How I've avoided cooking for the past decade

Any guest invited to dine with me is in for a treat. Maybe I'll serve perfect xiao long bao (soup dumplings) as delicate and succulent as you can get in Shanghai. Perhaps a perfect pizza with a crust doughy enough to make a Neapolitan weep. Or maybe a perfect dal with a side of naan that's still warm from the oven?

There's only one catch. When you inevitably pass your compliments to the chef, I'll have to add my own. Because if I'm responsible for the catering, anyone dining chez moi is likely to be eating takeaway.

Only the very best takeaway, mind you. Gourmet food cooked by recognised experts in a range of world cuisines. But certainly stuff I haven’t cooked myself.

While I’m a whiz with a jaffle maker and pride myself on putting ravioli in boiling water per the manufacturer’s instructions, the truth is that I've never managed to teach myself how to cook more than the absolute basics. I'm more of a NoviceChef than a Master. And that’s because I live in the inner city, where there really isn’t much point cooking for yourself unless it's a special occasion.

I gave it a solid go earlier this year. Admittedly, I took advantage of one of those services that delivers a pack of ingredients and idiot-proof instructions, but I did manage to produce something resembling couscous with miscellaneous vegetables one night, and passable pasta on another.

Here's the thing though – it took ages. Seriously, ages. The preparation alone took me at least an hour, which was double what the instructions said – pretty good going considering my skill level. Chopping veggies and combining things is trickier than it looks for TV chefs, especially when hand-eye coordination is lacking and knives are scarily sharp.

At the end, I was certainly proud of myself. But the whole process took 90 minutes, start to finish. That's the length of a movie, or two episodes of Vikings. And all for something I could have bought readymade for little more than the cost of the ingredients. What’s more, had I not been so lazy, shopping for the ingredients would have added another 45 minutes or so to the process – longer seeing as I don't know where the fresh produce is in my supermarket.

As I was eating that meal of my own creation, I felt in awe of anyone who comes home from work and starts cooking anything more elaborate than a frozen microwave meal. And I compared my handiwork unfavourably with the vegies stir-fried to perfection by the Thai takeaway around the corner.

None of us can be good at everything. The people around the corner are much better at making an incrediblepad see ew than me, but presumably less experienced in the art of writing faintly self-mocking pieces like this one. Isn't it better that I pay them $10 for their expertise instead of trying to put them out of a job by vertically integrating cooking into my existing workflow? Isn't that a win-win, in this era of outsourcing and efficiency?

I realise that cooking is pleasurable for many people. I think that I'll probably keep trying my hand at it on weekends, when I have a bit more energy and time to compensate for the inevitable errors. I still aspire to be able to cook a few really good meals.

But when I live in a city full of the world’s best cuisines cooked by people who've come from all corners of the globe, I'm not going to feel guilty if I salute their expertise by asking them to look after my dinner instead of insulting them by attempting to whip up an inferior version.

I outsourced my cooking

Any guest invited to dine with me is in for a treat. Maybe I'll serve perfect xiao long bao (soup dumplings) as delicate and succulent as you can get in Shanghai. Perhaps a perfect pizza with a crust doughy enough to make a Neapolitan weep. Or maybe a perfect dal with a side of naan that's still warm from the oven?

There's only one catch. When you inevitably pass your compliments to the chef, I'll have to add my own. Because if I'm responsible for the catering, anyone dining chez moi is likely to be eating takeaway.

Only the very best takeaway, mind you. Gourmet food cooked by recognised experts in a range of world cuisines. But certainly stuff I haven’t cooked myself.

While I’m a whiz with a jaffle maker and pride myself on putting ravioli in boiling water per the manufacturer’s instructions, the truth is that I've never managed to teach myself how to cook more than the absolute basics. I'm more of a NoviceChef than a Master. And that’s because I live in the inner city, where there really isn’t much point cooking for yourself unless it's a special occasion.

I gave it a solid go earlier this year. Admittedly, I took advantage of one of those services that delivers a pack of ingredients and idiot-proof instructions, but I did manage to produce something resembling couscous with miscellaneous vegetables one night, and passable pasta on another.

Here's the thing though – it took ages. Seriously, ages. The preparation alone took me at least an hour, which was double what the instructions said – pretty good going considering my skill level. Chopping veggies and combining things is trickier than it looks for TV chefs, especially when hand-eye coordination is lacking and knives are scarily sharp.

At the end, I was certainly proud of myself. But the whole process took 90 minutes, start to finish. That's the length of a movie, or two episodes of Vikings. And all for something I could have bought readymade for little more than the cost of the ingredients. What’s more, had I not been so lazy, shopping for the ingredients would have added another 45 minutes or so to the process – longer seeing as I don't know where the fresh produce is in my supermarket.

As I was eating that meal of my own creation, I felt in awe of anyone who comes home from work and starts cooking anything more elaborate than a frozen microwave meal. And I compared my handiwork unfavourably with the vegies stir-fried to perfection by the Thai takeaway around the corner.

None of us can be good at everything. The people around the corner are much better at making an incrediblepad see ew than me, but presumably less experienced in the art of writing faintly self-mocking pieces like this one. Isn't it better that I pay them $10 for their expertise instead of trying to put them out of a job by vertically integrating cooking into my existing workflow? Isn't that a win-win, in this era of outsourcing and efficiency?

I realise that cooking is pleasurable for many people. I think that I'll probably keep trying my hand at it on weekends, when I have a bit more energy and time to compensate for the inevitable errors. I still aspire to be able to cook a few really good meals.

But when I live in a city full of the world’s best cuisines cooked by people who've come from all corners of the globe, I'm not going to feel guilty if I salute their expertise by asking them to look after my dinner instead of insulting them by attempting to whip up an inferior version.

Originally published at SBS Life

Forget mind-altering drugs - learn a language

Australians have grown lazy about studying languages while our own has spread inexorably across the world, but we should make it a national priority.

I’m regularly astonished by the multilingual skills of my Indian relatives. Their first language is Tamil, but they were educated in English, and switch between the languages constantly when they talk among themselves, sometimes forgetting that I can’t understand the Tamil bits because the mix comes so naturally to them. (Either they forget, or are joking about me – I’m not quite sure...)

They also speak Hindi because it’s the national language, and some Sanskrit, too, because it’s the language of the Hindu scriptures.

India’s an extraordinarily multilingual country – it’s the second-largest market for English-language books nowadays – but there are many others. English is widely spoken in Western Europe, and in our own region, most Singaporeans and Malaysians tend to have two or three languages.

In the Philippines, most education is conducted in English and even the laws are written in it. Reading the local newspapers is always a fascinating exercise – the articles are in English, but drop in a few bits of idiomatic Tagalog, on the assumption that their readers are comfortable in both.

But we native speakers miss out when we float through the world in our English-speaking bubbles. There are millions of people out there who can swap between languages as rapidly as Aussie backpackers exchange empty tinnies for full ones.

Whenever I travel overseas, I feel lucky, and not just because the local media never, ever reports what Shane Warne’s said on I’m A Celebrity Get Me Out Of Here. When I visit a country where another language is spoken, I’m reminded how fortunate I am to have grown up speaking English.

Every airport has signage and forms that I can read, and even in remote corners of the earth, there’s still a good chance you’ll get by with a smattering of simple English words.

Sure, there are other options – you can always use hand gestures and mime, and one of my friends once managed to communicate which sort of restaurant he wanted to visit in Hanoi by showing his cyclo driver a picture of a dog. But English is nevertheless a handy language to speak.

French used to be considered the international language of diplomacy, but nowadays the most conspicuous place you’ll find it in international relations is when a few stubborn countries insist on making that awkward switch to “douze points” during Eurovision voting.

Pop singers from all over the world drop English words into their hits (check out Utada Hikaru’s J-pop classic ‘It’s Automatic’ for one especially tasty example), and garments across the world feature English words that make minimal sense to anyone who can comprehend the language – I particularly like this sweater, also from Japan, with ‘Benign’ written on it. The global reach of the internet seems likely to keep English on top for the foreseeable future.

I studied French in high school, and although I love speaking it, my opportunities to do so are so rare that I’ve grown very rusty, so much so that I can’t remember how to say “I’ve grown very rusty” in French – after all, Eurovision comes but once a year.

But I learned enough to know that visiting a country is profoundly different when you can talk to the locals. I’ve been able to discover that many French people share my love for long, abstract conversations about the meaning of life that end up magnificently unresolved. I’ve also discovered that they all have at least one cousin living in Bondi.

Plus, when I speak French, I can also quickly dispel the instant assumption that I’m English. This immediately improves how people treat me, especially if I pretend that I’ve been surfing with their cousin Armand.

I do believe that, in general, multilingual people have richer lives. It not only adds enormously to the pleasure of travel and allows us to empathise with more people whose backgrounds are different to our own, but it exposes us to vastly different ways of thinking. It’s mind-expanding in a way that a yoga workshop never can be.

(Oh, and your yoga workshop? Full of Sanskrit.)

For instance, our relationship with our Indonesian neighbours isn’t always a comfortable one – how much better would we be able to understand our regular differences with them if we were literally able to understand them? It’s not just understanding the words, it’s understanding the culture, with priorities and assumptions that aren’t always like our own.

When Kevin Rudd spoke in Mandarin on his visit to China, he sent a potent diplomatic message to the Chinese leadership that he literally understood them. He may have somewhat undermined that message a few years later with those rat-related comments, but he’s nevertheless proof of the lifelong benefits that language study can bring.

Not only is being able to speak languages other than English invaluable for business connections, but it will enrich your life in many other respects, too. You can read Proust in the original French, and better still, you can tell people you can. Who knows, it may even lead to you becoming UN Secretary-General someday?

Originally posted at SBS Life

How I invented the Asiavision Song Contest

Some things are worth waiting for. This week, Barack Obama became the first US president to visit Cuba in 88 years. Scientists saw the shockwave from a supernova for the very first time. And SBS announced plans to host an Asia-Pacific version of Eurovision.

I called for this in the pages of the Sydney Morning Herald way back in 2003, and obviously my wise counsel set the ball rolling, albeit extremely slowly.

And yes, I am taking credit for this; and no, I don't care how many other people suggested it, nor how incredibly obvious it might seem.

Since my game-changing opinion piece, Australia has achieved something far more unlikely than our neighbours in Asia joining together to sing terrible pop songs - something that's done on a nightly basis throughout the region that bequeathed karaoke to the world. We have joined Eurovision ourselves.

I was surprised when Jessica Mauboy was invited to perform at that semi-final a few years ago. I was astonished when Guy Sebastian was allowed to participate in the main competition last year. And I was utterly flabbergasted when Dami Im was invited back this year, with the suggestion that this might become a regular thing.

Perhaps I shouldn't be so shocked. For years, I've watched people build friendships by coming along to other people's parties, being so enthusiastic that they ingratiated their way into the social group. Australia's like that kid who gets begrudgingly invited to the cooler kids' parties, and before anyone realises what's happening, they're the ones bringing out a tray of jelly shots.

YOUTUBE: Thank You, Comrade Kim Jong-il YouTube clip

Apparently no other country outside the region has been so devoted to Eurovision for so long, and if much of our love of the song contest is drenched in more layers of irony than a Sacha Baron Cohen movie, the last people to pick up on this would undoubtedly be the Eurovision organisers themselves.

It's one thing to be amused by Eurovision, or even to take it to the next level by sending our own representative. It's another entirely to stage one for our own region.

Eurovision was one of the first pan-European co-operative events, and as tenuous as the case might seem, it can be argued it lay the groundwork for the extraordinary integration that the region has achieved nowadays, at least until Brexit.

Our region, too, needs a mechanism to release tensions, just as Europe did all those years ago. Passions have been inflamed by China's recent aggressive actions on those contested reefs, and the scars from World War II have never been as successfully healed in Asia as they were in Europe, where Germany's approach to its wartime liberty has been rather a contrast to Japan's denialism over some of its own atrocities.

