Blaugust 14/31: Neck-and-Neck Election

This post is part of the Antipodean contribution to Blaugust East.

Last week we packed up our board games, and this week I hope that you'll help me pack up those most treasured of my possessions, my ties. Some major stakeholders have suggested that my complete collection of neck-ties doesn't need to travel to England, so we're doing a cull down to a more manageable six. In order to do so, I thought we'd hold an election, partly because it's much more fun to hold elections than it is to just pick, partly because we're into week two of Blaugust and we're looking increasingly hard-up for content, but mostly because I want to revel in the joys of the nuanced political system that we enjoy here in Australia in comparison to other jurisdictions.

Thus, we'll be running a little ballot. The system will closely imitate the partial-preferential voting system that has been proposed as a refinement of our current method for electing Australian Senators, bringing upper-house votes in line with lower-house ones by allowing individuals to direct their own preferences whether they choose to cast their votes for parties en masse "above the line", or for individual candidates "below the line".

The beauty of this Australian system is that you can choose to direct your preferences if desired, so that even if your preferred candidate is eliminated your second choice still gets the benefit of your vote, and if your second candidate is eliminated the third gets your vote, et cetera. This means that your vote, provided that it is valid, will always be counted, and if you choose to allocate full preferences, it can never be exhausted and thus wasted on a candidate with no chance to win. And since we're electing for multiple places here, even if your candidate isn't the most popular, they might still win a place in the suitcase.

People from first-past-the-post systems think this is weird. But just imagine the situation for a hypothetical conservative voter in the in the UK election in May. Instead of having to vote for the lesser of two evils between the Labour Party and the SNP, you could rank your actually preferences and have them count for something! In a theoretical year 2016 AD in a US where Donald Trump runs as an Independent, you could rank him first and then the Republicans, and thus not disadvantage either by splitting their vote when compared to the Democratic candidate! Amazing, I know! And we've been doing it like this since 1918! There's some details about quotas and single-transferable votes and all that nonsense, but like most Australians, you don't really care how it actually works, so, moving on...

To facilitate a vote, I have sorted my tie pile into a selection of "parties", then ranked the candidates in each party and placed them on the ballot form available here. You may choose to either rank the parties in order of your preference (or just pick one if you don't like any of the others!) or rank individual candidate in order of your preference (as long as you vote for at least as many ties as there is room for in the suitcase). In other words, you can be a snob like I always am at elections and spend forever picking your favourite ties, or you can just select your favourite category, get the whole thing finished, and rush outside to the sausage sizzle.

Meet the Candidates

The candidates for election have been collected below. The parties have been randomised, and the candidates in each party organised in order of party preference. (Yes, I know some eagle-eyed following will realise that some of my ties are missing, but I've collected all the ones that I can find!)

 The Liberty Party (LIB)

The Liberty Party consist of those ties that are bright enough to make me smile every time that I see them, but just a little too bright to be appropriate in an office environment. They're wedding ties, mostly. 

1. Carribean Silk

2. The Yellow Thai

3. Green Sakura

4. Bad at Tetris

5. Crimson Tide

The Conservative Party (CON)

The Conservative party are dependable, solid manager types. The kind of ties that never draw comment. This isn't to say that they're boring, they're just the sort of tie that Bill Shorten would wear. The party leader, Polytetrafluoroethtielene, is Mrs. Owl's favourite. I'm not sure what that says about her.

1. Polytetrafluoroethtielene 

2. The Gopher

3. The Straight and Narrow

4. Thin Blue Line

5. Thin Red Line

6. The Islander

7. Grandma's Couch

8. Flashy Suit

 The Dad Party (DAD)

The Dad party is made up of the kind of ties that your dad used to wear in those photos from when you were a little kid, but now sit rotting in the back of the wardrobe.

1. Electric Boogaloo

2. Grade Four Teacher

3. All Aboard

4. Rumanian Garden Party

5. Tiny Teddies

6. The Smiths

7. Tropical Clouds

8. The Father-in-Law

9. Dalmation Question

The Christmas Party (CHR)

The Christmas party split from the Cartoon party after a bit of a falling out over how funny Christmas crackers are. They're the only party with a catchy campaign song.

1. Tannenbaum

2. Elf 1

3. Ho Ho Oh No

4. Elf 2

The Democratic Party (DEM)

The Democratic Party are a the centrist party that forms the middle ground between the Liberals and the Conservatives. You can wear them to work but they're probably going to get comments/

1. The Travelator

2. The Crimson Peacock.

3. Binary State

4. Yellow River

5. Donkey Congo

6. The Tiesellator

7. Infinite Apartment

The Dotty Party  (DOT)

The Dotty party aren't really anybody's favourites, but they get a lot of support in rural areas. They've previously supported the Conservatives to form a government.

