Future Man

I'm from the future. The problem is, I can't prove it. That's the most frustrating part. If I was going to travel through time, it would be handy to have at my disposal a ready way to prove to you that I am from the future. But I don't.

I'm only from two weeks in the future, so the technology is pretty much the same as today. There's no point in pulling out my new iPhone, e-book reader or some such other device because you could easily say that all I have is a prototype of a soon-to-be released version of the product. Besides, I didn't bring any of them back with me. I suppose I could give you tomorrow's winning lottery numbers if only I had taken note of them. Sorry.

I didn't mean to travel back in time, but here I am. I'm stuck in your timeline now and have to make the best of it. Truth be told, if I was going to purposely time travel, I don't think I would travel two weeks into the past. That's pretty boring. Perhaps I'd go back to some historical event, like the splitting of the sea or something like that. But to Ramat Beit Shemesh in January 2010?

How did I get here? Fascinating question. By chance? By luck? In fact, I don't remember. One minute I was in my own time, and the next I was here, wearing the same clothes, walking in the same direction. It is very disconcerting. I have no idea how it happened. Is this like a Groundhog Day experience? Am I simply reliving the same two weeks over and over and over again until I suddenly realize that I have been given a rare opportunity to achieve greatness in two weeks, where it would take others a lifetime?

But it can't be. I haven't any recollection of the past two weeks. Nothing. Not one bit of information travelled with me. Perhaps those who control time travel have imposed this rule on us so that we cannot take advantage of it. It is like my mind has gone blank - two weeks' worth of memories wiped clean out of my mind!

All I know is that I'm definitely from the future. I know this because I turned up to my doctor appointment and it says right here on the printout that my appointment is for Tuesday. But not this Tuesday - Tuesday in two weeks time. Yet here I am, standing outside the doctor's office at the clinic. Since I could not possibly make such a silly mistake, I must be a patient from the future.

Update: 26 January 2010 (added graphic) - thanks, CL!

What I Know About Baseball

I had an email exchange with a co-worker today about Aussie Rules football. I have worked with him for over 5 years and so it wasn't a surprise when he replied to one of my jargon-filled emails "I even understood some of that".

He then asked me if I would like to learn about baseball. I replied with a list of all I know about the great American game:

1. Create a World Series competition and only invite North America.
2. Wear tight-fitting, striped, knee-length pants.
3. Eat peanuts and crackerjacks.
4. Sing the American anthem.
5. Cover yourself with padding, wear a vision-obscuring helmet, and signal rudely to the pitcher.
6. Shout "Strike One!", "Ball!" and "Safe!" at random moments during the game.
7. In a gravelly voice, saliva spitting from your mouth, yell the words "you're" and "out" so that it sounds like "YEROUT!" while pointing to any player.
8. Wear one oversized glove.
9. Chew gum, spit generously and swear at the umpires.
10. Hit a round ball with a round bat (something like a caveman's club).
11. Run around a diamond that covers only a small portion of the entire playing field.
12. Steal bases, but leave them behind afterwards.
13. Run home, which is the place you started from.

Not bad for an ex-pat Aussie, eh?

Placebo Buttons

A placebo button is a button that, when pushed, does nothing other than make the button pusher feel like he has effected change.

A famous example is the "close door" button in an elevator. Does pushing it actually close the doors, or do the doors close according to their programmed cycle, anyway? Certainly, pushing the button makes you feel like you have done something, but whether you actually have or not can only be determined by experimentation.

The Museum of Hoaxes blog busts the myth that all cross-walk buttons are placebos. Some are, some aren't, some never were but are now.

This whole thing got me thinking: What other things do we do that are really just placebos, dummy deeds we do to make ourselves feel in control? Just how much of our lives is rigged? Are we all being manipulated? Is there some great super-governmental force out there giving us the illusion that our opinions count?

Here's a few things that might really be placebos:

• Half the operations we do in MS Windows:
  Ever tried to force a "hanging" program to close using the task manager?
  
  
• Filing papers at any government office:
  It's a fun exercise, but do they do whatever they want, despite your requests?
  
  
• Voting in an election:
  Aren't they all rigged?
  
  
• Paying taxes:
  You pay a certain amount of tax. Your tax money doesn't go to schools and hospitals. Someone else's does. Your money goes to fitting that new executive bathroom in some fancy government building somewhere.
  
  
• Ordering a steak at a restaurant:
  You order rare, it comes out well-done, but you felt decisive and powerful telling the waitress exactly how you would like it.

So how much control do we have over our own decisions, and do they mean anything? To test this theory, I've spent the last month making random choices, spur-of-the-moment, sometimes illogical decisions about lots of different things. The idea was to see whether any decision I made would ultimately lead me to the same end, proving the theory that everything is placebo and your choices don't matter, or whether my decisions actually had an effect on things.

Without going into too many details, Hugo Chavez is still in power. I ate raw dog meat in a Chinese restaurant. I filed the requisite forms and am now receiving financial assistance from Aboriginal Business Canada. I know the names of prison guards in four different African countries. I owe money to an Atlantic City loan shark. I don't have any clothes aside from those I'm wearing, but I do have all of my fingers, some of which are in an ice-pack in my rucksack.

Witticisms

I've been spending my time collecting witty phrases to share with you. Some are from the Internet, others I made up. Enjoy:

• This device is cuter than a box of puppies
• The back seat is harder to get into than MIT
• Cheaper than pirated software
• If your tumor were any more minor it would need a hardhat with a light on it
• The engine guzzles more than a college student at spring break
• It's uglier than an Elton John outfit
• It's sexier than a 1973 Porche
• He's more washed out than a room full of Maytags
• He's as washed up as an oil-covered duck
• As useless as a chocolate kettle
• He's brighter than Hiroshima
• He's as dim as a 40 watt bulb
• The grinding noise it makes is louder than an American tourist
• More persistent than a tabloid journalist
• This perfume smells worse than a political cover-up
• This supermarket has more isles than the Hawaiian Archipelago
• More distracting than a teenager with a cell phone
• This thing has more wires than a coathanger factory
• A heater that beats cold weather like global warming
• Greener than Al Gore
• The sky is bluer than BB King
• The color is redder than China
• It's thinner than a Presidential excuse
• It's faster than a nightclub gigolo
• The price is steeper than the Andes
• It's hot enough to boil an entire monkey
• It's hotter than Satan's backside

Have you got more?

Mid-Life Crisis

I just want to know when I am entitled to have a mid-life crisis. Is it possible to actually calculate how long I am going to live and then time my crises to occur exactly at middle age?

According to Wikipedia:

Middle age is the period of life beyond young adulthood but before the onset of old age. Various attempts have been made to define this age, which is around the third quarter of the average life span of human beings.

So I looked up the average life-expectancy of males and found that in Israel, that age is 76.46, at least according to the CIA World Factbook Estimates, 2008, as quoted in Wikipedia. So that schedules my mid-life crisis at between 38-57 years old.

I don't know if I can wait that long. I'm quite stressed out now and only 35. Actually, it's worse than that. Since I am from Australia, where the average life expectancy of males is supposed to be 77.8 years, I shouldn't have my mid-life crisis until I'm between 39-58 years old.

So this begs the question: what if I move countries? Do I take on the average life-span of males in that country, or am I stuck with the average life-span of my birth country? I'm guessing that since the average life span is a product of genes, environment and diet that it is a mixture of both. However, for the sake of argument, let's suppose that when you move to another country you adopt their average life-expectancy. It's only fair since you are also adopting their climate, health care system and crime-rate.

If I wanted to have my mid-life crisis earlier, I could move to any number of countries with lower life expectancies than Israel. New Zealand, UK, US, France and China all fit that criteria.

Swaziland has the lowest life expectancy, meaning that I could have had my mid-life crisis from when I was 15-23 years old. A bit early - I was married at 22 and hadn't even had the time to build up to it. I don't know how I would have managed to cope with a mid-life crisis at 15. That's just cruel. But according to the CIA, my next opportunity will be in Rwanda or Sudan, both of which will allow me to succumb to the pressures of life before my next birthday. Joy.

But what happens when you overshoot the average life expectancy of your country? By that stage you have already had your mid-life crisis, albeit too early. That could be a problem - what if you wanted another one? If you are still cranky between the ages of 47 and 71, does that automatically mean that you are going to live to be 95? Such questions should be left to the philosophers of the world. I undertook an extremely unscientific study of philosophers and found that the majority were German males who probably only have 75.96 years to figure this out.

But it really is comforting to know that I have the option to choose when I am going to break down under mountains of stress, and when I am not. Think about it, how much easier is it now that you know that you have a few years to save up for all of those expensive therapists? You don't need to spend time on the couch now, wait until you are close to the third quarter of the average life expectancy of people in your country and then pay a shrink to watch you go to pieces. Very economical.

But, of course, as long as you are at an age below the third quarter of your life expectancy there is nothing stopping you from practicing. Anything above that and, sorry, but I can't help you.

Hairdressers and Taxi Drivers

Everyone tries to be smart. Everyone wants to be clever. Everyone wants to get ahead. So you read newspapers, magazine articles and blogs to get to know what the pundits are saying about the latest economic data. You study the consumer reviews to make sure that you buy only the best value; and you work hard to obtain the right information to make the most informed decisions possible.

You just want to get that edge over the rest of the crowd.

So the name of the game is to keep all good ideas to yourself. Here's an example: Last time I went to vote I had to wait in line for a really long time. A friend of mine hobbled up next to me on his crutches. I was number 688 and he was number 734. Since they were only up to number 465, we both had a long wait ahead of us. Not so. Once they saw his crutches, Dave was given VIP Gold-Club, Presidential treatment. He was in and out of the voting booth in about five minutes. Next time they hold elections, I’m going in with a pair of crutches.

Look what I just did -I gave away my idea! At the next elections 300 people will turn up with crutches! Silly me. Now my brilliant scheme isn't worth the pixels it's written on.

Makes you wonder about all that information out there. Take the wall Street Journal, for instance. Here is a newspaper with a massive readership. Most of the world reads the Journal. So if the Wall Street Journal publishes an article in which they announce that investing in Brazilian offal exports is the next sure thing, you can bet your bottom dollar (and you just might) that they are misinforming you big time.

How so?

They say that those who can, do; those who can't, teach; those who can't teach, administrate (click here for the whole spiel). Like stockbrokers, if these supposed "experts" were any good at their jobs, they would be multi-millionaires. Why would they bother writing 2000 words about the latest financial Garden of Eden, when they could keep all that information for themselves and away from the hungry masses?

I'll tell you why: Hairdressers and taxi drivers.

Once Bob the taxi driver passes on the tip that stock in Paradise Ferrets is hot, it's too late. They don't mind telling you because once that info hits the papers, the opportunity is long gone. The financial analysts have already plundered that investment. There will be nothing left for you except the dregs. And the next time you let Pierre prune your mop, you'll find out that it's best to sell right now - everyone is doing it! By this time the price has dropped like polonium-filled potato and you've committed the ultimate sin of buying high and selling low.

So how do you get ahead of the game? What's the winning formula? I know the secret, but that would be telling, wouldn't it?

Relaxing, the Hard Way

In the movie "The Pursuit of Happyness" [sic] the protagonist describes a period of his life as "Riding the Bus", where he seems to constantly be going somewhere on the bus or chasing after it as it pulls away from the curb.

Right now I am writing this blog while on a bus. And I am also running up against a deadline - my battery is only at 17% and I have to finish this before the battery light flashes orange and the short, determined beeps signal an imminent shutdown.

But is forcing a shutdown so bad? Sometimes, during the hectic life I seem to lead, it is good to "shutdown" once in a while. By that I don't mean collapsing in a heap on the couch, unable to move because every bone in your body aches. Nor do I mean the type of shutdown that comes at the end of one's life. I'm talking about the type of shutdown that is followed by a "restart".

Thinking about it, it is probably a good idea to turn off, once in a while; to detach yourself from life for a short period of time - recharge your batteries, if you will.

13%

I do that sometimes by watching movies. Just sit back, relax and watch other people run around the screen, solving the problems of the world. But actually, that type of relaxation is not entirely beneficial. Heart-racing thrillers, intense drama, suspense-filled action - movies that leave you breathless until the last scene. It doesn't seem so relaxing now, does it?

10%

So how can you safely switch off from the world? How about renting a yacht and sailing into the deep blue? Extricate yourself from the world, disconnect from all forms of external stimulation. Sound idyllic? Not really. What happens when the ocean swells suddenly overtake the boat - or you run out of food and have to spend all day fishing with a broken line and a single Doritos for bait, just to stave off hunger? What if you are overrun by pirates who steal your compass and so you end up sailing to some unfriendly country where they strip you of your yacht and sell you to wealthy landowners who use you as a whipping boy for their recalcitrant child? How relaxing could that be?

7%

Here's an idea - stay home. You can spend your time sleeping, and hope you don't get a cramp from not moving enough. Or you could sit and play online games against strangers in another country who will ask no questions before violently slicing thorough your avatar with magical swords. Or you could just sit on your balcony and hope that you don't get skin cancer from the UV rays that apparently shine through the clouds, only to penetrate deep into your cells.

