Campus Activism
Student Union fees meant nothing to me when I was at university. I guess they went into supporting a wide variety of enterprises – the student council, campus newspaper, Union Hall amenities, discounted movies and concerts, stuff like that. I guess other organisations benefited, too, although I don’t recall any organised political agitators. My impression of latter category is that such groups organised themselves and had little effect on campus life.

In the final years of the Howard government, a successful effort was mounted to eliminate student services fees, to no little hue & cry on either side of the debate. Many students fully supported the cut and many opposed it. Those is support were, by-and-large, commuting students, a not uncommon situation here. Those opposed fit, broadly, into two categories: the politically-inclined and the sportif.

Self-proclaimed maverick (don’t you hate that word?) Senator Barnaby Joyce is supporting the Rudd government’s efforts to reintroduce the fees, limiting their scope to sports alone. I can see his point that allowing mandatory fees to be collected and distributed would allow politically-motivated groups to claim and receive some portion of the funding if the fees come back with no restrictions, but I don’t think this is a bad thing, and didn’t when they dropped the fees. Students living off-campus who don’t participate or take advantage of the full array of activities and amenities offered via the support of these fees could, I suppose, pay a reduced rate, but realistically shouldn’t. Instead, let the fees be used to subsidize commutation on large scale, as well as fund sports teams, newspapers, the library, the grounds-keeping, building maintenance, and political groups. Make it means-tested, even, both for collection and distribution. Small groups get less, big groups get more.

Inactive Activity
I love sports. Watching, anyway, although most of what plays as sports on television is not terribly exciting: cars, motorcycles, cricket, golf. . . . Luckily, somehow, I've become quite a fan of Rugby League. I've tried to get into Union, too, but it just won't take. In fact, I can really only generate the necessary enthusiasm for League during the actual season. The special one-offs, like Test matches, do nothing for me. Odd, but there it is.

Anyway, while weekends are usually just doing chores, running, and petting the cats, I'd heard the Rabbitohs-Tigers away match in the Heritage round was being held nearby, at the Sydney Cricket Grounds, so I bought a ticket, something I wouldn't bother about normally, being a season pass holder. I'm very glad I did.

Sydney Cricket Ground is an odd place to hold a rectangular game, and my seat was terrible, staring into the setting sun nearly throughout, so I don't think I'll do it again. (It's not much better at night games at ANZ Stadium, of course, what with the lights and all. Rugby's a day game, but like all professional sports, t.v.'s been its ruin.) And while Souths specialize in games meant to keep fingernails well-clipped and teeth ground down past the enamel - and this one was no exception - a spectacular win engenders great joy amongst the fans. Kicking a field goal in the last 5 seconds of the match to win by one point nearly caused a massive group cerebral hemorrhage. I got home in time to catch the kicker, Nathan Merritt, proudly tell us all that he never practiced field goals and had never previously kicked one. The Tigers were devastated and their fans disconsolate, after spending so much time dominating us, but it was quite a show.

Cat Fight
Wolverine, the first in what I expect may turn out to be a spin-off franchise from the original X-Men movies (just like the comics, really), wasn't half bad. They managed to link back X-Men 2 - although Patrick Stewart looked so bad, I wondered if maybe they didn't use a stand-in (he's uncredited) - and to keep the various Weapon X characters and X villains I remember, but there's a fair bit of revisionism at work, too, which I sort of object to. It's not like I've been keeping up on the comics over the last eight years, and the whole X-franchise is so expanded, I don't think Marvel does, either. Anyway, the effects weren't bad, the acting is only such if you care to call it so, and in the end, it's just another comic book movie. Unlike the Bourne movies, you don't come out of the theatre with your whole body thrilling with superpowers. There're plenty of explosions, lots of yelling, grunting, groaning, and growling - it's kind of like watching rugby. You know it's just gotta hurt.

As we exited, it appears that my expectations of paralyzing cognitive dissonance hadn't kept the nerds and geeks at home - the line was out the door for entry to the new Star Trek, which will have to be my next movie.

Annals of Bright Ideas
Which genius thought a 747 chased by F16's would be a nice photo op for NY'ers?

Ghosts of Country Music Future
I've been listening - a lot - to Neko Case, a singer I came to know via New Pornographers, for whom she's done some vocals. But as a solo artist, she's got a considerable output, and my own starting point was Fox Confessor Brings the Flood, an album I spent considerable time listening to, over and over, much to the exclusion of many other recordings I otherwise regularly or even occasionally enjoy. Fox Confessor is a remarkable record, so I went out specifically to get some of her "& Her Boyfriens" output, to be amazed at just how country she was. Recently I bought the album immediately preceding Fox Confessor, The Tigers Have Spoken, and it was straight out of the "boyfriends" country-Case style manual - which isn't itself a negative, as she's doing things with the lyrics that would nearly make Lucinda Williams blush to claim equal standing. What's really remarkable, and so very much more so on Middle Cyclone, the latest release, than even on Fox Confessor, is that Neko Case has forged a sound that so far and so well transcends categorization. This is what I've heard in so many artists at the top of their genre, where the cross-over isn't even a cross-over, it's purely itself, the way the "American songbook" - that stuff Sinatra sang, and Tony Bennett, etc. - was beyond merely pop, even "merely" swing, jazz, big-band, whatever. And - ZOMG - you can get the lyrics.

P.S. A. C. Newman's got a solo career? Too many records to buy, now.

Happy Easter: the Blood Is the Life
Let the Right One in is not your typical vampire movie. No religious iconography, for one thing, and, apparently, cats have different issues with vampirism than you might expect, but let that pass. I read about this Swedish movie on the internet (of course) well in advance of it release here. The director has been quoted as saying that he wanted to be realistic - what would it be like to be 12 forever and to subsist on blood? Nasty, apparently, and difficult. So, while M. has found the themes of codependency and addition as the underlying content of the metaphor of vampirism, and I'd concur, I was less involved with the meta narrative than the more obvious social studies involved. It's Sweden, after all, which has long struggled with various social ills, including, so children having to cope with survival under conditions effectively ignored or misunderstood by the adults, inevitably rely on each other, reinforcing their separation, one way or another.

This is also unlike the usual horror movie in general. Yes, there's horror, but the violence is mostly done just out of sight, leaving you with the knowledge of it, which is all the more effectively horrifying. Mostly it's ghastly, as much in its secondary as its primary senses, i.e., the movie operates more on the level of ghost story than gore-fest.

The look of the film is terrific and quite unique, and the music, while I found it sometimes a little loud, very effective. It's the the kind of movie that wins prizes, but it should be.

Yes, it's an odd choice for an Easter movie, in a way, but what else was I going to go see? Monsters vs. Aliens?

Church, State, and Kmart
One of the oddities back in NY, state, but also city, was the “blue laws”, laws that precluded, for example, bars opening before noon on Sundays. What’s so special about Sundays? For non-church-going Christians, anyway? Many of these regulations were holdovers from mixing morality and legislation, but they never interfered much with commerce. (Well, what, in America, does?)

Here in NSW, the government intervenes directly, making Easter a mandatory no-shopping day, because it’s Easter. Yea for the churches! (N.b., for everybody else, your own sacred days are managed at your own discretion; but if any Muslims really want to shop at Myer on Sunday, it’ll be open in the CBD.) This 1950’s mentality is just silly. I’m all for controlling against the rise of rapacious capitalism as anyone, but shuttering businesses – who would, if open, have to pay their employees at penalty rates – because it’s Easter, or Good Friday, or Christmas – isn’t really about making sure everybody gets a day off, it’s enforcing observation of a Christian canonical day of observation. And I’m against laws that effectively join church and state. The exemptions just how hollow the whole thing is anyway.

And is it really no coincidence that Joe Tripodi’s both the Minister for Regulation and the MP for one of the exempt “zones”?

Playin’ Rock ‘n’ Roll
Monday night shows that don’t let out until after eleven are a bit beyond me at this point, but even though she’s down here annually for the Byron Bay Blues Fest, Lucinda Williams doesn’t tour Australia often, so this was a must-see concert, at the (largely) civilized Enmore Theatre, and I’m happy to have made the effort, if a bit jaded this morning.

Often enough, a musician with a new album out pretty much just runs through the new material, but this show covered off at least one or two numbers from each album in her catalog, not really getting to the new stuff until well into the two-plus hours she spent on stage. It is, however, unusual, to say the least, to see a singer-songwriter reading the lyrics, but there she was, a music stand to her left, with the printed lyrics to all her new songs, managed by an efficient roadie, who’d bring out a new batch as needed, as well as handling everybody’s various guitar-changes. (There was a moment when – and I’m guessing – Lucinda couldn’t hear her guitar on the pick-ups, and stopped a song just a minute or less into it, but it was actually all o.k., not the roadie’s error, and they started over.) Interestingly, for someone renowned as a song-writing craftsman, Lucinda Williams doesn’t play much. I don’t think I saw much in the way of any chord changes at any time she had a guitar in her hands, electric or otherwise, but her backing band, Buick 6, managed to drive their blues solos into near jazz improvisational levels without ever losing the melody, so why should she do more than strum anyway?

