I Don't Think A Blog Entry Can Get Sillier Than This

You know, I don't think I can express the importance of tiny cakes sufficiently.  These bite sized morsels of icing coated deliciousness are truly symbols of the pinnacle of civilisation.  Tiny cakes transform a meeting from a tedious waste of time into a tea party with colleagues.  A performance review is a little bit more bearable with tiny cakes on the table.  The most awkward social situation can be smoothed over by the simple production of tiny cakes.  Try this situation for example;

"No Luke, I am your father.  And have a tiny cake."

or this one.

"You can't handle the truth!  But I'll bet you could handle a tiny cake."

I think those two movies would have ended very differently with the introduction of tiny cakes at a critical moment.  Tiny cakes bring the world together.

You couldn't get the same result with large cakes.  Large cakes breed resentment.  Everybody would be glaring at each other jealously trying to work out which greedy pig got the biggest slice before they did.  Jealously and resentment would be bred and violence would ensue.  Let's take a look at our cinematic examples again (because they have so much relevance to the real world) but this time insert large cakes into the mix.

"Join me Luke and we can rule the galaxy as father and son."
"You ate the large slice of cake you bastard!"
"I-I was hungry and I didn't think you wanted it.  I think there are some crumbs caught in my respirator if you like."
"Dark lord gonna die motherfucker!"

or, in the courtroom.

"Did you order the code red?"
"You're damn right I did.  The greedy bastard stole the large slice of cake.  I'd had my eye on that all morning."
"Case dismissed."

There really is no substitute for tiny cakes.  It is a little known fact that the Song Dynasty of China collapsed due to the inability of its emperors to provide the people with tiny cakes.  Correctly discerning that the Song's mandate from heaven had expired Kublai Khan overran their empire thus giving Marco Polo and Samuel Taylor Coleridge the opportunity to become famous.  If the Song emperors had been a little more attentive to the provision of tiny cakes we might have been spared Italian tour guides and poems about albatrosses.

Social Media: The Syphilitic Sailor of the Twenty First Century

I can't help wondering what use postcards are nowadays.  Once upon a time, of course, postcards served a useful purpose.  They were a cheap and convenient way of keeping in touch with people you couldn't bother writing a letter to.  Postcards were also useful for exciting the envy of others by sending pictures of the breathtaking sights you had (at least by implication) seen without resorting to the unforgivable sadism of the post holiday slide show.

Nowadays, thanks to social media the poor old postcard barely has a role left.  Now that we can inform everyone we have ever met (and thousands we would cross the street to avoid) of every bowel movement in real time there doesn't seem to be much point in buying a postcard.  Postcards will, no doubt, go the way of the dodo (eaten by syphilitic Portuguese sailors?) and soon wont be found anywhere except for the occasional stuffed specimen in a museum.  I personally don't think the dodo ever existed, the exhibits we see are just the result of some bored natural history students getting creative with some left over spare parts.

But back to postcards.  The inevitable demise of the postcard will actually be a bit of a loss for me because I do buy postcards.  I buy postcards when I'm on holidays so I don't have to bother taking photos.  The pictures in postcards are so much better than anything I could take anyway.  They have the advantage of being taken in perfect light at exactly the right time of day.  When I look at a postcard I can forget that my own experience involved fronting up at a rather grotty tourist trap at some inconvenient hour in the pouring rain surrounded by hordes of people unfamiliar with deodorant while a grubby six year threw up on my shoes.

Now I'm going to have to find some other way of remembering my holidays.  Fortunately that six year old is no doubt uploading all of his antics to facebook.

That Syncing Feeling

My employers in their benevolent wisdom have recently replaced my iPhone 4 with a brand spanking new iPhone 5.  An iPhone 5 is way better than it's predecessor because its like a whole extra number.  The battery also runs out quicker so you know it must be doing something cool.

I have no objection to my employers providing me with the latest in communication devices although I am starting to wonder when they are going to insert a microchip into my skull.  Of course getting a new phone meant that I had to sync it, a procedure simple for cavemen living in prehistoric times but a journey replete with swearing, tears and shrieking for me.  I'm not certain what syncing actually is but my colleagues assured me it was something that had to be done.

With the sync thing successfully accomplished (at least as far as I can tell) my new iPhone is working as it should (I think).  Certainly it sends and receives texts and emails.  I understand it can even make phone calls.  The five minute gap between being fully charged and running out of battery is a little irritating but doesn't cause a problem if you leave it permanently plugged in.  This limits your mobility somewhat but does make the iPhone 5 the ideal communication device for hermits, paraplegics and other people who don't get out much, like the dead.

