Second Guessing

Periodically, I will click on 'edit posts' and find that in my list of posts are a few I just never got around to finishing with some other thought demanding my attention and moving me on.

Yet in the past 3 days I've started and deleted a bunch of posts with great abundence. Eventually I just fell back on writing more chapters of 'the naive investor' (which I stuffed up and will have to write prequels for).

This though is new, not wanting to publish something. Clearly I have very low standards. More exciting though was that today I got hit by a wave of overwhelming desire to just forget everything I'd learned in the past 10 years, putting me somewhere back in year 11.

I don't know why, perhaps I'm just tired. Because in year 11 I was an unapologetic arrogant dickcuntfag. I would chew that kid up (unless it was a cross country event) and spit him out. I'd probably be a lot nicer about it than he would be.

I link it to another curious incident in the middle of the other night, when I woke up and scratched my calf in the middle of the night. For some reason I had the reassuring thought upon feeling my own calf that 'I'm me.' And it was good to be me. It was like waking up and discovering your lover was still there, but not remotely sexual and my lover wasn't there. I just woke up and was reassured that I was my old familiar self.

I can make nothing of it, unless somewhere people have been crawling into a portal into my head, like being John Malcovich. But I can't see why I or they would care.

At any rate, I don't want to remain myself, which I think is starting tocarry over into second guessing, posting some opinionated 'how to live your life' post and thinking 'do I really want to put that out there?' and deleting it, considering it of little value.

Here's the thing, I wright this blog for myself. I guaruntee that you haven't read all my posts, and yet I keep on producing them without your loyal patronage.

To me they are literal reminders I'm jotting down telling me how to live my life. That you can read it just keeps me honest, and allows me to confront my fear that people know just how big an arsehole I am.

I'm pretty sure by now that people generally know just how big an arsehole I am.

I think that's why I choose to take a positive approach to my newfound lack of self assurance. I hope to change, indeed depressingly If I go back to my very first post it will reflect I time when I was full of hope that I could change myself.

Incedently, that period was probably where I changed the most, sort of dropped the ball on being self centered and realised I didn't want to live with myself. Ironically I am perhaps in many ways more alone than ever. But that is to say I'm working less on loving myself and more on making myself somebody I can love.

I think we all have to hope we can change ourselves, otherwise we are recieving a life sentence with a dickcuntfag arsehole for our only roommate.

I don't hate myself, this isn't a cry for help. But after awhile I start to get on my nerves.

Naive Investor Chapter 5: The Problem of Property

I'm going to start with property in my chapters on asset classes because I have looked at it quite a bit over the past couple of years and what I see I don't like (particularly in my home market of Australia).

But before I list my reasons, let me say that property is the headlights to the Naive Investors Deer. It is the most enticing to the default risk profile 'Unlimited Upside exposure, no downside exposure' which isn't even true, but these attributes are thrust upon it more readily than any other type of asset class.

The Positive:

Land is a monopoly it is fixed in supply (or very very risky and expensive to create in the case of Dubai) and every person on Earth needs at least as much to stand and lie down on. Every square inch of livable and ariable land on earth is owned and demand generally outstrips supply. Hence often you can get away with un-utilitarian prices for land.
Or in other words - you can charge a premium for its Net Present Value.

Unless you're a mining company it doesn't tend to degrade in quality. The big plus of course is that you can charge rent, a form of tax on somebody else's productive activity for the priveledge of using your surplus land/property.

It's Unethical:

I don't like property investment because of the 'big plus', and I will say outright that property investment is unethical. The only exception I would make is in owning your own home/workplace, and that is to say that it is the lesser of two evils. You may as well monopolise the resource you are using rather than let somebody else do it for you.
Straight up and down though, let me be clear: Investment properties are unethical because you can contribute no actual value, yet tax another person for their productive efforts.
That's right rent is unethical. John Stuart Mill alludes to the argument 'private property is theft' and like proving the existence of god, it is much much harder to argue that it isn't than to argue that it is.
Start simply with the question 'what value does a landlord actually provide?' and it all falls apart from there. A landlord can provide value in some circumstances but these circumstances don't crop up with anywhere near the frequency of landlords themselves. I'm not going to go into it here, partly because it's an interesting meditation to have for yourself.

Property and the Turkey's That Buy it:

I'm pretty much lifting this straight from 'the Black Swan' but I feel more often than any other example of investor folly, the problem of Inductive Knowledge crops up in property. (though it is not unique to property).

The naive investor wants unlimited upside and no downside. They are cripplingly risk averse. They are most often blind to the positives of a downward moving price. For example if house prices move downwards they are horrified, they do not see this as housing becoming more 'affordable'.

I say they are turkey's because of Bertrand Russell's illustration of the Problem of Inductive Knowledge, covered thoroughly and entertainingly in the Chapter of 'The Black Swan' called '1001 days or how not to be a sucker'.

Suppose you are a turkey, and every day a man comes and feeds you grain. Your observation is that each time the man feeds you, you have a piece of data, or evidence that the man is looking out for your 'best interests'. For 1000 days the process repeats itself, and all your observations confirm the theory that the farmer is on your side. The 1001st day though is Thanks Giving and the farmer comes and rings your neck.
Crucially, the empirical observations aren't just wrong, but have an adverse effect on the turkey, which is to say the Turkey feels safer as it's danger actually increases. It feels safest, thanks to all the evidence it has collected at the point of its maximum danger.

So too with property 'investors' that at least in Australia will be called 'speculators' once their tremendous losses are realised. And while the farmer may know precicely when Thanks-Giving is, Turkey's aren't privy to the calander, just as property speculators aren't aware of their day of reconning. It will be incredibly hard to predict, especially because they will be feeling more and more secure in their investment right up to the day the market corrects.

It all has to do with the crippling risk aversion. Anything that goes down is a 'loser' and anything that goes up is a 'winner'. The crucial risk a naive investor cannot take is that something would change its most recent behaviour.

Thus they will only buy into something once it has already demonstrated its ability to gain. This risk aversion drives property speculators into markets when they have hit 'historical highs', because the evidence that they will continue to grow is at its maximum. In the Australian property market there is now 16 years of data to suggest that property 'goes up'.

This is the turkey empiricism - 'property has gone up, therefore it will go up'. And of course not just limited to property, but any investment will rise in price right up to the moment it falls. It's just that the property market unlike a particular given company tend to crash as a market, in lockstep. A whole army of speculators marching off a cliff.

Bubble Trouble:

One of the more perplexing things about property is that, the unethical monopoly nature of it is fundamentally sound. If you are willing to shelve your morals, then you can monopolise a scarce resource and pocket unearned money taken as 'tribute' from the people who actually do earn it. A localised government of 1.
Sounds harsh but its true, and if its legal you as a citizen are entitled to do it. But you can still overpay for something like that.
Suppose you could purchase the title of 'king of the world'. It entitled you to do whatever you wanted to anyone. If the price was set at $1 trillion dollars I would say ethics aside, take it. But if the price was set at 'all the oxygen in the world' there would be no point, the cost outweighs the benefit.
Similarly people buy into the property market, as sound as the monopoly is at a price where they recieve no benefit from it.

Michael Hudson's answer to the question 'How much is a house (property) worth?' is 'As much as a bank is willing to lend for it.' Sad but true, something that makes Peter Schiff say 'People don't own houses they rent them from the banks.'

Banks control money supply, and in a reciprocal fashion - banks can lend as much money as people are willing to borrow. A bank really facilitates bubbles, because individuals funds are generally limited, especially when compared to their desires.

This in turn is largely because of private property which ensures pretty much all resources are already monopolised by somebody else the moment you were born, you have to buy said resources of them and they won't sell unless its at a premium.

The turkeys that are satisfied though that 'house prices have gone up therefore they will go up!' aka speculators, are willing to borrow more money. The banks will lend them the money and are somewhat turkeys themselves, feeling safe to lend to a lowered standard of speculator because history confirms that they can always repossess the house and sell it at a profit to recover the debt. The one caveat is that Banks actually make money from housing (at current prices) where most property speculators do not.

The turkey problem, creates bubbles because the price will rise (as an investment) to the point where you make $1.01 in rent for every $1 invested on an ongoing basis. But speculation simply pushes it beyond this threshold, because the price has risen thus far to that point. Get enough speculators in the market and you inflate the price beyond it's investment capacity. This inflation of the price creates an asset bubble.

The turkey's look like geniuses right up until the bubble bursts where they are condemmned as speculators, but this doesn't cure their risk profile, the turkeys simply shift their eyes to another promising empirical experiment. Hence you see a property cycle that goes Bust-Boom-Bust-Boom-Bust-Boom. In all those Bust times you get things like Franchise Bubbles, Tech Bubbles, Oil Bubbles etc.

Price of a Monopoly:

Here is the minimum 'thorough analysis' an investor should do. The income property can generate is rent. FORGET CAPITAL GAINS. Just trust me for now. Rent is the only ongoing cash flow property has.
Rent is much easier to estimate than a companies profits because it tends to be fairly stable, its regulated and their are easily obtainable 'going rates' in every neighbourhood. It also often has little to do with the condition of the property, but has a far bigger footing in its location.

Then calculate a price/earnings ratio. Take the reserve price, divide it by the rent. If you were buing shares, you would be looking at a P/E multiplier of about 20. You can also go and use a mortage calculator - if you can obtain 7% from a government bond, then you would want the rental income to be 7% higher than your mortgage repayments at least.

It is safe to say that a slim minority of property owners really bothered looking at the rent when purchasing their home. They just looked at the turkey data.

