In words - make-believe.org

No sleep 'til Brooklyn!

2008-10-27T00:00:00Z

I'm back in the United States of America, seven months to the day since my last visit. The first time it took me thirty years. The flight was 23 hours long. All durations are interminable in some way or another.

If you enjoyed American Diary, I humbly present American Diary II: L Train to Brooklyn. You know what they say about sequels.

Mississippi Gambit

2008-09-27T00:00:00Z

Written for The Business Spectator, where it may appear in edited form.

The first debate brings to an end the silly season in every US Presidential election year. The trash-talking at the weigh-in is finally concluded, and the boxers are called to engage. 60 million citizens tune in, some clutching their tickets, some waiting for particular key assurances, some just wanting a winner to be declared. The climactic denouement to the election cycle is begun.

This debate was supposed to be on foreign policy. There was a rare consensus a week ago between the candidates — McCain hoped begin with his undeniable strong suit, and Obama was happy to have the focus narrow on domestic issues in October. Then, a crisis on Wall St intervened, and suddenly McCain wanted out. He ‘suspended’ his campaign, called on his opponent to do likewise, postponed the debate, and charged to Washington. Of course, his ads continued to air, his running mate was actually more talkative to the press, he himself held numerous TV interviews, and posed for photographers on Pennsylvania Avenue. Other than failing to appear on Letterman, and almost dodging this debate, it’s difficult to determine what was actually suspended.

But this was supposed to be his night, and though his pre-conditions (a word to which we’ll return) for enjoining the debate were not met, it surprised few when some hours beforehand he confirmed his attendance. He needed to: having consistently tracked several points behind in the polls since the start of the summer — short-lived bounces in dramatic news cycles notwithstanding — and after trampling across the delicate bailout negotiations in Washington yesterday, this was his big opportunity to lay a claim on the presidency, debating in the area of his clearest advantage.

So how did he do? Okay, given that the topic took a while to arrive. This debate was inevitably hijacked by the financial crisis. Almost half of it was consumed by the pressing economic questions. The candidates were invited to stake out a position on the bailout, and neither exactly did. Obama put forward some constraints on the release of federal funds, arguing for greater regulation, declaiming the economic management of the Bush administration and tying McCain to it by his voting record, and cautioning against golden parachutes for executives while Main St was hurting. McCain said “sure, I’ll vote for a measure,” but what was the measure? He meandered into populist pastures, attacking the rising trend in Congressional earmarks, which while politically sensitive have a very doubtful link to the causes of the country’s economic plight. When the topic is a US$700 billion subsidisation of Wall St, it seems naively disproportionate to be railing against a $3 million earmark for the study of bear DNA in Montana.

Somehow from this extended diversion into earmarking, a productive discussion of tax policy was salvaged. Obama reiterated the middle-class support he intended by his taxation reform, and goaded McCain into an unabashed defence of his proposed $300 billion in tax incentives to business. They traded the first direct blows (“Ask him about his definition of ‘rich’,” McCain muttered without elaborating), with Obama appearing to score most of the points. Asked to explain how the $700 billion would affect near-term budgets, McCain delivered a startlingly specific proposal: a ‘spending freeze’ on all government programs other than defence, veteran’s aid and legal entitlements. Obama’s answer was more equivocal — some budgetary expenditures would have to be delayed until this investment delivered returns.

Renewable forms of energy exercised much of the candidates thoughts on the future of the economy. After the home foreclosure signs, the ‘pain at the pump’ is the presaging symbol of economic concerns in this election year, and Obama in particular spoke at length on the promotion of these industries. McCain underlined his opposition to ethanol subsidies — in doing so perhaps ceding the swinging mid-western cornfields of Iowa — and his newfound embrace of off-shore drilling. Before the Republican refrain of ‘Drill baby drill’ could get a real airing however, Obama brought it into stark relief. America has 3% of the world’s oil reserves, and consumes 25% of the world’s production. “We can’t drill our way out of this problem,” he announced.

Oil was the unifying, understated theme of the debate that followed, which was the debate McCain originally wanted: foreign policy. Iraq, Afghanistan, Iran, Russia, Georgia dominated the discussion; other areas of particular American interest — Israel, North Korea, Latin America — drew only tangential remarks. Cuba went unmentioned, and though China’s emerging influence was addressed in the context of America’s ballooning debt, the wider implications of that relationship were largely ignored.

McCain claimed Iraq and the success of the surge, and Obama sought to emphasise the centrality of Afghanistan in America’s attempts to curb terrorist activity — that Bin Laden had not been ‘captured and killed’, that Iraq had been a misadventure, that Pakistan was a recalcitrant ally in controlling Al Qaeda and the Taliban. Here the candidates each found the slogans for which this debate will likely be remembered. McCain began sentence after sentence with “What my opponent doesn’t understand...”, underscoring the perceived experience gap effectively. Obama took McCain to task for supporting the Iraq war: “You were wrong. You were wrong. You were wrong.” Probably the hardest hit and the best sound-bite.