Lucinda Williams new album, Little Honey, finishes with the AC/DC classic, “It’s a Long Way to the Top (if You Want to Rock ‘n’ Roll),” and I seriously wondered if she would be so bold as to perform it in front of an Australian audience, even if they were, from my observation, very much partisans in her favor. She did, of course, leading, in her encore, from Son House through to Faces’ “Every Picture Tells a Story” (n.b. that’s her accreditation of the song, better known as a Rod Stewart when-he-was-still-good number, although everybody knows he kept it off the last Faces record for his own solo effort) and straight through to a rousing rendition of Oz-rock favourite.

Yee-hah!
So the capitalism meltdown is all the fault of financial market cowboys, and making boards responsible for calculating executive pay is going to fix it? Nonsense. Boards are renowned throughout the Wall Street Journal for making inane appointment decisions, including Byzantine remuneration strategies, seemingly designed to ensure CEO non-performance, and all well hidden from the public until the massive pay-out at the premature end of the idiot-king’s tenure. Even when savvy shareholders see these things and understand them, their self-interest leads them to overlook rather than object. Boards and shareholders alike are driven by share price. Some may want to look at price-earnings ratios, others are more interested in pure activity. While day traders may churn through stocks in a way only somewhat detrimental to markets, hedge fund dealers are far more destructive, as are executives themselves. And all those ponzi-schemers aren’t helping, either. Who brought down Bearings? And how many other multi-billion dollar schemers have you been hearing about for the last ten years? The free hand of the market is a hand at our necks, and only effective, comprehensive regulation can make it a helping hand instead. The system doesn’t work. It hasn’t worked for twenty years, at least.

The “If” Non-Apology
So the PM the kosher meal and took it out on the stewardess – what a swell guy; at least he apologized. Except he didn’t. The “if” circumlocution reduces any apology to none at all. So, yeah, Kev, I’m offended, and you should apologize properly, you posturing little jackass.

No Surfing
There's been a big storm over the last day and a half, closing the beaches to surfers due to waves too close to shore for safety - and leading some die-hards to hit the harbour instead - and putting enough rain down across the state to leave parts of northern NSW in a state of emergency due to flooding and to make my cats very unhappy with the results of going out the catflap. Me, too, for that matter, as walking into the office from the bus this morning had me saturated above the knee, without so much as having been splashed by a car. Quite impressive, really, all this global warming. And the cachements? Warragamba got a sixth of its April rainfall just today, no joke. The video's pretty good, if you're one of those weather-chaser types.

Killing Joke
There was a Monty Python skit about a joke that was so funny, whoever heard it, or even read it, would keel over dead. Similarly, David Foster Wallace’s epic novel, Infinite Jest, had an eponymous macguffin film that did the same.

There’s an amateur short film contest here in Sydney, called “Tropfest”, and back around the time of all those Japanese ghost story movies and Hollywood remakes, I suggested to someone trying to think of an entry that she should spoof The Ring, but instead of a videotape, it would be a cellphone call – “The Ringtone.”

It seems, however, that real life trumps art. It's a science fiction aphorism that any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, although we may tend to lose sight of just how far apart our various societies are from one another in the latest stages of globalisation.

Stage Door
It's been a busy weekend already, with the Rabbitohs last night and then today, only enough time to get the laundry out, before going to a matinee of The Removalists, a play by David Williamson, playing at the Sydney Theatre Company, down in the Rocks. For a 1970's play, it's surprisingly undated, although there is a tone there yet, both in its focus and in its language, but as it's set in Melbourne, maybe there's enough regionalism that I oughtn't to be too hasty. (Still, for all the wide distances that separate the major cities of the country, unlike America, there's little difference in accent, tone, or culture, Queensland under Joh not withstanding.)

This is a brutal work, and for the life of me, I can't see how the actors overcome the difficulties of the play or the production. I guess that's just what they do. The stage is no larger than my lounge room, and surrounded on three sides by tiered seating. It was not a sold-out crowd, maybe just 85-90%, but still, with the lighting, this is not a case of the actors unable to see the audience. Nevertheless, the operated without undue acknowledgment.

I say "undue acknowledgment" because the play itself is one that very much seeks to engage the audience in a knowing, if passive participation. In many ways, like the professional removalist brought it during the action, and, even, like the other major participants in the action onstage, one way or another, we are complicit in what occurs. This is a play of witnessing, much in the Christian sense.

It's terrible, fierce, brutal, and very challenging, and the humor throughout only makes those elements that much more difficult to address, walking out into the harbour ambiance.

The Brooklyn Academy's "Next Wave" festival was always my way of ensuring I got enough dance and drama and music experientially, as opposed to my more "passive" intake of books and CD's and movies, and I haven't found anything really comparable here in Sydney (although Nick Cave's "All Tommorrow's Parties" would have been an excellent equivalence if I hadn't been in Melbourne at the time), so it took the fact that my upstairs neighbor is a lead actor in this play for me to get out to it, even though the mere fact that Cate Blanchett and her husband, Andrew Upton, are running the Sydney Theatre Company ought to have been reason enough to go. Ash was terrific and took a horrific beating (yeah, stage-y, but it's on-stage, isn't it, not like the movies). The performances weren't all around great - I didn't think the women were notably good - but the Sergeant and Ash, as Kenny Carter, stood out.

Blackout
There’s censorship everywhere. I remember a documentary film about censoring “adult” movies in Canada, where a small group of people would gather to screen blue movies and decide whether they could be released to the public. From my recollection, there was little that didn’t pass.

Since coming to Australia, I’ve seen a couple of cases, involving movies, that have become celebrity events, and they’ve highlighted this country’s rather strict regulatory approach.

One of the present Labor government’s promises has been a nationwide internet filter, which approaches implementation. So I’m rather thankful to Wikileaks, a site devoted to exposing the kind of national censorship proposed, for posting the ACMA’s list of banned sites. I disagree with imposing national firewalls, outside of protecting national security – this isn’t China, for goodness’ sake; we’re supposed to be a free country, even if we don’t have a bill of rights or anything like it. While I can fully support policing websites that violate the law, but I don’t support this kind of totalitarian nonsense. Look – some Queensland dentist is on the list (not to mention Wikileaks.org itself (oh, I’m in trouble now, aren’t I?) It’s like the no-fly terrorist list in the States. What else don’t we know about?

Pets Peeve
Oh, the cats hate me now. I'm working back so often, they're unfed for many hours beyond their expectations. Here it's 7:30 already, and no way I'm done here before 8:00, with another forty minutes or more to get home, assuming there's a bus still running at that point. I don't like them being out after dark, not least for the one who sits patiently and invisibly outside the door until I get home, which isn't a deliberate act of ambush, but might yet come out that way some night. Sometimes I think it was a mistake to leave my last job, which always finished up by five.

Cushy
Hamilton Island is supposed to be one of the most beautiful places on the planet, and the task of living there for free and writing a blog to promote it to the tune of an six-monthly salary of AU$150,000 has to be the best job in the world, even discounting Sol Trujillo’s now-concluded stint as CEO of Telstra. They’re down to 200 candidates and expect to announce the final 50 next week. My God, it’s just like [insert country name] Idol, except without the recording contract.

Friends & Relations
I'm prompted to write this as a result of reading a recent post by a Smith-y I know, a transfer struggling with uprooted-ness.

The company I'm working at does a survey of its employees every year to find out if they like working there, more or less, and we're doing a new one, with just 12 questions, the key to which is: do you have a best friend at work? For about the first time since I started working full-time after university, I can answer yes, even though it's probably not entirely reciprocal. So what? I regard this person as an excellent friend, and it's certainly a good thing. But all those other jobs? I liked them, too, most of them. I guess it's selfish, but the job is about me in the end, do I like what I do, am I doing more and new and learning. Now, it should be mentioned that, for the first time ever, the project I'm working on is focused on the return-on-investment, whereas most of my past jobs were start-ups, the massive expenditure stage, and often they then proceeded to stagnate horribly. So I suppose that's a factor, too.

And I suppose there's some measure of increased engagement at work because of this whole friend situation because I'm also displaced from my family, the few friends I ever had previously, and even from my country & culture, to one degree or another (hey, we get all the best crap shows from America on our t.v.'s every night), without having made any notable new friendships post-antipodean relocation. But I'm like that, always have been. A one-man dog, as it were. One at a time, anyway.

Sure, I suppose being "the American" in many situations is going to be a disadvantage, going to mark me out as opposed to distinguishing me from the pack. And while 8 years of Bush have certainly had an effect, pretty much all the other years before that weren't doing us any favors either. In World War 2, for example, when our soldiers were the first broad exposure Australians had to Americans, the boys were picking up the local women and generally getting up everybody's nose Down Under. So as much as there was gratitude for the U.S. picking up where the Brits had dropped the ball (Let Japan take Australia; we'll get it back later), there was resentment and distrust, which latter sentiments tend to linger. Out here on the periphery of the world, and generally-speaking, anywhere outside the U.S., American boosterism doesn't get very far. So there's that.

Anyway, crowds of friends or not, I'm doing what I can, and it'll all work out or it won't. Whatever happens, so far I'm happy with my choices.

Return to Redfern
The renovation of the Redfern oval is complete, or nearly, if the lack of a scoreboard or even a clock within view of the grandstand is any indication (and it may not be; I'm not privy to the specifications), and today the Mighty Rabbitohs hosted Wests Tigers in a "friendly." The grounds are very nice, even if the conditions were a little too Australian-Open to suit a rubgy match, although the services on offer were meager. Well, you go for the football, don't you, not the hot dogs and meat pies.

