Exciting start-up business!

At Tim's Trains, we aim to take you from nowhere to nowhere else in a timely and efficient manner!

While it is unfortunately true, our trains haven't been arriving nowhere and getting nowhere quite according to the timetables lately, we are always striving to better our record at delivering excellent customer service in the field of nothing. Therefore, we expect to double our services to nowhere in the coming months. 

It is also lamentably true that our trains haven't been travelling quite as fast from nowhere to nowhere as we have set out in our performance guidelines, but with the latest technology, we hope to be travelling nowhere even faster, and we promise to get you nowhere in... oh, about an hour or so. 

Don't set your watch by it, though. 

And if all else fails, remember our company slogan: 

"At least we're almost better than Connex!" 

Several unpleasant things and a pleasant thing

Morning television presenters smile. A lot. Their faces are so permanently fixed up in a rictus of apparent pleasure that you know they must want something out of you. Who wants to wake up in the morning and suffer the agony of someone leering at you, teeth gaping through their half-opened mouths, for two hours on end? Yet that is exactly what morning television is like. 

Other people that smile too much: people in advertisements for gyms, people in shampoo ads, and the Joker, while he is in the midst of performing another demonically evil act. 

Also, the other day, I saw on television an advertisement for Qantas. It featured children frolicking about in the natural landscapes of Australia. They all wore white shirts. They were waving their faces around in the sunlight. They were crooning some dreadful hymn about Australia having sons and daughters who were doing meaningless things in other countries. And , O God, yes, they were smiling. It was a vision of horror! Imagine drowning at the bottom of an ocean of golden syrup, physically asphyxiating on saccharine. That's how bad it was. 

Coffee, however, is pleasant. Coffee does not smile at you in the morning while delivering banal news stories, or try to sell you gymkhana memberships. Coffee does not wear a white shirt or wave its deformed visage around in the sunlight or gargle hideous homilies about the virtues of home. Coffee is sturdy, reliable, grainy, and black. I think I will have another one now. 

Have a nice weekend. 

Unnouncement

I was going to go out tonight, but didn't.

UPDATE! - I'll keep you abreast of the non-event as it doesn't happen. And it still isn't.

Liberals, Labor 'asked' to join the Turnbull Party

Canberra, Thursday - Malcolm Turnbull has rebutted accusations that he asked Paul Keating about joining the Labor Party by replying that they, instead, had asked to join the Malcolm Turnbull Party (MTP).

'I was asked by high-level representatives of both parties, on several occasions, whether they could be absorbed into the Malcolm Turnbull Party,' says Turnbull. 'Of course, it wasn't an official party at the time, but I immediately accepted.'

Turnbull went on to elaborate to the media, saying that he envisaged the process of absorption of the two parties, with a combined age of over one century, and being constituted of thousands of members and elected representatives, would be gradual, and he would over time simply 'engorge them in my fleshy bulk', helped by the power of his ego.

The MTP, once created, would simply require minor changes to the laws of the land regarding the formation of political parties, and the democratic process. For instance, states Turnbull, 'votes could simply be replaced by an economical process of adulation'.

Paul Keating has responded to Turnbull's claims by laughing and replying, 'Look, Malcolm did approach me asking if I'd like to join with him. I was very flattered, but in the end I had to say no.'

Soundbi

These days, the media are so addicted to soundbites that a politician could sit in a studio and deliver a three-hour-long speech right to the camera, only to have that speech sampled by a journalist, edited down in the studio by the producer, and presented on air as a miniscule three-second-phrase. The meaning of that phrase is then hugely exaggerated by the reporter, presented to the public as a shocking scandal, a concerning development, a contemptuous sneer, or irrefutable evidence of the coming apocalypse, and subsequently completely ignored by the public while being repeated by reporters for weeks on end.

We've come a long way from the days when Dr Johnson and the likes would reproduce the speeches of parliament, verbatim, in their newspapers for pages on end.

It won't be long, now, before we get a news report like this:

NEWSREADER: And there is outrage in parliament today over a preposition uttered by the by the Opposition Leader, Malcolm Turnbull, that indicates a possible change in Opposition policy to the ETS.

REPORTER: It all started out normally.

MALCOLM TURNBULL: ... and...

REPORTER: But then, things got very ugly indeed.

TURNBULL: ... on...

