Sydney Comedy Festival

I've been to a few things at the Sydney comedy festival. A video of one of the more offbeat ones is below:

(some) Puppets can tell the truth without getting flustered...

Change hurts

4am thought

It's strange what can trouble one at 4am. Woken up by work thoughts my brain rapidly decided it didn't want to stick with the topic and wandered off on a random digression:

Normality is more extreme than you imagine, this is why the news is almost always bad.

Normality is consensus concept and so is maintained by general perception and is not a tangible or given, neither is it measureable, evenly distributed or universally available. People's experience of normality is vastly different based on location culture and life experience.

As you live in a mediatised culture your expectation of normality is most likely set by a mixture of media representations and social expectations/experiences. Unfortunately media content is saleable and is largely sold on the premise that it is news or new information. This selling needs to takes place even when there is little or no news or information and so minor information is hyped as important and even when it isn't. This is much easier to do with bad news than good news as our innate survival instincts have a greater push away from risk than they do a pull toward benefit (risk might kill you but a benefit is likely to be marginal except in rare cases where it could provide a competitive advantage - this would refer to basics like sex and food really).

Note to self: This is an incomplete thought and needs work.

Hot stuff

Turned all of these into chili sauce last night. The sauce is so hot it has symptoms.

Less interesting but more useful

There seems to be a general trend on the internerd summed up by the title of this post. As technologies and techniques come to the mainstream and gain general acceptance they start to look less like toys and more like tools. This means that (some) people start using them well and that people that don't use them so well either stop using them and switch to a more appealing medium or just go away and do something else.

Since the rise of FaceBook and Twitter - 2 services on a collision course - there has been a marked downturn in interesting writing on the internet. Why write a 200 word blog post when you can do 140 characters 7 times a day and achieve much the same thing? The move of applications like word processing and spreadsheets into the online space and the sheer amount of time people spend using software as a service applications (I use 2 fairly constantly at work) has meant internet use for fun is also regarded less as a toy even though more people are spending more time using it this way than ever before.

There also seems a general acceptance that online interactions now have consequences and aren't harmless. Everyone seemingly has heard a story about a FaceBook status setting or picture causing trouble, both apocryphal and true. However both NZ and Australian lawyers can now serve court documents via FaceBook and only last week a man was acquitted when his defense lawyer used as evidence data collected from the arresting officers online social networking activities.

The overall effects are by enlarge to make people quality filter what their published online actually activities are, even though they may be doing more, and make sure that there actually are filters in place both incoming and outgoing - activities suitable for a select minority have security settings that restrict them to that community. The incoming filters are also more accessible and more widely applied - if I don't want to hear about your latest move in scrabulous or your last.fm plays I don't have to.

However the easy sharing and filtering of information and social activity in established services has meant that the blogosphere is noticeably quieter and startups are more obviously useful. Those who have been doing it a while and doing it well are still around. Those who didn't do it so well or whose heart wasn't really in it seem to have found another way to express themselves that is closer to their hearts. A time of economic downturn is probably going to heighten this effect with money and time being concentrated by service providers on building things that people use and that providers can make money from. The downside of this is that the random elements, the runaway esoteric successes are going to be short lived or quickly assimilated into a bigger entity. The internet is going to be a bit less interesting but more useful for a while, but it really was time for it to grow up again anyway.

Moleskine

Why did I wait so long to get one of these?

In fairness to myself it's because they have really wanky marketing which is borderline misleading. I've always resented the way that they are so obviously appealing and disliked the fact that they cost an absolute fortune for what they are, that people that do use them tend to bore me about how good and how useful they are. They are also fetishised by productivity geeks who write in them in different colours for different things and separate them into sections with tabs.

What changed my mind? I realised how many notebooks were getting shredded by just being carried around and that was wasting ideas and important notes. I haven't carried or used a paper diary/organiser for more than a year, though this seems to be a cyclical thing. I have had to admit that a Moleskine plus a cover for it has resulted in a big rise in retaining thoughts and ideas - I'm even considering trying the multi-coloured ink thing to see just how annoying it actually is or whether it's a good idea, though I suspect the personal and work aspects of my life would argue about who got the black ink and who got stuck with blue (my neuroses might be too deeply seated to cope with that). The pocket at the back is so damn useful once you get used to carrying the notebook around with you.

So here I am moleskined up so the inevitable list of productivity hacks that must come last:

• Business cards in the file pocket - run out of business cards in your other stylish accessories? Oh look a spare!
• File cards/spare paper in the file pocket - you wouldn't want to tear a page out would you?
• Symbols - I haven't got much past my normal @ for action or task but I'm rapidly also getting towards $ for items to go on my wishlist and an information symbol for things to look up or research. I might need one for ideas too...

Byron Bay

Gottaluvit. Full of hippies, self included.

Downtime

Normally I spend 3 hours a day traveling to and from work. This is essentially dead time in which I do nothing; I listen to podcasts, I read books. I recognise that these are possibly luxuries that other people would struggle to make time for but the point is I can’t do anything else. Also I exhausted my fairly small library quite quickly, I don’t spend much money on music and whilst the internet has made it easier to find things *cough* quite cheaply *cough* I still haven’t really bothered.

The solution seems pretty obvious i.e. buy a car. However [insert environmental whinging here] and [insert ongoing cost whinging here] so I wasn’t that keen. Until I did the following bit of thinking.

Everyone values their free time but they never put a metric on it. Everyone says they wish they had more time to spend [insert activity or in the company of family here]. So I thought about the spend part of that sentence and actually put a cash value on it. For the sake of argument I valued my time at a reasonably modest $35 an hour. This means I spend $105 of my time each day traveling. Owning a car would give me back 2 of those hours on average saving me $70 of personal time per day. That’s $350 of personal time a week, or extrapolated to 48 working weeks a year, nearly $17,000 of personal time. Getting a car now seems like quite a good idea, an investment even.

