Edgey

I've lost my edge, maybe my memory is fuzzy and I just never had it, but overwhelmingly I just feel I've lost my edge.
No more pointy corners, no more attitude, whilst still being an overwhelmingly negative person. Overbearing perhaps, deconstructive maybe... I think I've spent too much time being friendly and not enough time picking on people weaker than me.
When I read some of Morley's scathing tirades and ability to devide the world into winners and losers I wonder, what happened to me?
If a bunch of starving villagers suddenly had some band of banditos come down from the mountains and start deriding them with cutting insults, would I find the villagers gathered outside my hut asking me to step out and retort on their behalf?
"Good swords should stay in their sheaths" it's true but maybe I need some time to be gangsta.
full time gangsta.

Cars vs Bikes

A simple observation, the convenience of a car is that it can take you to your specific destination and is generally a lot faster than most other forms of transport.
A car weighs roughly just under a tonne (well maybe not just but relatively speaking) for a four door sedan, the model of choice amongst most metropolitan drivers followed by 4x4s. Your average person let's just say weighs around 80kg so it takes something that weighs hundreds of kilo's to move around something under 100 kilo's, considering that on an international flight they only allow you 25 kgs of luggage for arguements sake let's assume most people don't generally haul more than 25kgs around in their car.
Weight wise the car exerts more effort transporting itself than it does transporting you. And that's import in itself, the energy required to move a car is generated through combustion usually an engine.
Engine power is measured in terms of horsepower, a lot of horses. Compared to using horses cars I guess are efficient, 100 horses generating 100 horsepower would weigh a lot more than 1 tonne and take up a lot more space.
To do this it has to consume a fuel that has no substitutes on a free market and requires energy to be expended in its production and transportation plus various suppliers in the value chain require returns on their inputs so their is a margin at each stage of wholesale, furthermore said fuel requires future investment in exploration that needs to be allowed for.
Now the same applies to food but consider.
My bike weighs at most 20kg, UCI regulations say the minimum mass of a racing bycicle is 6.8kg to support an average weight of 80kgs, most engineering practices require a factor 10 safety load that is usually bridges and so fourth are designed to withstand pressures that are 10 times greater than their expected normal load.
Certainly true for cars and bikes do pretty good at supporting weights that far exceed their own.
Furthermore the occupant on a bike has to propel themselves, that is they exert their own energies into the bike to make it go. The bike just makes a persons own efforts more efficient.
I mean yes Lycra is bad, cyclists are generally pussies and unpredictable on the roads, but the bike itself is a marvellous invention, the car whilst an engineering achievement is horribly inefficient and not as convenient as we may first assume.

Loshersh whine about doing their besht, winnersh go home and fuck the prom queen

Which is to say, one form of pure loss I found I discovered was getting your bike stolen, just dissappeared, without a trace, I didn't get to say goodbye, it was gone, I locked it to a steel hoop in the ground and I came back and it was gone.
But that's the middle of nowhere.
Let me talk about competition, as my mind was coiling around the idea of a sports league that worked like Semco, as in players set and declared their own wages, ticket sales takings were open and transparent, fans rated the games and there was no salary cap.
It would make a good double blind type experiment to determine what makes content interesting to watch.
I read an article where some dudes had thought they'd devised a mathematical formula to access how good an event was... but I think it deviated from what I would call exciting as it could be predicting the greatest sporting moment by said formula was an olympic mens rowing gold for England in 2004.

Maybe it was but the founder of the modern olympics said the point wasn't to win or lose but to show the true essence of sportsmanship, struggling to be your very best all that shit...
'Pierre de Coubertin Medal' is considered the highest honour, better even than a gold medal. It only occasionally gets awarded by the IOC.
Anyway I have my own theories about what make a contest exciting or not:

1. Emotional Involvement - if you care it is ten times the experience than if you don't.
2. Uncertainty of the outcome - a close contest gauruntees tension and tension builds to inevitable climax
3. Unlikelihood of the outcome - a one sided match is dull but if one by an underdog it gets more exciting.
4. Skill level - as players are pushed to the limits of their abilities the entertainment value goes up.

And that's basically it, I mean hollywood gets it. And yet most free market sporting clubs go the opposite way, they want 100% winning records. They want their players to dominate so thoroughly that they are 'in a league of their own'
I would contend that the games I enjoy the most, infact if anything are the ones where I am simply pushed to my limits. My brain trips out, my muscles fail and I just want to collapse.
And generally they are right, whilst winning is fun and bragging rights should be tradable in the market place, its not important at the end of the day.
Because of a strange compulsion possibly from the depths of natural selection.
But I like to play against a strong competitor, much, much more than dominating a weak competitor.
Third preferance goes to being dominated by a much much stronger player.

See I would have thought that the contest, the competition is what makes the players better, and increases the fun, that being said rather than having Lennox Lewis and Hollyfield punching on the same team is a lot less entertaining than Lennox and Hollyfield punching eachother.
Similarly Jackie Chan fights are often a lot more drawn out as he the underdog attempts to overcome some fighter with a physical advantage over him until eventual triumph are a lot more entertaining than Bruce Lee kicking some poor extra around like a rag doll.
But that highlights a point in itself, I guess players like Bruce Lee and Jordan are a phenomena of their own, pushed themselves so hard as to ascertain another plain of existence. But they are only created because of that insatiable lust to compete.
In summary it is the drive to be our best and to do so by pitting ourselves against the best competitor we can find.
Crushing ants is fun but only for a while. I say in life it should be about a constant pushing upwards, making other people better through our desire to be the best, and not the best there is but the best we can be. By surrendering no quarter. Giving no inch. Unshakeble unstoppable resolve.

