Horse 3171 - Eudaimonia - Element XIII - Vidiosus

There is a concept in Seneca's 'Epistulae Morales' (the Moral Letters) which is hinted at, which happens as the result of the citizens of the ideal city living in disharmony with each other; the word in this case is "invidiosus". The word in opposition to "invidiosus" that Seneca uses is "Vita" but this hardly makes much sense. Seneca is probably trying to nail down the Greek idea of Zoe but as applied to an interconnected group of people have no sensible way of articulating this other than to say what is in opposition to it and then trying to reverse engineer the concept. My problem is that the Latin word "Vita" comes out very closely to to the English word "Life" and variations on the word "Vita" exist in modern Romance Languages. 

The thing "Death" is the end of life. Death is the state when Grimaldi Reaper, aka the Destroying Angel, comes to collect the debt demanded by the kosmos' nastiest legal firm Hades, Sheol and Abaddon. Hades in particular has two very hungry daughters called "More" and "More" (very confusing) and feeding time is all the time. Death is not the thing in opposition to Seneca's Vita.

I would like to suggest that the thing in opposition to Vita in the here and now is not death but Envy. Remember, humans are innately selfish being who exist at the centre of their own observable universe; a poison to happiness is not just selfishness but selfishness that wants what other people have. What could be more pathetic and sad than a soul that can not be satisfied? A heart that wants and wants and wants and gets what it wants but still isn't satisfied, is to be pitied; especially when it looks to what others have.

At its worst, Envy is a raging feeling of discontent or covetousness with regard to another's advantages, success, possessions, et cetera. Envy is ultimately derived from the Latin word "invidiosus" which implies something which causes offence, is meant create offence, or worse is positively calcualted and conniving to create ill will or resentment. Envy as that discontent or covetousness with regard to another's advantages, success, possessions, et cetera is then outworked to wish that that person did not have those things. Envy in action is to try to give offense, or hateful and invidious remarks, or perhaps act in an offensive, unfairly discriminating, or maybe even injurious way to that other person. Envy is the well-spring from which contempt bubbles up and ultimately renders the other person as object, rather than a person worthy of care and concern.

We have entire industries devoted to the fuelling of Envy. Advertisers want you to buy their products; so will actively try and create the spark of envy in you, to make you want the thing which they have and want to sell. Practically everything which is touted as a luxury good, is driven by pouring petrol on the spark and then fire of envy. Watches, Jewellery, Motor Cars, Real Estate, Fashion, Dinners, Food, Drink, et cetera et cetera et cetera; for what? Did the man who got everything he wanted really live happily ever after? 

This is where I have had to cheat in order to arrive at this element. How do you find the positive opposite to a negative concept, when the negative concept has an "in" or "un" prefix for a word that doesn't even look like it has an opposite? The opposite of 'defunct' is 'funct'? The opposite of 'unkempt' is 'kempt'? What happens if you have a concept where the opposite doesn't even seem like a thing? I have to assume the opposite of Envy, is going to be derived from the opposite of its Latin root 'invidiosus'; that leaves us with the word 'vidiosus'.

Vidiosus (if it exists) would actively celebrate the good fortune of others. Vidiosus cheers on from the sidelines when someone else succeeds. Vidiosus is happy when someone else succeeds, it smiles when someone else is acknowledged, it cheers when someone else wins the accolades, it will even look kindly when that someone else receives praise and attention. Is the opposite of a pencil line, an eraser? 

We kind of know about a collective sense of Vidiosus if the national sporting team wins, though I am not sure if this is a particularly helpful example. Someone competing on behalf of us means that we are in effect playing by proxy; which is where a source of national pride comes from. Perhaps a better example of Vidiosus in action, is the provision of public goods and services, such as education and health care. Vidiosus would cheer other people's children getting an education, or actively want to see people that we are in commonwealth with, be protected from injury and humility. This may even require giving up private competitive advantage to see the whole community prosper.

I suppose that practiced internally Vidiosus would be the elimination of one's own envy when looking at the world. The stoics might have something to teach us here. Epicurus, the guy who is usually associated with hedonism, said that what he needed to be happy was a pot of cheese, a jus of wine, and four friends. This looks more like hedonism achieved through the laying down of envy and being grateful for the simple things of life. Laying down envy might be one of the most difficult tasks of all, as this demands a selfish heart to deny itself and be unselfish. This is probably put into better perspective when one realises that the world is not only complex but deeply unfair because those with money and power can bend the rules and buy the means to bend the rules. If it is possible to lay down envy for the things they have and the opportunities they have, then even though life is unfair, it is still possible to be happy. The great salve of envy is gratitude for what one has and deciding that what one has and is, is sufficient.

Here's the problem. I think that it is actually impossible to eliminate the wants of the human heart. Hitting one's body with birch branches, or sitting under a tree until the elimination of desire arrives, I think is a fantasy. Seeing other people as people and wanting good things for them, wanting them to be happy, and not being envious of the stuff they've collected, or the accolades they've won, or maybe even the family and friends that they have, is the sign of a human heart which is emotionally secure and dare I say it, mature. Is the opposite of poison is not being poisoned? At best (which is still terrible), all I can come up with is that the opposite of envy is "not envy"; which I think looks exceedingly dumb as a word. If it is a word, then I would like the noun for "not envy" to be "Vidiosus".

Horse 3170 - When The Saints Go Walking In

I do not generally write a lot about Australian Rules Football. There are so many nuances about the game that it is simply too much to analyse properly and relate in a thousand word blog post. However, this year something so strange happened at St Kilda Football Club that it warrants special explanation.

The most obvious thing about a game of Australian Rules Football is that it is played on an oval which is massively massive compared to other codes of football. If you were to take just one of the 50 meter rings and the centre circle, then you already have a field which is longer than many Association Football grounds. If you were to use this as the guide on which to populate the number of players you need, then by rights the MCG should need a team of 28 players. However, there are only 18 players on the field in a game of Australian Rules Football; which means that the game is almost by design, chronically underpopulated and the game is not won or lost by how well you can control space but by how efficiently you can fill it. 

Most historic formations (that is more than 99% in the history of the game) are variations on playing five lines of three with three rovers, or playing five lines with the extra players over-egging several lines. Broadly speaking the six kinds of players are Full Back, Half Back, Centre, Half Forward, Full Forward, and Ruck Rover. There have been tactical variations over the years such as the Brisbane side in the early 2000s who practically invented "The Flood" where the three rovers would form part of a rolling wave forward to transport the ball to the other end of the field; making use of the progressive overlap on the way through. Likewise, the North Melbourne side of the late 1970s employed "The Wall", where there were no three extra players and they effectively became six Full Backs; which meant that nothing got past them without express written permission. What has happened at St Kilda in 2023 is so strange, that it looks like nothing seen at least in my lifetime.

On the face of it, St Kilda this year have appeared to abandon five lines. In their place, they look like they have maybe four. This leaves roughly 50% of their squad to do tactical damage and to adjust on the fly. This is when they actually look like they have four lines of players. At other times this year, they have appeared to break this down even further to just three loose clumps which occupy very broad Back, Centre and Forward positions. 

What I find particularly interesting about this is that this is more of a system than a formation. The skills of a Full Forward aren't markedly different to a Full Back, or any other position for that matter. The thing that is different between a classic Full Forward like Tony Lockett or a Full Back like Sam Kekovich, is almost entirely down to mentality and the positional awareness that comes from playing in a particular position for a long time. Remember, Australian Rules Football is mostly about how efficiently a side can fill the available space and that not only means winning contests for the ball but finding players in loose space who can win uncontested marks.

This 2023 St Kilda side have not been necessarily fantastic at winning contests for the ball. They are frequently understaffed across the field as a result of playing a loose system as opposed to rigid formations. Their last win which was St Kilda 12.10.82 def. Carlton 8.12.60 only shows that they had two more scoring shots. The 22 point margin which looks solid, is as a result of being able to win contests in free places; such that they can get unimpeded shots on goal. So far this season, St Kilda has won 5 of 6 games and their only loss was against Collingwood who have also won 5 of 6 games and are second on the ladder.

Australian Rules Football is way too fluid for me to properly determine exactly what the system is but looking from the outside as a neutral, what I can see are shapes and positions in tension. St Kilda have not been trying to pull opposition players out of position in order to create loose players somewhere else. In playing something as unorganised as four lines which devolve into three clumps up and down the field, what they look like they are doing is creating that free space and loose players by never becoming attached in the first place. It is more difficult in principle to try and mark someone who isn't actually playing in anything that looks like a fixed position. 

In some respects, this St Kilda side looks a lot like the Netherlands' Total Football which was deployed to almost success in the late 1980s. The thing that eventually killed off Total Football was the even more brutal efficiency of a newly reunited Germany side, which played the most rigid 4-4-2 formation ever. Now I don't know if the counter to whatever the heck St Kilda is doing is some kind of return to brutal formation, which would likely be 4-4-4-3-3, or 5-4-3-3-3, or even 6-3-3-3-3, but I do know that St Kilda are not going to win football matches by monster records. They do not need to. The system is likely not capable of delivering massive margins and I do not think that it needs to. If a team can reliably win by one or two goals and change every week, then that's good enough.

