The Importance Of Being Harpo

The essence of taste

2010-07-06T11:40:00.027+10:00

Commonly, we acknowledge five flavours: bitterness, saltiness, sourness, sweetness, and savouriness. When I grew up there were only four but we have finally caught up with the Japanese by acknowledging their umami.

Umami, as we all know by now, is the meaty, brothy taste found in good stocks, mushrooms, seafood and indeed cheese and tomatoes. The reaction on the tongue that fires up the umami flavour receptors is triggered by salts of glutamic acid in the food. So, to give some food a bit more of this tasty flavour you just need to find a pure source of these glutamates and sprinkle it on.

This is exactly the same as happens with the salty flavour: the saltiness receptors on the tongue are triggered by sodium ions so we find the purest source of these ions — sodium chloride — and sprinkle it on our chips. Yum!

And indeed with the sweet flavour: add sucrose.

The pure source of glutamates that provide the savoury flavour is monosodium glutamate — MSG. This is a white crystalline powder first isolated by a professor of chemistry in Japan in 1908. Today it is produced by the bacterial fermentation of sugar beet or cane sugar (yoghurt, just so we're on the same page, is produced by the bacterial fermentation of milk).

This compound is under deep suspicion: restaurants advertise that they don't use MSG; everybody checks the labels of things they pick up in the supermarket and if it has “flavour enhancer 621” we put it back on the shelf; when I was in Shanghai we went to restaurants that had little bowls of powdered MSG on the table as a condiment, I certainly didn't go near them.

This suspicion started in the late sixties when reports started coming in of some people suffering a collection of symptoms like headaches, numbness in the arms, facial pressure or flushing suffered in the hours after eating at Chinese restaurants. These symptoms would fade after a short time with no other effects. MSG was used generously in these restaurants and was then named as the culprit.

In the forty-odd years since, MSG has been one of the most studied food additives and yet researchers have been unable to demonstrate a link between MSG and these symptoms.

“Although the prevalence of CRS [Chinese Restaurant Syndrome] has been estimated to be 1–2% of the general population it is not clear what proportion of the reactions, if any, can be attributed to MSG. The vast majority of reports of CRS are anecdotal, and are not linked to the actual glutamate content of the food consumed. Furthermore, when individuals with a suspected sensitivity to MSG are tested in double-blind challenges the majority do not react to MSG under the conditions of the study […]. Many individuals may therefore incorrectly be ascribing various symptoms to MSG, when in fact some other food component may be the cause.”

— FSANZ. Monosodium glutamate — a safety assessment, June 2003

So between one in every fifty and one in every hundred people sometimes suffer somewhat uncomfortable sensations after eating Chinese food when it has MSG in it and then they get better. And sometimes they don't suffer them. Particularly when they're taking part in a double-blind, placebo-controlled trial. And the cause of these symptoms may not be MSG. These symptoms would certainly be unpleasant and, if they prefer, then these people should certainly avoid food with MSG added if they believe it's responsible but I didn't know that this was what all the fuss was about.

There is a world-view in this country that MSG must be avoided at all costs. It is a dangerous additive in any dose. It is a world-view that appears to me now to be hysteria far beyond what the dangers involve. Salt has been shown to have a long-term effect on blood pressure and people are aware of this danger and in general wouldn't put huge doses of salt on a dish as a result but there is no horror at the very name of it, no restaurants saying they don't cook with salt. MSG has never been shown to have a long-term effect on anything. The dangers of MSG so far have been shown to be that it may or may not cause 1–2% of the population to feel a little uncomfortable.

So, then, why all the fear? The common belief in Australia, as far as I know, is that “MSG is bad for you” but why is that what everybody believes? Memes get national acceptance when they are easy to believe and there are two things about MSG that make it frightening: first that it is used by Chinese people and Chinese people are foreign and foreign things are unfamiliar and therefore frightening; second is the name. It doesn't have a familiar, homey name like “salt” or “sugar” but goes only by the name of the chemical compound and that sounds artificial and therefore dangerous.

While it is easy to say “Oh yes, Harpo. I know that the names of things is not the thing itself. I know that the map is not the territory” but the truth is that, despite how evolved you think you are, you are still influenced in your attitude to a thing by what it is called. You can't help yourself. You are aware that the “surge” in Iraq was the same as an “escalation” but your reaction was, nevertheless, affected. The names of things matter more than you are willing to admit to yourself.

If sodium chloride (a substance that is precisely as much a chemical compound as monosodium glutamate) can hide behind the friendly, familiar word “salt” then monosodium glutamate ought to have its own street name. If the Japanese can coin their Japanese-sounding “umami” for the name of the flavour and have us all use it then I am going to coin the Australian-sounding “mate” for the name of the compound and will use it to refer to MSG in the future.

Food tastes delicious with a good veal stock but if you haven't time to make one then a sprinkle of mate gets you well on your way to a scrumptious dinner. If the fears of Australians — particularly the 98% of them who suffer no symptoms whatsoever — make it hard to find then I will just have to look harder for it.

Harpo starts saving the world

2008-07-27T19:15:00.003+10:00

Passing lightly over that bit where I didn't write anything for nine months, I want to take this opportunity to make a difference to the world. I want to give a little back, to make my mark, to make the world a better, greater place.

The first step in bringing about change, I understand, is to acknowledge what is wrong and, ladies and gentlemen, this is where I come into my own. Criticism. Oh yeah.

To start this project of bringing about world peace, I present, in chronological order, Harpo's Top Ten of history's greatest mistakes.

