We Mentioned the War

Yesterday's tour of Perth bars was conducting by a charming German guide. And as we got chatting, the topics were many and varied, and at one stage I mentioned movies. A hypothetical other person in the group then described a recent film she'd seen portraying the round up of Jews in Paris in 1942, and as she got further into her description, she realised she'd ventured into awkward territory, but that it was too late to back out. She sensitively continued, and the German guide listened quietly, not revealing any discomfort, but who knows what she was feeling inside.

Later in the evening, another member of the group happened to mention Concentration Camps, and again, we found ourself in a curious place, until the conversation changed again.

That got me wondering. Is 65 years enough time for young Germans to feel distanced from these events. Would it cause offence to them should atrocities in the Second World War be mentioned?

Can my German readers please advise?

Let's Have a Drinkie

Oh dear, where did it go?

Last night I visited the site of Perth's first Chinese restaurant. The kitchen was destroyed in a fire a few years ago, and rather than repair it, a new owner converted it into a classy bar, the Canton.

Manufacturing Plausible Reports

Sometimes in the office, we're called upon to write reports, to produce figures perhaps to display a trend over time, or to compare performance of one organisation against another. Should you ever be called upon to do the same, I thought I'd write down some helpful tips to get you started.

1. When generating statistics, don't invent numbers ending in 0. Believable figures usually end in either a 3 or a 7, and if you can use a decimal point, that's even better. For example, someone asks you for expenditure figures on salaries for the last five years. As a noob, I'd come up with something resembling -


 2006   $100,000
 2007   $100,000
 2008   $100,000
 2009   $100,000
 2010   $100,000


But with many years of experience, I'd write:

 2006   $100,004.87

 2007   $100,006.93

 2008   $100,009.03

 2009   $100,100.17

 2010   $100,101.19

2. Include cryptic footnotes below your table. Clearly if you write something unintelligible that nobody else understands, you'll be regarded as a boffin. For instance, below the salary expenditures add this:

(a) Source: AGONxx12.23 report{@29-03-2011.14.47.01.111}
(b) Exfoliated expenditure, semi-adjusted for CPI, including Krypton Factor

3. Use a tiny font. This indicates that you're very scientific and precise. By contrast a large font is for a kindergarten.

Putting it all together, here's our final table.

Salary Expenditure 2006-2010

 2006     $100,004.87
 2007     $100,006.93
 2008     $100,009.03
 2009     $100,100.17
 2010     $100,101.19
(a) Source: AGONxx12.23 report{@29-03-2011.14.47.01.111}
(b) Exfoliated expenditure, semi-adjusted for CPI, including Krypton Factor

Jenga Fiddlesticks

The idea of this game is to take turns removing one stick at a time until the structure collapses. If it was your fault, you lose.

The only problem with playing this supersized version of the game is that the logs are large enough to kill you should they collapse on you.

This was the most popular sculpture I saw at Cottesloe, but when Safety and Health saw it, they had it removed. Killjoys

I've Been Surveyed

Sitting at home this afternoon, there was a knock at the door. A lady was surveying the street for Roy Morgan Research, and wanted to know who I would vote for, what tv and radio I'd seen recently, my favourite banks and many other topics. She raced through dozens of questions and I had fun responding. I mean how often do people really care about my opinions? On her way out, she left a 130 page survey booklet and said that were I to complete it and send it back within a fortnight, I'd be given a $50 voucher. Sounds enticing no? Actually the answer is a definite no. Reading the fine print, I could only spend my voucher on hideously overpriced prizes from their catalogue, including a pedometer, a 2 month subscription to a financial newsletter, a year's subscription to a website that I currently visit for free, an emergency cardigan and several other remaindered items that nobody in their right mind would buy. Somehow I can't see too many suckers completing one of these surveys for those lame prizes.

UPDATE. An emergency cardigan is bright orange for high visibility, and contains a GPS transmitter. When you're in trouble, you activate the GPS and an emergency helicopter rescue team will be dispatched to your location. I received one for my birthday a couple of years ago and it was a bit embarrassing when ironing it I accidentally pressed the button. 12 minutes later a helicopter crew had landed in my backyard, and I faked a heart attack just to make everyone feel useful. I did recover quite quickly when the defibrillator came out though.

