New adventures in cheese

Like you, I bought a big block of Nimbin cheese today.  No, "Nimbin cheese" is not some kind of euphemism for psychoactive substances.  (For those of you not from Australia, Nimbin has the widespread reputation, rightly or wrongly, as a hive of hippies with heaps of hemp.)  Nimbin cheese is in fact a cheese produced in Nimbin.

I was so surprised to see it right there in the stupormarket that I bought it without really thinking about it.  I don't even know what type of cheese it is.  Presumably it's a tasty cheddar or something similar.  Gets up to look in fridge ... oh my god - it's something called "Elbo style cheese". Eurgh.  I know that Elbo cheese must be a real and delicious thing, but the name is very unappealing, sounding like the consequences of a long-neglected personal hygiene regimen.

Anyway, I think that the reason I bought it was because of its colour.  Sitting there on the shelf amidst the other (non-elbo-style) cheeses it really stood out.  Yellow, dark yellow, yellow, pale yellow, green, yellow ... wait - green???

Yes, Nimbin cheese is green.  I was so enraptured that I threw it into my basket without a moment's further thought.  I thought about it all the way home though.  This cheese, from the home of the hippie, is a triumph of marketing.  Distinctive name, distinctive colour, colour has multiple connotations directly linked to the distinctive name (green = eco & green = dope).  The only comparable idea I can come up with right now would be to sell a Tony Abbott blue.  But the idea of somehow extracting milk from Tony Abbott to make it is an even worse concept than Elbo cheese.

Which is why I was so bitterly disappointed when I got home and unpacked the shopping and found a plain old boring block of pale yellow cheese in my bag.  Had I grabbed the wrong cheese off the shelf in my excitement?  Was the green colour just a product of my fevered imagination when I read that it was Nimbin cheese?  Was I stoned out my mind?

No, no, and no.  It turns out that Nimbin cheese is not green at all.  It's just ordinary looking cheese inside a wrapper which is green on the front and clear on the back.  Man...  I've obviously read Green Eggs and Ham one time too many.

Insidious mind-control

As you know, life is unfulfilling unless I have something to rail against.  At the moment, things are going fantastically because I am on a righteous crusade against non-canonical nursery rhymes.  It may seem harmless when people tweak these little rhymes and songs a bit but stop for a moment and think about what these shadowy powers-that-be hope to achieve with their historical revision?  I put it to you that the culture wars are being fought (and lost!) right under our noses.  Soon our children will be placing calls to the Stasi in the dead of night to report on our activities.  Think I'm exaggerating? Read on.

It all started when we were given some type of poster-thing by a community midwife to encourage us to sing and read to the Hatchling.  All well and good.  But these are the lyrics to Twinkle Twinkle Little Star that were printed on the poster: (the emphasis is mine)

Twinkle twinkle little star

How I wonder what you are

Up above the world so high

Like a diamond in the sky

Twinkle twinkle little star

I'm so glad that you came by

How about that last line eh?  Stupid or what?  Stars don't "come by" to visit like they are your friends.  And it completely stuffs up the rhyming scheme of the song.  I can't say for certain why some faceless bureaucrat in the Department of Nursery Rhymes saw fit to change it.  But I'm pretty sure it's part of some leftist conspiracy to indoctrinate our children into thinking that it's nice to have people just dropping in out of the blue, so as to weaken our resolve in the Great War On Immigrants and erode the sanctity of property ownership.

It's amazing how many leftist conspiracies you can find in children's literature once you become sufficiently deranged and paranoid.  For example, one of the Hatchling's favourite books is one called Where is the Green Sheep?  This simple book shows us all sorts of other sheep in our lengthy search for the Green Sheep.  Entertaining stuff, to be sure, but the author and illustrator don't miss a single opportunity to brainwash us into their pinko views.  Here's a short list of some of the sheep in the book and their barely subliminal messages:

• The red sheep and the blue sheep - clearly intended to make us think that it's okay to look funny or to be born ethnic.
• The train sheep and the car sheep - the train sheep reclines in unnatural comfort amidst a seething menagerie of unhygienic foreign animals while the car sheep struggles to repair his broken vehicle.  How much multiculturalism, environmentalism, communism and other isms can be crammed into just one page?
• The thin sheep and the wide sheep - because sheep can't be called fat anymore because it might hurt their feelings.  Still, they can't stop me from the enjoying the juicy strip of wide down the edge of my lamb chops!
• The wind sheep and the wave sheep - more environmentalism, more lazy layabouts.  I see there's no brown coal sheep, no uranium sheep, not even a natural gas sheep.  Sheep don't need real jobs, being happy to fly kites and go surfing.  Hence no need for a construction worker sheep or a chartered accountant sheep or a soldier sheep or any other form of gainful employment sheep.  I'm surprised the illustrator didn't just draw the surfing sheep with a disability support pension sticking out of his back pocket while it laughs all the way to the bank!