Incidently the longer the history of price rises, the less likely the rental income will beat your ownership costs by 7%.

There are other factors, but just remember that there are no good or bad properties, just good and bad prices, and good and bad prices are all functions of the income it actually generates.

The Bank Is Laughing At You:

I'll now explain the folly of investing for capital gains. Can you predict the behaviour of turkeys? Or rather, can you predict the weight at which a turkey is fat enough for dinner? Especially just by looking at it. Sure there will be extreme 'easy calls' either way. A turkey that ways 50g is obviously just a chick, just like a house that costs $1 on ebay is not likely to go much lower. A turkey that weighs 50kg should already be dead.

The property market is just the same. If house prices where $1 trillion this year it would be easy to say 'this isn't sustainable' it would probably mean the collapse of the currency yet alone the housing market. But right now it's hard to say whether a house priced at $650,000 in Footscray is getting close to the kill or whether $700,000 is too high.

That call is much harder to make. Especially because if your P/E multiplier is at 60 already, its irrational. There's no rational reason to buy, so why would somebody buy at 61, 62, 70, 80, 800? This was true of the tech stocks as well. Many people were buying companies that made no money at price multipliers of 600 and greater because the price had increased so far.

Once an investment leaves the boundaries of reason, it is speculative, and prediction is impossible from then on. The only thing that is almost certain (but never quite so) is that gravity will take hold at some point.

But why oh why, do banks facilitate this? Also if property is such a great sound investment, why don't the banks just buy property for themselves and then rent it to us?

They do, but they do it by loaning money so people can buy them themselves. It has numerous advantages for a bank.

If a bank bought a property that got $300 of rent a week, they would make $300 of rent a week back on their initial investment. If they convinced some turkey to borrow money to buy that same property with $500 mortgage repayments per week though, they are making an extra 60% of income on that investment. The tennant 'helps' pay off the mortgage with their rent, which comes out of their pocket from their productive earnings, then the turkey flips $200 extra dollars out of his pocket to the bank.

What is in it for the turkey? The hope that some other turkey will buy into (and him out of) this ridiculous arrangement at an even higher price. That is they will contribute $201 or more to the banks rental income rather than $200.

The bank earns all AND MORE of the productive income from 'investment property' that is their carrot to facilitate speculative behaviour. The 'paper wealth' goes to the turkey because it just facilitates more income for the bank.

Property is an Investment when:

Again casting ethics aside, if you the naive investor want to buy property as an investment (and I won't help you do it) when it meets the following criteria:

1) Rental income is cash flow positive.
2) The return on rent is greater than the next best investment opportunity. (something surprisingly easy to fail with property).
3) The Price/Rent (i'm making it easy for you) is in a reasonable neighbourhood of 20-30.

With ALL those criteria filled you may also want to consider Fixing your interest rate. This leans towards the 'margin of safety' so central to Benjamin Graham. If you can fix your interest rate and still satisfy the above 3 criteria, then you are dealing with a known quantity and are making a return on it.

Thus it fits the universal criteria of investment - it increases your purchasing power over time, it also would virtually guaruntee safety of principal as if you buy it at a reasonable price there is a fair chance you can offload it to some turkey at an unreasonable price.

Charity Muggers A Perplexing Decision

If you work, study or walk the streets of the Melbourne CBD you know who I'm talking about. My friend says they even populate the streets of Jakarta, which means the must almost outnumber peruvian pan-pipe bands.

I speak of the Charity Fund Raisers, typically a backpacker trying the job for a day that approaches you in a friendly bubbly manner sometimes even crossing the street to intercept you and makes an innocuous comment about some 'interesting' feature of you 'I like your hair'.

Chances are you've had all the thoughts I've had but I thought I'd put them down here for posterity. Can't you just envision the paid training day 'Look for some characteristic you can comment on, like their hair, then introduce yourself and ask for their name. The funner and bubblier you are the more fun they will have speaking to you!' and so on.

Thought #1: I give more money to homeless people.

Chances are you were stopped 3-5 years ago by an Amnesty person and you actually listened to them because you like Amnesty and are all for freeing and supporting political prisoners. Then they asked you - somebody who fare-dodges even with student concession (which you got for movies) to tithe $30 a month from your non-existent wages.
But it didn't stop you from forking $10 in change a month over to charismatic (or not) homeless people.
You still give the change (occasionally) to homeless people when you are in a generous mood but don't stop ever to talk to a charity worker about donating $30 a month.
Why the fuck don't they get a bi-polar alcoholic to train them: 'Just ask for 80c a dollar no more, you know... spare change. No need to be friendly, just act pitiful and non-threatening. If the snub you move onto the next person you will still make $30 an hour on a good day...'

Thought #2: what happened to the buckets?

It used to be that occasionally some mutely smiling young woman would have a shirt with a red ribbon pinned to it and a bucket labelled 'Aids/HIV find a cure' and you just threw whatever change you could spare into said bucket and move on with your day.
On a busy street corner these must have made like $100 a day. Who gives a fuck about ongoing support and spamming and tithed wages when you just need to send somebody out to hold a labelled bucket. No emotional scars, no annoyance and a big time saving.
I can only see it maybe being an OH&S thing because the bucket may get TOO HEAVY FROM ALL THE DONATIONS. As opposed to the current vogue system which ensures nobody donates any money at all.

Thought #3: The people who can afford the scheme don't have the time.

They are business people, they get a 30 minute lunch break a day, you want half of that.

Thought #4: Everybody loses.

The conversation is never fun, it is awkward and annoying. I don't want to hurt some poor backpackers feelings, but they push me into a corner where I have to extract myself. We both walk away feeling ill-treated.
Furthermore, I used to like Amnesty, Lost Dogs Home, Cancer Council, Red Cross. I bore good will towards them, its why I liked to throw coins in their bucket. Now they seem to have set out to annoy me every hour of every day of my life. I hate these charities now.
Who wins? They can't possibly make a lot of money this way, plus even if somebody DOES signup they aren't exempt from being harassed by the new faces every day. There is no winning.

Thought #5: I Do Concede...

For all the good will and respect these causes have, many people wouldn't actually do jack unless urged to. I wouldn't spontaneously decide to tithe wages to Greenpeace or Amnesty one day unless somebody hassled me, asked me etc. There just seems to be about 100 better ways to do it than this. The bucket for one. The school programs for another (my high school had an Amnesty International club that got new faces involved every year).

I mean, fuck. It's annoying.

Chances Are This is What Your Financial Advisor Believes

Another day another introduction to the world of Finance. Overall it was pretty good, but one thing astounds me in my return to University life - the amount of notetaking.

Sure there's the studies that say if you take notes you retain more, but taking notes isn't listening, and the time to do it is not in a lecture. It's when you review at home. Because if you aren't listening and note taking you are going to lower your defences to the information presented to you and that is going to effect your learning.

In particular it effects your ability to think actively about the assumptions being made that your lesson is based upon. The fundamentals or foundations and they don't come much bigger or fundamental than this slide I saw today:



To my lecturers credit he was saying things like 'Capital, LAND and Labour' as factors of production instead of the official 'Capital and Labour' that lumps natural resources eronneously into 'Capital' like they are privately owned assets.

It's just that this is a finance subject not an economics subject and the above graph builds 'our' decision making framework under some choice assumptions. If you haven't blown up the slides the logic reads:

1. Individuals are utility maximisers
2. Utility is a function of consumption
3. Consumption is a function of wealth
4. Utility maximising individuals wish to maximise their wealth

Unfortunately the key word here is 'Utility' and it doesn't get defined in the slide, but the lecturer described it as 'happiness' or 'satisfaction'.

I numbered these assumptions, so I could clarify some. 1 - I don't have such a problem at this, except to say that people aren't typically good at discriminating between wants and needs, nor weighing up their short term gratification against their long term gratification. It has some applications like - people want Hamburgers, but it doesn't make them good for them, they may also want a long life enjoying a high quality of life, guess which want wins out?

2 - This is the big one that has pretty much fucked up everything. I'm not kidding. Furthermore and more pressingly it has now been repeatedly, clinically proven to be false. A guy did a great rundown of the 'truth and lie' of consumption in a film I thought was 'the corporation' but I can't find it in the Youtube release.
Basically the truth about consumption is that if you are cold, naked and starving in the rain you will be miserable. If somebody then gives you (or sells you) food, warm shelter and dry clothing, you will go quickly from very miserable to very happy.
The lie of consumption is that many have assumed that this would logically mean that if you give somebody twice as much food, shelter and clothing they will become twice as happy. But the fact is that satisfaction or wellbeing driven by consumption has one of the steepest 'learning curves' known to man.

Ricardo Semler calls this concept the 'Da Vinci Constraint' named after Da Vinci's rules of proportion if nothing about his lifestyle. But he calculated (somehow) that in 2007 the most a single individual could actually enjoy was about $12 million. Anything after that is simply beyond an individuals physical and emotional capacity to truly feel the effects of wealth. And it makes sense, think in simpler terms of being somebody really into privacy and quiet solitude.

You buy so much farmland that your property stretches from horizon to horizon on the flat plane of outback Australia or somewhere. Guess how much land you need to meet that criteria? 3 squared miles x 3pi. Apparantly the horizon in miles from a 6foot persons vantage point at sea level (because it's pretty much flat) is 3 miles. That's all. Once you buy more than 3 miles in everydirection from the center point of your house, you wont be able to percieve (at least with your eyes) the additional isolation.
Maybe a bullshit example, but at least it demonstrates in a one dimensional way, our constraint to enjoy something.

3 - makes a lot of sense, provided that your wealth reflects true-cost.
4 - then also makes sense, hence the danger.

