How to tell a Woman from a Girl

Mother (henceforth called Farm Girl, for reasons which will become obvious later in the song) runs her own farm. She raises cattle. She is very good at this, but not so good at the commerical side of things. She has an accountant set her stock targets to reach her financial objectives.

Farm Girl sends me an email. "I'm thinking of buying some weaners..."

It's OK, I didn't know what weaners were either. They are calves that have just been weaned, three months old. Not to be confused with wieners - these come later.

Farm Girl doesn't normally buy weaners. She buys day-old calves, because her operation is oriented around feeding and raising them from this age. Day-old calves are much cheaper, and her expertise turns them into healthy fat cattle in quick time.

I ask her why she would want to buy weaners. "I'm behind my projections". Her accountant has set her a target of x weaned stock by the end of the year, and she figures that her best option is to buy older calves to meet the projection. I'm not so sure.

Firstly, she doesn't save any money by buying weaners. She still has to run her milking operation for other calves, and she has spare capacity for her proposed acquisitions, so there is no additional cost involved if she buys day-old calves instead. Well, there are minor costs, but they come nowhere near the higher price payable for the weaners.

Secondly, her advanced rearing methods mean that calves she rears from infancy mature faster than calves from other farms. In short, if she bought a weaner and a day-old calf today, they would both mature at the same time. This is what matters, because it's not until a calf matures, and is sold, that she gets any return on it, and the purpose of the projections is realised. She rifles through her accountant's projections and realises that if she acts now she can still meet her planned sale dates without difficulty. She relaxes.

Once she's given me this information I explain to her that she gains little benefit from buying weaners, since she won't get her return on them any faster, but that they'll cost her twice as much initially. I don't calculate the figure at the time, but the difference is somewhere in the order of $10,000. Done.

Next day Farm Girl sends me an email. "I'm thinking of buying some weaners..."

I'm sorry girl, I can't help you.

Surreality #9.3

Mother is indeed slightly unhinged, but I'm pretty sure I know why. At least, that's the conclusion she's been gently leading me towards. I'm still trying to place her on the reality-fantasy continuum and not having much luck - not a good sign. But the most important thing to establish is whether she's planning on doing some healing, or is just looking for someone to hold down the reality end of things so she can go off the scale. Then I'll know whether I have any place here.

Surreality #9.2

Day 10: Daughter reams out Boy for being negative (i.e. not having proposed to Mother, who he has yet to meet in person).

It seems they really do do things differently in the country. Apparently people have children so they will have someone to arrange their marriage.

Purple

The red you wear when you're feeling blue.

Occupational hazards

One of the joys of doing a line of work that lacks a standard job title is what you get to sift through while scanning the job market. Or, I should say, while keeping abreast of the job market. I can only presume that whatever service they provide, it's not grammatically demanding. I couldn't see them making $3,000 an hour for putting prose like this together.

Proof of Intelligent Design?

Blood is alkaline. Thus it will not corrode one's nice new guitar strings.

Surreality #9.1

Mother is either slightly unhinged or just a country girl (sometimes it's hard to tell the difference). Or both. Small wonder that she kicks arse.

Surreality #9

Girl meets Boy. Girl chats up Boy. Boy realises that he is too old for Girl. Girl talks to Boy like she has always known him. Girl realises that Boy is too old for her. So Girl does the logical thing - she sets up Boy with her mother. Mother kicks arse.

Boy must now decide whether to place his within range.

A new religion

Having just invested a few minutes of my life watching atheists and Christians engage in debate perhaps best described as less-than-robust - although, being conducted on the internet, it was, as you'd expect, intensely polite - I thought it might be useful to stake out some middle ground. Somewhere the warring tribes might come to sit, have a cup of tea, and work through their differences while feeling equally ill-at-ease.

Yes, it's time for one of my new religions.

Every religion needs some kind of founding, guiding principle, preferably quoted from an ancient text translated through half a dozen ancient languages, each of which attaches its own unique symbolism to a range of commonly-used words. I will simplify my task by selecting a text which has already been Quality Assured by three of the world's top 10 religions. I refer to what is collectively known as The Old Testament.

Now I must select my guiding principle. In order to appeal to the masses with their attendant spans of attention, I need a soundbite, something catchy, something the TV news editors can run with. An obvious candidate is Sirach 25:23, or, expressed more colourfully, Sirach 26:12, but today I feel like doing something original. So instead I'll choose Genesis 1:27, specifically God created Man in His image. Yes, I think I can work with that.

Let us now think through the implications of Man being created in God's image. Back before the beginning of time, we have God sitting around in His grand omnipotence (underpants not yet having been invented) with nothing to smite. We know that Man in such a circumstance would quickly become bored, and find himself compelled to build something in order to smite it. So God, not really having much else to do for the remainder of eternity, sets about building himself a Universe.

Of course, designing and building a Universe is no simple task. It requires the development of unifying principles of matter and energy, gravitation, electromagnetism, hydrogen bonding, fermentation, smallpox, Cleopatra, misuse of the apostrophe, breakfast cereal, borderline personality disorder, fish paste, cowbells, daytime television - the works. Hand such a task to a Man and he'd likely feel a tad daunted. Unless, of course, he thought he was God. Then he'd wade in and design the whole thing in one go, and in his unbridled self-confidence fail to recognise his mistakes. In his perceived infallibility and invincibility he would also likely just switch the thing on without thorough testing, which would just as likely result in some almighty explosion. Imagine how much worse it would be if he knew he was God.

I think you can see where we're headed here. God designs and builds His Universe in a mere six days (presumably tracked by burning a knotted rope, hence His installation of the Sun and Earth as an elegant timepiece). Naturally this isn't enough time to really think through some of its fundamental principles, like the unification of gravitation with the other basic forces, but He figures that this is just version 1.0, and no one seriously expects anything to be stable, intuitive and fully-featured until at least version 7.3. At midnight on the sixth day He is knelt over His Universe shooting footage for the unreleased documentary Behind The Scenes: The Making Of The Universe*, when He realises a flaw in His Laws of Physics. He puts down the camera and reaches for a screwdriver, but it's too late.

Universe 1.0 explodes. Our hapless God, with no opportunity to escape, is instantly vapourised, His constituent atoms flung to the far reaches of His flawed Universe, a victim of His own Creation.

So there we have our new religion, one which provides a satisfactory explanation for the Universe as we know it. All we need now is a name, which is fairly obvious, really - Kneeling Over Big Bang, or Knobbism. Disciples are to be known as Knobbs. Currently there are no plans to build congregations as it's difficult enough being a Knobb without having to stand in a room full of them.

* Behind The Scenes: The Making Of The Universe was axed as network executives considered the content "too demanding" for any conceivable audience.

A moment of weakness

We interrupt this mindless drivel to bring you a special event. An unknown but benevolent individual has placed upon YouTube one of Australia's classic television commercials, which for your correspondent was far too fortuitous a turn to leave unstoned. We ask that you forgive these gentlemen in their moment of weakness.

For the benefit of those among you who refused to see the humour in the above, yes, I have been labelled a misogynist. But after lunch I was dubbed a lesbian (you know what they say about curries). Balance in all things. I therefore present to you some girls getting even. I scarcely require to bring to your notice the attendant increase in sophistication.


Primer: the product (men's underwear) had been advertised for over a decade with the by then well-known jingle "one day you're gonna get caught (with your pants down)".

Dub is the Natural Rhythm of the Universe

I don't need to explain or justify that assertion. It just is. I don't know why that Stephen Hawking guy even bothers.

Oh, but of course - he can't dance.