Anyway, they staged a "legends" match, a face-off between squads from the two teams of long-retired players, which was entertaining and played in high-spirited good nature. Unfortunately, for Souths, that was about the end of anything positive, as the Bunnies staged one of their fairly typical almost-come-from-behind defeats. Leading late in the game, they gave up two tries to see the match end in the Tigers' favor, 30-26. Even a couple of minutes extended play didn't save them.

Welcome home, boys. See you out in Homebush in a month or two, and maybe it'll get better.

It's all True
Everything you've heard about The Wrestler, all the good stuff, anyway, is absolutely true. This is a gem of a movie, leaving absolution aside just as much as it does resolution, thereby adhering to a principle of modern story-telling: no one's story is ever over until it's all over with. Mickey Rourke I never had much time for, not surprising given most of his roles and his choice to abandon acting for boxing for so long, but I cannot think of anyone better suited to this part, physically, notably, but that shouldn't be taken as a dis to his acting chops, which are splendid. Marisa Tomei hasn't had a role like this in a long time, either, and takes hold of it with real vigor. The insight into these lives is entirely worthwhile and illuminating of so much more. Somebody better get an Oscar out of this.

DVD Late Fee
How good is Taken? I can't believe I missed this in a cinema. I'd heard it was good, but skipped it, never even really considered it, and then I had to wait for the video, paying the cost of my neglect in the small-screen experience of what is an entirely enjoyable movie, on a par, nearly, with the Bourne movies. Sure, it's a divorced dad and spoiled child action-adventure movie, but from the moment Liam Neeson speaks to his about-to-be-abducted daughter, the movie plain rocks. My only quibble: what ever happened to the also-kidnapped girlfriend? I guess that was her all doped-up and roped-down, but did she get rescued? Loose ends like that niggle.

Pics
I'm working (slowly) on uploading pictures to a new web page. A link will be available once I'm done. I'll do a separate page for the Adelaide-Kangaroo Island-Melbourne trip, too.

Update: Travel pics so far; more to come.

Pictures
I was fairly snap-happy over the last week-and-a-half, but a selected few photos should do the job. Rather than editing previous posts, I'll just stick them up more-or-less chronologically for a flavor of the trip.


A lookout vantage over the Barossa Valley, where our wine tour took us, outside Adelaide, which we shared with a woman from Vancouver, making for a most enjoyable day, particularly since she knew all the right questions to ask at each stop.


Greetings from Kangaroo Island.


Well-trained kookaburras. We had one on Mom's hand at one point, but I think she deleted the picture.


The penguins come ashore at night after days at sea, eating, and for their shore leave, molt. Because their eyes are adapted for underwater vision, white light bothers them, so the guides use red filters to show them up outside their burrows. Not even knee-high.


The Remarkable Rocks, as they're prosaically known, are a jumble of sea-and-air shaped free-standing boulders, very "Picnic at Hanging Rock" in effect as you wander among them.


For the tennis, we walked each morning along the Yarra to the show courts, along with many others from all points of the city. Later, we found out there was a special tram.


Alize Cornet lost last night, unfortunately, but we did get to see her in her round 2 match. She did pretty well, though.


We also got to see the Williams sisters in a doubles match, although we had to sit through a preceding match, after standing outside show court 2 for an hour, while a Serb and a Croatian fought out five sets, a match featuring some bad behavior by their supporters, a few ejections, and, when the Croatian won, loud singing and fascist salutes. What's with these creeps? They should be banned for life. From everywhere. Not the Williams, the Croatians-Serbs-Bosnians.


(Who are these people?)


I never got the story about the giant gold bees all over this building. There's a really big one up the top, too, and a bit of a swarm along one wall. Next time I'll ask.


I know what the latin says, but I reckon Melbourne's trying to tell us they built their success on wool, whales, beef and boats. I like the kangaroo rampant.


Our trip along the Great Ocean Road was very nice, and the driver even stopped when we spotted a koala along the way. The trees in the vicinity are badly denuded by mistletoe and hungry koalas.


This formation used to be connected to the land, but not anymore, not since 1990, when a collapse left two or three people stranded. These formations are largely limestone and sandstone, all being eroded. A rise in sea levels would cause further and dramatic alterations along this coast.


On our last day + 1, Mom & I visited the State Library, to see Ned Kelly's armor, among other things. The reading room was designed based on the famous reading room in London's library, and that of the Library of Congress. Australia did a lot of that sort of thing, combining the best features of the U.S. and the U.K. to achieve something new and remarkable in the world. It often works.

Pinky & Blinky's Big Adventure
So this couple I was traveling with woke up on Saturday with a whole day of nothing scheduled in Melbourne, a day to explore, visit the bookshops and museums, etc., but as we gathered to plan our afternoon, we found ourselves confronted periodically by members of the hotel staff, who seemed somewhat anxious and confused. We laughed about it a little, until I piped up to joke about how maybe we were supposed to have left already, including catching a midday international flight, now long departed. Unfortunately, it wasn't much of a joke. Over the course of our holiday, having not had much time spent at leisure to indulge in obsessive itinerary re-checking (and acting in ignorance on my part, or at least from the dates supplied), nobody thought to question Saturday or Sunday, 24th or 25th?

We managed to get the jet set rebooked for the next day, but still had to organize a place to stay, the hotel we were at being most thoroughly booked. The Langham, a very swank joint, were very helpful, and we ended up in the nouveau-deco Intercontinental Rialto, over in the city center. The hotel had only in the last few months reopened after a multi-million dollar renovation. It was o.k. Way overpriced, especially since one of the rooms was being heated instead of cooled. Luckily, that was the other room from the one I stayed it.

We shuttled out to the airport the next morning, very early, and once passport control opened, off went our intrepid explorers, leaving me to wend my way to the domestic terminal for a quick jaunt back to Sydney, from which I happily write this update, albeit anxiously awaiting news of what will have transpired in Los Angeles. Tune in (or post a comment, M&P) to discover: overnight stay or connecting flight and long drive home in the winter dark of North Carolina?

Day Three at the Open
29 degrees today, much more endurable, even if, after a set of Safin, we spent an hour or more waiting to get into Arena 2, where we would sit through two sets of women's singles just to catch the Williams sisters in a doubles match against a pair of Russians. Serena & Venus were dominant, if not dominating, but you can easily see how well they work together. It's a long day in the sun, though, and by the end of the day, there are so many layers of sunblock, you can't help feeling pretty grubby.

As I've mentioned, we're in Southbank, which is across the river from central Melbourne, but whether we head into town or stay on "our side", the city makes effective use of its riverfront. We'll see what else it's like, a little, tomorrow, travelling the circuit on the tram, but I'm already very intrigued at the idea of living and working here: what would it be like? How possible is it? I think, so far, Sydney's inner-west suburbs work better for me than trying anything similar here, but I do like this city.

Oh, Noes! Is He Still President?
Chief Justice Roberts fed the new guy his line wrong, so Obama swore in under a "revised" oath: does this mean that crypto-Muslim, non-citizen Barak Obama isn't really President anymore? ZOMG!

I fully expect there to be some of this kind of stuff around the internets today.

In the real world, however, much jubilation is evidenced. Congratulations, Mr. President; please fix the world.

Open-ing Note
I've got to come back and add links and pictures all through these posts, but we've been in Melbourne one-and-a-half days now, including what amounts to a full day at the Australian Open. Yesterday we got in around noon, unpacked, had lunch, and marched around a little. The plane did Dad's back in pretty well, so we cut it short and basically just chilled with the t.v. coverage of Day One of the tennis until dinner. I arranged a meal at the French Brassarie, which is one of the city's famously tucked-away restaurants, and which lived up to its hype in the in-flight magazine review that led me to it - all that internet research, and Qantas found my dinner; well, it all worked out.

Today, thinking it would be good to scout the venue and the offerings, we headed out pretty much in time for the gates to open, along with many hundreds of others, it seems, at least by the time we got to the tennis. Our journey along the Yarra river was peaceful, but presaged a hot day. And that it was. I have never in my life sweated so much sitting still as I did today, other than sitting in a sauna. It wasn't terribly humid, but it was hot, and no amount of sunscreen could in any way help endure that, other than insofar as we didn't leave roasted red as a cooked lobster.

Dad had a couple of particular matches in mind, so we trooped along with him to watch a seeded Frenchman desultorially beat an unseeded Argentenian, who at least gave a good account of himself, winning the first set, doing o.k. in the second, but, despite his opponents' struggles in the third, giving it up in the end.

The second match, pitting an American-born Swiss player against a French woman, was not well attended, the previous crowd having left their favourite behind. The wind picked up, and it was clear the Swiss was struggling with her serve and her shots as a result. After the third let, we took off to allow Mom to conduct her mandatory souvenier shopping.

The plan tomorrow is to head in later, which is both a good and a bad idea, I reckon, as we'll miss any chance at morning shadows, but at least have an afternoon cool, if the temperatures rise. It was easily well over 30 degrees today - 90 for the post-equator crowd, but is forecast only into the high 20's/80's for tomorrow.

At least we've discovered some inexpensive dining options nearby, including an "Irish" pub (which at least has the most extensive whiskey offerings of any bar I've been to in this country).

