On Wednesday my Twitter stream was dominated by the Politics & Technology Forum, and I’ll write more about that later. The other highlights this week:

1. MYOB continue to flood me with far too much promotional material, even when specifically requested not to. Losers.
2. People continue to install new software on the very day of its release, discover that it’s still buggy or insecure, and then complain. Do you never learn?
3. The Aurora Hotel in Surry Hills and the C Bar on the corner of Pitt and Campbell Streets in the Sydney CBD have free Wifi.
4. The comedians on stage at The Sly Fox Hotel on a Monday night are 300% more bitter & disturbed than I am.
5. There is no evidence that 17 Massachusetts schoolgirls became pregnant because of a “pregnancy pact”
6. There is not, but should be, continuous 3G or HSDPA phone coverage on the highway between Sydney and Canberra. In some places there isn’t even GSM!
7. “The 7 categorises of satedness: Food. Sexual pleasure. Alcohol. Music. Visual appeal. Amphetamines. Blue cheese. Agreed?”
8. The Concourse Bar at Wynyard Station has Coopers Ale for $4.70 a schooner and a choice of six cocktails for $7 each.
9. “Backpacking” has descended from “travel world for enrichment” to “global party by indulgent drunken arseholes”. Hence, “gas them”.
10. Automatic weapons really do solve so many everyday problems.

[Credit: Cartoon Twitter-bird courtesy of Hugh MacLeod. Like all of Hugh's cartoons published online, it's free to use.]

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How… 2005.

Laurel was tagged three months ago and is only getting to it now. And they’re not even real ropes!

Is that enough slagging-off? Shall I get on with it now?

Actually this will be fun on a Saturday morning. It’s been ages since I’ve done one of these. Here goes…

The Rules

1. Each player starts with eight random facts/habits about themselves.
2. People who are tagged need to write a post on their own blog (about their eight things) and post these rules.
3. At the end of your blog, you need to choose eight people to get tagged and list their names.
4. Don’t forget to leave them a comment telling them they’re tagged, and to read your blog.

8 Random Facts about Stilgherrian

As you read these, do reflect upon your own life and, if any thoughts are triggered, please add your own comments.

1. I can’t swim. Whenever I went near water deeper than my ankles my mother, bless her, would screech, “Don’t go near the water you’ll fall in and drown!” I avoided school swimming lessons. Even now, if I wade into water that reaches my chest, my pulse rate surges and more often than not I’ll have a panic attack. A spa isn’t necessarily relaxing.
2. I was the first person to let a talkback caller say “fuck” on Adelaide radio, as far as I know. At least in daylight hours. When challenged by the station manager, I said the sheer strength of expression was an important part of the caller’s political point, and that we didn’t do political censorship. This was in the late 1980s.
3. I’m told I’m a good shot with a gun. This was after a trip on HMAS Aware, an old Attack-class patrol boat run by the RANR. I loosed a full clip from a 9mm Browning automatic into a perfectly innocent oil drum floating gently off the boat’s stern. Most shots hit the target. The Quartermaster-Gunner noticed, and his views were relayed back to me. I haven’t fired a gun since.
4. One time I got so drunk I lost my colour vision for two days. I was left in charge of a keg of cider and was serving it on a “one for you, one for me” basis. Hey give me a break, I was young!
5. The scars below my left eye were caused by two different accidents. When I was about 2 years old, I ran into the brass tap of a rainwater tank — conveniently at face height at that age. When I was 23 I was run down by a car. I bounced over the bonnet. The windscreen wipers dragged my glasses from my face, ploughing a furrow through the flesh. It was raining. The blood trickled into my eye as I lay on the street waiting for the ambulance. My neck hurt. It hurt a lot. I remembered the drill, though. “Don’t touch me,” I kept repeating to the driver. “Don’t touch me!” Fortunately my neck was not broken. My left knee, however, continues to be dodgy.
6. At high school I was in the same Venturer Scout patrol as soon-to-be Senator Nick Xenophon. Every now and then I joke about running for the Senate too. Should I?
7. Once, for a whole week, I had no keys. I’d moved out of my Adelaide flat and was en route to Sydney. But everything I owned, apart from a bag of clothes and a handful of books, was in transit. I stayed with friends while making a leisurely journey via Melbourne, and I hadn’t arranged accommodation in Sydney. With no keys defining my relationship with land and property, I felt strangely liberated and fancy-free.
8. I sometimes wonder what would’ve happen had I stayed living in Adelaide. There’s an artist who… who perhaps could have received more of my attention. Last I heard, he’s sharing his life with someone born in the same hospital I was, on exactly the same date, but one year different. Fate is a fickle bitch.