Raise Your Hands

... if you want to see more Cottesloe photos.

You're just a bunch of dummies !

Perth is Full

Since the school and university holidays ended in February, Perth's freeways have been clogged for hours in the morning and the evening with commuters. It can take two hours to travel 20km. Perth's trains are full, bulging with passengers. Perth's buses are overcrowded. It's becoming untenable spending so long on the roads in order to reach work, especially when you don't really want to get to work anyway.

My shortcut caused slight irritation.

Here are my proposed solutions

1. School and university students to be barred from motorised transport. Instead of kiddies being delivered to school by car, and students driving themselves, they're welcome to travel by skateboard, roller-blade, donkey, bicycle, kayak or the old fashioned walk.

2. More shift work. People in professions other than mine to be forced to work different shifts, i.e. instead of 9am to5pm, there could be an early morning 5am to 1pm shift, and an evening 1pm to 9pm shift. This will  lessen the peak hour and spread traffic more evenly over the 24 hours.

3. People are assigned one day a week to live. There's a classic science fiction novel Dayworld in which an overcrowded Earth can only support its enormous population by having people each assigned one day a week in which they can wake up and live their life, before they sleep again for another six days. So in effect, the Earth is supporting seven times the population it could otherwise cope with. I'm in favour of this as long as I get to live perpetual Saturdays.

Luminous Bins

A useful invention, again spotted in Cottesloe (the centre of all interesting activity in Perth); the glow of these bins is caused by high levels of radioactivity. They have many uses, including :

1. Sterilise your food in them
2. Illuminate your house in case of power failure
3. Put rubbish in them.
4. If you want a luminous cat, stick it a bin overnight

Secret Slapsy

All will be revealed soon about this new craze currently sweeping the world. For now, you'll have to speculate.

UPDATED

Imagine you're having a normal conversation. You say an innocuous word such as "Tuesday" and then someone slaps you. Or you're on the phone and you say "cheers" and then someone throws water over you. If this happens to you it means you're in a game of Secret Slapsy, and nobody has told you. The rules can be mysterious, and they can change without notice. The other rule of slapsy is that the rules can't be written down - it removes the intrigue. I can't say too much more about this modern-day mania, but with luck you'll find yourself in a game soon. I recommend wearing an anorak and a helmet.

A Gull Sitting in a Puddle

Quelle twitte ! Note the enormous sky robot which has landed on the groyne in the distance. I wanted to get closer to see whether it was a Transformer bot, but it kept on frying people with its laser eyes, so thought better of it. Perhaps it zapped off this poor gull's legs?

Board Paddler in the Gloaming

Off Cottesloe on Thursday. On the horizon you can see the island paradise of Rottnest. Zoom in and you can find the lighthouse.

Day Vagueness

My new watch doesn't display the day of the week. After relying on digital watches to tell me the day since the early 1980s, I now have to guess and I frequently get it wrong. On Sunday I thought it was Saturday. On Monday I thought it was Sunday. On Tuesday I thought it was either Monday, Tuesday or Wednesday. By Wednesday I knew it was midweek, maybe Tuesday, Wednesday or Thursday. I feel constantly unsettled and uneasy being lost in time.

The part of my brain that should store days has never developed, and now that I've nearly reached adulthood, it's too late - those neurons aren't going to appear now. I feel mildly intellectually impaired and would like to warn others out there of the dangers of relying on digital watches from childhood, to prevent others ending up in my befuddled state.

A Bush Toffle and her Infants

Another elusive creature spotted in the dunes of Cottesloe last night, a rare bush toffle suckling her kids. Sadly few of these adorable animals survive in the metro area since they're bodies are highly prized for use in luxury pillows. If you ever book into a five star hotel, you'll be offered a menu of pillows to choose from, and one will inevitably be a toffle - please choose something else.

A Pair of Hattifatteners

Carrying their jugs of absinthe back to their beachside burrows to sustain their families.

Despite looking cute, they emit noxious odours if you approach too closely.