The fuck up is in 2, more so than 1. Once 2 is screwed the rest can all make sense and seem rational - but isn't. The foundations or fundamentals are wrong.

Here's an insight into how I evaluate things with very little research (not to say it is right or wrong, its just how I evaluate stuff). I push it to its extreme to see if the rule contradicts itself. By rule 2, we are in effect saying that happiness has a positive relationship with consumption. As consumption increases so does happiness/satisfaction/wellbeing. So give somebody all the wealth (the extreme, using rule 3) this person can then purchase and consume all the worlds oxygen. They consume all the worlds oxygen they kill themselves and everyone else.
The rule contradicts itself, people want to maximise their consumption, but by doing so actually destroy their wellbeing. Either 2, or 3 is wrong.

Because Consumption is a function of wealth, I question the motive, 2. Happiness is not a function of consumption. Or at least it has limits, very definite limits.

Why does it persist? I have never, nor will ever subscribe to 'the man' hypothesis, or piece of crap 'zeitgeist's 'Man behind the curtain' hypothesis. I don't believe there is an evil agent in control. I think it persists because it's simple and helps (some) people avoid headaches. Can you imagine how complicated it would be to run a system that says 'maximise consumption till point x, then from there on practice sustainably' or even run an individual company by the rule 'maximise shareholder wealth at $12M per individual, then buy them out with cash reserves and offer shares to somebody else - repeat.' It would be an administrative nightmare.

But still, I don't actually object to assumption 1. It isn't bad, but the rule is in assumption 2. A firm should try to increase it's value, particularly to its owners. But 'value' I would define in the longest reaching terms possible, like 'lifetime value' which means you don't sell tomorrows sustainable profits for todays opportunistic profits.

I'll have to be careful, because thinking like this could inadvertantly cause me to fail.

By the way, if you think 'The Corporation' is obviously biased (I would recommend it because it actually in a manner places the blame on you - the passive shareholders and/or stakeholders, rather than evil CEO's) then take it from a man who (briefly) lived the capitalist dream:

Day 1 of Macroeconomics

Don't worry this won't turn into a daily series of posts, I just wanted to comment on my initial impression of 'Macroeconomics 2' my first subject of my second degree.

Mark Twain said 'Don't let School get in the way of your Education' and never was a truer word spoken. The knowledge being taught is not useless, or even unscientific... just incomplete.

So we started with a recap on how to calculate Equilibrium Income or in plain english A sutainable level of Income, But 'Income' is equated to GDP (Gross Domestic Product) calculated in the 2 sector model as 'Consumption plus Investment' (or Consumption plus Savings).

What does that mean? It means are sustainable income is based on the assumption that everything produced must be consumed preventing either over consumption or under consumption. So what we don't save is consumed. Or I guess amongst everything produced some is used up immediately (consumed) the rest is saved.

One may instantly have it pointed out that this is pretty much describing what would happen to anything produced it would A) be consumed or B) be not consumed. What use is it?

And that question I feel is an important one, because it puts this wretched science (not my words) in context - straight up, I won't go into the 3 and 4 sector models or the Keynesian 45 degree equilibrium line doodad thingy. Suffice to say Government Taxes and Government expenditure get factored in.

To my so far insufficient understanding - if a high Real GDP (or Equilibrium income) is considered good, taxes already look bad - a bias against big government or socialism. That in turn is underpinned by an assumption that our well-being is underpinned by our ability to consume. Something I am satisfied has been proven to be false.

That's why who'se this for? Who is this useful to? Questions are important and need to be asked. I don't believe states are necessary, and underpinning every human organisation is a 'game' or power struggle. I won't express it as an equation because after deciphering 5 symbols at a time to read Macro equations, my brain is shot for the day. But basically it is finding a balance where you have maximum incentive to seek power balanced by minimum incentive to throw you out of power.

Various states have various games. For Mugabe and Kim Jong Ill it's the juggling act between keeping the people you use to do the oppressing happy enough to oppress the people who are angry enough to act against you (including foreign states). You can screw it up by pissing off your security forces (who are cheap to upkeep compared to a truly participative form of government, hence many democracies actively support their regimes and undermine any attempts at social reforms) or pissing off your people to the point where their anger stops them from caring about the next worst repurcussion.

Democracy is pretty much the same, except with a higher standard of wellbeing for the general population and lower relative wellbeing for the security forces (who generally are not employed against the general population).

The people in power are just making the (incorrect) assumption that GDP = Wellbeing, and as GDP increases so too does the satisfaction of the people with them.

Macro is admittedly, broad, sweeping and large in impact though comprised of millions of billions of details that create the effects. It looks at aggregates and averages, and as such if Mugabe and Kim Jong Ill just got stupendously rich enough their people would look pretty well off.

So I'm angry to feel this mentally exhausted learning about a measure of wellbeing as useless as GDP. But then it's good to know the language of fools so you can understand when fools are planning something foolish.

My experience of marketing was that in the 'real world' people use about 7% of the theory they learn in their degree. Usually the 'fundamentals' eg. 'Benefits sell not features' and 'Cognitive vs. emotional purchase decisions' and the 4P's. I imagine much of the reserve bank just sits around calculating money supply and real GDP rather than thinking deeply about the underpinning assumptions of this economic system. This thought scares me.

I'm not too concerned for myself, because I'm doing this Economics and Finance degree for the 'Finance' more than the 'Economics', but I do hope I can challenge each assumption I spot in my tutorials. The professors should love/hate me.

Grunge from Punk?

If you look up Grunge, or even Alternate-Rock, or the history of pioneering alternative bands like Jane's Addiction, Faith No More, etc. you will find that there origins are linked in with the underground punk-rock scene. Which is surprising because even the 'no effort' ethos of Grunge music has an underlying musicality that defies the central punk dogma (as it appears to me, a non-fan) which is just play hard, play furiously.

When the Sex Pistols came on the scene, there message I can see being important, that in the 60's in order to make a huge peace demonstration at Woodstock you had to be a prodigy on guitars or be blessed with amazing vocals to get up on that stage. Johnny Rotten and crew kind of said 'hey, everyone should have a voice, everyone should have this platform regardless of playing ability'. And thus you had a band that stormed up the charts without knowing any chords, a singer that couldn't hold a note and just generally all around crap band.

But once said, it had been said, the principle was sound but it gave birth to the punk genre, which having heard once I don't see much point to hearing again. Every highschool in the western world has a punk band, that by now you would think has churned out every possible high tempo power chord song in the world and can only be sustained as unique because there are just so many different combinations of english words possible.

There are even the good Punk bands like the Ramones, NOFX and ahhh... you're stretching my knowledge now.

The best punk band in my formative years 7 & 8 of high school was Greenday, with Dookie, but they were like a prize fossil to an evolutionary bioligist, because Greenday achieved their degree of mainstream success thanks mostly to the melodic walking bass lines. Grunge was present when Greenday came out, but when I first heard of them I thought they pretty much had to be the future with their blue and green hair, and well that was pretty much it. They looked like they had hair made by a machine not like the grunge stars that had hair made from years of inactivity.

I had no idea at that age of the 30 year history of punk rock. But I still find it perplexing that Grunge could have emerged from the punk rock scene. In fact there's a new photo book called 'Grunge' that when I picked it up thought 'this will be good' and it is 90% punk rock portraits with the last 3 or so pages featuring 'Pearl Jam' 'Nirvana' and 'Sound Garden' in quick succession.

I just think, maybe it did, maybe all the alt-rock band came from the underground scene of punk rock. But what did punk-rock actually contribute. None of these bands sound vaguely punk rock except in what they don't share with pop rock. Both punk-rock and the (used to be) greater alternate rock scene don't have vocalists that are trained in Gospel Choirs, They both use guitars rather than keyboards, they both have drummers setting the pace. That's about it, so I can concieve of baby Mike Patton's and baby Perry Farrell's and Baby Les Claypools but not baby Lars Ulrich's going out on a friday night in the 70's/ early 80's with their fake ID's and seeing punk rock bands and thinking 'cool, this is not pop music' but at some point they must have gone 'I like the lack of fabrication in punk rock, the lack of packaging and polish, but I want a band that can carry a tune, has some structure to the song that is less predictable than this.'

I can see how the alt-rock scene was derived spiritually from punk, but not literally from punk. Punk always struck me as a devolution from classic rock, you simply dropped the solos, the vocals and just replaced it with rythmic shouting and what not. Alt-rock and grunge seemed to be a return to the R&B genre of the 60's back when it was played by white boys like Cream or a black guy and a bunch of white boys like the Jimi Hendrix Experience. All the guitar magazines of the 90's seemed to merge these two periods as well with nary a mention of the Ramones at all.

So I guess I have to watch that documentary featuring Henry Rollins to understand whether I really should be grateful to punk at all. Even if I don't like it, at least it has provided a consistent counterpoint to Pop for generation after generation of teenagers with little imagination.

Insecurity As Freedom

Some time last week what started innocently enough as a request for info on Men's traditional kimono proportions like Toshio Mifune wears in Yojimbo and Sanjuro:


but ended up being a phone conversation at 2am, with my ex. Which sounds emotional, but being Japanese 2am was when she knocks off work and thus when she decided to call obviously not willing to wait 6 months for an off day as they call them.

As per my 'Taking the Kid Gloves off Post' I didn't ask about her relationship or lack thereof, but she asked about mine. I assume because every ex feels safer if their ex is dating somebody new.
And she called me out, I was doing my whole 'I'm not really interested...I'm not really meeting anybody...not socialising...' spiel and she said in her gifted blunt way 'sounds like excuses' which is true.