If I may be sold bold, I will suggest that St Kilda are quietly looking like they may win the flag. I will also suggest that if they win the 2023 flag, they will absolutely not win the 2024 flag. If I can notice this as a member of the commentariat then the professional staff whose job it is to yell stuff into phones and slam them into the desks in the boxes from way up high, have also certainly noticed this and will be madly scribbling on whiteboards. Meanwhile I think that St Kilda will look constantly on the edge of total disarray and lose contests on the ball all over the place, but quietly rack up wins by 1.5, 2.3, 0.4, 1.2 et cetera. The Saints will not go marching in but they will find free space and very quietly walk it in.

Aside:

My team Hawthorn will need to build a bigger trophy room this year because they will come home with the biggest wooden spoon in 127 years.

Horse 3169 - The Most Famous Failure In Australian Motorsport

On facebook there was a post in an Old Falcons Appreciation of a photograph and and advert for the replacement Falcon which Dick Johnson drove at the 1983 Bathurst 1000.

It looks like it is an advert from an old edition of Auto Action or similar and act the time they were looking for $32,000 for it. Here's the weird thing. This car in that advert, appears in no such livery that the car ever raced in. My guess is that the black and white advert shows a car in green, trying to match the colours that it wore for Bathurst 1983 but that repainting it would have been too hard a job. In the advert, this car looks like it is ready for a restoration to 1983 spec and the colour scheme that it wore; but this will still require the prospective buyer to somehow procure the necessary stickers. This job is far far easier in 2023 than it would have been in 1983.

This car started out as an white Falcon which was built by George Shepard for Bob Morris Motor Sport. George Shepard had previously built the Holden Dealer Team rally Geminis as well as the Country Dealer Team's Bathurst Gemini ZZ/R. It was campaigned in the 1982 Oran Park 300 by Bob Morris and F1 Champion Alan Jones.

Group C regulations called for improved production cars; with some of the interior trim still intact. I think that a white car was selected off the production line so that future liveries could be applied to it. Since a racing car is a 300km/h billboard, then it is good to start with a blank space upon which the propaganda for the companies can be written. An all-white Falcon is likely the same trim level that they would have given to taxi fleets at the time as picking one of them off the production line, would have been an easy job.

By the time that this Falcon has got to Bathurst 1982, it had acquired a blue bonnet and roof. The car however, would not start the 1982 Bathurst 1000, as during the Saturday Afternoon's final practice session, John Fitzpatrick clipped the embankment going through the right-hander before the drop into Forrest's Elbow, which tore the steering out and the car crashed into the earth bank. The damage was so bad that the car was withdrawn from the race.

Although I can not prove it, this car might share something with the car that it replaced and that it eventually would become. As this Morris/Fitzpatrick Falcon was sponsored by Channel 7, it carried a relatively brand new Racecam unit. As far as I can tell, the Dick Johnson Tru-Blu Falcon of 1982, did not have a Racecam unit installed on the Thursday, Friday, or Saturday. Mysteriously though, the car raced on Sunday with a Racecam unit. My suspicion, given that there were so very few Racecam units in existence, is that the same camera which was in the Morris Falcon on Saturday went into the Johnson Falcon for the race on Sunday.

For 1983, the car was then bought by Andrew Harris and acquired sponsorship from Channel 9 Bendigo. The only racing that it saw during 1983 was the Mallala round of the Australian Touring Car Championship (Mallala in South Australia being the easiest to get to from the base in Bendigo) and in that race it came 9th in a field of 15. It competed in the Sandown 400 that year but went around so slowly that it didn't complete enough laps to be classified as a finisher.

The most famous outing for this Falcon was on the Sunday of the Bathurst 1000 in 1983. After Dick Johnson crashed his own Falcon into a tree during Hardie's Heroes, this car was then repainted to match the Greens-Tuf livery that Johnson had been running and Andrew Harris and Gary Cooke took over the Barry Lawrence and Geoff Russell Commodore (they were left without a drive).

The thing that amazes me about this most, is that the spray and sign-writing team sprayed not one but two cars to race the rext day and as this was 1983, there weren't that many stickers that could be shipped in at a moment's notice. The Channel 7 Colour Ring on Dick Johnson's green car, was painted and mixed by hand. Today, the whole job would have been done by a plastic printer and wrap team. Only the Channel 7 Colour Rings of the side of the car have been painted. The roundels on the bonnet and the roof remain just as pure white. The colour rings look wrong and the number 17 looks strange but given the monumental task that they were given to have a car resprayed and rebuilt in one night, that's amazing.

Dick Johnson's team ported across everything that might have been salvageable from Kermit No.1 which had crashed, to Kermit No.2 to be raced on Sunday. Unfortunately, the car failed yet again and not even Captain Invincible from the Ford Factory himself, could not solve the cars woes. To have turned the car around at all is arguably one of the greatest performances ever seen at Bathurst; this was at a time after Ford had officially pulled out of motor racing and had lost interest. Dick Johnson was (and could in theory still be) running as a privateer.

The untold story in these pictures is the giant killing performance of  Andrew Harris and Gary Cooke on Sunday. They didn't even get to drive their ex-Lawrence/Russell Commodore on the Saturday as it was being sprayed first. They took the newly turned out Channel 9 Bendigo Commodore to an amazing tenth place. A fun fact about that car is that the local Ford dealership in Bathurst supplied them with 5.8 badges from the Falcon; which makes this (as badged) the only 5.8L Cleveland V8 Commodore ever.

For 1984 Andrew Harris would drive for Warren Cullen; so the Falcon was onsold to a company called Freedom Fence; where it was driven by Paul Jones and Peter Hopwood. It was then resprayed white again. 

What I find extraordinary is that even in the 1984 iteration of this car, the Recaro seats which are fitted have remained for the entire of the three years that it was a racecar. Evidently nobody thought to remove them because it wasn't necessary. It isn't immediately obvious but if you look closely, on both occasions that the car was green on the outside, it still remained white inside. 

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This advert which claims that this is "Australia's most historical 'Group C' racer, in full race trim", doesn't supply this car's race record in the race which it was purpose built for. That record is: Did Not Start, Did Not Finish, Did Not Finish. I do not think that it covered 1000km in its competitive life. I do not know what "most historical" is supposed to mean. The most successful racecars in Australia are the Brock/Perkins car of 1982/1983 which won the race twice but with different numbers, after it became the backup car for 1983. It shares this accolade with Shane Van Gisbergen's dual Bathurst winning Commodore - chassis 888A-054 which won in 2020 and 2022. Nor is this Australia's most famous 'Group C' racer. That either goes to Moffat and Bond's 1-2 winning Falcons of 1977 or Brock and Harvey's 1-2 winning Commodores of 1984; or maybe even the car which Kermit No.2 replaced, which got wrapped around some trees.

I will say that the story of this particular Falcon, which is ultimately a story of failures, is the most famous failure in Australian motor racing history. I have no idea where it is now or even if it exists. As it neither won anything, nor even finished the race for which it was intended, I do not think that its fame would have survived all that long.

Horse 3168 - Eudaimonia - Element XII - Perseverance

I think that the world has a very strange conception on what it thinks strength is. The reason why I think that it has this strange idea, is because people are selfish to the point where what is immediately in front of them is often the most impressive. 

The way we usually think about strength, mostly has to do with what is immediately displayed in front of us. The most obvious display of strength is raw power; that is: Who can exert the most force? Who can punch, swing a sword, pull things, lift things, et cetera, the hardest, the fastest? The strength of one person is not very much though. In antiquity horsepower was greater than manpower. From the industrial revolution onwards, we found a way to replace the horses with machines with many many times more power than one horse. We are currently in the process of replacing human brainpower with machine brainpower as well. When you talk about the strength of a person thought, while we may be impressed that someone can lift a heavy thing, or powerfully swing a club, we can all concede that it takes a very different kind of strength to stand up under hardship, under injustice, under cruelty, and under the meanness of other people.

Who are the strongest people in the world? Is it someone like Magnus Magnussen who can lift Atlas Stones? Or is it a mother who is awake at 3am because their child has the flu? Is it that kid in high school who is being bullied because they are the smallest, or not the accepted race of their immediate cohort, or who is late at passing through puberty? Is it a refugee who has fled chaos and is now waiting just to settle somewhere which might resemble normality and where they might be able to call home? Is it someone who must deal with an illness for which there will be no cure, or pain which will never be relieved? Is it someone who works at a mind-numbing spirit-sucking job who turns up every day, just to keep the lights on and pay their landlord who demands an even greater share of their meagre income? Who actually is the strongest person in the world when framed like that?

The kosmos is populated with people who are all each the centre of their own observable universe; which makes for a world with some pretty horrid side-effects on occasion. We all pretend to be the heroes on the good side; not realising that we are all the villains on the other. A kosmos populated by selfish people, means that they all think of themselves as the most important; which is hardly an objective starting point to determine who is on the good side or the bad side. Actually if you really want to reduce it down to atoms and elements, there is no-one on the good side.

