Threefold Inaccurate Catholics

I do hope that the same courtesies being extended to the Catholic Church will be extended to the World gathering of Pastafari that I propose takes place in Sydney next year. As a devout Pastafarian I will expect the city to be shut down, helicopters to hover constantly overhead and Spaghetti Carbonara to be available on every street corner. I believe it is everyone’s right to believe in the omnipotent supernatural being of their choice with as little evidence as they like and disrupt the lives of millions of others accordingly.

There are many things that I find innately annoying about World Youth Day, starting with the arrogant inaccuracy of the name:

1. World; amazingly not everyone is a Catholic. The name may mean universal but there are an awful lot of Indonesians, Indians, Chinese and pretty well the whole Middle and Far East to whom this really doesn’t apply. There’s quite a few Anglicans too, they used to burn Catholics…
2. Youth; it is a matter of record that unaccompanied minors and catholic clergy should not mix. In fact The German Shepherd himself is going to apologise for this very thing whilst he is here. This means that the city is filled with the only thing worse than devout children; the kind of devout adult who would volunteer to take them to WYD08
3. Day; day! It goes on for at least a week of rubbernecking pious bastardry.

Those attending WYD08 are known as ‘Pilgrims’ which I also cannot stand as it makes me adopt a John Wayne voice as I shove them out of the way (and sometimes into the harbour, I only wanted to see if they could walk on water…). Also in the age of cheaply available air travel is the word Pilgrim really appropriate? Surely the whole idea of pilgrimage is that it was meant to be hard, you were meant to go on foot and you were meant to discover things about the world around you and about yourself. What do I discover when I travel by air?

1. I don’t like most people
2. I don’t like airports
3. I don’t like aeroplanes
4. I do like a glass of wine and a decent movie

These are all things I could have discovered by travelling to my local shopping mall to pick up a DVD and a bottle of plonk, not travelling halfway round the world for a glimpse of the pope and to chant halleluiah tunelessly in another country.

The effect thousands of additional people in a city they don’t know very well has had a less than positive impact on the public transport system. The events in the city are supposedly timed not to coincide with the morning rush-hour. Unfortunately if you are pious enough and jet-lagged enough there’s no real way of predicting just how early you will get up do a little God-bothering sightseeing.

At least the propensity to wear the flag of their nation of origin and brightly coloured clothing and accessories makes them very easy to see through a rifle scope.

Premium Economy

There is a new service level on airlines and it is Premium Economy. These are not two words that sit well together and I suspect that the phenomeneon may be symptomatic of a greater sociological ill; we want it all but we're damned if we'll pay for it. Air travel should be expensive, it brutalises the planet and creates/supports an enormous number of jobs. From personal experience Ryan Air I can tell you that if you pay peanuts someone charges you for the monkeys.

So far I have discovered Premium Economy on Quantas, Thai Airways and Virgin Blue (who the hell thought up the brand name Virgin Blue for heaven's sake, it sounds like a dodgy website).

Just a quick note to the airlines; putting a contaminated sharps bin in the airoplane toilet might be very right-on but it doesn't send a great message about your cabin-mates. Just thought I'd mention it.

Get your Johnson out

Oh I say, how utterly ludicrous

3 Years ago, almost to the day, I left London:

Goodbye London, look after yourself!

We will Tom, have fun in Australia

A few months pass, and then:

KABOOM screams etc.

Er, what was that?

Terrorists, nothing new, as you were

3 years pass:

Oh Tom, we've decided to ditch one anachronistic old dinosaur of a mayor for another far more ridiculous one that will hugely damage our international reputation and make us the subject of stereotype ridicule for decades.

Never speak to me again.

A note to cyclists

Clearly a fetish

I'm not talking here to the ride it to work and back kind of cyclists, but to the multi-coloured lycra clad type. What you do is not a sport. It closely resembles a sport but consider: you need specialised equipment and lubricants to participate, the classic version has obscure french terminology, there are various shapes of foam rubber involved which you - excuse me - sit on! It is commonly done in large groups where participants seem to spend a lot of time looking at the bottom of the person in front of them.

Any activity that requires you to dress up like a perverted clown to massage your prostate with a custom formed piece of latex is not a sport it is a fetish. Particularly if you if you get up early in the morning to do it and shout to each other outside my bedroom window before I am awake.

Mountain bikers can stop feeling smug at this point, you do all this in the mud and rain and have clothing brands with names like "Muddy Fox".

Whilst I'm at it I'm sure there are several other sports that are little more than an excuse to engage in otherwise suspect physical encounters and hang around in changing rooms:

• Wrestling - Putting on a leotard to grapple each other to the floor and hold each other down. This is quite obvioulsy a fetish and greco-roman wrestlers need to be reminded that these wrestlers originally used to be naked and oiled.
• Judo - Really this is a sub-set of wrestling that shows off the Japanese capacity for taking things a bit too far. This is wrestling that you need to put on pajamas to take part in and then grapple each-other to the ground in an attempt to hold one-another down with your faces in each-other's armpits. Clearly a fetish.


