Potrzebie St. Market

I've been wondering lately how English must sound to people who don't speak English. It's common for us to trivialize another language by blathering the most common syllables in a random pattern- common AND historical. The Greeks would refer to their Phoenician neighbours as "Barbars", no doubt because in their semitic languages, everyone was called Bar (son) of something. Like Johnny Bar Mitzvah, the ancient world's finest (and manliest) sailor. Soon, the word "Barbarian" came to mean anyone who didn't speak Greek. But hey, those grape leaf eating homos may have been referred to as Losers, since many of their words end in *-lous or similar. Fuggin' greeks.

Moving on, we're all happy to refer to the Chinaman as Ping Pong, since the tonal languages use a lot of those particular syllabic constructs in their linguistic morphology. Also, let's face it, they play a lot of ping pong. Similarly, I'll readily characterise German speakers as EisenScheizens, because that's all I hear when they speak. And I think they like to eat shit.

By the way- if you're into poo eating, does it have to be your lover's poo? Or does a poo-eater look at a soiled kitty litter box like I would a Whitman's Sampler? Let me know, if you're a poo-eater.

So what does English sound like to the barbarians who don't speak it? What are the familiar bits and pieces that stick out to the hateful francophile, or the simple-minded Eskimo? Would it be the hard, Anglo-Saxon R's and K's from words like firetruck, traction and motherfucker? Or the middle german ERs and INGs that end so many of our words? I can't for the life of me take myself out of the English speaking world enough to imagine what it could be.

How does this sentence look?

"The best fish in Krakow are to be bought at the Potrzebie St. Market".

Which syllables stick out? Does it sound like this:

Thay bes vish ink krakowre tobee botatsh potrzebeestre mark"

Because in that, all my brain would hear would be the syballine S, the softer SH and the hard sounds of those Rs and Ks. I guess as an irreverent Afghani, I might imitate American soldiers like this:

"Shper per, grabben shiken gow now smith jonson krakker"

Then all my cave-mates would laugh, except for the Afghani hipsters, off-put by such a dated stereotype of foreigners.

Things I Like - Cats

I'm a cat person. I watched the latest episode of Futurama, "That Darn Katz!" in which it's suggested that cats are an alien species who came to earth for a nefarious reason. Played out idea, and lazy to pitch cats as a comedy device, but I felt like pitching some cat material all the same. because I'm lazy.


1. In a Coke vs. Pepsi battle, Dogs prefer Pepsi! Lame! And cats do not fucking care.

2. I get worried when using a laser pointer to bait my cat, because it might frustrate him or shine in his eyes. And if he knew I was worried, he'd think I was a pussy.

3. Cats are murderers, with none of this bullshit "malice aforethought". Cats have no aforethought.

4. You can hit a cat and feel bad about it, but that won't really matter to a cat. You know what matters to a cat? Food.

5. There's a legend that Muhammed cut the sleeve off his robe rather than disturb his cat who was dozing on it. When that cat woke up, on the sleeve of Muhammed's robe, it probably went right ahead and licked it's own asshole, patiently and with great care, like it did after any nap.

6. Cats are often cast in kids movies as villains in contrast to dogs. While dogs are very proud of this, cats have no opinion whatsoever. But don't think that's because cats would prefer independent films or anything- they don't. They just prefer food.

7. Do you have food? No? Then you are of no use to a cat. And even if you have food, they still neither like you or dislike you.

8. I know you like to think that cats have a rich inner life when you're not there. They don't. They just sleep or walk around.

9. When two cats meet, nothing magical happens. They just hate each other. And they certainly fucking hate magic.

10. No cat would ever read this post, because it isn't food.

Bullshit Problems

I read an account recently of a man's battle with sex addiction. It was harrowing to read about this man's inability to modify behaviour that cost him his health, his friendships and relationships, and even his job. At the end of the article, there was a profound sense of sadness, as the post-rehab self-analysis brought with it feelings of worthlessness to the author, and a sense of time lost and never to be regained.

BUT! It was still bullshit.

I know pain is relative, and no amount of objective relativity ever helps to lessen the sorrow and suffering we're personally feeling, but I think it's unfortunate that we allow ourselves to BELIEVE that certain types of pain are ACTUALLY real. This goes back to my concern over the bullshit of the future, where we force ourselves to forget what is and isn't a temporary lie we tell ourselves to make sense of the world, and we start to build entire paradigms on shaky, untrue foundations.

As far as I can tell, there are only a few types of real problems in the world, problems that actually inhibit our ability to defend ourselves against further harm. They are

1. Physical pain, including violence and abuse
2. Disability
3. No food

That's it. Everything else is what my friend Mitch is fond of calling a "First World Problem".

I'm going to provide a handy-dandy primer to help differentiate between real and not real problems. And before you ask "Hey asshole! Who made you the judge of whether or not my pain is real?!?!" I'm going to suggest that if you have the time to read this, CAN read it and don't have anyone chasing you with an axe, you probably don't have too many real problems.

I'm addicted to sex _ Not a real problem.
I have no legs - real problem.

I forgot my lunch and will have to buy a sandwich - Not a real problem.
I have a parasite - real problem.

I'm spiritually bereft - Not a real problem.
I'm being raped *right now* - real problem

I lost my keys- Not a real problem.
My pancakes are possessed - real problem (providing that in your head, this is the way you conceive of the problem that you've lost your keys. If your pancakes are actually possessed, not a real problem).

By the way, if you allow yourself to believe that you have a problem with say, shopping too much, I hate you, and maybe think you're a problem.

Genius

Like many people my age, I'm the go-to-guy for any tech questions in my family, ranging from the banal (how do I download a ringtone?) to the super banal (What's a Java?). It's annoying, but it's occasionally fun to have people think you're some kind of wizard because you know to set up an iTunes account.

My Dad is especially inept when it comes to anything computer related. Which isn't unusual, but Dad has the innate ability to ask questions that are so maddeningly obtuse that they can only be the creations of a boiling, genius mind. Dad takes bits and pieces he reads in magazines and hears on TV, some science he learned from Robert Ludlum potboilers, and synthesizes it into the scientific equivalent of ghoulash. Like when he asks me if Microsoft Word uses 128-bit encryption. For what, I ask him. Oh you know. For encrypting.

I got him an iPhone because even I couldn't get my head around most Nokia phones, and I found the iPhone enjoyably simple to use. I sat with him and loaded on music that he might like. I came across some Tenacious D. He'd never heard the D, and asked to hear some. I played Fuck Her Gently. This conversation followed.

Dad: Hahaha! That's great! Hey, do you think I could play that on the TRAIN?!?!? OUT LOUD?!?!?

Me: Uh, yeah, you could.

Dad: But I never take the train.

HOW DID HE DO THAT!?!? I could sit down from now until Doomsday and I would not be able to conceive such lunacy.

Ranto! Part 3 : Modern Bullshit and the Bullshit of The Future

PICKING UP IN MID-RANT

It's been 4 months since I last wrote this blog, during which time I've taken a long trip, gotten engaged, bought a cat, and had time to think about what I'm trying to get at with this long-winded diatribe. I'm happy to say that I'm no closer to a definitive answer, and it's shaping up to be a lifetime obsession. There are worse ways to spend a life.

I think all of this is a response to a question that's been burning inside me since I first opened my eyes. That question is....what?

"What" has always been more important to me than who, when and why. Specifically, "What's going on", and the implications of that question. If your first enquiry is who, then perhaps you're too worried about other people: their rank, value to you and what they're up to. Go be a priest, or a politician, or I dunno...someone else who seems really interested in what others are up to.

If your first question is When, then I guess it's tempting to suggest you should be a historian. But I dunno. "When" seems like such a weak question to me. It lacks context. "When did you get here?" seems pointless if you first don't know "What" that person's function is. "When" is for the clueless. I hate "When".

"Why" is a little more up my personal alley. But again, it's the context that matters. Why negates itself with the totally-not-useless axiom of "Why ask Why?". Why is too easily subdued with basic semantic jiu-jitsu (and possibly real jiu-jitsu).