I've simply failed to get a girl. I have a bunch of excuses but should stop using them. The bare bones truth is, I don't have a girl because I don't care enough to get one. I hadn't really talked or even communicated to my ex since she forgot my birthday - and why not who am I but some guy she dated for 6 months going on 3 years ago? That gesture too contained only the information that she didn't care enough to remember and really it's quite a reasonable thing to forget. (If you don't have facebook to remind you).

But more than not caring enough to get a girl, I have to admit, I'm afraid to. There was a time when my ex could have asked me to stop what I was doing, all she had to do was ask and I'd have a 9-5 job that wasn't challenging but probably be financially secure and steadily progressing towards 'quality of life'. And remember the race for quality has no finish line.

So yeah... ah... where was I? Oh yeah, I'm frightened, you know the human condition. But unfortunately for me I'm in the very unfortunate position of actually being afraid of women, not afraid to talk with them, or even be afraid to be seen naked by them, no I am simply afraid of having one.

Why? Well let me not answer that question... instead a vaguely relevant diversion. When I was 12 I thought I'd be famous by 18. I used to get anxious about this, because I wanted to meet my first and last girlfriend before I became famous so I knew she would love me for me and not my fame and fortune or whatever. Ha ha, what a cocktwerp, how naive youth is. But now that I'm old bitter and synical, I just don't think it possible.

Professions that involve fame are 'scalable' I highly recommend if you only read one book a year (or even two years) read 'The Black Swan' By Nicholas Nassim Taleb. He talks about these. He talks about Extremistan and Mediocrestan, and then 'scalable' professions and I forget what the equivalent was so we'll just call them 'non-scalable', scalable are winner-take-all professions. Like being a pro-athlete, rock-star, opera-singer, leadership consultant etc. That is, that the number 1 will earn 10 times more than the next most successful in that profession who in turn earns 10 times more than the next most successful, and the vast majority of people 'in' the profession aren't in the profession. They are waiters, work at starbucks or in my case, work in a call center.

Most 'actors' and 'writers' are seen and read by nobody, earn minimum (or less) wage and offer all the security of the Federal Reserve (hah!).

Now I've also said many times, that a luxury women have is that men in most cases don't think about their finances. For example today I was doing a mental exercise that was highly unusual. I was trying to imagine a married lifestyle where I was wealthy enough to have a big house and holiday in Europe every year. Now I admit that if I was earning $100k a year, and that took care of the big house, and my wife earned a relatively modest $25,000 a year, it still seemed like I had to put mental effort into thinking that her $22,000 after tax or whatever would pay for the holiday in Europe. It seems much more likely to me that if I want that lifestyle I would simply aim to earn $135,000 a year for the additional $22,000 after tax or whatever for the holiday.

I don't mean I can't imagine using somebody else's money, I just don't feel confident basing some part of my desired lifestyle that depends on somebody else's ability to earn it. I can't really imagine anybody thinks this way but evidently they do. Also evidently a lot of people also think liek me, earn your own money to control your own lifestyle.

The split seems to be divided by gender (but is not absolute), that is why I say girls have a luxurious position in that if they have a 'dreamer' or 'scalable' career ambition, becoming a dancer, singer, popstar or tennis player I can imagine that there would be plenty of men perfectly okay to have a relationship with them even if they financially contribute nothing. They wouldn't think of it as added stress or pressure on them, but there natural role to provide for a 'family' that includes their spouse. This would be called being simply responsible on their part.

It is a hangover from the atomic family deal, I know, and totally sexist in both directions. It is belittling to women to suggest they earn 'play money' just as it is belitteling to men to suggest they have a fundamental responsibility to provide for consumption.

But it's that view I'm afraid of. I know that most relationships start out just as fun, with ample trepedation that you don't necessarily want that partner for life. And some are over in two weeks, but others grow attached.

Just so, I can imagine meeting a girl that is okay with the fact that I am trying to make my way in a scalable profession...now. But they're 'okayness' is founded on the assumption that we'll only be together for 3 months anyway. But once those 3 months tick over, suddenly I'm the man in the picture, but I'm not the man that buys that house, that lifestyle or whatever.

Men have the luxury of being able to think that the woman in their picture is an independant variable to everything else in it. Women have the luxury of foisting responsibity in part onto that man variable.

But Germaine Greer said in the 60's that until people recognise 'insecurity as freedom' we can't be free. I'm sure there's millions of years of genes though urging people to feather their nest to care for the next generation, and the behavioural drive of those genes is going to be hard to dissuade.

But I'm afraid, I'm afraid of being asked to stop, to give up. I'm afraid of that. I should trust people not to, to give them a chance. Because at worst I'd just have to say 'get out' but I'm the kind of person that insists on their being a point to everything. Thus I'd rather have no relationships than a string of failed relationships. Sure I could have fun, but they take time and energy, time and energy away from my dreams I can barely afford now.

The great irony I see though, is that those who 'make it' are in high demand by a lot of women. If you're a big-shot comedian, movie star, or rock star or whatever then groupies flock to you, you can pick off some of the highest earning women in the world too, your Miranda Kerr's and Beyonce Knowles.

But where 12 year old me was being so naive was that many of these same women regardless of how much they are earning themselves would not stick around to be with you in the poor and uncertain begginnings of making it. When your mattress is made of cardboard and your diet consists of pocket change.

On top of that, many partners would discourage you in your fledgling years from even trying, with the pursuasive voice of a sexual partner you have become accustomed to. Not all, but many, too many in my experience. I've had ultimatums for cutting my hair on either side of the fence. (dumped if I do, dumped if I don't). The more serious of the ultimatums should have been the end of the relationship then and there.

It's one gender divide that persists and I'm truly mysogenistic over it. I don't blame anything in the X chromosome as such though, just social conditioning. I believe if you are going to teach women to be free, you have to teach them to think 'my money' not 'our money' as horrible as that sounds. I've heard it expressed by Billy Connelly as 'Men buy a house they want to live in, women buy a house they want to renovate. Men marry a woman they want to keep, women marry some guy they plan to change you into in the future.' His advice, dishearteningly was to 'not bother fighting it' and if there's no point to fighting it, I'm just going to run from the fight to begin with.

Depressing isn't it.

Soundwave Epiphany 2 of 2

My second epiphany was that I'm not alone, there's a lot of people like me I never see that don't come out of the woodwork until a band like Faith No More or whatever brings us out in numbers.

So what there's a diaspora of band fans. But what I mean is that there are abunch of guys and girls like me that don't at least look like they've sold out, gone corporate or whatever. They seem arrested in their development as evidenced by the number of basketball jerseys, black band t-shirts and camo shorts. It certainly wasn't everyone, for example we didn't look like the teenagers at the festival, we looked like the teenagers we once were, just with receeding hairlines, faded tattoos, non-athletic builds.

And it made me realise, that the adolescent rebellion is a structured part of our lifes contract. The teenager was invented with the transistor radio that for the first time in history allowed them to listen to different music than their parents and that was a start.

Teenagers have since rebelled against their parents as part of forging their own identity.

Then we crush their dreams with VCE/HSC or throw the stone into the barrel (as I believe it is called in Queensland). The adolescent rebellion is lip service only, we get to have haircuts and clothing for a couple of years, but not actually drop out of the shitty system.

What shitty system? The protracted university entrance process known as our primary and secondary education system, that then puts us in university courses geared towards the vocations a corporate community desires yet will not pay for.

Then laden with a debt most people aren't conscious they are accumulating - they start out in a junior position in a 'safe' job performing some rote unimaginative task day in day out to get a mortgage which is just renting your accomodation from a bank (since they typically absorb all or more than all of the rent, the only productive income a house can generate, the rest is paper income vulnerable to sudden dramatic wright downs). Then you have kids and put them into a private school in the hope they can have an even more safe, secure, rote unimaginative job than you did permitting them 3-4 years of rebellion mostly geared towards their clothing and hair style.

The rebellion just needs to be taken to the next level. There's a huge market for all these isolated people that want to rock. People like me, and cant stand the thought that the most imaginitive vision of the future 'our country' has is: stable economic growth driven by foreign demand for raw materials in our resource based economy.

Nobody wants to be a cog in that great machine, I'm not even sure if its worth anybody being a cog in that machine.

This epiphany was much shorter but possibly more significant than my other one.

Soundwave Epiphany 1 of 2

It's the riff. The riff is the epiphany.

I was at Soundwave festival in Melbourne Yesterday, mainly to see Faith No More again, and I'll just say that you can't see a band live for the first time twice. It was still the highlight although the crowd wasn't as good as at their sideshow, but they are a phenomenal fucking band.

So anyway, there was stage 1 and stage 2, and from when we arrived it seemed as if stage 1 was for the old timers and 2 was for the kids. I mean it went from some band called 'Paramor' to 'Placebo' whom while not my cup of tea I at least recognised and the dude has a good voice and I could tell their tracks apart. Then to AFI who can play but for some reason just seem totally emasculated, plus their fanbase look like children to me. Then Jane's Addiction, who were awesomely rad, as one of my heavy rotation bands through my adolescent years and just for being a fucking good band. The drummer can play, Perry can sing, you can actually hear the bass lines which drive the songs and Dave Navarro is the third truly A grade guitarist I've seen live.

Then JimmyEatWorld that I described to my brother as 'Folk-Punk' except we both had earplugs in so he kept arguing that they weren't 'Post-Punk' and that Talking Heads were Post-punk.

This triggerred the epiphany.

