Life Raft Potemkin

Your Say

Preface: After I wrote the question which ends this post, I realised that I had bugger all else to say on the topic. So I'm stealing John Quiggin's Monday Message Board idea (I prefer to think of it as an unauthorised borrowing, and I'm prepared to swear on a bloody high stack of copies of Philosophical Investigations that it's done with no intention to permanently deprive him of it) and leave the topic open to discussion in the comments thread.

Friday was a good day for new blog topics. Besides the immediately personal subject of my new Preparing for Work Agreement, I remembered a quote that I read somewhere, from someone who was troubled by the fact that something like 60% of Americans want the biblical account of creation taught in schools and that in George Dubya, they have a president who is happy to go along with them. Unfortunately I don't remember where I read this, or who said it but I don't think that matters right now. The thing is it got me thinking.

It occurred to me that if the remark was accurate, then the whole debate over the scientific justification for the Kyoto Protocol is, as far as the US is concerned, completely moot. Especially if, as some have inferred, the current US President is a closet creationist.

The only bit of evidence I could turn up via Google, is an often repeated quote from the 1999 election campaign, which doesn't come from the man himself, but from a spokeswoman:

"He believes it is a question for states and local school boards to decide but believes both ought to be taught," a spokeswoman said.

I think it would be hard to find a better example of dog-whistle politics: if you're a creationist, it's easy to conclude that Dubya is on your side, at least to the extent that he believes that creation should be given equal time in the science curriculum. On the other hand, leaving it to local communities is eminently in keeping with a grass-roots apporach to democracy and, if anyone actually wanted to make a serious issue of Dubya's position on the relative merits of creation science and the real stuff, there's not much of a peg there to hang anything on. The crowning touch is to have the statement delivered through a spokeswoman so that if push comes to shove, you can always maintain that, regrettably, your actual position was inadvertently misquoted.

So there's plenty of room for some of the President's supporters, and just about every one of his detractors, to assume that Mr Bush is a closet creationist although there's bugger all evidence to satisfy a balance of probabilities standard of proof, let alone establish the case beyond a reasonable doubt. But what the hell, this is a blog, not a court of law, so let's proceed on the quite explicit assumption that President George W Bush is a creationist and see where it leads us.

The first conclusion it leads me to is that, as far as global warming is concerned, any scientific arguments based on the fossil record or events occurring on geological time scales beyond the date of creation estimated from the biblical chronology aren't worth a damn. I can't remember the exact estimate of the age of the Earth from biblical "data": i think it's somewhere around the 6,000 BC mark with one estimator settling on the first day of the Michaelmas term at Oxford University as the actual day of the year.

Most of what I wrote in my post on the work of Veizer and Shaviv goes into the bin on these grounds: any cosmology that supposes that the Earth has spent 450 million years travelling around the galaxy has to be a load of cobblers if there are in fact only 7,000 or so years of terrestrial history to account for. This is one of the reasons I'd rather talk about this in terms of creation science versus the real stuff, rather than creation science versus evolution: it's not just Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection, or its modern derivatives that's at stake here, it's the whole of modern science.

I think it might be best to skip the jeremiad about the coming dark age of religious unreason, at least for the time being. While it might be fun to write, it will probably go over better if I do enough research to give it a little verisimilitude. For now let's stick to the topic at hand - what if George W Bush is a creationist? All relevant comments are welcome but I'd be especially interested in what you think the consequences for world politics and other big picture issues might be.

Afterword: I doubt that anyone's going to believe any protestations I might make that in no way do I consider this equivalent to asking if George W Bush is an idiot but all the same I'm going to insist that no imputations are intended about his cognitive functions, regardless of whether your preferred measurement standard is Spearman's g or Adorno's F Scale. Difficult as I might personally find it to conceive of such a person, I'm prepared to concede as a matter of courtesy that there are intelligent creationists in the world. And yes, the preface is one of those self-subverting ones beloved of post-modernists.

