There are wolves after me

Sign that I am getting old
I heard Feargal Sharkey singing “You little Thief” on MMM and I actually listened to it


Sign that it may not be as bad as I thought
I very briefly considered feeling nostalgic and but I didn’t, because I just couldn’t cope with the dissonance between the bitter declaration that “There’s no hard feelings/ there’s no feelings at aaaaaaaallll” and the stupidly cheerful horn section


Sign that I am getting old
I now get exceptionally cross when the neighbours start playing loud, bad music at 2.00am


Sign that it may not be as bad as I thought
I am still not willing to call the police. Instead, I prefer to go storming over to their place and confront 30 complete strangers, several of whom are bigger than me and all of whom were drunk enough to want to have a go.

Also, I have done this more than once and I continue to get out of there alive.


Sign that I am getting old
Grey hairs


Sign that it may not be as bad as I thought
Each one is still an event worthy of comment


Sign that I am getting old
I heard “She’s my Man” by the Scissor Sisters and all I could think about was how much it sounded like Billy Joel’s “Tell her about it”


Sign that it may not be as bad as I thought
I still like the Scissors Sisters song much better and I think the video is truly excellent

Or maybe it is
I have only seen that video because my 18 year old niece decided I needed to be educated in what the kids are listening to these days.



Sign that I am getting old
I am no longer as much of a Wil Anderson fan as I used to be


Sign that it may not be as bad as I thought
It’s nothing to do with a changing sense of humour or increasingly conservative political views, and all because the first thing I heard him do on his new show was back-announce a Simple Minds song, and the second thing was to announce how we could vote for Fifi on Dancing With the Stars. At that point, I suspect he hadn’t been completely frank about having complete creative control. At least, I hope he wasn’t.


Sign that I am getting old
I was listening to my sons’ HI-5 CD and I realized how much it reminds me of a Debbie Gibson record. Then I remembered that I own a copy of “Electric Youth” which I bought not long after it was released

Sign that it may not be as bad as I thought
Actually, this is just bad. Dude, seriously, why would you post this. Sure, only 15 people read this blog each day, but that’s still 15 people who now think you’re an idiot.

Stop it stop it stop it before you tell people that Hi-5 also sounds a lot like “Steps” AND YOU HAVE THAT ALBUM TOO.

*Curses*


Sign that I am getting old
It’s now several years since I have been able to say “Dude, I’m 29” to my mother-in-law.

Sign that it may not be as bad as I thought
The look on her face when she realized that someone had just called her “Dude” was one of the funniest things I have ever seen and I would do it again in a second if the opportunity arose.

Are you Jason?

Yes, another open letter.


Dear Jason

Dude, sorry to use your real name and all, but I figure you probably won’t mind since you have cheerfully been writing it all over the slides, ladders and swings at one of the parks I regularly visit with my children.

Tagging has always struck me as one of the less well thought out crimes in the world. Tagging involves, in essence, writing your own name. The fact that you spell it cool is really not the point. Congratulations, Jason, on taking the incredible stealth one step further by not only writing your own name in rather neat and legible letters, but adding your postcode.

I am not actually one of those law and order types who routinely gets exceptionally cross about these things. I know this because I have spent the last 10 years defending people who have been charged with, among other things, criminal damage (or, as the kids are calling it these days, tagging). I always try to be less concerned with a bit of minor property damage and more concerned that there are young people who feel so alienated and disenfranchised that they feel that they can only express themselves through damaging property.

I must confess that in your case, I am slightly less sympathetic than usual since I looked more carefully at your postcode and realised that you live in a suburb where I can’t even afford to rent, let alone ever buy a house, even though I earn what could be considered a reasonably nice salary.

If you are, as I could reasonably suspect, not actually poor and disenfranchised at all but a bored middle class teenager from a rather pleasant suburb, may I very respectfully request that you take up polo or stamp collecting or whatever it is that you society types do and, more importantly, the next time you feel like making the local park just a little uglier, could you perhaps consider than there are roughly a billion other things you could be doing with your time, and all of them are probably better than that.

