I know very little about gridiron, that sport which Americans call football, and which seems to be a version of Rugby where they wear helmets and throw the ball forward instead of backward.

But I recently decided to adopt an NFL team of my very own, the Cleveland Browns.

I discovered them whilst reading Existential Comics, an online cartoon strip which presents philosophy in the form of cartoons. This particular instalment, ‘In Which Friedrich Nietzsche is a Fan of the Cleveland Browns’, greatly amused me (here is the link below):

https://existentialcomics.com/comic/273

It also touched me (and inspired me – Nietzsche is one philosopher I truly enjoy reading, which probably says something about the tenuousness of my hold on sanity). Being a Footscray boy, I have always barracked for the AFL team now known as the Western Bulldogs (but which I would prefer to call the Footscray Football Club). The Bulldogs are a team which, until the miracle spring of 2016, had not won a premiership since 1954, and had not even played in a Grand Final since 1961. I am very used to being a supporter of the underdogs. I am no fickle or fair weather fan.

And the Cleveland Browns are definitely underdogs. They have not had any success since the heady days of the 1950s, long before the Super Bowl existed. This further Existential Comics instalment points out that the Browns are a ‘factory of sadness’:

https://existentialcomics.com/comic/325

I wanted to express my new found fandom by buying an NFL jersey representing the Browns. So I went to the Highpoint Shopping Centre to the new shop called ‘Stateside’, which sells American sporting merchandise (mostly singlets for the various NBA teams) and I asked the American shop assistant if they sold NFL merchandise. He said that they didn’t normally stock it, but asked which team I wanted. When I replied ‘Cleveland Browns’, he chuckled and shook his head and said ‘No chance’.

But, just like my commitment to the Footscray Football Club, I live in hope for the Browns. We got our premiership miracle in 2016, and I was fortunate enough to see my home town come to life in celebration that night. So too, perhaps even the Browns can win a Super Bowl one day.

I went through my Leo Tolstoy binge when I was about 24. I finally bit the bullet and read War And Peace, and then backed it up with Anna Karenina.

I must say, whilst War And Peace is both epic on the grand scale and deeply moving closer to home, I think, as a novel, I much prefer Anna Karenina.

Similarly, when I turn to another Russian novelist renowned for her lengthy novels, Ayn Rand (whom I binge read at age 20), I must say to the dismay of her devotees (those commonly known either as Ayn Rand Freaks or Randroids, but whom prefer to call themselves Objectivists) that I much prefer The Fountainhead over Atlas Shrugged. The Fountainhead really does work far better as a novel.

Which meant that I was quite pleased this evening when, on dropping off a number of outdated tour guide books at the book exchange at the bus station at Highpoint Shopping Centre, I saw a copy of The Fountainhead recently abandoned there. Now my copy of Atlas Shrugged can have company on my shelf.

It is a Cygnet edition, just like the other Ayn Rand books I have bought over the years (distant years now), and in the middle there is a tearaway postcard where you can send away to the Ayn Rand Institute to learn more about her ideas. Please don’t do that.

I have met several Ayn Rand devotees over the years, and it is very hard to generalise about them, given the one I know best is a highly eccentric and individualistic character, more suited to leading his own personality cult, than to the worship of that other unique individual.

But what I suppose I could say is that quite a few, transfixed with the ideas of Ayn in their late teens, try to emulate, as best they can, what they think would be the behaviour of the heroes in her novels. That is, they repress their own emotions and become rather wooden and almost robotic in their interactions, as if that is the way that John Galt or Howard Roark would behave.

That is, I guess, they ask themselves ‘What would John Galt do?’

As Jerome Tuccille wrote at the start of his 1972 memoir:

It usually begins with Ayn Rand.

The young crusader in search of a cause enters the world of The Fountainhead or Atlas Shrugged as though he were about to engage in unheard-of sexual delights for the first time. He has been warned beforehand. There is no need to search any further. The quest is over. Here is all the truth you’ve been looking for contained in the tightly packed pages of two gargantuan novels.

Whilst I am mostly sympathetic to Libertarian ideas (although, just like Ayn Rand, I vehemently dislike the term Libertarian), there is something both abrasive and wooden about Ayn Rand’s prose and general attitude such as to turn most people off her ideas, and turn her into an almost Dickensian caricature of a real political thinker and writer. (Of course, she is far more entertaining than Robert Nozick – Anarchy, State and Utopia is a great cure for insomnia.)