But WHAT demands attention. Just by itself, it's a call for explanation without pleading. When paired with "going on here", it leads to a contextualization, which can be further expanded on with a "what was before that?".

So I'm asking what. What is going on here, into the western society into which I was born, which is rapidly becoming world society. Now that I have a basic grasp of that, I might ask why, but that seems too soon: better to ask "what happened before that". Eventually, you can keep going back, til you finally reach a why proposition: Why did humans start engaging in competition in the first place. I attempted to actually pre-suppose that with my previous rants: essentially, we started to compete when we started to grow food for ourselves.

Back to the current state of affairs. The "West", conceived as North America, most of Europe, Japan, Australia and New Zealand, the UK and a handful of branch offices (Israel, Hong Kong, some degree of Russia) are the "free" world. In this world, the people with the physical might (ie. the state) are subject to scrutiny by the people without (the public). Growth and innovation come from individuals, who are free to associate as they see fit. The only judge of what's good and bad is the market, wherein the masses get to decide what's "good" and "bad". People of more refined taste are sometimes asked to challenge the initial assertions of the masses, leading to occassional reversals in general opinion, allowing a chance for real innovation and evolution, rather than just moneymaking. The state is granted a certain license to exert it's violence in cases when it is called for, by the people. Trust flows upward, so that individuals place trust in juries, who place trust in judges, who place trust in law enforcement, who place trust in legislators, who are spurred to action by an executive, who is spurred to action in turn, by the masses. You might recognize a pattern- group to individual to group to individual to group to individual to group.

This world represents under a billion people, or about 15-20% of the world's population. Tellingly, it also represents about $35 trillion dollars in wealth (measured in western money, natch), equivalent to about 65-70% of the world's wealth.

The next world would be the "Emerging" world. This is a term that works in the west only: it suggests that they are emerging from another world, into the world that the west lives in. Indeed, that's pretty much how it looks: the BRICs (Brazil, Russia, India and China) are all countries that are, on the surface, living in the western world, but are in the process of shaking off some old-world traits: tribalism, corruption, central control of power, the unchecked state, factionalism, corruption again (because there's quite a bit of that) and violent religious warfare. More on that last item later.

Beyond the emerging world is the developing world. Vietnam, Thailand, many ex-soviet states, some of Africa...countries that are working hard to overthrow thousands of years of complex civilization, shaking off old habits that have no place in the modern world. To a certain degree, the developing world has a better chance of success than the BRICs. Emerging world countries have a certain amount of power and sway already- they're muscular enough that they see no problem sticking with their current systems, whereas the developing countries are still open to anything and everything.

And beyond that even, there's the failed world- Somalia, and...um...well, Somalia is the best example that comes to mind. No government, no infrastructure- utter mayhem.

Ok, so that's What we have now. What came before that?

World War Two. Forget the cold war, we're still living very much in the rubble of that loud motherfucker. Aside from the wholesale destruction of the physical old world, we destroyed something else- ambiguity about our own destruction.

Human beings have been fighting ever since there was something to fight over. But metaphorically, we were fighting on a big open playing field with no borders. We couldn't conceptualize wholesale destruction, where everything- our physical worlds AND the people inside it- would be vaporized. The proof is in the failure- when we tried to picture it, the best we could stretch our minds to was theological armageddon- the twilight of the gods, where a hammer-man fights a fire-man and they're both swallowed by a snake, or angels fight demons on a field of skulls and- bullshit! Big time bullshit. Monsters that no-one (sane) has ever seen, fighting against each other with super-powers that don't exist.

But World War Two demonstrated that utter destruction was very real, and very much within the grasp of ordinary humans- farty, flabby, nose-picking humans, with back-aches and sexual urges and no superpowers at all. We live in a world where we can easily conceive the end of our species.

YOU CAN'T GO HOME AGAIN

I could easily look up the Heisenberg uncertainty principle on Wikipedia and give a somewhat accurate synthesis of it here, but instead I'm going to go with what I think it's all about.

Ok, so the idea is, A exists. I'm X. X observes A, and now A is A + X's observation. It can never be A again.

Let's put this into a tangible example. There's a bug, with all it's bug behavior. I observe said bug. Now that bug is the bug, with all it's bug behavior, and my observation of it. I can never be certain that what I'm observing now is exactly what the bug was doing before I observed it- I can only extrapolate.

So you might say- well yes, we could be smartasses about it and not believe in anything. Maybe the world disappears every time I'm not looking at it, and it's a massive leap of faith to assume anything happens without me looking at it, because I can never be certain that it is, right? So we may as well make that leap of faith, and live on, because the chance that our uncertainty has any meaning on the real world is slim enough that we're better off not getting caught up in such shenanigans.

But I think this uncertainty has some real world applications. Maybe the aphorism that "ignorance is bliss" has some real-world meaning- without certain knowledge, we can continue on in a way that we simply couldn't if we had that knowledge. Without knowing that we had the tools to destroy one another, maybe we'd be in less of a panic about the world- why bother dwelling on armageddon if we can't actually conceive of it? If the twilight of the gods is about the gods, we can compartmentalize it and get on with the human task of living and being.

But no, no. We've observed it, we've done it. You can't go back to having unobserved it. So what tool do we have to help us get by in the face of this awful knowledge?????

BULLSHIT

I'm not going to suggest that bullshit is a recent innovation. If I wanted to be parochial about it, I could take some well-worn examples from the religious world. The Christians had the inconvenient knowledge that their religion was an offshoot of older, more cohesive faiths- mainly Judaism and European pagan faiths. So, let's create some bullshit! The pagans were in need of being saved, and the Jews gave up their covenant with Yahweh when they betrayed Jesus! But that bullshit becomes tired. So it needs refreshing. Now we have all sorts of Christian bullshit- the Romans didn't kill Jesus, the Jews did. But now the Christians are largely ok with Jews, so instead, it was just his will that he be sacrificed. Then there's some old fringe bullshit, like The British Israel theory, that the 'white' man is the true descendant of the ancient Israelite, and not the jew- because it was inconvenient to associate the old testament heroes with the miserable enemy in their midst. And nowadays, we have some more uncomfortable truths- the Catholic Church, the oldest extant Christian institution, is both infallible and guilty of heinous crimes. So we need some bullshit! I'm not even sure I can get a grasp of what bullshit the church uses to get around this one- except to point to the wonderful examples of the lives of individual Catholics as proof of the theory. Which avoids the accusation entirely. Few rational folk have an issue with catholics or Catholocism- their anger usually goes towards the institution of the church. This includes the anger of many catholics. But whatevs.
Lest we blame the Christians for all the bullshit in the world, let's look at some others. Islam in the newest religion on the Western monotheistic block. It borrows heavily from Christianity, Judaism, and even pre-Islamic, Arab paganism. Awk-ward!!! So let's just say that Islam is actually the oldest, that even Adam practiced it, and up until Mahammed, everyone was a little off the mark.

The Jews! They belong in Israel because it was promised to them, right? Of course, that requires a belief in an unknowable god in the first place, and a bullshitting of one's-self that other people's sovereign rights are immaterial against the wishes of AN INVISIBLE MAN. But to clarify, I'm a zionist- I believe the modern state of Israel has it's legitimacy in having won a war with another sovereign power, and taken land won in that war. No bullshit necessary, just facts. But let's not go down that road.

Back to the point- Bullshit is a mighty handy tool. Even when the facts are well-known to us and make a certain path seem illegitimate, bullshit is right on hand to patch over inconvenient inconsistencies and allow us to move forward. I'm not suggesting this is bad- like with the uncertainty principle, we can get tangled up so badly that we become static. Sometimes we just need to forge ahead , even in the face of cold, inconvenient fact.

Just so long as we all know the score.

And that takes us to...