Yours, most sincerely, etc

INC

PS For my son’s expert analysis, click here

Again with the atheism, Part 2

Melbourne Girl, this one is for you.

After I took a couple of pot shots at way-more-famous-than-I-could-ever-be French philosopher Michael Onfray in a recent post, and in particular suggested that he should be a little more open minded on the life after death issue, MG asked me this:

are you certain of life after death as described in the bible and believed by people who believe in heaven and all that stuff? if you say yes, then just flip it around and see the faith in his words, the certainty. and it's a faith and certainty that has arisen out of the vacuum of hard, scientific evidence, upon which not only the christian faith, but all other monotheistic faiths are built.think about it.

And I promised that, at some point, I would answer that question. So, here goes….

For context, let me start by saying that I objected to Onfray’s comments for two reasons.

Firstly, he made a few completely unequivocal statements about the topic without providing any basis for his statements. Much of what he said seemed to amount to nothing more than an exercise in begging the question, and I expect more than that from anyone who engages in a serious discussion of such a fundamentally important topic. If any of my ramblings on these topics are badly thought out, I fully expect to get called on it, so the same standard should apply to a highly trained philosopher.

Secondly, in view of all that, I deeply object to Michael Onfray calling everyone who sincerely believes in life after death a liar and a fraud.

Your actual question, of course, is whether I am certain in my beliefs about such things. If it is suggested that I can’t criticize Onfray for holding his beliefs firmly in the absence of hard evidence if I am doing the same thing, only with a different conclusion, that would be entirely reasonable.

I think there is a difference between believing something on faith and being absolutely certain about it. At least, that difference exists in my case.

Frederick Buechner is rapidly becoming one of my favourite writers. This is his definition of faith:

Faith is homesickness. Faith is a lump in the throat. Faith is less a position on that a movement toward, less a sure thing than a hunch. Faith is waiting. Faith is journeying through space and time.

So if someone (and this frequently happens) were to come up and ask me to talk about my faith, it’s exactly that journey through space and time I’d have to talk about. The ups and downs of the years, the dreams, the odd moment, the intuitions. I’d have to talk about the occasional sense that life isn’t just a series of events causing other events as haphazardly as a break shot in pool causes billiard balls to go off in many directions, but that life has a plot the way a novel has a plot – that events are somehow leading somewhere.

Equally compelling for me is this definition of Christian commitment

If you tell me Christian commitment is a kind of thing that has happened to you once and for all like some kind of spiritual plastic surgery, I say go to, go to, you’re either pulling the wool over your own eyes or trying to pull it over mine. Every morning you should wake up in your beds and ask yourself: “Can I believe it all again today?” No, better still, don’t ask it till after you’ve read The New York Times, till after you’ve studied the daily record of the world’s brokenness and corruption, which should always stand side by side with your Bible. Then ask if you can believe in the gospel of Jesus Christ again for that particular day. If your answers always Yes, then you probably don’t know what believing means. At least five times out of ten the answer should be No because the No is as important as the Yes, maybe more so. The No is what proves you’re human in case you should ever doubt it. And then if some morning the answer happens to be really Yes, it should be a Yes that’s choked with confession and tears and… great laughter.

We can’t know what happens after we die, all we can do is try to work it out as best we can from what we learn in life, from people we trust and from our own experience. I won’t find out for sure until the hopefully far distant day when I leave this life and discover what’s next (unless Michael Onfray is right, in which case there won’t be any discovering to do or anything left of me to do the discovering). I certainly can’t prove that heaven exists, or that God is real, or that any of it is true. But here’s a few reasons why, this week, I continue to believe in God:

1. Watching my two boys giving each other a good morning cuddle and giggling endlessly
2. The article in last Saturday’s Age about mankind’s amazing ability to create systems of artificial intelligence
3. The sunset last Saturday night, even if I was appreciating it from a carpark. It was still utterly awe-inspiring.