Oooh chase me, chase me!

• Rugby - Using a funny shaped ball as an excuse to chase each-other around and wrestle each-other to the ground, in the mud! Until recently this was done in practical hard-wearing clothing. Now it seems to be done in skin-tight Lycra.
• Climbing - Uncomfortable harness that is particularly tight around the groin area, rope, silly little rubber shoes and again skin-tight bloody Lycra.
• Speed skating - This is a really weird one, a fetish where people with huge thighs to dress up in what amounts to a skin-tight Lycra gimp suit to chase each other around on ice. Bizarre.


Oh I'm comin' to getcha'

I'm sure there are more, I'll add them as I think of them.

On Browsing: Herbivorous consumption

Browsing is an activity where concentration and attention span as well as a deeper qualitative appreciation are hostile to the activity itself. It also means that people are more sensitive to negative forces, browsing has both push and pull forces and the push is instant and final and the pull is creeping and fickle.

"I'm a selective consumer me."

It's probably a bit unseemly to quote yourself but when I wrote this I started thinking more about browsing as it seems to be an increasingly important part of everyday experience.

Dictionary definitions aren't much good when you are looking to describe and understand something as prevalent and widely applied as the concept of browsing. At best you will be left with an awkwardly narrow definition and at worst discover that the term you are looking up has several different uses that vary only slightly in a semantic sense but when used as a basis for thinking about the thing it describes in a real world context produce a multitude of obfuscating subtleties (try saying that with a mouthful of jelly!). The definition I have come up with is:

Browsing is the act of continual selection and sampling dictating what will be consumed and what will be discarded.

This feels like a capital economic description but is derived from natural history's description of the eating habits of herbivores and I've pinched this as a metaphor for thinking about the process. The very fact that to me this sounds like something that might come up in a marketing seminar points to what is important about browsing; it is a choice mechanism based on sampling. The actual item or experience to be consumed must be part consumed or experienced in the act of making a choice. Choice only occurs when there is more than one option to consume and browsing is how we appear to cope with an enormous variety of choice offered: too many options actually inhibit a quick and clear decision, sampling and acceptance or rejecion have become the norm. We have been turned into herbivorous consumers by the overwhelming quantity of options available.

Browsing also seems to be an effective means of avoiding a definitive choice. With a little of this and a little of that you can browse all day without settling on a single option. It could lead to overconsumption, particularly if you continue with the idea that you are looking for a single perfect thing or simply get lost in the habit of sampling and moving on. Apathy and inertia are an unhealthy combinaton.

The act of browsing seems to have become an activity in itself; window shopping, channel surfing and web browsing for fun. What becomes of a choice mechanism when the final objective is removed? The activity seems a kind of aimless meandering, a feckless self absorption and commitmentless waste of time. Without an aim continuous browsing will probably lead down roads marked out by the most basic and instinctual drives, the lowest common denominator. I'm wondering if this is why there is so much sex on the internet - a medium where you have to open a 'browser' just to be able to access most of the content.

There is another name for herbivores in natural history: prey species. It is only by herding together in vast numbers and/or reaching a really enormous size that they manage not to be devoured!

More thought needed.

Curators of a zeitgeist

William Gibson

The place of blogs in the media landscape seems to be constantly up for debate. The paper-published media seems to have been of hugely divided viewpoint and variously to feel threatened, empowered, to reject the technology before finally embracing it.

The Independent and particularly The Guardian newspapers in the UK seem to have taken the concept and moved a lot of their content online, as have The Telegraph and The Times to varying degrees (from what I experienced of The Guardian when I was back in the UK last month this was definitely to the detriment of the newsstand publication). Whilst this probably can't be described as blogging there are many blogs on the sites.

The Internet over here in Oz is slowly coming round as Internet connections speed up and the newspaper sites are publishing things online simultaneously with the day's first edition (The Age, The Sydney Morning Herald).

The US media has various levels of online access but mostly seems to be sticking to the pay for access model to at least some stories as per The Wall Street Journal - now with extra Murdoch - and The New York Times on the East coast, and a free to access model on the West: The LA Times, The San Francisco Chronicle. The Chicago Tribune seems to have a mixture and USA Today seems to have gone all out for online audience engagement.

Leaving aside that the newspapers are now becoming proto-broadcasters with mixed media online content it is quite interesting that almost all of them now have blogs after some fashion. If you believe in the concept and validity of Citizen Journalism then the lines between the the journalists and the bloggers seems to be becoming blurred, particularly on the level of journals covering specific areas such as emerging web technology e.g. Techcrunch (relevant article). The clear trendsetters in this space were Wired in the US and The Register in the UK, a personal favourite. Both of these two have been blogging as journalism since before it had a name.