Hand-Holding for Safety

Lone pedestrians are unsafe. Lacking peripheral vision or with poor judgement of distances and speed of oncoming traffic, they can step out into a street not realising they're in jeopardy. Furthermore walking with a partner can also be problematic - if you're a speedy walker while your partner saunters along without a care in the world, that leads to frustration as you need to stop and wait every ten steps.

My solution is to require hand-holding. You then become part of a four-eyed walking unit. Not only are there more eyes checking for danger and determining the optimal path around hazards and obstructions, your hand-holding partner can hold you up if you stumble, saving you from a twisted ankle. You're also more visible to vehicles, and your speed is now the average of you and your partner's. But most importantly, you're immediately in a romantic mood. This means that hand-holding with colleagues is not advisable except in same-sex pairings.

Slippery Slopes to Criminality

We all start out pure and honest. We start playing Words with Friends, the addictive iPhone scrabble app. We challenge our friends to a battle of wits and vocabulary. We valiantly struggle on even when we're trying to make a word out of "AEEIIVZ" or "FJMOUUW". But then we lose. And we lose again. So although we know we're honest in our hearts, we also need a competitive edge. So maybe we check an online dictionary, looking for obscure words. And then we might try an anagram finder to list all possible words from these letters. So we might win and we're happy again.

But then the opposition ups the ante. They're winning easily. They're clearly cheating and so we have no choice but to do the same. We find a website that not only finds words for you, but also finds the best location on the board to place them. Now we're unstoppable. Until the opposition stumbles upon a similar website.

Next step is to enlist the help of others. A team of people is surely able to beat a single person. The aim is to win so convincingly that the opposition is demoralised and resigns. Now we start wondering. "Why am I spending 9 hours a day playing Scrabble. Surely there's an app that plays automatically for me?" And now we've reached the end point. We're invincible, and better yet, we don't even need to waste any time playing.

One in a Million Chance

Some coincidences are beyond belief.

A friend, Mr Q, was holidaying in the US last week, and we knew roughly where he'd be staying. Mr X had set up a free internet telephone system and was ready to dial a hotel to track him down, if only he knew where he was. Well Mr Q emailed and mentioned staying at a Howard Johnson hotel and this was enough info for Mr X to get started. Despite the time being nearly midnight in the US, he started ringing reception in various hotels in Los Angeles, searching for a guest by the name of Mr Q. None of them could help and so he switched to San Francisco hotels, again with no luck.

Disheartened he paused then tried again, this time ringing back the final hotel, asking for Mr Q by his seldom-used official first name. Our persistent Mr X was now spelling out Mr Q's name, and this time hit the jackpot. Although the clerk still had no record of him, Mr Q had amazingly been walking past reception at the very moment when the clerk had been spelling out his name letter by letter, and heard it and was able to answer our call.

Let's consider how freakishly lucky he was to find Mr Q :

1. We didn't know which hotel he was staying in.

2. Mr Q was part of a tour party and was not even booked in under his own name.

3.  It required Mr Q to be in reception at nearly midnight after a long day of touring

4. Even being in reception, Mr Q had to be close enough to hear the clerk spell out his name.

Unbelievable.

The Great Deletion Disaster of 2011

A couple of weeks ago, our office faced an enormous crisis. Somebody discovered that all of our important files and documents on our file server had disappeared. We could scarcely believe that all our work, dating back to the 1980s had vanished. Surely it couldn't be true. We did know that our IT people supposedly created regular backups and so it theoretically could have been possible to restore our files, but when someone accidentally deleted all our files several years ago, we discovered that their backups were far from complete, and we only survived thanks to having saved our crucial files to CD and DVD. Anyway, back to the present day and we suspected sabotage because surely nobody could have accidentally removed so much of our work. Perhaps a disgruntled former employee had wreaked vengeance?

The mystery was solved when someone discovered all the files and folders had been moved inside another folder. Obviously someone had accidentally dragged and dropped everything totally obliviously. Examining the details of the copied folders revealed the name of the culprit, someone who had been claiming they were not involved. We didn't want to announce the identity, but we did have a chuckle.

The moral of this story is that crucial files and folders must be made "read only", to prevent accidental catastrophes such as this one.

A Quiet Day at the Beach

This is Cottesloe Beach on a cool day, quite sparsely populated. Wait till you see it when it's busy !

Where's Wally?

