It would be irresponsible not to speculate

Two-track mind

2007-10-22T21:00:00.000+10:00

"Look, should Branko have been sacked without a full season? No, that's crazy talk. Is this a farce? I, and many working families right across this country think so. Will I be putting forward my name as a replacement? Look, we will release all Sydney City-related policies in due season, but more what's more important is that Mr Howard answer this question..."

Zwartboek [no spoilers*]

2007-07-31T23:08:00.000+10:00

'Black Book' in Engels.

Everyone knows and loves Paul Verhoeven for his cheezy, sleazy, ultra-violent masterpieces; Robocop, Basic Instinct, Total Recall, Showgirls and Starship Troopers. Such is his reputation that the mere mention of the word 'Verhoeven' on any film forum will summon a flamewar of Biblical proportions**. Now, back in his native Holland he's put out a high-exposive, altitude-fused blockbuster of a film, based around a de-familied Dutch Jewish cabaret singer entangled in the savage, treacherous twilight struggle of the Dutch Resistance in WW2.

If you've read anything on the resistance struggles in Occupied Europe, you pretty much know the score here; suffice to say, nobody comes out of this smelling like roses, a theme the movie does well to highlight, with strongly-drawn characters on both sides -- to the point where viewers may be surprised at their sympathies. Critics will say Verhoven strays too close in humanising SS and Gestapo officers, but one is never allowed to forget, for a moment the full import of their jobs and their choices. The sad thing is that they were human, not that we are reminded of their humanity.

The film isn't all torture and slaughter; a grim, but often warm humour suffuses much of the characters doings and dealings -- including those of a raunchy nature (of which there are plenty). The random, chaotic nature of war is shown in it's full flight*** and through the windows of black sedans we see a little (though not enough for this nerd) of the horrors afflicting wartime Holland. At 145 minutes it is a little drawn out, and it becomes harder to tease out exactly who triple-crossed whom, but none of these detract from the vitality and power of the film.

Oh and: Steun jezelf voor de emmer met shit scane!

*OK, one, kinda
**unless it's prefaced with 'Henk', naturally
*** there are a lot of improbable and crazy co-incidences, but if anything they pale to some of the stuff in the history books. I really couldn't say what, if anything, was obviously fictitious.

Daniel Davies is the most dangerous man on the Internet

2007-05-12T21:40:00.000+10:00

Someone stop him before he defends something worse...

The warm thrill of confusion, that space cadet glow....

2007-01-29T14:52:00.000+11:00

Went to this on Australia night.

We got to our seats just as the players were walking onto the pitch. For a brief moment I was hit by an amazing sensation, awe and anticipation mixed in equal parts as I watched 21,000-odd (that's the official figure, it seemed like at least 27k+) people roar, flags and banners whipping and flapping in gusty wind. Now, in retrospect, I wish I'd brought a camera along, but I doubt the photo would tell the same story as my eyes did.

The game itself was a pretty standard Sydney FC performance: run rings around opponent in first half, lose crucial player to injury/suspension (this time it was McFlynn with a groin injury), attempt to replace player from paltry bench stocks, then try to hang on grimly against resurgent opponent. We got to see both sides of the story close up, being side-on to Newcastle's goal as Brosque and Milligan scored rampant headers and Milton Rodriguez's comprehensive schooling of Topor-Stanley and Iain Fyfe in the second half.

It'll be a tense match up at EAS this sunday - despite Newy's away goal, this team as shown it has form against them and they have yet to beat us this season. It'll be interesting as well to see who we end up facing should we go through. At the moment it looks like a plummeting Melbourne victory - wiping them out of the finals would be fitting revenge for Round Two and Round Seventeen, even if they are on the downward slope of an impressive season.

Snugglepot and Cuddlepie

2007-01-25T10:48:00.000+11:00

... more like Puddlesnot and Cruddlepie am I right folks? *tish, etc*

Nah. It wasn't that bad - set and costumes were great, singers good. The story itself was as bloated as , with multiple redundant scenes and songs viz. way too much dancing around in circles and pointless captures and easy, tensionless escapes from the seriously un-menacing Banksia Men and Mrs. Snake. I know this is partially for kiddies, but they deserve a good pants-wetting fright - it's what good childrens stories are about. There were some laughs along the way but they were outnumbered by the shocking puns, by about, fivefold. And that Herald guy was right, songs = not memorable.

All in all an average adaptation that fails to reflect the strong atmosphere of dystopian despair and social decay that characterised May Gibbs original vision.

10.7/17

Teufelhund auf meinem Endstück

2007-01-23T14:41:00.000+11:00

Apropos of nothing: One of the funniest little bits of this magnificent DVD series is the old interview footage they roll out of European journalists interviewing the likes of Willie Dixon, Memphis Slim and such. One interview in particular has always stuck in my mind:John Lee Hooker explaining how he learnt to play slide by running bottlenecks along old steel cables in his thick, slurring Delta patois (strong enough to give me trouble), with subtitles in German. I don't know how well the subtitler did, but he must've had a headache by the time he was finished.

Guest Post: Christopher Hitchens on the Australian Wheat Board scandal

2006-01-30T16:09:00.000+11:00

Cross-posted at LP

Vale, the pro-democracy Left - this pallid specimen that blotches the screen before me is but a whited sepulchre, devoid, in it’s egregious simpletonism of even the slightest understanding of basic tactics

[”How many syllables was that? 47? You’re sure I used ‘egregious’ at least once? Excellent…”]

Hello, I’m Christopher Hitchens. Once again, I must be called upon to be of service in this grave crusade of which I am proud to say I am a mere footsoldier, by acting in defense of that much maligned benefactor of Iraq, the Australian Wheat Board. The case is simple. By bribing the country we were about to invade, the incredibly farsighted and steadfast AWB played a critical role in the preparations for Operation Iraqi Freedom.

At this very moment, I can see humourless lefties are giving that narrow grimace they call a ’smile’ and gritting their teeth with ‘laughter’, “oh ho, hah-hah, Christopher, as if. He must be joking!”, you writhe in you feeble approximations of mirth - entirely, parsimoniously, pericardially, proto-plasmatically predictable. Orwell is spinning in his grave, and yet you natter away, in this, our most dire hour.

Where am- where was I? [ Have I namedropped yet? I haven’t? Good lord!] Ah, yes, Salman Rushdie once told me that, "In order to do good, the evil must protect the strong from the good, lest in weakness, Tyranny should fall". What the AWB did, wasn’t that. It was different. In fact, the unfairly-demonised Paul Wolfowitz himself assured me of the momentous importance of the AWB’s task.

To wit, it was their self-sacrificing bribery that made a greater contribution to the overthrow of the bloated bellicose Butcher of Bahgdad than my own, putting the feeble efforts of the vultures of the Left to shame. By bribing Saddam Hussain, they confused him, so splendidly as to where he stood! Why should he take these ultimata, these countless, numberless, no - infinite, UN resolutions seriously, when there were still Western Governments making multi-million dollar deals with him? Why believe the US was serious this time, when contractors were still funneling money under the auspices of the UN? The poor crazed fool was hoplessly entagled in this web of grubby realpolitik that he could scarcely have noticed the bold, shining, sword of Democracy raining it’s merciless judgement on his sordid regime. So there. Aren’t you all ashamed? You’ve strove to ruin the careers of heroes all for your petting point-scoring politics. Wake up kids, the 60s are over, lets have a real debate!

