Bump - Just Write

What does one write when one wants to write but doesn't have anything specific to write about?

I'm good at writing. Always have been. Never studied or anything, just have always been able to do it.

I started a fiction novel a few years ago. I've almost finished the first act! Everyone who read it can't wait to see what happens next.

Well what happened next was life. New baby with health issues, changing jobs, buying houses, life life life! And the fiction novel has been patiently waiting on my hard drive and quietly bubbling over in the back of my mind ever since.

But now my life is at a point where I've realized you just need to do it. Don't wait for the inspiration or motivation, that will come when you just do it. Don't wait until you're over your fear of churning out a load of rubbish, just churn it out. Don't wait until you have something to write about, just write.

My day job entails a lot of writing - email communications, policies and processes, executive summaries, formal letters, client summaries, reports, data, there was even a magazine article thrown in there - so it's not like I haven't been writing. But it's been a long time since I created anything of my own.

Call me a weirdo, but ever since I knew how to type, a blank word document would get my pulse rate up. Just look at it! All of that pristine white space! Just waiting to be filled with sentences and paragraphs!

For me that is the joy of writing - creating something out of a white space of nothing. You start with a blank screen, fill it with sentences and paragraphs, and the joy of creating emotion out of those words - excitement, fear, joy, sentimentality, elation, amusement - for me is akin to the joy of creating music.

In a way that's exactly what it is - creating music with words. Forming sounds not out of vibrating strings but out of people's thoughts. Creating imagery not with notes and beats but by directing someones inner voice. That's exhilarating.

So you know what? Time to just write. You can write about wanting to write and not knowing what to write about and before you know it you've filled a whole page. How very satisfying!

Believing Skeptic

In accordance with my facebook status update of 9th February, here is the blog entry more fully explaining my new-found position.

Up until very recently I was under the same mistaken impression that most people are, being that a skeptic is basically the same thing as being a cynic, and being skeptical is being cynical. This is, however, not the case.

"Cynic: a person who believes that only selfishness motivates human actions and who disbelieves in or minimizes selfless acts or disinterested points of view."

"Skeptic: a person who questions the validity or authenticity of something purporting to be factual. A person who habitually doubts the authenticity of accepted beliefs."

Therefore when I say I now consider myself a skeptic, I do not mean I have engendered a generally distrustful attitude towards people. And whilst I may question certain fundamentals of the Christian religion, I have not shed my belief in God.

Skepticism is a process, and a skeptic is a person who requires a higher standard of evidence. When I call myself a "Believing Skeptic", I am calling myself someone who still believes in God, but requires a higher standard of evidence for commonly held beliefs, especially the beliefs of Evangelical Fundamentalism.

For the larger part of my life (being from the age of four until late last year), I was an Evangelical Religious Fundamentalist.

"Evangelical: denoting or relating to any of certain Protestant sects or parties, which emphasize the importance of personal conversion and faith in atonement through the death of Christ as a means of salvation."

"Religious: appropriate to or in accordance with the principles of a religion."

"Fundamentalism: a movement in American Protestantism that arose in the early part of the 20th century in reaction to modernism and that stresses the infallibility of the Bible not only in matters of faith and morals but also as a literal historical record, holding as essential to Christian faith belief in such doctrines as the creation of the world, the virgin birth, physical resurrection, atonement by the sacrificial death of Christ, and the Second Coming."

I believed that the entire universe was created in six literal days by God, that evolution was a load of crap, and that scientists were so hell-bent on being rebellious against God they had created an entire system with which to deny Him.

I believed that the Bible was a literal historical account, including the creation narrative, the exodus, and the events in books such as Daniel and Jonah.

I believed that after death, the souls of everyone who did not believe in the atoning death and resurrection of Jesus Christ (ie was converted, or "saved") were thrown into an eternal hell of unspeakable torment from which there was no escape for all eternity, regardless of the deeds done whilst in the body.

And I also believed that believing the above was essential for one's own salvation, such that if one deviated from one's belief in any of the above, that one would themselves be thrown into an eternal hell of unspeakable torment from which there was no escape for all eternity, regardless of the deeds done whilst in the body.