Caveat and note to self: This is a gross over-simplification and does not mean that getting a car will make you richer in cash terms unless you can convert those hours into money, which you won’t. Rates are subject to change without notice.

Residual thoughts: What other effects might giving your time a cash value have? How else might I value my time? Given this value what would I do with the extra 2 hours a day?

Pathological

Strange experience for this week:

Sat in the waiting room of the path lab waiting for a blood test. Lots of people sat around trying to keep the worried look off their faces looking through glossy magazines full of glowingly healthy people.

When I arrived I was the only man in there. This I suppose is down to women's far more intricate and complex plumbing, wiring and maintainence cycles.

Waiting rooms are always peculiar liminal spaces that are neither one thing nor the other and engender a limbo state of mind. Go here, wait. Be tested, wait to find out your results and then find someone to tell what it means.

Photos from Borneo

Well January was a dead-loss as far as this website goes but to get me going in February here's a quick slideshow of the best of Emily's photos from Borneo.

View Album

Get your own

Drumkit with a view

Offline

This is going to be interesting. We are headed to Borneo for a 3 week Christmas holiday that includes jungle treks and boats and all manner of adventures into caves and up rivers. We badly need a break but I don't think either of us has really absorbed the fact that we won't have or be looking for use of the internet for close to 3 weeks and most likely won't be using mobiles for that time either.

I don't think we really appreciate how much we use these things an an hourly basis. I've immersed myself much more deeply in the internerd this year, though I haven't written too much about it on here (I will, honest), I'm not sure what effect it's going to have. Perhaps make me more independant of things with flashing LEDs on them!

I will post things to various services from the mobile when I can. So anything worth finding out about will be on Jaiku (get yourself an invitation to Jaiku here). I've got this set to echo to Twitter which everyone else in the world seems to use. I don't use it because unlike Jaiku Twitter doesn't currently support text-message replies outside of the US and Canada. 

What I'm saying is that I'm not around for a bit and I might get withdrawal symptoms and then feel weird back at a computer on my return. That's not the least of my worries, I have a severe coffee habit and the withdrawal symptoms from that are an inability to concentrate, blinding headaches and irritability. Just what you need treking through the jungle...

95:5 Tempered

I've got a bit of a temper me. I try to get round it, I do my best to hide it, normally with fairly limited success. I have recently discovered that if I don't drink so much  - specifically on an empty stomach - things are not so bad. Also cutting down the coffee and eating at regular intervals seems to help.There are a few things that still get my goat no matter what. Pedantic jobsworthery and self-importance will undermine almost any good mood. Bad driving, my own or anyone else's, is also guaranteed to ruin a good day.

I am trying to rid myself of many aspects of being a grouch with varying (read minimal) success. I have always operated on the 95:5 rule i.e. 95% of everything is rubbish and often people will go out of theri way to ruin the remaining 5%. I tend to regard people who don't share this worldview with suspicion and contempt, the bloody hippies. However I am having to contend with the fact that when I go out of the door in the morning thinking I will have a good day more often than not  I do. When I leave the house thinking I have a bad day the story is much the same. This has got to the point where I now have to concede that the biggest factor affecting what kind of day I have is the attitude I approach it with.

As a lifelong 95:5 cynic this apparent affirmation of positive thinking is a little, er, challenging for me as it disproves the ratio (unless of course 95% of my opinions are rubbish (actually that sounds about right, ignore me I'm just doing a bit of belated growing up here).). I have no desire to become a detestable hippy but it seems I'm well down the road. Never mind, it could be worse, at least I won't get as angry!

The pint of no return...

...is the name given to the drink after which you will drink until drunk. Or number 3 as I like to call it. The phrase seems to come from a book by a recovering alcoholic.

Debugger

Brought to you by Unfuk

Ticket

I really like the minimal 2 colour design of my weekly travel pass

Beware Unsavory voyeur

Down on the upside

Oh, I see what you've done...

When you start looking for them the world is full of odd things like this.

So shoot me

Guns n Guns

Sometimes reality does the comedy for you.

Defeated by desert

Defeated by desert

I do hope my colleague forgives me for putting this up but the photo is really good, and you can't actually see who it is...

Converging, diverging: a warning

I am living a double life online. I have 2 signons to the internet accounts that I use to run my life.

One does most of the playtime stuff - like this blog - the other does the less playful stuff, like work and finances and other boring tosh. The two are artificially separated and are begnning to collide, I can't keep them separated for much longer, the work I do increasingly involves many of the activities I do online anyway. Increasingly I want my work to show up online with the things I do on a daily basis.

What has, up until recently been a carefully stage managed separate pair of entities might begin to exhibit some of the almost schizoprenic activity that they really contain - you have been warned!

P.S. anyone with any experience on handling multiple online identities and converging them in one place could chime in in the comments and give me a few tips on how I do this because at current I have 2 workblogs, this blog and an ancilliary one I'm considering killing off, 3 websites to manage, a life to lead and a job to do. It's all a bit much and I've inflicted the majority of it on myself.

Too complicated?

The world always threatens to become too complex and make you feel like you're a troglodyte sat banging rocks together in the dark.

Unsurprisingly the opening of the Large Hadron Collider(LHC) on Friday has certainly done that for the majority of the world. When the worlds largest and most expensive experiment is a cathedral full of kit too  - complex and integrated to call any part of it an individual machine - buried under the French/Swiss border and when you have to divert the course of underground rivers to build it (done by freezing them - unbeleivably difficult, an astounding engineering feat but all I can think about is the environmental impact), things may actually have gone a little too far. It's very hard to give a context, rationalise its creation and point to what need there is for this thing.