There's No Damn Bird in the All Green Hand*

I got a pleasant surprise the other night, of the kind which will be familiar to anyone else who is in the habit of hiding money from themselves. No-one hides money from themselves consciously of course - at least I don't think they do, but if, like me, you occasionally tuck a five dollar note given in change into a shirt pocket instead of putting it straight into your wallet with the bigger denominations, the effect is pretty much the same. A few days later when you're feeling a bit strapped, you remember the note and a quick search of the dirty laundry turns up the shirt, and the money. One dollar and two dollar coins can also be effectively hidden in the upholstery of lounge furniture by allowing them to fall out of your trouser pockets when you sit down. It's a way to lighten up dull days with a little of the festive spirit of Easter (even the secular commercialised version which I subscribe to).

The surprise about the Mah-Jongg set is that it used to be community property and I'd forgotten I had it. When my marriage went belly up, the divvying up of the chattels wasn't exactly done with a lot of care and attention: neither of us had the stomach for big arguments over who got the Bohemia crystal and who got saddled with the Selangor pewter. There wasn't too much argument about the two-pack epoxy resin anniversary presents: we arrived at a civilised agreement to each tell the donors the other had them, and put them out for the next scheduled hard rubbish collection. I think a lot of hand-me-down Tupperware went the same route: look, if you've got a house full of unwanted junk that you can't get rid of without offending friends and rellies, a messy break-up and divorce is probably the way to go. A rowdy argument with lots of throwing of crockery will take care of the willow pattern and the Franklin Mint collector plates and a lot of other "treasures" can be disposed of, to the satisfaction of both parties, by setting out a few sensible rules of engagement before you start the screaming match.

It doesn't even have to be real: once you've done with the property damage you can both "come to your senses" and realise that you're better off with each other. If some third party does get shirty about the fact that the heirloom Tupperware got blow-torched as payback for the chain-sawing of the Shaker reproduction television cabinet, you've got the upper hand, morally speaking: what really matters is that you were both able to forgive each other these acts of vandalism because you realised that the important thing about your relationship was the underlying love and trust which was strong enough to prevail in the end.

There's only two other things I need, now that I've found the Mah-Jongg set - which might still be nominally community property by the way. Although I currently have posession, I think it's on the understanding that there are borrowing rights, just as I have visitation rights with the cats. Of course the cat population has changed since the break up - of the three originals, only Csl is still alive. As far as the other two are concerned, I'm just this bloke who turns up occasionally, and can sometimes be harassed into tossing them a few pellets of kibble. As far as Csl is concerned, I'm still the bloke who lets her climb on his shoulder and wrap herself round the back of his head which, given her declining attention to personal grooming, is sometimes a big ask. The only reason it's still tolerable is that she's at least keeping her bum clean: expecting her to do that and take care of the body odour problem is a much bigger ask, too big to be fair. I've seen this before when Csl's nephew Duffy was in his terminal decline: eventually he didn't have the energy to keep his bum clean at all. The dog was usually eager to do it for him, a kindness which he didn't always welcome with appropriate gratitude.

What I need to go with the Mah-Jongg set (there's no graceful way to segue back from the cat digression to the Mah-Jongg set, so to hell with it) is an intelligible set of Mah-Jongg rules and three other players. That's actually one thing and three people, which provides a perfect excuse for a Wittgensteinian philosophy of language digression, but I think the cat digression was probably bad enough.

I'm still trying to track down my copy of Golden Oddlies, a collection of articles by the English humorist Paul Jennings. There's one that I'd like to post in The Potemkin Museum of Antique Humour called, if memory serves, "Halma is a Fine Game Damn It". It's about Jennings' attempts to learn Halma from instructions in German which came in a Halma set presented to the Jennings family at Christmas. The other Jennings classic which I consider required reading is the Report on Resistentialism, which has been put on-line by quite a few people. The problems in learning to play Mah-Jongg from the instructions in English provided mith most Mah-Jongg sets match the difficulties of learning Halma from German instructions. Here for example, is an extract from the Directions of Playing Mah-Jongg that are included in the set I have:

Director of the four players are as follows :-
East is the direction of BANKER or Chief of a game.
West is the direction of the person who sits directly opposite to the BANKER.
South is the direction of the person who sits to the right of the BANKER.
North is the direction of the person who sits to the left of the BANKER.

