C21 - Conventions
The really useful thing about not having a written Constitution is that the inverse of a thing being unconstitutional and then causing a massive bunfight (which is a feature of the United States' political process) is that there can't actually be anything unconstitutional without a constitution to strike that off. What this means is that the British Parliament is always in a perpetual state of flux; where the rules are decided on an almost ad hod basis and convention lasts exactly as long as it needs to. Convention breaks down either at the point where it is no longer useful or at the point where the players in the system have already caused so much of an outrage that breaking an unwritten convention is the last straw the breaks the camel's back.
What we saw at the end of the Johnson premiership is that he was forced out of the job after everyone agreed that he was unfit for purpose. What we saw at the end of the Truss premiership is that she forced herself out of the job after she decided that the purpose was unfit for purpose. As I write this where nobody is in charge and everyone is free to eat Milo out of the tin (om nom nom nom), is that the general consensus is that the King should dissolve parliament because parliament itself is unfit for purpose.
It this sounds like an outrage of Royal Prerogative, bear in mind that the 1975 Australian Constitutional Crisis was resolved in the most sensible way possible when the Governor-General dissolved parliament and in a pique of democracy, sent the public to a General Election. Just imagine that. The 2022 Conservative Party omnishambles can best be resolved through the most democratic means possible. The best thing about not having a constitution is that Parliament can't very well complain that it is undemocratic to refer the problem to the people via the most democratic means. If they people then decided that they still wanted chaos and disarray, then it will be democratic chaos and disarray and not at all unconstitutional.
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M19 - The Burgerverse
The Sausage McMuffin exists. Sausage and Egg McMuffin exists. Egg and Bacon McMuffin exists. All of them have cheese on them. The only way that you can normally buy a McMuffin with Sausage and Bacon together is with a Mighty McMuffin which has Cheese, Sausage, Egg and Bacon; which is actually a Sausage McMuffin plus a Egg and Bacon McMuffin minus a McMuffin.
I do not know what kind of falling out that Sausage and Bacon had. It is clear that the mediator in the relationship is Egg, for in the middle of a Mighty McMuffin it is Egg who keeps them separate. Egg is very obviously the one in this group who is the boring friend but without whom the whole group would descend into chaos. Cheese who is everywhere, is just happy to flit between every clique on the menu and even hangs out after breakfast has ended. Cheese will play with Chicken, Beef, Fish. Bacon will also kind of play after breakfast but neither Egg nor Sausage will dare show their faces after 1030am.
Not that I am all that likely to spend very many of my Dollarpounds at the Scottish restaurant because as I walk through the Queen Victoria Building of a morning, I see the McDonald's next to a Luneburger which reminds me of the smell of spew, and Lush and Oz Hair which both interfere with my eyes. Somehow or other, the landlords of the Queen Victoria Building have managed to create a magic roundabout which is a horse tornado of unpleasant smells.
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O14 - Order Of Magnitude
I have used this turn of phrase on a number of occasions, with a very specific meaning, and the other day my boss said that he always assumed that it just meant 'a lot' and sort if intuitively knew what it meant but this morning he asked me what it means. To be fair, I love things like this where you have a technical term for something but yet you can use it in normal conversation and people will kind of already know what you mean without actually knowing what you mean.
In mathematics and by extension in the sciences, an 'order of magnitude' is a multiple of the base that you are using. If you say that the new Capulet Firenza with the 4.0L V8 engine can four-wheel-drive costs $22,000 and it actually costs $220,000 then that is an order of magnitude difference because it costs 10x as much. The difference between 1 metre and 1 kilometre is 3 orders of magnitude because it is 1000x smaller, 1 kilometre is 1 meter times ten times ten times ten. The difference between a millionaire and a billionaire is also 3 orders of magnitude; Leon Musk owns more than one house or ten houses or even a hundred houses, he could buy a thousand houses; which seems like too many houses to have.
Magnitude is just an embiggenment of a thing. 'Magnify' means to look at something that has been embiggened. 'Magna' means an embiggened version of a Lancer. 'MAGA' means an embiggened version of a narciscist.
Harry Potter And The Order Of Magnitude is when Harry Potter does something ten times more impressive than a regular wizard, like actually writing that document for you instead of say "It looks like you are writing a letter. Would you like help with that?".
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T26 - Weird Accent Shift
It has to be said that the purest expression of any accent, be it regional in the case of a vast unwieldy place like the United States, or a tiny place with discreet pockets like Britain, a broad shaded type of affair like Germany, or a mostly uniform place like Australia, is always that part of the population who are not only the most receptive to their parents accents but also their friends; that is, small children.
