echopraxia

Let's Try This Again

2006-04-07T17:28:00.000+10:00

Now posting over here.

We are assured that mysterious computer-related things will succumb to catastrophe no more than around two or three times a week, and that sounds fine to me.

Advances, None Miraculous

2006-04-05T16:14:00.000+10:00

Somewhere in his generally fascinating The Thirsty Muse, Tom Dardis discusses the "geographic cure" for alcoholism, in which the unhappy inebriate (in his case, Faulkner) attempts to cure himself of bad habits simply by altering his immediate physical surroundings.

This is basically one of those things that never works.

Regardless, mounting irritation with Blogger and Haloscan have led me to try something similar. Thanks to the good auspices of Phooeyhoo, I'll be found from now on at echopraxia.phooeyhoo.com, as a sort of cousin site to Flog, should he ever decide to start posting again. If Dardis is any guide, I can expect a short grace period of reasonable output, followed by a protracted slide into an abyss of one-line posts and calendar months with only three updates to show for themselves.

Despite that prognosis, please update your links if you're of a mind to do so.

UPDATE: Alternatively, don't. Everything at the new place seems to have gone temporarily pear-shaped.

In comments, Pete presciently asks:

If I get a webcam can I just do a retina scan?

This is what we're ultimately working towards. Retina scans - in conjunction with other, more painful and invasive biometrics - are much more effective than a mere username/password system. And if you want to post comments, there's a microchip you'll need to have implanted subcutaneously. It's relatively inexpensive, and the "registration" process is covered by most HMOs and can be performed at any Mr. Goodwrench franchise.

Obviously, I will stop at nothing to safeguard my intellectual property. These blog posts are worth their weight in gold.

"A Common Problem Among Yale Professors"

2006-04-01T13:25:00.000+11:00

I've been over in the comment section at laurabush.info continuing to wage a vicious and unprovoked partisan campaign on behalf of the show Deadwood. While Googling up a non sequitur behind which to exit, I found this interview with series creator David Milch, which covers some of the same ground as the contemporaneous really long New Yorker profile but has enough new wrinkles to be worth reading. I'm posting it over here because Brandon has enough on his plate without having to host a dedicated site for me to pick fights with him about TV. (Although, come to think, that does give me an idea for a cable access show.)

Interview by Salon's not-un-awesome-in-her-own-right Heather Havrilesky.

The Adventure Of Two Dingo

2006-03-30T12:05:00.000+11:00

More of the world's problems are mediated through cartoons.

The media's response has perhaps been given added edge by still-simmering anger in Indonesia over the Prophet Muhammad cartoon furore.

Protesters rallying outside Australia's Jakarta embassy this week painted obscenities on its walls and carried banners of an eagle swooping to grasp the bloodstained neck of a kangaroo, shouting "Die kangaroo".

Of course, it's not a laughing matter. The phrase die, kangaroo is a laughing matter, though. But only a small one.

Should the Indonesian press be depicting John Howard as a dingo getting his Bone on with his foreign secretary? Well, why the hell not? I think describing it as "satire" might be a bit of a stretch, though.

Flurry Of Professional Activity

2006-03-28T10:09:00.000+11:00

Peer review is a leisurely business, so it's pleasantly bizarre to have two papers OK'd by two different journals in the space of one week. I started shopping this one around in 2004, so it's nice that it has found a home - particularly because, if any serious lies were found in it at this stage, my Ph.D. would probably be retroactively invalidated.

The referee's comments did include the phrase "riddled with howling errors", which is one of those formulations that the eye leaps to and the stomach recoils from, and is generally just not the kind of comment you're looking for in this situation. However, he/she was just taking issue with one of the other works I cited, which was a relief. I've never claimed to be perfect, but the errors that riddle my work are for the most part non-howling.

Anyway, this is straying perilously close to introspection. Time for some more posts about basketball or something, or maybe another week-long hiatus.

Second Tangential Reference To Iowa State In One Day

2006-03-27T13:38:00.000+11:00

Save your money! Accept one of our free tanks! It is invulnerable, and can drive across rocks and swamps at ninety miles an hour while getting a hundred miles to the gallon!

Was supposed to be doing something useful at the library; instead, ended up with Neal Stephenson's amusing rumination on operating systems, In The Beginning Was The Command Line, despite the fact that it's one of those tracts that is inevitably going to be available in its entirety online, like here.

The Cato Institute Has Surprisingly Little To Do With Basketball

2006-03-27T10:52:00.000+11:00

College hoops? Not so much. However, "For The First Time Ever, Libertarians Win Something" is a gem of a headline.

You could tell by all those three-pointers that this was a team organized on the wisdom of distributed decision-making rather than central control.

Quite. This, in a nutshell, is why I like Reason: principled libertarian commentary together with wry references to their foundation members' "Vulcan and human halves".

Tragically, despite the name, Kelvin Cato of the Pistons did not attend "libertarian mecca" GMU - instead, he chose Iowa State and their iniquitous corn subsidies. Another marketing opportunity gone for naught.

And Not Just The Obvious Ones, Like "Saloon"

2006-03-23T10:15:00.000+11:00

Apologies for yet another protracted absence. I've been... well, not exactly busy as such. Anyway, Queensland was ravaged by a hurricane, and I found out that I've had a paper provisionally accepted by some journal or other, so there are entries on both sides of the ledger.

I'm also about to lose access to my old university account in the US, so I've been rummaging through the last five or so years of email and keeping the good ones. Patterns begin to emerge in your correspondence if you do this in a short enough space of time, even in addition to the usual patterns you see after staring at a screen for hours on end. Many, if not most of these several thousand emails were sent from my office and consisted of passionate negotiations with others on campus over the question of whether we were going to go to the bar, and if so which bar, and when, and what were we to do upon arrival at the bar. Reading through them en masse, one receives the impression that a primitive new language is taking shape before your very eyes; one with fifty-odd words for "bar".

Unintentionally Revealing Remark Of The Month

2006-03-23T10:12:00.000+11:00

"Everything we need to know we learned in kindergarten."

Marbury vs. Billy Madison

2006-03-08T12:16:00.000+11:00

As if the shocking cinematic news uncovered in the previous post wasn't enough, the Volokhs have been digging up references to Adam Sandler movies in legal opinions.

In light of their findings, I can not only no longer carry out my work-type duties at a satisfactory level, but I need to lie on the floor for a while with a damp cloth spread over my eyes. Thanks again, internet.

Dead Writer Dodges Bullet

2006-03-08T11:11:00.000+11:00

Trawling around on the intermittently reliable IMDB, I found this.

Quoth I (after several seconds of stunned silence): Nevermore. Seriously, guys, no mas.

On "Psychological Enslavement"

2006-03-07T12:05:00.000+11:00

Actually, I'm retroactively warming to Crash. It was in no way, shape, or form a great movie, but seriously, for God's sake:

And while we’re on the subject, I might as well mention Lars von Trier’s soon-to-be-released Manderlay, which premiered at festivals in 2005, and is about the very kind of psychological enslavement that might lead a group called the African-American Film Critics Association to present Crash with a best-picture award.

Whoa. Dude. There has to come a point at which even the LA Weekly pulls you on one side and points out that no, in fact, hedging that statement with a "might" doesn't make it acceptable.

Clooney's Performance As Paul Krugman Honoured

2006-03-06T17:49:00.000+11:00

Some people who I, like, used to know have been blogging the Oscars. To Vague I say: chaw, pshaw. Acting Oscars are for a body of work (or, if you're Jennifer Connelly, a finish-the-innuendo-yourself) and P.S. Hoffman has just been rocking all over the place for the last ten years.

Crash, on the other hand, can bite me. Like Suomi, I was rooting for the goddamn cowboy movie, because now everyone is going to wax agonistical about whether Hollywood is making a statement about The Lifestyle (whether practiced specifically by closeted sheepherders or not) by denying it the Best Picture award, and I am sick unto death of this manufactured non-controversy already. I much prefer listening to people like this douchebag explain how Hollywood is out to destroy the world. There's something soothing about it.

Meanwhile, this is good stuff, especially notable for its innovative categorizing of doomed romances:

They're married to different people, or they come from different social classes, or they're on a big boat that's about to sink, or they come from different social classes and they're on a big boat that's about to sink, or one of them is a self-absorbed playboy who inadvertently causes the death of his would-be girlfriend's husband and then accidentally blinds her.

Evading The Tipping Point

2006-03-04T13:51:00.000+11:00

Saturday is a good day around these parts: I have an Ikea rocking chair, a large container of coffee, and an entire North American continent that still thinks it's Friday and is posting to their blogs accordingly. Tim Cavanaugh is a smartass, Ted Rall is begging for money to launch a frivolous lawsuit, five clones of Karl Malden are picking the Oscars again, and you apparently aren't allowed to have people arrested as a joke. All's well with the world.

As if everything else wasn't enough, the irritatingly-talented Malcolm Gladwell now has a blog. I've been avoiding his books in the vain hope that there's something about his style that won't carry over from New Yorker pieces to a longer form, but I'm gratified to see he's a fan of the hard salary cap.

(I did this with Jonathan Franzen, too, the avoiding. The critical reception for The Corrections was so goddamn effusive I refused to go near the thing for two years. When I did eventually crack it open, I found myself sitting on the subway muttering curses under my breath. Fuck! This is actually really good! I am not particularly proud of this.)

(Am I ripping off the "explosions" format? Sort of, but if you could patent the idea of the post-full-o'-links, that'd put paid to ninety percent of the world's blogs. Not that that would be a bad thing.)

"Photoshop, Swearing, Jokes About Food. That's It. That's All You Need."

2006-03-01T12:28:00.000+11:00

Since the latest indefinite hiatus over here, I have been desperately searching for an amusing basketball-related blog. Why this should inspire desperation is a mystery, but there you go. Anyway, the search is over.

It is an established fact that basketball has a much greater inherent comedy value than any other sport. If more baseball players did things like this, instead of just mooching around injecting each other with various types of steroid, I might care about baseball.

Quantum 8-Ball: "Ask Again Right Now"

2006-02-28T13:52:00.000+11:00

A quote to bear in mind: "A non-running computer produces fewer errors."

I thought this was going to take a while longer. (Notice, though, that the quote says "fewer", not "none". It is a much lesser achievement to create a machine that will instantaneously produce the wrong answer to your question.)

Whining At Tech Support Gets Results

2006-02-28T11:01:00.000+11:00

After a not-unreasonable three days, Google have mercifully decided that I am me and should be allowed back into my Gmail account. I now revert to my stock excuses for not reading/answering your email.

This may have just been a simple database screw-up somewhere deep in the heart of Google Labs. On the other hand, I doubt that a simple database screw-up would have trashed my last year's worth of mail, deleted my secondary email address, and changed my name to "Supersonic 31337". So it's hard to be sure.

(Incidentally, my level of computer expertise can be gauged from the fact that I spent about five minutes thinking "31337? Is that in... Ohio?" before being struck from on high by an anvil.)

