How I failed to celebrate my 38th birthday

This year, on Australia Day, I celebrated my 38th birthday. Well, I say “celebrated”, but it was a miserable effort. I emailed a few friends two days before to see if they wanted to do anything, only to discover that 90% of them were out of town, either because of the long weekend, or because they wanted to get out of hanging out with me.

In the end, I went to the beach with a few friends, most of whom were planning to be there anyway, and some other friends dropped by my place because they were in the area. I went out to dinner with my family, too, because they’re easier to pin down.

It was a perfectly lovely series of occasions, and if I hadn’t set my expectations absurdly high because it happened to be the day upon which I entered the world back in 1977, I would have viewed the entire proceedings as entirely satisfactory.

But because it was my birthday, I felt a little flat. I even felt a bit unpopular, a not unfamiliar sensation from my younger life but one I hoped I’d banished when I started hanging out with equally nerdy people.

Now, that’s silly, I know that. I’m adequately popular by any proper measure, like the number of one’s Facebook friends who took thirty seconds out of their day to say hello after the site reminded them to do so.

But then I got to wondering. Was the fault not my friends’ refusal to keep their schedules free just in case I bothered to organise anything, or indeed my poor organisational skills? Did the fault lie in the very notion of birthdays? Is there just too much pressure placed on our own personal New Year's Eves?

When you’re a kid, adding another year to the meagre tally of your age is cause for celebration. I was delighted when I transitioned from 6 to 7, for instance, and was able to feel more like the grownup I so desperately wanted to be. Later birthdays came with rights, like when I became a teenager and gained the right to have the sex I wasn’t having, or when I turned 18 and gained the right to smoke the cigarettes I’ve never tried, or when I turned 21 and gained the right to ask my parents to pay for a party. Good times.

But now, each extra year added onto the total simply reminds me that I’ve got fewer left up my sleeve. I’m hoping Joe Hockey’s right about us living to 150, but on the currentfigures, I’ve only a little over half my life left. And why would I celebrate a reminder of my own looming mortality?

The thing about birthdays is that they’re one of the very few occasions for being the centre of attention which our society condones. If it’s your birthday, you’re well within your rights to ask your friends to join you for a fancy dinner, or in a swanky bar, and some of them will even buy you drinks. If it isn’t your birthday, though, they’ll wonder why on earth you haven’t left them alone – or if you’re really so desperate to see them, at least offered to cook.

Besides birthdays, we make an effort for other people’s weddings, engagement parties, book launches, farewell parties, baby showers, and that’s about it until their funerals. Otherwise, once we hit your late thirties, we just keep comfortably to ourselves, occasionally arranging to catch up but certainly not pulling all the stops out.

So, since I abjectly failed to organise a half-decent birthday event, I’m going to have to wait 11 months before I can try again. And then I’ll be 39, and that’s a silly age for a celebration – so I’ll have to wait until my 40th.

As ever, at least according to some members of the federal government, the Queen offers a better way. Her birthday is April 21, but we always celebrate Official Birthdays on the second Monday in June – except in WA, quaintly. And indeed, every Commonwealth realm chooses a time of its own to celebrate – well, it’s not really Elizabeth’s birthday, so I don’t know – perhaps just her very existence?

Why, then, can we commoners not emulate our gracious monarch and designate certain days as Official Birthdays, upon which we prevail on our friends to attend a function in our honour?

As someone whose birthday often coincides with a summer long weekend, I may choose to have some date in winter as my Official Birthday. Not only will that ensure maximum attendance, and therefore presents, but given how sparse the social calendar is at that time of year, some of my guests may even be glad to join me. Furthermore, by dissociating the date of my celebration from my actual birthday, I will be able to process the trauma of my freshly-augmented age in blissful solitude.

An even better solution than Official Birthdays would be for everyone to be allowed to hold self-indulgent celebrations for themselves whenever they please, without the social stigma. But very few people I know have the social cachet to pull this off. This undoubtedly works for hip hop stars and members of the Dubai royal family, but I know very few people who are able to lure their friends into dropping everything for some kind of P. Diddy style White Party. More's the pity.

So in future, I’m going to forget birthdays and try and hold regular, small gatherings of friends throughout the year. Now that I think about it, the last time I cajoled everyone into coming to a big birthday party, I barely managed to speak to most of them for more than a minute or two. And my actual birthday can instead be devoted to the endless debate about Invasion Day. Which it already is, unless somebody, I don’t know, knights the Queen’s husband or something.

So once we hit 21, let’s stop celebrating our birthdays. We should need no pretext to entertain our friends, and even if we’re looking for one, the date of our arrival becomes less worthy of celebration with the passing of each year.

That said, I would like to officially notify all my friends who forgot my birthday this year to give me a shout out on Facebook before Friday, or I’ll delete you.

A good knight?

Yesterday, our Prime Minister pondered the relative merits of 22 million Australians, and decided that two men were worthy of our nation's top honour - a widely respected military leader, and that Greek-Danish fellow who is married to the Queen.

In so doing, Tony Abbott ensured that the nation spent this year's Australia Day discussing the merits of a nonagenarian who lives on the other side of the planet, instead of the person we would all have been discussing otherwise, Taylor Swift. Still, at least Rosie Batty got one evening atop our news headlines.

The decision has been met with a little criticism from the graffitists on social media, but in some respects, Prince Philip is a perfect choice. All of the other recipients since knighthoods and damehoods were reinstated have been vice-regal and/or members of the military. Philip is not only ex-military, but he's so downright regal that he lives in Buckingham Palace.

Despite the ongoing gnashing of republican teeth, we are a constitutional monarchy, and the latest Knight of the Order of Australia is a key part of that, having ensured its continuity into the 21st century by fathering four children, a healthy 75 per cent of whom are not currently embroiled in an underage sex scandal.

But despite the pomp, nothing could be more democratic than Mr Abbott's latest "captain's call", so-called because everything makes more sense with a cricket analogy, except when you recall that Australia's cricket captains don't in fact pick the team.

Australians were given a choice whether to dispose of our royal family in 1999, and overwhelmingly voted to retain it. Not only that, but we recently elected the former national executive director of Australians for a Constitutional Monarchy as Prime Minister - and with a majority as whopping as any of Her Majesty's estates.

Admittedly, Mr Abbott chose not to share his plans to reintroduce knighthoods and damehoods with voters during the campaign, presumably realising that it might have created some little distraction from his highly successful mantras about taxes and boats.

But our system is that our government gets to do whatever it likes, subject only to the Senate and the courts, before the public gets to review its contract. And besides, if we had been asked whether there was any chance of a man whose favourite TV show is widely known to be Downton Abbey opting to reintroduce an ancient heraldic tradition, who among us would definitely have ruled it out?

And even if we had, given recent governments' attitudes to election promises, what would have stopped him deciding to do it anyway?

Prime Ministerships ultimately reflect their occupants. Bob Hawke smashed a beer while wearing the world's most garish jacket and suggested that everyone chuck a sickie the day after Australia II won. Whereas Mr Abbott gave the Duke of Edinburgh a knighthood. Different men, different priorities. But we knew what they were into when we elected them.

Since we have chosen to be a constitutional monarchy with a monarchist leader, surely giving a knighthood to the Queen's husband is an utterly unremarkable thing to do? He's been our monarch's consort for 62 years - more than half of our existence as a nation. He is already a Companion of the Order of Australia, our previous top honour, and his son Charles is already a Knight of the Order of Australia. The Queen's rellos accumulate knighthoods the same way that Clive Palmer accumulates replica dinosaurs.

If Mr Abbott had wanted to do something truly unexpected, he could have emulated some of the residents of the island of Tanna in Vanuatu, and announced that henceforth, we'd be worshipping Prince Philip as a god. But a constitutional monarchy giving a knighthood to a man who already has three is about as surprising as American Sniper playing to big houses in Texas.

Despite the relatively small proportion of his 62 years beside our monarch which he's spent here, there's something deeply Australian about Prince Philip. Some have pointed to his history of what many have called gaffes and others might call especially robust examples of free speech in action.

But what could be more Australian than the odd moment of awkwardness when it comes to race relations? The Prince/Duke/Knight might not have entirely figured out what to say when he meets Aborigines, but our nation still hasn't figured out how to deal with the day on which his knighthood was granted also being a day of mourning for many of Australia's original inhabitants. And controversial gaffes are as enduring a part of Australian public life as Fred Nile.

When Tony Abbott reinstated knights and dames, he said that "this new award will go to those who have accepted public office rather than sought it". Well, surely nobody has sought their office less than someone who was born a prince.

Some great news about dealing with hair loss

Good news, fellas! (And also for the ladies that love us, amirite?!) Those unsightly chrome domes are a thing of the past! And it’s not just a sportsman paid by a laser-peddling company that’s saying so, but a dermatology professor at a proper hospital.

An even more credible source than Warnie has emerged to help blokes who notice that their hair is receding. Or that their bare scalp is expanding, if they want to be glass-half-full about it.

An article published by Fairfax this week reassures us gentlemen that there’s no need to worry about baldness any more. "The take-home message for boys staring at their bald fathers' scalp and wondering what their genes have in store for them,” says Professor Rodney Sinclair, is "don't panic, but don't leave it too late."

Apparently there are two effective pharmaceutical treatments which can not only arrest hair loss, but promote hair regrowth. Finasteride is a tablet that is taken daily, while minoxidyl is a lotion which you apply to your scalp.

Hair loss is undoubtedly unpleasant, and can be quite debilitating. It can make men feel unattractive, and indeed, less masculine – ironically, since it’s caused by testosterone, but nevertheless, it’s unpleasant. And now, if you’re willing to take tablets and rub chemicals into your scalp, it need not be a problem.

I have only one minor quibble with the good professor’s article. As effective as these two drugs apparently are – albeit despite some side effects which we’ll get to later – I have come up with an even more effective regime to deal with hair loss. I am in a position to absolutely guarantee it, because it’s the one that, after considerable research, I adopted myself.  

When you start losing hair, you could adopt a daily two-drug regime designed to stop this scourge from depriving you of your hard working follicles. Or, get this – you could decide not to care.

That’s right! Rather than feeding yourself chemicals and rubbing them into your scalp morning and night, you can simply shrug, adopt an ironic grin, and make some comment about it all being the price you’re willing to pay for being a seething morass of studly-as-all-heck testosterone.

Now, I’m not trying to downplay the psychological impact of hair loss. It sucks, it really does. When I realised at about the age of thirty that I was going to be prematurely bald, it threw me bigtime. The irony of my body supplying an unwelcome surfeit of hair in lots of places where I didn’t want it, and then at the same time denying me the very same substance on my scalp, struck me as cruel indeed.

A helpful doctor suggested I try minoxidyl, which I duly did (it’s available from pharmacies without prescription). I worked my way through a large bottle, rubbing it into my head, day and night. I’m not in a position to say whether it worked or not, since I didn’t use it for long enough. And that’s because when I imagined shelling out for this fairly pricey stuff for the rest of my life, and having to use it twice a day, I ended up deciding – screw it.

Screw it, even though I’d have to take extra precautions against sunburn – I went and bought heaps of hats.

Screw it, even though most bald men on the big screen are evil (thanks for the blow to my self-esteem, Dr Evil).

And screw it, even though I worried that it might reduce my attractiveness and self-confidence even beyond the considerable limitations that already seemed to be in place.

Screw it, I decided, because there was something about the sheer vanity involved in carefully applying chemical fertiliser to my head that really didn’t appeal. I decided that anybody who wanted to be with me would have to overlook my lack of hair, just as they’d have to overlook a multitude of other things.

So instead of buying more minoxidyl, I went and bought myself a pair of clippers and accepted my doom. And it’s one of the best decisions I've ever made.

It seemed like an even better decision when I read the article by the good professor, because there was something about minoxidyl that I hadn’t quite realised. See, it doesn’t just promote hair growth on your scalp. It promotes it everywhere.

Professor Sinclair fairly blithely solves this problem as follows: "Hair removal laser has led to a renaissance in the use of minoxidil tablets, as doctors can now effectively manage the unwanted hair that was previously a deal breaker."

Yeah, wait just a moment, Prof. So my alternatives are that the annoying hair everywhere grows even more aggressively, or that I have to have laser treatment? How many thousands of dollars would it cost to get everything lasered, exactly?

And even if I had shelled out for this, I wouldn’t feel like myself anymore. I’ve had an abundance of body hair since my somewhat early puberty. It’s a part of who I am. And while I’ve suffered the mockery of many people because of it – the comments in my yearbook were a tad depressing, since they revealed that 90% of my single-sex school classmates could only think of a comment about that, instead of, say, my engaging wit or fabulous personality – I find the idea of no hair utterly unthinkable. So thanks, but no thanks, Prof.