3%

So it seems that the only real way to relax without any negative consequences is to-

A Hairy Situation

As you can see from my profile picture, I used to have a beard. It was a good beard. A thick, solid, bushy thing. That beard and I spent many years together. It kept me warm and was an amusement for children. But now it is gone and I am beardless.

It was a snap decision that I mulled over for a number of weeks. One morning I decided to trim my beard and then I just couldn't help myself - I went too far and there was no going back. Everyone says that I now look 20 years younger. Someone mistook me for my younger brother. My daughter's friend didn't recognize me. It's like a new lease on life.

They may say that the clothes maketh the man, but I think it's the facial hair. In fact, it may be so fashionable to "mow the lawn" that some don't stop at the face. They keep going north.

According to Wikipedia, "Head shaving is much more common among men. It is often associated with religious practice, the armed forces and some competitive sports such as swimming, running and extreme sports". I thought the armed forces and competitive sports are religious practices...

But being clean-shaven isn't a sure-fire recipe for success.

Bruce Doule, an iconic Aussie Rules Football player used to sport a beard. Take a look at his picture and you will see why he was nicknamed the "flying doormat". Doulle was a half-back flanker for the Mighty Blues and, despite his scraggly appearance, was considered a very accomplished player.

Not a full beard, but Robert DiPierdomenico ("Dipper") has a trademark mustache that makes him instantly recognizable, on and off the field. Here's a great photo of Dipper, looking nice and unkempt. Dipper was also considered a champion Aussie Rules footballer in his day and was inducted into the Australian Football Hall of Fame in 2007.

According to The World of Beards, the greatest bearded sportsman of all time was Sergio Batista, "Sergio Batista is the only man to have held the [Soccer] World Cup aloft his facial furniture and therefore unrivaled as the World of Beards greatest sportsman". Yeah, but he wasn't an Aussie footy player.

And there are those to whom beards are sacred.

If you have a beard, you might want to make your way to Santa Barbara on 23 May 2009 for the Annual World Beard and Moustache Championships (not sponsored by Gillette). If you think your beard or Mo can stand up to the competition, you might want to sign up for Beard Team USA. Here's one member, Eric Brown from New York, NY, who will probably win, if they can find him under all that hair.



The World of Beards, which I must say seems more like a support group for hairy men, reports the following:

Each year King Williams College on the Isle of Man quizzes its pupils with possibly the hardest quiz ever devised by man. This Christmas the school has asked its pupils a number of questions about BEARDS! Clearly the future leaders of the country are being prepared for a life where a facial companion is a friend that will bring power and influence.

Perhaps beards are in and smooth faces are out. I should have done my research before putting shaver to face. I'm clearly out of whack with facial hair fashion. At least on the Isle of Man.

The Soft Sell

I remember that when I was a kid we were honored by a visit from an encyclopedia salesman. One evening he came to our house and sat himself at our dining room table. I remember thinking that he was a young fellow, or at least he seemed so. Clean cut, jacket and tie, pearly white smile and shiny black brogue shoes. I also remember that he was a smooth talker.

He was a great salesman. Pitching the Encyclopedia Britannica couldn't be easy, but it was the 1980s and Wikipedia didn't yet exist. He spoke with great honesty about all the benefits of the 20-volume set to a family with teen and pre-teen kids. "And what would you use it for?" he asked me as I leaned awkwardly against the piano, fidgeting the way a 9-year-old does. "For school work, I guess". The salesman smiled and spread out his hands, palms open, gesturing at the children. He beamed.

I'm sure that my parents didn't hear the spiel. I'm positive that they were oblivious to the salesman's statistics of how many of his customers ended up as Nobel Laureates. I think their mind was on the price.

I don't remember the going rate for the set, but if you take the current price of $1,200 and convert it to Australian currency (which is where I am from), it would be approximately $1,675AU. According to McCrindle Research (pdf), the average wage in Australia in 2008 was, conveniently, $1,000AU per week. Rounding it off, that makes the cost of the encyclopedias about 1.675 weeks salary. According to the same study, the average weekly Australian salary in 1983 was $324AU, making the cost of the set approximately $543AU. So that would be my guess (see "Creative Journalism").

When the salesman left the house, I wondered why our bookshelf was not adorned by the 20 magnificent volumes of the famous Britannica. My parents most likely breathed a sigh of relief. The salesman was good, but not that good.

Today I answered a knock at the door. It was an encyclopedia salesman. I almost called the Israel Antiquities Authority to make sure this guy is put in a glass box on display in some museum. I just could not believe that they still existed.

My salesman was not as smooth as my parents' was. My guy was dressed in ill-fitting navy blue track-pants, a plaid shirt and a coat that, from its length, looked more like a bolero than anything else. Sporting a bushy moustache, he breathed out heavily through his nose after each sentence. And he never stopped talking. One sentence ran into the other and I couldn't understand what he was saying half the time.

All of a sudden the price dropped by 30 shekels, and I hadn't said a word. I decided to keep mum, maybe I could bargain him down some more. I just looked at him as he kept jabbering on. After he dropped the price by another ten shekels, I decided to put the guy out of his misery. "After all," he sputtered, "I'm selling this at a loss".

Unlike my previous experience, this time when the salesman walked away, I didn't have to eye the empty space on the shelf. We bought a ten-volume set of the childrens' encyclopedia. They are actually very good and come with nice glossy pictures. Just my style.

Encyclopedia salesmen are a rare species. How could I refuse a bushy moustache and a jovial, albeit, unshaven face? The swanky suit and tie, smooth-talking thing was unnecessary. All through the sale I had no idea what he was talking about, but I smiled respectfully, looked concerned as appropriate, and laughed heartily when he laughed as I handed over my credit card.

The Name Game

Let's say that you wanted to open a new business. Whatever name you choose for your business will have to say a lot about it in only one or two words. For example, choosing a name like "Nik's Cakes" does tell consumers that you sell cakes, but why is "Nik's Cakes" better or worse than "Bob's Cakes"? It's boring, unimaginative and not very sexy.

Go to http://www.biztrek.com/articles/Naming%20your%20business.htm and you will get lots of good advice about choosing a business name:

Curl Up and Dye may sound cute now, but after six months, you and your customers will become very weary of the joke.

Yeah, especially if you sell cakes.

If choosing a name for your business is hard, how difficult it must be to choose a name for yourself. Imagine that you had just ratted on a mafia boss and were taken into the witness protection program. You get to live in a new location with a new job, new life and, of course, a new name. What are you going to call yourself? Bob Smith? I think not. How about something more interesting, like "Alfonzo de la Cruz" - perhaps that's a little over the top, especially if you are a Hassidic Jew. It's hard. Your name is your identity. How much does it say about you?

Actually, not much.

Do you really think that Bobby Blacksmith is really a blacksmith, or that June Tailor is really a tailor? She isn't, her father wasn't and her Grandfather doesn't know suede from silk. It's just the name she was born with. Nothing more and nothing less. Anyway, it's probably easier to inherit a name than have to choose your own.

But if you have to choose a name, why not go with the most popular? If everyone is doing it, why not you, too?

According to the 1990 US census, the following is a list of the top four most common surnames:

1. Smith 2,772,200
2. Johnson 2,232,100
3. Williams 1,926,200
4. Jones 1,711,200

It seems the Jones' couldn't keep up with the Johnsons'.

If you have to choose your own name, settling for one of the classics could just be tiresome. However, if you wanted to disappear into the sea of Smiths or Johnsons or Williams, well, it's probably not so hard. And blending in with the crowd could be just what you need when dodging the mafia. It's got to be harder to find a "John Williams" than an "Alfonzo de la Cruz".

Then again, if you have ever watched a movie where someone joins the witness protection program, you will know that inevitably the mafia sniffs them out. The witness invariably takes a bullet in the head while executing a hairpin net shot in badminton, or when about to perform a Zwischenzug (look it up) in a pool-side game of chess. So you may as well give yourself an interesting name. Spice up the headline news a little for the readers:

Last night, Alfonzo de la Cruz, the Jewish Hassidic owner of the famous "Curl Up and Dye" bakery, was gunned down by an unidentified mafia hitman. "Mr. de la Cruz played it bravely and valiantly, despite being in a difficult position," said his protector, Detective Bob Johnson. "Our investigations so far have found that he would have been check-mate in two moves, anyway".

Creative Journalism

I am the first to admit that my level of mathematics is not top notch. Numbers make me dizzy. I once had to be quietly escorted out of a 67th floor elevator. The night-janitor found me curled up in the corner in the fetal position, softly calling for Mamma. All those buttons. All those numbers.

So when I posted my last blog, I didn't really look too carefully into my sources. In fact, as soon as I saw numbers and formulae, my eyes began to glaze over. Digits danced before me in a hazy cloud of fog. If the author says there is a 2.5 billion to one chance of winning the lottery, then that is good enough for me.

Subsequent to that post, I was made aware that I should have done the math myself. It seems I could have increased my chances of winning by 720 times. I was told that if I had read my source's entire article, not just the one paragraph, I would have come to a different conclusion.

I didn't have the patience or the inclination to delve into the intricacies of the matter. Face-value was good enough for me. You see, it's not whether or not the facts are correct, it's whether they are plausible enough to seem correct. Standard journalistic practice.

"Never let the facts get in the way of a good story" is more than a motto; it's journalism's guiding principle. This quote, attributed to either Frank Dobie or Delbert Trew (according to this article, at least) has sold more newspapers than I'd care to count*. Just ask any Fleet Street executive.

The University of Toronto actually has a course called "Creative Journalism":

Creative Journalism uses new and provocative forms of style and content to challenge and change the contemporary media.

In other words, they learn how to mix creative writing with real journalism to make the news more pallatable, exciting and entertaining than it actually is. To do so, they study high-quality publications such as "Rolling Stone, Pitchfork Media, and alternative weeklies". A passing grade is only achieved if your articles begin with "Once upon a time..."

So forgive me for not reading through my source's entire article. Forgive me for not searching for corroborative evidence. Forgive me for not checking that 1+1 does, in fact, equal 2. When it comes to informing the public, 1+1 can equal whatever you want. And why not? If it weren't for creative journalism, we'd be forced to find entertainment in the rivetting fiction of the the stock market results.

*No. I did not obtain any source for this statement. Just believe me, it's easier.

Playing With My Mind

G-d is playing with my mind.

A few months ago my wife and I decided to buy a lottery ticket. It was a spur-of-the-moment decision. What irked me was knowing, not so very deep in my heart, that I was flushing money down the drain. I mean, what are the odds?

According to this site on Lottery Math,

The odds of a "Lotto" style lottery can be found with the formula: n! / (n - r)! r! where n is the highest numbered ball and r is the number of balls chosen. This is called in math a combination. An easier way to think about it is if there are 40 balls and 6 are chosen, there are 40 possible numbers that can come up first, leaving 39 that can come up second, then 38, 37, 36, and finally 35 on the final number. To find out how many numbers that is you multiply 40 ×39 ×38 ×37 ×36 × 35 = 2,763,633,600 making the odds 2 and a half billion to one.

Two and a half billion to one?! The money spent on the ticket could easily have gone to purchasing at least one bottle of beer with a 100% chance of satisfaction, assuming sufficient saltiness of the pretzels, sunflower seeds or peanuts.

But we hadn't yet read this site that says there is a better chance of dying from flesh-eating bacteria (1 million:1) than there is of winning the lottery (2.5 billion:1). So we played.

We won...

..our money back.

"Alright", said G-d, "I'll let you get away with it this time. Next time buy the beer".

Not too long ago I experienced another weak moment. I bought a lottery ticket, letting the machine pick the numbers so I could have someone to blame. I put the ticket in a drawer at home and forgot about it.

Yesterday, while searching for something else, I came across the lottery ticket. The vain hope of fortunes beyond my wildest imagination coaxed me into putting it in my pocket. Later on I found an excuse to wander down to the shops. I did a few errands, purposely eying the lottery store from across the way. Eventually, I found the wherewithal to actually enter the store, knowing that in a few moments a teenage service rep would shatter my dreams with a dismissive shake of his head.

He scanned the ticket.

We won...

...our money back.

G-d is playing with my mind.

The Only Thing In My Life That Isn't Hard Is My Abdomen

Life wasn't meant to be easy. It really wasn't. Well, not for most people. There are those people (who don't really exist, because you don't know any and you don't know anyone who knows any) who have charmed lives. The concept of a charmed life is just that, a concept. Like winning the lottery and paying off your mortgage are concepts.

If one seems to have a charmed life, they should be living in fear of the inevitable difficulty or tragedy which will uncharm their charmed life. It happens all the time in books and movies, which are reflections of real life. The princess lives a happy, care-free existence in the glittering palace. The attendants take care of her every need. Even the elephants in the nearby forest seem to trumpet in tune with each other. Birds, butterflies, sunshine and all that. Then, while she is taking tea on the north balcony, the monster sneaks up behind her and devours her alive. It's going to happen. No surprises there.

If its going well, fear the worst.

