope that you're well and that 2005 has started off O.K.

The horror of the tsunami faded a bit recently, with the bushfires on SA's [South Australia's] west coast. My first cousin, L.L. (his mother was Mum's sister*), who owns a farm** over there, lost everything - homestead, more than 2,700 pure-bred merino sheep, all farm equipment, fodder, seed, etc., etc. He and his wife got out just ahead of the fire (100km/hr winds). She drove the car and he drove the ute, with the four border collie dogs in the back. She did manage to grab a few photographs and some of her jewellery*** - but that's all - not even a change of clothes, toothbrush, or anything. Just lucky to get out alive. Their sons were not there at the time, so everyone is physically unhurt. It's very traumatic, and more especially for those who have lost children and other loved ones. Nine people died. L. and Y. had four sons, and the only one who was really interested in farming died a few years ago as a result of a brain tumour. The property has been in the L. family since 1920. So, they will have some huge decisions to make, but right now, they're not at their best.

So far as I know, all the rest of the family are fine. Uncle B. and Auntie J. have been overwhelmed with visitors - even spent one night sleeping at their son's place (S., who lives nearby) because there was no room for them in their own home!! Auntie M. and Uncle G. are going along well, as usual. G. is a fit 77 years of age.

Today is the last day of the Tour Down Under (a bicycle race). It's great to watch, but I've been a bit slow off the mark so shall probably not get there this year. The final race is through the streets of the city and North Adelaide - very pretty territory, and a nice area to walk around during the race.

Well, must push on and make a sandwich for my lunch.

Lots of love,

Mum
xxxxxxx

* Ma was the 13th child, and each of those kids was fecund -- any mention of relatives requires she append some info for me of just who the hell they bloody are. Memory: about a month into my time in Sydney, getting an energetic answering machine message from "J.", claiming to be related to me. I rang mum: "Mum, I just got a message from a J. Who the fuck is J.?" "Ohhh, that's B & J's eldest daughter, the one who..." and 5mins later I was fully briefed.

** owns a farm: for UK readers: in Australia, farmers are poor. They are farmers. They work the farm. The UK has a tradition of calling these people farm workers, not farmers. The UK has a tradition of calling people who happen to own a farm as part of their family's property portfolio but haven't seen it for 3 generations: "Farmers", and then a tradition of railing against the evil farmers.
This is not what "farmer" means in Australia.
"Farmer" in Australia does not mean some upper-class landlord whose life is Eton, "haw haw," and pheasant shoots.
"Farmer" in Australia means callouses and sunburn and your wife up on the roof nailing the tin back down in the storm while you're out bringing in the sheep. Grandma got hit by lightning six times that way. Mum tells the story of her and her sisters rushing out to pick their mother up off the ground outside when she'd been knocked off the roof one time. (My family are tough old bastards)

*** my first reaction on reading this was to smile: my mother is very Social. Jewellery has almost no worth outside the Social world, and --my first thought-- amusingly, is one of the few things likely to survive a bushfire with its $$worth intact, if not its original form. I wondered what one of my uncles' versions would be, of what this escape actually cost them.
But then I remembered walking around under a mate's house the day after a simple house fire, fascinatedly picking out of the pits and hollows in the sand the glittering silvery frozen puddles of his CD collection that had dripped through the floor above and run and huddled together to refreeze in their impromptu casting pits. Pure aluminium. So hard a metal to melt that it was more valuable than gold for most of human history -- it features on many of the crowns of Europe and England, for example.
And I thought she was right to take the valuables.
The fire would have taken them, too.

My Saltation post was triggered by another's, on whose I commented, as indeed her post was an extension of her own comments on another's, then realised I felt strongly enough about it to extract and post that comment.

It's not meant to be a comment on Vanessa's taste in art. I quite like the pieces she likes, as it happens. But just as a jewel can be made unattractive by an excrescent setting, so the foulness of the context in which most of these pieces are presented destroys most enjoyment of the actual art.

And hence my post.

Friday:
"Sal, do you mind if I leave at 4? Is that OK?"

"What are you asking me for? If you're done for the day, let us know and bugger off. We hired you for your skill and input, not to fill up time."


He was still there at 6.
Brow furrowed, brief bursts of keyboard pounding, barely cognizant of the people walking out around him, of the growing sparseness of the office desert.


We came back from the pub at 8 and dragged him and the other two out. It was Friday.
We wouldn't have interrupted them otherwise.


I was the boss from hell.
Your own hell, not your parents' or your priest's. Just you. And what you could do.
What you now knew you could do.

Those of you who tapped into Neonbubble's "Date the Elderly" post would have noticed this little yet vatic exchange on the comments:

God :

Your doing well my son. Keep it up

Daisy :

I'm laughing so much my dentures almost fell out.

p.s. If I pick on God's grammar will I burn in hell for eternity?

God :

its my grammer and ill do with it as i please

Saltation :

[...]
PS: God: You leave my Grammer alone, I saw her first and besides, it's ME she keeps feeding sweeties to. The horny little tart. I'm saving up and as soon as I can afford some sticky toffees I'll be round there in a flash. "Oh, dear, grammer, did the lolly make your teeth fall out? Aww"

Daisy :

Oh God, next youll be telling us that youre loosing you're mind...

God :

Jesus Christ! What is this an English lesson or something?

Saltation I wouldn't go out on the 17th of Jan 2005 and Daisy, daisy, daisy, find love now before it's too late (3rd March 2007)

Well, I filed this little prognostication away. He may not be my God, but I've read some of these chaps are actually PROUD to call themselves vengeful Gods, and I thought it best to play it safe. Frankly, and I'm sorry if this makes it sound like I'm getting old and cranky, but I've had a gutful of going toe-to-toe with Gods. It's just not worth it. If you lose, you're crucified, and if you win, their followers keep hounding you to the end of days. Typically theirs, but it gets old.

