mp3
I cashed in my Coles-Myers “Flybuys” points on an iPod Shuffle. (It’s worth it, the points expire faster than I can build them up enough for anything really expensive, like an airline ticket.) It hasn’t arrived yet, so I’m still using the $20 job I bought some months back. I get about 50 songs on it, which is usually enough to get me through a few days’ running. The Shuffle will be a whole gigabyte, so I expect not to have to refresh the mix too often. But I’ve got a peeve, and a don’t expect the iPod to offer any improvements: the headphones wires are very thin, subject to breaks, so you’re left, at some stage, to fiddle with the wires, trying to get a stable connection, or listening to music only coming through one ear or breaking in an out. Yesterday, I replaced my player’s stick-this-in-your-ear headphones with the over-the-ear model my gym membership bought me. They were useless immediately, perhaps because I’d been carrying them in my bag for a few days, banging around with the rather large hardcover book I’m reading (“Wizard of the Crow”, from Ngugi wa Thiongo, of Kenya). The nice thing about earbud headphones is that if you are in the midst of a run and need to remove them, you can stuff them in a pocket or otherwise get them out of the way, whereas over-the-ear models pretty much have to be pulled down around your neck, which is how I spent the next four kilometres. Surely the wires could be thicker, sturdier? It wouldn’t add much weight, and they’d hold up under exercise. I recommend this to anyone producing sports-model headphones. Thank you.

Please Hang Up the Tights
How bad is Spiderman 3? Everyone who worked on this movie, particularly Tobey Maguire, should take a very long vacation and maybe think about retiring forever so we don’t have to think about the possibility of a fourth movie. O.k., actually Thomas Haden Church was good. Or anyway, well-cast, since that’s pretty much exactly the way I remember the Sandman being drawn in the comics. That could have just been the shirt, though.

Everywhere, But Not to Drink
Walking past the Camperdown oval the other day in the pouring rain, I was not amused to see the sprinklers on, watering the grounds. In fact, over the course of the next few rainy days, I noticed the grounds continued to receive their regular watering, which, as the weekend approached, I couldn’t imagine the local footy team appreciating, as they’d be playing in quite a quagmire by Saturday. In any event, it comes, therefore, as no surprise, that business and government are eating up the water savings made by Sydney residents, with little recycling going on, and on-going infrastructure-related losses. It’s not good enough. Local councils and the State government have to step up their game. Earth Hour is a nice stunt, but there’s more to the situation than kilowatt hours, and it’s not just a matter of desalination plants.

Health & Well-Being
I joined a gym about a week ago. It’s probably a bad move, since the only branch convenient to me is just down the road from work, but in the opposite direction from the train, and I’ll have to make a special effort to go there instead of for a run in the park, but I’ve heard that aerobic exercise is of reduced effectiveness without strength-building activities. So now I can play with the weights machines. (Yes, there are also free-weights, but I’m intimidated by the guys in there; I’m foolish-looking enough, compared to all these young, muscle-y, and, frankly, thuggish-looking people. It’s bad enough that the arrangement of the machines is, as always, such that you are constantly faced with facing others working out on their pecs or abs or whatevers, and none of them are ever over-stuffed middle-aged nerds. I’m not there for pick-ups; move the machines to provide some semblance of privacy, please.) I can also use the cross-trainers or the treadmills.

Last night I went in for the first time. I made the rounds of some of the weights machines for half-an-hour or so, then went to explore the aerobics machines. The cross-trainer I got up on squeaked horribly and it was difficult to find a rhythm. Plus, my shin splints kicked in hard almost immediately. I persisted for a few minutes, but since the panel wasn’t operable, I don’t really know how long. I moved off to a treadmill and put in a few kilometres, gradually building up my speed, as I do on the street, and pounding along. These machines are not built for hard running, since as my effort increased, so, too, did the noise, pounding along under my feet. I’m a bit of a flat-footed runner, normally, although lately I’ve been making more of an effort to land on my toes. I read on the BBC news site at some point that the foot is designed to take impact better that way, and it’s easier on your knees. Since running up on my toes also means my shin splints don’t bother me, I’m happy enough, but it’s more effort, and I can really only manage a couple of K’s that way.

