A word to the unwise...

There are some very sexy things a man can do with a Mars Bar & a willing woman.
My advice to you...never EVER try and substitute a Snickers Bar.
To understand why, buy one & suck on it for a while. I will say no more...

First impressions count...

I'm pretty sure you don't need a marketing background to know that first impressions count..I think my nanna used to say something similar.
And yet, it's like the internet sucks all those common sense rules out of our heads.
With that in mind, here is my (humble) advice to the many patrons of online dating.
If you are serious about attracting someone quality...

• Please don't take photos of yourself with your shirt off. Ick! No one (serious) wants to know that you're sitting in your lonely, beige-walled bedroom with no clothes on talking to strange girls in Ghania who desperately need money to bring their mother/child/bulldog over from the UK.
• Just because you CAN pole dance/do the splits/touch your nose with your tongue...doesn't mean you should do it on your profile picture.
• Do NOT keep all your old girlfriends/boyfriends on your Facebook page so they can stalk your new 'recruits'. When it's over, baby, it's OVER!
• When you take your profile photo, try not to do it in front of wall of pictures of your ex-wife and kids, your mum & dad and the ex-in-laws.
• Maybe these aren't hard and fast rules for everyone but, for me, they sure are big fat squealing warning signs. Warning, warning! Danger Will Robinson!

Of course, if you're reeeally hot...maybe you should have your shirt off in one teeny weeny photo.
;)

Repeat after me…

NEVER blog drunk!

Spanish proverb...

Habits are at first cobwebs, then cables.

Read between the lines...

Suddenly here is another ex-lover chatting away to me on email.

Don't they get it? When I say 'I understand, let's be friends'...after they DUMP me…what I really mean is 'your ongoing presence is a constant reminder of my perceived inadequacies and I wish you'd disappear or at least be publicly and completely unhappy without me'.

Duh!

Blogging...

This blog has become the inside of my brain, on the outside.

Whims, opinions, funny moments caught in time like insects in amber - and almost as bizarre at times.

I remember reading on a teacher's wall once, things that children had said, including one little gem that came in answer to the adult sobriet 'think before you talk"...the child had replied "but I don't know what I'm thinking until I say it'.

That's how I feel with this blog.
Without it I wouldn't know how far I've come, or how much lies ahead of me.

So welcome to my blog...and to the inside of my head. It's a fun place to be.

Media wars...

I have my own opinions on Fairfax's cost-cutting and what mistakes may have been made over the past 12 months but I'm surprised at the way other papers feel free to comment on Fairfax financial decisions.

The one that struck me most is a comment in The Australian about the FFX CEO's decision to get rid of his chauffeur and use taxis or drive himself.
The Australian slagged FFX for putting a man out of work.

I wonder what they would have written if the company continued to put people out of work in all other sites but the Big Man continued to get driven around in chauffered style?

You can't win can you? At least not when you're up against News Ltd.

Every engineer knows...

The use of powerful tools by untrained people can be both dangerous and devastating.
The internet is just such a tool.

& speaking of tools? Why does anyone need four email addresses?
Are they spies? Do they need an email address to give their latest identity credibility?
Are they superheroes protecting an alter ego?
How many 'readers' or 'blogs' or 'feeds' or 'domains' does anyone need?
Just how efficient are these internet users being if, like me, they really don't know what the best medium is - just the latest or easiest.

An email is a gateway for someone to reach you.
You don't have four doorways at your home do you? You use just the one - the obvious one (unless the kids or the tradies have dirty feet).

What happened to one-stop shopping on the internet?
We collect identities on the internet like other old ladies collect novelty spoons, when they should be like cars - bought for functionality. Pretty colours and racy accessories should be a secondary considerations, surely.

I was warned to never trust a man with two phones.
I suspect that someone with several email addresses is equally duplicitous...or a great big sucker for 'the latest and greatest (and shinyiest) social networking site'.
It's cyber-schizoprenia for goodness' sake!

Of course I could be wrong and I welcome your comments...which can be emailed to sasha'ssoapbox@hotmail.com, sasha'ssoapbox@yahoo.com, or sasha'ssoapbox@gmail.com

Intellectual in-breeding...

