Busytown by Jolisa Gracewood

Where were we? Oh right. So I had this totally freaky dream. I dreamed that in the middle of George W. Bush’s 8-year term, they decided to have an election, just a sort of quick referendum on how he was doing. It seemed like a good idea to have him explain himself and make sure we were all with the program. (I know, crazy huh, but you know how logic gets all messed up in dreams).

And there was this really good Democratic candidate. Tall, smart, talky, nice smile, war hero. Actually, a bit too tall, a bit too smart, a bit too talky, but kinda cute, what with the smile and the hero stuff. He was Bush’s good twin or cyborg nemesis or something – I dunno, some crazy experiment at Yale in the sixties that went a bit dodgy.

Then there was something about a papier-mache turkey in the desert, and it turned out Bush was, like, really a robot, and then we all wondered if that meant the war in Iraq was just a virtual reality game or something, but then it wasn’t because all these guys in camo turned up, minus limbs and waving voting papers and explaining that American’s biggest export was democracy and they’d found a new market for it.

And the other guy was stalking round the place going “I have a plan! I have a plan!” and sometimes "Friend? friend?" like Boris Karloff in that old Frankenstein movie, except his suit was a lot sharper. He had a cute sidekick who didn't say much but was winking at all the girls, and some of the boys even though he kept going on about how married he was. Tch. You always get those at parties.

Because, right, suddenly it was a party, and it was Election Day (you know how time gets all messed up in dreams) and all the kids came out to vote, and people were voting till three in the morning because they were so into it. That was weird.

And then the party was happening at my house but also on the TV (you know how place gets all messed up in dreams) and I don’t quite know why, but Eminem was there and someone dressed as Osama bin Laden (I guess Halloween came into it somehow). Maybe it was Dick Cheney? Because I didn’t see him anywhere else, although someone said they saw him upstairs going through my underwear drawer, but that can’t be right. Maybe he was just perving at my old e-mail. Seems like the type.

And then someone put “I Will Survive” on the stereo because Cheney’s daughter was a lesbian and Bush’s daughters are, like, major fag-hags, and then we were all yelling at some guy in the corner who said that gay people can’t be teachers, not until hell freezes over and the earth is round.

And someone was outside shouting “Don’t leave the children behind!”, and I don’t know why, but a moose and a polar bear and a tiny spotted owl kept racing through the room going “What about meeeeeeee?” closely followed by some guy with what looked like an oilcan.

Oh yeah, and that guy who played Superman was there, and Arnold Schwarzenegger wheeled him in and they were both wearing T-shirts that said “I [heart] stem-cell research,” which seemed like a good thing.

And everyone was chanting, but I couldn’t make out what they were saying. It sounded like “Pour more beers! Pour more beers!” and Bush kept shaking his head and saying “But I’m the designated driver,” and then he said “Oh, what the hell, one won’t hurt.” Over in the corner the tall guy had his head in his hands and was moaning softly. Too much cognac maybe?

All sorts of other freaky stuff was going on, but you know how all the details mush together and then fade away when the radio clicks on and the announcer reads the news.

Which was that Bush was still the president after all. Duh! It was all a dream!

So I went into university and taught my class as I usually do on a Wednesday, but for some reason the students, who’d all just voted for the first time, were practically catatonic and all my usual jokes didn’t raise a smile.

I guessed at that point that it might be one of those dreams where you think you’ve woken up, but you haven’t really.

Suddenly friends were talking about moving to Canada or New Zealand, in that loopily optimistic way that people used to talk about making it big in a dotcom and then retiring at thirty to write novels and work in soup kitchens and hike the old Silk Road.

Some actually cried. Some apologized, as if they’d personally done something wrong.

And there was Bush on the TV doing his first press conference, and he was speaking in coherent paragraphs, exhibiting confidence and even intelligence. Barely recognizable as the twitching, grinning clown from the televised debates. Almost a different man, in fact. Perhaps they’d reversed the results of the mysterious experiment? Or fixed his control panel?

He was talking about earning capital and planning to spend it, although it wasn't clear what on. (For some reason, this reminded me of our schoolyard con-man back in fourth form, who could make money out of nothing. One day he picked up a couple of dozen ice-cream sticks off the ground, marked them off in one centimeter increments with a pencil, and sold them as handy pocket rulers for 5c each so he could buy himself a Trumpet.)