To summarize: I was 31337 for three days. Now I'm back to not being 31337. Regrettably, I did not take advantage of the fact that my earning potential was probably considerably higher while I was 31337. L8z.

Weekend Begins Inauspiciously

2006-02-25T09:22:00.000+11:00

Trouble in computing paradise. One of my Gmail accounts - the main one, the one at the top of the hundred or so CVs bearing my name that are currently being digested by the human resources departments of liberal arts colleges across the globe - has decided that the password I've been blithely entering for the last year or so will no longer be accepted. My other accounts are all fine, so it's not a browser/OS issue. This has the potential to suck on a truly epic scale.

The most likely explanation, as I see it, is that I've undergone some sort of overnight psychotic break, and my demented alter ego has changed the password to this particular account as part of its plan to wreak havoc on my comfortable bourgeois existence. So, if you've received any email from me within the last twelve hours... did I seem different at all? If so, did I seem as though I could be reasoned with?

Lou Dobbs Creams His American-Made Jeans

2006-02-24T14:00:00.000+11:00

Still watching the fallout from the ports deal. In the comments below, Brandon observes:

...you've still got wonder what the administration was thinking.

Well, it's a foreign company being bought out by another foreign company. The US administration doesn't have any business thinking anything much on the subject, and, assuming there's no threat to US interests, Congress doesn't have any business screwing around either. Do the security check, and hoist the rubber stamp.

Again, if the deal was to hand over responsibility for port security to a foreign company - any foreign company, not just one run by swarthy people - that would be a Bad Idea. Unless some radical proposition involving the US Coast Guard has been floated within the last few hours, though, it's a Bad Idea that has absolutely, precisely nothing to do with the matter at hand. Take the charmingly naive idea that a change in the parent company of this enormous seven-billion-dollar operation, with its investments spread over four continents, will somehow manifest itself in its local employees; sprinkle it with some good old-fashioned George Bush conspiracy mania, add some sinister Arabs, and the result is: They're giving away the ports! So that they can... uh... so that they can torture people!

This is entirely on-point. Here's an interesting dKos diary, together with the obligatory horrifying comment thread. And as for the argument that the deal should be opposed because it seems wrong "on a gut level" - one promulgated even by sensible people like James Lileks - Virginia Postrel says it best:

All I can say is my gut reaction was, "This is stupid."

I can't wait for opponents of the ports deal to wake up to the next terror in our midst: Arab-run airlines such as Emirates flying planes right into the US - many of them crewed by actual foreigners. It's amazing this has been allowed to go on for so long, really.

Phrases I Cannot Unlearn After Two Days Of Trying

2006-02-24T11:39:00.000+11:00

"That depends! Are you the Guaranteed Honky-Tonk-Style Blowjob I ordered from Room Service just now?"

(Meanwhile, Tim Blair notices something disturbing.)

Looking On The Bright Side, I Just Coined The Term "Art Malikalike"

2006-02-23T11:36:00.000+11:00

Always good to see a bit of bipar tisan populist xenophobia. Personally, I think it would be a terrible idea to allow non-US governments to control the security of US ports; fortunate, then, that that has nothing to do with what's actually happening. Obviously, it's tragic that the company in question will no longer be owned by a British firm, but we'll muddle through somehow. Presumably, now the company has been bought out by UAE interests, their staff of lovable Cockney barrow boys and chimney sweeps will be deported and replaced by sinister Art Malikalikes. (Well, he's British too, but his character in True Lies wasn't, and I think it's got a ring to it.)

Daniel Drezner talks sense in the meantime.

UPDATE: The Drezner comment thread is pretty horrifying, though. My favorite one begins:

There is no American company that can manage a port? Smells like an Abramoff type of deal.

That's right. We must act now before this company falls into the hands of foreigners, instead of the British! To judge by the handle "save_the_rustbelt", though, this commenter is quite accustomed to arriving late to political issues.

On Pedagogy

2006-02-21T13:22:00.000+11:00

Michael Berube makes me snarf my coffee:

At the end of the semester, they leave my classroom and plaster the campus with posters reading “Meat is Murder” and “Bush is Hitler.” Two years ago, one enterprising student came up with a “Meat is Hitler” poster. I have recommended that student to some of the nation’s top graduate schools.

WaPo Columnist Haunted By Innumerate 12th-Grader

2006-02-20T16:42:00.000+11:00

Oh, bite me, Richard Cohen.

Most of math can now be done by a computer or a calculator. On the other hand, no computer can write a column or even a thank-you note...

Sounds like he's lobbying for a raise, no?

There are those of you, and [symbolic victim of American education system] you are one, who know what it is like to stare at an algebra problem until you have eyeballed a hole in the page and not understand a thing you're seeing.

Italics his, and blood-curdling they certainly are. Not understanding something? My god, the horror!

I would venture to say that I use algebra (albeit not in the sense that Cohen means it) on a daily basis, and I'd also venture to say that I spend a large part of those days squarely in that state of hopeless incomprehension that Cohen regards as "like being summoned to [his] own execution." Cohen is absolutely right that his sacrifical math student can live a happy and productive life without ever having to solve simultaneous equations. On the other hand, it does not occur to him that teaching students to deal with notions that are abstract and difficult to understand might have value outside an algebra textbook - a broader value that he is apparently willing to grant to the high school history syllabus. After all, without a little measured humility (and few things are more humbling than mathematics) you might well end up, as a professional writer, confusing the ability to reason with the knowledge of specific facts (such as the location of deserts) and making cringe-inducing statements such as:

Writing is the highest form of reasoning. This is a fact. Algebra is not.

While this may indeed be true, Richard Cohen himself gives us no reason whatsoever to believe it.

Well, What Else Are You Supposed To Defend?

2006-02-20T15:18:00.000+11:00

After taking her to task for having the temerity to disagree with Maureen Dowd, James Wolcott (presumably) inadvertently accuses Mary Matalin of "defending the defensible."

UPDATE: Edited. (At least a day later and with no strike tags, for what that's worth.)

If We'd Only Stopped Him At Garden State, There'd Be No The Ring Of Brightest Angels Around Heaven.

2006-02-20T12:11:00.000+11:00

Finally, someone is willing to stand up to the scourge of Rick Moody. The state of Arizona is mulling over a bill that would entitle students at the state's public institutions of higher education the option to opt out of any coursework requirement that they find personally offensive, on the grounds that someone or other was displeased by The Ice Storm. There would presumably be some other consequences, but what the hell?

Personally, I'm not a fan of Rick Moody either, but I usually limit myself to disdainful sniffs and sayings along the lines of "Get a job, Rick Moody," rather than this sort of dedicated legislative action.

"No Iranian Will Beat Us On Our Home Turf!"

2006-02-17T11:34:00.000+11:00

This is superb. (Not to go on and on about this, but "cartoons" are about the level of political complexity I'm comfortable with today.)

In Reality, Only A Quarter Of The Day Has Been Wasted

2006-02-17T08:50:00.000+11:00

None of the following is intended to go against the spirit of sunny exuberance I was going for in the previous post. Indeed, I am so excited to be back in Australia that I apparently can no longer sleep. In contrast to my usual slothful ways, I launch myself out of bed at six AM on the dot with the feeling that half the day has already been wasted, despite having only dozed off three hours beforehand. Jetlag is not my favorite thing in the world, and - being ruled by my desire for sleep at the best of times - I'm incredibly bad at dealing with it. Five hours of lucid awareness in the middle of the night is not an appropriate trade-off for the same length of time measured in helpless, drooling afternoon power-naps in my office. ("For I have seen the mornings, evenings, afternoons... I have measured out my life with helpless, drooling power-naps...")

To make all this even more impressive, it turns out that twenty hours on a plane exposes you to all sorts of interesting microorganisms. Having survived a month of northern-hemisphere winter, I am now staggering around in the bright sunshine coughing, hacking, and sneezing so hard that mucus flies out of my ears. The smallest interaction in a coffee shop or bar is constantly at risk of turning into an out-take from Ghostbusters 2. This week, it has to be said, I am not exactly in championship form.

Hello Clouds, Hello Sky, Hello Thing Living In Crisper

2006-02-15T10:15:00.000+11:00

Back, at long last, to the inner west. As far as circumnavigations of the globe go, that was not much of an accomplishment: I did the second half in one giant leap, with an hour's layover in Singapore. It was a good trip, though. I may not be able to drink like I could when I was in grad school, but neither can anyone else.

Anyway, I may be fiddling while my career prospects burn, but a little relaxation is in order. Because I have a pathological aversion to checking luggage, I did all this traveling with a single shoulder-bag, and I need to reacquaint myself with worldly goods that do not require me to endlessly be carrying them to places. It's a banal but especially wonderful feeling to still have an apartment to come back to, squalid though I have made it: the dusty heaps of boxes, the homey pyramids of Toohey's bottles, the friendly waving tendrils of something I apparently left in the fridge.

It's good to be back. Who knows, I may even update this pointless thing a bit more frequently. Oh, and the survey that found me and my po-faced, unusually-shaped neighbors to be the most miserable people in Australia was, needless to say, conducted in my absence.

On "Turning Cartoonists Into Non-Persons"

2006-02-07T02:15:00.000+11:00

I wrote that last header without checking: in fact, Rall has already been paged:

Why are so many right-wing newspapers like France Soir and right-wing blogs up in arms over this act of censorship? Because it's a chance to attack Muslims!

Dude, the cartoonists in question are in hiding because people are threatening to kill them. Thousands of people are marching in the streets waving placards that say "BUTCHER THOSE WHO MOCK ISLAM". It's not (yet) a censorship issue, because editors choosing not to run cartoons is not, in fact, censorship. What this is is large-scale violent intimidation, which is arguably even worse. You don't have to have a problem with Muslims qua Muslims to find this slightly disturbing, surely?

Where were these advocates for free speech when I was dropped by newspapers like the New York Times because of my anti-Bush politics?

Ted, honestly, it's not quite the same thing. You know, this is why I love the guy: every so often you get a definite indication that he's viewing the world through lenses of an entirely different type. The real villains of the piece here, for instance, are the people who aren't getting the names of the cartoonists out there enough (although the twelve cartoonists are conflated by Rall into a single, presumably really terrified Dane):

It's gross that word guys are so determined to turn cartoonists into non-persons. At least this guy might get a little PR out of this mess.

Yes, especially if their irate public finds them and kills them. For Christ's sake.

Paging Ted Rall: Your Colleagues Need You

2006-02-06T09:37:00.000+11:00

Third consecutive post saying nothing more than "Still alive. In different country." It may not be particularly interesting, but it's true. I am still alive, and I am in a country where thousands of people are marching in the streets threatening violence over a series of twelve political cartoons. At first I assumed the cartoons would have to be particularly bad in order to provoke this sort of reaction, but some of them were actually quite funny. Maybe that was the problem.

