blog title

The Power of Music

I’ve noticed something recently that’s brought me a great deal of happiness. Music in headphones played (quite loudly in my case) erases my headaches. Like many of us all (or even all) I get headaches from time to time – usually because I’m tired or stressed.

Recently I’ve been experimenting with not taking any medication for it but simply going for a long walk in the park with the headset on. Nearly every time (I think it’s every, but there’s bound to be some exceptions) I’ve noticed the following:

. After a while the headache goes as I settle in to listening to the music.
. I feel refreshed even if very tired and able to continue on after
The refreshing effect and lack of pain stays with me for some time after
The headache does not recur unless I continued to do stressful activities or get stuck in front of a PC etc., freezing up my joints and so on.

It’s more consistently effective than any of the over the counter pills I usually take – paracetamol or ibuprofen, (which never works for me anyway) or even aspirin.

The most surprising thing to me is that the headache goes completely and doesn’t recur and the effects last for the balance of the day. It seems to erase the initial headache and any ones that occur after seem to be new headaches, maybe brought on by the same factors or new ones.

Once I realised this I went and did my 10 minute interwebs look and of course this same effect has been noted for many years now, although as always it seems to be treated with a great deal of scepticism, including the usual new agey fads/scams such as this.

There was a serious study done in 2001 in Germany with participants groups able to control their chronic headaches, and others done more recently too. A good summary is at http://www.emedexpert.com/tips/music.shtml which includes some of the other studies as refs.

The interesting thing is that no one knows exactly why – it seems to boil down to either /or a combination of music releasing pleasure endorphins overriding the pain, relaxes our autonomic systems, or some mind over matter effect (which they don’t give much credence too).

If I was to venture a hypothesis of my own it would be this (pauses to clear throat): it is primarily driven by a distracting as it were of our brain functions, with the pleasure induced from the music moving our conscious awareness of the pain into the background, and the brain working to erase that feeling as it replaces it in our short term memory with the feelings of pleasure generated by the music. I believe the mild exercise also assists by regulating blood flow and breathing, oxygenating the brain, making the ”brainwipe” of the pain more permanent and effective. That effect then lasts until it is overwritten later on by other factors. I think that having the tempo/patterns in the music act in the calming effect too and the walking with music combine to create a near meditative effect.

From what I’ve read this is pretty much as plausible as anything else yet done in this field. It seems to be treated with similar derision to that meted out to most alterative therapies (much of which I share) by the greater medical community except as a mild assistance to traditional techniques. I expect that it can be taken further, but let’s start with what I can see it does now. Many insist that only slow tempo or classical music is effective too.

Before I do that it’s worth noting that many blog responders on this so far have said “no way, it doesn’t work for me”. That may well be true however I think it is worth a try for anyone with a headache – there are no side effects other than the continuation of the headache for longer that it may otherwise have gone. Just make sure that all the factors are present, maybe with your own variations for comfort.

The keys to it are I believe several:

The music must be played on headphones or headsets with as much external noise as you can blocked. I use in ear headsets as they are light weight and give good sound, while blocking most noise. It’s like directly injecting music into your brain.

You must pick music that you really like. Critical! The music must be well known to you so that you can let it seep into your brain without too much intense effort to “listen”. It’s long been my view that the music you listen to regularly creates well-worn paths into your brain that more quickly simulate the pleasure response.
It must be played loudly enough to be both comfortable and a little “overwhelming” so that your surrounds are relegated to the background if at all.

You must walk, all the time and not too briskly – I prefer outside in a park but I don’t think this really matters too much. It’s about getting a rhythm going and gently pushing blood round your system. No running or heavy exertion I believe that will just pound the headache in and disallow the healing.
My own routine is a walk of around 5 kms (say 30-40 minutes) but I have found it works in as few as 15 minutes.

For me at least this works. And not just for headaches… tiredness recedes too and my general mood lifts, even if I’ve been very down.

This isn’t ground-breaking but it’s worth building into your routine. There are no side effects except maybe a blister or two if you walk too far, but I can’t think of much else. The only down side is that you need a bit of time but that is in itself a great way of forcing yourself to do what is effectively a type of meditation.

Happy trails.