Perhaps related to that point, is that every bad thing which happens in the world either happens through environmental accident, or human stupidity which leads to negligence or accident, or deliberate cruelty. If every bad thing happens due to accident, stupidity, and cruelty, and there are so many of us knaves in the world, then it follows that by the law of large numbers where we repeat the experiment lots and lots of times, that lots of bad things are going to happen and in a variety of interesting ways. 

I have my doubts that things can be reduced to a binary fight or flight response when badness or the nastiness of other people comes. Already there is an implied mismatch in power dynamics which says that one person is very much aware that they can lord it over the other and acts accordingly. We can basically assume that a flight response is either not an option or is not imagined by the person on the receiving end. Either the person on the receiving end backs down or shuts down, or fights back in some way. I suspect that Perseverance is related to some kind of fight response.

Given all of this, then there are a number of responses that people can prepare. Either you can complain, which in many cases is perfectly justified; or you can develop coping strategies, which may or may not be effective at mitigating the badness; or you can choose to persevere and keeping on carrying on.

Perseverance is not a virtue which is easily attained. Like all the the virtues such as patience or kindness, it is one which requires the moral work of discipline to achieve. Perseverance is best described as standing calmly and bravely against the circumstance and then working through the badness of unpleasantness which accompanies it. Perseverance is standing fast in the storm and then walking slowly into it. Perseverance is either gained deliberately because of circumstance, or accidentally because the circumstance is relentless and demands it; where quitting is not an option. Standing calmly and bravely when everything is screaming at you to stop, when other people might be screaming at you to stop by exacting injustice, meanness and cruelty, I think requires a greater display of strength of character, than merely swinging a club.

Perseverance is one of those moral qualities which is masqueraded by the rich and powerful especially and then used as a sheath over the top of weaponised cruelty. "If I am successful and worked hard, then why can't you?" The automatic connection with particularly financial success or lack thereof, is equated with the amount of work that someone supposedly does. Poverty especially is seen as a demonstration of some kind of moral failure. What this does is completely negate the circumstance, as well as the set of starting privileges which the various actors had to begin with. Quite often someone who has achieved a level of quiet calm has been forced to develop Perseverance; whereas the "successful' person from atop their gilded tower has not. Perhaps it is because of the job that I do but experience leads me to believe that richer people when faced with hardship (often of their own making) are more likely to respond with rage and nastiness, than poorer people who have had to practice Perseverance as a standard survival and coping mechanism.

As a moral practice to be displayed and worked outwards, perseverance may involve continuing to love and care for someone despite and in spite of their badness. That person may have very well wronged you. Perseverance as a practice, is always going to be expensive as with every moral work worth doing. This would suggest that Perseverance which I suppose could be though as some kind of positive adaptation after the fact, still requires an active choice to be able to do.

It seems to me that people who have learned to Persevere despite circumstance and hardship, are generally happier with life. This is likely because having learned and practiced how to keep on keeping on, gain a degree of inner confidence that they are capable of continuing; as well as the secondary moral product that the person at the centre of their own observable universe is both worth fighting for as well as not someone who they should be fighting against. Applied outwards it also says that the someone else for whom you choose to Persevere with is also  worth fighting for as well.

Horse 3167 - Fragments XX: I Don't Always Write Fragments. But When I Do...

M15 - The 15-minute City Conspiracy

I have no idea how the 15-minute city conspiracy theory started but it seems to be one of the more unhinged conspiracy theories that I have heard of. Put simply, the 15-minute city conspiracy theory seems to cite road construction as evidence that civil governments are going to install checkpoints to keep the population from going anywhere and thus keep control of the population somehow. Further supposed evidence for this was that the that the Covid-19 pandemic wasn't real and that it was an excuse to implant 5G micro-tracking in everyone. Just the writing on that sentence makes me question why anyone would think that this is remotely credible.

I don't understand how people can possibly conceive that governments have the capacity for mass tracking and surveillance, when they can't get simple things like taxation processing done properly. One of the reasons why the relatively light touch to keep us within 5km of our houses during the height of the Covid-19 pandemic, wasn't due to the overtly coercive force deployed by governments but people's despite to maintain law and order imn the face of an unknown and possibly very dangerous contingent threat. 

I also wonder about the sanity of people who wouldn't want things like schools, hospitals, shopping centres, libraries et cetera within 15 minutes of their house. Are these people seriously actively arguing in favour of having more inconvenient cities, being stuck in traffic for longer, and wanting longer commutes? Admittedly I have no problem with commuting 44km one-way to work but that's because I have a job. If someone wants to pay me six figures to work closer to home, then I am willing to lay that burden down.

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L150 - Levi's 501 Turns 150

According to the flickering advert boards of insanity, in between hawking eau de eye sting, soaps that smell like oatmeal, and sunglasses that have a retail price of more than a small hatchback, the 501 Jean by Levi Strauss & Co. is 150 years old. This means that this particular line of denim, dates from 1873; which is bang in the middle of the reconstruction era; in a state that wasn't really unconstructed.

The State of California, was given statehood pretty quickly after the discovery of payable gold and hence payable taxation streams. The gold miners, 49ers, all flooded to San Francisco to seek fortune, based upon the literal chance of striking it rich. It takes a canny businessman though, to see that the real fortunes to be made were not in dirtying one's hands by digging for gold but sending one's hand into the pockets of miners, by selling them things. Levi Strauss & Co. 

The 501 jean which dates from 1873, is well after gold fever has subsided and the rolling drudgery of normal life has returned. Evidently people still wanted a hard-wearing pair of pants; which given that indigo as one of the first synthetic fabric colours which was properly cheap, must have been pretty neat as well. I do not know if they had hep-cats and cool people in 1873 but there must have been enough people who liked these jeans to warrant their repeated sale.

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A20 - ABC

https://www.theage.com.au/business/companies/abc-hires-consultants-amid-nationwide-radio-ratings-slump-20230317-p5ct3t.html

Australia’s national broadcaster has established an internal advisory group and brought in external consultants to try to stop the dramatic decline of its radio audiences in capital cities across the country.

In the first GfK radio ratings survey of the year, all of ABC’s metropolitan stations, as well as respective breakfast and drive time programs, reported a concerning drop in audience share compared to the same time the previous year. The cumulative audience, which quantifies how many people listened to a station at least once during the week, has fallen in every single market.

- The Age, 20th Mar 2023

To be honest, the announcement that radio ratings have fallen at the ABC is not surprising. So-called "legacy" media like Radio, Television and especially Print media has been decimated in the past ten years; to the point where ratings look anemic right across the board. It also does not surprise me that The Age and The Sydney Morning Herald, which are part of Nine Entertainment Co. are reporting this as a loss for the ABC because they need to feel good about themselves as they too, suffer falls in revenues across their media assets. 

As the national broadcaster and one of the last bastions where actual journalism takes place, the ABC losing ratings is not something that should be merely laughed off. A lot of this has to do with the editorial choice by management to make the ABC run a screen for the tory interests which hand picked them. ABC flagship programs like 7.30 and Insiders, are not quite the hard hitting investigative journalism that we used to have and should expect in a functioning democracy. It is telling that the hardest criticism of the government's spending of more than a third of a trillion dollars on nuclear submarines, comes not from journalists but from a former Prime Minister who is now unchained.

However having said that, this article appeared in both The Age and The Sydney Morning Herald; which as Nine Entertainment Co. print media assets, are crowing far too loudly to be taken seriously. Nine Entertainment Co. which also happens to own Macquarie Radio, owns such radio stations as 4BC, 2GB, and 2UE. We can all take a giant belly laugh at the hilarious collapse of 2UE which went from being a fortress and stronghold of talk radio, to the point that having now morphed into a music station whose key demographic appears to the the residents of morgues, now likely has an entire audience which would struggle to fill a taxi.'

The ABC Local Radio Network has lost market share against stations like 2GB; not because they are inherently bad but because commercial radio has almost practically committed suicide. 2GB has managed to hold onto and consolidate all of the ex-2GB/2UE audience into one angry sordid right-wing wailfest. 2GB has decided that it wants to be a close of Fox Radio in the United States; because there is commercial advantage in stoking the fires of racism, xenophobia, sexism and any other culture war which they can light the flames to. 

Of course as expected, I would not be sitting atop my high horse if I didn't intend to ride it somewhere. I fully intend to ride this showpony into the ring and dazzle everyone with my amazing feats of utter boredom. Hey, it's a zero trick pony. My plan to drive audiences and ratings to the ABC is... make stuff they'll like.

Wow.

Inform. Educate. Entertain.

Wow.

If I was Grand Poohbah And Lord High Everything Else, then I would pivot Radio National into something closer in spirit to BBC Radio 4, and leave pretty well much everything as is. The ABC Local Radio network already excellently serves its niche. Triple J is perfectly happy to wear its 'ratbag radio' badge. ABC News Radio already basically is a cousin of the BBC World Service. Likewise, ABC Classic FM already is a cousin to BBC Radio 3. 

I would however make ABC Radio National the actual showcase for comedy and drama. We currently don't really do scripted comedy or drama on the radio and the medium is excellent at trialing out things because the lack of a visual dimension means that everything must live and die on the strength of performance and writing. Also, comedy radio panel shows are excellent. I find it scandalous that we do not have our own news quiz. This is also an excellent place to put on comedy shows from places like the Melbourne Comedy Festival and Adelaide Fringe. 