Though at times irritable, it was a substantive discussion. McCain was nuanced in describing the ground situation in Waziristan, north-west Pakistan, where local leaders had largely ‘inter-married’ with terrorist organisations. Turning the tables, he managed to portray his opponent as too gung-ho about American intervention in the region. Arguments over the Georgian crisis were not as varied as they were fierce: McCain’s support for Georgia was blunt, and he perceived that the Ukraine might ultimately be the real epicentre of the ongoing tensions among the former Soviet states. “An aggressive Russia is a threat,” declared Obama, one that demands “a sharp international response.” But the United States needed to avoid a Cold War mentality, to recognise some shared aims — particularly the management of nuclear armaments, which should not find their way into terrorist hands. You don’t look into the eye of Russia and try to find its soul, he said. McCain was incendiary: “I’ve looked into Putin’s eyes and seen three letters: KGB.”

On the handling of ‘rogue states’, specifically Iran, the answers revolved around a willingness to sit down and commence some level of negotiating. It all hung on the distinction between ‘pre-conditions’ and ‘preparation’. The Republican saw any presidential contact with rogue states that was made without pre-conditions as legitimising. The Democrat argued that a lot of low-level preparation would necessarily precede any meeting between heads of state, but that imposing US will before agreeing to commence discussions was ineffectual. This is perhaps the most substantial ideological distinction on foreign policy posture between the candidates, and the debate grew heated over Henry Kissinger’s views on the matter, but it’s unclear whether it’s a vote-swinger. Americans tend to let their President assume whatever stance he thinks befits the international situation. But McCain’s play is narrowly directed at Florida’s pro-Israel Jews, and Obama is making a more blanket appeal to common-sense. It’s likely to be a wash.

One of the surprising aspects of this debate, and of post-debate commentary, is how substantive it has been. Appearance and ‘electability’ assessments took a back seat. The height disparity was voided by camera angles, both men wore bad ties, McCain in particular struggled with eye contact, and wore no flag pin on his lapel. Obama had a habit of grinning at McCain’s criticisms that may have been ill-advised. US presidential debates are commonly processed this way: often the analysis that emerges, that propels the media narrative forward through October, concerns demeanour. And this debate was not completely high-minded, there was squabbling over voting records, and glossing over important issues. Nonetheless, after a week at the circus, this was a business-like rendevous.

The initial reactions were mixed. Trading markets like InTrade and Iowa Electronic Markets awarded points differently and barely significantly. The CBS News post-debate poll gave it to Obama by 18 points — 22 points on economic issues, but McCain claimed a six-point edge on Iraq policy. Commentators sat on the fence, declaring a ‘tie’ and a ‘draw’. This is probably how it will be received by the voters. But the question remains for McCain: after a bad ten days, does playing to a no-result on his home turf work in his favour, given his persistent gap in the polls? It’s hard to see how.

An Unseasonably Warm Weekend as Seen by Our Accountants

2008-09-17T00:00:00Z

Black Cat, Friday, 9pm

(Taxi for one from Brunswick — $13 + $7 tip.)
1 stubby of Coopers Green, 1 magnanimous stubby of Melbourne Bitter for the guy talking to you when I arrived — $9.50

Bar Open, 10pm

2 x Mountain Goat Hightail — $16
2 x Mountain Goat Hightail — $16
1 Mountain Goat Hightail, 1 glass water — $8.50

Cafe Romantica, Saturday, 2am

2 glasses the Pinot Noir, sorry I'm afraid we are out, okay the Burges Shiraz, there is also the Cab Sauv, that doesn't have a glass price, it is the same sir, very well the Cab Sauv... ahem... you know it is cheaper by the bottle if you are intending to stay around sir, 2 glasses please, no problem — $15
1 small mushroom pizza, 1 small bocconcini pizza, token gratuity — $18.50

East Brunswick Newspower, 10am

Copy of The Saturday Age (woohoo) — $2.40

Lygon St greengrocer, 10am

2 bananas — $1

Artisan Espresso, East Brunswick, 10am

Soy latte — $3.50

No. 1 Tram, Lygon St, 10am

2 hour Zone 1 full fare — $3.50

Farmer's Market, Collingwood Children's Farm, 11:30am

Raspberry jam, spiced apple and rhubarb relish, 1 rhubarb & cream tart — $12
Sticky malt sourdough loaf, fruit sourdough loaf with caraway seeds — $13
Bottle of Limoncello — $15
Persian Fetta in a tin, goats' cheese medallions in a jar — $26.50

Dight's Falls, shying from the midday sun

Call goes through to voicemail — $0.30

Lofty Mart, 2:03pm

1 longneck Coopers Green, 1 longneck Coopers Red — $9.50

Outside the former Cafe Dreams, 2:06pm

Taxi for one to Sydney Road — $15? No tip; rather, a tale worth telling.