And there lies the rub, and my main bone of contention (or the particular bone of contention I have time to discuss in this one blog entry): the Fundamentalist view that anything other than blind belief in the tenets of Fundamentalism itself constitutes disbelief in God and results in eternal damnation.

It goes something like this:

"If you don't believe that every word of the Bible is literally and ineffably true, how can you believe it is God-inspired? And if you don't believe that every word of the Bible is God-inspired, how can you say you believe that any of the words of the Bible are God-inspired? And if you don't believe that the Bible is God-inspired, how can you say that you believe in Jesus? And if you don't believe in Jesus, how can you say that you are saved and any better than an unbeliever? And if you're an unbeliever, how do you suppose you can escape being BURNED IN HELL FOR ALL ETERNITY? AAAAAA HA HA HA HA HA HAAAAA!!!!!! AAAAAAAAA HA HA HA HA HA HA HAAAAAAA!!!!!!!".

This is a baffling string of logical fallacies and straw men tied to straw men with other bits of straw, and has done nothing to better the human condition or improve the lives of its proponents or anyone else. It has done nothing to endear the attitudes of humanity towards altruistic or philanthropic ends, it has not increased morality, compassion, justice, mercy, grace and love. It has segregated the Fundamentalists from the rest of "The World" (those evil un-converted people who don't believe in the tenets of Fundamentalism and who are possessed by "the spirit of the world" or "the god of this age") into various in-fighting camps that drag people down instead of lifting them up. It has turned the attitudes of the world not against injustice, inhumanity, evil and selfishness, but against itself and anyone else who could feasibly be tarred with the same brush. And (most personally to myself) it has done scant more than fill well-meaning and God-loving individuals with such a crippling fear of unspeakable eternal torment with no hope of escape that they are too afraid to move, let alone grow, develop, learn, and contribute to the betterment of the human race.



I would gladly welcome any comments anyone has on this post. If you know someone who is a skeptic or an atheist, or a fundamentalist or other kind of conservative Christian, and you think they might have something to say in response, please tell them to have a read. I would love to see as many different responses and perspectives as possible regarding the uncharted metaphysical waters I now find myself sailing. Maybe as I delineate my position more thoroughly it will help some people through some of their own stuff, then become inexplicably popular, become a quick and easy means of fame and fortune for me and enable me to spend the rest of my life sipping lattes on my back porch in my pyjamas. It never hurts to dream.

Mickey Mouse Astronomy 101

Tonight I was working on a novel I am writing in collaboration with a friend of mine. After three hours, I came up with one page! But let me explain....

The one page was a "world description". The novel is a science fiction slash fantasy novel. It is set on a fictional planet that requires certain characteristics, therefore I had to make one up that fit the description; and in the fantasy genre, world-building is an essential part of the process. But being a bit of a literalist, I couldn't just "make one up". I needed to have a semi-scientific basis for these conditions.

Now I would never call myself an amateur astronomer. I don't even own a telescope! But I've always loved space and all things space-related, and am fascinated by astrophysics. As a kid I knew the names of all the planets in the solar system, in order, and what type of planet each one was. As an adult I have enjoyed the abundance of information that is available on the Internet to Mickey Mouse astronomy enthusiast hacks like me. I have very much enjoyed learning how nuclear fusion works. I was excited when I learned that scientists had actually created real antimatter! I am secretly proud that because I know how black holes work, I am no longer afraid that the Large Hadron Collider might accidentally destroy the Universe. I can relate to most of the really nerdy stuff they show on The Big Bang Theory, like getting excited about bouncing lasers off the Moon, and watching science fiction DVDs with the commentary turned on.......

.........I am very worried about myself actually.

Anyhow, tonight, when I created my planet, I had a few things to work out.