The press have not been as much help as perhaps the scientific community would like on this point. despite the extremely erduite and lucid plain english explanations from the very earnest and concerned scientists - who seem well aware that they've lost the rest of us on this one - the press and so the popular imagination remains stuck in around 1954. The majority of the focus has been on one single (non) issue: "Will this experiment suck us all in to a black hole?"

If you start talking about exotic particles, all of which seem to have the most wonderrful names (a 'charm quark'? brilliant) or about the higgs mechanism and why we can't quite figure out actully what mass and therefore matter really is when you get right down to it, then everyone glazes over (the only Planck length most people care about is in the DIY store at the weekend). Talk to them about black holes and the end of the world then you've really got their attention. However despite repeated assurances with very long numbers representing orders of probability it didn't really get through that the liklihood of the LHC producing a singularity (black hole type thing) was only marginally above that of you triggering one by getting up in the morning and making a cup of coffee.

The blame here doesn't entirely sit with the press. If the scientists had been a trifle less honest there might have been less interest. If someone asks you, "is there any chance this thing could suck us all into a black hole?" it is more prudent just to say "no" than tell them the absolute fundamental truth in language that they are going to have trouble summarising for a public audience.

Just for the record the answer is that they are doing experiments at such high energies that it is possible that small singularities might be created but these will be contained within a vacuum a long way from any other matter and behind a magnetic field so strong that it could pull your fillings out from 50 metres away which will mean that they decay in such a short period of time that you'd have trouble proving their existence. I hope that clears it up.

Why am I wittering on about this when clearly the world didn't end in any proveable way (more than it seems to be doing daily in any case)? Because if you don't explain things properly people get over anxious and start acting stupidly. It seems that at an Indian suicided over the news reports on television. This is undeniably sad and symptomatic of tabloidisation of media and the ugly refusal of accountability that this brings with it but there's also a personal element - if you are that anxious about the world and incapable of rationally going to find more information rather than panicking then you really are in deep trouble.

My other big problem with the LHC and the issues round it is that it seems no-one seems to be trying to relate the science to a benefit for people and all we are seeing is the main focus of the thing itself, to find out how the universe fits together. Such existential issues don't trouble most people on a daily basis but if it is explained that some of the technology that buds off from these experiments changes the world in unexpected ways that have nothing to do with Bosons and Leptons then they might appreciate it a bit more. The last particle accelerator that was built at CERN produced the technology that spawned the Internet. Hindsight is a wonderful thing, but even so that technology has changed our daily lives.

Using a by-product to justify an expensive and otherwise apparently irrelevant process has been done before and is a bit of a lame argument and it brings me to the last problem I have with the LHC. Despite all the technology, the potential benefits and my curiosity about how the universe works the actual concept is still a bit crude. What it does is accelerate protons round and round in opposite directions until they are as close to the speed of light as can be managed, smash them into each other and looks carefully at the pieces to see what they are. There are two ways to look at this and I am torn between thm. The LHC is either the greatest technological achievement of humankind - which is a position I am close to - or it really exposes how little knowledge we have about the world if all we can do is smash it up to see what it's made of.

Humankind just has to do better than this last position. We can't keep spending billions on things like this with the world decaying round us and justifying it with by-products and the benefits the eventual knowledge will almost certainly bring with it. It's quite possible that we might not be around to enjoy them given the amount of time that could take. The LHC might unlock a fundamental secret of the universe but if you look at it carefully humankind is actually still just sat in a cave in the dark smashing rocks together.

Umbrella bin

So many broken umbrellas they won't fit in the one bin.

Software and booze

The contents of one of my desk drawers. This says so much about my life.

Buried boat

Someone seems to have buried an entire boat at Frenchmans bay, much to the amusement of the children at the beach today.

Rock snot

Just say no.

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.

Beware, pole!

Can you guess what colour Sydney busses are? I don't quite know why I've started collecting signposts, possibly because I see so many every day.

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.

Whalesharks!

After a year's gap and at about the third attempt we finally managed to swim with whalesharks this time last week. I'll put some pics up when I have them developed and'or I can work out how to pinch stills from a DVD.

Also I am not dead, I was merely on holiday. That is all.

Beginners travel for free

Being an advanced passenger I'd already bribed the skipper for a quicker journey.

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.

Simplify

The person writing this sign knows the right word and thinks you should too.

5 % Bull

Previously she'd asked me, quite incredulously, did I know that five percent of greenhous gasses came from cattle farting. Yes, I said, I think I'd heard that before somewhere. But five percent, that's a lot.

Whilst lying in bed, starting to drift off:

Five percent?!That sounds like a load of bullshit.

We were helpless with laughter for the next 10 minutes.

Mister E Bunny

The concept of the Easter Bunny is just plain wrong. An extract from a recent interview:

Mr Bunny may I congratulate you on another successful Easter. How long is it now that you've been hiding chocolate eggs for children to find?

Eggs, yeah. Chocolate, right. You're...er... still eating those, right?

Oh yes, and most delicious they are too.

Oh yeah, go-on enjoy it. Let it melt on your tongue.

Er, Mr Bunny are you okay? Your tail is twitching in a most alarming manner.

Tail? Oh, yeah right "tail". (laughs) You still haven't got it have you? Oh yes, smear it up your face. Oh God, look it's sticking to your teeth!

Of course it could just be my twisted imagination that reacts badly to the idea of a rabbit hiding "chocolate" eggs with treats in for children but it does sound a bit suspicious. Doesn't it?

I had to ask...