Emperor Honorius executing his general Stilicho leading to the Sack of Rome in 410
The destruction of the library at Alexandria
The British losing their American colony through overtaxing
That thing where we chopped all the trees down
Napoleon's invasion of Russia
Hitler's invasion of Russia
Basically anybody trying to invade Russia, it seems
Iraq
Facebook letting people use verbs other than ‘is’ in their status update
Again with the trees. Chopping down trees isn't working out well

So there we have it. All we have to do learn from these mistakes, because — as we know — those who do not study history are doomed to repeat it.

…next semester.

Connections

2007-10-03T21:15:00.000+10:00

I have fond memories of watching a music video when I was a lad of some old-timey diva-ish kind of jazz bar song with this funny animated video and a magnificent piano solo in the middle. What struck me particularly at the time was that the video showed the innards of a piano — the actual hammers hitting the actual strings — as the solo was being played.

This song was ‘My Baby Just Cares For Me’ by Nina Simone. She had recorded the song back in 1958 but the video was from 1987: the single had been re-released after the track was used in a TV ad or something.

Whenever I hear the song I am struck by that great piano solo and I've long wanted to know more about the session musician they roped in to play it. I would have thought some faceless dude — who would have been paid a quick $15 to play on a timeless recording we're still listening to half a century later — deserved some fame. But the cool thing is — and I learned this only a couple of days ago — it was Simone herself who played it!

It turns out that her dream was to be the first black concert pianist and she only took up singing to continue to pay for her piano lessons. That's fabulous.

In 1966 she recorded ‘Lilac Wine’ which is, of course, a song now associated with Jeff Buckley. While many others have covered the tune, Buckley based his version on Simone's, saying of it “that's the only one that matters. That's the be all end all version. She's the king.”

One of the versions Buckley discounted was the 1953 recording of Eartha Kitt. Dubbed by Orson Welles as “the most exciting woman in the world,” Kitt, the Emmy-winning singer and actress, with her throaty voice and exotic looks was the Material Girl of her time. She reached her peak of hip groovihood, surely, when she guest-starred as Catwoman in the final season of the Batman TV series.

But the original Catwoman on the show — the archetypical, the definitive, the greatest Catwoman — was Julie Newmar and, if you'll excuse me, let's just have a look at a photo of her:

Oh yeah. Here's another:

Heaven help us all.

Newmar — not content with being stunningly gorgeous, not content with her strikingly high IQ, not content with her successful business dealings and property developments — has several patents in her name. One is a solution for that dreadful problem plaguing us all, being how to find pantyhose that'll flatten the stomach without flattening the bottom.

Newmar's leg coverings marketed as ‘Nudemar’ (“pantyhose with shaping band for cheeky derriere relief”) sold successfully through the 70s and 80s particularly after she herself modelled it in a revealing photo for People magazine.

There have been other celebrities with the inventor's bug: Jamie Lee Curtis invented nappies with pockets to hold baby wipes; Marlon Brando has the patent for a tool that adjusts the tension on skins of drums; Gary Burghoff brought the ‘fish attractor device’ into the world. I don't know what this device is — it's something to do with fishing, I presume. Fishing must have be one of his hobbies, along with the philately and jazz drumming.

There's an episode of MASH — in which Burghoff played Radar O'Reilly — where he gets to play a drum solo. The sound for it is not dubbed on which is the usual thing directors do but you hear the actual performance Burghoff did in front of the camera which is pretty cool. You've got to enjoy seeing that sort of thing.

Burghoff was the only regular cast member of the TV series to have performed in the earlier Robert Altman MASH movie. Altman's film was released in 1970 and of the five Oscars it was nominated for that year, the category it won was Best Screenplay which amuses me as I'm not sure it had one: so much of the dialogue was improvised. Altman claims that MASH was the first major studio film to use the word “fuck” so there's one for your next trivia night. The cast included Donald Sutherland as Hawkeye and Elliot Gould as a cracking good Trapper and Sally Kellerman as Hot Lips.

Regular readers may know how much I love talking about Star Trek. Oh yes. You can't stop me going on and on about Star Trek, so here's some more for you: Gene Roddenberry made a pilot episode of Star Trek in 1964 called ‘The Cage’ but nobody picked it up so he made a second one called ‘Where No Man Has Gone Before’ which got the TV series into production. This episode featured the same Sally Kellerman playing a Starfleet psychiatrist who gets kidnapped by the baddie in the episode.

I've not seen this pilot but reading synopses of the thing make it seem twee and quaint. Here's some dialogue:

“You fools! Soon I'll squash you like insects!” — Mitchell (the baddie)
“Do you like what you see? Absolute power corrupting absolutely?” — Kirk to Kellerman's character.
“Hey, man, I remember you back at the Academy… a stack of books with legs!” — Mitchell to Kirk

and so on. I don't think this would have won any Oscars for Best Screenplay.

This Mitchell character was played by Gary Lockwood who is most famous for his role as Frank Poole in 2001: A Space Odyssey. Lockwood's first scene in that film — one of the movie's most famous (if not one of cinematic history's most famous) — shows him jogging through the ship's centrifuge, shadow boxing, to keep in shape, while Kubrick has the soundtrack play a lugubrious, dreamy cello piece from Khachaturian's ballet Gayene — music evoking how slow and boring the routine of months in space would be.

Aram Khachaturian was an Armenian composer, a contemporary of such people as Prokofiev and Shostakovich — writing honest, uplifting, Soviet music at Stalin's pleasure. His piano concerto is a real corker. Of all pieces in the piano repertoire it is my favourite to listen to. Keep your Bachs, your Beethovens, your Rachmaninoffs… this is my pick.

While I'm sharing, I'd say Shostakovich's fifth symphony would be my favourite orchestral piece. Some may say it is a clichéd choice but those people can get stuffed. It's solid gold. That march? Eerie and disturbing. The slow movement: heart-stopping. Play it at my funeral.