Firstly, because most stars in the Universe exist in binary pairs, I decided that my planet should be in a binary star system. But I wasn't interested in the whole "two suns" motif, because 1. it's been done to death, and 2. a planet that orbited two suns at once would more than likely be completely uninhabitable, spending most of it's year in either extreme heat or extreme cold. So my planet is tidally locked to a small, cool, red dwarf star, meaning that one whole hemisphere of the planet is facing the red dwarf star constantly (like the bright side of the Moon to Earth), and only the far side that faces the larger, hotter, brighter and further star is habitable.

Secondly, I had decided that the day-night cycle should go: short day, night, long day, night, with the nights being of equal length. How does this work, I hear myself ask? So my red dwarf star has a highly eccentric orbit around the larger hotter star, meaning it has two very close approaches and two very far approaches, which allows the short day on the close approach, the long day on the far approach, and the night in the equinoxes, making it the same length every time. Of course this assumes that the red dwarf's orbital inclination to the larger star is basically zero, the eccentricity of the orbit is symmetrical, and that my planet has zero axial tilt - no problem. It's my planet, it can have zero inclination, symmetrical eccentricity and no axial tilt if I want.

Thirdly, my planet had to be completely covered in rock, and suffer violent sandstorms, with sandstorms always at night, and infrequently during the day. No problems - it's covered in rock, just like Mars or Venus. But the sandstorms? Aha! This can be caused by convection currents, as air from the temperature-constant bright side interacts with air from the temperature-fluctuating far side. And of course, at night, when the temperature of the two sides would vary the most, the sandstorms would be constant.

Fourthly, it's only a small world, but the gravity has to be the same or very similar to Earth's. How does that work? Of course - the planet has a very large, very massive iron core. This also explains how it creates a magnetic field strong enough to contain an atmosphere thick enough to support human life and minimise temperature fluctuations, whilst at the same time shielding the planet from the ferocious tides of two solar winds. Not only that, but with such a massive iron core, space-faring humans would be crazy not to go there and mine the crap out of it, right?

So now I have a nice little world in a nice little binary star system with all my environmental preferences neatly accommodated by the information I procured from Wikipedia, the NASA website, the Universe Today website, the Popsci website, and some website about Greek mythology (my planets and stars are named after figures from Greek mythology, partly because my collaborator had already given my planet its name, and partly for reasons that I really don't have time to explain in this post).

I'm a bit worried that someone that actually knows something about astrophysics will read it one day and laugh at my Mickey Mouse astronomy. But I'm not going for the "hard science fiction" angle. In fact, my world description is probably already too technical for the everyday Joe Blow fantasy-genre fan, and exists mainly for my own reference when describing certain events, and as a guide to how the environment on the surface would appear to a human observer. It's a science fiction slash fantasy novel, so hopefully it will be a bit more accessible to most people than the kind of stuff the guys off The Big Bang Theory would be interested in.

The next step is the characters. If it took me three hours to do one page about an inanimate lump of rock, I hate to think how long that will take!

Ignoramus

This week I had an experience that showed me how little I knew about certain things.

It also showed me that whilst I am not stupid, I am not necessarily as intelligent as I may think, and that there are people around me whose brains work far better, more quickly and more efficiently than mine.

How does intelligence work anyway? And what defines intelligence? Is it merely the ability to remember a large number of things? Is it the ability to process large amounts of information, or maintain large and complex trains of thought, without getting distracted and losing the objective? Is it therefore a capacity issue? A "mental bandwidth" issue?

And how much of intelligence is innate, a "talent", and how much of it is learned? How much of what we perceive as intelligence in another person is actual mental ability, and how much of it is just mental discipline, the result of a well-exercised mind? We're all familiar with the person in our lives who could have been and done so much more with their talents and abilities if they had just applied themselves, paid attention in school, not been slack and lazy and pushed themselves. Is this person less intelligent for not putting in the effort (i.e. would they currently be more intelligent if they had of) or are they just as intelligent, just mentally undisciplined, with large quantities of mental processing power going to waste?