28 February 2015
***Update to the below *** A long break, however I note that there are now formal moves afoot in the USA to have cable broadband and internet access services treated as utilities, with all the rights and responsibilities which that entails. The slow retreat of ideology over the greater good showing some green shoots.
July 29 2014

The God of Competition

It never ceases to amaze me how economically illiterate much of our polity is. There is something akin to a cargo cult mentality when it comes to competition in all its guises. Competition will seemingly solve any regulatory problem, and any failure to do so requires more competition. Simple?

I'd argue that market failure is nearly always the result of unfettered competition, and that secondly some services are not by their very nature open to effective competition.

Let's look for example at the deregulation of mobile phone communications in the early 90s. Yes TelecomAus as it was then was a bloated beast that was bureaucratically inept in many ways. The solution that was preferred was to force all new entrants to duplicate infrastructure. The theory was that you get competition on innovative services and features. In practice it didn't work that way. What we have ended up with is Telstra, a smaller copy of Telstra called Optus and a changing variety of outliers centred around the Vodafone built network that never seem to get really their act together. If you live in the far flung bush, then it's a monopoly service in any case.

It's overreaction to this fubar that gave us the NBN Mark1 (plus a great deal of annoyance at Telstras intransigence). Monopoly behaviour is not the failure of competition, in Australia in particular with our large reach and limited market size, it is the natural destination of competition - monopoly and oligopoly masquerading as competition.

Competition gave us the enormous fuck up that is called pay TV. This is a disgrace at every level, from the initial rollouts that gave many streets two suppliers while everyone else languished to the distorted business models that make it the most profitable to delay content launches, simultaneously fuelling the demand for off net circumvention. Ironically this simply gives the provider more grist for their woe is me mill, complaining about their monopoly practices impinging on their ability to reap monopoly returns. Curricular? Maybe but there is little in our regulatory systems that restrains behaviour that us technically competitive but actually destructive to our national economy on the whole.

Competition in electricity markets is an across the board failure. It is part of the reason for immense opposition to carbon pricing, as those with most to lose operate brown and black goal generators and have money to spend on lobbying. Competition gives us gold plated assets while ignoring innovation in generation and delivery - where is our large scale solar and wind business? In Germany ( with much less solar potential than us) alternative base load generation is already or nearly cheaper than coal or nuclear. WTF? We have frittered away the profits of privatisation and discouraged what competition supposedly encourages.

Want more? Labour markets. The notion of scarcity and bargaining power driving labour market equilibrium have largely been disproved. To me it looks like we used to have it largely right in the days of the accord and even the wage case approach of the 50s on. Even in the USA, cities are realising that raising the minimum wage improves their economies as increased wealth cycles through the system.

Competition failure is really though a big part of its brother god - that of Greed. More on that next time.

To muse slightly at the tail, it seems to me that one of the good outcomes of having ideologues running the country will be their ultimate failure, and a recognition that government "interference" in the competitive landscape improves the operation and well being of our economy and all within it.

July 3rd 2014

Lifters and Leaners? FFS!

Rarely do we get a chance to witness the sort of hyperbole that has been pushed about the political environment as recently...and by our incumbent government as well. The categorisation of our whole society into lifters and leaners from the Treasurer beggars belief.

It takes the whole fantasy economics project to its ultimate, sickly conclusion: a person's worth is only the dollars he contributes to our economy. All else is irrelevant.

As a mean scheme to draw debate away from the most loathed budget in history it has failed spectacularly. As a way of privileging the already privileged it has only worked to awaken the sort of active opposition from out and about that the Greens and others have dreamt about for years. In one swoop Hockey has fired the crucial shot in a new class war, one that many of us thought had been whittled away by successively rightist ALP governments driven by econometrics, power and polling.

The best thing about this is several fold: it has shone a unique light into the mind of the person in charge of our economy; it has reawakened political debate and discourse in the wider community; it has drawn attention to the manifest ideology of the government and its reliance on an IPA style (if not directed) agenda.

And to think I thought it would be Tony who'd crack first! He has amazingly so far managed to keep the crazy locked away in his ultra disciplined don't think just trot out rubbish style. Honestly, if we discovered that he'd been replaced by a robot in late 2011 or so I wouldn't be surprised. Thanks must go to Peta Credlin for riding shotgun on this. As it is Mr Abbott barely passes the Turing test. A discussion with him looks increasingly like an argument with an answering machine preprogrammed to direct your call to the list of LNP talking points but never to a real person.

