This week
the Fair Work Commission released its first findings
from its Australian Workplace Relations Survey (AWRS), which is a survey
that links together employers and their employees in the same data set. Most of
the first findings are pretty basic, and generally covered by the Australian
Bureau of Statistics’ set of surveys. Like the Household Income and Labour Dynamics
in Australia survey the really interesting stuff should come when
researchers start to do their ‘cross-tabs’ and interrogate the data a bit more.
One nugget
of interest for me though in the first findings was the extent of use of Australia’s
National Minimum Wage – which is currently $16.87 an hour. The survey found
that only about 1 per cent of enterprises pay any of their employees the National
Minimum Wage, and only 0.2 per cent of employees are paid the National Minimum
Wage.
Those
numbers do not really surprise me, although it is interesting to have them
confirmed. But this does not necessarily mean that barely anyone is reliant on
the National Minimum Wage adjustments. The National Minimum Wage applies to
employees not covered by an award or agreement, and plenty of employees on
award rates may be getting paid the same rate as the National Minimum Wage, or close
to it. Indeed, the low extent of employees being paid the National Minimum Wage
indicates that most employees are covered by an award or agreement. Other
surveys have found – as shown in the Productivity
Commission’s recent Issues Paper for its Workplace Relations Framework inquiry
– that the percentage of employees paid the hourly minimum wage rate is more
like 5 to 10 per cent, whether this be through an award or otherwise.
I suppose
another thing of interest for me from the AWRS’ first findings was that employers
still prefer to use informal documents to grant an employee flexible working
arrangements rather than the formal Individual Flexibility Arrangements. (I
wonder what employees prefer?) IFAs have in general not
been that widely used since they were first introduced. It would not
surprise me if the Productivity Commission’s inquiry recommends dropping or
replacing IFAs from the industrial relations system. Speaking of the PC’s
inquiry, with the Issues Paper now released, I may post something about that
sometime in the next few weeks.
Last month, the Australian Competition and Consumer
Commission launched a web
page which suggests when the cheapest and most expensive times to buy
petrol are. How does it do this? By keeping
track of what is known as the ‘petrol price cycle’. Retail petrol pricing is a
bit unusual. Overall retail petrol prices reflect the international price of
petrol and the exchange rate. But overlaying that in the Australian capital
cities are these regular (or at least semi-regular) patterns or cycles. That
is, petrol prices reach a ‘peak’, then come down over a period of a couple of
weeks, and then in the next few days shoot up again. Why? It is a
little bit of a mystery; it could indicate some collusion between retailers
but this is hard to show.
These ‘cycles’ make it somewhat predictable in terms of knowing
when is the best time to buy petrol. We say somewhat here because the length of
cycles can vary, and indeed have on average been becoming longer over the past
few years – the average trough-peak duration in Australia’s five largest
capital cities was one week back in 2009, but is now out to two and a half
weeks (see the ACCC’slatest
petrol monitoring report, p. 89) except in Perth. Further, in 2014, the petrol
price cycle in these cities ranged from 13 days to 43 days. One theory is that a
less predictable cycle is more profitable for retailers, but again it’s all
a bit of an enigma.
There are a couple of things we do know, and when you first
learn them they seem a bit surprising. One of those is that there is currently
no day which is, on average, more or less expensive than the rest (p. 90), again
except if you are in Perth (don’t fill up in the latter part of the week). Another
is that the price increases before public holidays are no greater than any
other time in the year, nor do public holidays appear to affect the timing of
any price cycle increases (p. 94).
So I know petrol price cycles exist, and that regular information is available on them. And yet I am a terrible consumer, because they have never explicitly factored into my petrol-purchasing decisions. I tend to just buy petrol whenever I am out driving, which is itself a rational factor, though probably still not the best move given petrol stations are hardly a long way from my house. I am probably one of those consumers that the ACCC people shakes their head at. Still, I guess it is their job to at least try and help us.