So I didn't budge from the house all day Monday, as you'll note from the violently sleep&alchohol-hungover noonday start and the flurry of blog posts till the wee small hours.

So far, so good. No significant damage that I can see, or rather: am willing to admit to.

I hereby pronounce the 17th thoroughly avoided.

I don't know who you got, God, but it certainly wasn't me.

Now, I wonder what Grammer's doing...

---

In other news, I just ran across Outer Life this evening courtesy of Vanessa. Go check it out -- instant blogroll. As you'll note from my Saltation post just before, he has an eye for the real and a deft concision of phrase.

this is a good and relevant read:

Hendrix Cat
"Sometimes writing is to share, sometimes it isn't, sometimes the mind is so confused that the best place for a document is buried in the hard drive and sometimes you're just so busy trying to snipe a bid past a manic American that you don't have time to write at all."

---

this is just utterly relevant:

Top Ten, Baby!! Top TEN!!

Drunken Celebrities' Favourite Blogs

Oh I am so proud, I could throw up.
And I'd fit right IN! Even MORE!

I just had one of those blank staring-at-the-screen moments.

I'd tapped into a heap of sites and followed some links and so on, then gone back to reading other already-loaded tabs while my steam-driven interweb connection held individual IP packets up to the light and sucked its teeth and mumbled indistinctly, crippledly bimbling round in the background bumping into things and every so often creating a hell of a crash, after which it goes very quiet and tries to look efficiently innocent.

A thin pipe means you get all sorts of accidental chronological juxtapositions.

In this particular case, I'd tapped in off someone's linked googlewhack, which led to a post quoting a popbitch newsletter, which linked to another site. I think that was the causal chain. I could be wrong. (It happened once; don't look so shocked.) And then I'd oh-so-rarely scrolled sideways on a favourite site's page which unfortunately has its layout hardwired into a screen resolution wider than my sad little old laptop's 800x600, and noticed a new(?) Recommended Link section.

I saw these two tabs back-to-back.

I read this one:

Bliss Day After Day

With a firm belief that inspiration is contagious I have created a Bliss Day After Day addition to the sidebar on the right . This daily link will lead you to news, events, discoveries, delights, and pursuits that I have discovered or have been made aware of. This is not a site of the day it is simply something that I wish to draw your attention to. It is also a place where I can highlight some sites that we can all visit to show kindness If you have a moment please consider a moment of Bliss Day After Day.
A Bliss Request:
I am considering creating a weekly post celebrating A Moment of Bliss. This Monday morning post would offer a place to list a moment of bliss or wonder that you experienced in the past week.

Hmm. Not to my taste. So I closed that tab and this one appeared immediately in its place:

Bliss

The LAYAspot has been designed to fit the women's body perfectly with orgasmic results. It's waterproof to so have a go in the bath for a trully mind blowing experience!

Add batteries to your basket?
Panasonic AAA Batteries (4 pack) @ £ 3.95

A blank staring-at-the-screen moment.

Ah. Ah heh. Ah ha ha ha ha ha. Ah he. Heh.

I'm really sorry, Jen, but I don't think I'm ever going to be able to take that site seriously now.

"Bliss Day After Day"...

The spectacular Soapy Goldfish has outdone himself again:

The medical profession is a rancid soup of charlatans and wastrels

I tell you all without shame, I was worried. Something was amiss. I saw no alternative to go and see my GP, Dr. Crispian Bladder-Frankly, and ask him what the hell was up with me.

So yesterday I sat in the doctor’s surgery and told him all. It had to be the surgery, because for some reason he refuses to meet in Sainsbury’s car-park, or the photography section of Boots. He’s a fussy bugger.

“Well,” Said the fulsomely–bearded Dr. Bladder-Frankly, “The symptoms you describe lead me to only one conclusion, Mr. Goldfish. I looked it up in my Doctor’s Big Book o’ Diseases, and I’m afraid I have to tell you something really quite crapular.”

“Don’t spare the honesty, Doc,” I said, “Tell it to me straight. Was I the bass-guitarist in a long-forgotten mid-nineties Indie band?”

“No,” Said he. “Well, maybe, I wouldn’t know. What I can tell you, though, is even worse.”

He fixed me with piercing blue eyes over the rim of his spectacles.

“You are,” He said, “Between 70 and 75% fictional.”

I gaped.

“You’re gaping,” Said the Doc.

some amusing nickage from memepool:

When memes go bad:
    Prisoner of Azbadgerstan

--

"Easily the strangest thing we sell"
    The perfect companion for oral sex
    (over and above an actual companion, i assume they mean)


And then clean the place up a bit.
    A very blue loo.

--

Careful what you sign:

EDIT: according to the esteemed and steaming Ministry of Information, not only is this old news, but it's not news.
"Um, this story broke some time last week, and Google fixed it within hours."
Right.
Yes.
*cough*
Radio Sal, first with all the wrong info. Your canonical source for belated and pointless hysteria.

---

login+password is freely available:

http://www.vnunet.com/news/1160489

A Unix community group has reported a flaw in Google's free Gmail email service which it warns could compromise user information.

Two members of HBX Networks, going by the monikers 'Hairball' and 'MrYowler', were testing a Perl script that would send out a newsletter. When they tried to reply to the test email the page displayed HTML code which included the names and passwords of other users.

"We do realise that Gmail is an invitation-only service in a beta-test state of development," said 'Hairball' on the group's website.

"Nevertheless, many people rely on Gmail heavily, and many more people are forced to communicate with Gmail users because of this reliance.