REPORTER: The Prime Minister, Kevin Rudd, immediately delivered this scathing rebuke!

KEVIN RUDD: ... so...

REPORTER: However, Mr Turnbull has insisted that his preposition was unfairly taken 'in context'.

MALCOLM TURNBULL: Too...

REPORTER: It is not known what will happen now, but clearly Turnbull's statement means the end of the world. Until next time.

All-purpose Australian national anthem

All-purpose Australian national anthem; encompassing geometry, geography, geology, the monarchy, unions, democracy, agriculture, parliaments, and patriotism

(Full context found in the comments at Still Life With Cat.)

Australians all let us rejoice,
Our land is sort of square!
With triangles and pointy bits
That stick up in the air.
We also kind of have a Queen,
But she lives overseas:
Plus: unions, parliaments, and sheep,
And eucalyptus trees.
In joyful strains let us rejoice -
God save our Gracious Queen!

Citizen weather report

Today's Citizen Weather Report comes to you live from Melbourne, where we've just had a Rather Interesting Weather Day, at times hitting highs of Very Very Interesting Indeed while working its way up to an Extreme Fabulous Wonderful Wow Weather Day, which has only occurred twice since records have begun.

The Rather Interesting Weather Day began as days usually begin, in the morning. Out to sea, low troughs of blowy blusteriness were gathering, while inland, several areas of spotty-spatteriness were whirling around doing what spotty-spattery things usually do. Meanwhile, clouds of the woolly, wispy, whimsical, and fluffy varieties were observed at various spots in the sky, floating about and occasionally bumping into one another.

As the day proceeded in the progressive manner that days have habitually been known to proceed in, several instances of rain, high winds, low winds, no winds, sun, clouds, and everything else were recorded at absolutely every location in the city, alternating with occasional periods of other stuff.

The temperature on several thermometers hovered for most of the morning around the 'kind of nice' and 'sort of nippy' range, dropping later in the day to readings closer to 'really rather chilly' and 'better pop on your mittens'.

Whilst the occurrence of this Rather Interesting Weather Day has been interesting enough for the Bureau of Meteorology to, er, take interest, a spokesman for the bureau has spokesmanned to Will Type For Food with these words: "I've really no idea what you're on about, but yes, the day was rather interesting. Can you go away, I'm trying to eat my lunch."

Whilst it is not known what exactly caused the Rather Interesting Weather Day, apart from all the stuff that was mentioned above, it seems certain that climate change is to blame, so maybe we should have more of it.

This has been a Citizen Weather Report for Friday, the twenty-first of August.

UPDATE! - Vote in the topical poll!

Climate change may cause more Really Interesting Weather Days to happen. Is this a good thing?
	Yes.
	No.
	Not sure.
	What the hell are you talking about, dimwit?
Free polls from Pollhost.com

Practical suggestions for everyday use

Spring cleaners: I find that cleaning is best approached by exploring how the term 'cleaning' is itself a social construct, and that it is only by liberating the words 'clean' and 'dirty' from the restrictive social structures of past centuries that we can really make political progress. Also, you'll find this takes much less work than actually 'cleaning'.

Coffee drinkers: spill coffee in your lap and call it lappucino. It doesn't make sense to do this, but the name seems appropriate.

Second hand diets: you have dinner, I get thinner

Thinking of going on a second hand diet. I'm going to get someone else to eat nothing but boiled cabbage while I gorge myself on gigantic butter cakes and what not, and my weight will go down.

As I see it, it should work on the basis of a simple principle: you are what someone else eats.

A review of one in two and two in one

One in two
There are many, many good reasons to travel in a car across Siberia. Love. Money. Communism. Crime. Finding the best watermelon seller this side of Omsk. But travelling in a car across Siberia in order solely to write a New Yorker article about travelling in a car across Siberia is not one of them - and certainly not when that New Yorker article is so boringly gargantuan that it stretches out over two magazines. This is what writer Ian Frazier has done, and in the process he has demonstrated how utterly pointless the theme of his article is: because instead of enjoying the writing about Siberia, you end up just thinking about what the hell the writer is doing in Siberia.

Quite aside from anything else, if you are going to write an article about travelling in a car across Siberia, then there's no need to actually go travelling. A much easier method for writing the article is readily at hand: by lying. You'd produce an article better than this one, too.

I put my New Yorker magazine down at the end of this article, not wanting more, but wanting less. Is it possible to unread an article?