But you know how there’s always some magical thing hidden under your pillow that tells you it wasn’t all a dream? In my case, there’s a Kerry-Edwards sticker on my washing machine, carefully peeled off by old friends Matthew and Hamish who visited us the day after the election to do a couple of weeks’ washing and to debrief on what it was like road-tripping round the swing states: exhilarating and infuriating in equal measure. And what it was like at Kerry HQ on election night: exciting, and then just grim.

Scrabbling around for consolations amid the post-election debris, the most we came up with was that Bush gets to clean up in Iraq. Even though it sounds like he’s already fixin’ to mess up in Iran.

Hmmm. You know that conventional wisdom about not switching presidents in the middle of a war? It makes you wonder, is Dubya like the guy who throws a match in order to say “Stand back, everybody, I’ve got a fire extinguisher!” (Pssst…. George! That’s a flamethrower… the extinguisher is over there, next to the UN building).

All Hallows’ Eve. Am I scared? Boy, eh. Election jitters all around, and yet under it all a preternatural sense of calm as if the outcome has already been decided. Most U.S. voters are feeling that way too, apparently. This despite the surprise reappearance on Friday of a certain bearded fellow -- Osama the anti-Santa, an ominous cross between the Grinch who Stole the Election, and the Ghost of Terrorism Future (although those weren’t chains he was rattling, but bones).

"Voters, Their Minds Made Up, Say bin Laden Changes Nothing," is the shock-horror headline in today’s New York Times.

Certainly helps get you in the Halloween spirit, though, doesn’t it? On my street, inhabited mostly by old folks and students, there’s just one pumpkin-bedecked front porch. But a trip last night to the nightmarish megastore Wal-Mart plunged me into an orange-and-black mock necropolis of plastic skulls and cauldrons and skeletons, animatronic cats and ghosts, not to mention life-sized moaning ghouls and shrieking witches -- actually, that was the parents shuffling frantically through the racks of kiddie outfits in a last-minute dash for costumes.

Forget about what you’re going to be when you grow up: the more pressing question for the American child is what are you going to be for Halloween? Dan Savage and David Schmader have a few highly topical and off-colour suggestions, if you’re still looking for a last minute idea. (Busytot is already sorted: he’s going as “what my Mum got at the rummage sale for five bucks,” i.e. a flying dinosaur. He informs me it’s an “opadon,” although the dinosaur dictionaries are curiously silent on this unknown species.)

As I skirted the costume aisle at Wal-Mart, I glimpsed the usual complement of fairies and superheroes, but strangely it was the ladies’ sleepwear department that pulled me up short. Amid all the sensible pastel delights and the occasional naughty glimpse of deadly-sin red, stood a large rack of khaki-coloured shortie nighties. Not so much camisoles as camo-soles. One style featured embroidered medals over the left breast and the legend “Little Miss General” on the back; another, in full camo pattern, announced “Sergeant Sweetie.”

Ick, I mean, ick. They didn’t come with dog-collars and leashes, but I couldn’t banish the image of Lynndie England getting dirty in a non-reciprocal fashion with the benighted prisoners at Abu Ghraib. I’m a broadminded person, and there is admittedly something hot about a uniform (Helllooo, Mr/Ms Fedex) but where’s the sex-appeal in this? “Drop and give me fifty, you ’orrible little man.” OK, maybe.

There’s been a lot of talk about how this country isn’t acting like a nation at war. No tax raises, no requests that the citizenry make sacrifices (apart from the families who are frantically purchasing the equipment their enlisted relatives desperately need -– this is the new comfort package, not knitted socks and fruitcake, but body armour and boots). Trust the brave retailers of fashion-for-the-masses to take the first step in the right direction: ensuring that the boudoirs of the nation are suffused with saucy fighting spirit. Hup two three four.

Will it get them to the polling booths, though? I don’t know anyone over in Iraq (only friends of friends), but I know at least half a dozen ordinary people who are fighting on the electoral front. Two New Zealand friends who’ve flown in from Wellington and Munich to volunteer in any way they can. A mum of two-under-five, a qualified lawyer, who’s heading to Florida to be a polling supervisor. A union organizer who’s been spending evenings on the phone calling up undecided voters in swing states. This weekend, a husband-and-wife professor and administrator, as well as at least one of my students, are driving up to New Hampshire -- the nearest swing state -- to campaign door-to-door. It's an all-volunteer army.