There are tensions across the Korean border, and if we define Asia more broadly than South-East and North Asia, we include the tensions in the subcontinent and also the ever-problematic Middle East.

Imagine all these countries vying not for geopolitical and economic superiority, but for the honour of producing the best/worst song in the whole of Asia. And, crucially, imagine the notion of a popular vote spreading throughout our many neighbours that don't currently allow that. It could be a revolution more profound than when Beyoncé dropped "Formation".

Peace and harmony are admirable goals - but beyond that, just imagine the sheer amusement on offer! The official press release hints at some of the delights that await us. As Blink TV director Paul Clarke says:

Imagine - the musical virtuosity of Bollywood, the cutting edge of K-pop, and the excitement of Chinese and Japanese artists - now the biggest music consumers in the world.

I do imagine those things, but I imagine so much more. I imagine Vietnamese rappers like SuBoi dropping S1<K beats, and the groovy hypnotic Morlum beats from the Isan region in northern Thailand. And above all, I imagine North Korea's Pochonbo Electronic Ensemble singing "Thank You, Comrade Kim Jong-Il".

They aren't the only excessively patriotic dags in our region, mind you. Check out "Stand Up For Singapore", from the island state whose sense of self-irony has never been quite as potent as its economy.

My only concern is whether Australia can mix it with the kitschy powerhouses of our region. So far, SBS has been choosing credible but bland artists, which I for one have found a little disappointing for a song contest that once handed its trophy to Mr Lordi.

YOUTUBE: Take you to the movies YouTube clip

I'm confident that if we look hard enough, though, we can find artists of sufficient quality for Asiavision. Take, for instance, the Sudanese-Australian rapper "Ur Boy" Bangs, who definitely bested Jimmy Fallon a few months ago after the talk show host included his track "Take U To Da Movies" in a segment mocking the world's worst music.

I want to take this opportunity to nominate Bangs as our first Asiavision representative, and I'm prepared to manipulate any popular vote, Boaty McBoatface style, to make that happen.

So well done, SBS, for giving us not one but two festivals of kitschy pop in which to revel each and every year. Next stop, the Pan-American Song Contest, and then we take things interplanetary.

This article was first published at The Drum

Putting the 'mine' in mindfulness

This is the decade of mindfulness. The practice, which derives from meditation, is being credited with all kinds of benefits – helping with depression and stress, pain management and even physical fitness. It’s apparently the mental equivalent of going for gelato.

So what precisely is mindfulness? Hmm, or perhaps, omm. It’s not easy to pin down.

Wikipedia defines it as “intentionally bringing one's attention to the internal and external experiences occurring in the present moment”, which is roughly as clear as mudfulness.

Reachout calls it a “special way of paying attention that can help with how you cope with everyday life or deal with tough times”, which sounds good, but doesn’t explain what you actually do to achieve these effects. Their article goes on, slightly less nebulously, to suggest that it’s about blocking thoughts of the past or future, and trying to be a value-free observer of your surroundings.

As far as I can gather, it’s like we’re supposed to access the rational person we become when we counsel friends not to worry about their horrible breakup, or whether they’ll ever meet anyone again, and concentrate on getting over it – only for ourselves.

So, how do we do that? How do we become the detached David Attenboroughs of your own brains?

Forget your hippie meditation classes and hipster colouring-in books. I have some simple ways to clear your mind of clutter and focus on the here and now.

Breathe

We do it all day, every day, and so rarely think about breathing. Take a moment to do, now. Slowly fill your lungs, and imagine each little alveolus sac swelling with air. The oxygen is moving into your system. Thanks, oxygen.

Now slowly expel the carbon dioxide. Get lost, carbon dioxide.

Now, if anyone’s nearby, start wheezing, and make choking sounds. You could try saying ‘Can’t… breathe…’ in a strangled voice. Then, just before they dial 000, explain that it’s a mindfulness technique you’ve been working on. You’ve been paying close attention to your own breathing and now you want other people to pay attention to it, too.

Meditate

Meditation is where you focus the mind on something specific. I have my own version of this, which I call me-ditation. I can think about myself endlessly, and reach what I believe is a higher plane of consciousness while doing so. For instance – what are my strengths? What are my other strengths? Which of my strengths is strongest?

I won’t focus on past failings or fears for the future. I’ll know that in this moment, I am truly awesome, and nobody can stop me thinking that about myself unless they interrupt me with reality, which is why I insist on not being disturbed during my me-ditation practice, which can sometimes last for many hours.

Play solitaire

Life is like a game of solitaire, isn’t it? (Just think about that for a moment, and nod appreciatively). We lay out our own cards and play them as best we can, ultimately answering only to ourselves.

Which means that we can cheat, without getting caught out by anyone besides ourselves. It’s a helpful reminder that life isn’t fair, and that you may as well look after yourself by taking advantage whenever you can. (Don’t blame me, blame the capitalist system.)

Visualise a beach

Thinking of a beautiful calm beach on a perfect day is one of the most common guided meditation techniques. That’s well and good for some, but for my own guided meditation, I prefer to visualise Alex Garland’s novel The Beach, which tells the story of an idyllic community of backpackers living on a Thai beach that slowly descends into a hideous, brutal nightmare, leading to many of their deaths.

It’s a good reminder that no matter how good it seems, life is only a bit of poisoned food away from descending into a toxic hellscape, even if you’re as handsome as Leonardo diCaprio, and I find that soothing somehow.

Erase someone else’s colouring-in book

Colouring books are very fashionable at the moment, but it’s not often known that they work both ways. Rubbing out someone else’s painstaking work is not only faster than colouring yourself, but lets you work up elbow grease, which is handy exercise.

Sure, they may have carefully coloured in the patterns for their own mental wellbeing, but now that they’ve finished, they should be happy that you too have been able to derive spiritual satisfaction from their work by returning the book to its pristine, unspoiled condition.

And I find that if I focus on the moment, I don’t worry in the slightest about whether they’ll be annoyed by me doing this.

Get sunburnt

There is nothing that will make you more conscious of the here and now than sunburn. You’ll be keenly aware of every single movement you make, because just about all of them will be agonising. And you’ll be observing yourself, concluding that you should apply lots of aloe vera and make sure you slip, slop, slap next time.

Don’t forget that sunburn is also an extremely natural, organic process and helps us reconnect with ancestors who didn't have access to fancy modern things like blockout. It will make you glad you’re not living in those times.

Start a worm farm

You will quickly find it hard to focus on anything besides the immediate moment of wondering why on earth you started a worm farm, and what's the point of worm farms anyway, come to think of it, why are worm farms even a thing, and isn't it horrifying that if you cut a worm in half you just get double the number of worms, that’s incredibly freaky, burn the worm farm, burn it now.

And so the circle of life continues. Poignant, isn’t it?

Or it'll go well and you'll make money, mostly by convincing other suckers to buy your worm farm starter kit. Which may not strictly be ‘mindfulness’ but certainly is lucrative.

Hang on to a ledge by the tips of your fingers

No past, no future, just now. That’s how it feels to be suspended over a ledge by your fingertips. Try to observe yourself outside your body. You’ll see you, clinging on, and perhaps you’ll reflect on your position as a metaphor for the precariousness of life.

Perhaps someone will call the fire brigade, or perhaps they won’t – it’s out of your control. Don’t worry about that. Your job is to cling on. Just as we all do.

When embracing this practice, I tend to choose a ledge about 2m off the ground, but I visualise myself much higher for the same effect (see earlier entry about cheating at solitaire).

Strum the banjo

You've always wanted to play the banjo, or is that just me? I’m not very good at knowing what other people want, usually because I’m in the moment, focussing on myself.

Well, as every mindfulness devotee knows, there's no time like the present. Get that banjo and play it. Play it a lot, no matter how terrible it sounds. You’re Steve Martin, only funnier, better at the banjo, and also you never starred in a remake of The Pink Panther. Visualise it and it’s as good as true.

Also, constantly playing the banjo with zero skill will make everyone around you much less happy with their lives, so you’ll seem to have it together by comparison.

Come up with a better definition of mindfulness

Perhaps you could try to come up with an explanation that makes it sound less like a fortune cookie or a George Harrison song, and more like the valuable psychological technique that many medical experts now agree it is.

I guarantee this will be such a challenging mental task that you won’t possibly be able to think about anything else, probably for days. You’ll observe yourself pondering endlessly, but not be able to stop.

Then, when you’ve cracked it, could you please edit that Wikipedia entry so that it makes sense?

Unlike this article, mindfulness is a genuinely helpful discipline. The Black Dog Institute has some useful notes here (PDF), and the Mayo Clinic is instructive too, while and BeyondBlue has some mindfulness resources including an app for new mothers. You may also choose to consult your doctor.

We should share housing for longer

Unless you’re an impossibly wealthy plutocrat, or a smug baby boomer who bought in the 90s (much the same thing), browsing a real estate website is incredibly depressing. It’s like listening to Adele while watching this video of a sad kitten and peeling onions into the shape of Nicholas Sparks.

Until the bubble bursts – which may never happen – huge numbers of Australians below the age of 40 will struggle to buy their own place. For many of us, a house with a backyard, or even an apartment with enough rooms for a couple of kids, is out of reach unless we go to regional areas or live on the outskirts of major cities.

A recent study found that home ownership for 25­–34 year olds dropped from 56 per cent in 1982 to 34 per cent in 2011, and for the same age group, the mean debt to income ratio ballooned from 115 per cent to 241 per cent. Those numbers are nearly as shocking as the price of an uninhabitable terrace in Sydney’s Surry Hills recently.

Home ownership is becoming a far away dream for many who are not lucky enough to still be living with their parents at the age of 30 and saving every penny. Something has to give.

Clearly, the Australian dream of a house on a quarter-acre block is a long way off for many of us. So what’s to be done?

One option is to load yourself up with debt, and hope you can make the repayments. Except many young people, even university graduates, face significant career instability these days.

Fortunately, there is another way, even if it involves abandoning, or perhaps deferring, the Australian dream.

Share housing has traditionally been something we do when studying, or entering the labour market – but given the cost of housing, it’s probably something more of us should do for longer.

After all, the idea that we all need to move into owner-occupied homes is a relatively recent one in our cultural history.

Sharing sometimes is more a bed of dust mites instead of roses, of course. But it’s a lot easier to get out of a lease than a mortgage.

When I look back at all the years between moving out and settling down, I definitely have the fondest memories of my years in share housing.

When I lived alone, I had plenty of space and time to myself, but I didn’t do anything especially worthwhile with it. In hindsight, I should probably have stayed sharing with friends until I got married, which, of course, has provided me with life’s ultimate fulfilment – a permanent share house.

And let’s not forget that there are other people we can share with. Our parents and grandparents are the ones who’ve benefited from the dramatic boost in property prices, with many of them becoming paper millionaires. So maybe they should share some of those sweet, otherwise-empty rooms that they bought on the cheap?

In many other countries – India, for instance – married couples traditionally keep living with one set of parents, generally the groom’s. While this might not provide much in the way of the West’s much-desired personal freedom, it means low living costs – if any. You share your meals, there’s built-in childcare, and ultimately, it offers a solution for aged care too.

Plus, if the proximity gets a little stifling, you can simply hand the kids over and go out to blow off a little steam. And while you’re out having a few drinks and venting, I can guarantee that your friends will be biting their tongues so they don’t make a scathing remark about the free housing you’re getting.

Growing up in Australia, it’s hard to fight against the notion that success in life means having your own place. But if you keep sharing until later in life, not only is your life likely to be richer, you will be, too.

Which makes it far more likely that you’ll be able to save up enough to get a place of your own someday. If you ever need one.

Originally posted at SBS Life

Forget aged care. This is awesome care.

“Help the aged”, Jarvis Cocker sings in the Pulp song of the same name. “One time they were just like you.”

