Norway
What to make of this? I don't doubt the murder of Oslo describes himself as "Christian", but I doubt he says he's "right-wing", more likely "conservative", and here we have the possibility of definitions. When this angry, hate-filled person says he's Christian, he means he's not a Muslim. Perhaps not a Jew or a Hindu, but I doubt he's ever taken his thinking as far as that. He has defined himself as the opposite of the Other of the day, and we all know who that is. In another time, before or yet to come, that could have been different. But he's no Christian, that's certain.

As far as being "conservative", well, that's come to mean something other than what it once was. Instead of trying to preserve something good, to slow reckless progress, conservatism, as we've seen in the U.S., perhaps especially lately, really means trying to roll back the clock to a idealised fantasy age: the 'fifties, the 'forties, the nineteenth century in more than some cases. This bastard is no different from the tea party crazies or the English Defense League or the National Front or whomever else you'd care to name. They want a different age, but have no understanding of what was truely at work in that age and why it cannot be.

I mourn Norway's losses, both the people and the sense that such madness was not part of their culture. It's in us all, unfortunately. Please let us find our way to a better relationship among ourselves sooner than it seems we have in us.

Gas
Australia's got a carbon tax, until 2015 - according to the plan - when we get a emissions trading scheme. I'm not opposed to either, but have my doubts about the overall efficacy of the plan on actually reducing emissions, although still willing to support positive efforts and evaluate whatever outcome is achieved, howsoever little that will be in my lifetime, especially with the Chinese, the Indians, and the U.S. unwilling or unable to act. For that matter, aren't India and China still among the developing nations, i.e., lumped in with Africa et al., and therefore those that will be on the outer with developed nations acting, not acting, and requiring their participation.

I guess it's one of the advantages of the Australian government's setup, that we can put through this kind of legislation, without having to have a "mandate", and without having to deal with a just-say-no opposition capable of siphoning off members of the party in power. Party-line voting can be trouble, too, but here's Australia taking action when the big players can't get it together to have it on the agenda even.

Sure, we have the usual suspects proclaiming doom, but, quietly, in other areas, you've got businesses and people looking for a way to make it work, and to make a profit, too. Will it cost jobs? Maybe, but it'll probably create some, too. Will it kill off entire industries? Please.

Auckland, Again
I'm spending a lot of time in Auckland these days, but I don't mind. It's a nice little city, although I wonder what it would be like to live there? I hear the transport system is pretty bad, and travelling to and from the airport supports this.

Although it seems every city aspiring to some notability put up a needle at some point, I rather like this one.

Festivals
The Vivid festival is one. Can't say the line-up is particularly interesting to me, but I still enjoy the lights.



The Customs House display was very animated and closely tailored to the elements of the facade, which made it quite a drawing card. The crowd on that side of Circular Quay was substantial.

Up the Rainbow Bridge
Happy Easter! To celebrate this most holy of Christian festivals, I went to see a movie about a pagan god: The Mighty Thor. Of course, they've made him an alien and Birfrost a wormhole, but all the mythological characters and structures are otherwise largely intact, including Sif and the Warriors Three, Volstagg, Hogun, and Fandral. I've never been much of a fan of the Thunder God, but with the Hulk and Iron Man already out there and Captain America coming up next, it's obvious we'll be getting an Avengers movie before long, so it's important to keep up.

Kenneth Branagh did a good job, and Anthony Hopkins makes a good Odin. This Australian kid they found to play Thor was beyond perfect, and engaging in just the way the movie is overall. This is light entertainment, as it should be. There's a lot more humor than we've seen out of Marvel Studios in general, and just enough of the various other dramatic elements to keep things moving right along. The spectacle of it all is not in any way underdone, but I have to question the 3D.

I'm not unhappy with it, entirely, but there wasn't much reason to bother, really. Standard 2D would have been enough. Funnily enough, movies have always been effective at deceiving the eye into a 3D experience, without the glasses. In this case, the illusion of depth was, I think, counteractive to this illusion. The different planes in which the action took place seemed flat layerings of one image upon on another, with none of the rounding binolocular vision affords in reality and our brain has supplied in movies over the years. Some of the faster action sequences seriously suffered in this respect. I'm hopeful they'll start leaving it alone if they can't make it any better than this just yet.

Dear Russell Crowe
I started attending Rabbitohs games as a member the year before Peter Holmes a Court and Russell Crowe bought their controlling interest, having learned to enjoy the sport since moving here, adopting them as my team out of a sense of loyalty to my ex (who only ever cheered for them because of a soft spot for small animals) and because, c'mon, any team with such a fearsome mascot is worth supporting. (Yes, I know, that's sarcasm, not irony, the sense of humour that Australians think American's don't get, so maybe we don't.)

But for all the investment Mr. Crowe has put in - especially the addition of Sam Burgess and David Taylor last year, and Greg Inglis this year - how am I left with such a win-less team? Granted, it's only round seven, but the only performer on the side is the littlest guy, Chris Sandow, who's kicking wonderfully well, not to mention scoring tries that seem to galvanise the squad, if only for ten minutes or so.