Last week
Tom Brady, quarterback for the National Football League’s New England Patriots,
helped the Patriots into their sixth Super Bowl during his career. The week
before Peyton Manning, quarterback for the Denver Broncos and formerly of the
Indianapolis Colts, saw his team eliminated from the playoffs in their first
game. This has been taken by some observers as further support for the argument
that Brady, who has been in three Super Bowl winning teams compared to Manning’s
one, is the better quarterback, including by Bill
Simmons.
I disagree.
Most of my reasons actually accord fairly well with the arguments put forward
in this Salon
article by Allen Barra. But here is why I think Manning has been the better
quarterback, or at least about even.
First up, I
put little weight on the argument that Brady holds an 11-5 edge in games
between their teams. For one thing, Brady and Manning’s teams do not just play
each other; there is the rest of the league where their performances matter as
well. Second, as important as quarterbacks are, the head-to-head record tells
me more that Brady has been in a better team. Third, Brady and Manning aren’t even on the field at the same time;
they each face off against the opposing team’s defence, not each other.
I put
slightly more weight, but still relatively little, on Brady having more Super
Bowl wins. Again, it mainly just tells me that Brady’s teams have been better,
not that Brady himself has been better. Now, given how important the
quarterback is to an NFL side, the fact that Brady has been involved in winning
three Super Bowl tells me that he is probably really, really good. But I
prefer a measure that can abstract a bit more from the effects of his
teammates.
For example,
Manning has been voted five times the NFL’s Most Valuable Player, to Brady’s
two times. Sure the MVP voting is quite subjective, but that tells me that more
often football observers have considered Manning as more crucial to his team’s
success. Interestingly in working out which quarterback ‘won’ each year,
Simmons gives 2003 and 2004 to Brady, even though Manning won the MVP in both
years, probably on the basis that the Patriots won the Super Bowl. But voters
clearly judged Manning the better individual player, so Brady’s triumphs seem
more reflective of team success.
Manning also
has a slightly
better career passing rating, at 97.5 to Brady’s 95.9. While a passer
rating is not the be-all and end-all – and it is itself partly dependent on a
QB’s teammates – it does capture many of the major statistics used to evaluate
one quarterback against another (touchdowns, completions, yards gained, and
interceptions). David Berri’s QB Score, which takes into account what
quarterbacks do with their legs as well, rates Manning
even higher.
Brady
proponents though can always point to Brady’s great playoffs win-loss record to
Manning’s so-so one. This argument was addressed recently at Fivethirtyeight,
and while it showed Brady has been the better playoff performer, Manning’s
playoff record is still somewhat better than if his teams had instead had an ‘average’
quarterback.
It is pretty
close though, and perhaps my argument is as much that Brady is not clearly
better as that I think Manning just shades him. But basically I think it is
only Brady’s three Super Bowl wins in four years – certainly not a small
achievement, by the way – that has stopped the consensus from favouring Manning.
On the other hand, maybe I just like Peyton
Manning more.
Why is this
blog called ‘The Wooden Finger Depot’? When I was a teenager I discovered that
I could ‘click’ my middle finger on my left hand in an unusual way, so that it
made a hollow sound if I clicked it against something like a table, like this:
A friend of
mine dubbed it the ‘wooden finger’. As a teenager, assuming that I would run a
creative empire one day, I planned to call said empire ‘Wooden Finger
Productions’. As a 20-something, intending that this blog would lead to my
creative empire one day, I called it ‘The Wooden Finger Depot’.
And there it
is. I actually originally called this blog ‘Random Mumblings’, until the same
friend I mentioned above said it sounded too self-deprecating. I do prefer ‘The
Wooden Finger Depot’, but I do sometimes think about changing it.
‘The Last of
Us’, a shooter/adventure/puzzle game revolving around yet another ‘zombie’
apocalypse, is one of the best reviewed games of all time. I was therefore very
curious to see it, and see it all the way through, which I recently did – on walkthrough. Yes, in the
case of this game review my gaming fingers were so leaden that I did not even
play the game at all.