Disparate locations, 2:30-7:30pm

5 SMS messages, $0.50
4 SMS messages, $0.40

Brunswick, 8pm

Taxi — $15?

The Labs, 9pm

1 bottle The Wanderer 2007 Pinot Noir (tab collected by Inventive Labs)

Chemist Warehouse, Sunday, 9am

Hayfever tablets, 4 x Kleenex tissue packets, 1 misc — $33

Upmarket Aquariums, Queen Victoria Market, 10am

(Avoided purchasing Eastern Longneck turtle — note to accountant: saved $125)
(More narrowly avoided purchasing 2 seahorses and tank — note to accountant: saved further $380)

Fruit and veg aisles, Queen Vic, 11am

Half dozen long red chillies, hunk of ginger, hunk of red ginger, 6 birds-eye chillies, paper bag of button mushrooms, paper bag of portobello mushrooms, 6 sprigs basil, tub of cherry tomatoes, paper bag of baby spinach — $15, give or take

Deli section, Queen Vic, 11:30am

Tub of giant green olives, spoonful of green olives stuffed with fetta, tub of mascarpone figs — $8 dollars exactly
Ball of buffalo mozzarella, large wedge of Watsonia cheddar — $12
1 bag crostoli — $3

Polish deli, deli section, Queen Vic, 11:30am

20 slices of sopressa, 20 slices of salami, 1 round of black pudding — $18
Mildly disapproving looks from vegetarian party, shrug from unrepentant carnivore — on the house

Bratwurst shop, deli section, Queen Vic, 11:30am

$0. This is remarkable.

King and Godfree's, Lygon St Carlton, 12:30pm

Bottle of pasta sauce, sixpack of Razorback Red Ale, wafer biscuits, bottle of champagne — $39

* * *

Then, I suppose to the great relief of Mr Bretherton CPA, we put our wallets away. Sometimes I feel sorry for accountants, whose receipts are this slender window.

Even in Kansas

2008-08-31T00:00:00Z

Speaking of those United States, the latest edition of Meanjin appears on the streets tomorrow, and carries an essay I wrote back in May on the presidential election. It's called 'Even in Kansas' — ostensibly a review of Don Watson's recent book on America.

Here's a snippet from near the end of the piece:

Part of the enthusiasm derives from the slate of candidates: the studious former First Lady and a visionary African-American, competing for the right to take on the decorated former prisoner of war. Of course there are plenty of citizens caught up in the Hollywood storyline. But greater energy stems from the sense that a series of fault-lines that have increasingly divided the country are being sealed over by this campaign, that the fortresses of the red-state/blue-state years, which by 2004 seemed like a sectarian cold war, are crumbling in fits and starts. McCain and Obama are tussling over independent voters, taking a different tack to the Rovian philosophy of energising the base, and both could lay some claim to post-partisan political outlooks, if the term weren’t mostly meaningless in an active Western democracy. McCain, in fact, has had to back-pedal from his monicker as a maverick, to prove his Republican heart, and he will have to wear the charge of Bush Mk II from Democratic campaigners, though it’s not entirely a fair one. Obama has a surer base, although he too has to mend the rifts of an arduous primary season. His proclivities lie in reconciliation, even to the detriment of his political fortune, as when in January he found himself under pressure in Reno, Nevada, for telling a newspaper’s editorial board that “the Republicans were the party of ideas for a pretty long chunk of time” and that “Reagan changed the trajectory of America... in a way that Bill Clinton did not.” They were reasonable, even illuminating observations, but Hillary, campaigning to a more traditional wisdom, turned them to her advantage.

The entire edition is exceptional — my part the least of it — and I'm excited that with Sophie Cunningham at the helm, Meanjin seems to be turning a corner.

The tittering classes

2008-08-31T00:00:00Z

Introducing 'These United States' — a Melbourne Writers' Festival panel discussion with Dennis Altman, Don Watson and Philip Gourevitch last Friday night — Peter Clarke noted with a glint in his eye that Hurricane Gustav is scheduled to crash into New Orleans around the time President Bush will give his speech at the Republican Convention. The audience chortled merrily.

It's important to get this right. You can say that the United States exercises undue influence over Australia's actions on the world stage. You can say that Australian culture is unreasonably dominated by tablets handed down from that foreign mount. I think it's vital that you say these things, that they're not said enough.

They weren't said much on Friday night. When a man like Philip Gourevitch (with whose oeuvre I'm only vaguely familiar) is launching repeatedly into an impassioned defence of his nation's role in the world, against a string of barbs and unironic comparisons with China — you have to realise that your taunts have become extreme, if not idiotic. Absolutely, wish for freedom from our cultural and political fawning. But don't relish schadenfreude.

This has been my kitchen bible for years.