I admit, that the reason all the kids punk bands sets blended into one droning punk concert for me was that I haven't invested the time to actually get familiar with the tracks. I'm listening to Street Sweeper Social Club on my ipohd at the moment and the first few times through I couldn't distinguish between each track. But like beer, punk is something that once given my first taste I have never had an urge to aquire a taste for it. I can appreciate people who like Punk, are fucking into it and all that - but they strike me as just like the teenagers that got way into beer because they wanted to get drunk - nobs.

But the genre's were the tip off here's two lists:

List #1 Inexhaustive List of Bands I Love:
Faith No More
Primus
Rage Against The Machine
Tool
Cream
De La Soul
A Tribe Called Quest
Jane's Addiction
Stone Temple Pilots
Pearl Jam
Soundgarden
Nirvana

List #2 Inexhaustive List of Genres
Alternative Metal
Funk Rock
Rock-Rap
Anarcho punk
Death metal
Folk metal
Glam metal
Groove metal
Industrial metal
Nu metal
Progressive metal
Sludge metal
Speed metal
Stoner metal
Thrash metal
Crust Punk
Garage punk
Glam punk
Grunge
Hardcore punk
Horror punk
Skate punk
Street punk

And these would not be sufficient to describe all the genres ascribed to the list of bands I like.

I just called the scene I was into 'Alternative' and I liked the big 3 Grunge band. But even then, I can't hear sufficient differences between say a skate punk band like Blink 182 vs. The Clash being a classic Punk-Rock band. I don't understand the need for genus/sub-genre shite. It must mean something to somebody, but not to me. Again I think punk fans and metal fans are the kind to have monochromatic taste buds in music such that they can actually distinguish between two different breeds of strawberry. (That was a pretty tortured analogy).

But my collection of 10 or so bands there are all over the place. For example, there's no system way to say 'Oh you like a Rap-Metal act like RATM? Then you should definitely check out Primus!' until yesterday I didn't really understand why that statement made sense, when on the surface there's no reason a fan of a rap-metal act would be a fan of an 'experimental rock' or as is the case with all bands too hard to describe in style 'funk metal'. But it's the riff.

It's the common thread between all music I like. They are all based around a combination of melody and tempo that forms the basic unit of a song. Punk tends to be chord based and the tempo to be simply 'as fast as possible' hence it loses me. But even a relatively tight genre definition like 'Grunge' is inadequate given the vast gulf between a seminal band like Nirvana, a borderline metal act like Soundgarden and what in the 90's I considered 'Grunge for Girls' in Pearl Jam.

In fact while Pearl Jam may be 1/3rd of seattle's big 3, I would put it in the other 'big 3' being the '90's girl's album collection - Pearl Jam, Jeff Buckley and Ben Harper. Those three bands combined so often in my female friends playlists that you'd think they would logically belong to the same genre. But no, they have nothing in common, Buckley being a cover band, Ben Harper being Folk Rock and Pearl Jam being Grunge.

The genres are largely meaningless except to hard core genre fans and they in turn are largely meaningless to greater society aka the mass market. I just called it 'alternative' because in Ballarat there was Power FM which played the spice girls and Video Hits that played clip after clip of groups dancing in futuristic hallways, and then there was triple j, recovery and rage that played everything else. Not the syrup for the mass market, but still pretty massive and this was the 'alternative' in the 90s.

But yeah, seeing Dave Navarro play guitar was sweet, fucking sweet because it's always great to see somebody who really knows their vocation, a master of their instrument. Now, I might lose some of you here because Dave Chappelle's sketch is funny because it has a basis in truth - many people are glad to see the death of 80's overplaying.

I think beyond white people loving guitars and black people loving drums and latino's loving electric keyboards, I would add that in my teenage experience females seem far more partial to acoustic music while males seem to prefer (or have greater preference for) amplified music. Acoustic and Punk tend to be chord based, rather than note based in generating melodies and once again the simplistic riffs come across as boring to me.

So maybe due to the various emasculating market forces that are bringing men cosmetics, tight jeans, crash dieting and everything else to make men as profitable and feeling as ugly as a woman, it was natural that the chord based accoustic music that started with 'Time of Your Life' and has brought us acts like 'Mountain Goats' and other folksy type stuff.

Or it could just be that the balance has shifted from melody to rythm thanks to hip-hop becoming the mainstream over the latter half of the 90's listened to by more suburban white boys than African Americans by a factor of 10-1 (or something).

Jane's addiction represent a now dying era where the guitar was played like this:



Such that to me it appears that these days this is how the guitar is played:



Now hopefully if you checked out both clips you will be hearing this song through my ears and maybe they will be fresh ears. Just as when John K talks about how great packaging used to be vs how much modern day sucks he contrasts it in a way that allows me to see it through his eyes.

But yeah, I also know (myself included) that 80's overplaying was a bit over the top, all the 'wiggidawiggidawiggidawiggidawiggidawiggidawiggidawiggida-Wow!' solo's and stadium rock and the charity festivals and shit people just got tired of it, it got too big and large and people couldn't handle the bombardment.

Navarro clearly has hangovers from the 80's style metal solos, but I think the difference between riff based rock and solo/overplaying based rock is finding that sweet spot between melody and rythm in your riff creation. The music scene I identify with emerged out from the flavor of the day which was Hair-metal that I find emasculated and just generally crappy (I can enjoy it now in a more kitsch way) that was Guns 'N Roses, Aerosmith, Mr. Big, Poison, Warwick etc. or as Mike 'Puff' Bordin put it in an interview about Faith No More's origins 'Guys who wore white sneakers and sang ballads'.

Jane's being one of the forgotten founders of the alternative scene (a lot of material I read in the 90's attributed it to Smashing Pumpkins, which is a bit like saying Obama is a contributor to the civil rights movement rather than a recipient [Which is what many people do say]) They have riffs rooted in the bass line that create space for a modest (awesome) amount of solo's and improv on guitar, drums etc.

Again though, I realise many people actually hate solo's. Many people hate rock. The wool was lifted from my eyes going on booze cruises and instead of rotating through the albums of the 1994 woodstock lineup, teenagers were grooving along to Van Morrison's 'Brown Eyed Girl'. A lot of people hate rock. I appreciate that, they like folk, accoustic and groan audibly at the concept of a solo.

The riff is what I look for, the pinacle of riffage is probably 'Killing In The Name Of' by Rage Against the Machine, no other track combines so many great riffs into one explosive song, but they do. I groan at the thought of having to endure an hour of chord based songs. Be it punk or folk.

Now it may be said that I'm trying to make a scientifically objective case for why my taste in music is superior. On the contrary, the Vampire Weekend track up top is a good song, sure I'm appalled that somebody would pick up the guitar and want to play it that way, but at the same time I believe in the core of my grey grey soul, that virtuosity and technical ability should never get in the way of good songwriting.

Scott McCloud in 'Making Comics' made up some jungian type 'artistic camps' for comic books that probably apply to all forms of arts. You have 'animist' that believe in storytelling above all else, don't let the artwork, or technical ability detract from the underlying story. What serves the story makes all the decisions for you. Every song has a story and if solo's don't help, don't do them.

Then I think punk is equivalent to comics 'iconoclast' which I personally hate. But it is where it's all about 'not selling out' and given that I'm 'animist-clasicist' in my approach, I find it hard to empathise with this artistic vision, I find it pretentious and self indulgent. I'm sure the reverse is true. I believe it is an important message though and shouldn't be done away with, but when it is in vogue I find it unbearable. In nutshell, it's the philosophy that 'everyone deserves a voice' this I can agree with, what bugs me is that in practice it tends to produce 'everyone deserves a voice - even if they have nothing worth saying' like punk bands with no message that contributes anything that the Sex Pistols haven't said already AND as despair.com says 'Never before have so many people with so little to say said so much to so few.' and I fully appreciate the irony of posting that on my blog.

But I lean towards the classicist camp which is all about steadily building on the craftsmenship of those that preceded me. Annoyingly it seems we are doomed to live life bemoaning the state of things and talking nostalgically about 'Golden Eras' for which in music I feel was the 60's and 90's where technical proficiency was met with relative creative freedom. Just like John K's Ren & Stimpy was a breakout cartoon because he was a classicly trained animator finally given license to create a cartoon that wasn't a marketing campaign for some toy.

The culmination is the riff, watch people (if you can keep still) at a punk concert vs. one of the 90's riff based bands that headline - Punk appears to consist of raising one hand and headbanging furiously, where in the alternative acts, people's movements are simple, but complex - the head still nods but slower than punk and their torso twists in rythm, dropping one shoulder or the other and their are micro 'static' positions where the movement changes directions.

Same thing happens with hip hop due to the complexity of the beats, but often the emotions are monochromatic (to me, my love of hip-hop is the combo of wordplay and beats) in the mainstream macho-posturing, I'm great, nothing more and often less.

The last thing I'll talk about is the guitars role on a stage. In punk it becomes a drum almost. rythmic strumming of the cords, but when somebody is A grade like Navarro and 'can play' as we say, then we are talking about Malcolm Gladwell's '10,000 hour' rule, they master the guitar, and it becomes a voice. It speaks a tonal language, but can be manipulated almost as expressively as a human voice. The great guitar players are often on even footing with a bands 'front man' typically the vocalist. Often they are the same person, and in the cases where the vocalist is pretty lacklustre, outshine them.

it's because these great guitarists have invested the time to get a voice from their instrument, they can speak through it like Terminator X speaks with his hands. You hear the voice and don't know the words, but you know how it feels and this is lost when reduced to cord strumming, they simply serve as compliments to the vocals not a stand alone voice that articulates emotions without any semantic confusion.