I was critical of Onfray’s approach to the question because it’s easy to make simple, absolute, statements, but it’s not helpful. We all need to grapple with this issue, to wrestle with it, to work it through and then make a decision about what to believe. And then we need to look at what that belief we form means and where do we go from here.

It is a very exciting journey.

I don't know why I said the things I said

We pause briefly between fairly serious posts about faith and atheism to bring you two slightly embarrassing scenes from my life in the past week.

Scene 1 – last Thursday

INC is sitting in Court waiting for the case to begin. My opponent and I have both filled out the “appearance sheet’, where we write down who we are and who we represent. The clerk re-enters the Courtroom

Clerk: Where’s that appearance sheet that was sitting here?

INC’s opponent: I left it up there on the bench.

INC: That would make it a disappearance sheet

*crickets chirrup loudly, a pin is heard to drop to the floor*

*INC resolves never to try to be funny in Court again*

Possibly not my best work, but technically, I got paid for that.


Scene 2 – Saturday

INC puts his two children in the double pram and goes to pick up Honey Bear from her pilates class. INC parks the double pram directly opposite the entrance to the pilates studio.

INC leans down and says to Bundle and Cherub “This is where we find mummies”*

Young lady sitting nearby starts laughing.

In hindsight, the worst part of this was not that I must have looked like the most incredibly sad and desperate guy in the world, but that, since my children look nothing like me, the young lady in question probably thought I had just borrowed these children for a couple of hours specifically for the purpose of hanging around a gym hoping to pick up.

The good news is that I gained a whole new understanding of Einstein’s theory of relativity. The 3 ½ minutes I spent waiting for Honey Bear lasted for around 18 days.




*meaning of course their mummy specifically, but subconsciously and rather unfortunately adopting a Bundle-like speech pattern. Oh well.

Again with the atheism

Continuing our theme of comprehensive analysis of a philosopher’s views from one brief article in the Saturday Age, this week we take a peek into the world of vastly popular French philosopher Michael Onfray.

It will probably not surprise you that I am going to disagree with a whole lot of what Mr Onfrey has to say. But I am pretty sure that if I ever met this dude, I would instantly take a very intense liking to the guy. Why? I suspect it’s this quote about why he wrote his latest book on atheism:

“When I went home, I checked my emails and saw that I had been sent some death threats. So I thought I may as well do something to really deserve them”

No matter how many things this guy says that annoy me, it’s just impossible not to love his attitude.

And now to a few things that impressed me less.

First this:
“Religions tell us we have to give up this life for another. They are telling us to up our desire, passions, pleasures- and that by doing so our existence in this world will make more sense, because the real sense of our life here below is the existence we will have once we are dead. What type of comfort is that? ‘Die while you are alive so you can be alive when you are dead?’”

When? When did religions say this? Was it any of the religions I am familiar with? Why wasn’t I told?

Frankly, if this dude had taken the time to reads my blog, I’m sure the 99 posts before this one could have suggested that I have no intention of ignoring the passions and pleasures of this life. I suppose I can accept that the most famous philosopher in France probably has a reasonable number of demands on his time and reading my blog is probably a fair way down on his list of priorities/ something he has never done and will never do.

However, if this man is planning to dismiss all religion, the least he could do is learn a bit about it first. One of my very favourite lines from the entire Bible is the bit where Jesus, talking about what he set out to achieve in life, announced that “I have come that you may have life, and life in all it’s fullness.”

I won’t try to speak for all religions, what with not even liking that term at all, but Christianity, at least, aims to make our lives on this planet more meaningful, not less.


And then there was this:
“When a soul collapses before the cold body of a loved one denial takes over and transforms this ending into a beginning.”

Followed by this:
“This is a swindle. We might have the impression that religions are doing us good, but it is by dint of a lie, a fiction, an extragavance.”

Says who? The fact that Michael Onfray has decided that death is a doorway to nothing at all whatsoever does not mean that he is right and everyone who believes otherwise is not only wrong but actually dishonest. Given that there’s really only one way to find out the answer to this one for sure, and as far as I can tell Michael Onfray is not and has never been dead, I have no idea why he feels such utter certainty on this one.