My reaction to Authur C Clarke's death was:

John Peel, Hunter S Thompson, Authur C Clarke - who's next?

I had to ask. Sorry.

Maybe it's time to do something creative.

Anxiety

Symptoms:

• Waking up before the alarm and waiting for it, watching it, trying to anticipate it
• Peculiar and inexplicable skin complaints
• Drinking too much
• Dreams where I'm back at university and behind on my work (3 times this week)
• Arguing with bus drivers before 7am on a Saturday
• 2 to do lists and no idea where to start
  

Treatment:

• Holiday

I recognise this, this is stress isn't it? Thank Christ for that, I thought I was going nuts.

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.

Autumn

It is now Autumn in Australia, I can't say I noticed Spring or Summer, we seem to have skipped a year's supply of those and just had nine months of Winter. Oh well, it can't be sunny all the time.

I got through the second 29^th of February of a 6 year relationship without that question being asked. Is this a good or a bad thing? I'm not sure I know. What I do know is that Emily will be peeved that she forgot to terrify me by threatening with it all day long, hah!

Where does Guy live?

Good God, I've made a hairdressing joke. Sorry.

Finally

Well thank heavens that wasn’t a colossal pain in the arse, by which of course I mean that it was. Getting your house wired up to the internet seems to be as difficult as everything else in this country. It has taken me more than a month from buying the connection and the kit to get things working properly. However the effort looks like it has been worth it and I now have an internet connection at home.

Let’s hope it lasts!

Write it down

My [other] constant companion is my notebook. The poor thing is beginning to feel the strain. It contains all the general tasks of life, thoughts and ideas that I rush to capture before they evaporate. I always intend to organise them later.

My fear is that it has become an indicator of my mental state; a collection of disjointed scraps and notes associated only by virtue of their collection in a single location. Tattered and frayed, dog eared and overworked it threatens to give way at any moment. Missing pages are missing memories, whole days passed in a blur or torn out, deliberately put beyond recall.

You can see why I'm worried.

Time to consolidate, organise and rearrange. I might sort my notebook out too...

Sorry Day

13 February was been a big day for Australia. The Prime Minister officially apologised to the Stolen Generations. This term refers to Aboriginal and Torres Straight Islander people forcibly removed from their parents and sent to live either with white foster parents or in camps governed by white people. This was a nationwide and state-by-state policy in Australia ostensibly to protect children at risk of harm but in fact enforced as a brutal piece of 'ethnic cleansing' and out and out racism as has been seen at any time in history. It lasted a hundred years or more.

Apologising for this atrocity has been a sticking point with governments ever since the idea was suggested. A large part of white Australia feels that it has nothing to apologise for; that Aboriginal people do nothing but drink, sniff petrol and laze around. Apologising to indigenous people for Australians of this viewpoint is feeding a victim mentality and validating the perceived lack of endeavour. This is, obviously to me, ignoring the fact that the parlous state of a lot of indigenous communities is a result of the interference of another culture.

This is not to ignore that child abuse, alcoholism and petrol sniffing are immense problems in many indigenous communities. These are symptoms of much bigger problems to do with poverty arising from the treatment of the indigenous population. A distributed hunter-gatherer culture had a concentrated capital economic white culture imposed on it that attempted to force its own values to the fore, removing autonomy and self-determination along the way. This was also done without providing a framework for development or progress – i.e. opportunity to access education and employment – without which many of these communities lapsed into third-world level poverty where they remain today. The average indigenous life expectancy is 17 years shorter than that of the white population.

There are reasons for this too; many indigenous communities are very remote making it very difficult to provide these opportunities even when the impetus to do so is present (from either side of the equation). The traditional ways of living, which supported these communities in the past, had been devalued and eroded by the encroaching culture, hopelessness and an apathetic helpless inertia was the result.

It is against this background that one federal MP when asked whether he supported an apology commented on camera that there were places in Australia where he thought children should be removed from their parents (his emphasis).

Nice one Kev

The wording of the apology needed to be right. Australians of any background are straight talking honest people and any half-hearted effort would have rendered the exercise pointless for absolutely everyone. The word sorry was particularly important as an apology can be without regret and regret as well as recognition of the past ills are what was needed. In the photograph is Sally Pierce who was herself removed from her parents. For years she has worn a black tee shirt with the word Sorry on it, after the PM’s speech she changed it.

Below I’ve included a couple of things, some thinking on what the apology might mean from the Special Broadcasting Service, a video of the PM’s speech, the full text of it and some reactions to the speech again from SBS.

powered by ODEO

Today we honour the Indigenous peoples of this land, the oldest continuing cultures in human history. We reflect on their past mistreatment. We reflect in particular on the mistreatment of those who were stolen generations - this blemished chapter in our nation's history.

The time has now come for the nation to turn a new page in Australia's history by righting the wrongs of the past and so moving forward with confidence to the future. We apologise for the laws and policies of successive Parliaments and governments that have inflicted profound grief, suffering and loss on these our fellow Australians. We apologise especially for the removal of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children from their families, their communities and their country.

For the pain, suffering and hurt of these stolen generations, their descendants and for their families left behind, we say sorry. To the mothers and the fathers, the brothers and the sisters, for the breaking up of families and communities, we say sorry. And for the indignity and degradation thus inflicted on a proud people and a proud culture, we say sorry.

We the Parliament of Australia respectfully request that this apology be received in the spirit in which it is offered as part of the healing of the nation. For the future we take heart; resolving that this new page in the history of our great continent can now be written.