"These people should expect their communications to be vulnerable to interception, at least until Gmail corrects the issue."

I have noticed that getting no sleep and drinking far too much can leave me feeling a little under par. Is this just me?

I just had yet another Apple "Design" brain-death brought to my attention.

Does anyone remember the first round of powerbooks with the internally-lit Apple logo in the top cover? They were upside down for 99.9% of use. When you used your laptop and the power lit the logo, the lid was open and upright, and the logo was upside down. Incredible. This featured heavily and hilariously in the early Sex & The City episodes, for example.

Eventually, someone managed to bang the designers' heads on the table for long enough for them to grow up and realise that maybe, just maybe, looking pretty for one angle of one type of publicity shot might be less important than the 99.9% of the times when people would actually Notice the logo. And the logo was turned the other way up. And now when you see people using Apple laptops the logo is the right way up. And doesn't look ridiculous.


They've done it again.

The Mac Mini's logo only works for the front-on publicity shots.

A great many people are going to preserve desktop space and tip this on its side. Half of my computer kit and all but one of my consumer-electronics are tipped on their side, for example, since they work just the same way and this preserves o-so-precious flat space.

                          

And even for those people who choose to use it flat, there's a very good chance it'll have the monitor sitting on it, since it will tend to be bought by people with constrained space. That IS its primary target market, after all. So even when laid flat: for most users, the logo will be invisible.

The publicity shot:
"Hey, look how cool we look.
Not you, you loser consumer: fuck off. I was talking to my mates."

In Real Life:

The audience for this logo positioning is not the users, but other designers.

Anyone who doesn't already know Charles is missing out on a real and a deep pleasure. Unfailingly casually off-handedly intelligent, moments of rich joy, a roundling wash of empathically resonating realness larded with truesight and surrealism. Today, the 14th of January, 2005, is his blog's first birthday. If you don't already know him, go visit. If you do: wish him a happy blogthday.

"This blog is an unrelenting distraction, a source of pleasure and distress, an all-ages show, and more than I ever saw coming. It's also a place for things that have no other home: bits of stranded writing and pictures, things that I once meant to say; an archive of the margins, from which the center surely draws.

And a chance to trace and retrace every line.

Greetings to everyone who has ever landed here, and big love to those who return. You all make this news from a luminous dream, and I'm grateful.

Now, enough about all that. Who brought something to drink?

Gravity Zero
Charles Ferguson

I did, I did, I won the lottery!! The 15 million pound super jackpotty rollovery lottery!! Just... not very much of it. £10 of it, to be precise, and damn them: they were. I looked at it askance to see if maybe they'd slipped a couple of decimals, then I looked at it aglance, then askew, then awry. Alas, aletdown.

Not to worry. I still have my health. I can sell THAT.

Further to my previous post:

"Basically, I'm calling for ideas for a name (url) for a single-purpose blog, devoted to maximally lazy Quality Of Life stuff. Where maximally lazy includes, because it derives from, good physical ability.
Please hurl ideas at me via either or both of the comments box and email."

Dipping into the postbox, shortly before Eudora dropped its IMAPpy guts again, reveals our correspondents have had reservations re the word "quality", substituting the suggestions of flavour or timbre or tapestries. (I'll admit to being a little confused about that last one. Since it were he what suggested it, I looked it up on the Jonny Billericay Search Engine but that didn't help.) Or else something along the lines of "A Way of Living Well."

RuggyBabs motored in with a nice tangent:

"was reading about your wanting a new bloggy addy
so did the first logical thing and went to thesaurus.com for synonyms of quality
they insist caliber is a ratherdecentsynonym for quality
on thinking that i thought of another word for life
and when I thought about life, what popped into my head was the answer to life the universe and everything, which as we all know thanks to the late Mr. Adams, is 42
your answer (if you ask me) is fortytwocaliber.blogspot.com

mind you teafortwominusone popped into my head too for some reason, but thats owing to my habit of making up names for anything and everything"

Thank you, Miss Babs, your free steak knives are in the post. Unfortunately I see the stamps are still on the table so I guess I'll be getting them back shortly. Sorry about that.

But your email reminded me of one of my favourite old .signatures:

"Remember, you must die whether you sit around moping
all day long, or whether on feast days you stretch
out in a green field, happy with a bottle of Falernian
[wine] fetched from your innermost cellar."
-- Odes 11 3, Horace (deceased)

So here are some and further general ideas. As before, your response is actively solicited -- by comment box if you're bold or by email if you prefer your Lurker status unpublished.

• timbre of life
  
• tapestries of life
  
• 42calibre
  
• living well
  
• wake up and smell the claret
  
• health is the slowest possible way to die
  
• appetency
  
• colour life brighter
  
• disenervation
  
• joie de vim
  
• life gourmand
  
• falernian notes
  
• hey lookit i found out

Hmph. Not sure that I like any of those. Have the feeling I need some nifty inspiration spark.

Assuming I ever get round to actually WRITING half this bloody stuff...

Ninth round of interviews with a bank tomorrow. With the global head of credit quant. So doing some re-reading of some overviews and general articles to get the terms and the flow right again, to get the rhythm of maths back into my mind.

So I'm over at the Barbican. Far shallower distractions here than at home, so can focus better for longer. England has no public libraries, not in the sense any other first-world country uses the term, but the Barbican has a little known bank of tables (halved in size in the last month) on an out-of-the-way gallery that lets me read and write comfortably. The repeated noise of the night's concert blares through the foyer's speakers (dunno who's on but via the speakers they sound peculiarly average) and there's a globe of people chattering around my gantry perch that cuts diagonally across the four-storey high open room, three dimensions of shrieking smalltalk from the ground and the galleries and bouncing off the ceiling. But it's all the same and it doesn't concern me, and so it's merely a wall of white sound.