People talk about players being "80-minute men", but I'd say the Rabbitohs manage about thirty per half, before fading into irrelevancy. The Bulldogs didn't just manage to off-load the ball whenever they needed to, they also managed their passing in a way that suggested South Sydney had collectively taken a blow to the head that left them unable to follow the movement, letting Canterbury penetrate the defense easily.

The score, 36-24, suggests a closer game than it was.

On the station platform on the way out, a local wag remarked, "next year, brother, next year". Seems like maybe that's the way this season will turn out. Do I need to think about a new loyalty?

Shipping News
Someone comes to town, someone leaves town. With shipping containers full of stuff.

Auckland's container port seemed to always have something going on.

The Feminism Mystique
I don’t think Paul Sheehan understands women or feminism, a condition that usually sees men avoiding the topic and letting women columnists and pundits to argue that feminism is wholly at odds with femininity. The idea that wearing high heels proves that Betty Friedan was an opportunistic middle class hack with no foundation for her argument is ludicrous. Blaming women for the social ailments of women is just blaming the victim, again. Short skirts don’t make rapists and they don’t preclude men making more money for the same work than the women. How is calling models “giraffes” not objectification, one of the very things Friedan – and other “Jurassic Feminists” – wrote and raised our consciousness about? If we look more closely into the fashion machine, how many of the houses are run by women? How many of the leading designers are women? I don’t follow this stuff much, but leaving aside the power of Anna Wintour at Vanity Fair – which isn’t nearly as much as The Devil Wears Prada would lead you to believe – the only one I can think of is Donna Karan, a perennial also-ran in the high-price/high-profile stakes. Ralph Lauren spends more effort on projecting idealisations of body type to women than other women do. But that’s all right, because really we’ve just survived a “demographic deformity caused by World War II”, not a great awakening to the possibility of changing power relationships that had women unable to easily obtain a divorce and without control over their own bodies. Yeah, the Pill had nothing to do with the changes wrought or the “distortions” initiated by Rosie the Riviter and elucidated by Friedan et al. It’s all about the babies, folks, and women need to get back to their real jobs.

Why does Fairfax pay for this guff?

Zeds
It's amusing (to me, anyway) having learned to consistently spell and even speak according to the Australian vernacular, to find myself stumbling over "New Zealand", inevitably calling it "New Zedland", because, of course, Z is not Z, it's Zed. The New Zedlanders I speak to don't mind so much when I say "N Zed", and seem to take it in good humour (sic) when I say "New Zedland", but I do seem to be the only one falling into this.

Anyway, I've now returned from there, Auckland, specificially, for a business trip, and my first non-US overseas excursion. Auckland is a nice city. Small, easy to get around. Naturally we were staying right in the heart of the CBD, and just around the corner from the main office, so I can't say really what it might really be like to live there. The harbour is much different from that of Sydney or New York or San Francisco. It's big enough, and the hotel had a view of the container port, which was pretty much non-stop all night and day, even when there wasn't a ship to load/off-load. Fun to watch for a while.


I'd like to get back there and explore a bit. Christchurch seems to have quietened down now, but it'll be a long time before it's ready for tourism. The Rugby League World Cup commences soon, but that would be a bad time for me, even though I do like the code, and hotels likely to be sold out already. I'll have to do some research. It seems to me you could do a lot in just a week.

Out
The predicted swing to the Liberals showed Labor the door in a big way, but nothing for the Greens, not even their expected win in Marrickville, although Jamie Parker remains neck-and-neck with Verity Firth, so maybe one seat. Nice to see Clover Moore, who also serves as Lord Mayor of Sydney, retain her Independent seat. Honestly, her departure from the Labor ranks ten years ago should have been our first warning that the factionalism was out of control. Can Barry O'Farrell make the trains run on time? And cheaper? We'll see.

Shame about Kristina Keneally stepping down as Labor leader. It gives credence to the tale of her being nothing more than a puppet, and the party could have done worse than to support her in attempting full-scale reform of how they operate.

Speaking of women in politics, Geraldine Ferraro has died. Her selection as VP candidate in 1984 stands in stark contrast to John McCain's choice in 2008 of Sarah Palin. Although scandal involving her husband was a big part of what sank the Democratic ticket, she herself was capable and competent. She opened the way for Hillary Clinton to mount a credible campaign for the Presidential nomination, and we could do worse than to hope for more like her.

You Pad
On Friday, I passed the Apple store on George Street, to find a line of people camped out waiting to buy the iPad2. The line extended around the block, and by six, when I left work, had gone even further. Appple guardians were managing the crowd, which I found beneficial. I had to come to work on Saturday, too, and the line was still there, if smaller. Interestingly, because it was raining, Apple had provide umbrellas to those without. I didn't ask if they'd have to give them back, but they looked like those special wind-proof umbrellas, and I'd guess they weren't gimmies.

But I don't get it. What's the iPad got that's so essential? It's bascially a hypertrophic smart phone, as far as I can tell, and only half a laptop, if that. There must be something that makes it worth such attention, but if I can't upload to it or download from it, it's just eye candy and Facebook updates.

Whatever.