Seriously, lasering everywhere? What kind of solution is that?

Then there’s finasteride. I trust drug companies – after all, their asthma drugs help me breathe – but I don’t trust them so completely that I want to take one of their products for decades for purely cosmetic reasons.

And remember how I said that balding made some men feel less masculine? Well, it turns out that finasteride has been linked with several kinds of sexual dysfunction, as Professor Sinclair acknowledges. There’s a detailed US NIH review of this here, and I won’t try to summarise it except to say that even the small percentage chance of an impact is, in my view, too high when, as the report says, "male pattern hair loss is only a cosmetic condition”.

Furthermore, the NIH says "It is better to avoid the drug for any patient who has prior history of oligospermia [and] infertility, particularly if he is newly married and is trying to raise a family.” Yeah, thanks, but no thanks.

Oh, and I forgot to mention the professor’s third option: hair transplants. I have, if anything, an abundance of follicles which show every inclination to keep growing lustrous hairs, but if I may give a considered opinion on a medically sensitive matter, eew. I especially can’t be bothered with this option. Again, it just seems expensive and vain.

I don’t want to downplay the psychological impact of balding. I’ve been there. I’ve looked in the mirror and felt rotten. I’ve been shocked when a screen in a lift showed the view from the security camera above, and I realised just how bare the top of my scalp had become. It’s far from fun, and if there was an instant way to snap my fingers and get all my hair back, I’d be more glad than I can say.

But surely it’s smarter to try and treat those feelings than the condition? (And, by the way, may I congratulate the Fairfax web team on a brilliantly insensitive bit of clip art to accompany the article? That pic of a despairing bald guy is just the thing balding guys’ self-esteem needs!) Shouldn’t we try to promote acceptance of our bodies the way they are? And will taking these treatments even make these feelings go away, if we’re constantly living in fear that the drugs will stop working?

We all have to come to terms with ageing. Balding is highly noticeable, but it’s nevertheless just one part of the ageing process. Even if I had a full head of hair, the sad truth is that most of it would be grey, anyway – and no, I definitely wouldn’t bother dying it. either.

So instead, I’ve decided to make my follicular hero a guy whose hypermasculinity simply cannot be challenged, and who hasn’t a single hair on his head – Vin Diesel. (His character in the Fast and Furious movies is called Dom, too.) Mess with bald dudes, and you’re messin’ with Vin. (Take note, Fairfax photo editors).

Vin doesn't give a damn about your minoxidyl or your finasteride, Professor. He’s too busy pumping iron, driving awesome cars and charmin’ tha ladies.

Okay, so there are very few Vin Diesels in Hollywood, admittedly – but Bruce Willis looks pretty great bald too. That’ll do me for role models.

So guys, the drugs are there if you want them, and it’s good to know that they work. But there are so many things to worry about in life, why worry about your scalp? Maybe spend the time and money you were going to spend on all of that medication in the gym, like Vin does, and I bet you’ll be too busy feeling awesome to give the state of your scalp a moment’s thought.

Are we all Charlie, really?

The team that produced Charlie Hebdo were exceptionally irreverent, frequently hilarious, and relentless in their attacks on France's most powerful institutions. But most of all, they were brave.

When Denmark's Jyllands-Posten published cartoons mocking the Prophet Muhammad which were met with a wave of violence, Charlie not only republished them, but added its own. And when their Paris office was firebombed in 2011, presumably in response to their special "Charia Hebdo" edition, their response was to depict a Muslim man kissing a male cartoonist with the caption "Love is stronger than hate". They employed bodyguards, but their humour remained as unguarded as ever.

It takes courage to publish a joke that risks making people angry, and perhaps even try to hurt you. I know this because I've discovered that at times, I lack it. The Chaser newspaper published a few controversial front covers, and I still remember the feeling of dread after our more provocative editions went to print.

But to respond to the firebombing of your offices by doubling down with more of the material that had provoked it takes bravery that I suspect very few could muster. Very few of us have our principles truly tested – but when Charlie's editor Stéphane Charbonnier said he'd rather die standing than live on his knees, he knew it was far from a hypothetical scenario.

The response to the murder of 12 people in Paris has been moving – a candlelit outpouring of shock that will no doubt remind Sydneysiders of the recent floral tribute in Martin Place. In both cases, ordinary citizens have taken to the streets to say that this must not be so, that we will cannot tolerate violence in our midst.

It's a feeling succinctly expressed by the words "Je suis Charlie" ("I am Charlie"), which spread across the world on Thursday, online, on placards and everywhere. It's a way of saying that this is an attack on all of us, and that we all feel outraged by what has happened.

The moral calculus of cartoonists versus men with Kalashnikovs is easy to compute. Of course, what happened was absolutely wrong, and reprehensible, and must be condemned. But as we do so, we should question our own reactions to the humour that we dislike. The fearless free speech to which Charlie Hebdo's cartoonists were so resolutely committed is not always so easy to defend.

In recent years, the game of 'stacks-on-a-comedian' is a favourite of those who seek to foster controversies online and on air. The likes of Chris Rock, Joan Rivers and David Letterman have all received death threats, and even someone as universally adored as Magda Szubanski experienced widespread vitriol after making a quip about cyclists on The Project.

I've experienced a little of this, too. A Sydney shock jock once asked his listeners to call in and supply The Chaser team's home addresses for broadcast, presumably not so his listeners could hand-deliver flowers. Another prominent Sydney identity invited us to come and tussle with his motorcycle gang, if we thought we were so brave. (We didn't, since we didn't.)

I've looked at Charlie's more outrageous anti-Islam cartoons, and I don't know that I would have been in favour of publishing some of them – not because they were too outrageous, but because I find them crude rather than funny. But we who say "Je suis Charlie" must defend the right to make those kinds of jokes even when we dislike them. Too often nowadays, people react to questionable material not with the indifference it might well deserve, but with fury.

An audience's recourse should be limited to not laughing, or switching off, or perhaps even walking out. If comedians and cartoonists keep producing jokes that don't make enough people laugh, they won't be in the industry for long. And as any comic will tell you, few things can hurt a joke writer more than a stony response. Sadly, as we saw this week, violence is one of the things that can.

If we are all Charlie today, then we should remember Charlie when humour inspires anger and outrage tomorrow. No matter how much we might dislike a joke, it's never acceptable to answer one with threats, or harassment, or violence. Charlie Hebdo's editors were so brave that they persevered, because to do otherwise in the face of intimidation was utterly unacceptable to them. It should be unacceptable to all of us.

2014: The Christmas Cracker jokes

Every year, I sit down to Christmas lunch in the hope that along with the turkey and pudding, I'm about to enjoy a delicious comedy feast when my family pulls apart this year's crackers and reads out the jokes contained therein.

Every year, sadly, they're the same old jokes. And I do mean literally the same old jokes. I swear that every Christmas since I was a kid, we’ve had the following, usually multiple times around the table:

What did one wall say to the other wall?
I'll meet you at the corner!

(I'm going to include exclamation marks after each joke as a form of 'boom-tish'.)

What do you get if you cross a kangaroo and a sheep?
A woolly jumper!

What's yellow and dangerous?
Shark-infested custard!

(I'm not sure whether the latter technically qualifies as a joke, but I am sure it'll be hidden in a gaudy cardboard tube at our family lunch today.)

So, in a bid to make all our Christmases come at once, I've come up with some brand new jokes for you to read out at Christmas lunch.

The list is full of punchlines that are little more than tenuous puns. But I didn't create the Christmas cracker genre, and it's beyond my power to change it. I can guarantee you, though, that at least these jokes are slightly fresher than that shark-infested custard.

What did one Obeid say to the other Obeid?
"Subpoena tough year!"

Why does the Catholic Church disapprove of the Coalition?
Because there are two female Bishops, and the Abbott has a wife!

What's the only card game that hasn't been banned in North Korea?
Kim Jong Uno!

Why does Schapelle Corby feel rich even though she wasn't paid for her TV interview?
Because she still has a Mercedes!

What's Luis Suarez' favourite food?
Chewna!

What's the one time when you use a bucket before you're ill?
When you're doing the Ice Bucket Challenge!

What do Blake Garvey’s marriage proposals and his real estate contracts have in common?
There's a cooling-off period!

Why couldn't the Australian boy band tour Siberia?
Because they don't get five seconds of summer!

According to the ICJ, what was the only scientific thing about Japan's scientific whaling programme?
The name!

What do you get if you combine APEC with the G20?
A novelty shirtfront!

What is Tony Abbott's favourite night of the year?
The knight he just recommended for the Order of Australia!

What's the difference between Oscar night and the next Australian election night?
On Oscar night, everybody's pro-Shorten!

How is the metadata retention bill like an envelope?
It’s intended to go through without anybody looking inside!

What did one bigot say to the other bigot?
I can't tell you, because section 18C of the Racial Discrimination Act remains in effect!

What’s Vladimir Putin’s favourite Justin Timberlake song?
Crimea River!

Why would a politician repeatedly suggest that women's main concern is the household budget?
Force of Abbott!

According to the Opposition's latest asylum-seeker policy, when is it acceptable to conduct turnbacks?
When you're Labor!

What was the biggest security threat at Russia's Winter Olympics?
Russia!

What's the difference between John Howard and Clive Palmer?
One's always out walking, and the other's always walking out!

Which vehicle needs pyjamas to travel anywhere?
A Bob Carr!

What protects against the sun and rain, but is useless against China?
An umbrella!

What do Barack Obama and Frances Abbott have in common?
They didn't have to pay to attend the Whitehouse!

How did Craig Thomson feel after his latest court appearance?
Fine!

Which white flower is native to Australia but pretends not to be?
The Iggy Azalea!

What’s the worst thing about being James Packer’s friend during the holiday season?
When he invites you to his place for Christmas punch!

A bromance is born: When Tony met Stephen

This week, the Sydney Morning Herald claimed that Tony Abbott is conducting a ‘bromance’ with his Canadian counterpart, Stephen Harper. It’s not the first time the Herald has used that term to describe their relationship, such is the depth of brotherly bonhomie between Australia’s PM and the leader from the land of the maple leaf. Evidently our PM has a depth of affection for his colleagues that he only usually reserves for his wife, his daughters, and dawn triathlons.

The unusual camaraderie between the two leaders extended to hangsies when Harper was here for the G20, and Abbott has gone so far as to praise Harper as “an exemplar of centre-right leadership”. Given the polls, and the recent phenomenon of even Andrew Bolt and Karl Stefanovic taking a swing at him, Tony Abbott must be relieved that somebody in public life besides Peta Credlin really seems to like him.

Bloomberg went even further in its depiction of the Abbott-Harper bond, depicting the two leaders inside a pink love-heart. This probably wouldn’t have thrilled our PM, who has previously admitted to feeling “threatened” by homosexuality. But it’s rather sweet to think of the two of them putting aside the customary formality of international diplomacy and developing a genuine friendship.

I wonder what they get up to when they’re together. Do they take turns watching rugby union and ice hockey? Do they watch tough guy movies with Jason Statham in them, and trade boasts about how they’re definitely going to shirtfront Vladimir Putin? Or perhaps they go for long bike rides together, during which Tony delights in lapping Stephen multiple times?

It can be hard for Prime Ministers to have buddies. The somewhat unexpected friendship between Kevin Rudd and Rhys Muldoon produced not only a children’s book with the distinctive title of Jasper and Abby and the Great Australia Day Kerfuffle, but a poignant moment when Muldoon rushed to Rudd’s side on the evening when he lost the Labor leadership. In his hour of need, when Rudd seemed almost friendless as his colleagues abandoned him for Julia Gillard, his bro came through.

Bloomberg’s pink love-hearts notwithstanding, the idea of a ‘bromance’ is entirely platonic, of course. I suspect term arose used partly via pun value, but most of its humour arises from the awkward way in which men tend to make friends. As much as we talk about mateship as a defining Australian value, warm public affirmations of friendship are still rare among men.

Unlike many women I know, most Australian men would hesitate to share a double bed with a male platonic friend, for instance, and wouldn’t dream of holding down the street holding hands the way women sometimes do. Even when men hug one another, we have to call them ‘man-hugs’ and deliver them with a sense of irony because of our reluctance to express too much affection. And unlike Taylor Swift and Lorde, we don’t tell everybody about our BFFs.

Some might suspect that men’s inhibition about expressing the same kind of affection that we readily show to our kids, parents and partners springs from some fear of people suspecting that we’re gay. Perhaps there’s something in that – or indeed, perhaps there was once, and the reluctance to express our affection towards other men has remained even despite our increasing tolerance when it comes to sexuality.

