I am internet

An example of how I Am Internet:

Today I ordered some rechargeable batteries from a website and the ordering made me remember that I had ordered before. I went to my email and searched for the business name and got five results; one was an 'order dispatched' notice which I opened. It had a item tracking number which I copied and pasted into the parcel tracking website and was shown that I had indeed picked up the parcel on 13 September - I thought this was when I flew back to the UK. I again searched my email for the name of the airline I flew with and found my old itinerary, which confirmed I flew later that day; so I picked up the parcel (or my wife did) on the way to the airport and we forgot that it was still in the car.

This all worked so easily and smoothly; so much detail was reconstructed from my patchy recolection. The computers are remembering for me. Part of me is the information I can access, and I am more functional because of the computer support.

I am not sure whether to love this or distrust it.

"Farmer's Best"

Oooh this one really gets me. A company is making something shit and they want to package it so people don't realise that it's not exactly what they'd hope for. The product has some fatal flaw; the car will rust, the hairdryer is noisy, the thing is just plastic not metal. In order to disguise this critical fact, the marketeers just come up with a name which is the exact opposite of the problem. So the rusty car is called something like "enduro", the noisy hairdryer is called something like "silencio", the crap bit of weak plastic is called "girder". It's just a big bare-faced lie.

The biggest, rudest, boldest bare-faced lie at the moment is Dairy Farmers "Farmer's Best (TM)", er, drink. If you live in Australia you've seen it; it has a green label, it has healthy ticks on the front, and it's high in Omega-3. It's like, the top product, probably organic, right? It certainly looks like that - the other products have stereotypical blue labels; Farmer's Best (TM) has a deep green one. Friends of ours, when asked to bring some organic milk for our toddler, bought us Farmers Best (TM). It's the one at eye-level in the supermarket, so you know it's being heavily pushed by Dairy Farmers. It's soaking up that desire amongst consumers for the best milk we can get... but it's not milk as we know it.

If you look at the Dairy Farmers' website you can read all about Farmers Best (TM). Except, of course, the ingredients. Luckily I have a second bottle, lovingly bought in good intention by another visitor. Before I tell you the indgredients, let's first look at the ingredients of Dairy Farmers standard milk:

• Milk
  

Now let's look at the ingredients in Farmers Best (TM):

• Skim milk
• Concentrated skim milk
• Monounsaturated vegetable oil (may contain traces of soybean oil)
  
• Maltodextrin (derived from corn)
• Emulsifier (471)
• Vegetable gums (401, 412)
• Mineral salt (339)
• Long chain omega 3 fatty acids (derived from fish)
• Antioxidants (301, 306 (derived from soy))
• Flavour.

Now there's too many issues in there to even talk about all of them here. To me, this appears to be a "processed" food, and processed foods are processed because it's cheaper. Milk is relatively pricey, certainly compared to vegetable oils, soy products, maltodextrin and the fat scraped off the machines at the fish finger factory. And I'm guessing that the antioxidants aren't put in there because of the wonders of natural antioxidants in super foods such as blueberries and green tea, but because antioxidants are actually... preservatives. But antioxidants sounds better, eh? And to sum it all up, they stick in some flavour. Because this isn't the 'best' milk Dairy Farmers can produce for you to drink. The is the cheapest, bulked-up, longest-lasting mixture of industrial food products they could conjur up and still con people to pick it up off the shelves, thinking it's the good stuff, because it's green, it has three ticks on the front and OMEGA 3 in big letters. It's not even 'milk' by Dairy Farmers' own definition. And if you look at the label, actually, it doesn't even claim to be. But they know you'll fill in that blank for them, erroneously. It's a big, bare-faced deception.

The companies and individuals that provide food for us to eat have a moral obligation to be honest with us. They should not package up one thing in a deliberate attempt to make us assume it's a different, better, sort of thing. It's easy to confuse and mislead people; it takes a better person to avoid the gains that this trickery can bring. And in this case Dairy Farmers show that they are not that sort of person.

Baby Stupid

The clearest example of commoditization of something which shouldn’t be is the ‘Baby Einstein’ phenomena. It goes something like this:

1. Instead of playing typical baby style music, it is discovered that playing Mozart to a baby increases their intelligence in the long term
   
2. Some company makes baby-style music based on Mozart melodies. All of the beauty and complexity of the music is lost, it is cheap to produce, and people buy it in the millions.
3. Millions of babies are played moronic music branded ‘Baby Einstein’. Millions of families do not listen to Mozart concertos, symphonies, operas etc.