 I'll bet you're not laughing now.  The next time you are reading a book to your child or singing a song to your baby, give some thought to what they might really be hearing.  Remember, if you don't vote Right, don't vote at all.
 

Power

Reginald Machiavelli, my old high school principal, used to say that it was better to be feared than to be loved.  Clearly you, Gentle Reader, disagree.  You thought it was better to be overlooked than loved, better to be loved than feared or respected, better to be feared or respected than admired, and better to be admired than to be scorned.  Good luck with that.  People are going to think you're nuts.

Since the most popular response was that it is better to be overlooked, I declare the winner of this poll to be the most overlooked choice.  Thus it is clearly best to be scorned.  And if you think what I'm doing is unconstitutional - tough.  I've got a friend with two angry rabbits who thinks otherwise:

Flopsy and Mopsy are VERY disappointed...

Do not try to play the system

Copyright Antony Green 2010

The heading of this post is the advice given to me and my Esteemed Colleagues by our Fine University administration when they were telling us how the Big Computer would automagically process our preferences for the rotations we go on next year.  I am sure that every year some small number of people do not follow this advice, choosing instead to rely on convoluted logic and/or game theory to justify selecting rotations they don't really want but believe they won't be allocated in order to secure other placements that they just know they need to get or their careers will be destroyed in utero.  But by and large, medical students are sensible level-headed types who would never try to play the system when this much is at stake.

Not so the Australian public.

An article in the Sydney Morning Herald, which you can read by placing your computer's cursor over THESE CAPITAL LETTERS using the pointing device with which it is equipped and depressing the selection button once, says that in a poll taken of voters since the election, 13% of them would have voted differently if they had known what the outcome of the election would be.  I have a message for those voters:

DO NOT TRY TO PLAY THE SYSTEM.

It's a difficult concept to get your head around, I know, but voting is an expression of your preferred outcome.  If enough people vote for something, it will happen.  There is no point voting for something that you don't want in order to "send a message".  Somewhat astonishingly, 1 vote out of 15 million sends no message at all, while 2 million votes out of 15 million changes the result.  If you want to send a message, write a postcard.  Sure, it'll cost you maybe a buck fifty.  But at least it won't put us all in the situation we're in now, where Bob Katter is the most powerful man in the country and Bill HendersonHeffernan* is trying to influence the formation of government by making prank phone calls in silly voices.

*okay I admit it.  I'm a moron.

Not Tony Abbott

Yesterday, in an interview with Rolling Stone Magazine, the software billionare and philanthropist Bill Gates was asked some questions about his family.  When asked if he thought that Jennifer and Phoebe should remain virgins until their wedding night, Gates replied, "Um, ahh, look - I'm no Tony Abbott.  You can't expect to be able to quiz me on this kind of stuff and for me to know the answers right off the top of my head."

Gillardia

We have a new Prime Minister down under.  Julia Gillard has been elected unopposed by the Labor caucus after Kevin Rudd spectacularly imploded under the gravitational pull of his own conceit.

Julia's happy - she's Australia's first female PM.  Labor's happy - they've shrugged off the iron yoke of totalitarianism.  Tony Abbott's happy - now the Labor MPs can't say "Et tu Brute?" to him in the lunchroom.  Kerry O'Brien's happy - rangas FTW!  I'm happy - I think she'll be an excellent PM.  She's intelligent, tough, articulate, and Left.

Everyone (bar Kevin) is happy.  Or so I thought.

Chatting to people at the clinic today, here are some of the choice comments about her:

"You'd think that her hair would look better seeing as her partner's a hairdresser."
"She could have at least worn a dress.  She wore black pants.  Probably trying to be one of the boys."
"I didn't vote for her.  The public voted for Kevin Rudd." (Er, not unless they live in South Brisbane)
"She doesn't even have any kids.  This is all she's wanted her whole life and now she got it in the bitchiest way possible."

All of the above comments were made by women.  They went on to discuss the Italian politician who had been a nude model.  I'm not 100% sure of the relevance but there you go.  Seems to me that 51% of the electorate just decided that Julia's gotten a bit uppity by smashing that glass ceiling.

What a shame.