We men weren’t always like this, of course. In primary school, I remember having an Official Best Friend. His name was Luis, and we’d play Battle of the Planets at little lunch, and sleep over at each other’s houses – playing Ghostbusters on his Commodore 64 was a particular favourite of mine.

Even in my (all-male) high school, guys had specific best friends, and everyone knew who they were. One of my close friends even maintained a league table, and kindly informed me when I went up and down his friendship list.

In adulthood, I’ve retained many of my old, male friends from school and uni – but it’s much harder to make new ones than it used to be. I meet some dude, often in a work context, and I think oh, it’d be cool to hang out with them, maybe grab a beer sometime. Maybe we do it once or twice, but it’s rare that we make the effort to stay in touch.

I suspect that’s because for some reason, it feels weird to be too enthusiastic about a new friendship. It’s as though once you hit your mid-twenties, you have to start being nonchalant about everybody. It seems a pity. I certainly don’t go around saying that people I’m fond of are “exemplars” of anything, which might well mean that when it comes to bromance, Tony Abbott is far less repressed than I am.

In recent weeks, another close male friendship besides our Prime Minister’s has been in the news, and for the most tragic of reasons. The cricketer Phillip Hughes’ friendship with Michael Clarke transcended even the usual close bonds that are forged on the sporting field. Clarke refers to Hughes as his “little brother”, and his eulogy for the fallen batsman last week was one of the most emotionally affecting things I’ve heard in a long time.

While I was listening, I had to pull over because of the tears in my eyes. And now that our cricket captain, that bastion of Aussie male masculinity, has displayed such extraordinary love for his comrade, alongside that extraordinary outpouring of affection from across the cricket world, perhaps other men will become more comfortable with displays of affection in our everyday lives too.

Men don’t generally tell other men that they love them, but we should, far more often. And if we examine the warmth and affection that our Prime Minister evidently bears for another, perhaps all of us men might find the inspiration to get back out there and embark on a few fresh, exciting new bromances of our own.

20 things I learned from the G20

1) It's short. Like, Tom-Cruise-without-platforms short. For quite a few leaders, their flying time would have exceeded their time in Australia, even including the time spent sleeping. I wasn't expecting it this huge meeting of the world's most powerful leaders to last about as long as a Lord of the Rings director's cut marathon.

2) It takes place right after APEC. What this means is not only that the multiple leaders who are part of both groupings can travel in a sweet VIP jet convoy, but it means that what happens at the first can totally overshadow the second. Like, oh, I dunno, if the US and China announced a completely unexpected carbon reduction deal that got the world talking about climate change ahead of a meeting whose host wasn't exactly keen to have the topic on his agenda.

3) "Brisvegas" is officially a thing now. Oh, it's been a nickname for years, of course. But now it's received the imprimatur of the leader of the free world, who mentioned it during his warmup gags at UQ. I'm hoping the next step is for the world's top bars to start serving the Brizgarita, a cocktail invented by the novelist Nick Earls that involves mixing tequila with the 1980s' second-most popular powdery substance, Staminade.

4) We invited the Kiwis, and all they could do is gloat. NZ PM John Key boasted about how his team beat the Kangaroos in the final of the Four Nations rugby league competition. Pal, your country ain't even in the G20, so if you want to keep getting courtesy invitations to the big kids'' table, you might want to keep your country's undoubted superiority in both forms of rugby to yourself, capisce?

5) Tony Abbott really wants that $7 GP co-payment to pass. Like, real bad. So much so that he mentioned it to eighteen fellow world leaders whose interest in the minutiae of Australian health policy presumably fell somewhere on the spectrum between polite indifference and open boredom. And then there's Barack Obama who would have loved to introduce something very much like the single-payer Australian system, except that he couldn't get the numbers. He, at least, knew exactly how Abbott felt.

6) If you want to deliver a stern rebuke in international diplomacy, use a junior minister. That's why we sent Assistant Defence Minister Stuart Robert to greet Vladimir Putin. However, this may backfire if the junior minister you send is a cool dude who can advise on the latest awesome bar and happening nightclubs, where to score weed without violating your diplomatic immunity, that kind of dealio. I'm not aware of whether Assistant Minister Robert is party to those kind of rad deets about Brisbane. All I know is that Putin claimed to be more tired than everyone else yesterday, and I leave it up to you to decide whether it was due to him doing jelly shots with Stewie til 3am.

7) "Shirtfronting" means different things to different people. The debate over the word's definition, which varies according to one's football code of choice, has at last been resolved. Some thought Tony Abbott meant the term in the AFL sense of "cannoning into", others the rugby version of grabbing the front of an opponent's jersey. We now know that what it ultimately meant was "present with an adorable koala".

8) Some non-Australians like Vegemite! One of President Obama's Secret Service agents bought a jar, apparently. Which would be great news for the Australian economy were Vegemite not already owned by an American company. Then again, perhaps the Secret Service use it to grease their sniper rifles? I've always thought it tastes like it'd be good for that.

9) There are other G20esque satellite groups. No shortage of groups attempt to jump on one of the world's foremost bandwagons. Have you heard of the B20 (business) Y20 (youth) or L20 (labour)? Probably you haven't. Then there's the T20, which is a bunch of academics who presumably don't realise that their acronym means cricket to just about everyone else, and my favourite, the Q20 – a group of prominent Queenslanders. Because of course no event is so globalised that Queenslanders can't make it about being Queenslanders.

10) Queenslanders can make anything about beer, as well. Imagine – Russia's president is about to visit your city amid geopolitical tensions resulting from his annexation of parts of Ukraine? What would a Queenslander do? Make a banner saying "Brewski?". I like the other one in the photo too, which says "We welcome our Russian overlords". Ah, they're a funny bunch o' bananas.

11) When the President enters a room, nobody sits. That's what they say in The West Wing, anyway. Unless it's he's in Australia, when our press, bless them, don't stand even while their American counterparts do. Which might seem a tad disrespectful, but I reckon there is something pretty great about the way we treat our leaders as equals. They do work for us, after all.

12) Vladimir Putin sleeps. So, he is human, kinda! Well, at least, his need to sleep is the reason he nominated for leaving early. Oh, and he has work to do. All of which sounded a lot like the presidential version of claiming a dog eating his homework after he was shunned by most of his fellow leaders over Ukraine. Still, he is very busy – those pesky neighbouring territories don't annexe themselves.

13) There's an international grouping called BRICS. It's a club for developing economic powerhouses: Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa. Or perhaps the name signifies that they get together to play Lego. After which Putin grabs everyone else's bricks.

14) Flag-burning is still a thing. There were protests from indigenous activists, who targeted their own community's representatives as well as the national government, they made their point, and then we have had the usual suggestions that flag-burning be made illegal. Given the extensive reporting of the protests, it remains an extremely potent way of getting attention.

15) Like rappers and Freemasons, world leaders adore silly handshakes. International relations are often underhanded at the best of times, so why not make a photo-op out of it?

16) This must have been one of the worst weekends of Kevin Rudd's life. He was a big part of starting the G20 leaders' meetings, and if he had won last year's election, he would have been welcoming the world's most powerful leaders to his home town, and unleashing an unprecedented number of high-level selfies on Instagram. So it's no wonder he was in the Middle East, at an entirely different meeting about international relations. He said he was keeping "an eye" on the meeting, too; and probably that eye was glaring.

17) Clearly nowhere is safe from kalemania. It was the first thing we served them at the welcome BBQ. I haven't read any reports on how many world leaders actually finished their portions of the "superfood", though.

18) There were novelty burgers. And based on these photos, the Bad Vlad Burger looked a lot tastier than the Big Obama one. Although it's on a Russian news website, so you can trust it about as much as you can trust that dodgy pic of the Ukrainian fighter...

19) Many Brisbane residents figured that the best way to enjoy the G20 coming to town was to avoid it. The locals got an extra public holiday, and made sure to use it – some even went to Bali.

20) The really important decisions are agreed on in advance. The G20's final communiqué cited 800 new measures that the member countries endorsed in the interests of, they claim, boosting global growth by 20%. Presumably that took up a grand total of zero seconds of their precious discussion time. So, why even meet in person when the details of the deal were sorted out in advance? Well, koalas don't cuddle themselves!

How to dodge your way through uni without actually cheating

I was shocked by the report on Wednesday that there’s a thriving business selling university essays. There have always been rumours about this kind of thing happening, so I guess I’d always assumed that some students outsourced help. But the semi-industrial scale of the operation was surprising, to say the least. MyMaster apparently raked in $160,000 last year, which is more than many university teachers make.

Was I the only person who thought the prices seemed competitive, too? After all, a 3000-word bachelor-level essay is only $585. The way university fees are going, it would cost you less to pay someone else to do the degree for you than it would to enrol in the first place.

The other thing about MyMaster that I find truly extraordinary is that they charged different amounts for different grades. We all know that essay marking is somewhat arbitrary – how on earth can they guarantee, say, a credit? I certainly didn’t know how to do that back in my undergraduate days.

The timing of these revelations was also somewhat ironic, at least from my own perspective. As someone who graduated from one of the targeted universities only last Friday, I was disappointed to learn, too late, that I could have just paid someone else to write my thesis. So easy! So unethical, yes; but so easy!

But you don’t need to hire MyMaster to get through university. Instead of paying some dodgy operation to defraud your institution, why not use these tips to scrape through, absolutely free of charge?

Please note that I do not guarantee a distinction, or even a pass.

For the purposes of these examples, I’m imagining that you’re trying to write an essay on the subject of whether or not Australia is made of cheese. For the purposes of your own academic career, I should clarify that as far as I know, it is not.

Use the readings

Almost all university courses come with a helpful selection of readings. In case it’s not obvious, you are expected to, um, read them. That’s why Arts is considered full-time despite having something like a dozen contact hours.

Now I have to confess that I often didn't quite manage this simple and entirely reasonable request, so I would flick through them in class and find a few choice passages about which to volunteer comments when the time came. The same approach works for essays. You need a few cheese-related quotations, and if you don't entirely read the article to get a broad cheese sense, who's going to know?

Well, the lecturer, if the article's author goes on to disprove the earlier contention – but that's not hugely common. And since the alternative is handing the essay in late or failing or paying MyMaster, this is probably your least worst option.

Use the readings’ bibliographies

Each of the supplied articles will contain references to more articles about the proportion of Australia that’s made up of cheese. Flick through those and find a few more gems to quote, or solid points to adopt (and reference). It'll impress the marker more than you deserve. Even if they pick you as a faker, it’ll be a superior class of fakery, and that should deserve some kind of grudging respect. After all, they were undergraduates once too.

Use Google Scholar to find new articles

When I was an undergraduate, going and finding fresh viewpoints on the subject matter required real effort – in my case, a last-minute trip to the library, and hunting through various journals, or on the shelves in the same Dewey Decimal category as the set texts. But now we have full-text searching of academic articles, it’s so easy to do this that you’d be a fool not to.

Google Scholar is great for finding citations, and then your own uni should have journal subscriptions that let you download PDFs or full-text. Honestly, students these days don't know their own techno luck. Why, in my day we had to use photocopiers!

Agree with your lecturer

Lecturers love nothing more than the sound of their own voices, regurgitated back at themselves on the page. You shouldn’t cravenly agree with the exact argument your lecturer ran – after all, university is all about displaying evidence of independent thought. So instead, quibble with one incredibly minor detail. For instance:

While Australia is certainly made of cheese, not enough consideration has been given to the proportion of cheese that makes up the geological record of comparable countries. The extent of Australia’s cheesy exceptionalism certainly warrants further study.

Of course, you can disagree with your lecturer’s point of view – you absolutely have that right, and if you can prove a contrary argument, you will highly likely deserve a high distinction; although you’ll probably be marked down to a distinction by your sulky marker. But disproving the lecturer’s thesis takes a great deal of effort and original research, and if you are the kind of person who does that, there’s absolutely no point you reading this article.

Refer to your lecturer’s own publications

Unless you’re doing a PhD, only one person is going to read your essay, so flatter them by showing that you’ve read their stuff, or at least flicked through it to find a few choice quotes. Just make sure you do it in the third person, so it’s not completely transparent. For instance if your lecturer is Dr Smith, you might write:

Smith conclusively argues, in what has become a highly influential piece in the literature, that the geological evidence ultimately proves that Australia is largely made of cheese. Or, as she puts it, with characteristic rhetorical flair, “Australia is not so much the Lucky Country as the Lactose Country”.

Write without doing any research at all

Why be flummoxed by a stack of academic references when time is limited? If you hand in a decent essay with zero research, you’ll probably get a pass, at least. You presumably have at least some interest in cheese, if you’re studying it. Perhaps even a few opinions.