BULLSHIT OF THE FUTURE

This rant began with the concept that trade is a wonderful thing, a tool to allow for human interaction without the need to fight over resources. It then dovetailed into a lament over the role of marketing- cheating around the reality of trade by creating a conception in the mind of your trading partner, allowing for unfair advantage- in simpler terms, rather than trading value for value, we seek to trade lesser value for greater value. The reason I hate this concept so much is that it works against the concept of trade in the first place- we use trade to get around the problem of violence. But then we abuse it, cheating people out of their money- and then those people call on good ol' violence to settle scores. Why bother?

From there, with a few twists and turns, I tried to establish the world we live in now- where we readily engage in lies, and have maybe forgotten the point of telling the truth in the first place. Maybe what I'm getting at is that no matter how well we bullshit ourselves, the truth is going to still be there, causing problems for us. The biggest problem? We know how it could all end. We can see the boundaries of the playing field, and we're uncomfortable with it. So we engage in all sorts of enchantments to push that away to the ends of our brains, where we can deal with it after death.

But it's the current trend in bullshit that has me worried. I'm going to start with a personal example.

In my past, I worked for a large organization. This company has a monopoly over it's industry, inherited from a public legacy - ie. it owned infrastructure that few private companies would ever be allowed to control, because in the past it had been a public company.

The products this company sells were inferior to their competitors for a lot of reasons. But it retained a significant market share because of it's position.

As a salesperson for this company, I was trained to sell on benefit and not on feature, which is old school salesmanship- sell them on how the product will make them feel, and based on their emotional state at the time of sale, rather than on the actual quality of the product.

But because I dealt with after-sales support, I knew firsthand just how bad the products were. After a while, I had to quit- I couldn't reconcile the fact that I was lying on a very basic level.

But when I went head to head with management on a few occasions, I noticed something eerie- these were people who knew full well that we didn't play fair, selling products that some people had to buy, because we blocked any competition with our control over infrastructure. Also, these were people who knew that some of the rhetoric we used, about quality, innovation, and having the best products at a price that was well above the competition- was bullshit. We made money from our weight and strength, and nothing else. Management knew that, and they knew that we knew that they knew!

Except they kinda didn't.

In other words, despite the fact that we were all in on a racket, earning money with well-placed lies, the management would stubbornly refuse to officially acknowledge the fact. Even when the evidence was right there.

I figured this was just professional posturing. But no. I'd sometimes speak to these people outside of work, and they'd stick to their guns. There was no frankness, no acknowledgment.

Ok, I thought, this is just sticking to bullshit to make the uncomfortable part of their day easier. Breaking it, observing the bullshit, would reduce it's effectiveness. I can feature that.

But no that wasn't it either.

YOU GOTTA BELIEVE ME!

One of my biggest fears is being right about something with no-one to verify that I'm right. Like, what if I went undercover, so deep that only one other person alive could verify that I was undercover- and that person was killed and left no records? I'd be adrift. Like a time traveller who arrived in the past, and then had his time machine broken. I'd be taken as a crazy person. I'd be dismissed out of hand, left to wonder whether everything I knew was right could be wrong. Left to question my own sanity.

Ugh. Just writing about it makes me queasy.

I worry sometimes that bullshit has taken on a life of it's own. It's one thing to engage in a lie. It's quite another to forget that it's a lie. That's where I feel the real problem is- we keep building castles made of sand, and then we FORCE ourselves to forget it's sand and move pianos into it. Then we're left confused and angry when those pianos fall right through the floor.

Like the financial crisis. For a while, financiers give loans to people who can't afford it, knowing full well it could backfire. But after a while it doesn't. New financiers walk into an accepted truth- people who can't afford loans can afford loans. Duh. It's right there. Forget the reality, or common sense- LOOKIT WHAT'S HAPPENING! Then people can't pay their loans, and financiers are left scratching their heads. I keep watching the news and wondering if it's all an act- this dumbfoundedness, a way to look innocent while taking taxpayer money- or maybe they really didn't know. It's meta-bullshit, bullshit that isn't bullshit by virtue of the fact that we've built bullshit safeguards around the bullshit.

Doesn't anyone get tired of it?

Here's another aphorism, like "sell the sizzle, not the steak", that I feel many people have purposefully missed the boat on- "Fake it til you make it".

Ok, this could mean- you have talent, but no-one will give you a chance based on faith alone. So fake being a success, so someone can give you a shot- and then show them what you've REALLY got.

Or, it could mean this- by dressing the part, you will become the part WITH NO FUCKING ACTUAL WORK INVOLVED.

This person is interesting! Their individual personality leads them to make aesthetic choices that are a true manifestation of their inherent uniqueness! If I dress just like them, I WILL BE AS UNIQUE AND INTERESTING AS THEY ARE.

I know I'm not saying anything new here, but is everyone aware that these people aren't aware?

CONCLUSION

I don't have an elegant way to synthesize this entire ill-feeling into a simple statement. But here's a go.

Lying isn't bad. Sometimes it's necessary. But don't forget which parts are lies.

Moving on, all I can hope for is that the current state of meta-bullshit will pass, as people will get bored with it. Perpetrators of bizarre anti-truths, whom actually aren't aware that they're lying, will eventually die out, and hopefully leave a bad enough taste in the next generation that we can get back to the real world- where lying serves only a temporary purpose, a bridge that we can look back on once we're on safer ground, without feeling the need to burn it down.

But let's not forget that we live in a world where we know how to end the world. I think maybe we're still in a state of panic, and we'll only calm down once we're able to reconcile that we can't go back to paradise, where destruction was an outside possibility.

And if we don't...well, we're adaptable. Maybe we'll just absorb the meta-bullshit, and when that gets tired, we'll build ever thicker layers, in perpetuity until there's no truth left at all, and we'll be easier to sell to than ever. No-one will be able to make any choices, and only the most ruthless bullshitters will have any power.

Uh...ok, I feel naive just saying that.

Ranto Part 2: Ye Olde Times

SUPER CIVILIZE ME

What was it that allowed human beings to congregate into cities? Well, as discussed in part 1 (circuitously), there needed to be a static and abundant food supply. Check that- a food surplus. If it's true that controlling an animal's food supply helps to tame their natural impulses, then the same could be said for humans- we became different once our food supply became controlled.

The second innovation came in the form of trade. With trade involved, different sectors could concentrate and specialize in the production of a good or service, which could be traded for others. This created a 'taming' or civilizing effect. We concluded, in the deep, dark genetic boiler rooms, that we no longer needed to burn calories in physical combat to get things we wanted. We could just trade for them.

But, and here's the kicker- there's always the option to walk away from desire. The human brain takes the same lazy route that everything else in nature takes- the path of least resistance. If we want something, we calculate the amount of work, physical or occupational, that it will take to get it. And we compare that to the amount of happiness we can expect to obtain from said object. If an iPod costs 4 days salary, but will bring you years of happiness...well, expect to sell many iPods. BUT- if the work is too risky or exhausting, our brain will rationalize away the desire for the object.

So where am I going with this? Well, I'm suggesting that the novelty of the market would have died out very quickly if it weren't for one very important innovation. At the beginning, it would have been very difficult to incentivize people to work, regardless of how revolutionary some new tools might have been. To get people to accept this new way of life, we had to restrict something. We had to manipulate the first ever market, the market for markets, by locking up the food.

AAAAND HISTORY STARTS....NOW. NO, NOW

There are theories abound regarding exactly when history starts, and what the first "civilization" was. Was it the Sumerians? The Egyptians? Han Chinese hydraulic civilization? Did early cultures in East Africa count as civilizations? Or did red-headed aliens come in boats from across the stars, and kindly fill in our ancestors on burials, marriage, agriculture and the rest? I'm not really sure which one is right, and I'm not sure it's really that important. What seems relevant to me is that history began when a farmer, with a surplus, first took issue with a less talented person stealing some of his surplus. There had to be a first time for that. Up until that point, theft was...well, theft wasn't. There was no concept of ill-gotten gain, because there had to be a fundamental shift in the idea of property. That's when history started, when someone first said 'Hands off'. From there. it's not hard to extrapolate how war, management, architecture, science, high technology and law evolved into their modern day counterparts. The only 'hard art' that I can think of that took a wholly different path is medicine, and that's mainly because the other disciplines can all refer back to that initial bullshit, whereas medicine has to be less bullshitty. Of course, this refers to actual medicine- life affecting surgery and chemistry.