As for ABC TV, the only real suggestion that makes any sense is to increase the budget. When the ABC produces TV drama and comedy, it draws from the whole pyramid of Australian theatre and is of such good quality, that it invariably gets exported. We are perfectly capable of making our own equivalent to Scandi crime drama, Britain's police procedurals, satire, and panel shows. If the ABC produces drama and comedy, it can then sell those shows overseas. 

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CC13 - The Crown Is A Corporation

It should be noted that the Commonwealth of Australia IS a corporation. This is the one fact that the mad conspiracy theorists have correct. As with any corporation, the Commonwealth of Australia has a set of replaceable rules called a Constitution; which may be changed subject to the rules spelled out within the bounds of said Constitution.

Unlike a limited liability corporation such as a listed or unlisted company (usually denoted by Limited in their name), or a Non-Limited Company of the form that mining companies like to use, or a Proprietary Limited Company, shares in the Commonwealth of Australia can not be bought or sold. However, just like any other corporation the Commonwealth of Australia has a share, which happens to be owned by itself; through the rather opaque concept of the person of the Crown. The Crown is Corporation Sole which means that not only does it theoretically have a share which presumably is inheritable, but as a Corporation it has all of the useful powers of legal personhood in that it can buy things, own things, sell things, can enter into contracts, sue people, and be sued by people. Also like any other Corporation, it appoints a board of Directors which we call the Parliament, and it appoints agents in the Civil Service who carry out the functions and the business of the Corporation.

Get it? Got it? Good.

So the reply that the racists have that they are not responsible for the actions of people before them, is in fact perfectly legally true. Why should we hold people alive today responsible for the actions of people long since dead? The truth which racists will generally always deny, is that the Commonwealth of Australia which is corporation sole, and this also goes for the Six Several Crowns of the States, are still the same legal persons that they always were. 

There is a very good case to be made that the Crown of the State of New South Wales came into existence upon the declaration of the colony which traditionally is settled at 26th January 1788. At that point, Captain Arthur Philip was no longer just a Captain of a Fleet of 11 ships but the Governor of a Colony, which was corporation sole and intertwined with the legal person of The Crown. Various Acts of the British Parliament followed including the passage of responsible government in 1855, which handed more control to the Crown of NSW. A similar series of events occurred for each of the other five several States. Likewise, the proclamation of the Commonwealth Of Australia on 1st January 1901, invented a new Crown as Corporation Sole, bound by the replaceable rules of the Constitution. 

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SS17 - Sam Pan the Kikkoman Fan's Terrible Plan

There are some questions that I get asked about that really make me question whether or not there is intelligent life on Earth at all. The real reason why we've not seen aliens is because they've already seen us and decided that we're stupider than a bucket of sentient space slime.

The question was: How much Soy Sauce could someone drink and still be safe?

This question came to my boss via a client via their 18 year old son. That ought to be enough information right there to frame this nicely. Nevertheless, if you ask a silly question you deserve a silly answer, or rather you deserve a sensible answer to show you just how silly you are.

As best as I can determine, the only thing in Soy Sauce which is likely to kill you is salt. Salt is a very simple chemical with only two elements and the bonds between the Sodium and Chlorine atoms are so strong that the chemical is dealt with exclusively as a solid component. 

The LD.50 of salt, that is the Lethal Dose which would typically kill 50% of the population is a lower bound of 0.74g/kg of body weight. For the purposes of this calculation, I'm going to assume that our genderless victim called Sam Pan the Kikkoman Fan, weighs 60kg.

60 * 0.74g = 44.4 of salt

A tablespoon of Soy Sauce (20mL) contains 900mg of salt, or 0.9g.

Sam Pan the Kikkoman Fan who  weighs 60kg would need to drink 49.3 tablespoons of Soy Sauce, or 987mL of Soy Sauce.

It probably goes without saying that Sam Pan the Kikkoman Fan, if they drank almost a litre of Soy Sauce, is going to have a bad time. They're not going to experience the same kinds of lightheadedness as alcohol, water, or other kind of intoxication and the kind of coma that they lapse into will be quiet. Perhaps the biggest deterrent to drinking almost a litre of Soy Sauce, is the prospect of drinking almost a litre of Soy Sauce. I don't know about you but there are far more pleasant things to be drinking a litre of. 

Horse 3166 - Heavy Is The Head That Wears The Crown

Over the past month, I have been watching with interest as announcement after announcement has been coming out of Toyota, with regards their line up in 2024. Specifically I have been reading between the lines to try work work out the fate of the Toyota Camry.

https://asia.nikkei.com/Business/Automobiles/Toyota-to-end-Camry-sales-in-Japan-ending-43-year-history

NAGOYA, Japan -- Toyota Motor plans to discontinue sales of the Camry sedan in the Japanese market, focusing on countries where the automaker's 43-year-old flagship model remains popular.

Toyota has notified Japanese dealerships that it will cease production of the Camry for domestic customers at the end of the year. Production will continue for exports.

Domestic sales will end in phases, and Toyota already has halted taking most new orders. New Camry models under development will be sold exclusively to foreign markets.

- Nikkei Asia, 23rd Mar 2023

The announcement that Toyota plans to discontinue sales of the Camry sedan in the Japanese market, leads me to believe that Australia will also see the Camry discontinued almost simultaneously. Australia and New Zealand are among the very few Right Hand Drive markets where Camry is sold, and seeing that Australia has little power in the decision making process and that New Zealand actually has none, ending production for Japan means that the supply of stock for the antipodean countries would be halted immediately. I see no conceivable way that Toyota would contract the building of Camrys to its North American plants for Right Hand Drive markets because there is zero business case for it.

If you look at the VFACTS data for March 2023, then you'll see that the future is very grim for Camry. March 2023 marked the very first time in Australian automotive history that no sedans, no wagons, and no hatchbacks, appeared in the Top 10 of car sales for the month. In every previous month on record, at least one "car" has finished in the Top 10.

March 2023 was headed by the Toyota HiLux, Ford Ranger, and Isuzu D-Max; with the next seven cars on the list being SUVs. The Camry was so far down the list, that it doesn't even lead its own segment any more; and just 548 units were sold in March 2023. This is a far far cry from the days when the likes of Falcon and Commodore sold more than 10,000 units in a month. This is a whole magnitude of order smaller and then half again.

Where did it all go wrong? The entire market for kids under the age of 25 buying new cars, is practically non-existent now. We don't pay kids proper wages anymore and what little wages we do pay them, we now scrape back in accelerated rental payments. The Ford Mustang was famously able to sell more than 83000 units per month every month in 1964, making it the only car to shift more than a million units in a calendar year. Why? Because wages were still rising and not quite 2/5ths of all sales were to people under the of of 25.

Related to this is the fact that cars are being bought by slightly older people, they are also bought by fatter people¹. Fatter people demand bigger cars that are easier to get in and out of. They also demand taller cars to get in and out of. You can also massage people's ego by selling them a bigger thing. If people believe that they are doing better by their family in terms of safety then just the perception is enough to get people to shift their buying intentions.

The second reason why trucks have eaten the top part of what used to be sedan and ute sales is that we don't pay kids proper wages anymore and what little wages we do pay them, we now scrape back in accelerated rental payments. This has meant that the people who are more likely to buy a new vehicle, are tradies because they can write off the purchase price of that vehicle on tax. A family who would have bought a sedan or wagon, can not. What happened in this respect, is that trucks suddenly acquired four doors, not because people want to transport people to the worksite but because tradies want to cart around their families at the weekend. I have a sneaking suspicion that the amount of actual tradie's vehicles being sold, that is two-door trucks, remained pretty constant.

Car makers are not charities. They purely chase profits. Why bother selling a $40,000 motor car when you can sell a $60,000. If a similar thing sells for $60,000 and you shift 2/3rds of the units, then the total revenue collected is identical². The thing is that there is practically no difference in input costs between a $40,000 and a $60,000 but the difference is how many units that you can shift to the general public. Sedans became trucks; wagons became SUVs. 

Where does that leave Camry? 

Camry sales are almost entirely dominated now by taxi companies who want to buy them because of the hybrid drivetrain. Hybrid Camrys survived the SUVification and basically now occupy the same place in the market as LPG Falcons did. VFACTS data handily tells us that of the 548 Camrys sold in March 2023, 544 of them went to ABN holders. This means that just 4 Camrys in Australia were sold to private persons in March 2023.

I think that the final nail in the coffin for Camry in Australia was hammered in by Toyota with this announcement:

https://global.toyota/en/newsroom/toyota/39070994.html

TOYOTA is releasing details on three new Crown models―the Sport, Sedan, and Estate―today, following the Crown (Crossover type) which was launched last year. The existing Crown website will be updated with information on features such as powertrain and design.

