Duck rabbit

I saw a recent documentary concerning perception of colour, and how it appears that we each do not necessarily see, or perceive exactly the same thing. One fascinating experiment concerned a particular tribe in Africa that had a limited number of words to describe colours, far less than were used in English. However, some of the words were quite specific. When shown a swatch of colours that were predominantly of one shade of green, but had a single patch in a different shade and asked to point out the one that was different, they did so with ease. The interesting thing is that to Western eyes it is almost impossible to spot the difference – honestly. We have no word to describe the subtlety of difference between those two shades of green. They did. The next experiment had all except one of the colours to be the same shade of green, and the one other colour to be blue. To our eyes the difference was blindingly obvious, yet these people had extreme difficulty to finding the odd colour out. Why? Because they had no word to differentiate between green and blue. Bizarre? Yes. But true. Look it up.

This adds experimental evidence to Wittgenstein’s idea that, boiled down, the mind can only perceive or imagine something for which it has the words to describe it. (Sorry for ending that sentence in a preposition – it just came out.)

So anyway, this got me thinking. Different natural languages must be better at certain jobs over others. Not every language has the words to describe certain things that can be described easily in others. Poetry, for example, is almost impossible to translate. Why? Because it contains concepts that literally cannot be described in another language (nah – it’s because you can’t make the same rhymes. Silence, fool). For centuries the language of diplomacy was French, and this was not necessarily because France was internationally dominant. Quite the contrary, It was England’s time. Yet the world chose to use French as the lingua franca of international diplomacy.

In an ideal multi-cultural, multi-lingual world we would use the right language for different jobs. One for engineering. Another for science and/or medicine. One for literature. One for intimacy, and so on.

What do you think? What language do you think would be best for:

• Engineering
• Literature
• Diplomacy
• Romance
• Medicine

Congratulations: you win. A triumph for democracy

When I spoke to my mother on the phone the other day I mentioned that I was aware they had recently had an election, and that they had returned the incumbent. I stopped myself from describing him as the plutocratic bastard that had systematically robbed the public treasury and funnelled the embezzled money into companies that he had controlling shares in, and then offshore. ‘How are those claims against the compulsory government earthquake fund going? The one that was found to be empty because the funds had gone?,’ was another question I did not ask.

‘Yes’, she beamed. ‘He seemed nice. His wife is nice. She’s from Wales you know. Her name is Bronagh. They make a nice couple. She’s from Wales.

From what I can tell from the wiki entry, Bronagh is about as Welsh as my mother is Scots, but this does not stop my mother from buying the imported nostalgic magazines about Scotland designed for retirees who remember with pride the traditions represented in those mouldering castles. She has, of course, never even been to the UK, but I have no doubt if asked would call it, ‘home’.

I waited, but there was no more forthcoming. That was the entire basis for her vote. A simple popularity contest on who looks like the nicer couple in a staged photograph. I have no statistics, but I be prepared to guess that this is the voting rationale for an awful lot of senior citizens, and an awful lot more besides…

Then I reconsidered. Wales. What was so significant in that point she emphasised? Then I worked it out. Welsh blood probably made her a descendant of King Arthur, and he was appointed by God himself by method of a strange lady distributing a sword in a farcical aquatic ceremony. If that does not make the Key government automatically good and destined to do the right thing by that bankrupt little nation then I’m buggered if I can figure out what does. Though I am sure that no such complete chain of thought intruded on her mind, I’d lay good money that the gut feeling was there, because if there is one thing my mother does know, it is the legends of a country on the other side of the world to which she has never been and from which there has been little interest in us.

A country always gets the government it deserves, and despite one of the more progressive voting systems, New Zealand still managed to steer a straight and clear course towards the brink. Good luck to them. I’m glad I don’t live there any more. Instead I have to deal with a government on the take from Japan (whaling) and one terrified of offending the ‘last superpower’.

Good news!

At last, The Vanilla Assassin is now available on Amazon and Google books as a download. How tremendously exciting is that? Very. That’s how much.

The Models and God

On the train today a dero sat opposite me. How could I tell that he was down on his luck and possibly homeless? The multiple layers of filthy flannelette and track-suit material for one. The leather tone skins caused partially by sun but also by an aversion for removing epidermal dirt for another. Conclusive? Possibly only circumstantial, but good enough for me.

He had an ancient Fox Terrier on a lead. Cute little dog, but I was far too wise to make eye contact or show affection to the pup.