Actually,
watching ‘The Last Of Us’ on walkthrough is I feel one of my better ideas. The
game is only available on a PlayStation, and since it is unlikely that I will
buy one of those just to play the console exclusive titles I thought: why not
just watch the whole thing on walkthrough? I can then see the whole story, and
without any of the stress of dying and whatnot. (I could take this even
further: ‘Red Dead Redemption’ may be next on my ‘watch list’.) Anyway, it’s
not like I was doing completely nothing: I used my time watching the
walkthrough to do some jogging (when I was not settling my newborn daughter),
so as the main character Joel was running about I felt like I was running with
him, even if I was doing nothing else.
For those
unfamiliar with the game ‘The Last of Us’ takes place following a pandemic that
infects most of the world’s population. You mainly play as Joel – a tough middle-aged
man tasked with escorting a young girl named Ellie who holds the key to saving
the human race. You
face off against many enemies; naturally the infected people, but also many
crews of uninfected people who are not at all sympathetic to your plight.
By the title
I thought that people would be few and far between in the game, but actually
there are quite a lot of people that you encounter, with the military having
taken control soon after the virus broke. More of the action also takes place
in cities than I imagined, rather than deserted woodland. And those infected ‘clickers’
are damn fast – not at all the slow-moving zombies than one might expect.
The game was
also larger than I was expecting – much larger. It feels like ‘The
Walking Dead’ blown up and blown out, and makes that game feel like the small,
2D game that it actually is. It also reminded me of ‘Batman:
Arkham City’ in that it takes a lot longer than you expect to get where you
are heading to, particularly in the scenes in Pittsburgh.
Still
watching ‘The Last of Us’ as a walkthrough probably gave me a somewhat different
experience to actually playing it. Really, it hardly felt like looking at a
game at all. Because the game is quite realistic and cinematic in style, and the
person doing the walkthrough obviously knew what they were doing it felt very
close to watching a movie, where the gameplay blends seamlessly into the cut
scenes. I did not get a sense of how much your character actually dies if you
play it.That absence of possible
failure may also be part of why it seemed to me that there were a few too many
combat scenes.
Nevertheless
you can see why this game rates near the top of many people’s all-time lists.
The story and characters must rate amongst the best to ever appear in video
game form. I am glad I sat/jogged through twelve hours of it; perhaps even more than if
I had actually played the damn thing.
‘Epic Rap Battles of History’ is one of those things that I didn’t realise was
missing from my life until I found it. I first came across it by searching on
Spotify at Christmas for songs with Santa Claus, and finding the ‘Moses
vs Santa Claus’ rap battle, which featured Snoop Dogg.
The series
is the creation of two rappers/comedians, Nice Peter and EpicLLOYD, and
features well-known historical and fictional characters taking on each other in
rap battles. It’s very clever, and very funny. All of the rap battles are
great, but here are my five favourites:
This was one
of the more successful battles, in terms of both the number of views and in winning an award. It’s a natural battle to have; Jobs actually gets
most of the good hits in during his first verse, though the point is made that
Gates was the more successful of the two. A ‘surprise guest’ rapper at the end
adds an extra facet to this episode.
This is one
of the longest battles: the Jobs v Gates battle had one guest rapper, this
battle has three. Extra cast members aside though the main Spielberg and
Hitchcock verses are surprisingly good, and imbue both of these figures – Spielberg
in particular – with more personality than I ever gave them credit for.
Spielberg: ‘You rock as many Oscars
as that schlep Michael Bay’ Hitchcock: ‘Half your billions should
go to John Williams’ 3. Albert Einstein v Stephen Hawking
This was
another highly successful episode, which perhaps played well to what I imagine
is the Epic Rap Battles’ primary audience – i.e. uber-geeks. Einstein naturally
makes fun of Hawking’s disability but in a clever way, while Hawking’s main
targets are Einstein’s looks and intelligence.