- Toyota, 12th Apr 2023

Taxi Companies can cope perfectly well with the hybrid RAV-4. However, if they want something a bit posh then there is a very solid market case to discontinue Camry and just sell Japanese Domestic Market Crowns in Australia. If cars are built to meet the Australian Design Regulations with regards side-impact intrusion bars, then they will already meet the rest of the world's safety regulations. I can see Japan tooling up to meet this from the outset, axing Camry, and giving us Crown instead, at a slightly higher price than Camry was. Probably taxi companies will be able to order a spew-spec Toyota Crown directly from the factory, which already has wipe down seats and driver's shields as standard. Crown will be that similar thing pitched a higher price. If a spew-spec Toyota Crown retails for $50,000 and they can sell just 80% of the units, then Toyota is money ahead on the deal.

As for the statement that new Camry models under development will be sold exclusively to foreign markets, as suggested by Nikkei Publications, I think that that likely includes the United States and Canada as the primary destination, possibly China, but not Europe. It certainly makes zero business sense to develop anything for Australia when you can only shift 500 units a month. 

I can't really lament the passing of Camry the way I did for Commodore or Falcon because as a motorsport fan, Camry had no pedigree that I cared about. Camry was always meaning to be an unexciting appliance for people who did not care, and who would ditch their cars within the 7 year warranty window. Buying a second-hand Camry is a lottery because the amount of maintenance on a Camry will either be immaculate or nil and there's no way of knowing.

What the ending of Camry does represent, is the ending of hope that there is going to very many cool cars for the masses any more. Hatchbacks are being given the axe left, right, and centre, and as the sedans also die off, that only leaves sports cars for the privileged and increasingly belligerent few. The end of Camry is a very significant dying of the light. I rage against the dying of the light³.

¹ No really, this was predicted some time ago:

https://www.drive.com.au/caradvice/its-because-youre-fat/

It’s because you’re fat. - Wheels magazine, 17th May 2018

² This same principle is the reason why the 3-point in basketball has improved/ruined the sport. The 3-point line was introduced to encourage long range shots because basketball became a game purely about shoving people out of the way and dunking on them. Again, risk/reward analysis says that you only need to sink 2/3rds of the shots to get the same number of points; so provided your shot accuracy is above 67% as compared with sinking 2-point shots, then always got for 3s. 

³ Do not go gentle into that good night,

Old age should burn and rave at close of day;

Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

- Dylan Thomas

Horse 3165 - We've Invented A New Sport!

One of the points of make a protest is to do it in the most visible way possible, to try and get your point across. To this end, one of the extraordinary scenes that has been ever seen at the World Championship of Snooker at the Crucible, was this man releasing orange powder all over a snooker table in protest of pending approvals for new oil and gas projects in the North Sea. Personally I fail to see any kind of connection between snooker, the group the protestor is representing, or the cause, but it has provided the most dramatic set of images from any sporting event this year.

I will make not comment about whether or not this protest was useful or helpful, or whether or not it changed anyone's mind at all because quite frankly, I have no idea. What I will say though is that this protest has given us the possibility of a new sport - RALLYCROSS SNOOKER!

Cross Country running, MotoCross bike racing, Bicycle MotoCross (BMX), Rally Raid racing, Rally racing and RallyCross all exist. What I feel that this man has given us the possibility of is snooker which is played on different surfaces; just like RallyCross racing. This is not only eleven kinds of stupid, it fills me with eleven kinds of glee. 

Snooker and Billiards as table games, are played on tables which are meticulously kept. Even the nap, the weft and warp, and the way that the way that surface has been brushed are all exploitable differences in the game. Just like shape of the undulations on a green in a game of golf, the nap, the weft and warp, and brush of the table all have noticeable effects on the way that balls roll across the table.

However, a layer of power would change the game entirely. Suddenly you have an environmental change which is going to be constantly different. When a ball passes across the table, it's going to compact the powder that it runs across, as well as creating little valleys and gullies in its wake. This isn't only true for the object ball but for every signal ball on the table. There would be a beautiful chaos about the little channels that the balls would make and remake as they ran hither, dither, and thither across the table.

A player might have to take into account that when a ball runs out of momentum due to friction, which it is going to do far more quickly because the surface is rougher, they it's more likely to be influenced by the little channels on the table. A skilled player might be able to use this to their advantage if they could direct balls to a few pockets and make those little channels on the table play to really useful ends. Of course that same little advantage might cause a ball to veer off course wildly as it tram tracked somewhere else. 

Purists of the game are going to spit yellow, green, brown , blue, pink and black at this suggestion and that's fine. They can have their game. The devotees of the new RallyCross Snooker would have to invent their own tactics and learn the new game. Oh insanity, what trouble hast thou wrought?

Aside:

I have questions about what would happen if you placed a golf player like Tiger Woods on a regular municipal golf course like us mere mortals have to play on. Would the players who are on several million dollarpounds really be that good if they were to also play on a course which had rocks and things randomly assorted on the fairways? I once played a round of golf at Menindee Links Golf Club which was so decrepit that fairways were marked with nothing more than a series of coloured spikes in the ground. The whole gold course was entirely devoid of trees. The reason why it was called a "Links" course is that when it rained, there was the possibility of the whole course filling up with water and becoming a series of random lakes.

Aside 2:

What would happen if England and Australia played a Test Match at regular municipal cricket ground like us mere mortals have to play on? Would fielding be as sharp if they had to field on a ground where grass was a luxury and you ran over a literal dust heap? How do you thrust your hands into the ground, or dive for a catch, if it is guaranteed that you will get grazed and cut up. How brave would they be then?

Aside 3:

We do know what happens when we put cars, motorbikes, and even trucks over different surfaces. Max Verstappen might be the Formula One World Champion but he's just playing a roundy-round game when compared to Kalle Rovanperä. 

Horse 3164 - This Is The Best Airport Feature

A client of ours who had just been back from London after spending time with family for the first time since the beginning of the unpleasantness of the past few years, remarked at annoying Heathrow Airport was to navigate as a passenger. It has been a while since I have been to Heathrow Airport but it seems to me that Heathrow Airport, probably since the very first day of operation, has always been in a perpetual state of being built and rebuilt as the demand for traffic passing through it only ever grows more and more furious.

My memory of Heathrow Airport is one of everything always being temporary with bare metal and carpets thrown over the top; but worst of all, a wayfinding system that would even leave the Minotaur confused. Its saving grace is the abundance of little yellow signage, which in spite of the place being a swirling mass of confusion makes it a place with a unified design language. Heathrow is proof that there are infinities which are bigger than other infinities. No, I contradict myself. It contains multitudes. Amelia Earhart didn't go missing. She landed at Heathrow and then got lost trying to find the Arrivals Counters.

One of the downsides to living in Australia is that we are thousands of miles away from other places in Australia. A second of the downsides to living in Australia is that we are tens of thousands of miles away from other places in the world. The British Empire used this to their advantage after they had leaned from their experience in America. Having a group of subjects who were very sad with the way things were being run and who were still reasonably close, was a recipe for badness. So when it cam time to ship off the ne'er-do-wells, miscreants, hooligans, and other assorted scum that they couldn't leave in hulks any more, sending them to Australia was a brilliant option because Australia was so far away that once people were sent out here, hardly ever went back.

This arrangement was fine until the world invented trains, the telegraph, the telephone, television, and aeroplanes. Suddenly you had people who could move around the world and wanted to do so so. However, the world was still a massively massive place and Australia even with the advantage of aeroplanes is still thousands of miles away from other places in Australia and tens of thousands of miles away from other places in the world. Even with air travel, it still takes tens of hours to get anywhere.

When you put people in an environment where they can't move very far for tens of hours, they get cranky and unhappy far more easily. You can pacify them a bit with delicious dinners and alcohol (if the airline cares that much), but eventually the aeroplane has to vomit it passengers somewhere. Airport terminals are usually filled with restaurants, cafes, various kinds of shops, maybe bars and pubs but all of these things still can not eliminate the burden on passengers of travelling with other cranky passengers, hollering babies, systems that from the outside seem arcane and confusing, and the inevitable enemy of delays.

Nice cafes, restaurants, shops, bars, pubs, televisions et cetera are all nice things to have in an airport. However all of these things are secondary to good airport design. Truly brilliant airport design goes right to the heart of how the airport is built and configured; and that is something which I think that there is only one airport in the world which excels above all others.

Narita Airport which is one of the two big airports for Tokyo (the other being Haneda) has level separated Arrivals and Departures routes for passenger flow.

Imagine that you are a passenger. You have never arrived at this airport before and maybe you have never been in an airport before (except the one that you just left from). When you disembark from the aeroplane that you have arrived at, the aerobridge forces you to go to the lower level of the airport terminal.

From here, Narita Airport goes to the effort of closing off glass doors; so that the ONLY way that you can go as an arriving passenger, is straight to the Arrivals Counters. You literally have zero choices to make once you leave the aeroplane. You just keep on walking down the only corridor available to you, until you arrive at the Arrivals Counters and customs inwards.

It is literally impossible to get lost as an arriving passenger at Narita Airport because by scheduling planes to arrive at gates that are not next to each other, and then closing off doors and glass walls so that you can only go in one direction, even if you’re hungover with alcomohol, sleepy-bye-bye-pills, or sleep deprivation because of that screaming kid who didn’t let you sleep for 18 hours, you can not go anywhere else.