As Ian MacDonald pointed out in his book The New Shostakovich, Dmitri Shostakovich, while writing a symphony that would be easy listening for the Simple Russian People and cheery, good-willed stuff to make Stalin not want to have him tried as a traitor, left musical “coded messages” throughout the piece describing an oppressed soul raging against the tethers of the dictatorship.

Ian MacDonald's book, a controversial one when it was released due to its sudden, Western-friendly rewriting of the Shostakovich legacy, has now become the most trusted reading of the maestro's works. Another MacDonald book was a study of The Beatles' output and perhaps his fusion of writing and music was encouraged by his fellow students at Kings College, Cambridge when he was a lad. Among these fellow students he met at Kings were composers Andrew Davis and John Eliot Gardiner and writer Salman Rushdie.

Rushdie enjoyed both popular and critical success with his 1981 novel Midnight's Children winning that year's Booker prize, and in 1989 Ayatollah Khomeini went on radio in Iran, announced that Rushdie's book The Satanic Verses was blasphemous against Islam and proclaimed a fatwa requiring Rushdie's assasination. At least one attempt on Rushdie's life is believed to have occurred and today the fatwa has still not been lifted.

The most famous celebrity to have been condemned for what people took as his defence of the fatwa (he merely described the fatwa from the Islamic point of view — he was vehemently against applying it to Rushdie) was the singer-songwriter Cat Stevens. This guy somehow sold bucketloads of albums in the late 60s and early 70s: millions and millions of albums like his Tea for the Tillerman and the triple platinum Teaser and the Firecat were sold. The song ‘Katmandu’ from an earlier album (which sold a shipload) featured a 20-year-old Peter Gabriel playing the flute.

Gabriel had been playing for a number of years with a bunch of schoolfriends in a band he'd named Genesis and they were starting to earn some notice with their flamboyant stage costumes and unusual lighting and whatnot. By the mid-70s Gabriel was coping badly with being the leadman of the band and quit. The split inspired his song ‘Solsbury Hill’ (“my friends would think I was a nut”) which would be my favourite Peter Gabriel number.

Coming second would be ‘Sledgehammer’: great bass sound, the head-nodding outro lasting a good third of the song's running time, and of course the award-winning video clip produced by Peter Lord's company Aardman Animation.

This was back in the days before Lord hired Nick Park who brought the company all their Wallace and Gromit fame but after the success of the ‘Sledgehammer’ video Peter Lord and his team were commissioned to do a number of video clips including — 12 months after the Gabriel song — the 1987 re-release of Nina Simone's My Baby Just Cares For Me I was watching as a lad.

Thanks to YouTube, here it is:

Presents cricket melons

2007-09-25T09:25:00.000+10:00

In yet another of those you-know-you're-getting-old-when moments that seem to be cascading past in staggering numbers at the moment, I'm pretty sure that my birthday last week was the first I've ever had where I received no presents at all.

The birthday was lovely and I spoke to lots of family and friends and the crew at the office made a fuss and we all had cake. Delightful. But dammit, I would have liked a present.

Certainly nothing elaborate: maybe a cute Harpo mug, or a nice little picture frame, or even some deodorant or an old shareware copy of Doom or something. I'd have been thrilled…

The cricket club had a practice match on the weekend. It was the first time I'd had a cricket bat in my hand since an eye operation I underwent earlier in the year and oh my god what a difference it makes. I admit I was facing some rather toothless bowling but the ease with which I could pick up the pace of the ball and get to the pitch was thrilling. Sport hasn't been very enjoyable these last few years but I am really looking forward to this new season now.

The practice match itself was a pleasure. Sunday was a beautiful afternoon. A number of players from another club we get on well with joined us and we had a couple of games on neighbouring fields going. The other crowd gave us an afternoon tea and we put on a BBQ after the game. It was good-spirited, slow-tempo, relaxed and thoroughly enjoyable.

I haven't posted with any particular point this morning. So what's new, eh?

Does anybody know any jokes? Why did the melons get married at home? Because they cantaloupe.

This was the reason the internet was invented

2007-09-16T15:10:00.000+10:00

Spa and a sauna

2007-09-06T10:15:00.000+10:00

I'm really not much of a skier. I have had a day or two on the snowboard each of the last few winters and rather enjoyed it in much the same way as you rather enjoy helping your friends build decking in their backyard.

Last weekend I went to the snow with the sole purpose of being extremely lazy.

I managed to achieve my goals through a strategic use of the Lying About maneouver followed by the power one-two of a long read of the paper and a long bath with book and a glass of wine. I was able to cross off a number of items from my 'next action' list such as: take a short stroll, sit on the couch reading some more of my book, bake some scones, yawn and stretch, carry snow from one spot to another, sudoku.

Bugger the snowboarding. This is how you're supposed to spend your time at Hotham.

Tumble

2007-08-24T09:45:00.000+10:00

I have received a friendly injunction to post a little more regularly.

I will post when I'm goddam good and ready.

I've been silent mostly due to the fact that I don't much fancy the thought of whinging a great deal on my blog and that's basically all I'd do at the moment.

For example: I took a tumble on the bike this morning. Some dude was turning right and the ute behind him — as you do — zapped around the dude by veering into the empty bicycle lane and parallel parking bit to the left. Except, as you'd have guessed, it wasn't empty: I was riding my bike through it at the time.

No harm done. I have a little bump on my elbow and a pedal is bent which I'm not fussed about — the pushy needs a fair bit of work anyway — and the driver was genuinely concerned and apologetic.

That sudden rush of shock and adrenaline you get at those moments is quite tasty, though. I basked in its afterglow for the rest of my ride to the office.

At such times it is common to get all militant about car drivers and rant about how irresponsible and dangerous they all are and then repeat the spiel about how bicycles don't waste fuel and fill parking spaces and cause traffic jams yada yada yada. People get so uppity about things. Bikes are better than cars. Cyclists are menaces. BMXs vs road bikes; Holdens vs Fords; Fitzroy St vs Brunswick St; Australia vs New Zealand; black vs white.

