Men and goats; women and shoes

At Canberra Airport last night I gave into temptation and bought Jon Ronson's book, "The Men Who Stare at Goats", a story:

"about what happened when a small group of men - highly placed within the United States military, the government, and the intelligence services - began believing in very strange things".

Strange things like the power of the human mind to telepathically kill goats and bend spoons; pyschic healing; "remote viewing"; and what the military could learn from the new age movement (only slightly more than the rest of us). Ronson's deadpan style and respectful recording of people who have an orthogonal relationship to reality is funny, but importantly allows his subjects to air the most outlandish ideas and tell the most outrageous stories and have them all-too faithfully captured. It also covers some of the less risible forms of military sillyness, such as MK-ULTRA and the use of drugs in interrogation in The War Against Terror (aka TWAT) as well other surreal torture techniques. Mostly hilarious but all head-shakingly disturbing.

Last Thursday night I went to the International Women's Day Dinner with a few people from work (I hadn't posted earlier, I'm sorry). Had fun, looked like this...


... waiting for the tram to take me home. It was also a celebrity roast/"this is your life"/celebration of the career of the former Police Commissioner, who later joined the police band to sing "I am woman".

Next day at work it was reported that one of my colleagues (not a large man) was seen drinking wine from the shoe of a female co-worker. Ever since hearing that I've had Tom Lehrer's "Wiener Schnitzel Waltz" going through my head...

"I drank champagne from your shoe, lala-la,
I was drunk by the time I was through, lala-la,
For I didn't know when I raised that cup,
It had taken two bottles to fill the thing up..."

I realise these two stories have no common thread, but they do make for a great title....