You are having the perfect day. Work is flowing smoothly and everything is falling into place. All your private phone calls have been for good things and you had very few work-related conversations. You got out of attending 3 meetings and the cafeteria even served your favorite dessert. Can't you see that you are heading inexorably towards a homeward-bound car crash? Isn't it obvious that something is going to go wrong? Why didn't you prevent the accident by giving yourself a paper-cut on the way out of the office? While uncomfortable, it is much less painful than rolling your car down an embankment. Face it, life wasn't meant to be easy.

Still don't believe me? Here's a real-life case in point. "I thought it was a dumb way to die", was Jeff Bezos' recollection of his could-have-been-last-thoughts when he was the passenger in a near-fatal helicopter crash. Money.cnn.com views the helicopter crash as a metaphor to Bezos' "charmed life" - oh yeah, "But then came the dot com crash" they write. If everything is going perfectly then expect that dot com crash because, baby, life wasn't meant to be easy.

Then you have it going the other way, too. You are down in the dumps and, suddenly, you make it big. Rags to Riches. According to a Forbes.com article in 2007, "Almost two-thirds of the world's 946 billionaires made their fortunes from scratch, relying on grit and determination, and not good genes" So most of the wealthiest people in the world started off poor and then made it into the big-time. Not so charmed before; plenty charmed after, but still doesn't qualify as a "charmed life"because of the first bit. Points earned only later in the game don't make a perfect score.

But my strongest argument that a "charmed life" is nothing more than a popularized quote from Shakespeare is that people are human. That means they die. So even if the person's entire life is going great and they make it to 100 years old with nothing but good luck, success and happiness under their belts, they will still inevitably die. "He was doing great until a sudden heart attack killed him dead in a stalled elevator between the 14th and 15th floors during an electrical outage when an errant cigarette-lighter delivery van collided with a petrol tanker, which rolled into the lobby of his building, setting it on fire." Just one small incident can ruin such a perfect record. How charmed can that be?

So if things seem to be difficult and if life seems to throw you punches that you have trouble avoiding or absorbing, then just remember that those troubles are a blessing in disguise. Imagine if you had a "charmed life", you would do nothing but live in agonizing fear until something bad happened, petrified of the inevitable upsetting of the apple cart. Who wants that? Which is why I'm not so worried when sometimes it seems that the only thing in my life that isn't hard is my abdomen.


This post in in response to a challenge to write about "the only thing in my life that isn't hard is my abdomen".

Something From Nothing

I do not recall in which of the Superman movies it was, but one of the characters took a special pen, drew a butterfly on the floor and watched as it instantly came to life, took off and flew away. In Star trek one would simply instruct the computer to provide a cup of "Early Grey. Hot", and the beverage would instantly materialize for your drinking pleasure.

I once saw an ingenious invention where the user would input a diagram or digital image of a mechanism into the machine and it would build a 3D representation of it using sand and glue. For example, you could feed the machine a diagram of a ball and socket. The machine would start whizzing away and build a working 3D model of it for you. Naturally, it took a really long time to produce such a thing, layer by layer. Also, the accuracy was not perfect and it was limited in its complexity. The 3D model was also not particularly sturdy, given the materials it was made from, but the idea that you can draw a two-dimensional picture and turn it into a physical reality so quickly is amazing.

Now, you might say that this is not so fantastic. After all, take any carpenter, for example, who would sketch a table on a piece of paper and turn that design into a real piece of furniture. An architect does the same sort of thing. However, the difference here is that anyone, without any skills to create something with his own hands, can actually partake of both the design and creation process. It is an exciting concept.

One of the oldest toy companies in America, FAO Schwartz (est. 1862), provides a similar activity for elementary school kids They have a service called “Imagine it”, where the child sits down at a kindergarten-sized table and, using nothing more than a Crayola Crayon, scrap paper and the world perception of a six-year-old, designs their own clothes. The drawing is then passed on to an eagerly awaiting staff of expert tailors who then proceed to create a life-size real version of the child’s drawing. Nifty.

The problem with this is that kids have wonderful imaginations. A third-grader would never design an outfit comprising blue-jeans and a T-shirt. Boring. They are more likely to draw a gaudy, glittering, colorful outfit which, if brought to life, would render them the school’s laughing stock. Come to think of it, that’s probably how fashion was designed in the 1980s.

I had to check this out, so I took a look at the FAO Schwartz website and came to the following conclusion: normally you would sit your kids down to draw pictures as a way of passing time, entertaining them and releasing their creative juices. Drawing can be a wonderful learning experience and fantastic for a child’s development in many ways. But for $900 a dress, you might want to consider reading them a story, instead.

Practical Jokes

There is nothing funnier than a good practical joke. I'm talking about a really well thought out, convincing set up. As long as you are not the victim, practical jokes are usually very funny. Take this oldie-but-goodie as an example (Link to YouTube):




Now that is just a classic.

I've played a few practical jokes in my time. Like when my colleagues went out to lunch and I replaced their computer monitors with cardboard boxes on which I had drawn a "screen" and a knob. One guy returned to his desk and sat there laughing for about five minutes. The other fellow didn't bat an eyelid. He sat down to work, typed a few letters and then called me on the phone to say, "Hey, Yossi, something's wrong with my computer".

Problem with that joke was that I had to schlep the monitors back to the workstations from the meeting room where I had hidden them. But it was worth the trouble.

Then there are other types of practical jokes, like those played on poor, unsuspecting people by Candid Camera or copy-cat programs. Like the time they got a delivery man to pull up outside a house on the side of a hill. When he opened the double-doors at the back of the truck thousands of unstoppable balls of all sizes rolled out of the truck. Funny, harmless, messy.

Jeremy Beadle was one practical jokester who had a show called "Beadles About" where he would play all sorts of practical jokes on people, like destroying their house and then showing up laughing "Ha! Gotcha!". Of course, he wouldn't do that every week. Sometimes he would go lower-scale and blow up their car or have their boss fire them, just for the gag.

According to this Wikipedia article, at the peak of its popularity, Beadle's About had 15 million viewers. It got so popular that, according to the Wikipedia article, in 1993 a man was arrested for pulling a policeman's beard thinking that he was Jeremy Beadle in disguise. Yeah, right. Twenty five heavily armed and highly trained SWAT policemen come bursting into a cocaine refinery in a grotty warehouse at the back of a strip club, shattering glass windows all around the illegal Chinese workers. The chief crook drops his weapon, doubles over in laughter and pulls on the policeman's beard and goes, "Ho! Ha! Very funny! We've been pranked by Beadle!" Likely story.

Take a look at this example of "Beadle's About" from Funny-Videos.co.uk

Funny thing is, they never told the victim that it wasn't his van!

What happens if one day an elderly gentleman comes home to find the house his family has lived in for seven generations completely leveled to the ground? While writhing on the floor in the agony of a heart attack, Beadle pops his head out and goes "Surprise!" Then the victim looks up at the grinning Beadle and scratches into the microphone "I hid my life-savings in the walls of the dining room that you just burned to the ground". Better call two paramedics.

When Jeremy Beadle died on 25 January 2008 at the age of 59, nobody believed him. They still don't.

It's a Violent World and It's Your Fault!

I suppose that the majority of parents want their children to live full and happy lives, free of violence, murder, death, pain and suffering.

According to this article about school violence:

"The fact is, violence of one sort or another is part of many schools today. Fortunately, this usually involves a small group of people fighting amongst themselves...Since the 1992-3 school year, 270 violent deaths have occurred at schools across the nation."

So, in other words, it's fine for kids to shoot each other, as long as they only do it among themselves. Sounds like a plan.

The article goes on to report staggering statistics about how many schools across the United States reported violent crimes on school premises each year, stating that the rate of violence has decreased. They warn:

"We must fight against this complacency without overreacting. We must fight to make our schools safe."

Isn't that akin to "KILL ALL EXTREMISTS!"

But it is our own fault. We have taught our kids to be violent.

How? Language.

Case in point: what did I learn in English class in high-school? To Kill a Mockingbird, Macbeth, Julius Caesar (among others) - all wonderful and highly acclaimed works of literature about rape, lying, murder, assassination, treachery and death. Just the sorts of things you would want your teenage children to study in depth. And we say that movies and computer games are responsible for youth violence! Harumph!

That's not to mention the fact that the English language itself is rife with oft used violent expressions:

• break a leg
• give my eye tooth
• give my left arm
• cut off his nose to spite his face
• kill time
• roll with the punches
• beat a dead horse
• to step on his toes
• to force one's hand
• to bite the hand that feeds you
• a dead ringer
• she cried blue murder
  
• stick out like a sore thumb
• ankle biter
• it's a slap in the face
• you beat me to the punch
• like banging your head against a brick wall
• hit me with your best shot
• keep your eye on the target
• hit the target
• He's such a riot
  
• to tackle a problem
• better than a kick in the pants
• when push comes to shove
• he's a real lady killer
• keep your nose to the grindstone
• to gang up on someone
  
• won the battle but lost the war
• on the warpath
• blinded by the light
• straw that broke the camel's back
• to put your nose out of joint

By educating these children we are turning them into thugs. By teaching them language skills, we are helping them to destroy society. Literacy is dangerous. Plain and simple. Keep the kids in the dark. Better to be stupid and alive than educated and dead, I say. Drugs and alcohol don't cause gang wars, Mrs Miller's 8th Grade Book Club does!

Do We Eat Too Much?

I have been mulling over the question of whether or not we eat too much. Do we really need three meals a day, or will one or two suffice? Even if we eat healthily, are we being wasteful by eating too frequently? And is there too much emphasis on food in our lives?

Do a quick Google search for "eat too much" and you will find all sorts of sites about eating too much meat, not eating enough meat, eating too much salt, and not eating enough salt. It seems like every few years something on the "do not eat" list becomes healthy and vice versa. So don't despair, in ten years scientists will announce that gorging oneself on salty, oily, sugary, snacks is good for you - only, gorge in moderation.

A rather long article in Time magazine boils it all down to society and culture: "We eat together when we celebrate, and we eat together when we grieve; we eat together when a loved one is preparing to leave, and we eat together when the loved one returns. We solve our problems over the family dinner table, conduct our business over the executive lunch table, entertain guests over cake and cookies at the coffee table."

We have moved food from being merely a means for survival into a social ritual. But, nutrition and parties aside, food has unquestionably infiltrated itself into other aspects of our lives. So much so that even our lexicon is overflowing with gastronomically related expressions:

- to chew the fat
- too much to stomach
- spews forth information
- hunger for knowledge
- thirst for the truth
- bit off more than he could chew
- bite sized pieces of information
- eating her words
- have his cake and eat it, too
- to eat humble pie

...and so on and so forth. No wonder we are all so food-focused.

As interesting a picture as this may paint for you, whether you like it or not, food is on your mind.

My Life Ambition

I have to confess that although I don’t mind working, the thought of going on a really, really long vacation is very appealing. I’m talking about taking at least a year off to travel the world and just enjoy life. Sounds idyllic? Read on.

My dream is to buy a luxury bus, outfitted like a first-class hotel suite: plush carpets, mahogany trim, marble bathroom, leather seats, comfy couches and all that. Then I’d drive the bus around the world, never needing to worry about packing, unpacking, checking in or checking out. I’d go where I wanted and enjoy hot showers, home-cooked meals and top-rate comfort in the middle of the city, desert, rainforest or mountain peak.

For that I’d need a bus license, a whole bunch of free time and a lazy $250,000 to purchase the vehicle. It is not a dream out of range, assuming I sold my house, quit my job, took a loan and sent my kids to live with an elderly wart-ridden aunt in a dilapidated mansion on the top of a dark, distant hill in a wooded forest. Okay, the last part is not essential. It doesn’t have to be a wooded forest.

Then I’d have to buy a beaver.

That’s one sentence that you weren’t expecting. "I’d have to buy a beaver". Actually, that would be a “Beaver”, which is the name of one of the companies that sells luxury motor homes. “Beaver”, as in www.beavermotorcoaches.com.

“Get into a Beaver” is their catch-phrase, which, taken literally, conjures up images of large, brown rodents holding their buck-toothed mouths wide open and pointing with their free paw down their gullets as they garble, “Get in, already!”

But I like that slogan, “Get into a Beaver”. Think of the newly retired couple stopping off at a gas-station in the remotest part of an Arizona desert. The husband goes to the cashier to pay for the diesel, feels his back pocket, turns to his wife and says, “Dear, I think I left my wallet in the Beaver. Would you mind getting it for me?”

“Get out of the fish!” is another sentence you didn’t expect to read here, but then again, you just did. It’s also a sentence that I never thought I’d utter, but I managed to say it often, making perfect sense each time. “The fish” referred to an inflatable swimming-pool toy in the shape of a fish and that the “get out” was directed to various children so that the other children could have a turn.

My life ambition is to sit in a fish inside a Beaver – and the scary thing is that you now understand exactly what I mean.

The Volunteer Conspiracy

Recently at a restaurant I overheard a group of people talking about their ages. They were all about 18 years old. That's when it hit me that I am a full 15 years older than them. When I was 18, they were 3. That means that when I got my driver's license, they were still wetting their beds. When I was at university, they couldn't even spell university. It was a revelation because on some level I still identify with them, sort of. In my mind I am still 18.

