"Sir, why are you not engaged in the government?"

What the hell is wrong with people that every single grounds management company employed in
Australia demands its employees use marginally efficient two-stroke engine leaf blowers to
attempt (and I use the word attempt carefully) to clear pathways, driveways, gutters, and
indeed any expanse of concrete, grass, or pathway which may gather a little detritus? Whatever
happened to brooms and rakes? I know they still sell them at hardware stores! I know that
brooms and rakes are cheaper than leaf blowers, leaf suckers, leaf fuckers, leaf anything with
an engine in it. I know the running costs of things with engines far outweigh the costs brooms
and rakes. The petrol and maintenance alone on a stupid appliance which is useless (and I
carefully use the word useless) must be astronomical when compared fairly to the old hardware
powered by human muscles. Also, groundskeepers working with a broom or a rake to clear away
leaf litter from paths and driveways are far less likely to have their noisy, ineffective tools
taken from them and violently smashed by those of us being made increasingly bitter and crazy
by the total madness of today.

Part of this obsession with making manual laboring 'easier' (I'm well aware my ironic use of
the word easier is useless) means that poor unfortunate groundskeepers have to lug around 10
kilograms of machinery which puts them in danger of industrial deafness, putting one's back
out, homicide from frustrated office workers who just wanted a nice quiet morning tea watching
leaves and flowers fall from the few trees which corporate culture has brought itself back from
the brink long enough to leave intact. It makes the person using a heavy, stupid, useless tool
look completely stupid, makes them persona non grata for noise and air pollution, and devalues
them as human beings. If I worked as a groundskeeper, I would use a BROOM and a RAKE, and not
just to mess with the establishment. I would name my broom "Self" and my rake "Respect".

Evolution works both ways, improvement and decline.

Chatroom Yoda says, "2 much time computer u on 4." Well, Chatroom Yoda, the wisdom of the masters you espouse meets not the talents of Wei Zheng or Lao Tzu! They said much more incomprehensible stuff. I think it was about making filial pies but my memory of reading that part of Chinese text comes from BEFORE my 4-hour remote session VIM marathon. Ah, there's nothing new under the sun! Especially now that vt-100 is passe and terminals come in standard VGA with lovely RGB colours. My eyes which years ago used to ache from CRT radiation now ache only from weeping in pleasure at the forward march of technology.

Now that everything old is new again, its suddenly hip to be square. The proletariat dream of a world of peace, prosperity, and simple brown sugar. An eden without poverty, crime, or whaling invades my thoughts like an icebreaker of inconvenient truth.

Speaking of annoying environmentalists, I dislike having dinner out at restaurants with people who feel a need to organise what you will be ordering because of an unfounded concern about "wasted" food. One of the privileges of being in the developed world is ability to satisfy hunger without remorse, and sometimes that involves the concept of 'leftovers'. This is not a bad thing, its just being satiated (and resolutely determined to employ the technology of 'refrigeration' which has been around for some time in these parts). It seems more a sign of imminent pathological disfunction rather than being frugal, restrained, or resource-conscious to want to clink the cutlery on your plate to clean it, just because you paid $14.99 for it to be served to you. No, starving children are not going to get the food that you, in Australia, will waste because you are too stuffed to fit anymore into your neck now thats its acting like a food-storage gullet. Who needs a deep-seated psychological need to finish every morsel of food put in front of you? Controlling what food other people order at restaurants is imbecilic, you have a food fetish competing with a control disorder, and its not healthy. No-one cares if all you want is a twelve dollar Greek salad. Bon appetit!

Controlled grain and seed crop production marked one of the greatest scientific watersheds in human history. Wheat is a complex plant, with hexaploidal genes. It is hard to grow in consistent quality (like people, or companies). Modern science is intent upon improving the wheat plant's yield, survivability, and ease of harvest. Pity the good folks at Monsanto and Dow Chemical have obviously never tasted a loaf of bread in their entire lives, although thats because they aren't stupid enough to even inadvertently consume their company's products. Seeds which were once commonplace have disappeared from public life as effectively as Adam Ant. Mustard is low on the pantry shelf but high on the food chain. The Roman legions used it to make spoiled meat palatable, and introduced it to Gaul. Even now the French love their mustard on batards. Medieval French monks hailed the yellow paste as a curative, and sniffed the powder to clear their heads. I use mustard to make my spoiled life palatable. For lunch, I am furious yellow on a city-wide crime spree.

Newtown, Sydney. Self-declared lesbian capital of the world. When furious, you can take a walk down King Street, where someone's radio is playing Melissa Etheridge 24/7, and dewy-eyed students behind countertops wear hairnets over their dreadlocks with pride. A kind of service-economy fashion accessory. You can have a torrid affair with people or drugs like Mary Jane, who will reel you in like a pyramid scheme, and pretty soon you've got a collection of her photographs or empty packaging under your bed and you shake when you go a day without.

Ah MJ, you're just playing on my fear of scarcity. There's really nothing special about you at all. But here I am, falling for your cheap come-on, because I'm suddenly terrified the rest of my life will seem like a long, grim march toward death if I can never have you? Like in all doomed relationships, you're even telling me up front to keep away. I just want to enjoy you before you ruin the experience, and then I'll be finished with you. Afterwards, I'll just want you to leave me alone, and I won't want to talk about it.