I know for myself that I found school relatively easy. I could usually come up with the answer to most questions by making an intelligent guess. This, coupled with laziness, meant that when I saw that I could get an average result with little to no effort, I thought "why try harder?" and pretty much just coasted. Certain teachers (bless their cotton socks) took me aside and told me I would not be able to rely on just pure intelligence for much longer, but of course, I didn't listen, because I was fifteen and had the world and everyone in it pretty much worked out. Why bother learning maths? I was going to be a bass player in an improbably popular rock band and would never need to know what pie squared was. Why try harder to learn German? I'm only doing this subject because the alternative was Agriculture, and I don't want to do all those outdoor lessons in the winter. And Chemistry! Even though I find it amazingly interesting, the concepts don't just immediately resolve themselves in my head, therefore I find that, in the face of having to put effort into understanding them, it's too hard and "I don't get it" and I'll just ride it out and hope the end result doesn't stuff up my year 12 results too much.

This became a really bad habit that is with me to this day. The problem then became that whilst yes, a lot of stuff I understood almost instantly, a lot of stuff I didn't; but instead of trying to figure it out, on a sub-conscious level I imagined that I understood it anyway, and just ploughed on with my own imagined framework, coming up with answers that sort-of fit sometimes, and sort-of didn't at other times. This has been very limiting. If only I was one of those "good" kids that had had the sense to push myself to the limit and really achieve something better than what I did. Shoulda coulda woulda.

But I think that, unfortunately, most people experience the same thing subconsciously at a certain age. They decide that, whilst the world didn't make sense before, it does now, thanks to this marvellous little worldview framework that I've knocked up using ordinary household perceptions, preconceptions and prejudices, and woe betide anyone that tries to tell me differently.

There are different types of ignoramus.

1. The proud ignoramus.

This person is actually proud of their profound ignorance. "I don't know anything, but my opinions are so good I don't need to!" Their opinion is their reality. They substitute knowledge for opinions. And, sadly, most of the time their opinions aren't even their own. Is this why advertising is so successful? "This product costs twice as much and is the same as the cheaper one, but the packaging looks nicer and the TV says it's the best one on the market, so I'll buy it." If ignorance was an Olympic sport, they would be three-time gold medallists. They look down on educated and inquisitive people with contempt. "What do you mean, you want to have a balanced opinion? What do you mean, you want to find out all the facts? What do you mean you want to hear both sides of the story? Pfffffft! This is what I think, for absolutely no reason, and if you don't think the same then you're an idiot!" Unfortunately, many proud ignoramuses are just mentally lazy intelligent people, their cumbersome mental powers going completely to waste on fantasies and imaginings instead of being used to correctly perceive their environment. The proud ignoramus is to be avoided - their ignorance is contagious.

2. The angry ignoramus.

This person knows they are not as intelligent as others, and is mad as hell about it. Therefore they avoid any interaction with information because to them it highlights their inability to process it. Whether consciously or sub-consciously, they too create a fantasy framework in which either a) they are intelligent, and everyone else is stupid, or b) they are at the correct level of intelligence, and everyone who is less intelligent than them is stupid and worthy of ridicule, and everyone who is more intelligent than them is arrogant, up themselves, not to be trusted and to be avoided at all costs. These are the types that end up in charge of totalitarian regimes. They see their warped sense of jealousy as a perfectly sound and valid reason to begin a vendetta against a person, group or social organisation. The only reason they are an ignoramus at all is because they spent so much time being pissed off that someone else was more intelligent than them that they had no time to actually exercise the intelligence they did have. The angry ignoramus is liveable with, but only if you are able to convince them that you are no more, or no less, intelligent than them.