It can be quite liberating setting out on an essay without the encumbrance of what other people think. And you might well have time afterwards to go back in and retrospectively insert a few quotes and reference that support your point of view.

The problem

Now, there's an obvious flaw in all my suggestions. Did you pick it? If so, congratulations, you get a free diploma, which you may Photoshop and print out yourself.

The issue is that doing all of the above requires a certain level of English language ability. You need to be able to quickly skim through academic writing and churn out at least some version of written English.

MyMaster sounds like it is catering  to some who do not have these skills. If so, then ultimately we must surely blame the universities. If they are admitting students without even bothering to check their English ability – for which a simple Skype interview would suffice, with speaking and typing components – then they are devaluing the prestige of their own degrees. And that's offensive to those who work very hard to get them, and even to people like me who follow the dodgy approach I've outlined above.

Perfectly innocent reasons why four Russian warships are heading to Australia

So, four Russian warships are heading in our direction, and pronto.  At first that may seem bad news of the “potential invasion by former superpower that’s held onto most of its weapons” variety.

But relax! There are plenty of potential reasons why the Russian Navy vessels might wants to head to Australia for a bit. I’m sure it’s one of the reasons below. Maybe several, who knows?

They did a muffin run. Russia has a bit of a PR problem at the moment, and nothing says “sorry, we goofed” like a basket of delicious muffins. They could deliver them to the G20 leaders, saying – "hey international community, we’re sorry about all the shenanigans in Ukraine – here, have a freshly-baked blueberry muffin!"

They’re just plain lost. After all, in recent years Russia has lost the Cold War, most of its former regional possessions, the respect of the international community and countless Eurovision Song Contests. Maybe this is just more of the same?

They’re huge Jessica Watson fans, and while they know it’s a while since her legendary circumnavigation, they’re hoping against the odds for a glimpse of Ella’s Pink Lady. Maybe she'll even sign their Kremlin orders?

They’re delivering a Russian Warshipogram. Nothing says 'happy birthday' like a surprise visit from four Russian warships. After you’ve been on the receiving end of one, you’ll never settle for a boring old Gorillagram again!

They heard Australia has the best gelato in the world. And who knows, maybe Cow and Moon is putting on a special borscht flavour for them?

They want to go on a Sydney harbour cruise. They’ve probably heard enticing tales of decadent all-you-can-drink packages and dancefloors where it’s still 1983 (or 2013 in Russian fashion terms). Or perhaps they’ve read glossy marketing brochures that somehow neglect to mention the main activity conducted on harbour cruises: projectile vomiting off the side of the boat.

They want to get within TV reception range to catch Family Feud. Grant Denyer is regrettably geoblocked in the Russian Federation, and they probably can't wait to find out to know what a random survey of terrible people think is a good job for a woman.

They’re rushing to check out the Great Barrier Reef while they still can. What with the damage caused by pollution, rising sea levels, the crown of thorns starfish, and tinnies thrown overboard by aquatic bogans, it’s a race against time.

They want to try Harry’s Café De Wheels when they berth at Garden Island. You can’t get a proper Tiger in Moscow – they serve them with mushy cabbage instead of mushy peas. In fact, in Russia they serve every meal with mushy cabbage.

They’re going to help Vladimir Putin make a dramatic exit from the the G20. The former KGB Agent and current supervillain plans to run into the ocean at Surfers’ Paradise, wearing a suit all the while. He'll use an improvised windsurfer made from discarded Paddle Pop sticks to head offshore, where a miniature submarine will meet him and convey him back to the nearby Russian flotilla.

They want to help Sea Shepherd protect whales in the Southern Ocean. About as likely as Japan conceding that its scientific whaling programme is only researching how delicious whale sashimi tastes, again and again, but it’s a possibility.

Their rudders are broken, and they know that the Australian Navy offers a free service that turns boats around. The ships were originally in Indonesia for an exhibition, and our navy is no longer entering those waters uninvited, so they’ll just have to keep heading south before we can set them on their way north and home.

Russia is bloody cold this time of year. In fact, the more I think about it, the more likely it seems that this is the actual reason. Somebody’s probably doing these sailors a favour by letting them pissfart around in the Southern Hemisphere during the coldest month before they head back to their bleak home base in the windswept port of Freezingrad.

Redfoo? Literally I can't.

I hadn't heard of Redfoo before he was announced, with great fanfare, as a judge on a reality show I don't watch.

Since he became a permanent fixture on tv and in our gossip columns, I've been unable to overcome my bafflement at his choice of moniker. Red for the hair, okay, sure - and he certainly seems proud of that unkempt mop, doesn't he, the scamp? But "foo"? Indefensible.

Is he purporting to be some kind of associate Foo Fighter, as yet unrecognised by the undisputed leader of the Foo Army, Brigadier Dave Grohl? Is it a shout-out to the appalling 90s hip hop crew Fu Schnickens, who collaborated with Shaquille O'Neill to record a rap song whose chorus "What's up doc, can we rock?" mandates the answer - no, you can't, please just Fu off.

Or is he using Mr T's preferred contraction for "fool", a species of people that T famously pities? In that case, I guess it makes sense. If the "foo" fits...
At the time he was appointed to the X Factor judgeship, I applauded the decision to give a prestigious job on prime time television to a minority group. Sure, he's yet another white man from a privileged background - but he's a redhead, and there aren't as many of them on Australian TV as there used to be, what with Kerry O'Brien only on our screens once a week, and Julia Gillard even less.

But despite being a member of a group that's frequently discriminated against with vile terms like "ginga" or "bloodnut", Redfoo has placed himself firmly on the side of the oppressor in his new song.

I don’t want to overanalyse lyrics that Redfoo probably scrawled on a first-class airline coaster in five minutes, but ‘Literally I can't’ is appalling. And I don't just mean musically or grammatically. The constant objectification and silencing is obnoxious in the extreme, and the video's characterisation of its target as dumb, spoiled college girls is not only sexist, but lazy. Mocking straw-woman bimbos is about as original as, hmm, releasing a song with the refrain “Party rocking in the house tonight”.

I mean, the guy is 39. Why's he even pretending to talk to college girls half his age? That's utterly creepy. You’re about to turn forty, Redfoo. Enough with the endless going on about partying, before you seem like pop music’s answer to Silvio Berlusconi.

The only useful advice Redfoo can offer the much younger women he’s addressing in this disgrace of a song is to steer clear of guys, well, like Redfoo. Whereas when tools like 'Foo tell them to shut up, they should listen to Ms Swift instead, and shay-shay-shake it off. Like I imagine Redfoo shakes his enormous mane to get rid of the inevitable lice.

After all this is a guy who reckons his celebrity status makes it fine to slap random women's posteriors on the dance floor. Seriously, who would do that? How does him being "Redfoo, with the big-ass 'fro" make assaulting a stranger okay? If anything, people slapped by Redfoo should get exemplary damages for enduring such a humiliating ordeal. If he tried it on me, I’d be telling him to Lawyer His F***ing Ass Up.

Why didn’t he realise that there would be huge backlash? Well, the answer to that’s fairly obvious - but why did nobody at the record company raise a Redfoo flag?

Or perhaps Redfoo knows his song is sexist twaddle straight from the Blurred Lines Institute of Mi$ogyny. Perhaps that's why he's so defensive about it on Twitter, where his response was “I love & respect women and feel they are the most powerful people on this planet!” he wrote. Which displays blissful ignorance of the patriarchy he’s perpetrating - but regardless, if so, why release a song that’s an instructional manual for disempowerment?

“(This is) another example of critics victimizing an artist by purposely misinterpreting his/her work to support a pre-existing agenda,” he went on to say. Mate, your rhymes aren’t exactly TS Eliot. There aren’t that many different interpretations that can be given to lyrics which find several different ways to say “shut up because I’m interested in your body, not what you have to say”.

Although Redfoo is very interested in what his critics have to say, apparently. The Herald-Sun apologised to Redfoo for a lyric which the “musician” claims is “I said jump on the poll, I don’t need your opinion”, and this in a verse that already mentions pogo sticks. But it doesn’t matter what he claims the lyric sheet says, it’s an obvious double entendre (and one that Are You Being Served? would have rejected, for that matter). And how exactly is it possible to jump on a series of survey questions designed to determine political affiliation, anyway?

Enough of this twit. We have plenty of our own homegrown sexist fools without needing to import extra ones from America. Why do we need Redfoo when we have, for instance, Family Feud survey designers? Just call one Redfeud, give him attention-seeking glasses and we're good to go.

And why would we want Redfoo on the X-Factor in a role where he gives career advice to aspiring musicians when he's made it abundantly clear that the only people he wants to hear from are those who have the XY Factor?

How to write a novel in one month

It’s often said that everyone has a novel in them, but it’s probably more accurate to say that everyone fondly imagines that they do. I’ve certainly lost count of how many times I’ve had conversations with people where they talk about how they totally want to write one, and outline some of their plans – and, in the back of their minds, are clearly already walking onto the podium to accept the Booker.

But then their ambition peters out into the same five words we always use to defer non-urgent, hard-seeming things: “If only I had time”.

I used to be one of those people who would bang on and on about wanting to write a novel, but never managed it. I used to be certain that if only I could pause my oh-so-kerazee life to open the spigot of my creativity, sheer genius would flow onto the page, and plaudits would inevitably follow. It was in the same category as my much-cherished plans to become incredibly fit, learn Thai cooking, enter Tropfest, make a credible indie record and learn jazz piano, none of which I have managed thus far.

What’s always particularly daunted me about the idea of writing a novel is the word count. The average novel is around 70-80,000 words, and while I’ve known people who managed to churn out even more than that for a PhD (around 100,000 words, as a rule), it took them at least three years of backbreaking toil and a significant portion of their sanity to do so. I’m comfortable writing pieces of around 1000 words, like this one – but seventy of them, back to back, in a way that makes sense? That seemed ridiculously hard.

I sat down to start a novel just over a decade ago, but about 10,000 words in, it got confusing and hard and I got busy. The superficial problem was that I couldn’t figure out how to make the plot make sense, but the real problem was that I just wasn’t putting in the work.

And it’s an awful lot of work, I now know, because I ultimately found a way to trick myself into writing one. I enrolled in a creative writing masters’ degree, and my sheer pride, along with the money I’d invested in course fees wouldn’t let me drop out – so, by the end, I had the draft of a novel.

I found a way to overcome my tendency never to finish anything, and I’m still enormously proud of the novel I produced – writing that many words, which I’ve now done a few times, is undoubtedly the hardest thing I’ve ever had to accomplish.

But while I ended up paying quite a lot of money to a university so they’d impose deadlines on me – a system which worked brilliantly for me – there’s another, free way to force yourself to do something that you might not have considered possible.

I was astonished a few years ago when I discovered a community of people who gather each November to write – get this – a novel in a month. And they didn’t even choose a long month – November contains a mere thirty days, which means you have to write 1667 words a day to get there.

Yes, that’s right – sixteen. Hundred. Words. A. Day. It’s kind of like Tough Mudder with wordprocessors and without electric shocks. A seriously hardcore, almost cult-like way of accomplishing a goal.

And yet people manage to write the 50,000 words, and they’ve been managing it since 1999, when a guy called Chris Baty and 21 pals in San Francisco did it, dubbing the month of their labours National Novel Writing Month  or NaNoWriMo for short. Last year, more than 300,000 people signed up.

Ah, but how many finished, you may wonder? 14%. So, not all that many, but still – that’s 42,221 people. The number that really amazes me is that 3.5 billion words were written which, but for NaNoWriMo, probably would never have seen the light of day.

The best thing about the crazy-brave NaNoWriMo approach is that it makes the solitary drudgery of writing a novel a task that can be shared with others. NaNoWriMo participants gather the world over – including across Australia – for “write in” sessions, where they encourage one another to churn out words. There’s a system of rewards, which you unlock by pasting in the text of your novel (sure, you could cheat by pasting in something like this  but why would you?), and if you finish, you get a little virtual trophy. 

Even if you don’t want to meet up with other writers, you can tell other people you’re doing it in the hope they’ll keep you honest. Which is why I’m telling you that this November, I’ve decided to join them. And I reckon if you’ve always thought you wanted to write a novel, you should, too.

There’s a map of worldwide word counts for November 2013, and I can see from it that some Australians managed to finish their fifty thousand words. So, it’s been done before, even though it’s a beautifully warm month here in Australia – the opposite of the horrible weather in San Francisco that led them to choose this time of year for NaNoWriMo. I hope to be among them, and hope as many people as possible will join me.

You probably have lots of objections at this point – here are a few I thought of, and how you can overcome them.

