Daddy, where do puppies come from?

Well, son, they grow on trees.

I'm watching a documentary about a workplace. The real pity about these shows is that the cameras alter the way people behave. Documentary film crew goes to management of ACME. Asks, "can we film your employees doing what they do?" Management thinks, "hmmm, who works for us that isn't a goof-off, won't embarrass us, has some personality to make us look good?" So inevitably, the boss's favourite, the neatly groomed, upbeat family man who turns up early wearing a looney tunes tie gets chosen. OK, no problem.

Ever heard of Heisenberg's uncertainty principle? It states that you cannot simultaneously measure the position AND momentum of a particle. Schrodinger went further and pointed out that it means the act of observing an action influences the action itself. Workplace documentaries are just like that. Knowing that a camera is observing your every action alters the way you act. So it stops being a true record and becomes an advertisement for how you'd like to be seen. Like Chris Rock said, we're not meeting you, we're meeting your representative.

If you ever seen one of these shows, try counting how many times people in the background look at the camera or look at the person being filmed.

New yeti/penguin games.

seal bounce

penguin darts

Courtesy of Indi.

The latest game at work is to think of songs with the word 'love' in it, and replace it with the word 'slug.'

Examples;

Feel like making slug,
When a man slugs a woman,
You've lost that slugging feeling,
Muskrat slug,
Slug is in the air,
All you need is slug (slug,slug,slug,)
I just called to say I slug you,
I slug you just the way you are,
You'll never find a slug like mine,
hunka, hunka burning slug,
The greatest slug of all,
The power of slug,
How deep is your slug?
Can't enough of your slug, baby.

There's loads of them. have fun.

Steve Irwin is just a second-rate Harry Butler.

Does anyone else find the whole 'Happy Birthday' ceremony painful? The lights are turned down, your nose is filled with the smell of burning candles from a pastry-cum-fire hazard, an awkward circle forms around a squirming guest of honour and the assembly drones the happy bloody birthday song atonally, off key, out of pitch, there's a short mumble when we get to the 'dear so-and-so' part when everyone uses their own epithet for the birthday boy/girl and then a quick triple 'hiphiphooray' starting unenthusiastically and waning from there.

It makes me want to tear my own earballs out.

They mapped the human genome a couple of years ago, I think. When I heard the news I thought it meant that superhumans were just around the corner. Clearly I didn't understand what the news meant at all.

Couples in the USA can already choose the sex of their children. The husband wanks off into a styrofoam cup, the whack it into a machine, it separates the XX and XY sperm and Robert or Roberta is your uncle. Or Aunt.

So what's next? Presumably it will be possible in the future to choose eye colour, personality, talents, IQ, height, longevity, etc., in your children. Also, presumably, it would be prohibitively expensive for the majority of people to engineer their children, so at first there will be a genetic super-class, a group of perfectly healthy, supremely fit, extremely intelligent, staggeringly beautiful overlords who will be the finest athletes, scientists, musicians, models, academics in the history of the human race. Ordinary Joe Bloggs like you and me won't get a look in at the job interview, these jammy bastards will lap up the gravy leaving the likes of us to gnaw on the gristle, purely by accident of birth. Society rewards individuals of talent - but what if the talent is just a matter of how much $$$ your parents had? At the moment talent is doled out by accident, so if you're lucky enough to be smarter than Einstein, then good luck to you. But just because your Dad was Bill Gates? That kinda sucks.

So what's the alternative? Ban all genetic modification? The field of genetics represents the human race's greatest opportunity for rapid evolution and advancement, bar none. We can wipe out disease and congenital deficiencies, creating a hyperintelligent super race able to increase human knowledge and achievement further and faster than ever before, solving every problem there ever was. How can we ignore that?

Maybe if I'd been engineered I'd know the answer to that one.

Bin Laden's mastermind may be wounded

Isn't it always strange how you hear about who these top guys are after they've been cornered or captured? You never hear them announce that they're looking for Ayman al-Zawahri, you always hear that they've cornered or captured him. It's almost as if the Americans corner some bloke up in the Ramalamadingdong caves then say "a-ha! we've cornered Ali AlAkhbar-Yiyiyiyiyiyiyi, he's Osama's top aide and Al-Qaeda's chief entertainment officer and OH&S rep. He's the one that got them the ergonomic prayer mats and arranged those interfaith volleyball games." Then they trot out some bloke who looks like a cross between a wino and con the fruiterer and try to convince you he's the most evil dude since Stalin.

Of course, if you do see someone like that crossing the street, the smartest thing to do is run the run the bastard over.

Happy St Patricks Day for yesterday, everyone, especially Michelle - hope things are looking a bit brighter.

I happened to mention that I was a bit of a gourmand today.

"Don't you mean gourmet?"

"No, gourmand."

"Well, what's the difference?"

"A gourmet is a connoiseur, with a refined and educated palate, constantly searching for new ways to excite it. A gourmand is someone who will eat and drink anything not nailed down or breathing, and we're kinda flexible on the second part."

Fast Eddie (G Edward Clark) has created a blog. Visit it here. Of particular note is the message board. I'm feeling a bit paranoid so I won't write anymore. I need a hug.

Stowaway cat attacks pilot


It wasn't just some dude in a cessna, either, it was, like a boeing, you know?