Nuclear Safety
The situation in Japan continues to be worrying, and you’d have to wonder what can be done and what’s next. Reading about six-inch thick steel containment vessels and explosions capable of damaging them shows both how much effort has gone into safety and how much can still go wrong.

Power generators are dealing with tremendous forces, and things can go badly wrong with any of them, nuclear or otherwise. The BP Gulf spill is evidence that just dealing with the substances is risky enough, let alone refining them, and then utilising them.

Granted 9.0 earthquakes and tsunami incursions of over 4 kilometres aren’t common, but if a building designed to withstand a direct hit by an airliner in a country with earthquake building codes second to none can fail as dramatically as these reactors, the question of how safe is safe has to be asked. Are we really prepared to continue using nuclear power? Is this just an old, flawed design that has been superseded elsewhere, even in Japan – where one of the reactors was already scheduled to be decommissioned?

I hope for the best, that the situation gets under control soon, and without catastrophic radiation release.

Elsewhere: Germany is now thinking ahead.

News
When I was in the US in January, a lunatic shot a member of the House, down in Arizona. For the next 48 hours, that was the only topic presented on the 24-hour cable news stations, Fox, MSNBC, and CNN, notably. Broadcast national news took a wider view, if only just, and if only because with 30 to 60 minutes available had much less disposable time than that required to run a day-long news cycle.
Mind you, the news was that Gabrielle Giffords had been shot, that a judge and a nine-year old girl were among the killed, the number of wounded, and that the perpetrator had been arrested. In the following hours, the news grew to include the prognosis of Representative Giffords and, to be honest, very little else. Yet the analysis – no, that’s too strong – the discussion never stopped. If I switched on the television, I would learn nothing new. But why did I expect to?
This is the 24/7 news program’s trap. You keep hoping to hear something you missed, something that would make sense, would add to your store of knowledge, that would help determine a course of action or imbue a sense of progress. This is what they are selling, little different from the endless news “updates” that are nothing more than advertisements for a program that will have little content in the end beyond what you’ve already gleaned from the ad or from an earlier program.
And now we have Japan’s 9.0 earthquake and the devastating tsunami that followed. This is certainly producing a lot of valuable new information, especially in regard to the nuclear power plants situations. Anyone paying even the least attention to these events and their development is eager to receive new information.
Typically, however, we have an opportunistic attempt to deride the Australian national broadcast company’s relatively recent launch of a 24-hour news channel. And, as usual, it’s coming from the Murdoch empire.
Mr. Blair lists the programming content of ABC News 24 on the Saturday following the destructive events in Japan, up until 5:30 p.m.. He makes no mention of any coverage they did offer during this period or afterwards, so maybe he just wasn’t getting his tsunami jones satisfied.
Why? Because he’s been led to expect non-stop coverage of whatever major event has occurred in the last 24 to 72 hours, regardless of whether there’s any new information? Or because it’s the ABC, a public service that he’s decided is fair game so long as Labor is in government, rather than the Coalition? It can’t be that, because during the Howard era, when Mr. Blair got his start as a semi-public figure and now a columnist in the tabloids, he’d be just as critical whenever a story or program aired critical of the Liberals.
I want to know what’s happening in Japan, because it’s important. It’s important on many levels, not least to the Japanese themselves, who are presently undergoing, for me, unimaginable hardship and trauma. But it isn’t something I’m interested in so I can play the tall poppy card in a one-sided political smear campaign, and that's what appears to be the intention. There are bigger things than the ABC, whether you think it’s working to its job description or not.

State of the State
On a national level, I consider the Liberal Party increasingly modelled on the Know-Nothing basis. Opposition Leader Tony Abbott standing up in public to declare that carbon dioxide is not the villain it’s portrayed as in the “[unsettled]” science of global warming is fatuous disingenuousness. How long Abbott can last in his role is unknown. The Liberals appear to like having a vicious unprincipled attack-dog as leader, but when the next election is called, will they still want him, or will they go for someone more measured?

The question is sort of more acute at the State level, insofar as New South Wales is less than two weeks from going to the polls, with the Liberals highly touted to take the government out of Labor’s hands. In their case, I can’t say as I’ve heard much from their leader, Barry O’Farrell, either before the election was announced or since. I have started to see some attack ads on television, but only one where O’Farrell himself stands up to say anything about policy, and I find his statement regarding the proposed Federal Carbon Tax hard to fathom. (If the tax is implemented nationally, how can a State Premier rescind it?) Regardless, despite the silliness in the advertising, O’Farrell has been very different from Abbott, mainly as he hasn’t been much of a presence at all, and when he does show up in the news, hasn’t got much to say. Well, the big stuff gets done in Canberra, anyway, I guess, not Macquarie Street.

I’m pretty well convinced that the Liberals will take government, though, and not looking forward to it. Although Labor have undeniably been inept, my own experiences don’t suggest they’ve been as bad as the newspapers and television programs say. I ride the buses and trains and travel throughout the city pretty extensively, and it all works well enough often enough. I haven’t had any bad experiences with the hospitals, although the horror stories that occasionally surface are pretty horrible. The MP for my area, Verity Firth, hasn’t been bad (although her husband getting picked up buying a tab of ecstasy was pretty stupid, especially for his timing), so I don’t have any motivation to vote Greens, let alone Liberal. So if Labor have been bad, it’s been mostly literally political. Their leadership spills, portfolio hand-offs, various scandals and, more recently, abundant resignations have tainted the brand. Is there any reasonable expectation that it won’t be much the same for the Liberals?