The woman next to me had a book to hide in, and this worked fine until her phone rang. Once she had hung up he started, ‘And speaking of that…’

What was the keyword? Hello, perhaps? Shoelace? I did not know.

Then she was blessed with a lecture on how he was a film maker. International, no less. The Golden Years of Australian Rock and Roll. Quite probably the last time he had a square meal or was conscious. It would be a series of films, fascinating to the rest of the world: a runaway success abroad and scarcely capable of meeting cinema demand at home. It’s a kind of science fiction. Though did you know that publishers say there is no such thing as Science Fiction? It’s actually called Industrial.

‘I intend to put them right.’

The greatest band in the history of music, at least for this, the centre of all culture for the galaxy, was the Models. So now you know. He then went on to describe the emotions he felt at the concerts.

The target discovered that THIS was her stop. He looked around for someone else who also had been touched by this epiphany, but the two teenagers dressed in handkerchiefs nearby were doubtless of the opinion that the world had sprung, fully formed, out of the void and into existence about three seconds before their birth. I studiously continued my research for the novel.

Near me, a woman sat dressed in twelve layers of dowdy red with a physique that, if it was a game show, the question would be ‘cake?’ and the answer would invariably be, ‘yes, please.’ She gripped a red rolling suitcase, clearly returned from some conference or other.

Whenever anyone went past, or even periodically just to passengers near by, she would tremulously call, ‘God bless you.’ Every one ignored her.

When I left, she did not even raise her eyes to me. Presumably because I am old, bald and bad tempered looking.

I said to her, ‘God bless you too, Darlin’.’

I was unsure whether she appreciated my intention of a general wish of goodwill, rather than a specific evocation of her particular pernicious little cult.

A spark came to her eyes, but only fleetingly. Then it was replaced with her default deep despair. Because her god is a prick. And regardless of how many “god bless yous” she hands out, at the end of the day she will still be fat and lonely, and the only hope in her life is for the day she dies. And on that day, if she has been self-effacing enough and, particularly, she has accepted one particular bloke as the special saviour to remove the stains of the crimes that she and her entire species has been condemned of in absentia (talk about racism and tyranny), then she might just be allowed a little happiness.

This encounter depressed me far more than the first. The first guy at least was in a mental fugue state in which he is was the star in a never ending party of pubs and drinks and girls and dancing. She, on the other hand, had decided not to live her life at all, but to spend it in a self made purgatory.

The end of movember

25 November, 2011 07:08

Travelled man on train feels need to tell whole carriage opinion of world.

What a weird country

Two amazing things have crossed my mind now that I am back home in Melbourne.

The first is that I never thought I’d find this country cold after having come from the mountains where it snows. But at a mere 21 degrees I am rugged up like it is the Arctic.

The second is the outrageous prices of everything here. I guess that’s what you call ‘cost of living’. We had a focaccia today for lunch. Organic bread, organic chicken, organic bree, organic avocado, and so on. Fifteen bucks! Now for a glorified sandwich at tourist prices I might just about swallow $5 in Siem Reap. Fifteen dollars… my god: that would buy seventeen and half beers! But it was organic, Gaye argued, briefly. In comparison to anything in Cambodia that is over processed and comes out of a can? Yeah, right. Organic is just natural farming practices in most countries.

It is easy to understand the disillusionment that people coming from such countries suffer once the dream of getting to the First World is realised. At last: I can earn such astronomical sums and have unparalleled wealth. Actually no. Your earnings are sucked away in prices such as these, and you are dragged into a cycle of bling and conspicuous consumption just to fit in. Spot the number of people here smiling, and compare that to the number of people smiling over there – and no, they were no all smiling at me in the hope of a magical greenback: they were smiling at each other as they lived their lives.

Consumer Capitalism may make wonderful accounting sense in that it keeps the wheels of industry spinning at top speed and delivers an overabundance of material goods (until the ecosystem collapses, but that’s another story), but what it signally fails to deliver is happiness or contentment on a significant scale. And if a political economy is not about fostering the conditions for the majority of people to be actually happy with being alive, then what is the point of it? Who or what does it serve?

Very few people, apparently. The mega rich are stampeding to the offices of counsellors while their children are in court for various pathetic abuses. A good portion of the rest are suffering from road rage because they haven’t arrived at their totally pointless destination YET! Kids are in the depths of despair because Skyrim, preordered no less, has not arrived YET so their life is desolate and empty and have nothing to do. Try to explain this misery to a Cambodian kid whose only possessions are the shorts he is wearing and a fishing net. He’ll laugh at you. There aren’t enough hours in the day to do all the things he wants to.