Two in one
Some enterprising publisher has been re-releasing old Eva Ibbotson titles in a series of 'two-in-one' books. Ibbotson has written enough small books, and enough good books, to really pull this concept off.

Have I rhapsodised about Ibbotson before? I will now. Here are a few two word phrases that describe her writing: brilliantly plotted, wonderfully witty, heartwarming satire, hell crazy good. That last phrase was three words, not two: that's how good she is.

At the moment I'm reading a two-in-one combination of 'Not Just a Witch' and 'Dial a Ghost'. I'm halfway through the second, having zipped my way through the first on a Sunday afternoon.

Ibbotson has a delicious turn of phrase, with the ability to make you bark with laughter by saying just one or two words. (I love how she describes one old man 'sitting pinkly in his bath'.) And what better way to establish the moral wickedness and nastiness of characters than by saying this:

Because Fulton wasn't kind at all; he was evil, and so was his sister Frieda. The school that they ran was called Sunnydell, but no place could have been less sunny.

I want to read more. So I'm going to do it now. While sitting pinkly in my bath.

Bug love

There was an advertisement on the tram this morning that read:

Drink Dilmah to save an elephant

Now I rather liked that idea. Saving an elephant sounded fine and grand and heroic, just the same sort of a thing a big game hunter would do, but in reverse. I envisaged myself, a house husband, ensconced in a chair by the table, proudly drinking Dilmah, sip by valorous sip, while my wife (it's amazing what you can imagine on a tram journey) stomped gloomily around and about, finally sticking her head around the corner and asking what on earth I was doing.

"Oh, nothing," I would reply, magnanimously. "Just saving an elephant."

But then, I reflected, it's all about the elephants, isn't it? Or if it's not the elephants, it's the whales, or the dolphins, or the glorious wilderbeest. Humans like having big compassion for big things. Can you imagine extending that compassion to the fungal rash on your finger that has caused you to slather the dermal-cream equivalent of Agent Orange all over your hands, every morning, and every night? Or what about the plight of the parasitical bug that is so epically titchy it spends its entire life living up a mosquito bum, and has become endangered due to a tragic shortage of mosquito bums? It must be hard to extend our God-like compassion for all things living to those things which we don't know about yet.

We humans, all things considered, really are rather pragmatic about our sympathies. It's easy to feel sorry for an elephant. Oversized, overweight, but most importantly, over there. Not so much smallpox, which has an unpleasant habit of forming over you: and which we've been conducting nothing short of a genocidal war of extermination on for the last few centuries. We couldn't contract elephants like we contract bacterial infections or viruses, either: it's geo-spatially a rather difficult proposition. No, it's easy to love an elephant from afar. They don't give us anything to worry about, really. 

But still, just this once, I'd like to see an ad like this:

Buy our marvellous product! Save the endangered mosquito-bum dwelling exotic-bug-thing from extinction!

The internet has given us the power to post lolcats around the world at the speed of light

A funny thing about the communications revolution: the more revolutionary this communications revolution gets, the fewer and fewer products I use, the less and less I use of them, and the smaller their importance seems. I don't subscribe to a newspaper, have a Blackberry, I've never used the telegraph, I wouldn't even know how to use Morse Code, I would probably be too afraid to use the pony express, and if I ever got an iPod I'd probably drop a bomb on it rather than use it. On the other hand, I do have a home phone, which I use principally as a paperweight; a mobile phone, which I leave at home or turn off; a subscription to a magazine, though I don't ever read the news articles; some old envelopes lying around the house, though some of them are so old that I got them a decade ago, and I haven't ever used them; a shelf full of DVDs which I haven't seen, right next to the television which I never turn on. And then there's this laptop and the blog I log on to. Hello, everyone!

I don't even know how news gets through to me, since I don't read newspapers online either, and I read blogs for opinion and personal stories. The news stories somehow get filtered down through the internet, so by the time they get to me they've probably come fresh from a second hand source who got it from a third hand source who got it from a friend of a friend who is writing for a local newspaper in outer Transmistria, (circulation, two: a nanny and her goat).