Einstein: ‘I’m as dope as two rappers
you better be scared/Cause that means Albert E equals MC squared’ Hawking: ‘There are
10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 particles in the universe that we
can observe/Your mama took the ugly ones and put them into one nerd’ 2. Michael Jordan v Muhammed Ali
Almost every
line in this battle is a winner. People of my generation, who remember Jordan
being the most famous person in the world, will likely appreciate the
references to his career and life more, but there are still some good lines
about Ali in there.
Jordan: ‘You can fight one man?/I can
drive through a whole team’ … ‘I would pass the mic to Pippen but I’m not done
scoring’ Ali: ‘Now your daddy got killed and I
feel for your family/But your baseball career that was a tragedy’ 1. Rick Grimes v Walter White
How good is
this battle? Walter White gets in three of the best lines from the series, and
I’m still not sure he won this one. The impressions are spot-on: Grimes with a laid-back
southern twang, and Walter with a menacing staccato. And it has a good beat; I
could listen to this battle many times over.
Grimes: ‘Sheriff Grimes rhymes dirty
like my armpit stains’ White: ‘I’ve seen Walter Jr. handle walkers
better than you’ … ‘You can bite me/I’ll be standing right here in my tighty
Walter Whities’ And my
favourite lines from the other epic rap battles:
Goku against Superman: ‘How many
times are they gonna rewrite your story/Your powers have been boring since the
nineteen fucking forties’ Gandhi against Martin Luther King
Jr.: ‘I am celibate because I don’t give a fuck’
Clint Eastwood against Bruce Lee:
‘I’d beat you in round two but that’d be unbelievable/No one in your family
ever lives to see a sequel’
Mozart against Skrillex: ‘I am the
world’s greatest composer/No one knows what you are/Except a lonely little
troll who knows how to press a spacebar’
Captain Kirk against Christopher
Columbus: ‘Why don’t you boldly go someplace you’ve never gone before/Like
India’
Oprah against Ellen: ‘So check under
your seat because I got something for ya’
Ellen against Oprah: ‘I’m jumping
over Oprah like I’m Tom Cruise on a sofa’
Babe Ruth against Lance Armstrong:
‘Yerr out, with three strikes, and just one ball’
Moses against Santa Claus: ‘It takes
nine reindeers to haul your fat ass/You took the Christ out of Christmas and
just added more mass’
Ben Franklin against Billy Mays:
‘Cause I’m mint I’m money I’m an educated gentleman/So join or die Bill cause
it’s all about the Benjamin’
Mitt Romney against Barack Obama: ‘We
all know what went down in that 2008 election/You’re a decent politician with a
winning complexion’
Chuck Norris against Abraham Lincoln:
‘I invented rap music/When my heart started beating’
Sherlock Holmes against Batman:
‘Dissing these dynamic douchebags was elementary my dear Watson’
Renaissance artists against Teenage
Mutant Ninja Turtles: ‘We’re like your NES game/Cause we can’t be beat’
Ebenezer Scrooge against Donald
Trump: ‘I don’t believe in ghosts/And I don’t believe that hair’
Adolf Hitler against Darth Vader:
‘You call yourself a Dark Lord/You couldn’t even conquer Space Mountain’
Marilyn Monroe against Cleopatra:
‘You think you’re so chic/Up in your fancy palace/Getting low on Marc Antony/Tossing
Caesar’s salad’
Dumbledore
against Gandalf: ‘The prophecy forgot to mention this day/When I knocked your
ass back to Gandalf the Grey’
Comic book
writer Grant Morrison has a reputation for fitting big ideas and manifestos into
his stories. ‘Thunderworld Adventures’ – the latest instalment of his
cross-title epic ‘The Multiversity’ is, as far as I can tell, not one
of those stories. From my reading it is essentially a ‘simple’ 1940s-style tale
of Captain Marvel and his Marvel family. And yet it does that really, really
well. How does it work?