2008-08-23T00:00:00Z

Yes, he's packing heat.

Recipes are presented in comic-strip form. To take a sequential sample from, say, page 144 onward:

Partridge
Steak and Kidney Pie
Tripe and Onions: A Stirring Tale
Boiled Leg of Mutton with Caper Sauce (to feed over a dozen)
Osso Buco
Sharp and Sweet Tongue
Gird Your Loins (here Len explains various cuts of lamb)
Corned Beef and the New England Boiled Dinner
Pork Loaf
Ris de Veau a La Creme (veal throat, in case you were wondering)

A perusal of Wikipedia indicates that Len is now looking forward to his eightieth birthday and has not yet succumbed to heart disease or assassination. Eat that, nutritionists!

Wintergreen

2008-08-19T00:00:00Z

She is a noble soul, that is what she tells me, in no fewer and no more words, in those very words. This is in the context of the bumblebee. The bumblebee, which was really just a bee, so we will call it a bee, landed on her person. It took shelter under the collar of her coat perhaps. The point is that she is the bumblebee, but then this is a true story, and we should imagine the curious bee stumbling around her shoulder hunting down the promise of her sweet scent, which is pollen as you know, but since we have rendered and bottled it and thereby deceived the bee, it is hopeless. She is hopeless, no of course she is not, for she is a noble soul. That much is clear.

With the bee thus tucked beneath her lapel, wandering hopeless but cheery in pursuit of her promise, so she boards a tram and validates her ticket with a beepity beep. And sits down, and some time passes, and she becomes aware of the buzz of the bee, and surprised, she might in your imagination suddenly move, disturbing and distracting that hymenopteran mind from the tryst she never intended to make. Perhaps a flick of the hand. Let's say a reflexive flick of her hand. So now the bee is in the air, and finds itself upon a tram.

That didn't happen, not immediately. Instead, as you've surmised, she sat still and considered that the bee might become airborne, and find itself upon a tram, and this troubled her more than the possibility of a painful prick, for she is a noble soul. So she sat still, and glared balefully at anyone who thought of taking the seat next to her, giving the wrong impression but for a greater good she hoped they would never know. See? Already there is hope, and it relies not on heroism but quietitude and stillness and sacrifice. I think it often did for her.

But she had many stops to go, and some things are inevitable, and one of them is that a bee, given pause, will eventually realise it is on a tram. Of course a bee has no conception of trams or conveyances of any kind, being possessed of wings, and only dimly perceives a prison, so I'm really just saying that the bee knew something wasn't right. The world was moving and its wings and hairy legs were not. There was a discernable absence of flowers.

So it took off, up from her garment into the air, to what it knows best, which is the promise of freedom, and all promises seem alike to a bee, for it can only smell them. So it headed for the smell of flowers. You and I both know that nothing (but flowers) smells so much like flowers as old women, who shroud themselves in the mist of English gardens. The bee made a bee-line for the promising cloud.

"Then I thought," this is what she said to me, I am merely recording it, she said "I thought I'd better do something to try and get it off the tram because I felt a little responsible and I am a noble soul." This is a true story, and all the parts of it are true, except what you and I imagine of it, which merely contains the possibility of being true. But we know what she said.

Rummaging in her bag, feeling pangs of conscience for having brought the bee onto the tram (but to whom did she feel guilty? The bee? The old woman in her miasma of roses?), she found a tin of Wintergreen Altoids. The mints fell into her hand and she put them in a safe place, perhaps because she liked the taste of rootbeer, perhaps because her mind was on the bee, which was on the tram and whose own thoughts were full of roses and the unthinkability of windows. She folded some paper. By this stage a rough-headed Preston guy (we are proceeding on her descriptions, for we have nothing else but ghosts) had replaced the old woman in her seat, presenting a dilemma that is hard to articulate but easy to understand. She pressed her thumb and forefinger against the fold of paper and watched the bumbling bee.

Then, and again I have to quote, she thought: "Sod it, I'll just go for it." This bit she had to explain to me, and the mechanics of it require some precision: "The tin goes over the bee against the window then you slide the paper in so you can move the tin away from the window." At that moment, the rough-head stood up and the bee fell neatly into another enclosure.

She wasn't sure, but she thought that the other people on the tram were impressed.

What you don't know of heroes is the agonism that comes after. We all imagine ourselves performing good deeds, normally in hindsight, and rarely do we consider that the aftermath is difficult. What she felt was the buzzing of the bee against all sides and corners of the Altoids tin. For many stops, until her stop came, it beat itself against the night and the cruel betrayal of rootbeer, which to bees makes no sense, being sweet and useless. But it's not a bad thing, because the bee is therefore alive, and has not succumbed to menthol. It struggles and struggles and in the struggle it remains a bee, a living bee.

Her stop comes and she disembarks and feels the bee smashing against the metal box in her hand. There is row of planter boxes before a cafe. They are full of Liriopes.