Thank you and goodnight.

100% Aussie Shame (there is some mild abuse and non-nettiquette-compliant language in this post)

2005-12-14T17:36:00.000+11:00

I guess what disgusts me the most about the Cronulla Riots is the mass, boof-headed stupidity on ample display by all sides. From the word go this fiasco has been a magnet for numbskulled fuckwittery easily surpassing the Macquarie Fields and Redfern mass brain-explosions. Special "I'm-a-clueless-shitstain" awards should be handed out (with jail sentences) to the clowns who bashed up lifeguards in the first place, the racist trainables who started SMS Lynch-mobs, the feckless, shit-stirring demagogue who egged them on over the airwaves and the puke-your-guts-out halfwitted bloodnut dunder-nuts who ran around bashing anyone who didn't look 'Aussie' enough. You brain-damaged Neanderthals blurt and slurr about how "Lebs only attack in gangs becoz they're chicken" - what the fuck is assaulting women in a mob then, micro-minds? To the 'Lions of Lebanon': shit like this is digging an even bigger Big Fat Pit of Stupid.

You all make me sick, but none moreso than those prancing little Gumnut Fascists with the Aussie flags, that slobbering tool with 'Ethnic Cleansing Unit' written on his t-shirt, the 'lions of lebanon' revenge text message and all the drooling dickbrains who think this is justified because 'they started it!' or 'we were here first!' (including Bruce "Revenge for Bali" Baird). Grow a fucking brain and then feel really really sorry about what you;ve done the last week or so - all you clowns have made an embarrasment of your country, your neighbourhoods, and the non-thicko Australian way of life.

Gotta intertextualise them all!

2005-12-09T12:50:00.000+11:00

Stolen from here

Frank was here, went to get beer

2005-12-07T22:47:00.000+11:00

Three weeks?! Shit.

Ok. Last shitty assignments are in, I'm a free man, I do what I can baby, I do what I can, oh yeah oh y- never mind. Last few weeks, I have been going to a suburban garage where the proprietress jabs me with electrified needles, burning needles, and gives me whopping back bruises. It's great! Apparently I'm a long term case (8 months of doing crap all about my health can't have helped) but I can feel some of the benefits already; more energy, less pain, better relaxation, better pain control and a brighter healthier outlook on life. You know, you should join us in Acupunctopia. You would feel happier there. We supply all you could ever need Why would you want to leave? It's bliss. Join us. Join usssss...

Can't remember what I was going to write, so I guess I'll do an album review.

Orbital - Snivilisation (1994)

This album is greater than the sum of its parts. By '94, Fueled by mass public demand for music to listen to while on shrooms in a forest glade and ever-improving techonology, electronic music was splitting and crossfertilising at dizzying speed. Band's styles were undergoing seismic shifts in the space of a few years (compare Experience the Prodigy with Music For the Jilted Generation, and compare that with Fat of the Land) as keyboards and drum machines were superseded by computers and an attendant library of tricked out ne plus ultra software tools. A new type of electronic music was surging through, 'Big Beat'* embodied by acts like the Prodigy, the Chemical Brothers, Propellerheads, Fat Boy Slim-

-Crap. I sound like this guy.

What does all this have to do with Orbital?

Well, they didn't do that. You won't hear crunching breaks or fat bass lines, mad samples and spaced out guitar lines on Snivilisation. It's basic elements are the same as every previous Orbital album: basic drumachine beats, synths, one or two samples. That's it. Somehow, despite this, it's a massive head-trip, beyond the sum of its component parts. Odourless, colourless and fatal it'll sneak up on you as you are locked in a battle of wits with the Man In Black** (now there's a contender for dumbest metaphor of the Year) drawing you into the blissed out neverworld of perfectly orchestrated patterns and melodies. Warm, balanced and breathy, spaced-out, expansive and sci-fi, organic and digital, united at last with a sly social message.

Whatever they did later, with this album and it's predecessor the Brown Album (1993) the Hartnoll brothers showed anyone who cared to listen just how rich electronic music can be, using just the basics.

16.7/17

*Blah blah, unrepresentative of diverse acts, genres whatever - electronic music has twice as many sub-subgenres than rock, jazz and metal combined, oversimplification is the only way to avoid generic catatonia.
** Sourced from this site. Ever wondered Humperdinck's bow skill levels? Spent restless nights trying to calculate Fezzik's combat skill vs ranged modifiers? This guy has solved all your problems. I love the internet.

Halloween in Jordan

2005-11-15T23:20:00.000+11:00

Juan Cole's blog is a constant stream of great informed comment, but this post on the Jordanian hotel bombings and one of their more bizaare casualties is brilliant.

Oh Dear! She's stuck in an infinite loop, and he's an idiot!

2005-11-15T21:59:00.000+11:00

Waaaah! Apathy and angst snap at my brain like the devilhounds of crappy poetry and spurious metaphor! I don't know what I want to do with my life! Blogging is a chore! Why don't I enjoy writing? Why am I so lazy and behind in my tasks? I have not seen friends in... days! My eyes are burnt and rusty from the monitor's evil glare and my hands quiver from RSI! Sociophobia has left me cowering in the corner of a room, stuffing my face with peanut butter and crying deep down on the inside! There's crap all on telly and the Socceroos are going to lose by beating Uruguay 2-1 tomorrow, I can feel it! My back hurts! My teeth are rotten to the core because I don't brush them and I'm afriad of the dentist's disapproving voice if I go to get them fixed! Life is meaningless!

yeah. that felt kinda good actually.

This week, I has been mostly reading a whole bunch of books for my now months-overdue Development Studies essay. My article is basically going to be a huge beat-up job on neoliberal development and neoliberalism as an economic theory in general. The more I've been reading the more interested I've become in the idea of 'development' - the definition of which varies from person to person, and seems to get vaguer the more you think about it. One of my main criticisms of neoliberal development theory is that it pretty much isn't a development theory at all, neoliberal prescriptions (and proscriptions) to developing countries are almost entirely concerned with the structural adjustment of the economy - social, cultural, political factors barely get a look in.

To me, this seems completely arse-backwards to the point of willful blindness - development isn't just economic growth. You can have high economic growth and still have millions in poverty. Countries like Brazil and India have both got increasingly developed economies, millionaires and billionaires by the dozen alongside massive infant mortality rates and income inequality.

Is the United States a developed nation? It has the largest economy in the world, unparalleled economic, military, cultural, scientific clout - yet it has 40 million people without any kind of health insurance, crappy public education, campaigns to wipe out evolution and an infant mortality rate that has been rising since 2002, to the point where 41 countries, Cuba among them, have lower infant deaths than the US. Physical wealth and liquid capital need to be measured against how societies look after their worse off - economic growth is no guarantee of social wellbeing.

Aeterna Dicta Anti-Pullman (habeus spoilerum)

2005-11-05T21:28:00.000+11:00

First things first. I am not now, nor have I ever been (apart from a few weeks when I was eight and was convinced that there was someone watching me at night (in a benign way, you sicko) and assumed it was this God guy people were so big on) a Christian. Nor am I a wishy-washy 'maybe there is maybe there isn't I'm afraid to admit I'm an athiest' type agnostic. Based on my assessment of the implications of an omnipotent, omniscient, omnibenevolent God and my observations of the world around me, I've come to the conclusion that unless some really, really, really convincing evidence comes my way, the omni-everything God hypothesis just doesn't stack up (it also isn't falsifiable and hence unproveable. Props to ma nizzle hip-Popper, K to the A-R-L, peace be the journey).