Get over it.

The driver of the ute could have looked more carefully for me, but then I could also have been more active when I saw the car stopping to turn right: that's a big flashing neon warning sign for a cyclist.

It's not a question of cyclists vs drivers. It is merely me versus the rest of the universe and that's true of each of us.

2007-08-01T16:25:00.000+10:00

Having strained my voice on the weekend I am trying to recover by speaking as little as possible.

People come up to me at work and say “Yo ma homey ma homey yo dope punk da Harpmeister.” Yes this is exactly how we talk in the office “Yo da H-man yo ma Marx bro ma homey ma homey etcetera. Yo lay down some o dat mad phat linked list library shee-yit on me ma homey ma homey. Word.”

And I would like to reply “excuse me, there is no longer any requirement for a linked list library as I can just instanciate some objects and store them in a Vector. To rewrite such functionality would be a waste of everybody's time and I need to finish this GUI I'm working on by EOB tomorrow.”

But I'm trying to speak as little as possible so I say “sure.”

People stop me on the street and say “Prithee stay young ruffian. Whither thou on such a blustery and foreboding post-prandial hour? Dost thou not espy a loathsome tempest upon the lowering horizon? Get ye within yonder taproom and 'scape the fearsome bluster.”

I usually reply, when stopped in this way, “I wouldn't go in that pub if lightning was setting my clothing alight and the path to it was strewn with gold. And more than that, nobody ever spoke in that stupid ‘prithee’ way. ‘Whither thou’ for God's sake! Leave me alone. Freak.”

But no, rest is vital for a strained voice so I reply “yep. Thanks.”

It's all about drinking lots of warm water, avoiding dairy and being extremely compliant.

Harpo gets to do something fun

2007-07-24T16:00:00.000+10:00

We are playing at the Barleycorn on the weekend which is a gig I've been looking forward to for some time. It has been much too long since I've been on stage and I do enjoy it so. The People too have been deprived of our particular brand of hot rock and are starting to get restless. The Spanish civil war started in much the same way.

So, anyway, it should be fun.

Sporting capital of the world

2007-07-23T12:45:00.000+10:00

I gathered with some mates at a pub in Richmond to watch the quarterfinal between Australia and Japan.

A footy game at the MCG had finished only a few hours earlier so obviously the room was full of beefy lads with overdeveloped foreheads, product-filled hair, upturned collars, bourbon and cokes and brilliant bon mots about fat chicks, car theft and homos.

I'm glad they were getting into the soccer. Good on them. Naturally the only thing they could think of to encourage our tiring representatives as the game wore on was to cry out “Aussie Aussie Aussie” at the TV screen at which some others answered with the clever reply “oi oi oi” which struck almost everybody in the room as pure genius. I was certainly cheered by such a creative display of pride in one's homeland.

They howled as one with surprise and indignation whenever somebody fell to the ground after a tackle. They were endearingly bewildered by the red card as if we were never going to suffer harsh decisions. One of them wittily described the referee as a homo. Oh how everybody laughed.

The game itself was an entertaining spectacle. The Japanese were as well-organised and sharp as expected and Australia had a few good patches. The Aussies played a valiant last 45 minutes a man down in difficult conditions and the draw after extra time was actually a good result against a team better and ranked higher than us. A couple of guys gave tired penalties at the end and out we went. After the dreadful, dreadful displays in the first two games, this match I rather enjoyed.

My footy-loving neighbours in the bar were not so generous. When they were finally able to remember his name they had same things to say about Graeme Arnold and how quickly that homo should be fired.

Like a native

2007-07-19T15:00:00.000+10:00

I get down, out of kilter and bored from time to time, it's true. When that happens I like to start teaching myself a new language.

This winter I've been giving Chinese a go and it's certainly a challenging language to try. I stroll down Little Bourke St looking at all the signs and saying to myself “wouldn't it be nice if I could read that” which is essentially the level of my current fluency in the language.

In fact I know only a few phrases.

Immersion is certainly the name of the game when you try to learn a language so I am culling my DVDs (does anybody want my Gary Oldman collection? I also have some of the Jeremy Brett Sherlock Holmeses you can take) and replacing them with Chinese language ones.

I have a number of the Hong Kong Jackie Chan movies dubbed into Mandarin now and after watching them, these are the Chinese phrases I know:

Stop!
Don't hit my glasses
We're chasing drug-peddling pirates with handguns
Ring my insurance agency
Get him!
This soybean curd is off
Explosives? Explosives!?
Guarded by an electric fence, trained killer henchmen and a shark tank? No problem. Watch this!
Let her go, you fiend
I need more stuntmen
That police officer has foiled my evil plans once again
Gosh those Mitsubishis are good cars

and, of course:

Hhhyyyaaaaaa!!

Oh rats

2007-07-15T17:45:00.000+10:00

My black heart is still filled with hate and the searing weight of my fury is today about to land on freakin' lab rats.

I can't stand lab rats. I hate their unnatural lack of disease with their own special breeding programmes and whatnot, I hate their status as the last word before you get to humans when scientists are testing theories, I really hate that whole rattier than thou attitude they have going. I hate them.

Worst of all is their lack of imagination. Make one go through a maze and offer it cheese at the end and your work is done. It'll power through that freakin' maze until the end of time expecting some more cheese. The stupid lab rat is not going to stop occasionally and contemplate Kierkegaard or write a string quartet or even just take a random left-turn because it's a Wednesday. No. It'll just go straight for the freakin' cheese. Stupid lab rat.

The thing that brought these miserable creatures to mind was seeing people driving this afternoon. Light goes yellow? Accelerate. Here's a clue: it doesn't make a difference. All it does is say to the world “I am well aware that I was supposed to have stopped but I'm going anyway.”

