Hi folks.

Just a quick note to say thanks for your fine efforts and support through the renovations.  Last week was pretty active at the Pig’s.  We had two of our three busiest days – with a top of 468 views and five days in a row over three hundred views.  Comments have gone over 1,300 and Jason tells me that this is an excellent effort for a blog that isn’t flogging anything or running with red-hot items like Therese Rein’s crash diet (what’s with that piece of marketing ?)

I’d like to congratulate Glenda for racking up 82 views yesterday with a lot of interest from actual and potential customers in her Farrah Fawcett coiff piece.  Clearly big hair is more compelling than a Brazilian guide to shaping mono brows.

Let’s hear more from the ladies lounge as a balance to our escalating recent and classically violent series on death and destruction.  I’m up for review contributions in the new Category of Critics, Critics, Everyone’s a Critic and things have been too quiet in the Music space.  And while I have learnt everything I know about Cricket from Voice, I’m sure the Ashes will be a persistent topic in the Sports Bar.

I would be delighted if we could have a review of Tony Abbott’s new book – particularly before it’s released.  In fact a raft of reviews would be excellent.  Perhaps  our headline next week will be “Michael Jackson spotted on a Glenelg tram, reading a pre-release copy of Tony Abbott’s new book ‘I Did It John, Brendan and Malcolm’s Way'”.  I can feel some Warrigal digital mischief in the pipeline.

Will we see Kevin Rudd, Steve Smith and Simon Crean despatch Father O’Way to sort out Hu’s in a Shanghai clink ?  No, Who’s on first.  If you think this is fishy, so do I.  Stay tuna.

Of course you are more than welcome to get off your backsides and suggest / create the news of the week.  How could it be less accurate than the mainstream media ?  It’ll surely arrive sooner, be fresher and be far more readable.

Manne, can you please bring the car keys in to work ?  There’s a rumour that Bunter has been seen over in the Unleashed paddock !

Cheers to everyone.

Emm

Welcome to the New Ozopoly.

When Parker Brothers published Monopoly in 1935 – into the teeth of the last Great Depression, little were they to know that it would become the most played board game in history.  Wikipedia says that there are 485 million players worldwide.  Miserable bastards.

But it is, for me the most quintessentially American pursuit, is it not ?  Mercilessly smashing one’s opponents into economic submission, wrecking their lives with a Wall-Street epicentral GFM based on financial instruments so arcane as to be indistinguishable from fraud – driving American hegemony relentlessly forward and crushing third world economies faster than a sports shoe company flogging powdered milk products.

As a lapsed student of business, I have an instinctive fear and loathing of monopoly – as I rightly should – being a law-abiding citizen wedded to free markets and unfettered competition.  Never for a minute would I contemplate running a cardboard cartel for years – and if I ever made a slip up like that, I’d be the first one to cough up say $36 million or so in fines by way of self-flagellation.

Monopoly is a cruel cruel way for kids to be introduced to commerce.  As an Australian child, one was supposed to aspire to something rather unfamiliar in the fibro jungle of the western suburbs – namely a Hotel on Mayfair.  Very unfamiliar – especially in a trade union household – as was the central thrust of the game – far, far from a collectivist world view.  I didn’t appreciate that a Hotel on Mayfair was about expensive accommodation.  I thought hotels were where your dad went on Saturday to get pissed and into blues.

Meanwhile, back in the land of board games was all that fussing and fighting with the luck of the dice running against one and all and the tendency for

a) bankers to be unfamiliar with basic ethical principles (plus ca change, la meme chose),

b) amnesia not distributing cash accruals fairly,

c) tedious counting of money and

d) games that seemed to run for about the same length of time but with a lot more action than an innings by either Boycott or Lawrie.

I think it’s time to recognise the need for a rethink of Monopoly – as is apparently the view of Hasbro – the people who out-monopolised the Parker Brothers.  Wired (June 2009) noted that now it will be possible to do away     with all that messy cash and to use plastic credit cards.  Imagine if the reality stretched out like today – the banker would work up a sweat offering more and more credit to NINJAs (No income, No Job; No Assets) using the assets to secure sub-prime loans.  You could own all the Hotels on Collins Street – and still go out backwards in an unsecured derivatives swap organised out of Bent St.  I think we’re looking at an opportunity to involve shares and other investments as well as property.  “See your Storm unit price vaporise.  Get a margin call from Which Bank ?”

