The major supermarket chains are engaged in a new battle - to reduce the number of plastic bags issued. A laudable goal, certainly - the reduction of land fill and hazards to animals are worthwhile benefits.

My local supermarket has risen to the challenge in a number of ways. On those little conveyor belt divider things, they’re using the slogan "Every bag counts". And they’ve obviously told the checkout chicks/blokes to lean towards the smaller green coloured plastic bags, with the possibly unfortunate consequence that sometimes it seems you walk out of the supermarket with two small green plastic bags, suspecting that your shopping would have fit into one slightly larger white plastic bag.

Both chains also sell reusable cloth bags, but the problem with this is that they are branded. I tend to shop at both on occasions - sometimes they have specials, sometimes I want something from Coles that I know I can’t get at the (rather poorly stocked, sometimes) local Safeway, and so on. I’m happy to use a cloth bag, but how would I feel walking into Coles with a Safeway bag, or vice versa? Should I buy a set for each, and remember which ones to take each time I go shopping?

As it happens, digging around in the kitchen, I found an old cloth bag. I don’t recall where it came from, but it’s not branded, and it’s big enough to carry a fair bit of shopping. So on Saturday when I needed a few things, I stuffed it in my back pocket and walked down the street.

There seem to be some people who are so well organised with their grocery shopping that they do one trip every week (or longer) and buy everything they could possibly need for the week. And presumably they manage to use up most of the perishables they buy before they go off.

And then there’s me. I’m nowhere near that organised. I generally buy a bunch of stuff on Sundays that I expect to use during the week, but I always end up stocking up in dribs and drabs during the week. But when I think about it, smaller volume trips to the supermarket are good on several fronts.

Firstly, because I’m not returning with tons of stuff, I can leave my car at home and walk. The other day I saw a woman pack stuff into her car, and drive literally out of the car park, around the corner, and into her driveway - a total distance of about 300 metres. About half the travel time was spent waiting to turn right into the main road. Utterly ridiculous. EXERCISE, people. Use your legs for more than working the clutch/accelerator/brake or they might just drop off while you’re not looking. No, really, researchers at the Uni of Adelaide last year concluded that one reason the population of western countries is much less fit than in decades past is our addiction to our cars.

Secondly, for some reason I’ve found in the past that I sometimes buy a bunch of food and it gets stuffed way back into the darkest recesses of the fridge and I forget about them for a week or two, by which point they are only edible if I am willing to risk the lives of myself, my friends and family. Which as a rule, I’m not. Just In Time is the kind of thing logistics experts love, and in cases like these I can see the benefit.

And finally, I don’t have to feel self-conscious about getting to the checkout with five thousand items which will obviously not fit into one (reasonably sized though it is) cloth bag. Well, at least I’d be trying
to reduce how many bags I’m carrying, but I’d still feel a bit silly. Maybe that’s because I’m a beginner in this cloth bag lark. Or maybe it’s because I only have one. Time to go looking for some more.

So anyway I moseyed into Safeway, and did my shopping (maybe half a dozen items). The checkout chick saw the cloth bag under my arm and happily put it on her little bag feeder thing to pack all the stuff into it, despite it taking a little longer than usual. Obviously the plastic ones are perfectly streamlined for this process, but not to worry, if lots of people turn up with their own bags, I’m sure the staff will get used to it.

Everything fit fine, and as I walked home I discovered the other benefits of the cloth bag: the handles don’t dig into your skin, and thus are much more comfortable. Plus I get to show off my environmental consciousness for very little effort. It’s certainly more likely to set an example to others than wearing a Greenpeace t-shirt.

Not that hard, was it? I think I could get used to this.

Why is it that the guy with a corner office next to me is also the loudest guy on the floor? I mean, even when measured from outside his office. Loud music has been my saviour in the past few, deadline filled, stressful weeks. If I put my ear plugs in and pump up the music, I can just about drown out his speakerphone conversations (door open, natch).

As I write this, during a momentary lapse of productivity (3:11pm Friday),Powderfinger’s Internationalist is blasting away in both my ears, in an attempt to drown him out. This time he’s not using the speakerphone, but obviously the other half of the conversation is utterly hilarious, judging from the raucous laughter.