"Perfect." That's what she told me.

She kneels down and prises the tin open. The bee tumbles out into the grasses. It's coated in white Wintergreen Altoid dust. Landing on a blade, it shakes itself clean. A moment, and it zigzags into the air.

Maybe she wasn't the bumblebee. Maybe that was you and I. It hardly matters.

Pearson's corollary to Murphy's Law

2008-08-07T00:00:00Z

The thing that goes wrong will activate your contingency plan for what you expected to go wrong, which it never is. This will have disastrous repercussions.

Also: fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck.

Distant splintered glass

2008-08-04T00:00:00Z

I ate alone at Sahara, where four years ago I wrote about the view from a cracked window. The vista has changed — then it was a deep hole in the ground, now it is another city mall. The window is still broken. I liked that.

Pirate statues of Hanoi

2008-06-29T00:00:00Z

I picked up David Foster Wallace's collection of essays, Consider the Lobster, again the other day, and re-found his account of John McCain's failed presidential bid in 2000. It was written for Rolling Stone. An excerpt from early in the piece:

Here's what happened. In October of '67 McCain was himself still a Young Voter and was flying his 26th Vietnam combat mission and his A-4 Skyhawk plane got shot down over Hanoi, and he had to eject, which basically means setting off an explosive charge that blows your seat out of the plane, and the ejection broke both McCain's arms and one leg and gave him a concussion and he started falling out of the skies over Hanoi. Try to imagine for a second how much this would hurt and how scared you'd be, three limbs broken and falling toward the enemy capital you just tried to bomb. His chute opened late and he landed hard in a little lake in a park right in the middle of downtown Hanoi. (There is still an NV statue of McCain by this lake today, showing him on his knees with his hands up and eyes scared and on the pediment the inscription "McCan — famous air pirate" [sic].) Imagine treading water with broken arms and trying to pull the life vest's toggle with your teeth as a crowd of North Vietnamese men all swim out toward you (there's film of this, somebody had a home-movie camera and the NV government released it, though it's grainy and McCain's face is hard to see.) The crowd pulled him out and then just about killed him. Bomber pilots were especially hated, for obvious reasons. McCain got bayoneted in the groin; a soldier broke his shoulder apart with a rifle butt. Plus by this time his right knee was bent 90 degrees to the side, with the bone sticking out.

I went looking for a picture of the statue:

The unseen virtue of keeping a blog

2008-06-22T00:00:00Z

It'll be a decade next year since I started blogging. Like most people who have engaged in this activity for a while, I have a slew of unpublished drafts, discontinued when I stopped to think, or fell into a quagmire of details I could see no way to resolve and consigned to a better, future self. They are rarely ever eventually published, which is a good thing, even if it means my future selves don't live up to expectations.

Though I hit Publish intermittently these days, I am better for having this space. Because it is where I go to express my beliefs, to an audience, meagre but highly valued, and in my imagination deeply critical. Sometimes, often, in my thoughts I arrive at an opinion, and if it is an interesting one I consider bringing it here. And then I wonder what you will think of it, and how, given you are different to me, you would respond. Sometimes I doubt you would respond at all, which makes me question whether it's an interesting subject. That's good. But if I decide you might, then I start to review all your possible objections, any of which might reveal me for a fraud. Then I think of ways to make the assertion so as to deny or invalidate your objections. I rewrite and rewrite the argument in my head, seeking a defensible position against your cleverness.

Sometimes it never comes, and then I understand that I don't really believe in my erstwhile opinion. That I agree with you. And I am better for it. And I have written nothing.

It bothers me when people apologise for not having blogged something recently. Be unrepentant, and wiser for it.

A June-November romance

2008-06-09T00:00:00Z

This appears to be an exercise tailor-made for me. Not because I have much chance of winning, but because it crams the best aspects of political and cryptographic nerdery into 40 characters. I started running my numbers, but two thoughts stayed my hand: first, there's no way I'll keep my trap shut for five months, and second, there is a lot yet to happen. In January I thought Edwards might contest the primaries for longer than he did. Even in March I thought Obama would win over Ohio.

So let's keep the temporal purview narrow. Will the VP choices count for much? It was Edwards and Cheney in 04, Cheney and Lieberman in 2000. No, I don't think it will matter all that much. Americans vote for a lot of reasons, but for veeps rarely these days. As a test of one's analytic capacity, though, it's a bit interesting. I'm intrigued by the possibility of Brian Schweitzer, but I think Obama might choose Kathleen Sebelius, and I hope he does. McCain, I suspect, will pick a friend first and an asset second, but in a toss-up, perhaps Crist.

Feel free to lampoon my general wrongness.