His examples of those similarities in the next lyric aren’t necessarily great – “drinking, smoking cigs and sniffing glue” – but it’s a sweet sentiment nevertheless.

The rest of the first verse is “Help the aged, don't just put them in a home, can't have much fun in there all on their own.” And that’s the part I’ve always wondered about.

I’ve spent quite a bit of time in aged care facilities in the past few years, and I’d have to say that they leave me conflicted. They supply care to the aged, as advertised, but does outsourcing the day-to-day assistance mean that families, in the end, don’t care enough for relatives who once had us as their top priority?

On one hand, a place where absolutely everything is done for you is my idea of paradise, and tallies beautifully with my lack of life skills. They handle cooking, laundry, cleaning, bathing, dressing – whatever’s needed to make you comfortable. There are activities and outings, and one home I’ve visited even bakes fresh muffins on the premises, which is the most brilliant method of placating anxious, guilty relatives imaginable.

At times I wonder whether these facilities would be willing to take an unusually incompetent 39-year-old, or if I could make a buck by opening a place catering to inept younger people like mes? Not so much Moran Care as moron care?

But there are times when they seem nightmarish. Laminex-clad departure lounges stinking of boiled cabbage and industrial antiseptic, where we abandon our relatives except for birthdays and Christmas. In the meantime, our so-called loved ones are lfet to wonder whether we’ve forgotten them entirely or are just a bit selfish, until eventually their memories go and it doesn’t seem to matter how often we visit, so we don’t quite so much.

Then I remember how challenging dementia can be, and conclude that in such cases, there’s barely any alternative. Until there’s a cure, many of us will get to the stage where we need round-the-clock care, and are a risk of wandering. Which means somebody else decides to place us in locked facilities, making us effectively prisoners, but it’s for our own good, and… well, this is why I’m so conflicted.

To be fair, many of the aged care home residents I’ve met seem to be having a ball. Rather than being stuck in their own homes, where they’d be alone most of the time and everyday tasks are a challenge, they’re in a social whirl, a kind of octogenarian version of Paris in the 1920s.

It’s the late-in-life equivalent of those beautiful days in our late teens and early twenties where we spend every living moment with our peers and friends, and it can be ours again if we move to aged care homes.

Except that most of our friends are likely to be in different aged care homes. But still, in places like that, you’ll never be short of bridge partners, which I’m sure is a wonderful thing. I haven’t had a decent game of cards in years.

An hour or so after I walk out the door of an aged facility, I’m back to being self-absorbed again. But there’s always a transitional period in between my concern for whether my relatives are enjoying life and the resumption of my usual narcissism, a sort of halfway point where I wonder, in a brief flowering of empathy – how would I cope with their situation?

The answer, generally, is not very well. The average aged care home is located somewhere very quiet, in a nice suburban street, and while I'm all for soundproofing, I can't imagine wanting to live somewhere that far from things like cafés, shops, theatres and cinemas. I'd much rather live a short mobility scooter ride away from a multiplex, ideally one with an amusement arcade attached. I fully expect to go almost daily, especially if they have Street Fighter XXIII.

I remember once seeing Gough Whitlam, in his nineties, sitting in a wheelchair at the opera. He seemed utterly captivated, and I thought – wow, that’s something to aspire to.

By the time I'm that old, the bands I like will probably all be dead and buried, but I'm happy to be wheeled to any You Am I or Blur covers band I can find. So I'd like my aged care home to be in the inner city, please. I'd gladly park myself somewhere in a skyscraper, preferably above a mall, ideally one with yum cha.

My colleague Wendy Harmer wrote a piece a few years back that envisaged multiple generations living in the same tower blocks. Great idea, I reckon. My grandkids shouldn't get away with monthly visits. I want them an express lift away, in an apartment whose entry system can't be blocked against an annoying but doting old man.

Then there’s the food. Fewer steamed vegetables and roasts, and more exotic food, please. Thai, Italian, Mexican, and maybe a bit of my generation’s current favourite - gourmet fast food. Yes, we know pulled pork and duck fat fries will reduce our lifespan, and we are more than happy to make that deal, thanks.

And let’s not forget the decor. I understand that for most of my grandparents’ generation, floral still-life paintings and redwood furniture topped with white lace is the very definition of niceness. But for my aged home, I'd like stainless steel, please, and a bit of warehouse chic, maybe some groovy exposed brick. Pop art on the walls, ideally via massive hi-def screens that rotate through Lichtenstein, Warhol and maybe a bit of Jeff Koons to keep us on our toes. Classic movie posters would be another option – maybe Pulp Fiction or A Clockwork Orange? Not especially soothing, admittedly, but the posters would remind all of us of our share houses many decades ago.

I realise that all these requests may make me seem like a massive tosser. Fine – give me an aged care home I can share with the other tossers, where people can come and talk to us about pretentious European holocinema,. It'll be amazing.

I’m not exactly excited about getting old. And sometimes, I worry about being transported to the aged care homes of today, stuck in a bingo game that will never end or trapped in a giant doily.

But I don't think our tastes shift all that much as we age. So the aged care homes of the 2050s will surely be fairly different to the ones that cater  so well to today’s aged customers.

In the end, I’m pretty confident that if you give me a big screen, speakers hooked up to a streaming service, a comfy reclining bed and fast internet access, I’ll be as happy as can be.

Oh, and some freshly-baked muffins. Some things never change.

Sydney is too expensive for young people to take a risk on a good idea

The world is full of bright young people building spiffy websites and nifty apps. They're skipping the stability of traditional employment to code in cafes and co-working spaces. But they're probably not doing it in Sydney.

World Economic Forum research found that young Australians were poorly prepared for the digital economy, and faced intense labour market uncertainty. Fewer young people want to work for a start-up than in any other country surveyed – a mere 3.8 per cent.

Who can blame them for choosing a nice, safe bank job in expensive, uncertain Sydney? Starting a business can mean years of earning almost nothing, and just surviving in this city is fiendishly expensive, let alone funding a house big enough for kids.

I don't know many successful Australian tech entrepreneurs – presumably there are a few who haven't moved overseas yet? But when we left uni 20 years ago, lots of my cohort had a go at becoming artists, musicians, writers and comedians – equally risky propositions. Many of them are still thriving today.

My friends and I started a satirical newspaper called The Chaser when I was 22, in what would now be called an ultra-niche content play. Even in 1999, we knew it was foolish – our first edition contained a history of failed independent newspapers.

Our paper joined them after six years, 90 editions and roughly a dozen legal threats that were abandoned after the lawyers estimated our assets. But we've worked in the media ever since, somehow surviving on the gag-writing skills honed over 90 all-nighters. (Topical comedians are nothing if not agile.)

My generation was lucky that back then, Sydney seemed as cheap as our jokes. These days, Demographia says it's the world's least affordable city after Hong Kong.

In Sydney, the NSW government's identified a Diagon Alley for the magic of innovation. Premier Mike Baird wants the disused White Bay power station to become "Australia's own quantum harbour". Personally the word "quantum" reminds me of Scott Bakula​, but Opposition Leader Luke Foley supports the idea.

Our leaders envision a harbourside hub buzzing with minty-fresh ideas, rattling as disruptive coders bash their keyboards to grow the digital economy. All we need is entrepreneurs to start up the start-ups.

Politicians aren't the only ones advocating entrepreneurship. A recent report by the Australian Council of Learned Academies identified an "urgent need" for more businesses to commercialise our publicly-funded research.

Apparently we have superior technology but can't sell it. We're the 2016 equivalent of Betamax.

But unleashing world-beating innovation isn't as easy as tossing around buzzwords and generating 3D renders of groovy co-working spaces full of hip young techpreneurs. (Apparently that's a word.)

If we build these exciting hubs and incubators, will anybody come? Surely the lack of a groovy converted power station isn't the only thing stopping smart people launching startups to commercialise breakthroughs made by researchers with safer university jobs. Not when starting businesses has the risk profile of a Game of Thrones character.

Sydney's full of cheerful yellow posters advertising the government's "ideas boom", like so many pre-election daffodils. When announcing his innovation package in January, Malcolm Turnbull praised countries where "entrepreneurship is valued and taking calculated risks or 'having a go'... is considered to be the norm".

It's not surprising that this PM believes in taking chances – it worked out for him last September. But Labor's spruiking innovation too. Bill Shorten promises "regional innovation hubs" and a "Landing Pad for Australian innovators", which sounds as though he'll install mattresses under the windows of every co-working hub.

Both leaders want to sound future-focused in the hope that voters will give them one. We might not be seeing the contest of ideas that was hoped for after Malcolm Turnbull's ascension, but there's certainly a contest to talk the most about them.

They'll struggle to encourage young people into entrepreneurship, though, if they don't address the boom that isn't spruiked on posters – the housing one.

Rents on four-bedroom inner-city terraces have tripled since I shared one with friends 20 years ago, according to Housing NSW. Rents have risen almost as much in the outer suburbs, too. Whereas wage growth has stagnated recently.

This means that it's more expensive to roll those dice than ever. An average room in an two-bedroom inner-ring apartment now costs $330 a week. Food, bills and the rest can easily double that, which is an awful lot when you're putting in sweat equity and have to cover your business' costs, too.

Making Sydney affordable enough for entrepreneurship will require an ideas boom from our policymakers. Otherwise not only will Australia never establish the startup culture we're told we need, but nobody will start dubious new satirical publications. It would be tragic indeed if those few agile innovators who do claw their way to the top had nobody to lampoon them.

First published in The Sydney Morning Herald

How to avoid tweeting your way to unemployment

Free speech is a fine thing. Unfettered self-expression is a precious gift. Some might say that in a democracy such as ours, it should have no limits whatsoever.

But in this era where we all carry portable publishing devices in our pockets, it should definitely have limits, and even if your employer doesn't impose them on you the way the ABC does on people like me, it makes good sense to impose similar rules on yourself.

So, with that in mind, here's some advice about how not to screw up on Twitter, the premier platform for laying social media landmines that explode beneath you at the most inopportune moments.

Now that I've published this advice, it's 100 per cent likely that I'll get into trouble on Twitter in the next 24 to 48 hours, because we live in a deeply ironic universe. But I'm prepared to risk that inevitability, just so that others may learn. Think of that before you post your own scathing tweet about whatever I'm about to say...

Choose your username carefully

The golden rule here is - don't include your job, or anything else that's subject to change. After Kevin Rudd was deposed as Prime Minister, he remained @kevinruddpm on Twitter for more than a week, which seemed extremely poignant, and also ill-advised. And yet his ex-pal Wayne Swan didn't learn from that, and registered @SwannyDPM shortly afterwards. Now he's @SwannyQLD, which isn't likely to change.

Not only is it humiliating to have to change your name when you lose your job involuntarily, but the earlier you can grab a good username, the better. The ABC's managing director was able to take over a disused@mscott account a few years back when he switched from @abcmarkscott, but not all of us have those kinds of contacts in Twitter HQ.

Tweet for the job you want, not the job you have

That advice is often given in terms of how you dress, but for how you tweet it's even more important. Last year, a relatively unknown comedian called Trevor Noah was given the enormous challenge of taking over The Daily Show after Jon Stewart's departure. Shortly after he was announced, a wonderful moment for him was overwhelmed by the discovery that he had tweeted some extremely off-colour jokes a few years earlier.

They're indefensible jokes, but most comedians push the envelope when they're trying to get noticed. Nowadays, they should probably stay in the comedy cellars. He got through it, but I'm sure it's still one of the first things that comes to mind when some non-regular viewers hear his name. Perhaps if he'd imagined how well things might go for him career-wise, he'd have been more careful...

To clarify - tweet for the job you want, always remembering that the universe is unpredictable.

In today's news, there are a couple of examples of the same kind of thing. The incoming Senator for Victoria, James Paterson, was scathing about the prospect of Malcolm Turnbull returning as leader, calling him "ineffective" in 2012. Perhaps he thought then that there was no way a comeback would happen, or that he himself would be offered a Senate spot so soon - but sometimes unlikely scenarios come to pass, especially in politics, and especially recently. If we learn nothing from the rise of potential-president Donald Drumpf and former-holder-of-the-balance-of-power Clive Palmer, we should learn this.

