buter's BABY blog

Michael is known for complaining that the English language is imprecise, and there are far too many words which can be misunderstood. For instance, a word may have two (or more) distinct meanings dependent on context. Also, there are many words that sound the same, so in spoken conversation you can get all confused. Like what? you ask. Let's consider an ordinary conversation:

Me: Hi Michael
Michael: High.
Me: Did you have a great weekend?
Michael: My weak end was grate. Ewe?
Me: Err.. good, thanks. Would you like a cup of tea?
Michael: Yes, I wood like tee.

... and so on.

<<warning - if you don't understand French, you're likely to be extremely bored by the next bit. Go read Dilbert instead. Today's wit: "[A marketing biathlon is] where you ski up to people who don't buy your crap and shoot them".>>

Consider this poem.

Suivez le guide!

LE GUIDE

Suivez le guide !

UN TOURISTE

Je suis le guide.

SON CHIEN

Je suis mon maître.

UNE JOLIE FEMME

Je suis le guide.
Donc je ne suis pas une femme
puisque je suis un homme.

LE TOURISTE

Je suis cette jolie femme.

SON CHIEN

Et moi aussi, je suis cette femme,
puisque je suis mon maître.

LE GUIDE

Suivez le guide.
Moi , je ne suis pas le guide,
puisque je suis le guide.

LE TOURISTE

Je voudrais bien savoir qui est cette jolie femme que je suis.

SON CHIEN

Je ne suis pas mon maître,
puisque je suis mon maître
et que cela m'ennuie.

LA JOLIE FEMME

Je suis le guide, je suis la foule,
je suis un régime, je suis la mode,
je ne suis plus une enfant... Oh ! J'en ai assez !
Je ne suis plus personne.

(elle disparaît.)

LE GUIDE

Oh ! J'en ai assez !
Je démissionne.

(il disparaît.)

LE TOURISTE

Oh ! Je ne suis plus le guide,
je ne suis plus un homme,
je ne suis plus une femme,
je ne suis plus rien.

(il disparaît.)

LE CHIEN

Enfin ! Je ne suis plus mon maître,
donc je suis mon maître
et je ne visiterai pas les châteaux de la Loire !

Jacques Prévert

It's very funny if you understand French. The humour is a play on the words "je suis" which can mean "I am" or "I am following" - it doesn't really translate into English, but you get the idea, right? Ok you can go back to Dilbert now.

(Je disparais.)

A little while ago I tried to write a complete post about the RU486 controversy in Australia. The story goes like this:

1. Drug availability in Australia is generally regulated by the Therapeutic Goods Administration
2. The Federal Health Minister, (currently Tony Abbott), has veto power over "restricted goods" of which one happens to be RU486
3. The aforementioned RU486 induces abortion
4. Proposed legislation before Federal Parliament would remove the Health Minister's veto power, effectively giving the TGA final say over introduction of all drugs, not just the "non-restricted" ones.

Add some content-free media circus performers and you get
Conclusion: Tony Abbot wants to have a say in abortion.

Does anyone else see the problem with this? As Buffy said, "your logic does not resemble our Earth logic".

Anyway my original post was going to be some pithy remarks about how the TGA is best placed to make decisions on drugs, and it should *never* be in parliamentary hands because at least the TGA has a better chance of finding out the real science behind the drugs where the MPs are influenced by/able to cast blame on the amorphous mass of "public opinion" or "the electorate" or "lobby groups" (or "plain pig-headedness"). And that the debate was not, and never was, about whether the Government Controls Abortion, and the planned usage of any particular drug shouldn't even be considered in the debate.

Luckily it was all over by the time I had barely started the post, so I never had to try to finish it or massage it into some kind of shape suitable for publishing. And the decision? That the TGA should make the final decision about drug introduction to the Australian market. And all thanks to those level-headed politicians who actually seemed to be voting in the best interests of the country rather than today's favourite lobby group. (I'm not referring to Tony Abbot, of course).

But! It seems that the aforementioned media circus has finally realised this! At least - they have finally published some comments from real medical professionals saying that RU486 is not about abortion, it's about more control over reproduction, and by the way that parliamentary debate wasn't about RU486 at all so can we please just get on with it?

Ahh. It's times like these I wonder if I really need a blog. The world seems to be able to sort itself out without me.