As always every time I come to the Barbican, homeless people are omnipresent. There are some of the audibly reeking variety, but there are a lot more of what Dickens called "the Shabby Genteel" -- people with tightly gripped memories of a previous life, fading. People wrapping themselves in an environment they want, want to be a part of; though excluded from participating in, excluded from more than presence at, observation of. Here in this literally hideous example of architectural peer-group posturing, bizarrely serving as one of London's cultural epicentres, they are orphaned phantoms, drifting through, hovering in the eddy spaces, dull-eyed, overpreoccupied, underactive, out of the way.

But it's warm.

And one of the very very few publicly available spaces in London which don't involve sitting on the footpath.

Two at the other end of the tables on this side of the walkway, another on the other side, and one two tables in front of me, moving with slow care as he arranges his papers and notes, careful not to too quickly exhaust his tattered but publicly acceptable activities for the evening. And at the table next to me, four people sit through --ignoring-- the first half of the concert in the hall 30 feet from them. Oddly primped and dyed clothes and coiffures, clearly dressed to a subcultural norm rather than for general appearance' sake. Three men, one woman, all of similar and similarly indeterminate age: perhaps 40s, perhaps 50s, maybe late 30s. Always difficult to tell in England-- 25 year olds have decrepit bodies, 50 year olds have teenagers' skin.

Then as they talk a very strong group dynamic roars out of the maelstrom of gestures and postures and pauses and words: three supplicants orbiting one alpha male: one sexual/political, two financial/political. His is the voice booming out and utterly dominating the conversation, but their silences scream back across the table at him.

After some god-awful cod-science, he moves on to complaining about "property." "One of our purchases costs more than £5mm a year just to pay for people and protection to stop other people drowning," then off onto various braying analyses of whether and why it's cheaper just to let them. He's not really worried one way or the other; nor has he thought any of it through terribly well; he's just showing off for the others how big and important are the issues he can play with, and by implication how big and important is he.

Yawn.

Pat them on the head and they subside again behind the wall of white noise I briefly popped them out of.

How can such accidental flaunting of incorrectly-"earned" position compete with:

"A popular way to 'fill-in' the default probability would be to use a hazard rate process with, for example, a piecewise hazard rate curve fitted to the credit default swap market."

or:

"The N-dimesional copula function C[0,N]N --> [0,1] specifies the joint distribution of the trigger levels U_i."

or:

"The one-factor Gaussian copula function is defined as:

MATHFART

Sorry about that last, but if you read too much of this sort of stuff too quickly without a break, you hit one of the bigger huger messier half-page formulæ and that's all you see.

And that's your cue to back out carefully and go and do something else for a bit. When you come back, it'll read like English again. Where a single sentence can take half an hour to read, but is beautifully, gloriously, awesomely concise precise English nonetheless.

And so that's what I'm doing now.

---

At The Curve currently:
mostly self-indulgent attention-seeking peer-posing tosh
but also

Douglas White

"Boy Blue"
(Hooded sweatshirt, Oak; 2003)

Proof has been found that the word "Blog" predates the internet. First used in 1959, in fact. (via) And it appears little has changed:

---

But, inevitably, blogs acquire new and sexy cutting-edge cachet.

"Tribal Hero", eh?

I quite like the sound of that.

Clipped out of the big post below for purposes of clarity:

---

... But did rather prevent attending to blogoverse duty.

So let's have a quick look at my RSShole sites.
ARGH!
Christ!
My nominally Daily sites have 231 new posts! My Inner, Middle, and Outer Sphere sites have 505 posts with Oort Cloud 256 (ooo.... geeky!). OK, that's just ridiculous. How many total posts has my RSS universe made since I last read the web?
...
!!
10, 964.

Uh....
OK, strip out the "High Volume Posters" categories. Leaving...
7,720
Oh fer fuxache.

Even that bloody faux-blog belledejour's back again.

Plus I've got emails too.

When did blogging become an effort?

Right not now, that's when not.

ATTENTION!! EVERYONE!! Saltation officially has no fucking idea what went on in your world since about the first week of December! All right? And if you don't have an RSS feed and/or are a graphic-heavy site and/or a post-heavy site, possibly since November.

*thinks* Mmmmm. December was a goo-ooood month.

OK. This post constitutes my Get Out Of Context Free card. If anyone bloggy wants me to be aware of anything they posted in the last 4 weeks, they're going to have to send me a direct link.

This is clipped out of the following post, since I think it deserves separate and important treatment.
Basically, I'm calling for ideas for a name (url) for a single-purpose blog, devoted to maximally lazy Quality Of Life stuff. Where maximally lazy includes, because it derives from, good physical ability.
Please hurl ideas at me via either or both of the comments box and email.

---

It occurs to me, as it has repeatedly for much of last year, that many many key posts, primarily on the core Saltation site, have simply sat as a topic in my mind. With core content implied, but lack of time/energy spent in assessing wording or approaches. Interestingly, from a psychological point, I have posted aspects of many of the core numerous times in comments boxes over the blogoverse.
And a quick glance over the "Drafts" both written and typed shows a myriad of posts that I still think are worth posting, despite their now non-timeliness.

Enough.
2005 shall shee theshe shpat out.

-- Shal.
Shal Connory.
On your back and take my 007, baby.

Here, for my own purposes of embarrassing myself into actually producing something, are some of the major posts that have been hanging fire for way way too long:

• Sugar [the BIG one] (chromium)
  
• Fat
  
• What is Laughter?
  Humour explained.
  Nietszche never knew he was funny.
  
• Cholesterol, Heart Attacks.
  