So Far
South Australia isn't but an hour's flight from Sydney, or thereabouts, but Adelaide is a distinctly different city. We didn't have all that much time actually in town, committing our only full day off to a winery tour of the Barossa. This was very nice, as it was just four of us - Mom, Dad, me, and a very nice woman from Vancouver, who, it turned out was also a sommelier for a restaurant there, which sources some notable portion of its wine list from a vineyard on the list. I ended up buying a bottle of wine on her recommendation (and my own palate), and it was swell. We all ended the day dining in an Argentine restaurant - a little over-priced, but decent, and finishing the bottle. I also bought some port to bring home and cellar for the next ten years, at which point it's expected to be magnificant. It was pretty good already.

Kangaroo Island was interesting, especially day three, which I'll get to shortly. Day one was spent on the bus tearing around hither and yon, stopping to sample products of one kind or another: eucalyptus oil, sheep's cheese; or else looking this and that landscape, all quite pretty and picturesque; or visiting sad animal shelters. The raptors exhibition, however, was terrific, although we've got to find a camera shop to see if we can restore the shot of Mom holding the kookaburra, which photo got accidentally deleted.

Day two was a day off, which was nice, spent lounging by the pool reading, although we did go out at sunset to catch the kangaroos and wallabies at their work: eating, hoping, crossing the road suddenly. The highlight of the evening was the "Little Penguins" (formerly known as "Fairy Penguins", an appellation which has gone in favor of political correctness). Cute, but immensely noisy. Apparently, they'll cross the road and set up burrows under people's houses when they're all at home at once, setting up quite a hue and cry all night until they're ready to go swimming again, at 4:30 a.m.

On the third day, we had a bus tour again, before catching an early evening plane back to Adelaide for the night. This tour went out to the western end of the island into the national park. You may have heard that December '07 included some horrific bush fires, which consumed about 20% of the island's vegetation. Well, the evidence was everywhere, although so, too, was the regeneration. Still, it was clearly devastating and extensive. "Remarkable Rocks" and the Admiral's Arch are magnificant natural stone structures. Sea lions are, apparently, dogs de-evolved back into sea creatures, and they sound and smell like it. (We'd seen a colony of Australian sea lions on day one; the second set were New Zealand sea lions. It was quite enjoyable to see them gamboling in the surf, especially the young, who seemed to be learning their ocean-going skills in relative safety, since there'd be no White Pointers up by the rocks.)

Another early morning flight, and now we'll do an afternoon of Melbourne, with dinner booked nearby. Tomorrow and Wednesday - Monday & Tuesday for the podeans - will be spent at the Open, although I have to see if DAA are doing anything locally for the inauguration, which will be broadcast, but I'd rather catch a party, if there is one.

Pictures anon.

Travel Travails
Off to Adelaide tomorrow, where temperatures are in excess of 105 Fahrenheit.

Thence to Melbourne, for the tennis, and where temps are comparable. I hope there's a pool.

Collector's Item?
No way: every geek and half of all Obama supporters under 65 are going to go out and buy a copy of Obama Meets Spiderman, I reckon. And it'll be cheesey. Any hints what Spidey villian will be trying to stop the inaugeration? Doc Ock? The Lizard? Yeah, that's it, the Lizard.

Price Strike
When I was a kid, I walked a picket line. It was the Long Island Meat Strike, a period during which the supermarkets were jacking up prices on meat and housewives across Long Island were galvanized to find out just what was going on and to achieve some measure of fairness. It achieved some measure of national stature, including a Congressional hearing, and one incident in which a farmer shipped a calf to the leader of the strike, saying, here, you raise it, see how much it costs and how much you get back when it's steaks. The leader of the strike adopted the little doggie (as a motherless calf is known), until re-homing it to an upstate farm, where it could live out its life. (It probably did end up as food, I suppose.)

Anyway, one of the significant outcomes of the strike was to require that all supermarkets provide unit pricing. This is a scheme whereby every consumer good on the shelf had a label expressing its purchase price, but also a shelf tag that provided comparative value, i.e., price per ounce. This allowed the shoppers to calculate relative value. This jar of mustard was 8.33 and this was 9.85, but the first was 10 ounces and the second 12.5. While it would be easy enough to calculate the differential, this was in the days before hand-held calculators, so many people were left with making their decision simply on which price was lower, even when that meant they ultimately paid more for an equivalent product.

The Australian Retailers Association to claim that mandatory unit pricing won't bring down prices is simply - no, scratch that - it's deliberately disingenuous. They are lying to you. It won't achieve an immediate effect on prices - or any, it's true - unless we consumers use unit pricing to our own advantage. Look at the unit pricing and buy the less expensive but comparable option. If there are two organic olive oils on the shelf and one gives you a unit price-based advantage, buy that one. Same same for everything else. Compare and save, as so many discount shops advise. Back in NYC, Sym's, the discount clothing retailer, advises: an educated consumer is our best customer; same principle applies.

Yes, let's get this done, Australia - nearly forty years after we achieved the same victory in New York, and ultimately across the nation, thanks to a decent Congress at the time. We need it, and we deserve it.

Meat Strike! Meat Strike! Meat Strike!
Union! Union! Union!

Swears and Curses
It's not exactly comforting to see that the more things change, the worse they get in American politics, or the Senate, at least. This is a poor example to set of the kind of behavior the new President can expect from the legislature. This is not "the change we need."

Urban Renewal
My inner-west suburb appears due for literally big changes. While I’m not likely to be directly affected for some time, the prospect of increased population density along the Parramatta Road corridor isn’t terribly appealing, at least not when it’s meant to increase the demand and thereby provide the impetus for improved mass-transit. As with so many new developments in the outer-west, the support seems to wait for the need. What this will mean is more traffic, more crowding on the busses, and more people packing into an already limited set of grocery, shopping and entertainment centers and precincts. More stress all around, as such increases are likely to require more call-outs to cops and firemen and EMT’s, et al.

When I was living in Surry Hills, part of Sydney’s south, but pretty much contiguous with the CDB’s borders, essentially, the Council conducted a survey to address zoning changes. The area was a thorough mix of building types, with many warehouse-conversions and commercial buildings scattered throughout the otherwise mostly terrace houses and low-rise blocks. What was proposed, and, I expect, enacted, albeit after I relocated, would allow considerable change, so that low-rise blocks, houses, and open areas abutting high-rises (anything more than three stories, essentially) would be permitted to be (re)developed proportionately to their neighbors. Living in a seven-story warehouse-conversion (on the 1st floor, the one above Ground level), we were next door to a four-story block with a large courtyard area. That four-story block, including the undeveloped courtyard, was to be permitted to climb another three stories, which would have had the effect of blocking the morning sun (the good sun, that is, afternoon sun being so very much longer and hotter) for many units, whose owners, no doubt, had based at least some part of their selection on light and view.

Looking at the neighborhood dispassionately, however, the plan made sense. Nobody was jumping in on the development options right away, tearing anything down or building anything up. It would bring a measure of coherence to a largely chaotic jumble of building styles and would likely also gentrify an area that suffered from its fringe status. There were at least three homeless shelters within a block or two of our unit, as well as numerous backpacker hostels, but little in the way of services. All that would probably improve.

But that close to the CBD, we had good bus service to pretty much anywhere in Sydney, Central Station a five-minute walk away, and good shopping and entertainment options. That’s not quite so true for the inner-west, as much a development jumble as anywhere else among the older suburbs. For example, the development of the Broadway shops, sitting between the CDB and Glebe, was the death knell for movie theatres, supermarkets, and many other shops from Newtown to Strathfield. Yes, a few IGA’s and shops survived, but many didn’t, or they had to alter their offerings to refine their specialisation. And it’s not as if big-box shopping centres don’t suffer attrition in what they offer. Even Broadway recently lost even it’s HMV, most likely as a result of increased internal competition, with the addition of Target to a complex already including Kmart, both of whom sell popular CD’s and DVD’s

Yes, stacking some thousands of new homes in among the existing is going to increase demand, but nothing’s going to serve that demand until it’s present. Parramatta Road is a desolate strip of car dealerships and failed enterprises. There’s hardly even a fast-food chain all the way out to the Olympic Park. The furniture store that burned down a few years ago remains burned-down. More people probably come in from the outer-west, only as far as Parramatta, than come out from the inner-west, but they’ve got highways, for one thing, allowing Parramatta to serve as an alternative city-centre, much as Chatswood does for the northern suburbs.

I’m all for development, but it needs planning, it needs to be done along with the integration of services to support it, and that’s not easy to achieve. This plan seems a little too free-market for me.

Gone with the Long-Winded
Baz Luhrmann's epic, Australia, is, as everyone has said, the Australian "Gone with the Wind," with the WWII bombing of Darwin by the Japanese standing in for the American Civil War. It's got it all: love-match misunderstandings, race relations, scenic backdrops in place of on-location shoots, set-piece chapter breaks - plus digital effects George Lucas would be ashamed of. Oh, o.k., the story's not bad, and for a tear-jerker, it's effective enough, but Nicole Kidman, for all that she makes a go of it, struggles throughout, and Hugh Jackman basically alternates between trying to be an Aussie Rhett Butler and otherwise Snowy-Rivering his way through all the other scenes he's in. The Aboriginal kid is good, but doesn't get to do much, and everybody is pretty much left to caricature instead of character. Jack Thompson gets killed off so fast there's pretty much no need for him to even have been in the movie. David Wenham, an actor I've really enjoyed in many other roles, is given little more to do than sneer through his nose in sound bites, more like John Lovitz's pathological liar than anything else ("Yeah, that's the ticket, yeah"). It's pretty, it's loud, it's got a story, but it has no substance. The narration is repetitive, and so's the plot, finally.

