Mark Twain is oft quoted as writing: ‘There are lies, there are damned lies, and then there are statistics.’

I follow the Wikipedia page on the Corona Virus outbreak very closely, and I have expressed considerable concern twice about the accuracy of some of the numbers given on that page, particularly in relation to the Peoples Republic of China, where the numbers usually are clearly behind what other public sources publish, giving me cause to be concerned about the motives of whoever maintains that part of that page.

Today, after China revised the death toll upward, the numbers simply do not add up.

The total number of cases recorded on that page for the PRC are 82,367. They also record 4,632 deaths and 77,944 recoveries.

What is wrong with those numbers? Anyone who has passed grade 4 math can tell you that 4,632 and 77,944 add up to 82,576. A 209 person disparity has two possible explanations – one is that whoever is maintaining the numbers of cases in Communist China is not bothering to record them honestly, and the other is that scientists (or necromancers) in Communist China have found some way to raise the Dead, or at least 209 of them.

Not even Dear Leader Kim in North Korea has yet claimed an ability to raise the Dead (although I am hopeful that he will one day), but he does not need to as he has clearly succeeded in keeping the pandemic out of his hermit kingdom. Hence I know what the most likely explanation is for that 209 person discrepancy.

Look, I love Wikipedia. But at times like this, major discrepancies in the publicly available information, due to control of the information being seized by troll like sources with ulterior political motives can have serious consequences.

And whilst on the subject of inaccurate stats, why does Wikipedia say that France has 108,847 cases whilst news.com.au says that it has 134,562? I have noticed the numbers diverging for several days.

As I walk the streets of central Melbourne on my lunch break on the two days each week I work in the office now rather than at home, I do reflect on how (as I like to say) almost On The Beach empty they are.

Nevil Shute is one of my very favourite novelists, and has been since I was 16, as I have written previously. On The Beach is probably his most important, and tragic, novel; tragic because everyone dies in the end, important because perhaps, being as popular as he was in the 1950s, it helped to prevent a real nuclear war breaking out.

But it is not exactly a fun read, not for a teenager in the 1980s during the Cold War reading about how the residents of Melbourne face the slowly approaching but inevitable end of the world.

Aside from On The Beach, which is most well known because of it’s film adaptation, Nevil Shute wrote quite a lot of other novels. A Town Like Alice, both as a film with Peter Finch in the 1950s and a miniseries in the early 1980s, is particularly very well known.

Those two novels are still in print, but it is increasingly rare to encounter any of his other novels in bookshops (or libraries) anymore.

He published 21 novels in his lifetime, plus two novellas published posthumously in the one volume soon after his death, and another novella found in draft form in a library manuscript collection in the early 21st century by his fans and then finally published. Shute might not have liked those posthumously published works, but I sure did.

For the most part, Shute has a gentle and optimistic view of humanity. There are rarely any villains in his stories, mostly just challenges that his heroes and heroines need to overcome through their own resourcefulness. And there are many pilots and yachtsmen.

His novels can be divided into five main categories – the first three novels he published in the 1920s, which closely resemble conventional thrillers; his 1930s works which are rather atypical (I find it hard to categorise Ruined City or An Old Captivity); his war novels, starting with the pre-war warning about high altitude bombing What Happened to the Corbetts; his immediately postwar works such as The Chequer Board, Round The Bend, and No Highway; and then there are his seven Australian novels, written after he decided to migrate with his family to Australia after the war.

We mostly remember Shute for his two most famous of those Australian novels, On The Beach and A Town Like Alice. Some might remember the 1986 miniseries adaption of The Far Country. But the others are worth reading too, for the most part. Requiem For A Wren is a moving and tragic love story in the aftermath of the war. The Rainbow And The Rose is particularly poetic and immersing. In The Wet, which is a bizarre dream sequence set in the then future (1982) told by a dying man to a clergyman during a Queensland flood, is, despite the preposterous premises in many aspects of the story, a highly entertaining read.

It’s only Beyond The Black Stump, of his Australian novels, that I did not enjoy enough to read more than once.

And then, at the end, just before Shute died in 1960, we have Trustee From The Toolroom, which is in a class of it’s own, impossible to categorise. It postdates all his Australian novels, but has nothing to do with Australia, rather, it’s modest hero is a typically English mechanic who travels, relying on the accumulated good will he has built up over his lifetime through his good nature, to French Polynesia to save his orphaned niece’s inheritance. The hero is a rather naive fellow, but his naïveté is what seems to get him through – he does not see any ill intentions around him, and his goodness draws out the generosity of those whose lives he has touched.

Perhaps that is why Trustee From The Toolroom usually tops the list of favourite Shute novels, as voted by his fans in the Nevil Shute Foundation website.

In any event, most of his novels are worth reading, not once, but at least twice or three times.

On my lunchtime walk today, I strolled down Bourke Street and saw this memorial table dedicated to Sisto, the late owner of Pellegrinis, the cafe which is a Melbourne institution.