I don't think Pullman sucks because the Ultimate Bad Guy in the Dark Materials trilogy goes by the name of Metatron, Regent of YHWH, nor because he recently trashed the Narnia books as being bigoted, anti-eggplant chauvanism or whatever. No, dear reader, Pullman sucks because he's an overrated hack who can't write for shit.

It puzzles the hell out of me that he's gotten so popular (though I didn't think Harry Potter was all that greater either. Shows what I know), and so universally admired. I'm amazed that even earnestly critical reviews in the New York Review of Books gush about his brilliant world creation and amazing ideas and fast-paced, gripping plot and touching characters. Are you all crazy? Are we reading the same book!?

First serious critique: Pullman's books are a colossal disappointment and a graveyard of missed opportunities.

Think about the ideas he brings up: dimensional travel, spirits, Dust (anyone? No? Dust. Anyone? No? Dust. Anyone...), innocence and experience, a device that always tells the truth. All great elements, all get really dull and unimaginative treatment.

Case in point: the alethiometer. A device that always tells the truth is a fantastic vehicle, with great implications. With it, an author can explore all kinds of ideas; what truth is, wether its absolute or relative, does it depend on how questions are asked, how do people deal with it when it's unpalatable, whether some questions are better left unasked, how even a true statement can be misinterpreted or misrepresented - all meaty, challenging ideas, just asking, begging, for the rollicking Speculative Fiction Romp treatment. Is Pullman having any of it? I wish.

Instead, the alethiometer (which Lyra can conveniently use with speed while the Dastardly Baddies have to wait ages to get a reading) is used as a Magic Plot Acceleration Device, a classic deus ex machina to help the author out whenever he's dumped his characters in an untenable situation with no chance of escape. Stranded you characters in this bizarre world in another dimension with no clue where they are or where to go? No problemo! With the Alethiometer MPAD your characters are seconds away from otherwise completely inaccessible information that'll solve your crappy plotting mistakes!

Now, if the alethiometer was only used like this a few times, the books wouldn't be so bad. But instead, this happens all the goddamn time, and throughout all three books it appears to be the alethiometer's sole purpose. Only once does Lyra misread it, and its a relatively minor event in the first book. The issues and implications of such a wonderful device never again rear their heads.

Similarly, with the exception of the daemons, the rest of Pullman's ideas get pretty dull treatment. We have a multiverse, with an infinitude of worlds, with a myriad of unique supernatural phenomena, interlinked and collapsing in on each other. The possibilities are endless, the implications wonderful. What happens in the final book? A big dumb battle between Good and Evil, climaxing in a war to end all wars. Great. Never read anything like that before. Where'd you think he got that idea from? The man's imagination is boundless!

Did I mention the crappy plot?

It's pretty clumsy. Witches, Armoured Bears and Texans magically turn up to help the heroes without any real explanation of why they're risking their necks by going against the combined might of the Authority all for two little tykes and then fade right out the story until they're needed again. The bad guys are ridiculously dense and do stupid things over and over again. The supposedly cunning Mrs Coulter takes Lyra under her wing and somehow never searches her room or close possessions ever, despite plenty of opportunities. The Gyptians somehow get a seaworthy boat from somewhere and somehow furnish it with provisions for a hundred men and sail to Finland and land at Helsinki all without attracting the attention of the Magisterium and its many soldiers, officials and spies. Somehow.

Mere details don't interest Pullman, even those he spends pages and pages building up. Consider the children's escape from Bolvangar in Book One. Lyra's managed to free all the still-ensouled children, and is leading them across an open icefield to freedom, while a battle rages behind them. All of a sudden, they're confronted by the compound's elite Tartar guardsmen, with rifles, facemasks and snarling wolf-daemons. Crap. These guys are nasty. Pullman's been telling us for the last chapter or so how tough, fearless and accomplished they are as elite soldiers. But they are beaten, because Lyra picks up a handful of snow and throws it in one of their faces, then all the kiddies join in and escape while the Tartars fumble, blinded.

Give me a break. The author has established these guys are hardened badarses. Yet they fall victim in seconds to a barrage of snowballs from shitscared freezing kids? All of them? Without firing a shot? Without their unblinded wolf-daemons jumping the kids daemons? Details. Mere details.

I'd ramble on about the crappy characters, but I returned the books to my cousin, and don't have access to ready examples. Suffice to say, I was thoroughly disappointed with pretty much every aspect of the trilogy, from the -1 dimensional characters to armies of deii ex machina. Much like the Matrix, there are good ideas and good scenes in the Dark Materials trilogy - the bit where Lyra and Will find a frightened, tired, chibi-YHWH in a cage and releasing him to dissolve in peace, his face beaming with gratitude was poignant, touching and a little cute all at once - but Pullman's three volume slog rarely hits anything so sublime.

10 out of 17.

Marvellous Journeys

2005-11-05T20:00:00.000+11:00

Today I went to a sci-fi/fantasy writing workshop hosted by this man. It was good fun, and wierd in a strange way (that told you a lot). Terry's a pretty energetic and flamboyant speaker, he started of a with a fairly intense, motivational introductory talk about pursuing our ambition, going to the next level, taking writing seriously, advancing our projects and getting published. All of which pretty much intimidated the shit out of me - this workshop was a birthday present, I didn't have any projects of any kind. I didn't even have a sample.

I'm not sure about previous workshops but I suspect they might have been a bit more advanced in their projects; but as a he asked each of us in turn what our projects were and what readers we liked, I suspect he realised that some of us weren't on that trajectory- at least not at the moment. In either case after that run-through the workshop shifted to a more relaxed, less intense format as we learnt about the byzantine intrigues and protocols of UK/US publishing and Australia's position in this vast system for the shifting of marketable, paper-based narrative product.

I wish I'd been taking notes properly throughout, as we covered a really great range of topics; our current media culture, the singularity, how (and how not) to get your work published, consistency and believability in fantasy worlds, all of it really interesting and useful. I was startled by all the stuff there was to learn - up until then it hadn't really struck me how much writing was a craft as well as an art - but also at the resources available online (we got scads of useful links).

During lunch break we all got to read the group's anonymous writing samples (including my not-so-anonymous handwritten, paragraph-length writing sample), and critique them out loud afterwards. Some of the samples I read weren't that impressive, being pretty conventional shopworn genre-fantasy, but others in our group have got really good stuff going; a lot of the samples I didn't get to look at sounded great. My paragraph got pretty good reviews.

I was expecting a lot of nerdy male SF-heads my own age, but on the contrary, the group was a very mixed sample, ranging from late teens/early twenties to two septugenarians, who were total dudes and there was a slight gender imbalance, favouring the females (which isn't actually that surprising when you consider the makeup of Australian fantasy authors). We all put our email addresses and someone's setting up a yahoo group to stay in contact, of which I hope something good will come of it.

PS

As a postscript, here's the paragraph. It's part of an idea I've been kicking around in my head for months, loosley themed as a space-comic-opera romp with liberal pilfering from Iain M. Banks, Steven Baxter and one of Alex Clatworthy's MSN names (true!).