So who’s going to swing it? There has been so much pre-match analysis, based on so much prefabricated theory and premasticated data, that it feels simply foolish to attempt a prediction. Even the barometer site that tracks the electoral college tally based on the latest polls, Electoral-Vote.com, flips as rapidly as a tossed coin on its way up, and we won’t know until after it lands (and perhaps until after the Supreme Court has a jolly good look with a magnifying glass -– although at least we know to watch out this time for that two-headed penny).

But my money’s on the youth vote, that great unknown mass of first-time voters who can’t be polled because they all use cellphones, and whose prior voting record is a tantalizing blank. A very stroppy piece by Kevin Criss in Salon argued as much:

Kerry will take about 70 percent of the young vote. I am predicting, collectively there will at least 20 million more voters from these two groups, young'ns and blacks. You maybe think "yeah the fuck right" -- but trust me. On average 30 percent of African-Americans vote. Expect a minimum of 50 percent this time, maybe close to double. That is anywhere between 7 to 9 million more blacks voting. Young'ns will have a similar margin. Again, we at most vote at a 40 percent rate. Young'ns will easily double their numbers, going from 18 million to about 36 million.

(While we’re talking numbers, let me register the new report in the Lancet -- full text here -- that estimates the number of Iraqi civilian deaths since the current war began at 100,000, not the 10,000 that has been conventionally quoted. Naturally, Downing St begs to differ).

So who and what is pulling in those disenchanted and misunderestimated young voters? Let me put it this way: Do you believe in rock n' roll, can music save your mortal soul? In a last-minute dash for the polls as significant as Osama’s pop-up video, bad-boy Eminem is marshalling the troops that Springsteen, P. Diddy, Linda Rondstadt and the Dixie Chicks haven’t yet reached. Young people, angry people, men and women, black and white, and pretty much anyone else who watches the video for his new single “Mosh.”

Even if you’re not a fan of Mr Mathers, I suggest you check out his latest work (see the video at iFilm.com if you have enough bandwidth, or read the lyrics). He calls for a march on Washington and to the ballot box in language that channels equal parts MLK and Malcolm X – absurd, but it works:

Come along, follow me, as I lead through the darkness
As I provide just enough spark that we need, to proceed
Carry on, give me hope, give me strength, come with me, and I won't steer you wrong
Give your faith and your trust, as I guide us through the fog, to the light at the end of the tunnel
We gon fight, we gon charge, we gon stomp, we gon march through the swamp, we gon mosh through the marsh, take us right through the doors
Come on

The lad has, for the moment, grown up.

Eminem doesn’t explicitly endorse Kerry, he simply raises some hard and sinister questions about the domestic effects of Bush’s policy, and urges his listeners to rise up and vote. Oddly, so does Osama bin Laden. Not a man known for espousing the democratic process, he addresses Americans directly -- "I wonder about you" -- and intones “Your security is in your hands,” sounding for all the world like a social studies teacher giving a crash course in civics to a bunch of worryingly underenthused students.

Or a serial killer taunting the police: “Vote for Bush/Kerry and/or I’ll strike again.” These are terror tactics, I might add, also enthusiastically adopted by Bush’s dark lord of a sidekick, the man who says “nuclear device” as often as his boss says “hard work.” As The Onion put it, only slightly satirically, Cheney Vows to Attack US if Kerry Elected.

So, what now? Is a vote for Kerry a vote for bin Laden, as the Bush camp wants to argue? Or a vote for Bush a big thumbs-up to bin Laden’s favoured tactics, as the videotape seems to suggest? What the heck is bin Laden running for, anyway? (We know what he’s running from, albeit in very very slow motion, waving over his shoulder and singing “catch me if you can!”). And where does all of this leave those of us without a vote, but with an interest?

Roll on Tuesday November 2 – which is not just Election Day but, as everyone schooled by nuns will recall, All Souls’ Day. May whatever spirits are abroad protect all our mortal souls from the requisite ghoulies and ghosties and long-leggety beasties as well as all the things that go bump or boom i’th’night. And may everyone who can, stand up and VOTE!

