Elegy

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I lay me down, inviting sleep,
Then close my eyes and quietly weep;
And, weeping, I compose an elegy
To all who haven’t read my trilogy.
Oh what joy when, with contrition,
They rectify this sore omission!
Enlightenment and laughter will
Fill their souls and overspill!

Critic   Oi, poet bloke. That don’t rhyme.

Poet    What?!

Critic   “Elegy, trilogy.” That don’t rhyme. Won’t do.

Poet    Well, it very nearly rhymes.

Critic   Not good enough.

Poet    It’s assonance, for God’s sake.

Critic   Asinine, more like.

Poet    Assonance! It’s a perfectly legitimate poetic device. Look it up.

Critic   Wouldn’t have done for John bloody Betjeman and he was Poet Laureate.

Poet    Well it did for Philip bloody Larkin and he was Poet Laureate too!

Critic   Phil who?

Poet    Philip Larkin! Half the time he didn’t bother with rhymes at all, and when he did it was half-baked. “Clothes, those.” “If, life.” “Back, dark.” See?

Critic   S’pose you stand a chance then. Next Poet Laureate?

Poet    It’s… not impossible.

Sapiens

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sapienscover

It shows great generosity of spirit when one author recommends the work of another. This I now do.

I’ve just finished reading ‘Sapiens’ by Yuval Noah Harari, and I urge you to read it too. And give it to your friends and relatives, or at least recommend it to them. It’s subtitled ‘A Brief History of Humankind’, and although there may not be much there that you don’t already know, he puts it together in a way that makes one think about it differently. At least, that’s how I felt.

Best of all, Dr Harari ends by speculating about what will happen next in Homo sapiens’ journey, when our powers to create and control will truly make us godlike and the next step in our evolution will be of our own making.

It put me in mind of my own modest work: The Eeks Trilogy, available from all good e-book retailers in a single volume entitled ‘Goldiloxians’, which speculates about our future dealings with intelligent robots. But do read ‘Sapiens’ too.

Invisible Dirt

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If you’ve read my book ‘Household Management for Men ‘ (aka HM4MEN) you’ll be familiar with the concept of invisible dirt. This is dirt can be detected only by people with a certain medical condition, who are known to doctors as ‘women’.

Having spent a month in a Tbilisi apartment where the only cleaning equipment was a broom, a dustpan-and-brush and a duster, when it came time to do a bit of a clean-up – so the landlord and lady wouldn’t think I’m a slob, and by extension that all Australians are slobs – I wielded the broom. Applying it to an apparently clean floor I witnessed an astounding phenomenon. As the broom progressed along the surface of the floor, dirt appeared in front of it!

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After some experimentation and coffee-assisted contemplation I concluded that the dirt became visible when it attained a certain critical mass. So by moving the broom along the floor the invisible dirt was aggregated, consolidated, concentrated to the point where visibility occurred.

And I wondered… if this can happen to invisible dirt, might it not also happen to dark matter? If we could devise something analogous to a cosmic broom, and sweep the dark matter before it, a critical mass might be reached that would force this shy substance to reveal itself.

So I’ve done the hard work – the insight bit. If some clever scientist-person will now take the next step and come up with the means to carry out my clever plan… well, I’ll be happy to share the Nobel Prize 50/50.

Menial Tasks

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I just read an article in the Sydney Morning Herald (the SMH: my favourite Australian on-line read). It’s yet another one about senior female professionals being asked to do things that are below their pay-grade: doctors taking lunch orders in this case.

secretaryIt reminded me of a talk that my boss (the late Sam Wright, a good colleague and friend, much missed) gave to the staff he managed about 45 years ago. Let me explain the situation. All the men in the organisation were professionals and all the women were secretaries. So any woman was automatically junior to any man, and the women (or ‘girls’ as we called them then) organised a roster among themselves to ensure that everyone – men and girls alike – got tea twice a day and the cups were washed up.

It worked pretty well. But then one day the organisation – the British Federation of Master Printers as it was called then – hired a woman in a professional role. What to do?!

Sam grasped the nettle, called a meeting of staff and told us all that the new recruit was to be treated as a man. The girls were unhappy at first. She was a woman, right? So why shouldn’t she make the tea and wash up the cups like the rest of them? It was like the days of apartheid in South Africa, when Japanese were treated as honorary whites but Chinese weren’t.

But something in the SMH article jarred. Someone is quoted as saying “We’re talking about senior medical officers. Qualified doctors tasked with taking lunch orders and told to perform menial, secretarial tasks.” I looked up ‘menial’ in the Oxford English Dictionary and it defined it as “requiring little skill and lacking prestige.” I have never thought that secretarial duties require little skill, and the most skilled of the secretaries I’ve met were accorded much respect. Not prestige maybe, but certainly no-one would have labelled them ‘menial’.

The First ‘Stroppy’

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Yes, that’s what some people have been calling the new Stroppy Git Award for Meaningless Twaddle. There have been some strong contenders, especially from the USA, but the winner is… Palladium! Their advertisement for a so-called summit on “reshaping the future through positive impact” was the very first nomination:

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No other nomination surpassed in either meaninglessness or twaddledom.

Hotel Showers

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I judge a hotel on its fulfilment of a few basic conditions:

  • Helpful staff.
  • Free wi-fi.
  • A fridge uncluttered with overpriced mini-bar stuff.
  • Separate waste bins in the bedroom and the bathroom.
  • Separate, decent-sized bars of soap for the basin and the shower.
  • A shower that I can stand under without using one of my hands to hold it up.