Thousands of people on the streets, and no British newspaper has even printed the fucking things. A French publication took the ballsy move of publishing the offending scribbles along with a big headline affirming their right to make fun of whichever sacred symbol they chose. The ballsiness of this move was, however, slightly undercut by the paper's owner, who promptly fired the managing editor and distanced himself from the whole affair, citing reasons of mortality.

First they came for the political cartoonists - twelve very frightened Danes, in this case - and I said nothing, because I can't stand political cartoonists. And yet it seems wrong, somehow, to hack them up with machetes without first holding a trial of some sort. How would we know that the people being torn apart by a raving mob were actually political cartoonists?

Heaving A Sigh, Looking Around For Leaders Of Plucky Resistance Factions

2006-01-31T23:35:00.000+11:00

It took a little while, but I've reached that happy situation of waking up and being uncertain as to which city I'm in. According to the skyline, this is Washington (DC) although I can't discount the possibility that I've just been transported into a grim post-apocalyptic future again.

I'm wrapped in a blanket and stealing slices of American cheese from the Canard's fridge. I was going to write a list of seven things I habitually say, but to do so without having been "tagged" would, upon sober reflection, be unutterably pitiful. I am about to return to my home country for the first time in going on two years, and for some reason this is making me uneasy.

Airline Blanket, Saturated With Tears

2006-01-26T07:45:00.000+11:00

I haven't just been weeping into a blanket over the loss of Lou Rawls. I've been travelling and things. Currently with the Flogs, where - in a stunning turn of events - we have been drinking various things.

Meanwhile, I feel for United Airlines, who are still going through the motions of running an airline, despite having been in Chapter 11 for years now. Something is clearly getting them down, and I'm going to charitably assume that this is it. Soon, we'll see slogans like

UNITED AIRLINES: OH NO! YOU, THE CUSTOMER, ARE UPSET ABOUT SOMETHING? WE'D BETTER HURRY TO DO SOMETHING ABOUT IT, OTHERWISE WE MIGHT GO MORE BANKRUPT!

A certain lack of focus would be excusable, is all I'm saying. My own excuses are similar.

UPDATE: Hmmm. Maybe not.

You've Made Me So Very Happy

2006-01-11T13:10:00.000+11:00

I completely missed this, and now I'm sad: the great Lou Rawls died last Friday.

If I had a song, and I needed someone to sing that song, I'd take it to Lou Rawls.

That's a bastardization of a quote for which I can't remember the proper attribution - I read it in some liner notes a decade or so ago - but the sentiment was always a good one.

Other Things To Do With The Corn Cob From Sanctuary

2006-01-06T16:48:00.000+11:00

Following up the post below, this.

I note it because it includes the phrase "So if you're a Faulkner fan, kiss a frog today," because it describes ol' Rummy McTypewriter as "the worst postal worker in the pre-David Berkowitz era," and because I'm trying to provoke an irate response from Vague.

Grad Student Flop Sweat

2006-01-05T11:16:00.000+11:00

I've been on the job market for a little more than a year now, and I'm afraid the results have not been uniformly positive. I am still assiduously mailing off materials, references, etc to dozens of more or less obscure colleges around the world, together with febrile predictions of how awesome my research is going to turn out to be and statements of my teaching philosophy expressly designed to obscure the fact that this philosophy amounts to: Stand at front of room with piece of chalk, explain things, occasionally stroke chin in learned manner. The piece of chalk is my nod towards "using technology in the classroom", something that is apparently in vogue despite the fact that our existing pedagogical difficulties had precisely fuck all to do with our not having sufficiently cool gadgets. Now we learn... with robots!

That last bit is an example of the kind of thing it would not be good to say in an interview, by the way.

However, reading this makes me count my blessings. My current state of solvency, non-unemployment, and blissful exile from the lecture theatre is basically due to a kindly soul offering me a mulligan on last year's job cycle, rather than my having "applied" for a "job" which has "duties" beyond my own amusement. I think part of the reason that there is money floating around in the world to be given to people like me is that the New York Times can't write snarky articles about what we do.

Robots Are People Too

2006-01-03T11:35:00.000+11:00

One of the minor subplots in the bomb-lobbing campaign between blogs of the left and of the right concerns comment sections - specifically, which side most welcomes discourse and community via a robust exchange of Haloscan abuse. Many hurtful things have been said about what a site's comment policy - and the standard of the commenters they attract - implies about the character of the site's proprietors. In a spirit of neutrality, then, I'd like to take a moment to congratulate the fine people who, despite the high levels of traffic their blogs attract, nevertheless go out of their way to engage with all of their commenters, not just those who reflexively spout their side's designated talking points. People like this guy.

Of course, no good deed goes unpunished in this world, and there's always some sneering amateur around to nitpick the details:

Neil, you appear to have started a conversation with a comment spam robot.

(Hat tip: Tim Blair.)

Hot Fun (In The Summertime)

2006-01-03T11:32:00.000+11:00

The fourth (and by far the most awesome) subheader from yesterday's Telegraph front page:

TRAIN LINES MELT

Although it sounded fascinating, I was unable to read the story in question, as the paper then burst into flames.

I Was Reduced To Consuming My Eyes

2006-01-02T12:29:00.000+11:00

I would like to apologize to anyone in a cool climate who has received a phone call from me within the last twenty-four hours complaining about the weather. It is an unseemly thing to complain about.

But yesterday was something else, though: the hottest New Year's hangover on record. A hundred and eleven degrees is about enough to lightly poach my eyeballs in their sockets. The gutters were running with boozy sweat all day. I made it out of the apartment precisely once, on a desperate mission for groceries, and was sufficiently addled by the heat that all I could manage to buy was three kinds of fruit juice.

I blame NASCAR.

Little Man From Another Place

2005-12-30T12:52:00.000+11:00

Watched Good Night and Good Luck the other day, and recommend it: it's a viscerally unsettling portrait of a nightmare America, not so far removed from the comfortable banalities of the present day, one in which Leland fucking Palmer is reading the eleven o'clock news.

Seriously, I think this is why we haven't seen Ray Wise around more often in the last fifteen years - although after checking out his IMDB page, I'm definitely excited for Cyxork 7: The Final Cyxorkening - it's completely impossible to see him and not be creeped out. He's not in GN&GL very much, but whenever he's on camera it suddenly feels like a horror movie. ("Senator McCarthy, you're going back to Missoula, Montana!") Ray Wise exudes hopelessness from every pore. Each of his smiles is a terrifying rictus. And something is always up with his hairpiece, possibly owing to manipulation by dark forces. This man absolutely needs to be given a sitcom, and his sitcom needs to have a very intrusive laugh track and kitschy theme music by Angelo Badalamenti.

Christmas Declares War On My Liver

2005-12-24T21:22:00.000+11:00

Last year was the first time I hadn't made it back from points abroad to spend Christmas with the family in England. I felt a bit maudlin and sentimental about it, and I expected to feel something similar this year, only worse - after all, last year I was surrounded by friends and loved ones, and now I'm sitting on my balcony, on the other side of the world, drinking tea by myself like the grumpy old bastard I am rapidly becoming. And yet I don't feel the least bit maudlin, I think because Christmas in this stifling heat is entirely different from Christmas in drizzle and damp and doesn't have the same set of emotional associations at all. On that basis, I think I might prefer this version.

Anyway, cloying holiday sentiments have also been driven from my body by that reliable old stalwart: a real bastard of a hangover. Last night was the final reckoning for the world-class pizzeria across the street from me, and for some reason that led to a morose liquor-fuelled attempt to figure out how it is that I have developed this Vibrating Death Palm technique that only works on Italian restaurants. (The owner accepted my apology gracefully, although he did look slightly nonplussed.) I am supposed to be in Annandale watching some cow-punk act play sped-up carols and, I am forced to presume, cover Slade, but I've been operating at forty percent all day and I just can't bring myself to do it. Balcony, books, occasional fireworks detonating in the distance, and the prospect of the beach tomorrow will do very nicely. Compliments of the season to all.

Dance, Monkey!

2005-12-20T20:38:00.000+11:00

So, I blathered:

[Peter Jackson is] the perfect guy to put in charge of a blockbuster: no matter how enormous the production gets, you can be assured that he's gotten the script as tight as possible and then spent just ridiculous amounts of time worrying over the exact type of chainmail the orcs are wearing, specific gross-out effects shots, etc...

Um, it's generally a good idea to watch the thing before making such bold statements. Specifically, the statement in bold, because it's completely untrue in this case. Now Jackson has made his name with a trilogy of famously overlong films, maybe they're just going to keep getting longer and longer - he's paid his dues, and who's going to fucking stop him?

Anyway, so the damn ape movie could be trimmed by half an hour and lose nothing at all. I am a bastard of an editor - except with my own stuff, obviously - and I reckon I could double that, albeit at the cost of some suspense. A lot of the secondary characters are just completely unnecessary, and so (though it pains me to say it) is Adrien Brody - especially since his character already inexplicably morphs from Geeky Playwright to Impossibly Daring Swashbuckler whenever one is called for. Jack Black carries the first hour or so, practically singlehandedly, through some pretty rushed exposition and some dialogue that clanks more than it should. Naomi Watts looks a bit lost in the early going, but more than makes up for it once the ape shows up and she has to start doing emotional scenes with a special effect.

Speaking of which, it works. I was worried at first - all the CGI involving boats is frayed around the edges, the dinosaurs (hey, when isn't it a good time for dinosaurs?) look a bit creaky - but that may have all been the equivalent of the first shot of Team America, an attempt to fake us out. The best stretches of the film are actually the ones with little or no dialogue at all, and I don't just mean that as a comment on the quality of the dialogue - the action sequences in the middle are on a par with anything I've ever seen. Also, the entire final act in New York is marvellous, except for those nagging "why does Adrien Brody's character exist?" moments.

Perhaps worth noting: Andy Serkis does double duty as Kong and one of the otherwise superfluous secondary characters, which is a nice touch. The only other film I can think of with him in the flesh, as it were, is Topsy-Turvy. (By the way, he has to win some kind of award for this. Has to. I know a digital effect isn't technically a Supporting Actor, but still.)

Addicted To Love!

2005-12-19T12:48:00.000+11:00

So, this just made my afternoon.

Alas, if you're actually paying attention to what you're reading, you probably won't experience the thrill of discovery that I did - the headline kind of gives the twist away. I thought I was skimming some piece of nonsense about how smoking in movies is a terrible social ill, innocently grumbling to myself, and then suddenly... well, I snarfed my coffee somewhere around the line

That's performing a good public service. But let's take this humanitarian impulse one step further. We would suggest that ABC News take on another dangerous practice — homosexuality.

Now, that's the kind of segue you just don't see very often anymore! It's even better if you imagine it delivered a la Will Ferrell in Anchorman.

The practice shows the dangerous and addictive nature of the homosexual lifestyle. As if it wasn't bad enough that the homosexual men are HIV-positive, they simply cannot stop having sex with other men. So they are still having sex, this time with other HIV-positive men... It appears that the homosexual lifestyle is as addictive as smoking.