The cheese hypnotises the lab rat and all thought ceases.

It's only a little thing — and I'm in a sufficiently mad funk at the moment to get worked up about little things — but if you're going to run the light just sail blithely through the intersection. Save fuel. Don't look like a freakin' lab rat.

Leave me alone

2007-07-12T15:30:00.000+10:00

Here's a tip. If you are sneezing you don't actually need to vocalise at the same time. It is perfectly possible for you to sneeze by simply expelling air without engaging the vocal cords at all.

Try it.

Please just try sneezing without your loud, shouty accompaniment.

Please.

Just try it.

Harpo just making a wild, general statement.

2007-06-28T08:50:00.000+10:00

It is a truth universally acknowledged that, when behind the steering wheel, people are idiots. But when they're behind the wheel when the weather is bad, people are particularly stupid idiots.

Seriously, take care on the roads in this wintry weather.

The Dawkins meme

2007-06-15T10:00:00.000+10:00

The ever-enjoyable I'm Not Craig has tagged me in a post he has entitled “I still don't know how to pronounce ‘meme’”. This comes after he ended a post last week with the line “I promise to shut up about Richard Dawkins for a while” — Dawkins's TV show about religion had provoked some discussion — which is fine and all but here's a nice coincidence: it was Dawkins himself who invented the meme!

He didn't invent these “6 wierd things about me” blog posts as such, rather the meme was introduced in his first best-seller The Selfish Gene as an example of the power of self-replication.

The book is, of course, about evolution and describes the mechanism of genetics: how processes that promote the propogation of almost perfect copies of genes from generation to generation are more likely to continue than other processes. It is a well-written, entertaining, rigorous read that attempts to share some of Darwinism's beauty and magic.

At one stage in the book Dawkins wanted to make the point that genes need not be the only type of replicator that does that and suggested that cultural ideas act in pretty much the same way. Popular songs, views on Julia Gillard, jokes about Damir Dokic: they live in one person's mind and can be passed on to the mind of the person next to him through the mechanism of speech.

As with genes, some memes are better at propagation than others. Dawkins elegantly describes the example of the lyrics to Auld Lang Syne. The refrain is almost universally sung ‘For the sake of auld lang syne’ when Burns actually wrote ‘For auld lang syne’. Why has this mutation survived so well in the meme pool? Dawkins suggests that as most people learn this song by listening to other people singing it rather than by looking it up in their copy of the Scottish Student's Songbook. If you are unsure of the words and are nervously singing along with a large group of people belting out this old classic and, no matter how loudly the people who actually know the correct words are singing, if there is even only one person erroneously throwing in the ‘for sake of ’ bit, you will hear it loud and clear — the S and the K really cut through the sound and that's what you hear and, thus, you think that's how the song goes.

This idea of a cultural unit acting as replicating entity entered the language shortly after the publication of Dawkins's book (acting memetically as he himself later noted) and some blogger must have applied the word to this idea of taking some rules about what to post and passing them to one of your blogfriends. The rules are replicated, you understand.

Anyway, for INC's pleasure I'll quote the paragraph where it makes its first appearance:

We need a noun for the new replicator, a noun that conveys the idea of a unit of cultural transmission, or a unit of imitation. ‘Mimeme’ comes from a suitable Greek root, but I want a monosyllable that sounds a bit like ‘gene’. I hope my classicist friends will forgive me if I abbreviate mimeme to meme. If it is any consolation, it could be related to ‘memory’ or to the French word même. It should be pronounced to rhyme with ‘cream’

And to join in with this particular meme I'll say that one of the wierd things about me is that I tend to write pompously when the subject turns to something I once read about.

The Good, The Bad And The Ugly

2007-06-13T15:40:00.000+10:00

The movie opens with a panorama of empty desert. Your focus is on the hills in the distance. Suddenly a tired, pock-marked face moves in front of the camera filling the screen. The contrast between the wide-shot and the close-up is dramatic and stylised.

The opening scene consists of this aging hired gun slowly riding into an almost empty town, slowly getting off his horse, he sees some other unsavoury types slowly arriving in town. They slowly approach each other and the camera follows them slowly walking through the dusty street. A dog runs across the road. It all happens slowly, silently but for some heavy footsteps clumsily dubbed on. They all slowly stare at each other as the point of view changes from close-ups to wide shots. Slowly, you understand. What are they meeting for? Are they all about to shoot each other? Are they all about to sit down to a nice game of backgammon?

They meet at the door of a building, all pull their pistols and suddenly dash through the door. Suddenly you hear a volley of pistol fire cranked up full volume on the soundtrack and suddenly a figure with a napkin around his neck, a half-eaten lamb joint in one hand and a gun in the other bursts through a window. This is Tuco, the “Ugly” of the title. The contrast between the suddenness of this action and the slow build up to it is dramatic and stylised.

The Good, The Bad And The Ugly is very much about style in this sense. Other scenes include a long sequence where Tuco is riding through a desert holding a dilapidated parasol where each shot is framed like an oil painting; or when Angel Eyes (the “Bad” played by Lee Van Cleef — who is awesomely cool in this movie) menaces some retired soldier by staring at him and eating soup; the final showdown between the three main characters is a brilliant sequence consisting of what is essentially three dudes just staring at each other for four minutes while Ennio Morricone's deliciously good soundtrack bangs from the speakers. These scenes and others are deliberately slowed down — a conscious extension of time for the purpose solely of style.