The default-position pizza

2008-05-13T00:00:00Z

All sorts of things end up on a home-made pizza when I'm feeling inspired, but when I just have to use the pides in the fridge before they go brittle, there's the fallback, the default position:

Pide base
Tomato paste
Long strips of Hungarian salami
Diced brown onion
Button mushrooms
Pitted Kalamata olives
Jalapeño peppers
Cubes of Australian fetta
French capers

Grill it til the corners of the cubes go dark. Go easy on the tabasco. And use a knife and fork, landsakes!

To the pain means the first thing you lose will be your feet below the ankles.

2008-05-07T00:00:00Z

Ah, wasn't that something? From the first counted votes in the early morning (Melbourne time) until its mid-afternoon denouement, Indiana was a feast of democratic theatrics. If you couldn't set aside the time to follow the narrative as it played out, let me recap.

Indiana belongs to two timezones (Eastern and Central), and has the unusual, arguably dubious practice of closing polls early at 6pm — not so strange to Australians, but then again we don't vote on Tuesdays. So at the groggy hour of just after 8am, results started to trickle in from the Eastern majority of the state. Beginning, as usual, with rural areas. Those deep southern tracts that Bill Clinton spent a week traversing repaid their debts and left a tip. Hillary streaked to a 30 point lead that simmered and settled into a high-teens holding pattern as Fort Wayne proved an Obaman buttress — but while the percentage held, the vote difference grew: first ten thousand, then twenty, then quickly enough forty. Marion County, host to liberal Indianapolis, began its slow churn of results, and eventually the vote difference stabilised at fifty thousand displaced chads. Consequently the percentage shrank, dipping to 53:47 with the surprisingly pro-Obama votes from the Catholic northern county of St Joseph.

Just under four hours into the count, the percentage came to rest at 52:48 in Clinton's favour, a net advantage of some 40,000 from just short of a million votes. The university town of Bloomington in Monroe Country was secreting predictably Barack-loving numbers, but only in counterpoint to the wide rural stretches of lower Indiana turning out on behalf of the woman who wanted to save them $50 at the gas pump over summer and protect them from vile gun-control laws.

Two counties reserved their judgement at 0% counted, hanging like Damoclean swords or waterbombs over the numerical status quo: Lake County in the north-west — home to the city of Gary and 8% of Indiana's population — and Union in the mid-east, in deep Clinton country, which looked ominous until one glanced at the census data (something like 0.1% of the state).

On the 29th of March this year, the mayor of Gary — a man by the name of Rudy Clay, an unabashed Obama supporter — claimed that the city would be the talk of the nation two months later on election night. Gary, you see, has a history of electoral king-making, because it produces results like molasses makes bubbles. Clay said that day that Gary would be the name on the lips of newscasters: "They are going to point at Indiana and say Hillary Clinton is leading by one point but Gary ain't come in yet."

He was only out by a percentile or two.

So we waited. Clay had the numbers — we knew this because other mayors of Lake County appeared on the networks and explained that they'd tendered their machine votes at half-six Central. But Clay had a sense of drama akin to the great Elizabethan playwrights. It was not until 1:45pm, just short of midnight in Indiana, that Clay dropped a 28%-of-the-vote bomb on a frothing commentariat: this quarter of Lake had gone 75:25 for Obama, yielding him an eighteen thousand vote gain, and tightening the margin to 23,000.

The sanest voice I've found in US electoral psephology put Obama's chances of winning Indiana at 30% when this information was divulged. If anything like that ratio held in Lake, the state (and likely the nomination) was his this night.

But Clay had a finer ear for melodrama. He waited forty minutes for the chattering heads on the cable nets to exhaust this tantalising revelation, and then produced the 56%-of-the-vote enigma: Barack's advantage reduced to 65%, his gains in Lake minor but still enough that when extrapolated made every vote count.

Then, gaining my admiration for his gumption, he made himself available to the media. He talked and talked and talked about the so-called reasons for the delay, and said at one point "there's more results coming in about 20 minutes", deftly dodging the ham-fisted attempts to pin him down for (quite obviously) staging the scene.

But wasn't it a dream? For a long moment, Obama had the nomination if he could just pull out 20,000 punctured ballots, and how couldn't he in Chico Gary? Of course Clay gave us his third act right on time, a 98% fizzler, when the inevitable south of Lake County redressed the imbalance initiated by Gary, leaving Hillary comfortably 30,000 clear.

All of which means that West Virginia looms next Tuesday, a presumed victory for Clinton, like Kentucky a week later. But when Kentucky votes, so does Oregon, and it is the likely win there for Obama that should finally resolve this, if Clinton does not tender her handkerchief in the face of the inevitable this week. And not before time: this has been good, but it has become damaging, and we've seen multitudinous sides of her that really we'd rather not have. I'd like Oregon to bring this thing to an end, in part because it and Wisconsin are my two favourite American states I've never seen.