Would I want to be 18 again and go through all of the stuff that 18 year olds go through? Hell, yeah! 18 year olds have the most fun. Most of them live at home with their parents (for some this is bad, for me it was bliss); most are studying; and socializing responsibilities come before all else. What more could you want out of life?

Ah, but I am wrong - fulfillment doesn't come out of "living it up", at least not in 2006. According to the Australian Bureau of Statistics, "In 2006, 5,227,000 people aged 18 years and more had undertaken some form of voluntary work in the previous 12 months" That's quite a nice number of fulfilled people.

Hang on, what are we saying here? Help others so that you can feel good about yourself? So is it about them or is it about you? Here are some extracts from the official blog of the Florida Public Relations Association (FPRA):

"On a purely selfish level, volunteering makes you feel good about yourself"
"From a professional standpoint, volunteering is a great way to add to your portfolio"
"There is no greater way to expand or add to your skill set than by volunteering"
On networking: "The more people you know, the more opportunities there are out there for you"

I was expecting the last paragraph to say something like: "Despite all of the benefits to you, volunteer work is about giving to others and helping the less fortunate in your community". However, no such luck. It seems that volunteering is about you!

Wait a moment. Let's not be rash. That's only one source, right? How about this survey conducted by "Imagine Canada" (www.givingandvolunteering.ca) in 1997 which produced the following results:

Three-quarters of volunteers (76%) reported gaining interpersonal skills such as understanding people better, motivating others, and dealing with difficult situations.

Two-thirds of volunteers (66%) said they developed communication skills in public speaking, writing, conducting meetings, and public relations.

Sixty-four percent reported an increase in their knowledge about such issues as health, women, politics, criminal justice, or the environment.

More than half of unemployed volunteers (54%) believed that volunteering would increase their chances of finding a job.

I could go on, but that's enough. I proved my point. Volunteers are single-mindedly hell-bent on squeezing the most out of the less fortunate. Let's face it, the underprivileged are being used as stepping stones for some self-important volunteer's career prospects. Soup kitchens are evil dens of self-centeredness, thinly veiled in a facade of "helping" people - yeah, volunteers helping themselves, that is.

My research has conclusively proven that "volunteers" are out there, everywhere, masquerading as a positive force, when they are actually a devilish cult. So next time someone does something "nice" for you, think twice. They may offer you soup, but they are really in it for themselves. Trust me.

The Modern Dwarf

Imagine if your entire life you were someone else’s curiosity, a pet, a zoo animal, an object over which people “ooh” and “ahh”. I can’t imagine that it would be a pleasant experience. Think midget, circa 1600 CE.

Now imagine that your entire life you were someone else’s curiosity, as before, but this time you are paid millions to be gawked at. The more people who point their fingers, the more prestige, fame and fortune come your way. You are invited to meet the President of the United States, your wedding to a fellow little person is front-page news and your name lives on in history. Think Tom Thumb, late 19th Century.

The modern dwarf can thank people like Tom Thumb. The modern dwarf can now exploit his diminutive stature by acting in diverse roles such as Snow White or Star Wars. Alternatively, he can carry a copy of the equal opportunity act and sue the large-size pants off anyone who can even spell the word “discrimination”.

The modern dwarf has career opportunities open to him that are far more diverse and interesting than those of regular sized people. They can be teachers, computer programmers or circus performers. They can be accountants, doctors or human cannonballs. They can be actuaries, bus drivers or garden gnomes. The possibilities are endless.

The modern dwarf can be the star of professional sports that you and I cannot, such as Dwarf Tossing, which has an international professional league. All you need is a helmet, a landing mat, a dwarf and a six-foot drunk. Place a few bets, hold the little guy by his shorts (pun), swing him back and forth and then throw that dwarf in the general direction of the mat. It’s a team sport.

Make no mistake, the modern dwarf has it good. Oh, and they are also great at small talk…was that a little unfair? Perhaps a tiny bit.

(This blog is in response to a challenge to write about 'The Modern Dwarf').

The Perfect Business

One of the oldest and well-tested truisms of business is to be the first in the market. If you are first on the scene with a new product or service not offered by anyone else, you are more likely to succeed.

I was trying to think of a business I could start that would fit this requirement. Then, out of the blue, it came to me during a conversation with one of my colleagues. He said that if he was to start a terrorist organization, he wouldn’t call it something boring (think Al Jihad), he would name it something exciting, like a sports team (think Tamil Tigers).

He is right. Your name means everything – how people perceive your organization is vital to your success. Do you think your terrorist organization would be respected if you called it “Belligerent Bunny Rabbits”?

We live in a world of terrorism, where, like McDonalds, there’s a new group in the industry springing up on every street corner (see the US State Department’s list of terror organizations). Now is the opportune time to offer terrorist organization marketing services. Why not? Joe Average doesn’t really know the difference between Al Qa’ida, Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigade, Hamas or Fatah. To him, they are all just the same. If your organization is responsible for an incident and it is mistakenly attributed to some other organization, who will know and who will care? You have to stand up and get yourself noticed. A good marketing campaign is the way to go.

Logos, slogans, full-page advertisements in broadsheet newspapers, a visual media campaign, an interactive website and radio slots – that’s the way to get your message out there. We will get you on Oprah, if that’s what it takes to ensure that your terrorist organization gets the credit and reputation you work so hard to build.

The more I think about it the more I realize that terrorist organization marketing services really is the perfect business. Now, all I need is to employ someone to collect on bad debts. You interested?

Low-Risk Strategies for Buying a Used Car

Someone challenged me to write about how to buy a used car. The simple answer to that is to find a car you are interested in, approach the seller, give him money and drive the car home. But that would be cheating my challenger.

The topic should really be “low-risk strategies for buying a used car”. Although that title sounds more like a management text-book than it does a blog post, I think it more accurately describes the essence of my challenger’s challenge.

So what are the low-risk strategies you can use when buying a used car? The answer is that there aren’t any. You just have to take your best shot. Sometimes you will be lucky and find a good car, and other times you will end up buying a vacuum cleaner that sucks your money right out of your pocket. But there are things that you can do to minimize the risk of buying a four-wheeled-dud.

The first thing to do is to really ask yourself if you want to buy a used car or not. The high risk of wasting thousands on a lemon might be enough to push you to buy a new car instead. But new-car salesmen are just as bad as used-car salesmen. Certainly, the car itself will probably go okay, but new-car dealers will relentlessly push the buyer into buying all the extras. This often leaves the buyer with less in the bank account but some nice, fancy gadgets in the car that won’t ever be used (passenger-side airbags? Feh!). So when you are weighing the pros and cons of buying a used car versus buying a new car, just figure that you are going to get royally worked over no matter what you do. It’s easier when you learn to accept that fact at face value.

Never buy a car from a friend. That is my next piece of advice. You may have ridden in the car many times, or you may even have driven it from time to time. Over the years your friend may have described to you his dealings with car mechanics. He may have spun adventurous tales of danger and excitement, like the time when his car broke down on a busy six-lane highway and he had to cross to the other side to get to a phone booth, but was attacked by an angry chicken. You may think you know this car. But you don’t. For in the deep recesses of your friend’s mind is the thought that one day he might sell the car to you. So, whether he realizes it or not, he won’t tell you the full story behind the breakdown (he didn’t get a flat tire, the rear axle sheared itself off the chassis). He may not do it consciously, but your friend is holding back. I would believe the part about the chicken, but a flat tire? Come on.

Know to ask the right questions and then doubt every answer you get. “Has this car ever been involved in an accident” is a great question. Assume that the answer is “yes”, but you are more likely to hear, “I was once driving south on a vacation with my family, when the car in front of us spun out of control. Thankfully this car has great brakes so I managed to stop on time. The driver of the other car was okay, but his car had to be towed to the next town. Luckily my car is very powerful, so I attached the tow-rope and hauled it 100 miles down the road, in the snow, barefoot”.

Another classic question is, “When was the car last serviced?” The true answer is probably that Cousin Angelo came down last weekend and helped to get the car going by repeatedly whacking the starter-motor with a monkey-wrench. However, the answer that you will probably get is, “I service the car regularly. Unfortunately the service log-book was destroyed when I drove my car at high-speed through the collapsing wall of a burning building to save a trapped fireman, a small child and her teddy bear. I managed to save them and the car emerged unscathed, but on the way out of the burning building the fireman flipped through the log book, commenting on how I only used authorized mechanics, when a huge bird of prey swooped down, grabbed the log book and then dropped it into the fiery depths of the second floor, never to be seen again”.

So buying a car is a tricky sort of a business, new or used. If I were you, I’d just take the bus.

The Ultimate Vacation

Where did you go for your last vacation? Disneyland? Hawaii? Europe? Colin went to Mongolia. He wrote about it in his most fascinating blog, creatively titled "Colin's Mongolian Adventure". Let's not knock Colin. He went to a different destination - to a place where he could see something new and exciting, to challenge himself and come back with engaging stories and lasting memories. I hope Colin doesn't mind if I reproduce a small section of his blog:

To summarize, everything in Mongolia can accurately be explained by merely adding the words "Crazy Mongolian" at the beginning of the name. (E.g. Crazy Mongolian bus drivers; Crazy Mongolian jungle birds; Crazy Mongolian construction workers; and Crazy Mongolian liver diseases.)

This is truly the best I can explain the country.

After all the planning, effort and expense he put into his adventure-trip to Mongolia, the best way he can summarize the place is to call the people "crazy"? Whatever would Gengis Kahn think of Mongolia's hard-earned reputation? "Crazy", indeed! He would be rolling in his grave if he read that. But I thought we weren't going to knock Colin. Let's face it, at lest he left his comfort zone and did something interesting, even if his summary of the whole experience is a little short on adjectives.

It seems to me, though, that the reason most people want to go away on a vacation is either for: luxury (think 6 star Hawaiian resort hotel), fun (think Disneyland), quiet (picture deserted tropical beaches, fine, white sand and exquisite solitude) or adventure (backpacking in Europe, a ride down the Amazon, or an African safari). I think the last category of people get the most out of their vacation. Adventurers get to meet interesting people, enjoy fascinating experiences and contract exotic diseases.

I bet that the ultimate adventure holiday would be a trip to space. According to this short piece on www.space.com, "on April 28, 2001, Dennis Tito, a California-based multi-millionaire, became the first ever space tourist". Mr Tito boarded a Russian spacecraft and then spent two weeks on the International Space Station.

Now that has to be the ultimate vacation.

Firstly, you have the excitement of the buildup. You are sent to a secret Russian camp to learn how to survive lack of gravity, oxygen deprivation and G-forces that push your face through to the back of your head. Then you pay millions of dollars and trust your life to a spacecraft made by a country that can't even produce a decent automobile. You then leave your spacecraft and live in an isolated metal box called a space station, which is basically a fragile pod equivalent to a tiny, vulnerable Lego construction, delicately floating in a great ocean of nothingness. You then spend two weeks getting in the way of a bunch of nervous scientists, hoping that the oxygen doesn't run out, that equipment doesn't malfunction, that asteroids don't crush you while you sleep, that food rations don't get accidentally shot out of an airlock, that aliens don't attack, or that the pilot for your return trip doesn't lose the keys to the spaceship. I can think of nothing more fun than that.

Tito's 2-week jaunt on the International Space Station in 2001 hasn't yet spawned a space-hotel industry. Despite the predictions (or fantasies) of futurists, techies and trekies alike, space-station hotels are still a long way off. A less-than-thrilling article by Leonard David entitled, "The Future of Travel: Aquatic to Cosmic Destinations" quotes an "expert" who says, "You can't have a successful hotel if you don't have the means of getting people there." How cleverly insightful.

Fortunately or unfortunately, at least for now, the majority of us are limited to searching for more Earthly adventures. So next time you feel like a break from the drudgery of life, either borrow a couple of million, learn Russian and bunk down with the Cosmonauts, or do what Colin did and find something different, like climbing Mount Everest using only a ball of string and a toothpick.

Send me a postcard.

How to Open a Coconut

I was surfing the web and came across a very informative site called www.howtoopencoconuts.com. It shouldn't surprise me that such a site exists, but I found it amusing that there is an entire website dedicated to showing you how to open a coconut.

The way this website advises you to open the coconut is by delicately tapping holes in the end of the coconut and then draining the liquid (coconut water). Once the coconut water has been extracted, gently wrap the coconut in a towel and then sledge the thing with a hammer until pulverized. You may wish to bare your teeth, yell and think of something that makes you angry. I call that a bonus.

The funny thing about this method is that at the top of the website are the following words, "but we humans can't just sit around and let monkeys show us up, right?" - yeah, right. Monkeys can crack open a coconut with their bare hands, a banana peel and a pebble, but we use rusty nails and hammers. Sure, we are much smarter than them.

This got me thinking about the most efficient method for opening coconuts.

I went to About.com, which is a great resource for advice on almost anything. They suggest that after draining the coconut of its juices (by using a corkscrew to poke it in the eyes), you whack the coconut with the blunt edge of a knife. If that doesn't work, bake the coconut in the oven for 15 minutes and then whack it with the blunt edge of a knife. I think they like whacking things with blunt edges of knives.