Lost you? I'm surprised if you got this far, what an essay my simple epiphany was. But Bryce went to a Big Day Out and saw Lupe Fiasco that year and told me the next week that he 'never wanted to see another guitar on stage again' and I sympathised with him, because most guys on a stage are doing little more than holding a guitar and acting pretentious. I'm sure there are competent guitarists out there they are underground, teenagers that are obsessed with the early 90's, late 80's and early 70's late 60's acts. I just hope they come to the fore again soon, a decade of strummers is wearing me thin. I'll do what I can to create a platform for them... if I ever get the means.

Named and Shamed/Freedom vs. Equality

This is a response to the explosive op-ed piece 'Named & Shamed' found below, to which I will add my combustability.

http://www.theage.com.au/opinion/named-and-shamed-20100223-p0ty.html

The basic argument is that whilst many women now choose to keep or hyphenate their maiden* name, most kids are automatically given their paternal surname. This should change, that kids may have their maternal surname...?

I won't really argue against it, in fact I guess it's the same sort of consciousness raising as pointing out how referring to human achievements as 'man's achievements' and 'mankind' and all that shit makes women feel, and if it makes them feel small, belittled or disrespected it should stop. So really as far as I can be 'for' this maternal surname recognition equality stuff, I guess I'm for it.

But I just see this as an argument between two parents ego's. Striving for equality (and it is unequal now) rather than freedom which is the viewpoint and rights of a child:

1. The 'Family' line is a Fantasy.

One of the most powerful passages (when you think of history and how many people have died or been forced into marriages to protect a family dynasty) in Dawkins 'The Selfish Gene is as follows:

When we die there are two things we can leave behind us: our genes and memes. We are built as gene machines, created to pass on our genes. But that aspect of us will be forgotten within three generations. Your child, even your grandchild may bear a resemblance to you, perhaps in facial features, or a talent for music, in the colour of her hair. But as each generation passes, the contribution of your genes is halved. It does not take long for it to reach negligable proportions. Our genes may be immortal but the collection of genes that is any one of us is bound to crumble away. Elizabeth II is a direct descendant of William the Conquerer. Yet it is quite probable that she bears not a single one of the old king's genes.

Gene's and memes. That's it, and neither are preserved with much fidelity between generations. I mean even with memes much of the core values my grandparents possess like views on foreigners, religion, homosexuality, freedom, nationalism etc. are already lost on me, which means they are lost within 2 generations. My gene composition resemblance should last a generation longer. Thus I would argue that the family line is a temporary state centered on the parental generation as a medium between their parents and their children, the family is really a unit most concentrated between parents and children in their youth till majority.
The influence of family on identity deteriorates from there.

The point being, that there isn't much point to being named after somebody four generations your senior, the chances of you resembling them beynd being a member of the human race, or thinking like them are slim to nil.

2. A Question of Ownership

Parents don't own their children, their children own them. Parent(s) choose to bring a child into the world, the child doesn't choose them. I also kind of think all children are accidents. My birth was planned, but seriously my parents couldn't have planned on having me. They had trouble planning whether I was a boy or a girl.
Parents are responsible for providing their children with food, shelter, & security through their vulnerable infancy, and that's all. That they effect the identity of their offspring is an inevitable by product of rendering these services. If they are unable then the responsibility is taken up by the state via the social safety net.
Germane Greer in the Female Eunuch talks about the tyranny of mother-hood in the chapter 'Baby' as below, I was glad to see this prejudice or allusion to a child being the mothers property or even achievement was addressed:

'The intense absorption of the baby in one human being... is a necessary factor in the development of the character which is considered normal in our society. The prejudice against the substitution of any other person or number of persons for the omnipotent mother is very strong indeed'

3. What's in a Name?

My name is 'tohm' that's how I think of it. The name on my license, passport and birthcertificate are the names of a stranger, I don't identify with my full name. When I hear it, or even derivations like 'Tom' I think 'how quaint' or 'gee this person hasn't seen me in ages'.
Most people though stick with what I consider a 'placeholder name'. That is some given name decided on by the parents and as per convention a surname same as the father. Then you can trace that surname's derivations through the paternal line (which is largely meaningless) back to some ancestor. I know of at least one 'rare' family name that came about through a clerical error when the family migrated to Australia, specifically a typo changing their official name.
Most though in the western sphere are regional based some paternal ancestors home town like 'Da Vinci' means 'Of Vinci' and 'Toscano' means 'Tuscan' and largely shed no light on the family identity apart from the knowledge that they didn't have a vocation (eg. Medici) esteemed enough to warrant a vocation based surname. But very few Smiths are still Smiths, even fewer Fletchers are still Fletchers and the 'Hill' for which my Grandfather was named is now long lost to memory.

Names have little intrinsic information as to somebodies identity. They may prejudice people one way or another given your older siblings, father, mother etc. but their main use is to distinguish two people in a group that share the same common name. Though more often a nickname will suffice.

I like nicknames by the way, they are peer given and more often telling of character than given names or surnames.

4. Who's Ego?

All surnames in our society are paternal, which was the first thing that struck me. The argument then is not really about women's right to name their children for their father over their husband. I'm sure nobody thinks of it that way, but that they be able to name the child after a name they have come to identify with themselves.

Setting aside how uneven the current convention is, if the mother has come to identify with a paternally derived surname then it suggests that people would adopt any name given them into their identity.

My mother gets upset that I insist on being 'tohm' and her feelings are hurt that I won't keep the name she chose me. But she could have called me 'Penis Dickface Cock' (which if I survived childhood I probably would have kept) and wider society wouldn't blame me for adopting a new name. Her feelings are hurt because she interprets it as resistance to her ownership of me. Which is true, I don't understand the way she talks about my achievements (or lack thereof) as if they are her own particularly when more often than not she hasn't contributed or has actively opposed my efforts to get them.

Which makes her sound like a bitch, but she isn't she's just a standard mother. Loving, supporting, anxious. I wouldn't take her maiden name ever though because I associate it with her father, who was a dick, and 'head' of the family. Even the word 'maiden' name is these days a misnomer. Few brides are 'maidens' having already broken their 'maidenhead' long before marriage.

5. Property Rights.

The 'Named and Shamed' article builds the child's surname argument from the more accepted practice of Brides that keep their own names or hyphenate. Identity is part of this argument, but the major hurdle it overcomes is the tradition of marriage that is a property transaction between father to son-in-law. Over many years western society has gotten rid of the dowry, the payment to relieve the son-in-law's family from the burden of taking on another woman. But the father still 'gives away' the bride, the engagement ring still marks the bride as the groom's property, and the surname indicates that the grooms family has taken possession of the bride.

I get slightly annoyed at the number of girls that will be all 'that's right' and 'rock on' for the keeping the surname argument but will then flash their engagement rings in a display of conspicuous consumption.

But I would say, the surname argument begins and ends with property, and as it applies to children I happily agree that as it stands it could be more equal (given that surnames have no intrinsic meaning) and would cost little but ego to do so to aportion the egotism more evenly between the genders.

But this would mean that both were doing something that deep down is really vile equally. And equality isn't freedom.

6. Japan!

In Japan if a family produces only daughters (like commodities) then traditionally the parents would find a second son from another family to adopt into the family. He takes his brides surname and becomes head of the family or the next generation. This is because the Japanese take the 'family identity' thing really, really, seriously to the extent that a man with no male heirs will adopt a son just to preserve the family name.

In Japan, unless you are an intimate friend of somebody you refer to them as 'Handa san' or 'Kimura san' or 'Takehashi san' not their first names, but their family names. In Japanese highschools not only do the students address teachers as 'Mr Smith' but the teachers address students by surname as well.

As a foreigner you may not notice it in your direct experience. Most Japanese people adopt a 'When in Rome' attitude to living in our first name societies, plus foreigners never suspect anything is wrong with referring to somebody by first name. ur intimate treatment of strangers in Japan probably endears foreigners to the locals.

So Japan is like a step backwards with its emphasis on being identified with a family or clan first and individual second, and it is a very very patriarchal society, but the answer also comes from Japan.

The samurai traditionally were given a name at birth, that was kind of like a nickname:

A samurai was usually named by combining one kanji from his father or grandfather and one new kanji. Samurai normally used only a small part of their total name.
For example, the full name of Oda Nobunaga would be "Oda Kazusanosuke Saburo Nobunaga" (織田上総介三郎信長), in which "Oda" is a clan or family name, "Kazusanosuke" is a title of vice-governor of Kazusa province, "Saburo" is a name before genpuku, a coming of age ceremony, and "Nobunaga" is an adult name. Samurai were able to choose their own first names.

Tokugawa Ieyasu the most famous and influential shogun. Arguably the supreme patriarch of Japan's cultural heritage was born Matsudaira Takechiyo, he chose his own name and made up the most (or second most, after the Emperor's) famous family name in Japan's history.

7. Frank and Franklin Jr.

Show me somebody who knows who their great great grandfather was and I will show you 4 generations of under achievers. The only real time a person would arguably gain from adopting their parents identity over their own is when they can ride on the previous generations coat tails.
But more often than not, you do your child no favors by calling them Jr. Just look at the success of Franklin Delano Roosevelt's son FDRJR in politics, who was crushed by the expectations heaped upon him, or the dazzling career of Frank Sinatra Jr as a singer.
I haven't thought much about having kids, but I actually don't like the idea of them being associated with me by my name. I don't like the thought of them inheriting some legacy or being judged by my actions. I want them to have a clean slate, neither unduly advantaged or disadvantaged. In the same way that Gates and Buffet will give away their vast fortunes for charity rather than passing it on to their children who haven't done anything to earn it.
Ideally my kid would be given a place holder name, and then I have no doubt that when they reach 16-18 somewhere they would choose their own name through a natural trial and error evolution process like I did.