Similarly implausible, or so he may have thought, was the idea of the Greens and Liberals ever working together - and yet Jim Casey, who is trying to unseat Anthony Albanese in Grayndler, has been criticised for a series of tweets using strong language to refer to "Tory" parties - those very same people whose preferences he may find himself seeking before the election.

Don't try to use a hashtag for marketing

I call this the #qantasluxury effect. Some social media 'guru' at the airline created a competition back in 2011 - to enter, you had to post something using the hashtag #qantasluxury. Cue lots of jokes about terrible food and scheduling problems that quickly overwhelmed any legitimate entries.

And yet social marketers keep trying to do this. Just search for "hashtag backfires" like I did and you'll see there are stacks of examples. #AskTrump, #myNYPD, #NameAHorseRace, even #RespectMyPMin Malaysia. Closer to home, #YourTaxis created the opposite effect to the Victorian Taxi Association's hopes of rallying fans to counter Uber.

So it shouldn't have been all that difficult to predict that many, if not most, of the tweets under the Federal Government's own #ideasboom hashtag would be sarcastic in nature. Never forget that social media is a seething viper's nest of smartarses. (That's why we love it.)

There's too much risk in seeding self-serving hashtags, but if you cater to Twitter users' love of bizarre, timewasting inanity, things can still go viral in moments. That's what a few Australian comedians discovered when mucking around the other day with a deliberately stupid topic called#celebrityhousehats - before long, @Mashable had tweeted about it to their seven million followers.

Imagine your boss reading every tweet

Getting this wrong is one of the fastest ways to lose your job - here's a list of no fewer than 16 people who did, with former Age columnist Catherine Deveny being a well-known example. So is when you tweet a personal comment from a work account - I'm so terrified of doing that that I use a whole different app for work. Which leads me to…

Don't drink and tweet

Same goes for other substances too, of course. To see why, simply refer to any of the dozens of times@KanyeWest has found himself with a few hours to spare and unleashed a highly entertaining stream of consciousness. Recently, he hit Mark Zuckerberg for a billion dollars for "Kanye West ideas" and admitted to being deeply in debt. Kanye's tweets are like he's interrupting Taylor Swift's speech right on your smartphone screen.

Note - I'm not suggesting that Kanye was in any way intoxicated when he did this. As he'll tell you, he's pretty special. I just think that certain substances have been shown to, shall we say, bring out the Kanye in all of us. Take for instance the Australian cricket team.

Understand direct messages

Famous people send each other direct messages. They send them to fans, too. (At least so I've read - obviously I'm not famous enough ever to have been involved in anything like this.) But the problem is, in most Twitter apps, one tab is for totally private messages, while just next to it is the tab for the ones that are 100 per cent public. The risk should be obvious, right?

I'm going to try and be charitable by pointing out that we are all fallible when it comes to technology, but let's just say that former New York congressman Anthony Weiner is more fallible than most. When trying to mount a comeback from Scandal #1, some might have ensured that aides did all the tweeting on their behalf. But, well, let's just say that Weiner - or should I say Carlos Danger - is an enthusiastic, but not proficient, adopter of new technology.

You can't assume you'll remain anonymous

Refer to @RealMarkLatham.

Finally, when things go wrong, remember… deleting won't save you

The internet is like the North in Game of Thrones - it remembers. (And can be utterly brutal.) It's worth being aware of places like the Sunlight Foundation, an archive of US politicians' deleted tweets. If you stuff up, deleting isn't necessarily a bad idea - but you still need to apologise, because someone will have screencapped it. Like life, Twitter doesn't come with an undo button.

So, why would anyone use Twitter at all? It can make careers, too. It and Facebook have enabled Donald Drumpf to become the Republican frontrunner without spending much money (here's an interesting analysis from a marketing perspective). And comedians like Rob Delaney have built careers on consistently excellent (and edgy, as a word of warning) Twitter accounts.

Social media is a potent maker and destroyer of careers - so go out and do your worst, remembering that if you ever get anywhere, you'll definitely have to front a press conference and apologise for it.

This article was first published at The Drum

Say hello to election mania – and I do mean mania

Guessing what's in Malcolm Turnbull's head. That's what anyone with a passing interest in Australian politics will be doing for the next three months or so. In fact, it's recently overtaken Pin The Appropriation On The Responsible Subcommittee as Canberra's favourite parlour game.

No doubt the PM's head contains many things - public transport maps of our major cities, including photogenic selfie locations, and more Thucydides than anybody outside of a university classics department could possibly need. I suspect there are more tasty stories about Kerry Packer in there somewhere, too.

But if you searched long and hard enough, peeling back the layers of legal arcana and shimmying around the complex corporate structures contained therein, you would find an election date.

Speculation about this date has reached fever pitch in certain nerdy circles. It's dominating Insiders and Q&A, and it would probably be dominating the Bolt Report if it hadn't been consigned to the same place Channel Ten stashed Yasmin's Getting Married.

The commentariat is writing of little else, and I'm constantly hearing my fellow politiconerds say "If I were Malcolm Turnbull, I'd...", and coming up with their theory about his best tactical move.

(Personally, if I were Malcolm Turnbull, I'd immediately retire and go back to finessing my tech stocks instead of trying to mould our ramshackle polity into something workable, but that's just me.)

Because the House of Representatives doesn't have fixed terms, we get to play this game at least once every three years. Julia Gillard tried to avoid it by naming her date early - one in a long series of judgements that didn't solve her polling problems. Kevin Rudd and Tony Abbott were also denied the chance to pick a date by their nervous colleagues.

In fact - and this astonished me when I realised it - no Prime Minister has been re-elected in their own right since John Howard beat Mark Latham in 2004. So Malcolm Turnbull is trying to do something that's as rare in Australian politics as a civil, constructive Question Time.

Numerous commentators have started to ask questions about what the PM's strategy is, and indeed whether there even is one. And given the lack of sweeping announcements in the past few months, we can only speculate that he's either getting all his ducks in a row as part of a carefully planned strategy reminiscent of the brilliant Athenian general Alcibiades (sorry if you thought we were getting through this without more Thucydides), or forlornly wondering why all his ducks keep flapping off.

But whether or not there is a strategy unspooling slowly before our eyes, or the PM genuinely can't decide what he wants to do, the result is the same: endless speculation.

At every opportunity, the political commentariat speculates about various dates, indulging in the sort of rule-in, rule-out games that politicians keep promising not to play with us. They'll painstakingly explain that because of the difference between the laws governing Senate and House elections, the PM's options are relatively few.

The best man at explaining this, of course, is ABC election analyst Antony Green, and he's gone into several hundred words on the subject. The most realistic option, though, is a normal election (House and half-Senate) between Saturday 6 August and the end of the year.

However - however - there's another possibility, and it's one that gets commentators, prognosticators, analysts, psephologists and approximately zero normal people hugely excited.

We could have...

Wait for it...

A double dissolution!

Yes, folks! An election that's exactly like a normal one for us voters, except that we would be electing the whole of the Senate instead of half of it.

And this possibility has let electoral geeks indulge in a feast of triggers and mandates and joint sitting talk. Let me explain just a little bit.

A double dissolution was, until recently, a completely suicidal move unless you were likely to win a whopping majority. That's because it's a lot easier for microparties to pick up seats in a double dissolution than in a regular election.

You know how last time, several people from the Motoring Enthusiasts and Liberal Democrats got up, along with several Palmer United senators until they weren't United any more? Even more of that kind of thing would happen than usual.

Or, at least, it would had the government not managed to obtain agreement for changes to the Senate ballot which should serve to freeze out most microparties. More on that in a sec.

A double dissolution would mean an earlier election, probably 2 July, after a long campaign. In other words, Christmas in July for election nerds.

And this is where the game gets really fun, in the unlikely event that you're the kind of person who finds this stuff fun. Because double dissolution speculation is, for the terminally geeky among us, even more exciting than regular prognosticating.

Let me try for a bit. The big question is, will the PM be so bold? Ah, but being so bold would mean having to rush through the Budget and a supply bill. And subjecting us to a near two-month campaign which would probably be about the details of that budget, which may contain belt-tightening measures. Very bold indeed.

But if he's passed this new voting legislation, which the cross benches strenuously oppose because it means an end to getting elected with a handful of primary votes, wouldn't he be crazy not to go for it? Since the crossbenchers will be impossible to work with otherwise?

Yes, but what if he cut a deal whereby he wouldn't go to a double dissolution, meaning the crossbenchers would all be guaranteed three more years of their sweet Canberra gig, in return for them playing more nicely in the next term of the Parliament? And so it goes.

This is fun, right? Well, I think it is. It's what I imagine a dinner party at Barrie Cassidy's place would be like if he'd ever invited me to one, or, indeed, even knew who I was.

Truth be told, I suspect the PM hasn't yet made up his mind what to do. After all, Alcibiades was nothing if not flexible.

So, in the meantime, we play the guessing game. A game which can only be interrupted by bombshells emanating from or about Tony Abbott, it seems. But even then, it resumes immediately.

And just think - we could be playing until December!

Some people actually enjoy this stuff - I'm one of them. But then again, some people enjoy running through mudpits filled with live electrical cables - an experience that I imagine is not unlike running for political office.

In any event, it's Game On in Canberra. And if you don't enjoy intense talk about dates (something which most political geeks only get to do before an election), my advice to the vast majority of Australians is not to talk to, listen to, or read any of our nation's small cabal of election nerds until it's over.

If crooks can communicate securely, why can't we?

If we learned one thing from the drama surrounding Edward Snowden and his revelations about the National Security Agency, it's that Russia is still the best place to go if you have US secrets to peddle.

But if we learned another, it's that governments are able to access far more of our personal information than we previously thought.

Even before we heard about PRISM and the rest, we were on notice that what we keep on our phones can be vulnerable. Way back in 2005, Paris Hilton (remember her?) had the contents of her T-Mobile Sidekick (bet you don't remember them) uploaded all over the internet.

It's happened to a litany of celebrities in the years since - Paris always was at the cutting edge of fashion.

Smartphones are portable grenades whose victims are likely to be ourselves. One ironically-named US politician has destroyed his career on multiple occasions using nothing more than the phone in his hand.

To the extent that any of us weigh up the risks at all, we seem to have decided that the fun and convenience of smartphones outweighs the risk. And so, we keep our lives on our phones. They're full of our photos, emails, documents, financial details and passwords. Accessing our smartphones is as close as it's possible to get to accessing our souls. And we trust that our gadgets are as secure as our own inner thoughts.

This is precisely why the FBI is so eager to get Apple's help with accessing an iPhone used in the recentSan Bernardino terrorist attacks. They believe it contains information that will help law enforcement officials uncover the rest of the attackers' network - an admirable goal, surely.

The right balance between privacy and law enforcement is difficult to strike. I suspect most of us would like the police to be able to protect us against "bad guys", but expect innocent citizens to be protected from rampant, speculative snooping.

Of course in practice, it isn't that simple - or so Apple says. CEO Tim Cook has released a public letter arguing that if they create a backdoor of this nature, it will be like opening Pandora's box - by which I mean the mythical figure, not the music streaming service.

It appears that the FBI wants Apple to disable two of the most potent security restrictions that the iPhone and similar devices possess. Firstly, they want to be able to make unlimited attempts to guess the phone's PIN without the phone slowing down between wrong attempts, as it's currently programmed to do in order to prevent "brute force" attacks. Secondly, they want to deactivate the feature whereby the phone gets wiped after 10 wrong attempts.

These changes would be made, it's important to note, only for this one phone, which would have a specially vulnerable version of the operating system uploaded to it. But Apple argues that if this is rendered possible even in one special instance, it will be possible for other hackers too.