... Eoc woke him with buzzing synths and faint echoes of something harsher. He was drowsy, verging on puking. They were decelerating. About time. After a struggle he levered his eyes open. The music jumped in tempo. Eoc was getting impatient. Showtime. Sila dived out of his crib and swam down the corridor.

Mysterious huh? I'm glad I ended it there, otherwise I'd actually have to explain what was going on to the reader. Artistic license rocks.

Miyazaki

2005-10-13T21:55:00.000+10:00

Everyone's all Miyazaki hyped with the release of Howl's Moving Castle, so I'm jumping on the bandwagon too, with a review of his 1986 effort Laputa, Castle in the Sky.

I was just idly watching this movie and was quickly capitivated. It starts off at breakneck pace, with sky pirates, airships and a mysterious floating girl, but what got me hooked were the expansive visuals and landscapes - the cliffs, pits, chimneys and railways of Pazu's strange ever descending industrial revolution-ish town. The fantastic is anchored with references to our own past, Zepplins and WW1ish military hardware, coal mines and radios, making it incredibly fun to wonder and speculate about this fantastic world.

As well, the kid protagonists Pazu and Sheeta are active and adventurous, (and touchingly sweet) the way kids imagine themselves being in make-beleive - brave, clever, fighting nasty adults and going on incredible adventures together. Miyazaki balances adventure and character, danger and humour almost perfectly and mixes them with the awesome and fantastic. If I were to criticise this film, the only thing that comes to mind is SPOILER WARNING the shift Dola's band of pirates undergo, from villains who throw hand grenades into a crowded street to laughable bumpkins. It just feels a bit wrong that they so quickly become sympathetic in light of the stuff they do in the beginning.

15/17

To My Newest Reader...

2005-10-04T23:16:00.000+10:00

VESNA SMELLS

Internet arguments about stuff. (Part 1-ish)

2005-10-03T23:46:00.000+10:00

This isn't a rant about the evils of online courtesy or the common fallacies made by aggressive arguers and if it turns into one, then stop reading. Instead, I'm trying to nut out my own problem of having to be polite (or at least not bite the head off) to people on online communities. This has come to a head because I've started posting at larvatus prodeo, a aussie political/cultural blog who's commentators and posters I like and admire, and I don't want to piss the people I'm arguing with off and/or come across like a jerk. But sometimes, oh sometimes, there are people I'd love to verbally thrash some internet sense into. Between these two instincts a sensible common ground must exist, and this is a long rambling attempt to find it.

Anyway...

Before there were blogs, there were forums and bbs', and the one that dragged me to it like a moth to the cathode was Portal of Evil's forums. They're a flamewar jungle, and gentler souls who believe in civility and moderation in debate if plunged into them by some strange mistake or fit of passion would be ridiculed and demolished. But if you look beyond the titanic clashing egos, and the 3dgy attempts at humour, they have a strange fairly stable community of highly articulate, educated and pisstakingly funny posters, who collectively have a huge knowledge base, humanities, sciences and the fuzzy shit in between (economics and social science, I'm looking at you). Or PoE-News does at least.

It does set a pretty intense level of argument, where ad hominems come out fast and stinging and the high-octane nature of debate can turn semantic differences or slight quibbles into huge festering branches of stupid inflamed argument, which has the effect of driving shy-er posters away and keeping lurkers from posting as well as encouraging wannabe posters to imitate or surpass the articulate, acerbic regulars.

But the one thing this environment does that I admire above all, is cut short political-partisan mudslinging and posturing - the people who post there are well-read and pretences and attempts at condescencion that would get past on other milder forums are called stone dead. Insults are a given and so articulation and evidence are what ends debates.

The posters are largely Yanks (though there's a small and trusty crew of Aussies to bring an antipodean perspective) and the political analogues are vaguely different (many more liberal democrats than social democrats) but the kind of stupid right-wing (death beast) name calling that seems to flourish on Australian blogs gets shot down in flames of ridicule and if the poster keeps up the tack they (usually) end up totally refuted at every point and trapped into saying dumb stuff they can't defend.

The reason I bring up Portal of evil is that for a long time I've wanted to emulate the posters there, at least as far as knocking really bad arguments apart with derision, to the point where I've ignored compromise and community and all the happy friendly non-biting people's heads off stuff that seems to go on on the Internet. But, sometimes as much as I like sociability and civility in debate and discussion there are times when I think you can easily go too far.

For example, another forum community that I visit semi-regularly is the Straight Dope boards, which tries to solve the civily-vs-flaming problem by having a fully moderated proper 'Debate' board with rules against Rude Words and Ad Hominem abuse and a 'Pit' thread for flaming. In this lurker's opinion, the whole arangement didn't solve anything at all, as people could get away with being apalling twats on the Debate forum by dotting every 'i' and 't' all the while taking disingenousity to great new heights, while other posters who tried to reason with them couldn't call them on it decisively - with derision outside the Pit.

This arrangement I find deeply unsatisfactory because the subject of the 'pitting' would often instead play high and mighty and not sink to the depths of the Pit and get the serve they sweetly deserved.

Urk, brain tired.
Post more when can think tomorrow.

Skreeeek! Klank! Clunnngk! Slam! Smack!

2005-09-27T22:37:00.000+10:00

The sound of a car crash reminds me of high school. One of the perks of being a drama student was getting out of class to set up the school hall for productions; stacking chairs and desks, pulling out pallets. When someone knocked over a rise or a stack of chairs they would topple and hit the ground, making a hideous chain of clangs which would boom and echo across the hall. That's what a car crash sounds like: there's a screech, then the slamming sounds of impacts follow on, in a rapid booming series.

I was idly walking up Illawarra road when I heard someone knock over a huge stack of desks behind me. That was wierd. Why would anyone put a huge pile of school desks in the middle of the road? People were running to see it, with a purpose they didn't have a few seconds before. It dawned on me: a school desk van must have broken open, spilling its contents all over! I ran to clear the road of these hazards.

Ok. Enough of that. It was a car crash. A blackish old sedan type had smashed down a metal traffic barrier-thingy on route to burying itself headfirst into the non-Station side of Sydney's Las Vegas (that's Marrickvile RSL, for those not in the know), aided by a bash in the butt by a speeding white car. The old geezer in the black was a little shaken but seemed ok - an airbag saved his life. White car chick was unhurt.

These things are interesting to watch just for the way people react. A group of a dozen or so hang around the main vehicle crash scenes and look after victims, everyone else watches from a greater distance and point and gesticulate, recreating trajectories and impacts with their arms, nutting out rough consensus.

Then the cops and medicos come round and take statements and everyone leaves. The excitement and interest disappates. People later pass by the embedded car like it wasn't there.

Sherlock Holmes and the Mysterious Case of the Mogwai Album Review

2005-09-13T20:49:00.000+10:00

Some of my favourite albums I started off hating. That was definitely the case for Ok Computer, and something similar happened with Rock Action.

For this bizarre lapse of judgement I have only my angsty teenage quest to find the ultimate in distorted rock cool, which drove me to read the Pitchfork review of same album and take it to heart in a way that not even the purist snobs who wrote it intended.

To spare you the torture of the article itself, I will summarise: to this impressionable young music snob it promised (post?)ROCK ACTION! It used to a lot of adjectives! My eyes scanned across, picking up superlatives and adding my own fervid interpretation: this album would blow my head off with rock awesomeness!