The story of the three main characters takes place through the American civil war. Almost from the start to the very end the actions of the war affect the plot of the small group of money-grabbing gun-slingers. They get caught in artillery from time to time; they steal some uniforms and get captured and stuck in prisoner camps; they converse with soldiers with arms or legs missing; they move through towns abandoned by the locals and taken over by soldiers; even the final showdown takes place in a war cemetary. If the movie has anything to say about that is that neither the North nor the South is any better than the other: the whole war was a catastrophe. All the soldiers just seem to stroll about shooting each other.

The film is not so much about this kind of message, though. Certainly not one about plot (a bunch of guys take it in turns to gang up with each other and then betray each other in the hunt for a case of coins) or about character (Tuco is pretty much the only person in the movie to have one) but it is a string of great scenes, humour and action. Sort of like Princess Bride except with rather more murders than romance.

There are just cool bits throughout like where a pistol barrel is pointed right at the camera which becomes a mortar that destroys a building; a mammoth set-piece showing a battle over a bridge of which Blondie says “I've never seen so many men wasted so badly” (one of a very small number of examples of him earning the “Good” name — he's good only in comparison to the other two); the scene where Tuco searches Sad Hill Cemetary for Arch Stanton's grave — it is just two and a half minutes of Eli Wallach running in a circle to another Morricone masterpiece and it is utterly superb.

I don't suggest that some of the crappier bits couldn't have been cut out but it remains one of my favourite movies.

The Good, The Bad And The Ugly airs at 11:30 Friday night on Channel 7.

Tea hints

2007-06-07T09:45:00.000+10:00

Some people here are about to suffer a shock from my outrageous, bohemian, aberrant lifestyle but I don't drink coffee.

Yes, I know. Sorry for springing it on you like that; just take a deep breath and try to recover. But it's true: I no longer drink coffee.

I have no wish to present you with a long spiel about the health dangers of habitual coffee intake — I don't know whether there are any and don't particularly care. My choice is not one of health nor one of morality, vegan-style, rather one of deliberate self-abnegation.

Being a software developer I was living the cliché: drinking my long blacks happily and with merry freedom. Nothing better than sitting in a café reading a recent Wired, perhaps, with a slice of cake and a tauntingly bitter espresso with strong body and impressive crema. Mmmm.

Our development team were working on a particular project a couple of years ago and the company rented a room for us several suburbs away from the rest of the office which was delicious and very productive — just the three of us in this one tiny room with three laptops, a test server, a big sheet of butchers paper on the wall with lists of tasks and the woman running a freight company on the phone in the room next door (“Or moy gord. Did he really? Or moy gord” every minute and a half. Christ, she drove us nuts). But there was nothing to do when we wanted a break except to make ourselves more coffee and or moy gord were we floating on the ceiling by mid-afternoon every day. I would go home and suffer dizzy spells and strange heart palpitations. I would wake up in the morning awash in sweat and with shaking hands: it was actually kind of groovy.

And in the midst of this my girlfriend, a lass I was particularly fond of, dropped my sorry ass leaving me a crushed, self-hating, shell of a lad. I lived the cliché again: standing at cliff-edges staring mournfully out to sea with biting offshore winds pulling at my hair as the orchestral soundtrack swelled and the camera swooped in a helicopter around me etc.

I guess that in order to regain the sense that I had some sort of control over myself I decided to give something up of my own choice. There was, of course, no way I was giving up the smack so given our recent experiments in coffee insanity I just stopped drinking it — cold turkey — and have been enjoying my Earl Greys ever since.

Now, as much as I enjoy rambling endlessly and in dull detail about my own history there was a point to this: there are a couple of hints in making a decent cup of tea which I would like to share:

The water must be boiling when it hits the tea leaves. Not merely having recently boiled but actually boiling. That's the secret.
Get everything hot beforehand and keep it hot. Warm the pot with a splash of boiling water before you put the tea in; warm the cup too; tea cosies… the whole production. So yes, heat: it's all about the heat
The whole cuppa tea things works better when your conversation is about show tunes. I don't try to explain it; it's just true.
Full cream milk. I may have ranted about low fat milk here before. I predict fat is making a comeback — fat is the new black.
A good cup of tea is a little harder to make with teabags but certainly not impossible: just remember to let the teabag steep before you add the milk. The fat (see above) will coat the bag which obstructs the infusion.

So. Yes, indeed: tea hints. Don't say I never do anything for you.

A long weekend.

2007-06-05T14:10:00.000+10:00

I just had a delightful weekend visiting my brother and his family in Perth.

A few days leave from work made it a long weekend which was a brilliant idea given that we Victorians get an extra day off next weekend: the Queen's Birthday holiday.

Surely many of you know that it is not the Queen's actual birthday; she turned 81 back in April, bless her cotton socks, etc. Apparently her birthday is celebrated publicly in June because the weather is better in England in June than in April and is that not utter genius.

I hereby wish to celebrate my birthday both in September, which is the actual anniversary, and let's say the second weekend of February, just for kicks. The weather will be better, to borrow Liz's excuse. A day off for everybody: Harpo's Birthday Holiday.

And while we're at it, let's move Christmas Day to late April in order to liven up the start of the footy season and get the religious festivals over together. We could move Cup Day to the Wednesday just so we don't have to spend our day off bothering with that horse race they have. And, dammit, the Dawn Service on ANZAC Day is just too early. Let's make it Comfy Brunch Service.

It turns out that they don't have the Queen's Birthday holiday in Perth — they had a Federation Day off yesterday, celebrating the birth of Western Australia — which is a surprisingly republican move for a state that voted 59% no in the referendum.

How the rest of Perth celebrates Federation Day I can't say: I didn't see a great deal of enthusiasm for the concept. But in my brother's family it apparently involves bribing small children with icecream and reading about Gruffaloes — and perhaps some of the “jumping game” you see us playing here.

Can there be any better way of celebrating?