I am reasonably certain that this wasn't intended as a joke.

Irvine Welsh Doesn't Make For Feel-Good Confetti

2005-12-19T01:24:00.000+11:00

Welcome to Blog - misidentified as "Bush" in the links below because it's a URL that simply deserves attention - points to some misty water-colo(u)red memories of last Christmas. Thanks to his conscientiousness, I still have the remnants of Irvine Welsh's Porno, post-shotgunning, in a Ziploc bag. It reads much better that way, although we declined to deploy the results at the actual wedding.

The Week's #1 Scare-Quoting

2005-12-19T00:47:00.000+11:00

This sounds like an interesting show.

Time and again the more socially useful innovations - those that you might think in themselves would benefit large numbers of people are roughly dismissed by the dragons [see link for context - Z], while the ideas and inventions which succeed in attracting investment are usually relatively pointless ones in the bigger scheme of things... The fact is that these people are, fundamentally, worthless. I suppose I like it that the show confirms all my prejudices about the types of people who 'succeed' in business.

The author is, of course, free to invest in any socially useful innovation he sees fit, although such a course of action might be, like, selling out. Goddamn that 'success', anyhow - it truly is the second-worst thing out there.

In Other News, Dilbert Is Still Going

2005-12-17T01:47:00.000+11:00

I haven't been paying that much attention to this blog popularity contest that concluded recently. Every so often, a finalist would mention it, everyone involved would feel slightly awkward, I'd vote for them if I could be bothered, and that was that. I had naively assumed that Achewood would effectively be running unopposed in the "best humor blog" category, but apparently this was not so. It seems that I have not been paying enough attention to the world's "humor blogs", and that there actually are some other than Hutton (who apparently wasn't nominated). Now I have some catching up to do. Why not start with the 2005 Best Humor/Comics Blog?

In short, it's great stuff, but a bit refined for my taste. For instance, scattered amongst a large number of posts urging people to vote for them in the aforementioned contest, we find the

Anatomically Correct Ann Coulter Action Figure

Now, maybe I've been out of the fray for too long, but this one is sailing over my head. I certainly can't recall any occasions upon which jokes have been made about Ann Coulter, nor do any obvious jokes that might be made in such a context spring to mind. But wait! There's something in smaller type!

"Flaccid" model shown. Erection sold separately.

Still drawing a blank here, sorry. Oh, wait! But surely they couldn't mean... that? And yet, upon closer inspection, the Barbie doll has a distinctly phallic bulge on display. Scandalous! My political and sexual confusion was only eased (and even then, for how long?) by this thoughtful sidebar:

This is political satire. Everything posted here should be understood in that context.

Ah! Satire. Now I get it. Thanks.

Man Elected By Australians Optimistic About Australian Character

2005-12-16T12:40:00.000+11:00

Some controversy over John Howard (or, as he is sometimes known, HoWARd - zing!) having said this:

I do not accept that there is underlying racism in this country. I have always taken a more optimistic view of the character of the Australian people. I do not believe Australians are racist.

I don't think the linked post is bad, although I think treating the Cronulla riot as primarily an outbreak of white racism is missing the point. To quibble, though: if this is an "abnegation of leadership", are we to presume that a statement indicating the opposite would have been an improvement? Public statements by leaders of nations are typically not a good place for introspection.

The statement "I do not believe Australians are racist" can be construed as a refusal to acknowledge that any Australians are racist, but I think that's a hell of a stretch, one that would only be undertaken by someone who has already decided to put the worst possible spin on anything coming from Howard's direction. Better to say that this kind of statement is a challenge, an expression of faith, a thing to be lived up to. (Easy for me to say, of course, as I'm not an Australian.)

Negative Stereotyping Of Jack Black Not Decried

2005-12-16T11:10:00.000+11:00

As a card-carrying Peter Jackson geek, I try to keep an eye out for articles like this. Good times all around, especially the last line - am I the only one who finds it in questionable taste to compare the characters of King Kong and Othello? - and an always-welcome excuse to link to this.

(What I love about Jackson as a director, by the way, is his pathological attention to detail. He's the perfect guy to put in charge of a blockbuster: no matter how enormous the production gets, you can be assured that he's gotten the script as tight as possible and then spent just ridiculous amounts of time worrying over the exact type of chainmail the orcs are wearing, specific gross-out effects shots, etc, with the results that his films are always amazingly unified spectacles - he may not be fantastic with actors, but he knows exactly what he wants to put on the screen and he's technically ingenious enough to find effective ways of putting it there. If he wasn't making films, you have to think he'd have the world's most intricate model railway in his basement. In anyone else's hands - except possibly Sam Raimi's - a Tolkein adaptation would have been a massively overlong trawl through endless incoherent battle scenes and quasi-mystical nonsense: Jackson made it a slightly overlong trawl through etc. He's wonderful. If he'd been given the reins on the Harry Potter franchise, it might have actually not sucked.)

Terra Cronullius

2005-12-14T12:56:00.000+11:00

A news cycle has passed. Now, let the wanking commence.

"Examination of root causes" has - justifiably, in my view - been mercilessly lampooned by right-leaning types in recent years. 9/11, the London bombings, the riots in France, etc, all have provoked frantic introspection from their left-leaning counterparts. Except in the hands of a very good writer, this kind of frantic introspection can easily devolve into outright apologetics, tasteless hand-wringing, and miscellaneous appalling bollocks. Post-Sydney riot, I think it would be a mistake to go down this road. Yes, the riot didn't happen in a vacuum. No, a bunch of Lebanese thugs terrorizing a neighborhood does not in any sense justify a group of non-Lebanese thugs attacking random - to use the media nomenclature - "people of Middle Eastern appearence".

On the other hand, a lot of the "nuanced" analysis has been particularly bad and shows no sign of getting better. I get that writers like the guy I picked at random to link to above don't want to seem to be singling out immigrants, or anything like that. I get that white journalists understandably feel more comfortable picking targets that don't leave them open to charges of white supremacy. But doing what's comfortable isn't the same thing as doing what's correct, and a professional writer should be able to clearly distinguish between describing the actions of people who belong to a particular ethnic/religious group (be they Lebanese street thugs or white beach vigilantes) and condemning everyone from that group. Apart from the fact that it's basically ego-driven, this journalistic hypersensitivity reinforces divisions between ethnic groups (make no mistake, in a liberal society with a free media, to be considered beyond criticism is to be excluded from an important part of the public discourse) and leads to stuff like this:

...most of the 10,000 who gathered on the Cronulla foreshore had been unconsciously affected by the stream of negative stories from the Middle East and Bali. It coloured their own experiences of seeing young Lebanese Australians daring to treat their beach like they owned it.

"Daring to treat the beach like they owned it" is, in this context, a marvellously sensitive euphemism. "Threatening to rape women on the beach" might have changed the sense of the paragraph somewhat, as well as adding a dash of that extra reportorial je ne sais quoi. There are serious and ongoing gang problems underlying this story, which the writer linked above completely ignores in his haste to interview gender studies faculty at the University of Sydney. For bonus points, see if you can guess what the gender studies lecturer has to say on the subject.

And then there are the people on (for want of a better word) the right who seem determined to treat the aforementioned Lebanese street thugs as somehow representative of Islam, complete with mocking references to "the religion of peace" and so forth. This is a meme that I find distressing: it's every bit as stupid as declaring (and God knows there have been a lot of people declaring it) that a bunch of flag-waving white guys attacking random non-white folks at the beach are somehow representative of the rest of the damn country.

Internet Still Not A Haven Of Rationality

2005-12-13T11:49:00.000+11:00

I'll have more to say about the sudden Clockwork Orange-ness of Sydney later, but for now let me just observe that Sydney Craigslist is finally beginning to kick off.

I don't think many Sydney folk know about Craigslist; it's usually just populated by whining Americans and semi-literate Brits trying to pick a fight. This disappoints me; I was in the US just after Hurricane Katrina, and Craigslist Rants & Raves was, even more so than usual, a fascinating glimpse of the very worst aspects of the nation's id. At time of writing, all this nonsense in Sydney has generated a whopping nine posts, most of which also look to be from whining Americans and semi-literate Brits, but at least it's a start. And look! Someone's even posted an article from those zany racists at VDare! I feel quite nostalgic.

Assembled Douchebags: "Keep Our Sand White!"

2005-12-12T13:46:00.000+11:00

Interesting weekend to be at the beach.

Now, I'm not a very adventurous beachgoer. There's a direct bus from the end of my street to Coogee, and the ride across the harbour to Manly is gorgeous; that'll do nicely. As far as I'm concerned "Cronulla" is just a minor Dr. Who villain circa 1970. So, when this punch-up was forecast by someone at our table at the Coogee Bay Hotel on Saturday night, I may have underestimated the import, said something terribly witty about Quadrophenia, and gone about my evening. After seeing all the apocalyptic "race riot" headlines in the Herald, I felt slightly chastened. In the spirit of learning and humility, then, here are some lessons to be drawn from the whole mess:

Quadrophenia still has untapped comedy potential after all these years.

The dominant race, whatever it may be, disdains punctuation. Apostrophes, in particular, are a clear sign of racial inferiority.

The word "capsicum" is an Australian substitute for "pepper" even in non-culinary settings: witness "capsicum spray" in the SMH link.

There's nothing you can't protest by throwing rocks at the police.

Bridge And Tunnel Crowd Triumphant

2005-12-07T12:42:00.000+11:00

A clearly bitter Tim Blair points out the finest in Australian blogdom.

(I actually think this might be the best blog in Australia. Perhaps a bit political for the judges' taste, though.)

"We Got The Results Back From The Lab, And We Think We Know What The Problem Is"

2005-12-04T10:15:00.001+11:00

Dan has an excellent excuse - really, a series of excellent excuses - for his recent absence. Myself, I don't. The only thing that has seriously distracted me this week is the discovery that I live directly across the street from a really good pizzeria, but it's not like I've never eaten pizza with one hand while typing with the other before.

(As a general observation, I wasn't expecting to find outrageously good Italian food in Australia. And yet, there it is. Innovations are even being pursued: after visiting one neighborhood restaurant enough times in one week to develop a rapport with the diminutive lunatic of an owner, he offered me a seafood dish of his own design. Its most prominent feature was, in some ways, a thick cream sauce and yet, in other crucial ways, a curry. Alas, the restaurant went out of business a few days later.)

The Pot Of Gold At The End Of The Tunnel Of Mixed Metaphors

2005-11-24T10:54:00.000+11:00

I always found Thanksgiving a slightly odd holiday; an awkward trial run for Christmas and a transparent excuse for taking a five-day weekend. On the other hand, viewed as such, it's at least unpretentious and makes perfect sense in the modern world. This is something that cannot be said for, say, Guy Fawkes' Night. Guy Fawkes' Night struck me as the most natural thing in the world until I actually tried to explain it to quizzical Americans: "Well, yes, now that you mention it, I suppose we are burning the guy in effigy, but it's not done, uh, maliciously." (I still maintain, however, that having the nation's premier fireworks-related holiday in November makes much more sense than having it in July.)