This is what the communications revolution boils down to: when something goes wrong with your internet, you phone up your service provider, who is somewhere in Sydney, or Darwin, or Bangalore, and tell them about your problem, and they stare at their computer and try and find what the problem is with your internet connection without actually looking at your computer or your software, but by speaking to you and getting you to click through the internet yourself. When they're about halfway through this frustrating and meaningless process, something goes wrong, and your internet provider gets angry and starts speaking to you very slowly as if you were an idiot. You get angry in turn, swear at them, and ask for them name (which they'd already given to you at the start, but you'd forgotten), and say you could just as easily go to another service provider. Then your internet provider hangs up on you, and five minutes later you get another phone call back from them. They give you a false name (you know it's false because you can understand it) and tell you that the other person you spoke to, who oddly has a voice that is exactly like the person that you're speaking to now, had phone problems and that they (that is, the person who is speaking to you now but has a voice that is exactly like the other person) will be dealing with your problem now. Then you spend another half an hour on the phone to them, test everything on your modem and computer, and they conclude that the problem is either a problem with your modem or computer, and then you both have a competition to see who can hang up first.

Then a few days later Kingsley comes round to your house, concludes that the internet switch on your computer has gone off, turns it on, and everything works.

Amazing! World-changing! Revolutionary!

Though I've had enough of the communications revolution for the moment. I might hang up this blog for the day and go out and get into a face-to-face argument with the tram driver about the Napoleonic wars and the Prime Ministership of Lord Wellington, like every good gentleman should.

Singles column

M., S., seeking like-minded F. My favourite terrorist threat level is blue. My current swine flu susceptibility is 20. I like: long surveillances on the beach, dinner party conversations about what sort of plastic cutlery should be allowed on planes, and holding hands so long as you've washed yours first eight times in hot water and doused it repeatedly in industrial-strength anti-bacterial breach. If you'll be alert, I'll be alarmed. Come be the TAMI to my FLU. 

Tall and small

Standing in the queue today at the shopping centre, I reflected upon how everyone seemed to be going out with someone who was taller, but only a little bit taller than themselves. It seemed to me only natural that if tall people went out with people who were a bit taller than them, and if smaller people get going out with people who were a bit taller than them (but still small), it wouldn't be long before homo sapiens had split into two separate species, just like H G Wells' Eloi and Morlocks, except these two separate species would be called the 'tall people' and the 'small people'. 

And relations between the two species would be amicable at first, but gradually, the bodily and cultural differences between the tall people and the small people would become all too apparent, and whenever a tall person would look upon a small person, he would behold an incomparably hideous visage the like of which he had never seen before except that one time when he went to the small person village, and a small person would think the same, only in reverse. 

And so it would come to pass that a state of war would exist between the tall people and the small people, and neither side would prevail over millenia, though both would possess certain advantages over the other side: for the tall people would be taller than the small people, and the small people would not only be not taller than the tall people, but not taller than some others of the small people, which is an advantage if you a small person. 

But finally a lasting peace accord would be struck between the tall people and the small people. However, hatred and resentment would last between the tall people and the small people for generations, and it would only be through the enlightened activism and forward-(not to mention upward and/or downward)-looking policies of various concerned citizens in the tall and small person communities that the two would come together again. And from henceforth, they would exist in a state of enlightenment and happiness, with every community event and festival at which they attended being full of size-appropriate activities and thoughtful and sensitive acknowledgments of the tall and small people who had existed on this land before the current tall and small people. 

And there would be great rejoicing. 

But then, as I stood there in the supermarket, it struck me that almost everyone goes out with someone who is either taller or smaller than them, and that it's not all that remarkable really, since it would be so freakishly amazingly unlikely for a person to go out with another person who was exactly the same size as them (to within one tenth of a millimetre) that it would only happen sometimes. 

So I paid my money to the supermarket guy (who by this time had been waiting for some time) and toddled off to catch the tram. Which I missed. 

On coffee

An odd thing happened to me at the cafe today. 

That, in itself, was not odd. Going to the cafe these days is an inherently odd experience: buying a drink and actually drinking the drink is the least of the things you have to worry about. If that were all you did at a cafe, it would be all right. 

Increasingly, though, you have to contend with ideas and ideologies, with notions and hypothesis, with symbols and signs and omens and portents. Things are always skinny or lite or medium or large or two-for-one or one-for-three or free or fair or naughty or sinful or de-this or anti-that or friendly-to-those or targeted-at-them. You can barely twitch a finger without politically offending someone or upsetting a delicate environmental balance or fattening something or lightening something else or offending some other party. And that's just talking about the cups the drink comes in, even before we come to the drink.