We today take this first step by acknowledging the past and laying claim to a future that embraces all Australians. A future where this Parliament resolves that the injustices of the past must never, never happen again. A future where we harness the determination of all Australians, Indigenous and non-Indigenous, to close the gap that lies between us in life expectancy, educational achievement and economic opportunity. A future where we embrace the possibility of new solutions to enduring problems where old approaches have failed. A future based on mutual respect, mutual resolve and mutual responsibility. A future where all Australians, whatever their origins, are truly equal partners, with equal opportunities and with an equal stake in shaping the next chapter in the history of this great country, Australia.

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Kiribili sunset

Tasteless bathroom

Wow! That's bad.

Virgin Blue: Huge Thanks!

I am normally on the complaining side of the equation when it comes to customer service and I am rarely impressed by the way companies deal with me which makes it particularly noteworthy when they do it well. On Friday I was not just pleasantly surprised but utterly blown away by the lengths to which the check-in staff of Virgin Blue at Sydney Airport went to help us.

Our online check-in failed to work but we had run out of time and had to get to the airport as quickly as possible. It was raining, hard. The traffic ground to halt a not even a kilometre up the road. We got to the airport and the transfer bus from long-term parking failed to arrive and then got stuck in a traffic jam of taxis. We missed the flight and would have had to buy a ticket for a different flight and not use our tickets for the Australian Open that night.

The ground crew not only didn’t make us buy another flight, they moved heaven and earth to get us on any of the next three flights out of Sydney and they did it despite the fact that we were both, frustrated, angry and upset (I was rude too, but Emily kept her head!). Thanks to them we missed only the first set of the women’s singles match that night – the first of three – and saw all 5 sets of the men’s.

We would probably have gone straight home and not gone to Melbourne at all had it not been for the people that helped us. Instead we had a fantastic weekend away, saw a day and a half of top class tennis. I can’t thank them enough.

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.

To do list

Unlike 90% of the rest of the world I return to work on 7 January. My beloved does not and today has nose firmly pressed to grindstone. This has precipitated the dreaded To Do List.

I am not the most reliable person on earth so a to do list outside of work is more of a vague indication of possible activity rather than a strict list of tasks to be accomplished. My other half is not so lackadaisical and the stern looks and telling off I will most likely receive in the almost inevitable event of my failing to complete everything on it will be unpleasant in the extreme. There's no point begging for mercy, she'll be at work all day and I'll be at home watching the tennis and guzzling sausages.

It's not that the list is particularly onerous - it has only 10 items - the problem is that I've not been at work since Christmas Eve and the majority of tasks to be completed in that time have been the same:

1. Drive somewhere
2. Eat something
3. Drink something
4. Sleep

How am I to deal with 10 tasks that are all different and have sub-tasks that require actual thought? Plus the fact that one of these tasks is 'Ironing', that isn't a task, it's a sentance (and no time off for good behaviour either)!

Congwong beach

Round the corner from the new place

Pigeon hate

Even pigeons turn their back on you if you haven't got anything for them.

Keys and stress

Now which one opens the postbox...

One of the most reliable indicators for the amount of ongoing stress in your life is the number of keys you carry. As you can see I am going through a time when I have more keys than is strictly necessary.

Tonight my major task is to go and clean the old flat as it is now empty and all the dark, dusty areas can now be reached. Other people have Christmas parties, I have to clean.

A lesson from moving: It is far more efficient to get removal men with whom you have almost no common language – almost all communication is then gestural and tonal and many of the possibilities for misunderstanding and disagreement are negated.

Euphemism?

Er, not for me thanks...

Defictionalisation...

...appears to be a particularly ugly neologism for the process of fictional things being produced in the real world. A few people I know used to have a Buddy Christ.

Leaving aside my horror that a more elegant word doesn't seem to have been found, some vague wonderings about artistic practice and theoretical embodiment, the feeling that reality is eating itself and the noise from the post-modernist philosophers "we told you we were right" party I have only one thing to say:

Where's my bloody lightsabre?!

Bah humbug

As is traditional around this time of year I state that now it is December you are officially allowed to use the C word but not the X one and link to this post and tell you how many Americans reached it by searching for how long you cook a 24lb turkey - more than normal although still not as many as get here by searching for celebrity tongue, which I only rank 5th on for heaven's sake. It's an odd perversion, but a harmless one I guess.

This year, having bought property, I would also like to add that Christmas is officially canceled and that I'm afraid that if you had been expecting anything more sizable than a pint of beer as a present then you are going to be sorely disappointed. My apologies for this.

I have also just realised that it is my Grandmother's Birthday and I have utterly forgotten to send her anything, bum. Sorry Mum, you did remind me and, like the useless pillock I am, I forgot. At least being in her late eighties Gran might forget too...

Backwards busriders

Next time you're on the bus watch for the people that choose to sit facing in the opposite direction to travel. Not those who do so because all the other seats are taken but people that actively choose to do so, they're a bit different (rare too).

Going backwards makes most people a little queasy, these people are tougher than that. They are so accustomed to public transport that motion sickness long ago ceased to be a problem for them.

A lot of people don't always know where they're going or at least like to be able to see their stop to make sure they get off in time. The backwards people aren't worried by this, they have their routine and they know the route so well, they know it backwards.

The backwards seats are the only seats on the bus that force you to look your fellow passengers in the eye, all at once. Other seats grant the comfort of staring at a seat-back but not these. These seats reveal the bizarre theatre of people on the bus, in public but in a confined, unnatural state of locomotion. Sitting backwards on a Saturday night-bus is an operetta.

These people spend their journey looking from their point of departure watching the world go past them with their back to their destination, meeting it only when they choose to get off. In the mornings this means facing back toward home, watching it disappear into the distance. In the evenings watching work fade into the past.

Next time you're on the bus watch for the people that choose to sit facing backwards, they're a bit different.