On reading Cook's letter, I was sceptical. He suggests that right now, the knowledge about how to do what the FBI wants does not exist, whereas if it's invented, it can't be uninvented, so to speak. All phones will be vulnerable henceforth.

That's an assertion that seems worth querying. I'm no programmer, but surely the restrictions that currently exist in iOS are in a few lines of code that could easily be modified? Instead of wiping the user out after 10 wrong attempts, couldn't that number be changed to 1,000,000? And couldn't the slowdown between incorrect guesses also be modified to be, say, 10 milliseconds instead of 10 minutes?

There are probably complexities I'm missing, but it doesn't at first glance seem to be a request that involves radically re-engineering the phone or inventing some breakthrough. If anything, the FBI's request seems a lot less complicated than what the jail-breaking community routinely does with Apple's operating system. (Perhaps they'll help if Apple won't?)

But while I suspect it might be possible to hack into this one phone without compromising everything, Cook's effort to protect his users' privacy seems admirable in general terms.

Nobody wants to use a hackable phone. I'm sure everyone who buys one of his products would urge him to make them more, not less, secure. And I'm sure that the many members of the law enforcement community who use them feel the same way.

Cook is more convincing about the impossibility of creating a device that can be hacked only by one trusted set of users. If the FBI can get into everyone's smartphones, then others will be able to as well. And indeed, if Apple can theoretically hack the San Bernadino phone today, probably others can too.

More broadly, Apples seems to want to make devices that nobody can get into - not them, and not law enforcement. (Their Touch ID devices are apparently much harder to break into than the San Bernardino one, which is an old model.) If they're secure enough, no subpoena could compel them to breach their users' privacy, just as someone who installs an alarm for you shouldn't retain a code of their own.

As a user, this is extremely reassuring. As a member of the public, let's face it, it's somewhat scary. So where should the balance be struck?

It seems likely that the average terrorist already uses smartphone apps that are far more secure than the hardware itself. Apps like Wickr (used by Malcolm Turnbull) and TOR (funded by the US State Department) already permit what are believed to be completely secure communications, while Osama Bin Laden cleverly evaded the NSA's dragnet for many years by sending couriers with physical USB drives.

So while human error is already a factor and the odd criminal might stuff up and use an insecure smartphone on occasion, the really canny crooks are already using unhackable systems. Otherwise the US would be able to send in their drones about five minutes after the average ISIS lackey sent a text.

And while we know that there are terrorists out there exchanging messages that are a threat to our wellbeing, the reality is that the average person is far more likely to come into contact with hackers who want to steal their personal information. Our email inboxes are full of messages from scammers, and they fool millions of people each year.

So if the average terrorist is already using extremely secure communications platforms that are far less hackable than the devices they run on, and the average non-terrorist is at risk from hackers and identity thieves, I believe it's reasonable for Apple and other tech companies to continue to make devices that are as secure as possible. In terms of threats to the average person, it's probably the lesser of two evils.

There's also the question of whether we can always trust law enforcement agencies to do the right thing. History shows that while the vast majority are of course dedicated, admirable people, any organisation is subject to corruption. Should the dodgiest members of the law enforcement and intelligence communities really be entrusted with a back door to everything sitting on our telephones? And if our spies can get in, can't all spies?

It's tempting to voluntarily yield our civil liberties whenever we hear the word 'terrorism'. But while I'm a little sceptical of Cook's argument that this one exception would irrevocably open the floodgates, our cybersecurity is an extremely precious thing, and it's something that our law enforcement agencies are also supposed to be protecting.

Since criminals already seem to use state-of-the-art encryption that goes far beyond anything built into our day-to-day hardware, it seems reasonable that the rest of us are allowed to use secure devices as well.

My ten favourite thing about the 2016 Oscars

This was surely the first Oscars where more attention was paid to the people who hadn't been nominated than the people who had. Sitting through the 3.5 hour ceremony, it was hard not to notice every set of five nominees was uniformly white - and there were a lot of them.

But in terms of what happened, as opposed to what should have and didn't, here are the things worth talking about.

Mad Max Fury Road

Let's start with the parochial bit, because you can bet the news bulletins will. What an incredible achievement for George Miller's movie, which cleaned up in the categories that related to the look and sound of the film.

Best Film Editing. Best Production Design. Best Costume Design. Best Makeup and Hairstyling. Best Sound Editing. Best Sound Mixing.

Six Oscars in all. Six! The most ever for an Australian film, and it was particularly delightful seeing Margot Robbie present the Makeup and Hairstyling Oscar to another Australian.

Cobbling all of that excellence together arguably deserved Best Director ahead of Alejandro Iñárritu, but it's hard to resent one of the most interesting filmmakers alive today for his back-to-back wins. The bottom line is that The Revenant is billed as a 'serious movie' and Mad Max is a fantasy blockbuster, and while that makes the latter more watchable, it means that the Academy voters were always more likely to support the former.

George Miller can rest on his many, many laurels.

#OscarsSoWhite

In his monologue, Chris Rock immediately went there. Of course he did. Rock has spent decades wittily confronting America with its racial shortcomings, and he spent practically his whole monologue confronting the monochromatic elephant in the room.

Moreover, he did it so well that when he finished and the white people took to the stage to begin handing one another trinkets, you could sense the disappointment in the overwhelmingly white room.

That said, Rock's gag about how women shouldn't mind that they get asked what they're wearing because men all wear the same thing fell horribly flat, and some commentators have observed that his insight into sexism fell somewhat short of his insight into racism - although I liked the Björk swancallback.

But his willingness to mock every aspect of the process - including Will Smith and Jada Pinkett-Smith, the leaders of the boycott - was admirable nevertheless.

His sharpest observation, for my money, came in the form of a sketch inserting African-American actors into some of the Best Picture nominees, ending with Chris Rock being marooned on Mars by Kristen Wiig and Jeff Daniels. This is the bigger, and more challenging, issue behind #OscarsSoWhite. The vast majority of Hollywood movies are stories about white men. Even Straight Out Of Compton was written by white men.

The Oscars often overlook award-worthy non-white actors - I would have handed last year's Best Actor straight to David Oyelowo for Selma last year, but neither he nor the director Ava DuVernay was even nominated.

But the bigger issue surely is that not enough actors of colour get significant roles in the first place. Hollywood has a lot of work to do. And by choosing which movies to watch, the responsibility ultimately falls on all of us.

The scrolling thanks

This innovation was supposed to mean snappier, more meaningful speeches. While a noble idea, it didn't really work. The blathering thanks to profound statement ratio was the same as ever, only more speeches were awkwardly interrupted by 'The Ride Of The Valkyries'. (Does it get any whiter than Wagner, incidentally?) When this happened after less than a minute in many cases, I tended to wish that Odin's winged handmaidens would swoop down and hasten the rude orchestra on to Valhalla.

Stacey Dash

When Chris Rock introduced the Clueless star to wish America a happy Black History Month, nearly everyone watching in Australia said 'Huh?'. When I did so on Twitter, @anythingbutfifi pointed me to this article, which explained that she's a Fox News contributor nowadays, and suggested cancelling Black History Month in response to the #OscarsSoWhite controversy.

I'm pretty sure the whole thing was a joke at her expense that she wasn't in on. She wasn't the only one, but Chris Rock earned the right to amuse himself for a bit. (The other joke on the subject, with Angela Bassett, made me laugh out loud.)

Leonardo DiCaprio

Finally, Hollywood's sport of torturing one of its most earnest leading men is over. The best thing about Leo finally winning Best Actor is that he can stop making Oscar bait movies, and go back to choosing roles for fun - if he still knows how, given his plaintive acceptance speech about climate change.

Jenny Beavan

Stephen Fry likened her to a bag lady at the BAFTAs. But now not only does she have two more Oscars than he does, but she accepted her one for Mad Max: Fury Road wearing an awesome embroidered jacket.

The droids

Cameo of the evening went to C3-PO, R2-D2 and BB8. Although I couldn't help noticing that two in three of the droids were white.

Ennio Morricone:

This was the most moving moment of the night for me. An elderly man who was helped to the stage and also needed a translator, winning at the age of 87 for a score that was probably the best thing about The Hateful Eight. The bonus was that we got to hear what 'Tarantino' sounds like in Italian.

Spotlight wins best picture

This was a surprise to most viewers, with The Revenant or The Big Short tipped by most. And on a day when Cardinal Pell is giving evidence to the Royal Commission, too! Still, Hollywood loves a cause, and this one has, justifiably, been hard to ignore. I haven't seen the movie, but I'm glad that a movie about this subject beat the tale of some guy lost in the wilderness.

Alicia Vikander

Despite having been widely tipped, the winner of Best Supporting Actress (for The Danish Girl) was the most overwhelmed and enthusiastic winner of the night. It was a reminder that while we can be cynical about the awards, and analyse the politics ad infinitum, being recognised by one's peers still means an awful lot to those lucky enough to pick up a little gold statuette.

If only tonight we could sleep...

We don't sleep enough. Our doctors tell us this, assorted lifestyle gurus tell us this, and our bodies tell us this every time we wake up feeling like our heads have been gently bludgeoned with a fence paling.

Modern life stretches us until we're worn out like cheap rubber bands that have grown weak and flabby, no longer fit for purpose because they've become as horribly overextended as this metaphor.

But instead of heeding the message and retreating to slumberland, with earplugs, eye masks and a soothing recording of Dr Ben Carson's stump speech, we struggle on.

Resisting healthy sleep has become our daily norm. We are woken not by the sun at the time that suits our biorhythm, but by the remorseless bleeping of gadgets. On the way to work, caffeinated drinks jolt our sluggish brains into action. On the way home, electronic devices interrupt us with supposedly urgent messages, preventing us from shifting our minds away from the workplace.

Sleep is invariably our lowest priority.

And all the while, there's society's constant pressure to earn, succeed, compete and provide. Making rent or mortgage repayments, balancing budgets, planning for the future - it's stressful and exhausting.

Our sleep debts pile up at casino loan shark rates, and if we don't pay them back, the punishment is no less disturbingly physical. That's the main lesson from a new study by the US Centre for Disease Control which has found that the detrimental impacts of sleep deprivation go well beyond what's commonly understood.

I'm somewhat prone to insomnia, so I've always assumed I had a fairly good handle on the effects of inadequate sleep: that horrible groggy jet-lagged feeling, only without the excitement of visiting a new timezone. The heavy eyelids, the nodding off, the inability to form coherent sentences that transforms us into less perky versions of Sarah Palin. Dumb mistakes creep in, and everything seems just that little bit harder.

But according to the CDC's extensive study, there's more to sleep deprivation than this. Sleeping fewer than seven hours, the CDC says, increases your risk for "obesity, diabetes, high blood pressure, coronary heart disease, stroke, frequent mental distress, and all-cause mortality". And if that's not disturbing enough, it also "impairs cognitive performance, which can increase the likelihood of motor vehicle and other transportation accidents, industrial accidents, medical errors, and loss of work productivity that could affect the wider community".

In other words, it can kill you slowly or quickly. And if you wind up in hospital courtesy of sleep deprivation, you might end up being killed by your doctor's.

We all know that when we haven't slept enough the night before, the following day is going to be a painful one. But clearly, that's not where it ends. "I'll sleep when I'm dead" is all very well, but the CDC is telling us that if we don't start taking sleep seriously, we will be.

As a lifetime non-smoker who has always been quite smug about it, I was shocked by the claim last year that sleep deprivation was as detrimental to health as smoking. The CDC report doesn't make this comparison, but clearly those of us who've given up or never started smoking because of the health benefits need to realise that there are other, equally important lifestyle decisions.

The sad thing is that the future wasn't supposed to work this way. Remember the promise of time-saving devices that would open up our leisure time? I'd hoped that our electronic wizardry would make it so we didn't have to put in more than four or five hours a day, and computers would do the rest.