Looking back with the acquired learning and further reading of three decades, I think that the problem with Ayn Rand is that there is nothing original about her, except in the Walter White way that she has meth-cooked the raw ingredients that have been provided to her by other, greater thinkers. She has the politics of John Locke; the epistemology of Aristotle (interesting that she claims intellectual descent from him, the first empiricist, rather than from Plato, the first rationalist, given the importance of Reason in her oft repeated utterances); the economics of Ludwig Von Mises (who incidentally was a dinner acquaintance of hers); and the attitude of Nietszche (is it an accident that the climaxes of both The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged are a big explosion – literal in the former and metaphorical in the latter?). All four of those thinkers are far more interesting to read in the original rather than through her interpretation.

To all this, I could add that she has all the charm of the Marlboro Man. Her vehement affirmation that cigarette smoking is pro-life is something that brought her to a rather ironic but apt end.

Yet, there is still something fascinating and compelling about Ayn. It’s why, even though I do not really like her style, I have read a lot of her essays on top of her novels, and the two memoirs her former closest disciples, the Brandens, wrote about their lives with her.

But I guess I would give Jerome Tuccille the last word on Ayn Rand. Towards the end of the last chapter of his memoir, he recalls a TV appearance of Ayn Rand in May 1971 in relation to her views of the ecology movement as being anti-life, anti-man, and anti-mind. His paraphrasing of her words (and my editing of the page of text) appears below:

All of you out zere beyond the age of twenty-nine should get down on your knees every time you zee a smokestack.

Pollution is ze symbol of human achievement. Wizzout technolochy and pollution, man would still be living in ze Stone Age.

Trees, rocks and mountains are nonproductive elements. Zey just sit zere occupying space, creating nozzing of zeir own.

We are locked in a life-and-death struggle between nature and technolochy, between mindless rocks and trees and ze boundless genius of ze human mind.

We’ll build factories on ze beaches and highways over ze oceans. We’ll build a smokestack to ze moon.

It is quite easy to send her up, is it not?

As Tuccille then observes (although that chapter does not end there as the 21 year old me recalled it, but does go on for a few more pages):

Ayn, you sweet, lovable, crazy bitch. Don’t tell me it usually ends with you too!

I doubt that I would ever make a good music critic. A bloke at work whom I sometimes manage is a drummer, and one of the bands he was in happened to be ARIA nominated (he refuses to clarify which one exactly it was), and whilst one of my friends from the office assures me that this bloke is Australian musical royalty, I have heard of hardly any of the acts he has worked with (and of those that I have, I do not know the music of Tex Perkins nor Dave Graney).

I get great pleasure in stirring this brooding musician with overdone talk of my fondness for bubblegum pop like Nikki Webster (I don’t actually like that stuff, but it is good material for some good natured provocation), or the exciting news that Lindsay Lohan is about to release her third album (I actually did not know that she did anything of note anymore except take lots of party drugs in night clubs).

As I mentioned in a post a few days ago, I was in the Countdown Generation. I relied on Countdown for most of my knowledge of music in the 1980s, and I knew very little about anything that was not on Countdown or on 3XY radio.

Which is as good as way as any to segue into not really knowing anything about Jefferson Airplane until very recently.

I think, when listening to Casey Casem, the DJ formerly known as the voice of Shaggy from Scooby Doo, presenting the American Top 40 on Sunday nights on 3XY circa 1984, I first heard the name Jefferson Starship. Some song by them was played by Casey, but I paid it no heed.

It was the following year, when they dropped the Jefferson and became simply Starship, that ‘We Built This City’ with all its hard pop (or is it soft rock?) rhythms burst onto the airwaves, the first of several instantly popular (but inherently appallingly vacuous) songs that stormed the charts (remember ‘Nothing’s gonna stop us now’ or ‘Sarah’? No? Good!).

And that was how I first became acquainted with the music of Grace Slick, co-lead vocalist of Starship, and formerly the lead singer of Jefferson Airplane, by then the distant ancestor of Starship, who had led the smooth slow moving wave of psychedelic rock in the late 1960s, around the time I was born.