And so I bought it. Eagerly slammed it into the cd player. Awaited ROCK ACTION.

And was hit with disappointment. What was this shit? Slow, steady melancholic synth waves? Some guy singing in a vocoder?!

I

skipped

tracks.

Into gentle wistful melodies and a singer softly intoning 'Ghosts in a photograph...'. The next track was in Welsh. What was wrong with this album? Where's the rock?! I threw it in a pile in disgust. Made a few more attempts. Halfheartedly. This was not what I was after at all. I had been duped by those indie snobs!

I lent it to Bina.

Months passed.

How an album you gave a few listens to and gave up on can suddenly grow on you, without you listening to it again, I don't know. It didn't happen with anything else I discarded in disgust. Not in this way. Melodies and lyrics, verses and choruses would drift through my head, half-remembered and fragmentary, breaking apart on closer attention - the best bits were missing. I knew they were.

I had made a mistake. I needed it back. My mind would disintegrate from the torment if I didn't.

When I got it back last year, I kissed it and apologised. It was plastic and couldn't forgive. Or do anything really. But I put it on again, sat back and fell into great songs; melancholic, regretful, droning, tense, triumphant, some with words and others mute. Whole again.

This review had nothing to do with Sherlock Holmes. Ha!

Words Fail.

2005-09-03T12:45:00.000+10:00

Fresh troops offer supplies, protection in anarchic New Orleans

"...NEW ORLEANS, United States (AFP) - Thousands of fresh troops poured into New Orleans, bringing urgent food and medical relief and offering protection from armed thugs terrorising the city in the wake of Hurricane Katrina..."

"...Columns of smoke rising from multiple fires in New Orleans lent a combat-zone air to the devastated city, where gangs of looters had filled the law-and-order vacuum in the immediate aftermath of the storm..."

Guardsmen Evacuate Refugees From Superdome

"NEW ORLEANS - National Guardsmen helped evacuate the mass of storm refugees from the Superdome on Friday, where thousands were stuck in knee-deep trash and blacked-out, putrid bathrooms..."

"...At midday, the evacuation was interrupted briefly when school buses rolled up so some 700 guests and employees from the Hyatt Hotel could move to the head of the evacuation line — much to the amazement of those who had been crammed in the stinking Superdome since Sunday."

"...Things reached such a state inside that people opted to stand on the broiling brick walkway, jammed shoulder to shoulder in temperatures that Pollard estimated had reached 125 degrees in the middle of the crowd..."

President Arrives in Alabama, Briefed on Hurrcane Katrina

"...The good news is -- and it's hard for some to see it now -- that out of this chaos is going to come a fantastic Gulf Coast, like it was before. Out of the rubbles of Trent Lott's house -- he's lost his entire house -- there's going to be a fantastic house. And I'm looking forward to sitting on the porch. (Laughter.)"

I could re-open posting with something profound...

2005-08-30T21:49:00.000+10:00

... or I could steal from Misha!

What were the skies like when you were young?

2005-08-06T01:54:00.000+10:00

So I stopped taking my medication. I can't really say I feel that much better physically, but I've definitely noticed a boost in attitude, less stretched out and clogged, less inclined to follow the script, willing to entertain new ideas. I read an article about inflammation saying that exercise and meditation do more to cure it than drugs, something I knew for months, but did nothing about, for a bunch of crappy reasons, laziness and self pity high among them, but these were definately amplified by the stuff I was taking to hose down the flames in my chest. I kept doing it because it was easier than trying something new, but in the end it wasn't an easy way out at all, in the long run it just made things worse.

Someone wiser than I once said that waking up to yourself pales in comparison to the task of staying awake. She was right, but you can't stay awake forever, you have to learn how to sleep the right way, the sleep that makes wakefulness fresher and better for it, not the half-aware stupor that is a mockery of them both.

Here goes...

London Commentary

2005-07-12T12:55:00.000+10:00

I don't claim that these are the only good responses and analyses of the London Underground attacks, or that they're definitive in any way (in fact I think people should lay off the speculation and the name calling, with the drawing of conclusions and the unveiling of the way forward until we get more information about who exactly did it and how; but fat chance of that ever happening, right?), instead, I liked them, for whatever reason; their pessimism, optimism, cynicism, more-than-a-little-bizarre ranting (Ach McLeod, ye daft Scots basterd) and so on.

First, Billmon's reaction, which is more than a little cynical, but as far as he predicted the reactions and commentary of pundits and commentators he's spot on.

Though perhaps he couldn't have predicted this disgusting and revealing insight into what qualifications you need to be a TV pundit. In Brit Hume's case it appears you just need to be incredibly insensitive, callous and just plain freakin' stupid. Yeesh! Stock picks...

Fareed Zakaria's article is probably one of the more interesting and insiqhtful analyses of what the attacks are likely to mean; at least compared to a lot of the reactions and recriminations right and left.

As a final word, in light of all the usual clueless "Blair is now pay the price for the war on Iraq, I told you so I told you so neenerr neener" and"This clearly shows that we are winning the war on Terror and must stay the course in Iraq to secure final victory and reclaim our soverignty over Moon-cheese from the Tungstenoid* menace!" post-bombing pontification, I thought I'd drag out this old warhorse, which is more pertinent than ever given the increased polarisation and general partisan stupidity that makes up most of the 'debates' about 'Iraq' and 'terrorism' on the 'internet', 'these days'.

*Can I just mention this is the first time the world 'Tungstenoid' has been used on the internet, ever? Obviously our complacent liberal democracies have been too self-absorbed and 'soft' to take heed of the threat posed by these cold-hearted ruthless mineraloids to our cherished values, our very way of life! Truly, now more than ever this proves that my politics are the only valid way of thinking and that to consider any other explanation or even question the existence of these metallic fiends is objectively pro-Tungstenoid and therefore treason.

School's out for Winter

2005-07-01T22:21:00.000+10:00

Last exam today, Logic. Came in five minutes late, left three-quarters of an hour early (some dudes were out of there in half). It was multiple guess, which made it easy. I had to guess about five questions, and I may have fucked myself over by not knowing a contrary pair of propositions from a subcontrary, but eh, all over now.

So what am I going to do over the holidays?

For a start, rebuild all my severly neglected non-uni friendships (sorry guys!)
Start learning Go again,
Get my hands on another copy of Orbital's Snivilisation (there's another great album),
Read read and read (burning through The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich at the moment),
Write words heap more (here and elsewhere in my misbegotten family of half-finished journals),
and finally *sigh* I guess I'm going to have to get a job of some kind as well...

Studied Helplessness and Look How Book-Having-ate I Am, You Fetid Plebians

2005-06-27T22:54:00.000+10:00

Erg. Politics and Int'l Relations exam today, which I blundered into somewhat underprepared. There was a small fire, several inhalation related injuries and nearby residents claimed 'The Stench was sickening. I was puking for hours and me dog died!'. The Opposition Leader, Kim Beazley decalered 'This is a clear sign of a government that is out of touch with the people of Australia, and wouldn't know a broken car from the two chickens in the bedclothes'. He was later forced to retract that statement under pressure from Schapelle Corby's legal team.