Instead, of course, we've put in increasingly long hours because most people's work has become less physical, making it possible to do it all day. Cloud computing and portable electronics have also melted away the distinction between work and home.

Not sleeping enough is also a foolish approach to life. I've long been convinced that pulling very long hours is counterproductive - you can survive with very little sleep for 48 hours or so, but if it goes on beyond that, you'll get so much worse at your job that the benefits of pulling extra hours melt away.

It shouldn't be so hard to sleep more hours, given how naturally sleep comes to most of us, but it is. The artificial light from our ubiquitous screens trick our bodies into thinking it's time to be up and about, right when they're supposed to be lulling us off to slumberland. I constantly find myself checking Twitter or Facebook or a messaging app when I'm meant to be dozing off. Every time, I find something that fires up the neurones which are supposed to be slowly powering down, especially in this era when you can't go online without finding something you're supposed to be outraged about.

The temptation to put in a few more hours to get ahead is constant, and even when we have a night off, there's a temptation to stay out a few more hours to blow off some extra steam - although the spread of lockout laws is certainly helping with that!

So we can add sleeping enough hours to eating healthily and exercising regularly, two other things we're constantly told by doctors but never seem to get around to acting on.

But the CDC research makes it clear that many of us have to change. I constantly tell myself that I need to break out of the cycle of making myself so tired that I don't feel like exercising, and instead work out so that I'm sufficiently exhausted to sleep properly.

How precisely I make myself do that is currently beyond me, but I suspect it has something to do with willpower. Perhaps if I sleep more, I'll be able to figure it out?

Sleep deprivation is a form of torture, routinely practiced at Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib. Most of the time, though, we're doing it to ourselves.

Dear Chris Martin, here's why Coldplay are funny

In an interview coinciding with his Super Bowl performance, where his band unwisely invited a contrast with the twin musical forces that are Beyoncé and Bruno Mars, lead singer Chris Martin confesses to not understanding why Coldplay are funny:

"I had a couple of years in the mid-2000s where it was really confusing to me," he said. "I was like, 'Why is our band sometimes a punch line?'"

A member of Coldplay not understanding why Coldplay are funny is, itself, fairly funny.

Well, Chris, I'd explain, but I'm not sure you'd understand. Someone who calls their child "Apple" clearly has limited self-awareness. But for anyone else unconvinced of Coldplay's amusingness, one sentence gleaned from a Guardian review of your performance explains both why your band is funny and why you aren't in a position to appreciate it:

Coldplay perform[ed] three of their biggest hits - Viva La Vida, Paradise and recent single Adventure of a Lifetime - on a flower-shaped stage, their instruments garlanded with flowers and the band's name written in Hindi on the drum kit.

You wrote "Coldplay" ... in Hindi … on the drum kit. Game over.

Or, as they say in Hindi, कहानी खत्म.

Now, the whole embracing flower power and mysticism thing was cool (as opposed to Cold) fifty years ago when the Beatles did it. It's far from cool now, and especially not at a gig sponsored by a cola corporation in the middle of a football match.

Their new song, which they performed at the Super Bowl, is called "Adventure Of A Lifetime", a name that's too clichéd for a self-help author. It comes from an album called "A Head Full Of Dreams", the last word of which should surely be pronounced "Dweams". Because Coldplay are many things - rich, successful, remarkably consistent, and by many accounts really lovely guys - but they are not cool.

Many of their ideas are twee, even some of the ones that are monster hits. That's been the case ever since their second and also head-themed album, A Rush Of Blood To The Head, which describes excitement without generating any of it.

But what that record did generate, in spades, was catchy, radio-friendly hits. I can't hear the arpeggiated keyboard intro to "Clocks" without wanting to punch a wall, or at least a clock, but there's no denying its popularity.

Also, they once released an album called Mylo Xyloto. And with that, the prosecution rests.

The thing is, I like a lot of what Coldplay do. Honestly. I was a massive fan of the first album, Parachutes. And ever since then, every album they've released has had a number of huge, singalong hits. "In My Place", "Speed Of Sound", "Fix You", "Viva La Vida", "Magic", "Paradise". All killers at karaoke, which is, of course, the ultimate test.

I saw them live at Splendour In The Grass a few years ago, and they were excellent. Honestly. Sure, they were selling t-shirts saying "Every Teardrop Is A Waterfall" at the merch tent, but if you set aside the cloying sentimentality of that lyric, they put on an excellent show.

Some musicians are dorks, and like it or not, that's Coldplay's place. Similarly, Bono seems unable to comprehend that after being pretty cool in the 80s and 90s, U2 are now a powerful, stodgy institution quite like the ones he likes to lecture about poverty. His band nowadays has a lot in common with their younger British imitators from across the Irish Sea, except Coldplay don't have to give away their records for free.

Worse things can happen. Even Paul McCartney, became consumed by tweeness as he aged. (Ringo was twee even in The Beatles, bless him.) Sure, it happened to Coldplay after one album, but they're still hugely popular and somehow selling records even in this age of piracy, so why not enjoy it?

The best solution from here, Chris Martin, is not to wonder why your band's funny, but to laugh along. Which, surprisingly, you seem to be extremely good at.

The same Coldplay that once released a song called "Hurts Like Heaven" also produced one of thefunniest videos I've seen in ages for a recent Red Nose Day. In it, they're trying to write a Game of Thrones musical that everyone except the band realises is terrible.

Martin leaps around with manic gusto, and we seeing him writing lots of hilariously terrible yet still-catchy tunes for it – the reggae number "Rastafarian Targaryen" and the incest love ballad "Closer To Home" are particular standouts. The latter features the lyric "Are you thinking about Joffrey, such a spirited lad / I was his uncle, I was also his dad". Then Liam Neeson chimes in with a voiceover – "It's the first romantic ballad about incest in Coldplay's career."

Now, that's funny. So was Chris Martin's episode of Extras, where he tackily tried to work cross-promotion into charitable projects and an excruciating cameo.

I'm not sure Coldplay wrote either of those scripts. But they went along with them, and good on them for it.

There's something endearingly humble about the band, too. In the same interview that Martin confessed to not getting why his creative impulses were hilarious, he admitted that he'd pitched a song to Beyoncé and she'd declined, describing it as "awful". This follows from drummer Will Champion's admission that Bowie declined a pitch, saying "It's not very good, is it?" What other band would have been sincere enough to admit to being dissed by Bey and Bowie?

I'd advise them not to do gigs alongside the ridiculously cool Beyoncé and Bruno Mars in future, and once they've burned the place down, definitely don't return to the stage for a weepy version of "Fix You".

But hey - if you come to Sydney and play another stadium gig full of upbeat but faintly effete power pop and sincere ballads, I'll happily go along. Just don't expect me not to snigger if you write "Coldplay" somewhere in Hindi.

Why hasn't my band made the Hottest 100 yet?

Every year, the arrival of triple j's Hottest 100 fills me with sorrow. Not because my near-total ignorance of the songs in the countdown is a sign of my ever-increasing age, although it is. Nor because for the past few years, nobody has invited me to a bangin' Hottest 100 party, although they haven’t.

No – I mourn because every year, the Hottest 100 features a grand total of no songs by my band. Zip, zero, zilch.

It’s been that way for ever since the countdown started. A whopping 2300 songs in all, and my band has none of them. How is that fair, when Powderfinger have something like six hundred?

Now, triple j and its listeners can’t be held entirely responsible for this slight. The fact is, despite spending much of my teenaged years and twenties playing bass in various uni revues, jazz combos, weird theatrical productions and other ill-advised projects, I never actually started a proper band or recorded any music.

In other words, my number of Hottest 100-eligible recordings to date is also zero. But this wasn’t for want of trying. And when I say trying, I really mean dreaming.

If all it took to become an international pop sensation was sitting in one’s bedroom, strumming an acoustic guitar with fingers too chubby to strum the notes cleanly while feeling sorry for oneself, then I’d be Taylor Swift. Or, more likely, Ryan Adams doing mopey covers of her.

Like Taylor, I wrote love songs, although unlike Taylor, mine weren’t so much about breakups as never-happeneds. Like Taylor, I wrote songs about the haterz, although in mine, I didn't manage to shake them off.

Unlike Taylor, I never spent time recording country music, though, so there’s that.

The closest I came to rock ‘n roll superstardom was playing one gig at Bar Broadway near Sydney’s Central Station with a singer-songwriter friend. Performing under the name ‘Mending’, we weren’t too bad, I think; and the name of the band seemed to promise better things to come.

But my friend retired from performing serious music immediately afterwards, and has never done so in the 15 years since. I’m not certain that it was my fault, but I’m not certain that it wasn’t, either. My musical career, at least, would remain resolutely unmended.

My one other rock gig was the time some friends and I went into the legendary Sydney University band competition, birthplace of the Cruel Sea and the Whitlams, under the name The Be-Dazzlers. Even though two of the other four bands didn’t bother to show up, we lost to a band known only as With Pins. In contrast, we were short of talent, rehearsal time, adequate songs, and pins.

That said, it was a miracle our gig happened at all after the car with all our gear in it broke down outside the uni gates. It was also a miracle we survived after the crowd began throwing things at us midway through our set.

We didn’t deserve any better. The only sustained effort I’d put into the occasion, despite being lead singer, rhythm guitarist slash bassist and main songwriter, was the goatee I’d grown especially. In my defence, it was still more than our lead guitarist, who only managed to get an amplifier the day of the gig.

Even though it was the mid nineties, we found out that there were limits to the whole ‘slacker rock’ thing. But as terrible as we were, I still reckon we were better than Bush.

It’s a shame I couldn’t get a proper band together in the nineties grunge era. That really was my time. Not only was I was very good at angsty self-loathing, which seemed to be the qualification for musical success back then, but my wardrobe of misshapen knits and unironed flannies had somehow become the latest fashion.

Plus the brilliant thing about grunge rock is that you don’t need much in the way of guitar skills. Just basic chords through a dodgy distortion pedal will do, meaning that for once, my inadequacy was entirely sufficient.

And of course even though I was half-decent at the bass, I wanted to play guitar – who listens to Nirvana and wants to be Krist Novoselic?

I've had to accept in the years since then that my rock dreams are dead. But listening to the past few years of Hottest 100 countdowns has given me fresh hope. Forget bands – we are now in the era of the knob-twiddling producer.

Flume, Chet Faker and Gotye have all done brilliantly in recent years, to name but a few. It seems that all you need to make the countdown nowadays is digital music software, a weird stage name and hundreds of hours to pour into mucking around with a computer.

Facial hair seems to help, too; and I'm certainly sorted for that as required.

I’m qualified. I've got GarageBand (which is free, after all), the awesome nickname ‘Dom Juan’ which a friend gave me – ironically, obviously – and the hundreds of hours I currently spend aimlessly surfing the web. If I redirected these attributes to music production, why couldn't I make next year’s Hottest 100?

Well, my lack of musical talent, for starters. But my dreams always unjustifiably assume I've got lots of that despite all the evidence to the contrary, so why not give it a go?

So – Hottest 100, here I come! Just as long as I can solve one more problem besides the whole ‘writing and performing a great song’ issue – or at least coming up with a song as good as The Rubens’.

On Australia Day 2017, I’ll turn 40. Surely that’s way too old to get played on the national youth station?

My best hope of countdown immortality now, surely, is if triple j’s middle age-oriented stablemate Double J launches its own list of the year’s hottest songs.

So, bring on the Lukewarm 100! Dom Juan is on his way.

10 things to talk about at a Hottest 100 party

It's January 26, and while the debate over the moral complexity of Australia Day continues, there's one thing today on which we can agree - the Hottest 100 is a musical feast for all!

Well, OK, not all, exactly - it's the youth station. But anyone who knows their triple j playlist as backwards as an Aussie rapper's cap - or anyone like me who will be listening in shamefacedly to catch up on a year's worth of music - is in for a treat.

The Hottest 100 has been part of our summers since I was young enough to sing along with all the songs on the countdown, and the tradition of Hottest 100 parties stretches back just as far.