Anywho, back to the point. I think this is where right wing and left wing begin as well. Of course, the concept of there being a line in the sand between the two is only relevant to post-enlightenment European societies and the people they affected (read: almost everyone). But the fundamental difference begins here: one side believes in ownership, the other side believes in need. Both sides believe in freedom- the concept that one person should have no control over the other. Except that they don't. I'm going to suggest again that one side believes in God, and the other side believes in Apocalypse. But even they're not quite sure which is which.

A SLIPPERY SLOPE

The idea that civilization began is hard to argue with, since everything happens for a first time at some point. But the idea that civilization is a lineal ascension towards the heavens is a little harder to lock down. To begin with, there are bumps in the road. Egyptian civilization was highly sophisticated, but was outmuscled by a mercantile Levantine civilization. That culture had to deal with the simple but quick-learning Hellenes, who grew to enormous sophistication, only to be bamboozled by the proudly prosaic Romans. And so forth. If sophistication is to be equated with a higher capacity for reason and a more egalitarian approach to systemic problems within human societies (poverty, sickness, substance abuse, etc), then it's hard to say we're in the most advanced window even now. Even if one were to take a 'right wing' view that sophistication is measured in terms of personal freedom and direct compensation for work that produces value, it could be easily argued that we've been in better places before.

Ok, but even accounting for bumps in the road, one could say that it's still an ascension. On a line graph, it might look a little jagged, but it still goes up, right? And it's a common academic conceit to say that people conceive of the modern day as being inferior to a golden past, but that really, everything is much better than it used to be. But even looking within the last 200 years, a period in which statistics has become the rigorous discipline we now take it to be, there's no evidence we're going up. The median age at death hasn't budged nearly as much as we think it has, leaps in technology have been enormous, but not proportionally superior to other ages of discovery and innovation, and human health isn't necessarily better as a whole. This isn't being creative with the stats, this is just trying to look at the whole situation.

LOOK, SERIOUSLY, TASTE IT. IT'S GOOD

I remember a friend asking me what "Jewish" means. I grew up in the stable and remarkably self-contained Jewish community of Melbourne, Australia. When i got out of school and into the workforce, I discovered that people who had grown up 30 minutes away by car had no idea what a Jew was, or how Jewish religion and culture was distinct from others.

I tried to think of a novel metaphor to explain how Jewish culture differed from Christian culture, specifically in light of the inevitable question about race, religion and nationality. Actually, the way the conversation went was :

- What nationality are you
- Jewish/American
- No, but nationality
- I guess Polish.
- What does it mean that you're Jewish?

So how do you answer this without starting from the year dot? Clearly, I have no problem starting from the year dot. But I wanted to see if I could put it into a context my friend could quickly get his head around. So I tried PC vs Mac.

Judaism is similar to Apple. It's a closed system, encompassing a hardware and software model. You can't easily graft Judaism onto another nationality, (which I surmised was my friend's word for what others may call ethnicity) and you can't easily operate another software model onto the Jewish ethnic group. Benjamin Disraeli may have been baptized as a Christian and lived a devout Christian life while serving as a member of parliament and Queen Vic's Prime Minister; but neither he nor his contemporaries could resist labeling him as Jewish. On the flipside, the Khazars, a nomadic central asian kingdom, tried taking up Judaism as an antidote to Christian and Muslim influences in the middle ages. It never caught on with the people.

So, to extend the metaphor, Judaism works for Jewish people, the same way Apple software works best on Apple hardware. Can Apple hardware run other OS's? Sure! But not well. And you can run Apple software on a PC, but why bother? The point seems to get lost. I know this metaphor breaks down in light of more up to date Macs that run Windows well, because the guts are the same as a PC. You could string out the metaphor and say this is analogous with Jewish people becoming more "white", with intermarriage being so high- but Jesus, enough already.

Now, how is Christianity like Microsoft? Well, like Microsoft did with Apple, Christianity took some initial cues from Judaism, but made the format much more open. Christianity pared back some functionality to allow for more open market readiness. They took away the hardware compatibility issue, by making it so that you didn't have to be ethnically Jewish, and you didn't need to be circumcised. They took away some of the more restrictive software elements, by eliminating dietary regulations and strict guidelines regarding the Sabbath. They kept a lot of the cool stuff- the all-powerful God, the asceticism- and added some killer apps of their own. Most spectacularly, they added the idea of Salvation. That's the killer app of Christianity, the way documentation is the killer app of Windows, and e-mail is the killer app of the internet. It adds something so fundamental to the mix, that other cultures started to budget in Christianity as a necessary expense. Because Hell is as bad as the competition being quicker and more organized than you are, and as bad as being unable to communicate quickly where others can.

In this metaphor, companies like HP, Gateway, Dell, Acer, Asus...they start to look like the Greeks, the Romans, the Gauls, the Teutons...they were hardware folk who paid a license to adopt a great system and graft it onto their 'hardware' cultures- the license fee being a tithe to a centralized church. Sometimes the fit was imperfect, so things got adjusted, cottage industries were started to smooth over the differences...think of Adobe and Java and Cisco, and then think of the fragmentation of the European Christian landscape. Think of all the Sony software you get on your desktop with a new Vaio, and then think of Christmas trees, Yule logs, easter rabbits and other conventions that fit with ancient European cultures, but have nothing to do with the New Testament.

So what's the relevance of this long detour? The civilization that we live in now, with it's fundamentals in Christianity and agriculture, is based on the concept of "what we have is very good, and we recommend you take it up as well". It's hard to argue with that logic, because...here we are! Obviously, our ancestors thought it was good, because they took it up. This culture then, must be superior to cultures it supplanted!

That approach should work with Microsoft as well. It's on 95% of machines around the world. Apple, by comparison, is a minnow. So why does Apple inspire such loyalty? And why are Apple fans sometimes portrayed as being brain-dead zombies suffering from Stockholm Syndrome, trapped into an ecosystem that sucks their wallets dry, while Windows users can blaze a free trail? Because of bullshit.

Look, I'm not saying Apple is better, or that Judaism is better, or anything like that. That's not really the conversation here. But one thing to point out- Microsoft got it's market power with clever legal, marketing and licensing tricks. It's underlying product was excellent; but soon, that wasn't as important as how well it could lock you in with sophisticated deals.

Christianity has things to recommend it over Judaism, and for that fact, most other faith software. The idea of Grace, the concept of a (new) covenant with God, and the idea that you're pre-damned, and need to work towards Salvation- these are exciting, world beating innovations. That got the ball rolling. That allowed the Church to enter the spiritual market. But it was their vertical integration- the idea of Christian governments and Christian armies- that allowed them to win market dominance. And after a while, that was the source of their power, not their spiritual innovation. Meanwhile, The Jews carried on, with their own civilization in the background, borrowing bits and lending bits as they went, occasionally beaten down in the market (very beaten down), but staying true to a closed system that only changed on their terms. Other groups weren't so lucky. Some died out in body and spirit, others in spirit only. A big heap joined the party to the extent that they became the party. It's like how "Roman" once meant people from the city and region of Rome, then came to mean people who adopted Roman culture, then came to mean the Greek Christians in Byzantium, then came to mean a plurality of Germans.

So what's the problem here? Christianity isn't really what this long, tired rant is all about. In a way, it's a minority player now too; a supporting act. The real star of the show here is the whole industry of Markets. The idea of trade and rewarding value and merit. This idea, a spectacular, world changing idea, is what's really at stake. And if History began with the idea of property, it may be at a fundamentally precarious point right now. A confused point, where the left and right are more divided than ever, but where fundamental meanings are clouded in a fog of bullshit. Where corporations, which mimic governments, are champions of the right, and where progressive innovators are champions of the left. Where faith, mystery and personal peccadilloes are right wing stalwarts, while firm handshakes, clear visions and operational efficiency are left-wing causes. How did we get this way? What did World War 2 have to do with it? And at what point does right-wing anarchy meet left-wing anarchy to make...anarchy?