He was brutally murdered 18 months ago in the city by some deranged wannabe terrorist.

As a sliding door moment, I was in Pellegrinis with one of my friends chatting with Sisto about half an hour before his life was so unfairly stolen. He was a very nice fellow.

Even though Melbourne is a city of five million, everyone still knows everyone else within a couple of degrees of separation, and it seems everyone knew Sisto.

My best friend lives in Melton, a pragmatic but affordable home ownership choice after his marriage breakdown divested him of his previous home.

He does not live there for the lifestyle choice, with the local greyhound racing stadium near the freeway and the live wrestling hosted at the Shire Hall.

But home ownership is an important and intrinsic necessity for most people of our generation in this country (ie Gen X) and being able to afford a home, even in Melton, is better than renting a studio apartment in North Fitzroy (how are all those closed cafes, restaurants and bars working out for you now, smartarse hipster millennials?!).

The other day, he was sending me a What’s App message about living in such a lovely village laden with bogans (I have every right to joke about it, being a Footscray boy first and postgrad dropout second and having kinfolk who have made the title of Village Idiot in North Sunshine hereditary), and when I replied, the auto-correct on my phone changed Melton into Meltdown.

That might work better. We should petition the Melton Shire Council to change the name.

Much as I believe in free market capitalism, I do not believe in being an avaricious a-hole. The following news story has gone viral, about a supermarket manager, John-Paul Drake, who refused to give a refund to some such avaricious a-hole who decided on a not-so-clever get rich quick scheme where he and some cronies decided to buy 5000 rolls of toilet paper and 150 bottles of sanitiser where he subsequently could not get eBay to list his stash for sale:

https://www.news.com.au/finance/business/retail/supermarket-bosss-blunt-reply-to-toilet-paper-hoarder-wanting-refund/news-story/985cc7022ce371a71b7d86c3031e2ce5

At a time like this where government is (hopefully only temporarily) imposing unprecedented controls on civil society and the economy due to the pandemic, it is important to reflect on what makes our society – both free market economics and civil society – function.

It functions on trust, civility, and a general sense of decency. For as long as most people behave in a generally decent way (you don’t even have to be kind or generous, just mostly honest and not exceptionally greedy or a-hole like), our society functions well. If more than a few people were to behave in a way which is not generally decent, then the whole community would collapse into a chaotic mess.

Behaviour like this price-gouging would be entrepreneur who sought to corner the toilet paper market and turn a quick profit, and who then asked for a refund when his scheme fell apart, is not the kind of behaviour which engenders trust and civility in society. Nor is it decent. It is the behaviour of an a-hole.

He has been rewarded by the finger from a supermarket manager, and can now hold onto his giant stash of toilet paper. Happily for him, being a giant a-hole means that he probably will go through that 5000 roll stash fairly quickly, so that is a silver lining for him.

As for John-Paul Drake, he really deserves to be Australian of the Year.

Right now, we have the coronavirus pandemic wreaking the most havoc seen in the First World since 1945. Pandemics are not exactly First World Problems. They are what we expect to find in poor countries, ie the Third World (which reminds me, I heard a rumour that Ebola is making a comeback at the moment).

Which is why it is an opportune time to talk about too much choice, in the context of TV programming available to me today.

A very clever but highly dislikable sociology lecturer I studied under over 30 years ago once opined to his class that one of the problems we have in the modern world is too much choice, and that all this choice was not making us any happier.

I think, although as I have not thought too much about his words in the intervening decades (BTW he later wrote a book about nihilism in Western Culture which seemed to me to be a rip off of Nietzsche’s Will To Power), that he used video libraries as an example of where we are festooned with too much choice (the words of the Pet Shop Boys in one of their break through songs would probably have been unfamiliar to him).

And I suppose his words were true. Priggish and self-righteous though they (and he) were. Video libraries could be an overwhelming overload of choices of crap that you could rent and waste a few hours watching. (I did one weekend, when house sitting near a classier video library in Albert Park, treat myself to quite a few classic Bogart films though, which I was very pleased to finally see.)

It’s hard even for my generation to remember what it was like before and in the early days of colour TV (when video recorders were only used in schools to show us Playschool or David Attenbourough nature documentaries). We kept our crappy old Australian made TV (an Astoria) for ten years, and aside from regularly breaking down, it had very bad reception and only got us channels 7 and 9, choosing between which required a set of pliers as the channel selection dial had busted early on. Channels 2 and 0 (precursor to Ten) had signals too weak to easily pick up.

And there was the vertical hold problem – the TV picture kept jumping up and making it unwatchable (there was a vertical hold switch on the back of the set).

Even after we got our colour TV in 1981 which had channel selection buttons and better ability to pick up signals (and no vertical hold issues), the signal from channel 2 was not always strong enough to get a decent picture when trying to watch countdown.