Sad to say, I am not very musically curious. Because they were not played on the radio for some strange reason (I wonder why), I know next to nothing about the music of The Ramones, The Grateful Dead, Motley Crüe or The Violent Femmes. Likewise, I only really discovered psychedelic rock about five years ago, when a colleague dragged me along one boozy Friday night after work to an Ethiopian cafe in Footscray, crowded predominantly with late baby boomers, to listen to a local psychedelic rock cover band. They were good, really getting that elusive sound of psychedelic rock just right, making me feel like I had been at Monash Uni 20 years earlier than when I had actually studied there.

It also got me very curious to discover more about psychedelic rock. For that, Apple Music (which I am hopeless at navigating) proved to be pretty useful.

Which led me to White Rabbit, and the band that performed it, Jefferson Airplane. And inevitably to another side of Grace Slick, whom I only knew from Starship.

There are such darkly beautiful brooding lyrics in White Rabbit, like:

‘And if you go chasing rabbits, and you know you’re going to fall

Tell ’em a hookah-smoking caterpillar has given you the call

And call Alice, when she was just small.’

Sixteen years is a long time – from 1969 when that song was a hit, to 1985, when Starship burst out again with their insipid soft rock sound (although there was nothing insipid about Grace Slick’s strong vocalising, even then), was my entire lifetime to that point in time. We went from Apollo 11 to the eve of the Challenger disaster, from the bowels of the Vietnam War to the last few years of the Cold War. We went from a time of hippies to the age of yuppies.

And we went from the beautiful music that Grace Slick wrote and sang in her prime to Bernie Taupin’s formulaic hits.

I think it is really sad. Much as I am a very conservative person, I find it a tragedy that the hippies faded away the way they did, and that the troubadours and minstrels who sang the anthems of an angry generation at Woodstock then sold out and gave my own generation such insipid tunes.

Grace Slick never believed in singing into her old age. She retired gracefully, and her voice has not been heard in many years. Perhaps, it would have been better if she had stopped after Woodstock, long before Jefferson Airplane reinvented itself into the musical space wreak (morbidly apt given NASA in early 1986) that was Starship.

I’m what is commonly known as from Generation X. Here in Australia, we could also be called the Countdown Generation. Countdown was a popular one hour weekly music show on the ABC from 1974 to 1986, hosted by former music producer Ian ‘Molly’ Meldrum.

It usually featured as guest host some popular musician or band, had at least one act pretending to perform live in front of the studio audience, a few music videos, a chartbusters segment, and, at the very end, the eponymous countdown of the top ten songs of the week.

Meldrum became well known for his interviews with various rock stars on the show. (His post Countdown interview over a decade later with a visibly stoned and off his face Liam Gallagher still makes me chuckle at the memory.)

In this era, when music videos were first coming into their own, and way before the internet was more than a rocket scientist’s private preserve (to borrow from Joseph Conrad, kids, ‘the darkness was here yesterday’), it was the main way that teenagers like me were to discover new music.

There were other shows too. Channel 7 had the 3 hour long Sounds Unlimited (from 1981 simply Sounds) hosted by Donny Sutherland, and there was a brief attempt on channel 10 in 1982 with something on weekday afternoons called WROK. I guess that music videos made for some very cheap programming options.

What I am getting at is that it is now, for people like me who no longer have a working TV set and haven’t regularly listened to conventional FM radio since the mid 1990s (I once tuned into Fox FM in the mid 2000s just after I had gone through a break up and was disgusted at the lack of empathy of the DJs with the silly fools who rung up to bemoan their love lives, such that I decided it was now far too toxic to listen to) it is hard to discover any new music.

When did I last adopt any new favourite artists? Tori Amos is so 1994, Alanis Morrisette is 1996, and Live is the late 1990s. I somehow missed Pearl Jam (when I first heard someone play a guitar based version of Better Man at a birthday party in 1999, it was totally new to me). I was never really a Spandau Ballet fan, but when they toured Australia ten years ago, it was the best concert I had ever been to (and there was no one under 35 in the audience – ha!). And I have seen Suzanne Vega and Kiss tour twice.

So how do I discover music now? In the age of the iGen, iPhone, iMac, iPod, iPad, iTune, people like me are dinosaurs, wondering about where to go to find a replacement for my kaput CD player. (Finding smart speakers for the lounge room to sync with my iMac or iPhone seems to be a bit beyond me.)

What brought this reflectiveness on, you might ask? Well, I was watching Dickinson this afternoon (episode 2 – I am savouring them one at a time) and realised that they did not stop making good music in 1996 (although I think I could safely say that Suzanne Vega did, alas). There seem to be a lot of very good artists out there producing music that I could really enjoy, and someone is finding it and putting it into the Dickinson soundtrack. For example, Mitski, whose song Your Best American Girl plays as the credits roll on episode 2.