Yet it's the now aptly nicknamed Sloppy Joe that has somehow managed to snap the lock on the straightjacket and in a fit of anger lash back at those impertinent souls who happened to believe in an Australia where the worth of a person was more than mere dollars.

We must not fall into the ALP trap of debating on this turf. This is insulting, demeaning and hypocritical at every level. Hockey, Pyne, Abbott et al all got their education at public expense. Many of these guys have rarely worked outside of politics. It is hypocrisy in the extreme that they can turn around and throw such pejoratives back at others after the levels of community support they have all received. Abbott took at least his first degree as a foreigner. I think we should send him a bill plus interest for what his free degree cost the Australian people.

Frankly I'm so gobsmacked I can't even continue to rant about this. It hurts my brain and contributes to my already high blood pressure. Maybe I should send them the bill for treatment. They only seem to understand money. All I can do is reiterate the blog from a few weeks ago. I'm somewhat ashamed to be part of the most spoilt, pandered to, greedy generation of all - the boomers - and embarrassed to see what a venal bunch we have become. I now hope for a double dissolution - I cannot see any other solution.

Thank you for tuning in. Rant over. Normal transmission may resume soon.

June 18 2014
On the Foxtel Dinosaur (again)
Couldn't say it better than Bernard: http://www.crikey.com.au/2014/06/18/the-copyright-industry-sends-forth-a-skeleton-army-to-fight-piracy/
If Foxtel provided a sensible option that allowed reasonably priced single view I would buy that way. Forcing copyright detection to my ISP won't make me buy Foxtel, I'll just wait or not watch it at all. I've had PayTV several times and every time have thrown it away in disgust. It's an old product that doesn't cater to my needs.
George and co give up. You won't win this one. Buying newscorpse support this way won't win you a second election.

Why are We so Obtuse?

This isn't so much a reasoned argument as an impassioned plea to understand. It started in my mind as a discussion on the things I should do as opposed to must do.

Why do we fail to do what we know is right, and good for us, if not in general, both in our daily lives and in our wider community? Let's just play this through on a practical life series of examples. Ethics and religion demand their own discussions and I'm in no position to start on these more generally until I can address the personal.

Let's start close to home: I know I must do more to attain and retain a better level of fitness in my life. I know I must cut down on sugar. I half arse address these by having a pinch only of sugar in my tea but then eat a chocolate bar with abandon most days. I walk at a strapping pace a lot, but frankly I could do some real exercise, weights, aerobics you name it, to get up to the next level and just maybe avoid those heart issues that I know run in my family.

Or a story I read recently while browsing the interwebs. This was by a researcher who studied the dissipation of fine particulate pollution and yet failed to reroute his routine walk to school away from busy roads teeming with it... Until his subsequent heart attack.... when he was one of the few people in the world that knew of the link between the two.

We all do it. Until faced with the blatant unarguable smash in the face consequences we all know better than the proven knowledge which we know is right.

Climate change is the outstanding current example. Climate change denialists, masquerading as sceptics (how the ancient philosophers would be riled at this taking of their name!) seek to legitimise their blind refusal to accept the facts by arguing as if it is a school debate. Climate change is not a matter of opinion - it's a fact. Arguing against this is like arguing against inertia - all that fine rhetoric won't do you any good when your body is being thrown through the windshield in an accident.

But in fairness to the extremist deniers, we are mostly guilty of the same ostrich like behaviour. How many of us really practice climate change minimisation? Sure we recycle, we don't take the car as often as we could, occasionally we ride or jump a tram, and just maybe we installed solar power or hot water when it was cheap. But have we thought through how the balance of our behaviour could be modified?

I have to be the first to say that I've done very little. I want the polity to act on my behalf and voted for that. Now that the votes have been overturned I have to reassess, to examine myself and see where I can make my own difference. What's stopping me?

Do I need a flooded chunk of the bayside suburbs to impress this on me? Or will general sanity prevail and we all recognise a need to change?

I dunno, but in the meantime I will at least make a start. We are all delightfully imperfect, and it's only through relishing this that I can hope to progress.

3D Printers - WTF?

I’m going to sound like a luddite here, but what’s the big buzz about 3G printers?

