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.

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.

Read: The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya

You have until 10AM ACST to post your answers for the current quiz, and a new one will be along tomorrow, if all goes according to plan.

Let's get this off our chests right away. I don't understand Japan at all. This is a bit of a problem for my street cred, and around AVCon circles I'm beginning to be vaguely known as 'the odd one who doesn't like anime'. For a guy who tries to be involved in helping to run an anime convention it's a serious black mark, so I do my best to expand my horizons. The latest opportunity came when Jimmy (of the infrequent updates) lent me the first in what is apparently regarded as quite a good series of Light Novels (a light novel is a novella, as I understand it, but not all pretentious like novellas normally are), Nagaru Tanigawa's The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiha, on a sadistic whim.


I actually enjoyed reading this a lot more than any manga or anime that I've read or watched respectively for quite some time. It's easier to understand something that's put down in words (and in a superior translation, I must add) than it is to try to get a bunch of seemingly unconnected images that would apparently transfer instant understanding to a Japanese or sufficeient advanced otaku audience, and the style is pretty fun, for what I guess would be categorised as a Young Adult novel here.

Kyon, the (ok, one of the) hapless victim(s) of the title character, is the first person narrator with a friendly, rambly tone and a very enjoyable habit of phrasing his narration as if it's part of the current conversation. Every now and then the other characters will respond to what he "thought", which is a clever little technique which adds I nice little element of brain-bending to an already complicated plot, what with the pocket universes, time-travel, and reality-editing killers and all. And I have a more-than-sneaking suspicion that things are likely to get considerably more complicated in the following books (of which I hear there are at least ten).

The story follows the formation of the SOS Brigade, a school club in the mysterious style of Japanese school clubs that I can't begin to understand, whose purpose is to serve the whims of the domineering title character and generally look for crazy people. This process is made easier by most of the crazy people being members of the club. I don't really want to go any further in case I spoil the whole thing, but there is the potential for some crazy, crazy junk later in the series, which I am interested in reading out of a sense of cat-killing curiosity if Jimmy is up for me ragging on his favourite reading matter yet again.

Page 123:

[Is one of a few picture pages of the book. This one features a schoolgirl in the traditional ludicrously short skirt, with a dreamy look on her face, and a knife! Oh no...]

...which brings me along to the reason that I generally don't like the anime/manga genres in general, they're just creepy. This book, for example, features a character whose main purpose is to be sexually harrassed, and though the narrator is a decent enough bloke and keeps pointing out that this is perhaps not all that appropriate, it doesn't stop him from staring at and fantising about such scenes.

Now you might be tempted to say "but isn't the narrator a teenaged boy? Isn't that just good characterisation?", but to me the awkwardness about it just makes it worse. It seems to reinforce the all-too-common idea that somehow guys can't help but be pervents, and that this sort of thing is acceptable, because a human being with feelings just can't help themselves sometimes. I don't know about you guys out there on the internet, but I've never thought that sort of thing was funny, and scenes like this and the gratuitous fanservice that's so common in these forms just detracts from the experience for me.

Maybe the authors know their demographic, maybe I'm just the odd one out here (sales figures and con attendance would seem to support this view, not just for anime and manga but across young adult fiction in general), but it seems to me that it just cheapens the art-form, and cheapens those of us that read it, too. How do we expect people reading this sort of stuff to grow into functioning human beings, or more important, to graduate to reading big boy's books?

Well, that got a bit more serious than I intended. That's two days in a row I've finished writing the post and felt all preachy. Maybe I need a holiday or something.

Since I was supposed to be reviewing a book, and feel like I haven't done it justice, let me just say that the energy and enthusiasm for pure silliness that you find in Japanese media is a wonderful thing that we could do with more of in our Western literature, and this book is a pretty good example of what we're missing, despite some of my gripes.

If you were hoping for a review of the Buru Quartet's This Earth of Mankind, I'm afraid it will have to wait until I get my hands on another copy, because the one that I was reading has gone home to its owner.

Reading List Progress:

Number of Books read: 5
Australian quotient: 1.045
Fantasy quotient: 2
Science Fiction quotient: 2 (this can count as SF, because it mentions aliens)
Biography quotient: 1
Next Up: William Gibson, Neuromancer (By popular demand)

Tie of the Week

At my work, Friday is casual day, but the rest of the time I abide by the unofficial but strongly encouraged part of the company dress-code that suggests that a gentleman should wear a necktie at all times. Sadly, me wearing a necktie doesn't make me look any more professional, it just makes me look like I'm a goof wearing a necktie.

Thankfully, though, somewhere along the way I discovered that I liked wearing neckties, and have amassed a somewhat larger-than-required selection. They have thus become a regular gift for birthdays and Christmasses and the like, which only serves to amplify the problem.


This most recent birthday, I received the little gem of a necktie above (pictured here with my purple Thursday shirt on the basis that I get the most comments on my ties when they are paired with my purple Thursday shirt. You can't really see it all that well due to the erratic photography style that I practice, but it portrays Tintin, investigative reporter extraordinaire, expressing his mild suprise at the rather novel experience of being shot at with arrows. He is one bad-ass dude.

It is my new favourite tie, and so I wore it every day this week. I plan to do the same with all the other ties in my collection, good, bad and oh-so-ugly, in the coming year or so, therefore lauching yet another of the vain and pointless exercises that are becoming a staple of the leaflocker. So:

Tie Number:001
Designation: Oh Tintin, my Tintin
Provenance: Birthday present 2011
Manufacture: Citime, Italy
No. of Comments: 12 (New personal best)
Most Favourable Comment: "Ooh, I love Tintin, let me lend you my boxed set!" (I sense another little project coming on)
Least Favourable Comment: "That tie clashes that horrible shirt of yours. Doesn't your mother dress you properly in the morning?"
Observations: Most people don't find this tie as funny as I do. Weird.

Tune in next week for another, less interesting, tie-related post.

The Latest Quiz

Yes, it's Wednesday here in beautiful downtown Adelaide, and Wednesday means quizzes. But unfortunately this week's quiz is not quite ready due to me somehow managing to lose all the files. Thus it will be delayed by as much as twelve hours, while I get home from work and start again.
While you're waiting, though, here's an example of the sort of thing that we'll be dealing with. The quiz is a series of strings of flags, like a virtual parade-route, and each string of flags represents a historical progression of events, with the top flag being the oldest in the string, and the bottom flag being the most recent in the string.

Let me remind you at this point that there is a code of honour amongst gentlemen which precludes the use of references and collaboration of any kind when participating in high-stakes competitions such as Leaflocker quizzes. Let us match wits, you and I.

STRING 0: (considerably harder than the quiz itself)
What does this string of flags represent?


If you're still looking for something to do, everyone in Monday's post, as well as James, whose bidding weaknesses I have not been made aware of, has made their first steps in the August Blagofest, so there's plenty of new stuff out here on the internet.

Counting Things

37: Number of minutes spent on commute to work
1 : Number of sharp objects encountered in carpark
13: Number of staples currently holding together trousers