Since first posting the entry below, I've had some excellent advice from readers on dealing with the whys. Flash programmer Minty writes from Sydney that he favours the dada-Daddy approach to circuit-breaking: "When it's obviously getting circular, my answer becomes 'Chocolate cow.' An example:

Him: "What's that?"
Me: "A rubbish bin"
Him: "What's that?"
Me: "A grey rubbish bin"
Him: "What's that?"
Me: "A chocolate cow"
Him: "Noooo! It's a grey rubbish bin."

And thus endeth the conversation, with a child happy in the knowledge that he's corrected my inability to recognise a rubbish bin."

And Brent Jackson gets to the bottom of the whole thing by re-interpreting the question in a very intelligent way:

Just thought I'd share a small breakthrough we had with our toddling daughter regarding the cascading "But why?" questions. She was repeating the question because we weren't answering what she was asking. Once we figured out that her "Why?" was not "Why is it so?", but actually "Why do you think that?", or, less ambiguously "How do you know that?".

If my daughter had used your example, "Why is that man grumpy?", our response was along the lines of "I could tell he was grumpy because he tooted and raised a finger to me when I changed lanes."

Smart, that, and quite possibly definitive. I'll give it a go and let you know.

Busytot is three! Although if he had a say in the matter that would read “Busybigboy is three,” because from his point of view, three is the official threshold of bigboyosity. He's at a point in his life where he suddenly has both a past and a future. All of his fantasy scenarios involving exciting jobs as astronauts and other people’s daddies and taxi drivers happened “oh, about three years ago,” and he’s already calculating what he’ll be eligible for when he’s ten. A bunk bed. A Beetle car. A New York City fire engine with a ladder on it.

Having twigged to the fact that both Mummy and Daddy are teachers (I teach big kids to write, and apparently Daddy “teaches big kids to play” – which will be news to the big kids currently enrolled in Mathematical Methods of Physics), he insists that he too is a professional pedagogue.

“I teach the little ones,” he clarifies. “My students aren’t same-sized as your students.” When I ask what, precisely, he’s teaching these students of his, he says “Pushing.” Er... really? “Yes, pushing, you know, pushing things, like door bells, buttons to cross the road, thing that beeps the car, all that stuff you got to do pushing for, because I’m quite smart about that sort of thing.”

Four years off the age of Reason (four more years!), he is also halfway through that mysterious correspondence degree in Law that all toddlers take in order to torture their parents. And he’s double-majoring in Philosophy, currently slogging through Why 101.

The universal Why appears to be hard-wired into the human brain, a sort of deeply instinctive Tourette’s-like anti-Socratic method in pursuit not exactly of understanding, but of the point of maximum absurdity. Once he’s launched on one of his infinite regressions down the path of Why, you have no choice but to hang on and ride it out.

It’s easy to miss the turn-off, and find yourself down some gravel road in the middle of nowhere arguing an increasingly non-winning position. These either involve the sort of cosmological questions about the universe that Busytot’s Dad is paid good money to work on, or alternatively, some kind of toilet talk.

The latter usually happens when I inadvisedly vent out loud about Bush talking on the radio, say, or a bad driver, or some obstructionist civil servant who’s just sent me to the back of the queue.

“Why that man a grumpy old bugger?”

“Gee, I don’t know... well, you get grumpy when you haven’t had a poo. Maybe he hasn’t had a poo today.”


“WHY HE NOT HAVE A POO TODAY?”

And so on.

Once, just once, I tried turning the tables and answering a why with a why. Does not compute. I thought he would blow his top. “You not say why, I say why!” he shrieked, and while my ears were still ringing, he calmly returned to the subject at hand. “Why cinnamon bagels make my bottom hurt?” (It's OK, put down the phone -- we're not pastry perverts, he's just allergic to cinnamon).

Sometimes he gets ahead of himself too, which is what makes me think it’s hard-wired. He’ll slip a stitch.

“Why I can’t climb on the table with socks on?”

“Because you might slip off and break a leg.”

“Why I not go to hospital in a ambulance going wee-oo-wee-oo?”

“Wait, who said anything about an ambulance?”

When it’s not why time, it’s rhetorical question time. What do I mean by rhetorical questions? The kind you ask only to answer them yourself. What is an example of a rhetorical question? Hamlet, say, to-be-or-not-to-being all over the stage. What is an example of a toddler soliloquy?

"I'm going to wear hippo pajamas tonight. You know why I'm going to wear hippo pajamas? Because they're very very special to me. You know why they very very special to me? Because they're NEW and I LOVE them. You know why I love them?"

