I'm not allowed to write about politics for Ninefax anymore, but occasionally I sneak one through.

Dear Santa,

I know this is a bit late, Big Fella, and that you’ve been busy with the toy factory that fell into the mile-deep crevice when the polar ice sheet melted underneath it, but I’m really hoping you’ll bring some of that jingle-bell magic to the job this year, because we need it.

Our exhausted heroes could use a little Christmas cheer.
Our exhausted heroes could use a little Christmas cheer.Brett Hemmings/Getty
I have a list of things we need you to pack into the sleigh, and sorry, but it is a long list. Before you go getting your own list out and adding me to the naughty column for being so greedy, I should point out that none of this is for me. Or not directly.

First up we need about 20,000 bright-orange coveralls. It’s for some friends. They’ve been wearing theirs for more than a month now because they only had one set to begin with, and, while you’ve been rescuing elves and reindeer from that disintegrating glacier, they’ve been trying to save the world...

At Blunty.

I love the $170 000 banana art story much I could just eat it.

At Blunty...

I am in awe of Italian artist Maurizio Cattelan, who convinced three rich idiots in three separate transactions to cough up between 175,000 and 220,000 dollary-doos for a duct-taped banana on a wall over the weekend.

But I am truly, madly and deeply impressed by hungry performance artist Dave Datuna, who ate the half-million-dollar installation without warning, permission or a freshly cooked waffle swimming in chocolate sauce.

It's book launch time, it must be thinky column time too.

At the Instrument.

Cod, Mark Kurlansky’s enjoyable history of the big mouthed Atlantic all rounder, is just as much a history of human politics, economics and warfare, ranging from the murderous adventures of maximum Viking Eirik the Red to the three strange and mostly bloodless "Cod Wars" between Iceland and Great Britain in the decades after the Second World War.

A thousand years of human folly and conflict, with the cod swimming through it all; European colonisation, the American War of Independence, the rise of the slave trade.

The seemingly porous state of Australia’s defences against cyberattack has been exposed by serious intrusions or attempted intrusions.
The seemingly porous state of Australia’s defences against cyberattack has been exposed by serious intrusions or attempted intrusions.
In living memory, Germany lost two wars in part because of that fish. While first the Kaiser and then the Führer’s Volk suffered privation and malnutrition in the First and Second World Wars, their English enemies harvested the North Sea for megatons of protein to feed millions of soldiers and factory workers.

Crediting an Allied victory to plentiful supplies of fish and chips might seem an amusingly hot and salty take on such a grim topic, but it does go to a hard truth in the history of human conflict. Starving your enemy can be just as effective as bombing, shooting or stabbing them.

In any future global conflict involving the post-industrial West, siege and starvation, the most medieval of tactics, are likely to be among the first deployed.

And the more advanced the belligerent, the more vulnerable they are to digital disruption of real-world supply chains...

One wrinkle in my Melbounre trip. I forgot my airods. I had to walk around withot playlists or podcasts. Like an animal.

I left my AirPods behind. Two days of book signings in Melbourne and nothing but my own thoughts as I walked from one store to the next. It was Hell, until it wasn't.

We're not often left to our own thoughts these days. Not randomly. We might occasionally have reason to consider them. Should I change jobs? Do I swipe right? Are my franking credits worth dooming generations unborn to a wretched demise on a dying planet of rising, acidic oceans and scorched, barren earth? (Spoiler, not just yes, but HELL YES!)

At Blunty.

At the Instrument today:

Our mass attention deficit disorder has been accelerating for decades. Digital technology merely super-charged the process.

You can probably think of older analog technologies that nudged us out of our collective deep thought long before the iPhone moved the seat of human agency from mind and soul to fingertip. That’s right. I’m looking at you, TV remote.

I have no data, no research, not even a dodgy web link, but I can’t help feel everything went sideways for the human race when we could flick between four or five channels without even burning four or five calories to haul ourselves up out of the couch and all the way across the room to turn a dial.

Dials are what we had instead of Siri and Alexa, kids. And they worked every goddamn time. You even got a little cardio bump from using them because in the olden days they were always on the far side of the room.

But even as our technology accelerated, so did our imaginations. If you bother to sit through a much-loved TV show of your childhood — OK, my childhood — let's say Thunderbirds, you’ll be horrified at just how slowly it moves.

Full text is here.

I used to keep a bucket by the front door. No. Not that sort of bucket, you moron. That bucket we kept on the coffee table in the lounge room of the share house, every share house, I Iived in. No, this other bucket came later, after marriage and children and the sudden but related decline in my readily available funds.
This bucket was my savings plan.
Every time I’d come home with coins in my pocket I’d toss them in there. It was a small, red plastic pail of the sort you’d take to the beach to make a sandcastle with children. If I did nothing to curate the stream of coinage, the bucket would usually top out at somewhere around seven or eight hundred dollars. But if I was smart and culled the fifty cent pieces, the final value could get up near twelve or even thirteen hundred bucks. Those old fifties seemed to offer the least value for volume.
I’d fill that bucket on average every nine months. It was a great way to pay for Christmas.
But I have not filled my bucket in many years. This is not a metaphor.
I just don’t get that many coins anymore...

At Blunty