One thing that must be said for Thanksgiving, though: I don't think I ever had a conversation with an American - Americans I knew well, Americans I knew in passing, Americans I happened to be passing on the street - in the two weeks leading up to it without being invited to eat with their family. The culture-wide determination that transient grad students not miss out on the victuals was really rather touching.

And rather than actually being thankful for anything, I always cop out and start compulsively emailing people this at around this time. Happy Thanksgiving, all.

From The Trenches Of Fashion, November 2005

2005-11-23T08:46:00.000+11:00

Bruises are not in this season. Facial hair remains inadvisable. Lapel adornments are also a no-no. But most of all, avoid yellow.

Hipsters & Grandmothers Weekend Social

2005-11-19T14:49:00.000+11:00

I'm a fan of Pitchfork. There aren't enough media outlets willing to write suitably biting reviews of things. (Not that that's all Pitchfork does, but they are at least willing to put the boot in occasionally.) I've virtually given up on most music journalism because of the dearth of outraged partisans who hate ninety-five percent of new releases. If you're reviewing an album, and you think it's mediocre, be as harsh as possible. It's more entertaining to read, and to properly say why you hate something you have to describe it well enough that the review will at least be informative - as opposed to the anodyne crap they print in the likes of Rolling Stone - even to someone who really likes the thing you're reviewing.

Case in point: this rather well-done review of Lambchop's Nixon, a record which is one of my favorite things ever. I completely disagree with the conclusion - basically "This band blows because my grandmother prefers to listen to the Pixies" - and poor mumbling old Kurt Wagner takes some shots for his interesting deployment of falsetto, but I enjoyed the review very much. I would have liked it better if it hadn't been so respectful.

One comment, though:

But while it's hard to imagine hating Lambchop, it's also hard to believe they could be anyone's favorite band.

I'm up on the seventh floor with the windows open, Victoria Park spread out below me and the city beyond it, "Up With People" playing as loud as possible, Wagner is mumbling something about "a welfare state of the soul", and to that assertion I say: Nonsense.

Week Of Banal Realizations

2005-11-19T10:20:00.000+11:00

...the least meaningless of them being: if you don't go to tae kwon do training for a few months - perhaps on account of moving to a new country, or something - and then you suddenly start again, every single tendon in your body is going to let you know about it. Particularly, TKD emphasizing as it does the kicking of things, the ones in your legs. I'm currently walking like a man with a dark secret in a Western. Small children gaze up in awe and incomprehension as I hobble around the neighborhood. Local merchants give me discounts and ask me for my folksy wisdom on various matters, but all the folksy wisdom I can generally muster is "It hurts! It hurts!" so in due course they raise the prices again.

Like The Rules For The New York School

2005-11-17T22:41:00.000+11:00

Apologies for absence; I've been belly up to the bar of the Nag's Head, in St. John's Road, trawling the collected Kenneth Koch.

Community outreach is not being neglected. While perched in a corner, trying to keep a straight face and drink my bodyweight in awful domestic lager, an attractive young barmaid came over and expressed curiosity as to what I was reading. I said something mealy-mouthed about poetry. An hour or so later she reapproached and asked to see it. Against my better judgment I showed her some of the juicier passages from The Art of Love, which I'm (as of today) convinced is one of the best love poems ever written. It's an extremely long litany of boisterous advice from the distressingly goat-like Koch, with lots of surreal interludes about hippos fucking and attempts to make the reader buy other products of his from The optimistically named Shop of Love. It starts out innocently enough, with

To win the love of women one should first discover
What sort of thing is likely to move them, what feelings
They are most delighted with their lives to have; then
One should find these things and cause these feelings...

which is unobjectionable - in fact, admirably pragmatic - and inspires the casual service-industry employee to read further. Unfortunately, most of the ensuing advice consists of progressively bizarre BDSM metaphors; the barmaid happened upon

To make your girl into an airplane, ask her to lie down on a large piece of canvas
Which you have stretched out and nailed to a thin sheet of aluminum, or, if you are economizing, of balsa wood [it continues in this vein for quite a while]
...Carry her to the airport, or to any convenient field,
And put her on the ground. Ask her to "take off!" If she does, you have lost a good mistress...

but really, there are many parts that probably would have gotten me 86'd outright. As it was, she just giggled nervously post-perusal and had a co-worker cover my part of the bar for the remainder of the evening. Another job well done, poetry!

Mission Creep Sets In

2005-11-13T11:54:00.000+11:00

The scary thing is that, as a football fan, I don't even find this policy suggestion terribly unreasonable. After all, the facility is there, right? Got to use it for something. Think of it as a variant on the "broken windows" theory - if someone is prepared to subvert or preempt the broadcast of SEC games in the month of November, their Hatred of Freedom likely runs deep and will presumably manifest itself in even more disturbing ways if they are not dealt with in time. Off to Gitmo!

Geneva Convention Not Applied To Pets

2005-11-13T09:16:00.000+11:00

Thus Hutton:

Our allies consider it good sport to shoot the poor beasts [that is, dogs in barrels]. That's so easy it's like shooting dogs in a barrel, they say. Which just shows the total hypocrisy of the Bush regime: they lecture the rest of us on human rights, then roar with sadistic laughter as they shoot dogs in barrels.

And Bush:

In June, the House of Representatives voted for a constitutional amendment to ban flag desecration. I urge the United States Senate to pass this important amendment...

Dodging the issues once again, Mr. President.

This is bad news for the recently blogging Atkinson dogs. Unlike fish, though, they at least have a sporting chance of tipping the barrel over.

The Flying Spaghetti Monster Cometh

2005-11-10T08:38:00.000+11:00

Oh, Kansas. What is to be done? The expression "vote with your feet", in this context, would usually mean to move away from that school district. Here, though, I think people should find the relevant members of the school board and kick them.

Not sure how I feel about the lawsuit Althouse alludes to, though. It's not necessary (or, for that matter, sufficient) to oppose ID on the grounds that it's religious or inspired by religion; all one needs is the fact that it's really, really stupid. Suppose we take the theory at its word - then what? Well, we're done. Any remaining mysteries of science can just be chalked up to the inscrutable whim of the Designer, and we can all go and play quoits. Either that, or the job of the biologist would become that of trying to divine the Designer's intentions, which would be hilarious. Many great works of science have been inspired by devout religious faith; unfortunately, so have many attempts to explain winter as the Sun God being displeased with us. This falls into the latter category.

Paragraph-Length Double Standard Exhibited

2005-11-09T08:11:00.000+11:00

ESPN's intermittently non-sucking Page 2 feature hires Chuck Klosterman, whose previous sportswriting experience seems to consist of being interviewed by Bill Simmons. Is this a good thing? Yes, this is a very good thing. Here's why:

You see, Brett Favre would not have been on that sex boat. I know this. I know this because BRETT FAVRE JUST LIKES TO PLAY THE GAME. BRETT FAVRE JUST WANTS TO GO OUT THERE AND THROW THE OLD PIGSKIN AROUND THE OLD BACKYARD. AND YOU KNOW, SOMETIMES BRETT FAVRE HURTS YOU, BECAUSE BRETT FAVRE TAKES A LOT OF RISKS. HE'S A RIVERBOAT GAMBLER! BUT YOU CAN NEVER FAULT BRETT FAVRE, BECAUSE BRETT FAVRE LOVES TO PLAY THE GAME. BRETT FAVRE WOULD PLAY FOR FREE. IN FACT, IF THERE WERE NO OTHER OPTION, BRETT FAVRE WOULD TAKE OUT A SMALL BUSINESS LOAN FROM A LOCALLY OWNED BANKING INSTITUTION AND PAY THE NFL FOR THE OPPORTUNITY TO THROW THE FOOTBALL TO THE LIKES OF DONALD DRIVER, BECAUSE BRETT FAVRE EMBODIES A DYING MYTHOLOGY WHICH SUGGESTS THAT THE ICONS OF A SOCIETY CAN REPRESENT (AND AT TIMES TRANSCEND) THE HIGHEST VALUES OF THAT SOCIETY IN A WHOLLY ALTRUISTIC CONTEXT. DO YOU NOT REALIZE THAT BRETT FAVRE LOVES TO PLAY THE GAME? WELL, HE VERY MUCH DOES.

That's pretty much what I imagine it would be like if the Fametracker people did a sports column. And it has paragraphs, actual paragraphs which are longer than two sentences! (Which is more than can be said for most of what I write, but it's, uh, an inherently more staccato idiom.)

Nothing Explodes For The Time Being

2005-11-08T23:53:00.000+11:00

Thoughts upon hearing about today's wave of arrests: Did they just roust a bunch of people at random? Shortly followed by: Wow, I'm glad nothing in the city exploded. Followed by: well, even if they did arrest a bunch of random people, at least no tourists were inexplicably shot on trains.

One other feature of the story linked above, that I actually find reassuring, is all the references to courts hearing things, and documentary evidence being presented, and whatnot - over two hundred hours of phone transcripts, etc. This is not something that one tends to hear in US reports on similar cases. Don't get me wrong: I'm on balance inclined to believe that (for instance) Jose Padilla probably was on the verge of doing something awful in Chicago, but it would be nice if the system could still have a couple of, you know, checks and balances written into it, just on the off-chance that if someone were to be arrested erroneously - not that that would ever happen! - there might be a chance of it being noticed.

Diplomatic Incident Narrowly Averted

2005-11-08T22:07:00.000+11:00

Thanks to those who have expressed interest in my new crime-fighting persona. It has been surprisingly successful; yesterday I thwarted six muggings and ate several donuts.

Unfortunately, then this happened. Needless to say, down at the station the kimono didn't help matters much.

Gambits Of Men Named Ray

2005-11-07T23:09:00.000+11:00

I think it was Raymond Chandler who once described the art of plotting as "when you run out of ideas, have a man come through the door with a gun." It works, too.

Actually, come to think, was it Chandler? It might have been Raymond Carver. If so, that would indicate that Carver never once ran out of ideas, which is impressive. Let us now salute Raymond Carver.

Whichever it was, though, all these years later Onstad may have come up with a variant that applies to an even greater number of situations: when in doubt have Raymond Smuckles do this.

With Great Power Comes Great Responsibility And A Kimono

2005-11-05T23:51:00.000+11:00

I've never been very convinced that an overabundance of choice is one of the bad features of decadent Western consumerism. I recall the heart-rending and possibly apocryphal tale of some professor or other, transfixed in the breakfast cereal aisle of a supermarket, utterly unable to meaningfully distinguish between the brands. In the distance, the problem is only exacerbated by the presence of five million other products, most in a number of subtly diffent forms, and some in economy sizes. (Can't be bothered to find link to someone seriously advancing argument. Too sleepy.)

