Father’s Day

A tops Father’s Day doesn’t just happen. It requires careful planning.

1969

Massage

If there’s one thing I’ve learned so far it’s that there are very few moments where the correct answer to “should I get a massage?” is “No.” This place is good, and cheap.

Actually, I’ve learned plenty of things. Pop music can sometimes change the world, but mostly doesn’t. The fact that it mostly doesn’t is not important. Total, clean separation of programming logic and presentation in a template system is not possible, partly because a template system is an interface between programming logic and presentation. Almost all books considered classics are worth reading, or at least dipping into.

And that’s just four. I could go on, but the massage has blissed me out too much.

And, really, everything changes the world, when you think about it.

Top Dilettante

Alternate reality TV

The usual formula of career-based reality TV sees starry-eyed hopefuls audition feverishly to gain access to a crucible of exacting standards and ridiculous challenges, presided over by a trio of judges with years of professional expertise and borderline personality disorder.

Top Dilettante boldly inverts that formula and requires its burnt-out contestants, weary of the demands of their modern and exciting careers, to dabble in areas for which they have no real passion or aptitude. Put up in the Top Dilettante House – a capacious three-storey terrace within walking distance of at least four decent cafés – the contestants are just barely dissuaded from seriously attempting to  dash off watercolour sketches, write light verse and perfect pop tunes, compile vaguely flirtatious mix CDs and curate exhibitions of banal streetscape photography.

Points are awarded neither for skill nor effort, but for the degree to which the teams can affect an air of nonchalance about the outcome of each challenge, and indeed the entire show. Contestants who display the least sign of taking any of it seriously will be subjected to amused sidelong glances and raised eyebrows, and anyone with the bad taste to have a tearful emotional meltdown or achieve a searing personal insight will be left in the house, as the subtle scorn of the other contestants is considered punishment enough.

Astroligist

From a flyer found in my letterbox on Sunday. Spelling, punctuation and layout as in original.

MEDIUM ASTROLIGIST SPIRITUAL
HEALER

IF YOU HAVE NOT FOUND A SOLUTION
TO YOUR PROBLEM COME TALK TO US.

* family - marriage problems etc
* bring back a loved one, find true
love.
* bad habits etc
* to be more inteligent, education
work etc
* if your scared,bored,unknown illness
etc
* to sell a property, business
etc fast
* business improvements
* we can find out which career,
business etc
will be successfull for you
* we can also tell obout your past
and future
* removing bad luck, bad spirits etc

very successfull results
MY WORK IS CONFIDENTIAL

I guess this is why it’s called a “depression”

Reports from 3AM, or: How I respond to a global financial crisis.

1. Read lots about it, mostly on various websites and blogs, some of which sent to me by a friend who subscribes to this Austrian-school gold-bug mailing list and some of which are written by sane people.
2. Internally adopt an attitude of high seriousness.
3. Think really, really hard about it.
4. Eventually remember that in the past this approach has worked for almost no problems at all.
5. Even those problems over which I had any control.

Which is why I’m going on an economics news fast and teaching myself Haskell. Work as if you lived in the early days of a better nation, and all that.

It’s beginning to smell a lot like Christmas

The mingled odours of ripe mangoes and pine trees in grocer’s stores

Boxing Days of my childhood: roast sweet potatoes, corgi hair, John Player Specials and warm stale red wine, all ripening together in the hottest kitchen in Sydney

Please remember to put the prawn shells in the freezer until garbage night or they’ll really stink the bin out

Petrichor

That one Boxing Day when my hippest uncle had discovered daquiris and blew up Grandma’s blender in a bout of overenthusiastic frappé-ing, adding a cloud of ozone and smoke to the mix

The mingled odours of ripe mangoes and stale chicken fat in Coles on the 27th

A friend and a song

I only heard the song a few times when I was a student at the end of the 80s. It was cool and arch and clever and literary in the face of death, in a way that was both scary and heartening. My friend enthused about it to me, or perhaps I enthused about it to him, it could have been either. It was a friendship of shared enthusiasms but few confidences. The song’s swagger and assurance reminded me of the qualities which I admired in him and which I envied, which is why even after we started to go in different directions I would always think of him if I thought of the song, although I never knew the name of the artist and never heard it played on the radio after that year. My friend died, quite unexpectedly and suddenly, in 2000. Although we had seen very little of one another in the preceding five years, the 21st century still seems odd without him. There are many things which remind me of him and make me wonder what his opinion of them would be, but since his death nothing is quite as emblematic of how and why I miss him as