But it is challenging. Music Video shows on free to air TV are a thing of the distant past, even if I were to own a working TV (I don’t anymore), and FM radio DJs are not the funny loveable jokers they were when I would listen to whilst doing my homework in late high school or whilst writing my essays at uni.

And one way or the other, Apple Music is not all that user friendly or easy to use.

Until this month, whenever I have walked around the city at lunchtime and noticed various international students wearing face masks to filter out the pollution, I have thought them rather silly. After all, this is Melbourne, not Kuala Lumpur or Beijing.

Guess who is laughing on the other side of his face now?!?

This morning, a push notice from one or other of the various news apps I have on my phone announced that today, Melbourne has the worst air pollution in the world, thanks to the bushfires.

I was not quite 14 when Ash Wednesday happened in 1983. That night, a big, thick, black cloud of smoke descended on Melbourne around 7.30pm, a frightening and unprecedented experience.

We have never had anything quite like that in my lifetime, including right now.

What is different is that the Ash Wednesday smoke cloud passed by and disappeared into history. We have now had about a week and a half of smoke and poor air quality plaguing Melbourne due to the bushfires.

And when I am not getting push notices on the air quality, the news apps are telling me that either the Prime Minister or one or other of the state Premiers is currently addressing the media on the sorry state of affairs.

In the case of the Prime Minister, it is a rather belated show of leadership (standing next to a four star general in a slouch hat is probably as good a way to recover as any from the image crisis of a Hawaiian holiday). You would think, given he is surprisingly good at reading the mood of the people and achieving electoral success, that he would have at least noticed how Jacinta Ardern in New Zealand shows leadership in a crisis situation – the rare times she does not show that disarming smile. [To say nothing of the prime minister we did not have, Bill Shorten, who used to be very good at looking very leader-like when members of his union were in life threatening situations.]

But when we put aside the failure of our Prime Minister and various state politicians (ie the emergency services minister of NSW) to put on the appropriate show of empathy and leadership in a crisis, the problem of the bushfires currently besieging the nation is a bit more complicated than whether to take a holiday at what most people see as the right time of the year.

Whether the Prime Minister was on holiday or not was not a good look, but it was not determinative of the fire crisis. Nor, 11 years ago on Black Saturday, was the absence of Police Commissioner Christina Nixon from the crisis centre determinative – although it was a symbol of poor leadership (something which the Brumby state government probably gratefully hoped would deflect attention from themselves).

The main problem is that there has been a total failure to address the root causes, real or potential, of the bushfires. That is where leadership has failed, and the failure was long before Scott Morrison booked his holiday in Hawaii. Nor is it a matter of his failure alone – his is mostly an uncharacteristic lapse in his ability to read the mood of the people.

I see three issues where we have put ourselves, as a nation and as individual states, in the predicament where we have such fires besieging much of our country.

1. Global Warming and its causes
2. Fuel loads and the lack of ongoing attention to fire risks in rural area
3. Equipping and supporting our country fire services

Taking global warming first, I must say that I am still a bit skeptical about it, but, as Rupert Murdoch once put it, I am willing to give the planet the benefit of the doubt. The Prime Minister and some of his cronies treating coal like gemstones triumphantly after the last election has become, during bushfire season, a rather tone-deaf gesture. But whether global warming has contributed or not to the bushfires, we need, as a community and not just at the behest of our leaders, to assume that it might and behave accordingly.

[What are you doing about your carbon footprint? I don’t drive, and see the presence of several cars in a drive way as rather obscene and wasteful. I compost and have a worm farm. I have planted many trees around my house, both front and back, and am looking at where I might perhaps plant some more. I don’t complain about rising energy prices. I looked into getting solar panels, but I was persuaded that they are inefficient on my roof orientation and I am concerned about the long term environmental impact of the waste produced by those panels.]

After that, there is the issue of fuel loads. Where there is fuel there will be fire. Much as I find the general tone of conservative political commentator Peta Credlin rather off-putting, I think that she did have a point when she wrote on the weekend in the Murdoch Press that in recent years, state and local governments sympathetic to urban Green politics have avoided winter back burning and the sort of low intensity fuel clearance needed to keep our bush and wilderness areas more fire proof in the summer. They have done so in worship of a misguided environmental agenda which has now, if you pardon the tragic pub, backfired. After all, have we learned nothing from Black Saturday 11 years ago?