But I don’t have the time!

Nobody has the time. Nobody. I know people who’ve taken leave to write novels, and ended up faffing about on a full-time basis. There is never a good time to write a huge number of words, so you may as well do it now. Starting tomorrow, on the first of November.

But I don’t know how!

This is the true beauty of NaNoWriMo, I reckon. There isn’t time to mull – you need to be typing continuously. Some novelists painstakingly plan their masterpieces, but if you’re going to do it in a month, there isn’t much time to plan. You just have to come up with a vague idea, and bash it out.

My first novel evolved from a 1000 word rant by a guy who hated playing terrible music at terrible 21st birthday parties, and I somehow got 70,000 words out of that. Once November’s finished, you can edit – but until then, don’t even think about it, just keep writing.

If you’ve read a novel, ever, you probably have a decent idea how they work. You need a protagonist (whether it’s a first-person story from their perspective, or just a main character), a situation and a challenge which somehow threatens their situation. Then you explain how they overcome, or fail to overcome, the challenge.

Yeah, I know narrative structure is more complex than that – but it’s a good way to start your thinking. If you want to know more about how to structure a novel, here’s a simple guide, and here are four common kinds of plot.

But I don’t have Word!

Well, that’s no problem, as it’s far from ideal for writing a long document. What you need is Scrivener. It works on Mac and PC and has a 30-day free trial, perfect for NaNoWriMo. Also, it’s cheap. Here’s an article I wrote about why it’s the best novel-writing software there is.

But I don’t think I can do it!

Yeah, you can. But even if you don’t get to 50,000 words, you’ll still have made a start, and that’s the main thing. 

But I honestly don’t know how I’ll find the time!

Everyone has to find their own way to make themselves write, but here’s how I do it: I go to a place that serves coffee. I don’t much like buckling down and working, but I do like coffee – so I’ll take my laptop to a place that offers it but not free WiFi (essential, lest you be distracted – and don’t kid yourself that checking Facebook is “research”), and type while the caffeine is bouncing around in my brain. And the idea is not to stop until I’ve hit the limit.

I seriously doubt my ability to do that for thirty consecutive days, but I won’t find out until I give it a shot. Starting tomorrow.

But… but… but...

There are some people in life who react to an impossible-seeming challenge with abundant common-sense reasons why it’s a bad idea, and there are others who rush on in with gusto. I’m usually the former, but this November, I’m going to try to be the latter.

Will you join me? At the very least, you might begin writing a novel about someone who wants to write a novel in a month, but keeps getting distracted. It’s a sad ending, admittedly, but if we bust our guts for a month, we might just be able to come up with some happy ones.

A few thoughts on Comrade Whitlam

Gough and Margaret Whitlam, by Timeshift 9 (Creative Commons)

Among the many fine tributes to E. Gough Whitlam delivered in Parliament today, on the day of his death, the Member for Watson in Whitlam’s beloved Western Sydney, Tony Burke, mentioned one thing that brought back a fond memory for me.

Burke said that in Labor circles, it had long been considered a very great honour to be the tall, younger man on whom Whitlam leant for assistance as he left one of the countless Party functions he attended.

I once served as a human walking stick for the former Prime Minister, and I also felt honoured to been able to offer this giant of Australian public life some brief assistance. Not at a Labor Party function, though; but a rather more conservative occasion – an alumni dinner for the Sydney University Law School.

After studying there, Whitlam went on to become a QC and to make laws; I went on to a career of occasionally getting arrested and making jokes about political figures. A few of my Chaser colleagues and I were on stage making jokes that night. I felt somewhat intimidated by such an august audience, but I’m sure we managed a few gags at Whitlam’s expense, as we did some of the others luminaries who attended, including Malcolm Turnbull.

At the end of the night, I found myself sitting at the same table as the Whitlams. Throughout the evening, I’d observed an endless succession of guests walking up to Gough and paying their respects. Each one expressed their affection with great emotion, and each one received Whitlam’s undivided attention as they did so. And each separate, no doubt extremely similar conversation nevertheless seemed to give him enormous pleasure.

I got the sense that his life had been like this for many decades since he’d left politics; that everywhere he went, he was praised for the legacy of his three short years as Prime Minister. In those years, I imagine, his reforms had planted countless seeds whose fruition decades later gave him great delight.

After all, the areas of his government’s most significant reforms, like health and education, are emotive ones for voters. Doors to educational opportunity being opened and hefty bills being waived are not the kind of things one soon forgets.

Of course, some will point out that the extent of his government’s largesse in these matters was part of the economic legacy that was been questioned ever since 1975. But regardless of one’s view of the policies, what could be more understandable than the profound gratitude of those who benefited from them?

That night, I had just managed to have a brief conversation with Whitlam himself – I’m not sure what about – when his wife Margaret decided that it was time to return home. She tried several times to get his attention from across the large round table where she was sitting, at some distance for some reason – perhaps to avoid the constant stream of Gough acolytes.

He didn’t notice her entreaties for several minutes, due either to the state of his hearing or his great enjoyment of the tributes being paid; probably both. It was relatively early in the evening, but I got the sense Gough could have gone on all night discussing the things he’d done thirty years earlier.

After her entreaties were ignored for several minutes, Margaret decided to take direct action, and picked up a bread roll. She tossed it at her husband from two or three metres away, and, ever the athlete, scored a direct hit. Her countenance had been quite grumpy while she was trying to attract Gough’s attention, but upon making contact, her face broke into a grin.

Somewhat reluctantly, Whitlam acknowledged that it was time to go, and asked for my assistance, as the nearest hefty gentleman. I was only too happy to oblige, and he leaned on me as we left the room and slowly moved towards his waiting car.

I had no idea what to say to a former Prime Minister who was propping his still-considerable stature on my shoulder, and so resorted to paying the same manner of tribute that others had been offering all evening. I told him that my father had always maintained that but for the Whitlam government, his life would have been profoundly different.

Dad was 19 when Whitlam was first elected in 1972, and on the verge of the Vietnam draft. Furthermore, having avoided conscription, he was able to attend medical school, now that it had been made free. My mother, too, was hugely grateful that her teaching bond was forgiven by the government, allowing her greater flexibility in her career.

My parents married the year after Whitlam was elected, and I was born in 1977. Who knows – perhaps this would not have been the case if my father had been sent to Vietnam?

My grandfather had a rather more direct relationship with Whitlam, who appointed him Governor of the Reserve Bank in 1975 despite my grandfather not exactly being a Labor comrade. In so doing, Whitlam followed the tradition of Deputy RBA Governors taking over the top job, which was an interesting and not necessarily expected decision given his Government’s disregard for tradition in other areas of economic management.

What’s more, thanks to Whitlam’s decision to recognise China, my grandfather had the privilege of being part of the first official trade delegation to the PRC in 1973, before Whitlam himself visited as Prime Minister. I've heard a few stories about how vastly different China seemed back then.

I know far too little about the Whitlam government to pass any kind of meaningful judgement on the whole of its record: I was born two years after its unexpected termination. But its enduring social legacy speaks for itself, and its economic difficulties are still debated today. Certainly the Khemlani affair strikes me as being one of those not infrequent occasions where Australian politics defies satire.

I studied Whitlam's dismissal in that same law school that we both attended, and it was hard to avoid the view that a system where Prime Ministers and Governors-General can effectively remove one another is a problematic structure, lending itself at times of instability to a race to be first to pull the trigger. It's a great credit to the restraint of the players in our political system that there have not been more moments of instability like 1975.

What is hard to dispute is that the Whitlam government's legacy has been vastly disproportionate to its duration. John Gorton was PM for roughly the same period, dating from the era of the 1968 worldwide student riots to 1971, but I suspect very few Australians know much about his government. I just read the relevant Wikipedia entry – there’s not all that much there, even though it ran for a longer period.

It's a curious fate to have spent nearly 40 years reliving the details of the three years of your life spent as Prime Minister, and perhaps one which Julia Gillard and Kevin Rudd will also share. It's fortunate for Whitlam that he remained immensely proud of what he achieved in such a short time, and that so many others around him seemed to share that view.

I’ve noticed a few comments today saying what a pity it is that we only pay tribute to the likes of Gough Whitlam after they die. That sentiment often feels appropriate, but perhaps not for our 21st Prime Minister. What I saw that night in 2003 gave me the impression that for decades, he must have been able to bask in the same kind of adulation I saw at that dinner whenever he left the house.

Malcolm Turnbull concluded his tribute to his late constituent by paying tribute to the Whitlam marriage, and it does seem to have been a partnership of rare intimacy, mutual respect and affection of the sort to which many aspire and few achieve.

From what I saw that night at the law school, I’m very confident that whenever he got too big for his boots – which, let’s face it, may well have been often – Margaret was at hand to bring him back to earth. Occasionally with the assistance of bread rolls.

In the company of men

On Saturday night I went to my high school reunion. Which means it's been twenty years since we all endured the HSC. Twenty years of noses at the grindstone in many cases, dramatic shifts in careers for others and for others still, escaping the rat race entirely. Twenty years of relationships, marriages, children – even divorces in some cases. And we can no longer claim to be young, even if some of us still act like it.

On my way to the event, I ran through the school reunion clichés in my head. Based on Hollywood efforts like Peggy Sue Got Married, Romy and Michelle's High School Reunion and Grosse Point Blank, some people would drink too much, some would not have moved on from the glory days of high school, and others would dance cheek-to-cheek with their high school sweethearts before kissing passionately underneath the mirror ball in the high school gym and finally achieving the fulfilment they'd been craving since they were teenagers. And fade out.

Except that the last bit was pretty unlikely, at least for most of us. Because I went to a single-sex school.

So, on Saturday, I walked into a room containing eighty guys, all of whom I knew, and no women. That felt weird. Really weird. And yet, this was how school had been every day for six years.

Well, in the interests of accuracy, there was one woman in attendance last Saturday.  In other words, the gender breakdown was roughly that of the Federal Cabinet. One of my schoolmates, either via bold non-conformism or a misinterpretation of the invitation, had brought his fiancée, who nobly conducted small talk with lots of men she'd never met before.

After half an hour of wandering round in a daze, I settled back into the old male milieu. Once I did, I had a great time. So many of those old social divisions, which I’d felt so keenly in the early years of school when I was bracketed as a nerd, had melted away after twenty years. There were lots of people working in finance, law and IT, and it no longer mattered how they'd gotten there, or how cool they'd been along the way.

Let's face it, practically no guy besides Robert Downey Jr or Jay-Z can pull off being cool at 37, a fact my classmates and I went on to demonstrate by heading to a bar with a dance floor which every single one of us avoided as though, with apologies to Sophie Ellis Bextor, there had genuinely been a murder there.

All this week, though, I keep thinking about how different my life was when I went to a single-sex school. Having attended co-ed primary schools, I'd enrolled in an all-male high school with great trepidation. Girls had been of huge importance to me since my first ridiculously intense crush in Year Four, and my growing interest in women had been exceeded only by my growing shyness around them. The prospect of six years cloistered away with my own sex was a concerning prospect.

I remember my mother asking the Master of the Lower School (yes, it was that kind of institution) how we were supposed to socialise with girls. He said, with an entirely straight face, that we could meet them on the train.

To be fair, my school was full of were always tales of CityRail Lotharios from the leafy Upper North Shore. But I lived a mere two stops from school, and was horrifyingly timid. How was I going to charm one of the brown-clad students catching the train to Sydney Girls’ High in five minutes each morning day?

In short, I wasn't. The most I ever got was an occasional embarrassed hello to some far-too-cool-for-me type I'd known in primary school. And so it went for most of my schooldays.

We did the occasional drama production with girls’ schools, but due to a notorious cast party in Year Nine, the years of bigger roles for which I'd endured dozens of ignominious walk-ons happened without women on stage at all. It was only at university that I began to build a solid group of genuine female friends.

My parents and I agonised over same-sex education. Ultimately we felt the opportunities on offer were just too compelling, and I haven't yet really regretted that. My school, though, would have been so very much better if it had been co-ed. The overemphasis on sport, the victimisation of vulnerable kids, the emphasis on maths and science over humanities, the rampant homophobia – I suspect my school was better than some in most of these areas than others, but my friends and I agreed on Saturday night that it hadn't quite been good enough. I'd like to think all of these areas, and more, would have been significantly better with girls in the classrooms and playgrounds.

There are endless debates over co-education. Some say it benefits boys to the exclusion of girls. This may be so, although there are plenty of co-ed selective schools in NSW with exceptional results  But surely such concerns can be addressed by good teaching, and must be weighted up against the social impact of single-sex education, which is far deeper than just a few shy, scared teenage boys like I was.