As far as I can tell they’re relatively useful tools for prototyping stuff, for making little bits of plastic and metal that can be joined to other bits to actually make things. They’re great for modelling (here’s a great 3D model of San Fran done to highlight development) – and they must make a sculptor’s life a breeze…. BUT

I don’t get how they are gonna change life as we know it?

What I don’t really like about them:

· They don’t make complex objects – you can’t build a complete engine in one go
· They are slow.
· They waste raw material – all that unused stuff has to either be turfed, or recycled.
· I bet they aren’t especially efficient either (happy to be shown this is wrong but..)
· They are not yet at least really set up for mass production (see above).
· They don’t make me tea and toast for breakfast (I could be forgiven for thinking that they should given all the stoopid hype about them).

It seems to me that they are the germ of an idea of a something. Maybe the sci-fi crew (of which I’m often an enthusiastic supporter) have been reading far too many novels set in dimensions where they have universal replicators.

3D printers are NOT that!

No matter how many wish fulfilment fantasies we have they don’t really contribute much

Can someone tell me why we should be lauding the (second) coming of these things? I say they are a fad that will eventually morph with technology into more but right now they’re close to being but a toy, a curio, a useful tool for a few sectors and no more.

Please convince me otherwise.

Boomers – the me generation

I’ve been trying really hard to stay out of politics on this page – but it’s hurting my brain. The release of the Budget last week has done my head in. All I will say is that I’ve been confidently predicting since last year that eventually Mr Abbott’s head will explode from the sheer volume of garbage inside it and the crazy will burst out. In the meantime he has let (nay encouraged, demanded) that the ideologues take over the citadel and the budget is really but the latest in a line of these very ideologically based activities of the government.

So rather than decry the budget explicitly I’d like to use it as an example of the sorts of hypocrisy in which my generation (yes I’m a boomer, born into the last stage) currently engages, and which by implication really does involve all of us from both sides of politics.

As a generation we were exceptionally lucky – I paid virtually nothing for my education (two undergraduate degrees completed over an extended period) and during that time access to different sorts of study assistance (NEATS, AUSTUDY etc.), the good ole dole was relatively easily available and the interrogations that seem to accompany these benefits were largely absent.

Yes by definition we were an elite group as only 20% or so of our age attended higher education, but we expected it as our right and demanded access to facilities, new campuses and a level of debate and activity around university life that has largely disappeared under the pressure of modern living.

Virtually everyone in politics today would have had some or complete benefit from these sorts of policies in their youth.

The irony of this year’s budget is that it so aggressively attacks the young, working inevitably towards the completion of a project to deny our children and grandchildren the benefits that we experienced, fencing them in ever more and more in order that they will have to work to pay for our retirements in ways that we never did (the first boomers have really enjoyed the windfalls of compulsory superannuation with generous pension and tax concession – everyone from now on will have it harder and harder).

Under this project we have entrenched home ownership into our age group: we bought property at the lowest relative prices in generations, then awarded ourselves generous tax concessions as landlords to really drive it home to younger people that they could not get into the market at all. We snapped up prime inner city real estate when it was incredibly undervalued as a result of post war suburban booms and watched it skyrocket in price, then ploughed that into investments everywhere to lock up the market in our group’s hands.

We have made higher education more and more expensive to obtain, gone are the carefree days of a university education being about life as much as learning, and put more and more pressure on our kids to study study study.

Younger people who want to work in arts get almost no support and can’t even fall back on the dole. We are about to start programs to ensure that older people get incentives for staying on in the workforce, by default discriminating against the young (yes I know that there has been discrimination against older workers too, but in the context of an overall project it is just another string), including making it harder to get apprenticeships (and let’s face it apprenticeships were where many of us got our starts – lineys at Telstra, chippies at the builders and so on). We have made it harder and more complex to even get any job, requiring more and more qualifications than ever faced us – a nurse has to do a degree now, not just a few years of slave labour, and we are asking our kids to do extended unpaid internships, something that certainly wasn’t around that I can ever recall.

We can’t even be bothered to do our part to help face the “moral challenge of our lifetime” – climate change - we all want to stick our heads in the sand and believe the denialists – it will all be ok, yes it’s just a bunch of mad scientists and science is really black magic isn’t it….