Sure, I could complain. But the problem is, he’s senior. Very senior, I’d say. Not only does he have an office, it’s not just an office with windows, it’s a corner office, and one with very good views. By the lifts is a sign pointing to his office. And in one of his loud conversations today, he mentioned a corporate box at the MCG. So to be honest, it intimidates me, a lowly four-day-a-week contractor. I’m not in his department, but have no doubt he could snuff me out like an newt.

I also have, within ten metres of me, a woman with a high pitched laugh, and apparently her colleagues send her jokey e-mails all day, because she’s always laughing while reading her computer screen… and another one who has gone out, left her mobile on her desk, and someone has been trying repeatedly to ring her for the last hour on both phones. How many times before they get the message that she’s not here?

Back to my data matching work…

3:15pm. Seems my colleagues agree with me. They haven’t resorted to loud music yet.

3:35pm. I finally got to AWOL woman’s phone before it stopped ringing. Obviously it was a matter of life and death, yet the guy didn’t want to leave a message.

3:36pm. A minute later she came back. And did I mention that she too suffers from gales of laughter?

Time to pump up the music again.

Twelve years ago a bloke in Sydney and I conspired on a cartoon about the last Gulf War. It seems timely to dig it out again now.

The theme of the clash of western vs. (other) culture continued for me on Sunday night when I watched The Year Of Living Dangerously on DVD. Why this movie? Well, because it turns out that my Dad knows the author, Christopher Koch. And (wait for this) Koch apparently admitted when it was pointed out to him that one of the major characters, the Chinese-Australian photographer Billy Kwan, is actually based on Dad, who was a journalist in the 60s, when the story is based.

Watching it was spooky. Billy’s habit of calling Mel Gibson’s character "old man", some of his quite philosophical lines, and when he talks about his Chinese-Australian lineage all sounded just like Dad.

Towards the end of the film, as Indonesia begun to erupt with violence, the realism got a little more real than I expected. Sirens wailed around me, louder than it seemed they should. I paused the movie. The sirens continued. I looked out the window. Two fire engines had pulled up across the street, the boys in black and fluorescent yellow jumping out to put out a fire in a skip.

It’s a bit of an obscure movie nowadays, though it starred Mel Gibson and Sigourney Weaver, and the actress (!) who played Billy won an Oscar for it. Still, well worth checking out, especially in the context of the ongoing clash of western culture with others, and a powerful dictator. Sure,the cover makes it look like a Mills & Boon novel, but don’t judge a DVD by its cover… check it out if you get the chance.

As I think about world events, and look through my diary entries for this month, it occurs to me how self-absorbed I might seem. This is not really the case - at least I hope it isn’t, though I’m not about to use this an excuse to launch into a 3000 word study on how self-absorbed I might or might not be to try and figure it out.

It’s just that generally I try to avoid talking politics and heavy stuff here. Or if I do, I’m looking for an amusement angle, which isn’t really there at the moment.

But someone asked what my take is on current events, so here we go: here are my thoughts on the current situation. No doubt some of these points will have people seeing red and entering nasty comments, and demanding that I go to various web sites of their choosing for re-education.

• Australia suffered a big impact from the Bali bombings, which was our biggest death toll ever to terrorism - 88 Australians dead, and as well as about 100 others. There certainly seem to be links between Jemaah Islamiyah (JI) and Al Qaeda, and if any country is qualified to go after either of them, it’s us. So I suspect many see our involvement in the action in Afghanistan as reasonable. But then, that seems to have wide military backing from a number of nations. Does it make us a target? Were we a target in Bali because of our involvement in Afghanistan? Or just because we’re a prosperous western nation? Good question.
• I think Saddam is a horrendous tyrant, and is in my top ten of world leaders who should be toppled, but I have not seen any convincing evidence of a link between him and international terrorism groups such as Al Qaeda and JI, or any link whatsoever to Bali or September 11th.
• So, if being a horrendous tyrant is all that you need to get a coalition of western forces ousting you from power nowadays, I’m interested to see who is next on the list. Somehow I doubt there is anybody. Bush’s comment a few months ago that "This is the guy that tried to kill my dad" makes it sound (a) like it’s some kind of vendetta, and (b) like the plot of a movie sequel:
  Gulf War II - This time, it’s personal.
• I am undecided whether or not Saddam has weapons of mass destruction, and is therefore a threat to the rest of the world. He might well have them, but it seems the UN never found them. Colon Powell’s PowerPoint slides didn’t convince me any more than they convinced anybody else who needed convincing.
• Australia has a few thousand troops in the coalition. It’s probably more a symbolic contribution than providing anything to the coalition that the US and British forces can’t do themselves. I hope they’ve got some fairly good co-ordination between the various forces happening, because in the business world, mixing large groups of people attacking different aspects of the one goal, and trying not to trip over each other, is a recipe for disaster. Throw deadly weapons into the mix and… well…
• I don’t for one minute subscribe to the simplistic "blood for oil" or "we must fight for the security of the world" lines. This whole issue is full of shades of grey, it’s definitely not black and white. As with anything, there are advantages and disadvantages for the different people involved all over the place.
• But many of these points are now pretty much academic. The war has started now… I can only hope that it is quick, that a minimum of innocent people are killed or injured, and that this time, a proper conclusion is reached.