8. Freedom

In Nelson Mandela's long walk to freedom that he is still walking as far as I know, I was surprised to learn that South African Apartheid was arranged into 3 tiers, first there was the white master race, then the intermediary 'coloureds' like the Indian workers (Ghandi being the most famous of them) and way down at the bottom the indegenous Africans.
In prison, Mandela was forced to wear shorts (initially) to infantilise him and his peers, where the Indian prisoners recieved pants.
To me the argument of maternal surname (which is maternal's paternal) vs paternal surname is like putting energy into Africans right to wear pants in prison. It puts them on equal footing with another slightly less oppressed ethnicity, but it is a far cry from freedom which is the real prize.

Evening up the naming rights would be an improvement to a practice I find fundamentally wrong. The only arguments for surnames are the practical ones - the only one being to distinguish between two people with the same first name. But why not just use street name or suburb? (sure it would make it easier for kidnappers) or any arbitrary surname. Anything but one that suggests that children don't belong to themselves. Why not name them for the families breed of dog. At least Labradors have intrinsic associated qualities (hungry and friendly), unlike Fletchers, Smiths, Bakers and Farriers.

Furthermore, your husband or wife is somebody you have chosen to be with (in most countries) so why not take their surname. You didn't choose your parents. Why not institute a surname swap, or have some standard 'Von' type prefix and then take their first name as your surname, 'tohm of michelle's' or something, we should fancy it up with some French.

Maybe I'm the only one who sees it this way, but I doubt it after all there is a book on family called 'they screw you up'. I know too many great people that have been completely fucked over by the 'property of the family' treatment, parental expectations, institutionalised feelings of guilt and debt to people you would never choose as friends. I've been lucky my family is pretty benign, but why take the risk? I would definitely allow for the possibility my kids will think I'm a total cunt, its their life I hope they choose to spend time with me not feel obliged to.


9. Men are Not Free

Every time the Women's movement seems to get derailed, it is usually because it has been striving for equality rather than freedom. A woman's choice of profession is an important right, but to have a 'career' under the same system as men is equality not freedom.

The one time I walked out on Claire in our relationship was when she treated me like a man, namely I had quit my shitty job and she blasted me (as far as she blasts anything, which isn't as explosiony as it sounds, more like a nagging lecture) about being responsible and shit. Which ticked me off, I had no fiscal responsibility to her, we weren't sharing rent or anything like it, she was just my girlfriend. If the situation had reversed I would have been all like 'good on you' and looked forward to sleeping in. I would have paid her the respect of assuming she knew her own financial situation well enough to make the call.

Men have the advantage over women of seldom considering their partner's income when forging their financial goals, but men are still expected to be breadwinners, as Greer points out when she talks about 'How much men hate women' they do percieve women as a trap (or did traditionally) they get married, have kids, get a mortgage and bang! trapped in their life. The lack of insecurity to pursue different interests and career paths is not freedom, men are not free. Having a job that draws on the talent reservoir is preferable to being trapped in a house doing cleaning and fussing over kids, and equality in career paths is a step forward. But now the way everyone approaches work (as just one example) needs to be rethought to achieve freedom. As Greer sagely notes, until we recognise Insecurity is freedom, we cannot be free.

Ben Franklin or Jefferson or one of them said 'Those who would trade their liberty for a little security deserve neither' and this was way before women's suffrage. (I guess its fair to assume the 'those' they were talking about were white men). Equality is only the big picture when you are striving for equality with somebody free. A jailor is relatively free, in that they can quit their job where the prisoner can't, but they still have to go to prison.

It's easy in South Africa for the indigenous Africans to see that it was the Whites they had to strive for equal footing with not the Indians, and they ended up taking all oppressed minorities (majorities) with them. With Gender it's different, Men occupy the superior, but no such truly free gender exists, everyone suffers in some way from the gender role subscribed to them, the male role is preferable but far from perfect. Fighting for an equal opportunity to be a wage slave, or to foist your identity on an unsuspecting child may be valid in terms of equality but they are battles, when nobody seems to be fighting the war.

Seeing Faith No More

I think I've been to the greatest concert ever. Apart from an isolated pocket of anti-social behaviour (smoking tobacco in a mosh pit) the crowd was great. The music was great, it was all life affirming and like most great things hard to put into words.

So here's some highlights in a rare positive take for me on interacting with large numbers of human beings.

1. User Generated Crowd Control.

Some people are dicks, it can't be helped. Some piece of their X or Y chromosome is missing that makes them think they should get trashed to the point they can barely stand up at a concert that most fans are grateful to be at and wouldn't dream of numbing their perceptual filters for a second.
So the vast majority was just picking up these douchebags in an 'involuntary crowd surfing' moment to simply get them out of the crowd. They would be dropped into the arms of security and ejected from the pit. Then you would see some guy getting pats on the back from other guys.

2. Nice Guys.

I foolishly wore my glasses. Which was fine for songs like 'Easy' and 'This Guys In Love With You' and Faith No More's Easy listening numbers. But not so great for 'Cuckoo for Caca' and so fourth. I should have taken the hint and put them in my pocket when some crowd surfers heel went into my face, but I thought I could handle it. I got greedy, and at one point I dropped them. I gave them up for dead of course. It was too crowded and sweaty and the whole pack was jumping 1 meter side to side with every off beat. But then I felt them under my foot and tried to grab them up in a lul. I found part of a watch which I discarded again, then another guy attempted to look for me and found the same watch, which was nice. And the 7 foot guy infront of me who was my anchor turned around concerned I was actually falling down and about to be trampled. Nice guys everywhere.
I found my glasses, eventually and but their new shape into my pocket. Another guy picked up somebodies discarded shirt which I helped hitch up to him hackey sack style. I thought it was something important to the guy, but he was just like 'hey free shirt' hilarious, until you consider how much everybody was sweating in festival hall.

3. Rock is Dead, but can be Ressurrected.

What of Faith No More itself? If your not a fan I won't bother trying to sell you on their music. Look them up on youtube if your interested or read their Wikipedia Article.
The support act was AFI, and for me they proved once and for all just how bad the current fashions are. I didn't realise it but in the war of masculinity forearm tattoos are completely turned pussy by nut hugging tight jeans. Furthermore their guitarist can play, he was doing the two handed tapping and all that shit. But this was completely diminished by his front mullet, which is the only descriptive term I've heard for the current trendy hairstyle. My sister had the call of the night when she held up her phone with the txt 'These guys are for people too ashamed to admit they lik boy bands'. To me they struck me as 'A Man Inside' rather than 'A Flame Inside' but I'm old and crotchety and conservative when it comes to what rock is. Their rightly embittered fan base who enjoyed a piddling hour long set were into their music. They were braving a room full of 25-35 year olds all wearing black shirts, mysteriously loose fitting jeans or army cams and looked like they would do some serious fucking damage if they turned angry.
But the kids you know, they were really into this AFI stuff, and the second FNM concert only happened because they couldn't come close to selling out festival hall. And I will admit that A Flame Inside struck me as harder hitting than most of what cuts it on triple j these days. But they looked like a pop band compared to FNM and for me it affirmed that music has gone soft pretty much since FNM broke up. I've historically attributed it to 'Mechanical Animals' by Marilyn Manson that really ended the 90's and revived the 80's, but of course, rocking goes in waves and the next generation doesn't necessarily rock harder than the generation that precedes it.
The obvious example would be the 80's. The 90's really started in the late 80's '87-'89 saw Metellica and to a lesser extent Faith No More, Primus, Jane's Addiction coming up and creating alternate rock, alternate to hair metal and glam rock bands like Guns 'N Roses, Posion, Warwick etc.
So if you were at a concert in the 80's of Duran Duran, and Led Zeppelin or Sabbath came out and played a set after them, they same thing would have happened as happened last night, you would have had pissed off 'fans of the day' angry that their concert had been hijacked by old fogies that just plain rocked harder. Duran Duran probably isn't a fair example, maybe more like Roxette than Duran Duran.
So yeah, rock is periodically going to be killed by that portion of the masses that complains 'What happened to all the fashion in music?' but is resurrected by 'I want to feel ways about stuff' crowd.

4. Great Opening Act.

Onto the affirming stuff. AFI made an exit and the roadies came out. Their young fans streamed disgruntedly out of the pit and I headed in. The roadies did their thing. It always seems like an hour but is probably only 20 minutes and they dragged the AFI kit away to reveal Puffs' kit. Which was exciting.
Then a uy with a severe comb over and two plastic cups of water came out in a great way to kick off a FNM concert. Some guy in front of me that must have seen FNM back in '96 or something said 'Harvey Hamburger, Legend' or something.
This guy told lame ass jokes, was it in a nutshell. He started with 'Why did the farmer start a punk rock band? Because he was tired of Haulin' Oats. (Pronounced All-the-notes).
The best one was 'Why did madonna feed her newly adopted child dog food? Well she didn't really have a choice, that's just what came out of her breasts.' and then he screwed up the delivery on 'Why did Madonna post divorce from Guy Ritchie have three roadies shit in her mouth backstage at a concert? Because she is single again.'
The crowd actually booed him when he said 'Why did Metellica cut their hair? Because their hairdresser said it was the only way to get out all the man-cum.' Evidently there's a fair if not total overlap betwixt Mettellica and FNM fans.
The point was though, that everyone was hungering for Faith No More, and this guy just kept going with the jokes. I assumed he was there until the crowd got really pissed off and angry, I thought I could see Puff standing at the side stage where Harvey would look periodically as if to ask 'are they pissed off enough yet?' and then what I thought was puff would gesture to keep going.
The guy said he had 80 jokes and I believed him. Eventually the crowd was just chanting 'Faith No More' in an attempt to drown him out and booing continuosly and yelling out 'Fuck off' and stuff. I just thought, what a great way to warm up a crowd. Like cockteasing at a rock concert.