Kids up until about the age of 5 do not really develop meaningful accents. From about the age of 5-10 when they interact with other children, is when the twin forces of home and school start making massive changes to the way someone speaks; to the point that by about ages 10, 11 and 12, the process is complete.
In Australia we have a 'broad' and a 'refined' accent; with small regional variations but there isn't very much. Moreover, there isn't really a lot of variation between the Bogan West where I live and the decidedly posh Northern Beaches where I work. Whether I want to or not (usually not), I get to hear lots and lots of primary school and high school kids having conversations on the train and buses. I was already aware that there is a difference between my lack of Australian Questioning Intonation (AQI) and more people, I was already aware of my slightly different vowel constructions but recently I became aware of mid-tonal dips in long vowels.
I had always assumed that this was a feature of people's speech which I didn't understand; as though mid-sentence it sounds as though the world was falling apart. To my, a mid-tonal dip in a long vowel sounds like a whinge. What I am finding though, is that this is happening in perfectly boring sentences by a lot of younger people. I do not know if this is the impetuousness of youth or if this is in fact a slight change in the way that our flower of Australian English has bloomed.
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R7 - The Right to Vote
There is no explicit right to vote in the US Constitution. The 14th Amendment states that the right to vote can not be denied because of a previous condition of slavery and the 19th Amendment states that the right can not be denied on the grounds of sex. Neither of those Amendments prevent a legislature from denying someone to vote on some other grounds and neither of those Amendments express in a positive sense that the right to vote actually existed in the first place.
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M23 - Michael Jordan
To be perfectly honest, basketball is not a sport that I care much about. I have some broad idea about how it works but beyond knowing the names of a few teams and a few players, I can not say that I am a fan. Even so, even I who does not care about basketball, has heard of Michael Jordan. Probably as much as 30 years after Michael Jordan was at the height of his basketball tidying skills (basketball is a tidying-up game), you can still see kinds on the street who are wearing Chicago Bulls jerseys with the famous No.23 on them.
What I want to know, is if the people who are wearing a Chicago Bulls Jordan #23 jersey in 2022, actually know who he is. I imagine that there must be at least some portion of the population who wear the jersey in the same way as people wear Ramones t-shirts; never having seen them live, or even on video.
The weird thing is that I have probably seen more of the Jordan #23 on the sporting field in the past two years than I ever cared to in the 1990s. Michael Jordan owns half of the 23XI Racing Team in NASCAR, along with Denny Hamlin; so #23 is currently in use as a sporting number. I seriously doubt though that the kids who are walking around in a Chicago Bulls Jordan #23 jersey in 2022 are likely to know this. I could be wrong.
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G5 - Good Enough
The people who really really appear to love burgers from the Scottish Restaurant (if you dare mention it's name then the ghost of Halloween past, dressed as an evil clown, will get you) are mostly small children and parents who want to appease small children. If you ask most adults, there are likely not many who will tell you that their favourite restaurant is the Scottish Restaurant but they will admit that it is good enough.
"Good Enough" is a similar principle to YAGNT (You Ain't Gonna Need That). If a product is good enough then it doesn't need to try harder to chase profits, and the general public who are life support systems for bank accounts and wallets with credit and debit cards will give up their dollarpounds for products which are not super satisfying but good enough.
It is said that perfect is the enemy of good. That is that in chasing perfection, a solution which would have done the job might be overlooked. Good enough is the slightly shabby cousin of good, where the solution doesn't explicitly have to be fantastic.
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H31 - Halloween
It is weird that in Australia, when it is still daylight outside after 7pm, that people want to appropriate a Northern Hemisphere post-Harvest festival. It is also weird that as we have no such holiday as Thanksgiving in Australia, that Christmas things are already in the shops and Christmas songs are already being played over the tannoy in shops. Santa Claus is coming to town but he has to walk past all of the pumpkins to get there.
The Mosman Chamber of Commerce issued no requests to businesses in the area to be equipped with lollies, as in previous years and so the number of children that we had arrive at our offices this year was only two. I heard a knock at the door, walked downstairs and saw a boy and a girl standing there, just sort of starting at me. One of them yelled "Lollies!" before they thrust their hands out and when I told them that I didn't have anything, I heard "****head!" before they both ran off back down the stairs giggling as though they'd made some funny joke.
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