Is this a comprehensive picture? Of course not. Plenty of people are perfectly content in the Consumer Capitalist system, but I would suggest that these advanced people would be equally happy living in a cave. Does that Cambodian kid WANT to own a PS3? Does he want to have to work to catch fish to eat when he’d rather be playing volleyball? Does he wish that there were more job opportunities when he leaves school? Of course he does. But none of these facts alter the central point: he is, on average, happier than the kids in our society that have everything that advanced manufacturing can dump in their pampered, spoilt, lazy, listless laps.

And so I return to the question: how is our system ‘better’, when better is a measure of happiness rather than an accounting of money? A step backwards – a liberation to the fields – is no answer. No one wants to go back. The poor nations want to advance to our perceived wealth. But we need to learn how to smarten up how we run our own societies. Money is a great measure of cost, but a piss-poor measure of value. Emphasis on the concept of value is what we need more of in the economy of the future, and less on cost.

For your viewing pleasure:

No piraña

This was the sign over the big knee high glass tanks full of shallow water fish. Cichlids of some sort, I’m sure. The native variety not overbred in captivity for domestic aquariums back home.

The sign was a little piece of humor because piraña are only found in South America. For the non-fish watcher, however, it was probably an important informational piece. For a mere $3 dollars, and that’s the easily three bucks you can earn, you can sit on the sides with your feet emerged in the water. With rasping little mouths the fish, numbered in their hundreds, go to work on your footsore, calloused, stinky feet. They nip nip nip like a myriad of tiny sandpaper pliers. No chance of damage, of course, but uncomfortably like being tickled by Liliputian cheese graters. Not to be missed on any account.

With us sat a French speaking German that had a physique like Hercules and only one finger left on his right hand. I tried to guess his age and came up with a range between 45 to 400. I suspect he may have once seen this place in a different light.

The manager of our villa, a German speaking Frenchman, advised us today that monks are the worst thieves in this society. Parasites, he said, in response to my question about vegetarianism and Buddhism. Monks walk along the street with cell phones and cigarettes, eat the best food, get what ever they want and generally give nothing in return. They are also the worst sex offenders, apparently, but nothing is ever done.

A stunning generalization and one I am in no position to investigate.

Tonight I had a spectacular back massage from a woman about 2 feet tall who could have bent spring steel with her bare hands, while Gaye had and hour and a half pedicure. She is now as a hungry as a horse, whereas I hardly have the energy to order another G & T. Perhaps the South American connection is more strong than at first suspected. I feel as if I have been shot with a curare tipped dart and I am paralyzed, unable to move more than my right index finger and able only to make feeble mewling noises.

Gin and tonic, my new favourite drink

By tuk tuk to Kampong Phluk. I try to say it and not sound like a chicken.

Except that there was no tuk tuk. It was a mini van, which is almost as good because the roads are the same either way.

Met a young fellow who had just finished his archeology degree and was taking 18 months off to tour the world sites. We agreed that at merely 37 years to build one of these monuments was an amazingly short period of time.

Kampong Phluk is a town built on stilts in the mighty Mekong. At this time of year the water is receding and it is a few steps up into the building. When the Dry season is at its fullest the river drops four, five, six or more meters, leaving these places perched atop unlikely poles.

The boats to this town reminded me of gondolas, though I am conscious of oversimplification, like the Old Man Who Read Love Stories. They had raised and prominent prows and sterns. The motors were four cylinder, or possibly straight sixes, directly out of cars and crudely bolted in. I traced the control levers with my eyes, seeing the pulleys to change the direction of the ropes to throttle and steering. Clutch and brakes were still in place as foot pedals, as was the accelerator. A column shift added a stylish touch to the bus steering wheel. And every one of them were hand made to the same pattern.

Back at the villa I discover that having done no walking and instead sat still all day my hips have seized up and I walk like a cowboy. Well, that’s one possible reason.

Apparently there is a mini archeological temple just five minutes walk away down our lane. New friends, Mike and Kirsten have gone to investigate. Gaye is upholding the finest traditions of a seasoned traveller by enjoying a massage, while I explore the ‘hair of the dog’ theory by the pool. It is 1634 local time.