 

And as for the drink... ! There's decaffeinated-soya-mocha-latte-with-chocolate-topping not to mention extra-large-skinny-affo-gatto-with-cream-topping as well as medium-goats-milk-de-sugared-honey-flavoured-chai-latte and also... the list goes on. You could enter with a dictionary and lexicon for five different languages and still have no idea what you end up ordering. You're not just spoiled for choice, you're spoiled for choices about other choices that you are also spoiled for. And as the catalogues of beverages becomes more numerous and the interrelationships between them become more complex, strangely, the difference becomes less and less discernible by any of the five senses: the difference becomes, basically, less different. How on earth can you tell the difference between a decaffeinated-soya-mocha-latte-with-chocolate-topping, and a medium-goats-milk-de-sugared-honey-flavoured-chai-latte? Is it perhaps like the difference between a four-legged beagle and that rare breed of five-legged beagle that has been, freakishly, only born with four legs? 

I remember vaguely going into the South Melbourne Starbucks some years ago and ordering an iced drink of some vague, generic, caffeine-based sort. Halfway through sipping it down it occurred to me that I might just as well have been sipping down the iced beverage sitting on the other table in the hands of the sharp-suited businessman talking to the peroxide blonde. As a matter of fact, I started to wonder about it -  because it looked very like the sharp-suited businessman talking to the peroxide blonde was sipping my drink after all. I mentioned this to the sharp-suited businessman as I was getting ready to go, by way of a joke, and his face immediately turned several shades of purple; he began shouting at me fiercely, and he ripped a paper receipt out of his pocket and made passionate gesticulations at it. (Peroxide blonde, meanwhile, stirred her skinny latte whatever thing and looked out of the window.) I think he was still at it when I left.

 

One way of combating as much as possible the nebulous complexity encountered when going into cafes is by devising a short list of drinks to buy. Here is mine: 

- Milkshakes, because cafes can very rarely fuck these up. Anyone who wants a several gallon hit of lactose clearly doesn't care much about the environment or health, anyway.  

- Cappuccinos, just because. 

- Mochas, because they have chocolate in them. 

- Short blacks, because they're short and black: there's much less of them to stuff up. (It's the small target approach to barista-ing.) 

I suppose in a perverted way I envy the person who sashays into a cafe and insouciantly orders a skinny fair-trade frappucino-hold-the-sugar-with-a-light-and-zesty-infusion-of-nutmeg-saucily-shimmied-in-mountain-bear-yoghurt. It's not merely the obvious linguistic dexterity they possess, but the exoticism inherent in the names that roll off their tongue, the hint of something magic and sublime glimmering over the horizon. Envy, yes - but as for me, I'll stick to plain old cappuccino, thanksverymuch. 

Anyway, getting back to the odd thing that happened to me in the cafe, and that I thought was very odd indeed at the time and seems odder now, was this. I ordered one cappuccino. And the person next to me ordered exactly the same thing. One cappuccino. One. Cappuccino. 

Out of the vast swirling list of possibilities and probabilities, of coffees still to be made and combined, this network of might-haves and would-be and maybes, this giant ocean of theoretical futures, we two happened to choose the same drink. How bizarrely, extraordinarily, superbly, shockingly, terrifyingly, weirdly unlikely is that? Wouldn't it be akin to standing alone in the middle of the desert, underneath a cloudless sky, and being struck instantaneously by lightning? 

This is how I reacted: I grabbed my coffee and bolted down the hill. 

It was only later, reflecting upon the matter in the quietness of the office, that I was able to look upon the whole sordid affair with more sobriety and equanimity. 

And by the way

O let this morning train be late
Before it pulls in to the station
At a languid, lazy rate,
O let this morning train be late:
I want to finish chapter eight,
And spend some time in contemplation:
O let this morning train be late
Before it pulls in to the station.

What my night was like

And without further ado, here's some further ado.

Short title to title a short post

This is just a short post* to link another short post on Maria's blog, written about a short comment on this blog. Some things are shorter than this post, true. But very few things are postier.

*With a short title. See above!**
**And short footnotes.

