I haven’t had one for sixteen years and won’t have another for thirty-two years.

For the past sixteen years, I’ve been 2⁴ + n : where (0 ≤ n ≤ 15).

Today I’m 2⁵.

That means I now need a whole extra digit to represent my age in binary.

Yesterday I was 11111.

Today I’m 100000.

Egad.

But I’m only 20 in hex …

What is this heinous crime against sense and grammar of which I speak? None other than the prevalent and ever increasing abuse of reflexive pronouns.

Offenses against the apostrophe can be understood, and sometimes even forgiven, as the rules for its use can be a little complicated. Anyone with a fifth grade education should, of course, be able to correctly deploy their punctuation marks but, as we all know, what should be the case very rarely is the case.

But this aggression against reflexive pronouns will not stand.

For some reason, people seem to have got it into their heads that reflexive pronouns sound more ‘formal’ and start throwing them around willy nilly when they’re trying to sound ‘proper’.

So we get locutions like:

• ‘Many people, myself included, have no idea about grammar.’

• ‘John and myself went camping on the weekend.’

• ‘If you have any questions, ask myself or Fred.’

• ‘Should I get anything for yourself or Sue?.

The use of ‘myself’ or ‘yourself’ in each case above is incorrect and sounds stupid. It doesn’t make you sound ‘correct’ or ‘formal’ or clever. It makes you sound like an idiot. Stop it. Seriously.

Instead, try using the correct damn pronouns - they’re there for a reason people:

• ‘Many people, me included, have no idea about grammar’.

• ‘John and I went camping on the weekend’.

• ‘If you have any questions, ask me or Fred’.

• ‘Should I get anything for you or Sue?.

The rules for using reflexive pronouns - myself, yourself, himself, herself, oneself, ourselves, yourselves, themselves, itself - are not difficult. Not even remotely. They’re used always and ONLY when the subject is also the direct or indirect object. Loosely speaking, this means when the person acting is also the thing acted on (when the agentivity is reflexive).

In other words, only use ‘myself’ if you’re doing something to yourself.

For instance, I can hurt myself, correct myself, improve myself, or make a fool of myself. Likewise, you can entertain yourself, educate yourself, convince yourself, give yourself to someone, or give yourself an early mark (indirect object).

It’s not rocket surgery.

Difficulty seems to arise most often in coordinating pronominal phrases. Don’t use a reflexive pronoun just because you’re referring to two people. If you’re unsure, think about which pronoun you’d use if you were referring to only the pronominal referent.

You wouldn’t say ‘Myself went to the beach yesterday’, so don’t say ‘Sue and myself went to the beach yesterday’.

Similarly you wouldn’t say ‘Ben gave I a lovely present’, so don’t say ‘Ben gave Sue and I a lovely present’.

When you use the incorrect pronominal case in trying to sound ‘proper’, you just make yourself sound like a moron.

Here endeth the rant.

It seems like only yesterday I carried her home in the palm of my hand.

Here it is on the shelves at Readings Carlton.

You couldn’t swing a cat on their FAQ page without hitting an internal inconsistency.

Does this site represent the biggest collection of morons since the Texas Taliban and the Kansas School Board had their annual ‘Nutjobs Against Rationality’ conference, or is it just poorly executed satire? You decide.

The DJs contemplate, on air, during the competition, that you can actually die from ingesting too much water.

One suggests that maybe they should have done some research.

Another argues that as the body is 98% water, you should be able to ingest as much as water as you like.

A third jokes that they’ve all signed releases.

The guy who thinks the body is 98% water then asserts - from his obvious vast repertoire of medical knowledge - that if you drink too much water you’ll vomit (and be out of the competition) before any harm can come to you.

A listener calls in and explains that you can, in fact, die from water intoxication. Medical Boy casually rebuffs her with his vomit-before-harm theory.

During the competition they ask the guy who’s supervising the the competition whether anyone’s dying there yet. He jokes ‘we’ve got one guy about to die here!’. The reply, ‘Make sure he signs a release!’.

It’s a terrible shame that the station never sought any medical advice, despite recognising a potential risk, and that no medical staff were on hand to supervise the competition.

One of the finalists was 28 year old Jennifer Strange.

By the end of the competition she was complaining that her head was hurting. She was reassured that this was perfectly normal. She said, immediately after dropping out of the competition:

“they keep telling me though that it’s the water, that it will tell my head to hurt and then it will make me puke.”

The DJs laughed at her appearance during the post-event interview, telling her she looked terrible and that her stomach was so distended that she appeared to be notably pregnant.

It’s surely criminally negligent that she was given eronneous medical advice and that at no time was she provided with, or enjoined to seek, medical attention.

The pain she was feeling was her brain swelling against her skull as she’d ingested seven and a half litres (two gallons) of water.

A few hours later she collapsed and died from water intoxication.

She was a mother of three who had entered the competition for her kids.