Icy Slurp

Coming home from a shopping centre with an icy snowy mango tower in a tub a few days ago, I was driving in my normal sedate manner when the whole sticky mess toppled over and spilt all over my console and gear stick. I parked the car and without thinking, changed gears and thus the mango icy ended up inside the transmission. More of this exciting story to come after a brief tea break...

...tea break over.

I can reveal that with no cleaning equipment available to me, the only option was to lick and slurp up the whole mess myself. After a few minutes of using my tongue as a sponge and my mouth as a vacuum cleaner the car was looking great. The only problem being a sticky residue covering affected areas. But that wasn't a problem. As long as nobody touches those areas, the car looks spotless.

Rouge Giant

Also spotted at Cottesloe Beach yesterday, a scale model of the true life Chinese Giant known as Baby Han, who lived in Peking in the 1870s.

Beached Camels

At Cottesloe's annual Sculpture by the Sea, you can find various out of place objects on the sand. Most are indecipherable metallic oblongs, but the figurative ones such as these camels can be amusing.

Modern Dessert

Remember when immaculate presentation was expected at a restaurant. How things have changed. This mess is the chocolate fondant cake I received from a winery in the Swan Valley recently. Apparently they'd run out of dishes and instead found a slate tile and dropped my food onto it from a great height. I'm not critical of this new style - it suits the busy and messy chef who no longer needs to feel shame when they randomly scatter ingredients all over the place. I take this a step further and spread food over much of my kitchen when I'm in action.

Triple Calamity

Today has been classic. Here is why.

(1) At lunchtime I excitedly headed into town to the only Fossil outlet within 3000km, to try out my chosen watch. After much searching I found that the shop was deserted, empty, boarded up and a sign explained that it had been flooded. Of all things, a shop in drought-stricken, heatwave affected Perth was inundated. And it was closed indefinitely.

(2) At Somerville Auditorium for tonight's Festival film, "How I Ended This Summer", a Russian three hour epic about two taciturn fellows manning a remote weather station on a bleak island in the arctic, spending hours in between taking meteorological measurements kicking oil drums around the landscape and gutting trout. The idea is that the slowness and silence of the movie puts you in the mood of these guys stuck in the tundra away from civilisation. But instead, the silence was interrupted by a jaunty jazz performance nearby in the university grounds, that completely changed the solemn mood of the film into more of a comedic silent film reminiscent of the Marx brothers.

(3) Opening the mail today, one item delivered to my house was actually meant for a nearby resident. To make matters worse, the letter indicated that this person had not paid a fine and was being chased for it. Late at night, a ninja stealth operation was mounted in order to hand deliver this important letter without the knowledge of said criminal neighbour. Secrecy was essential - please imagine the scene if he'd discovered your correspondent or one of his minions with opened letter in hand, sneaking around his letterbox in the darkness.

At least it's now nearly midnight, and tomorrow can only be an improvement.

A Serve of Tennis

Having recently been playing tennis almost daily in order to avoid blogging, I thought I'd list a few of different types of serve I often try. Since nobody is able to teach me how to do a standard topspinner, I've resorted to a mixture of the following, hoping to confuse my opponent.

My serve can be girly. So is my skirt.

1. Slice - put side-spin on the ball so that it veers off to the left


2. Dropshot - this is sometimes regarded as unsportsmanlike conduct, but if it wins the point, I'll take it


3. Lob - strangely enough, I've never seen anyone else serve a lob


4. Reverse slice - it's awkward to hit, but if you brush over the back of the ball from right to left, it swerves to the right. It's tricky to control though


5. Lollypop - my second serve is incredibly weak and slow. Sometimes I use it for a first serve to shock people.


6. Flat - when I'm in form, this can be scary fast. But this only happens once every decade.

Today's Absent Post

Today I've been so busy that writing an intelligent post would be impossible. Instead, here are the activities that have prevented me from blogging.


1. Still choosing a watch
2. Playing tennis
3. Visiting Edith Cowan Joondalup Pines to see a festival film
4. Setting up the new PVR so that my computer can talk to it wirelessly
5. Watering the garden
6. Listening to BBC Radio
7. Playing Scrabble on iPhone

Now do you understand the pressure I'm under? Give me a break people !