Next up: Modern Bullshit and Bullshit of the Future

Ranto! Part One: Cavemen!

SOMETHING TO CRO ABOUT

So about 200,000 years ago, evolution had narrowed the "homo" strain down to two strong species: Cro-Magnon and Neanderthal. There were probably some human-ish types in Indonesia and other remote communities (remote from Eastern Africa, that is), but they're no longer around today, and it's unlikely they found their way into the homo sapien line.

Neanderthals were about 5 feet tall, wide, pretty hairy and pretty clever. They had large hearts and brains (physically I mean) and they buried their dead. They probably had some language, and they probably used fire to cook with. They were probably much stronger than modern humans, and with their big chests came big lungs- they could probably track game for a long, long time. They infrequently settled, and they never seemed to engage in agriculture, at least not dedicated agriculture. They never seemed to acquire a taste for fermented things, so they probably never came across wine, cheese or bread, and they needed a lot of fresh meat. They probably had high infant mortality rates, but if they survived childhood, they likely lived well into their 70's. They lived in Saharan Africa, Israel, Jordan, Turkey, Most of Europe and Central Asia. They don't seem to have gotten much further than that.

Cro-Magnon were as tall as modern humans. In fact, Cro-Magnon were modern humans. I doubt they did battle with the neanderthals. They probably interbred with them, but as they were faster and cleverer (big asterisk- see next paragraph), they probably just pushed them out and monopolized their food supply. Cro-Magnon genes got passed along, neanderthal ones largely did not. No mystery there.

Cro-Magnon didn't have neanderthal's stamina. So they were forced by necessity to become more efficient hunters. I should point out, I don't think they were cleverer per se- I think they were just physically weaker and were therefore required to become cleverer. I think both species possessed the same capacity for ingenuity, but Neanderthal never had to progress much beyond hunter-gathering to survive in the long term, and the short term encroachment of Cro-Magnon was both too quick and too subtle for them to respond to effectively.

Cro-Magnon lived in tribes: closely bound groups, mostly kin, where survival was determined by how best to survive, and set rules were entirely anathema. What good is a set rule if it isn't working? I don't mean to suggest that life was a constant battle without time for discussion or debate- the opposite. I think that's all life really was. A few hours a day to secure food, then the rest was sleep, sex, socializing and play time. Traditions only came about when they were necessary and they worked.

Of course, early on, they would have realized that they couldn't afford to stay to themselves for long. Interbreeding is one of those things that probably made a lot of sense at first glance ("But she's right there!") but we wouldn't be here if they didn't figure out that they needed to talk to other tribes and organize some cross-territory hot-boning. That worked out nicely, because the by-product was alliances with other groups. And another nice by-product was Trade.

YOU HAVE CARROTS? WE WERE GONNA MAKE CARROT CAKE! OH THIS IS NICE.

Trade is awesome. Tribesman A and Tribesman B are watching their kids get married. Tribesman A mentions that they have shitloads of carrots. Tribesman B sighs. They'd like some carrots. All they have is abundant skins of water. Tribesman A moans. Man, they could really go some water.

Then a chocolate truck crashes into a peanut butter truck, and lo, the Peanut Butter Cup was born.

This is really cool: there's been no unequal gain- the same amount of goods is still present in the room, but the amount of happiness has increased several-fold. Og has carrots, Bill has water- and no-one had to kill anyone else to better their lot! Who needs theft, murder and rape when you have trade? And best of all, at the end of the day, we can go back to our camps, and we don't have to "get all up in each other's faces".

TOTALLY CEREAL

Well, this is almost exactly how it worked for a long time. I don't mean to imply it was all hunky-dory- it was probably difficult, though no moreso, relatively, to working 8 or 10 hours a day in an office. The main thing is that the child mortality rate was pretty high. Few made it past 5 years, but the ones who did, lived as long as we do now. And they had skirmishes too. Frequently. With neighbouring tribes, amongst themselves- maybe as often as every week. But they weren't wars of destruction, they were mostly preventative clashes to establish that each tribe had a claim to be there, the strength to back that up, and the will to use it. And even that standoff would be put on hold once there was something to trade.

In this set-up, calories came from hunted meat and gathered vegetables. Probably a 50-50 split. But whereas gathering took quite a few calories to perform, hunting took A LOT of calories. Since these dudes were semi-nomadic, camping down for a number of weeks at a time before moving on, they probably knew about wheat. It grew wildly. They probably knew that if cut at a certain time, they could get some fat, juicy kernels out of a stalk. And over time, they probably saw what happened when you crushed those kernels up into a paste and baked it. You got damper. Let the mix rot for a bit before you bake it, and you get bread. And bread was totally tits.

We're at about 10,000 years ago now. 8000 BCE.

One tribe decided to put aside hunting for a bit, and to concentrate on this bread dealio for a while. They got expert at it. It was seriously hard work, but the long-term payoffs were big. They had a surplus of food after a while. Which meant they didn't eat all their vegetables and milk straight away, since they had other food available...and once they were allowed to rot a bit, wine and cheese came next. Then preservation, which had been an amateur sport til then, went pro. Because you have all this food now, that you can control yourself...cant let it go to waste! And hey, we have excess food...so wolves hang out with us, and whaddya know- they're not bad to have around, once food is available (that isn't in the form of our young children). And hey! excess food can be fed to other animals, like reindeer and oxen and goats...so they stick around, and we have lots more milk available! And now we can/have to build more permanent settlements. That'll require more tools, and more tools means small jobs get done quicker, and we can turn to bigger jobs meaning bigger tools, and so on...

THE FALL (?)

Depending on your viewpoint, this was either the most glorious moment in human history, or the start of the end. The plus sides seem self-evident: with more food and permanency, our kids live longer, and we have more need for and access to, tools. That's about the end of the up side. The other stuff- we get bigger and more well fed, we have to work less, we get wiser- that's not really true. We're on the whole no taller, smarter, stronger, or healthier than we were before the agricultural revolution.

The downside is pretty big. We develop fear of the future for the first time. I'm sure hunter-gatherers know fear. But I doubt an idea of "the future" ever came to them- Life is now, and it'll be now tomorrow, and it was now yesterday, too. They know time passes, but it doesn't pass towards anything, it just passes.

Farmers, meanwhile, know full well that time passes, and that it may not be in their favour. Without a good harvest, things will be very bad indeed. They're going to agonize over that.

There's a weakness in this part of the theory- surely the hunter-gatherers knew to measure time in human physical development, and in seasons. I'm sure they did. But I'm not convinced that those things brought enormous fear. Maybe winter, for the sheer difficulty. But not the same way it would have struck doubt and fear into a farmer, who knew that he had locked himself into a system of producing food that was completely fucked over by lack of sunlight and water. A hunter gatherer can still go hunting in winter. Tough, but not impossible.

But the farmer has preserves of food! But the hunter gatherer has those as well. But the farmer has more, because he has a house, and he can store more than he can carry! True. That part is true. It just means the hunter gatherer has to limit how many people can be in his tribe. The farmer can wile away those winter nights, 6 inches deep in moist farm-wife, knowing that while he builds his stocks of food in the harvest months, he builds his stocks of more farmers in the winter.

More downside. Jealousy, violence and stress. The farmer has toiled very hard for his food. Very hard. Much harder than the hunter gatherer! Losing his food- be it to fire, plague, locusts, theft, foxes, whatever- is going to hurt awful bad. So he stresses over it. How to store it. How to protect it. How to ensure that no-one else gets it. Sure enough, that's going to require some very powerful, high strung and violent genes to succeed in that environment. So that's what the farmwives are going to pick. Of course, you'll also need some very talented and clever genes too. So that becomes part of the equation as well. What do the Hunter-Gatherers need? Well, realistically, they'll need violence, strength and cleverness too. But a different cleverness, and a different violence. This part is hard to pin down, but I think the hunter gathers were sexually selective towards co-operation, and farmers for competition. Make of that conclusion what you will: I'm still trying to get my head around it.