Wind him up and watch him go.

But although the lad speaks in increasing complicated (and contentious) sentences, he still indulges in a literalness that, to my ears, is as literary as anything on the Booker shortlist. He really really really likes rectangles. "Also bluetangles, and greentangles, and lellowtangles..." Synaesthesia is his middle name, and now I too can't see anything "redtangular" without a haze of colour around it.

There is something Joycean about his word for the oil-fired radiators that keep the house warm: they’re radi-heaters, of course. And when I corrected his mention of the “rain-pipe” outside the house, he looked at me with pity. “I call it a rain-pipe, because it’s where the rain goes.” He’s even experimenting with humour. “Does that make sense?” I ask him, and he solemnly replies, “Yes, it does. It makes three cents. Hahaha, I only joking.”

It’s like watching a robot program itself: lots of experimentation, repetition, extrapolation, repetition, interrogation. It’s very scientific. Except when it’s junk science. Here’s Busytot on nutrition: “Milk makes your bones grow.” “Pears make your eyebrows grow.” “Raspberries make your penis get bigger.” (And they’re cheaper than Viagra).

We’ve had some fascinating lectures on Ethics: "Listening and Understanding are very important. You know what Listening and Understanding mean? Listening mean not being Bad, and Understanding mean not being Cross. That what they mean." Grasshopper.

And politically, I think he’s a Democrat. Remember how in the third Presidential debate, John Kerry argued for a more amorous approach to, er, international affairs (in uncharacteristically Bush-like language)? The Kerry Doctrine: "Frankly, I think we have a lot more loving of our neighbor to do in this country and on this planet."

The Busytot Doctrine, cooked up on a late-night drive down the highway as all good political platforms are: “I love everybody in the entire world.” Happy sigh. “You know where the entire world is? It’s over there, behind those buildings.”

I can’t get enough of these Presidential debates. It’s like Monday night football – er, Super Twelve -- for debate geeks. Or for the whole world. There we all are, sitting on the couch with a beer in hand, yelling at the TV: “Kick it into touch!” “Hollywood!” “Get up off the ground, ya wuss!”

It’s balm to my nerdy soul, a ringing retort to those who think debating isn’t a real sport. I never broke my nose while delivering a particularly decisive rebuttal, but twice a year, there I was with my team, off to Easter or Winter Tourney. We were there on the ferry with puking rugby players performing rousing choruses of “Na na nah nah, get your gears off,” and we passed as hardened sporting reps as long as no-one asked what we played.

Just this once, though, everyone is watching my sport.

The opening match was excellent, and not just because my team won. I sat on the couch, with a bowl of popcorn at my elbow, and an insomniac Busytot on my lap, and delivered a play-by-play adjudication as John Kerry kicked Bush’s sorry, surly arse into touch. Repeatedly.

Who would believe that Bush and Kerry had the same debate coach at Yale? Obviously they learned different things from him. Kerry learned how to debate, and distinguished himself by whupping a previously undefeated touring Oxbridge team.

Mind you, debate, American-style, is a different beast from the variation practiced across the Commonwealth, not nearly as audience-friendly. It's a serious, linear, fact-heavy enterprise; where we prize the random witty repartee, they prize the solid party line.

I should confess that most of what I know about the American version of debating, I learned from an immortal film called Listen To Me. I call it immortal because it will not die, and according to the scarily illiterate reviews on Amazon, junior debaters across the country are still thrilling to Kirk Cameron’s performance as a young gun in thrall to the icy, take-no-prisoners debate coach played by Roy Scheider. Oh yeah, there’s also a love plot, as alluded to in the official synopsis:

Two crack college debaters can't find the words to express their feelings for one another. But being thrust into the finals against Harvard and standing before the Supreme Court Justices, the two must break down their own walls of communication...

Which is more or less what happened in the first Bush-Kerry debate. Except there was only one crack college debater on the stage. Bush was a washout, the guy you’d put at First Speaker if you had the bad luck to draw him as a team-mate in the mix-and-match round. First Speaker can get by with repeating a few key lines. Everyone else needs to be on their toes and ready to rebut, which requires a quick wit and a critical mass of intelligence.

Even then, you're doomed if you argue a losing case. The one time in my life I got help from an outside source during a debate was when my team, giddy from lack of sleep and overindulgence in Easter Tourney spirit, elected to argue "That We Should Copy the Japanese" with reference to Pearl Harbour. Hey, it seemed like a good idea at the time.