There’s an opportunity for the Greens, which I doubt will come to any substantial gain, let alone the government (which I have my doubts they’re ready for). Out in the western suburbs and rural NSW, the Greens are evil institutionalized, so their only shot exists in the eastern and inner west suburbs. The east will vote Liberal, is my prediction, and the inner west, often safe seats for Labor, will stick it out or go Liberal, but I anticipate that any gains made by the Greens will be here. Newtown, Marrickville, Glebe tend to lean harder left than other suburbs. If Verity gets dumped from her seat of Balmain, it’ll be because of her individualized campaign slogan: “Keep Verity” (i.e., Labor is awful but it’s not Verity’s fault). I know it motivates me.

But I’ll have to live with whatever government we do get, nevertheless.

8.9
That's about as big as these things get - the scale essentially only goes up to 10. Japan, now, after two big hits in NZ - and orders of magnitude greater than those, and a tsunami on top of that - must be reeling. You'd almost think it's spreading.

V-v-v-video
O.k., so that's a reference to Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome, but even if that's an Australian movie damaged by Hollywood, it's still kind of iconically Australian, and so is The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert, which after all this time I've finally seen. What a good movie, and what a cast. Hugo Weaving, Guy Pearce, and Terence Stamp, with Bill Hunter for good measure, and maybe they're camping it up a little much, but the emotional realities, the strengths and weaknesses of the characters, play out so real, even if it is, by now, a period piece. The reality of the bigotry faced down could have been stronger, but for now, today, particularly (Mardi Gras!), it'll do.

The Thriller at Lincoln Center
You wouldn't think they could make a suspenseful movie out of ballet, but Black Swan is a first-rate nail-biter all the way through. Natalie Portman was getting on my nerves a bit in the early going, all weak and teary, but she does a terrific job of crazy. Very enjoyable, even haunting.

(Benjamin Millepide is the lead male dancer and the choreographer? As appropriate as it is, isn't also sort of perfect?)

Credit
Where it's due: US Airways refunded the checked baggage fee for the bag they mishandled. Without being asked. That's good customer service.

Bites
When I heard about the marsuipial tree frog with a full set of teeth, upper and lower, I was mainly interested in where it’s found. Unfortunately, not Australia. I mean, we’ve got eight of the ten most deadly snakes, spiders the size of dinner plates, why not a bitey frog? Especially a “marsupial” frog.

Western Culture
That's True Grit watched now, Joel & Ethan Coen's update of the John Wayne classic. It's all there, and a good deal more, especially, as all the reviews have noted, by paring out the sentimentality from 1969. Which shouldn't suggest that there is no feeling, no recognizable humanity in it. These are frontier folk, however, and making their way in the years following the Civil War, and that comes through quite plainly, in most all its contradictions and incapacities. It's a well done movie, with excellent performances all around. Matt Damon talking past a bitten-through tongue was especially fun, as was Jeff Bridges throughout. I'm sure Hailee Steinfeld will have a fine career; she's sure to get more roles based on this performance.

For the Coen's, though, for all that I've heard about True Grit being either a further departure for them, I rather think it's an extenstion of their work, which has often been nearly parodic in its homage to various genres of the past. I'd suggest that this isn't so much a remake as it is the selection of solid material on which to develop their interest in the Western. They couldn't very well have attempted Rio Bravo or any of the other old John Ford pictures, I think, as their content wouldn't have the resonance today that they did evern as recently as when I was growing up, a time when playing "soldiers" was more common that "cowboys and indians". Like Clint Eastwood's Unforgiven, the Coen's have chosen a modern western for their interpretation, and it works.

Now I just need to see Black Swan and The Fighter, and I'll be up to speed. If the hot weather keeps up on the weekends, I may even have to go see The Green Hornet, although that'd be a last resort film.

Hot
Up to 42 degrees today (that's 107 for you podeans). Just thinking breaks a sweat. Where's a southerly when you need it?

Oh, and because metropolitan Sydney doesn't experience freezes, older buildings often have a substantial amount of their infrastucure on the outside, e.g., water pipes, which means that on days like today, a hot shower doesn't much require a water heater.

Academia
The Social Network seems bound to do well at the Oscars. Even now it's still in cinemas, if just one show per day. But even more, it's just one remarkable movie. It's arc, which the construction plays with constantly, is remarkable, if because it so well encapsulates the nature of the central character's personality, even while it also provides a framework for understanding the "internet 2.0" and just what this thing, that nobody even knows what it is yet, as is so often said in the course of the film, is. Facebook, God help us all, is the internet now, and The Social Network really is the best movie of 2010, that I've seen, anyway. I think when I get to the early 2011 crop I can expect some remarkable cinema, but still within the conventional boundaries. I'm looking forward to Black Swan and True Grit particularly, but they'll just be movies. The Social Network is an anatomy course.