• Exercise usefully and enjoyably, not painfully and boringly. Do more in an hour than most gym-junkies do in a month. How exercise works.
  
• How to Eat, How to Move
  
• Nutrition-- What you don't realise
  You are eating fertiliser.
  Your grandparents ate food you can't buy anymore.
  
• Nutrition-- Supplements that are useful, that you may find useful
  
• Human Rights do not exist
  
• Humans are not Racist. Humans are Groupist
  
• EU vs Europe.
  Germany II: an insight into History-Being-Made from History-Few-Remember
  
• Observations of England by an Australian [a series]
  
• What unavoidable unemployment really means to a person
  
• Gonk Journalism
  
• and the whole Sal family, for that matter
  
• .prn .spm file compression
  
• The Kitchen Fairy
  
• Caving
  
• TMI?
  
• Collusive Oligopoly
  
• "Imminent global crunch" -- yes, no, maybe
  
• Tea
  
• Constitutions. Cultures. And How-Not-To.
  
• SideBlogging -- technical note
  

Some of these fall under the aegis of this post's adumbrella.

"I've been umm-ing and ahh-ing and don't-think-so-ing for months now. Re how to eat so you're healthy and happy. And how to exercise so you're healthy and happy."

Which I *have* (over)thought about and think it boils down to "Quality of Life". So really warrants either or both of a book and/or a separate blogspot address.

So what I want from you:
IS:
thoughts on what to call the new site.
It'll come out semi-book-form, in the sense that it's more topic based than chronology based. (So those on RSS readers should ensure theirs is set to detect Updates.)
But I need a NURL. New Universal Resource Loobylooby. qualityoflife.blogspot's gone. Maybe qol.blogspot? Except a quoll is a cute little aussie marsupial. Cute i can do (keep your eyes closed); Aussie i can do (keep your legs closed); but Marsupial's a piercing too far, as far as I'm concerned. And I'm very, very concerned indeed, I should let you know; very concerned indeed.

Phone conversation with recruitment agent Tuesday:

"So how're you coping compared to last week? Feeling better yet?"

"Mate, much much better. Today the vim is back, I have my brain once more. I can focus! I can see the sun!
...
Although...
Errrr...
Actually....
I just realised. It's completely grey outside. Clouds from horizon to horizon.
So the fact I can see the sun is actually a bit of a worry.
Maybe I'm just seeing one BIG spot before my eyes.
Still, that's gotta be better than lots of little spots last week, right?"

"*laughs*"

*yawn*
*stretch*
*scratch*
*glance at clock*
AAARRRGGGHHHH!!!!
*cough*
I mean...

Good heavens! Is that the year!?
I'd better get a move on.

Sal addresses the keyboard for 2005 :

"Dear Keyboard"

Hmm, no. Too faux formal.

"Yo! Keyboard!"

Hmm, no.
Too...
No.

"Keyboard! M'man! M'device! Shnizzle my I/zzle/O, baby"

No.
Jesus.
No.

"Keyboard"

Yeah, that'll do.

.
.
.


So how was everyone's Christmas and New Years then?
Mmm?
Good, was it?
Hope so.

Mine was YOOJ.
Really. Fuckin' yooj. Best xmas/new years for years.
I've not actually been cognizant of the web let alone the blogoverse for about 3 weeks. Sorry and stuff like that. Here's why:

The run-up to Christmas was very real-world intense. Started beginning of December, went ballistic week 2. Days spent preparing for 10minute moments. Rushing to be in a completely still situation when the response comes through. Preparing for god-knows-how-broad discussions, so as to retrieve the old was-a-generic-expert capacity (and attitude, sadly). Sprinting to try to Close by Christmas; let down by others at the last minute. Planning to declare bankruptcy mid-January. Bank gave me months' leeway Christmas Eve.
Literally Christmas Eve.
Primarily because of personal reasons: I'd paid the extra for "Personal Banking" for years since I'd noticed that that was a primary mechanism in England for being treated like a human rather than being actively penalised, had worked with these guys for years, been absolutely clear and real with them for years, giving them warning of risks early even when they didn't eventuate, talking to them like people not drones, treating them like real people basically. As a no-other-option gesture, rang them Wednesday before Christmas. They, these people, these people who knew this little part of me, ran around pulling all the stops out, independently thought of and organised a bureaucracy-free alternative to the best option we'd thought of on the phone, got it all done so that I could walk in on Christmas Eve and sign a form. And stare blindly at a piece of paper drenched in small print that I could trust, that I couldn't have had the option of seeing had I not foreseen the need to circumvent standard English culture 6 years ago. That gave me crucial months' living across the crux recruiting time of January and February. (Jenny: you're gorgeous. Not just pretty to look at.)
Bang. Crack. A weight's bounced off my shoulders and ultra-misery end-of-days Christmas suddenly has the sun shining into it.

Merry Christmas.

Giving me immediately a clear 2 week window across Christmas. Of nothing I could achieve professionally, and a clear chilled time I could enjoy socially.
A delirious relief. Literally dizzying.
My first "holiday" in 2 years.
Kicked off on Christmas Eve, finishing around 4am. Therein was laid a pattern which lasted through to January 3rd. Dear Lord.
Like the old kiddie song says:

All I want for Christmas //
is my two front places on the liver transplant list.

I could tell you a squillion little stories, all great. Even the "bad" bits.