WikiHow suggests that you hold the coconut in the palm of your hand and have a go at it with the blunt edge of a machete. "Hey, can you hold this coconut for a minute while I go crazy over it with a machete? Don't worry, I'm only using the blunt edge". Ah, no. Live-Food.com shows you a video in which the person demonstrating how to open the coconut wields a meat cleaver the size of Greenland and then tells you not to cut your fingers off. Thanks for the advice.

Jeremy and Michael, whose coconut-opening video is featured on lonelyplanettv.com, demonstrate their somewhat unique method. According to these two outdoorsey types, all you need is a swiss-army-knife, a coconut, a car jack and a heavy off-road vehicle. Simply puncture the eyes of the coconut with the swiss-army-knife and prop the coconut between the car jack and the underside of the heaviest part of the car. Pump the jack until the coconut explodes under the pressure.

So there you have it. If you are planning on getting yourself stranded on a deserted tropical island, all you need to take with you is a hammer, a nail, a towel, an oven, a corkscrew, a large, meat cleaver, a swiss-army-knife, a car jack and a heavy 4x4. I don't know about you, but to me it seems easier just to bring along a monkey.

News: Entertain Me!

To me, there is nothing like sitting on the couch with a nice big, hot cup of coffee and a newspaper. It's a mystery to me, but for some reason it can be very relaxing to be able to sip a steaming cuppa and read the news: usually morbid stuff like how many people died in what tragedy in which part of the world.

I remember that when I used to have a TV at home I would watch the news as a form of entertainment. Sure, I rationalized that I was "informing myself" about world events. But, get real, it was enjoyable to sit and munch on a cheese-topped cracker and listen to the newscasters report on things that only happen to other people.

It is for this reason, I also used to like listening to the news on the radio. Talk-back radio was especially fun because you got to hear regular people air their opinions on how leaders of foreign countries should shape their policies towards other foreign countries. When it comes to foreign affairs (especially someone else's), everyone is an expert.

The Internet has brought a whole new dimension to the news. If the regular news isn't entertaining enough, you can now amuse yourself with made-up news (ala The Onion) or with news of people doing stupid things (News of the Wierd).

One of my favorite books "Chronicle of the 20th Century", is a compendium of newspaper-like articles spanning the 20th Century. The articles in the book include happenings from around the world, but have a focus on Australia and its involvement in world affairs. A marvelous gift from my parents-in-law.

There are serious articles about world wars, political upheavals, tragedies and famine. Then there are nostalgic pieces covering social, cultural and sporting issues (like the fact that Kaarlo Makinen of Finland won the gold medal for wrestling in the Bantamweight division in the 1928 Amsterdam Olympic Games). The inside front cover of the book is a map of the world as it stood in 1900. The inside back cover shows a map of the world as it stood in 1999. It's really quite interesting to see how events moved those lines around.

The great thing about this book is that you can pick it up at any point in the 20th Century and then just go with it and follow the articles through time. The articles themselves are not original newspaper articles. Each piece is written using the style and terminology of the day, with the knowledge of the time. It is absolutely fascinating. Break out the beer and sunflower seeds and I can sit for hours, and relive Israel's miraculous birth and survival or immerse myself in the Great Depression of the 1930s.

Whichever way you look at it, it's funny how news, no matter how stupid, inspiring or horrible, keeps us entertained. So next time there's an earthquake, tsunami, economic crisis or upset in international one-day cricket, boil the kettle, make yourself comfortable and enjoy yourself.

Center of Attention

Why is it that some people seek to be the center of attention? There are some situations where being the focus is expected (as the bride at your wedding, for example) and there are times when one should stay out of the limelight (for instance, when you are being investigated for fraud).

As a kid, the best way to seek attention was to either win an award or throw a tantrum. Both tactics worked for me. As an adult, I have noticed that it becomes more and more difficult to be the center of attention. Winning awards is harder to do and throwing tantrums is not nearly as effective as I would have hoped, so I have discovered.

In my opinion, the more successful attention seekers in a social scene are those with a really good sense of humor. Witty people tend to attract others. Everyone likes a good laugh, especially if the person telling the joke or the story tells it well. On the other hand, it is a bit dangerous because you can lose your audience just as easily as you got them. A few bad jokes, botched punch-lines, mistimings or even a heckler or two can be devastating to your reputation. Remember, you don’t want to be a stand-up-comic. You want to be a people magnet.

Below you will find hints and tips that I compiled to assist those who would like to try to use humor to become the center of attention. Keep in mind that there are no free steak knives and no guarantees…

Firstly, you have to make sure that you have a good balance between how much you speak and how much someone else in the crowd speaks. You don’t want some guy telling a long and involved story about an accounting problem he solved, “…and then I realized that I’d put the wrong amount in the debit column! Can you believe it?!" Hilarious. You will lose your admirers in less than a second. On the other hand, you need to create the illusion of a conversation. People need to feel wanted.

When and how much to laugh is also a tricky thing. On one hand, you want to encourage people to gather around you. Laughing is a great pull-in for passers by. But laughing too much at your own jokes can make you look foolish. Especially if they can tell that you are faking it. Practice faking being genuine. It helps a lot.

Hold a drink. A glass in your hand is a great tool for helping you to limit your arm movements so you don’t look like a monkey on drugs when you tell your stories. It is also useful for when you pause for special effect. Whether to look contemplatively into your glass, to take a long slurp or a short sip is a matter of judgment. It all depends on the effect you want to create. Whatever you do, make sure the glass is only one-third full – and don’t gesticulate wildly or you will spill the contents on one of your audience.

Eye contact. This is very important. Nobody likes a person who tells jokes while looking at their shoes unless, of course, you are an actuary. On the other hand, don’t hold anyone’s gaze for too long. You will lose the rest of your audience. Make a point of looking at everyone in your audience, except for the person about whom you are telling the joke. That would be a bad idea.

Be cool. Wear clothes that make you look sophisticated yet comfortable. Half-sitting on a stool while half-leaning at the bar is a perfect pose. You seem cool and relaxed, especially with a drink in one hand. Think James Bond, but funnier.

If people start to leave, and you are down to five people, excuse yourself and walk right up to another group of people. Fake knowing someone in the new crowd, if you must. You don’t want to be left surrounded by only a small group of people and you want to be seen to know others, too. If you are in the unfortunate situation where you are left with only one person and that person leaves, definitely do not shout across the room, “Hey, did I ever tell you the one about the…” It is doubtful that the person will turn around and say, “Oh, no, you didn’t! Please, you must tell it to me now!” You will instantly destroy the reputation you worked hard to build up.

If you have a bad night, don’t despair. As they say in showbiz: “no publicity is bad publicity” Take that any way you want.

Semi-Intelligent Gifts

It is that time of year again when all good little children write down their wish lists and hope for the best: firetrucks, footballs, fluffy bunnies. However, parents' shopping lists this year featured a $300 robotic dinosaur called Pleo, who, incidentally, is the most popular toy of 2007 (at least according to some website or other, which probably makes it true).

According to the blurb:

"This techno dino is equipped with sensors (35 in total) throughout his tiny body, allowing Pleo to react instantly to sight, sound and touch. They also make Pleo capable of expressions and reactions. They also make each Pleo unique. As Pleos learn, Ugobe says, they begin to form their own distinct behaviors and personalities developed from their environment".

From the sounds of it, Pleo is better than a real pet because you can go away for a vacation and not have to worry about it. You can just leave it sitting on the shelf, scowling for two weeks. Imagine its joy when you return. Either that or it will greet you with a lop-sided smile, enticing you to come close so that it can open its cute little mouth and bite your head off.

The sentence "As Pleos learn, Ugobe says, they begin to form their own distinct behaviors and personalities developed from their environment" is very interesting. The sadist in me would like to see if one can give Pleo a multi-personality disorder. In fact, I wonder if we can use Pleo for social and psychological experiments. Instead of forming groups of willing human subjects to undergo psychological tests, we can simply have piles of Pleos, ready to risk irreversible psychological damage for the greater good.

Learn from his environment? I can't think of anything more dangerous than leaving the poor, cute little robot alone with five-year-old children. What will he learn from his environment? To throw tantrums, hit siblings and pull hair? Great. That's all any parent needs, a toy that thinks he is a child. Now, where have I seen this before?

Pleo isn't the only semi-intelligent robot on the market, although he might be one of the cutest.

How about the WowWee Alive Elvis Animatronic Robot: ""...a lifelike singing and talking bust of the best selling solo artist in U.S. history." - just the King's head and shoulders? No stepping on his blue-suede shoes.

Then you have Robo Robbie: "Robo Robbie is a simple toy by any means, and you can tell by its price ($18.89) and design. In essence, Robo Robbie is a walking, talking, and dancing robot that shoots harmless foam discs from its mouth as well." A foam-spewing toy? I don't get it.

For those futurists out there who think that today we are building the technology that will eventually take over the world, I suggest you sit back, relax and wait another fifty years. I don't think Pleo, a singing head and Robo Robbie are quite up to world domination. Well, at least it doesn't mention it on the box...

Biodegradeable

I'm all for saving the environment. We have spent thousands of years messing up this planet. It's time to right the wrongs, stop plundering the planet get the place back in order. It's time we cleaned house.

There are things that one can do to facilitate this: drive eco-friendly cars (or ride a bike), recycle glass, plastics and paper, and buy environmentally friendly toothpicks (see: Spirit of Nature).

But there are some environmentally "friendly" products out there that make no sense at all. Take, for example, scented plastic bags used for disposing dirty diapers. Living in a household with small kids, I understand the whole nappy sack thing: you want to keep the smell in the bag. I relate to that. So why would you want to buy biodegradeable nappy sacks? Your Huggies won't biodegrade for a thousand years, yet the nappy sacks take only 60 days to turn to dust. What a great invention! I suppose that 60 days is long enough to get the sack out of your house and into landfill. That might be okay for you, but think of future generations!

In a thousand years archaeologists will excavate our current rubbish dumps to determine what sort of society we lived in. And what will they find? Dirty, bagless nappies! Their conclusion will be that we were an unhygenic society that disposed of dirty nappies without enclosing them in a scented bag first, like any normal futuristic parent would. Of course they wouldn't know that we first wrapped the nappy in a bag because it degraded 1,000 years ago (less 60 days).

So by using this product, you are actually destroying the reputation of an entire generation of people. We will be viewed in the same light as those from the middle ages who thought it was physically dangerous to wash yourself.

In fact, the whole biodegradeable business is a disservice to our society. If you buy all the biodegradeable stuff out there on the market, in 60 days there will be no evidence that any of that stuff actually existed! Let's say that we all go pro-biodegradeable to "save the environment" - there will be nothing left for future archaeologists to find.

Now that I think about it, how do we know that what we dug up from 1,000 years ago is really indicative of that society? What if they were really an advanced culture? What if they actually used only biodegradeable products and all the evidence of their society disappeared 60 days after use? What if the fragments of clay utensils that we found are really museum pieces that they found in their excavations of societies that existed 1,000 years before them?

It is therefore irresponsible to use cutlery made from corn or disposable plates made from sugarcane. It would be a travesty of history to buy biodegradeable pencil sharpeners or biodegradeable refridgerators.

Give future historians a chance to learn the truth - and keep those 1,000 year old nappies away from me!

Call Centers in the Caribbean?

I read in Business Week Online that India is losing business to the Caribbean. According to the article, the number of Caribbean call center employees jumped from 11,000 in 2002 to 55,000 in 2007. That‘s pretty cool.

North America has discovered that the Caribbean Islands are full of hotels. Hotels deal with grumpy customers. Senior Management contends that people who deal with grumpy hotel customers would make great call center staff. A good solid business argument - and a suspicious one.

Now, I don’t know about you, but if I had a choice of traveling first-class on business to Calcutta or Barbados, I think that Barbados would win. Do I want to spend time in busy, dusty New Delhi, or would I prefer to wear board shorts and do business on white, sandy beaches in the Bahamas? Would I want to eat curry in a sweaty restaurant in Bangalore, or drink dacharies by the pool in Aruba?

Of course, doing business in the Caribbean has its drawbacks, too. One of them is if the Caribbean Islands cease to exist. I guess that would be bad for business. What I mean is, when global warming gets serious and Jamaica disappears below the depths of the rising sea waters, the Indian business option suddenly looks much more attractive. Unless they can build a huge water-proof retaining wall, Haiti will be history. Cubans will have to become Scubans (okay, that was bad, but I couldn’t resist).

But despite the threat of total environmental disaster, with regard to the India vs Caribbean call center issue, those tiny Islands with great weather and five-star hotels will win every time. You see, I believe that people often make decisions based on what they want to do, rather than on what is the right thing to do. If people based their decisions on what is correct rather than what they want, then nobody would drive motorcycles, drink, smoke or vote for inept governments.

So next time you call to reserve a seat on an airplane, or call to complain about your phone bill, or phone to cancel your subscription, don’t be surprised if you hear reggae music in the background. Hey, mon, get your dreadlocks out of my curry – I mean coconut…

English Lesson

It says somewhere that one of G-d’s greatest gifts to us is the ability to forget. That way, pain and suffering don’t stay with us forever. Memories of bad experiences fade with time. The cost of this all, as you well know, is that good memories also fade away. We forget details of places, people and events. Sometimes we even make up our own memories in place of the ones that we forgot. Have you ever had a conversation that went something like this:

“Yeah, I remember. It was a big blue boat with white writing on the side. How can I forget?”
“Actually, it was a small white boat with blue writing on the side. You were three at the time, how can you possibly remember?”
“No, I’m sure of it: big, blue with white writing!”

