The Light of Meaning

I only live about two kilometres from where I work. Nevertheless I encounter 11 sets of traffic lights on the journey to and from work.

Growing up I thought I had my head around how traffic lights worked. Red means you stop. Green means you go. Orange means go faster.

Yes, my father was a lunatic uninsurable driver. We used to go on vacations and wonder at what point: a) the car would break down, and b) how serious the crash was going to be.

This is a man who once drove into a bridge. I mean a bridge! It’s not like it jumped out in front of him.

My mother would sit in the front passenger seat with a death grip on the dashboard and occasionally yelp: “MIND!” as my father wound out the straight six to squeeze past some hapless victim who just happened to be in front of us.

In the days before speed cameras there used to be speed trains as well. This was where one driver would take the punt that there were no cops on the road up ahead and floor it. Then all the drivers behind would think: “Well, they can only catch one of us” and follow the fast guy.

Right, back to the point.

I was a bit surprised to discover that red means stop, green means go, and orange means stop if you can do so safely before you reach the intersection. I always follow this rule. I also know that it’s technically called “amber”, but Amber is a girl’s name, not a bloody colour. It’s orange, OK?

Now, what I can’t work out is what happened to the other people who sat and passed their driver’s license test and are presumably privy to this knowledge.

It seems we all fall into one of these categories:

1. I’ll stop when it goes orange, if I can do so before entering the intersection.


2. If it goes orange and I’m reasonably close, I’ll floor it to get through the intersection lest I have to lose two minutes of my life stationary and watching traffic.


3. If I floor it now I might get to the intersection in time to catch the orange light.


4. It’s red, but the cars stopped at the just-turned-green light haven’t had a chance to move yet, so I can get through without getting hit.
   

And I saw all of these on the way to work this morning. Despite numerous ads on TV warning about intersections and the city publicly announcing the installation of red-light cameras, people still run the risk.

I only have one word for them: Morons.

Mr Author Type

I sit beside the fashion editor at the newspaper. Now I'm not saying anything about exorbitant profit margins in the cosmetics industry, but she gets sent shitloads of stuff for free.

Absolute shitloads of stuff. We're talking everything from perfumes and face creams to chocolate cakes and calculators. She's got drawers full of shoes. Designer handbags turn up on her desk. Every day more packages are turning up.

I've only had one letter delivered to me since I started working here three years ago. And I think that was from the tax department.

Fortunately the fashion editor works on a principle known simply as: Share the love.

This means that every now and then she will load up a table with crap she's been sent and we vultures in the department will pick the bones clean. I haven't had to buy shampoo in more than two years. I've got high priced Baldessarini eau de toilette sitting on my desk in case I start to waft during the day.

Of course I also have a tin of gravy, a rice steamer and a martini glass. I have no excuse for these. Random stuff just gravitates towards me.

Anyway, under the principle of "share the love" I was this week given a small, blank booklet. It's about 20 pages long and only the left-hand pages are lined. I didn't know what to do with this book and vaguely considered writing some poems in it.

But poems are difficult to write when you have nothing to say. I mean, you've read this much of my blog posting and I haven't actually said anything, right? I am soooo wasting your time right now.

But I love you for it.

So, my solution to my blank book dilemma was to go back through three months of tweets and pick out what I considered were my best ones. Then I either copied them or developed them a little. It was fun.

I managed to fill the booklet, despite Internet Explorer posting a warning saying I was running a script that might be causing the system to run slowly and would I like to stop running this script (ie, Twitter) now, yes or no? *Click no* By the time I got back to February tweets, it was displaying this message three times before it would show me more tweets, and then another two times afterwards. Which was a pretty passive-aggressive way for Microsoft to tell me: "Please will you stop running this fucking script!"

Anyway, I've titled the booklet "Laze Against The Machine!" and I will actually publish it one day when I have some money. But here are a few samples of what's inside (apologies if you follow me on Twitter and have seen them all before):

• I'm so boring that this morning I tuned out of a conversation I was having with myself.
• I was nearly killed by a freak Mexican wave.
• Yesterday I accidentally set a ratite trap. This morning I'd caught two ostriches and a moa.
• Beware of puns! It can be dangerous when a phrase turns on you.
• I went to a bulldozer fight. The matador didn't stand a chance.
• You can't drive me insane. It's not far; I can walk from here.
• I called the suicide hotline. The guy was fantastic. Told me exactly how to tie a noose. Took me through it step-by-step.
• When Evolution comes, I'm going to be first against the wall.

