Velcro

..
traditional fasteners, but its use has spread into areas where buttons or studs
do a perfectly serviceable job, and have done throughout history. Apart from
anything else, I dislike the sound of velcro, and I imagine women who have hair
removed from their legs and other more personal bits with wax strips like it
even less, but for a commando in the field the consequences of such a distinctive
and penetrating sound as you try to access some ammo in your pocket could be
fatal.
The other bit of news was equally revealing about the short-comings of modern
society. Tests conducted by an Australian (?) psychologist Bradley Smith revealed
that dogs were quite unable to work out how to get to food behind a transparent
barrier that dingoes sorted out within ten seconds. The most pathetic part was
that some dogs ‘barked at their owners for help’, which puts me
in mind of some recent incidents with me and Google maps. I wrote a song back
in the ‘80s called The Final Solution, (which, perhaps naively
but certainly insensitively we recorded in West Germany a matter of only a few
kilometres from the site of the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp), and it concerned
the rise and rise of computers in society. One of the lines went, The more
computers get to know, The more that we forget, (it sounds less clumsy
sung), and it was saying something along the same lines as Bradley Smith’s
conclusions re’ dogs.
As with dogs, there’s a hint of anthropomorphism involved when we discuss
computers. We tend to create things in our own image – like God, for instance
– and, like God, stuck ranting vindictively in his King James’ time-warp,
whether they be Mac or Microsoft, computers have compelled us to adapt to their
finickity ways, and now to our astonishment generations Y and Z instinctively
cope from an incredibly early age with what appears to us Baby Boomers to be
bafflingly counter-intuitive logic.
There’s a smug consensus that these days people are smarter and better
educated than ever before. But does our kids’ feeling comfortable with
the technology necessarily make them smarter than us? I don’t believe
so. Not only that, but when you have search engines conducting searches for
information by popularity, the knowledge base must inevitably start to shrink
over time, so the system is fatally flawed. We allow books to disappear at our
peril. (See Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451)
If this sounds somehow familiar, it’s probably because as a nation we’ve
just had an incredibly efficient bloodless coup predicated purely on up-to-the-minute
polling. There’s symmetry between Obama and Rudd’s careers as far
as voter disappointment goes; the difference being that in the US they can’t
do anything about it until the next election, (which is where we start to muse
about the Westminster versus the American political system and the US gun laws
and I’m not going down that path).
I just wonder if having a direct conduit to public opinion is actually that
helpful to the process of governance in the long run, and that’s quite
apart from suspicions that the polling process is susceptible to manipulation.*

On the bite-sized shock, horror front, I notice that the Japanese made soy
milk product Bonsoy
is back on the shelves. I haven’t seen any publicity about it, but apparently
the product has been re-formulated and is now light on iodine. Massive amounts
of iodine were present in my system coinciding with a period when I was being
treated for the symptoms of hyperthyroidism, which may or may not have contributed
to a bout of arrhythmia. The only milk product I used for perhaps a decade
or more was Bonsoy. I still haven’t enquired of my thyroid specialist
whether my last blood test revealed that my iodine levels have subsided since
I stopped using Bonsoy, but it goes without saying that the whole episode
was quite worrying and expensive. My thyroid specialist also said there was
very little evidence to show that an over-abundance of iodine was necessarily
harmful in every case, but that might have something to do with the amount
of research done on the subject. In any event, there was sufficient alarm
about it in the first place to abruptly withdraw Bonsoy from distribution
at the start of the year – a little official clarification might be
in order.

*based on personal
experience of a phone poll – see Surveys