Vinegar baths

I'm consulting today. So far this appears to involve drinking lots of tea, not bothering to get dressed and regretting that second bottle of wine last night.

It also means I get to look at reports with titles like Prevalence and Pattern of HIV-Related Malnutrition Among Women in Sub-Saharan Africa: A Meta-Analysis of Demographic Health Surveys.

My question is: If you're HIV positive and starving in Zimbabwe, are you malnourished because of Mugabe or HIV? Or is it all South Africa's fault, because Mbeki has completely fucked up any kind of reasonable, informed or effective response to both Mugabe's dictatorship and the spread of HIV in Southern Africa? Maybe he should get his Health Minister to tell Robert to have a vinegar bath ala suggested official AIDS-prevention strategy and everything will be okay.

If there is anything amusing about Zimbabwe, though, it is that it may well be brought down not by political opposition, international pressure or internal revolt, but by the fact that the German company that supplies the printing presses with paper to produce the hyper-inflated currency has refused to make any more deliveries. The power of the corporate dollar in action.

If I was Mugabe I'd be lobbying the Pope for the next World Youth Day and asking for an advance hard currency sweetener. Apparently the Catholics don't mind institutional sexual abuse or believe in climate change, so they probably wouldn't have any issue with the mass genocide of an entire nation. I'm just not sure it is fair to sick Guy Sebastian and his Christian warblings on a country already in so much pain.

Culture Wars

World Youth Day is surrounding my house and my workplace. I begin each day with bouts of rage following the latest Catholic update on the State of the World. This morning dear old Cardinal Pell proved his relevance by mouthing off about how global warming is a false conspiracy (probably a Jewish one, just like the holocaust, or maybe like evolution or all of those altar boys who, year after year, keep blaming innocent Priests for completely understandable behaviour, after all, those kids are 'asking for it' in those skimpy altar robes) and then going on about how we must all 'populate or perish' in 'western countries'. Oh my god.

I started to see 'pilgrims' wandering about in the manner of loose-ended youth two days ago. I saw my first Catholic couple yesterday, sweaty palms grimly stuck together in defiance of the church (and my tip: pregnant by Sunday). The hordes took over today. The streets of the legal district have confirmed, via crass cultural generalisations and oversized national flags, that the Italians are much better looking and the Americans really are fatter.

I also note that there is a direct correlation between billet-point and cultural/ethnic background. Small tubby white men in dogs collars are all loitering about the five star hotels. The Americans appear to be appearing from the city fringe (I saw a very frightened looking one trapped between a large transvestite and an adult club on Oxford Street around sunset last night). I have it on good authority from a friend in the outer suburbs that his bus into the city this morning was full of Melanesians. I hope their missionaries are in the suburbs too.

Separately, a Korean trade delegation just arrived at my workplace. As my colleagues gathered to go into the conference room I threw myself back to 2000, when I lived in Korea, and said, "Say hello in Korean! Say, "aun song ha seyo!" Note that I hadn't said hello, or thought about saying hello, in Korean, in eight years. Said colleagues all trooped in and I could hear a chorus of Australian accented "aun song ha seyo!" and thought, "hey, that doesn't sound right". I googled and it is actually "aun nyong ha seyo".* I sure hope I didn't tell them to say, "Your mother's kimchi stinks and your father p*sses soju".

*Note that all translations couldn't be sloppier or more approximate

Lucky we don't have any kids

Picture post today, prompted by a continued anger and disbelief that this kind of 'public education' campaign gets public money that could be spent on, I don't know, adequate public schooling or healthcare.* Or condoms to throw at the Catholics about to descend on Sydney en masse. Or a lion to sick on said Catholics.



*In the interests of fairness, I checked, and this is an 'industry' group, ie sponsored by drinkers, but did get $5 million of federal funding. I guess I should be glad that that that $5 million wasn't spent on police capacity to roundup Anne Geddes for her abhorrent, child-hating and exploiting p*rnographic photography, ala Bill Henson, or on another office night out at a dodgy suburban nightclub for an unpleasant backbencher with an ego and a face like a frying pan.

Follow the leader

I had this episode with a nasty, but psychic, green parrot a couple of years ago. Since then, I've developed an aversion to spiritual birds, but I still pop off to see a regular psychic now and then. I needed some cosmic uplift this weekend just past, so loaded myself into a friend's car and took off for the suburbs, and a recommended medium.

The psychic started out by telling me that when I started to "feel a little mad, like you're going insane", I have to put my hands on my head. This is all very well and good, but it is difficult to type with your hands on your head. I'm wondering if I can fashion a small alfoil cap to keep myself grounded (it would also stand in as an effective mind-ray deflector in case of alien invasion). A friend from India suggested a turban, but then I'd have to rename this blog "The Adventures of the Juice Bar Lawyer and His Cosmic Turban." My inner editor doesn't hold with such long titles.

Things looked up further into the session, however, when the psychic explained that soon I am going to be in a position to start a small cult, complete with followers. Unfortunately, I need three to five years of spiritual development before I can begin to manipulate - I mean, enlighten - said followers. In the meantime, my psychic guide suggested I develop a business case to ensure that I profit financially from my little venture. I'm now in the process of weighing up the options for my minions' wardrobes. White robes are always practical and a classic cult choice, but a little obvious. Matching orange velour tracksuits, perhaps?