It is either good or it is bad

2007-05-30T15:40:00.000+10:00

The sculpture here is supposed to be of Aristotle, the famous Greek philosopher from the 4th century BC and teacher of Alexander the Great. Lauded by some as the “father of modern thought.”

Rubbish. Aristotle was a chump.

Have you seen modern thought lately? I sat on the train yesterday and both the woman next to me and the guy on the seat across the aisle from me were reading about Angelina Jolie in the MX and were, no doubt, only moments away from drooling and moaning. One of them had presumably just got some clever person to tie their shoelaces for them.

This is clearly Aristotle's fault because his three main laws of logic are stated as:

A is A — an apple is an apple
Everything is either A or not-A — it is either an apple or not an apple
Something cannot be both A and not-A — you can presumably plug in your apples yourself by now.

Now this was fine for Aristotle back in his day. But we have new shit now. Heaps of things are both A and not-A. Is that light a wave or is it a particle? Well, it depends on how you measure it, I guess. Is that house painted green or brown? Well, it's a sort of greeny-brown isn't it? Do you like living next to a train station? Well, I like it because it's handy having public transport so close but I don't like it because I end up with MX readers gibbering incoherently all over the footpath.

If you feel like a bit of light reading for your own trips on trains pull out your copies of Descartes and Einstein. You will read that there is more to life than either-or. We have points of view, we have fuzzy logic, we have nuances, we have imperfect perceptions.

Light bouncing off an object goes in all directions. That which hits your eye reacts with cells causing a chemical reaction that triggers an electric response that travels along the optic nerve to the primary visual centres of the brain. Then the brain constructs a model that represents the object that the eye is looking at. And then it puts a label on it: a blue teacup. All these processes are at various levels of abstraction and if we forget that then we start living in a bizarre dreamworld where our assumptions start ruling our lives and we end up reading MX to keep up.

Either-or thinking is one old-fashioned way of thinking; another is the verb ‘to be’ which I have already used twice this paragraph. The use of that verb in the language sets up an Aristotelian identity — an A is A kind of thing — in your abstractions that may not need to be there. The teacup is a cup (‘is’ joins a noun to a noun). This particular teacup has angles, six panels, a delicate handle, a pleasing curve as it widens from the base, thin walls but a substantial weight and it has a great many other qualities denied by the identification of it with a mere ‘cup.’ The teacup is blue (joining a noun to an adjective). This seems to make its blueness some sort of integral essence of the teacup as though they were one and the same thing. No, the teacup appears a soothing light-blue colour to me.

Suspect the verb ‘to be.’ Watch it closely. If you were to cut this word out of your vocabulary you would find your entire perception change. Items you perceive are not lumped together under categories that deprive them of all detail. You would begin to notice things for what they actually are. You would become more conscious of the assumptions you make from the abstractions you have of the world about you.

But you won't drop this word from your vocabulary — certainly not from reading this badly edited ramble. I haven't and I wrote it. But still I find it interesting to think that this one word has so much power.

So, yes. Aristotle's three laws of logic? Bollocks. If Aristotle were alive today he would surely revise them. But then again, maybe not: he was a chump. He'd probably just be reading MX.

The lazy callback

2007-05-21T18:45:00.000+10:00

One of the techniques that comedians use is the ‘callback.’ This is where they make a joke that references a joke used earlier in the set. Go and watch some Ross Noble if you still aren't sure what I'm talking about (or just go and watch some Ross Noble anyway — you could not spend your time better).

For we civilians the callback can often add a humorous twist to a conversation but there is one particular abuse of it that we sometimes make:

A: “Did you see the FA Cup final? My lord, that was dull”

B: “Yeah, like watching synchronised swimming”

A to Z: “Ha ha ha”

It's the lazy callback to a joke made, not earlier in the conversation, but just in assumed common experience — in the received popular culture. As though it were an established fact that synchronised swimming is so dull that the mere mention of it should elicit nothing but derisive laughter.

One popular example of this phenomenon from a few years back was Damir Dokic — the Yugoslav-born father of tennis player Jelena Dokic. All you had to do at the time was say the word ‘Dokic’ and you would expect the eager crowd gathered about you to collapse giggling to the floor, incapacitated with the biting humour of it, without you actually having to go to the effort of actually thinking up an actual joke.

I was at the time rather fond of Dokic. Do you remember he was once thrown out of Wimbledon for alleged drunken and disorderly behaviour? He had approached a British journalist Mark Saggers, working for Sky Sports at the time, and asked to use his mobile. Saggers handed it to him; Dokic looked at it saying “I used to have a phone just like this and the stupid thing never worked!” and hurled it to the ground, smashing the phone into a very large number of very small pieces.

If you were Saggers you'd be livid and would want to see Dokic man-handled off the Wimbledon grounds in front of his teenage daughter. But for the rest of us, that's pretty bloody funny.

My heart warmed to the big old lunatic after that and yet to this day we still hear people mindlessly reaching for the Dokic callback.

But it's true: the FA Cup final was like watching synchronised swimming.

A little bit of surgery

2007-05-08T20:40:00.000+10:00

I can recommend eye surgery to anybody thinking of giving it a try: it's a barrel of good times.

This morning I was able to take the eye-patch off and see with my miraculous new vision. It was deliciously exciting: for the first half-hour or so, before my brain got used to it again, my whole house stood out in vivid, even exaggerated, 3D — like those magic-eye pictures that used to be popular. I mooned about the house with a stupid grin on my face: “oh look at that bottle it's in front of that other bottle! Bwaaa haha!” etc.

The procedure itself, on Monday, was a breeze. Firstly, nurses rock. Seriously. Nurses are just ace. If you are a nurse then you have my good opinion and if you know any nurses you can tell them from me that I think they're lovely. It's all about blankets: they just looooove giving you blankets. If you want to pamper a lad just give him some blankets and then inject some sedatives into his arm. Secondly, unlike the dentist, say, where you have to jack your own jaw open and breath through your nose and forbid yourself from swallowing and so on — and I still struggle with that — you don't have to do anything once your eye is anaesthetised. You don't have to keep your other eye closed or stop yourself blinking or anything: I was naïvely thinking I might have to do something of the kind.

