So very frustrating

My job, from time to time, requires me to carry around a mobile phone for a week at a time that is called in the case of a certain type of emergency. When this happens I usually have to immediately stop what I'm doing, change into work gear, jump in a car and travel to where the emergency is (potentially anywhere in NSW) and deal with it.

Well, last week was one of those weeks. Usually when I have the phone I get called maybe once or twice, three or four times is a lot. Last week, I had NINE calls. Nine calls is unheard of.

Whats more, of those NINE calls, TWO of them required me to actively deal with the problem (if you know what I do you'll probably know what I'm on about, if not then I could tell you, but I'd have to kill you). Two in one week is freakish, it never happens.

It was funny at the beginning, I'd say things like 'I'm going for the record'. But I must have jinxed myself, because the calls kept coming and I kept having to go and deal with the emergencies. It's kind of frustrating when not only can you not do your regular workload, but the jobs are adding a pile of additional paperworkd on top of it.

The very worst thing came on the Sunday, I had planned an afternoon for myself and all of a sudden the phone rang and I had to travel to flood ravaged Kempsey to deal with yet another emergency.

I do like being the person who solves other peoples emergencies however.

The coarsest

I wonder which professions are notorious for having the worst language...

Surely construction workers would have to be up there, and I vaguely remember hearing the expression 'swears like a sailor.'

The reason I wonder is because occasionally I let the occasional four-letter-word slip, and when my lovely partner hears it, she is less than impressed. So I'm kind of hoping my particular profession comes quite high up on the list of the world's worst swearers so I can at least come back with: 'well love, you signed up for this package and you get it, foul-mouthed warts and all'.

My Story

I've started to write a book.

It's a fictional novel set about 100 years in the future. It's set in a world where the human race is nearing extinction. Global warming looked as though it was getting out of hand, until the melting ice-caps caused a release of cool fresh water into the oceans which altered the sea currents and caused a snap ice age... (look it up, apparently it could be possible although if it occurred it would mainly be in Europe and the Eastern coast of North America).

Anyway, we don't need to know how it's happened, just that it has. Characters have to contend with harsh conditions, scarce resources, a break-down of basic services and law and order and to top it all off; an deadly weaponised virus that attacks the digestive system and brings about an inability to process food, then in the late stages it causes madness so severe that the hungry person starts to try to eat other people.

Anyway, the purpose of my story is almost as much to establish the world in which it is set as it is to tell a story itself. You see, I imagine that if I somehow managed to publish my story, I could establish a website describing my 'setting' for which any writer can then go and write a story, (within given constraints) they then submit the story to me online and if I like it, I push to get it published (there'll have to be some kind of agreement with a publisher). For new and undiscovered writers it might be a way to get your work noticed, and for me it's a way to be creative, read new and interesting stories and develop my own 'brand'.

In addition, there's the added benefit that after this initial story (and there has to be a story line, it can't just be explaining the world, otherwise it would be mighty boring) people can write stories (or even TV shows or movies) without having to explain the world in which they are set, because that's already done for them.

Any constructive ideas anyone?

Burn

Lyrics from the Jessica Malbuoy song Burn:

Look what you did to me, cut me so very deep
I need a doctor 'cause this is starting to burn.

...

...

Sounds like a Urinary Tract Infection to me Jess, a course of antibiotics should clear it right up.

Cinderella

The whole kingdom lined the streets to see Prince Charming and his new wife Cinderella walk the streets, everyone rejoiced.

Cinderella and Prince Charming moved into the palace at the top of the hill, they had servants to buy them everything they needed, to cook their food, to dress them, to clean the palace, to usher guests, to tailor clothes, to play music, the list was endless.

Cinderella had the whole North wing of the palace to herself, and Prince Charming lived at its center.

Cinderella had everything she could possibly want, she never had to leave her beautiful palace again, which was lucky because it was now lawfully forbidden for any man to look upon her. All her servants were female and she was confined to the palace, should any man have looked upon her beauty it would have heralded his death.

7 months after they were married, Cinderella fell pregnant, and 9 months after that she gave birth to a beautiful baby girl.

15 months after their marriage, while Cinderella was still pregnant, the King of the land died, and Prince Charming became King Charming. He suddenly became very important and he was away from the palace often.

