Tag Archives: Ron Allan

Stroppy 2024!

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As we bid farewell to the Emmys the spotlight turns towards the Stroppys – or rather the Stroppy, there being only one such award for meaningless twaddle each year. After much thought and hand-wringing the winner is… drum roll… anonymous. Yes, that’s unfortunate, but I don’t know the name of the author of this gem, extracted from a report written for a certain international financial institution based in Washington DC:

James Joyce (portrait)

“A weigh station that is also a public check post shall undertake checks in its capacity as a weigh station unless it is established to the satisfaction of the authorised officer that the payload on the truck or combination being checked originated from the nearby urban agglomeration in which case the check shall be made in its capacity as public check post, and if the truck or combination is found to have committed an infringement requiring immobilisation then that infringement shall be waived and the truck or combination allowed to travel directly back to its loading point for rectification without penalty or permanent record of noncompliance.”

Marcel Proust (caricature)

At only 106 words this sentence can hardly be considered Joycian or even Proustian. But it makes up for that in its opacity, convolution, clumsiness and… well, let’s just sum it up as twaddledom.

I am indebted, not for the first time, to my long-term friend and sometimes colleague Ron Allan, who nominated this passage.

And here’s an unrelated thought bubble… I just read that the average human exhales 255kg of CO2 per year. That’s equivalent to an old-fashioned ounce per hour, so it seems plausible. 

Boeing 747: First roll-out (30 September 1968)

Back to the individual level, the average person exhales about 20t of CO2 over a lifetime. If this number is correct, our species is directly putting 2 billion tonnes of CO2 into the atmosphere annually.  This is as much as 800 million petrol-powered cars.  Or 90,000 Boeing 747s.

Perhaps a childless person who voluntarily undergoes sterilisation should be issued with carbon credits.  What do you think?

By the way, do you happen to know (or be) a film producer in need of a potential blockbusting script for a TV series? If so, please let me know.

Home-Grown Fruit and Stroppy 2019

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Nectarines

Today’s my birthday and therefore the day to announce the winner of this year’s Stroppy. But first I make will make another announcement: Mrs SG and I have harvested our nectarine crop! It amounted to 7.2kg after cutting off the rotten bits. St Bernard’s Market is selling yellow nectarines A$2.99/kg at the moment, giving our crop a retail value of A$21.50. Mrs SG wondered aloud whether that would cover the cost of watering the tree for a year.

I was reminded of an email circulated recently by my old friend Ron Allan. It was a picture of lots of tomatoes with the caption “Growing your own tomatoes is the best way to devote 3 months of your life to saving $2.17.” Well, Ron, even if that’s US$2.17, we did much better than that!

That curtain-raiser is little more than an excuse to display a colourful picture of our nectarines. Now to the main business. The winner of the 2019 Stroppy Award for Meaningless Drivel is … drumroll … the South Australian Academic Health Science and Translation Centre, for this passage from a report to the state government agency SA Health:

“What we can deduce from our work is that it is possible to generate a narrative around the experience of multiple stakeholders, going through a large-scale system change, in ways that both acknowledge the limitations of the data but support the emerging themes from the data, and from other (realist) literature reviews.”

A worthy winner! Thanks are due to Brad Crouch, the Advertiser’s Medical Reporter, who drew this to my attention.

And this year’s Stroppy goes to . . .

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C M Lewis! What’s that? You’ve never heard of him? Well, neither had I until my old friend Ron Allan nominated him for the 2018 Stroppy Git Award for Meaningless Twaddle, based on the following piece of writing that was published in the Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History in 1987:

“ Transnationalization further fragmented the industrial sector. If the dominant position of immigrant enterprises is held to have reduced the political impact of an expanding industrial entrepreneurate, the arrival of multinational corporations possibly neutralized the consolidation of sectoral homogeneity anticipated in the demise of the artisanate. “

Some credit for this nomination must also go to Thomas Sowell, who cited it in his essay ‘Some Thoughts About Writing’ and thereby brought it to Ron’s attention

I looked for a picture of C M Lewis at Google Images, but I was offered only C S Lewis and C Day Lewis. So here’s a picture of Thomas Sowell instead, together with a quotation that will appeal to many readers.

Nominations for next year’s award can be submitted at an time.