[Or is the agenda here a but more sinister? Back in the late 1980s, a politics tutor of mine commented that in the UK, there were committed communists voting regularly for Thatcher’s Conservatives because they believed that only Thatcher in power was capable of forcing the proletariat to achieve class consciousness and rise up in workers’ revolution. Greens might be cultural Marxists, if such creatures exist, and perhaps some of them might be insane enough to think that they can achieve greater acceptance of their ideas by having policies which cause the fuel loads to grow (supposedly for the good of nature) to the point where bushfires are more ferocious than ever before. Just speculating, but I would not rule it out entirely.]

And lastly, there is the issue of properly equipping and supporting our fire services.

This is usually not a matter for the Federal Government. However, the decision of the Federal Government some 4 years ago not to fund a national fleet of aircraft specialising in fire fighting because it is a state responsibility seems to have been a smug and short sighted one. (After all, I think that the first federal politician to seriously put state rights in front of the growing powers of the Commonwealth has yet to be born, and probably won’t be until the second coming of Christ or thereabouts.) Big mistake, and one which right now is going to prove costly.

How we do organise, equip and support our country fire services is a state issue. Sadly, this is one which appears to have been either neglected, or subject to tragic political interference.

As a major case in point, in 2016, the highly unpopular reorganisation of the predominantly volunteer Victorian Country Fire Authority along lines proposed by the United Firefighters Union to the Andrews Government was a matter which tore the Andrews Cabinet apart, and caused the departure of several senior firefighters from the CFA. It also became a federal election issue in Victoria, one which probably cost Premier Andrews’ federal colleagues the 2016 election (although I suspect he would only shed crocodile tears over the failures of his factional opponents).

Aside from it’s electoral consequences at that time and it’s general unpopularity, has the CFA reorganisation had more serious consequences for their capacity to handle bushfires? I don’t know, but it is an example of putting petty politics in front of public safety. Are there other such examples in other states?

In any event, the Royal Commission into these matters will be interesting.

I had an email from Telstra the other day, warning me that I had used 85% of my 100 GB monthly data allowance on my internet plan, with more than 2 weeks to go til the end of the billing cycle. This is the first time that has happened in the year since I got my iMac, and can be explained by my binge watching various shows on Netflix and Apple TV since Christmas Eve. Firstly, I did The Witcher, then I got into Apple TV and tore through For All Mankind, an alternative history of the space race, and then watched all of Morning Wars (aka The Morning Show for the one reader I have out there in the USA).

And now I am into Dickinson, a somewhat steampunk retelling of the early career of mind 19th century American poet Emily Dickinson, starring Hallee Steinfeld in the titular role.

I have read a lot of poetry in my time. From age 15 til about 9 years ago, TS Eliot was my favourite poet, and The Waste Land my favourite poem. Then, when going through a bit of an existentialist crisis connected to a health scare, I took another look, along with a deeper dive, into Dylan Thomas, and decided that he is my favourite poet, and that his work In Country Sleep is even more mind blowing than The Waste Land.

But sometime even before TS Eliot, I read Emily Dickinson. I always though of her as rather prim and proper, a frigid American answer to the spinsterish Jane Austen and the Bronte sisters.

Mind you, the evidence that has come to light in recent years in her correspondence suggests, gratifyingly, that that impression was quite wrong, and that Emily was a much more interesting character than a repressed spinster secretly writing her poems in the parental home, til dying in stifling late middle age.

The Apple TV series Dickinson plays on this alternative revisionist characterisation of Emily Dickinson, presently her as an 18 or 19 year old rebel with the mores of the iGen (or, being a Gen Xer myself, I might say Gen Z, as I define the following generations against my own).

I have only seen the first episode so far, and I am savouring it (I did go into Telstra to convert my internet plan to unlimited data, but I am not sure it has triggered yet). We see an Emily Dickinson who swears, who ironically and drolly observes ‘How sexy!’ at the next suitor that her mother is lining up for her to reject (a pig farmer), and who confidently and conceitedly observes ‘I love it when people quote me’ to another spurned suitor and literary collaborator. And she kisses her brother’s fiancé on the mouth quite passionately (this is based on an interpretation of some evidence from letters that have come to light in recent years).