This is called misremembering. It’s not exactly forgetting, but it’s remembering incorrectly. We do this for all sorts of things, especially people:

“He was such a good guy.”
“Well, he evicted us from our house.”
“No, wasn’t that his brother?”
“I think you are misremembering.”

Misforgetting is another thing altogether. Misforgetting is when you forget something incorrectly. In other words, you thought you knew something and forgot it, but the reality is that you never knew it to begin with so you have misforgotten it.

“Um, I used to know how many liters of water evaporate from the Mediterranean Sea every year, but I forgot”.
“I think you mean the Black Sea. You never studied the Mediterranean region”
“Oh, yeah, I think you are right! I just misforgot”

Misforgetting can be useful. It can make you look wiser than you actually are. For example, you can be at a dinner party, blabbering on about stocks and shares and financial markets and then say something like, “Was it ACME Ltd that went up or was it Company X that did. It was so long ago, I don’t remember”. The fact that you never heard of either of these companies is irrelevant, you have simply planted the idea in your listeners’ minds that you, at one stage, knew all of the details but you just forgot. In other words, another definition of misforgetting is “lying”, but only if done on purpose.

Misforgetting is a great word. Not only because (to my knowledge) I just made it up, but because it will confound those who don’t know what it means:
“Hang on, didn’t you say that you used to know the code but you forgot it?”
“Oh, actually I don’t think I ever did. I must have been misforgetting at the time I said that”
“Um, well, that’s alright then, I guess…”

The word “misforget” is also a great word because it describes the combination of two mistakes into one. At first you forget, but then you realize that you forgot incorrectly. I don’t think there are too many words that can do that.

I suppose to “unmisforget” is to have once thought that you misforgot, but then you realize that you actually forgot correctly. Unmisforgetting can be a very satisfying experience. You can feel victorious that you unmisforgot something and set the record straight that you really did forget it correctly. This word trumps “misforget” because not only does it combine two mistakes into one word, but then, with the addition of only two letters, it corrects one of the mistakes.

Now you know why my wife doesn’t let me help my kids with their English homework.

The Crash

On the way home from work the other night we passed the scene of a car accident. The vehicle in question had both its front and rear ends smashed in and it was positioned across two lanes. There were no other cars involved, although one could easily be mistaken considering the amount of broken glass strewn across the road.

It must have taken extraordinary skill to crash the car in such a spectacular way, especially since the road was dry, well lit, flat and very straight.

As we passed by, I glanced out the window and noticed the driver sitting on the road barrier. I know it was the driver because he was inhaling his cigarette smoke so deeply that, if he let go, the cigarette might get sucked down his throat. His foot was also rapidly tapping the floor. Two sure signs. What also struck me was that the barrier was twisted horizontally, creating a perfect place to sit. How convenient. Why not make the most of a bad situation, sit down and have a smoke?

Wait a minute, this sounds a little too convenient, don’t you think?

I never studied the skid marks, car wreckage, road barriers, paint scrapings or the satellite images, but I have a strong feeling that the accident happened like this: the driver was drinking a coke from an over-sized open cup while talking on his cell phone to a friend about a passionate subject like, say, sport. The increasing speed of the car matched the increasingly heated debate about the effect of brand-name sport shoes on performance. The friend then dropped a bombshell: the driver's favorite player just announced that he will be switching to a rival team. In shock, the driver fumbled his phone, which fell on the floor and slid under his chair, just out of reach. That’s when the driver swerved across multiple lanes and lost control.

The front of the car clipped the barrier on one side of the road and spun around, narrowly missing an elderly pedestrian, a child with a ball and a family of cute yellow ducks. In his panic, the driver couldn’t remember what a relative who had taken an advanced driving course in the 1970s once told him about how to come out of a spin: should I brake hard, pump the brakes, accelerate into the spin, turn into the spin, turn out of the spin, keep the wheel straight…? So he tried all options and managed to increase his speed as his car collided with the barrier on the other side of the road, ricocheting off it like an elastic projectile.

As the scenery went by anti-clockwise, the driver realized that when the car finally comes to a halt, possibly upside down, he will have to be at the scene for some time. He then stopped groping under his seat for the phone so he could concentrate on maneuvering the car to impact the barrier at just the right angle. He managed to point the car at the barrier and flatten the metal sufficiently so that it would serve as a seat where he could wait comfortably until the tow-truck’s arrival.

Just a hunch.

The Truth About President Bush

I have to admit, watching clips of President Bush messing up his speeches is funny. I don’t know why that is. I mean, poor guy, it seems that every time he stands behind the microphone it is a disaster waiting to happen.

“…and if you are working hard to put food on your family…”

Granted, he is a very visible President. He attends lots of functions, gives lots of speeches and he is likely to make a mistake every now and then. Nobody’s perfect. I’m sure that every President before him made the occasional slip. Bush has been in power for nearly two terms, so he has ample opportunity to make a mess of it.

“..I know that human beings and fish can live together peacefully…”

Okay, but then you can say that every President faced the same challenge. It just so happens that President Bush botches it more often than others. Or that could just be the media picking up on his shortcomings.

Ostensibly, the President of the United States is supposed to be the most powerful man in the world and the fact that he seems to be unable to construct a sentence should be quite disturbing for the American people.

I wonder if you put together a compilation of President Bush Senior’s gaffs, whether it would fill a five-minute time slot on the David Letterman show.

“…is our children learning?”

Now, isn’t it obvious to anyone out there that if you were George W. Bush’s PR director that the right thing to do would be to limit his public appearances? I mean, if you can’t prevent him from becoming entangled in the English language, at least minimize the opportunities for damage. But George W. is out there: on television; giving press conferences or holding impromptu road-side speeches. You can barely shut the man up. Sounds fishy…

After much thought, I have concluded that there could only be one possible explanation: Bush is America’s ultimate weapon against terrorism.

The American people are using their own President to soften the enemy. If the bad guys think that the President of the United States of America is dimwitted, they will get sloppy and the US will catch them before they can perpetrate their acts of terror. Pure genius. George W. Bush is the world’s best actor. He makes all those mistakes look real. His well-rehearsed goofy facial expressions really work. They fooled the US public into doubting the President’s intelligence, they will certainly fool the terrorists.

Behind the scenes, I bet that the President is sharp, articulate and very smart. I bet that the major decisions regarding US policy originate from behind that big desk in the Oval Office. I bet that Bush is no fool, not by a long shot. I bet that he is the cleverest and most conniving politician the US has ever seen. He is shrewd and cunning, using his Texan background as the basis for his apparent awkwardness. Bush generates this public image of a nice guy, just trying to keep up with the world; one who can barely say his own name, let alone spell it. It is a deception, a ruse, a trick, an act.

“…Fool me once and, uh, er, shame on…you. Um, er, fool me once and you can’t fool me again”

It is the greatest con ever and you have been fooled.

[Late update: link to a collection of Bush Bloopers]

Sweat

When you think of a real man, do you think of a middle-aged professional with graying hair, wearing a power tie and a fancy Rolex, working in a big office building with a doorman and marble floors; or do you think of rough-faced cowboys breaking-in wild horses, or muscled workmen on a rig surrounded by huge pipes and oversized spanners? Does the word “bloke” conjure up images of sophisticated, educated and refined gentlemen smoking long cigars in the club, or of tall, strong, sweaty men doing the jobs only real men can do?

Sport is also manly. I’m talking about well-built blokes with bowling-ball biceps who put their bodies on the line because they only play to win. No pain, no gain. If you aint sweatin’, you aint workin’.*

Let’s face it, there is nothing more manly than doing hard, physical work and getting sweaty. I’m not talking about perspiration – that’s too delicate a term. I’m talking about sweet, salty, gritty, sweat. Men love to sweat. It’s true. Here’s an example: what happens right after a tough football game? The players don’t just shower and go home. No. They go to the locker rooms, get into a huddle, sweat-against-sweat, belt out the team song, slap each other on the back and then, maybe, they’ll go and have a shower before hitting the pub. None of this “Ooh, don’t look! My face is flushed, better go powder my nose” business.

Go into any boxing club and the first thing you will notice is the pungent smell of years of sweat oozing out of the floor-boards. The boxing club is real man-territory. Punching bags, boxing rings, barbells. There’s no room for mercy. You either train until it hurts, and then some, or you get out. Coaches yell insults and instructions, but the boxers obey because they know that the coach’s job is to make them into the leanest and meanest. Leave your Blackberries, MP3s and mobile phones outside because the boxing club isn’t powered by rechargeable lithium-ion, but the raw energy of men being men.

What about the gym? How can you consider yourself a real man if your face isn’t contorted in pain as you conquer that weights machine? How can you show yourself in public if you cannot claim victory over the treadmill? How can you live with yourself if the rowing machine gets the better of you? Push it and work it until you succeed.* That’s what I’m talking about. Real satisfaction.

Even if you are not a well-built muscle-dude, you still understand what I mean. It’s about proving yourself to yourself - showing yourself that you've got what it takes. You can do it. Sweat is the physical symbol of getting a hard job done. That’s why real men don’t run to the shower. Sweat, my friend. Sit in it, revel in it, enjoy it - sweat is your trophy. You deserve it.

*Note: watch it, injured men don’t count!

Welcome to the New You

Identity Theft is a crime that claims more and more victims every day. Personality aside, your details are a large part of who you are - your family status, your health, address, telephone numbers, income and so on. The age of technology, where your personal information is stored electronically, has given rise to this new phenomenon. If someone can tap into that database, they have the ability to virtually become you (in many senses of the term). This is only possible because the security of the information is at the fickle mercy of technology, organizational policy, budgets and the expertise of the database administrator.

Identity Theft sounds like a bad thing. But it aint necessarily so. Here’s why:

I figure that the medical condition that troubles the majority of people today (whether they know it or not) is depression. Everybody has gripes, complaints and dissatisfaction. I’m not talking about complaints about lousy service at the local grocery store; I’m talking about complaints that have a marked effect on your life: career issues, parenting problems, essential household appliances breaking down at the wrong time of your financial cycle etc. These areas of discontent lead to various levels of depression, depending on your personality.

My proof for this is as follows. It seems to me that one of the biggest growth industries in the last twenty years is “therapy”. In the good old days people used to learn to deal with their problems on their own. We used to be strong, tough, resilient. People used to work it out (or, alternatively, go to a public place to take out their frustrations with a semi-automatic, but that’s not my point). My point is that “therapy” (the art of being paid for listening to other people moan about life) has become a popular method of getting out of dealing with your problems the old-fashioned way: by thinking.

So I figure that I’ll do you all a favor and give you some advice that will save you hundreds of dollars a month on therapy: if you don’t like who you are, become someone else.

As I mentioned at the beginning of this post, becoming someone else (in my unscientific opinion) is today’s second-fastest growing industry. All those people who can’t afford therapy have decided that it is better to simply leave their old self behind and become someone else.

Let’s put it another way. Someone mentioned recently that people no longer repair their broken printers. It is usually cheaper to just buy a new one. Let’s apply the same logic to people. If you feel all broken down and that you can’t go on just find a better alternative and discard the old you.

I know (hope) that I’ll get lots of comments from therapists who will say that each person is an individual personality with something to offer the world and that they are worth saving. Translate that: each client is an individual billable account with weekly appointments that are worth, at least, $100 per hour.

Listen to me, people, save your money!

I’m not advocating theft. I certainly wouldn’t suggest that you break the law. I’m simply offering a cheaper and more fun way of dealing with your problems. Don’t bother reinventing yourself because there is probably a better person out there who you can be, instead. Hey, anybody want to swap?

My Theory on Gifts

Everyone knows that buying a gift for your spouse can be a dangerous undertaking. If you buy her jewelry then you have to make sure it is exactly the color and style she likes - otherwise it shows that you haven’t been paying attention. If you buy him any type of clothing, no matter what it is, he will think you are unimaginative.

A popular grumble is, “what do you give a person who already has everything?” This person already has so much stuff that he will not appreciate a gift which merely adds to his collection of material possessions. So the only option left is to buy him something that is not a material possession, like charity in his name, or maybe a consumable (bottle of wine, a cake, batteries for his MP3 player) or, say, an experience (theatre tickets, a meal at a fancy restaurant) and so on.

If you can’t find the right gift, you can always blame it on the manufacturing industry. Look, the fact is that we each have a birthday every year, but inventors and manufacturers can’t think of and produce enough new stuff each year to cover for all the birthdays. Try using this logic on the people you love. I’m sure that this compelling argument will win you friends.

Then there are gifts that you absolutely shouldn’t give:

Socks (unless you are the in-laws)
Anything that implies the other person is fat
Anything that will be useful for you only and not the recipient
Anything to do with plumbing
Any type of musical instrument (to a child)
A single one-way ticket to anywhere
It’s the thought that counts. True story: I once invited a friend over for a meal and he brought me the most unique gift. He said the following, “I bought a gift for you to thank you for inviting me for dinner, but I ate it. It’s the thought that counts, right?” I obviously should have made dinner earlier, like right after breakfast.