The aerobic machine room is a tiered rank arranged in a semicircle in front of an array of television screens, the centre eight playing music videos, and the nine to the left and right playing one of the three commercial broadcast stations. The machine noise drowns out the music, so it would probably be best to bring headphones. I think there’s a jack you can plug into. Or I could just listen to my own mp3 player, I suppose, although I think there’d be some level of audio conflict. Still, I find when I get off a treadmill – and this isn’t new, just something I’m mentioning now – I’m actually a little dizzy. I don’t know why that is; it doesn’t happen running on the street, no matter whether it’s an easy run or hard. It’s disorienting, so music might be a bad idea, might throw off my balance more. I wonder if that happens for everyone. Maybe I’ll get used to it. Or maybe a branch will open near home and I can skip the treadmills and go run in the street after the weights. That’d be good. There isn’t really enough time for both at work, unless I go after hours, and then I feel bad about the cats, waiting for their dinner. Maybe I’m too co-dependent to use a gym.

Connected
I bought a t.v. and DVR over the weekend, with the idea that I’d catch up on some quality viewing. What I’d forgotten is that there just isn’t any to speak of. Right now, it’s pretty much all about Big Brother, and who cares? These are all incredibly stupid, narcissistic wannabe’s behaving badly in enforced intimacy, occasionally required to participate in truly pointless and spiteful activities to garner the attention of a purportedly vast audience of viewers seduced into believing they are also participating in the show, although they’ll walk away at the end with nothing more than a significantly larger telephone bill than usual for any similar period of time while somebody else gets a car. Idiots.

I don’t get home in time even to enjoy a nice Simpson’s re-run, thank God.

Also, I opted for the 61cm screen, instead of the 48cm, or whatever, and really regret that. It looked a lot smaller in the store. Stuck in the space under the stairs, it’s truly immense, and I have to sit on the other side of the room in order to see it, or wear reading glasses. I guess it’s not just ceiling heights that affect how we live, but every element of room size, including the stuff we jam into them.

Look, I bought the damn thing for the DVR, mostly. There are a large number of movies I’d like to see that I missed in the theatres, for a variety of reasons, so now I’ll watch them. I’m debating over The Departed vs. the Kill Bill’s first. Yes, it goes that far back, maybe further. In fact, yes, further. Plus, when there’s stuff on late, I can whack a disc in and program to record whatever old movie or late-night U.S. show, like Bernie Mac, I’ve been missing. If I got Foxtel (never; no Murdoch anything in my house), I could even watch baseball again. I’ll leave that as an excuse to go to the pub.

Emboldenning the Terrorists, or the Liberal Party, Anyway
Oh, no: Tony Blair's set a deadline for pulling out! What will happen in Iraq, now? All they have to do is wait until June 27, and then John Howard will announce an election, and then next year will be the U.S. primaries and Presidential election . . . why, by the end of January 2009, the whole thing could be over.

Sui Generis
I decided to pass on the complete Naked City recordings in favor of the single-CD package, once I saw the price tag, and while that was probably the right decision, I can only imagine just how far the full set could have gone. John Zorn is a fascinating musician, composing and performing material unlike anything else I’ve ever heard from anyone else. Yeah, somebody’s sure to say, oh, no, there’s this guy, and so on, but, look, this isn’t Ornette Coleman or John Cage or any of that post-fusion stuff from the ‘80’s (although Fred Frith plays bass here). Zorn’s music isn’t for everyone. It’s often very hard to listen to at all, and I like it. He’s got a very pointed fascination with movies and television, or their music, anyway. One of the first Zorn albums I ever bought was The Big Gundown, a collection of Ennio Morricone movie soundtrack songs. Naked City is like that, sometimes, with “A Shot in the Dark” and the James Bond theme being the most easily recognizable offerings. “Batman” and “Re-Animator” are in there, too, although I’ll probably have to rent those again just to refresh my memory of their dominate musical themes. I could do without the vocal gymnastics – screaming, really – but Zorn’s of that school where Diamanda Galas and Meredith Monk come from, pushing the boundaries of what constitute singing. And look: Frith, as mentioned, and Bill Frisell, the latter of whom, if you are listening to his current work, you’d never imagine here. Now that I’ve had one listen, I know I’ll start wishing I’d just bought the box.

Not Conservative Enough
Imagine: Newscorp owns Dow Jones. Not yet, but just think of what would become of the Wall Street Journal’s editorial page if it were operating at the behest of Rupert Murdoch. The mind boggles.