There was a time when we all thought the internet would open up a wide, world of new learning for its users.
But instead, I think we are simply filling our lives with bigger volumes of the same ol' same ol'.

My BrainsTrust of IT-savvy friends are busy teaching me about feeds and readers and alerts to help me read more of what I already know or like.
But where's the reader that feeds me things I should be interested in, stuff I might like if I stepped outside the perimeters of my own head?
Where's the cyber-librarian catching me at the counter and saying 'you know, you might really like to give this one a go'?

We moan and moan about the consequences of specialisation of skills - but now we have specialised thinking!

Social commentator Faith Popcorn talks about clicking, clanning and cocooning that occurs as people ‘chat’ with their virtual clan, cocooned from the rest of the world, isolated in cyber-space with a handful of people with like interests.
People who have avatars - not real-life wrinkles, fat-rolls and guinea pig laughs.
It’s a filtered, airbrushed, abbreviated world that teaches us nothing about inclusivity or tolerance.
Now, all of you busy, educated, involved people out there who are just enjoying a little peace at home with the convenience of your varied, RSS-filled personal libraries – I congratulate you on your smart use of an amazing technology.
For the rest of you who are sitting at a laptop ignoring the child or partner sitting beside you (like I am) in favour of yet another article on improving relationships, at the risk of sounding like my Mum I say…get up, get out & get some fresh air in you!

An in-depth political summary...

Labor - Liberal
Tomatoe - Tomato
Let's call the whole thing off...

Sooks and censorship...

A while back, an Indonesian newspaper published a satirical cartoon depicting John Howard and Alexander Downer as slavering dingoes 'mounting each other'.

Now, to be fair, Howard basically replied to the media's hysteria with the very Aussie 'get over it'.
Up my way, however, local news stations were appalled at the evil Indonesian media's bad taste and political shortsightedness in depicting our national treasures in such an unflattering light.

Now I can’t say Howard is my favourite former politician and don't even ask me about Downer - but I was impress by their responses.

According to ABC online, Howard said...
'In relation to the cartoons, well I've been in this game a long time, if I got offended about cartoons golly, heavens above, give us a break.'

Mr Downer said the cartoon was tasteless.
He says people can choose to publish tasteless and grotesque cartoons in a free society

Now, don't quote me on this, but isn't one of the Western world's biggest complaints about Indonesia the continued evidence of empire building, a trend towards dictatorships and...ohmigod...even CENSORSHIP!?
And here we are condemning a newspaper for printing (gasp gasp) distasteful political commentary in the form of a cartoon!

What would Larry Flynt say, really?
And let's remember, there are no actual laws to protect free speech in Australia - just conventions, which many heretofore unnamed media barons have done their best to circumvent.
(Long live the Goanna?)

My least-favourite lecturer at Uni taught me, what I now believe is, the most valuable journalistic lesson I ever learned.
Free speech means even the wankers get a say...and let's face it, they're always the first ones to pull up the soapbox.
(And yes, I am not unaware of the irony of me writing this - but, please, let's move on)

So, what's the world coming to if Aussies are upset at someone taking a poke at the pollies?
The Indonesians aren't saying anything we haven't said a million times, about our own politicians - not to mention theirs, and the rulers of every other nation on Earth - so, in my eyes, this is really a wonderful step towards multicultural understanding.
(Ask me about Indonesia's role as the world's last empire-builders and you'll hear much worse language than dingo-rooter).

The upside of this whole issue is that Australia and Indonesia now, agree on something.
The avenues of communication are now, finally, open...
Let's reopen trade, we can bitch about the Yanks together, it's all good.

But what I really want is to find a site with the damn cartoon on it. Someone send me a link! It appears to have been expunged from cyberspace.
And where are the Chinese cartoons, the Bosnian commentaries, the Haiti satires?

And note to the media, rom one journalist to another, what the hell is all the fuss about?
Or to quote a short man – “golly, heavens above, give us a break!”

Idiot-proofing...

aIf germ-proofing has resulted in the rise of deadly super-germs, what will come of making things idiot-proof?