The plot:
Captain Marvel’s arch-nemesis, the mad scientist Dr. Sivana is trying to create
a new day using time stolen from other universes: Sivanaday. Somehow
introducing this day is meant to result in the defeat of Captain Marvel. Sivana
employs a super-villain equivalent to the Marvel family, along with monsters
and ‘time tornadoes’ to try and beat our heroes. On paper, it’s a relatively
simple, better-than-average, traditional Captain Marvel plot.
How then can
it work for a 30-something year-old reader in 2014? Though Morrison may use ‘Golden’ and ‘Silver’ Age tropes, he is extremely adept
at doing so, being able to determine what attracted him to these comics as a
child from the perspective of a middle-aged comic professional. Morrison writes
good dialogue; it’s sharp, with few word balloons overstaying their welcome. For
example, Dr. Sivana standing next to his captive victim saying ‘I thought so. The lightning-staff. Give.’
demonstrates the villain’s intelligence and ambition with more economy than
many other writers would use.
All this is
to say is that Morrison has a strong command of his style, and it is a style
that can make even a relatively straightforward book like ‘Thunderworld
Adventures’ feel like it has depth, meaning and craft (which it does).
Morrison’s style has to, a large extent, made ‘The Multiversity’ books – really
mostly just a series of one-shots – seem like a significant whole, as it did
with his other one-off, multi-title epic, ‘Seven Soldiers of Victory’. Morrison has a more pop-oriented, more free-form
(even if somewhat sharper) approach to writing than his chief comics writing
rival Alan Moore. It will keep his books mostly out of the universities, and
for some readers it may fail to convince, but if you can get into the rhythm of
his stories they are an enjoyable ride.
For
Christmas, my wife gave me the book ‘1001 Comics You Must Read Before You
Die’. Even for
someone like me who has read more comic books than they should have I still
found it full of interesting new suggestions. The editor and authors have tried
to create a true international selection of the most significant comic books;
hence not only are American comics well-represented, but so are those of Japan,
France, Belgium, and the UK. It knocks out a lot of the ‘second-tier’ US comics
(‘Young Avengers’? Chuck Dixon’s ‘Robin’? You won’t find them here …),
although more surprisingly for me it also does not explicitly recommend some of
the most well-received post-Stan Lee/Jack Kirby Marvel Comics runs such as
Frank Miller’s first ‘Daredevil’ run, John Byrne’s ‘Fantastic Four’, and Walt
Simonson’s ‘Thor’.
One series
it recommends is the late Dave Stevens’ ‘The Rocketeer’, which given you can get
it for a few bucks on Kindle I thought I should finally give a read. Stevens’
1930-style stories, like Morrison’s modern-day ‘Thunderworld Adventures’, are
relatively simple but enjoyable, though without even a hint of the high
concepts that underlie Morrison’s series. The stories are well-crafted and
serviceable, but they surely would have been mostly ignored if not for Dave
Stevens’ beautiful art. The moments of cheesecake, with the Rocketeer’s
girlfriend Betty (modelled on 1950s pin-up Bettie Page), probably helped it
gain a following too.
Another
thing that makes it special is that, in over two decades, only about 100 pages
of ‘Rocketeer’ comics featuring Stevens’ art were produced. I read it all in
one sitting, and it’s funny – the story was just OK, and even the art was
pretty samey throughout – and yet I absolutely think it belongs on a list of
the 1001 greatest comics (this reviewer looks to have had much the same
view). Never underestimate the allure of cult status I guess.
Another
series that was recommended, and which is not at all simple – and possibly not
even all that enjoyable, though that doesn’t mean it isn’t good – is Bryan
Talbot’s ‘The Adventures of Luther Arkwright’. Seeing a full-page reproduction in the ‘1001 Comics’
book of the cover for issue #2, with the title character confidently striding
forward and a massive hellicarrier in the sky behind him got me excited about
this series. Then I saw that Warren Ellis called it ‘probably the single most influential
graphic novel to have come out of Britain to date’ and that got me even more excited.