How I dated Destiny

Just to clear something up: I don't have an issue with internet dating. Several good mates (and my mother) have got lucky trawling dating sites. I couldn't, however, let this opportunity to ridicule other people pass me by. Myself, I rely on sheer presence and animal magnetism to populate my non-existent dating life (as I was explaining to FfZ and AD the other day, I stopped wearing man scent the day I realised just how attractive my natural stench of wasted potential and progressive decay actually is).

On with the ridicule: an article in a random emerging technologies journal, Dating & Intimacy in the 21st Century: The Use of Online Dating Sites in Australia, popped up in my inbox this morning, fresh from wandering the halls of Melbourne University. This is what I took away from reading it, in between fits of giggles, carefully suppressed into my mug of coffee:

- Methodology in the post-academic business-case world of your average new-age Australian University is less than impressive. My guess is that "in-depth interviews with 23 users of online dating services" actually means "we were at the pub and our mate Batwing was telling us about the chick he scored on LavaLife", while "based on a web audit of more than 60 online dating sites" should read "And then we got home pissed, went online, and tried to find that dorky guy from the next cubicle over at work on RSVP."

- Apparently if you are a chick and you are online dating, you have to:

a) hail from the eighties (and have a ridiculous eighties name such as Melody or Destiny);
b) exhibit bunny boiler characteristics (see Chantelle: "I just wanted to find someone who wanted to live the rest of their life with me! That sounds old-fashioned. I don’t really care what anyone else thinks." Well, sweetie, maybe if you did care what other people thought, you'd shave your back and stop opening every date with "I just want to find someone who wants to live the rest of their life with me!" Then you might have a shot.); or
c) be careful of dudes wearing lifts (see Stacey: "I’ve responded to some people based on their photos... and found them in the end of the day a little... too short")

- If you're a bloke, you have to:

a) be lazy (see Marcus: "[It is an easy way to meet, there is] no need to dress up or make a physical effort");
b) appear delusional (see Stuart, who claims to be 'articulate' in the 'pursuit of ladies' and goes on to explain that "I really really enjoy expressing myself through the written medium and I discover tonnes about me in the process." He uses numbered points, but doesn't appear to know much regarding sentence structure. Or should I write, "Appear to know much he doesn't regarding sentence structure"); or
c) have a crush on your boss (see Marvin: "I can do it at work. Like I’m sitting there at work on a proposal, I’ve got my boss breathing down my neck...")

Personally, I'd like to know how many of the 23 people surveyed had dated one another. My tip: Bruce ("[Don't want to waste time to] learn about someone if the first face to face meeting is the last because they have personal hygiene problems, such as bad body odour") had the bad luck to stumble across Chantelle ("I don't care what other people think").

It's not easy being a green table

My new workplace amuses me no end. My approval rating soared after I got a haircut that was, and I quote, "neat". I'd been champing at the radical margins with the previous bouffant, which was actually more the result of poor personal administration skills and pure laziness than a post-capitalist attempt to stick it to the corporate man. (It's not me, it's my bones. That are lazy, that is.)

This conversation just happened:

Colleague: [Demonstrating meeting-related victory] I had the best idea, it was that I'd use a green table!
JuiceBar: A green table?
Colleague: Yeah, a green table. You would have seen me wandering around with it.
JuiceBar: I would have thought I'd have noticed that... An actual table?
Colleague: Yeah, an actual table. Hold on, I'll get it.
JuiceBar: [Stares in a perplexed manner at office wall and considers possible sizes and uses of table, while colleague scurries off to get table.]
Colleague: See! A table! [Enters with Excel spreadsheet. A green one.]

A lamb I deboned earlier

The tips and tricks section of my Sunday paper tells me that, in the event of unexpected guests arriving, I should serve olive tapenade ("if only a little is left in the jar, add mayonnaise") with drinks, then pull out an entree of goats cheese, green leaves and leftover bread, follow with a main involving a deboned leg of lamb rubbed with Morrocan-style spice mix, carrots leeks and potatoes and top it all off with blue cheese, fresh fruit and bread ("instead of a traditional dessert").

Call me crazy, as the person who has my wallet and keys just did, after I managed to forget that they had my wallet and keys twice in the space of about ten hours, but by my reckoning, this means keeping on hand several condiments (what if I am low on mayo as well as olive tapenade? Panic!), fresh bread, "leftover" bread, fruit, vegetables, cheese, Morroccan-style spices and a small boneless sheep.

Honestly. I am almost moved to write a letter to the Editor suggesting that next week's "emergency dinner party" tip should involve keeping on hand several vats of home-stirred icecream, freshly-baked souffles and imported Japanese salmon, just flown in, still flapping around on the freighter floor, from a small port village just south of Osaka. "Oh, I've got nothing to serve, but please, have a seat, while I grind up some pine nuts for pesto, deglaze a pot roast and consult the last Donna Hay for table setting suggestions!"

The thing is, I'm barely functional for an adult (see above reference to lack of wallet and keys). My fridge involves several open bottles of wine, three sorts of beer, dahl left over from a dinner party so long ago I'm surprised it hasn't sprouted a small lentil crop, and a number of different cheeses. If a dinner party lobbed unexpectedly on my doorstep, the best it could hope for was vinegary wine, old cheese and lentil patties with the mould scraped off.