One less Bob

Bob Brown announced his resignation from the Australian Greens and Federal Senate earlier today. As a person totally unknown to Mr Brown, I wish him all the best in his future endeavours as he seeks "the other green pursuits, including writing, photography, a little music and bushwalking with [his] good companion and partner, Paul Thomas". 


I only mention this because of an earlier post in which - tangentially, I may add - his name was dropped. I was referring to his "global parliament" speech - not that crazy when you think about it for more than five seconds.  


With the founder now ready to move on, how will the Greens fare in uncharted waters? Hopefully, all that Christine Milne - as new Leader - does in the name of the Greens will be in the name of its members right around the nation and of course its 1.8 million voters at the 2010 election. 


Good luck Bob, and thanks for your work, most of which was done when I was either unborn or politically unaware. 


Who will take his place as ideologue in the Parliament? Bob Katter, perhaps?

A Morgan-atic Marriage in Melbourne

Pollster Gary Morgan wants to be the next Lord Mayor of Melbourne. Good luck to him.

What has ruffled my feathers in this case is that Morgan is trying to make the jump from making a crust asking people what they would prefer to be the case - and making a comment about it to journos - to making a crust asking people what they would prefer to be the case - and making a comment about it to journos.

Seriously, (!) my beef is not with Gary Morgan. How could it be? I have never met him, so I can't attest to his credibility or lack thereof.

The bone I would like to be picked has almost been picked clean (thanks, Lindsay Tanner), but I shall do so regardless. This has to do with my desire to sharpen my metaphoric teeth as opposed to deriving protein-packed goodness (too far?).

The point is that the jobs of pollster and politician seem to be so similar. Hell, were they only monosyllabic words, no one could tell the difference. Okay, that's stretching it, but it seems to me that they are doing each other's jobs: pollsters are running the country* (by dictating the national conversation) and pollies seem to run to a focus group every time there arises an issue in which multiple perspectives are to be considered.

Should Mr Morgan be elected, how would he derive feedback from his policies? Would he use his experience (he has quite an impressive CV) in business or his experience in polling? One would hope that it is the former, considering the candidate has already been quoted as saying he is "more interested in business activities" than the current Lord Mayor - apparently Cr Doyle is "more interested in social activities". (The Age, 13/04/12).

The ironic thing - or not; I don't know, make up your mind - is that I wanted some polling numbers to add a bit of content to this point. Alas, it seems to be too early in the race for that old chestnut. I shall be watching Roy Morgan - the company Mr Morgan's dad founded in 1941 - with earnest.

*I realise the link is a little old but it serves the point adequately. You could argue, quite reasonably, that the 26th Prime Minister - Kevin Rudd - was deposed by his own party to make way for the 27th - Julia Gillard - because of poor polling numbers. It is one thing for leadership change to occur during Opposition - the party in minority wants the best possible chance to gain a majority at an election (and a large part of that is the reputation that the leader has. A poor leader will guide his or her party only through Opposition.) - but it was indicative of a party - still - under the wraps of polling. Yes, the Liberal/Country Party Coalition in the late 60s had a leadership crisis of their own while in power, but it was apparently caused by party distrust. The same occurred in 2010, obviously, but the distrust was not causa sui, as it was in the late 60s. I submit that in Labor's case, the distrust was directly influenced by bad polling numbers for K. Rudd. What is bad for the Labor Party is that Gillard's numbers as PM have been much worse on occasions, yet she hasn't been replaced. This doesn't make the Labor Party noble, or willing to stick it during the rough times. This makes the party look inconsistent. If there's one thing people hate with governments, or with authority in general, it's inconsistency. Given this context, I am not willing to predict a landslide at next year's scheduled election; stranger things have happened in politics.

Darkness at the break of noon

Damn. I've just realised I've written the perfect header for a Good Friday post. As it is now Easter Monday when I am writing this, I have two options:
1) Wait 363-odd days (leap year yada yada) and post then
2) Carry on like a sporting chap

The problems with 1), as you can imagine, are many and varied.They range from the highly-probable (the world ending before then) to the almost-certain (my forgetting to carry through with this cunning plan) to the very-unlikely (my actually getting a life and not needing this activity to keep me in a state of lucidity and semi-sanity). Well, they're all non-zero probabilities, so each may occur, according to the synthesis of "naive inductivism" by my good mate A.F. Chalmers. 2) seems like a more preferable option.