5. The Band.

They rocked and rocked hard. They talked to the crowd, they have so much good stuff (3 5 star albums and 1 4 star album, in my own opinion one that seemed to be shared by everyone in the room). So it's impossible for them to do a live set. For those who it means anything too the set included (but not necessarily limited to): Reunited Again, From Out of Nowhere, Digging the Grave, Last Cup of Sorrow, King For A Day, Midlife Crisis, Be Aggressive, Surprise Your Dead, Epic, Easy, Poker Face, Ashes To Ashes, A 'Don't Dream It's Over' refrain, This Guy's In Love With You, As the Worm Turns, Who Cares A Lot, Just A Man, Caffeine, Gentle Art Of Making Enemies, Stripsearch... and now its testing my memory. Which is to say, no concert is 'unforgettable' it's an experience.
Poker Face was particularly interesting, the Faith No More rendetion really proves how laughable A) considering Lady Gaga avant guard is. B) That a band like Faith No More can totally rock out a pop song, then all the 'hardcore' acts of the day really aren't pulling their weight in their ability to put balls into their music. It was also good because virtually no fans of FNM know the words to Poker Face, which prevented them from drowning out Patton's vocals which was rare in the concert.
During 'Surprise You're Dead' this big guy appeared next to me, and he was REALLY fucking into that song. He was 'dancing' like I was feeling and I totally empathised with him. He was jabbing his albows and thrusting his fists like a prize fighter who had just won the whole fucking bakery. Like a babboon getting ready to rip your face off. It was awesome.

6. Roddy Bottum.

Roddy Bottum is openly gay, as of 1993, traditionally, metal and punk rock, alt rock etc isn't associated with the gay community, the crossover being more in the Sphere of REM (Even though Micheal Stipe waited till 2001 to make any definitive statements about his sexuality), George Michael and Elton John.
But Roddy Bottum has helped composed some of the hardest hitting, epic, rock tracks of all time. It's great to see, really, how irrelevant his sexuality is. I hope it encourages other gay men to fucking rock.

7. Mike Bordin.

I didn't see much of Bordin, he played mostly up the back occassionally strolling up to the microphone for back up vocals. The guy is a positive roll model for pudgy bearded men everywhere. I don't think his bass lines have been showcased better than 'The Real Thing' which was their first Patton Album, but the guy doesn't necessarily play anything complicated, just simple and hard hitting. It hits you right in the balls. He cuts a fine figure and is really a clear cut case of somebody that looks like one of your friends dad's being way way cooler than your friend.

8. Puff.

Mike Patton and Puff were in line from my vantage point. There is nothing that can be said of Puff that would add to 'the guy can play' they played the tracks that really showcase just how good he is - namely Mid Life Crisis and Cookoo For Caca, as well as some of the more punk rock tracks. The guy is committed to being white and having dreads. That's a lifetime of torment but he's stood by it.

9. Mike Patton.

Is really uncontenstably the best vocalist ever, and one of the best front men. I don't really like the concept of front men, but you can't deny Patton is. His presence somewhat detracts from the crowd, because to a lesser extent than Eddie Vedder and Anthony Keidas, he attracts the annoying 'sexual fans' which I'm sure he loves over a sausage fest. But like Vedder and Keidas, the band wouldn't be the band without him, so you have to take the bad for the good. I've said plenty about Patton over the years, but the guy just performs, my voice is shot today and I wasn't screaming like he was, so I have no idea how the guy can back it up night after night. I hope for the sake of the suckers going tonight his voice isn't shot.
He'd clearly lost about 5 kilo's since the Download Festival last year, no doubt from the constant touring. So I didn't mind so much that his shirt was tucked into his pants. Also he dived into the crowd at one point and I touched his head. Stupid I know but I was starstruck. I didn't need to be any closer as it turned out.

10. The Guitarist. I don't know his name even, the concert if it was missing anything was Jim Martin's crazy hair. But having said that, Jim Martin is probably missing his hair. The guy could play, and he played the solo's which it wouldn't be a FNM concert without. I appreciate the guy.

So after the concert I was drenched in sweat with mashed glasses, but I was happy. Very happy. Way more happy than anything could piss me off. Thus the strange blend in any concert of how much you love the band and how much you hate the dicks in the crowd was skewed way towards the love of the band last night. Sure the crowd was a little uncoordinated, like any impromptu mass movement will be, but that was on the whole forgivable making the experience 99% up 1% down. Sure the 'perfect' concert could still top it, but I doubt it ever will. We should all keep striving though.

Busy?

If I had to name one pet peeve with most professionals it is the repeated claim that they are 'busy' and in particular 'too busy'. Ask someone to elaborate it's surprising how many times (about 30%) they actually can't.

People spend a lot of time at work. Time they are compensated for no matter how meagerly they think they are. But they people who can't substantiate their claims of business are not just annoying but concerning.

Concerning because overwork leads to so many problems. Firstly the health ones, the longer hours you do the less likely you are to prepare your own meals, then you spend less time on yourself, and you are not the inexhaustable reservoir of energy, and more importantly ideas that you think you are.

It's like when Terry Pratchett said that aspiring fantasy authors have to read outside the genre of fantasy. Any ambitious career person has to spend time looking outside the prism of your company. A company is its own microcosm and are prone to living in their own reality rather than the greater reality of the marketplace. A few employees will have daily customer and end user contact, but many in marketing, accounting, IT, logistics etc. can come close to never having contact with the end of their value chain.

Work suffers because you suffer. Your lack of personal interests and relationships shrinks your range of stimuli, like trying to get new ideas from a painting by looking at the one painting again and again. You tick people off who like you and want to spend time with you. You probably have a more involved relationship with your boss than your own father or mother at times.

I mean spend time with people you choose to be with and who choose to be with you. When you aren't forced together and defined by an organisational chart you have the opportunity to use real people skills as opposed to corporate ones.

That's just speaking of the work life balance. Many people won't attempt to achieve it because they are 'too busy', ie. their job somehow depends on them working overtime every day.

The adage 'the work expands to fill the time available' is true. Furthermore your average person is terrible at time management and prioritising. It is almost everyones natural inclination to 'feed a crying child' that is, they confuse urgent with important. Many can't see a difference between the two.

That's why claims to be 'busy' are so infuriating. Why the fuck would anyone have a contract that says '9-5' for a job that actually requires '8-6' or greater? Have your employers lured you into a position under false pretenses? In my experience I highly doubt it. Most people who are most 'enthusiastic' for lack of a better word think they are getting ahead by doing it.

Like 'urgent' and 'important' they confuse 'work' with 'value' and can't see a difference between the two. I think most people create most of their value in any given task or job in about 3 hours of their day, maybe less. I draw on average for 1.5-2 hours per day and get tremendous value out of the exercise, making steady progress. More progress than I made in a week at my old job.

There are some exceptions though, but they aren't what you'd think. Sure surgeons performing 8 hour procedures shouldn't look at the clock on the wall after 3 hours and say 'close him up, we've already contributed 80% of the value' but they work in a rare profession where urgency and importance actually correlate - saving lives. What I was thinking of is more like my part time job now - call center work. The task is pretty rote and repetitive, and provided you can stay in a good professional mood you can contribute value for 6-7 hours to the same standard. The only caveat being that your throat may wear out.

But again, when you are performing market research your goals and productivity are absolute, and very measurable. Surveys per hour, refusal rates and so on. Most 'knowledge workers' if you ask them what the companies objective is will come up with an elaborated version of 'more'.

Management standards are so low in Australia that it is rare to see a manager. (most often called 'Director' 'Vice President' or 'CEO') You spot more frequently another worker with an inflated title. No management is actually done, but they will occasionally exercise authority.

Thus in your average organisation you will see an extended line of chinese whispers where priorities get mutated or forgotten down the 'chain of command' few 'managers' will perform adequate anual reviews, just like few will write an honest reference letter. In summary, few people have any idea why they are busy, as in what productive work they are actually meant to do. They just want to do more, and feel that more is the answer. Not better, not strategic, not smarter, just more.

So it really gets up my nose when people tell me they are too busy, especially too busy to plan. Anyone that doesn't have a plan that says in concrete terms what they are trying to achieve cannot substantiate that they are busy. A person that doesn't have scheduled their actual priorities from said plan cannot tell me where their time goes, and thus cannot be busy.

These people tick me off because they are my friends, and they could be so much happier, healthier and nicer, and have more time to spend with me and their other friends AND be better at their job if they spent less time doing more and more time doing the right things. I can't blame them directly a lot of social conditioning and bad management standards have often encouraged them into the fallacy of 'busy' but I can get angry when they tell me they are too busy to change.

Because its the equivalent of saying 'I'm too busy to be better at my job'. Plus I actually have a trauma surgeon friend and he finds plenty of time to catch up. So anyone not stitching up car crash and drunken brawl victims really has no excuse and no right to call themselves 'busy'.

A Subjective Love of Human Foibles

I'm a big fan of N8 Van Dyke's work in particular his Dutch series. So while browsing through his collection I found this.

I love this picture, the expression and gesture had me laughing to myself all yesterday.

I'm still laughing. It makes me fall in love with the moronic human race again.