Kevin 07

Labor took the election early last night. I can't say I noticed as we were out and about and horribly sunburnt having been out all day.

It's about time I stopped with this politics tripe and got on with some real blogging...

Election day

My coverage of the federal election here hasn't been what I'd hoped but buying a flat and changing job roles seem to have got in the way of it a bit. However, it is election day in Oz and so I shall be going to go surfing all day and then to a party in the evening as I am not elligible to vote.

Australia's electoral practices are far more progressive than a lot of other westernised nations. All citizens have to vote, even if overseas a plane ticket actually has to be produced to avoid a substantial fine. Australia also uses a proportional representation system in which voters order the candidates to match their preference (a 1 for the first choice, 2 for the second etc.).

For some arcane reason that I don't really understand some seats in the senate are also being decided and for these you can either order the candidates or just put a 1 in a box for your party of choice. You can actually practice voting at the Australian Electoral COmmission's website.

Polls suggest that Australia is in for a change of government but it could be a nailbiter. There's been some great last minute wrangling including questioning the validity of 12 candidates applications with the promise of legal action andhanding out fake pamphlets supposedly saying that Labor support Islamic terrorists.

Honestly, I have no real idea what's going to happen.

CyberPunkEm

CyberPunkEm

We've been at a charity event at the Hilton in Sydney tonight. We have come away with a teddy bear, the flowers from the table and some bloons.

Election 07: So where was I?

If you're worried about the lack of sanity evidenced by writing about politics at 3 in the morning don't worry. I was woken by a bizarre noise from next door that sounded like an entire skelton being dropped on a hard surface from a great height. Worry about that instead.

I was covering the Australian election from an TV/internet and ex-pat perspective when all of a sudden having a life got in the way. Oh yes, and the whole thing became really tedious.

We've had more of the same from both sides. Liberals first:

And now Labor:

We've also seen some genuine thinking by the two main parties. Liberals first, again playing to their economic record versus that of the oposition and doing so against the background of an interest rate rise (the first ever during a general election campaign in Australia):

Labor's latest plays to the uncertainty of electing a Prime Minister who will be stepping down soon (Howard said yesterday that he would probably be in office for at least 18 months):

To give you a taste of what it's actually like here if you're reading from outside Australia all of these video embeds are on television here. You can't get through an ad break without seeing at least two of them.

Street canvassers have been at a minimum and I am grateful that an English accent can give you the instant get-out of not being able to vote. I can't help feeling that with 10 days to go something a bit more dramatic ought to be happening. The fact that it isn't is probably because both of the parties set out their stalls pretty early on and have stuck to their guns pretty doggedly.

Some spending plans were announced on Monday from the Liberals but Labor doesn't seem to have done quite the same thing and in the interest of research and reasonable comparison I'll go through those later in the week.

Why not?!

This sticker is under the driver's side window of all Sydney busses.

Elearning07

Live moblogging an award for slidecasting about moblogging - it doesn't get much more information age than that! Or does it...I also twittered the tinyurl to the organisers. I wonder if anyone will notice in time for tomorrow's session....

Ferry

Ferry

The ferry to Circular Quay from Balmain

Clean your damn car

Insert worm gag here

At the weekend a worm caused a storm in a teacup. The worm in question is not a political candidate but a screen graphic used by Channel 9 to measure public approval of candidates. It takes the form of a line at the bottom of the screen that changes colour and tracks up and down an onscreen graph based on the real time electronic voting of a studio audience of undecided voters.

The storm in a teacup was because Channel 9 did not have permission to use this under the rules the National Press Club applied to allocate broadcast rights of the debate between Kevin Rudd and John Howard. They used it anyway and the NPC killed their feed. Channel 9 then switched to rebroadcasting ABC's feed with the worm patched over the top and claimed that the Press Club had bowed to pressure from the Government in killing their feed and called it a violation of free speech.

Almost everyone is ignoring this non-story except the two broadcasters involved and the international press who love a claim of free speech violation. Channel 9 may not have had permission to use the worm but do they really need permission? The damn thing was more of a distraction than anything, particularly if, like me, you had absolutely no idea what it was.

Oddly though Channel 9 had a news crew inside the online production suite; not something you do without good reason. Might they have had an inkling that this was going to happen and have actually bent the rules deliberately in a cynical ploy to gain ratings? Surely not.

The worm was an issue because John Howard does not fare well under the gimmick. He had only been on screen 3 seconds when the graph(ic) went into a negative reading from Rudd's immediately positive reading. The worm being left out of the broadcast was almost certainly part of the negotiations to actually get a debate aired. Rudd had wanted 3 debates, Howard has cleverly agreed to only one.

Cleverly because Howard is a very professional and polished politician with 11 years practice at being PM. People know who he is and his extempore speaking seems natural, he appears to know what he's talking about even when he is winging it. Rudd is not a familiar face nor do people necessarily feel they know what he's about. There is an air of Blair about him, although he is much less creepy and seems more genuine. Actually on those criteria he's nothing like Tony Blair but you take my point.

Rudd used the time well outlining policy and using phrases like "what my party stands for", "what I would do in office" etc. but on balance I'd have to give the debate to Howard. The PM consulted his notes far less, seemed more composed and didn't make the error of breaking eye contact with the camera or the person posing a question when he had finished talking, which Rudd did. Phone polls by the broadcasters and the newspapers broadly agree with me. Political analysts though split the honours evenly, citing Rudd's better use of detail and Howard's slight hesitancy on reconcilliation with Aboriginal people and troop withdrawal from Afghanistan and Iraq.