One of the standard tropes is that at 165 minutes (plus twenty minutes or more of advertisements and trailers), the movie's about an hour too long. I reckon I'd really only ask for about twenty minutes of my life back, discounting the ads, which I'd get even for a 90-minute flick, and basically just because that's about how much time in total is spent lingeringly on cliches.

Oh, and the songs over the closing credits are terrible. Really, get out while you can.

Packaging
Public Image, Ltd., has re-released "Metal Box" in a CD analogue to the original packaging. I know I only bought it because I fell for the marketing gimmick, but it's a terrific record anyway, and now I'll have those "poptones" turning up on my iPod.

Conveniences
There were a number of considerations I had to make when I took this job in North Ryde, some of which included the fact that in Parramatta I had convenient lunch-hour access to doctors and dentists, whereas the desolation of a big-box industrial park offered limited prospects even for so much as a cup of coffee (it being a cultural practice here to provide instant coffee in the workplace in preference to what is considered horrible American drip machines; many people prefer to bring a small French press, but then I'm just bringing home clean-up chores along to the office, and I've got enough to do). Other factors include: home deliveries (Australia Post does not open on Saturday and only from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. on weekdays, severely limiting my ability to attend the local branch) and household repairs.

A month or so ago, my oven stopped working.

A month or so ago, my Parramatta dentist called to remind me of my six-monthly appointment, prompting me to find a local dentist, who, delightfully, doesn't work Saturdays, but 8:30 to 5:00 on weekdays.

A month or so ago, I bought tickets to a big event that the Sydney Festival organisers thought best to send to my home address via registered mail without offering me a different mailing address option.

I booked the dentist and a day off. Probably I could have done a half-day, but let's make a long weekend out of it, I thought.

As long as I've got an early dental appointment, I thought, let's book an electrician for the same day.

And on the Wednesday preceding, the registered mail pick-up slip arrived in my mailbox. It all worked beautifully, serendipitously. Hooray for me.

The dentist, despite accepting my insurance, charges $60 above the "reasonable and standard" rate established by my private cover. (And let's not even get into the whole water-boarding experience it proved to be; don't tell me that's not torture.)

Yesterday the dishwasher broke.

If these things go in threes, there'll be a problem with the tickets, I reckon (although it could be that the NY'er's international distribution company has decided to reallocate my subscription to somebody else), but that'd be the least thing to go wrong.

Genre Nostalgia
It's funny that I never got into The X-Files, but I didn't, and watching the movies confirmed it. I rented both yesterday and watched them back-to-back. I guess I already knew that that wasn't going to offer much continuity, but it seemed the best way to address the second, to provide context. Now, this was a show that essentially pioneered the techniques used in Heroes, Lost, etc., that sense of dislocation as the different plot lines within and between episodes swirled around, touching, almost but not quite converging, and it was all going to be the aliens all along, of the secret world government, or maybe just some mad scientists operating all on their own, so even if you weren't going to get a straight answer, it'd be a fun ride. It just wasn't. Largely, David Duchovney goes around blank-faced, beaten up, and carrying on through, like the good hard-boiled detective he's modeled on, but without the force of personality to make you care, and Gillian Anderson wanders through every scene she's in looking like a startled squirrel, which is the full range of her acting ability from what I've seen elsewhere. So even when you get any kind of plot, there's not a lot of it - which may be a movie-length translation problem - leaving the majority of what's on screen mere atmosphere.

As we're now in the summer television doldrums (not that we aren't usually, there being nothing much to watch on free-to-air to begin with - and even if I had digital, the broadcast options don't vary), I've been reading a little more after dinner than usual (and just to keep adding parentheticals, since most of what I watch are the hot shows out of the U.S. and these are usually played at or through past what time I go to bed, I usually knock over at least the NY'er in short order), which has led me to the Smiley series of John LeCarre's spy novels. I remember when these were the hottest spy novels going, and the third of them was made into a BBC show with Alec Guinness, but the novels aren't holding up particularly well. Is it post-Cold War malaise? Is it just that they're too British, too English, really? Is it just the narrative voice, one that seems to go off into an aren't we clever tone, speaking suddenly quite directly to the reader as if regaling its audience with an amusing story? Big, overwritten, these books are nothing like LeCarre's recent stuff, books where he's found an anger not expressed in these. Maybe that's the key, finding the anger, because there must be some, repressed, stiff-upper-lipped into a gruelling slog through minutia.

Perhaps instead of renting a movie tonight, I'll focus on finding Smiley's edge.

Rate Cuts
It’s a dilemma: when the Reserve Bank cuts interest rates, commercial banks can pass that along in part or in full to their customers, but when they do, reducing mortgage repayments, for example, and everybody cheers, they also cut the return on savings or new term deposits, which everybody seems to forget. Granted, these are not the preferred investment instruments these past few years, and if you’re holding a mortgage, your savings may not be doing you much good (better if you pay the maximum extra and then bank what’s left), but mortgage rates simply aren’t all that high at the moment and while the global economy is bad everywhere, we’re not at much at risk of massive foreclosure exposure as others are. Banks, like any other company, need profits. They shouldn’t need the kind of profits that have provided CEO’s around the world with income in excess of 60x that of their lowest-paid employees, but enough to stay open and keep handing out compound interest and offering loans. I say all this in the first year of a five-year fixed-rate mortgage, so if I’m honest, I suppose if I had a variable rate I’d want the full cut just as much as I’d hate every interest rate rise passed on in full. Fair enough, if they run the rates up equal to or in excess of the Reserve Bank’s increases – and they did – they need to at least pass on the savings, too.

Yes, It Has [Arrived]
Oh, there's my Obama shirt. Funny colors.

Thanksgiving
American history isn't a big thing here, so I found myself on Saturday having to explain a little about the Pilgrims and their Indian enablers, but all-in-all we had fun. I didn't do much cooking, and certainly no roasts. Even though rain blew through a couple of times, we had lovely weather out in the garden. I guess a BBQ might have been o.k., but I haven't done much towards that. It's a small, communal space, after all, so maybe that's for the best anyway. I did make a nice cucumber salad, with crushed peanuts, dried chilies, turmeric, cumin and mustard seed, parsley, mint, and dressed with lemon. Quite nice, too, as all the flavors were present, distinct, yet melding nicely. It's always nice to see the Spielman's, even if it wasn't the full contingent. The Munoz's turned up late, but I was very pleased to see them. Married two years now, and this is the first time we've gotten together since the wedding. Very bad.

Xmen, I mean Xmas
The office party's been announced, and it's got a theme: Hawaiian nights. Terrific. No thongs (flip-flops, for the Americans) or singlets (wife-beaters for the rednecks), but wouldn't you know it? Mambo loud-shirts are eBay-only at this point. A couple of years ago, they decided that Reg Mombassa's designs were too old-hat for the kiddies. The surf-set wasn't buying their gear because it was the same stuff their middle-aged uncool old dad was wearing. Little did I know, and little does the Counsellor know, but that beer tree shirt I got him 'way back in 2000 is now a serious collector's item, worth well in excess of what I paid and climbing steadily. Even eBay doesn't have any of that particular design left, which leaves me with the stubby-chips-and-fags design (if it arrives in time) or my 3-eyed-Jesus-at-the-footy (the miracle of the pies, or somthing) t-shirt. Gotta do it, though. Maybe I should go for the Ned Kelly & John the Baptist one?

(And where's my Obama shirt?)

Who’s Squealing?
In one of the most petty instances of political gamesmanship, we now have the Federal Opposition carping about the Prime Minister’s recent phone call to George Bush over who let slip that George didn’t know what the G20 is? Rudd has denied W. even asked, but because Murdoch’s Australian reported it, Turnbull and crew are treating it as true and a leak, deliberately embarrassing Bush and showing up Rudd as a political fumbler. We’ve got Tony Abbott calling Rudd “cowardly”, even, for refusing to continue to engage the Opposition on the matter.

Frankly, I find Australian parliamentary politics childish in its daily performances. While I wouldn’t put it past Bush not to know about the G20 – a man of such deliberate ignorance, he’s been shown up on a regular basis – and likewise I wouldn’t be surprised if Rudd himself was the source of the “leak”. Here he is having dinner with the editor of the Australian, the call comes in, and, afterward, Kev says: “Jeez, that W., said ‘Who’s that?’ when I asked him about meeting with the G20.” So off goes the intrepid journalist to get a nice piece in for the morning. It’s not a scenario I can’t see happening. But so what? “National Security breach”? I think that needs more explanation than who did or didn’t say what to whom. Can we please move on?