Cri de apple core

Let's get voluptuous on margarine,
On rolling ravishments of Vegemite,
Toast God with steaming cups of Ovaltine.
Let's get voluptuous on margarine,
Eat pikelets with a fiery, fierce delight,
Lavished with lemons, and with five-day cream:
Let's get voluptuous on margarine,
On rolling ravishments of Vegemite.

Modern mental disorders

Pre-emptive hypochondriac post traumatic stress disorder (PHPTSD)
In this syndrome, the sufferer diagnoses themselves with a traumatic response to a coming personal crisis before that personal crisis has happened. Often, they will ask themselves questions about what will happen to them if something happens to them, and will usually experience flashforwards to the flashbacks they are going to have to some sort of traumatic event, whatever that traumatic event is going to be.

Spontaneous Tranquility Attack (STA)
The sufferer, often for no apparent reason at all, will find themselves undergoing sudden devastating feelings of calm, and thoughts like 'things aren't so bad, really', and 'isn't it a lovely day'. This is often disastrous for their nervous, high-paced lifestyle, as it results in lack of motivation and an inability to take seriously serious things seriously.

Glamnesia
The inability to remember minute details about a celebrity's life, despite being bombarded with those details, day in, day out, by every media source imaginable. This disorder is often treated by removing all the media sources from the sufferer, following which he or she will feel, for no apparent reason, as if they were missing out on something, though they're not sure what. After being exposed to celebrity media again, they will pay renewed interest to the details of the celebrity's personal life.

Multilateral summit personality disorder
A type of mass hysteria or delusion where all of the important members of a worldwide political summit decide, en-masse, that they are actually the collective delusion of a small, insignificant participant in that summit, a guy called Smith who has been sitting in the corner and quietly making notes on an Excel spreadsheet all this time. (Also known as reverse multiple personality disorder).

Advice for computer support staff

Computer support staff: when people in the office ask you to fix a problem that basically involves switching something on or plugging it in, tell them that the equivalator delivering negative protulance to the N2 and Z31 gates has been registering negative inflows, causing statistical imbalances in the flux capacitorial areas of the hardware leading to the software.

It's deceptive, it's untrue, it doesn't mean anything at all, but it'll make them feel so much better about forgetting to press a button. It'll also make you sound shit-hot smart.

It's the little things, folks, it's the little things.

Mixed metaphor poem

Or, Swine Flu over the Cuckoo's Nest

It's raining pigs with wings out there:

They're flying in the face

Of the wrong tree they are barking up:

They've lost the human race.

If you stand upon your morals,

Then you take it lying down.

So take the matter quietly while

You shout it round the town.

You might save the baker's dozen,

But then, bad luck comes in threes.

So if you lie with sleeping dogs,

Your cat might get the cheese.

Remember, look before you speak,

And think before you leap:

Stay on the flat and narrow road,

Although the hill is steep.

Don't count your ugly ducklings 'til

The golden eggs are cooked.

Don't pull the giant catch in

Until the goose is hooked.

Too many chefs make light work,

But always think of home:

And though you may stray far away,

All toads lead to Rome.

UPDATE! - In previous installments, a small talk poem, a non-sequitur poem, a manners poem, a dangling modifier poem, and an understatement poem.

Does anyone say this at home?

Shoosh! I'm listening to the PM on AM on the ABC on FM. It sounds like he's got PMT!

Me in the past, tense

I was reading somewhere the other day that the internet is an instantaneous medium while newspapers are time-constrained, or something along those lines. (It's funny, by the way, how even though internet sources of news and opinions are instantaneous they rely just as much upon received opinion like this - which is to say, cliches - as traditional forms of publishing. (Oh, wait, no it's not.)) 

Anyway, to all those people who maintain that the internet is instantaneous, I give them my email, at yahoo.com. I use this new, even-more-instantaneous service that they made me sign up to about a year ago. It's all right at home, but when I compose an email on a work computer (I do it at lunch break, okay?) things are different. Let's say I start my email with seven words or so: I type the words in, and five minutes later, they'll appear on the screen. By that time, I'll have been able to: 

- consider my spelling

- reconsider whatever I'm talking about, or arguing

- walk around the office and perform an old-fashioned, non-instantaneous (though faster) form of communication, such as talking

- make some coffee

- decide to delete the whole email and write something completely different.

Chances are, by the time I've finally typed up the email (some 20 words later) and sent it off, I'll have used up my whole lunch break. 

The internet is so instantaneous! It's almost as instantaneous as tectonic plate shift!