Murder in the red barn

2008-05-06T00:00:00Z

Don't get me wrong, I'm as much an admirer of the opening scene of Lost in Translation as anyone. But this, this is execrable. Its only virtue, perhaps, is that Scarlett Johansson has demonstrated for all time how to murder a Tom Waits song. No-one need ever try again.

There's a whole album of this shit.

Awesome.

Things I like when I'm durnk

2008-04-25T00:00:00Z

Berocca
Computers
Sunshine
Moonlight
Socks
Kelly

Also, the prickles of stars when the moon's hid. G'night.

The two-four-two

2008-04-17T00:00:00Z

This guy says that the perfect pop song runs for two minutes, forty-two seconds, no more, no less. He claims to have proof, which is sporadically convincing.

So I created a filter in iTunes: File->New Smart Playlist..., select Time from dropdown, 2:42 in the text field, OK. And my doubts disappeared. Not a bad set list, if from a small and biased sample.

Text message pack rat

2008-04-03T00:00:00Z

I don't use my phone much. Certainly not for talking to people. I do everything in my power to avoid talking to people on the phone.

I message people a bit. Not enough to be all that quick at it. Not enough for it to cost me anything — my phone bill has been $16.50 every month for the last 12 months, except in December when Kelly's ute broke down and we wasted 20 minutes on hold to the RACV. Not enough to have given up my regard for punctuation or my disdain for abbrs.

What rankles me about my phone is that despite some 2Gb of storage, I'm only allowed 4Mb for my messages. It's infuriating, because those messages are part of my written history. They're the best thing on my phone, and Nokia has granted me no way of exporting them. Everytime I'm forced to do a cull, twenty or thirty koans vanish into the void. I hate to tell you this, but I tend to delete your messages rather than mine. Not your good ones though — I'm trying to keep those, although Nokia has other ideas.

I have 1099 messages in my Sent Items folder. For a random sample, I'm going to take the 30 middlemost messages (534-563) devoid of context and dump them here. It's navel-gazing, but this is a blog, right?

Hang on, it's going to take a few minutes to scroll to them. Typing one-handed. Bring on the 3G iPhone already. Dum-de-dum. Is Everybody Knows This is Nowhere Neil Young's best album? I sometimes think so. Oh look, 420. If you recognise one, let me know. Alright, here goes nothing. (Reverse-chronological, for the record.)

! Poor bugger. It does sound a bit exotic when described that way...
I reckon you picked it. So, Sarko v Sego - not sure she can make up the ground..
A-ha! Thanks. Il sera interessant s'ils font cela! ... croissant.
Any last minute tips on l'election for me?
Hmm, he said he'd be there... Possibly he was getting some lunch with a friend
Not a bad idea actually. At this stage we're planning to go to the G, but if that changes I'll give you a buzz.
Good night, mon cherie
I wish!
I don't know!
Oof. Peter's.
Losing at poker.
No I am gambling!
Yas.
Yes.
No wrong jesus.
As in sugar man.
Jesus rodriguez playing at the corner.
I suddenly need a fridge. But no drama.
How busy are you today?
1:30am. Back momentarily.
Fergot it were on.
[Audio MMS message]
Myp2p.eu. There's a list of software in the sidebar.
Yep there's some blue sunnies here; I'll be here for a few hours.
Excellent! I will get the cupcakes.
Up for some virtual golf and a barbie on Friday arvo?
WHAT ARE YOU DOING?
My indian name is johsaf.
Didn't hear a thing - heard it on the radio half an hour later. Quite sad
On our way

So obviously that was my francophilean phase. For a lot of them, my guess is as good as yours. Incidentally, I won that poker game. And bizarrely, the only two text messages I've ever previously transcribed on this blog were in that random sample. That was unlikely. In summary, Nokia sucks.

It's Tuesday night in the 'bush

2008-04-01T00:00:00Z

So, two facts. Both rendered indisputable like erosion renders things indisputable: by the steady drip-drip of me saying it over and over. First, I live in Carringbush and the Tote is my local. Second, I do like my booze.

Except, one of these isn't quite true. With a good arm I could throw a stone from here and hit the Tote. But as this posited stone approached the top of its arc, it would fly past another watering hole. That one, if you're being pedantic, is my local. It's a corner hotel, built in a Walt Disney castellian style, with bright turquoise spires projecting from every perpendicularity. From a distance you'd say it's almost cute. Actually it's rough as guts. The closest I've ever been to mugged was walking past the front bar one Sunday afternoon, when a bloke with one arm wrapped around his girl put his other hand on my chest and inquired after my finances. That was something of a quandry, because you don't want to antagonise a belligerent man in front of his woman. The situation was eventually defused by the security guard who (oddly tenderly) embraced my assailant, turned to me and said "You'd better get the fuck out of here, bro".

I probably owe that guy a beer.