The main reason this has always sounded unconvincing to me is that the professor in the story isn't doing anything to shape his own existence: all he can do is complain about the immodest variety of processed cheese slices, rather than taking affirmative steps to masochistically limit the choices available to him. Only permit yourself to eat muesli! Become a lipogrammatical consumer! Pretend you're only allowed to shop in the frozen-food aisle! Nobody's stopping you!

Or so I would have said. Lately, though, I too am becoming alarmed. You see, the fruits of my slack-jawed wandering, when carried upstairs and laid out in the cold light of the kitchen, are beginning to make less sense than I would like. Today I made it home with a dozen cinnamon donuts, a bread knife, and a kimono. I'm worried that the invisible hand of the market is trying to nudge me towards becoming a really bad superhero.

"Like A Good Lap Dance, It's Unavailable In Seattle"

2005-11-05T10:07:00.000+11:00

The stats gurus at Football Outsiders, drunk on the success of their various metrics, have moved on to the intangibles. Gambling will never be the same again.

For some reason, NFL coverage is rarely funny. This in contrast to the NBA, which occasionally seems to be an enormous joke that the players are all in on. (Fifteen million dollars for Brian Scalabrine, "Tremendous Upside Potential", the ontological fact of Ron Artest, etc, etc.) For a sport that is inherently ridiculous in many ways, this is a shame.

Gaddis: Fly

2005-11-04T23:27:00.000+11:00

In real life, I will occasionally blather about William Gaddis. I shouldn't, because I've never finished either of his most significant novels. Five years ago I made it halfway through The Recognitions before being distracted, leaving it for a couple of weeks, losing the thread completely, and deciding that plowing onwards for the sake of being able to say I'd finished it would be cheating. JR likewise, only two years ago and not so far. One of these decades, Bill.

But The Recognitions is special, and I've recently come back to it, determined to lash myself to the mast beforehand. Fortunately, there are reader's guides and volumes of annotations to do the lashing with. But why bother? I opened the book up thinking there was a reasonable chance I was being masochistic in that status-conscious and Serious-Novel way that Tom Wolfe is always complaining about. A couple of pages in, I remembered why:

There was the cell where Fr. Eulalio, a thriving lunatic of eighty-six who was castigating himself for unchristian pride at having all the vowels in his name, and greatly revered for his continuous weeping, went blind in ecstacy of such howling proportions that his canonization was assured. He was surnamed Epiclantos, "weeping so much," and the quicklime he had been rubbing into his eyes was put back into the garden where it belonged.

That's a throwaway aside (I assume) and it gives me chills. There are enough sentence-pairs that do to actually make it seem potentially worthwhile to look up the obscure references - and God knows there are a lot - in the hope that there will be something fantastic and witty encoded underneath all the classical allusions. This is something I could never bring myself to do with Ulysses - which just seems to demand it a little too much - and I'm not convinced it's actually a good way of enjoying a book, as opposed to dissecting it. But The Recognitions is special. Although, for all I know, the ending fucking sucks.

Pervert's Capacity For Happiness Further Begrudged

2005-11-04T17:57:00.000+11:00

This is very, very cool.

(Via Radley Balko.)

UPDATE: I'm not trying to insinuate that Radley Balko is a pervert. It's... never mind.

More "Honeyed Words Of Deceitful Capitalism"

2005-11-04T16:31:00.000+11:00

A historic anniversary approaches and is remarked by the Australian Communist Party, which must be a very interesting organization.

When imperialism enlisted fascism as the means of destroying this new [Soviet] society, the people rallied to the defence of Soviet Russia. The Russian people made colossal sacrifices to win a titanic struggle against Nazi Germany. In the process, they saved the rest of the world as well and proved the superiority of the socialist system, for a capitalist Russia could never have done it.

Actually, this is an interesting point. Twenty-three million Russians are reckoned killed in WW2, and the soldiers of the Red Army were deployed with, if anything, even less regard for their survival than their Western counterparts in the good old Somme days of "climb out of trench, run towards machine-gun emplacement waving stick". It's possible that a non-totalitarian Russia wouldn't have been able to bear the godawful number of casualties sustained while beating back the Nazis; it's also possible that a system with more invested in the survival of the people (as opposed to the People) wouldn't have sustained said godawful number of casualties. Either way: I'm not sure that the superiority of the system is demonstrated very well by its withstanding a godawful number of casualties.

(The author firmly believes that it's never a bad time to boost your Google ranking for the phrase "godawful number of casualties".)

Last Post On The Topic

2005-11-04T10:37:00.000+11:00

The history at the end of the last post includes, under authors' names, links to their Suck output. It's all good stuff, but I have to recommend Chris Bray's work in particular. This, to pick at random, is excellent, as well as absolutely anything on the list with a military-sounding title. He is also the man who forever ruined J.D. Salinger for me, something for which I suppose I am grateful.

Post-Suck, he would occasionally surface in other outlets, mostly in order to rip Victor Davis Hanson a new orifice. As far as I can figure, he's currently in UCLA's History graduate program, blogging here with some compadres, and was recently (gulp) called back up. There's going to be - there may already be - a glut of soldier's memoirs on the market in the years to come, but someone should offer Bray a large sum of money for one regardless.

A Great Sucking Sound

2005-11-03T21:57:00.000+11:00

When I read this sort of thing, I think fondly of Suck, where it would have been a full-blown essay.

I read Suck obsessively for its last couple of years, and was genuinely pissed when it went under; how could this enterprise, which had generated precisely zero revenue - although I may have clicked on an ad once - from a reasonably faithful reader like me, not be stacking up the cash? After a while, though, as weblogs began metastatizing across the land, the Reason web presence began to exhibit many Suck-like features. (Italics important in that clause.) The magazine's editor (the linked-above Gillespie) and online editor (Tim Cavanaugh) are both prominent Suck alums, and the blog title Hit & Run was also the name of Suck's Thursday column of quick snarks. The name sets the tone: the majority of Hit & Run contributors who are non-Suck-affiliated still, on this form, would have fit right in. It's cohesive enough to conjure up an entirely unlikely image of them all sitting around some updated Algonquin table, complaining about smoking bans. And that (to finally get to the point) is what set me to Googling up this quote, which is something I'd often thought but never adequately expressed:

...one of the most important things you can do is create this illusion of an ‘in crowd’ that you’re not in on. And it really does work, right? The ideal for a magazine would be like Mad’s usual gang of idiots, where you have this sense that there’s this really wacky crew all getting together to come up with these really great ideas. You really want to be part of that, you feel like you’re on the outside looking in on that.

Quote is Cavanaugh, the idea he ascribes to Heather Havrilesky, taken from this excellent history of Suck. (Even as an obsessive Suck fan, I will concede that it may be a tad on the long side.)

Late Twentieth Century Joined

2005-11-02T20:52:00.000+11:00

Oh, sweet nectar of life. My ADSL modem has finally arrived, having apparently been shipped from China the long way round. It even works. The combination of the balcony, the ADSL modem, and the makeshift bar I have constructed alongside it is a thing of beauty. Now, watch my spelling go to shit and wait for me to accidentally drop my laptop onto the street down below and be sued by a jogger.

This paradigm shift also means that, while I would ordinarily be paying far too much attention to all this Supreme Court business - because watching people who are not lawyers argue about judicial nominations is, for some reason, a compulsive behaviour for me - I have to consider my priorities anew, and dust off some of those hard-won time-management skills. From now on it's all pornography, all the time.

(Well, with maybe a five-minute stop at the Blogometer to see if the world has ended, and another five minutes cursing and wishing I'd thought of "Alito's Way" first. Then, pornography.)

Thanks, Internet!

2005-10-29T13:01:00.000+10:00

Here are just a few of the things that I had to restrain myself from shouting in the middle of my bizarre goal-setting meeting earlier this week. Not sure which would have been worse in the long run.

Punch in your weightclass, you backwards ass mountain man.

Ka-boom! Here we come! Whose woman parts are next?

Duodecimal duodecimal duodecimal. (Repeat endlessly.)

Academia is not well-suited to management-speak. The gaily coloured form, with its columns for "Goals!" and "Action Items!" and "How will you know when you have made tangible progress towards your Goal?" ended up full of things like "Broaden area of knowledge", "Read things", and "Talk to collaborator". My subconscious sprang into action with rapid-fire edited highlights of all the euphonious phrases I've read during the past few days' idle blog inspection, and I began to chew on the sides of my tongue while making a "thinking" face.

No Vision, No Future, And No Ketchup

2005-10-28T16:03:00.001+10:00

I presume this was intended as a joke.

Look at the way we live now, in the west. We grow up in increasingly fragmented communities, hardly speaking to the people next door, and drive to work in our self-contained cars. We work in standardised offices and stop at the supermarket on our way home to buy production-line food which we eat without relish. There is no great misery, no hunger, and no war. But nor is there great passion or joy.

Dylan Evans is having a rough week, and it's the fault of liberal democracy. Perhaps he needs a change. He could go and talk to his next-door neighbours, perhaps, or find a job that interests him more than lecturing at the University of the West of England apparently does. Alas, his society is lacking a philosophical infrastructure that would enable him to do so. Instead he is forced by an uncaring system to write appalling nonsense like:

More, Campanella and Bacon all agree that everyone must work. When work is shared out between all members of society, Campanella calculates that each person will have to work no more than four hours a day. That would leave plenty of leisure time, as well as energy to use that time wisely by, Campanella suggests, attending lectures.

It's about time we got that sorted out. Only four hours a day if we all pitch in and help with each other's jobs? Good job, Tommaso Campanella. I'm glad this figure was "calculated" - as opposed to "pulled out of your ass" - otherwise I might doubt its real-world applicability.

The problem with the utopianism/consumerism binary is that Evans is wrong about the paucity of utopian thinkers. There are more of the bastards than ever. What he's actually complaining about is that there's no single utopian ideal to which we're all forced to subscribe. The beauty of consumerism - invisible to Evans as he drives his self-contained car home from his standardised office, munching on a production-line sandwich - is that everyone gets to have a shot at implementing their own utopian vision for themselves. Our success rate is every bit as dismal as the society-wide utopian thinkers', but at least we get to go to the bar in the evening instead of listening to lectures. (And besides, if he was already at the supermarket to pick up the production-line food, couldn't he have bought some relish as well? Even if you're trapped in a depraved consumerist wasteland, there's no need to deprive yourself of condiments.)

Possibly A Reference To The Utah Jazz?

2005-10-28T12:15:00.000+10:00

After disappearing into thin air with an enigmatic yet polite request to Bring [his] Cake Back, and just in time for the NBA season, it's the triumphant return of Billups. We can only hope that this will result in more season previews like this one.

On another note, reading the Blogger comment spam that plagues the non-Haloscanned among us, there is some absolutely unhinged niche marketing going on. At time of posting, the last comment on the "Please Bring My Cake Back" Billups post is for "white power small business consulting".

(No, Seriously)

2005-10-27T14:21:00.000+10:00

Goth suicide pact.