Boys' clubs have survived in Australia to a remarkable extent. I don't mean those all-male institutions like the Savage Club that boasts Senator Brandis among its members – they, clearly, are on the wane.  I mean informal, cosy coteries of "good blokes" who drink and banter together, and are always happy to do one another a favour. I often enjoy those interactions, but they trouble me when they become a means of hoarding and exercising power.

Boys’ schools condition men to be instinctively comfortable in such environments – mine certainly did for me. Surely it's not a coincidence that a government which has drawn criticism for the lack of women in its ministry is full of men who attended the kinds of schools I did?

And while there were more women in the last government, especially its final incarnation, they were still nowhere near parity. The union movement has traditionally been just as full of boys’ clubs as their political opponents. And has the word "powerbroker" ever been attached to the name of any women from Labor’s dominant NSW Right? There's a reason why the term "faceless men" is gender-specific.

It's not just politics, of course. We still have boys' clubs throughout our workplaces, sporting and cultural institutions and religions. The attitude that led to my high school, one of Australia's earliest, being founded to train future leaders and therefore only admitting men still prevails more than it should.

But the biggest problem with limiting oneself to the company of men is that while it can be fun as a one-off for a bucks’ or reunion, ultimately all-male environments often aren’t simply as interesting. As a rule, there’s too much discussion of sport (which men often default to when they can't think of anything else to discuss) and not enough making fun of The Bachelor.

Conversations about just about every aspect of life suffer when they don’t include a female perspective, just as they do when everyone speaking is from the same cultural background. Spending time exclusively with your male friends is the social equivalent of eating only pub food – and it’s not a coincidence that the two things so often go together.

Thinking about it this week, I'd need a lot of convincing to send a child to a single-sex school. Of course it depends what's on offer, as it did for me – but single-sex education reinforces artificial, archaic divisions. It seemed pretty old fashioned when I started in 1989; it'll seem much more so by the time my hypothetical kids are in school.

And while I had a great time at my reunion, I’m sure I’d have enjoyed it even more if I’d had lots of old female schoolfriends there, too. Because life is co-ed, after all, and if our schools are preparing us for it, they should be too.

Why I’ll never be a backpacker

I visited Australia’s most famous beach the other day, and felt like I was overseas, albeit in an odd country where diamond-shaped kangaroo warning signs and keyrings of little thongs with “Bondi” painted on them seemed to be the major currency.

While maps show it as part of Sydney, the reality is that Bondi belongs to the international community. Like Khao San Rd in Bangkok and Arambol in Goa, it’s been utterly colonised by backpackers and the businesses that sell them cheap phonecards and crappy souvenirs.

Backpacker enclaves have common features the world over. There are always tatty cafés offering fry-up breakfasts accompanied by banana milkshakes and Bob Marley. There are always odd little travel shops offering cheap prices on a hand-written board that seem a total bargain unless you know how to search the internet.

And there are always shops selling t-shirts that nobody would wear except backpackers, every single one of whom will be wearing the exact same wacky one. “Same Same But Different” and the fabulously witty “iPooed” were one-time favourites, as was the Red Bull logo before it became available here and we realised it was nothing more than an odd-tasting caffeine drink.

Still, backpackers are friendly and cheerful, and it’s one of the few areas in life where people from many different countries can genuinely gather together and share their common goals and aspirations, like finding untouched surf spots and discount ganja.

In a sense, the backpacker world is a lot like the UN, if it had ended up with France, Germany, Switzerland, the Netherlands and Australia on the Security Council.

But as charming as I still find backpacker culture, there’s one aspect where I’ve realised I have to draw the line – the accommodation. As I wandered around Backpacker Central the other day, I looked up the staircases of the hostels, and it brought back unpleasant memories of sweating under a slowly-rotating fan in hostels too dimly lit to facilitate a proper inspection for stains.

The bunk beds are invariably uncomfortable, of course. Some have slats which are placed so widely apart that part of the mattress sinks between them, leaving the edge of the board to jar into the small of your back. Others have wired bases that have inevitably developed permasag. The mattresses are generally designed for children, and if they’re ever more than an inch thick, it’s because they’re swollen with a bedbug colony.

While the beds are either metaphorically or literally noxious, for me it’s the sharing that is truly uncomfortable. As a relatively self-conscious person, I didn’t much enjoy having to bunk with strangers even in my early twenties, but nowadays the idea’s unthinkable. I do love my fellow man, but I don’t love having to sleep in the same space as him (seeing as dorms are usually gender-divided), or hear him snoring.

And yes, I snore myself, and yes, that’s a bit hypocritical – but I don’t have to hear myself, do I?

And the shared bathrooms – wow. They’re permanently in a condition that’s somewhere between a terribly negligent house party and the portaloos on the final day of a music festival. Even if mud and urine aren’t caked on the floor – and they will be for several hours of each day, at least – there’ll be a constant risk of tinea. What’s more, while I concede there’s no definitive scientific evidence (yet), I’m still convinced that communal showers transmit Ebola.

Proper backpackers don’t care about any of this, though. On their travels, they’ve already survived far greater health challenges, like cholera, dystentary, those parasitic fleas that burrow into the soles of your feet and prolonged exposure to Goa trance.

Of course, what backpacker accommodation has going for it is that it’s cheap. Which is great, because it lets backpackers stick around for months at a time before going and picking more fruit up north. And I have to confess that there have been times when I’ve browsed through the Sydney rental guide and seriously considered taking up permanent residence in a hostel just to pay non-astronomical rent.

But unlike backpackers, most of us who travel are relatively time-poor and travel-budget rich. I don’t mean we have lavish budgets – I certainly don’t. I just mean that if we’re only travelling for a week rather than quasi-indefinitely, we can afford to get a place where we have at least a bed and bathroom to ourselves.

Because let’s face it, “communal” means “like a commune” which means “acceptable to hippies” and therefore means “unacceptable to everybody else”.

And that’s why when I plan a holiday nowadays, I would rather spend fewer days travelling and not have to risk a sleepless night listening to some Bulgarian dude snoring/scratching his mosquito bites/listening to phat beats on his massive but non-enclosed headphones/picking up.

But all of that said, when I looked at those Bondi backpackers sitting at outdoor cafés and pubs, blissfully carefree expressions on their faces, laughing with mates they probably just met the night before, I couldn’t help being a little jealous of those who have lives where their only responsibility is not working through their savings too quickly, or doing a spot of bar work to eke out just a few more months of travelling. Of lives spent far from mortgages and careers, with the promise of a near-endless procession of lazy days ahead.

No wonder they’re happy. Even despite their living conditions.

I never spent more than a week or two backpacking while I was the right age, and nowadays, I have responsibilities I’m not really willing or able to neglect.

But perhaps that means that I don’t understand a truth that all backpackers know as intuitively as they know the Oz Experience timetable. That when some random dorm-mate shouts out loudly in Czech at 3am during a frenzied, chemical-induced dream, what you actually hear is the sound of true freedom.

Everybody must watch ‘Justified’. Here’s why.

[embed]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0UZlz8J4iGk[/embed]

Television now has an icily contemptuous greeting to match Jerry Seinfeld’s famous “Hello, Newman”, which was always delivered with more malevolence than you’d expect from a mild-mannered, sneaker-clad comedian.

The difference is that when the words “Hello Raylan” are uttered by Boyd Crowder (they all have names like that in rural Kentucky, apparently) to the man with whom he used to mine coal back in the day, there’s every chance they’ll both draw pistols – and quite possibly use them.

Buddies who shoot one another: Boyd and Raylan

Boyd Crowder is a spiky-haired rural crook who’s at various times a passionate tent preacher, a tattooed neo-Nazi and a criminal mastermind. His nemesis, Raylan Givens, is a US Deputy Marshal with polite manners, a great deal of ruffled charm and a cowboy hat.

They’re the main characters in the TV show Justified, which I’ve been watching constantly, staying up late to catch just one more episode and then finding myself unable to sleep because my heart’s still racing. And now I want to explain why if you haven’t been watching it, you should.

The best way to explain why it’s so great is to say that it’s Elmore Leonard’s favourite adaptation of any of his books, and he would know. The late crime writer has been hailed as one of the finest American writers of the past century in any genre, and his rules for writing are legendary. In particular, he cautions against “hooptedoodle”, which sounds like advice everyone should follow, whether they’re a writer or not.

Leonard’s books are populated with a menagerie of endearing rogues, terrifyingly callous villains and lawmen (and women) who stray outside the rules to get the job done. Having made a start writing westerns, he adapted to the decline in the genre's popularity by shifting to contemporary crime, usually in Miami or Detroit but sometimes more exotic locales like Cuba and Italy.

Raylan Givens is his greatest hero, and one of the few deemed worthy of more than one literary outing (along with Karen Sisco, memorably played by Jennifer Lopez in Steven Soderbergh’s Out of Sight). And that may well be because with Raylan, Leonard succeeded in fusing his two favourite genres. The first Marshals, of course, were heroes in the old West, rounding up posses and maintaining frontier justice with their star-shaped badge and trusty six-shooters. And Raylan is their contemporary heir – not just because of the hat, which tends to amuse the more unambiguously modern characters he encounters.

But his most important gift in fighting crime is that he, like the legendary Wyatt Earp, is the quickest draw in the – well, not so much the Wild West as the even wilder South, from Miami, Florida to Lexington, Kentucky.

In Justified, we first meet Raylan at the end of the 24 hours he gives Tommy Bucks, a Miami drug dealer, to leave town. That’s a move straight out of the Earp textbook, but rather at odds with the contemporary Marshals' handbook. Raylan sits down opposite him, and Bucks draws – but the lawman is too quick, and "puts him down”.

That situation is repeated throughout the series and gives it its name - because if the bad guys (and girls, as it happens) draw first, Raylan's justified in shootin’. His skill with a weapon is almost like a superpower – he always has the edge, even though dozens of bad guys (and a few bad ladies, into the bargain) try to shoot him first.

As a result of the Bucks incident, Raylan is send to the doghouse – or more specifically, his home state of Kentucky – while the shooting is investigated. That means reconnecting with Boyd, his own equally nefarious father Arlo, and a few old flames as well.

The way I've described it, the show sounds like a Hicksville version of cops 'n robbers - and, well, it is. If you can watch a few episodes without doing dodgy impersonations of the ubiquitous Southern accents, you’re more restrained than me. But it’s a highly entertaining one, and a suspenseful one, too. We never genuinely expect Raylan to die, but other major characters can, and do. There are constant standoffs with pistols drawn, and the suspense rarely lets up.

But Elmore Leonard’s legend was not built on the frequency of his pistol-packing standoffs. It’s all about his rich, morally complex characters and their engrossing, entertaining dialogue, and that’s what's been faithfully replicated in Justified. Leonard, who called the two adaptations of his novel The Big Bounce the first- and second-worst films ever made, loved the series so much so that he wrote a fresh novel, Raylan, drawing on some of the show's new characters. The author's fresh plots were, in turn, incorporated into subsequent episodes.

Take Dewey Crowe, the hapless Crowder acolyte played by Sydneysider Damon Herriman with a spectacularly rustic accent. Every time he’s on screen, he’s hilarious, almost dying due to his own stupidity and escaping largely through dumb luck. He’s surely the most endearing and amusing neo-Nazi ever created.

And then there are the major villains, articulate and charismatic. Crowder is the most enduring of them, but perhaps the most memorable is Mags Bennett, whose small general store is the hub of a marijuana empire, and keeps the peace according to her own lights, and by dispensing moonshine which is known for its deliciousness – but can at times be lethal.

Mags Bennett, moonshine matriarch

Margo Martindale won an Emmy for the role, and it’s a testament to her performance – and the writing – that at times, you almost want her to succeed. Her character’s a throwback to an older version of the South, where you would do anything for your family but never trust the guv’mint, no sirree. She encapsulates the overall conflict in the series between the old smalltown traditions and the modern world that’s encroaching on Harlan Country.

As for the dialogue – the banter is of the highest quality, and often very witty. And the confrontations, at times, involve powerful speechmaking in front of an audience. No less than Quentin Tarantino admits that Leonard’s laid-back, minimalist approach to conversation was a huge influence on him in writing movies like Pulp Fiction, where the chats the characters have on the way to the crime are just as interesting as what they say while it’s going down.

One of the other interesting lessons from Justified is just how complicated the US justice system is. You have the Marshals, the oldest federal law-enforcement agency with no real Australian equivalent, but there’s also the FBI, DEA, ATF and so on, all wanting a piece of the action. There are also state police, local elected sherriffs, and even a constable, who somehow occupies a lower tier still. And there are federal, state and county lockups.