In short the generation that proudly sang “hope I die before I get old” must have been prescient - we must have known how selfish we would be and how grasping, greedy and rapacious we are. Those of us that marched against wars and bombs, and fought for gender equality and a myriad other causes have all well, sold out, in favour of a comfortable retirement. We have let the ideological warriors of the right forge ahead because they whisper in our ears (like some Tolkienesque grey adviser) how they will make it better for us all the time. They blatantly outright lie, and lie again and we believe them because we are small and selfish and greedy and want to believe them and don’t want to do the hard work to make it all right. Do we?

We could fix much of the budget so called crisis over the course of several cycles by:

- - Staging in the removal of negative gearing on rental properties. Extra tax will be collected and house prices will stabilise and fall allowing more people into the market.

- - Removing much of the superannuation tax concessions. This alone can add billions as it is phased in.

- - Restore the carbon pricing mechanisms- they weren’t perfect but they do add billions to revenue and encourage at least some action on carbon abatement.

These three big ticket items would go a long way to restoring a long term budget balance – this obsession with balancing the budget but at the cost of the young the poor and the helpless is surely a wakeup call to the rest of us – is this really the Australia we were born into? Is this is the Austramerica that we want to become? But no government will do it because the polls tell them that we will vote them out if they tell the truth and campaign on items that will hurt the pockets of boomers.

Is this how the generation of Dylan and Lennon and Woodstock really want to be remembered – as the most selfish and uncaring of all?

The PayTV Dinosaur

19th April 2014

I read with interest the recent article from the anonymous Game of Thrones downloader. What a mess we have got ourselves tied up in... ( as an aside what self absorbed times we live in when one of our great issues is whether we pay for other people's ideas or not - it's not life or death now is it?).

There was a lot of vitriol and self justifying on both sides. No one walks way covered in glory that's for sure. On one hand I can certainly sympathise with the downloader - he has found a way of paying something for the product that avoids having to buy other unwanted bundled items and returns some money to the rights holders. I can also see the view of others who claim to bit torrent it now and buy the DVD later, although that's on a lot shakier ground.

The real problem here is that we have allowed and encouraged monopoly practices to flourish in many parts of our economy and that leads to inefficiency and basic ripping off. It's no wonder when faced with what is easily seen as unfair practices, the response is to seek to work around the problem, or frankly outright steal it.

Filmed entertainment still seems to be struggling with the same fights as music and books, fights that got mainly resolved some time ago. Books are easily available from several sources and we don't see a lot of angst about kindle/nook/iBook etc nor a wholesale ripping off process. Music too is not only available from a number of online stores and there are several free and subscription radio stations that pay to play music. Despite some early pains these will get resolved and music and books are surviving. I also note that last year was the first for a while in which cd sales actually rose.

Filmed entertainment by its nature is more capital intensive than either books or music so it will take time, but Hollywood's obsession with finding and prosecuting so called criminals has to stop in order to move ahead. Movies themselves have moved to a less risky model for the higher cost spectaculars and yet people like Wes Andersen and Woody Allen still manage to make smaller movies that find their audience.

It's time for the distributors to find more legal ways to get their product to market. In the end they lose most from piracy. The Foxtels of this world won't gain any more from tightening down on piracy because people simply won't subscribe until they see it as valuable. It's the makers and distributors that miss out. It's time to end the silly practices of sole distribution rights and staggered sales. Outlets like Quickflix and other delivery mechanisms are the way of the future.

If they don't see this and soon they run the risk of being more examples of Kodak style blindness. Netflix is already producing its own shows. Won't take much for HBO to go the same way in terms of delivery. Wait till they start streaming services in a big way...

PayTV has to open up more flexible options if they want to stay relevant. They're not growing as it is and they don't have right to monopolise output. We don't owe them anything - free to air at least gives us the option of watching or not and voting with our thumbs on every show. PayTV doesn't and that makes them greedy and lazy.

One thing I can confidently predict: until PayTV sees the light on this basic premise they will become less and less relevant to our culture and will fade away in time. Embrace the future or become fossils.

**** UPDATE **** 27th April - Bizarrely enough I see that Foxtel have just promoted a product called "Presto" which gives you no lock in access to all their movie channels for $19.99 per month on streaming only, or you can log in and buy one off movies for around $6 or so for new releases. Maybe, just maybe, they can feel the change a-coming. GoT ain't on it but.....