This is followed by a description of the three suits (bamboo, numbers, circles) and the various honours (the three dragons and four winds), flowers and seasons etc. I think fisking the instructions would be a rather pointless exercise: I hope it's clear that I don't need instructions for myself, I actually do know how to play the game. It wouldn't be too hard to get three experienced players together either. The problem is, without intelligible instructions, you don't know the scoring system. It's the scoring system, with its complex rules for doubling the value of hands, special limit hands and all the rest that turns what would otherwise be an overly elaborate version of Gin Rummy (actually, like Canasta, a westernised and extremely simplified version of Mah-Jongg) into a genuine strategic challenge.

Normally a winning hand in Mah-Jongg consists of sets of three of a kind (for example three matching eights of bamboo) or three tiles in the same suit and numeric sequence (for example 4-5-6 of circles), plus a pair of two matching tiles. Some pairs, such as a pair of winds, or a pair of dragons score points. The game may also include a number of special limit hands, which automatically score maximum points, no questions asked. There are ten traditional limit hands, which are usually included (unless you've decided to exclude limit hands entirely) and several others which may be included by agreement between the players. The American version of Mah Jongg, which includes four extra "Joker" tiles among other innovations (such as an inflated scoring system which makes it easy to produce thousand point scores) includes a frankly bewildering number of limit hands. I've heard that in association play, limit hands are changed on a regular basis, to spice up the competition and keep things interesting.

For most social purposes, the ten traditional limit hands and maybe a couple of the more memorable common limit hands (such as the "All Green", the "Seven Pairs" and the "Great Snake") are quite enough to maintain an interesting game. There are also a few potentially entertaining sheer luck hands, such as "Moon from the Bottom of the Sea" which is going out on the last wall tile or discard, that tile being the One of Circles. Lest anyone think I've got a phenomenal memory for Mah-Jongg limit hands, it's time to admit that I'm getting this information from the help file of my copy of one of those PC Mah-Jongg games, of which more later. If I was up against some seriously heavy Mah-Jongg players, I'd be dumb enough to toss the One of Circles (or the Five Circles or Two Bamboo) as the last discard and end up paying out some seriously heavy points to winner of the hand.

One of the traditional limit hands is the "Thirteen Orphans" hand which consists entirely of what, to a Canasta or Gin Rummy player, would be rubbish: it includes a 1 and a 9 from each of the three suits, one each of the winds and dragons, and an extra tile which matches any of these thirteen to make a pair. It's a pretty devastating piece of showmanship to quietly build a crap hand into a 500 point winner, while everyone else is franticly competing for pungs (three of a kind) and chows (sequences). If you start the game with at least 10 out of 13 of the required crap tiles, it's often worth trying for the Thirteen Orphans. Here's how it's described in the instruction book:

Except 2 to 8 of the "Bamboo" the Circles and the "Numbers" cards the winning cards can be formed by constitution or 13 different cards of each of the remaining varieties. (See Figure 10).

In having such a form of cards in hand the player in order to win has to wait for any 1 of the corresponding cards so as to form a pair of "The head of the Bird" ...

You can see what I'm up against here: the explanation of the scoring system is completely unintelligible. So tracking down something better is essential. Because I have a hankering to play Mah-Jongg again. As enjoyable as the occasional game of Mah-Jongg on the PC might be, it's no more a substitute for sitting down to a table with four other people, shuffling the tiles and building the wall, than on-line porn assisted self-help is a substitute for a more sociable approach to prostate care. For some things you just have to get real. Especially when the AIs are routinely kicking your arse.