In the latest reports, the Sacramento Sheriff had handed the case over to homicide detectives after listening to a recording of the show.

Here’s a five minute audio clip of the salient parts. News reports in the local paper here and here.

Ten people have been sacked. Here’s hoping for criminal charges.

His resolute patience extends far beyond mine as he tries over and over to bring first a supervisor, then a floor manager, to the simple realisation that there is a hundredfold difference between measures of cents and measures of dollars, even when the measures are really small.

The real magic happens at around sixteen minutes in when the floor manager derides the whole concept of .002 dollars:

Rep: ‘What do you mean .002 dollars?’

Guy: ‘[sigh] … Do you recognise there is a difference between .002 dollars and .002 cents?’

Rep: ‘No. There’s no .002 dollars … what would a .002 dollars look like? I’ve never heard of .002 dollars …’

Katrina Firlik, neurosurgeon and author, appeared on Radio National’s All In The Mind program the other day. Listen to the audio - or read the transcript - for Katrina’s account of her profession as equal parts scientist and mechanic, and for interesting - and disgusting - tales of brains she has encountered.

The software of the mind is equally as fascinating as the wetware of the brain. And roughly as little understood. But cognitive neuroscientist Ogi Ogas managed to leverage his understanding of cognitive processing to win a tidy half a million dollars. And had he been slightly less risk averse, it could have been a cool million …

This is another example of a fascinating kind of characteristic breakdown of cognitive function which tells us a lot about how the brain functions.

The article includes a touching story of love blossoming between a prosopagnosic fashion model and a mime, and a cautionary tale for prosopagnosics relating the potential danger of inadvertently hitting on your ex …

Turns out we’d contracted a bout of Spasmodic Dysphonia, brought on by idiopathic pecuniary oversight. Apparently, the masters of the internets don’t much care for it when you neglect to cross their palms with silver and tend to pucker their figurative sphincters around the end of the tube that delivers brain in a vat to you, dear reader.

The pathology was relieved by relaying a series of numbers to said masters, whose puckers have since relaxed sufficiently to again allow the free flow of venerable wisdom to the internets.

It was rather coincidental that we should contract this pernicious pathology as I’d only just learned of the syndrome the other day.

Scott Adams - of Dilbert fame - had suffered Spasmodic Dysphonia for eighteen months. Despite there being no record of a patient recovering from this, he persisted with a range of very sensible linguistic exercises before finally, and quite suddenly, stumbling upon a way to reconnect the requisite neural pathways and has since made a full recovery.

I find his account fascinating reading. Neuropathologies are always interesting and informative, since one of the best ways to learn how a complex system is functioning is often to observe the ways in which it fails. Reverse engineering from characteristic breakdown is a useful methodology in cognitive science.

What is particularly interesting about this case is not just that he suffered from a dysphonic aphasia even though his articulatory apparatus remained perfectly functional. What is particularly interesting is that his capacity for linguistic production was contextually governed.

Scott could produce perfect speech in certain contexts - such as public speaking - but struggled to articulate in normal conversational contexts. He couldn’t speak conversationally, but he could sing utterances.

And the breakthrough that once again restored his full vocal capacity? Rhyme. Interesting. Very interesting.

Splice the mainbrace maties and last one ‘round the mizzenmast be a pox-ridden swab, arrrr ….

See how more movies should have ended over here …

You know you want to.

I did a bit of research on the internets beforehand - bacterial contamination being a potential concern with low temperature cooking. I eventually found this article which was quite informative and which I took to be trustworthy.

The interesting thing about internet ‘research’ is that you discover exactly the same text repeated in numerous places. Consequently, one of the paradigm standards for trustworthiness of information - broad agreement in the relevant community - simply doesn’t apply. Even when a whole tubeload of cooking sites make a particular claim concerning a cooking technique, one wouldn’t want to take this as an indicator of the veracity of the information.

But back to the roast …

We picked up some lovely cuts of pork, lamb and beef from the Vic Markets for this experiment. Six kilograms of meat for under fifty dollars - around 11am on a Saturday or Sunday is a great time to get heavily discounted meat at the markets.

To prepare the roasts, I roughly chopped some onions and apples. I laid the pork on a bed of apple and the beef and lamb on a bed of onion in a large roasting dish. I sprayed the meat lightly with oil and sprinkled it with sea salt, then covered the lamb with rosemary, the pork with lemon, and rubbed cayenne pepper into the beef.

This is what it looked like going into the oven:

I then popped the tray into the oven - preheated to 160°C - for half an hour to quickly kill any bateria that may have been on the surface of the meat, after which I turned the oven down to 90°C and left it for twenty hours.

I didn’t get a photo of the meat coming out of the oven as I was a bit busy preparing sides at the time. I can say, however, that it was by far the tastiest and most succulent roasted meat I’ve ever prepared.

What’s that? You want photographic evidence? I guess I’ll just have to do it again next weekend. Sigh.