The songs may have changed, but the conversations in our backyards and pubs on countdown day have stayed the same over the decades.

So I'm pretty confident that this exclusive guide to how to talk about the playlist that stops the nation is as up-to-the-minute as my musical knowledge is stuck in the late 1990s.

1) Who did you vote for?

The obvious place to start. It's hard choosing just 10 songs to sum up a year, isn't it? No doubt you'll want to showcase your good taste by sharing your perfectly composed list with all and sundry, but there is another approach. The real pros, like former triple j Drive host Lindsay 'The Doctor' McDougall, vote multiple times with multiple email addresses. Tricky!

(I don't know whether you're supposed to do this, but far be it from me to disagree with a real doctor...)

2) What'll be number one?

The big question. I think 'Hotline Bling' could be a dark horse, both because Matt and Alex from the breakfast show dressed as its video for the ARIAs, showing just how huge it was, and also because it's one of the very few songs being tipped for the countdown that I've heard of.

Anyway, this is the part of the conversation where I nod and try to look more knowledgeable than I am. But hey, I'm nearly 40.

3) How many Aussies are there?

After many years of concerns about under-representation, Aussies have been smashing it recently.Thirteen of the past 19 number ones have been home and hosed songs (that's triple j-ese for 'Australian'), and once again the number of local entries is likely to be very high - reflecting, in particular, how many great electronic/dance artists this country's produced in recent years.

Go Straya! And go triple j for playing so many sick Aussie tunes, ay!

4) How many women aren't there?

This is a more awkward topic. There's never been a number one by a female artist, and last year, at least according to one count, just over 20 per cent of artists had a prominent female member.

This is not a new issue for triple j to contend with - station manager Chris Scadden crunched the numbers back in 2013, and made the point that the station plays significantly more female artists than feature in these polls. And naturally, a listener-voted countdown like the Hottest 100 diagnoses a problem; it doesn't provide a chance to solve it.

One thing we can be sure of, though, is that triple j will continue to break new artists from a diversity of backgrounds - they do more of this than anyone.

5) ... But how great is Courtney Barnett?

Her unassuming, witty tales of suburban Melbourne life have attracted more hype than the resolutely low-key singer-songwriter would ever have sought. She deserves number one this year, I reckon. 'Depreston' captures the horror of the housing market in a way that must resonate with every Australian below 40 - and it's incredibly catchy, too.

In any case, though, I bet thanks to C Barnett, young women all over Australia are picking up six-strings in much the way Eminem once encouraged scrawny white dudes to enter rap battles. The results will surely be far more listenable.

6) Where's Bieber?

This question is this year's version of #tay4hottest100, except it's somehow not funny when it's Bieber. Plus, 'Sorry' is no 'Shake It Off'.

As with Taylor Swift, the answer is - absolutely everywhere else. While some artists do cross over (hello Drake), there's surely no point in triple j playing the same music we already hear on multiple commercial FM stations.

A broader comparison between the Hottest 100 and the other list of Australia's favourite 100 songs last year, the ARIA singles chart, is interesting - there will probably be at least a dozen songs on both lists. There's lots of Biebs and Tay Tay over on the ARIA chart - but also a lot more women in general. My quick count gave 40 songs with at least one female artist credited. It'll probably be ahead in terms of racial diversity, too.

This may reveal some uncomfortable things about the audience's listening and voting preferences. Or maybe it just says that female artists are conquering the mainstream, and not bothering so much with the alternative sphere. Then again, maybe the triple j playlist focuses more on singer-songwriters, and that world is still far more male-dominated?

Worth pondering while you listen, anyway.

7) Can you believe some guy manually entered 20,000 votes forTepid 100?

No, I really can't.

8) It's sad how nowadays so much music is just some dude with a laptop

I've been whinging about this problem at music festivals for years. But as with every other artform, technology is breaking down barriers and letting anyone have a go, and the results are often spectacular.

Maybe the gigs aren't as interesting, but the elaborate production is often more so.

9) Have you heard the story that inspired 'King Kunta' by Kendrick Lamar?

Which is the hot favourite for #1, on both the Tepid list and at least one betting website I checked. It's a remarkable tale - probably fictional - about a slave whose foot was cut off by slavers after multiple escape attempts, but who eventually triumphs.

If it wins, it'll change up a very white-looking list of #1s. Pretty potent song to play across the country on January 26, too.

10) The countdown isn't as good as it used to be

A few years ago, I heard this chorus at a massive Hottest 100 party where most of the attendees were in their 20s, and it was somehow depressing yet reassuring given my own 90s nostalgia.

I'll defend the 1995 list that reflects my first year at uni against any more recent 100. The truth is surely that the countdown is as good as ever, but we all eventually stop being 19.

So, have an excellent countdown, especially if you are 19 - it'll never get better in the years to come, I promise you.

And may the best song win.

The shocking shock of tennis match fixing

I am shocked by the revelations that have rocked the tennis world on the first day of the Australian Open. I am shocked that highly paid tennis players should be accused of taking extra payments to throw matches, and shocked by the sheer extent of the corruption that has been alleged.

And most of all, I'm shocked that such a dramatic exposé, reflecting months of intensive, data-driven, investigative journalism, has been broken by Buzzfeed.

No, no; Buzzfeed does proper journalism alongside the deluge of cute pet listicles.

Early in his campaign, they published one of the most fascinating long-form articles on Donald Drumpf I've ever read, and only last year, former ABC journo Mark di Stefano uncovered the origins of the finest meme in Australian political history (link contains strong language and even stronger research).

But still, today's "Tennis Racket" piece is probably a high watermark for the website, just as these allegations seem to be a low watermark for a sport which used to consist of gentlemen gently popping the ball over the net with tiny wooden racquets until one of them yielded so both players could stop for restorative gin and tonics.

The investigative effort has demonstrated a level of determination that's positively Hewitt-esque - just getting your head around the number-crunching involved is exhausting. And this kind of intensive analysis surely provides the best path forward for tennis, which, to guard against future allegations of this nature, clearly needs to employ its own team of data watchdogs looking for sudden betting surges which could indicate a fix.

Big data analysis works well to detect dodginess - your bank employs a similar system of constant data analysis to figure out whether your credit card details have been stolen. Perhaps the most disturbing part of the scandal is the apparent refusal of the sport to put a thorough detection process in place for years after the alarm bells first sounded.

Buzzfeed credits Betfair, one of the world's leading sports gambling agencies, with detecting an irregularity in a notorious 2007 match in Poland. Some might view this sophisticated detection system as a guarantee that most sports remain clean. While this may be true, I would cynically point out that the same mathematical geniuses who designed the alert system presumably tweak the odds to ensure that the house is almost always ahead.

But if we learn anything from the tennis allegations, which follow major match-fixing claims in cricket, soccer, basketball and a number of other sports over the years, it should be that gambling on anything involving human beings is fraught with problems. Wherever there are humans, there will also be human frailty, and therefore greed and corruption. Wherever there's big money to be made on the side, there will be what can perhaps be termed Cronje capitalism.

Sports betting has been around for millennia - the Romans used to enjoy a flutter on chariot racing; and for millennia, betting on the outcomes of contests that can be manipulated has been about as foolish as voluntarily becoming a gladiator.

For there to be superstar champions in sport, there has to be a raft of less successful, more poorly compensated players, eking out a living by getting defeated in the first or second round. At some point, these athletes, who train just as hard as the big names, realise that they'll never win lucrative sponsorships or access the major prize pool. Little wonder then that they're apparently susceptible to throwing the odd set here or there to make as much money as they can before they retire. It's heinous, obviously, but it's an inevitable result of how lopsided the financial rewards in sport have become.

And one of the main sources of the deluge of money for successful players has been the gradual legalisation of sports betting. Nowadays, you can't watch overseas soccer matches without being bombarded with animated ads for betting sites along the sidelines, and their logos even feature on the chests of the players themselves. In the decades ahead, presumably, huge global gambling agencies will buy up entire sports and stream them via the internet with feeds that are constantly interrupted by the latest live odds.

Even in relatively regulated Australia, we are moving closer to ubiquitous sports betting ads. This is the first Australian Open where gambling promotions are being allowed on the arena itself, the timing of which now seems ironic to say the least. Tennis regulators are surely as unlikely to be able to halt the enormous growth of online betting in their sport as any other sports administrators. Surely it's only a matter of time until even the Olympics adopts a new logo that turns the five rings into zeroes next to a dollar sign.

The truly sad thing about the obnoxious growth of legal, regulated gambling, though, is that as this scandal reminds us, it's vastly preferable to the kind of unregulated, illegal gambling that seeks to fix matches. As irritating as I find them, huge multinational gambling corporations which constantly monitor sports for irregularities are probably the best guarantee we have that the match itself will be a genuine contest, albeit one that's constantly interrupted by annoying betting ads.

In one sense, these embarrassing accusations come at an excellent time for the 2016 Australian Open. Given the scrutiny that will follow these allegations, surely nobody would dare to throw so much as a point at Melbourne Park over the next fortnight.

The ongoing challenge for tennis will be to ensure that it closely monitors all future matches, especially those away from the grand slam spotlight, to guard against results that are only unexpected to those who aren't in on the scam.

16 predictions for 2016

2016 is here, and promises to be a year of intense competition. We've got national elections both at home and in the USA, the two-week carnivale of the Rio Olympics, and all those pending legal contests between hoverboard manufacturers and their unhappy purchasers.

It's a year of big prizes, like the $2 billion American Powerball draw, and big disappointments, like that of just about everyone who entered it.

While nobody can truly predict the future, especially those unscrupulous people who'll try to charge you for doing so, I've donned my Nostradomus hat and peered into my tisane leaves to try and forecast what's likely to happen in the year that, whatever happens from here, can definitely be said to have followed on from 2015.

1. Australia will underperform at the Rio Olympics

While we will perform extremely well for a nation of 24 million people, it will not be enough for a public that is addicted to constant sporting victories. There will be a huge public outcry and a public tarring and feathering for any Olympian cheeky enough to return from Rio without at least one gold medal.

2. The 2016 federal election will be closer than expected...

The polls are far from close now, so anything resembling a contest will fulfil this prediction. Possible reasons for a tightening of the race might include yet another bout of internal instability (likely), the government's apparent enthusiasm for increasing the GST (very likely) and the shock re-emergence of Godwin Grech (who can say?).

3. ... But Malcolm Turnbull will be re-elected

In Wentworth, at least. And just in case that looks like I'm sitting on the fence, I'm tipping an increased majority – Wentworth loves a winner.

No, really – the Coalition's likely to be re-elected unless it boldly pitches for major economic reform, with an increase in GST at its centrepiece that enables their opponents to run a scare campaign – so you can see why I thought the result might be closer than it looks now.

4. Tony Abbott will stay in Parliament

Believing that all he has to do to once again unseat Malcolm Turnbull is to sit and bide his time, a strategy which will only prove unsuccessful if Malcolm Turnbull remembers that this was the exact strategy he adopted against Abbott.

In the meantime, Abbott will spend the early part of the next parliamentary term writing a sequel to Battlelines. His defence of the Abbott government will be called Never Stopped Stopping Things.

5. 'Shake it Off' will top the Hottest 100 at last

But via Ryan Adams' doleful cover version. Some wit will then mash up the two versions and take out the 2017 title as well.

6. Jon Snow will return in Game of Thrones Series 6

Because of course he will, probably courtesy of Melisandre's freaky magic. The new series will be slightly less gory than the last one, and also slightly less interesting. Australians will still pirate it voraciously, but take far less joy in doing so.

7. The next book in George RR Martin's series won't appear by 31 December 2016

The Winds Of Winter will continue to prove that like winters in Westeros, Martin's series has no regularity, can last for far longer than anybody expected, and may well never end.