Unhelpful
The rhetoric, if you can call it that, employed by Shadow Finance Minister and Liberal blowhard Joe Hockey is unhelpful to the debate, even though it’s already over. We’re going to have a temporary increase in the Medicare levy to pay for the reconstruction of Queensland, “dumb”, “stupid”, or not. I take the point of Warwick McKibben that a tax increase puts pressure on the public just when we’ve been holding off an economic crisis, but notice that the good professor’s reasoning points to the idea that deficits are not in themselves bad, but that sticking to artificial deadlines and targets may be. Where the Liberal Party line is that Labor is fiscally irresponsible for its deficit spending, economic reasoning tells us quite plainly otherwise.

I will not object to the levy. Insurance won’t and can’t pay for everything. I expect the government to make cuts where it can and should already, but I’m happy to pick up a fair share. I may reduce my charitable giving, however, since the government’s going to pick up the slack for me.

Festival!
I haven't done much of the Sydney Festival this year, my overseas trip having cut into much of the time it runs, particularly for any of the events that seemed of interest, but I headed down to the Opera House for Australia Day, and it was a madhouse, even out on the water, with more boats than you'd think could navigate through even Sydney Harbour's great expanse.


The Opera House itself is, as always, a draw, too.


But I was there for the Architects of Air show, Mirazozo. This is a kind of jumping castle for adults, would be one way to describe it. A variably-shaped inflatable set of domes and pathways, with patterned opaque and translucent panels, creating a lightscape environment experience. New-agey music piped in, but not too intrusive, and not too many people at a time wandering through. I'm really enjoying these new light-art installations.

The outside gives little sense of what the inside will be, although you may get a sense of the crowds down at Circular Quay for the holiday.


The interior was psychedelic, man.

Payment Summary
The Queensland floods are a big disaster, and paying to put things right is going to cost a bundle, and it's going to cost each of us individually, most likely. So when Shadow Treasurer Joe Hockey says he objects to a special levy, I wonder: would he still object if the state was held by a Liberal government? Anna Bligh, Labor Premier of Queensland, is enjoying increased popularity and approval as a result of how she's handled the situation. The Liberals aren't likely to see themselves in government there any time soon, not like in New South Wales, where a decade or more of near-as corruption and outright ineptitude have Labor on the nose quite distinctly, imperilling their prospects to the point that no one expects them back at the next election (coming soon to a polling place near you).

Although Hockey's alternative proposal, cutting spending, has the support of financial analysts, his motivation I think stinks. This is about killing the National Broadband Network program at the behest of Tony Abbott and trying to smear Labor as fiscally irresponsible.

The problem is that the NBN is good for Australia. In the short term there are jobs and in the long term there's modern high-speed internet, now an essential element of doing business, and something that the old copper wires just don't handle particularly well, especially in more remote communities where such infrastructure can be light. And for Queensland, the reconstruction effort provides a golden opportunity to start laying in the fibre optics. We need to fix those lines anyway, let's use the good stuff.

Spending cuts can be made elsewhere. There is sure to be some fat in Defense, for example. Some delays on the JSF program, a dog to begin with, wouldn't hurt.

And if I pay another .5 percent for this year, I don't mind. Just be careful with the bookkeeping, please.

Binational
It's tough being a citizen of two countries sometimes. This year's US State of the Union address is scheduled for 25 January at 9 p.m., which turns out to be 26 January at 1 p.m., just when I'm scheduled to be participating in some Australia Day events. Given that my main interest in the SOTU is to see whether the new Republican House majority will engage in heckling, perhaps I'm better off catching up on YouTube or some such afterwards.

Political Speech: Meaning & Intent
It’s been long known that when politicians speak, they use what are essentially coded phrases to convey meaning to their target audience. “States Rights”, for example, from the mouths of Republicans and their right-wing brethren is well known for being a code phrase to connote opposition to civil rights, especially for minorities, or even anti-abortion, depending on the context. It rarely refers to educational curricula, but busing instead. So when a avowedly conservative politician uses the phrase “blood libel” the first thing that comes to my mind is that she thinks all Democrats, and even most or all liberals, are Jews, and therefore not real Americans, who are, of course, Christian, and that by using this phrase she will accomplish two things: the jingoistic and racist elements of the so-called Tea Partiers will see all opposition to her and by extension themselves as alien and “anti-American”, and no one will be able to decry her usage as anything other than a smear against her without generating something like a feedback loop to increase that perception of alienation.

She doesn’t write this stuff herself. She’s got people to do that for her, and they’re not as stupid as we wish we could believe she is. Did she really mean her critics are falsely claiming she has “blood on her hands” or did she mean that her critics are blood-drinking, “protocols of the elders of Zion” Jewish liberals bent on destroying America? This is a hate-filled, angry woman, a failure as a working politician, now enjoying a means of spreading her hate without any effective opposition or recrimination. We must not let her get away with this poisoning of the discourse.

Itinerary
If there's one thing I've now learned, it's that even after a major storm, there's enough snow and ice left over in the U.S. to create enough of a blizzard to shut down airports. US Airways, who have a major hub in Charlotte, NC, started cancelling flights and rebooking passengers early on Monday, facing down a big storm that had already put the lights out at Atlanta. Unfortunately, that's all they did. They ran out of de-icing solution early, so were left handing out cots and foam pallets - in the international terminal only. Even though we were scheduled to fly out from that terminal, there were no announcements at our end, so by the time we knew we were staying over, we were staying on the floor.