...And by that I mean: most of the short answer questions were easy, except those on areas I hadn't studied at all. The first essay on Vietnam was a total mess. It was really hard to get into a writing groove, as I was underprepared and freaked out about how underprepared I was, which didn't help much at all. Once I start writing a bad essay it is really hard to stop; crappy paragraphs and ponderous sentences jacknife and twist and tangle into a big verbal train crash, particularly when your heart is racing and the time is going too fast and yet too slow. With that one I pretty much ended up writing too little and too much. I'll have nightmares for weeks, I'm sure of it.

The Iraq War essay was a lot easier to write, though I dunno if it was any good, I think it was good, though again, I had to pull it out of a huge brain crammed with useless information in the dying half of the game to revitalise any chance of my team making it to the finals. Shit. A Sport Metaphor. That's wierd... Anyway, I might try and retrieve some adrenaline-soaked fragments of the essay and put them together a little more considerately for this blog (prioties, people, priorities!). Or I might pass out.

Second half of second-hand bookstore halfprice clearance scam loot got picked up, me by. Got scads of dried paper, should keep me warm for ages. Among all the Tom Clancy and John Grisham and behind the rooms filled exclusively with the Bride Stripped Bare and Angela's Ashes I managed to find Don Quixote, The Critique of Pure Reason, The Beauty Myth (Which Mum thinks is a load of wank, based on her having once met Naomi Wolf, who is apparently a Californian Jewish Princess. I told her that that was horrible slur and typical of the media's anti-princess stereotyping. The Shadow Minister for Princesses Laurie Ferguson said such comments set a worrying precedent. Shortly afterwards he was fired from Schapelle Corby's legal team, amidst public outcry), The Burned Children of America, Invisible Cities and for some lighter reading: The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, Sideshow: Kissenger, Nixon and the Destruction of Cambodia, The Gulag Archipelago and The Plague. If I get round to it I might post some reviews, who knows, I might even read the books first.

So, I heard this cool album...

2005-06-24T22:37:00.000+10:00

Dead Kennedys - Fresh Fruit For Rotting Vegetables (1979)

Hippy Nerve Gas. Amusement Park Disasters. Drugs. Paranoia. The Cold War. Vandalism. The Khmer Rouge. Childkillers. Shitty Landlords. Wiping out Homeless People with the Neutron Bomb. And a kickass cover of Viva Las Vegas. This is the first album by one of the greatest punk bands of all time and it's fucking mad. The DK's were a combination of several unique talents - no one sings like Jello Biafra, he's brilliant, psychotic, unnerving and wickedly funny. He bares it all on this debut album, screeching, raving, growling with menace and laughing maniacly, ably backed by East Bay Ray's dynamic and agressive guitar work, which ranges from distorted 50s pop rampages (Kill the Poor, Lets Lynch the Landlord) to his trademark creepy, cinematic slide (Holiday In Cambodia - I'm not one for favourite songs, but this is way up there in my nonexistant ranking) and Klaus Flouride's crunching, dirty bass.

This album is full of horrible unpleasant topics, consumer excess, breakdown, mental illness, leaking chemical weapons dumps and the Year Zero, handled with unrelenting sarcasm and black humour. Musically it's more than your average punk album, like a blocked-up sewerage pipe it overflows with 50s surf pop and 60s psychedelic influences and the paranoid musical style of the fifth Kennedy, the enigmatic 6025. This album is a toxic punk landmark. I love it.

Autechre - Tri Repetae++ (1996)
Ever wanted to know what music robots will make after the last fragile human is crushed by their titanic automated war machines? Of course you have! And this is the album for you!

In a break from their previous subtle, melodic ambient masterstrokes, (Incunabula (1993) and Amber (1994) ), Humanoids Sean Booth and Rob Brown ruthlessly shut down their emotion cores and produced this inhuman, antiseptic, alienating, disorienting ear crusher masquerading as an album. Where Aphex Twin likes to give listeners the finger with distorted vocals and blistering snare rushes, Autechre calmly inform the listener that; with this album, they are obsolete, soon to be replaced by automatons who will perform their functions with greater efficiency. There are no exceptions, no warm edges, no friendly analogue bubblebaths. Instead; drills, needles, antiseptics, and acid jackhammers will eradicate any trace of unhygenic humanoid waste, to the buzz of electroceramic compound lathes and the drone of radioactive fusion cores.

For all it's angular antiphonic beats and droning synthorgans , this album manages a kind of alien beauty; inorganic, clean, and majestic. Listening to it conjures images of spaceships unfolding in orbit, automanufacturing plants and refineries spawning yet more robotic stuctures, metallic unlife unfolding across moons, across gas giants, harvesting suns and creating new ones in the cold, inky void. Beautiful, mindbending sights; but no room for people.

An Empowered and Informed Member of Society

2005-06-18T20:43:00.000+10:00

Phone angst?. Me, I like the phone a whole lot better than SMS. Actually, to qualify: I like my home phone, my mobile shits me and I wish I had never bough- err.. got it off Im (I've never actually bought a mobile phone, to this point I have managed on hand-me-downs from the active mobile phone buying section of the community (Grandma, Dad and Im). I just get really annoyed every time the little crapbox rings, or buzzes or unleashes clouds of acid or whatever the latest ringtone thingy is (That would make a good skit, I think. <- This Skit Idea Copyrighted By Prof. S. Q. Windowlicker, 2005 all rights reserved by reading this you void all claims to the ownership of any bodily organs you may possess including, but not limited to, your juicy, precious brain...). Home phone, fine, I enjoy running down the hall all tensed and 'who could that be!'; but when that little thing goes off and I have to dig it out of my pants and try and press the right button (it likes to lock up or put them on call waiting to torment me) my attitude goes to 'this better be worth it...'.

So how about airline food? Why do they call it 'air-line' I mean, what kind of line goes through the air? TOM CRUISE OPRAH OMGLOL!!!!!!1111. Ugh... Sorry. It all just came over like a big brainfart. I'm better now.

Exam break just ended, but I still have precious little time to cram for subjects I've barely noticed all semester. Those evil bastards at Social Science and Policy Studies gave us the questions in advance. Only, of the 10 questions out of which you must pick 2, only 6 will be on the exam paper itself. Oh yeah, real evil. I can just imagine them cackling away in their tiny underfunded common rooms: 'Yes Batman, you wanted the questions in advance, well here they are: but which ones will be on the paper, why, I wont tell you! Remember! If you get the question wrong, Gotham City burns down! BWHAHAHAHAHAHAH!'.

As for me, I managed to squander STUVAC playing Hearts of Iron. I am minded to (seriously) blog about my experience so here goes:

I think pretty much every gamer knows this story. Our sloven protagonist sits down in front of his computer, and thinks 'I really should get started on that assignment, but it's 12:30. I'll just play [Hearts of Iron/GTA/Civ III/MS Golf/that game that Skittles™ made to sell more of their delicious fruit* candy. Six out of ten doctors say 'Skittles™ Makes You Smarter!' ( the other four said 'How did you get into my office?!')] for half an hour, and then get started' and so you sit down to you virtual command seat and everything seems to dissolve into the screen. Your posture worsens, your eyes strain against the cathode's unyielding stare, your hands harden and constrict themselves into a brutal rictus around the mouse and keyboard. And then, after what?, maybe an hour tops, you look around and notice the sun is down and the moon is up. Your butt makes a sickly peeling sound as you rise from your damp seat to stare and the cold face of Father Time. His grim predictable nose shows the record: an entire afternoon is vanished.