High 5's all round.

I'd rather be a rapist than a christian

Just hear me out, the rapist I refer to is Kobe Bryant and in the interest of non-defamation it was an allegation dropped by the plaintiff, the Christian being Dwight Howard Orlando Magics new big man who isn't an alleged Christian he's a Christian.
Dwight was my front runner for taking my second Jersey honours because my Vinsanity singlet needs to be washed from time to time. I liked his powerful physique and extreme dunking style, Kevin Garnett said he didn't have that much talent when he entered the league. Dwight will be big one day (which is of course to say that he is currently physically very big what I mean is in a celebrity status sense).
But It's playoff time so that means I spend most of my working day watching nba.com's play by play text rundowns of the playoff matches. I gotta say it's been a pretty exciting run in the western conference and the east with the exception of Netz versus Raptors were just about all sweeps including Detroit Piston's wiping Dwight's Orlando magic off the floorboards.
In the western conference I was hoping to see the Laker's bounce back as underdogs to the pheonix suns but after winning one game in the best of 7 round they got rolled.
I wanted them to win because I wanted Kobe to step up, to put down numbers in the 40's and 50's to dish out 9 dimes and rack up 2 blocks. Or at the very least a quadruple-double.
And Kobe does that from time to time, Kobe has close to the worst team in the league, I mean there's Lamar Odom who is a servicable Power Forward but compared to just about every other team in the playoffs there are no other teams this dependant on one man.
Kobe has the best stats in the league, is without a doubt the greatest player since Jordan and is occupying a space between Jordan and Wilt the Stilt. He is a serious contender for greatest of all time.
Yet unlike Michael he has an army of haters slightly bigger than his army of fans, he is viewed as arrogant and spoilt (and in some parts a rapist) but everyone has to hand down maximum respect for his game.
But he raises a point that resonates with me, that has propelled him up my list of jersey contenders from down the bottom as too mainstream (that honour has to go to Lebron, I don't know why he is never viewed as spoiled, I mean if that guy wasn't the most heavily marketed person to have not achieved anything yet in the league...) up to number 2 behind Vinsanity. Because something tells me that someday Kobe's jersey will have as much old school cool as MJ23, KA-J34, CB34 and so on.
The guy's got three rings, 2 consequtive scoring titles, the second highest single game score in history, an equal record 4 consecutive 50+ point game and seems to progressively get better.
I'm told he can't win the MVP because his team doesn't win enough, suffice to say I would wager you could put Kobe in any team in the L and they would scrape into the playoffs.
I can't say I've ever been a Kobe hater but he does highlight the important point, infact maybe he doesn't highlight it but flea certainly did in his nba blog

Confidence Not Arrogance

Posted by Flea on March 23, 2007, 2:20 p.m. ET
kobe bryanti have said it so many timesbut it is something that bares repeating
he is so taken for granted
people often think, oh he is so arrogant because he is so talented, let me tell ya something
people mistake the confidence that comes from a superb work ethic as arrogance
this is not just a matter of talent, or some bizarre genetic gift
some magic fairy dust that was sprinkled on him as a baby
yes,
his will power,
and his discipline,
and his work ethic,
and ability to stay focused and never rest on his laurels,
but always
work on improving his craft are part of who he is
yes all these things come from his god given nature,
and his genetics,
and the way he was raised
but the bottom line is
the guy works hardreal hard
day in day outhe is gonna make the most of who he is
he is gonna fulfill his potential
he will never look back later at his life and think oh i could have tried harder
he is willing to make the necessary sacrifices to be the best
and he is the best
because he cares the most
and gives all he hashe loves basketball
and we are all lucky to witness it
along with that the lakers all played well
they could have the put the clamps down on the grizzlies a little harder that's for sure
they let em score way too much
but luke payed welll
amar played well
kwame made some great defensive plays
smush moved the ball well
the momentum is gathering steam
where was jerry west?

go lakers

go bruins

end of flea's post.

Flea makes a good point, a good good point. I don't know how many movies push the message of believing in yourself but this seems to be the paradox of virtues. To become a champion you need to believe in yourself, but this is a quality to be observed, not said, no don't you dare profess your self belief out loud because that is arrogance.
Really the first person in every case to believe in you is you, not your coach not your teacher not your hair stylest. That's the starting point, others can jump on the bandwagon as the momentum overcomes the friction but really that's what believing in yourself should be all about - once you believe it, promote it. It's not exagerration it's just communicating who you are.
Freakin' humility is just a waste of time, and I find incredibly arrogant. Ian Thorpe demolishes record after record, how humble he is, what great humility from a great athlete. First time he was honest was when he quit - he didn't find it challenging or worthwhile.
Arrogance is going out with a sense of entitlement, that you don't have to compete, don't have to step it up. But arrogance is not believing you have the goods. Because you may have the goods.
Similarly humility isn't saying you don't have the goods when you clearly do.
Humility is being good, but knowing you want to be better. That's the only time it is permissable. That's the word from Rev. tohm.