This is forgivable, of course, but not day two. They knew there was still ice and freezing rain, but still ran out of de-icer, even while every other airline operating out of Charlotte continued to de-ice and send planes out. US Airways couldn't even be bothered to cancel their flights until the very last minute. So that was another night learning the comfortable end of being homeless. By this time, after so much terminal food, I'd have killed for some fresh vegetables or fruit.

Well, we got on an early flight to Myrtle Beach on day three, so that was o.k., except US Airways then lost our checked luggage. Clearly, this was an operational failure. Passengers checking in that day got their luggage without any trouble. The rest of us were catch-as-catch-can, that is, US Airways didn't prioritise luggage according to re-bookings, just loaded up whatever came to hand.

Our bags did eventually show, but I lost two days of holiday as a result, not to mention the US$25 for my lost checked bag. What's the money for? I don't know.

So there I am at the end of it all, booked on a flight from Myrtle Beach to Sydney via Atlanta and Los Angeles and Guangzhao. My 11:37 flight is delayed due to "mechanical problems", and is now scheduled for 14:30. Except that flight doesn't arrive, another one, the next one, does instead. There's a seat available, so I actually make my connection at Atlanta for the flight to L.A. Based on what happens 26 hours later in Sydney, I'm guessing my checked bag didn't make the flight or the connection or the China Southern flight, even though that one is delayed by 12 hours, due to "weather in Russia". This is a lie, of course, because China Southern puts up all 500 or so of us in a hotel. Nobody puts anybody into a hotel for weather. A business class traveller I meet makes some calls and confirms the "weather" is fine, but not China Southern.

And guess where my bags are? I don't know either.

What a trip. One of the cats is missing, too. I'm still hopeful he'll turn up, but I guess I'll be calling the shelters and vets before long and wandering the neighborhood all night trying to find him.

Update: Cat's back. Something wrong with his eye, but he turned up after an hour or so of calling him and just in time for dinner. Unnecessary negativity.

Update 2: Cat's eye looks o.k. today, so no vet trip. And my luggage turned up. It seems that instead of handing it off to China Southern, Delta elected to carry my bag to Sydney themselves. It probably got here before I did, given the cancelled flight to China, but two different outfits handle baggage for Delta and China Southern, requiring someone (me) to get them talking to one another before either could work out what to do. As Casey Stengel put it: Can't anyone here play this game?

Robot Attack
I could have waited for an iPhone. Luckily, I don't much care about the apps, especially games. Although I do like the tricorder.

Snow Day
If I remember, This is what cost Mayor Lindsay his job. I’ve seen enough on Facebook and elsewhere to know this was a truly epic storm, so I’d cut the guy some slack, but this isn’t going to help.

SCG Blues
This being summer in the antipodes, cricket is the game to watch, so I’ve put some time in this year to learn a bit about it, the Ashes being an especially iconic test match. That England gets to keep for the first time in 14 years. They deserve it. They outplayed the Australian eleven pretty much throughout, on offense and defence. God knows it’s got to be pretty nearly impossible to make a comeback from a first innings score under 100, or even 200, especially when your opponent seems capable of doubling that rate or better, and we managed to be caught out pretty easily for just such results more than once.

It’s not like we weren’t trying, of course. The Ashes is a big deal here. But in Melbourne, for the Boxing Day test, whereas England bowled 42 overs in the first innings, Australia expended 159. This meant we spent a lot of time chasing balls before managing to take a wicket, whether caught out, leg-by-wicket, or bowled out, whereas we hit quite regularly to just where the English thought we would, our batsmen caught out.

And I’d rather not mention the second innings performance.

There’s some suggestion that this was inevitable, given the recent spate of retirements of such as Shane Warne and Glenn McGrath, leaving Australian cricket bereft of talent, and it’s interesting to note that whereas two on the English side are more regularly 20/20 players than in test cricket, all but two of the Aussie eleven are 20/20 stalwarts. Strategy and skill-sets would be quite different, I’d think, but I guess either the selectors didn’t think so or their available pool is indeed diminished. So I blame Rupert Murdoch and television. And no wonder. Games that take four days to play are pretty hard on the attention-span, especially when they start at 10 a.m. and run past 6 p.m. (Who invented such a thing? Or did cricket evolve to this? Must read more CLR James.)

Xmas

Every year, each bus depot decorates a bus and solicites the community for votes. This is the entry for the Leichhardt depot and an excellent representation of the lengths they'll go to.

BP & Bush: Never Forget Their Sweet Talk
Brilliant.

O, My
I don’t have anything against Oprah. I think her book club probably did a lot of good, for example. Her show, last I saw of it, and which wasn’t very often anyway, did seem to have devolved from the kind of tabloid-ish self-help and “awareness” topics she became famous for into celebrity-sharing and scream-fest giveaways, but if that’s what she wants and what keeps her brand going, that’s up to her. Her trip to Australia, is just perplexing, and not just the reaction to it.