Yesterday I woke up at 0558, two minutes before the alarm went off, so this morning as I lay in bed waiting for the alarm to go off I suddenly thought to myself, "say, that alarm hasn't gone off." Suffice to say I had forgotten to set the alarm the previous morning and it was now 0658.

I rang work to say I was going to be late (I start at 0700), quickly washed, brushed teeth, dressed and scurried out to the car. To save time, no time to shave.

So here I am at work looking like a tramp who has been rudely awakened, stuffed into powder blue cotton and chinos and shoved behind a desk. The boss just asked me "how often do you bathe?"

I'm told there's blogging etiquette. I can understand stuff like 'listing sources for quotes and links,' and 'not mentioning people's names without permission,' that sort of stuff, but apparently it also extends to content.

Baldocks to that! If you don't like the content, bugger off and read something else.

A blog is primarily driven by the writer's motivation, not the readers desires. If the two coincide, great. If they don't, stiff. This isn't a newspaper or a magazine, it's not a novel or reader's digest. It exists because I want to write it, not because anyone wants to read it. And just as well, because otherwise it wouldn't exist.

I'm not trying to be rude or anything, just stating my position. I still love you.

I'm watching 'Road to Perdition' when I suddenly realise something. The characters played by Tom Hanks are always competent. They are real, flawed but above all competent. The guy can lead a company of rangers onto omaha beach, survive for years on a desert island armed only with a leatherman, execute condemned men with humanity and fly a damaged Apollo spacecraft safely back to earth.

Enough. Let's see him as a complete screw up, an unco, a clumsy big unit who can't remember his pin number, sleeps in when he's got an important appointment, accidently backs his car over the cat in front of the kids, has spinach caught in his teeth when he meets the Prime Minister, tucks his shirt into his underpants and returns his videos three days late.

Like the rest of us.

It's raining here in Sydney.

"Oh, brilliant, post. How very original."

No, wait, give me a chance. It's Gay Mardi Gras night and I can just imagine Fred Nile looking out the window and saying to his wife "see? God agrees with ME!!! ME!! I tells ya."

Gay Mardi Gras night always has a bit of a schizophrenic quality to it. I remember a few years ago I was working at night and a co-worker was late in. When I asked him why he was late he said that when he was walking down the street to the train station (he lived not far from Oxford St) people kept pinching his bottom and making rude suggestions. I can imagine only one thing worse than that. Walking down the street and people NOT pinching your bottom and making rude suggestions.

I can tell how you got here. I have a tracker that tells me where you came from. In fact, I can see you now.

No, actually I can't see you now, but I made you look over your shoulder, didn't I? But, I can tell how you got here.

A lot of people get here because they know the address, some people got here because I have my site listed in blog listings that get updated when I update and some people get here by doing a search for something on google.

I've noticed that some people get here by doing searches on some strange words. "Sydney" I can understand. "Summer Hill" I can understand, too. "Chris Parkes" is totally understandable. But if you came here searching for "home enema kit" or "refrigerate after opening" or "sydney city sex escort porno" or "advantage AND basketball AND tourette's" or "picture of basil fawlty kicking manuel" I can only apologise and hope you find what you are looking for elsewhere.

I want you to picture a kindly-looking old man. Any of the cast of 'Coccoon' will do. Don Ameche crossed with Walter Mattau with perhaps a little Father Christmas thrown in. Wearing a hat.

Now I want you picture him driving a brand new Magna and attempting to perform a u-turn on a busy street involving several uses of the R gear position, whilst the drivers who have stopped to give him way try to figure out what it is he is doing. Random indicator signals confuse the situation.

Now I want you picture him cursing the drivers around him, swearing like on a tourettes sufferer on a bad day who just stubbed his toe and missed out on the lottery by one number. A large blue streak appears above his head. A passing wharfie blushes.

Welcome to Summer Hill on a Friday afternoon.

The previous penguin smacking game has a disgustingly violent sequel

Also, happy birthday to Leo from yesterday. Leo is now 8, having been born on February 29, 1974. I also have a cousin Geoffrey, who I think was born February 29 1970. The sunday paper said that 300 people in Australia share a birthday on February 29. That cannot possibly be correct. Think about this statistically - There are 365 days in a year and 366 in a leap year. That means that over a period of four years, there are 1461 days - your chance of being born on the 29th of February is 1 in 1461. Now, there are a little over 20,000,000 people in Australia. If we divide them up evenly, that would mean that the number of people born 29th February is 20,000,000 x 1/1461, which is 13,689. Someone please correct my reasoning if it is faulty, but there HAS to be more than 300 people with that birthday.

This leads me to question where in hell the so-called 'journalists' at the sunday paper get their facts. They clearly plucked this figure out of the air - what other shit are they just making up and hoping no one will notice? Granted, the sunday paper is not taken as gospel truth, but it should at least not be a complete fabrication. Why not just call it the Sunday Fairy-Tale? Don't they have any better sources than what-some-guy-said-down-the-pub or my-vague-recollection-of-a-book-I-browsed-ten-years-ago?

PRIME Minister John Howard has revealed his intention to donate his organs

I've only got one question - has he set a date?

I'm an organ donor, by the way. A card carrying organ donor, no less. I have one particular organ I'd like to donate to Charlize Theron, if she ever asks.