A Mammoth Technicality

Here’s an interesting little argument for you to start with somebody.

Years ago there was concern that elephants were soon to become extinct. Hunters and poachers were shooting them, even on wildlife parks, and making off with their tusks, because some people somewhere got it into their heads that ground up ivory was a good base for organic viagra. Or they wanted to carve little figures out of tusks and sell them to tourists at vastly inflated prices.

Well, we still have elephants roaming the African wilderness because of the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species; CITES. And also because people started shooting poachers, who aren’t an endangered species.

It prevents elephant ivory from crossing international borders, effectively stemming whatever tide of elephant tusks was flowing. There’s still probably a black market trickle of elephant ivory, but now that people need a CITES certificate authorising the possession of their ivory, the demand is so much less.

One alternative the hunters have found is in the frozen wilderness of Siberia. For three months a year they can get out there and happily and legally dig up mammoth tusks. Because mammoths are extinct there is no problem, except that the “hunters” have to spend two days defrosting the ground around the tusk before they can get it out.

Now, according to my good friends at Wikipedia, there are an estimated 150 million mammoths buried in the Siberian permafrost. So there’s no real danger that the trade in mammoth ivory is going to dry up any time soon.

Meanwhile, scientists are optimistic that one day they will be able to sort out differences in mammoth and elephant DNA and eventually a little half-tonne woolly bundle of joy will be delivered via a surrogate elephant mother.

Can you see where I’m heading with this?

At the moment of mammoth birth, technically the woolly mammoth will no longer be extinct, but will be an endangered species. Therefore CITES kicks in and the tusk hunters are out of business.

Or will they argue that the newborn mammoth is not of the same species as the 150 million others floating around the Siberian underground? Because scientists have dicked around with the DNA and used DNA from another animal to effectively build this new species of mammoth, is it still a proper mammoth?

I think there was a similar argument circulating when Jurassic Park first came out. If such a park were possible, would the animals there technically still be dinosaurs?

Well, that’s one for you to argue about with somebody. You can make a fair case for both points of view.

If some alien species found a strand of human DNA and filled in the holes with, say, chimp DNA, would the result still be considered human? Fortunately, that’s one for the aliens to debate. But I'm pretty sure you'd find the results in Temuka.

Shelling Out At McDonald's

Yesterday I did the fast food breakfast thing.
Technically, the only time you should visit a fast food joint for breakfast is if your previous night’s dinner came in a fifth-of-a-gallon bottle. I’ve always liked the way Americans can talk about “a fifth” of some spirit or other.
Here in New Zealand we don’t have fifths. We have wholes. We’ve metricised ourselves, I’m thinking it was a way to save money.
Years ago we had fifths, except because we’re metricised they were 1125 millilitre bottles. Then at some point the liquor stores decided to abandon 1125ml bottles and just go with 1 litre bottles ... for the same price. I mean, who’s going to quibble over 125 mls? That’s half a cup. Except that you’ve now effectively put your price up about 10 per cent. I dunno. The math on that one is a bit beyond me and I’ve wandered off on a tangent.
So, anyway, I wasn’t hungover, but I did have a hankering for a McMuffin. I pulled into the drivethru and noticed something strange on the McMenu.
A sausage and egg McMuffin would set me back $4.20. But a sausage McMuffin, sans egg, was only $2. Which, through process of elimination, means that at McDonald’s an egg costs $2.20.
WTF? What are these eggs made of? Are they especially talented eggs? Do they cure cancer or something?
“New, at McDonald’s: the SuperEgg, each one individually laid and blessed by the God of Commerce.”
McDonald’s pricing amuses me anyway. When petrol companies put their prices up it’s like this big national news story. “Petrol’s just gone up three cents a litre!” But McDonald’s keeps quietly shifting its prices up with no mention at all.
I reckon, 10 years ago, that egg would have only cost 50 cents. That’s 50 cents shelled, cooked and blessed by the Queen of Good Karma. And even then we would have been “Fifty cents for an egg? Are you crazy?”
And now we’re paying $2.20 for an egg.
Except we’re not.Because the day I pay McDonald’s $2.20 for an egg is the day I don’t buy an egg at McDonald’s.