3. The misguided ignoramus.

This person usually has been taught from quite a young age that the only thing worth knowing is XYZ and everything else is crap. For example: "my son doesn't need to go to school and learn all that crap. He needs to get an apprenticeship and learn a trade. Then he'll be a real man, not one of these poofters who sits on their arse in an office or a laboratory behind a computer all day." The misguided ignoramus may also have become the way they are due to social or peer pressures: "all the other blokes at school are only interested in cars, girls and beer. Therefore the only things worth knowing about are cars, girls and beer." Sometimes the misguided ignoramus has been led astray by society, and is a victim of propagandist advertising: "I really feel like a beer. A hard-earned thirst needs a big cold beer. And the best cold beer is.... but I'm a bit hungry. I feel like a burger. Should I go to burger joint A, or burger joint B? I know, I'll go to burger joint B, because the burgers are better at burger joint B." The misguided ignoramus is harmless enough, but may not allow you into their social confidence if you do not drive the right make of vehicle, live in the right kind of suburb, barrack for the right sporting team, watch the right kind of American crime shows, eat the right kind of burger and drink the right kind of beer.

4. The blissfully unaware ignoramus.

This person is often also a misguided ignoramus, and can usually be found in the company of the proud ignoramus (the angry ignoramus thinks they're bloody stupid and won't have anything to do with them). Due to social and societal conditions, this person is completely unaware that they don't know anything, because their world is their sphere, and their sphere is so small they know everything about it. They will react to new information with suspicion and fear, because it's unfamiliar, and that makes them feel uncomfortable, because it doesn't fit with the way things are, which is they way they always have been. These are the kind who are born, live and die in the same suburb or small town, and who think going to Tasmania counts as having travelled overseas. They can be quite lovely and easy to get along with, if you can understand a single word they say.

Of course their are more kinds (including the kind that writes blogs attempting to delineate types of ignoramus when they don't know everything themselves), but in my own observations of life these are the main types. Unfortunately, being an ignoramus of any sort does not prevent you from getting into a position of power and influence in society. It's also sad to note that intelligence seems to have no influence over whether or not one is or isn't an ignoramus. Becoming an ignoramus is a choice. Whether or not this choice was yours is not the point. The point is, there is one choice which is yours and yours alone, and that is the choice to stop being an ignoramus.

So how does one stop being an ignoramus? Stop telling yourself that you know everything, that you've got the world figured out, and that you don't need to learn anything more. If you form an opinion, remind yourself that it is only an opinion and in the absence of the knowledge of all facts may not be entirely correct. If everyone around you keeps telling you how smart you are, start hanging around someone who's smarter, in order to avoid little-big-fish syndrome. What's little-big-fish syndrome? Being a big fish in a little pond, who thinks he's reached his peak because he doesn't become a bigger fish, without realising it's just because he's still in a little pond.

The experience I had this week made me realise just that - maybe I'm a big fish in a little pond, and instead of getting into a bigger pond, I've allowed myself to become comfortable thinking bigger of myself than I really ought to. But the experience I had was a part of me attempting to get into a bigger pond, so I'm not going to get all bent out of shape over it. If I make it into that pond, it will be an awesome opportunity that will stretch me and force me to work hard to reach my potential, which honestly does scare me a bit. But I'm a lot more scared of being trapped by little-big-fish syndrome, so I'm more than ready to make the leap. If I don't make it into that particular pond there'll be others, until one day I'll find myself in the pond that allows me to grow to the size I was meant to be.

The middle of Nowhere

I returned home yesterday from an interstate trip. The occasion? My sister's wedding. Did I enjoy the wedding? Yes. Did I enjoy driving with my family to my erstwhile country-home-town and staying there for half a week? Not really. Why? Two words - screaming baby. (Plus on the way over my eldest son took some skin off his hand coming off a slide in Lameroo, then chucked a whitie in the supermarket and vomited freshly-ingested hot dog all over me, but that's another story). I will skip the Albury stay for now because it really wasn't very interesting, apart from my sister's wedding (and everyone knows how boring it is listening to someone talk about a wedding), and talk about two main parts of the journey to and from.

First, let me tell you about the Big4 Paringa Holiday Park in Deniliquin, NSW. It's great. I'll prove it! Here are some photos:

This is the cabin we stayed in. That's me holding the towel (the tall one). Looks pretty nice huh? No, not the towel, the cabin. Wait 'til you see the view from where I'm standing:

Nice! It was on the Edwards River which runs through Deniliquin. Below is a photo of me attempting to be a half-decent father and taking my son on a bike ride:

Apart from my sister's wedding, this was the highlight of the whole trip for me. If you have to stay in Deniliquin, make sure you stay at the Big4 Paringa.