Undercut Nation

I know, I know, I know, I know, I know, I know, I know, I know, I know, I know, I know, I know, I know, I know, I know, I know, I know, I know, I know, I know, I know, I know, I know, I know, I know, I know, I know, I know, I know, I know, I know, I know, I know, I know, I know, I know, I know, I know, I know, I know, I know, I know, I know, I know, I know, I know, I know, I know, I know, I know, I know, I know, I know, I know, I know, I know, I know, I know, I know, I know, I know, I know, I know, I know, I know, I know, I know, I know, I know, I know, I know, I know, I know, I know, I KNOW!!!
Any kid that has an undercut is trouble...the undercut is for bogan kids, drug dealers, kids that spit, shoplift and smoke cigarettes in primary schools. Kids that try to make their own crossbows, kids who use sodium bulbs to blow up things, kids who tagged, kids who wore flannel shirts around their waists...
But I find myself having to admit, the undercut is pretty cool. trouble, but cool. The mullet has had a renaissance thanks to a resurge in websites dedicated to it but the undercut was a similar late 80's early 90's sensation that may represent the suburban graffiti period of white gangsta.
I see white kids with corn-rows and it makes me want to vomit. Then you know the shaved head has made it's way into every sub culture it doesn't say anything anymore. But the undercut says 'stop looking at me old man' or 'keep your hands in your pockets whilst on public transport'.
I guess it went out, like me with the grunge movement. And sure a new generation needs to define itself with a retro take on goth vis a vis the assymetrical emo haircut.
The problem with emo is that it's goth with the romance removed, so what was easy pickings with some ingroup upside before is now easy pickings with all emotional vulnerability downside.
The undercut represented the top bit of an empowered individual, it took dedication, commitment, self confidence. You could accesorize but not overly so., sadly I think my undercut days are gone. Furthermore you punch undercut into google and you find frustratingly few examples for me to substantiate how gangsta it is/was. I don't know anyone these days with an undercut, something happened to masculinaty sometime when friends came in and every white boy became a gel boy.
Let's not forget the importance of the undercut to women though. It can give that same fuck-off vibe whilst preserving femininity. time for some exhibits:

Exhibit A: Mike patton circa Epic channeling pure white cool slightly pre-grunge watch the you tube clip to gain full appreciation

Exhibit B: Trent Reznor circa Head Like a Hole, the dawn of industrial sub culture, check you tube again for appreciation of the 'english headbanger' where dreadlocks and the undercut meet

On cyclists

If a cyclest is irresponsible and unpredictable on the roads they get killed.

If a driver of an automobile is irresponsible and unpredictable on the roads cyclists get killed.

A grievous offense with a car can result in you not only killing a cyclist but killing yourself. But who knows if you hold your nerve the bike goes under, the corpse bounces off the bonnet, a lesson is learned? or is it.
I think if people think execution helps deter crime and that guns can deter home invasion and muggings - maybe fitting all cyclists with C4 could make our roads safer.
I mean if anything having exploding bycyclists is really an exercise in evening up the exchange. You clip a cyclist they blow up you also die in your big car.
Just like guns are the great equaliser "who needs courage when you have a gun" so too could be exploding bicyclists.
I put this revolutionary idea to my housemate...


...i just thought about dinner and it's far too early in the day, now I feel agonisingly hungry...

...and my housemate suggested that people would just try and wing cyclists and drive away causing an amusing explosion at no personal cost.
That's true except I'm thinking more like the cold wars M.A.D. sort of explosive - Mutually Assured Destruction. The explosives would be big enough to vaporise a family sedan or porsche 4x4.
Furthermore it would also make cyclists less tempted to run that red light. To cut across 3 lanes and maybe even look behind themselves once in a while.

And I wonder why nobody takes anything I say seriously? A serious post on this face-off between self powered and internal combustion powered later.

see you douchebags.