It would be time also to update some of the other game dynamics.  Dice loaded to roll snake eyes (aren’t they always ?).  Imagine chance cards that read “Lie about who was driving when your car went through radar trap and get out of gaol free.”  Or perhaps “Congratulations, you have successfully bonked a town planner.  Your Hotel redevelopment on prime beachfront crown land with heritage artefacts has been approved.  Collect $4 bazillion”.  You could look forward to turning over “Your cousin Bilal lands a job in the Department of Planning. Collect 100 chainsaws”.  Or “You win pre-selection for the seat of Wentworth.  Become Leader of the Opposition”.  Well, not all chance cards are good, are they ?

How about Community Chest cards like “The Public Health System collapses – pay the Health fund half of your money and the bank half of your house”, or “Bad luck, 40% of your compulsory super contributions have headed for a Lehmann account in Lichtenstein, lose many, many turns.”

And the actual real estate ?  Nobody does railways or utilities these days!  New OZopoly would start with every player owning a Telco, a coal-fired power station, a desal plant, old growth forests and a motorway or airport.  The first thing that players would do is sell them off to a Singapore mega investor or Chinese resources giant and invest in funds backed by Detroit real estate and General Motors shares.

The game of Monopoly has virtues not so readily available to the real world.  If things are not going your way, you can always wander off to the toilet and never return, or distract the imminent winner with an offer of going to the shop for a paddle pop.  Less well-tempered losers can always upend the board and refuse to ever play again.  Or until the next rainy day.

Tough that the new Ozopoly won’t be played on boards.  It might continue to be played in boardrooms, but the cut and thrust will be on screen.  Games will last a mere two or three minutes and we will routinely see Muscovite and Nigerian names popping up in Land Titles registers around our fair cyber nation.

But at its core, monopoly has the dead and rotting smell of greed.  No matter how hard you tilt the level playing field, sneaking cash under the table and dropping huge hints – or miscounting so you land on their one street, your littlest kid is always going to get dudded by his or her older siblings.  Fortune, as usual goes to the brave, huge and massively cashed-up.

Monopoly teaches them that life is capricious, unfair, full of dread and loathing and not worth the risk.  It removes all doubt that there might not be enough resources to go around and it totally violates the indigenous reality of Australian life – that the land owns us and not the reverse – and that our prosperity comes through collaboration and fair dealing with others.

Hey – wait a minute – look – the real estate in the local rag is going up !  Excuse me, I’m off to see a hooker.

The Newsflash from the BBC was most alarming:

4/07/09 BBC

Harry Potter star ‘had swine flu’

Harry Potter actor Rupert Grint is recovering from a “mild bout” of swine flu, his publicist has said.

(http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/entertainment/8134632.stm)

Well, we’re truly stuffed now! Obviously, we can’t even go to the movies any more and, unless we wear a burka, we certainly can’t go and see our most beloved film. Not now that its beloved star has succumbed to the ravages of this insidious malady! The Atomou household is most distressed at the moment and lives in tremulous trepidation. Lest we, too, get snatched by this ever-spreading contagion, we won’t even borrow videos until this cataclysm of sneezing and splattering ends and we won’t know when that happens until the white dove we’ve sent out of our ark returns alive, free of sneezes and with an olive branch in its beak.

We will play scrabble for a while longer.

But the world’s health authorities have it all wrong. The origin of the flu, I mean. And the appropriate medication. Sure, they’re right about it bouncing off pigs but they’re not right about Mexico. Nor the medication. Mexico wasn’t the birthplace of this pulmonary curse.

No, its birthplace was a place called Aeaea. Two letters put in sequence two and a half times. The first two vowels of the alphabet. If you say it out loud enough it’ll sound like you’re in unbearable pain; and that’s why it’s called that. Aeaea was an island. Might well still be an island but Roman writers reckoned it’s the modern Mount Circeo, or Cape Circaeum, in Italy, on the west coast. “Circeo,” they thought, “from Circe, the witch goddess who lived there.” They were probably right.