Tourism’s a great thing and a big part of the economy here, and we spent millions of dollars to bring her down. I don’t imagine recouping that very soon as an immediate consequence of Oprah’s visit. The 8,000 people in Melbourne’s Federation Square today, for example, are likely for the most part locals and unlikely in consequence to spend any money, whether for public transport or lunch, than they would have already, but the disruption they’ll have caused to traffic will surely have a flow-on effect to productivity and revenue elsewhere. Maybe not much, but just wait until the big O gets to Sydney and the rebranded Oprah House. At least there’ll be an offset in parking fees and fines and ticket sales. But her 300 imported audience members aren’t likely to bring about much of a difference. Even after they get home and tell everyone how wonderful Australia is, with the U.S. economy in the tank, how many Qantas flights will that translate to?

Good luck to her and the various Federal and State Tourism Ministers, hotel associations, etc. But 8,000 people standing around for a fifteen minute look at Oprah waving to them? Weird.

Drips & Drabs
It's hard to believe that I'd agree with even half of anything John Howard has to say, even over "Wikileaks", but I do. Half, anyway. Frankly, I don't regard the leaks as any more of an offense than I do Julian Assange's action in publishing them. What I do see is the media ganging up on someone stepping on the turf they'd been gaming for decades and politicians crying foul over being caught out in lies and obfuscation. In both cases I think we all know we knew it all along. No surprises here, except insofar as we now see how far even ostensibly liberal governments will go along with the kinds of prosecutorial abuses we thought were only a Bush II purview. Whether or not the Swedish courts have a case against Assange, the fact that the U.S. is already in discussions with them over extradition show how valuable Guantanamo is to Obama, and Australia's Julia Gillard's self-serving assessments of Assange's "irresponsibility", insofar as it allows her to declare illegality without coming straight out with it, give us Labor as Howard-lite, even while Howard distances himself from such an assessment.

I welcome Wikileaks. Post that crap. But let's see what else we can get: from Britain, France, Germany, China . . . . it shows up every creep in the public service, free society or not, for exactly what we know them to be: self-serving, greedy, rapacious bastards causing more trouble than they're worth.

Funny I should post such an assessment after bagging the Tea-Baggers, I suppose, but I'm no less put out by Obama caving at every turn than I am by Palin mischaracterising all of U.S. history than I am by Labor's failures here or the Liberal's fight against the working class than I am by . . . . we need something better than democracies that have abandoned democracy. Transparency and a strong, fearless, but righteous media are valuable, even in the form of socio-inadroit (or even sociopathological) individuals like Julian Assange.

Publish and be damned, but publish. We need to know for sure what's all too easily hidden or told as lies.

The Rich You Will Have with You Always
And always complaining about their taxes, too, or at least their Republican lackeys will whinge.

Meanwhile, Warren Buffett, who has probably done more in his life to make other people rich in addition to his own accumulation of wealth, speaks honestly and directly, saying he’s willing to pay more and we shouldn’t listen to anyone like him who says otherwise. And with the national deficit out of control as a result of the Bush tax cuts and two quagmire wars, we get Mitch McConnell telling us the “argument is over” on the tax cuts, but continuing on unemployment extension.

The whole country went completely nuts when Obama got elected. Eight years of Bush, with the Republicans pushing through every mad scheme when we all knew it was madness, repudiated in 2008 with the inevitable Democratic election, and they can only think selfishly of insisting on the legitimacy of their legacy of debt and destruction.

Conservatism used to refer to the principles of slowing change, not reversing it, let alone the kinds of changes that were enacted: the nearly untrammelled power of the executive branch, the gap between rich and everyone else growing nearly exponentially, unwinnable wars, a national debt that staggers the imagination . . . where’s the conservation in any of that? But not only are these things to be conserved, they should be at the expense of Federal power.

The rhetoric of Bush legacy partisans in government, the media and our neighborhoods is talk of “States rights” and includes an increase in commemorations of secession and the Confederacy? Any connection to health care reform? Bailouts? Maybe federation has passed it’s use-by date.

The Outer Space Years
Oh, yeah, I remember the Outer Space Men, I think we had all of them, maybe except the squid guy, but I had no inkling that their genesis had anything to do with Major Matt Mason, although we pretty much had all of that stuff, at one point or another, too. There were some excellent toys in those days, probably made from highly toxic substances.

Gig Guide
To The New Pornographers last night, at Manning Bar, on the Sydney University campus. A small group of us saw them last year at the Annadale, a tradition music venue in what once was the pub-rock circuit, a tradition decimated by the introduction of pokies, and they were terrific. They were no less excellent this time around. A little more stage banter, amongst themselves and with the crowd, perhaps due to the presence of Neko Case, who was too busy with her last record to tour with the band. It was a lively show, with a substantial and appreciative crowd, at a venue I'd go to again, if another band of interest ever turns up. It would likely be a good introduction to local bands of note, as with the support act, Little Scout, from Brisbane, a solid act that I'd guess will do well in the next few years; quirky, but solid, they held the stage well.

A late night, all up, and a school night, too, but as tired as I was this morning, it was worth it.