Soon after the birth of the little girl, King Charming took another wife, Snow White, who lived in the South Wing of the palace, Cinderella and Snow White did not like each other. Not long afterwards Cinderella fell pregnant again.

When Cinderela was four months pregnant, King Charming took a third wife, Thumbelina, who lived in the Eastern Wing of the Palace. When Cinderella was seven months pregnant Thumbelina too became pregnant. Two months later Cinderella gave birth to another beautiful baby girl. Seven months later, Thumbelina gave birth to a baby boy.

The whole land rejoiced, a new heir to the throne of the land. As the mother of the heir to the throne, Thumbelina became King Charming's first wife, Cinderella was made to move out of the North Wing of the palace, and into the slightly less lavish south wing, Thumbelina moved into the north wing and Snow White moved into the east wing.

Within the next twenty years, King Charming took another wife (Rapunzel) to live in the West Wing of the Palace, Cinderella had 7 more children, Thumbelina had 10 more, Snow White had only three and Rapunzel had five. Along with his four wives, King Charming entertained fifty concubines at all times, who were not allowed to be over the age of twenty, Cinderella saw less and less of King Charming as age started to show on her face.

When Cinderella was in her forties and King Charming in his late fifties, the eldest son of Snow White, (Jack) became jealous of his eldest half brother, who would inherit the wealth, the palace and the throne. Late one night he snuck through the palace and killed all his half-brother princes who were older than him (5 in total) and the four next oldest boy children junior to him. Cinderella's three eldest boys were killed. The over-zealous young Prince Jack then murdered his father, King Charming.

The next morning, the kingdom awoke to the screams of mothers crying over their dead children. Jack, now by far the eldest boy siezed control of the kingdom. His first act as King was to throw Thumbellina, Rapunzel, Cinderella and all of their children out of the palace with nothing but the clothes on their backs.

Cinderella and her children had become accustomed to having servants to buy them everything they needed, to cook their food, to dress them, to clean the palace, to usher guests, to tailor clothes, to play music, and they had no idea how to care for themselves. Cinderella's youngest two children died from infection, and Cinderella had to resort to selling her body on the street to feed her younger siblings. Cinderella was now old however, and had little success, so she had no choice but to sell the bodies of her two eldest daughters.

At the age of 52 Cinderella died from an unknown illness.

But King Jack's reign was long and glorious; he made the pages of history, statues bearing his name lined the streets of every town, and great obilisks were built in his honor. He took four wives, seventy concubines and was murdered at age 64 by one of his own sons.

What Grinds My Gears

I'm beginning to realise that this blog is just becoming a rant session about things I hate, and I'm about to do it again. Perhaps I should change the name of my blog from 'We Blog' to 'Things I Hate'. It really does seek akin to Peter Griffin's 'You Know What Really Grinds My Gears'.

Today; famous people.

I despise the kind of movie star or musician who has developed the idea that they are better than everyone else, and therefore feel entitled to ignore or abuse the normal people.

The way I see music and movies is as a form of contemporary art as opposed to simply entertainment. True a vast majority of Hollywood movies and popular music are the equivalent of biro drawings of boobs and cock-and-balls in the exercise book of a high school boy; (entertaining, but not much artistic value), but still art nonetheless.

The thing is, these actors and musicians RELY on people liking their work, watching their films, buying their CDs or going to their concerts. It's the appreciation of the massess that give these people a career and when I see or hear of these artists ignoring or abusing those very masses it makes me furious.

I have a similar idea about many politicians. While I am willing to be proved wrong, I get the impression that many a politician believes that they are voted to the people's 'bosses', and if they're voted into office they gain the right to dictate how the very people who voted them in live their lives. The principles of democracy are that EVERYONE has an equal vote, however unless we want parliamentary meetings involving everyone in the country, we need to elect someone to represent us. Politicans therefore are the elected spokespeople or representatives of their constituents, not their bosses. The way I see it therefore is that the politicians actually work for the people, so the people are in fact bosses of the politicians, not the other way around.

I should just stay away from pop music

Today I'd like to talk about the use of sexuality in pop culture, (and some side issues). My rant stemmed from listening to the lyrics of a recent Beyonce song, (no this is not my usual type of music, but nevertheless I heard it).

It's the song where she says 'if you like it then you should have put a ring on it'.