That’s all I can think of for now.

Actually I think the efforts of the coalition forces might be better directed at the smeggers at work who shut off everyone’s web access and made everyone re-apply for it, as well as the people who are making the paperwork involved take longer than wading through an ocean of molasses. It’s ludicrous - quite apart from not being able to look up reference material for my job, if I want to know what’s going on in the world I have to go outside and ask somebody, or try and browse the news on WAP at argh cents a minute.

If ever a portent of doom from the impending war appeared, it was yesterday’s weather around Victoria. Bymid afternoon a huge duststorm blanketed much of the state, providing an almost eerie view from the window of the building where I was working. Normally the view from the 28th floor is good - right across the southern and eastern suburbs, and across the bay. When the dust descended, the view shrunk back to only a kilometre or so. And amusingly it wasSmogbusters
day, too.

Thankfully at ground level it was a little more hospitable, but very windy. Reminded me a little of that Gomez music video where the wind starts blowing everyone and everything away.

As for the war… wellnow that it’s started I suppose all we can hope for now is that it’s over quickly and without too many casualties.

Well I told all the people at the blog meetup tonight that I’d post this. So I’d better do so.

A message to the bloke sitting opposite me on the train this morning: Hey mate, you may find it effortless to look terminally cool sitting there, but it all went out the window when you got up to get off the train, and so nonchalantly went to stand at the wrong door to exit. Having to turn around again when you realised was definitely not cool. Where did you think you were? Richmond?

I’m not feeling too crash hot today. The soreness from Saturday’s walk has just about worn off (and leaves me thinking that in future more regular, gentler exercise is needed to gear up for such a full-on experience).

But it’s mostly the remnants of last night. There’s two reasons one might be clutching their stomach, rolling around, unable to do anything else. One is collapsing in spasms of laughter, and the other is having extreme stomach pain. Alas, for me, it was the latter. I was as sick as a dog overnight. As sick as a very sick dog. I think was food poisoning. The prime suspects are

• a sausage roll I bought in Mt Macedon on Saturday (unlikely - there’s not much organic in a sausage roll, besides, I ate it a good 36 hours before becoming sick)
• the mince meat in the batch of Bolognese sauce I cooked up last night

Sadly, it seems to be the latter. I’m a little disappointed, as I had started rejecting the slightly crappy supermarket meat, and been buying stuff from what seemed to be a good butcher in Elsternwick. Alas, it seems the mince is dodgy. Shame, as I thought it cooked up so well, too. Must have been all the red wine I put in it.

So anyway, the first bit was the stomach pain. Not enough to wake me up, but intriguingly it manifested itself into the dream I was having at the time. I don’t recall all the details now, but it was something along the lines of a bunch of people meeting, and one of the issues raised at the meeting was ensuring equity for people with stomach aches.

About 2:30 it woke me up. I stumbled around the house to find a hot water bottle, which combined with lying in a kind of foetal position is one of my preferred ways to deal with stomach pain. The first one I found had a hole in it. The second one didn’t. Not that it helped anyway, as the pain intensified. I’ll spare you the grisly details, but basically from then until about 6am, I spent the night alternately writhing on the bed in agony, then chucking my guts up, cycling about every half hour. Not pleasant. I’m a noisy vomiter, too - I bet it woke the neighbours.

By 6am, whatever it was that my body had decided was not worthy for digestion had been expelled, and I was able to get some sleep. And despite looming deadlines at work, I took the day off to try and recover. I didn’t have breakfast, but my lunch and dinner stayed down, so I think I’m well on the road to recovery.