So we had 2 channels in practice, and 4, later 5, in theory. And we tended to be glued to the TV set.

These days, we have data streaming. I have book marked all the major networks except for channel Ten, which is pretty crap most of the time these days, on my iMac. I stopped owning a functional TV set 3 or 4 years ago, and I don’t really miss it. But with either catch up or live streaming online of these free view channels, I have virtually unlimited choice (and unlimited data to use to watch them).

On top of those, right now, I also have Apple TV+, which kept me occupied at Christmas time, and am trialling Amazon Prime, which I have been binge watching since Easter Saturday.

And last year, when one of my close friends was living in my spare room after breaking up with his wife, I had free Netflix for a while!

So you see, an abundance of choice as to what to watch. Too much choice perhaps, and you have to wonder whether it it worth your while investing that much time of what you have assigned on this planet to lie around watching silly shows on TV instead of doing something else, even during a Pandemic.

I have not had a chance today to do any binge TV watching – it took longer than I expected to tidy up my garden a little and plant some lavender, and then place some begonia cuttings in pots for propagation. I think I am happier for having done those than for picking which is the next show on Amazon Prime I might spend a few hours staring at.

Back in January I bought a Venus Fly Trap as a gift for a friend (I make such heartfelt gestures from time to time), and decided that I wanted to find it some food.

So I went looking around my front verandah and garden for some insects or other bugs I could feed to it (I admit, I would like to see a Venus Fly Trap leaf close around it’s prey) and to my chagrin, I could find nothing.

Which got me to thinking that maybe those environmentalists were right, that the Insect Apocalypse is upon us and all those bugs we usually regard as a nuisance when we take their role in the balance of nature for granted have been disappearing at an unhealthy rate.

Since then, I have seen plenty of bugs in my garden, to my relief, and even mosquitoes buzzing around my home at night (thankfully my blood group is not as attractive to getting stung by mozzies).

But I did reflect on this, and how maybe it is time to make my garden more bee friendly. I am not going to go so far as to get a full beehive (I know someone who has though) – I don’t like honey very much. But I asked my mother to grow some lavender cuttings for me from one of the bushes she has in her garden.

Hence this morning, I have just planted four lavender plants in my front garden along the fence line, to form the start of a lavender hedge for my home. That is just the start. I will plant more cuttings and grow those , until my front fence line is fully covered by lavender plants.

It is a little thing, but I don’t like roses, and I want to do my bit for the survival of bees, even if I don’ get to feed them to a Venus Fly Trap.

I’ve never been an Age reader. My father always used to bring the Herald (an evening newspaper) home each night after work, and from the age of nine onward, I got into the habit of buying what was then called the Sun News-Pictorial (a morning newspaper) on the way to school. In 1990, they were merged into the supposedly 24 hour (ie morning and afternoon edition) Herald-Sun, which I believe no longer has an afternoon edition. (Not, aside from Business Editor Terry McCrann and the Garfield comic strip – and a relatively recently resurrected ‘In Black and White’ column – does this newspaper have much in common with the old evening Herald newspaper either, which tended to have deeper journalism than the Sun.)

So I have been reading what is now the Herald-Sun and its predecessor papers for over forty years.

One thing that has never changed is the Easter Saturday headline for the Herald-Sun. Every year, it’s Good Friday appeal for the Royal Childrens’ Hospital sets a new record of money raised.

That is a good thing – even though everyone is shut up at home and people are not rattling tins for the appeal, more money is still being raised by the people of Melbourne for our children’ hospital. Especially this year, when people are closed up at home and things look a lot darker than usual.

But I do lament the predictability and shallowness of the journalism at the Herald-Sun. I doubt that any news publication that I semi-regularly read can be as predictable as it is, except for Money Magazine.

I went for a walk last night around sunset, to get some exercise. Being cooped up in the house all day got a bit dull, particularly as I did not trigger my Amazon Prime trial til this morning (binge watched The Boys most of today).

I walked til the McDonalds in Military Road, which had the drive thru extremely busy, with cars banked up right til the entrance from the street, the busiest I have ever noticed.

I think this was because it being Good Friday, there was nothing else open, and no other reminders of normality in this time of pandemic. So people, seeking a respite from cabin fever, got into their cars and drove to the nearest McDonalds to get some semblance of normality, in the form of comfort food.

For me, normal is eating at least once at the local Thai restaurant each week, with a bottle of decent red wine to accompany the food. That is not possible right now, and I do miss it. I grazed today on a succession of toasted cheese, tomato and onion sandwiches, and on some yoghurt. But I can see how for many people, McDonalds is a tie to the sanity and mundane stability of normal life. Especially as not only has the local fish and chip shop closed for the duration, but also the kebab caravan permanently parked at the service station.

For the duration, I work in the office in Wednesday and Thursday each week. Seeing two separate sets of wine deliveries on my doorstep this evening was a rare treat!

And just in time for Easter!