Tuesday April 1st..
Well it has been a month but here I am again:

Making your bones

An acquaintance remarked the other day at a seminar on insight that he "just wanted to find a shortcut, to get there quickly". This seemed to me an appropriate comment on the world today. It's also one of the complaints we all make about gen y staff too - they don't want to wait and go through the process, whatever it is, they just want to arrive at the pot of gold.

Other examples abound. The internet helps us fool ourselves that we can be instant experts on just about anything. "Ask Siri" was what another friend said was his strategy for doing household minor repairs. Another uses Google and YouTube relentlessly to give the appearance of expertise when contracting to do work he has never trained for. Yes I know it's all fake it till you make it, but in reality we're at major risk of just fakin' it. We have lost the appreciation of craftsmanship and skill built over years of experience.

We all know about unconscious and conscious competence etc, but the piece that never really gets stressed (outside of elitism) is practice, drilling, experience, call it what you will.

There is no shortcut to learning the violin or the piano. Your brain has to master the unconscious pathways to allow you to reel off that piece by Beethoven, while reading the music and hitting the keys in a musical, nuanced, feeling manner.

It's the same with any other physical or mental skill. If you don't train for it then you never really get it. I'm no great carpenter, but I know that I've done enough time on the tools to be able to pick it up again after a short period of time. It's the difference between struggling with a hand plane on a piece of wood, and gliding the tool smoothly over the surface, scraping gently away yellow curl after curl.

It applies to our day jobs too. After a few years most of us can do them with our eyes shut. We make quick decisions that are generally correct, guided by the accumulated experience that spits out instantly when confronted with a dilemna. It's a combination of Malcolm Gladwell’s observations on the power of practice (10,000+ hours = true expertise) and the split second summations he summarised in "Blink".

But you can't get there without it. Sure our body of technology fuelled knowledge available in a second assists, but you've still got to do the hard yards etc. (funny isn't it how all the sports cliches come out in this setting - it's where the notion of practice and rehearsal most come into our consciousness).

Without wanting to sound like a cranky old dude yet again, there isn't really any shortcut. You still have to make your bones.

Louisiana Driving Day

Down at Laura plantation it's the sounds that overwhelm most. Birds twittering away constantly, frogs and other river creatures croaking along the Mississippi across the road and over the levee, the trains that never end tooting and hollering across the flatlands and swamps.

The little elements that stand out, the house that looks like an Aussie homestead, but with no hallway. Business was conducted in the bedroom, and the house faced the river so that it could suck in the cool air and push it through the house (Venturi effect). The amusement in our guide's voice when she described how the Yankees got it all wrong with their sweaty Tara style mansions, facing the sun, no air flow no affinity with the dense humid countryside. The Creoles saw themselves as a different people, not really part of the USA, until the state govt banned the teaching of French in 1920.

Louisiana still isn't really a full part of the USA. It's predominantly French catholic, uninhibited, free with affection and living for parties. Mardi gras is just one tiny piece of this, but it's the melting pot that allowed and enabled so many different musical genres to flourish in such a small area. Creole zydeco farm music, New Orleans jazz, blues and soul rock all evolved in separate groups and until the latter part of last century probably didn't have much crossover in their audiences. Food is different there too, spicy and fried, seafood based food that thumbs it's nose at the meaty Texan diet.

Too bad though that the sugar plantations are mainly gone now, despite it being the home of a vicious brand of slavery that largely stayed intact for years after the civil war, as they decline also in Queensland. It seems like some sort of deliberate policy to site a lot of dirtyish industry along the Mississippi - chemical plants, steel mills, refineries and the like all just at the rivers edge and often sticking out from the rural landscape incongruously like a race of aliens came down and sprinkled them around haphazardly. God knows what effect this has had on the river and the hundreds of miles of bayou swampland surrounding them.

Lunch at Aunt Ellie's in Gramercy, home of a huge rusty factory that extends for at least a mile of red metal pipes, gantries and fines along the river. Fried crawfish tails, had to ask what a hush puppie is... I've always thought they were shoes......funny I never realised crawfish were so small! I thought they were like yabbies, but they're like tiny shrimps. Every damn thing's fried: crawfish, catfish, chicken all slavered in flour and spices.