* The All Green Hand consists of sets composed entirely of Green Dragons, and all-green members of the Bamboo Suit - anything but the 1, 5, 7 and 9. The 5, 7 and 9 of Bamboo commonly include at least one red stick of bamboo in the design, while the 1 is traditionally represented by a bird. As a matter of fairness, the All Green Hand shouldn't be included if one of the players is red/green colour blind**, as they're at an obvious disadvantage when it comes to recognising the Bamboo tiles which don't qualify as "all-green". In a good quality set, the designers really go to town on the bird, as well as the Flower and Season tiles which aren't used to form sets, but do provide very handy points bonuses.

** As it happens, red/green colour blindness is a sex-linked genetic trait, which is more common in men than women. I wouldn't give much for your chances of getting a fair game of Mah-Jongg if you were a colour blind male taking on a game of Mah-Jongg with three of those man-hating-politically-correct-lesbian-separatist radical feminists who have done so much over the past twenty years to make western civilisation a living hell for the average bloke. Call me callous or a sexual quisling, but I don't much care what might happen to anyone who would be stupid enough to get into such a game.

The Potemkin Museum of Antique Humour

Bentley, N (England (1907 - 1978(?)), Young Elizabethan Era): Clerihew & Vignette

Description: Whether cartoonist and writer Nicolas Bentley (a non-smoking anti-anti-vivisectionist) properly belongs in a museum of antique humour is open to question. Although consistently amusing the quality that stands out most in Bentley's work is his wit, which is of the very driest kind. I'm not sure that Bentley set out to be funny; rather he produced the sort of sharp, insightful satire which often just happens to be funny.

Two works are presented in their entirety: first a clerihew Cecil B. de Mille and secondly a vignette Historic Moment which tells the story of a collision of minds between a stuffy Cambridge Don and "a healthy-looking girl called Myrtle, who in some strange way managed to give an impression of chic and yet remained unquestionably English."
Both pieces are from How Can You Bear to Be Human, which you might be able to track down, second hand, in Penguin. It's worth it, if only for Historic Moment which shows how a genuinely intelligent writer can take down intellectual snobbery without resorting to sneering anti-intellectualism.

Finally a couple of minor notes. Firstly a heartfelt plea from the curator that no-one dobs him in to the Berne Convention Copyright cops: I considered presenting Historic Moment in an excerpted form, but there was no way to do so without losing the richness of the characterisation or the brilliance of the ending. Just how rich this seemingly sparse piece is in fine detail became very clear after I decided to bite the bullet and transcribe it complete, rather than presenting an arbitrary selection of highlights. It's one continuous highlight from beginning to end. Secondly the colloquial sense of "rooted" in England in the 1950s has very little in common with the Australian colloquial usage of "rooted" but I admit that I nearly had a bit of a guffaw when I got to it during the transcription.

...

Cecil B. de Mille

Cecil B. de Mille,
Rather against his will,
Was persuaded to leave Moses
Out of The Wars of the Roses.

...

Historic Moment

We were sitting so that we faced each other across the table. He was a Cambridge man, name of Cedric Cudham, a minor don. He had a florid face and a hairy neck and his eyes were small and myopic. He was full of history and had that air of invincible superiority that is so often a sign of a second class intellect. At forty-odd he still retained some of the deliberate gaucheries of the undergraduate - there was a bright bandanna sticking out of the pocket of his dinner jacket - only now they had become the deliberate eccentricities of a conceited chump. he spoke quickly and authoritatively in a harsh voice that cut through conversation like a buzz-saw. He was every inch a don, of the crass, self-opinionated type, and with each mouthful of the souffle that he shovelled in (his table manners were none to good) I longed to kick his teeth in. He had a good strong set and I could imagine a heavy briar clamped between them as he sprawled in his airless rooms scribbling away at some erudite paper on the Diet of Worms.

