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

I am shocked, shocked I tell you, to discover a structural inequity fashioned into the very apparel with which our ladies must enclothe themselves.

But I am also quietly relieved, having been originally quite concerned that the repeal of stern but uncompromising legislation prohibiting the escape of lady legs into the public realm would lead to all manner of distraction for any poor fellow momentarily deflected from his daily course by some unexpected encounter with the female undercarriage.

From the Archives of the Bounders Club. Minutes and Proceedings of an extraordinary meeting to address the threat of lady pants.

Gentlemen, it has recently come to my attention that lady pants do not have pockets.

At the Instrument...

Apparently all my investments in ergonomically sexy chairs and exotic dark matter standy mats were bullshit.

Well, this sucks. I just bought an ergonomic keyboard and before it even arrives the whole field of ergonomics is revealed to be a skeevy wangboozle as crooked as mouthful of Dickensian urchin teeth.

I don’t much care that companies and governments might be wasting hundreds of millions of dollars a year on dodgy “ergonomic chairs, keyboards and consultants”, as reported by Fairfax Media yesterday.

But I care heaps that I might have just wasted $39 on a discount Microsoft ergonomic keyboard from the Beast of Bezos and it may not immediately cure my crippling minor discomfort from typing too much.

Who'd a thunk it? Me, at Blunty.

From Blunty today:

I have had a horrible realisation. I don’t need a new iPhone. But it’s worse than that. I don’t need a new phone of any sort. If I was rocking a Samsung, or Pixel or any smart phone released in the last four or five years, as long as I could replace the battery … I wouldn’t need to upgrade.

This is an awful, shameful thing to know about yourself, but I had been creeping up on awareness for a while now.

The eye-watering price tag for the latest fondle slabs from the blessed fruit company did surely hurry me along to revelation, but it was an instance of calculated generosity that pushed me over.

I replaced the battery on my old iPhone 6S Plus a week ago. With nearly 750 charging cycles on the clock it was, as the iMinion from the Genius Bar told me, “about to be consumed”. They sounded both horrified and impressed by that. Apparently not many batteries survive in the wild long enough to be “consumed”.

On the upside though, it frees up some money to buy a new iPad Pro. My curent iPad is nearly seven years old. I figure to retire it to the kitchen.