two-pot screamer dot com

eleven a, a tiny bar in Highlander lane is the only place in Melbourne I have found that does $5 cocktails during happy hour. Happy hour runs every Thursday and Friday from 4PM to 7PM, with an “Extra Happy Hour” from 10PM to 11PM on Fridays. Enjoy…

Ding Dong Lounge was a crowded sweat-pit for the Dern Rutlidge reunion show. With a few years of live shows, one full-length album and a single that was “played a couple of times on JJJ”, they gathered quite a large following. A lone heckler spoke for the entire crowd when Craig tried to plug their new band, Young Breeder - “get back together you cunts!”

The band played all the best tracks from their album, Johnny No Stars; and when they played Lines on the Table during the encore, the crowd sang along to the chorus. It was a great show.

The low-light of the night was witnessing the worst pick-up attempt I have ever seen - a guy making significant eye contact while singing along with the chorus of “Smells like Teen Pregnancy”. The “get away from me you freak” facial expression he got in return was priceless.

Walking home, I saw two girls crawling around on the floor of the 7-Eleven opposite Billboard nightclub looking for a pill they had dropped. How does that quote go - only users lose drugs?

Maybe it’s because I’m stuck in an airless office with no windows in sight, or maybe it’s just because there is a hint of spring in the air, but I’ve become obsessed with the weather.

I’ve given up on The Age’s weather page (softcore!), and gone straight to the source. I am currently refreshing the image below about 5 times per hour. If anyone tries to make casual conversation about the weather, they had better watch out or I’ll go all Eric Olthwaite on their arses.

This blog is semi-anonymous. My friends know about it, and I send non-work email from my address here but, if you search for my full name on the Internet, this site won’t come up.

What does come up (not surprisingly) is the website of a guy with an identical name. It’s not a very common name, so getting a number 1 Google placing for that search term is as simple as registering a www.yourname.com domain name.

The freaky part of this is that this guys is so similar to me that he could be my (evil?) twin…providing we had parents with a twisted sense of humour when it came to baby names.

Let’s have a look at the similarities…

• We both have the same name. I’ve already covered this, but it’s here to bulk up my list a little.
• We both live in the same country. He lives in New South Wales, I live in Victoria.
• We are both the same age. Well, approximately. We were both definitely at uni at the same time.
• We are both geeks. We both have websites and both studied a tecnology-related degree.
• We are/were both involved in radio. When I first found this guy, he had a show on student radio (just like me). Now he does a show on community radio, and the closest I get is my RRR subscription.
• We have a similar sense of humour. I base this purely on the fact that we both read out “strange but true” news stories on our respective radio shows…mine were possibly slightly more sordid… “In retrospect, lighting the match was my big mistake. But I was only trying to retrieve the gerbil”
• We even look a little similar….in that fresh-faced, anglo-saxon, geeky sort of way. I can’t find a recent photo, but here’s one of him in high school (I’m feeling a little “stalker-ish” right now) and, if you put his photo up against one of mine from the same period and kind of squint, we look identical!

I try to keep my work life and my personal life separate. The people I work with don’t need to read about my interest in boobies, so work-related stuff goes on my professional website, that is written under my full name.

…Which brings me to the reason I am a little annoyed. My professional website covers a niche area of techology that I specialise in. Amongst limited circles, I am known for expertise in this area. Professional reputation is important, and (sorry if this sounds all “marketing grad”) my name is like a brand that I want people to associate with this area of technology. Therefore it is kind of annoying that anyone who searches for my name on the internet sees Stuart Lastname - Enthusiastic Masturbator…or whatever.

*sigh* Okay, it sounds kind of petty (especially in light of my previous slag on business students) . Maybe I’m the evil twin…

Update: His site has fallen off the front page of Google as it is now “under construction” and contains no content.

Right now, my sole financial plan is … don’t spend more money than I earn. It’s not very sophisticated, but I think I’ve done okay so far. It’s easy to let lifestyle expand to match income; to spend that bonus (speaking hypothetically here) on a fucking huge television instead of investing for the future. Plenty of people earning vastly more than the averate Australian income live paycheque to paycheque.

I think it’s time to move on to a slightly more complex plan…like investing in an emu farm, or helping out that nice sounding Nigerian man who keeps sending me emails. But, before I do that, I should probably do the following…

• Full financial audit. Nothing says “fun” like a spreadsheet with graphs of money in vs. money out.
• Read a book on financial stuff. I picked the smallest one I could find; more a pamplet thatn a book really. 10 Key Steps to Wealth by “Australia’s best known financial adviser” Paul Clitheroe is only 86 pages long - small enough to read in a couple of days on the train.
• See a financial planner. The Financial Planning Association of Australia has a page that offers help to find a financial planner. I wonder if I’ll be able to find one who doesn’t get a cut out of anyone they refer to a specific product.
• Think about superannuation. This one is left until last because retirement seems too far away to worry about (I’m sure I’ll end up regretting this eventually). Two websites - Calculating superannuation needs and the Federal government’s “super choice” website

For me, thinking about money stuff is like pulling teeth. Even writing this blog entry (which is more of a personal TODO list than anything that anyone else will be interested in reading) was painful. I purposely did not study this stuff when I had the chance because I found it, well, boring, and I wanted to spend my life playing with expensive toys (ie/ technology) instead.