We have a guest poster today. The man behind the grander spanner and co-producer of the story of my life that is buter's blog.

Yes folks, it's time for (drum roll please) D™'s first story.

So it was another tri-annual, super fun, Super6, waterskiing weekend last weekend. The story being 3 couples, of whom a disproportionate third supply both the place to stay and the boat to ski behind whilst the other 2 thirds supply alcohol (not while boating of course), good company and good looks. The favourite spot is the Wisemans Ferry area of the Hawkesbury river north of Sydney. Through several years of trial and error we have discovered that the best time to ski there is March, towards the end is better for cooler days but the water is a fairly consistent 24°C and extremely pleasant for a dip or a ski. The middle of the day also coincided with the ebb tide for the river and some of the finest water anyone had ever seen. Michael helpfully stated that if anyone had trouble skiing it can only have been due to their complete lack of talent.

The flavour of the weekend this time was wakeboarding. It's usually a mixture of 1 and 2 ski waterskiing with some wakeboarding. This time it was pure wakeboarding and with spectacular results. Great leaps were made by the 3 n00bs with Nicko actually landing the aforementioned great leap. Michael maintained the grade with wake clearing leaps (from a the toe-side approach) and mastered both the mid-air and cross-wake switch. D™ made lots of holes in the water with his head and is on the waiting list for a new spleen. The People's Choice award went to Vic (Vodkatoria) C. After a previous wakeboarding effort which ended badly with a cranium-first-entry and ringing ears, she sucked it in, got up first go and made great strides towards wakeboarding greatness. Other on-water entertainment included two girls mudwrestling in the black mud exposed by the low tides of the weekend and the extraordinarily good conditions.

The downside of the weekend was the affirmation that a weekend of boating is great for everyone except the owner of the boat. A dislodged accelerator spring made for interesting boarding for Michael when the boat took off with much-gusto before unceremoniously dumping him when Vic killed the engine to prevent him trying to wakeboard at 80km/h (the boat's top speed). But more was in store the next day when a suspected overheated engine stranded Power Play on the quiet side of the river, 3 km from the boat ramp and against the tide. Paddling provided extremely trivial headway and after 45 minutes of failed attempts at flagging, help arrived when we were rescued, Bundaberg-Rum-style, by a boat of beauties and enough engine to get us back to the ramp in 20 minutes. Our saviours refused payment upon condition of upholding the boat code and returning the favour if required, and we were as always happy to oblige. We found a really nifty use for plastic money too. You can swim with it.

And to round off the day, the electric winch on the boat trailer conked out with the boat halfway out of the water. Thankfully the backup hand winch came to the rescue but left Michael with quite a to-do-list and more proof that boats are fun, but they are also money pits.

.... or as I like to put it, we were just messing about in boats.

For the record, the mudwrestlers were not the two girly girls whose complete lack of talent at wakeboarding was entirely due to not even trying.

Yep, it's that time. The 'Friendly Games' have started in Melbourne. You all know I'm not really a sports freak. In fact my only skill probably lies in fooling people into thinking I can fence. That came to a head when I was appointed a competition president for the fencing portion of the World Junior Modern Pentathlon a couple of years ago. After that, fencing seems to have gone by the wayside.

Anyway, today's story is about .. "which games?" "The Commonwealth Games". So being a non-sporting person, I always approach the television coverage with cynicism. All those youthful athletic sweaty bodies, all that competitiveness and ambition ... but then when I sit down and watch it, something comes over me .... seeing the competitors from the low-profile nations entering the stadium ... there's the team that took 9 days to travel to the Games because they had to catch the mail ship out to England and fly from there (they have to leave before the closing ceremony to catch the mail ship back) ... there's the team that had no uniforms until Channel 9 organised some for them ..

It's like, these really are a friendly competition. Apart from all the winning, and stuff, there's a whole bunch of people who are just so glad to be there, representing their country. It's a very warm'n'fuzzy feeling to see their faces when they entered the MCG and all 80,000 people cheered for them. In some cases that's probably more than their entire population! As someone said, these countries are sub-olympic microdots on the face of the earth, and this is their only chance to shine. In spite of - or perhaps because of - the missing Americans, Chinese and Eastern Europeans, these Games are more about fun than winning. Or it could just be that we all had to learn English ... so the teams and officials can actually all converse reasonably freely in the same language. (Is that why the Americans don't come?)