Gift-giving is a slippery slope. It turns out that the more you know a person, the harder it is to buy them the right type of gift. There are a few reasons for this:

1)You have already given this person a number of gifts over the years and you are running out of ideas;
2)The “flowers and chocolates” option will no longer suffice;
3)You need to maintain your reputation as a good gift-giver; or
4)You feel compelled to pay a minimum amount of money for the gift so you won’t look cheap.

So it stands to reason that the longer (and better) you know someone, the more likely you are to buy the wrong gift. Therefore, I propose that we set a new rule: if you know someone for more than, say, three years you do not have to give them a gift. I mean, better to spend the money on people you don’t know. It’s much harder to go wrong.

Snippets of Conversation

One of the most often used opening scenes in movies is when the camera follows a man walking along a street. The man inevitably crosses the road, enters a shop or gets into his car just as the main characters appear. The camera stops moving so that it can concentrate on the main characters, leaving the man in the opening scene to move off camera, never to be heard from again. He was merely an excuse for the camera to get from its starting position to where the main characters are located.

I wonder what the "opening scene man" is thinking as he plays his part. Is he measuring his strides? Is he trying desperately to walk the route without tripping over? Well, he certainly isn't trying to remember his lines. After all, the "opening scene man" never talks.

It could be that the "opening scene man" is not thinking anything in particular. Perhaps he is a professional "opening scene man" who has done this opening scene many times and just wants to finish it so that he has enough time to get into character for his next opening scene for another movie in another sound studio somewhere else.

But, really, the "opening scene man" is just an irrelevant snippet of the movie. He plays no important role, his presence has no effect on the plot and he is only there because the viewer needs to get perspective before the movie starts. But that is precisely why the "opening scene man" is vital to the film. Without him you won't easily be able to determine the time-period in which the movie is set, the location and so on. Without the "opening scene man", the start of the movie would be like walking into the middle of a conversation without knowing the context.

Have you ever done that? I mean, have you ever walked into the middle of a conversation but you don't have a clue what the background to the conversation is? A variation on this theme can often be found in movies, especially if one of the characters is walking through a party scene. Inevitably there will be a group of people in the background listening to someone tell the end of the joke. The audience in the film laughs raucously and the viewers are left wondering what the joke was. Sometimes it ruins the whole movie for me, especially if I spend the rest of the film wondering what could possibly have been so funny.

If I come across good ones, I collect them and write them down. Some of them are very amusing. Here are a few:

"...even though it's short, he puts it on at night"
"...so stop breathing"
"...then the doctor said, "Oh, I thought it was a fish!"
"...or your head will feel like an inflated latex watermelon"

Actually, I picked up this gem today "...It's very dangerous. I mean, all you can do is eat the peach". For hours I wondered what they could possibly have been talking about. I guess I'll never know.

Pink Elephants

The title of this blog is "Pink Elephants", although it has nothing to do with pink elephants. But since I am afraid of a visit from the KGB, I thought I'd better don the proverbial fake mustache and give this post an innocuous name. I'm sure the KGB internet crawlers are prowling for articles just like this one.

Fox News has Putin winning a landslide victory of 306 seats of a possible 450 seats in the lower house. That's only 68% of the vote. What's more, overall, Putin won 61% of the vote. Fox News calls this a major win.

Well, Fox, I disagree. This is not a triumph for Putin, it is a disgrace. It is utterly despicable that a former Major in the KGB managed to only convince 61% of the people to vote for him. Vladimir Putin should be ashamed of himself.

According to news articles from before the elections in the former Soviet Union, factory workers were being forced to vote in favor of the Russian President, Vladimir Putin, on pain of unemployment. This obviously wasn't enough.

It is true that compared to, say, the Hamas Terrorist Organization, who managed a frightening 58% of the people to vote for them, 61% sounds like a lot. But compare it to the late Saddam Hussein with a perfect score of 100% of the votes, Putin's achievement looks rather thin.

In the good old days of Communist Russia, everybody knew that the elections were predetermined. It wasn't a hidden fact and nobody was expected to take the results seriously. It was all a fate a compli. Today, they make a big show of the democratic process with politicians and regular people alike, casting their votes. They celebrate that more than one competitor is allowed on the ballot. But we all know it is rigged, so why bother going through the motions? What purpose does the ruse serve?

However, the fact remains that even with the prospect of bodily harm and other such threats, Putin still couldn't get a larger majority of the people to vote for him. A star KGB pupil like Putin has the potential to coerce at least 85% of the voting public to to vote for him. 61% is a dismal failure, not a glorious victory. His KGB instructors are probably very disappointed. Look, Putin has all of the tools and techniques at his disposal but did not use them to good effect. I mean, it's like copying an assignment your brother did for the same class a year before, only you get a lower grade than he did.

Are Museums Outdated?

According to 24 Hour Museum News 15,462 people visited the Coal Mining Museum for England in August 2004. Between April and August of the same year, 2,118,518 visitors passed through the turnstiles of the British Museum.

While these statistics are almost as old as some of the exhibits, one wonders why so many people go to visit museums. I mean, in this day and age, everything you want to know about any subject - including History - can be found on the internet. If you want to know about Christopher Columbus, go to www.columbusnavigation.com If you want to know about Australian explorers, Burke and Wills, go here:www.burkeandwills.net.au If you want to learn about Herod, Wikipedia will help you out.

Do you think that you will learn something extra by being in the same room as a wax replica of an original reconstruction of an ancient tool, based on either fragments of iron and crustacean fossils or some book-worm-historian's educated (best) guess of what life was like way back when?

Do you think that by going to a museum and standing face to face with inanimate objects labeled with glossy tags and well-written explanations on embossed card will give you more information than a Google search of millions of articles, worldwide?

Are the closing times, noise-police, do-not-touch signs, overpriced gift shops and crowds of people worth the mortgage-your-house-to-get-in entrance fee?

So why did 331,605 people visit the Kyoto National Museum in 2005 or an unpublished number of people visited the Frank and Jane Clement Brick Museum in any given year?

The answer is simple. People like to collect things, and the museum is the one place that people can go to see what the government, organizations or private individuals have spent their time accumulating: dinosaurs, machinery or, surfing memorabilia.

We are pack-rats by nature. And we like to hold on to things for so long that others will pay good money to come and see that well-presented pile of stuff. Pictures on the internet don't (yet) give you the full sense of how much stuff of one kind can be displayed in a building. But walk up those steps, through the rotating door and into a museum, the reality of what your tax-dollars have been spent collecting over the past thousand years really hits home.

So next time you find yourself sitting at your computer taking the virtual tour of The Museum of HP Calculators, stop and consider for a moment whether you are really treating yourself to the full experience. Get in your car, hop on a bus, take a train, tram or bicycle (or some ancient method of transport from, say, the era of the Empire of the Great Qing) and get over to your local museum. They've spent millenia collecting things, you may as well go and see them.

This blog post was written in response to a challenge to write about why people visit museums.

My Advice to US Presidential Candidate Hopefuls

The latest news reports out of Australia have Prime Minister elect, Kevin Rudd, appointing a former rock singer, Peter Garrett, as Environment Minister. This may not be a surprising move because Peter Garrett is not only known for his bald head and gangly dancing, but he is also known as a social activist. I suppose you could call him "new age". His very popular song about Aboriginal Land Rights (Beds Are Burning) is a case in point.

Now Peter Garrett is a Minister in the Federal Government.

I'm sure that Peter is delighted with his new-found power. Instead of getting out there and protesting, he can actually do something about the problems he has complained about through his music and the media.

Considering that Mr Garrett will manage Australia's slow push towards a more environmentally friendly society, he may have to change the name of his band from "Midnight Oil" to "Midnight Energy Efficient Renewable Resource". It doesn't quite have the same ring to it.

Enough about Peter Garrett. The truth is, he might actually do a good job. Once they reach positions of real responsibility, some celebrity politicians prove that they do have what it takes.

Governer Schwarzenegger is one example. I don't know much about US politics, but I really wanted him to lose the election so he could say, "I'll be back". But it turns out that he is doing a half-decent job. Either that or the respondents to the opinion polls are too scared to vote against "The Governator".

Jesse Ventura, former wrestling star, was less successful. Despite his election as Governor of Minnesota, his massive decline in popularity prompted him to decide not to run for re-election in 2002. At the time, Governor Ventura was involved in no less than 11 major controversies. Obviously "The Governing Body", as he was nicknamed, wasn't as scary as Arnie. Ventura now lives in Mexico.

So my advice to Hillary, Obama and Guiliani is that if you want to make it in politics, either become a tofu-eating, plant-loving vegetarian, or turn on the video camera and go beat someone up.

Popcorn

The art of popcorn-making is dying. I remember when my father passed on the secret of popcorn-making to me one night. We were standing by the stove and he was shaking the pot over the open oven flame.

Not too much oil.
Not too much heat.
Shake. Shake. Shake.
And the fourth secret, which I am not at liberty to disclose.

I was never much good at making popcorn, despite that I know the fourth secret. The last time I tried to make popcorn from corn-kernels over an open flame, I wasted a bag of popcorn and about an hour and a half. There were times, though, that I got it right and the corn popped perfectly. I dubbed myself "The Popcorn King". I seem to have lost the knack and thus the popcorn throne. My shake-the-pot technique has been found wanting - and then there's the fourth thing, which I don't do very well. But I can't tell you what that is.

So now I do what the majority of the popcorn-eating population do. Either I buy it ready-made from a popcorn vendor, or I use the microwaveable stuff.

The popcorn-vendor popcorn is not bad. The machine spits out a decent popcorn, but then it is a risky business. You have to be careful from whom you buy - and I doubt they do the fourth thing, which as you know by now, I can't share. Trust me, I doubt they do it. At least not in public.

Microwaveable popcorn is certainly the easiest method. It is quick, reliable and tasty. The manufacturers have hit on the right blends of fatty oils, preservatives and salt. You can buy the salt reduced or salt free varieties, but then, what's the point? Believe it or not, there is actually an art to making microwaveable popcorn. Well, I wouldn't go so far as to say that it's an art. It's more of a skill.

You see, the popcorn manufacturers can't test every microwave on the market, so the instructions are very general, "...on the highest setting for between 2 and 4 minutes". In my microwave, four minutes is popcorn murder. Complete incineration. Now, I don't know about you, but to me it's much more fun creating black, inedible kernels while standing over a stove furiously shaking the pot and doing the fourth thing (which I can't reveal) than it is standing there watching the popcorn burn inside the microwave.

You really have to have the knack, even when using the microwave. It is certainly a matter of trial and error. You have to learn how your microwave behaves. You have to feel what it feels. See what it sees. Understand its psyche and get inside its mind. A microwave is like a person, each one is different. If you understand one, it doesn't mean that you understand them all. My microwave, for example, is schizophrenic. Sometimes two minutes is enough. Sometimes it needs up to three. Four minutes is completely out of the question and even three can be totally lethal.

So I stand by the microwave. Watching. Listening. Feeling. And when my instinct tells me that the popcorn is ready, despite the heavy popping sounds, I quickly flick it off. Too long and the popcorn is toast. Not long enough and I end up with more crunchy, teeth-killing kernels than I would like. The timing has to be perfect to get the right ratio of edible popcorn to unpopped kernels.

But even when the microwave gets it right, it's a real shame I can't do that fourth thing.

You Took the Music Right Out of My Mouth

Ever heard of Wierd Al Yankovich? He's a musical satirist. That means that he takes a popular tune and substitutes the original lyrics for his own, more amusing ones. For instance, one of his most famous victims is Michael Jackson's "Beat It" (renamed "Eat It").

One may be forgiven for thinking that the parody is often better than the original, which it often is.

Songs have two main parts: the music and the lyrics. As it turns out, the lyrics are secondary, it's the music that's important. You can take the words away from almost any song and you are left with the musical component, which often stands on its own.

But, believe it or not, there are people who deliberately break the rules. They retain the words and substitute the original music for their own. I'm talking about the following unfortunate invention: Rock Operas - operas sung to contemporary rock or heavy metal. Imagine if they decided to make a Rock-Opera out of Macbeth. Yep. That's all we need. 15 long-haired 17 year-old school dropouts belting out "Fair is foul, and foul is fair" to heavy base guitar and merciless crashing symbols. Just like William imagined.

It's difficult to fathom but if, for some reason, Rock or Metal Operas don't appeal, how about Hip-Hopera, which is actually a real word. Hip-Hopera is opera sung to Hip-Hop or Rap (officially "Rap Opera", although I prefer "Ropera" or "Rapopera")? Just imagine Macbeth portrayed by some gold-chained, 300 pound black dude rhyming out, "Out, out, brief candle! Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player that struts and frets his hour upon the stage and then is heard no more: it is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing."

"A tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing". How apt. However, I suppose it takes a special skill to massacre Macbeth in A minor.

According to Wikipedia, "The infinite monkey theorem states that a monkey hitting keys at random on a typewriter keyboard for an infinite amount of time will almost surely type a particular chosen text, such as the complete works of William Shakespeare." But whatever you do, don't give the monkey a guitar.

