Wasps

On the way to the bus stop this morning I walked through a swarm of wasps, on the narrow corner of Garnet and Shamrock streets, and was savagely stung around the head.
If this is going to happen every day it will be most annoying.
It could be worse, mind; father was allergic, and it would just about have killed him.

Myki

Rosemary can't discuss Myki without collapsing in a frothing heap, and I try to calm her down: but it's not easy when they do things like this.....

I want to use the much-touted auto topup, whereby money is transferred automatically to the card when it gets low.

I go to the myki site:
I go to Topup and sign in there:
In my account, I click Top up myki;

You can top up as you go or set up myki auto top up for 'set and forget' convenience.
Choose the myki below you wish to top up or set up auto top up for. 

I choose a card;

Auto top up is even better
Auto top up is a smart and convenient way to make sure your myki is always ready to use. All you do is set up an automatic direct debit from your bank account or credit card to your myki. Just set and forget!
Here's how to do it. Once you receive your myki, the account holder can set myki auto top up. You only need to fill in a form if you choose automatic direct debit from your bank account (no form is required for credit card). You can fill it out online by going to myki auto top up request form or call 13 6954 (13 myki) and we'll send you one.

I go to myki auto top up request form, as requested, and find that it sends me to the form that the above passage says is not required - a form that for credit card payment involves a signature, printing out the form, and posting it. Unless I'm missing something completely, there is no way on that page to submit anything electronically. 

AAAH.  That's it. When that says "You can fill it out online by going to..." it means the form, not the automatic direct debit: for that you click 'Next", below. 

Appallingly written for its meaning.  What is needed is a statement that 

Here's how to do it. Once you receive your myki, the account holder can set myki auto top up.

•           Online, by credit card only  - click NEXT
•           By filling out a form and sending it in, by direct debit from your bank or by credit card - here

         You only need to fill in a form if you choose automatic direct debit from your bank account (no form is required for credit card). You can fill it out online by going to myki auto top up request form or call 13 6954 (13 myki) and we'll send you one.

So true

German aphorist Georg Christoph Lichtenberg (1742-1799):

• “There are very many people who read simply to prevent themselves from thinking.”

I'll be damned

Reading an article in the New Yorker I realise that in some fifty years of reading W. H. Auden’s “Epitaph on a Tyrant”:

Perfection of a kind was what he was after,
And the poetry he invented was easy to understand;
He knew human folly like the back of his hand,
And was greatly interested in armies and fleets;
When he laughed, respectable senators burst with laughter,
And when he cried the little children died in the streets.

I have simply transposed the verbs in the last line -
           And when he died the little children cried in the streets.
to make it utterly meaningless, or at least completely different.

I read too fast, with too little attention, driven by an urge to have read rather than a desire to read; but even for me, this is spectacular. 

“absolutism” is “the basis of all civilization.”

 "The National Rifle Association’s Wayne LaPierre ... claims “absolutism” is “the basis of all civilization.”

“Without it,” he said, “Without those absolutes, without those protections, democracy decays into nothing more than two wolves and one lamb voting on, well, who to eat for lunch.”

 Surely as a generation that has seen these kinds of negotiations demonstrated on reality TV programs such as Survivor we should be able to see that in the situation where "two wolves and one lamb [are] voting on, well, who to eat for lunch" the lamb would last at least into the second round, on the basis that the lamb would say to the weaker wolf "Look, eat me now and you'll be up against your superior in the second (and inevitably tied) round - vote for him, and you'll clear out your toughest challenge for the top spot."

and of course see
http://home.vicnet.net.au/~borth/Twainshl.htm

And, carrying that a little further, if you started with 53 lambs and 47 wolves you could use the same arguments to carry it through to the point where you had 53 lambs and one wolf and they could rush him or just hire him as an enforcer against minority lambs.

Which would, I suppose, be an illustration of how the rich lambs do in practice manage to retain their position of power.

And however it all ends,  it's not easy to see how voting actually makes the lamb's chances worse.

Interestingly, exactly the same wolf/lamb reference comes in to a libertarian/anarchist rant here that wants to discard the constitution entirely, guns amendment included -
http://www.tnr.com/article/politics/112147/disinaugural-blues

OK

I see that someone has:
"The New Agrarianism and the Economics of the Shire," University of Vermont, Burlington, Vt., April 9, 2011.

Shire Reeve

One weak spot in the Lord of the Rings is the hangover from The Hobbit, which is the whole situation of the Shire. The Shire is, of course, rural England, but Tolkien's determination to see it unstained by commerce or craft means that it has nothing other than gentry and yeomen farmers and peasantry -  no soldiers, no lawyers, no MPs; no governance structure of any sort, and no defence.  We're told that they're protected by the Rangers, but we're not told why.  Why doesn't Rohan look for lebensraum? What are their major exports?  Nobody else seems to value pipeweed. It's very hard indeed to splice a 1910 rural village on to warrior societies like Rohan and Gondor, and the economics and politics have to be written in as exceptions virtually hobbit by hobbit. Has anybody attempted to do the politics of the Shire?  Are police mentioned at any point:  what preserves the social hierarchy?  Where is the hangman?