Anyway, the Tote is my local. The alternative doesn't even really register anymore. But this evening I had some work to do, and by extension that involves a dose of the great programming elixir. This pub is by any measure the most convenient of my available liquor vendors, and tonight I figured that having navigated the shadier streets of Gotham, nothing in Carringbush could hold any terrors. So I ducked across the road into the bottle shop, looking for a white wine. I cast my eyes about the shelves for a second, and then the proprietor appeared. "Have you got... oh," I said, as I found the fridge on the other side of the counter. She sort of snorted, and I looked at her.

She was a short, stocky woman with close-cropped hair. And a well-groomed moustache.

"...Could I get the Jacobs Creek Chardy?" She snorted again, we swapped bottle for change, and I was almost laughing. God I love Carringbush.

Darlin don't you go and cut my hair

2008-03-27T00:00:00Z

You might think I cut my own hair because I'm a cheapskate. There were times (good times) when that might have been a fair accusation, but these days I like to think it's demonstrably false. It's not because I'm anti-social either, though to a certain extent I am — unless I've been drinking. But of course there's Dr Follicles on Gertrude, where they ply you with Coopers ale as they tame your tresses, which would be the perfect cure if shyness or misanthropy were the ailment.

In fact, I cut my own hair largely out of obstinacy. When I was five (yes, twenty-five years ago), my mother took me to a hairdresser on Hamilton St, Mont Albert, and I got freaked before I even sat in the chair. I don't remember why, but I ran out onto the street, and no cajoling nor ultimatum could bring me back into the shop. I swore to my mother that day I would never, ever go to a hairdresser, or hair stylist, or hairmonger, again.

So for the next seven years, Mum cut my hair. She had a whole armory of scissors, I remember: some thin, some curved, some tapered for the fringe, some with teeth like crocodiles, all very cold against my skin. Despite the professional quality of her arms cache, and her diligence and patience, she usually managed to nick my ear or the back of my neck, and always, without fail, I looked like a bucktoothed goofball at the end of the procedure.

Now when you are being stubborn, and people are being accomodating, and then you have the temerity to complain in spite of their goodwill — what usually results is a stand-off. So by twelve years, when my appearance, I guess, started to matter, and yet I still would not betray my five-year-old self, but nor could I have my hair cut by my mother, she devised an ingenious plan. "You will go to the barber," she said. "He's different from hairdressers." I remember being doubtful. But I was in a no-win scenario, so I took her at her word and for two years, on an occasional afternoon, I trudged down Broughton Rd to Elgar, where Joe the Barber had a shopfront. It said Joe the Barber in the window, even if it had no white and red poles. He was old and Italian and loved his soccer and cigars. He'd say "How would you like it?" and I would mumble something like "Short back and sides" but it didn't matter — he just got out his shears and gave me a uniform #2 every time. He didn't talk much, which was really how I liked it.

I eventually wised up though. The bloke was a hairdresser. And I had sworn off them. So I started cutting my own hair when I was fourteen or fifteen. At first I did this with Mum's ordnance of cold steel, pointing one mirror at the front of my head and one at the back. The results were mixed. But I was entering a period of my life where mixed results were good. I started dying my hair — for a long time fixated on a product that gave me a lustrous "Mahogany Copper" mane, before I moved to jet black. When I got a girlfriend, Suwindi, she cut my hair a few times. She once shaped the crown of my head into a crude Eye of Osiris, it was completely awesome. You can still kind of make it out in my Year 12 handbook. At the end of that year I attended Presentation Night and accepted a prize with a small, skin-white X shaved into the middle of my head. And when I moved to Sydney there was the relatively notorious occasion where I asked my friend Elanor to "make me look like a mangy chicken." She (bless her) said "okay!" and deftly wielded the scissors, both of us giggling maniacally. I sort of did look like a black-feathered moulting rooster at the end of it.

Usually though, I was the one responsible for the crimes against my coiffure. In my twenties, as my radicalism faded and my contentment grew, I discovered these things called clippers, which you could buy at the supermarket for fifteen bucks. I had always assumed they were the exclusive property of barbers, like scalpels for doctors. Ever since, my routine has been largely unchanged. At an interval of two or three months, I go to the bathroom and (NSFW warning) strip naked, not out of any bizarre fetish but simply because I hate getting stray hair on my clothes or towels — it prickles my skin. Then I just do what Joe the Barber used to do — roll the #2 across my head for ten minutes. When done, I jump in the shower.

Of course, every time I'm obliged to do this, I feel the need to improve my technique a little. I learned that "jigging" the clippers around my head, rather than a smooth push, was much more efficient in claiming chunks of hair. I devised an ingenious method for keeping the back hairline mostly straight: wrapping one hand from earlobe to earlobe, and then pushing the #0 clippers up my neck until I hit my index finger. I have a canny knack now for hearing when the clippers are full and need to be tipped into the plastic bag in the sink.

I suppose with all this practice and conscious technique improvement, if the digital economy ever goes south, I'd make a pretty good barber. Five-year-old Joseph didn't say anything about that.