It was a sad island, inhabited by a sad goddess.

And the medication is a little root. Moly, the gods call it. It’s a black thing that has a milk-white flower emerge from bits of it.

Aeaea was the fifth place that Odysseus and his men visited on their way home from Troy. In the end, out of all of them only Odysseus will make it home. The rest will be either slaughtered, or eaten by Cyclops, or by beasts of the sea or drowned in the vast, salty, wine-red waters of Poseidon. That god, brother of Zeus, was furious with that lot of Greeks and with Odysseus in particular, who had, not only blinded one of Poseidon’s sons, his handsome giant, the one-eyed, the wheel-eyed, the Cyclops Polyphemus, but he had also boasted about it and taunted Polyphemus with unbearable insults. That was hubris! Unforgivable stuff for a mortal! So what if Polyphemus had killed and eaten six of Odysseus’ men? Divine creatures can do as they please.

So, Poseidon’s anger was implacable and it would take all of Athena’s charm and ten years of wandering by Odysseus to convince the other gods –while Poseidon was away feasting in Ethiopia- to grant Odysseus his home-return. Nothing is more valuable to a mortal than his home-return. The gaze at his homeland as he approaches it, after a long absence arouses the greatest delight in all mortals.

Athena loved the resourceful scallywag.

“Tell me, Muse, of that man of many resources, who wandered far and wide, after sacking the holy citadel of Troy. Many the men whose cities he saw, whose ways he learned. Many the sorrows he suffered at sea, while trying to bring himself and his friends back alive. Yet despite his wishes he failed to save them, because of their own un-wisdom, foolishly eating the cattle of Helios, the Sun, so the god denied them their return. Tell us of these things, beginning where you will, Goddess, Daughter of Zeus.”[1]

So begins Homer’s “Odyssey.” Odysseus’ men, though brave and brutal on the battle field with hearts full of raging blood, away from the blood-soaked ground were simply stupid. Heads full of straw. So they were deprived of their home-return.

Odysseus and his men had already endured much hardship and adventure before they got to Aeaea. They had just left the island of the god of the Winds. What a billowing stuff up! Before that, they were on the island of the Cyclopes. Six of the men were grabbed by the giant, hurled against the wall of his cave like unwanted pups, and eaten. Some thrown onto the fire of his hearth, others boiled and yet others eaten raw.

Before that they were on the land of the lotus eaters. Odysseus nearly lost all his men and himself there because that fruit made the eaters happy and care free. Useless, in other words. Unwilling to move from under the tree.

And before that, the first port of call after Troy, they had a war with the Cicones. There, his men showed just how stupid they were and how the ten-year war in Troy had completely replaced the compassion in their hearts, with bellicose brutality.

Odysseus and his ship entered the Aeaea’s harbour slowly, carefully, anxiously. Their past adventures had sharpened their wariness. Who lived there? What sort of mortals, what sort of gods? All they could see from their ship was a thick forest. Odysseus decided to send down Eurylochus with a scouting party. These men walked up and into the dense forest and, after a while, found in the centre of a clearing, an enormous palace made out of cut stone. Lions and wolves roamed about around it but they seemed to be tame. As they say in the classics, little did they know! The animals were, of course, drugged with a powerful and sinister potion concocted by the owner of the palace.

Eurylochus pricked his ears and peeled his eyes.

Still panting from the run back to the ship and trembling with fear, he tells Odysseus later.

“Someone inside, a woman or a goddess, was singing in a clear voice as she walked to and fro, in front of a huge tapestry. The men shouted and called to her, and she came to open the shining doors, and invited them to enter: and so they innocently followed her inside. But I, suspecting it was a trap, stayed behind. Then they all disappeared, and no one emerged again, though I sat a long time watching.”[2]

Odysseus flung his bow and a quiver full of arrows over one shoulder, strapped his great bronze, silver-embossed sword over the other and stepped ashore. He had almost reached the palace when he was stopped by Hermes, the messenger of the gods.