Meh. It's 6:45. I'll just annihilate the last vestiges of the French Army and then get started at 7 on the dot. Repeat x 7.

Well not entirely. I did some work, and I went out to Church's farewell party. But still. It's the wierdest thing, because I was playing on someone else's computer (mine wont even run it) and they're gonna uninistall it at some point, and so all the progress I made (in this case I was playing as France in 1936, trying to set things up so I didn't get steamrolled by the Krauts) will be wiped. But I kept playing, hour upon hour. Holz had a film theory term that described this- i forget it's name and more precise details but it was basically the state of interacting with the screen, and letting what is on the screen become your point of view.

In my case, its meant spending (wasting?) hours upon hours on various games (this is in the last half a year or so, when I've really had better stuff, and sometimes important boring stuff to do) running over games, scenarios, worlds I've already played and trying to get something more out of it, when in the end, it'll eventually get erased from my hard drive and never seen again.

I think it's a similar reason to why people watch television, to be able to just sit, watch, focus on the screen and kinda dissolve. Games are a little different, they require some imput, but unless you're really onto something interesting and new, in many ways it's plain old data entry at a desk meets watching TV (with apologies to all those people who find data entry as interesting and stimulating as gunning down Nazis or managing a spacefleet) that tiny level of interactivity doesn't make it more of an involved active pastime (unless you play your computer games while rapelling down a cavernous ravine or something. Hey... that's an idea**.

In conclusion: our society is sick beyond repair and it is only a matter of hours before we collapse into a massive lump of biomass fused to a huge radiating screen eternally explaining to ourselves how we think that sometime in the next couple of episodes Hernandez is gonna get shanked ( I'm only up to Season 4) and that there's no way that bullet could have been made of meat.

*'fruit' is defined by the Skittles™ corporation to include any and all forms of matter, including but not limited to dark matter, benzene, vespene gas and processed cheeses or meats. By reading this you forfeit any and all legal rights you may possess and are required by SkittlesFuntimeLaw™ to report to the nearest Skittles™ vendor for ~~re-education~~ your chance to win a NEW IPOD SHUFFLE.
**Copyrighted yadda yadda yadda void ownership of your firstborn

Gah, HTML Hard

2005-06-17T22:54:00.000+10:00

Tried to do a little bit of blog housework, but the job's only quarter done, links started gobbling each other up. I understand html like a monkey understands mining. I can poke around with a stick for delicious grubs but I couldn't dig up a lump of coal if you had a gun to my head. That being said, I wholehearted endorse these new links/products. This is pretty much a cruel teasing post, dangling tantalising tidbits of articles to come such as, my review of the new Dr Who series, random thoughts on computer games, reviews of albums that came out before I was born and who the hell knows maybe a serious political/socio/cultural rant. With footnotes! Until then, I need an early night's sleep.

G F oAm F oAm F G F G- (Cue ripping solo in G)

2005-06-06T21:39:00.000+10:00

Sometimes music says it a lot better than words. That's the opening sequence to Smash It Up (part 2) by the Damned, the song (both parts, a punk epic at five minutes) have been stuck in my head for the last three days, and it's been bliss. Everytime that section kicks in I dance and air guitar around in a circle like an epileptic getting shock therapy. Hearing that song again for the first time in years was like an old friend rocking up at your door with booze and awesome tales to tell. I'm pretty sure I don't look hard enough, but there really isn't much music like that any more, at least, it isn't popular, which is a crying shame. I told you, I'm an old 80s fart stuck in a 19ish year old's body.

'So this is how liberty dies: to thunderous applause.'

2005-05-27T13:04:00.000+10:00

There, I found a decent line in Return of the Sith. But apart from that: eeeeesh!

The first twenty minutes were fine, actual clever directing as the camera pans out and we slowly realise just how big this space battle is (and that's one thing Lucas is fairly good at). It was really Consider Phlebas, which can only be a good thing (now THAT would be a fucking apeshit awesome movie, not that it'll ever get made). But like all good things this rapidly comes to an end with a big crash landing and they all start talking and you start clawing your eyes out to GET AWAY FROM THE WOOD. Serious wood, the opposite of the Matrix method, where they underacted so heavily that they might as well done the whole movie with action figures, instead this movie is shot through with people acting like utterly clueless, melodramatic hams. Flopping uselessly. In Space. STAR HAMS - REVENGE OF THE SHITE .

Not that all Star Wars movies aren't fairly cheesy, but there really are some noticeable differences between the prequels and the originals, just in the way they take themselves less seriously than the newer ones, wherein everyone walks around with lightsabers stuck in their butts Talking About Matters Of Great Importance To The Survival Of The Republic. That and Alec Guiness, Peter Cushing, Harrison Ford, Carrie Fisher, James Earl Jones and even the dude who trampled around in the Darth Vader suit could actually act, at least compared to Darth Calculon. Also, the other is quoteable, in an endearingly ironic way as opposed to the new ones, which are pretty much solely mocking. Seriously "Anakin, you're breaking my heart!" ?! Search your feelings, you know it is true.

The only thing more unintentionally funny than ROTS, are the way it's crappy, paper-thin, melodramatic, pseudo-machiavellian machinations have been picked up by some retarded gasbags in the US, who instantly saw it for the hateful polemic against the Bush Admistration that it so obviously was.

Seriously, that movie is so freaking incoherent that I don't know how anyone could be sure what it was about. The main character whinges, has bad moods, acts creepy around women, has all these Jedi principles but compromises them completely when an incredibly untrustworthy character who just admitted he could read his mind and is known to be evil and behind the deaths and attempted murders of himself and others he loves while waging a covert war against everything he has sworn to defend, promises to save someone he thinks may be in danger based only on some old Myth about a Sith Lord.

On the strength of this, he then goes off and butchers kids (off-screen, of course). The Jedi are supposed to have all these principles and ethics, but at every point in the film where they're put to the test they get really pissed off and resort to stupid violent tactics; i.e. Anakin and Saruman- err... Dooku, Windu with Palpatine, Obi-Wan leaving Anakin to slide slowly in unbearable agony into a river of lava instead of stepping in and killing him, WHICH WAS HIS WHOLE MISSION, IF YOU RECALL. 'Only a Sith Lord deals in absolutes' ?! Seriously, the story is so artless, you can see the stickytape holding the ham and cheese together.

But welcome to the early 21st American political climate: 'Jar Jar Binks is a blatant caricature of President Bush!', 'Palpatine, Palestine: Coincidence? I don't think so!', 'The Jedi are a pro-Abortion cult and a threat to the Institution of Marriage!'. These are the same people (moronic right and left wingers both) who like to claim that Team America: World Police for their political side, ignoring the fact that it was indiscriminately offensive to both political persuasions, who generally fail to notice that pop-culture is entertainment, where any political message you might care to read is secondary to the main goal of making people watch and laugh and cry or whatever (in the case of the Star Wars prequels all humor was unintentional); with the exception of Thomas the Tank Engine, which, as anyone can see, is blatant Thatcherite propaganda. You'd think this wouldn't need much explaining, but in this hyperglobal-post-post-industrial-info-media-post-trendyprefixgoeshere-society even the right-wingers are getting postmodern, as all this penetrating analysis of cocksucking puppets, homosexual imagery in childrens tv and the hidden left-wing agenda of Sesame Street seems to demonstate. The dudes at Troppo have a good term for it: Conspicuous Indignation, where thin-skinned political types go out of their way to find some trivial offense against their beliefs in any form of media and make a huge fuss about how offended they are.