But sure enough- when the farmers started to multiply- and they did, very quickly- they had no time or patience for hunter-gatherers on "their land". And they had very good tools to deal with interactions.

Of course, the poor shmuck hunter gatherers probably thought someone owning land was totes retarded (if they bothered to think about it at all), and ignored warnings from the farmers to bugger off. They weren't stubborn, they were probably just bemused.

If someone started yelling at you to stop blueing his peaches, would you quickly get out of the way, or would you kinda stop and say "what are you on about?". Of course, you could hazard a guess at what's making this guy so upset, and you could try to work out in what way you had blued his peach, but in the meantime, he's used some wicked awesome scythe to chop your head off.

And after a while, even the dudes who had learned to just get out of the way of these high-strung farmers, pretty soon discovered that all the way had done been gotten out...of. So hunter gatherers were soon driven to those places so remote and hostile that you couldn't even grow a seed on it, and stuck around until many centuries later, when a farmer decided that there was something in that area that was needed back home for that ongoing competition with other farmers. Be it rubber, or tobacco, or sugar or whatever. And before you know it...no more hunter gatherers.

I'M JUST GOING TO BITE AIR, LIKE THIS

I like mythology and legend. They're like little knowing references to history. And the more obscure, the better. Like when someone makes a pie, and you make a Simpsons reference by saying "Now Jim, don't you eat this pie..." It's a random quote, but it calls on the shared experience that you and Jim had of the episode where Bart and Lisa are on different hockey teams, they start fighting, and Marge goes to check on them, tells Homer not to eat the pie, and en route to surreptitiously eating it (by "biting air"), Homer smashes his head. FUNNY.

Of course, if Jim has never seen the Simpsons, he wouldn't get the subtext, and contextually he'd be like "fuck you dicknose, It's my pie". (Of course, his "dicknose" reference would suggest he's seen Teen Wolf, so let's not judge Jim too harshly, even though he is a pie-eating-no-simpsons-watching motherfucker).

If Jim knows that episode, he cracks up. You've strengthened the pair bond, by saying "hey! we like and know the same things! Marry my sister!" NICE.

Ok, so back to mythology. Mythology of itself is like this big debate, this big reasoning. All these early folks kinda know that they used to be hunter-gatherers, and that life was different. So they form this way of short-handing this difficult concept:

Flood myths- there were humans, but something happened, and those humans were wiped out, and we're like, "new humans".

Gilgamesh- The great-grandfather of our people had a brother, whom he really loved. But the brother was wild, and great-grandfather had to destroy him. But he feels totes bad about it.

Golden Age- Those old humans were really cool. We're Silver Age humans. We're also cool. Not quite as cool. *Sniff*

Paradise- Life used to be really great, when we lived in this nice, walled, apple orchard. Then we discovered something, and we lost that, and now we're out in the wilderness, always toiling.

Cain and Abel- The farmer and the herdsman were brothers. Sky father preferred the herdsman's lifestyle, and the farmer, in his jealous rage, killed his brother. Then he refused to own up to it, and now he's cursed.

Pandora/Eve- Things were good when we didn't know. But we got curious and tried to find out. We found out, but now we can't un-know.

NOW WHAT?

So here we are. We're at about 6000 BC. Farmers have been around a while, and after a lot of hard work, they're pretty much alone, with the hunter gatherers and tribal types on the fringes. Of course, the farmers are hunter-gatherers too, and 2000 years or so of sexual selection doesn't quite stand up to 200,000 years of tribal sexual selection. They don't have it out of their system yet. So they congregate in weird tribes. Inter-competitive tribes. Catal Huyuk, in Turkey was an early one. Jericho was another. These are some of the first cities, in a context we can understand today. Not villages or settlements, but a collection of non-related families, collected near a water source and easily defended ground, where labour is specialized and trade is ever-flowing. All this supported by a geologically close agricultural sector, just outside the boundaries of the city. It's not a tribe, exactly, but it works almost as well as tribes have for 200,000 years. And in many ways, better.

We're at this point because of some very ground breaking ideas. They are:

1. We want freedom from powers beyond our control.
2. We love our children as individuals, not as an ambiguous "next generation".
3. Work is virtuous, and what I earn is mine alone.

If those things sound perfectly reasonable in context, don't be alarmed. That's because you're descended from farmers. Here, more or less, is the exact opposite conclusion:

1. We want to leave the power over life and death to the Gods.
2. An individual child is not as important as the overall health of the tribe.
3. Work, for it's own sake, is totally shit. And screw your rights, I want what you have

If you thought these things all the time, you'd be thought of as backwards, cruel and lazy. If that seems about right to you...again, don't be alarmed.

Here's my take: neither of these viewpoints is right or wrong, because the world doesn't actually work like that. Both work a little bit. Both can be made to work in the long term. But one method has been around for a lot longer than the other.

To put it another way: Let's assume two men want freedom.

One man envisions being able to walk completely unencumbered by anything, completely naked, through the wilderness, hunting and eating only when he needs to. He doesn't worry about the future, because he knows he has no power over it.

The other man worries about the future. He worries it will be really bad unless he plans for it. So he encumbers himself with weapons, clothes and provisions. He goes traipsing off into the wilderness, eating and hunting to a schedule, to ensure he can get through the bad times that he knows full well is just around the corner.

Let's say it another way. One man believes in God. The other believes in Apocalypse.

That's where I'm going to leave this for now. I should point out: I don't believe in socialism, I value the individual over the group, I believe in freedom and I really like science and machines. I don't believe man is flawed, and I don't believe women are sneaky or evil. I also don't believe in God, or at least, I don't believe in a beardy giant man who lives on a mountain and is concerned about what I eat or whom I shtup.

Because think about it. That's retarded.

Next: Ye Olde Times!

Ranto! Introduction

I think the arch of my intellectual inquiry has taken a typical route; as a youngster, I was hooked on mythology. Then came Jurassic Park in 1993 and I turned my attention to dinosaurs and natural history. With high school came a fascination with classical music, comic books and ancient history. A chance purchase of a book about freemasonry when I was 19 lead to a long fascination with that subject, which fed on my existing love of history and mythology. When I was 21, I picked a political side, unsurprisingly leftish, and began investigating liberal causes- globalization, the downside of civilization, anthropomorphic climate change, abuse of labour markets, and so on.

Religion has always been a big thing too. I was brought up in Melbourne's cozily incestuous Jewish community, where everyone knows everyone and that girl you have a crush on might very well be your cousin. I went to Jewish schools and had a passing competency in all things religious, from Hebrew to texts and traditions. But it was only after high school that I started to become interested in Jewish civilization, Christianity and the wider world of religious belief. This probably co-incided with my first attempts to get into the pants of someone who wasn't possibly a cousin.

Back to politics. I became vegetarian for a while after reading Fast Food Nation. I read all of Daniel Quinn's books, and still agree with his basic hypothesis- man has been tribal for a lot longer than he's been urban, and that exclusive agriculture was probably a mistake. I even read The Communist Manifesto, but even my soft, impressionable brain found it a bit eye rolling.

When I was 24, I picked up a copy of The Economist, because Time had become a sadly predictable rag, cycling through the following 4 topics every month: Iraq, DNA, How bread can kill you, and new speculation into the gayness of long dead US presidents. Not that those things are uninteresting (Hahding wuz a queeah), but I was just sick of seeing a double helix graphic on every second cover. The Economist was a refreshing change, and with Fox News already setting the ungracious tone for political discourse all around the world, I needed something that actually seemed fair and balanced. I was impressed by the depth of reporting, the sparseness of the editorializing, and the anonymity of authorship (there are no bylines). I studied the Economist style guide, and I subscribe to the audio edition, where I get to hear it read in clipped Queen's English by men and women with syrupy voices. I listen to/read most of it, though I blank out during the Asian and African sections. Get more interesting, Asia and Africa!