Bali Bombers
I understand the execution of the Bali Bombers, as these men are collectively known, and the reactions to their crimes, trial, sentence, and deaths. It’s Indonesia’s right to manage its judicial system and to impose capital punishment, but I take no satisfaction in these executions, even while I can sympathize with those, due to their own involvement or that of their families, as victims, who do. But capital punishment is less satisfying to me than would be the conversion of these men from fanatics into having an understanding of what their actions really did, both in the direct harm to the people killed and injured and their families, Australian and Balinese, and to those who see their deaths are martyrdom, who are themselves radicalized, a more lasting damage. I’m glad they’re gone, but I pity us all, knowing that there are still those who think a car bomb, a suicide bomb, a gun, a grenade, a war are ever really legitimate options for redress.

Proud, but Underdressed
I have never been so moved by a Presidential acceptance speech as I was today, standing in a room with hundreds of my fellow Sydneysider expat Americans, and nearly as many again Australian supporters, listening to Barak Obama promise to be President for all of the country, even the ones whose trust he had not yet earned, and even while I knew there were so very many who would simply refuse to ever support him. For the African-American Vietnam vet who left the U.S. after his discharge and stood beside me in tears, for the gays & straights of Democrats Abroad Australia, for every Aussie whose regard for America was dashed to pieces in 2000 and again in 2004, this election was momentous, and we all know now not only that we must work harder than ever, but that it can have an effect. We can change the world for the better, because we can change ourselves, we have changed ourselves.

But where's my Obama shirt?

Undecided
Down to the wire, and there are still people making up their minds. I know McCain isn’t Bush – it’s the best line he had in any of the debates – but I don’t believe he’s actually got a plan for being president, other than to be president. Obama, on the other hand, I think has a plan, even if it may be pretty high-level, and I’m sure he’s got the thinkers to pull it all together into the detailed agenda a president needs. What Obama has that McCain lacks, to pick one, is leadership. No, he’s not a secret Muslim, planted by the A-rabs to trap Amurica into becoming an Islamic theocracy. No, he’s not a socialist terrorist redistributionist, and I can’t believe that anyone is still making those accusations as if they’re arguments. McCain’s got nothing but anger fueling his campaign, that and wing-nut Palin hysteria. And I reckon he’s done serious damage to the future of the country by picking Palin as his running mate; certainly, he’s damaged the GOP, dealing a body-blow it’ll be reeling from for the next eight years. Well, good. They gave us Bush – two of ‘em, and one of ‘em twice. But what a shame that Palin’s been plucked from the obscurity of Alaska, where the damage she might have wrought could be curtailed. The idea of seeing her again in four-to-eight years curdles my blood. Unfortunately, Obama’s choice of Biden really only gets us eight years, instead of twelve, as Joe’ll be a little long in the tooth to take advantage of incumbency in 2016. He was a good pick, for the stability he provides, for the reassurance his experience provides, something not on offer from the Republicans, but he’ll only ever be VP, now.

Wednesday, I’ll be out at Slide Lounge, Oxford Street, Darlinghurst for the Democrats Abroad election watch party. Four years ago, the party turned into a wake, but I think this year I’ll need to have taken Thursday off, too.

Outdoor Art
M. & I made the annual Bondi pilgrimage to “Sculpture by the Sea” over the weekend, although I’d say mainly on the basis that her cousin’s husband, Mark McClelland, had a piece in the show. In fact, it won the big NAB prize, something the Sydney Morning Herald was a little dismissive of, attributing the accomplishment somewhat to its position. This is more than a little unfair, since it wouldn’t have been the artist choosing the location, but the curators, in which instance they did a swell job. It’s also worth taking into account that a substantial number of the installations – and many of them amount to that more than to a more specific categorization as “sculpture” – aren’t particularly site-specific. The Andy Warhol wire mesh bust, for example, has no real place in an outdoor show, let alone one that ranges over two kilometres of dramatic shoreline. Mark’s piece suited its position, much more so than some of the others. In itself it was an accomplished work, quite a surprise, really, as we had no idea he’d taken it up.

There were other pieces in the show that I liked quite a lot as well and some – many, really – that were just “Sculpture-by-the-Sea” sculptures. A Christo-ish wrapping of a massive boulder was derivative, perhaps, but nonetheless effective for the change it wrought over how you looked at something you’ve seen so many times. The Perspex sphere floating offshore (for sale! Put it in your pool!) drew and held the gaze, bobbing in the swells. The dogs ranged in stopped motion up a hill were evocative of wildness, the sort of shock that runs through you when unexpectedly encountering animals in their natural habitat and state. The iron sea urchins were quite good, too.

The Next War President
Remember when W. called himself a “war President”? If you had any doubts about the belligerence of John McCain, you might see them cast aside with his latest remarks. He’s ready to pull the trigger, folks. He’s always been ready. Not like that namby-pamby Obama, all willing to talk and stuff.

John McCain will take this country into another war if he becomes President. That's not to say Obama won't, but with McCain, it's a guarantee. You read it here first.

Politics, as usual
I’m sure the canteen in Canberra is as much a fine-dining experience as anywhere else, just as much as I’m sure I’d take my wife to lunch somewhere outside the office, but in a period when governmental concerns over increasing levels of obesity are making headlines week-by-week, who orders the Stroganoff, anyway, let alones worries that the portions are too small. (Reminds of me of that joke about Army food/old-age home meals/etc.: The food’s so bad here, complains one. And the portions are so small, responds the other.) Does it come with a salad? A bread roll? Maybe you’d like a wafer-thin mint after your meal?

Call a Royal Commission!

Biopic
Patti Smith’s first album, “Horses”, was one of the few from that period that I instantly “got” when I first heard it, and I’ve been a thorough fan ever since. Somehow, in her later career, she kind of fell off the radar for me, maybe because she wasn’t touring, focussed instead on her life as a mom in Detroit. Her return, marked initially by a pointed anarchist anthem, “People Have the Power,” was welcome, if disappointing, but when I caught up with “Gone”, well, she really was back, a better songwriter and poet than ever before. So when Dream of Life was announced for previews at the Dendy, M. booked the tickets and we made the pilgrimage yesterday. I use “pilgrimage” quite deliberately, not because it’s some kind of trek down to Circular Quay, but because of the film itself, which at 109 minutes, is too long by half, due entirely to the long, long meditations of Patti attending the graves of Gregory Corso, Arthur Rimbaud, and her husband, Fred “Sonic” Smith, among other visitations. The movie has many appealing moments with Patti herself and the people in her life, including her band, but without much exposition beyond a quick recap of her life, and some old footage of her from when she first moved to NYC, an appealing gamin. One of the critiques of the film I’ve seen elsewhere is that nobody is identified, except contextually, and I did find that to be a problem. If I didn’t know her band, the introductions come rather late in the piece. Sam Shepard I knew, but which one was Tom Verlaine? Or Flea, for that matter? Was that her boyfriend with the Prada bag? Does he have a name?

I enjoyed it, mainly for the music, for those moments when Patti’s life was opened up a little for us, but I can’t say this was a stand-out documentary as such.

Sub-prime Reasoning
I'm not great economic genius, but every day I read or hear someone say the economic crisis we're afflicted with at the moment is the fault of people taking out mortgages they couldn't afford. This is specious.

The majority of mortgages in all the history of mortgages are unaffordable, and the borrowers do everything they can to make ends meet. I don't blame anyone for wanting a home of their own, even if their reasoning, their calculations, have been flawed. Nobody much was out there explaining the positive balance to be achieved by renting over buying, certainly not to the extent that so many of these people would have had the access to the information or wouldn't still have had that other voice, the bad angel, if you will, whispering just the opposite, something we're all susceptible to, even if it's more a matter of having that extra piece of chocolate cake or not.

And I still don't blame the mortgagees, and certainly not to the tune of trillions of dollars. Sorry, that's where I have to get off this train-wreck of an argument. There are just under 300 million people in the U.S. How many of them would have to take out a mortgage-they-can't-afford to run up the debt into the trillions? Even leaving aside the fact that there aren't 300 million people eligible for a mortgage, even as subprime holders - because many already own, are smart enough to do the math, are children, own in tandem with someone else - you'd need many more than you can comfortably blame for the problem, I'd reckon, but, like I said, I'm no math genius, even if you do give me a calculator.

Not to mention it's money on paper, for one thing, which brings me to where the fault really lies: corporate greed.

It's been a long-standing problem for corporations, private and well as, although especially, publicly-traded, that their focus is not on their existence, but on providing "shareholder return." This can only be accomplished by maximizing profit. Fair enough, that corporations should be in the business of making money, but that's not quite the same as "shareholder return," something that's more about accounting tricks than actual revenue versus cost. There's only so much any company can do to maximize profit, you know. There's a minimum number of employees, after which the company can't fulfill it's commitments to its customers. There are overheads, costs paid to government, suppliers, etc. It takes money, we always hear, to make money, and it's true. But shareholder return doesn't care about that. Show a downturn, show a slow-down, and shareholder return shrinks, the market gets itchy, shareholder return shrinks more, and so on, until you're out of business and shareholder return is zero, anyway, or worse, as we're seeing today.

So Joe Plumber, to take Senator McCain's new icon, loses that home he couldn't afford the mortgage on, even if he was making his payments, because his bank sold his subprime mortgage to someone else who sold futures on it to some other cabal who leveraged whatever that was worth in some other obscene transaction, until somebody had to have some cash and it had to come from Joe Plumber or Joe Sixpack or me or you.