I don't know what the point of the previous paragraph was.

Anywho, I wanted to share this video of Bob Dylan singing "It's Alright Ma, I'm Only Bleeding" velocemente. 

Related to the previous post, videlicet my little tribute poem.

The reason why I find this video special is that it goes for 5 and a half minutes. That's right, a quickened version of a song goes for 5 and a half minutes. Original studio recordings also found on your Tube go for about 10-11 minutes. Keep in mind that this is Dylan singing the words quickly, not a shortened version of the song. Were one to utilise the fast forward function on Media Player, (yes, I have, incidentally on many Midnight Oil songs. I'm obsessed with the Oils at the moment. More on them in another post, perhaps. If you wanted commentary on modern pop culture, well, you're in the wrong place) a standard 5 minute song would last for about half that time. This is the same ratio. I've listened to the full, drawn-out version (not on my bandwidth however, thank god, or I'd never hear the end of it). It's slow. It's understandable (unusual for Dylan) but it's painfully slow. I also have  My dad has a copy of Dylan singing a reasonably-quick live version in 1980, which goes for around 6 minutes. But it's just...I mean...Since when do "fast" versions of songs go for a 5 and a half minutes? Are there any other examples?  Remember, on radio (and yes, I do actually know what I'm talking about for once, well sorta anyway), the longest song will last 4 minutes. And that's probably pushing it. Good onya Bobby, for breaking the mainstream. Plenty of Bobs I know break the mainstream: Bob Brown, Bob Carr &c. Oh, if you want interesting, read Bob Brown's recent speech about "global parliament". It's well delivered, and it certainly didn't deserve the crap that was hung on it by the mainstream media. It's a trope that warrants further thought, and by that I don't mean the four- and five-letter words that I could use to describe the debate the in this country today. Which is another interesting trope, that can't be debated in Australia today. Regression, regression everywhere.

From one Bob, to another Bob, to another Bob, back to the second Bob, back to the first Bob, take it away:

Bob Dylan #1

The following is my rudimentary attempt to join the ranks of Matthew Arnold, Shakey, and my muse, among others. It is dedicated, as you can probably gather from the title, to that one-and-only, the great Bob Dylan. You can criticise anything you want, obviously, except with regards to what metre I wrote in: I do not know, and frankly do not care. Expect more to come. 

****

In conditions in the two

Who have been made late this afternoon

Because both of them in the

Then you know what to do

At Nobel Prize

Small businesses involved with forces that are not that sort of

Momentous or with the relation with has already met this evening about

It added value

Conclusions based out of every four years of our ideals of the war was

Waterfalls illegal

Moment and I thought you discovered that it is the whitewater

Won’t be here

Here here

That part of fellow

All right

Along you

As long as it is a matter of fact

That these little small company that had bolted fault at all that she was

Killed well-off fellows that are right now that I’ve attached a tail

Stands at about that

Artisan went out and for the market everything from Sally Johnson book

Tries it on the

Even if you happen to find out much is the exact

Happy to be to be states teachers teach then knowledge within each other one is

Out of faith

Students at the end of the things that they read stranded

You’ve got a ton

Happily married man

Sheraton Fuerteventura into thinking you expect him to know what’s going on in

There and that can win with a panel of free time I thought that was all right

Physiotherapy angry at the issues that I mean I’m not going to be alone is

There’s nobody in the incident and electronically’s health even as they get

Them I think that it is now

Traditionalism or insufficient set-asides inadequate keeping him and I

Think it’s clear that he or she would have already that Saddam Hussein

Flap flatmates

Rubber glove

Coordinators is Austin says when it is expected for special himself instead of

Dozens of weapons

Thirty three day Republican politics politics

And their families cannot be delivered to extract the Cherokee propels America

Mobility

For them to think that part of the flip-flop on the maximum

That sometimes a mother love letter

That there are no it’s not very doubtful all that stuff is not an air force base

Alone

Walked back out of that into a subject that led to the president of the

Allright

Padding-left

Can just tell them

Agreeing

It’s not a good night

That’s not to me

Sun-dried tomato

Light but not the

Motto

"But what does it profit a man if he gains the entire world but loses his soul?"
 -- Matthew 16:26

The time has come to declare what I will  hope will be my modus vivendi for the rest of my life. I apologise to the atheistically-inclined among us for choosing such a nakedly Biblical passage for what is a very symbolic and substantive statement. But funnily enough, hours of (seeming) Bible recitation did not produce this affinity with the quote. I came upon it during the dénouement of my muse's revelatory The Picture of Dorian Gray. Clearly, the whole point is to not forget about the spiritual side of things when earthly possessions come your way. 