But this brings me to my second aspect: a little town in north-western Victoria called Ouyen.

There are a few words and/or phrases that sum up my experience of Ouyen: flies, mosquitoes, assorted other little flying bugs, dust, funny-smelling meat, funny-tasting meat, grubby little cafes, haunted pubs. But in amongst all the dourness there were some remarkable positives. It's hard to delineate them though, so I'll tell the story instead.

On the way over to Albury, we stopped for the night in Ouyen at the Hilltop Motel. Phil and Julie (the proprietors) made us feel very welcome and were very pleasant conversationalists. The rooms were clean, comfortable and inviting, and after my eldest son and I had enjoyed dangling our feet in the pool and talking to some random old Pom who was having a swim for a while, we headed into town on foot for a meal at the Victoria Hotel.

From the outside it looked just like any other really old pub. After locating the particular front door that led to the meals area by trial and error due to the lack of signage, we entered the foyer. It was like stepping out of the driver's side door of the DeLorean. There was a sunken floor with antique mosaic tiling, an old wood-and-glass framed reception office that looked like it hadn't been used since 1953, and a massive wooden staircase obscuring the entrance to the dining room.

The dining room itself was newly refurbished, although this probably took place in the fifties, when ornate ivory-coloured fake ceilings and crystal-shaped plastic light fittings that looked like miniature upside-down Fortresses of Solitude were all the rage. (Google it all you non-Superman fans). There were about twenty tables for two, and one big long table for twenty running right down the middle of the upper level. That's right - another split level room! The lower level was a bit more modern, I'd say seventies era based on the wood-grain finish plywood covering every available surface.

So I decided that there was only one way to make this place better - beer. I went to the little bar on the lower level and asked for a beer. As this took place in Victoria, what I got was a "pot" of beer, although it didn't come in a pot, it came in one of those dimpled glass mugs they used to have at the Adelaide Uni bar. It contained Carlton Draught, which, when you are stranded in a regional Victorian pub, isn't so bad. I consumed it whilst waiting for my meal, and decided to go for a wander to the front bar to see what else they had on tap. I discovered that they actually had four different varieties on offer: Carlton Draught, Carlton Cold, Carlton Light, and VB. Maybe I've been spoilt by the plethora of lagers and ales on tap in Adelaide pubs, I thought. I decided I'd best stick with the Draught for my second round.

It was a good thing, actually, that my surrounds in the pub were a source of such amusement, because we were left with plenty of time to survey them whilst waiting for our meals. About an hour, to be exact. This is probably where the "haunted" bit comes in. I'd say there aren't any actual ghosts at the Vic Hotel, it was probably just my imagination getting away from me as I stared at the century-old (or what seemed like century-old) first dining room next to ours, which was partitioned off from us except for a gap through which I could see a pianola, and with very little else to do other than share wisecracks about how daggy the place was with my wife, prevent my son from sliding off his chair onto the floor, and wander around in the front bar in a fruitless search for half-decent beer. My mind began to dwell on how many people must have come and enjoyed this place over so many years. The part we were in was actually called the "ladies' lounge", and I imagined ladies dressed up in those big old frilly dresses with the big bums and the bonnets, smoking cigarettes out of black holders, sitting around sipping soda water and complaining about how positively boorish men had become in these modern times whilst their husbands sat in the front bar, drinking a narrow selection of parochial lagers, smoking cigars and complaining about how outspoken women had seemed to become these days. Then you start imagining that you can feel the atmosphere of those former times, and you can almost hear the laughter and the stilted accents, and you freak yourself out a little bit, before realising that you've wandered halfway up the stairs to the accommodation section and it's dark, and maybe I'll go back downstairs and have another pot of Carlton Draught.