Likewise, when you arrive at Narita Airport to leave on a plane, you arrive at the upper level of the airport and provided you can match your boarding pass to the correct gate number, you can find your plane. Once you have passed through inwards security, while you do have a bit of freedom to visit the nice cafes, restaurants, shops, bars, pubs, televisions et cetera, the only way out is via an aeroplane.

If you want to change planes, then you can avoid passing through the Arrivals Counters and Customs, and you are directed to a set of escalators which then lead you back to Departure Lounges on the upper level.

If you are designing an airport, you have to assume that the passengers are either illiterate, or in a fugue-like zombified state because spending 18 hours on a plane will leave even the cleverest dons at Oxford, miserable shriveled wrecks of people. That screaming kid who didn’t let you sleep for 18 hours, is arguably the smartest person in the building because their response to it all, while being loud and generally annoying, is arguably the most emotionally intelligent.

Any other feature that an airport might have, however nice and ambiently pretty it is, is just a mere luxury or convenience. Unless the volume of traffic through the airport is so small that you can't have two streams of passenger flows at the same time, then  level separated Arrivals and Departures routes and closed doors, is a borderline necessity. 

Horse 3163 - Eudaimonia - Element XI - Temper

I think that the various uses of the word Temper are interesting.

Tempered Steel is perhaps the most famous of all the tempered metals and the tempering process is one of work hardening, of folding and beating it back into itself, of forging and hammering byt fire, so that the finished product will be one which is more resilient, harder, sharper, and which will not shatter when hit.

Johann Sebastian Bach's "The Well-Tempered Clavier" derives its name from the tempering process of music, which is one of adjusting the various musical notes within a key, such that they sound chromatically correct and in harmony with each other. Specifically, The Well-Tempered Clavier was a work of music in 24 keys, which can be played on a well-tempered klavier/piano/harpsichord et cetera, which has had a kind of cheating process played upon it so that all of the keys are in harmony with each other. As music relies on intervals and humans are notoriously bad at having perfect pitch, then the fact that all of the notes in all of the keys are slightly wrong to make use of a series of compromises, then we no longer care.

The third use where you are likely to come across the use of the word Temper, is in relation to the disposition of humans and animals, and their relative exercise of anger at appropriate or inappropriate moments. One expects a soldier on the battlefield to be really angry in order to be able to do his job; we expect a labourer to be really angry and channel that anger into the striking of hammers into timber, but we can all show scorn and displeasure at someone who has lost their temper and displays inappropriate anger at their family or their work colleagues. We might expect a small child who has not developed or learned proper control of their emotions to display anger for really inconsistent reasons whereas if an adult acted that way against their spouse or their employees, we correctly identify that something has gone seriously wrong.

It is the third usage of the word "Temper" that we usually associate with the disposition of humans and animals but the inspection of the other two gives rise to make me think that they are connected. Quite a lot of the training of a child is to get them to take control of their own emotions and impulses, which is a kind of work hardening. Asking children to perform tasks or play nicely with other children, is training children to play in harmony with each other. In short, work-hardening, playing in harmony, and keeping control of one's anger and emotions, is part of deanimalising of people, as left unchecked and unregulated, even people can display more than a degree of feralness.

I have heard it said that anger is not really an emotion but rather a reaction to circumstance. I do not know if I agree with this, as anger can be displayed as both in reaction to an unmet desire, or a thing going wrong, as well as in opposition to us having being wronged by someone else. In all of those cases, anger wants to play in opposition to an enemy which may be abstract or real.

The Greeks had a very strong sense of those with the word usually rendered as anger - paroxunó (παροξύνω). It denotes one who is being incensed, who is being sharpened, who is being provoked; which seems to suggest that anger is a thing happening to someone more than them having agency to be able to control it. It is that last point which determines whether or not anger is well placed. Anger which leads to action in the face of injustice, is sometimes a noble pursuit. The problem is that humans are biased, selfish, small, self-centred creatures who believe that they are the heroes of their own story. Naturally, they're going to assume that their own anger is justified in the pursuit of justice while other people's is misplaced more often than not.

Broadly speaking, the Greeks never solved the problem Aristotle linked anger to desire which he thought bordered on gluttonous. Anger in Ethics is "a desire, accompanied by pain, for a perceived revenge, on account of a perceived slight on the part of people who are not fit to slight one or one’s own". He thought that "anyone can become angry – that is easy. But to be angry with the right person, to the right degree, at the right time, for the right purpose, and in the right way – that is not easy".

On the other hand, someone like Seneca who wrote an entire essay on the subject of anger, thought that it is the "most hideous and frenzied of all the emotions". He likened anger to a kind of temporary insanity and as an emotion without a logical border, he decried "whole peoples condemned to death in an indiscriminate devastation" in suggesting that anger leads to groundlessness of actions, inability to differentiate fairness and truth, and uncontrolled agitation. 

If anger is the emotion which follows as a result, then temper is the part of mind and soul holding it back. If anger is the beast, then temper is the chains which bind it. It likely follows that self-control and not reacting when every single bone in one's body absolutely wants to take off someone's head from their neck with a club, is a far better option most of the time. If everyone was quick to listen, slow to speak, and slow to become angry, then everyone being well-tempered will likely lead to all three definitions of the word being practiced; which implies resilience, harmony, and appropriate reactions to things.

Horse 3162 - I Do Not Think It Is A "Journey"

If you look at the last remaining bastions of commercial television, then you find that the one thing that keeps on keeping on is the endless amounts of singing competitions, cooking competitions, and other skills based competitions shows. My Kitchen Idol Block Master Voice Chef Rules, with their panel of B-list celebrity judges who are hanging on before they become C-list and D-list irrelevancies, take members of the general public who have demonstrated an above average skill level at a thing and compete for some nominal amount of money and/or the fame and ovation of the people for a fortnight.

As these contestants are members of the general public, they are not necessarily skilled in the arts of wordsmithing or word wrangling and wheel out the same tired and old clichés as though they have dropped an atomic bomb of profundity upon an easily impressed general public who are also not skilled in the arts of wordsmithing or word wrangling. One cliché that makes my brain shift gears without the clutch, is...

"I am on a journey and I have learned so much about myself".

No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No.

Mamma Mia, let me go.

Apart from the obvious that I would like people to invent new clichés and turns of phrase because that is more interesting, describing life as a journey is actually problematic.

The problem with describing life as a journey, is that although we experience life as a linear chain of events, describing life as a journey implies that there is an objective final destination that people must get to. The net consequence of not reaching that implied objective final destination is that someone's life has been a failure. Experience thus far leads me to believe that the only final destination that people actually get to, is after they've travelled on the all stations train which eventually stops at Sheol, Abaddon, Gehenna and Hades. Everyone ends up being successful at arriving at the final destination. Is that really what these people want to say?

It could very well be possible that these people have gone through abject awfulness while being on their respective television shows, to the point where only the sweet release of death can salve their internal grief. Maybe they are on a journey and they realise that the only thing left is to meet Grimaldi Reaper and ask him politely to scythe through that final harvest. Death and Hades are like the monster with sharp teeth and a bottomless stomach - feeding time is all the time.

As with any of these kind of discussions, "if you think you can do better, then why don't you?" is a question worth answering. I think I can do better; so here we go.

Life is a symphony.

Think about it. A piece of music is a linear intangible object. It has various highlights and logical rules that need to be followed. Some music sounds pretty and other pieces of music sounds downright nasty and ugly. None of us are capable of playing any more than a few instruments and none of us can really play any other part than the one we happen to be playing at that particular time. You can not perform a symphony unless there are many many parts of the orchestra all playing together. Sometimes we all pause and watch as a virtuoso plays a very particular thing really well but most of the time we are all playing together in concert with everyone else.

A symphony while being a linear intangible object has no proper final destination. Unlike a journey where the objective is to get to the end, the objective of a symphony is the playing of the symphony. It is the means to itself. The point of playing a symphony is playing a symphony.

I also think that it is cruel and unfair to blame someone for playing something simply, either if that's the instrument that they have or that that is the part that they have been assigned. Unlike a competition, or a journey, or a game which is to be won, success shouldn't be measured by whether you scored more points, or arrived at the end faster, because if that was the case then if life was in fact a journey then the winner would be someone who got to the end first. The analogy of life being a journey falls to pieces in those terms because it is a silly analogy.

I think that the symphony of life works best when people play in harmony, in commonwealth, and in concert with other people. It is best to assume that unless people are playing really badly, that they are doing the best that they can, or if they are not doing the best that they can that they are trying to play along. Sometimes they just don't have a very good copy of the music sheet and are just trying to play along. Sometimes they think that they have a definitive copy of the music sheet and think that everyone else should be playing exactly as they.

Someone who is on My Kitchen Idol Block Master Voice Chef Rules is not on a journey. They are on a television competition show. They must have demonstrated an above average skill level at a thing or else they wouldn't be on the competition at all. This kind of comment, is a rather pointless kind of thing; which is purely designed to add to the manufactured drama of the story. I am afraid that I do not believe it either. You haven't come on telly to go on a personal journey of discovery. You've gone on telly to win a thing.