As someone who studied engineering, I think the general perception of business students amongst fellow engineering students was…

1. They’re kind of thick. They’re not studying engineering after all, and the level of mathematics they need to know is weak. A business lecturer might spend an entire lecture telling the class that profit is equal to income minus expenses.
2. They’re kind of soulless. When people leave high school and feel that they have to pick something to do at uni, but still don’t know what they want to do with the rest of their lives they never pick a difficult course. The path of least resistance doesn’t lead to a degree in physics or mathematics. Out of any university course, Business probably has the smallest number of people who are actually passionate about what they do. The majority of people are there to keep their parents happy or have some vague idea that studying business will be a good way to help them earn money in the future.
3. They’re kind of boring. You won’t find anyone with purple hair in the business faculty. Even though everyone has read Richard Branson’s biography and knows that they need to “think different” just like him, there seems to be a herd mentality.
4. They’re kind of slimy. You just know they’re read the book that says that you can get people to like you if you have a firm handshake and use their name in conversation. Firm handshakes from business majors have the opposite effect.

Maybe, with all of our sniggering about people who wanted to be the pointy-haired boss from Dilbert, we’ve missed the fact that there might be a tiny bit of worthwhile content in a business course.

I can’t find the issue right now, but I recently read in New Scientist magazine about a study which showed that male chimps would pay^* to be able to view images of female chimps’ butts and images of high-status males.

The not so hidden sub-text of the story was, of course, the obvious parallels between apes and humans. It certainly helps to explain the popularity of FHM magazine, with its content of cheesecake and sports stars, but the question that remains in my mind is…what do the female chimps want?

^* In this case, “pay” means exchange food treats for…ever seen a chimp with a wallet?

Today’s irony was seeing a guy with a massive gut wearing a Gap Athletic t-shirt.

Today’s irony was seeing a guy with a massive gut wearing a Gap Athletic t-shirt.

I write compulsively (maybe I should blog more often?). I always carry a pen and paper with me. One time I whipped it out to jot down something interesting at a family event. My uncle, with a wink and a nudge speculated that I’d brought it along to write down girl’s phone numbers…which, now I think about it, is a little creepy because I was related to everyone there.

The latest media beat-up, picked up today by breakfast radio and television, along with various newspapers is the “NSW schools political correctness controversy”. The line taken by all media outlets is perfectly illustrated by Simon Benson, State Political Reporter for the Daily Telegraph, who wrote a short article entitled “’Mad’ bureaucrats censor Jesus Christ” on March 3, 2005.

The son of God has been written out of parts of NSW school English texts.

“Before Christ” (BC) has been removed from literacy test history books and replaced with “Before Common Era” (BCE) in what the NSW Opposition described as political correctness gone mad.

About 150,000 students who sat through the English Language and Literacy Assessment (ELLA) test on Tuesday were confronted with the new term in an extract entitled “The Surveyor’s Problem”.

It described an event which took place in 509 BCE in Northern Egypt where a Government surveyor had been ordered by the Pharaoh to find out why the Nile River kept flooding.

A footnote to the extract explained BCE means “Before Common Era” (also known as BC).

This story has been successful because it is really three stories in one. Firstly, the NSW Liberal State Opposition and Federal Liberal government get to sink the boot into the NSW State Labour government. Secondly, it’s seen as an attack on Christianity; it didn’t get to be the world’s dominant religion by taking this sort of thing lying down. And thirdly, it’s the familiar “meta-story” of “political correctness gone mad”, and a perfect opportunity to piss on the Australian “Elite” – which, surprisingly, doesn’t mean politicians, millionaire businessmen and media tycoons but rather middle-class teachers and public servants.

As Benson’s article goes on to mention, “…the BCE footnote is used in international scientific, academic and museum contexts”.

So the controversy boils down to a high school English exam using a term used by academics, and experts in the field, rather than the general public.

One morning TV presenter perhaps missed the point of English comprehension exams in general when he pointed out that the footnoted term might confuse students.

The argument that the term should not be used, as it is not understood by the general public falls over entirely when applied to any other high school subject.

• Computer science - Every component inside a computer is now going to be called a “chip”, no matter what it is.
• Physics – the term “mass” to be replaced with “weight”. “Centrifugal force” (even though, despite public opinion, there is no such thing) will take the place of “centripetal force”.
• Chemistry - sucrose, fructose, glucose etc will now just be referred to as “carbs”.
• English – “verb” will be replaced by “doing word”, adjective by “describing word”.

Benson and his knuckle-dragging cohorts in the media and State Opposition should leave academic standards alone and dedicate themselves to a task more suiting their Stone Age intellects…like, say, a quest for fire.