After said hour, our meals arrived, and I must say - they were fantastic. Seth (my eldest son) had spaghetti bog, my wife had roast lamb, and I had the mixed grill. The meat actually didn't taste funny here, and the steak on my plate was cooked to perfection, as was the bacon and the sausages. My wife's roast was a little bit dry, but only around the edges (from sitting under the heatlamp waiting for my meal to be ready). The juicy bits were tender and very tasty. Another great aspect of this meal was that we were able to charge it back to our motel room - something we hadn't been able to do anywhere else since our Hamilton Island holiday in 2006. Quite progressive thinking for the middle of nowhere, one of the benefits of being in a small and largely traveller-supported town.

On our second stopover in Ouyen on the way back to Adelaide, we decided that, whilst the meals were great, we would give the Time-Warp Hotel a miss. I had eaten a few times before at the Mallee Route Cafe, and had decided well in advance that we would eat there this time. In my past experience it was clean, the staff were friendly, and the food was good. Plus, if you read the sign out the front, they serve "Expresso Coffee", which to date I have not seen for sale anywhere else. (I once paid $2.50 for a mug filled literally to the brim with Nescafe Blend 43 at a truck stop in Ouyen. I'll take Expresso Coffee over that any day!) You can imagine my chagrin when we drove past and saw all the chairs upside down on the tables! This was not good. Where else was there to eat? The Fairy Dell Cafe? (yes, that's really what it's called). No - it smells funny, and it doesn't look clean. And they rent DVDs from there. Don't ask me why, but I don't trust eating establishments that rent DVDs. We drove past the Ouyen Club - closed. Plus it looked crap anyway. I saw a sign pointing to the Ouyen Golf Club. I headed in that direction, imagining a club house and eatery the likes of which you may find in Adelaide. I quickly realised on arrival there that apparently, in regional Victoria, a corrugated tin shed qualifies as a club house and no, there was no restaurant.

We headed back to the hotel room in despair. What were we to do? Go without? Eat the complimentary jam biscuits for tea? I looked in the visitor's guide. But it says "Mallee Route Cafe, open 7 days from 8am - 8pm". Something's not right here! So I picked up the phone and gave them a call. They answered! I said "are you open?" and they replied "yeah!" as if to say "waddya reckon ya clown?" I said "OK, it's just that I drove past and all the chairs were upside down on the tables and the lights were off" to which they responded "ah nah, just cleanin' the floors." Er... OK. You clean the floors with the lights off? I decided that asking more questions was a bad idea, and just went there and got some takeaway. And yes, I must admit that the floors did look very clean. So did the rest of the place actually. There was no funny smell, and no DVDs. My hamburger meat did smell funny, but it tasted nice, and I heard no complaints from my wife regarding the lasagne, or my son regarding his chicken bites. (My youngest son, who currently lives on breast milk and formula, complained a lot, and loudly, but he did that for most of the whole trip anyway, so I can't really attribute that to the Mallee Route Cafe).

So we survived our two nights in the middle of Nowhere, and came out with some tales to tell. But can I offer you interstate road travellers some valuable advice: if you have to stay overnight in Ouyen, stay at the Hilltop Motel, and eat at the Mallee Route Cafe.

To blog or not to blog

Yes, I know I said I was going to do this every day. But I've been busy. Work, kids, stuff etc.

Plus I'm not great with obeying my own rules. It's like when I took up running a few years ago. I'd always meant to do it, and had set my alarm early and said to myself: "tomorrow morning, when your alarm goes off, you MUST get up and go running!" Then when the alarm goes off tomorrow morning I say "stuff you self" and go back to sleep. So I just kept setting my alarm, putting my running shoes beside the bed, until one morning, without giving myself any prior warning, I got up and went running. Then I just kind of kept doing it. It was like the elephant in the room. I knew it was there, but I didn't talk to myself about it. And it seemed to work.