Yeah. In summary: thin skins + Crazy political paranoia + too much spare time= Gilmore Girls is a hateful Mcarthyist Screed!, SpongeBob Stole My Brain! etc. Anyway, must rush, I've got to go and write my dissertation on the agressive anti-globalisation messages hidden in that well known blatant leftist polemic: 'Dr Who'.

Rumours of my death have been greatly exaggerated,

2005-04-30T19:04:00.000+10:00

The EcG was negative, and shortly after the scanning-lady told me this, I suddenly felt a lot better. She was a little embarassed, and apologised for not being able to give me a positive result for pericardial effusion. We laughed, I went home, and procrastinated.

In the meantime, things happened. In a masterful peice of scheming and brazen powergrabbing (to say nothing of the fact that putting this guy anywhere near oil, or money, or power full stop is a jawdroppingly stupid idea) Achmed Chalabi was appointed Iraqi Oil Minister.

Chernobyl's core was noticed glowing through the cracks. Dr Yablokov, a member of the Russian Academy of Sciences reports that experts had "seen a luminescence characteristic of chain reactions inside the giant building", adding: "Who could predict what might happen if hundreds of thousands of tons of concrete, which was hastily poured 19 years ago, tumbled down on the ruined nuclear reactor?".

In more local news, a NSW Central Coast family finally pulled down their big, joyous, flapping National Socialist German Worker's Party flag (the mother claimed she didn't know what the flag meant and was just flying it because her four month old baby liked the colours. Lying through her teeth or just plain thick? You decide).

And then there's these clowns, who really, really, really shoulda known better. At this point it looks like they're going up against the wall. In a brilliantly handled sting operation the Indonesian police have managed to net nine stupid mules, miss the heroin delivery and shoot their only lead (so far) to anyone higher up. Waw Bagus, Polisi!

Connecting generator to Douglas Adams' grave.......... now!

2005-04-19T23:48:00.000+10:00

Via Evil News comes NOKIA this horrible, shattering, utterly unpredictable revelation from a perfectly neutral and utterly NOKIA unbiased source that the makers of the HitchHiker's Guide to the Galaxy movie (who previously NOKIA directed a bunch of ads and a few music videos) don't know shit about their subject matter and have NOKIA made a ripe stinking turd, which according to my future self is the cause NOKIA (and main theme) of a global revolution and several brutal fanboy dictatorships that last well into the year 2072. In any case, consider yourself warned.

In other news, it looks (certainly feels) like my heart is swelling up again, but I really can't tell you much for sure until after EcG test on thursday.

This started out as a haiku but got really obese

2005-04-11T11:42:00.000+10:00

Ion tense air lies heavy on the tounge,
an invisible weight

Cobalt slab apartments
hunker beneath sky's clammy blanket

minimalist accomodation fortress, (or silo for sleeping robot?)
I watch it through geometry of Railway Pylon Forest

Emptyhead sprawling into void (set sail for angst)

2005-04-10T01:57:00.000+10:00

Someone whos wisdom I will forever cherish (and forget and reremember until I get it tatooed into my sweet grey matter) once told me what I am, and why I feel forever uncomfortable with what counts for socialising as it is understood and practised in the early 21st century. To wit: I am an 80s nerd, one of the very last. Had I been born fifteen-twenty years ago in Manchester or Detroit or Glasgow or somewhere, I would have been a comfortable misfit with likeminded malcontents, hunched over 303's and 808's, diligently pre-programming beautiful 8bit synth cascades and trying to make the most inhuman sounding, unlistenable riffs we could. We'd get stoned and watch ghostbusters and dr who and cack ourselves, wear really tight jeans and talk passionately about how much Thatcher and Reagan suck and how we're all going to get fried tomorrow in a glorious nuclear dawn to bored chicks with massive perms. It'd be beautiful.

Ech. There's no crying over what never was (and probably wouldn't be as good as I'd like to imagine). Instead, you (meaning me. this blog is about me, not you. unless I tell you otherwise) can only go forward, vaguely comfprted by the notion that you're a wonderful unique 80s snowflake stuck in the fucking horrible 21st century. Because, really, if I took the time to collect data on what I felt and how Ifelt ever second of the day, woth special focus on interacting with strangers, the results would come in overwhelmingly on side of a constant sense of being really out of place, unequipped, not cool enough, not sharp enough, lacking in everything, but mostly confidence. I act loud, I pay people out and crack really nasty jokes, but that's a distraction, trying to create some heat and light, draw some attention, anything to stave off the creeping fear of fading into a shadow and just drifting out of everyone's memory

Link Dump 2005

2005-04-08T23:14:00.000+10:00

Portal of Evil - I lurk compulsiviely here, and have since at least 1999, particularly the news forums. PoE provides a invaluable service, uncovering the unknowably insane gibbering void of bugfuck reality-disconnect crazy created when global internet access collides with the beautiful ever-fragile spectrum of human delusions and paranoia. Contains a healthy and vibrant (read highly offensive) forum, with some of the funniest posters EVAR. ( some stuff NSFW. duh).

Riverbend - A truly kick-arse blog, made by IRAQ'S SEXIEST BLOGGER, riverbend, who posts whenever the generator is working. Real day to day no-bullshit social/political commentary and other random insights. Highly readable and actually relevant. (cry).

Juan Cole
While we're one the whole Iraq thing, you can't go past Juan Cole. Professor of History at the Uni. of Michigan, the dude lived in Beirut in the Eighties, translates and summarises Arabic newspapers in his spare time while swinging from chandeliers and engaging in other such feats of derring-do against mindless neocon pundits. Like his title says: 'Informed Comment'. He knows his Iraq/Middle East.

INTRODUCING THE LARGEST BILL AND TED SLASH ARCHIVE EVER!!!

2005-04-07T23:03:00.000+10:00

Would it be depressing to say that I was afraid to write for four days because I couldn't think of anything I could say that would satisfy my absurdly high standards for a first blog post? Well I just said it, so I guess not. For theatrical reasons I will not reveal too many of my personal details here. Suffice to say they are like as to give me away to my perpetual foes. Instead, dear reader, watch and be amazed as illogical, poorly structured rant after illogical, poorly structured rant and whiny self-evaluation after whiny self-evaluation pour fluidly from the screen like a wild herd of broken metaphors from the boughs of the Great Metaphor Tree. Watch, as you are hammered ceaselessy by bolded text with italics! Be amazed at the barrage of questions! Can Windowlicker keep it up?! Will he ever stop whingeing?! Why does he torture you so?! Doesn't he ever get bored?!

The answers to all these and more will be painfully revealed, week by measley week, on this, the GREATEST BLOG IN THE err, UNIVERSE!

Being merely a Test

2005-04-03T01:50:00.000+10:00

AAAAAAAAAAAAHhhhhwwaaaaaaaaaaaa

Backdated haiku the First,

2005-03-31T05:54:00.000+10:00

Dawn across soccerfield

Moon haze in glowmilk sky

Summer is over, birds still sing