About thirty seconds into my first affirmative speech, I noticed a senior debater down the back of the room gesturing to attract my attention. He shook his head sadly. He drew a finger across his throat repeatedly. And then he cocked an imaginary gun to his temple (perhaps in reference to the classic adjudicatorial line about how one team shot themselves in the foot, but then the other team shot themselves in the head).

He was right. We were screwed. But if we'd had a cunning plan, like some brilliant accomplices in the back row and a more than rudimentary knowledge of sign language, or -- here's a thought -- an invisible earpiece and a radio transmitter, we might have been able to pull out of that kamikaze death dive before it was too late!

Which brings me to those “rumours on the internets” that Bush was wired and that he was being fed lines through that NASA-designed radio transmitter between his shoulder-blades and a miniature telephone implanted in one of his molars. Conspiracy theorists and gadget-heads are working overtime to identify the mystery object glimpsed under Bush's suit jacket -- a squarish bulge in the first debate, and a thick wire in the second.

As many a commentator has pointed out, if Dubya was on a direct line to God or Karl Rove or Karen Hughes, he might have done a trifle better in the debate. And there are plenty of alternative explanations for that mysterious rectangular lump on his back, too. Take your pick from the theories floating around the internets. It’s a bullet-proof vest (although Bush’s people have explicitly ruled this one out). A rumple in the fabric of the French-tailored suit. A back brace. A medicine pump (delivering a patented mix of caffeine, Ritalin, and vodka). A spine implant. A brain-eating alien parasite (yes, yes, a very hungry one). A string that, when pulled, makes him say one of five phrases. A parachute just in case the Almighty changes his mind about George halfway through the Rapture.

Conspicuously, neither Dick Cheney nor John Edwards needed electronic back-up in their vice-presidential rendezvous. Cheney boldly lied through his teeth in a darkly saurian mumble (one online wag suggested he was much more comprehensible if you had a smattering of Parseltongue). And ace lawyer Edwards winked and twinkled and flirted with the jury at home, resembling no-one so much as Carrie Bradshaw’s Mr Big. He also mentioned several dozen times how smart his boss was. Cheney’s silence on this score was deafening.

Round two between Bush and Kerry had echoes of their first encounter, but a more vigorous pace thanks to the gladiatorial style of the forum. Kerry’s delivery was smooth and consoling, even though he spent too much time rebutting things Bush hadn’t said. When he sat back on his stool to watch Bush flail around, he adopted the mournful countenance of a wise old owl. Once again Kerry invoked Bush père as a psy-op tool to rattle Junior, but he himself channeled an avuncular vibe, like the disappointed uncle watching a once promising nephew make a noodle of himself.

Bush, meanwhile, fiddled ceaselessly with the front of his suit (fixing that there volume button on his magic radio?) and hectored the audience in a voice that grew reedier and crankier by the minute. Between engagements, he perched on his stool and winked and grimaced at no-one in particular (the voices in his back teeth?). Asked to discuss three mistakes he’d made - a common enough job interview question, after all, and one for which you always prepare a clever answer -- he couldn’t think of one.

Surprisingly, the audience was the real winner on the night. They were a homogeneous bunch - almost uniformly white, well-dressed and well-spoken -- but their questions were intelligent, nuanced, and surprising.

And yet the town-hall format, aimed at engaging the “undecided voters,” apparently didn’t sway them either way. The polls and oracles are at once partisan and noncommittal – it seems that if you think Kerry won, you think Kerry won, and if you think Bush won, you think Bush won. And if you were undecided before, you still can't wrap your head around the differences between the two candidates.

Frankly I can’t imagine how you could possibly be an “undecided” voter, this year of all years. Saying “um, gee, I dunno…” at this point seems like an indefensible luxury, one of those first-world breaches of commonsense and good taste that baffle and infuriate the rest of the planet (like buying a gas-guzzling, Beetle-crushing, rollover-prone SUV to commute to the office). And yet the undecideds don’t appear to be the least bit agonized or embarrassed by the sudden malfunction of the choosing part of their brain. On the whole they tend to look self-righteously cautious, a fussy diner dallying over the menu, torn between chicken and beef. Tough if you’re vegetarian.

Best of three, then?