Nina Simone - Sinnerman

The Stranglers "Golden Brown" 1981

Squeeze - Cool For Cats (Official Video)

On Hong Kong: If some Hong Kong Chinese folk have a real problem with being Chinese, then they have a real problem. This is not a problem the Government of China can actually help you with, and no one else will help you. This is your problem. It doesn't matter what you destroy or who you kill, or who you beg to help you to see yourselves as something far cleaner and better and more important and more intrinsically worthy. None of that will help. This is your problem. You have brought yourself to...yourself. It is not the world's fault that you hate yourself and seek to destroy yourself. Being so special and exceptional, that is your business.

Daylight Saving is a funny thing. I was in favour of it for decades until I bought a fantastic Casio GShock watch 3 years ago and suffered far too many hours trying to change the hour hand. And this may make you think I am an idiot, true, but I handed it over to 5 other people, not idiots, actual watch aficionados, watch shop keepers etc, and they couldn't change the time on it either, without access to the 70 page instruction booklet. I posted it back to Casio in Japan, I sent it back saying that I don't want it anymore...and that they should try harder...but instead of keeping it, they fixed it, and sent it back to me. That's true. They returned it, fixed up for that season. Nice of them. So, instead of doing that again this year, I bought a $25 replica of it that is much easier to change. The remarkable Casio G Force, a watch you can wear underwater on Jupiter, as one needs to do, is in the desk drawer until the times change back again in a few months. I doubt the real usefulness of Daylight Saving. It is a complication, a complexity, and we are getting much simpler now, and for the future, and we can't do fascinating complexity anymore.

Perfect Marriage: my view: a perfect marriage, well, this is not an easy thing. it should start with a couple who fundamentally mostly like each other, and at a time when neither is actually rooting someone else, or rooting themselves too much. In some peoples lives, this may be a very rare anomaly and an important and quizzical time. with the necessary arguments, it is important that neither resorts to psychological or physical violence, or indeed, actively hiring assassins, or when running away, one doesn't run very far. Half way motels are for shadey sex and shadey remorse...& its important that they are nearby. It is probably best that your loved one doesn't hold a sharp knife to your throat more than once. I'm not judging, I'm just noticing. eventually you both have a child, i guess, or not, and then usually the dad/husband wants to have sex with someone else to stave off the existential angst of realising that life has no inherent meaning at all. this is part of growing up. it takes the whole of life to understand this fact. yes, life has no meaning. any meaning is a shonky construction over the Void, but it works for, hopefully, a long time. Build that bridge...and after a decade or two, meet the one you love. the same one. thats a perfect marriage. How long does that last? well, back to the issue of existential angst and the meaninglessness of reality and of truth...i dont know. no one knows. if anyone says they know, they are advertisers for some crap notion that is worse than yours, and more expensive than yours. On we go. It's a messy, imperfect ...mess, most of it and with great beauty and wonder in it all, and that's pretty well how we guess we are still actively alive rather than being in the process of actively dying. Now, yes, there is a difference between actively living and actively dying, but we'll get to the dying part well enough without any advice or help at all. Dying knows us much better and more intimately than we will ever know dying...but that's, for a lot of us, a bit further down the road. I think you should marry someone who you are prepared to put in the ground, and they should marry you with the same serious resolve, because that's one of the things that marriage does really mean. I'm very happy with my choice and my marriage. I'd much rather she put me in the ground than I put her there. Too much paperwork and too much sadness for me.

I don't know why Australians worry so much about China, apart from, of course, being rote-educated to do so by our American owners.