He may well
be right. I don’t know enough about British comics to know how much of
Arkwright was ‘new’, and how much of it reflects the British comics ‘scene’ or
‘tradition’, but in reading it I could see a lot of the work of other major
British writers in it – Alan Moore especially, but also Warren Ellis, a bit of
Neil Gaiman, and even Grant Morrison. There are alternate realities, spiritual
mumbo-jumbo, filthy British streets full of citizens with rotten teeth, a fair
chunk of graphic violence and along with this, wholesale massacre, both on- and
off-panel. Why are British writers so keen on killing off scores of fictional
citizens? – see Moore’s ‘Miracleman’, Ellis’ ‘The Authority’, Mark Millar’s ‘The Authority’, and
John Wagner and Alan Grant’s ‘Judge Dredd: The Apocalypse War’. The British writers have written
some of the greatest comic book stories ever, but it is hard to think of a
major one that was not primarily bleak and full of death (maybe James
Robinson’s ‘Starman’, and even there Robinson set fire
to Starman’s home city). It makes me think that Britain is a very dark and
dismal place indeed.
Anyway, ‘Luther Arkwright’ is worth a look. The
main plot involves Arkwright travelling to an Earth where the English Civil War
has continued on for the past few hundred years due in part to a group of
madmen called the Disruptors. Talbot eschews conventional word balloons, jumps
from time period to time period, and has a ‘ticker tape’ running throughout the
comic of disasters befalling alternate Earths. There are fair portions of it
that made relatively little sense to me, and some readers may very well ‘rage
quit’ it about a third of the way through. But it is another demonstration of
how idiosyncratic comics – often the work of just a single, ‘visionary’ creator
– can be. It belongs on the ‘1001 best comics’ list as well (I think).
After the
World Cup last year I decided to pick a team to support in each of the major
European football leagues. For the Bundesliga I was drawn towards Borussia
Dortmund. I liked their logo, colours, and name, and I remembered watching them
in my hotel room on holiday stage a miraculous comeback in their UEFA Champions
League semi-final against Malaga. I even went so far as to order from their online shop this t-shirt:
Basically as
soon as I pulled that t-shirt on Dortmund’s fortunes plummeted. While they have
continued to perform well in the Champions League this season, in the Bundesliga
they are perilously close to relegation, as I continue to wake up week after
week and quietly curse as I see that they have lost another match. As a result
I have fallen victim to the old sports fan’s superstition that somehow me
choosing to follow them has caused them to crash.
I wondered
if I could trace the fall back to specific players, or the absence thereof due
to injury, similar to how I have done on this blog before for AFL clubs. But in the course of trying to find
the player statistics I came across the team
statistics, and was struck by how decent they were. Consider how Dortmund
rank this season:
Borussia Dortmund’s ranking in
Bundesliga for 2014/15 season, as of end 2014:
General play:
Possession: #2
Pass success %: #4
Offense:
Shots per game: #3
Shots on target per game: #5
Defense (higher number indicates better performance):
Shots conceded per game: #16
Fouls per game: #16
Generally these are things that
appear to have been found to help a team win. Essentially the one thing that
stands out that Dortmund hasn’t done well – apart from, well, kick goals – is getting
shots from within six yards of goal, where they rank dead last. It looks to me
then that Dortmund have not performed particularly badly, or at least not as
badly as their ladder position suggests; they just haven’t been winning. Which
is a different type of ‘cursing’ I suppose, though one that should correct
itself. That is, assuming that my t-shirt purchase doesn’t cause Borussia
Dortmund to be playing off in the Bundesliga 2 next season.
Postscript: Here is some further analysis I found on Borussia Dortmund's statistics this season.