1. The Amicable Vicar

2. Invictus

3. The Mycroft

4. Fade to Blue

5. The Garbo

6. Prince of Persia

7. Eye of Saruman

8. Salmon Fishing in the Yemen

The U.N.C.L.E. Alliance (UNC)

The U.N.C.L.E. alliance is made up of the kind of ties that appeal to those weird uncles. There's the Aussie Tie Uncle, the Bow Tie Uncle, and the Uncle That Still Wears His School Tie.

1. Australian Orienteer

2. Penny Black

3. Great and Small

4. Bitters

5. Penny Green

6. Tie-ota

7. The Classic Telecom

The Cartoonist's Party (CAR)

No-one messes with the Cartoonist's Party because they don't want to be the next target.

1. Oh Tintin, my Tintin

2. Oh Mickey, You're So Fine

3. Internet 1.0

4. Mouses

5. Send in Sinatra

6. Mister Hyde

7. Steak Sandwich

The Paisley Coalition (PAI)

The Paisley Coalition is an amalgam of the previous Paisley Party and the Diagonal Lines Party. This diversity works surprisingly well for them.

1. Popular Penguins

2. The Red Wedding

3. M.C. 4 Lyfe

4. Construction Site

5. Vintage Wallpaper

6. The Postman Delivers

7. Both Sides Now

8. Spud

9. Fibulae Jugulum

10. The Clone

11. Rot Stops Here

Since by visiting the site you've registered for voting, and in Australian elections all registered voters must do their democratic duty or risk a fine, you'd better consider your options and then go vote. This is the great moral challenge of our age, people.

Thursday Night Games

I know I've already posted today, but some new board games I got recently got some play tonight, and I wanted to brag not only that I have new games, but also that my friends have excellent taste in games and you should all get some friends like them.

First, my Thursday gaming group (spots are open, only eligibility criteria is being able to get to Aberfoyle Park, SA on Thursday nights, bringing snacks optional but recommended) opened one of my new games and played it while I cooked them dinner. There's nothing so good as listening to good people having fun in your house while you prepare good food for them to enjoy. It makes you feel all grown up and responsible, not feelings I get often.

Takenoko sounds like a good thing. And so PRETTY.

Then, they obligingly allowed me to whoop them at another new game. Friends is good.

Rolling natural 20s is how you win at King of Tokyo. Game is so hype.

I doubt if there's really anything I could say to review these games that the internet hasn't already done better than I possibly could, so let me just say that these games are pretty good and you should all play them with me some time.

And don't worry, there's more where these came from.

Read: The Messenger

Unfortunately, though the Leaflocker has not been busily producing content for the last few months, we have also not been filling that time with reading, so I'm afraid that it will take us very little time indeed to work our way through the piles of books consumed since March. In fact, once this review is over, that'll be it, back to square one, so it may be a little while until our next book gets finished unless I resort to reading either novellas or comic books.

On first being lent Markus Zusak's The Messenger, my assumption was that this was the new novel of the award-winning author of The Book Thief, which I'd enjoyed quite a lot a number of years ago. Now normally the cynic in me would say that this was the book that he really wanted to write but he wrote The Book Thief first because writing a book about Jews in the Holocaust is a good way to make yourself famous, but that would be extremely unfair for two obvious reasons (if not many more). Firstly, it turned out that it was actually his first novel, and then on further research it turned out that it was actually his fourth one, but still written and published before the Book Thief, and secondly it's just a demeaning thing to say about the Book Thief, a heartbreakingly beautiful book about which I will hear no criticism.

Thus, I went into this book expecting a lot, and looking forward to again experiencing the slightly odd way that Markus Zusak comes at telling a story from an unusual direction, looking for the signs of an author that would just a couple of years after this go on to write The Book Thief, and I was not at all disappointed. The Messenger tells the strange story of Ed Kennedy, a taxi-driver who gets a strange playing card in the mail and ends up trying to save the lives and make a difference in the people around him. 

The pace is slow at first, as we were eased into the story, but the gentle conversational tone is a pleasure to read (very Australian) and the interaction of the characters, who are all fundamentally genuine and decent people (some would label them superficial), particularly in little personal conversations with Ed, is a real joy. It shares the informality of The Yiddish Policemen's Union that I so enjoyed reading last year, so I must have a soft spot for this kind of story.

Page 123:

It's the truth. I don't know. My jeans feel a thousand years old as they wrap around my legs. Almost like a blue-bottle. My shirt burns me cold. My jacket scrapes at my arms, my hair is frayed, and my eyes feel shot with blood. And I still don't know what day it is.

Just Ed.

I turn.

Just Ed walks on.

Just Ed walks fast.

He begins at attempt at a run.

But he trips.