In Other News: Goth Suicide Pact

2005-10-27T10:26:00.000+10:00

It's interesting to contrast the local reportage on the Iraq imbroglio with the American news, since the papers over here are marginally less concerned with US electoral point-scoring. The press here seems to report the whole mess as a battle between an occupying military and a nationalistic insurgency fighting to remove said occupying force. Perhaps this is fair enough, but it strikes me as worth mentioning that the principal US policy goal relating to Iraq involves removing the military as soon as things stop exploding. If the goal of the insurgency is to get US/allied troops to leave Iraq, then it's the worst idea ever, since without an insurgency the US/allied troops would have left already. This leads one to suppose that this is not actually the goal of the insurgency, and that there is a bit of projection going on.

Meanwhile, another enjoyable feature of the local media is that crazy people with books to promote don't feel obliged to say that "of course I support the troops etc etc..." going instead with:

The defeat of America and its allies in Iraq is vital to ensure...

etc, etc.

Oh, well. Enough of this nonsense. Back to the novel.

A Non-Profit Organization, But Not For Want Of Trying

2005-10-26T13:01:00.000+10:00

Apparently, with this blog, and a buck fifty, I can buy a cup of coffee.

That's actually not as bad as it sounds because, um, coffee is very expensive in Australia. Besides, it's much easier to make a sincere pledge never to sell out if you're armed with the knowledge that nobody's buying.

Coulter Swallows Own Tail

2005-10-26T11:05:00.000+10:00

Well, this had to happen sooner or later:

They're always accusing us of repressing their speech. I say let's do it. Let's repress them... I'm not a big fan of the First Amendment.

Not to take Ann Coulter seriously, or anything like that, but I think this is a cry for help: she's bored of the shtick and now the best thing for her career would be for someone to lend her credibility by actually trying to shut her down. If she has to do it herself, though, it'd be amusingly similar to the time a shipment of Andrea Dworkin's books was destroyed at the Canadian border after falling foul of the draconian anti-speech laws Dworkin herself co-authored. Maybe there's a provision in McCain-Feingold that will save Coulter the effort, although I doubt her adoring public will cooperate:

She's a little raw, but I think she balances the left's Michael Moore.

Why the fuck does Michael Moore need balancing? Just let him fall over.

Australians, Australian Decried By Same

2005-10-24T15:29:00.000+10:00

I really don't understand what's going on here at all, but who cares? Fight! Fight!

This is how I deal with moments of brain death in the afternoon: randomly click around until I find a decent scuffle, then watch it unfold in slack-jawed wonderment. This one is also pretty mind-boggling, although some responsible moderator has been through and excised a lot of the most horrifying bits.

The Even Bigger Chill

2005-10-23T13:06:00.000+10:00

Most of the weekend has been spent carrying fridges around Bondi Junction and its environs. In amongst all the toing and froing of fridges, the plan was, I ended up with one of my own, since the people I was assisting had bought some number of fridges surplus to their requirements. It was not unlike a heist movie, only with less running and more swearing. Protagonists of heist movies would be well advised, in my opinion, to stick to diamonds and the like. A heist movie centered around a cunning double-cross involving multiple indistinguishable fridges would have to be about four hours long. Also, it's hard to come up with decent one-liners when you're halfway up a flight of stairs trying to keep from being crushed by a freezer compartment.

At such times, I could really do with a forty-two ounce margarita of doom. Alas, the original recipe is the other side of a large body of water. However, now I have a place to keep the fixin's appropriately chilled, and my apartment stands prepared to become a full-fledged margarita lab as the weather improves. It has been about five years since I have had enough space and privacy to set up a proper scientific cocktail facility, and I miss the little homelike touches that they provide. The bubbling flasks, the fluorescent liquids, the mysterious explosions in the dead of night - it doesn't seem right without them.

Ladies And Gentlemen, Your New UN Ambassador!

2005-10-19T18:26:00.000+10:00

I'm by no means an expert on Australian parliamentary procedure, but there do seem to be a few features that recur down the generations:

Mr Tripodi had been speaking in Parliament last night about the Pacific Highway when Mr Fraser lunged at him and grabbed him by the throat.

I travelled all the way around the world to be closer to stories like this, and it was worth every minute. Be sure not to miss the Hansard transcript; it actually reads rather like one of Harold Pinter's more recent poems:

I should have asked you about the 13 deaths. You tell us about the 13 deaths, you bloody clown! Get in here! Come in here and tell us about the 13 deaths.

Come to think, it's too metrical - it's more like one of those T.S. Eliot fragments where somebody's going on about dissolving women's bodies in bathtubs. A high point of modern politics, either way.

Guilt By National Basketball Association

2005-10-17T15:25:00.000+10:00

Who knew the Village Voice would turn out not to be big NASCAR fans?

Not all of America loves NASCAR. It's mostly those who live in the "red" swath of middle America, an area that includes the South and the Southwest and that helped elect George Bush last November.

NASCAR is incredibly tedious and I approve of anything that works to diminish its popularity, even equally tedious knee-jerk Village Voice pieces insinuating that fans of the sport are racists. Is there some way we can allege that they're child molesters, as well? I'm hoping this tactic will be the one that finally works for golf, as an increasing number of adolescent girls start turning pro.

As opposed to the NASCAR driver presented in 3 [Dale Earnhardt], a white man who leathers his hands working with tools and relying on his daring to earn victories, the American Sportsman/black athlete squanders his God-given talent and is loud-talking and brash. He is a millionaire whiner who complains about how inadequate is his pay (Latrell Sprewell), or who brawls with paying fans (Ron Artest). He is lascivious, perhaps even a rapist (Kobe Bryant). And there's reason to think he's a cheat (Barry Bonds).

I kind of get where he's going with this, but the trouble is that Spree is a millionaire whiner, Artest is a headcase, Bonds is, if not a juicer, a hard man to root for, and the less said about Kobe the better. The list of black American athletes who exemplify the virtues the writer spends much of the piece being snippy about - Donovan McNabb, Kevin Garnett, Dwyane Wade, Byron Leftwich, Priest Holmes, etc, etc - is a much longer one, but for some mysterious reason he doesn't get around to mentioning them.

In snarling defiance of a country that seems to have an endless supply of indistinguishable rugby variants (and don't get me started on cricket) I have also been keeping up with this.

Fuck an endowment, campus, thousands of alumni. . . this is between three people: the coach, his former star, and, uh, a large state university... Even if it makes absolutely no sense, he wants Cincinnati to face him like a man.

Good stuff from the always-entertaining Kenyon Martin. Now there's a fellow who could make NASCAR highlights worth watching.

High Finance For High People

2005-10-13T14:28:00.000+10:00

Penury beckons, as the very long number issued to me by my bank two weeks ago turns out to differ - subtly yet crucially - from the number they're actually using to keep track of my ducats. It seems that changing that final 0 to an 8 really fucks things up. The helpful young man who I've spent most of the afternoon waving my arms at in panic seemed quite proud of the system whereby customer account numbers never differ by just one or two digits - so my paycheck hasn't been credited to some undeserving person, it has just disappered into the ether. Not only did this not reassure me very much, it makes me think that this error-detecting property has made them complacent. One manifestation of this complacency is that now their new clients are apparently only being told approximately what their account numbers are.

Perhaps it's some kind of new security system. If so, it's working perfectly: no money in, no money out. Meanwhile, it seems I am going to be drinking wine in a box and panhandling for a little while longer.

Snoop Dogg Takes The Fifth

2005-10-12T10:24:00.000+10:00

What hath Scotch and soda wrought? This, for starters, courtesy of the ~~scintillating~~ superluminal Dan Atkinson.

If Bob Dylan (or, more likely, someone holding a grudge against Bob Dylan, possibly Big Joe Turner or one of his relatives) were currently looking for legal representation, I think this post establishes Atkinson's bona fides and expertise on the subject beyond dispute. Sadly, I don't think he is. One side or the other in the Leonard Cohen dispute, on the other hand, might very well be. I don't have the song to hand, but I suggest something along the lines of:

Leonard Cohen:
- has a secret life in a mirrored room.
- has run out of people to torture.
- has ordered his baby to lie beside him.
- has made a number of ancillary demands, including but not limited to crack, anal sex, the Berlin Wall, Stalin, St. Paul, and miscellaneous other historical figures, religious icons, and modes of Biblical knowing.
- is unfamiliar with the meaning of the word "repent".
- nevertheless claims to be the little Jew who wrote the Bible.
- has seen nations rise and fall.
- has listened to their stories most assiduously.
- has been instructed to say, clearly and coldy, that it's over.
- does not like children.

You:
- do not now, have not in the past, nor will ever know Leonard Cohen from the wind.
- are being beaten by the Devil with a riding crop.
- are about to have a packed social calendar.
- also do not like children.

Your woman:
- is about to be suspended in midair, upside down.

Things:
- will slide in all directions.
- will be unmeasurable.

The blizzard of the world:
- has crossed the threshold and overturned the order of the soul.

The hole in your culture:
- has a tree stuffed up it.

Wish I Was In Heaven Sitting Down (Slight Return)

2005-10-10T18:40:00.000+10:00

Sartre, or someone who might as well have been Sartre, once described Hell as perhaps nothing more than a room with a chair in it. After much inconvenience and brandishing of credit reports, I finally have this angle covered. Even better is the fact that, unlike some places I have set up shop in the past, there is nothing overtly Satanic about the chair, unless its being from Ikea counts. (Between the chair and the bed, I have four pieces of metal and six screws left over. Nothing is collapsing when I sit on it, and now I get to make a bonus collage!)

There you have it: the thrill ride that was my weekend. I have also discovered that there is an annual limit to the number of blogs I'm allowed to read in my office, a limit that I could quite easily exceed (and maybe already have) during the course of an average afternoon's procrastination. This means that the room will soon be a room with a chair and a wireless modem in it, and all the more hellish for that. Hell with nice views and a balcony, though, mind you. Got to have standards.

And If We Do, What's That Number We Dial Again?

2005-10-07T09:23:00.000+10:00

The U.Syd campus is home to a large number of motivated postering professionals. I was honestly intending to hit the "Marx and the Anarchists" discussion on Tuesday - the rubric implied that the purpose of the meeting was to unite, not divide, the two groups, and that had definite comedy potential - but the next one could be even better. Alongside a sinister musclebound silhouette of pig, in threatening posture, with truncheon raised, the question is posed:

DO WE NEED THE COPS?

I don't actually think you're the ones being asked, lads, but by all means consider the question.

It Certainly Seemed Like Multiple Mad Jacks Bradshaw To Me

2005-10-06T21:18:00.000+10:00

Speaking of goths, just saw the Nick Cave-penned Oz-western The Proposition. It's fine stuff - soulful Irish hero, venal, genocidal English villains, and all - the kind of film where you're surprised to learn, watching the credits roll, that there was only one character named "Mad Jack Bradshaw". It also does its bit to further raise the profile of the funny-looking and suddenly-ubiquitous Danny Huston, which I think is a good thing.