The supporting cast is hilariously wooden and intentionally two dimensional, with Jane Krakowski playing Mrs Dickinson with all the blindness of a Mrs Bennett, and black humour flying in all directions. And throughout the episode, as Emily struggles through the creative process to write the first verse of The Chariot (they don’t allude to the title as such, but I do know my Dickinson), we see it emerge line by line, til at the end she concludes, in a way very atypical of 1850 America: ‘Nailed it!’

Amway strikes me as a really efficient way to lose your friends and alienate your family. My only direct experiences of multilevel marketing are two separate instances where acquaintances and friends of mine got entangled into Amway and its Australian offshoot Omega Trends and tried to get me involved (out of politeness I heard them out and did not tell them where to jump immediately, although I did not sign up). I suppose my apathy about things I am not comfortable doing (rather than my skepticism) serves as my primary line of defence against getting involved in such schemes.

For some reason, whilst idly browsing the net the other day, I came across this link from the angry wife of a former Amway devotee. Do read it as it is Laugh Out Loud hilarious:

http://marriedtoanambot.blogspot.com

I suppose I could say more about my encounter with a would be Amway dealer (and acquaintance from Uni) and his mentor from 27 years ago, except that the above mentioned blog probably covers such experiences in much greater detail than I could be bothered writing.

I have a reasonably good and prosperous life, so I do like to give back, albeit probably not as much as I should or can afford. I have several charities to whom I have authorised direct debit on a monthly basis, as the main way that I give back.

One of them is, or rather was, or perhaps unavoidably still is, White Ribbon Foundation. White Ribbon Foundation is intended to raise awareness of domestic violence, so as to eliminate it at it’s sources.

White Ribbon went into administration in early October, whilst I was in Italy. When I returned, a direct debit was taken out of my credit card in mid October. I then contacted White Ribbon by email to cancel my direct debit, and got no reply. I assume that by then, the office no longer was attended. So I contacted the administrators, and was assured that direct debit was going to stop.

Mid November, another $25 comes out of my credit card, and I contact the administrators again. Again, I am reassured that the bank account that is collecting these debits is being closed down.

Yesterday, I see another $25 coming out of my account, so I have now approached my bank about disputing the transaction with White Ribbon’s bank. Hopefully this results in this now dead charity finally stopping the debits.

Cancelling my credit card and getting one with a new number issued is not really an option I want to consider except as a last resort. I have my electricity, gas, phone, Apple Music and three other charities doing regular direct debits, and it is a considerable administrative burden to me to move these onto another credit card – I would need to find a window of time where there are no direct debits for a few days.

Which leads me to reflect on charity and regular giving. We give to charities because we don’t have the time or know how or contacts to do good works directly ourselves, so we trust that charities are able to do those good works on our behalf. Hopefully, that involves making the world a better (or at least a less bad) place in some way or alleviating some suffering.

But we don’t always do our due diligence on charities. I expect that the other charities I support currently (Mission Australia, Fred Hollowes Foundation, Berry Street) are well run and are spending most of their funding doing good works on my behalf. I am not sure that this was the case for White Ribbon. Aside from the very critical news articles about questionable policy decisions White Ribbon was making, there appear to have been a number of governance issues which I ignored.

Firstly, you could register as a donor online rather than by speaking to a live person on the phone. That suggests that they are not well enough resourced to have live people taking the donations – or to speak to donors about such matters as the direct debit of their funds.

Secondly, White Ribbon did not send me a tax receipt for the 2017-18 financial year. I only received one for the 2018-19 financial year after I contacted them by email. This suggests that they are not properly organised as to be accountable to the proper governance standards expected of a charity.

Those things were red flags I ignored. But there were others, looking back, that I should have looked at.

Thirdly, there has been a revolving door of CEOs in the time where I have been a regular donor. That does not augur well for a charity. It indicates dissension and uncertainty at the leadership levels of the organisation.

Fourthly, White Ribbon spent most of it’s relatively small budget on administration. As they are focused on raising awareness rather than providing services or material help, this is to be expected. But I should have reflected a little more closely as to whether this is what I expected from a charity I support, or whether I should have chosen to go with a charity which focuses on addressing the suffering. After all, White Ribbon seems to have had little effective idea about how, noble though the goal is, it was to achieve it’s objectives.

Hopefully it all gets sorted through my bank and I do not have to cancel my credit card. But it does cause me to think more closely than usual as to whether any worthy cause I wish to support deserves my money more than another. I will be more thoughtful in choosing to whom I next offer my $25 per month donation.