I recently stayed at a hotel that failed dismally on the last of these. Luckily I always travel with a coat-hanger made of very thin wire. This is how I had to shape it to hook the shower head on the top rail of the shower screen:

benthanger

Do you have items that you carry around to rectify hotels’ deficiencies?

Brexit

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Today is the 193rd day since the Brexit Referendum. This being a prime number, and therefore indivisible, it seems an ironically appropriate day for a post about an event that exposed such deep and lamentable divisions among the people of the United Kingdom.

I didn’t have a vote, having emigrated from the Green and Pleasant Land 38 years ago, but if I had I would have voted Remain. I don’t know whether staying would be better in the long run for the British economy, but I’m pretty sure it would be better for Europe as a whole – economically, politically and in every other way in the short, medium and long run.

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But Joan Williams, a friend from way back whom I respect, voted for Brexit and I asked her why. Her answer had nothing to do with immigration or the NHS. I reproduce it here in full, with Joan’s permission:

“ If you really want to know why I voted leave, it’s basically because I’m afraid I do not think the EU is a good thing. I don’t think the world has outgrown the nation state yet, and that when it does it will not be through the likes of the EU. I love the individual European countries that I know (i.e. Germany, Italy and Spain), and value both our similarities and differences, and don’t see what is gained by trying artificially to weld us all together.

“ I don’t think any supranational institution is better than none, or that being semi-attached to an institution that is heading in the wrong direction is ‘the best of both worlds’. Most importantly, I revere the British constitution, and I don’t take our democratic freedom for granted; the more we compromise and dilute and sacrifice it, the more we are losing it.

“ We achieved our freedom and developed our democracy before anyone else, and it is still the best, and still an example to the world; whereas the EU, in its top-heavy unaccountable over-bureaucratic clumsiness, more resembles the old tired easily-corruptible19th century empires. One doesn’t need to invoke Napoleon: Nicholas II and Franz-Josef are bad enough! It is like choosing to be a dinosaur instead of a mammal. ”

Does anyone else out there feel the same way?

Cheap Coffee

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Frosts in Brazil, civil wars in Africa… whatever’s happening on the supply side one can be sure that a kilogramme of your average branded instant coffee is going to cost at least US$25/kg retail (compared with US$2.15/kg for robusta coffee beans in bulk).

I tend to wait for specials and then buy a big jar of can – or buy supermarket ‘own brand’ coffee. I did this last week and it was pretty awful stuff. Today I experimented by putting a drop of vanilla essence in the cup and my consumer experience was transformed!

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So here’s my Economical Household Management Tip for December. Buy the cheapest coffee you can find and a little bottle of vanilla essence. Do this over your whole adult lifetime, invest the savings wisely, and you could have enough for a funeral that will be the envy of your friends. The ones who outlive you, anyway.

Sun Tzu

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I am indebted to the blog https://chinaicons.com/ for drawing my attention to the proverbs of the famous Chinese military tactician Sun Tzu, whose writings are still studied by military commanders the world over. I’ve borrowed this picture of his statue from the China Icons website.

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Among the proverbs this one resonates with me particularly:

“Hence to fight and conquer in all your battles is not supreme excellence; supreme excellence consists in breaking the enemy’s resistance without fighting.”

Isn’t this exactly how the Chinese leadership is making fools of the rest of us? Their creeping occupation of the South China Sea, consolidation of their hold over Tibet and suppression of political freedom in Hong Kong are all being achieved through persistent bullying and angry outbursts that fall short of provoking armed conflict. (See my earlier post ‘Trump, Tsai and Xi’.)

Again, one can draw parallels with those other rogue states Israel and Russia – and North Korea too, I suppose.

PS According to the WordPress computer, my fellow-blogger at China Icons found that earlier post of mine “awesome”. He or she writes well and is not given to extravagant hyperbole, so I guess I’m up there with Sun Tzu himself – and even Confucius! Or maybe WordPress is leading the charge towards degradation of the English language. OMG, that would make me s-o-o-o stroppy!

Trump, Tsai and Xi

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Why must we always be the ones to back down and compromise our principles? By ‘we’, by the way, I mean The Liberal Democratic West (LDW for short, not to be confused with LBW).

Taiwan is a country with its own government, socio-politico-economic system, policies and values. It suits many people to maintain the fiction that it’s a renegade province of the People’s Republic of China that will one day be reincorporated into the mainland Chinese polity, but for all practical purposes and for the foreseeable future it is a separate state.

Moreover, the so-called People’s Republic of China under Xi Jinping is going out of its way to behave badly. Whether it’s denying political rights in Hong Kong, flouting international law in the South China Sea, engaging in industrial espionage or dumping dodgy steel products on world markets, China is donning the clothes of a Rogue State.

And why wouldn’t it? It has observed that the LDW will always back down rather that risk a fight – unless its opponent is orders of magnitude weaker. Israel, Russia and Saudi Arabia have got away with murder, so why not China?

That’s why I applaud Donald Trump’s decision to talk to President Tsai of Taiwan (both pictured below, courtesy of AP). Let journalists and political advisors cringe and mouth the doctrine of appeasement. I say, “Enough! What’s the point of spending 4% of your GDP to build and maintain the most powerful military machine in the history of mankind if you always back off rather than risk hurting a few feelings?!”

trumpphoning tsaiphoning

Don’t get me wrong: On almost every issue I am at odds with both Donald Trump and John Bolton (tipped to become his Secretary of State), and I have no appetite for a Third World War. But in this one instance the Donald got it right and John’s endorsement was spot-on. We tried being nice to China and look where it got us. It’s time to try something different.

If Xi Jinping doesn’t like it, let him rant and act offended and threaten to cut off the supply of Barbie dolls.