So I began to expand on my political knowledge. I did an Open University course on International Politics, to get a handle of the basics. I read Atlas Shrugged, which is a valuable read if you want to know where the radical right gets it's talking points and attitudes from. My dad, a far more avid novel-reader than I, had always pushed me to read some Ayn Rand. I know why now- her ideas are thought provoking, compelling and utter shit. It doesn't take a particularly keen mind to put two and two together- she was a homely Jewish-Russian girl, whose family was persecuted for being middle class. She became a fierce advocate for meritocracies, talent, patriarchy, competition, weird sex and disturbingly, a fetishist for tall, fair, Germanic physical qualities. I'm not going to suggest she was a self-hating jew (I don't think her ethnic heritage was really part of the conversation), but she definitely seemed to buy into the master race ideology.

So this brings me to the subject of markets. Also, the left-right divide, the culture war, the end of history, the new world civil-war and what it is that bothers me so much about the world we live in.

I'm not good at due diligence. I won't make any footnotes or references. I'll paraphrase. to sidetrack for a moment- I read an interesting idea recently, that western philosophy has always taken a hypothesis-antithesis-synthesis approach, in contrast with say, the Jewish approach to debate- hypothesis-antithesis-antithesis-antithesis approach. In a nutshell, this means that goyim like a result and Jews like to sit around and argue. I don't think either group would quickly deny that, but for rebuttals to this crackpot hypothesis you'd have to speak to their respective leaders; Queen Elizabeth for the goyim and Boss Jew Herschel "Hank" Rosenblatt of Teaneck, NJ.

So yeah, I'm looking for an argument here. I don't expect any real conclusive answers, because we're talking about history, government, the market and human endeavour. These are fluid things that we live in, not fixed things that can be readily observed and quantified. I'm really just putting out ideas and observations here, to put my thought processes on paper and make sense of it all.

I'm not looking to synthesize a Grand Unified Theory of everything, because through early cultural osmosis I picked up a wise-alecky, stubborn, stiff necked tendency to immediately switch positions on something once it has been conclusively settled on. I suppose I am suggesting that this is something that has been baked into my thick, garlicky jewish blood. Basically, if I ask for chicken, and you agree that chicken is the meal of the day, I will then argue why fish is better. For one thing, it's healthier. And what, you no like fish?

This post is just an introduction, while I form a cogent argument for my next post. I'm going to try and take a chronological approach, because a) it helps me and b) it'll help me workshop some ideas for a book I'm trying to draft. It's also easier.

I'm also going to steal ideas without giving their originators their proper due. Thankfully, no-one is reading this.

Next: Cavemen!

Pad-o!

When I was 18, I had a job as an outbound telemarketer for a telecomms firm. I would sit in a chair while a new piece of software, called Genesys, would scan a database of calls and transfer someone to me when a human voice was recognized as having picked up. I would then offer some deal and...well look, the point was, I worked the swing shift between 2pm and 10pm, and for half the day even Genesys couldn't find anyone at home, and I'd spend a lot of time playing Gameboy. Which, even in 1998, was pretty retro.

Around that time, Comic Book Reader (.cbr) format was brand new. It took scanned images of comic books and compiled them into a fairly intuitive viewer for your PC. Also, there was Napster- a ridiculous concept, where people could download digital songs and TV shows to their computers (in real player format...remember real

player?)- for free.

I remember at the time thinking about what it would take to put books, especially my new cbr comic books, onto a device like the Gameboy. It boggled my mind- take my entire comic book collection everywhere I went? And what about books? What about a single device, in colour, wrapped in leather, but that could replace textbooks and novels? I was really excited.

I talked to people about it. My future brother in law, who was in software. My friend Jake, who was just starting to get interested in industrial design. From my end, I imagined it being subsidized by the government as a health-saving device, part of a healthcare bill, specifically because it saved young backs. You sell them en masse to the education sector, and people can load in cartridges (like the gameboy) pre loaded with entire libraries.

I didn't shut up about this idea for many years. In 2001, I moved to Seattle, without a degree, and still chasing dreams of being an actor. I wasn't really a computer guy, but I liked the idea of nice things that did neat stuff, rather than really cool things that were hard to do cool stuff on. I was excited to start making friends with people in the IT industry.

I moved back to Melbourne in 2002. On the bus between Seattle and LA, where I caught my flight from, I started talking with a fellow passenger, and showed her my Rio Volt, a cd player that could play MP3's. It was by far my favourite thing in the world- I could load 120 sings to a disc. I had always been the kid carrying lots of entertainment in my backpack- a walkman, 10 mix tapes and probably 3 graphic novels. I'm a voracious media nerd. I always wanted more, and that idea about having everything on one device kept in my head. I want more content and less physical stuff.

She showed me her favourite gadget- an iPod. It was so expensive and out of reach in my mind, that I was barely curious. But I was a little curious. Apple was completely foreign to me- I had Windows 98, and all things Mac were a bizarre universe to me. But I had a play and yeah, it was ok.

in 2003, iPods got colour, and I bought one. 20GB. Now THAT'S a lot of media in one spot. I filled it, and I'm not even a big music fan, I loaded it with photos, even though I barely ever take photos. I liked doing stuff with it. I liked using it as a hard drive. I would take it to work (another call centre job) and work on uni assignments in between calls, or read comics, or write short stories and scripts, and save them to my mini digital briefcase, and then strap that fucking thing to my arm and listen to music while riding my bike home. I even used a converter which took any word document and turned in into notes, which could be loaded into the iPod and read like a book. I read Wealth of Nations and Josephus' Histories on that thing. I even tried taking single scanned pages of comic books and loading them in as individual photos, hoping to flip through them and read as...but alas, the screen was way too small.

The video came, and I sold my old one and upgraded to that. And the storage was even bigger- 60GB! I watched cartoons, porn, full movies, TV shows- whatever I could download in digital form, I could get on there. I liked it.

When the iPhone came in 2007, I evolved into full time tech nerd. I followed a live blog of the keynote, and audibly "wowed" when Jobs showed how to pinch and swipe on the thing. I knew it wasn't coming to Australia for a while, but I was patient. I'd get one.

And as soon as I got one in 2008, I opened it. And then that night, I loaded the thing with apps. And one of my first apps was a comic book reader that took....PDFs only.

Fuck it, I thought. I've been waiting for this. I converted some CBRs into PDF, loaded them and....it was garbage. Too small.

iCried.

Well no, I moved on. I even sold my iPhone and upgraded to the 3GS as soon as it came out, and I've now converted to Mac as well. I'm hooked, because Apple seems to do things the way I like- they make simple looking devices that do great stuff, rather than just cool looking things that do everything half assedly. I liked their marketing too- it seemed the perfect marriage of steak and sizzle- they sold the benefit, but the feature behind it was so thoughtfully built, that it actually exceeded beyond what Apple itself sought to deliver. Now that's how you run a railroad.

In all this time though, I still wanted my comic book and book reader. I'm addicted to the economist, and I love the audio downloads they offer, but I also want the print edition- but after years of moving around crates and boxes of magazines and books, I'm sick of clutter. I wanted a slim device that did all this stuff, and not a bunch of things that needed looking after! I want to consolidate! I want space, not bookshelves, room to move, not a need for more room. That's what clutter is to me- it creates need, rather than happiness. I want happiness. And I'm happy when watching movies, reading books and sending messages to my loved ones. I like to be entertained.

When a friend in early 2009 told me he could get me an old Windows XP tablet, I was interested. Fuck the crippled UI- it would load PDFs and cbr files. I was willing to give him $700 for it. Thankfully, that deal never materialized. Then the rumor mill about an Apple tablet started to heat up. Then the Kindle came out, and it was shit- black and white? Jesus, this is 2009. Other tablets started to pop up (not in shops, mind you), and they all looked like crap.