The actual anaesthesia I mentioned might have been a bit of a test of nerves, though: two needles directly into your eyesocket either side of the eyeball. The staff there, however, didn't seem to make much of a fuss about it and I was all relaxed with my blankets and my sedative so I was perfectly happy.

The procedure involves cutting a small slit along the side of the eye, inserting a probe that chops up the lens of the eye, inserting another probe that sucks the bits out and then sliding in a plastic lens and I was able to watch it all from the inside! Very blurrily, of course, but I thought it was interesting.

Took today off work and spent the afternoon relaxing and just looking at things. Oh yeah, car coming up the street, I see you. Yes book, I'm reading you. Yeehah!

It wasn't cheap though. That private health insurance stuff is actually some pretty cool shit.

Ultimate

2007-05-02T11:50:00.000+10:00

I had never seen a game of ultimate frisbee before I volunteered at the annual national championships last week.

Yes, indeed: competitive frisbee. The game is sort of like netball, in that it is non-contact and the person with the frisbee can't run with it — only pass it to a teammate — and also sort of like gridiron, because you score by getting the frisbee to a teammate in the endzone and that the idea in general play is to gradually make yardage up the field as you have possession.

The sport surprised me in a number of ways. Firstly, the higher-seeded matches displayed a great deal of skill: those guys can really throw with speed and accuracy and have superb control, when it's needed, over the way the frisbee swings to the left or right; and they were quite competitive as well: teams made a lot of noise when they scored and there was fierce support from the sidelines as games were on. And secondly, the lower-seeded matches were much less skillful: the participants were clearly just having a pleasant little run about in the park with their mates. I knew it was an amateur sport but at rare times I found the national championships just a little bit surprisingly amateur.

My task was simply to assist the organising committee with whatever was needed to aid the players. I helped prepare the lunches, man the bar, keep the bins empty and the water barrels full and also just point at stuff for people — all your standard volunteery things. They gave me a T-shirt.

The kicker was that I went five days straight without email and internet! How I am still breathing, I don't know.

Change of career?

2007-04-20T12:15:00.000+10:00

Morose in the office. Everybody is quitting. All the people I like here are resigning; it is wholly depressing.

Perhaps it's time to give the programming away. Here I am a shit-hot, gun coder — but is it time to try something else?

A few thoughts:

Deckhand on a trawler?
Work in a donkey shelter?
Fashion model — obviously
Hairdressing (“And so, how would you like it?…” “How is your morning going?…” I'd be a natural!)
Run for mayor
Gonzo journalism
Firefighter
Watchmaker (there's a career that's going places)
Actuary
Usher — no, what about a butler!

So I guess there are always plenty of options.

There's a musical playing the comedy festival at the moment about one of our previous prime ministers. Those bastards stole my idea! I was already half way through writing one hell of a musical when I heard that those bastards had stolen my idea.

But then, to give them credit, they've gone for Keating which, looking back, is a stroke of genius. I wish I'd thought of it: mine was about John McEwen.

I might just stick with the coding.

Idle hands

2007-04-16T13:25:00.001+10:00

If you should ever feel the desire to feel butch and manly you could do worse than spend the weekend removing a gearbox from a car.

Not being a particularly car-mechanicky chap, my idea of fixing cars is to wait until one of the wheels falls off and then take it to the local repair shop. But, happily my housemate loves to tinker with cars and from time to time buys an old wreck, parks it in my backyard, fills my backyard with tools, ignores it all for about three months and then makes the car roadworthy and sells it. Good on him.

Over the weekend he and I replaced the clutch on the Ford which was oddly satisfying. I can sort of see what he finds so enjoyable about it: mostly it's how good you feel when you finally stop — much like jogging…

The task involves a great deal of lying underneath the body of the car on my brickwork which is now blanketed with oil mixed liberally with the dirt. Your hands and forearms are black with grease. The only conversations you have either are about socket wrenches or are just incoherent strings of F- and C-words.

Replacing a clutch involves removing in a particular order a number of parts that are all placed in awkward positions, buying a new clutch from a wrecker's (wreckers' are great fun, by the way — like those R-rated adult shops except with old radiators instead of crotchless knickers), putting it where the old one was and then bolting everything back on. As you would expect.

We were half-way through the last step when one of the bolts sheared off as we were tightening something.

Once again I have a car abandoned indefinitely in my back yard.

A Play

2007-04-10T11:30:00.000+10:00

Pinched from Daniil Kharms by Harpo

CAST:
Sir Robert Menzies, Prime Minister of Australia 1939-41,49-66
Kate Grenville, Author

SCENE:
Spanish seafront. Day.

Curtain. Stage is empty. Enter Menzies, strolling. Perhaps muttering an early draft of some speech. Menzies trips over.

Menzies: Oh!

Enter Grenville with a notepad and pen. She trips over Menzies.

Grenville: Oh, damn, Menzies!

Menzies stands up. Goes to leave but trips over Grenville.

Menzies: Oh! Grenville!

Grenville stands up. Goes to leave but trips over Menzies.

Grenville: D'oh! Again!

Menzies stands up and trips over Grenville.

Menzies: Oh! Curse you authors!

Grenville stands up and trips over Menzies.

Grenville: Damn! Menzies.

Menzies stands up and trips over Grenville.

Menzies: Grenville!

Grenville stands up and trips over Menzies.

Grenville: Bugger!

Curtain falls as both are on the ground.

Menzies: (off) Grenville!

Grenville: (off) Menzies!