They had put him next to a healthy-looking girl called Myrtle, who in some strange way managed to give an impression of chic and yet remained unquestionably English. With what intention they had been paired off it was hard to say. Clearly he hadn't much interest in women of later date than Madame de Maintenon or with less politicalacument than she must have had. Myrtle looked as though her political acumen began and ended with the knowledge that Daddy always votes Conservative.

Having listened with a slightly dazed expression to a short lecture on Napoleon's strategy at Austerlitz, Myrtle deemed it the right moment to shove in her tiny oar.

'I thought Marlon Brando was awfully like him in Desiree, didn't you?'

'Who is Marlon Brando?'

It was just a little too brusque. A lesser fool than Cedric would have seen how far calculated indifference towards a girl like Myrtle could be carried without giving her the needle. This time she felt it.

'Oh Mr Cudham surely you must have heard of Marlon Brando?'

'Must I?'

'Oh well, I mean - well one must be rather an oyster in a cloister not too.'

She knew exactly how to swing it and did so with a sweet reasonableness that took the blunt edge off but made the point a little sharper.

'He was absolutely Napoleon,' she said. 'I mean, he really was, really. Oh, he was wonderful!'

'You are alluding now to Napoleon?'

Myrtle - and I don't wonder - seemed rooted for the moment by this shaft of academic irony.

'Not to Napoleon. The only thing I know about him is that ludicrous hat.'

'He did possess other attributes of course,' said Cedric, dry as ginger ale, though not as sparkling.

'Yes, but actually this film's all about his sex life.'

'I'm afraid that I don't often go to Hollywood films,' Cedric said. His tone put Hollywood, and in fact the whole industry, exactly where it belonged - beyond the pale.

'Oh do tell us, what do you go to?'

Myrtle, in spite of appearances, seemed to be nobody's fool, but she knew somebody else's when she saw one, and at twenty paces a blind man could have spotted Cedric as being Acton's or Macaulay's or in fact the dumb disciple of any historical sage who had been dead long enough not too offer any competition.

'You adhere to the concept of perpetual motion, Miss Hesketh, like a good many of your generation, if I may say so.'

Myrtle rolled a round and startled eye in my direction.

'But do say so. Or does that mean something I oughtn't to know about?'

'The desire for movement per se, or shall I say the desire for what they call in the United States "going places", doesn't necessarily exert an equal attraction on succeeding generations. You "go" to the cinema; I "go" - at least in so far as I may be said to "go" anywhere - in pursuit of the University beagles.'

He gave a broad, bland, and rather fleeting smile to show that (a) as she wasn't worth more than a moment's consideration he bore her no rancour, and (b) the subject was now closed.

'Is that fun?' the flat innocency of Myrtle's tone seemed to imply that of all sports none sounded more of a deadly bore than beagling.

'Indeed it is. And it is also a considerable test of stamina.'

'You should come with me some time, Cudham' I said, 'on the Monte Carlo rally. That's a pretty good test of stamina. You'd enjoy it.'

He turned his tight-lipped smile on me and his little eyes glittered behind their heavy lenses.

'Would I? I doubt whether you would, though.'

He was wrong there. I knew what those ice-covered bends are like going over the Col du Fau. In a low-slung sports job like the one I drove in '54, and given a patch of mist, with him on the outside edge it would have been money for old rope.

'What's wrong with the cinema, though, Mr Cudham?' Myrtle wasn't going to let him get away with it.

'What indeed?'

'Well, for my money,' I said, 'there's Hollywood.'

Myrtle looked faintly disappointed.

'Well, yes, but I'm against vesting authority in the lower apes.'

'Our friend has put it in a nutshell,' Cedric said, smug as a bishop. I didn't care for our being classed as friends, but I let it ride.

'Well I don't care what you say,' Myrtle said brightly, 'I think Desiree's a jolly good film and I adore Marlon Brando.'

'Chacon a son gout,' said Cedric with a hint of a shrug, just to show there was some Gallic blood as well as soda water in his veins, at the same time watching me to see whether I appreciated how delicate was his irony.