If you don't believe in Citizen Journalism then you probably believe that there is still a defined and specific craft to writing and a duty to truth in journalism that it is very hard for your average Joe to recreate (the wikipedia link probably won't have much use for you either). You might find yourself in a minority here, everyone thinks they can write. This doesn't necessarily mean they're right , but it does mean 'me too' writers like me proliferate and litter the Internet with dubious opinion and often unchecked 'fact'. Personally I think this is a moot point and blogging is still an emerging phenomenon that is more interesting in a social context than it is in a journalistic one.

Web logs seem to have begun as link lists of interesting sites with diary elements creeping slowly into the logs as online publishing became easier (strangely pictures of cats seem to have played an important part in this). Many bloggers continue this trend posting links and diary snippets daily, sometimes hourly. Those that do tend to hook into certain trends and, if looked at as a whole, seem to have a kind of Jungian collective unconscious that identifies certain themes and ideas that have the attention of the Internet as a whole, which increasingly means the westernised world.

Oddly the best of this types of blogs seem to be by science fiction writers. I can only surmise that, watching the things they wrote about come to pass, these writers are watching in awe and extrapolating further to another unforeseen future.

What got me thinking about this was an interview with William Gibson in today's Sydney Morning Herald in which Gibson says he has switched his focus back to the present as it is far stranger than anything he could imagine (also see this one in The Washington Post). In fact the present frighteningly close to what he imagined. It is almost impossible to read Neuromancer now without compiling a mental timeline of how this future will occur.

As an example, in Neuromancer Gibson describes a past in which a war is waged as much in cyberspace as it is in base reality. Somewhat presciently the war takes place between Eastern and Western powers. This is dangerously close to happening:

• Beware the Trojan panda
• Chinese military hacked into Pentagon
• Did China hack into Pentagon networks?

The quote below is attributed to Gibson though I can't immediately track down its' provenance:

"The future is already here; it's just not evenly distributed."

It's hard to argue with that.

Back on the point I had somewhere; bloggers like this are the reason for the title of this post. They both catalogue and define the milieu of an age that is increasingly about a 'lensed perception'. In an age where information arrives more quickly than it can be processed it's not so much about what you see as the viewpoint that you see it from and the way that you arrived at it that defines what you understand of the world around you.

For me blogging is this curatorial act/trusteeship where individual examples are probably not significant but a categorised broader view will be much more revealing in anthropological kind of way and over a long period of time. Of course cat pictures are always good too!

3 Recommendations with links from the sites below them.

William Gibson

• Russian ASCII goggles
• KKKlouraphobia!
• Secure Beneath the Watchful Eyes

Bruce Sterling

• Planetary Imagery: 30 years from Voyager
• Days of cheap food are over
• Hookers swarming on Cragslist
  

Warren Ellis

• Only $11.99
• One species' genome discovered inside another's
• Memories of a massacre

"...dread and ecstasy at one and the same time, this is the modern condition."

Bleeding edge news and Tuesday blues

"I could use a hug about now"

With the APEC summit about to happen in Sydney and an opportunity for Australia to showcase its' position as a real economic and political player on the global stage the biggest news story over here at the moment is obviously going to be about a drug taking rugby player.

Last weekend Andrew Johns was arrested in London with an ecstasy tablet in his possession. That's right, one tablet. This is surprisingly convenient for him as if you get caught with one tablet in the UK you can say it's for personal use, if you get nicked with even only one more than that you get done for possession with intent to supply. A man of Johns' size, and apparently considerable experience with controlled substances, will probably want more than one pill to get his rocks off all night. Someone, possibly someone wearing a blue uniform, has done him a big favour and stepped on the rest.

Johns has pleaded that he has been battling bi-polar disorder and that he was using alcohol and drugs to self-medicate, something his doctor almost certainly told him not to do. For a start alcohol is a depressant and won't really work, the drinking experience would feel hollow and shallow and make the problem worse, especially if you drink predominantly filthy Australian beer.

As a second point MDMA, the active ingredient in ecstasy, whilst effective immediately, with even casual use has the side-effect of a nasty comedown when it wears off. With continued use you get delayed comedowns that take place a day or two from the high. These exhibit themselves as a rather dark and tearful mood a few days later - commonly known as the Tuesday blues.

There are a couple of points here that I don't like:

1. Johns' symptoms are as much a result of his self-medication as they are anything else. Given the length of time he's been using it will now be impossible to distinguish between these and the original depression. This doesn't matter however, the treatment will be the same.
2. Successful intoxication of any kind requires knowledge. John