This isn't new, it's just snowballed. We've been headed this way for a few decades now, although things really started getting out of hand in the eighties, when the GOP decided it ought not to be too concerned with how people got along and focussed instead on ensuring they got along so long as they were incorporated. The Democrats haven't helped, frankly, and as much as I hear from back home that Obama is no less in bed with the usual corporate suspects and beholden to the lobbyists, I have to agree. My only hope is that he really will prove to be a leader. I know McCain won't. He's too old and too beholden and too bought-and-sold-out. In some ways, I wonder about Hillary Clinton, but, then again, what did Bill do? I mean other than to set in motion a lot of the regulatory changes that are killing us now.

AU$ down to US$0.65, in a decline as precipitous as it's gain, and during a period where the expectation from the analysts was that we'd be at par. Goes to show: you can't trust the experts. Makes me feel a little better about my own thinking on the topic.

The Uses of Power
Of course Sarah Palin abused her power as governor of Alaska, that's what power is for, and that's what she wanted it for. Her entire history is about power and its (ab)uses. She didn't like property taxes, so when she had her chance, she got rid of them in Wasalia. It didn't matter that she replaced a progressive tax with a regressive one. She got what she wanted. And when the GOP power brokers needed someone they could put forward who wasn't implicated in any of their major corruption problems, she was a logical choice, someone who'd do what they wanted, but not so smart as to start running them. Of course, she was also not so smart as not to end up in a scandal of her own, but ya pays yer money and ya takes yer chances, as the saying goes. And this is the kind of person John McCain thinks is Presidential material, the legacy he'd leave us with, once his own two terms (assuming he can take a second, let alone the first one, and assuming his health holds out) expire? Sure, why not? George H.W. would have left us with Dan Quayle if he could have, after all. The GOP is beyond cynical. They believe power is a right, their right. And look what they've done with it. Since Nixon, look at what they've done. (Skip Ford, he was pretty much a nonentity.) Reagan's "trickle-down" bankruptcy of D.C., Bush I's . . . o.k., skip him, too; all he left us with was his son. Bush II, who's Reagan lite, if only from a intellectual standpoint, which is saying something in itself, even while he tries to out-Reagan Reagan. And now McCain, the most cynical of them all. And his legacy? Unending war and Sarah Palin appointing Supreme Court Justices. I've never been happier to be an ex-pat. What my first country could come to with this crowd in power for just four more years, let alone eight, or twelve, or sixteen . . . it's beyond belief.

The Election the Democrats Have to Win (But Do They Want to?)
In the run-up to the last Australian Federal election, and, in fact, well before, there was a fair amount of talk from both sides that Labor might be better off losing, so that the Liberals would take the heat on the economy. With stocks collapsing, rates going up, coming back down, and the AU$ in free-fall, we may well be looking at joining the U.S. in a recession, which is bound to hurt Labor at the next election, maybe even cost them their narrow majority.

If the U.S. doesn't pull out of its own tailspin soon, maybe the Democrats would themselves be better off not taking the White House, and it could cost some House seats. The problem with that is, whatever you think of Obama, he's better for the U.S. and the world in the medium- to long-term than McCain, who'll only give us the same as we've been getting from Bush, except worse, because it'll be for that much longer.

Meanwhile, because I moved, and my forwarding notice has long since expired, I've had to cast a write-in ballot. I'm confident I've voted for the right man and in time, but I dislike the uncertainty of this method.

Gig Guide
It ran pretty late for a school night, but M. & Astrid & I hit the Annandale Hotel for The New Pornographers - how could we not? We came to them relatively late, but so what? The show was just "wow" all the way through. Hearing them live offered an opportunity to fully appreciate just how much precision these musicians bring with them. It's a tight, tight band, playing dense music, with unusual virtuosity. No sign of Neko Case, which was kinda too bad, but I'd almost rather just savor that experience separately anyway. The ELO cover ("Don't Bring Me Down") to close the set was inspired.

Limits of Power
So Bloomberg wants a third term as Mayor? I guess I can’t blame him, or fault him too much for trying to overturn term limits. I always thought term limits were stupid, but the legislature enacted them, and I think they ought to live with them, and that includes Mayor Mike. After all, he ran for the office knowing he could only have two terms, so it gets a bit “president-for-life” to wait until the end of your second term to reconstitute the constitution. Suck it up, Mikey, you’re through.

Bailout
All this stock market volatility is distressing, at least insofar as my 401(k) is concerned, which is probably down to practically nothing by now, and, because I no longer contribute to it, unable to take advantage of diminished prices for the inevitable return to growth. So much for retirement. Speaking of which, Mom & Dad – and millions like them – are disproportionately affected by this crisis, since they were smart enough to invest for their post-working lives, but now are unfortunate enough to rely on stocks and so forth to fund daily living. Will the Bush plan help them?

There’s a reason I used the phrase “disproportionately affected” before. While banks and brokerages and insurance companies are in turmoil, and the Chapter 11 filings and mergers and takeovers will result in many employees at many levels being turned out on the street to fend for themselves, adding financial stress to the system already burdened by too many people unable to meet their mortgage or credit card repayments, pouring billions of dollars into these companies to prop them up until the good times roll again is, by and large, going to benefit the ones who always benefit, the CEO’s and others in the upper eschalons of power.

Already receiving remuneration at a vast percentage difference from their employees, the mechanisms of their pay are designed for them to ride out these perilous times and reap their reward at a later date. It’s like watching some secondary bandit troop come riding through to raid the fields after the first Mongols came through burning everything behind them and you’ve just managed to coax a few fresh shoots of grain back among the ashes. No Congressional or independent oversight is going to stay their hands. They’ll have their stock options to exercise, and they will. They’ll have their golden parachutes, and they’ll float gently down into their next cushy berth in a new corner office or boardroom. And it will all start over again.

Meanwhile, while the wealth of CEO’s is largely intact or carefully immunized from the effects of corporate greed and the foolhardy deregulation of the last twenty years, millions of us won’t see dime one out of the Bush bailout, but we’re the ones who really need it. Those retirees who can’t put gas in their cars, those marginal middle-aged middle-class mortgage-holders who have to decide which bills not to pay, nobody’s looking out for them. Why, it’s really their fault, isn’t it? Taking out a mortgage they couldn’t afford, spending up big on their credit cards, retiring before they absolutely had to . . . what were they thinking? Look what they’ve done to the economy! Personal Responsibility!

If you’re twenty-five or thirty, you’ll have a chance to rebuild. You might end up moving back in with Mom & Dad, but this, too, shall pass, and if you’re careful, you’ll get it all back eventually. But the pain you’re experiencing is suffering for many others. There is no coming back from seeing your retirement funds slashed, even wiped out. Bush, certainly, and Congress, most likely, aren’t going to help you. You’re not a market.

Self-Explanatory
When they say “Police ‘Need Criminals to Boost Numbers’” is that one of those chicken-and-egg puzzles?

Cutting Heads
If there's one good thing that's come from having finished training for the marathon, it'd be that I was home for the telecast of the 1st U.S. Presidential debate. I respect Jim Lehrer as a newsreader, and, in the PBS News Hour, when I catch it, as a moderator of discussion, even though I think he could stand a better set of commentators than he's got. As the moderator of the debate, let alone as the author of the questions, he was pretty weak, I thought, but be that as it may, the debate showed up a couple of points.

First, McCain often approached the point of incomprehensibility, struggling to finish a phrase, let alone a sentence, or to make a point, and always striving mightily to accomplish two things: sound like Ronald Reagan and to portray himself simultaneously as Beltway insider and "maverick" outsider. For anyone who's been paying attention, for even just the last year, neither came off.

Obama was measured and reasonable throughout, often crediting McCain when he didn't have to (and McCain certainly never saw any reason to offer any such courtesy), even when there wasn't so altogether much to hold praiseworthy. Don't forget - don't ever forget - that for all McCain's principled stand against torture as an interrogation method by U.S. troops, he rolled on the CIA and other paramilitary arms of U.S. power. I think he came off well, particularly on domestic issues, but he never stumbled on the foreign policy issues, either, even if he did let McCain slide on a few porkies.

Admittedly, I'm an Obama supporter, but that's not to say I'm blind to his faults. He doesn't have years (and years and years) of history on Capitol Hill, or any great depth in matters military, economic, or whatever. McCain certainly has more personal experience as a legislator than Obama on any matter of governance you can name. But experience doesn't translate into leadership, and that's what the Presidency is about.

Congress makes laws. The Judiciary ensures they are applied or can be. The President leads the nation. Bush has led America into a terrible economic crisis, two wars where one would have been sufficient, and a general malaise of neglect and abandonment of the needy. McCain will do nothing different. Obama will. At any rate, Obama will try. McCain is for McCain, and that's all. Obama is for America, the one we Americans are raised to believe in, the one where if you try you can succeed, where anyone can grow up to be President. That's not McCain, and he's not the President I want to see lead the country for the next four years, let alone eight.

And God help us all if his running mate ever came to power. No, let's not even mention what she could do to the Supreme Court.

Yes, I'm o.k.

That's me at the end, the only one of the five of six runners included in the video being asked if he's in need of medical assistance. I must have looked as healthy as I felt.

Feel better now, though, thankfully.