'Well what's your taste like then, Mr Cudham?'

'In what?'

'I mean in film stars.'

'Well, I've told you, I seldom go -'

'Oh, yes. But I bet I know exactly the type of woman who attracts you, Mr Cudham.'

He tried a deprecating snigger which didn't quite come off.

'Then I congratulate you on your percipience,' he said.

We seemed to be swinging well outside his conversational orbit, which I've no doubt left the relationship of the sexes where it was when Herbert Spencer fell over it. But the man's vanity was too strong for him; he stuck his neck out a little further.

'For example?'

'Oh, well, someone like Marilyn Monroe probably,' said Myrtle.

Cedric sniggered again. Then the prig in him, never very far from the surface, came to the top and leant over.

'I don't think Miss Monroe and I would have much to say to each other.'

'That would be one time, Mr Cudham,' said Myrtle, 'when what you have to say wouldn't matter.'

...

Life as a Cliche

I noticed, on a quick visit to Meika, that he's got himself in a spot of bother with his Preparing for Work Agreement. It's as good an excuse as any to have a bitch about my own, and maybe slip in a few general gripes about the whole cock-eyed system while I'm at it.

I got a new Preparing for Work Agreement on Friday. Apparently I come up for another new one in a fortnight or so, when I'll spend another 45 minutes with my Job Network Service Provider person nutting out the things I'm going to agree to do so that I stay on CentreLink's good books for another fortnight. It's getting to be a pleasant relief to wake up in the mornings to discover that, despite all the indications that it should happen sometime soon, I didn't turn into a giant cockroach while I was sleeping.

To tell the truth, I don't know, or care, whether the new arrangement is because I've been identified as a client requiring special attention, or it's part of some general revision of the whole system of Mutual Obligation. Back when Droning David Kemp introduced this nasty piece of cant into our political vocabulary, I was still making a comfortable living as an outsourced computer programmer, so I wasn't immediately affected by it, beyond being outraged at the breathtaking hypocrisy of the concept. Show a list of the basic "Mutual Obligation" requirements to anyone who worked, as I did, in the CES during the 1980s and they'll quickly tell you that most of them were already included in the "Work Test" which was applied to dolebludgers back then. The only thing that has changed is the name, which is a flat out lie.

There's something very insidious about the whole concept of the Preparing for Work Agreement. Most of the requirements are easy to meet - such as the one about keeping my Resume up to date - so it's easy to take the position, as some mo doubt will, that the requirements are by no means onerous: all I basically have to do is stuff that a rational person would do for their own benefit anyway. Perhaps these people might like to explain why then, is it necessary that each new agreement has to be signed by me and, to make assurance doubly sure, each individual point on the agreement has to be initialled, to indicate that I have actually read it. This strikes me as, at the very least, petty.

But there's a more worrying possibility. Anyone who's been in the contracting labour market knows just how much legal weight can attach to putting your signature on a piece of paper with the word "agreement" in the title: just enough to land you in court if you're not careful. The whole procedure reminds you that there's someone with the big stick out there and if you're not careful, they'll be coming after you to administer a few whacks. Whatever the reason, someone has just raised the hoops I have to jump through to remain at least homeful, so I hope you'll excuse me if I'm feeling a little pissed off about it and slightly paranoid about the possibility that the whole point of the exercise is to produce plenty of documentary evidence to support a suspension of my Newstart Allowance on the basis that I in breach of my Mutual Obligation or whatever the cant phrase is.

To add insult to injury, I also learnt on Friday that a little bit of assistance that would have been very welcome, can't be provided. At our first meeting my Job Network Provider person (who I quite like - she's sensible enough to realise that the system isn't) raised the possibility that we might be able to get some business cards printed, to help promote the small business I'm currently self-unemployed in. It turns out that it's not a goer: the relevant assistance program is only available once you're off NewStart, which reminds me very much of that famous novel where the hero couldn't get out of flying bombing missions on the grounds of insanity, because the fact that he didn't want to fly any more missions showed that he wasn't insane. And, once again, it's based on some thinking about employment and the nature of unemployment that's at least twenty years old.