On the bright side, we have this:
“And to me, spirituality and religion are two different things. You can be an atheist and be interested in spirituality, which is my case.”

This is why I said I disagree with nearly everything that this guy says. On this point, Michael Onfray is absolutely right.


And finally, Michael Onfray was asked whether beautiful art and music and the like might provide a hint that maybe there is a God who is the source or inspiration for such wonderful things. Here’s his answer:

“And I think Bach would have existed without God; he would have been a musician anyway. He wouldn’t have composed oratorios and cantatas, but he would have done something else that would have been just as brilliant. Religion has acted as a structure, but if we change the structure, we will still have arts.”

This answer, if you read it a couple of times, boils down to “You don’t have to be a Christian to write good music”. Frankly, everyone knows that. The last 40 years of popular music would suggest that, if anything, the exact opposite is true, and being a Christian seems to make writing good music almost impossible.

My point here, more or less, is that Michael Onfray’s answer, while entirely correct, does not actually address the question. The world is too beautiful and magical a place to be something that just happened at random. To me, the beauty of this world is a signpost to something big and true and amazing.

It’s a question that deserves serious consideration, and a philosopher, of all people, should not be fudging the answer.

A good way to celebrate Mother's Day

This will take all weekend, but its well worth it.

Start by somehow having both children in bed by 8.00pm on Friday night. Sit down and watch whatever movie happens to be on TV. Fortunately, this turns out to be “The Notebook”, which may be the finest depiction of true love and commitment in the history of cinema. Take care to remember that it’s only a movie, otherwise the sheer beauty of it will cause your heart to break in to two entirely separate pieces.

Curse quietly under your breath when one of your children wakes up ten minutes after the movie ends. Send your wife to bed. Spend the next two hours feeling a little frustrated by your child’s refusal to sleep, but at the same time grateful for the extra time to think up a Mother’s Day Gift.

Get up early on Saturday. Take both children and go to your nearest shopping centre. Discover that the particular shop where you were going to buy a Mother’s Day gift is actually no longer there and has been replaced by some random clothing store. Realise that you have a little under half an hour to come up with Plan B.

Go and buy the entire first series of the West Wing from JB Hi-Fi. Wonder if you should get some sort of award for getting a double pram full of small people through the front door at all, let alone navigating it around a crowded set of small aisles. Consider the possibility that you are probably no longer in the demographic that a place like JB is really targeting. Feel slightly old. Take your children to the pet shop to look at puppies because you actually have a few minutes to kill and the children have been remarkably well behaved throughout all of the above.

Find your wife, drop her and one child at the supermarket. Take other child with you and go and buy some fruit and vegetables. You may need these later, for cooking and stuff.

Go home (NB do not forget to stop by supermarket to collect wife and child on the way), eat excellent salad wraps for lunch.

Prepare marinade for “Chinese style” pork ribs. Consider that if you ever need to know how to say “What the heck is this” in Cantonese, taking a few of these to Beijing and handing them around might be a good way to go about it. Decide that these ribs are going to be awesome so you don’t care.

Realise it’s only two o’clock and it’s a stunningly nice late autumn day. Take the whole family to Grant’s picnic ground in Belgrave. Feed the luckiest birds in the world and take a stroll through the tree ferns. Stop at the café for a milkshake and a bowl of chips for the children, and a very nice glass of chardonnay for your wife. Sit and watch the wedding going on just outside the café. Feel very relaxed.

Take a leisurely drive home, decide you both ate too many of the chips at the café, leave the ribs to marinade overnight and eat soup for dinner.

Get up early on Sunday, organise breakfast for the children, and hope your wife doesn’t wake up before you have time to make a card. Write a poem in several different colours of texta incorporating phrases often used by your children, such as “Thank you mummy, that’s very sweet of you”. Get the children to decorate it with various stamps and cute stickers with bears on them. Feel very pleased with the results.