A Supposedly Fun Thing to Do
That I'll probably NEVER DO AGAIN. ZOMG. 4:32, by the clock over the finish line, and pretty much by my clock, too, although maybe a little less, since it was a couple of minutes before my brain would function enough to remember to stop it. I literally hobbled to the nearest city street after picking up my finisher's shirt and silly medal, and my gear, which all took far longer than I liked. But after buying a sports drink, which I consumed walking home the last block, and then polishing off the one I bought yesterday, I discovered perhaps the most painful aspect of doing silly things like this: showering. Yes, even though this is something you'd think would be a blessed relief, in fact, removing the salt from certain sensitive areas hurts a lot. Pain was inevitable, as previously mentioned, but this was suffering. Only briefly, of course. After that it was a matter of getting the water hot enough to restore my internal body temperature to normal and then drinking lots of water.

It was, however, a really interesting course. Starting on the north side of the harbour, and crossing the Harbour Bridge on a beautiful Spring morning, was a splendid start. Even better, the race then loops through the Domain and Botanical Gardens out to Mrs. Macquarie's Point, and past the naval base at Woolloomooloo, before heading back through East Sydney and into Darlinghurst along Oxford Street (strangely deserted, for the most part, although you could hear the Saturday night gay bar discos still pumping out the jams). The best part of this stretch was the bandit who jumped in: "I've been drinking for eight hours! And I'm going to run with you!" I'll never know what happened to him, but I doubt he lasted long.

The course took a loop through Centennial Park, out to Randwick Racecourse, and doubled-back on itself a couple of times along the way. Very annoying, but oh, well. After that, it was straight through the heart of the city via Surry Hills, my old stomping ground, as it were, and off along a stretch of highway to Leichhardt. And it was a stretch. By this time, we'd passed 28k, and I was looking for that 32k marker, with the excuse that, if I can get past that, it will be the longest I have ever run continuously and maybe there'll be a water station and I can take a little break. There was, I did, and it was the first one that still had some Gu. Up until then, I'd been making do with the two I'd carried - and consumed by about the 18k mark, jelly beans and diluted sports drink. Jelly beans, I think, are not as good. Sort of reminds me of that NY'er article, where they talked about Frank Shorter shaking up Coke to remove the fizz - a stop-gap measure until technology catches up. Of course, it has, and judging by the wrappers I saw, there was Gu provided, or maybe those were just the packets people had brought of there own.

Hairpin turn at Norton Street, and back up through Ultimo to the city. Nice working-harbour views. My training run had taken me - literally - over some parts of this course. Normally the Old Glebe Bridge is closed to traffic, but I'd had a nice look at it many times, crossing the Anzac Bridge above it. The loop through the Rocks was strangely desolate, although there's not much reason for anyone but a stevedore to be there generally, so I shouldn't be surprised. Suddenly, however, we were under the south towers of the Harbour Bridge and making the loop around Circular Quay. Packed to the rafters it was (and it was the first time anyone called out, "keep going Keith Richards"). By this time, walking was long since not an option. If I walked it became harder and harder to start running again. Murakami's mantras and examples did little, but I employed them - I am here to run; I am a running machine. Helped, I suppose, as I managed a bit of a kick over the last K and crossed the line better than I had any real reason to expect.

I was done in. I've regained a little energy, and the blisters I thought I felt coming up over the last 8K never did materialize. Clearly, taking the advice from the salesperson at Rebel Sport to buy a half-size up was worthwhile.

Now if I can just make it into work tomorrow. . . .

Last Gasp
Well, the training is over, so it's all on for Sunday. I missed a few days, unfortunately, but most here at the end, during the tapering off period, so maybe it's not so bad. I've done 93% of the training, all up, although I admit to being fairly slack about the cross-training element. I mean, if I ride my bike around town for a couple of hours doing errands, stopping here and there, does that still count? I guess I'll find out.

The race pack is seriously disappointing. Not only did I have to buy the shirt, but the stuff they hand out for free is handbills - not even discount coupons. I mean, in NYC, even if the shirt was just a cotton T, it was part of the entry. It's not like I'm in contention for any prizes, so it's all down to personal achievement, now.

The NY'er had an interesting piece on marathoning a couple of weeks ago, centered around the great hope of the nation for the Beijing games (but, my, didn't that Kenyan dude kick it?). Basically, all the big races and Western elite runners are subsidised by us hundreds and thousands of slowpokes. So why can't they hand out an advance tube of Gu?

I'm also readying Murakami's memoir, "What I Talk About When I Talk About Running," which is just annoying. Blah, blah, blah, I run every day and at least one marathon in under 4 hours every year. . . ." Bastard. No, actually, although I don't think memoir is his form, there's some good stuff in it here and there. I especially like: Pain is inevitable, suffering is optional (which I've since learned is Ghandi's). I may write that on my arm for Sunday.

Obligatory
Saturday was local council elections across NSW, so I got to vote for Mayor - Lord Mayor, no less - and a referendum (on whether Sydney should be divided into wards, and guaranteeing 3 councillors each, theoretically making the overall body more representative. At this level of government, party politics doesn't get in the way quite so much as it does at the State and Federal level. Clover Moore, for example, is an independent, and while Labor otherwise has been dominant, the Greens have a significant influence. The independents and Greens in the bigger houses play much more of a spoiler role, when they play any role at all.

Now the NSW State government (Labor) has been getting kicked around lately, what with the Premier resigning after sacking his cabinet, the new guy making some poor picks of his own and so on. The conventional wisdom basically runs that the State would kick Labor out, if there was a decent opposition. And it's true; the Liberals have been woeful. As for the Greens, well, you might just as well not vote as vote for them. They just don't have the power base. But if the Liberals can't make a go of it at the next election, they really ought to just stay home. WA just went (barely) for the Liberals, making Labor's wall-to-wall government stranglehold a thing of the past, and probably enlivening the hopes of the party here, too. We'll see. If the new guy manages to find the money for the infrastructure spending, and doesn't run into any more ministers-without-pants scandals, Labor could still pull it off.

And it's not like the Liberals nationally are all that, although having ousted the pathetic Brendan Nelson in favor of silvertail Malcolm Turnbull, they might yet have the nous to stand up to the Rudd government and make a challenge in 3 years. I don't think Turnbull's really got the credentials or the charisma, but that's just me. Peter Costello finally turning down the leadership sort of definitively probably helped Turnbull, but for all the fun it's been to listen to the whinging about Costello's memoir and will-he-won't-he (get real; he never had the nerve) stand for leader, it'd be nicer if they'd just get on with the job.

In some ways it's been a relief to focus on the U.S. Presidential run. McCain just gets nastier all the time. How anyone could ever have believed he was a politician of a different sort - a maverick - should have been put to rest as soon as he was shown embracing Bush in a bear hug after losing the nomination in '04. You is my bestest friend, George, no matter what anybodys says (including you). Jeez. Principles, eh? And look at his running mate! I mean, Obama picking Biden was a little bit of a surprise. What? He needed a daddy? O.k., that was unfair. Biden's not bad. Every time he turns up on t.v. here, he's asking the pointed question of somebody who needs to be poked with something sharp. He's not a bad speaker, he's got the credentials for the top job, he's got the gravitas. So why Alaskan Governor Palin? What was Johnny thinking? Was it really just his infamous temper flaring up over being denied Lieberman? Screw you guys, then, if I can't have Joe, I'll pick this no-name chick? Nah. And it's not all about the oil (in ANWR), either. Don't forget, McCain is fully aware that all the crude under the tundra would have zero net effect on gas prices and wouldn't last a year, even if you could pull it all out at once, or before two years from deciding to drill there. Is it the guns? The anti-abortionism? The mommy factor? She's freaking clueless, even if she isn't afraid to open her mouth and let everyone know. She won't melt down, and she won't make (quite) as much a fool of herself as Quayle did, but she's just a stunt.

I sit next to another ex-pat at work. I knew, the instant I met him, that he was a Republican, but, since he's from Chicago, and since he's recently spent a fair amount of time laughing at Palin and McCain, I asked. Yeah, die-hard, dyed-in-the-wool GOP. Voting Obama. Wouldn't have voted McCain even before Palin. For all the talk of stealing Hillary voters off the Democrats, I reckon John'll have driven off a few others who might have stuck with their party just like he did this guy. What a maverick.

Into the Infinite
David Foster Wallace, an author whose novels I've enjoyed immensely - including the immense "Infinite Jest" - hanged himself. I can't say how sorry I am to hear that. Other authors of his generation have pointed to him as the "smartest guy in the room", but I guess there are sometimes just demons beyond endurance even for such as Mr. Wallace.

Boom
The Large Hadron Collider is up and running, and so far no black holes sucking us into another dimension. At least, not that we’re aware of. Let’s see what happens when they actually start smashing up protons.

Closing in
Today's 19k was nearly as fascinating to me as Thursday's 6k, for the latter of which I turned in a clocked time of under 5 minutes per K. Today, however, at just under 6k, even if slower, showed something remarkable: after all these weeks, 19k, which was unimaginable 16 weeks ago, doesn't even require the kind of effort it did the first time I ran it, just the motivation. And there's the rub: I'm very tired, so psyching myself up for the training runs is getting a little old. Gu does seem to help - thanks, bro, but what helps even more is knowing this will all end soon.

Although there is still to be a running cabal at the office, at least until summer hits its stride.