This iPhone also has Siri.  I thought that was the name of Tom Cruise's daughter (I later learnt that was Katie Holmes) but apparently not.  Siri is a disembodied voice that speaks from your iPhone and tells you stuff.  Specifically it tells you stuff your iPhone can do for you.  This is an amazing feature, rather than waste whole seconds doing things on your iPhone you can waste seconds telling Siri to do them for you.  Try not to swear at her, she doesn't like it.

Some people might think Siri is rather pointless but they're forgetting the target market.  It's entirely possible that hermits, paraplegics and the dead will welcome the conversation.

The Future is Back Again

Well the old year has come to an end and the new one begins in a flurry of tennis tournaments and involuntary days off.  As I look back over the past year it occurs to me that I should really watch where I'm going.  So rather than indulge in pointless retrospectives of the litany of failures, disasters and acts of simple stupidity let us instead look forward to the tangled mess of unrealistic expectations, irrelevant dreams and unfulfilled hopes that will make up 2013.

Predicting the future isn't that difficult really.  Once I had performed the necessary rituals, sacrificed the requisite animals and got out of rehab after indulging in the appropriate mind expanding narcotics I was ready to go.  In truth I needn't have gone to all that effort.  The truth about the immediate future is that it tends to be pretty much like the present only more so.  People say that history repeats itself but so does the future which is not surprising when one considers that they are pretty much the same thing viewed from different perspectives.

Everything remains pretty much the same year after year until after a decade or so you suddenly look back and realise that the world bears very little resemblance to the one we were living in just a scant ten years ago.  Even so we only realise this if we make a conscious effort to notice it.

Of course there are occasions when change is rapid and dramatic.  The easiest way to identify these occasions is from the shockingly high body count.  Setting aside such gruesome revolutions in the affairs of men some basic themes can be identified.  In Australia there will be an election and a politician will win it.  This is as it should be.  Having a general public deeply interested in politics is usually an indication that something is going terribly wrong.  General apathy is normally a sign that things are going well.

Around the world people with a deep interest in politics will attempt to changes things for the better.  For all our sakes let's hope they fail.  Other people will seek power, influence and control over their fellow humans.  Even the most successful of them will achieve less than they think.  Of all the things to strive for power is the least attainable and the most likely to encounter opposition.  Most people with power gained it as a side effect of something else they were doing.  Which is not to say they don't enjoy it.

Fragmentation of power is one of our strongest guarantees of, if not freedom then at least a bearable existence.  Even those who desire nothing but power will find it impossible to wield without at least the tacit consent of the ruled.  When that consent is withdrawn all hell tends to break loose.  The clever powerful never let it get that far.  The stupid powerful learn just before they're dragged out of their hidey hole and killed that they didn't actually have as much power as they thought.  Ultimately you can only herd people in more or less the direction they're prepared to go.

So what does the future actually contain?  Simple; dust and bones.

I Would Rather a Modern Roman than a Dane

Well I've just bought a new frying pan.  I'm not quite sure why I bothered since I tend to cook my meat to a colour and texture pretty much indistinguishable from the chunks of teflon that have been breaking off the old pan and finding their way into my meals.  However the sight of a disintegrating frying pan is aesthetically displeasing to me so a replacement was in order.

What on earth is it about frying pans that makes them so damned expensive?  The basic design has been with us for several thousand years and with all due respect to horny handed frying pan craftsmen is not particularly complicated.  I will grant that the non stick surface adds a level of complexity that frying pan makers in ancient Rome didn't have to grapple with but frankly that non stick surface would have had to be shat out of a rare Indonesian civet cat to make the price justifiable.

The most expensive pans I saw (ie the ones I didn't buy) were retailing at over two hundred dollars, and that was the discount price.  Perhaps it was the fact that they were made in Denmark which contributed to such an outrageous price tag.  While I was delighted to see that the economy of Denmark is sustained by something other than Lego and tourists who got lost while looking for Germany I must wonder if manufacturing frying pans is quite the right fit for the Danes.  Denmark is a first world country and part of western Europe into the bargain.  This means that they are pretty much required to pay decent wages even to people who work in factories.  Ask any businessman how economically irresponsible that is.

Manufacturing in Europe survives by operating at the high end of the market.  That is by making high quality, high tech equipment which requires a certain level of education and technical skill even on the part of the skut workers on the factory floor.  Thus high prices can be commanded and high wages at least partially offset.  This plus the snob value of having "made in Europe" as opposed to "Banged together by semi slaves in some third world shithole you've never heard of" allows at least some products to be competitive.  Those of you who thought that Liechtenstein's sole contribution to modern civilisation was facilitating tax evasion and the laundering of drug profits may be interested to learn that the best high quality optical equipment in the world is made in that tiny country apparently by the seven or eight people who aren't bankers, tax lawyers or the royal family.

Frying pans however strike me as being rather marginal as far as being a high end piece of technology goes.  No doubt the Danish product is just wonderful but personally I think a perfectly serviceable frying pan is something that can be readily created in any semi civilised economic disaster area.  Which is why I went straight past the two hundred dollar frying pan and bought the fifty dollar one that was made in Italy instead.