Of special note are these lyrics:
Decided to dip but now you wanna trip
Cuz another brother noticed me
I’m up on him, he up on me
Don’t pay him any attention
cried my tears, after three good years
Ya can’t be mad at me

Basically, unless I'm sorely mistaken, the gist of the song is that she's been with a given guy for three odd years, she got fed up with no marriage proposal so she started looking elsewhere. The message I hear is: 'you had three years to propose and you didn't, so it's your fault that I'm rubbing up on other guys'.

Come on now... I'll get to the issue of 'social expectation of marriage' later, but as far as I know, there is no time limit for marriage proposals, there are many relationships that go well beyond three years diamond ring free. Plus, I see no real difference between that and somone else saying: 'you had three years to spontaneously tell me you didn't want me to murder you with an axe and you didn't, so it's your fault that you're lying in tiny chopped up pieces on the floor', the obvious rebuttal being: 'how was I supposed to know that it was something I was supposed to do', (well, that would be your rebuttal if you weren't dead).

For all we know, our dumped fella may have been perfectly happy where he was, in a long term relationship with the girl of his dreams, just because no proposal was forthcoming doesn't mean he didn't want to be with her forever.

Which gets me back to the social expectation of marriage. We grow up to believe that everyone should get married, even fairytales glorify the institution. We live our whole lives being force-fed the idea that it should be everyone's goals to find their sole-mate, put a ring on their finger and 'claim them for life'. The reason people want to get married long before they've even met their partner' is because they grow up being indoctrinated with the idea of marriage by people who were themselves similarly indoctrinated.

So what if someone doesn't want to get married, but instead wants to live forever with the one they love, secure in the knowledge that their partner is staying with them by choice and not for fear of the legal ramifications of divorce (not saying that is the only reason married people stay together, however it may be a reason some marries linger long after their natural expiry date).

Whose to say that the guy in this song hasn't found his happy place, the perfect situation in which he has found his sole-mate and is comfortable in his life, when all of a sudden, the woman leaves, cheats and then blames it on him because he hadn't proposed yet.

Marriage is the choice for me, and in less than 12 months I will be, but I still respect the choices of those who decide that it is not for them.

Why I don't believe in charity

I'm actually completely serious when I say I don't believe in charity.

Human beings are possibly the worst thing that has ever happened to this planet, we consume, we pollute, we multiply, then we migrate and do it all again.

Wherever there are large numbers of people starving, or suffering from diseases like polio and leprocy, there must be a root cause. The two main root causes I can think of are that the people are living within a political system that isn't supporting them, or are occupying a land that is unable to produce enough valuable resources to sustain them.

If the land can't sustain the people that occupy it, then it's a clear indication that there are too many people. Therefore I see this extreme poverty as nature's way of keeping our species at controllable numbers. When we give to these people, we are helping to sustain them within a land that can't. Without charity, peoples choices would be to migrate to greener pastures or die, and while I know it initially sounds heartless, these deaths are necessary for the sustainment of the earth itself, and the people who inhabit it.

If people are living within a political system that either doesn't care about its citizens in poverty or is incapable of helping them, whether it be an autocracy or any other system of government, then I believe charity won't help. In autocracies I would be pressed to believe that the charity is going to where it is needed, and even if it does I imagine it would stand a high chance of being 'taxed' or confiscated. In a democracy in which the numbers are so large that the charity is un-fixable, then surely no amount of charity can sustain its people indefinitely, so all we end up doing is extending the misery of people in poverty, or worse still, allowing them to further multiply to even more un-sustainable levels.

So I don't believe in charity.

I recently had the privelage of travelling to a democracy with a very high level of poverty. I thought this would be an excellent test of these values, because if I truly believed them I should be able to look the poorest of people in the eye and tell them not that I couldn't help them, but that I wouldn't. I had people in the depths of despair come to me and ask me for money, men with no hands, children living on the streets, mothers of young infants and I didn't give money once.

And no, I don't believe I'm heartless. I would go to great lengths to help a friend in need, those in my community are very important to me, but I feel no such compassion for those outside it.

After all, survival of the fittest is the natural order of things, but if the fittest continue to sustain the weakest, then all of a sudden we will find the world populated to its capacity and filled with a genetically weak species.

And let's face it; the world is sick, and as Agent Smith would say; we are the virus. She's getting a fever (I refer of course to global warming) and if we don't get the virus under control soon, her immune system is going to start killing it, be it by fires, floods, tsunamis, hurricanes, earthquakes or viruses.