The Price of Time

It's a common strategy for companies to offer gifts in kind, probably the most common form of a corporate thankyou (or maybe well known) is the frequent flyer program. Airlines often have excess capacity on flights, the variable cost of having a customer sitting in that seat is let's say $40. Even though a flight to Hawaii might cost you $1100 if you would only take that seat on that flight because you can pay for it with frequent flyer points you get an otherwise empty seat so you get a flight you value at $1100 and it only costs the company $40. This works so long as the system is set up so a paying customer never gets bumped for a ff awardee.
I've been reading on win-win strategies under game theory and I was thinking about the old pay rise negotiations.
Firstly negotiation under game theory (and in practice) is daunting enough, but the thing about pay rises is that they are more or less the opposite of the above situation.
You see thanks to Income tax (and HECS) is that an employer values a pay rise much more than you do. An extra $4000 might represent depanding on your tax bracket as little as $2200 a year or $42 a week to you but it means $76 a week your employer has to pay. That's of course a worse case scenario and generally the more you earn the more you claim back on tax. But to someone like me who has no deductable expenses (apart from donations to recognised charities) combined with short term cashflow problems having half a pay rise locked away for a year (or 50 if using tax effective super contributions) just isn't something I get all fussed about.
So it costs a company up to twice as many dollars to get the same impact out of me, the taxation system not only taxes better performance but it reduces the incentive for a company to say thankyou in cold hard cash.
Now when I was a casual employee you don't talk salaries but in hours, like $9.80 an hour to be seniour management at HJ's and $21 to talk shit on a phone. And it made it clear cut what time was worth, infact pay was related directly to time. Performance measures generally held steady and you had that 1:1 relationship between time spent and revenue raised. ie. for every 1 hour worked you sold 23 burgers. but most jobs and indeed work don't follow this cycle. take retail, for two months of the year (november & december) the value of an hour goes up alot during the christmas retail period, I think it's something like 80% of the years business happens in December. Hence you see the casual staff numbers balloon up at this time and then be cut back massively come February.
And most full time jobs are the same but it gets obscured by the fact that time isn't the only factor that can increase or decrease your value, it can just be sheer capacity, your strategic fit, customer demand, timing, seasonality, business cycles, government investment, overseas interest rates, deregulation, regulation and so on and so fourth, but the fact is that not every hour you put in is worth as much as every other hour you put in.
Your energy and concentration are not as good at the end of a day as at the beginning of the day, or the shipping deadline is 2pm and customers tend to only use your services up until this time.
Furthermore, if people were really honest with themselves they would admit that they only put in at maximum around 3 hours of productive effort a day, yet most of us are at work for 8. Some people do pile on the effort and work a phenomenal amount of hours productively and these people are why Unemployment is high, they should actually be highering graduates to do their book keeping and other things for them that they are currently micromanaging like Donald Rumsfield. Yes they may have to sacrifice their pay but this again comes back to the same question?
What is the value of time?
8 hours work, 8 hours rest and 8 hours recreation is the basis of the 8 hour day. Outside melbourne trades hall we fitted a monument to this notion, it is what many, but not I would consider a 'balanced' day. But If I have to work as many hours a day as I'm sleeping I'm not doing one or the other efficiently.
If say you shift the balance to 10 hours work (pretty common) and cut back to 7 hours recreation and 7 hours rest already we see that the situation is unbalanced. Now you would also notice that this breakdown adds up to 24 hours, lot's of assumptions have been made here, or ommitted for want of simplicity. For example what is commute time? is it working day or recreation day, in the mornings it's more likely to come out of rest time. Say you are the average Melburnite and your commute is 1 hour each way through rush hour traffic - 10 hours became 12. Or even in the balanced perspective 8 hours becomes 10. You may even enjoy driving and good old breakfast radio or like me enjoy a 15 k ride to work whilst listening to music. It doesn't really matter if you enjoy it or not it's part and parcel of your decision to work. And I don't really begrude work for not being sub 1 minute travel time for my place of residence. I'm a realist but really the decision to sell your time to an employer really leaves two things to negotiate at a table and most often we only negotiate one side of the deal and worse give away the other.
How often does work give you money because it may as well or to make a favorable impression? once a year if that, and believe me a company would rather give money to customers to say thank you than employees.
Yet we give away time that is our recuperation time, valuable time to a company and in reality the company probably doesn't value it anywhere near what you or I do.
Infact if anything by the time you sign your first contract you've probably overprovisioned your time for what the company demands in value.
You could probably get out 75% of the output in 50% of the time you work now, and I feel that estimate is conservative. as such 50% of your hours should be negotiable.
So there is time that you value more than your employer does, and then there is pay which an employer values more than you do.
So I would have thought if anything hours would reduce as you moved up in a company but the reverse tends to happen.
That's what I call a lose-lose anyway I'll see how I go at the negotiating table.

Open Stride

A goodweekend is not as easy as intuitively it promises to be.
I find usually I just spend too much time recovering and not enough time doing productive stuff.
but I managed to catch up with a fair few people and stuff. Furthermore I stimulated my brain finding myself drawn into a whole bunch of design stuff.
I was going to say, at some point, something and that something was that if ever you get an invitation into someone else's world, take it.
I mean to say if people want you to take an interest in something do so.
Why I say this is that I was watching Crude Impact on SBS, where they were saying that if China consumed resources the way US citizens did we would need 6 more planet earths.
Daunting enough but I am confident that market forces will painfully reinforce that this simply cannot happen, no matter what WA premiers promise they can dig out of the ground.
Anyhoo, that is to say I thought, each and every person lives in a world of their own. Because perceptions are unique to one person, and if perceptions have an impact on the qualities of any object, person or thing in the universe.
For example, houses and cars are of relatively little value to me, but they are god given rights in the same way lungs are for others (again not a god given right)
Speaking of lungs mine are back to their screaming best.
I was drifting off to sleep last night in my running gear when I said: No! go fucken run tohm you always let yourself down on a weekend.
So then I got up and ran from my house round the zoo and then around princes park and then back home, which is about 9.5k but the real revelation was that it actually got easier, as I ran my legs felt looser and I just sped up and sped up. I was overtaking people for the first time in a long time around the park.
I then headed home and heading along the bike path that hugs the railway line the bells started ringing and the boom gates fell.
I realised if I sped up I could avoid having to jog on the spot waiting for traffic to pass.
So I did and I hit something that I hadn't for maybe 3-4 years. My open stride.
For ages (2 months) even though my heart has been strong, my lungs good I still haven't felt like I was going fast. Last night I hit my stride and it felt fast and it felt good.
Running is good.

A waste of breath...

If you didn't catch southpark last monday (in Australia) possibly last January in the US they played Part 1 of Go God Go! Southpark like John Safran are good at handling issues I find because they never let any one audiance get too comfortable. Plus Mrs Garrison is hilarious in almost every appearance on that show.

Anyway that's how I would prefer the endless debates aboot religion should be conducted, commically and with feces being thrown.
Instead extremists tend to set out to maximise human suffering and moderates simply to consume most of the resources of intellectual capacity humanity has to offer.
I was reading a blog entry that was looking at the 'controversy' of the da vinci code as to whether Jesus could have fathered a child or not and whether in the early days of Christianity they were even organised enough to actually follow and protect this bloodline.
Now immediately my mind clicks into gear to come out with rational arguements for or against this case and my DAV experiences deeply ingrained make me want to pursue it with fervor.
But I read on and then found that the author proposed that this was meerly an extension of a 'deeper' question, a debate that had raged on for years:
Was Jesus Devine?
Interesting? Yes. Was the authors arguements good? Yes. They seemed well thought out, the dialogue was engaging and it was drawing on volumes of research.
I read about two paragraphs and was up to the bit where St Paul was trying to claim he had visions from Jesus and this gave him title to being the 12th apostle, maybe something about the definition of 'Messiah' I don't know. If it had been a conversation I would have been compelled to speak out with my opinion. But instead having really only broken the surface on the arguement presented a question popped into my head:

Do I care?