An interesting twist is to invert the key subjects in the quote: "But what does it a profit a man if he gains his soul but loses the entire world?" The message here: You can try to be godlike on God's green earth, but you won't be able to share it with anyone. 


The obvious conclusion then is to toe Aristotle's Golden Mean; this is worth a (fairly wordy) blog post in itself; apparently similar concepts appear under different names, like the Confucian Doctrine of the Mean and the Buddhist "middle way". To spare the sanity of my readers, and the lucidity of my writing in this post thus far, (steady, boy) I won't go on to a tangential history of the Golden Mean blah blah blah. 


The whole point is that I have articulated, in the computerised version of permanent marker, a simple worldview that I will try - and just as often as not, fail - to live by, keeping in mind the consequences of what the inverse has waiting 

A thought bubble

Two things struck me as Google Chrome opened to its eponymous search engine today:
1)Who is Mies van der Rohe? (Judging by the layout of the title, he/she was some sort of architect, designer &c)
2) Why do we need to celebrate his 126th birthday?

Obviously, Wiki can help me with the first question, but the second remains far more apocryphal. Someone out there knows the answer, and if they see this post within a year (obviously before Van der Rohe's 127th birthday), I wonder if I would be able to be privy to the information

#justsayin

The ingredients of a good zinger

No, faceless KFC executive, I'm not some pissed-off, lone-wolf former employee/slave of the Colonel about to reveal the secrets to the greatest foodstuff since sliced bread. Hell, you should be thanking me profusely for not suing you to kingdom come after your totally euphemistically-titled "burger" The Double made me as sick as a dog, and then some. And then I had to go for my driver's test the following day while, in the words of Jacko (the Aussie one), "me brain hurt", a mountain of mucous was stuck in my nose and an avalanche of tissues was needed to get a snowball's worth of snot out (TMI?). I passed (but luckily didn't pass out), probably because the fella from VicRoads fell asleep for some portion of the journey.

This is, however, tangential to the main argument of my article. Very tangential.

It seems to me that the art of telling a good "zinger" - or one-liner, quip, whatever takes your fancy - is slowly dying, like the gentle art of making enemies (some may think me very proficient in this); I am of course referring to the Whistler book and not the Faith No More song. No, in all seriousness (ha!), I think it is time to expound upon a new philosophy, one that will expand upon the New Hedonism and even the Aestheticism that my muse for this blog helped to develop: Zingerism, anybody? (Let's hope that any of the Jewish faith of the Hebrew nation doesn't derive this to create Zionist Zingerism; Aestheticist Zingerism sounds marginally better, if only because it would take in the A-Z of philosophy.)

What am I on about? I want to deconstruct what it means not to tell a good joke but the way in which its humour is magnified. This is done by making a nicely-timed comment, here referred to as a "zinger" and signified by exclaiming "Zing!" at the appropriate moment, that emphasises or highlights the humour of the moment. A zinger is best approximated when considering the moments after somebody tells a joke. The Zingerite (Zingeree?) applies his or her philosophy by seasoning the joke with a bit of a wisenheimer comment. The point here is to be as rude and as crude as the Zingerite can possibly be - innuendo of the sexual nature always goes a treat and if the Zingerite can insult either the host or the joke-teller - or both - then their zinger is highly rated

What, then, is the key to creating the perfect zinger? A solid reference to pop culture - and pop politics - is always handy. Clearly, the current hipster generation, judging by the stereotypes being shared around like some venereal disease, has a treasure trove of useless facts just like some golden treasure chest full of loose leaf paper waiting to be opened for a purpose such as this.

What is the purpose? It is to make yourself believe you are utterly and uselessly intelligent, and that's before the alcohol (and/or drugs) kicks in. In a word then, it is entirely and shamelessly a self-indulgent party trick, much more purposeful and "fun" than, y'know, getting water into a glass from a plate without anyone touching the plate.   

Apart from being a mediocre burger (alright, yes, I admit I do have a secret addiction to it), a zinger can be used to make an already-good party great with witty banter seasoning the conversation. Adherents to this new philosophy of Zingerism, with the muse of this blog as its figurehead, will be the first to realise the joy that the zinger - the after-joke, not the burger - provides.