Well, that's the other sort of style in the book, the attempt to be 'literary and serious' that I found a little too forced. It works well, don't get me wrong, but it feels a little too put on to be taken seriously, the one thing that puts The Messenger down a peg on my personal rating system compared to The Book Thief. But I did enjoy the conversational tone too.

There is, as with all books that are trying to be literature, as well as all good mystery stories, (which this book most definitely is) a big twist ending, which I failed to guess although with a couple of chapters to go I was just a hair's-breadth from the right answer. I found it charming, but I suspect that it was supposed to be a 'Whoa' moment. This feeling was reinforced by the 'reading notes' in the back, which are apparently widely used (I recently discovered that I have a friend who studied it for year Twelve English), and it much be a handy tool for school classes and book groups to have the questions all written out already, even if they are a little on the side of 'So class, how clever do you think the author is on a scale of 9 to 10'.

Overall, I'd recommend this book, not as much as I'd recommend The Book Thief, but still more than any other book that I've read in recent times. I don't know how well-known Murkus Zusak is outside of the country, but I should note for my American audience that this one is called I Am The Messenger in the US, and that at the prices that you guys get away with buying new books for I see no reason why you shouldn't get yourselves a copy. For my Australian readers, this is a good book by an Australian author who really is something special, and you should at least borrow it from your local library or something, as I can't lend you this copy because it needs to go back to its owner (who knowing my penchant for books has carefully pencilled her name onto the front page).

Reading Progress:

Number of Books read: 10

Australian dividend: 3.045

Science Fiction dividend: 2.5

Fantasy dividend: 3.5

Biography dividend: 2.5

Literary dividend: 1

Mystery dividend: 1.5

For those of you wondering how the dividends work, they're merely the overall number of books in each category (decided mostly by whim), which when divided by the total number of books read would yield that category's quotient (I was using the wrong terminology earlier and it was bothering some nice and helpful readers. In other words, 3.5 of the 10 books read so far have been loosely categorised as fantasy.

Next Up: Who knows? Probably not Neuromancer.

Guess Who's Back?

...and ready for blogging...


(It's me)

Two Disturbing Pictures

There's probably a taboo against posting this sort of thing in a public place but...


There's definitely a taboo against posting this kind of photo in a public place, it's a strange and unusual punishment of the worst kind and liable to cause public panic, but a guy can't help the face he's born with.

Distractions...

I know I should be focusing or reading Limits and Renewals and thoroughly getting my Kipple on, but I slipped last night in a fit of bad judgement brought on by my perpetual insomnia and picked up one of my favourite books, Pretty Girl in Crimson Rose (8). This was a bad idea, because it means that my head is now constantly swimming with cryptic crosswords clues and terrible wordplay, so you can probably expect either a tidal wave of punnage or the production of a cryptic or two in the coming couple of weeks.


Those of you were unfortunate enough to know me during my brief stint at university will remember that my on-again-off-again obsession with cryptic crosswords was the defining feature of my life at the time, and combined with my fondness for card games caused my premature and unceremonious departure from academia after just one year. We can only hope, for the sake of my employment and the sanity of anyone in a 100m radius, that this phase is not as disruptive or enduring as it was last time around.

The main point here, though, is that you should totally read it. If you're an Adelaidean, I have a copy I can lend you, just drop me a line sometime. If you're not, do yourself a favour and get a copy of Sandy Balfour's clever, quirky and someway eccentric little book, it's fun times.

Just don't get too involved.

Mission: Failed

That's right, just one book into my attempt to read all the books in my library, I've fallen and I can't get up. Walking past the newsagent yesterday I saw a book, a beautiful book, with a good weight to it and the promise of more beauty inside, and made an impulse buy. I was out the door before I realised that I wasn't supposed to be buying books any more.
The book in question was called "A Historical Atlas of the World", and features many thousands of maps of various places at various times. I'm not utterly convinced that it's well executed, but it's an idea that's always fascinated me. I won't add it to the reading list (it's a reference book, reading it throuhg would take a while), but I will probably post on it some time, because I just can't resist a good map.

Matchmaker, Matchmaker

In my usual fashion of taking credit for things I had very little or nothing to do with, I think it's probably worth mentioning that two of my friends announced their engagement last night. This would not normally be remarkable, after all it seems that half the people I know are suddenly getting married at the moment, except that it turns out that I introduced these two back in the deep dark depths of time when we were all back in university. Truly, I had no idea that introducing pancake girl and the blob would lead to marriage, but I can't help feeling more than a little bit proud.
So here's to you, blob, and to you, pancake girl, and to an exciting future.
My ego stirs me to point out that my record is pretty good so far, and that I have my little bottle of sulphur and some woodchips ready, and that all you single friends of mine are more than welcome to turn up to my place for my weekly dinners. You never can tell, and at least you'll be fed.