Well........................no.

No I don't care if Jesus was devine or not. It's of relatively little importance to me. I don't have much personally invested either way. I don't care whether Gabriel or Buddha were devine or not. I just don't care.
The obvious retort is the old 'Why do you talk about it so much then?' which plays on a favorite past time of mine which is to ask someone who's clearly fine 'Why are you upset?' or 'What's wrong Tim?' and refuse to take 'Nothing' for an answer.
I remember reading in a Comic following Lex Luthor's run at presidency the first chapter was called 'The Reason' where without any dialogue or text you followed Lex through his day constantly being confronted by the image of Superman until he cracks and decides to run for president.
This is essentially what being an athiest is like, you live in a world with people who begin with the assumption their personal god exists, or moderates who begin with the assumption that a personal god exists. And work from there.
It's like being put on a committee to solve the 'Reduction of Water in our Bucket Project' beginning with the assumption that the bucket is perfect and there can't be a leak.
I must admit ignorance to a lot of non-Judaic religions but here is a selection of controversial debates that thanks to the beggining assumptions result in a total waste of time (these have actually been debated by professionals):

When does a soul enter an embrio/fertilised egg
Where do children go who die of natural causes before being baptised (resulting in the Catholic Limbo clause)
Anything regarding the Holy Trinity
If two teachings from the Prophet contradict eachother should we default to the earlier or the latter teaching?

And so on and so on...
I mean imagine if your most intelligent friends called meetings with experts around the world to spend their time debating issues such as:

Did Tyrone from TV's good times prefer Sandlewood or Oceanspray?
Can a power ranger coin be used for evil?
Which componant Lion in Voltron is the most intrinsically good?

Imagine if people killed eachother over these issues on a day to day basis, Imagine if some of the worlds most capable (but not brilliant) minds where pouring study day after day into these issues.
Imagine if on Insight and other panel discussion programs moral questions deferred to the president of the Transformers fan club.
Imagine if merchandisers were exempt from tax if they sold anything related to telly tubbies.
Imagine if the highest point in every town had a huge building dedicated to David Hasselhoff.

That's what it's like being an athiest.
Example my former housemate Damo spent a year of his life writing a long thesis on Agency, now he's dedicating some years to writing about modal metaphysics, in doing so he has some pretty interesting theories on what is moral behaviour and he has to read up to find out what progress has actually been made into moral studies and what have been proposed by other academics for the past however many thousands of years.
Infact psychologists and scientists and what not have gotten together and done studies on what does and doesn't constitute moral behaviour.
Now he's probably dealing with an end of the spectrum that is beyond any sort of moral call I'll ever have to make.
I would imagine these sorts of experts are who you should refer to in understanding complex situations in terms of weighing up say the rights of an individual against a majority, the tyranny of majority or where one decision effects multiple parties such as borrowing resources off of future generations.
Complex, the sort of stuff Jimmy Carter used to agonize over.
Compare to say the case of The Bean Farmer's Union vs Pythagoras. What's that I say?
Pythagoras wasn't he the guy that came up with all them rules about the nature of right angled triangles?
Yes, but did you know he was also a bit of a religious leader? It's true. Seldom does anyone question: Was Pythagoras Devine? which is a compelling question I don't care about. I would say probably since he clearly had some sort of devine insight into triangles, timeless and universal. However he forbade his followers eat beans.
Now beans are a low fat source of protein and in terms of the food chain take much less energy to produce. They are vital to mexicans and vegetarians.
Imagine if we paid as much legislative respect to Pythagoras' church as we do to the Judaic one's, we would have 'bean free' on our menu, in certain states you wouldn't be allowed to grow beans.
In africa you can be stoned to death for eating beans.
The list goes on. Furthermore an expert in things Pythagoras did or didn't like would be respected and subsidized in taxation, they would get a seat on discussion panals where poor Damo may never set foot. No cocktails and cupcakes and glamorous models for him, no choirs to lift his spirits in the great hall that he presides over.
No for damian it is just his rustic clothing and study for as long as he lives.

Now most dissapointing of all I logged onto the comments left on this post I was reading and I saw all these specific questions technical aspects of the bible story posted under parky's comment 'this was too long - :)' asking can you trace the lineage of the 12 disciples? more blah blah blah...
Again who cares, these I would have thought may be some important questions:

What is moral behaviour?

That's a good starting point for everyone, the second thing is to resist the temptation to rush to the nearest holy book and find out. Because a much better answer is:

moral behaviour is anything that reduces suffering, immoral behaviour is anything that increases suffering.

Now that's a starting point isn't it, and the real kick in the pants is that religion can deviate from such a simple test, in our society people are wasting their time and energy having all sorts of debates over whether Pythagoras meant beans literally or in a metaphysical sense. One could ask: how did this ever become a moral question?