Kicked off on Christmas Eve with a ... well, let's just draw a polite veil over that... finishing around 4am. On to a great mate's place for late Christmas lunch then over dinner playing with 0.5, 1.5, and 2.5 year old kids. (0.5 and 2.5 are twins who will grow up very different due to completely different treatment/training. Standard pattern. Always surreal to see it happen, nearly always saddening to see. Potentials curtailed. Standard pattern. 1.5's an empathy-free attention-seeking game-player. He will do well.) Much laughter and sillybuggerisingaround. Rolling a small child old-enough round in the air: up and down and round and over. He's shrieking with delight. He's flailing when it's safe. He's freezing and moving cautiously when it's not. Which means I can throw him higher and harder and faster than if he was normal. And he can have that much more fun. And I can be sure he's still Safe.
That evening after the kids have gone to bed, a touch too much alcohol for young Sal. (hint: don't, when drinking large amounts of good red wine, forget that you're ahead of the crowd courtesy of rehydrating on richly-poured vodka-and-orange) Apparently I crawled into bed around 5 shouting "you've got to move your car!"
I deny everything.
In particular: the facts.

Always safer to deny the facts. At least everyone can agree on what you're denying.

Late start on Boxing Day, for all the right reasons:

Late bedtime.
Late wakening.
Yum.
Clean kitchen floor.

After scraping 1/3 inch of overnight ice off windscreen then irretrievably pushing house keys through departed friends' empty house's post-slot, discover car won't start.
On coldest day of year so far.
With no more clothes than postal gift from mother of English-shirt-thickness cotton Australian windcheater.
Actual hypothermia.
Past pain. Simply hurt.
Go past hurt. Actual damage.
The AA can't fix the car in situ. Supremely kind AA man offers us lift to relatively-nearby house.
We realise only later HOW kind, when we learn NO normal transport is operating that day.
Hypothermia. REAL hypothermia. Learned a long time ago I can (anyone can) drive body past normal shutdown limits. Close fist 1-2 hours later and after a couple of seconds the knuckles' skin stretched over my suddenly close bones goes suddenly icy. Not not-warm. Not normal. Icy.
Sponge-fading, weak-folding; intellectually driving my body along the footpath. After a mile up hill, we're --I'm-- stumbling between poor options in a freezing dark mediocrity. To suddenly explode into a brightly lit, deliriously contrasting evening on broad soft leather sofas with budget prices and comfort food and real ale.
Wrestle kitten-cats. All night. No sleep. They're too squeaky, too needy, too sharp-clawed, too cute, too fluffy, too poorly educated. No sleep.
Experiment the next day. They're very very susceptible to being educated. They behave this way just because they've learned this behaviour works, gives them what they want. Give it up because I'm only going to be here a couple of days.
Freezing moments in borrowed clothing looking out over a beautiful black-carpeted light-sparked London while standing among recent archaeological remnants below modern technological excrescence and rolling in the beauty of the place and of the moment and of the Victorian history. Showed this, given this joy, by someone with the same appreciation for real life. For the richness of the history behind this little paper-thin moment-wave we live in.
- Realise I may have lived too long in dodgy areas, seen too much: actively physically concerned as we walk in there, up the wide open lightless path from the road into the park and over the adjacent hillcrest. As we walked by at the start of the evening on the other side of the road, we passed 4 people who would actively attack/rob and potentially stab/rape us under only slightly different circumstances, at least 2 of them heavy heavy coke users. The same local population is still walking through/waiting at the bus-stops on the other side of the road, mutually invisible behind the hill-top. And here's pitch-black with no lights or people or police. (Paranoia? I got stabbed in the chest with a 10 inch blade in much much less dangerous circumstances. Look down at your chest, see bright rich red arterial blood jetting out so hard your T-shirt jumps out and the cotton-covered fountain stands with each squirting heartbeat -- that's a Moment.) It took me a good 10 minutes to have my ears not prickling for footsteps, to have my eyes not prickling for lazy straightening up from leaning against a tree, darker shadow separating from darker shadow in the black lightlessness, to stop swivelling, spinning in place, eyes wide, hackles raised, hands lifting, weight on balls of feet. Maybe: maybe: maybe this place has history so it's not cool.
Long slow dully sleepy happy relaxy chilled pub moments. Leather lounges and almost no one around and good food and good beer and peace and dark outside and peace and papers inside and words only every so often as we creep into energy again, staying within the envelope of pleasure.
Stay longer. Enjoying all the moments. All the pleasures. Even the dullnesses. No negatives. So rare.
Bloody cats. Like most kids, they just need an unambiguous --strictly unambiguous-- period, and they're set for life. But if they get Reward in opposition to their sense of fairness, it creates an ongoing unsanity, unconsideration for others.
Just like kids.
Just like people.
The cats are still not considerate-of-others when I leave, but are peacefully happy and not fighting.
Easy for me: I had the luxury of not living with them. Grandparent syndrome. And also of spending £2 on food for them. They only liked a fraction of it.

Oh that laughing wrench at the heart when they both rush to the finally placed bowls they've been mewling round my ankles for, simultaneous. And stop. And simultaneous: both turn their little plaintive eyes up at me with a 2-foot-separated synchronised roll upwards of their bewildered betrayed faces, lambent green in fuzzy cuddly black. "What?! What is this? Why have you done this to us? Oh, how could you, we trusted you, we TRUSTED you." Oh the contrast from what I'd expected! :D Never come across a starving cat before that didn't like oily fish (mackerel, in this instance). Rectified slightly with the chicken. But even then, they mostly ate the jelly. And looking at the ingredients on the tin afterwards, I'd've probably done the same. 10% chicken? Eh? And English wholesale chicken is only 50% chicken anyway, on average.
But the weaker one, the frail frail damaged hurting one, the one that vomits: that one ate nearly all. And sat wrapped round her stomach, purring blind, for hours afterwards. And again the next morning.
That felt good.