Well, except for Australia. For us, it's still all about the winning. Isn't it?

No, I don't know what it means either. But tonight I was at a loss for things to not watch on telly, so I whacked in the ol' Serenity DVD. If you haven't heard of Serenity, shame on you, and if you've heard of it but you haven't seen it, shame on you twice over.

But, gratuitous movie links aside, very early on in the film, oh about 6 minutes in, one character says "The neural stripping does tend to fragment their own reality matrix".

Errr, what? Of course this is an endearing bit of pseudotechnopsychobabble on the part of Joss Whedon (or some hack) but the term has lodged itself securely in my reality matrix and it's doing its part to fragment what's left there.

It's like, I am exposed to so much information and so many new ideas, every day, that I don't have time to process them all adequately. And so they either go into weird dreams about peaches and Clueless, or they just float around in my subconscious, taking up valuable real estate, and giving me a vague sense of always having forgotten something. Or of someone watching me. (I get mixed up sometimes.) But what tends to happen is that I feel a bit - well - fragmented. I think making blog posts serves as a way to mildly defrag the reality matrix. A chance to say some random things that were inspired by other random things, and let it all just flow.

Speaking of flow, here's a segue into some more random thoughts. I don't know about you, but I sometimes feel a little swamped by all the "stuff" there is out there on the InterWeb. There's so much information, so many jokes, so many games, so much weather... just so much, well, stuff. It's hard to sift through and find things that are not only interesting on first read, but that remain interesting, and are worth revisiting.

For instance, there are approximately 6.5 billion people on this planet*. From all those people, how many blogs do you think there might be that are actually creative enough to draw in passers-by, and of the creative ones, how many that manage to maintain that without degenerating into stories about "grilled cheese and potty training"? Speaking of reading blogs, the story I linked by WSJ just there, has some funny statistics which you should read if you have the time (or the attention span).

I feel much better now. I think the reality matrix is no longer quite so fragmented, (apart from a few minor glitches) so I shall bid you adieu.

Have fun storming the castle.

* from this point on, approximately 87.4% of the statistics are made up. Including this one.

What makes a blog or a book worth reading?
What makes a podcast or a radio program worth listening to?
What makes a TV show or movie worth watching and then buying the DVD so you can watch it again and again?

You guessed it folks, the answer is - "content".

I've recently started listening to an excellent podcast called The Daily Breakfast. It's produced by a fellow called Father Roderick who happens to be a Catholic priest in Amersfoort, a town in The Netherlands.

If you've been a loyal reader of this blog you will recall that I mentioned my philosophy of religious tolerance - why then, you ask, am I listening to a Catholic podcast? Well first off, it's not about Catholicism per se. It just happens to be produced by a Catholic priest. Secondly, my philosophy of tolerance means that I will be happy to listen to podcasts by practitioners of any religion - as long as they satisfy one key requirement - good content.

That's the thing, folks. Content is key. Fr Roderick knows this. He advocated it in one of the podcasts I listened to this morning. (I think from early January). His podcast is informative, easy going, and interesting. Which is just what I need sitting in my car in the Victoria Road car park in the mornings.

Not every story can have a good ending though. This morning my iRiver decided not to work (some blah about running out of battery power..) so I was stuck with listening to CDs or to the ever-so-crappy morning radio programs. It's good, but really there's only so much of Classic FM that one person can handle .. and all the other "breakfast programs" are totally content free!! Take for example, the radio station that is running some insane competition where the prize is $1000 for every medal Australia wins at the Commonwealth Games in Melbourne. (For the record, Australia won 82 gold medals last time) .... aaaaah, but don't get me started on sports.

Aarrrrghh ... I have a whole bunch of stuff to write about. But in the interests of actually posting this - you will have to wait.

So in other news, books you must read this week are:
Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials series (sorry, you can't borrow them from me as D™ is still reading them)
Garth Nix's Old Kingdom books
The Red Queen by Matt Ridley (about the evolution of human nature)
William Gibson's Neuromancer
And anything by Haruki Murakami , but in particular Kafka on the Shore.

If you've read them already, then re-read them.


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