So here I am, staying up late when I'm tired, and just blogging. I've actually just spent a few hours writing something else so I don't really have a lot to say, except if it's about the future of digital newspapers, or how Dropbox works, or how it's great to have external hard drives plugged into your wireless router and dropboxes and stuff if you actually remember to copy that really important file that you did on the laptop onto them, otherwise you'll have to trudge off to the loungeroom and turn the laptop on and copy into your dropbox and onto the network drive (because you got so scared you'd deleted it when you couldn't find it anywhere you made yourself a little bit obsessively paranoid) before you can use it on the desktop.

My blogging may also drop off during the next week and a half due to all sorts of stuff I've got on but I'll still try to do it, because it's been a good exercise, forcing myself to put my thoughts into writing, forcing myself to describe in English what's been going on inside my mind.

Which reminds me - I've read my posts, and it seems like I think about serious stuff most of the time. No wonder I can't lighten up! Plus, disturbingly, I've already noticed a pattern: partially humorous opening remark, followed by opening discussions leading on from the remark, followed by a little story from my life, followed by grandiose moral posturing about the radical issues I feel it relates to, followed by some kind of home-made platitude along the lines of "if we could all just think like me, everyone in the world would transform into cosmic beings and be happy", before finishing off with a funny little kicker just to even the mood. Maybe I'm being a bit harsh on myself, but I'd rather be like that and be able to self-criticize than do what the Yanks do and tell myself I'm so amazingly wonderfully incredibly brilliant, intelligent, sexy and (to top it all off) humble and self-effacing that nothing I ever do could be anything short of the most brilliant thing ever to be written in the history of sentient life in the Universe, therefore I should feel comfortable with the pile of luke-warm, insipid, beige tripe I just choked up onto the plate, pat myself on the back and eat another side of ribs, a donut, and a bowl of diet ice-cream covered in fat-free maple syrup. I'm sure a healthy perspective is somewhere in the middle of the two.

Enough pendulum-swinging for one night. I have to get up at some ungodly hour tomorrow and attempt to find my way to work on Adelaide's woefully inadequate public holiday transport timetable. TTFN

iPhone blogging

It's actually quite tedious blogging from an iPhone, so this will be a short one.

They are quite nifty little units, but they have their limitations. When I first got one I was expecting it to be a lot more gimmicky than it was. The email feature is handy, it syncs with outlook and has a web browser. For serious business use though, you can't go past the Blackberry. But considering I only really need it to play games whilst on the toilet, it does the job nicely.

I was thinking today about the 80's, when there were no mobile phones, no SMS, no facebook, no blogs, no wikipedia, no online maps and no emails. If you said to your friends "I'll meet you at the show at 7", you went there at 7 and hoped your friends would turn up within visual range. If you couldn't find them, you would go for a wander and hope to run into them. Then if you couldn't find them after that you would go to a payphone and call their house. If they weren't there, you would call around your other friend's houses to see if they were there, or if not speak to someone who might know where they went. Then if you still couldn't find them you would assume they were there somewhere and enjoy the show, because if you didn't end up running into them at the show you would probably catch up with them next week some time.

Now days, you say "I'll meet you at the show at 7", then when you turn up, SMS them saying "I'm here". If they don't turn up within 5 minutes you SMS them again saying "where the hell are you?" and then if you still can't find them you ring them and stay on the phone trading landmarks until you bump into each other. You enjoy the show and enter several facebook status updates to the effect, then go home and write about it on your blog, entering a google maps reference link so people could see exactly where on earth you had such a great time. Your friends read your blog and post replies containing links to humorous topics on wikipedia that relate to something you were talking about. Then when you get to work on Monday you email your work friends telling them what a great time they missed out on.

You know what I'm going to say next, right? It was better when everything was so much simpler? Wrong! I think technology is fantastic, and the fact that it's so much easier to communicate with everybody these days is brilliant. I'm so glad I found my high school reunion being organized on facebook, and that I can stay in touch with old buddies via a simple SMS or email, whereas in the 80's I would have long lost touch with them unless I sat down and wrote an actual letter, on actual paper with an actual pen, then stuck it in an actual post box and hope it made it.

So I'm all for technology. But I think my next blog will be touch-typed whilst sitting at my good old pc - my index finger is killing me!