ANZAC Day greatest day of the year

Ah the traditions of Anzac day are long and proud. What a special day of the year.
I had just done my laundry on Monday night where I confronted the reality that I couldn't make it through the week, even with a public holiday without doing a load.
Anyway whenever I have done my washing it's usually so long overdue that I get a certain luxurious feeling like I've just bought a whole heap of new clothes.
As such I had my pick on Anzac day of bball singlets to choose from to go playing in. I'd texted all my players the night before and in the best Anzac tradition I got up early in the morning around 8.30 (tim brown on SYN by the way is a truly representing youth voice of rare wit and intelligence matched with equal ambivolence and superfluity) and played some NBA Live 07 where as the Houston Rockets I shat all over the Dallas Mavericks with T-Mac sinking 69 points 5 rebounds 2 steals and 2 blocks with 8/8 3 point shots made just to get me in the mood.
Then I went in early to town and even though Vincent & Tosh had cancelled and Daud couldn't make it Rio was still down for it and I had my traditional al fresco breakfast. I sure miss Misaki on days like these because I use to go out for breakfast with her in real classy places and get things called 'The Big Breakfast' or Eggs Florentine or Benedict and occasionally pancakes. Infact we probably went out for breakfast more than dinner. I think Breakfast feels like more of an achievement.
Anyway, suffice to say I just can't bring myself to the skivvy wearing loner state of mind where you hand over decent money for a great breakfast to eat by yourself. Instead I went to a swanston walk cafe and handed over too much money to enjoy an indecent breakfast by myself.
Speaking of indecent the complete absence of all other forms of CBD entertainment outside of the parade sure brings the bogans into this neck of the woods adorned in essendon and collingwood colours drinking a lot of beer (at 11am) and swearing loudly, I know carlton is no exception when it comes to its fair share of unruly fans and these guys are more likely to shell out for membership than people with highly disposable incomes having values of 'loyalty' over values of 'value'.
Anyway I ate my breakfast and Rio texted me to say he was running late and so I had an hour to warm up before our game.
I have been working on my jump shot, well technically its just the regular overarm shot, and I'd be hitting around 45%, I wanna get over 50% but my problem is in a game I'm expected to be down on the low post picking up garbage goals not hitting jumpers.
But After 20 minutes warm up (approximately half of regular game time) I decided to switch to hook shots and found I'm hitting about 30% even with my back to the basket, If I could get that up it would be super helpful on the low postin converting an offensive rebound into a score.
After my shoulder was getting tired I switched to my old bad shooting style which could be called the pass shot, It's my awkward long range underarm shot that I used whin I was a teenager playing and got increadibly accurate. It would be useless except for its deceptive nature.
A) it looks like a pass so instead of blocking the shot defenders rush into the key to intercept the pass or stop the man inside.
B) it gives me extra range so people don't expect me to shoot for 3 because I can't hit it with a jumper.
Anyway I still shoot about 80% with this but it's so easy to block it's useless in the paint.
But that more or less concluded my hour long warmup.
I bought a Gatorade and rode up to melbourne uni where I played with Rio against some chinese guys 4 on 4 half court. The first game me, rio and this other dude made up one team and represented all rebounding options so we won 10-4 then we switched the other rebounding king and I went from grabbing 3 boards to 14 thanks to my superior boxing out, admittedly a lot of rebounds where off my own low post shots but I scored about 3 of the 10 to tuck away our second win.
Then we switched to 3 on 3 when Omar came to play some big guys with some illmatic ball handling skills. We did pretty well and I did surprisingly well rebounding considering a 10 kilo disadvantage I had but we lost.
Second game we lost by a more convincing margin but Rio finally got his low post shooting down. Omar claimed to have too much power from all this wisdom teeth surgery.
Anyway then I ate some lunch and hit boarders for a while. By the time I got home it was 5.30, by the time I got back from the supermarket it was 6. By the time gnocchi kicked in It was 8.30 and I managed half an hour reading before I passed out.
What a fine way to uphold the traditions of Anzac day.

Spam

Because I almost never use my hotmail account, I almost never expect to recieve any email. I've never ever had problems with spam either. In a time when people where leaping from hotmail to yahoo and gmail like there was no tomorrow even using their crappy ISP provided accounts I stuck by because I had no reason, I'd almost never recieved a single bit of spam.
So today I log in and to my bitter dissapointment people I know have instead sent me promo's and advertising material.
Maybe what they say is true, the internet is the end of human contact if the only reason people can think to contact me is to send me mail flyers.
I mean obscure pornographique at least.
Anyway April's been a let down in blogging, but man not because I haven't wanted to post, if you had seen the ideas stewing in my head you'd be all like, man I want some stew.
Anyway I will endeavor to post.
The great dissappearing pancake.

John's Wager

If you look at John's second most recent blog post of his personal life you'll see a well reasoned and lightly entertaining post.
But I remember a wager I made with John, one whose end I fulfilled and he sold out, claiming he had 'already had that conversation' infact I don't even think it was that it was more like 'I already know what she'll say'.
That wasn't the deal john.

that wasn't the deal.

And unlike John I'd like to apologize for not keeping my blog up to date.
I've been busy, but not with better stuff to do.

Hygene Theory

Is there anything I dislike more than some uppity pussy turning their nose up at some food or balking at using some utensil or camping aparatus for fear of microscopic germs.
I heard at a recent dinner party some dude had a sister who brought out her boyfriend from another country and the dad threw a BBQ party for him and offered him a sausage and he said 'Can't eat that its burnt, carcenogenic' and the Dad, rightly in my opinion decided to dislike him forever.
I've also seen a dude on Nerds FC when taken on a camping trip ask if the nozzle on his sleeping matress has been sterilised, to which he was lied to when the response was 'yes' he then couldn't believe that it had.
We are talking grown people here, people beyond the whole 'boy germs, girl germs' age of 6.
People who wont eat stuff off the ground, are horrified of having to touch a toilet seat to put it down, couldn't imagine anything worse than a kid playing in mud.
All this bubble wrapping is producing highly strung, socially awkward people of no use to society in general.
The only germs or microbes I've ever heard doing serious damage to anybody are the ones in Hospitals what eat your flesh off your bones. Because Hospitals are so sterilised.

