To Sydney and back

I haven't posted for a while because I was in Sydney for a week - bigger, madder, dirtier, and with better food than Perth.

Sydney is awesome. I SAW MUSLIMS!(haven't seen Muslims in months) Some of them worked for PricewaterhouseCoopers!

Above is a photo of the ground floor of Darling Park Tower II (we have the whole building because we are bigger, madder, dirtier and we have better food in Sydney). Great little coffee shops with large leather couches to sit in.
On nice days you can eat your lunch in the Darling Park gardens in the front .

If you haven't picked up on it, moving to Sydney is definitely on the agenda. Not least because there are more Muslims and no one has heard of Kalgoorlie.








8 sleeps until Cape Town!

Milan Kundera

In The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Milan Kundera described immigration as walking a tight rope without the safety net of familiarity, friends and family beneath you to speak to you in a language you have known since childhood.

I am so

sexually frustrated right now.

Economics

This is extract from a article submitted to the Yale Law Journal entitled "How not to succeed in Law School" by James D Gordon:

"There are two schools of thought that should be considered in detail, followers of Critical Legal Studies who believe that all law is aimed at SUPPORTING free market capitalism, and Lawyer Economists who believe that all law in an unwarrented INTERFERENCE with free market capitalism. Other than that the two groups pretty much see eye to eye*.

Econs basically believe that material wealth is the highest human value, and that justice, fairness, dignity and protecting the helpless all cost money and are therefore "economically inefficient". The money would be better spent on much more trancendant things, like pet rocks, hemorrhoid pads, and other items needed to satisfy AGGREGATE DEMAND.
Econs prove their theories be devising little mathematical formulas which assume whoel truckloads of untrue things and then come to a particular conculsion. The conclusion is always - get this - "the market will take care of itself." According to the Econs - I am not making this up either - there is a GIANT INVISIBLE DISEMBODIED HAND that magically takes care of everything. Before you get too excited by this, remeber that this is the same invisible hand that gave us the invisible GREAT DEPRESSION. Oh. That invisible hand.
When you point out that the assumptions in the formulas are simplisting (a euphemism for false), the Econs get really testy and tell you that you don't understand that discipline^. Besides, although sitting in an office and writing mathematical formulas may not be the most effective way to solve the world's problems, it is at least one of the highest paid, and you can't have everything. Morevover, Law and Economics doesn't require any empirical studies, which, afterall, would be tedious and time consuming. So the Econs don't want to hear you say that their beautiful theories are about to be murdered by a brutal gang of facts. Also they have no time to listen to you as they are too busy trying to get the maths section back on the LSAT.

*Compare the debate between liberals and conservatives. Liberals want to regulate business activitiy but not sexual conduct, while conservatives want precisely the opposite.

^Economics is a closed system; internally it is perfectly logical, operating according to a consistent set of principles. Unfortunately, the same could be said of psychosis". (Jones and Wilson, An Incomplete Education)"

QV1

This is Perth city from Mount Eliza. To the right of the photo, just out of view, is the Swan River and behind you is the sea. My building is QV1 which is the one on the far left, my desk is just left of centre, half way up. You can see me waving! Hello!

This is not me

But it could be - a few more salsa classes and I could have my own Tupac look alike clutching my body wantonly.

Hot as 1844

A little south of Perth is Fremantle which is the Perth port and the original settlement for the WA convicts. Freo has maintained it's late 19th century architecture with narrow streets and cobbled walk ways. The old prison is now a museum and the high street has become a funky cuppacino strip. The University of Notre Dame is currently buying up all the old buildings and turning it into a little university town. My aunt Alison has recently started lecturing in their Health Sciences department.

Monday was West Australian Labour Day and I went down to meet Ali and her hubby for lunch in 38 degree heat. After two beers I suddenly realised that I was plastered! John and I had to walk around Freo for 2 hours to sober up while Ali finished her lecturing.

This is the 'Gate to Fremantle', through which the convicts entered Freo from their ship in the harbour. Freo Prison is widely regarded as one of the harshes and most brutal convict prisons in Australia. It also holds the dubious distinction of hanging the first white Australian in 1844 (a 15 year old boy convicted of murder) The colonials were enthusiastically hanging Aboriginals long before 1844.

Shaken but not stirred

Last night I experienced a schizophrenic having a psychotic episode.

Meet my cousin Michael.

As a schizophrenic, Michael has difficulty distinguishing truth from his delusions. He is also withdrawn and he has difficulty communicating with people because he doesn't make eye contact and he processes conversations at a slower rate than normal people. This means that some of the time Michael believes that everyone is out to get him and the rest of the time Michael is really weird.

Mike is 32 and has finally got a job as a draftsman (he doesn't interview really well, for obvious reasons, and he lost his last full time job about 3 years ago). His first day of work was yesterday. Unfortunately, schizophrenics are most likely to have an episode in situations of extreme stress.... Like your first day of work.

He comes to salsa with me on occasion and last night he started getting weirder and weirder and on the way home he was driving all over the road and swerving into oncoming traffic. I finally got him to stop in the middle of a parking lot and he went crazy; he started shouting and swearing at me. It turns out, he'd decided that the people in salsa were whispering about him.

It was very scary but I stood my ground and eventually made him calm down. I was all by myself in the dark and I didn't have a phone and this mad idiot wouldn't stop telling me to fuck off at the top of his voice.

The funny thing is, my first reaction was to get extremely angry, his driving could have killed us and then he was screaming rubbish at me! But I didn't lose my temper and this was a good thing because he seemed to deflate when I stared at him silently or kept my voice low. It took tremendous effort to deal with a person who was acting so irrationally. I'm fine now, and he didn't hurt me at all.

What I'm really proud of is that I stood up to him (despite dark parking lot, no phone, small car and big 32 year old man shouting that he hates me). Schizophrenics take great offence very easily but Michael often goes one step further and begins to bully back when he feels bullied. I'm the only person in the family who hadn't yet witnessed this behavior. He's pushed his own mother down the stairs and threatened my mum with a bread knife. The rest of the family won't go near him as a result. They exclude him from family gatherings if they can help it.

The only problem is, he might go and do the same thing at work today. Not very good for job prospects.