If you get to know me, you will realise that proper use of apostrophes is one of those things I go a bit OCD about. The above heading, where I chose to use a possessive apostrophe with the word “Grill’d” which does not exactly need a contraction, is something which almost sent me a little haywire for a moment.

Which is perhaps less than an ideal segue into one of my more serious interests – good quality hamburgers and the market for such.

The gourmet burger chain Grill’d has, since it opened in Camberwell or Hawthorn in 2004, grown to become a giant of approximately 140 stores around Australia (it is, by a factor of almost ten, bigger than Burger Urge, the next largest gourmet burger chain in Australia). At the time when it was a new brand, some food reviewers were rating it (wrongly in my opinion) as the best burger in Melbourne. I welcomed it, because anything which lifts the standard of burgers several notches above our beloved Scottish named behemoth Maccas is good news. It was one of several gourmet burger chains emerging at that time – the other two of note being Port Melbourne’s Urban Burger, which did not last very long, and Yarraville’s Burger Edge, which at one point had about two dozen stores, including some interstate, but which now seems to be consigned to a few freeway co-locations with service stations, a business model which does not augur well for it’s long term brand re-growth.

I will note that my home economics class in 1982 had a lesson on the evils of McDonalds, in which it noted that there were 103 McDonalds stores in Australia by then. (I believe the number now is around a thousand, give or take.) Grill’d has gotten to the point now where it could quite possibly come to rival McDonalds in Australia if it does not put a foot wrong too often.

But it does have a few controversies. A few years ago, there was a very well publicised wage dispute, which caused it some reputational damage. Since then, the main founder has had separate and highly acrimonious fallings out with his two original business partners. These issues, if you are familiar with the foundation myths behind McDonalds (I did watch The Founder a couple of years ago, as well as reading a book about Roy Kroc in my teenage years), are not exactly unique. In some ways, Simon Crowe, with his marketing genius, eye for prime real estate, and dealings with his partners, seems to parallel Roy Kroc in some ways.

This past week, a much larger dispute has flared up, surrounding a traineeship program, funded by the Commonwealth, which seems to have been set up to run at less than optimal efficiency. Consequently this has caused several disgruntled employees of Grill’d to complain that they are being paid the lower traineeship rates when there is no good faith endeavour to enable them to complete the traineeship in a reasonable timeframe.

It got to the point where a protest outside the Lygon Street Grill’d yesterday delayed it’s opening by an hour, according to media reports. (FYI, McDonalds briefly had a restaurant in Lygon Street in the 1980s – it did not last long.)

This story has the potential to cause a lot more reputational damage to Grill’d than the other controversies. After all, who really cares if a few rich blokes who are former private schoolboys have a quarrel over their business arrangements? That is not exactly UFC trash talking entertainment to yak about over a beer on a Friday afternoon. And the pay dispute a few years ago was supposedly confined to one franchise store. That could be blamed on a rogue franchisee. But where 75% of stores are owned by the main company rather than franchisees, and the traineeship is a company wide initiative, this has, at the very least, a very bad look.

And at the same time, the Fairfax media is running parallel stories about food safety issues identified at several stores.

I think burger chains, like many businesses, rely on a superior business model to make them successful. If the business model is not up to scratch, then the business will fold, regardless of the quality of the food. (Quiznos made superior subs to Subway, yet got wiped from Australia about 14 years ago.) To this point in time, Grill’d has been able to grow because of it’s business model. Along the way, many other burger joints have fallen by the wayside – the Burger Bistro in Perth no longer exists, and the store in Shafto Lane did not long survive after Grill’d set up nearby, even though Burger Bistro made one of the best burgers I have ever had.

Which gets me to another point. I do not really like the taste of the burgers at Grill’d. There are many smaller burger businesses out there which are currently putting out better quality burgers than what you get at Grill’d. And you can get the Mighty Melbourne Burger in any Grill’d in Australia, but it will be renamed to something more compatible with whatever state you happen to be in.

Ultimately, if Grill’d is in a major spot of bother, I am not exactly sorry. They are not competing with McDonalds and other junk food standard burgers like Hungry Jacks. They are directly competing with all the smaller burger joints and chains. Those places, with their more unique and interesting burgers, are the ones who are more at risk from the continuing rise of Grill’d than McDonalds.