*and occasionally from Bay Marie's in dodgy businesses, but what's a couple of days watching day time tv between friends.

Lately I feel like Kobe

I'm glad Kobe has surpassed Lebron, apart from the whole alleged forcing himself on hotel staff incident, I never really understood why Kobe get's backseat to Lebron. A guy who is potentially great seems to take precedence over someone who has maximum game.
So anyway to qualify the subject heading I don't feel like Kobe in that I don't feel an urge to have extra marital relations with people who don't necessarily want my loving. No I'm referring to Kobe's wonder week racking up 4 games in a row with plus 50 points breaking that run on the 5th game with 43 points. Now when an MVP can score average ppg of 25 (or in Steve "Nasty" Nash's case 19) that's a phenomanal run.
So when I say lately I feel like Kobe, I mean I don't know how Kobe feels, I mean it could be anything from the bored elite 'business as usual' to the pig ignorant lotto winner 'god is moving me from a dimension beyond my understanding'.
What I feel like is that I am racking up performance milestones, like I'm stronger than ever and resistance is just dropping away.
I don't know if anyone else has ever fallen into this good times zone but If I had to guestimate the coordinates of it's origins I would say self respect.
I think for me it always comes from treating myself as my numero uno competitor. Just as I try to bury the tohm of yesterday, i try to make it hard for tohmorrow to surpass me now.
If only I was good at something that pays as well as bball. (if you make it)

A Sad Day

Some point 8 months ago I was going to sleep, which I have done many times since however, on this particular occasion I stumbled accross a pile of garbage intermixed with clothes and leapt over my doona which had been left awkwardly the last time I got up. I then read a bit and put my book down on top of an old cereal bowl that now contained my mobile phone.
In doing so I knocked a pile of change onto the floor and like a crystal bullett in the forehead I realised

I cannot look after myself.

I'm incapable, or rather inept.
I also realised at that time if I was going to be dating again I had to do muchos mostest to actually transform my room into a place I would be willing for a girl to see.
It was a lot of work, infact the ratio of time spent cleaning up a room to time spent making a tidy room messy must be something like 80:1 yet a messy room stays messy and takes a long time to get messier so why ever clean anything up?
For at least 3 months now I have been relatively tidy.
But the point is I have met people that find this task, real real easy.
The overwhelming majority of these people are girls, girls who can look at two shirts of seemingly the same substance and say: that one is clean, that one is dirty.
Men who are neat I should qualify as not finding it easy, they usually are hardcore disciplinarians with repressed matricidal tendencies.
Anyhoo mayhaps the import is the reaction to the words neat and dirty.

Maybe some people actually read the sentance this way:

Anyhoo mayhaps the import is the reaction to the words neat and dirty.

But I would read it more like this:

Anyhoo mayhaps the import is the reaction to the words loser and fun.

Is it any wonder I throw tantrums cleaning my room.

I don't want to be a loser.

Top Ten: Misakigo

1. Sewiously
2. Fresh Begetables
3. I habe a question
4. Its become my favorite
5. That-a why?
6. Carbohydro
7. Seep (Sheep)
8. Puppies underwear (actually talking about Paul Pierce)
9. oh my gosh!
10. Gorgeous

I mean she can think I'm picking on her english, but I'd be so dissapointed if she lifted her standard to professional, she'd probably become a boring individual if she spoke, well not like me but someone else.
missing you petal.

A Real Job Pt.1: Win-win

I thought I'd dedicate some time sharing my thoughts on why it may be good to go work for a souless corporate entity.
I think many people work on behalf of mortgages, and work towards ambiguous and thoughtless financial goals, not because they are stupid or imoral but simply because determining a purpose in life is clearly quite difficult.

"Win-Win: One of four outcomes our company provides, the others being Win-Lose, Lose-Win and Lose-Lose."

You can only go into business if you be making someone's life easier. That is ethically, obviously there are people who go into business, that parasitically leach resources out of the community (Win-Lose) who sacrifice themselves unsustainably (Lose-Win) or run a company into the ground through sheer incompetence (Lose-Lose).
The last kind being normally reserved for politics.
But Win-win is the fundamental belief required, tat you can benifit other people and mutually benefit yourself - it really is this belief that makes profit and value possible.
Value occurs when you apply your expertise to a problem for someone else who pays for this solution which covers the cost of your efforts and then some.
A person will only pay that bit extra if the solution is of value to them.
And that's where win win occurs.
Of course a sentient person can also wring intensive value out of a joint venture that may have occured in error.
At any rate as Musashi would say meditate on this in depth.

Darkplace returns

Darkplace, a show close to the greatest show ever is coming back soon.
Thursday just got it's flavour back.
SBS if you can.

