Democracy?

For the most part of the 11 years I've lived here in the Lucky Country, the only electable option on the national level seems to have been the one led by a conservative party called the Liberal Party (go figure). After re-electing the same guy four times, that guy decided that Australian voters were idiot push-overs. So this time around, we were reminded of our right to stop putting up him, like a battered wife suddenly finding the courage to club her abusive husband to death while he's engrossed by the footy on the telly with his feet on the table she just cleaned. So we voted for the other party, the Labor Party. The guy who leads that party seems nice, and smart, and his only vice seems to be a visit to a stripper's club while he was in big bad New York, which he apparently already told his wife about. We are yet to find out whether the new guy can stay calm when he has to do more than talk like a nice man.

By the skin of my teeth

"I like to eat salad for lunch."

I'm sure lots of vegetarians find themselves saying this to themselves and to others. I actually do like it, provided that it's an unnamed salad with many ingredients that includes at least one pickled vegetable, some crunchy nutty bits, peppered, and with no dressing.

The salad queue is often long near where I work, and I'm sure most of them are not driven to the habit by their realisation that a lunch could be had without having to hack open anything that's got eyes to watch you while you, through a butcher or fish selling guy, hack them open. I know this because many add octapuses to their vegetable cocktail.

Maniacal vegetarian philosophies aside, and before you start wondering what this has got to do with the title of this post, please indulge me in thinking back to your recent lunching experiences: how many times have you come across the recognisable corpse of an insect in your lunch? How many times have you come teeth to wings with a member of the buzzing race over lunch?

I was munching my nutty salad loudly 10 minutes ago while reading the Dilbert Blog when via my infallible peripheral vision I saw some movement on my recently emptied white plastic fork. Zooming in, I found a small winged creation casually strolling up the handle. I'm not sure that Wingbo here realised the gravity of the situation that just passed, or the significance of the experience that we just shared. For a moment in the universe, there was only it, and me.

They say "if it don't kill ya, it'al makes ye stronga". Damn right! Meeting Wingbo under these circumstances very nearly killed my hygienic-a-freaked-out ass, I mean, head, and I'm sure we're both better off for not having had our relationship gone any further. More intense options such as sharing blood etc. would have been a bit too hasty, I think.

I can't give you a "post production catch-up" with Wingbo: we parted ways from the moment I blew it off the fork and I don't expect that I'll be seeing it ever again. I don't carry any grudges though: I know that what we had was special, but that it had to end.

So much for venturing out into the unknown and trying a different salad place.

Ignorance is bliss?

Statistics are compiled to reflect the truth. But a reflection is not usually the whole truth and is therefore inaccurate, by definition. Faced with the choice between an answer that is available but inaccurate and, well, no answer, what do we do?

The short answer is to stop looking, a path that all of us have chosen to follow on all but a very few topics in life. We resign to the belief that no one could possibly know everything, but together, we could know more. Hence Wikipedia, I guess.

But the words in Wikipedia has much less immediate impact than numbers. Today, I was faced with a web creation: the World Clock. It's created by a group of people who call themselves Poodwaddle and who specialise in making web gadgets you can use on your blog.

On the World Clock is a running tally of our world's "truths": the number of people being born, the number of bicycles being produced, the number of people dying from "noncommunicable diseases" including war. It gives you the option to view the tally as from the beginning of this year, this month, this week, this day, or even this moment: you can clear the tally at any time, and watch the numbers grow.

So for those of us with vivid visual imaginations, it becomes very tempting to allow your mind to see the numbers in 3-Dimentional flashing colours across the globe, from the flies hovering around a child's eye infection to the mechanical fingertips of production lines churning out computers, and even a tear drop or two, from the 233 marriages and 47 divorces that came into effect in the last 2 minutes.

Lovely? Shock & Horror? In a heartbeat, I felt like a freaked-out intergalactic migrant.

Or maybe I should just give my head a break and do some of the work I'm paid to do.