I was now jailbroken on my iPhone, and I loved it even more. I like pushing it. I like using bluetooth headphones and being able to ride my bike and listen to podcasts and music without any wires (yes, I know it's dangerous, but you don't understand- I, unlike everyone else, know what I'm doing). But even with my handy little device, I still carry a notepad in my backpack, usually a novel, and a portable hard drive (actually, my old iPod, now devoid of any music and just used as a briefcase) to play with at work. Does the iPhone have annoying limitations? Sure. No USB drag and drop. Low storage, comparatively. No Flash support for Safari. Crippled Bluetooth. It's not perfect. And it certainly can't display my comic books.

I was seriously hanging out all week for the keynote on Jan 27. I devoured all the news and rumours. I got up at 6am to follow a liveblog.

The details- the name, the fat bezel, the iPhone OS- didn't even register to me. I just looked at that big beautiful screen, and smiled. Finally!

But I was so disheartened to read the press. People loathe it. People think it's ugly, crippled...they're laughing about the docked keyboard- I was praying for a docked keyboard! I was shocked Apple came out with one at launch! People want a full OS...really? I love the iPhone OS. When it first started coming out, I was thinking "this is what computers will look like down the road. No more windows, it'll be about home screens and apps". I'd buy a new computer right now if it offered every single package and program out there as a standalone app instead. But shit, you can do that and make it portable? And always connected by 3G? For under a thousand bucks for the highest end? Does anyone really believe this thing isn't going to sell like crazy?

Well, whatever. Haters, says I. This thing is going to be really cool. And I'm going to buy one as soon as I can, get home, find the app that reads cbr files, and then load on every issue of Cerebus, Sandman and Transmetropolitan. And I'll finally have a device I've been thinking about for over a decade. It won't change my life, but it'll make me happier. And hey, if they can make legal content cheaper, I'll gladly drop my pirate

ways and pay for more content.

(Ahem. More, not all. Let's not go nuts).

And 6 months after that, I'll convince my girlfriend Lisa to get one too, which she'll grudgingly enjoy, and then I'll pull that smug-as-fuck face and get my ass handed to me. That'll make me happier too.

Fictionary!

Every couple, I imagine, creates an entire lexicon out of their shared experience; cute words and phrases that are intended to strengthen the pair bond, a secret language that identifies one to the other as their freely chosen companion.

Most couples mercifully keep this cutesy shit to themselves- out of a sense of self consciousness, a desire to keep it private, and for a lack of elegant phraseology to take the words out of personal context and explain them to the lay-person. Thankfully, I have no shame, no desire to keep anything private, and a thick, veiny vocabulary that's just bursting with enthusiasm.

1. Boobelachma- boobs, or anything related to them, uttered in a faux-arabic accent. Can be a noun or adjective (n. "Gimme some boobelachma!" or adj. "That woman sure is boobelachma! But you even more so, pon rabies")

2. Mah Bebeh (also. Pon Rabehs, Pon Swayzeh, Vince Frabehs, etc.)- a vaguely insincere rendering of "My Baby", meant to evoke the patois of an un-self consciously "cool" hipster action hero, or Eurotrash. To be used when the other partner is upset about nothing important (eg. "What's wrong, Pon Shwabies? Did life not come out the way you want to in your mind babehs?")

3. Balls, Ham, Smith- Versatile suffixes to render adjectives as nouns and verbs as institutions. Eg. "I feel angryballs at all this reality telesmith! Fetch me some sodaham!"

4. Splayed Fatly- the condition wherein the described is unappealingly lying on their back due to over-consumption of food. Usually accompanied by high pitched moaning and sad, beefy farts.

5. Scroobily doo and boobily doo, foobily doobily do (toot sweet!)- A tonal garbleham evoking nothing beyond mild restlessness or an inability to otherwise articulate one's thoughts.

6. Doo, do-do da-doo!- A tonal garbleham specifically evoking an insincere conclusion to a thought, using a tone common to the tail end of late 20th century US television sitcom theme songs. Further intended to evoke a sense of contrivance or an otherwise unsatisfactory conclusion.

7. Garbleham- An incongruous grouping of sounds, syllables or mis-heard words and phrases, intended to evoke a sense of deja vu or ironic self awareness.

8. Totes- All purpose adverb used to evoke both a sense of completeness and an ironic detachment from youth culture, through gentle mockery. Eg. "That sandwich is totes tastyballs. Let's get an iPhone app to describe it's awesomeness, Von Shwagels".


You better believe this list will be updated. I'm even happy to include good ones from other couples and claim them as my own.

Discuss-o! : Where The Wild Things Are

I'm not familiar with the work of Maurice Sendak, the creator of Where the Wild Things Are. Like anyone else following the drama of how the adaptation finally made it to the big screen, I know the vague outline by now- born of immigrant parents in Brooklyn, Maurice create a number of works in the 60's and 70's, sparsely worded but wildly illustrated tales of pre-adulthood angst. The books are by now storied classics, clutched protectively to the collective chest of 2, maybe 3 generations of largely white, middle class people. At the time, they were censored ins ome areas, widely debated in others. Particularly for the illustrations, which evoke a universe of Id- packed with burly monsters, grotesque villains and brave children.

My girlfriend, Lisa, is a fan. She was having shpilkes over it's release way back in August. I agreed that it looked good- I like Spike Jonze, I liked the cast, I liked the soundtrack, and it certainly looked compelling. And of course, I originally figured it was another delightful sequel to Major League, this one where Charlie Sheen returns as Rick 'Wild Thing" Vaughan, now a pitching coach with the feisty Cleveland Indians, helping them back to the World Series! Surely they will need to sacrifice more than a bucket of Kentucky Fried Chicken to overcome those evil New York Yankees!!

!!!!

So we saw the movie, and we both genuinely had weird dreams that very night. We can't say for certain that the movie did it- we'd also had felafel and red Twizzlers that day- but it probably helped. Lisa was underwhelmed at first, but formed a complex assessment. I'll post hers first, and then my own take.

Lisa's Analysis

Lisa is always looking for a psychological angle, and her approach to this movie was no different. She felt that the creatures were manifestations of the Kubler-Ross model of the stages of grief: Denial, Anger, Bargaining, Depression and Acceptance. There are 7 creatures, though if we take the morose couple of Ira and Judith as one, and powerless goat-boy Alexander as a proxy for Max himself, then we get a reasonable analogue: Ira and Judith are Denial; The hulking and impulsive Carol is very much Anger; Douglas, the peacekeeping bird creature, is our Bargaining, KW, the loner, is Depression, and the dangerous, silent but ultimately gentle Bernard is Acceptance.

In this context, the film is a story of a boy who has to come to grips with the fact that his father is gone. Supporting this is the crux of the story, where Carol wants to build a home for everyone to stay together. Keep on seeing it in this context, and it's difficult to see it any other way. Everyone is eager to accept Max as a king. They need a king. Max needs a father.

I think Lisa is dead on with this analysis. The director has subtly hinted as much, with Max glimpsing painful reminders of his father's absence; a globe on his desk from an anonymous giftbearer, his mother canoodling on the couch with another man.

Adam's Analysis

I, uh, thought maybe the whole thing was that Max had met up with some homeless people, and he saw them as scary/lovable monsters. Apparently, I can't distinguish subtext from subway- sandwiches that is!

*laughing so hard that delicious meatball sub starts spurting from my nose*

I'm open to any other suggestions. Maybe it was just a delightful family romp about a boy and his furry pals?

Oh, and I also saw some Viking allegories with Bob and Terry, the two weird little owls that say nothing, but that everyone seems to understand. Didn't Odin have a pair of ravens named Thought and Memory that would return to him every day? And doesn't Max's boat look like a tiny little Viking longboat? And didn't Max tell the Wild Things that he had beaten up some Vikings? Hrmmm???? We're through the looking glass here, people.