Ultimately, the show wouldn’t work without Raylan being, like many of Leonard’s characters, just plain cool – as is Timothy Olyphant, who deserves major awards for his performance. He doesn’t say much, but whether he has to take on a bad guy, he just says something restrained and confident like “Here’s how this is gonna go”, or “Way I see it, you got two choices”, and then he tends to win.

At times, Raylan does the wrong thing to help a friend or a loved one – and equally, at times, the criminals are kind and even upstanding, helping Raylan on occasion. Even though the Marshal always wins, the story is morally complex, and the twists along the way hard to predict.

And that’s why, even though it’s full of guns and hicks, I love Justified. It's hard not to admire Raylan's ceaseless devotion to his job, and the law. In fact, I like to think I emulate it in my ceaseless devotion to Justified, staying up late watching Justified and talking of little else but Justified. In a way, I like to think, we are both heroes.

Just doin' my job, ma'am. Just doin' my job.

Why I phear phablets

Samsung has copped a lot of criticism, and lawsuits, for the close resemblance that many of its phones and tablets bear to Apple designs.

And I’m not going to call them (or the Android operating system) blatant copies, because I’ve no interest in defending a lawsuit of my own. Besides, I generally enjoy the work of tribute bands.

But there is one innovation that Samsung can rightfully claim for its own: the phone so absurdly large that it makes you look almost as ridiculous holding it up to your ear as Maxwell Smart did with that shoe of his.


They're nicknamed ‘phablets’ either because they're halfway between phones and tablets, or because they’re phreakin’ enormous. And indeed, the new iPhone 6 Plus could just as easily be called the iPad Nano – it’s not that much smaller than the Mini.

I’ve always felt that the phablet form factor seems a bad compromise, as though a phone and a tablet had fought amongst themselves for our tech budgets, resulting in a blend of both that's somehow worse than either.

Nowadays they look downright titchy, but I remember when the first touchscreen smartphone, the iPhone 3G, seemed enormous. I upgraded to one from a BlackBerry which was already the widest phone I'd ever owned because of its keyboard. The thing was so long that you pretty much had to give it a pocket of its own - a dilemma for a gentleman such as myself who dislikes using back pockets. Between my wallet, keys and phone, two of those items were going to have to get squashed. And so it’s been ever since.

Today a guy on the bus pulled out a Galaxy Note, and in spite of myself, I was impressed by the ample screen real estate. For reading, it's clearly better than peering at a normal-sized smartphone – whether a last-generation Android phone, since they've just about all mutated into enormity in the last year – or any iPhone, since even the widescreen 5 series is as narrow as its forebears.

But then I wondered – what if Note Man got a call? Surely he would look ridiculous with a phone that's approximately the size of a skateboard plastered against his ear? His head and hands would look tiny. The other passengers would laugh at him, surely?

Well, okay – he could use a Bluetooth headset, you might suggest, and sure, he definitely could if he wanted to look even more silly than he would with a massive slab of plastic glued to his ear. Or he could use headphones with a built-in microphone, which is also true except that then he'd look like he was raving maniacally to himself, or perhaps rapping along with a Kanye track – it's not easy to tell the difference.

At the point where you aren't regularly holding it to your ear, though, surely you've given up on your phone being a phone in some profound way? Surely the device's design is making it unable to fulfil the purpose for which you originally bought it?

But then I started thinking about how I actually use my phone. And here’s the thing: it’s almost never for calls. Even if people want to reach me, they email, text or message via Facebook or Whatsapp. (Or, if the message is entirely pointless, Snapchat.) In fact, typing is probably a more important function than calling. Which starts to make a larger phone make sense.

And then I realised that what I do with my phone, above anything else, is read. Emails, tweets, news stories, blogs, even ebooks – it’s undoubtedly my primary reading device, even though the screen is so cramped. Surely for reading, a phablet would be considerably better.

I also love Instagram – the one social network that all of my family is into – and sometimes even watch videos on my phone. Because sometimes they're entirely too urgently to wait and watch on a bigger screen, like the one where Tony Abbott has been digitally inserted into The Darjeeling Limited.

In short, I use my phone constantly, and for almost all of the ways I use it, a bigger phone would be better, and a phablet would be much better.

But would I really embrace a larger phone? And in particular, would I risk the ridiculousness that is a phablet?

As I was wondering about this, I glanced at my current phone. As of 2pm, its battery is almost flat already. I charged it overnight, and I’ve barely used it this morning – by my standards, at least.

Here’s the thing about bigger phones – they generally have bigger batteries. The new larger iPhone 6 promises 14 hours of talk time on 3G vs 10 for the iPhone 5 models – but the 6 Plus promises 24, and so does the Galaxy Note 4.

In other words, the latest phablets offer about 60% more juice than the current smartphones. If those numbers can be believed, a phablet might even make it to dinner time without needing to be recharged.

You know what – thinking about the perennially infuriating battery life issue, I don’t care how big these new phones are. Give me a smartphone that will genuinely last until midnight without needing to be recharged, and I’ll buy it. Even if it is genuinely as large as a shoe.

Hopelessly intimidated by Bunnings

If we all have our own personal hell, uniquely and fiendishly customised to our own preferences, mine will be a Bunnings. An endless Bunnings, with aisle after perplexing aisle, stretching out beyond the horizon on either side with cute little handwritten signs that try and pretend that the company isn't an enormous corporate monolith, and yet no handy sign pointing me to the one thing I’m looking for, or anybody to help me find it.

In other words, it’ll be exactly like an ordinary Bunnings. Except instead of a few snags on the barbie for a community fundraiser, the demons will be holding a sizzle of sinners’ souls.


Bunnings terrifies me because it proves exactly how incapable I am of improving my home. You can buy timber, paint, fancy new lights, outdoor furniture, complicated storage systems, even entire buildings like sheds and pergolas, none of which I will ever buy and set up myself. 

I didn’t know how to use any of this stuff back when I was studying woodwork in high school and was only required to bang a nail into a wood, and I’ve lost even that ability in the subsequent years. And yet in Bunnings, there are dozens of entire categories of personal inadequacy, all helpfully signposted, from decorating to tools to kitchen to bathroom to outdoor living. 

There’s even a gardening section, which I find especially confronting because not only do I have no clue which plants to buy for my windswept city balcony, but if I do a bad job looking after my plants – as I inevitably will – they will die, and I don’t need withered plant corpses on my ungreen hands. No living creature deserves the fate of being entrusted to me.

And then right when I’m feeling at my most emasculated, and am thinking about the plants I won’t buy because they’ll certainly die, I suddenly notice that there are weapons everywhere. And I’m not just talking about the dozens of chainsaws, hedge trimmers and whipper snippers on offer. (Sure, they don’t sound scary, but those things can flay innocents like a Bolton from Game of Thrones.)

Those of us who grew up during the brief, glorious peak of the slasher film during the 1980s will know that every seemingly-innocuous hardware item has been adoped by some terrifying onscreen monster at some point – those movies had an awful lot of sequels. Over the years, they worked their way through wrenches, hammers, shears, pitchforks, hoes, spades – pretty much every single item in a standard garden shed.

Multiply that effect with Bunnings’ vast volumes stacked up to the ceiling, and you have all you need for a major panic attack.

Nevertheless, despite my aversion, I braved the belly of the beast a few weeks ago. And it really was a beast – the Alexandria branch, one of the biggest anywhere. It’s so massive that there’s even a vast second level, even though I can’t imagine what they keep up there that isn’t already for sale on the voluminous ground floor.

Now, I’ve admitted to my general hardware hopelessness – but there is one thing I can do. I can hang pictures on plasterboard walls, as long as they’re not too heavy. And really, it’s about as simple a DIY task as it gets – all you need to do is scan the wall with a stud finder to make sure there isn’t any metal underneath the surface, and then screw in the anchor and attach the picture to it. Easy, even for me.

The problem was, Bunnings somehow didn’t have the thing I wanted. Oh sure, there were about forty different kind of plasterboard anchor, but I didn’t understand how to use them, and my relatives who are more expert than me have warned me that the other kinds left big holes in the walls. Plus, my pictures are precious, and I don’t want them to fall off, taking most of the wall with them.

So yes – even in the overwhelming enormity of Bunnings, they didn’t have either of the two kinds of anchor I like, trust, and know how to use. I eventually found a salesman to help me, but he seemed not to know what I wanted, let alone which of their dizzying array of products would be best suited to my task.

And so I left, and went to a tiny hardware store, the kind run by a guy who’s been there for decades and knows every single item he has in stock. The kind, in fact, that has been nearly obliterated by the Bunnings behemoth. The whole transaction took me less than ninety seconds, and then I went home and started hanging pictures.

I’m sure I’ll return to Bunnings again someday, ideally with a relative who can help me navigate around those foreign, frightening parts. And only after I’ve tried a small, local hardware store run by somebody who’s used and thoroughly understands the products they’re selling.

Don’t get me wrong – I’m sure that if you know what you’re doing, Bunnings is brilliant, and you can go to the exact right section with the kind of informed, clinical precision I display when visiting computer shops. I’ve just found that in order to use a giant DIY store, you genuinely need to know how to do it yourself.

How to decorate so people think you're amazing

A recent survey of the sort that retailers conduct to make us think about the products they sell found that 48% of Australian men have placed items in their bedroom with the explicit intention to impress prospective sexual partners.

This number almost surprised me, because it would suggest that as few as 52% of Australian men are thoughtless boors. Except that this figure is challenged by the additional information that the items left out to try and impress prospective partners included surfboards and medals, both of which are entirely wrong unless your surfboard has been sprayed by Banksy or your medal is displayed for reasons of irony, because you won the medal for Being A Li’l Aussie Trier (Despite No Conspicuous Merit At Anything) in Year Two. It's probably also okay if you're a war hero or Olympian.

The same survey found that 28% of Australians have been put off a prospective partner by the state of their bedroom, which is also somewhat intriguing because it implies that the number of people who hook up and head back to some rando's place while being too smashed even to notice the bedroom is as low as 72%.

In other words, it’s worth getting the details right. Consider yourself the curator of the museum of your own life.

I learned that this stuff matters quite a few years ago, when a woman I was rather attracted to spending a great deal of time perusing my bookshelf at a party, while I pretended not to notice while suppressing an absolutely agonising volume of self-consciousness, but also remaining at a convenient distance unless she wanted to ask me any questions about my excellent taste. I don’t know whether she formed favourable conclusions – but they certainly weren't favourable enough to get a pash.

If you’ve visited Brett Whiteley’s studio in Surry Hills, it’s full of cool stuff. His own artwork, of course, but also groovy bric-a-brac. Try applying a critical eye to your own space and ask yourself – if I died, could this house be instantly turned into a museum of me that would impress visitors for centuries to come? If not, you need to get to work.

After all, we live in a society of snap judgements, and this applies above all else to our homes. Who hasn’t felt judged when a plumber calls and, while addressing the lake of sewage that has accumulated in our living room, makes some idle comment about the poster on your wall? Yes pal, I know Pulp Fiction’s a classic film, and that’s why I put the poster there. Now make like Mr Wolf, and sort my mess out.

Since we live in a superficial society where people form instant impressions of us based on our material possessions, I’ve put together a definitive guide. Don’t make the mistake of displaying items based on your actual taste, unless your taste is so good that Wallpaper* did a shoot at yours last week. Instead, allow my highly sophisticated, thoroughly neurotic self-consciousness to inform your own.

Books

Highbrow is good, of course, but the classic trap is to display impressive books you haven’t read. Placing something like Infinite Jest or Finnegan’s Wake on display will probably get you an impressed “ooh”, but that’s worth nothing if you have to admit that you haven’t actually read it. So make sure you skim through, or read a few reviews so you can parrot on demand. Your prospective lover almost certainly won’t have read it, and in the unlikely event that they seem not only to have read it, but genuinely understand it, they’re probably out of your league anyway.

Go for acclaimed novels which display your cultural sensitivity and global interests. And I don’t just mean books about people from other countries by white people, like Alexander McCall Smith’s Number One Ladies Detective Agency series. Include some Haruki Murakami or Fatima Bhutto or Khalid Hosseini or Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie on your shelf  – and make sure you at least know how to pronounce their names.

But it’s not all about Booker winners. It’s equally important to show a sense of humour. PG Wodehouse works for this, and does Stephen Fry or Colbert. Make sure you make your humour selection gender-balanced, too – the recent memoirs by Tina Fey, Mindy Kaling and Sarah Silverman might be a good start.

Music

For the music you actually listen to, use a streaming service. That way nobody can judge you based on your Katy Perry consumption – unless you make the mistake of having all of your selections posted to Facebook, in which case you are going to need to start this whole process from the beginning with a different partner.