Plus they were quiet from their exhaustion from keeping a NEW person awake all night. And yet... that behaviour's not compulsory, not necessary, not a given. When their minder shouts at them, they go away or they come to her. But then they repeat what they were shouted at for doing. Because the shout was Attention for them (which is what they were looking for) not the internally-felt but not-externally-expressed Admonishment. When I say more quietly "Oi", they look, and they slink away: embarrassed. And they don't do it again for HOURS.
The unintended beauty of the Horniman Museum.
Fat fat geese the size of the fat fat dwarf goats. Literally, side by side: the same size. The midget goats are just too fucking cute for words. Even these words: "too fucking cute for words". Discover inside that that goose's species' name roughly translates from the Latin as "goose goose". See some horny superfat bunnies chasing each other's arses round a big pen; we suggest and laugh about superfat bunny oral sex. Then laughing even harder a second later at the horny superfat bunny hopping reversedly --180 degrees-edly -- onto the face of the not-really-expecting-that superfat bunny and pounding away. They heard our joke. Or maybe they were French rabbits?
"Oh god, watch the teeth, the teeth, watch the TEETH!"
The bandstand's chairs have been left unlocked, unchained, for all of winter, but 50 yards away the animals' enclosure has twice been wire-snipped into, and the cut-doors are jerry-rig patched.
Discover inside the museum the reasoning behind African female circumcision. No less horrific a consequence but the stickiness of that meme now makes a sense.
And notice with startlement that most older "human" species' brains have frontal lobes pretty much the same size as modern humans. The evolutionary variation is not in the "higher" thinking's parts, but in the "primitive" parts. Our "under"brain is significantly larger than Australopithecus's, but the "seat of reasoning" is about the same size. OK, there is a vast difference between size and ability, as regards nerve tissue. But.... it's something to think about. Perhaps we dominated not only from ludicrously over-active reproduction (animals our size are normally in estrus once a year, not once a month), but because our subconscious/rationality is substantially more capable than our then-competitors, who were merely as intelligent.

And notice with MORE startlement that "Neanderthals" were actually wildly different species from each other -- in particular, the western european ones have completely different teeth -- they are grazers, pure vegetarian -- their front teeth are not flat-to-the-front like ours; their front teeth run deep front-to-back. (I noticed years ago that Neanderthals weren't wiped out-- they bred in. You can still see pure-bred Neanderthals walking around today thrown up by the ongoing genetic whirlpool. I met two at university. Lovely people. But like women, poor communicators.) Their teeth have the heavy wear-able bulk of vegetarians, not our modern flimsy cutting and squashing scavenger teeth. Radically different jaw. Imagine a tooth slightly narrower than normal when he smiles, but thick and running backwards into his jaw for another half-inch. Very science-fiction. Very as-seen-on-TV model-of-alien. Walk backwards and forwards between the elephant skull and this Neanderthal's skull. Same teeth. The wear pattern on the "incisors" is the same as sheep's and cows' and giraffes' and elephants': grinding --rocking-- wear along the tooth, and deep.

New years. Brilliant too. Early at my place, meet --for me-- new friend at nearby unbelievably obscure, unbelievably real, unbelievably unreal Local Pub. Complete with local elves. Of all shapes and sizes.
And she comes back from the loo and shouts "you two are the loudest people in the whole bloody pub!!"
And me making sure the girls dance not only with us, not only with the clamouring arseholes that they jump at, but also with the nice guy, the real guy. Because they wouldn't have, otherwise. He wasn't an attention-seeker. He didn't play The Games. He was just Real.
Of all the things I've done this last year, that group-of-moments stands out.
Of all the things I've done this last year, the fact that I ONCE broke the game-players' game for someone, with people I regard as Real and Beautiful: that stands out.
Midnight. Midnight Does as Midnight New Years Should. A Benchmark Moment. Glorious. And as we leave, surrounded by the usual noise, the real man comes up to us, ignored by the girls (he's not playing THE GAME!!!), and quietly offers his hand with a big real smile. "Happy New Year. And thank you." "Mate... it was my pleasure. Really." And we shake, and we smile into each other's eyes, and we each go our ways, him back to his group-status-assigned seat in the corner, me to join my friend and hers on the footpath. I hope he gets more this year. I say that purely in the sense of someone who deserves more receiving more.

"Wow. We're sorry, Mr. Tation, but it seemed that your replacement liver wasn't rejected, so much as absorbed. The consultant actually used the word "inhaled" but collapsed shortly after with a nervous complaint and hasn't spoken since. So we've booked you in for another oper.... oh wow, it's 2 o'clock this afternoon."

Over that period I logged on a smattering of times. Primarily to webmail via remote to see if someone had actually landed in London for the threatened meet-up drinks. (nope) (poof)

and I've just noticed, on reading my own comment boxes, I didn't respond to a good mate's wellXwishes, despite doing so for a mutual mate "immediately above". Argh! Absolutely unintended! (plus also various other wellwishings. but i didn't appear to actively snub them.) That whole "i thought it, so i did it" syndrome. Which, come to think of it, sums up 99% of Female relationship inputs. God, maybe I'm turning into a girl.
OK, to save me stressing out, could everyone please go over to Jen2's (that's the order i blorgy-met you in :) (and let's campaign to bring back blorgy!!) site (and if you don't know Jen1's site, I feel an unsupercilious and deeply felt pity for you and offer you this) and say "Sal's a bastard, I always liked you better". Yeah. That'll teach me. If you get the chance, wish her the merry christmas she wished me.

