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Having threatened to do so a while back, I am going to publish R0’s excellent cocktail recipe, the Kevin ‘07.  As the name implies, it was invented to be imbibed at an election party.  I heartily recommend it, preferring the ‘old labor’, ’sweet victory’ variant.  So, without further adieu, I rip the text straight out of R0’s Facebook announcement, and place it here.  (Hey R0, if this irritates you, feel free to edit/remove, dude).

Kevin ‘07 Cocktail Recipe

How to mix a Kevin07;

• In a tumbler (pref. thin glass), place a single ice-cube.
• Add one measure of Absolut mandarin vodka, and one measure of Beenleigh white rum.
• Throw in some torn mint leaves, and a segment of lime.
• Swizzle together with a chopstick.
• Remove chopstick.
• Top up with soda water (pre. not top-shelf).
• Over the back of a spoon, pour a splash of grenadine, and then add a dash of bitters.
• Imbibe!

And now, the rationale:
Use a thin glass tumbler to evoke Kev’s glass jaw, and a single ice cube for global warming. Mandarin vodka is obvious, white rum for the Australian canefields. Mint and lime, green credentials. Chopstick–again, obvious. Soda water should be cheap, as we’re all economic conservatives, now. The grenadine and bitters is for the old guard of Labor, wondering how an economic conservative ended up as leader of the ALP.

And now, some variations:

Kevin07 (Sweet Victory)

• Use lemonade instead of soda water. (Delish!)

Kevin 07 (New Labor)

• Ditch the grenadine. (This version is not red, basically).

And I suppose you could have a Kevin07 (Queenslander), using Bundaberg rum instead of Beenleigh. But we didn’t have any Bundaberg, so I’ve no idea how this would turn out.

No, readers, it’s not some obscure spell or item from Nethack; at least, not to the best of my knowledge. It is, in fact, the way to pronounce what could possibly one day become the most important acronym of the 21st-century: IFBRWSD.
Inevitable-Facebook-Related-Work-Slow-Down
And let’s not forget non-inevitable FB time-wastering; Fibre-Wizarding is apparently very costly.

Ahh, Facebook–as BWP told me, basically utterly fucking redundant, since it’s just a platform from which to run applications that you actually want. (Do not look behind the curtain!) I find it quite dull, but still have an account which I use to play chess. BWP-it’s your goddamned move! (meta-)POKE!

So sang the Scissor Sisters. And, when you dance like me, that’s probably not a surprise. My dancing is characterized by an excess of finger-wiggling (p’raps I’m double-jointed?) and the one rule I have is never to move elbows and knees in the same direction. Some have compared my dancing to this man’s moves … but look where he went!

I went to a wedding a few months ago and was on the only table that did not dance. The academic-students table; I had grim flash-forwards to the rest of my life lived out a la Harry Haller. Then, at another wedding last week I was convinced that I would dance, dammit. And I did, a bit, and then took a bit of a breather on the sidelines. (For some reason, I get tired really fast when I dance. All that mad-finger-action, I guess.) And, then, akin to a great bolt-from-the-blue, it struck me: why I don’t like dancing very much. This revelation occurred to me watching people “do the Nutbush”. Not a dance I know how to do.

Nutbush involves lots of moves. If you don’t know them, you’re not really in the club. I noticed that there seem to be moves, also, for dancing to that song from Grease. Can’t remember the name of it–but people all knew when to wave their arms, etc. But not me–I remained sidelined. I do know the moves to YMCA: and as proof, I urge people to make the ‘C’ to their left. Otherwise, to the onlooker, it is all backwards.

So, I have no idea about the moves, and feel somewhat awkward on the dance floor (’cept after a few drinks). Similarly, I am uncertain about the rules for ordering coffees at cafes. Do you order at the counter? Wait and take your coffee? Pay nor or later? Sit down and expect a waiter? Also buying clothes from department stores–I feel like once I have been given advice or assistance that the onus is on me to buy the item of clothing. Oh, to find a man’s shirt that isn’t emblazoned with nonsensical, half-legible graffiti or stencil art. (Idea for a future post–Why I never get served in retail clothes shops.)
Dance-floors, cafes, shops, all sources of mild frustration and worry for me.

This reminds me of a story my doctor told me. He runs one part of the teaching program at a university, and has a fair few students from fairly grim parts of the world, e.g. places where you have a 1-in-3 chance of dying before the age of 12, mostly through violence or malnutrition. He said that the local kids are all worried every six months or so, about exams–but these students from distant shores tend not to worry at all, as though they don’t even understand why you would worry about an exam.

But (in defence of my fragile ego) you gotta worry about something.

Yours in mild-and-far-from-debilitating-social-phobia,

Rabbit Zero

It’s admissions time. There are lots of famous nerdy books that I have never, ever read. Here are some details, and let me apologise in advance if I disappointed anyone.

1. Hitchhiker’s Guide. I read the first one or two. Not only have I not read the rest, I’m not even sure if this is how you spell Hitchhiker’s.
2. Asimov. The closest I came is a short story in the style of Asimov, by Orson Scott Card, and included in a collection of short stories by Card. (Or is it Scott Card, like Leigh Fermor?)
3. The books in the sequence after Ender’s Game. These would be, I think, Speaker for the Dead and Xenocide. (As a caveat, I have read The Forever War, which I thought was absolutely awesome, and then read The Forever Peace, which I felt was sooo fucking bad that it put me off whatever is the third in that trilogy.)
4. Any of the Discworld books.

That’s right. Pick yerselves up off the floor, nerds, and contemplate this–I ahve never, ever read a Discworld book cover to cover. I did read The Carpet People, many times over, and I have read about two-thirds of Small Gods. But that’s it.

Anyhow, I am amazed that BWP, who is a mad–and I do mean mad–keen Discworld fan, has never mentioned to me the game Cripple Mr. Onion. (It needs special cards.) I like card games a lot, with bezique as a particular fave (actually, the only one I really play much at all), and have wild dreams of writing a card game with BWP’s gf. Called Snodjrij. Be that as is may …

… and it may to the same extent as, say, my cooking show, my animated cartoon about the possibly-homosexual and always-bickering mouse and rabbit superhero duo, my various academic articles, etc. etc. etc. …

… be all that as it may, I am also amazed that the rules for Cripple Mr. Onion were in part formalised by a fairly famous Australian, Prof. Terence Tao. Yet there is no mention of this fact on his CV. That said, I guess if you’re smart enough to win the Fields Medal, you can pretty much do whatever you want, prioritize your CV any way you see fit.
But I’d be putting something like that on my CV. Snodjrij here we come!