Curiously, there was a warning before the film that it might be offensive to viewers of Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander heritage. I'm not sure if this is something done regularly in Australia, or if I'm missing some serious point, but to display a warning aimed specifically at the delicate sensibilities of one section of the audience seems like a bit of a cruel spoof of PC. (On the other hand, in the cruel-spoof-of-PC stakes, I don't think there are any restrictions on the display of imagery associated with pigs over here.)

Still No Escape But The Tomb

2005-10-04T20:13:00.000+10:00

You can tell a lot about a city from its free alternative weeklies; they're like a seething vegan id. For instance:

This month Enmore's Gothic community reveals its dark heart with the Under The Blue Moon Festival Kicking off at 10 AM and running well into the witching hour this festival is designed to please everyone with well planned events catering to all ages and dress sensibilities. Through the day there are many worthy sights to behold including Goth pavement artists; Gothic kid's treasure hunt; LIVE Stonemason; Goth Artists' Exhibitions; Hair Design Display by Doppelganger; Goth Wheel of Misfortune and [newspaper torn in half and flung across room]

What I have learned, in this instance, is that I am not going to live in the district of Enmore. The electric thrills of live masonry might not quite make up for the other factors, shall we say.

Gutter Journalism Ain't What It Used To Be

2005-10-03T19:57:00.000+10:00

From the book of splendor alluded to below:

Cock-a-hoop with [winning a libel case, albeit with a total award of one farthing], Norton plunged into a great booze-up. For weeks he was in a state of helpless, hymn-bawling drunkenness. Truth was without an editor and the difficulties of its staff were aggravated by Norton's practice of lurching around the office with a revolver, firing off a few chambers when the caprice seized him... When Norton was officially told of his dismissal he was too drunk to understand what it was all about. The new editor had occupied the chair for more than a week before Norton sobered up sufficiently to realise he had been sacked. He took the sentence philosophically, even admitting to [owner of Truth, more or less] Crick that it was justified, but immediately took steps to frustrate it. He was still, by the original chicanery of the organisation, registered proprietor of Truth. He directed the Post Office to divert all its correspondence to him, and [hilarity ensues]

It's virtually all like this; chapter after chapter of blackmail, bribery, physical violence, and shockingly bad editorials set against a background of three or four distinct decades-long bilious feuds between the various principals, most of whom were elected members of Parliament in addition to being part-time media moguls. If you ever, anywhere in your travels, find a copy of this book I cannot recommend it highly enough. Most of the source materials are apparently archived here, so I'm going to pay a visit as soon as is convenient to pick up some pointers.

Slightly before the book's serialization in 1958, a descendent of the Norton in that excerpt attempted to sue the publisher for a kind of retroactive libel, using a freshly-minted Act of Parliament believed to have been drafted precisely for that purpose. It didn't quite work, but the law remained on the books. I hope it's not still there. I may be wrong, but I think even in England you can't libel the dead.

All That's Missing Is The Edible Da Vinci Code

2005-10-02T13:30:00.000+10:00

The apartment hunt goes not so well, so here's a new plan: camping out in the cavernous, desolate local history sections of area bookshops, of which there are a dizzying number. Copies of John Pilger's collected works will be burned for warmth; or, if warmth is not required, they will be burned on general principle. For a pillow, a copy of Cyril Pearl's wonderful Wild Men of Sydney, which will hopefully make me a better writer by osmosis:

The barrenness of the political scene [in Sydney in the 1890s] can be measured by the fact that Sir Henry Parkes still dominated it. A mature community would have soon wearied of the predatory, vain, and mediocre politican behind the Elder Statesman's aureloe of whiskers.

I'm not done with the book yet, but it's entirely possible that this is the nicest thing he's going to say about anyone in it. Australian politics seems to have been quite a lot of fun:

Violent behaviour and violent language [in Parliament] were condoned or scarcely rebuked; fights between members were not uncommon and the sight of a drunken statesman falling off his bench during a debate excited amusement rather than indignation.

This is a model to bring up the next time anyone starts wanking on about getting young people involved in politics.

In other news, I wish Sydney Craigslist wasn't so dead. I need someone to give me furniture, even if that means I have to start occupying some of the contemporary literature aisles.

Take Me Down To The Infirmary

2005-10-01T10:48:00.000+10:00

While wandering around downtown in an hours-long mission to be denied health coverage, I found myself in the middle of a giant parade of shirtless men painted red and white. A Sydney football team has apparently just won something or other for the first time in a while, and was being presented with the keys to the city. I am now in an ideal position to become a bandwagon fan. Go Swans, with your spectacularly un-macho name.

Speaking of healthcare, I've now been given three completely different and mutually contradictory reasons why the healthcare reciprocation treaty between Australia and the UK doesn't apply to me, two of which I know for a fact are bogus. I suspect they're making this shit up, and I'm going to keep calling the Melbourne office back until I get someone - perhaps a janitor - who won't say absolutely anything in order to get off the phone in under thirty seconds.

Oh, and I'm buying a digital camera as soon as I start getting paid, if only so I can post the view from my office window. It is, as Flog would say, a pisser.

The Right Man In The Right Place Two Months Late

2005-09-29T10:04:00.000+10:00

While sipping tea in the dark and skimming the morning papers with the aid of a novelty glowing keyring from a sports bar, I see that this person is no longer in need of a public relations consultant. (I can't do any better than Tim Blair's headline.)

I had been more or less counting on the job, but will turn my attention to the classifieds with a light heart. You have to expect certain setbacks. Although not, perhaps, the ones that befell Mr. Brogden.

Sydney Off Balance

2005-09-28T17:45:00.000+10:00

As Hutton arrives in the US, I depart, in order that the number of English people in said great republic remain constant. You (as a nation) have to be careful about this sort of thing, otherwise you wind up having to contend with the Minutemen.(Imagine me making a tired pun about the Revolutionary War or Mike Watt at this point, as I can't be bothered.) The number of English people in a country is one of those delicate karmic balances that you mess with at your peril.

Not that I'm going to go back when Hutton leaves, or anything; I don't particularly like to travel.

Anyway, there doesn't seem to be much point maintaining the rather flimsy "undisclosed location" affectation, especially since all I've been able to do for the past several months is bitch about how difficult it is to get rid of all my worldly possessions and move to Australia. I am, finally, there. The precise city must go unnamed, though... although there's a big harbour... and an opera house... oh, fuck it.

Aesthetics Of Disaster Relief

2005-09-17T06:12:00.000+10:00

Everyone is still shouting at everyone else about the inundation of New Orleans. To be sure, there's plenty of blame to go around: failures of local, state, and federal gov't in quick succession, etc, etc. But I don't think anyone has started taking random pot-shots at charitable organizations yet.

It's not much, but I can get the ball rolling: the first Red Cross TV spot to begin running, about a day after it became clear that things were going comprehensively pear-shaped on the Gulf coast, consisted of a sober montage of black-and-white pictures of devastation and human suffering along with a number to call and pledge donations. No problems there. Then, however, some genius decided to jazz things up a bit by having Johnny Cash accompany the misery, singing "Bridge Over Troubled Water".

I think they pulled it off the air fairly quickly, but still, for Christ's sake. We can only be thankful that the Man in Black never covered "When The Levee Breaks".

Life In A Box

2005-09-14T07:59:00.000+10:00

I have become yet another home of randomly-broken silence. This is a good thing, unless you are interested in stories about the three-year-old dust formations my apartment suddenly turns out to be full of. Some of them spell out words, but fortunately none of them have instructed me to kill yet. Only a matter of time, I suppose.

Australia soon. I am still nursing my almost complete ignorance of the place. However, apparently cricket is popular in Australia, and England recently won something called the Ashes. (The name is familiar, and I'm sure I have some deep-rooted cultural memory of what the fuck the Ashes are, but it too is packed in a box somewhere.) On the one hand, I won't really be able to get into the spirit of triumphalism, because cricket may be the one sport I care about less than baseball - on the other, this will hopefully pay dividends in terms of not getting punched in the face. It's a delicate balance of costs, benefits and clouds of sentient dust over here.

Blame It On The Bar Snacks

2005-08-31T10:04:00.000+10:00

Apparently, it has been five years to the day since I first cleared Immigration and made my way into these here United States. I was energetic, motivated, and charging around San Francisco gulping down multicolored beverages and ravishing the hippie women. They were, on the whole, more optimistic times. I recall with particular fondness being served sepia-colored strawberry wedges as a bar snack at some yuppie establishment in the Haight. They were sepia-colored in part because everything in my memories is sepia-colored, but also because they had been sitting in a vat of rum behind the bar for a period of some months.

After the sepia-colored fruit, things are a bit hazy for a while; when I came to I was shackled to this desk, in a city far from San Francisco, with a thousand-yard stare and a belly. I only remember the precise date of my admission because I've been having to write it on various forms ever since. My plan to chip a sufficiently large hole in the wall to admit both myself and my trusty desk is nearing completion, and passage is booked for Sydney in anticipation of this. Assuming I make it there in one piece, rest assured that I will consider nothing more adventurous than a salted peanut to accompany my subsequent multicolored beverages. (The hippie women are also out of the question. Does Australia even have hippies? The homegrown kind, I mean, not the accursed Anglo-American travelling variety.)

Unnecessarily Developing The Theme

2005-08-27T14:00:00.000+10:00

That last post felt, even to me, like shooting low-hanging fruit in a barrel. But then I read this. He uses the word "Albion" with no apparent irony, deploys matador imagery to have a go at the Spanish, and asserts that Thatcher was voted out of office.

There is a sweet but rather unsettling kind of Anglophilia that comes over some young American conservatives. It makes them wear bow ties, and as such I think it should be opposed where possible.

As for the AmSpec: no wonder they're a .org, is all I'm saying.

American Spectator Now Officially Just Publishing Any Old Shit

2005-08-25T08:36:00.000+10:00

Greatest opening sentence ever, here. You'd think it would be difficult to top this:

News was abuzz, as news ought to be, about how Pope Benedict, a.k.a. Cardinal Ratzinger, speciously abetted derisory comments toward one Potter, comma, Harry as a threat to Christianity as we know it.

but the author manages with aplomb.

While wasting time reading op-eds from around the world, I always make an effort to alternate between demented right-wingers and demented left-wingers. Then I go and sit in the corner and weep.

A Fly On The Wall At The Last Six Feet Under Writers' Meeting

2005-08-23T10:07:00.000+10:00

"Is it an admission of defeat to wrap up the fifth and final season of this, our inexplicably well-received show, with essentially the same arc we were using to wrap up the second season? Do you think it'll look too much like a blatant admission that we've been treading water for the three years in between? But if so, does anyone have any better idea of how to wring dramatic tension out of these people's misery when they so clearly deserve to be miserable, and have even virtually exhausted their meagre capacity for self-awareness in managing to become horribly depressed?"