“Wretched man, where are you off to?” He asks Odysseus. “Wandering the hills of an unknown island all alone? Your friends are penned in Circe’s house, pigs in close-set sties… You must take a powerful herb with you, and go to Circe’s house, and it will ward off the day of evil. I will tell you all Circe’s fatal wiles…”

Then Hermes tore out a herb from the ground and handed it to Odysseus.

Odysseus obeyed the god. As well as the goddess with the lovely tresses, who was quite taken aback by this new phenomenon. She has never come across such obstinate recalcitrance. No other mortal had withstood the potency of her potion. But then she remembered. Hermes had warned her that Odysseus would arrive and that she had to look after him before she let him go. She calms down and tells him to, “Come, sheathe your sword, and let us two go to my bed, so we may learn to trust one another by twining in love.”

And so (cutting a long story short) after Circe gave back his men their human features, she and Odysseus went to her fine bed.

The Moly root worked.

Odysseus and his men were looked after for a whole year. The softest beds, the sweetest wine, the tastiest of morsels, the most beautiful minister’s of Aphrodite’s rites. When the year was up, when all the seasons rolled the one after the other, the men approached Odysseus and told him to remember Ithaca.

Odysseus remembers,

“My proud heart yielded to their words… but I went to Circe’s lovely bed, and clasped her knees, and the goddess listened as I spoke winged words: ‘Circe, keep the promise you gave and send me on my way, since my spirit is eager for home, and so too are my friends’, who weary me with their grief whenever you happen to be absent.”

To this the lovely goddess replied swiftly:

“Odysseus, man of many resources, scion of Zeus, son of Laertes, don’t stay here a moment longer against your will, but before you head for home you must make another journey.”

That journey, of course, was to Hades. Circe guided him through its portals and there Odysseus saw his mother, whom he tried to embrace three times but failed, where he saw Achilles who said he’d rather be a slave among the living than a king among the dead, where he saw the great general Agamemnon, who, the moment he arrived home, was slaughtered by his wife, Klytaimestra and her lover, Aigisthus and where he saw –the shock nearly killed him also- one of his mates, Elpenor, the youngest of them, who was alive only minutes earlier!

“…not one of the cleverest or bravest in battle. Heavy with wine he had climbed to the roof of Circe’s sacred house, seeking the cool night air, and had slept apart from his friends. Hearing the stir and noise of their departure, he leapt up suddenly, and forgetting the way down by the long ladder, he fell headlong from the roof. His neck was shattered where it joins the spine: his ghost descended, to the House of Hades.”

But that journey is another loooong story.

Not Mexico, then and not Tamiflu but Aeaea and Moly, taken with a shot of ouzo at the Pig’s Arms with all of the mortal mates one can get.

….. another fabulous piece from ……. Atomou

---

[1] Translation by Tony Kline http://tkline.pgcc.net/PITBR/Greek/Odyssey1.htm

[2] http://tkline.pgcc.net/PITBR/Greek/Odyssey10.htm

As a community service, the Pig’s Arms has opened a new clinic for the terminally boared.

Our latest bulletins:

1.  If you receive an Email warning you to avoid eating pork, ignore it.  It’s just spam.

2.  The Hell’s Angles were concerned about recent reports of sine flu – but they were just going off on a tangent.

3.  Merv rang up the swine flu line but all he got was crackling.

Things are coming along nicely with the much-needed Pig’s Arms renovations following the unfortunate accident with the propane torch when granny was doing the pink creme brulees.

Merv was saying that a mate whose name was Tripe or something like that was assisting the Council to issue a certificate of occupancy any day now.

Oh, CAREER !  My mistake.  Career counselling.  The latest boom industry.

The Concise Oxford leads off its definitions of career with “a swift course of progress”.

Hilarious, eh ?  No mention of a blind alley down which a person’s joy and aspirations go and become quietly strangled by an assorted cadre of water cooler sociopaths.

Career counselling.  You go there with no concept of a career and someone with a soft soothing voice encourages you to believe that there is value and virtue in a logical progression of employment beyond mere monetary gain.