My earliest bookmark for the blog is dated 2005, so that must be when I became a regular reader. It was full of the sorts of things that I like to read about: odd music, sex and politics and sexual politics, architecture, art and design. I was hanging around on ILM in those days and had noticed him posting there too. It was apparent that he was a musician but I had never heard of his records or seen any of them in stores so I didn’t have much of an opportunity to become a fan of his music as well as of his writing. Occasionally he’d post tracks and they were to my taste, although I remember thinking that if I had heard them when I was younger, I would not have liked them as much. Their dark tone and frankness about sex were the sort of thing I used to be diffident about and would have put me off. When a comment appeared on this blog under his stage name I was impressed but also felt too shy to ask if it was him or not. Not too long after that, he described an upcoming live show on his blog and I found out that it was he who had written

that particular song. It was a very strange sensation when these two distinct things, Click Opera and my memories of Jad, were joined up. The blog is one of the many things which I want to show him but will never be able to. This month, Momus is posting mp3s of his six out-of-print Creation albums, so I’m finally able to listen to “What Will Death Be Like?” again. I still really like it. This is a way of saying thank you to them both.

Les mos et les choses

Thirty days hath Movember. Thus, after it had raised almost a quarter of a thousand dollars for mens’ health awareness (thanks very much to everyone who donated) my mo was snipped close with scissors and shaved off just after midnight last night.

It’s not that I was keen get rid of it; it’s more that I was furiously desperate to have my smooth face back. Ah, prickle-free kissing and not worrying about having cappuccino stalactites hanging over my mouth.

So now, though the itching is gone, the question remains: what is it about the mo which makes it the most ludicrous of facial hair options? C suggested that it’s the combination of hairiness and grooming: while a beard can simply run wild, a moustache must be cultivated, and such cultivation is regarded as unmanly.

I think this is partially correct, but it doesn’t explain why beard styles which also require careful trimming and shaving, such as the goatee, are merely funny, lacking the sleazy grotesquerie of the mo.

This morning’s shave was unusual, since I had chin stubble but a smooth upper lip, reversing the configuration which I learned to shave as a beardless youth. And then I realised that just as the moustache is the first facial hair to appear in boys, it’s also, for the most part, and for reasons which are no doubt physiologically connected, the only facial hair to appear at all in women. The female mo or “ronnie” (a term I owe to the excellent Irish film Intermission, which contains a sensitive exploration of this delicate subject) is our society’s most taboo form of hair. It’s a signifier of mature womanhood and of the blurring of gender characteristics as we age, and it also raises the spectre of childhood terrors, an unfamiliar, persecutory and hairy Aunt who must be kissed as part of the symbolic order of the family gathering. You must forgive my waxing Žižekian, we watched The Pervert’s Guide to the Cinema on the weekend, and speaking of waxing, Slavoj really needs to get rid of the fatbeard, although I’m sure he has excellent Marxist grounds for wanting his face to look like a badger’s scrotum.

Incidentally, one of the unexpected results of Movember is that it made me much more aware of other mens’ facial hair, and, frankly, the situation is grim. Men: grow a beard, grow a mo, or shave every day. Hungover rock stars don’t matter any more, so stubble does not make you look raunchy and devil-may-care: it makes you look like a lazy nob.

But I digress. The moustache on its own is a paradoxical attempt to look butch by imitating the facial hair of the ephebe or the female, and so it will always, I think, court grotesquerie, like so many other macho incursions into domains which were pioneered by women: Norman Mailer novels, footballers in drag or the beeriod.

Things we should all get used to, part 1

i. Some proportion of anyone’s beliefs are held because they meet emotional or psychological needs, not because they are useful or true.

ii. Some proportion of believers will hold beliefs for their whole lifetime, no matter what external evidence is presented to discredit or disprove those beliefs.

iii. Any belief which is widespread enough for you to have even noticed it is believed by a large number of people.

Lemma: For any belief, no matter how odd or silly or untrue or annoying you find it, an appreciable number of people will hold that belief for their entire lives.

iv. For a currently widespread belief is to die out in your lifetime, two things must happen:

a. your remaining lifespan must contain the point in time at which all the believers of that belief will have died, and

b. no new believers can be recruited to the belief during that time.

v. The chances of both iv.a and iv.b happening for any belief are very, very small.

Conclusion: Any beliefs of which you are now aware are going to be around for the rest of your life, no matter what happens in the meantime to disprove them, and no matter how much they annoy you.

Corollary: The Internet means that even if a belief be held by only a single person on a different continent, you will still be apprised of it.