We're living in the age of anti-Darwinism where only the idiots are still breeding.
The people you love - the ones you think are great parents with fantastic kids - stop at two, or even one, or spend their life travelling the word childless.
Then you meet people with three kids to three different arseholes. (What happened to once bitten, twice shy?)

Or the woman I met a couple of years ago with 12 children, who found a new partner when her teenagers stopped being eligible for pension payments and maintenance - and then found herself in hospital, in labour, at the same time as her 17-year-old daughter.
It was a joy to see them down the street together with matching prams, sharing a cigarette.

Nyah nyah! My school's better than your school...

If you have a child in school, there’s a good chance you were one of the thousands of parents who helped crash the www.myschool.edu.au school comparison website last week.
How’s that for a show of parental competitiveness and involvement – so proud!

There’s a lot of concerns about this site, especially in small, country towns like mine.
How can an average government school of 50 kids – from Reception to Year 12 - square up alongside a private school with more than that many kids in a single grade?
Well, myschool tells us it just can’t.

The myschool site is confirming all country school parents’ greatest fear that:
numbers = resources = results = more resources & more numbers
Little country schools have an awful lot of red shaded rectangles showing up on their pages and yes, it is disappointing, maybe even demoralising, for those students, teachers, families busting their butts to find out that…well…it’s still not good enough.
But when we’re talking about resources I think it’s important to point out that the most important resource in education is people. Real live, sweating, bite-my-tongue-and-get-down-to-work people.
For instance, in schools where just one or two local teachers stick with a single grade over several years, their teaching ability becomes very clear in the NAPLAN (National Assessment Program Literacy & Numeracy) results.
And, at my school, I’ll make you a bet that that same Year 3 group that’s doing better than the school’s other grades will score equally high next year with the same teacher and different kids.
How’s that for an uplifting example of just one person making a real difference?

But it’s not just teachers who make the difference.
While a larger school, with bigger, better music or sports programs may be able to hire the best – in some smaller communities, equally wonderful people are donating their time, and getting great results too.
Maybe it’s about pride and ownership? And if so, then the big question is how do we get our students, teachers, communities and governments to take more pride in our schools – our small, country, red-shaded schools – and invest more resources?

I’d suggest we need to celebrate our successes better.
Support our teachers and school teams more.
Get off our arses and help out – before and after our own kids leave our local schools. It’s not just parents who have something to give to their local school communities.

But, you know what?
People in small country towns know that their kids are disadvantaged for resources and rich in great people. We’ve always known that.
But, conversely, not every city school is going to have better results or be better suited to your child than the small, underfunded one he or she is currently attending.

I’d rather have my hormonal pre-teens surrounded by people I know, who know me, and who care about all of us…and who are too embarrassed to lose their temper because they know they’ll have to front up to me on the netball court the following Saturday.
I want teachers who are invested in my kids, and schools that are working for better results.
I want a school whose team looks at those results on the (constantly crashing) website and says ‘bugger that, we’re better than that and we can prove it’.

So – I think www.myschool.edu.au should be the making of a lot of schools.
The ones who dismiss the figures (& pretty red and green boxes) as irrelevant, are fooling themselves.
Schools are quite happy to hand out reports - what's wrong with them occasionally receiving one.
This site isn't negative - it's just statistical. And we all know the old saying about statistics don't we? (You don't? Really? Well what did YOU learn at school?)

The idea that we shouldn’t be able to publicly publish those tables in the media is ridiculous!
We publish the top five holiday destinations, we publish the five most dangerous cities…crap, we’ve published the five favourite sex positions in 25 countries.
We publish who is better than who – every year, every week – on the footy field. And if we put in as much support, money and pride into our schools as we do our sporting teams then all our kids would be kicking goals academically.

For those who say you can’t compare schools…I say suck it up. Of course you can. Parents want to.
We are a nation of comparison shoppers and we want the best.
Now the challenge is to be the best.
And that’s not just about SACE results – it’s about nurturing, community involvement and opportunities - as well as academic success.
But let's face it, if you're falling down in the academic arena and you're a school - well, you better have one hell of a good music program going for you.