Apocalypse - The Directors Cut

Well the end of the world is upon us yet again.  I think that makes the third time this year.  Obviously the hideous death of the entire human race is a topic that never loses its appeal.  It has to be admitted that we as a species have a long track record of apocalyptic predictions.  We've been predicting the end of the world for pretty much as long as we've known there is one.  Psychologists might say this indicates deep rooted feelings of uncertainty and impermanence in the human race as a whole (mind you, psychologists might say just about anything).  I personally think the human race is just addicted to cheap melodrama.  Or possibly we're running out of excuses for not doing our homework.

One might assume that predicting doomsday is a harmless enough hobby and keeps a certain type of the street.  Sadly the hobby is not harmless at all.  Predictions of imminent apocalypse lead to mass panic, short selling of stocks, lousy disaster movies and the election of Frederick III as Holy Roman Emperor.

Still there are some compensations.  For me one of them is the sheer delight I take in listening as people earnestly discuss the possibility of the world ending as a consequence of the date measuring techniques of a defunct civilisation who (in case anybody failed to notice) actually had their own personal apocalypse some centuries before they ran out of calendar.

Another fun thing to do is watch people attempting to prepare for the end of the world.  By definition the end of the world isn't actually something you can prepare for unless you actually have a method of leaving it.  This, however, does not stop people trying.  The usual methods employed seem to be the digging of bunkers and the stockpiling of canned goods and firearms.  I must admit whenever I see these people interviewed on TV I usually get the impression that that is what they would be doing anyway and the upcoming fiery death of all humanity is merely a convenient justification.  Still digging holes in the backyard and stockpiling supplies is almost certainly less harmful than anything else these people are likely to be doing and should give the local economy a bit of a boost as well.

After the event of course or, to be more accurate, after the non event they are going to feel somewhat disappointed.  Particularly if they have just blown their life's savings on shovels, canned goods and firearms.  Hmm, a group of bitterly disappointed, heavily armed, well supplied people with their own bunkers and fortifications.  Possibly there is a slightly less than certain future for their neighbours at any rate.

Perhaps it Would Help to Think of Zoos as Retirement Homes

Some people don't like zoos.  Which is fine, everybody is absolutely entitled to like or dislike whatever they like (or don't like).  However some people seem to dislike zoos because they are mean to animals or some such thing.  Of course a badly run zoo most certainly is mean to animals, or at least it stands a good chance of so being but I have little sympathy with people who object to zoos on principle.

Whenever you hear somebody whining about the dignity of animals or how terrible it is for wild animals to be housed in zoos you should listen a little closer.  With a bit of effort you should be able to hear their brain actually decaying.  For starters if the animal is genuinely wild I would probably prefer it to be kept in a zoo.  Particularly if the only other alternative is to carry an elephant gun when I wander down to the shops.  While not many of them developed opposable thumbs or animal rights activists most animals were a good deal more successful at developing teeth and claws.

Animals do not tend to roam free because they are active libertarians.  Animals roam free simply as a function of where they were born.  If  a wildebeest is born on the Serengeti then it is going to roam free.  At least it had better if it doesn't want the grazing to be exhausted pretty quickly.  This doesn't really seem like my idea of freedom.

As for the dignity of animals, that's an easy one.  There isn't any.  Animals don't have dignity.  They have far more pressing concerns, like survival.  Any dignity we see in animals is imparted by our own imagination and is based on our (to my mind) arrogant delight in seeing human qualities in animals.  It is just as silly to claim dignity for an animal as it is to dress your pet dog in a sailor suit because he looks so cute.  A lion is a magnificent, handsome beast but do you honestly believe it is thinking about dignity at all when it is shoulders deep in the carcass of the wildebeest we met in the previous paragraph?

The most amusing thing about the concerns of animal activists in this situation is the cognitive dissonance involved.  By caring about animals, worrying about them and taking an interest in their well being they are essentially treating those animals as pets.  Nothing like that happens in the wild.  When humans were wild and uncivilised, just one animal amongst many, they didn't keep pets.  Animals were something you killed and ate if you could and hid from if you thought there was a good chance you would be on the wrong end of that transaction.  Even when we domesticated animals we did so so that we could eat them or exploit them in some other way more conveniently.  Actually being disinterestedly concerned about their well being is a very modern phenomenon.

I suspect that people look at the harmony of nature and see it as some sort of well organised collective with each according to their needs and blah blah blah.  Actually the harmony is created by everything doing their best to kill everything else and not quite succeeding.  The proof of this is simple.  On the entire planet there are only three types of animals that stand a chance of dying of old age.  These are humans, our pets, and the animals we put in zoos.