BONWAG

I thought I’d been paying attention. I thought I had an eye for detail. But sure enough, as this article explains, we just don’t make cents any more. I’d never noticed.
(and for the nostalgic among us: ¢)

I cannot take credit for this wisdom, or even figure out where they came from, so I’ll just post them and get out of the way. Feel free to comment on the wisdom/wrongfulness of these:

Gifts for Children: This is easy. You never have to figure out what to get for children, because they will tell you exactly what they want. They spend months and months researching these kinds of things by watching Saturday-morning cartoon-show advertisements. Make sure you get your children exactly what they ask for, even if you disapprove of their choices. If your child thinks he wants Murderous Bob, the Doll with the Face You Can Rip Right Off, you’d better get it. You may be worried that it might help to encourage your child’s antisocial tendencies, but believe me, you have not seen antisocial tendencies until you’ve seen a child who is convinced that he or she did not get the right gift.

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Gifts for Men:Men are amused by almost any idiot thing — that is why professional ice hockey is so popular — so buying gifts for them is easy. But you should never buy them clothes. Men believe they already have all the clothes they will ever need, and new ones make them nervous. For example, your average man has 84 ties, but he wears, at most, only three of them. He has learned, through humiliating trial and error, that if he wears any of the other 81 ties, his wife will probably laugh at him (“You’re not going to wear THAT tie with that suit, are you?”). So he has narrowed it down to three safe ties, and has gone several years without being laughed at. If you give him a new tie, he will pretend to like it, but deep inside he will hate you.
If you want to give a man something practical, consider tires. More than once, I would have gladly traded all the gifts I got for a new set of tires.

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Some of you … may have decided that, this year, you’re going to celebrate it the old-fashioned way, with your family sitting around stringing cranberries and exchanging humble, handmade gifts, like on “The Waltons”. Well, you can forget it. If everybody pulled that kind of subversive stunt, the economy would collapse overnight. The government would have to intervene: it would form a cabinet-level Department of Holiday Gift-Giving, which would spend billions and billions of tax dollars to buy Barbie dolls and electronic games, which it would drop on the populace from Air Force jets, killing and maiming thousands. So, for the good of the nation, you should go along with the Holiday Program. This means you should get a large sum of money and go to a mall.

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You can always tell the Christmas season is here when you start getting incredibly dense, tinfoil-and-ribbon- wrapped lumps in the mail. Fruitcakes make ideal gifts because the Postal Service has been unable to find a way to damage them. They last forever, largely because nobody ever eats them. In fact, many smart people save the fruitcakes they receive and send them back to the original givers the next year; some fruitcakes have been passed back and forth for hundreds of years.
The easiest way to make a fruitcake is to buy a darkish cake, then pound some old, hard fruit into it with a mallet. Be sure to wear safety glasses.

The days which science-fiction foretold – where people would prefer retreating to a virtual world rather than put up with the real – are drawing closer. While watching a TV special on Andre Bocelli’s latest recording (one of today’s great tenor singers), the introductory commentary made the observation that the camerawork and landscapes featured in the programme were truly beautiful. “So much so,” it said “that sometimes you think you’re watching computer graphics.”.
Er; shouldn’t it be the other way around? When did we stop aspiring to have computer graphics look as good as the real thing? When did they start getting better than the real thing?
And on the topic of computer-assisted creativity; I’m having a hard time believing that Kate Winslet’s new single (she sings! she acts! she scores!) isn’t silicon-enhanced. It just sounds too perfect.
And that sort of cynicism is all too easy. It’s sad that these days, in arts just as in sport, your best efforts can be called into question, just because the tools are getting too darned good.

I don’t want to spoil any of the twists and turns in this story, but it’s worth a mention

One of the fun things to do around Christmastime will be to call your local bank or health service or big business and ask them to cough up any information they have on you. There’s a new privacy law which comes into effect in Australia on December 21 which demands businesses – with a turnover of more than 3 million smackers – give you all the information they have on file about you when you ask, or suffer eternal torment. It should be interesting to see who’s actually set up to be able to give it to you (without having to go through the dumpster out the back).
This isn’t a plug for IBC’s Privacy Services Unit, because I don’t work for them any more, but they have all the info you need to put a blowtorch under your bank manager this Christmas. Remember that when they give you gip about your credit card balance :-)

And once again, we’re proud of our performers, Caleb and Allanah, who were part of Mater Christi Primary School‘s Christmas Show for this year. They’ve been practicing long and hard for two terms now, and the show was well worth all the effort. A great, professional production. Caleb was a sailor as part of a ‘Yellow Sumbarine’ number, and Allanah had an ‘Itsy Bitsy Teenie Weenie Yellw Polka Dot Bikini’ which she wore for the first time today. Suffice to say that she wasn’t afraid to come out of the water; she’s a natural on-stage, so we’ll have to make sure we get the video archived away for her later career in dance or theatre. Granny got to see the Matinee today, and Mum and Dad went tonight. Well done, everyone!

Ainslie and I were honoured to ‘do lunch’ with our local member Francis Logan at Parliament House today. The dinner was part of a prize we won a few weeks back for finishing second in a quiz night at Lakeside Baptist, so we joined with our fellow champions Fay and George to see where our taxes had been spent. Great dinner and great conversation, and a chance to see Parliament in session. Francis is responsible for the local area (Cockburn), as well as for the MidWest (Geraldton – where Ainslie and I met), so we had no shortage of topics to discuss. (Luckliy we’d done some homework beforehand.) Many thanks for Fran and the team in the Dining Room!

TIME has been helping hype ‘Ginger’ for a while now; a cool new consumer gadget that threatens to turn the world on its head. Bigshots were investing and the media was kept guessing for years, but it’s out now. It’s officially called ‘Segway‘ now, and is – as predicted – a kind of motorised scooter. It looks kind of weird, but aparrently it does all it’s magic by strategic weight-shifting, and – best of all – will apparently shuffle you around the city for a day on about 5 cents of electricity.
Is it too late to ask for one for Christmas?

Coudal Partners is the arena for a strange new world of Internet-inspired artistry: PhotoShop Tennis. It’s been partly inspired by the phenomenon of digital photo manipulation which has emerged in the last few years, the most notable being the ‘tourist guy’ and the ensuing one-upmanship (see here). The rules are explained thus:

It’s a pretty simple idea really. One player emails a photoshop document to the other containing a single layer. Each player progressively adds a layer until the match is over, either by time, withdrawal or mutual consent. A guest adds comments in real time and the people watching vote for a winner.

It’s all frightfully arty, and you probably need to know a little about photoshop filters to fully appreciate it, but it’s another example of my favourite net topic; ‘collaborative creativity’. Some of the matches are truly beautiful.

Up to now, we’ve just had the list of Scrobble definitions. Now, we can actually play it online! If you’re interested in joining a foursome, just leave your name here.