8. John Farnham will celebrate the 14th anniversary of his 'The Last Time' tour

And will mark the occasion with a special commemorative tour, the 'This Is The Last Time I Call A Tour The Last Time Tour Tour'.

9. Facebook will become completely autonomous

In mid-2016 the world's most intrusive social network will stop needing our assistance, or asking our permission, to post baby photos, 'like' statuses that make us look politically correct, check into locations like first class lounges that make us look like we're showing off, and posting long self-pitying screeds. It will also allow us to automatically reply to the latter with platitudes about how we really love the person and yay.

In 2017, we will completely outsource our entire emotional state to Facebook's algorithms, and I for one will be glad about all the time that will save.

10. An explosion of public outrage will lead to Mark Latham leaving The Verdict

The outbreak will involve intense attacks on any or all of the following: middle class feminists, mental health conditions, Labor politicians past and present, people who live anywhere besides Western Sydney and people who live in Western Sydney but do not, in Mark Latham's view, deserve to.

I feel, though, that the tea leaves are slightly unclear on this point – it's also possible that the whole of The Verdict will be axed except Mark Latham, who will be given his own show.

11. The Twenty20 fad will wane

While it's currently enjoying huge popularity, T20 will shortly prove too involved for our ever-diminishing attention spans. Instead, we'll play a new version that lasts for no more than 45 minutes. Bowlers will bowl from both ends simultaneously, 'tip 'n run' rules will apply, and fielders will be allowed to run out batters if they hit them with the ball while they're running between wickets. The injuries will add a degree of danger that will help to make things more exciting.

12. Donald Trump will win the Republican nomination...

And do so comfortably, despite having taken policy positions that have appalled even many within his own party, for the simple reason that he is more famous and less boring than the rest of the field put together.

13. ... And step aside for Hillary

Once Trump wins the nomination, he'll finally look into what it means to be President of the United States and discover that he would be not only required to work full-time at a workplace without his name on the front in massive gold letters, but would be expected to place his assets in a blind trust. Yeah, nah.

14. At long last, Leonardo DiCaprio will win an Oscar

But only one for Best Costume Design for the work he did growing that beard for The Revenant. It's so bushy that you can't see his smirk, making this the greatest DiCaprio performance ever - a dizzying triumph of facial hair sculpture!

Also at this year's Oscars, a woman who is a far better actor but gets paid a fifth of what he gets will win Best Actress. Probably Jennifer Lawrence so we can all guffaw at her wacky pratfalls yet again instead of treating her with the respect her talent ought to command.

15. The new iPhone 7 will be a mere 5mm deep

But will achieve this by needing to be charged every 15 minutes. Rumours of it losing a traditional headphone jack will come true, and it will also lose all buttons, the speaker, the camera and the microphone. Instead Siri will intelligently anticipate your needs and deliver any relevant content and services to you, which will work very well if all you want is an upgrade to the forthcoming iPhone 8, which will be 2mm thick and able to be folded for origami.

16. There will be a new cooking show

Undoubtedly the most inevitable of these predictions. I'm tipping a cooking/weight loss combo show which explains how to buy kale and instead of eating it, be sustained by sheer smugness alone.

You can't have edgy comedy without occasionally going over the edge

Ricky Gervais returned as host of the Golden Globes this week, and as sure as night follows day and regret follows the purchase of a hoverboard, his routine sparked off yet another chorus of controversy.

The comic himself predicted it, tweeting "Better get dressed and offend some humourless c---s, I suppose" before the ceremony even began. Whether or not you agree with his characterisation of the many people who took exception, Gervais certainly achieved his objective from the first moment he took to the stage, nursing a beer as a palpable symbol of his disdain for the audience and the gig.

The indifference was an affectation, of course, because if there's one thing that matters to Gervais even more than his forthcoming David Brent movie, it's his reputation as a stand-up comic.

While the Oscars may be the movie awards night with prestige, the Golden Globes have become the ones that are reliably funny. Whether Gervais or the equally acerbic Tina Fey and Amy Poehler are at the helm, the room will regularly fill with the sound of uproarious laughter instead of the trite standing ovations you get at the Academy Awards.

They've turned the night into an industry roast whose fire temporarily cleanses Hollywood of the smug self-congratulation that is otherwise its default setting. Nothing is sacred – including, in one of Gervais' more memorable gags this year, the priesthood itself.

All night, Gervais only lavished the kind of praise on stars that is habitual elsewhere in the industry when he was setting them up for a punchline. Anyone he praised for having had a good year was on the verge of a skewering. He picked on Ben Affleck, Mel Gibson, Sean Penn and the tinpot Globes themselves, delivering great lines each time, but he also went for some less safe targets.

Which brings us to the night's most controversial joke, the Caitlyn Jenner gag, which illustrates why edgy material often gets bigger laughs. As soon as she was mentioned, there was an intake of breath in the room. How, Hollywood wanted to know, would Gervais make a joke on this topic funny rather than abominable? His attempt involved her perpetrating negative stereotypes of female drivers, thanks to a fatal car accident.

Ouch, right? When I summarise it in those terms, it sounds awful. But listening back, in the moment, it's certain that the joke got one of his bigger laughs And it achieved that result because mentioning a sensitive subject raises the audience's hackles pre-emptively, but also increases the chances of a really huge laugh. Sacred cows can be the most rewarding to prick.

Watching back, the Jenner joke somehow bypassed the crowd's rational analytical processes and made the cream of Hollywood laugh despite themselves. Cutaways of some of the actors in the room betrayed a degree of sheepishness – Jamie Lee Curtis looked thoroughly disapproving, for instance. But she still had a chortle.

I won't add to the many analyses of the joke published elsewhere – like dissecting a souffle, picking humour apart inevitably ruins even a perfectly defensible joke. If you laughed, you laughed; if not, the line didn't work. A joke's success ultimately reflects how many of our involuntary humour buttons it manages to push. And there's a place for material that makes us groan, too.

The joy of comedy is that it entertains us despite our better judgment. It appeals to our actual sense of humour, not an affectation. You can fake trendy musical taste by memorising Pitchfork (I've tried), but you can't fake the genuine belly-laugh when a comedian hits one out of the park.

The unvarnished honesty of audiences is what makes comedy rewarding, but it's also what makes it difficult. Being funny is hard at the best of times, and being funny amid the general torpor of awards nights is about as hard as it gets, which is why even certifiable geniuses like David Letterman haven't been invited back to the Academy Awards.

While it probably means that we're all terrible people, there can be little doubt that humour is getting meaner. We've travelled from the gentle situation comedy of Family Ties, via Seinfeld with its total lack of likeable characters, to Amy Schumer, who doesn't so much poke fun at things as burn them to the ground. Bless her for it.

When comedy is cruel, it sometimes chooses a sacrosanct target, or misses a blow. In that case, it delivers a wince rather than a laugh. But that doesn't mean comedians shouldn't try to hit the right targets, and hit them hard.

And when they fall short, we should react with indifference rather than fury, unless we want comedy that only ever delivers benign, bored smiles. If we keep tarring and feathering our edgy humorists, we'll only have the dull ones left.

Personally, I'd rather Ricky Gervais delivered lots of big laughs and a few "ooh, that wasn't quite right" moments than a lifetime of inoffensive comics doing safe material. Otherwise, we'll have to watch the Golden Globes for the awards, and that would be far more painful than a few off-target one-liners.

Desperately seeking El Chapo

The actor Sean Penn and the narcotraficante Joaquín 'El Chapo' Guzmán, who recently traded tequila shots in the Mexican jungle, have more in common than might be immediately apparent. They've both had a long association with products that have been blamed for the moral decline of Western civilisation - in Chapo's case, illegal drugs; in Penn's, Hollywood movies and Madonna.

I'm not sure which was the greater challenge, tracking down the Mexican drug kingpin or reading Sean Penn's 10,000 word article about him. The former took six long months, while the latter certainly felt like it did.

But if you wade through the endless paragraphs which betray the author's greater fascination with himself than with his subject, there is an extraordinary story to discover. Penn's tale of burner phones and planes fitted with scramblers feels like a thriller, and his success in reaching Chapo seems so implausible that it's lucky that the two of them took a photo together to prove it really happened.

Despite the contempt many have expressed for Penn, it cannot be denied that while Mexico and America were using every resource they had to find him, a Hollywood actor managed to reach him while armed only with hubris.

Given Penn's stunning success, one can only wonder how many years and lives could have been saved if the hunt for Osama bin Laden had been entrusted to Justin Bieber.

It's possible that Penn's contact led directly to Chapo's capture, and if that's the case, the actor is undoubtedly as brave as he is naive as he is at risk of having an extremely uncomfortable conversation with a blowtorch-wielding member of the Sinaloa cartel.

And while the world generally indulges its film stars, it's unlikely that Chapo's associates will give Penn a free pass because they liked his stoner character in Fast Times At Ridgemont High.

We're only in the second week of January, but I'm confident that Penn's trip to visit Chapo will not be topped in this year's surreal celebrity story sweepstakes. Surely we've already found the 2016 version of Barnaby Joyce's jihad on Johnny Depp's dogs?

There's just so much about this tale that seems implausible, from the involvement of a glamorous Mexican star who has played a narco on-screen, to Penn's assertion that he has no idea whether laptops are still a thing, to his confession that at a pivotal moment in the narrative, he passed wind.

Perhaps the strangest twist in the story is the suggestion that the drug kingpin's desire to produce his own biopic led him to meet with Penn. Despite being the most murderous drug lord in a notoriously brutal country, El Chapo seems no less insecure about his place in history as any tinpot dictator who's ever filled his suffering country with statues of himself.

The drug boss seems to be attempting a more extreme version of the project undertaken by the members of NWA when they airbrushed the darker side of their own pasts out of Straight Out Of Compton. Quite possibly as a result, he's now unlikely to get a triumphant ending, and will instead rot in a US jail.

So El Chapo's motives for meeting the actor were clear enough. But why on earth did Sean Penn want to sit down with the world's most notorious drug trafficker?

His lengthy justification involves the oft-cited argument that the 'War on Drugs' has failed, and that addiction should be treated through the paradigm of healthcare rather than law enforcement:

What of the tens of thousands of sick and suffering chemically addicted Americans, barbarically imprisoned for the crime of their illness? Locked down in facilities where unspeakable acts of dehumanization and violence are inescapable, and murder a looming threat. Are we saying that what's systemic in our culture, and out of our direct hands and view, shares no moral equivalency to those abominations that may rival narco assassinations in Juarez?

This is a critique worth exploring, and even President Obama has been declaring his dissatisfaction with the War on Drugs of late.

And yet you don't need to sit down with one of US drug policy's greatest villains (and, arguably, beneficiaries) to examine the situation's complexities. Regardless of what one might think of the way our society moralises about the product he supplies, El Chapo is undoubtedly a mass-murderer.

Penn's extracurricular 'activist' activities are as passionately conducted as they are widely parodied. Presumably Penn told himself he was provoking some much-needed debate, and got excited about the adventure involved - which, admittedly, was considerable. But just because you're offered access to a fascinating villain doesn't mean you should take it on any terms.

We cannot expect Sean Penn to act judiciously unless he's in front of a camera, but Rolling Stone should not have endorsed his mission. The conflicts involving Mexico's drug cartels have led to the deaths of more than 160,000 people, according to government estimates, and no deals should be cut that might benefit the reputations of anybody involved.

And while the actor's article is certainly not hagiography, Rolling Stone's decision to grant Chapo approval was indefensible. Even if the effort backfired and led to his capture, no self-respecting publication should trade its integrity for even as extraordinary an exclusive as this one.

Rolling Stone's formidable reputation has suffered in the wake of recent scandals, and the magazine that published Hunter S Thompson's brilliant first hand-accounts needs to lift its standards. Penn's piece is not the classic gonzo journalism it purports to be. Rather, it feels more like a stunt pulled by a different kind of Gonzo.

For Penn's sake, I just hope Chapo's henchmen are kinder than the journalism academics will be.