I think not hippies

I heard a radio ad saying that water and electrical appliances don't go together under any circumstances...

I think not... What about an electric kettle?

Think first hippies.

AIRport

Here's a completely pointless insight into where my head was a few days ago. I was standing at the airport waiting in the very slow line to check in my bags, and this old guy spent about ten minutes at one of the four counters, moving cloths and items of luggage from one bag to another, trying to get the weights right. I thought to myself; if you've got too much weight old-timer, it doesn't matter where you put it, you're still going to be over-weight and have to pay the excess baggage fee. Then I thought; maybe he's trying to reduce the amount of 'air' in his bag in a misguided attempt to avoid paying for the extra weight that air provided, (so futile did his efforts look to me). Immediately my mind went off on one of its tangents of strange thoughts, which I will try to recreate in this blog:

When I was younger I saw a TV show which proved that air has mass by by the following 'demonstration':

They created a makeshift set of scales and at each end they placed a balloon. They then balanced the scales. Then they inflated one of the balloons, and sure enough, the one with air in it was heavier and tipped the scales.

I suppose then, that to demonstrate that air has mass the test is okay. BUT; does that mean that if you had two empty luggage bags on scales and they were exactly the same except one was full of air, and the other was crushed down with minimal air, the one with air would be heavier?

The answer is no, they would weight the same, the experiment was a better demonstration of elasticity, pressure, buoyancy and weight than it was a demonstration of mass.

The balloon, being elastic, pushes in on the air contained within it. This inward push caused by the elasticity means that the air within the balloon is at a higher pressure than that of the atmosphere around it. The high pressure air inside the balloon wants to push outwards on the interior surface of the balloon until the pressure is the same as the atmosphere, however the elasticity of the balloon (pushing inwards) balances with the pressure inside it (pushing outwards) and prevents this from happening. Balloons burst when the material reaches its elastic limit and the balloon can no longer expand elastically, so the pressure inside it then causes the material to fail, the balloon ruptures and the air rapidly reverts to atmospheric pressure, causing a 'pop' or explosion.

Assuming the air inside the balloon is the same temperature as the atmosphere around it (I will come back to this later), the pressure inside the balloon will be directly proportional to the number of air 'particles' inside the balloon, which move about randomly, colliding with the walls of the balloon, pushing outwards on it, so higher pressure means that there are more air particles inside the balloon than there are in the same volume of air outside, i.e. the air is more dense.

Now we get onto the issue of buoyancy; the basic rule is that every object with volume has a buoyancy force acting on it equal to the weight of the matter (be it air or water) displaced, (that is why you are more buoyant in water, because water is heavier than air, you are displacing more weight and as such are more buoyant. Now, because the balloon has denser air contained within it, it contains more mass, and as such has more weight than the atmospheric air it is displacing. Therefore, the weight force pulling the balloon downwards is now greater than the buoyancy force trying to lift the balloon. This along with the weight of the balloon itself is why balloons inflated with normal air fall to the ground, however they fall quite slowly (because even though it has more weight than buoyancy, the difference is quite small compared to a rock or a person).

In the case in which there are two balloons on scales, one inflated and one deflated, the mass of the balloons cancel out, it is the pressure exerted by the inflated balloon which makes the air within it denser and causes it to tip the scale. So yes, it does demonstrate that air has mass. However, if you were to conduct the same test using plastic shopping bags instead of balloons, with one bag filled with air at atmospheric pressure, and the other crushed down so it contains no air, the scales would still balance because the buoyancy of the air in the inflated bag would be equal to its weight. So the only element that would affect the scales would be the bag itself, which cancels with the crushed bag on the other end of the scales.

So, air has mass, that's true. But at atmospheric pressure, while surrounded with air at the same pressure and temperature, the air does not have a net weight (as it cancels with its buoyancy.)

So in summary, if you're at the airport, trying to crush down your bags so they have less air in them so you're less likely to tip the scales and pay excess baggage, you're wasting your time and perhaps you shouldn't have cut it so close in the first place.

In this example I am completely ignoring things like: The fact that air is warmer when it is exhaled from the body, which would increase pressure for a short period until the temperature normalises, and the fact that exhaled air has less oxygen and more carbon dioxide in it, and as such may be heavier particles, however these are negligible factors which don't have a significant effect on this argument.