Over that period II:
Anything requiring effort or which could be delayed was ignored with a resoluteness and firmness of spirit that was not only an inspiration to others but also medically necessary. I played a couple of times on a blog-god's site whom I know is tolerant of my less able participations --not sure if that's still the case :)-- but apart from that was completely off-line. And possibly out of order. The posts I made here were literally spasms of a moment; in one case due to someone leaning over my shoulder and saying "'limerick'? what's that file?" and me saying "that's my favourite ever poetry. ha! i should post that" and bish bosh 30 seconds later it's posted. Looking for all the world like I was sanely in charge of my own faculties and posting with malice aforethought. Mens rea? My arse.

Since then: supremely nice long late dinner Monday at an odd find: Italian restaurant called Mill St Cafe, just off the Thames, east of London Bridge and just past that groovy mast-rigging style footbridge (turn right as you come through the passage cut through the building). Proper Italian food, run by Italians in an over-the-top Italian style, though odd personal dynamics among the Italian staff suggest the owner/headoffamily might be getting a little megalomanic/self-obsessed. But for that octopus salad, you can forgive much. Since Wednesday I have had 7 interviews. Rather time- and energy-consuming.

Friday evening I really really attempted to blog. Not sure what I actually did. Saturday night was an unexpected social pleasure. But did rather prevent attending to blogoverse duty.

So let's have a quick look at my RSShole sites.
ARGH!
Christ!
My nominally Daily sites have 231 new posts! My Inner, Middle, and Outer Sphere sites have 505 posts with Oort Cloud 256 (ooo.... geeky!). OK, that's just ridiculous. How many total posts has my RSS universe made since I last read the web?
...
!!
10, 964.

Uh....
OK, strip out the "High Volume Posters" categories. Leaving...
7,720
Oh fer fuxache.

Even that bloody faux-blog belledejour's back again.

Plus I've got emails too.

When did blogging become an effort?

Right not now, that's when not.

ATTENTION!! EVERYONE!! Saltation officially has no fucking idea what went on in your world since about the first week of December! All right? And if you don't have an RSS feed and/or are a graphic-heavy site and/or a post-heavy site, possibly since November.

*thinks* Mmmmm. December was a goo-ooood month.

OK. This post constitutes my Get Out Of Context Free card. If anyone bloggy wants me to be aware of anything they posted in the last 4 weeks, they're going to have to send me a direct link.

Now.
2005.
It occurs to me, as it has repeatedly for much of last year, that many many key posts, primarily on the core Saltation site, have simply sat as a topic in my mind. With core content implied, but lack of time/energy spent in assessing wording or approaches. Interestingly, from a psychological point, I have posted aspects of many of the core numerous times in comments boxes over the blogoverse.
And a quick glance over the "Drafts" both written and typed shows a myriad of posts that I still think are worth posting, despite their now non-timeliness.

Enough.
2005 shall shee theshe shpat out.

-- Shal.
Shal Connory.
On your back and take my 007, baby.

Here, for my own purposes of embarrassing myself into actually producing something, are some of the major posts that have been hanging fire for way way too long:

• Sugar [the BIG one] (chromium)
  
• Fat
  
• What is Laughter?
  Humour explained.
  Nietszche never knew he was funny.
  
• Cholesterol, Heart Attacks.
  
• Exercise usefully and enjoyably, not painfully and boringly. Do more in an hour than most gym-junkies do in a month. How exercise works.
  
• How to Eat, How to Move
  
• Nutrition-- What you don't realise
  You are eating fertiliser.
  Your grandparents ate food you can't buy anymore.
  
• Nutrition-- Supplements that are useful, that you may find useful
  
• Human Rights do not exist
  
• Humans are not Racist. Humans are Groupist
  
• EU vs Europe.
  Germany II: an insight into History-Being-Made from History-Few-Remember
  
• Observations of England by an Australian [a series]
  
• What unavoidable unemployment really means to a person
  
• Gonk Journalism
  
• and the whole Sal family, for that matter
  
• .prn .spm file compression
  
• The Kitchen Fairy
  
• Caving
  
• TMI?
  
• Collusive Oligopoly
  
• "Imminent global crunch" -- yes, no, maybe
  
• Tea
  
• Constitutions. Cultures. And How-Not-To.
  
• SideBlogging -- technical note
  

Some of these fall under the aegis of this post's adumbrella.

"I've been umm-ing and ahh-ing and don't-think-so-ing for months now. Re how to eat so you're healthy and happy. And how to exercise so you're healthy and happy."

Which I *have* (over)thought about and think it boils down to "Quality of Life". So really warrants either or both of a book and/or a separate blogspot address.

So what I want from you:
IS:
thoughts on what to call the new site.
It'll come out semi-book-form, in the sense that it's more topic based than chronology based. (So those on RSS readers should ensure theirs is set to detect Updates.)
But I need a NURL. New Universal Resource Loobylooby. qualityoflife.blogspot's gone. Maybe qol.blogspot? Except a quoll is a cute little aussie marsupial. Cute i can do (keep your eyes closed); Aussie i can do (keep your legs closed); but Marsupial's a piercing too far, as far as I'm concerned. And I'm very, very concerned indeed, I should let you know; very concerned indeed.






I was going to say something funny. I really was.
Oh, and welcome to the new year, all. Felicitations.

Happily rolling between hangovers and evenings and mornings (mostly in the rear-vision mirror) and hangovers and hangovers and bottles and new years and hangovers and things and hangovers and ow.

And stuff.

And in the spirit of lazy rolly happy newy yeary stuff, here's one of my all-time favourite limericks, for you all to ring in your various new years's ('s) with('s):

This limerick is **SO**FILTHY** that it would offend you. So I'll put
"di-dah" for the filthy words:

Di-dah, di-dah, di-dah di-dah,
Di-dah di-dah di-dah, di-dah;
di-dah di-dah di-dah?
Di-dah di-dah di-dah.
Di-dah di-dah, di-dah di-fuck.

- oy