Horse 3161 - Arraignment Is Not Arrest

Before I went to bed on Tuesday night, the various new outlets were reporting that later on Tuesday (in America) that Donald Trump would be brought before the Supreme Court of New York State to have the 34 various charges read against him. This is where the meta-story gets interesting.

Sky News Australia breathlessly reported that Donald Trump was going to be arrested. Sky News Australia which doesn't have original thoughts of its own, as far as I can tell exists for a purely American audience via its YouTube channel, for the sole purpose of adding legitimacy to the existing narrative of Fox News, through the mechanism of being exotic. Fox News in America was also trumpeting that Donald Trump was going to be arrested. Nine Entertainment Co. through Nine Network and the newspapers of The Age and The Sydney Morning Herald were also reporting that Donald Trump was going to be arrested.

However, NPR, the BBC, Politico, the ABC, DW and NHK were all reporting correctly that Donald Trump was going to be arraigned. Now before you accuse me of 'liberal bias', the news feed that I saw on NPR's Twitter account yesterday morning (Wednesday), showed Donald Trump walking into the courtroom as free as a bird. What's going on here? Does reality have a 'liberal bias' or could it be that Sky News Australia and Fox News were deliberately lying to their audience for the purposes of creating a narrative going forward? The truth is that word mean things and that Donald Trump was arraigned and not arrested.

An 'arraignment' is when the accused has the list of charges against them read to them, so that they might be able to mount some kind of future defence. An 'arrest' is when the accused is physically taken into custody and held and then has the list of charges against them read to them. The nature of the charges against Donald Trump is such that he was never going to be arrested but rather arraigned. Arrest warrants almost without exception, are written against people who pose a physical threat to other people, either because of a history of violence and/or criminal damage and Donald Trump has as far as I can tell, no history of that at all. Arrest warrants might be written against people, where because of the nature of their enemies, a physical threat is posed to them. Now given that the failure rate of US Presidents due to fast moving bullets is 11.25%, then the physical threat posed to Donald Trump is non-zero but it is not that much higher than the threat to the general populace because of the United States' dangerously stupid gun laws.

Arraignments on the other hand, are read to people in courts because the state thinks that it has some kind of criminal case to be prosecuted. The most common arraignments that happen are drink driving charges, where the accused has been charged, and is generally very compliant with police. In such criminal cases, the accused is generally quite remorseful and ashamed and is staring headlong into the void of what they think is a very dark future. They pose little to no threat of physical violence or damage to persons and property. I can also tell you that many Arraignments are read to people in courts in absentia, where the person has committed some kind of non-physical crime and would rather take the transcript of charges away for analysis later. Justice might very well be blind but she doesn't actually care if the accused is in the room where it happens or not. Justice who comes with the set of balances will weigh up the cases and will strike judgement with her sword in due time, whether or not the accused is there.

So knowing that Donald Trump was going to be arraigned and not arrested, why report that he was going to be arrested? Because if you are Sky News Australia or Fox News, you can then paint Donald Trump as some kind of falsely accused hero; which fits in nicely with your general attack at a supposedly corrupt court system and a supposedly corrupt media. "Look at us. We are the sole purveyors of truth. Do not believe the others. They are false prophets!".

The unwritten truth is that the prosecution wouldn't have even attempted to arrange Donald Trump unless they knew that there was a good to excellent chance that they could prove the charges. The evidence is must be very very strong, or else D.A. Alvin Bragg wouldn't have pressed charges.

Still, the fact that Sky News Australia and presumably Fox News would use the word 'arrest' instead of 'arraignment', which is functionally a lie, either indicates that they want to spin this coin at some point in the future or they that genuinely think that Donald Trump is sunk.

Horse 3160 - Eudaimonia - Element X - Hope

In reading through Plato's "The Republic" in which he imagines the perfect future society/city state, one of the words that comes up with a surprising amount of regularity is the word Elpis (ἐλπίς). It is strange because Elpis appears to be kind of like hope, or expectation, or some kind of trust, which might be similar to the later Roman concept of Fidus. I find it weird because when Plato speaks about the Republic as an imagined future thing, he seems to almost take the expectation that society is going to naturally emerge towards it. I do not suffer from the mislaid illusion that society naturally tends towards rule by the wise, the kind, or the benevolent but the hope that if society collectively puts in the moral work to achieve such and end, is certainly worthy of hope.

It seems to me that in trying to nail down elements of Eudaimonia, the ones that are further along in the list are both harder to identify as well as harder to do. Invariably they all have to start from some kind of civic philos; which also implies that all of them require active work. 

The broadest conception for a definition that I can find for 'elpis' within Greek philosophy, encompasses the whole realm of the expectation of a thing or event happening, or that the person or thing will do what they say that they will do. Elpis can be applied to both family members, or more generally the leaders and administrators in civic philos (such as judges, police, and the entire civil service, the system of civic fabric itself, as well as to the quality of workmanship that goes into a thing. 

Hope as both a moral work and the product of moral work, starts from the standpoint that not only is someone looking outside of themselves but that they are deliberately thinking the bext of them. As applied to people, there are two classic stories which encompass the idea of Hope as a moral work; both of which have been adapted into movies.

The tale "Beauty And The Beast" is the story of Belle, who in the book is described as a victim of horrible circumstance when she is selected by The Beast against her will to be the object of his affection. The moral work of Belle in that story is mostly done by Belle who has to overcome the obvious and very scary thought that The Beast in in fact beastly. We learn throughout the course of the narrative that the moral work that Belle does is learning to love the Beast despite the fact that he looks beastly on the outside and in fact has a truly horrible past for which he is being punished. The moral work of pretending to love the the Beast to appease him, eventually becomes the actual act of doing so. This is the act of Hope not as a ethereal idea but as a hard thing being worked out.

The other story which is similar is the story of "The Magic Mask" in which a man who looks horribly disfigured, puts on a mask which makes him look beautiful to the rest of the work. Eventually after years and years, his own face has grown to conform to that of the Magic Mask and when he takes it off after many years, he has become beautiful. This story was adapted in part to become "The Mask" starring Jim Carrey in which the main character develops confidence in the process of wearing The Mask and pretending to be the character that lives inside of it.

Now both of these stories touch on the idea of Elpis in that in the act of pretending to be the qualities which the characters set out to be, they eventually acquire it through living out those qualities. The idea that one hopes in someone else, or in something else, or for some future set of circumstance, can only be achieved by the decision to hope in someone else, or in something else, or for some future set of circumstance; including if that something else is at the moment not possible. The Beast is only changed into someone worthy of affection because Belle has chosen to make him the object of her affection because she hopes he will be worthy.

This obviously has all kind of implications across a whole range of disciplines where the abstract overlay is not necessarily immediately concrete. People at the cutting edge of science have some kind of hope that what they are doing will contribute to the body of knowledge. People who have hope in political ideologies want to make the world better through the act of political policy. Religious people have hope that the belief set that they have is true, while irreligious people have a similar hope that there isn't anything beyond. Investors have a hope that the money that they spend will eventually give back a return on their investment. Parents have a hope that their children will go on to grow up and lead lives of their own. All of the above has to do with the deliberate act of hope in a future which has not yet arrived. Even at the smallest level, I for instance have hope that a Mars Bar will be delicious, as opposed to not being delicious. 

Of course it would be remiss of me to talk about Hope without mentioning the absence of it. People without hope are in a place which is awful and pitiful. The outcome of not having any hope can lead to a mind which is left unchained and ends up doing work upon itself, to the point of depression, despair and in the worst cases, suicide. A person without hope lacks the expectation that there is any kind of good future or good things happening to them. If therefore seems almost cruel to demand that someone with an absence of hope, somehow generate it for themselves. The act of giving people hope, either through changing their circumstances, or changing their mindset, requires practical demonstration of civic philos; which as with any moral work is expensive for the people doing that work. 

Yet again we are brought back to the idea of practical civic philos, which in this case means deliberately thinking the best of other people, despite and perhaps in spite of what they actually are. This may very well require us to be like Belle and think of others as worthy of saving and showing philos to, even though they look like and possibly are beasts. It might require us to look upon others as though they are wearing The Magic Mask, with the expectation that they will be eventually changed to match the expected or imagined outer appearance. It may even require us to think that we too can be better people and then work and act accordingly. The entire self-help industry, gym memberships, 12-step programs, therapy and counselling, education and training, are all based on that same premise of hope, that some aspect of ourselves can be made better.

Moreover, the practice of Hope, that is the work of the expectation of wanting the best for other people, is related to an alignment position because in expecting and wanting the best for someone else invariably means changing the circumstances so that that can happen; even if it is only changing the dialogue between people. That too requires moral work.

Horse 3159 - Apparently It's Got Groove; It's Got Meaning

A well-a well-a well-a, oop!

Tell me more, tell me more.

Like who is this for?

Tell me more, tell me more.

Should we show it the door?

Sydney Buses have been doing their level best of late to get me to subscribe to a streaming service to watch a new series called "Grease: Rise Of The Pink Ladies". To put this in context, this series is presumably a prequel of sorts to the film "Grease" and to a time before the protagoist of that film, Sandra Dee, arrives at Rydell High School. I am intriuged by this series, not because I intent to subscribe to the streaming service but because I am quite quite bewildered as to whom the intended audience is. The whole reason why this series was greenlight is a complete mystery. Here is why.