Get a few CDs, or if you’re really trying hard, some vinyl. The key here is to span genres – make sure you have a bit of jazz, classical, hip hop and world music, even if your choices are fairly obvious. And spice it up with one or two records that nobody’s ever heard of that you can rave about to make it seem like you’ve got excellent taste. That’s why for a few years, I went to great effort to feign love for the Japanese girl-punk band Shonen Knife, before ultimately conceding that they weren't worth the effort and I definitely shouldn't have bought the t-shirt.

Art

There’s no shame in having cheap posters if you can’t afford actual artworks – just make at least some of them are about things other than sport and/or fantasy movies. Yes, the Lord of the Rings trilogy was excellent, and so was the Tahs' victory; but no, that doesn’t mean you need a series of posters.

And have some proper art. If you have no idea, just go to the MoMA or Tate Modern Store online and find something you don't hate – maybe something comic-inspired by Roy Lichtenstein, for starters. And if your collection includes one of those pictures of dogs playing pool or poker, make sure it’s balanced by something amazingly avant garde so that it’s clear you were kidding.

But really – even a montage of free postcards can make it look like you have some kind of aesthetic sensibility. Just something more than, I dunno; a surfboard and medals.

Furniture

Let’s make this easy. Just try and have some, some, furniture that isn’t from Ikea, Freedom or Fantastic Furniture. Even if it’s terrible and you found it by the side of the road, just pick something that distinguishes you from Edward Norton in Fight Club.

Oh, and beanbags are are an absolute no-no unless you’re in a share house and under 23.

Knick knacks

Here’s an important rule of life – whenever you go somewhere exotic, get a souvenir, even if it’s extremely cheap, just so you can talk about your travels and seem experienced. It doesn’t matter whether the thing is lame, like a snow globe or a Thai Coke can or something – you can make fun of it and show you don’t take yourself seriously while secretly taking yourself incredibly and painfully seriously.

Your object just needs to raise the question of where you got it, which will enable you to launch into a travel anecdote and there’s nothing your guest can do because they asked.

In conclusion

Please note that I haven’t included any of the items I currently display in my house to make people think I’m brilliantly erudite and live a fascinating life of gallivanting around the globe like some kind of Santa who delivers laughs and penetrating insights instead of presents. That’s because I don’t want anybody copying them. Instead, copy my technique, and you’ll be impressing people in no time.

Just don’t forget the most important rule, which is to make your carefully cultivated collection of stuff designed to present you in the best possible light look like some old flotsam and jetsam you’ve randomly cobbled together because you’re too busy being awesome to put any thought into how your place looks.

And when your guest is impressed by the article you’ve placed there for that explicit purpose, for goodness’ sake – feign surprise.

Why on earth do people take camping holidays?

There are some people whose idea of a holiday is having to do everything for yourself. These people find it relaxing to go to a place where you have to perform an even more time-consuming version of your everyday domestic chores, with vastly inferior equipment and no dishwasher. And these same people, rather than sinking their tired bodies into a comfy bed or sofa at the end of an arduous bit of travelling, would rather build an annoyingly elaborate shelter for themselves before they can so much as close their eyes for a few moments.

These people are called campers, and they are wrong.

I recently spent four days camping at a music festival, and while I very much enjoyed the festival, I was once again reminded how glad I am that humans invented proper housing, with soundproof walls and without mud.

Jean-Paul Sartre famously wrote in No Exit that “hell is other people”. He should probably have specified that “hell is other people in the tent next to yours who won’t shut the hell up at 3 o’clock every morning, but instead giggle drunkenly about things that couldn’t possibly be considered funny unless your brain was addled with alcohol and/or other chemicals and, let’s face it, wasn’t exactly over-endowed with much intellectual acumen to begin with.”

Okay, so his phrase is pithier, but I bet mine is more heartfelt.

No Exit is set in a locked room, but it should have been set in a tent, because at least a locked room offers proper shelter. Tents turn into a furnace after roughly five seconds of sunlight, and offer precious little protection against cold. Whenever it rains, somehow the water will get into your tent, as predictably as Lara Bingle getting into trouble with traffic police.

Admittedly, my tent didn’t leak, but every single time I left it, my head or the hood of my garment somehow rubbed against the sheet of canvas that covered the opening, transferring moisture onto my head. Why you’d use a fabric that water passes straight through for that purpose I cannot fathom, but it’s just yet another annoying aspect of the hellride of al fresco misery they call camping.

We as a species didn’t spend millennia evolving from aquatic to land-dwelling creatures in order to go and sleep somewhere soggy.

When the first European settlers arrived in Australia, they camped. One of Sydney’s most charming beaches, Camp Cove marks the place where they spent the night before moving on to Sydney Harbour on 26 January 1788. As Bill Garner points out in his charming survey of camping in Australia, Born In A Tent, the first European settlement was the proverbial row of tents.

But here’s the thing – as soon as they could manage it, everyone with enough money built themselves a permanent dwelling.

Getting proper camping gear is so expensive, too. The first time I camped after it was compulsory during school, I bought a sleeping bag that claimed to be rated to zero degrees. Where I was staying went down to about two degrees at night, and I soon learned that the manufacturers had interpreted the number to mean that at that temperature, you probably wouldn’t die of hypothermia, touch wood. It was the most painful evening I’ve had since I decided it’d be hilarious to watch Battlefield Earth.

So it was back to the camping shop for another sleeping bag, and a special camping towel, and backpack, and gumboots, and by this point, I’ve spent enough for at least a week in a cheap hotel.

And even with proper gear, you never avoid the feel of that squishy, muddy, cold earth penetrating through a tarpaulin floor like some kind of malevolent sandpit.

Cooking while camping is the most annoying rigmarole imaginable, with lots of fiddly bits and pieces, but even going to the toilet is irritating when you’re sleeping outdoors. What’s more, when you camp, you’re resigning yourself to feeling, smelling and being filthy until your holiday slash ordeal is over.

Now, I accept that camping has its uses. If you’re on a polar expedition, or conducting urgent research in a remote corner of the Pilbara, or even temporarily without housing, then clearly, it’s great. At music festivals, it’s probably a better option than staying miles away and waiting in interminable bus queues. What I don’t get is why people do it for recreation. Is ordinarily life not challenging enough without going out of your way to make every little aspect of your holiday fiddly and annoying?

Perhaps you imagine I’ve no love of the great outdoors. Incorrect. I’m happy to gaze appreciatively at a picturesque vista from my comfy hotel room. I’ll even go strolling through the magnificence of Mother Nature on occasion, especially if there’s a band playing outdoors at the end of the trek.

In fact, I think my unwillingness to sleep bang smack in the middle of nature should be interpreted as a sign of great respect. I’ve no desire to be Mother Nature’s uninvited guest.

After all, even the most eco-conscious camper has some level of impact on the landscape. Whereas I tread very lightly, and then head to a place with a proper shower.

In defence of the Daggy Friend

Keira Knightley sings in her new movie, and is really quite good. No, honestly. And even if they did AutoTune her vocals to bits, I’d have to say that they did a great job. She sounds a lot better than Scarlett Johannsson covering Tom Waits, at least.

The film’s called Begin Again, and it’s deliberately adorable. Keira plays Greta, a shy singer-songwriter who, at the start of the film, is dating her college sweetheart and fellow singer Adam Levine, who’s headed to New York to make it big.

Well, he’s called Dave in the movie, but he’s a twit with an implausibly high voice, so it’s just Adam Levine beneath the tiniest of cinematic fig leafs, really.

Obviously Greta didn’t read my polemic against the Maroon 5 singer, because she’s surprised when he dumps her like a total douche. Even though Greta is not only a brilliant songwriter who supplies him with better songs than the mediocre guff he writes himself, but has the looks of Keira Knightley, he cheats with some record company floozy because men are fools, or at least Adam Levine is.

Distraught, Keira leaves the fancy apartment that the record company paid for, and runs to the only other person she knows in New York, her Daggy Friend. Steve is played by the stubbly, plump, jolly James Corden, a fellow Brit who’s also come to the Big Apple to try and make sweet music – and in reality scrapes together a few bucks via busking.

Nevertheless, he gladly puts her up on the sofa of his tiny, tiny apartment, and so she doesn’t simply wallow in misery, he drags her out to a bar. Then, during his set, this paragon of human virtue invites her up on stage to sing a song because he thinks she’s so totally brilliant. Nobody notices except disaffected record company exec Mark Ruffalo, who that very day has quit the label he founded because it’s all rubbish and so forth, and yet hears Keira and suddenly believes in music again.

Yeah, this film sounds terrible right now – but I did honestly quite enjoy it. Anyway, Keira and Mark make a record together, setting up all over New York City to record al fresco with the sound of the taxis, kids playing, and whatever happens to be out there. It’s adorable, if highly derivative of the cult Take Away Shows.

Here’s the thing – despite Daggy Friend Steve being the pivotal figure who picks Keira/Greta up when she’s been discarded and gets her back on her feet, and performing on all of the dainty little manic pixie dreamgirl songs she records all over NYC, we never hear anything more from him. He’s off to the side of every shot. In fact, he’s so irrelevant to the overall movie that they haven’t even bothered to mention him in the synopsis. He may well be in love with her, but we don't find out because the screenwriters essentially forget him halfway through.

But Steve was my favourite character. He’s the only person in the whole story who’s cheerful, and seems to in any way care about anybody else. He isn’t given his own romantic plot, and certainly not allowed a romance with Knightley. His only function, it seems, is to be there in her darkest hour, and then just help out, like some kind of useful butler.

There’s all manner of age-gap-disregarding sexual tension between Greta and Ruffalo’s character Dan, but Steve’s just there to smile along supportively, and play keyboard. Pathetic, really. I kept wanting to shout at the screen “Hook up with Steve, Greta! Good old Steve! He won’t leave you for some floozy!” And he wouldn’t have, either. His sheer gratitude would have lasted decades until his excessively big heart gave out, possibly with the assistance of excess cholesterol.

The original title of Begin Again was Can A Song Save Your Life?, but what it really should have been called is Yes, A Daggy Friend Can Save Your Life And Then We’ll Never Hear Anything From Him Again.

Begin Again is only the most recent example of this, of course. Like Cameron in Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, Garth in Wayne’s World, McLovin in Superbad, Daggy Friends are there as enablers and sidekicks, but ultimately get ignored when the action heats up.

In the Harry Potter books, Ron Weasley initially appears to be the Daggy Friend, and ultimately gets to hook up with Hermione Granger who is – let’s face it – far more awesome than Ginny Weasley. But Ron is actually the Comic Relief Friend, a far better character – Harry’s real daggy friend is Neville Longbottom, who gets randomly paired up with someone called Hannah Abbott, an almost entirely perfunctory character, just so JK Rowling can have a neat ending.

In fact, Daggy Friends have been left by the narrative wayside for centuries. In Romeo and Juliet, Benvolio’s the one who convinces Romeo to even go to that stupid party, and tries to be a peacemaker between the Montagues and Capulets, and then we pretty much forget about him. Sure, that means he doesn’t have to die at any point – but still – it’s a typical Daggy Friend gig.

The phenomenon is hardly unique to male Daggy Friends, of course. In both Emma and Clueless, the ingenue character is abandoned as soon as Emma/Cher realises that they have their own romance afoot. Uptight Shoshanna in Girls belatedly got some action from Ray, but she’s still regularly left out of many episodes entirely as Lena Dunham focuses on her less one-dimensional characters. And in Mean Girls, Cady leaves behind her two Daggy Friends, Damian and Janis, and even though there’s an ultimate reconciliation, we barely see them once Cady becomes friends with the Plastics.

For too long Daggy Friends have languished pointlessly in the shadows, which is why I’ve been so glad to see Jon Snow’s Daggy Friend Sam getting a romance of his own in recent episodes of Game of Thrones. And the new Star Trek movies put Daggy Spock together with Attractive Uhura, despite James Kirk having a thing for her. Uhura is a rare movie heroine who realises that the daggy, stable love interest is the better bet. As Spock would say, it’s simply logical.

Daggy Friends are kind and loyal, and they deserve better treatment in Hollywood. We need more movies like When Harry Met Sally, where both Harry and Sally’s Daggy Friends are paired off. Otherwise, we’re teaching everyone that loyal friends, the ones who are there when Adam Levine entirely predictably walks out on you, can just disappear from your life when they’ve fulfilled their purpose. It’s time Daggy Friends got not only the limelight, but the love interest.

Oh, and when not playing a Daggy Friend in Begin Again, James Corden is a Tony-winning phenomenon who’s more talented than Keira multiplied by Adam squared by Mark. So really, who’s the Daggy Friend now?