Just as much of "Mutual Obligation" is identical to the "Work Test" of the Seventies and Eighties (and possibly earlier), the definition of "work" used to determine whether you are "actively seeking suitable work" hasn't changed either. Work is still defined as "permanent, full-time employment": basically, despite all the changes in the labour market since 1980, the only way to qualify for the dole is to look for a job working for someone else. It's interesting, to say the least, that a government that prides itself on being a reformist government, especially in the area of Industrial Relations (or as Tony Abbott would perhaps prefer it Workplace Relations or Employee Relations), is still using this definition to determine eligibility for the dole. If they're really serious about freeing up the labour market, you'd expect that some attention might be paid to freeing up the Mutual Obligation System, so that the unemployed have a little more freedom to find their own way back into the labour market, rather than relying on a single, fairly restricted route.

When you look at the definition of "suitable" for the purposes of Mutual Obligation, the whole game is exposed for the sordid, punitive little exercise it really is. Once again, it's a very old definition: it's work that you can do, subject to a few caveats about general community standards, and which pays at least the award rate. The community standards caveats are there so that, for example, devout Catholics can't be breached for turning down the offer of a job as receptionist at the local massage parlour, licenced or otherwise. Quite what the concept of an award is doing in this definition in the bright new world of Individual Workplace Agreements is beyond me, but no doubt the wording of the regulation has been changed to reflect current industrial relations law. If this is reform, give me reaction any day.

Since I've raised the issue of alternative ways to get off the dole queue, a few words about the New Enterprise Incentive Scheme (NEIS) are in order. This is the scheme under which the government supports the unemployed to set up new businesses and their have been quite a few NEIS success stories. So you'd think that me and my business partners would be applying for NEIS wouldn't you? We looked at that: but to qualify for NEIS, we would have to set up an entirely new business.

What we had when I first signed onto the dole, was an existing business with quite a bit of client goodwill, a good reputation and, thanks to our participation in one of those business ideas contests, a fair bit of interest from some of Australia's more monied suits. Look, we've tendered for jobs with major corporate clients interstate and knocked out the local competition for God's sake. You think we're going to throw away our existing business name, with all the cachet we've managed to attach to it, to qualify for government assistance knowing that when we go in to tender for jobs the first question customers will be asking is "Just who the bloody hell are these people?" Nor would it help our business reputation any to declare the business bankrupt, just so that we could start another one with government backing. I remember I nearly wept when I was signing on and friendly CentreLink guy told me that under the Social Security Act I might not be considered unemployed unless the business was formally declared bankrupt. Catch-22 does that to you.

Afterword: there's bound to be someone out there who is going to say, on the basis of what I've written here, that I've effectively chosen to be unemployed because I'm too proud to go work for someone else or something similar. All I have to say on that score right now is that there's a small grain of truth in that, even if saying this does concede a point which might be gleefully ceased upon by bloggers looking to score a few points with their blog-claques by getting in a few cheap shots at a soft target. All I'm going to say on the subject of permanent full-time employment for now is been there, done that didn't like it. For every permanent full-time job that I don't particularly want to take up if I can possibly continue to put off re-entering the happy little world of middle-class office politics, there are six other people who might have a less jaundiced view of the prospect than I do.

A Physics Exercise for the Lead-Footed

Larry is driving his Holden Commodore V6 along a residential street at 60 kph. A child runs out into the road 10 metres in front of him: although Larry attempts to brake, he still hits the child.

Assume:

The total mass of Larry's car, including mag wheels, spoilers and sound system is 0.5 tonnes;

No more than 10% of the car's kinetic energy (energy of motion) will be transferred to the child in the collision;

The child weighs 20 kg;

An average building storey is 5 metres high.

How tall a building (in storeys) would Larry have to throw the child off to produce the same level of injury to the child?

Solution next Monday.