This blog post is in response to a challenge to write about Macbeth in song.

Don't Google Yourself. You May Not Like What You Find.

I did a bit of egosurfing (otherwise referred to as vanity searching, egosearching, egogoogling, autogoogling or self-googling). I looked up "Karp" and didn't find much that thrilled me.

I then Wikipedia'd myself and found a whole bunch of Karps listed - from punk rock bands to mathematicians. Not that I was expecting an article about me, but I thought that I might find someone with the same family name that did something interesting, something I could relate to.

And then I saw him.

Robert Karp. This was the type of guy I can identify with. Bob lived from 1911 to 1975, but from 1938 to 1974 he was employed by the Walt Disney Company to write the scripts for the Donald Duck newspaper comic strips. Now, there you have it, a man after my own heart - he writes, doodles and gets paid for it. What a perfect job.

So now that Donald Duck is my favorite cartoon character, I just had to find out some interesting facts about him. I discovered that not only is Donald Duck a household name, but he, too, has a household of his own. Take a look at this article, it describes the Donald Duck family tree. Here is an excerpt:

Donald's father is Quackmore Duck, his mother is Hortense McDuck and his twin sister is Della Thelma Duck.

Huey, Dewey and Louie are the children of Della.

Donald was supposedly born in 1920 in Duckburg.

Hortense McDuck is Scrooge McDuck's sister. Quackmore Duck is the son of Elivira "Grandma" Duck and her husband Humperdink Duck.

Donald Duck is a descendant from both the McDucks and the Coots. According to the cartoon, Back To Long Ago, Donald appears to be the rebirth of the 16th century sailor, Pintail Duck.

Scrooge McDuck is the richest duck in the world.

http://www.squidoo.com/donaldduck/ mentions that his full name is actually Donald Fauntleroy Duck. His parents must have been drunk at the time.

I never knew that people followed Donald Duck with such fanaticism. I mean, I know that Disney does all it can to market their products to kids (fan clubs and all that), but this sort of detail smacks of geeky Star Trek fans and their Trekkie clubs. I can think of almost nothing worse than attending a Donald Duck convention to be surrounded by a thousand ill-tempered, clumsy, speech-impaired Donald Duck look-alikes.

But Donald stood the test of time. If he were real, Donald would be 87 years old this year. I don't think I know of anyone else who could get away with not wearing pants for that long.

Living Your Life Vicarously Through Others

You are a parent who wants your kid to be a lawyer or a doctor, but they really want to be an accountant or an actuary. You are a coach pushing your team to be the best at their sport, but they just want to run around and get sweaty for fun.

That's because you are living your life vicariously through others.

I have no problem with that. In fact, I condone and encourage it. Just because you didn't make it in your dream profession or in your dream sport, it doesn't mean that you can't still live the glory. Just because you found yourself sitting behind a desk, day after day, shuffling papers or whatever, it doesn't mean that you can't feel the warm glow of the spotlight of victory on your shoulders, albeit through someone else.

In fact, living your life vicariously through someone else is the easiest way to become successful. All you have to do is pace the side of the pool and shout unintelligble instructions while your child swims lap after lap. They feel the pain, but their success is yours. You may have to obsess about your child's dance routines while she spins pirouette after pirouette. She may get dizzy, but her wins are your wins.

It takes far too much effort to put in all the blood, sweat and tears to become the best at something. Why work so hard when you can get someone to do it for you, but you still get to reap the benefits?

Some of you might think that I am trying to make my point by being sarcastic. You know, say the opposite of what I think and then make it too ludicrous to be true. But I'm not. I'm straight-faced serious. I sincerely belive that you can be all that you want to be, just by basking in someone else's glory.

Look, put it like this, living life vicariously through others is merely a form of outsourcing. If you need to get a project done but don't have enough time, outsource some of it to a consultant or expert, so you can get on with the other stuff. Living your life vicariously through others is no different. You don't have the time or resources to achieve your dreams, so get someone else to do it for you. Outsourcing is a legitimate method of attaining a goal that you cannot reach on your own. How can you argue with that?

So go on, don't hesitate! Sit down, have a cup of coffee and live your dreams.

Not Everyone Can Be a Superhero

I would make a bet that when we were kids we all wished, at some stage or other, that we could be someone special, like Superman, Spiderman or, heaven help us, even Batman. Sometimes those fantasies linger a little bit longer and live in the recesses of our minds during our teenage years, fading away slowly as we approach adulthood.

I seem to fall into some unclassified category of adults who still like to think about what life would be like if I found that I was, say, impervious to bullets. Oh, yeah! Fearlessly striding into battle, shooting at the bad guys with bullets bouncing off my chest as I single-handedly win the war. But I would also have to be able to fly as well because what is the point of, say, going to an Iranian nuclear site to blow it up if I couldn't get over the fence? I'd also have to have super-strength because even if they couldn't shoot me, all they would have to do is punch me in the nose and I'd be finished. Maybe I should add invisibility to my wish list because then I could sneak into Ahmadinejad's office and listen in on his secret conversations with evil terrorists. But what would be the point in that if I couldn't understand what they were saying? I'd have to be super-fluent in all languages, too. But I digress...

According to the Blue PLAY Survey (PDF), conducted by American Express in 2005, "More than a quarter of adults (26%) sometimes wish they could revert to their childhood years, saying life is too serious". That's only because they don't have powers of time-travel that can whisk them back to any point in time and change history to save the world from the forces of evil, all the while preserving the timeline they are sworn to protect, yet never revealing any of this to mortal man, destined to wander anonymously through time and space.

But not everyone can be a superhero. Just think about it for a moment - who would you save? The damsel on the outside ledge of a skyscraper is not there in distress. She is there because the ledge provides the best angle from which to zap the neighbor across the road with her magical zapping powers, while the neighbor uses his forcefield to deflect the zapping attack harmlessly into space. The hostages locked in an old vault deep beneath the earth are not gasping for breath as the oxygen supply slowly runs out and the time bomb sits in the corner ticking away. They are all busy morphing into their liquid form to slide under the door to freedom.

If we were all superheroes the world would be complete anarchy. As soon as someone says something that rubs the wrong way, there would be a fistfight with the two combatants destroying downtown Manhattan as they bounce off walls and do impossible acrobatic stunts off national monuments, even if they weren't in Manhattan to begin with. Imagine what would happen if your neighbor didn't like you. They wouldn't send their dog to eat your prize roses. They would rip your entire house from it's foundations and hurtle it mercilessly towards the sun. Meanwhile, in the Batcave, you would be refilling your Batman Utility Belt with Batgrenades and Batarangs which you would launch from your Batmobile in a drive-by attack on their home. Pow!

It would be an impossible situation. So, logically, I can only conclude that we can't all be superheroes. Some of you will just have to face the harsh reality that only us, a small percentage of the population, can leap tall buildings in a single bound. Now, out of my way while I practice landing.

The Product Every Supermarket Lacks

Go down to your local supermarket and take a look around. What is missing? Come on, think. What is it that you have always needed but could never find in your local grocery store? Any ideas?

Okay, I'll give it to you: ham or latke flavored soda.

Now you are kicking yourself because it was so obvious that you should have guessed it right off. CNN reports that this "holiday season" Jones Soda Co. in the United States is marketing a number of new flavors that have always been missing from the American diet, including ham flavored and latke flavored soda. Both kosher and caffeine free.

I don't know about the ham one, but I wonder about the latke flavor. Did the product development team fight about whether it should taste like store-bought, instant or home-made latkes? Also, do you have to drink through a thick layer of oil before reaching the actual soda? That could really put a damper on the fizz.

Just in case you were worried that the other traditional Channukah flavors were being left out, you should know that the Jones Soda Co. Channukah Pack includes all your favorites, such as Apple Sauce, Chocolate Coin and Jelly Doughnut flavors (while stocks last). Sounds...scrumptious.

According to the CNN article (and please, don't eat before reading the next bit), "For its contract to supply soda to Qwest Field, home of the Seattle Seahawks, Jones came up with Perspiration, Dirt, Sports Cream and Natural Field Turf. The company -- fortunately or unfortunately -- prides itself on the accuracy of the taste."

Now, I can see how they got it right for the ham and latke flavours, but perspiration flavor? Field testing must have been fun. Can you imagine the Jones Soda Co. executives around a large board-room table testing out the Perspiration flavour before it went to market?

"Glad you all could make it to this taste testing. I'm Bob from Product Development. We have here what we think is a winner for the Perspiration Flavor line of sodas. Okay, Jack, being the CEO you can go first. Drink from bottle number one and tell me what you think."

[Jack drinks]

"Um. It's good. A bit salty. I don't think my perspiration is that salty. What do you think, Jim?"

[Jim drinks]

"Yeah. I think Jack is right. His perspiration really isn't that salty."

Science: That's Entertainment!

I think that the point of scientific, theory, conjecture and experimentation is for our entertainment pleasure. I can just see all the white-coated scientists with their rotten tomatoes at the ready, aiming for my good typing hand. How dare I minimise the importance of scientific wisdom! Think of all of the good that science has brought to the world! In one line I reduced to mockery millennia of effort and thought. Entertainment, indeed!

In the hope of causing a ruckus, I am prepared to defend my viewpoint - feel free to disagree. Take a look at this website. It lists the top 20 most bizarre scientific experiments of all time (note that they are only the top 20. This implies there are more!) Some of them are truly revolting, others are interesting and the rest are amusing. But they are all entertaining. I mean, reading them is fun. Science = Entertainment.

I know you are thinking that the scientific experiments on a website called "museumofhoaxes.com" can't possibly be serious. And even if they are, they don't really deal with hard-core scientific issues. But don't dismiss my theory just yet.

You can't get more mainstream-scientific than than the quintessential scientist, Albert Einstein.

Albert Einstein and his contemporaries, Boris Podolsky, and Nathan Rosen, created a thought experiment. A thought experiment is a theoretical experiment, all you have to do is postulate. You don't actually have to do anything. In the scientific world, this famous thought experiment is lovingly referred to as the Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen (EPR) Paradox. In a nutshell (according to Wikipedia), the EPR Paradox "challenged long-held ideas about the relation between the observed values of physical quantities and the values that can be accounted for by a physical theory". Or, even more simply, the EPR Paradox attempts to prove that the theory of Quantum Mechanics is not complete.

When you take into account all of the arguments, the EPR Paradox seems convincing: Quantum Mechanics is found lacking. Unfortunately, real experiments have cast doubts on the soundness of the EPR Paradox.

How in the universe (pun) can this possibly be "Entertainment"?

Well, it is entertaining on a few levels. Firstly, the wonderful irony is that Einstein's theory of relativity is one of the major pillars of Quantum Mechanics and Einstein found the whole philosophy of Quantum Mechanics difficult to stomach. That, in itself, is amusing. But even more so, the debate gave rise to the following two delightful quotes:

"I cannot believe that God would choose to play dice with the universe." - Albert Einstein

The rebuttal:

"God does not play dice with the universe; He plays an ineffable game of his own devising, which might be compared, from the perspective of the players (i.e., everybody), to being involved in an obscure and complex version of poker in a pitch-dark room, with blank cards, for infinite stakes, with a Dealer who won't tell you the rules, and who smiles all the time." -Pratchett and Gaiman's book "Good Omens".

If science can spawn magical quotes like these, then there is no doubt that the purpose of it all is for our entertainment.

(This post is in response to a challenge to write a blog about the Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen Paradox. How did I do?)

Keeping With Tradition

According to this Wikipedia article, in Nordic countries, only government-run vendors can sell alcohol because the government wants to crack down on alcohol consumption in countries where "binge drinking is an ancient tradition". Nice one.

This got me wondering about other interesting ancient traditions. How about: kissing the Blarney Stone. According to tradition, one who kisses the Blarney Stone is given the gift of eloquence. At his own risk, one must climb over the parapet of an Irish castle and hope that his friend doesn't let go as he lowers himself precariously over the edge to lay his lips on the Blarney Stone. One of two things can happen. Either he falls, in which case the myriad expletives flowing from his mouth in the seconds before death prove the tradition true; or he doesn't fall and when questioned as to his death-defying experience he answers, "Oh, blimey. Lost for words! Can't describe the feeling!", proving the tradition of eloquence somewhat false.

Military personnel are famous for "hazing" as a traditional way of welcoming new recruits. Come to think of it, kids do the same at school to the new guys. Taking advantage of the newbies is obviously a cross-cultural and cross-generational tradition.

Tevya, of "Fiddler on the Roof" fame, sang of keeping traditions. Nietzsche spoke of learning to change in order to avoid self-destruction. Tevye didn't self destruct and Nietzsche didn't sing, so I guess they are even.

I think that some traditions are not just nice things we do for sentimental reasons, but they are necessary to enable us to get on in life. Familiarity. Routine. Habit. For example, my traditional prayer before lighting a barbecue in public - that prayer is all that stands between me and a totally humiliating disaster; or only eating sunflower seeds while drinking beer. Is there any other way?

In the modern computer age, where this morning was a lifetime ago in technology years, I hereby resurrect my ancient tradition of blog posting. Hurrah!