You’re tagged!

And now it’s your turn. If you’ve already done this meme, let me know and I’ll victimise someone else.

• ’Pong, obviously.
• Alex Willemyns. Since you use Tumblr it’s tricky to post lots of text so maybe you have to do a series of pictures. Or post one fact at a time using text snippets. Or make a video.
• Garth “Deadly Bloody Serious” Kidd, it’d be nice to something from you more often than once every two or three months.
• Houston, whose last name I won’t give ‘cos it’s not on his blog.
• Nick Hodge Try not to make them all geekfacts.
• Snarky Platypus Here’s an excuse to finally write a second post. Or update Insane Platypus, a fine women’s basketball blog which has languished for nearly two years.
• Zern Liew. I know your Eicolab blog is business-oriented, so maybe yours all have to be facts about yourself which define your business identity. “All business is personal.”
• Zhasper

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Sometimes I do. Especially on days when things haven’t gone so well with clients. Then on other days I read stuff like Hugh MacLeod’s piece the quiet life of a writer yak yak yak. Explaining how he loved Hemingway and Graeme Greene, he says that even though their books were very different their daily routines were pretty much the same.

Basically, they’d live somewhere cheap, quiet and relatively conducive to getting a lot of writing done. The Florida Keys and Cuba in Hemingway’s case, the South of France in Greene’s.

They’d get up early each morning, then write diligently till noon.

Then they’d head for their local café, drink gallons of booze for hours on end, and stagger home late at night.

Then they’d do the same thing the next day. And the next. And the next. For years on end. Women came and went, friends came and went, children came and went, money and fame came and went, but the daily writing-booze combo remained the great constant.

I’m not sure I like the idea of staggering home drunk every night, but as somebody who likes to write, likes his beer, and likes the simple life, I can’t say I find their overall Modus Operandi unappealing.

On a sunny Friday morning in Sydney, in the city’s most beautiful time of year, I think I agree.

And now, back to reading a company’s office manual so we can build them a CRM system…

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According to the ABS media release:

• Harm from alcohol causes 5.5% of the burden of disease for males and 2.2% for females.
• The increase in those drinking at a risky/high risk level since 1995 has been greater for women than men. The proportion of females who drank at a risky/high risk level increased from 6.2% to 11.7%, while for males the increase was from 10.3% to 15.2%.

That is, the problem is bad and it’s getting worse. And as we already know:

• Alcohol is the second largest cause of drug-related deaths and hospitalisations (after tobacco).
• Alcohol is the main cause of deaths on Australian roads. In 1998, over 2,000 deaths of the total 7,000 deaths of persons under 65 years, were related to alcohol.

The figures go on and on… and so does the hypocrisy.

As I’ve posted before, less than half a percent of the population using methamphetamines (”ice” or “crystal meth”) has caused a moral panic, including a tabloid-screeching edition of Four Corners. But the “alcohol problem” is, in raw numerical terms, more than 120 times bigger. 9.5 million Australian enjoy a drink in a typical week, compared with a supposed 73,000 using ice.

Literally thousands of Australian die every year directly as a result of alcohol. And yet we still use it to bless marriages, launch ships and (if Christian) celebrate communion with God. The government not only condones selling alcohol, it actually gives the industry millions of dollars in tax relief. We even promote wine tourism!

What I don’t understand is why two drugs of similar harm levels are treated so very differently. One attracts millions of dollars in government assistance, the other costs us millions of dollars in policing. What is the difference?

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