"Grease", starring John Travola as Danny Zukko and Olivia Newton-John as Sandra Dee, was a rock-and-roll musical which was released against the unexpected blockbuster of 1977's "Star Wars". "Grease" was released in 1978 and for its day, was a retro musical set in 1958. I get this. Retro is basically a form of nostalgia which has been packaged up and resold as a cheap dopamine generator. Grease was a piece of pastiche which made use of the tropes from the late 1950s, especially the musical tropes of doo-wop changes, and the blues I-IV-V-I sequence, then dressed it in the bubblegum version of the era.

Growing up as a kid, there were several radio stations which played rock-and-roll music from the 1950s and 1960s, for the Baby Boomer generation and the tail end of the silent generation. I have a strange knowledge of music which was made in the 20 years before I was born for that reason. Retro seems to follow on at about 20 years behind whatever is current as kids get a handle on the media that their parents lived through. Grease as a piece of retro media in 1978 made perfect sense in the day.

It follows that Grease itself as a piece of media, is going to get its own echo retro which should follow. As it was released in 1978, then that echo retro should have arrived in 1998 but it did not. Instead, what this TV Series is, is a piece of echo echo retro, which has been made 25 years after an echo, 20 years after an echo, 20 years after the original as retro. 

Perhaps we should blow you mind to bits even further. Grease which was set in 1958, looks at kids who were in their final year of high school. This means that they are 18 years old in the story. 1958 - 18 = 1940. Children who were born in 1940 are not Baby Boomers but Silent Generation children and who would be 83 years old in 2023.

Here's the problem. "Grease: Rise Of The Pink Ladies" is set in a time where you have Silent Generation children and Greatest and Lost Generation parents. If this is a show about intergenerational conflict, then the antagonists, who are Greatest and Lost Generation parents are mostly all dead. Even the youngest of the Silent Generation are 78 years old now.

Are Silent Generation viewers going to be watching this show through the lens of nostalgia? I doubt it. Are Baby Boom viewers going to be watching this show through the lens of replayed retro? I doubt it. If this is made for presumably Generation X, Y, and Z (because the oldest of Generation Alpha is now 12 years old) then who of them are going to watch this through the sense of retro? I do not know.

Maybe this is meant to be watched in the same way that I watch Poirot. Poirot is set in the 1930s; which means that as a Generation X member, it plays more like a period piece. I feel the same way about watching Granada's Sherlock Holmes which starred Jeremy Brett. Most of those stories are set in the 1890s; which means that if Holmes is in his 30s, then he was born in the 1860s or 1850s. 

As "Grease: Rise Of The Pink Ladies" is set in the 1950s, it is set in the era of the Trente Gloriuses, in which household incomes are still rising, television is starting to become a thing in people's houses, and the invention of the teenager is a thing as they are able to rush into the workforce and get meaningful jobs and buy really cool cars. These last two things are like a major slap in the face to the teenagers of today, the late Generation Z kids, whose jobs have been replaced by machines before they ever got to work in them and where all of the cool cars have disappeared. 

I grew up in the tail end of the Cold War. As such, I got to witness the dismantling of the welfare state and the progressive breaking of the social contract and ladder that the people who had fought in the war made with the children of the future to make the world better. The Silent Generation who never had to fight in the war and the Baby Boomers who mostly didn't have to fight in a war, have spent the last 40 years, kicking the ladder out from underneath them. Some of Generation X have been able to jump onto the ladder, some have not. Less of Generation Y have been able to jump onto the ladder. Generation Z can't jump on the ladder at all. Generation Alpha doesn't know that there's a ladder. 

All of this means to say that I do not know who the intended audience of this show is. Prime TV watching demographic used to be 18-48. None of these people saw Grease as anything other than echo retro. To set a show in presumably 1955-58, is asking the audience to imagine an optimism which they never ever witnessed. The people who saw Grease the first time as retro in 1978, are mostly old and unlikely to want to subscribe to streaming services. The people who lived through the 1950s at that age, are even less likely to. The people who have only ever seen Grease as received media have been given a show which on the face of it, they can not inherently relate to. This means that if "Grease: The Rise Of The Pink Ladies" is going to work as a TV series, it will have to do so as a period piece which only survives on the strength of it writing.

Summer dreams, ripped at the seams but oh...

Those summer... Niiiiiiiiights!

Actually, Mrs R came up with the best answer for who this is for.

It's for theatre nerds. 

Horse 3158 - The Worst Opening Ever

I was asked via the book of faces to write a piece about the "dumbest opening in chess." 

I confess that I am not one for remembering a bunch of formal openings for the reason that the beginning of a game of chess is sufficiently fluid enough that formality almost immediately falls apart. The beginning of a game of chess is about trying to control those 16 squares at the centre of the board and develop as much stuff as quickly as possible. That can either be done aggressively and dynamically or glacially and defensively. People who are deep into chess theory will tell you all about the Queen's Gambit, King's Indian Defence, Cheese Sandwich Opening Horowitz Defence, Hippopotamus Defence, et cetera. However when it comes to the "dumbest opening in chess", one opening stands alone. It is so deliberately stupid that it brings forth laughter when played at the highest level. 

- King's Pawn to the centre.

- do not care what the opposition does

- King to the second rank.

Or:

1. e4 e5

2. Ke2 ????!!!!

White pawn to e4 is the perfect book opening as this opens the space in front of the King, for both a Bishop and the Queen to advance into the field of battle.

Black countering with e5 is a not a bad opening of itself but it doesn't put any pressure on the White Pawn which has advanced.

White King to e2 is so bonkers-mental-bad-insane, to the point where the standard notation can't even contain the immensity of just how terrible it is. It is so immensely terrible that its nickname reflects the notion that someone must have been so utterly zonked out of their brain on drugs that they no longer have control of their senses. The name of this opening is... The Bongcloud Opening.

Supposedly invented by user "Lenny McBongcloud" at chess.com, the "Bongcloud Opening" is terrible for the following reasons.

1 - it actively blocks the Queen and the Bishop; which means that the next few moves must entail correcting the deliberate stupidity.

2 - because the King has moved, it can no longer Castle with the Rooks any more.

3 - because the King has advanced onto a space which has practically no cover, it becomes immediately vulnerable.

Space behind pawns is excellent because your own pieces can dance around like the Bolshoi Ballet. Space around a King is like sending Kaiser Willhelm or King George off to stand in front of the trenches in World War I. The Bongcloud Opening surrenders control of the central space, surrenders any and all tempo to the opposition, is both attackingly and defensively stupid, and so with all that in mind it deservedly gets four Question Marks and four Exclamation Marks.

So why do it?

Chess is a game which on the surface is about thinking logically and critically. Scratch the surface even just a little bit and you find out that chess is actually a sport which contains all of the bile, acid, smugness, humiliation, partisanship, and rivalry of any other sport. If chess was actually held with full size people in a stadium then it would have jerseys for the teams, scarves, and grandstands of fans chanting and hurling abuse at each other. The game itself is supposed to be a battlefield played out in miniature, though why the clergy have katanas is beyond me. If chess was held in stadia in the same way that darts, netball, basketball, cornhole, judo, or other such stadium sport was held, then all of the raw emotion of humanity would spill out into the chequered field just like it does everywhere else.

But it doesn't.

Chess is held on a tiny tiny stadium, mostly in silence, between two pugilists who are both playing not only a game which involves thinking logically and critically but which contains bile, acid and humiliation. All of the bile, acid, smugness, humiliation, partisanship, and rivalry of this sport, can be described by notation; in silence.

The Bongcloud Opening is not about gaining position, materiel, space, tempo, initiative, or any other logical advantage. No. The Bongcloud Opening is about expressing to the opposition that you think that they are the intellectual equivalent of pondscum and that you can still win by punching yourself in the face. The Bongcloud Opening is about showing open contempt for the opposition by physically demonstrating that you think that they are beneath you. It is open and obvious self-sabotage which is designed to induce confusion and outrage in the opposition. Why would you do something as stupid as that? 

It is the same as Manchester United starting nine players against an opposition who is a hundred places below them in the league pyramid, in an FA Cup start. It is the same as Juan Manuel Fangio patiently walking across the track at Le Mans to his car at the start of the 24 Hour Race while everyone else sprinted. It is the same as sending out a small child to fight a seven foot tall champion. The Bongcloud Opening is an act of egregious intellectual aggression. It is also for the reasons stated above, the height of stupidity. The Bongcloud Opening is the open brag that you are better than the opposition, to the point where you can deliberately injure yourself and still win.

It had better be proven though. Winning a game using this opening will send other players into a spiral of confusion so quickly, that they can be used to power a small city. Winning after having used this opening makes the opposition question their sanity and want to flip the board in frustration. Losing after having used this opening is just desserts, just deserts, just disappointment. Losing after having used this opening merely serves to prove the foolhardiness and utter stupidity of the person who did it. It may even be a perverse form of generosity in that it's practically guaranteed to give away ELO Ranking Points to the opponent.