If you haven’t already heard it, this ‘Baby Mozart’ sounds crap. I wouldn’t be surprised if prolonged exposure at an early stage of development made the child profoundly stupid. I don’t know classical music well and I’m not being a snob; I’m just telling you that ‘Baby Einstein’ music is cheaply produced ringtone lift muzak. It is not the same music that was used in the experiments that made babies more clever, and it will not have the same effect.

If you do know some nice Mozart recordings (you know, played by an orchestra) then I’d love to hear any recommendations.

That's the end of my rant about the Baby Einstein Mozart music phenomena. On a more positive note, our little one has now learned to point and we are spending a lot of time trying to tell him what he is pointing at (often: nothing). But it's quite fun that he's now a bit more interactive, if you know what I mean. It won't be long before we can start amazing and confusing him.

Should I love Macro?

So we all know why we should hate Nestle and their evil agenda (www.babymilkaction.org/pages/boycott.html) and Johnson & Johnson make some pretty pernicious products (have you ever checked out their ingredients? Babies beware!) and don’t get me started on Coca Cola and Cadburys and what they are doing in the developing world. But it’s really easy for me to hate big brands like these because I am in the educated middle class. In fact it’s great to hate these companies – I get to feel both intellectually and morally superior about my clever insights into nasty big brands that promote unhealthy over-priced heavily branded aspirational ‘food’, with very little sacrifice on my behalf. I can live without fizzy pop and heavily scented body lotion.

But really, who am I kidding? I am just another marketing category, only mine costs a whole lot more and makes me feel more exclusive. If you wanna be in my club you have to eat really heavy brown bread at four times the price of normal bread, eat mostly organic, healthy, weighty stuff and everything must be pure, pure, pure. Same marketing practice, I’ve just been sold a different story.

A friend (hi Matt) recently had a rant of his own. He hates Macro (an organic supermarket in Australia). He hates the way, as he sees it, that a couple of businessmen are capitalising / exploiting / commoditising the organic movement and charging astronomical prices in order to make a fast buck. And he’s probably right. But the way I see it, at the very least, Macro is helping to promote food that is more environmentally sustainable, better for our bodies and our planet and my son loves the apple and cinnamon purees. So it’s commercialisation, which I don’t normally like, but the cause is honorable or at least just a little bit better than the other options.

Time is fleeting

So much to do, so little time. Here's what I have to fit in to a normal day:

• 0.5 hours in a morning playing with my son
• 0.5hrs getting ready for work
  
• 1.5hrs travel to and from work
• 8.0hrs hours work (inc lunch)
• 0.5hrs cooking
• 0.5hrs eating dinner
• 0.5hrs housework (as if I do that)

... which adds up to 12 hours. With 8 hours sleep (which I don't get), I should have a whole 4 hours lying about waiting for my own personal use. Yet I never seem to have time for anything.

I suppose another hour or two goes to glorious family time, if I get home early enough. Or maybe I have to shop for basics on the way home. And I probably spend 2 hours lying down watching a DVD (we have no broadcast TV, just DVDs) or playing a stupid computer game, or once in a blue moon reading a book. With the odd gap I have then filled my day I suppose. And my week. And my year. And my life.

All the other things get crammed into weekends - maybe some odd jobs, hell, even a little leisure. But really I should be doing something else, something that isn't paid work, that isn't resting to recover from paid work, something positive, creative, satisfying. Maybe it's why people do sports - it's shown to relieve stress and ease depression, and I know from when I used to have a gym membership that exercise makes you feel good. But I'm not the type; the sporty people I met when I was younger have put me off being sporty - this was in England, where sport is a punishment. Hopefully being Australian will provide a different attitude for my son.

So I want to do something more creative with my spare time, so that my son does. I don't want him seeing a worker bee who buzzes out in a morning only to flop down exhausted when he returns. Work is not life, at least my office work isn't. I need to demonstrate that you must find time to pursue other interests. All I remember of my parents was 1) gardening (boring) and 2) a weekend sailing hobby which obliterated all other spare time. It was too monochrome.

So I will change myself for my son's sake. I will fit in some more exercise so he stays active. I will make use of an hour here and there for something that brings soulful rewards.

He's such a positive influence on me.

Welcome to our first blog

Well hello there. It's a new year and we've decided to start a blog - there's quite a few apparently, so ours can't hurt.

Who is "we"? We are a man, a woman and a baby boy living in Sydney, Australia. Our blog will be our first attempt to share our thoughts about life and the world around us. It's a good time to start a blog because parenthood can change your perspective on things - indeed it can be one of the reasons for having a child. Perhaps you can get bored of preening, partying and enjoying all that this privileged modern life can offer. You become a parent, and things look different, things have different reasons and you are aware of different effects. And of course parenthood itself can throw up a few blog-worthy events.

So welcome to our blog. Let's see what happens.