The worm firmly gave the debate to Rudd. If the audience really was composed of undecided voters then Howard may not be the totem he once was. This election is going to be a hard faught one in the marginal seats and if Howard provokes disapproval just by appearing on screen then he is going to need something extra. For me though the debate was proof that Howard is still tough and definitely more than a contender. [lazy joke about electorate being worm that turned goes here]

Naked PM?

I either have astonishing reach and influence or a talent for stating the blindingly obvious. Today’s video clip is the Liberal Party response to the Labor response to the Liberal unions campaign ad.

Look, it’s Howard and he’s perched on a desk (they must have sawn the legs off). In a bit to out-casual Rudd he’s also jacket-less; how outré! This is begging the question how far will they go? Until Vladimir Putin’s recent photo shoot and since Mussolini politicians don’t really strip off. The fat Italian fascist’s favourite political posturing involved going bare-chested and do manly thinks like mucking in with the hay balers. In a close election are Rudd and Howard prepared to bare flesh? Will we see Kevin in his grundies and a string vest? Will there, the Australian public wants to know, be Prime Ministerial nipple? According to the viral marketers the two are already prepared to change their hair.

As the dominant narrative of the moment the election has considerable use as a marketing too if you can get in people's heads. The election has been expected for so long that companies and their agencies have had plenty of time to prepare and as a media meme an election is all pervasive. Commercial ad campaigns are beginning to mirror the political one.

Apologies, I haven’t actually watched the video above, I’m at work and can’t be bothered. It’s probably Howard saying that he’s not scaremongering but engaged in informing the public about the potential unionist content of a Labor cabinet that would mean the thin end of the wedge for [small] businesses. He probably says something about flexibility in employment and industrial relations and taxes too.

I have noticed from the front page that the theme of embedding your rival’s advert in your own is continuing. Will we also then see this repeated so that by the time a government is elected you will be able to trace the story backwards by finding the adverts referenced in each clip? Has that actually been the case and are you reviewing this post 6 weeks from now tracing things backwards to see how Australia ended up with a naked PM? Interesting.

For speed, and appropriateness of response the Liberals score some points here but this is a definite ‘me too’ advert. It’s the same thing without a jacket (I reserve the right to change my opinion after having watched the video, but I doubt I'll have to).

First blows in the campaign

The first blows in the election campaign fell early in the week. Things are going to move quickly of necessity, 6 weeks is not long to win hearts and minds especially when people already have a well formed impression of your party. Possibly this is why I was a little disappointed with the standard of the opening salvo.

The Liberal Party, rather predictably, weighed in to Labor for its’ Union connections, as it has been doing for the last month.

The move was so predictable in fact that Labor had a reply ready to go which was posted on their website within half an hour of the Liberal ad going live.

Perhaps it is a little early to expect innovation. The Labor – yes, that is the correct spelling here as wrong as it looks – political movement has been linked to Unions since its’ inception (in Australia 1891). That the Labor front bench might contain unionists seems a little obvious.

Whilst the ad is very polished and hammers its’ point home with the requisite force it has opened up with a negative, attacking the opposition not starting from a positive. The Liberals have plenty of positive at their disposal, unemployment is at the lowest rate for 33 years, the Australian economy is booming and the Government is in a position to offer big tax cuts and arguably still manage spending. Why not remind people of that? The polls say they've forgotten.

Strange too that it was left to the Treasurer and deputy PM to launch the advert. Costello is a credible financial manager and is most likely to succeed Howard as PM in the medium term. Immediately before the election was called the Liberal party suddenly had a tizzy fit about who would lead, and for a while it looked like Howard might not be fighting the election as leader. The party eventually decided to hold on to Howard but what does that say about the election prospects of ‘Captain Smirk’? If Costello is not seen as strong enough to win an election and Howard has said he will step down in the not too distant future who exactly are Liberal voters voting for? And, more importantly, why associate this problem so closely with the opening of your campaign?

Howard is notably and noticeably absent from Liberal advert as is mention of any Liberal politicians or policies. Rudd’s response was concise - perhaps overly so - and personal. In a country still so conservative in outlook that any and all newsreaders appear behind desks for even the briefest of bulletins Rudd was perched on the front of a desk with a TV remote in his hand talking to the camera with an easy non-threatening manner (not that I suspect he is capable of being very threatening). It builds on the media created notion of the election as Rudd vs. Howard and it shows Rudd as the voice of his party. The image of the much shorter John Howard trying to perch on a desk flickered briefly through my mind. Rather unkindly I wondered if his feet would touch the ground. I expect Rudd on his desk to become a motif of the campaign.

Round one to Labor.

Headphones

"You can bite my shiny metal iPod"

The doped masses, heads hanging, blank eyes badly hidden behind over-expensive sunglasses sit on the bus together, nodding to the invisible beat of the anaesthetic administered aurally via the white umbilicus.

"Yesterday, I swear I got to work and had no idea how I got there."

Every smart suit and pair of clicking heals living in denial of their symptoms. The brain-surgeon working on itself excising the horror of the daily commute asks only for a little music to cut by.

Election

The two countries that I have lived in for any substantial time are both gearing up for a general election; one definitely and soon, the other probably and not until next year. All being well with visas I will have the peculiar sensation of watching the Australian election, that I cannot vote in, from the perspective of living in the country and in the new year watching a British election which I could vote in, from the other side of the world.

In my native Britain the sitting Prime Minister, Gordon Brown, would be seeking the validation of having won an election on his own merits, having inherited leadership from Tony Blair, but has ruled this out until 2009 saying that he 'needs more time to lay out his vision'. Brown had considered an Autumn election and has faced criticism for leaving the country in suspense about his intentions, most notably from his deputy.

In Australia, where I currently live, the Liberal coalition will be seeking another term in office to return the 10 year veteran of the top job, John Howard, for only a few years before he steps down in favour of, who we don't quite know but probably the current treasurer, Peter Costello.