Michael Jordan Goes To Hell

"Let me introduce you to my main man Brett,
He is smoking what is not a cigarrette..."
- Salt 'N Pepa - Heavin and Hell

Indeed it seems to be seeming that S&P defined hell as the ghettos in which there community is expected to survive and thrive. Infact they combine both paradise and damnation into one tight package.
There are no generally agreed specifications and dimensions for hell. Which really you know all it needs to be is the unpleasant alternative to Heaven, you know like a production line, or an eternity of having to sit next to a talkative old person on a tram, or just a room full of mosquitoes. Anything annoying when multiplied by eternity would infact become unbearable torture. One would think.
Maybe just people in a queue talking ignorantly about a band you like. Or talking passionately about a band you think is overrated.
Or just teenage girls talking.
Anyway the point is you wouldn't have to do much when talking about eternity to make hell extremely unpleasent.
Yet most church groups rely on vague terms like "the worst place you can imagine" if you grew up in the country that's probably the dentist.
If you watch lots of anime from Japan it's probably a lot worse than the Catholic church can imagine. (although presumably not much worse than what the inquisitors used to do to fellow human beings on their god's behalf).
But you know this definition is really the weakest, its quite hard to imagine some place without then realising with certain self admonishment that it doesn't work that well.
Straightforward: Lake of Fire. Burn in hell for eternity in a lake of fire. I mean it's impossible to really concieve this as punishment from a mortal perspective, simply because there's only so much pain a physical body can take then it shuts down. If your mind shut down because it was being roasted in inconcievable agony the experience would probably be akin to the athiest concept of the afterlife.
But supposing if the "afterlife" is different and one's threshold of pain is increased so one doesn't pass out. I imagine you feel pain, you feel pain, you feel pain, pain becomes boring and your mind starts to focus on other things.
Like moving from one climate to another, humidity makes it hard to breathe. Heat makes you sweat doing the simplest tasks and cold puts you to slip or makes your nipples go hard.
Anyway the point is if you are conscious to experience pain, and the feedback is useless (ie cannot alleviate the pain) then most likely your conscious is going to get over it and work on other things.
So we find ourselves in a game, to make pain and suffering of any use (as pain and suffering) there has to be ways to improve or reduce your situation on the pain and suffering front.
Furthermore this ridiculous dimension of pain is supposed to operate for eternity. Therefore Economics don't really apply because it would seem you have an infinite resource (time) and economics is based on the belief that relative to our needs(/wants) resources are limited. But if you had all the time ever (so much time, the concept of time became irrelivant) your potential would become infinite.
So say you take all the concepts of hell that various nasty individuals have imagined over the years and rolled them all up into one mega hell and then multiplied it by the largest number you can think of and...
Michael Jordan would still trounce it.
Think about it. Put someone with michael jordans work ethic into a hell even worse than has previously been concieved and give him an eternity to triumph over it and give it 10,000 or 100,000 years and he will triumph. Through sheer unshakeable resolve.
He'd push apart those mountains. Chew through the shackles holding him down and wring the buzzard that pecks out his livers neck. He'd dunk the giant bolder down on the apex of the hill so hard it wouldn't roll down the other side.
He'd recruit a reliable center and a swingman of similar ability to Scottie Pippen, maybe even put together a dream team and be simply unbeatable.
It may not happen overnight, in fact if hell does exist I'd be surprised given the time the tennents have had (6,000 years mayhaps for the one's that first made graven images) that I'd be surprised if it wasn't hospitable by now.
It just doesn't work, unless it works in ways so mysterious as to be inconcievable and thus not worth wasting your time worrying about.
So stop praying already, if you indeed have an afterlife, you've got plenty of time anyway.

Outed

At the bottom of this post I have attached a newsletter I recieve every month from a faith group having just finished reading "Letter to a Christian Nation" I think I can't go back.
I was priveledged to have a chance in life to discover how wondrous the world around me is, I only had this chance because my father when he was 6-8 years old realised that religion was in essence all bullshit. When I was taught "Religious Education" in Primary school, of which any one of a religion other than Christianity was excused (at a Public School no less) I could never really get into prayer. When I prayed there was a distinct absence of anybody responding.
I was fortunately aware as too few are too late, that there was infact a choice, to accept or reject god. My parents said "do you believe in God?" you could choose or not choose. There was some confusion because my parents also wanted me to experience the magic of Santa and the tooth fairy but overall I would have spent almost in entirety 10 weeks believing in God.
But something else happens when you look at Intelligent Design, possibly the most significant advance in science for centuries, possibly bigger (shamefully so) than Einstein's theory of relativity. Because religion by imposing on the territory of scientific process invited science in like never before to have a look.
I'm not going to explain the far reaching implications of intelligent design suffice to say, on cursory observation points out how ridiculous and more to the point useless a belief in God - (amplified for belief in a specific god) is.
Therefore I wish you to know that I will afford no special respect for anyone's religious beliefs and practices, it's a waste of my time and energy and I find it personally offensive because of the impact it has on the world I wish to live in and reproduce and alleviate human sufferring.
If on the other hand you want to waste a lot of time and energy protecting a lot of suffering and misery that goes on in the world check out any of below (except earth hour it's an environmental cause and has nothing to do with multi-faith subsequently sounds pretty good):

Well, the March events have been pouring in – there are almost as many here as on the calendar! I hope you can attend something:

Yoga classes (Weeks beginning 7 Mar) Hindu
Short Course on the Song of Songs (13 Mar) Jewish
Women and Human Rights in South Asia (14 Mar) Peace
Jewish Holocaust Museum Public Lecture (14 and 21 Mar) Jewish
Workshop for Birthing Mother (15 Mar) Jewish
Black Harmony Gathering (17 Mar) Koori community
Workshop on Spirituality and Social Justice (17 Mar) Christian
Jews, Shoah and Genocide (18 Mar) Jewish
Pastoral Care Meeting (18 Mar) Muslim
World Meditation Hour (18 Mar) Brahma Kumaris
Continuing Education in Ministry (19 Mar) Christian
New Moon Gatherings for Women (19 Mar) Jewish
Birth of the Prophet Mohammed (pbuh) (30 Mar) Interfaith
Nomination for the Young Muslim of the Year (30 Mar) Muslim
Earth Hour (31 Mar) Environmental Peace