How unfair, confusing and pointless is the career counselling fiasco we throw at kids in Year 10

Do you think that a child is born and when asked what they want to do when they grow up, they immediately discard the notion of being a fireman, nurse, teacher, train driver, doctor, plumber, sparky, chippie, vet or truck driver – and demand to work as a career  counsellor ?  No ?  Then clearly this career counselling dude has chosen some other role for which he or she was manifestly unsuited – and now will assist you to do likewise.

Do you remember your turn with Mr/Ms White – the failed commerce teacher who was given the role reserved for useless people (equivalent to “Special Projects”) ?

Did it go something like this ?

M White: “What sort of things do you like to do ?”  This is a trick question because (with the exception of Rex Hunt) there is no career involving lying around on the beach with a copy of Ralph or New Idea and drinking beer / gin and tonic (Mr White’s secret fast track to retirement).  For a while there it seemed like being a muse was the go.  Lots of long lunches and fine wine in the beer garden of the Pig’s Arms and being fairly available s*xually for artists, musos and artistes.

But a year ten kid is far more likely to nominate a job that an attractive person on TV does – say super model , news anchor woman, game show host or Formula 1 driver.  Thinking of a military career ?  Get in the rather longish queue for “RAAF fighter pilot”.

“Sports star” is the ephemeral career option of choice for the puny, poorly sighted or generally bewildered.  And every ghoulish year ten kid has had a mental rifle through images of themselves in lab coats and goth gear as a crime scene investigator.

Then you complete a battery of tests where they ask 13 questions in 27 different ways to cross validate each other and quantify the unquantifiable.  “Do you love to add up and check columns of figures ?”  “Would you find checking a column of figures interesting ?”, “Don’t you hate calculation errors ?”.  These are interspersed with questions about how much you despise your parents and whether you are energised by the great outdoors, maybe a circuit diagram or Proust. “And how exciting are balance sheets, eh ?”

Perhaps the greatest irony is that a suspiciously large number of Mr White’s counselees become accountants – or perhaps something slightly less exciting – like commerce teachers.

Well, as it turns out the top three careers perennially in demand (leaving out prostitution, politics and policing) are actuaries, tax lawyers and …….. accountants.  In rare instances – say for example during a mining boom, there will be a run on geology faculties and mining engineering schools.  Rarely heard is “I have my heart set on being a scholar of ancient Greek, Latin and Sumerian”.  And more’s the pity, but how could this possibly complete with preparing a profit and loss statement

A couple of weeks pass as you rocket towards the now barely noticeable school certificate or basic competency document.  Meaning you showed up occasionally and troubled teachers not so much.  Then comes the follow-up meeting where the awful truth of your future career will be set in stone.

You secretly want to be a doctor.  You mum and dad are both medicos.  Your two elder siblings are both at medical school. Your grandfather was a doctor before the unfortunate Chelmsford affair – the one you have been instructed to refrain from mentioning.

Mr White opens the envelope as if he was about to announce the winner of “Best Director” and you notice a faint smile before he reveals that the Boggs and Meers test – which has a very high reputation for accuracy – has narrowed your best choices down to  (drun roll)  ……“chef, waiter, taxidermist, radio astronomer and deep sea diver”.

He seems to be completely comfortable with the randomness of this eclectic mix and the lack of apparent unifying theme.

And then, to cap it off, he puts down the test results, pats you reassuringly on the shoulder and says something wonderfully supportive (and totally unhelpful) like “Whatever you want to do,  I am certain that if you apply yourself, you have the ability to achieve great things”.

And with that you head off to the bus stop.  On the bus, a scout for “Home and Away” notices your trademark freckles and recruits you for a screen test.  That leads to a walk-on part, which in turn leads you to a regular gig and a salary roughly twice that of your parents – even before you land the huge pet food commercial deal and become the face of Pal.

Meanwhile, back in the careers room, a despairing Mr White scans the newspaper for positions vacant, takes himself off to TAFE and eventually lands himself a job as a chef in a resort in Byron Bay.  And when you come off the shoot, the waiter (do you remember Mr Black – your former HSIE and visual arts teacher ?) serves you their trademark entrée – gamberi Senor Blanco.