Rail, rail, rail, it's obvious to us from here that the great rail barons made modern America. They snake all over the country pulling miles long centipedes of bulk containers, cattle trucks and passengers. With our few coastal lines its alien to our way of thinking where rail is a spindly network of suburban lines with a small interstate network overlaid. The US has doubtless hundreds of thousands of wagons spread everywhere drawing the disparate parts of the country together into a seething commercial beast. It is part if the incredible density of population. Despite miles of space and large lots, wide roads, freeways that carve out big chunks of the country, you're rarely far from a sizeable town. These too spread willy nilly, not like our compressed urbanity...there can be swathes of forest or swamp right in close the city areas yet the burbs can grow like a fungus for miles out, creating huge urban areas that are split historically into smaller pieces.

The Mississippi and Atchafalaya river systems dominate south Western Louisiana creating the vast fens and bayou systems teeming with life of all kinds. The breadth of the Mississippi alone is awe inspiring, large ships plying freight up and down much of its length. We simply have no parallel and it underscores the dryness of our country.

Someone told me early on that there are only about 5 cities in the USA different to the norm: New York, San Francisco, Boston, San Antonio and New Orleans and even the newer parts of these are all depressingly similar. Louisiana still feels almost like another country. ...

On Beards and Razors...

I can’t bring myself to cry for Gillette et al’s sales dropping off due to the global upsurge in men growing facial hair. Indeed I have to confess I’m pretty happy about it in some ways. For too long have these guys taken us for granted.

Let’s start from the basics – no one likes the act of shaving – it wastes time and is repetitively mind numbing, and in many cases uncomfortable but for most of the last century we have preferred smooth faces over beards.

First it was twin blade razors in the 1970s – they convinced us that the old safety razor wasn’t safe, and didn’t really give a good clean shave – because after all we wanted our skin to feel like a baby’s bum didn’t we?

Then it was the advent of 3 blade razors in the 1990’s – ( “3 blades good, 2 blades bad” – very Orwellian) and even closer shave and of course a more expensive set of blades.

And in the last few years it has become multi blades (5 or 4 depending on your brand) that rule – “5 blades good, 3 blades bad”....

On the surface this looks like a picture of innovation from the caring team at the male equivalent of the “Ponds Institute” – dedicated to giving us only the best in shaving technology – because after all we are guys and men can always be convinced to upgrade to new technology (as I was told on more than one occasion – it’s the easiest thing in the world to get a bloke to buy a new TV – just get them in the store and looking – they are bound to walk out with the newest, lightest, flattest screen available)...can’t we?

Let’s leave aside the fact that the so called innovation seems more like the product of stupid desperation – “duh, if 1 blade was good, 2 blades better and 3 really god then surely putting more blades on must be even better, huh?” than real innovation – this isn’t the space race after all.... and you can’t tell me that these ideas weren’t locked in 20 years ago or more and the companies have just been eking out the existing product lifecycles ( and patent exclusivity) in the meantime? “Yeah let’s introduce the 3 blade in 1995 and the 5 blade in 2005 – while we are waiting we will do the odd test and basically sit around designing our retirement beach houses.”

The thing is that we (well me at least) are really starting to get annoyed at the razor companies.

Planned obsolescence really translates to “stick it to the suckers who won’t upgrade – they are locked into us”. So prices for twin and 3 blade razor refills are really getting extortionate – part of this repricing is deliberately done to make the new 5 and 4 blade razors seem reasonably priced (they are after all more expensive by their nature) and partly to bleed our product loyalty dry. I can see the marketing departments now – twin blade and 3 blade razors are labelled in their product lifecycle presentations as “cash cows” and they are milking us hard - $30-40 for a set of eight blades that back in the 80s or p90s would have been well under $20. Since then there hasn’t been much inflation and by comparison items such as mobile phones and computers (much more complex devices) have become less expensive over time. Production costs would have barely risen because let’s face it most production would have been outsourced to Chindia years ago and the rest is just big fat margin.

As consumers we all know these facts and resentment lies just below the surface. We can smell a rat and a rip off and instead of making a big fuss about (for frankly where have we had to go until now) we are just deciding to let it all grow out.... so suck it up FMCG companies – there’s lots more where this came from I bet.

No doubt the bearded return will fade with time as it has in the past and the companies will gear up to shave us all again – mainly in our pockets – but we can only hope that by then there will be some real innovation that will give us a real choice – for example where is the male facial depilatory? Someone will give these guys a run for their money soon... surely?