In both counties questions were being asked about when the election would actually be called. As the Head of State for Australia is in fact Queen Elizabeth II, John Howard is obliged to get permission from the Governor General to dissolve parliament and call an election; something he flew back to Canberra to do this weekend. I have just learnt from the BBC News website whilst doing a light bit of research for this post that he has, as expected, called an election to for the 24^th of November.

Howard had been expected to call an election before now and his reluctance to do so has caused some bitter acusations from the Labor opposition. The accusations are that the Australian Federal Government is using its' advertising privilidge to market government policies and the delay in calling an election was to allow these to run their full course before polling day. There does seem to be some weight to this argument given the noticeable increase in frequency of these adverts on the TV every time a poll comes out favoring Labor and a definite slant in the advertising towards selling the legislation rather than telling people how it works.

The major election campaigning issues which I may do further posts on are going to be:

• Work Choices and employment law (unpopular - favouring opposition)
• Australian involvement in Iraq (unpopular - favouring opposition)
• Assistance for drought areas (popular - favouring government)
• Cuerrent economic position (popular - favouring government)
• Ongoing climate change preparation (varying but mostly favouring the opposition)
• Aboriginal and indigenous affairs (varing and impossible to place also a latecomer to the party)
• Howard vs Rudd - it might come to punches, which speccy nerd will you be cheering for?

The last and probably the critical issue is who can maintain credibility not just personally but throughout their party and their campaign. This is going to be tricky as Howard has probably the greatest credibility of any Australian politician and is a real political street fighter with a knack for finding vulnerabilities his oponents didn't know they had.

Rudd has weathered a few storms on this front with his wife effectively being forced to sell her interest in the Australian arm of the business she runs, and Rudd having a boozy night in a New York strip club in his past revealed. Rudd should not be underestimated though. He might, as Dame Edna Everidge(CBE) pointed out, look like a dentist but he is also a former diplomat with postings in Stockholm and Beijing. During the APEC summit Rudd was able to address the chinese delegation in fluent Mandarin. The night in a strip club story only made him look human and has actually strengthened his position.

This is going to be a tough fought election that has another interesting aspect to it. Every party has embraced the internet as a campaigning tool. Google are running campaign channels on YouTube for all the parties and have an Election 2007 tab for their very popular homepage. Both of the main parties have been using social networking sites like MySpace and Facebook for a while. This is going to be Australia's first real internet friendly election.

I was trying to work dammit!

I was actually doing some work on the internet, for a bit of a change, when there was a flash and a KABOOM and the connection fried. A very sudden and extremely powerful thunderstorm wafted through and interupted every transmitter for miles. Not even the phone worked.

The connection is now so erratic I am writing this in short bursts. This occasionally happens here, it's one of the hazards of living right on the Pacific ocean. A year or two before I came to Sydney there was a hailstorm that spat chunks of ice the size of a softball from the sky. It hasn't done that yet but I wouldn't want to be outside in it.

Film festival special

Last night Em & I went to a session supported by the Sydney Film Festival that was specifically devoted to internet distributed short films hosted by two people Emily has worked with/for. This is great for a number of reasons, my favourite being that I can show you the three stand-out ones right here.

The first one is a Will Ferrell film (!) called The Landlord. It speaks for itself but if you are interested in how they got a child to do this then have a look at the Funny or Die site for 'the making of' and outtakes clips too.

The second film is too odd to describe so I shan't. It is distributed by atom films who support independant film makers through advertising. This means that there are some pre-roll adverts on the video but stick with it, it's weird!

AtomFilms.com: Funny Videos | Funny Cartoons | Comedy Central

The last video clip is a piece of machinima. Machinima - machine animation - for the purposes of this film, is taking the output of your computer and dubbing it as film. The artist in this case has built a Vincent Van Gough picture in the very powerful 3D rendering engine of virtual world Second Life, put some effects on and dubbed it then dismantled it in Second Life leaving only the video clip behind. It is a breathtaking piece of work when seen on a big screen, I'm afraid I can only do small on here.

One of those days

Everyone is in for it today.

I woke up at 5am, the internet depressed me with stories about arguing nuns and some idiot who kept his amputated leg in a smoker.

I thought I was about to pull through but have gone to the cupboard to make a cup of coffee to find that in a careless moment the coffee has been thrown away. Thrown away.

I now have to wait until I get to work before the first cup. I have to arrive at my workplace unmedicated. I haven't done that in years and have no desire to start.

I do hope my colleagues are reading this and can take the appropriate measures. Bribery with caffeinated goods and bacon sandwiches always works.

Birdcage in a fishtank

I like ideas that force a change in perspective. I came accross the image above randomly the other day and it has been troubling me for a few days. It shows a birdcage inside a fishtank.

At first I thought the image was manipulated but someone actually has created a birdcage inside a fishtank.

Something about this still made me uneasy. The thought that it might possibly be cruel to the birds bothered me, but how is this any less cruel than caging them to begin with (They still have a grill at the top of the cage to allow air to circulate)?

Something about the dissonant juxtaposition of two sets creatures, that in thier wild state would be free but here confined, draws attention to the unnatural state and wanton human interference. Particularly with the birds cage inside the tank where they look imprisoned and in danger. Somehow if the fish tank was surrounded by a birdcage it wouldn't seem as strange.

The last troubling thought was the reason for it's creation. I found the image without any contextual information. There's nothing to tell me whether the fishtankbirdcage is intended as a conceptual artwork intended to provoke those thoughts, just a visual oddity intended to make it appear is if birds were flying underwater or simply the product of someone with spare perspex, a tube of silicon glue, a twisted imagination and too much time on their hands.