Entertain the children any way you can so that just once this year your wife gets a decent sleep-in. Once she wakes, and presents and cards have been opened, cook pancakes and whip up a very good caramel latte .

Decide that your two rampantly teething children will drive you nuts if you stay home a minute longer. Head straight for the zoo. Briefly panic when you see just how many cars are already there. Relax when you see that there are no queues and instead take a moment to appreciate that this would cost you $44.00 if you had not joined Friends of the Zoo.

Try not to laugh too hard when you see a three year old at the baboon enclosure pointing and loudly proclaiming “Like grandpa. Like grandpa”. Fail at this. Also enjoy seeing various elephants and penguins.

Head home and enjoy the aforementioned ribs, followed by Grey’s Anatomy and the surprisingly addictive “What About Brian?”.

Feel happy and relaxed. Resolve to have far more weekends like this.

A slightly late Happy Mother's Day to you all.

This one is probably going to get quite silly

Most email spam is really quite easy to ignore. ABout half of the spoam emails I get at the moment appear to be from some German dude in his Frankfurt based business. I could be wrong about that, since my knowledge of German is so limited that the only way for this guy to be sure that I would understand his emails would be to offer to sell me 'the best way to the train station'.

The other half of it tends to be advetisements for some sort of medication or similar pharmaceutical product that will apparently make my wife very happy even though I am the one whpo would be taking it. I'm not really sure that I follow the logic there so those emails tend to be deleted.

Just occasionally, the subject line in a spam email is so good that it's impossible not to open, like the one I got last week.

From: [some spamming dude]
To: INC
Subject: Ringleader admits obvious of chicken

I had to open it, just in case in contained a news story like this...

A group of radical but also quite weird animal rights activists were arrested this week after they attempted to infiltrate the Logie Awards by hiding inside a giant chicken which was left just outside the Casino.

Police were called after no one at all was fooled into thinking that the chicken was in any way an official part of the ceremony, despite the absolutely genius plan of dressing the chicken in a giant "Poultry in Motion" T-shirt. It turns out that Chicken Run gags are no longer topical.

When interviewed by police, ringleader Gerald McCluckenheimer admitted that, in hindsight, the chicken was somewhat obvious. McCluckenheimer is well known for a series of similarly eponymous stunts, including attempting to infiltrate the Big Brother house disguised as an ostrich egg and chasing Adro up several flights of stairs with a frying pan and 10kg of bacon strapped to his own head.

McCluckenheimer appeared before Melbourne Magistrates Court this morning and he was released on bail on his own undertaking to JUST STOP IT.

Police spokesperson Senior Sergeant Jade McKinnon said "Look, seriously, what does this guy think this is, McLeod's Daughters? You know, the show with the incredible thematic subtlety, like last week's episode which was littered with King Arthur references, all leading up to the penultimate scene where Abi Tucker pulls a knife out of a wooden beam with no apparent difficulty even though it's been stuck there for years and no one else has been able to move it even one inch. Anyhoo, this whole chicken themed stunt thing just makes me cross."

The Opposition Police spokesperson, whose name I have temporarily forgotten if indeed I or anyone else ever knew it, said "We waited a week for INC to post something and all we get is this complete nonsense? Seriously? When we win government, our first priority will be legislate against this blog. Not all blogs or anything, no, just this specific one. So, INC, nothing much for you to worry about for the next 7, or maybe 11 years, but after that, watch out."



Sadly, when I opened the email, it was of course nothing like that at all. But at least I now have a good sized investment in some guy's sausage factory in Frankfurt.

Huh? What?

We apologise for this temporary break in blogging, arising from a fairly unexpected visit from relatives who live interstate.

To help pass the time until blogging resumes, here's a list of words that start to sound really strange if you say them too often, to the point that you will wonder if they really are part of the English language at all:
1. Elbow
2. Geese
3. Pumpkin
4. Lathe
5. Nephew
6. Potsy

And there's probably more.