State Transit Owes Me $50
The 2nd annual Run4Fun (which needs a less silly name) went off at 8:30 this morning at the Olympic Park, and I barely made the start, so there was a substantial pack ahead of me when the gun went off. 55:27 at the finish, by my watch, and I reckon that ought to be the chip time, more or less. It was much more crowded than last year, so a lot of charity money would have been raised, but that section down by the Hockey stadium gets very crowded. It opens up again after that, but you're never not in traffic, much like every other large road race in town. It was good fun and an easy, quick ride back to Central on the train, but getting out there was logistically more difficult than it should have been.

I was at the bus stop in plenty of time for as many as four buses that could have gotten me to the train and a ride to Homebush, but nothing, no bus. From my stop, you can see over a kilometre down Parramatta Road, so with all that nothing coming down the street, I walked down to the Broadway shops, where I could hope for the Lilyfield line, the Glebe Point buses, or service out of Newtown. What turned up? The bus I should have caught to begin with, half an hour late. Half an hour? Sure, it's Sunday, but if you're running a bus service, how do you account for those 30 minutes? Traffic? C'mon. I sat next to a young woman, also going to the race, and we got to the train platform with about 45 minutes to get to the venue and no train for another 10. It'd take all the remaining time to get to Lidcombe, let alone to the start, so we opted to split a cab. Hence the $50. But it was a cheerful enough ride, if not offering much of a chance to get a little extra sleep, and in the end a good run. And a free newspaper, too, although why, when they give you a subscription, is perplexing.

Update: It's a cheap watch, but it's pretty accurate.

Milestones
Sparky Anderson, 76, led the Detroit Tigers to win the World Series in 1984, the year I left Michigan, where they'd been my adopted team. To be honest, I thought he was 76 then.

That Tigers' line-up was terrific, and they had a great year, one that looked, for over a month, like they couldn't lose. Anderson was, that October, the first manager to have led teams to win the Series across the American/National Leagues divide, and he practically invented the modern managing style of pulling pitchers off the mound and using relief as a key defensive strategy. He was also the only manager who honored the players' strike of 1995, taking unpaid leave rather than take on any replacement players, quite an admirable stance. A grand old man of baseball.

Milestones
Sparky Anderson, 76, led the Detroit Tigers to win the World Series in 1984, the year I left Michigan, where they'd been my adopted team. To be honest, I thought he was 76 then.

That Tigers' line-up was terrific, and they had a great year, one that looked, for over a month, like they couldn't lose. Anderson was, that October, the first manager to have led teams to win the Series across the American/National Leagues divide, and he practically invented the modern managing style of pulling pitchers off the mound and using relief as a key defensive strategy. He was also the only manager who honored the players' strike of 1995, taking unpaid leave rather than take on any replacement players, quite an admirable stance. A grand old man of baseball.

10,000 Steps
Seven Bridges Walk today, a nice excursion of 25 kilometers that takes you west and north and back around for a circuit of the Harbour and its suburbs. Depending on where you start, which was, for me, Iron Cove.
Followed by Gladesville (over)

(and under, which presents something of a monumental aspect the "over" image misses),

Tarban Creek

and Figtree, which, as far as bridges are concerned, is as far as I got last year before (a) getting a little lost and (b) soaked in a thunderstorm that also included a temperature drop that left me as cold as I've ever been in this country.

I did manage, last year, to bear with the course, until the next downpour, which coincided with my arrival at Waverton Station, at which point I bailed in favor of a train.

This year, however, the threatened storms never came, so that, by the time I got to the vicinity of North Sydney, it was actually getting a bit more warm and sunny than I was fully prepared for. Nevertheless, the Harbour Bridge is a magnificent ediface, and it was gratifying to arrive within view of it, even if I was starting, at this point, to seize up.

Once across, I was in the CBD, but lost the route. Not that it mattered much, as I work close enough to Darling Harbour to know the approach to the Pyrmont Bridge well. I probably saved my self a kilometre or so as a result.

Then home again, home again, across the ANZAC Bridge, leaving only another 2 or 3 kilometres from my starting point to home and recuperative measures, such as a shower and a cold beverage.

So all up, 25-30k done in 6 hours, and best of all, parts of the city normally left unvisited. I took note of some good running areas that will help when training for the SMH half starts up in January, over paths I didn't even know were there, but will take advantage of proximity to the Harbour.

Next year I'll take the divergences into the bushwalks and really make a go of it.

Autumn into Winter
Leaving aside the issue of "World" in baseball's World Series, and, for the moment, the teams now scheduled to commence that tournement on 27 October, since when did baseball last into November? Accordingly to the remarkably speedy update on Wikipedia, this is the third time, and the second in a row, although no citiation is provided.

I caught the last few innings of the Giant's game, sorry, from the news reports, to have missed the whole thing, but there were some local enthusiasts there, too, to appreciate the tactics employed as the Giants clung to a one-run lead, and the Phillies threatened credibly. With the Rangers, however, having beaten the Yankees for the AL flag, I'm somewhat reluctant to watch much more, as it'll surely entail shots of George W. in the stands, but I can hope San Francisco stomps all over his smirks.

St. Mary MacKillop, Oi! Oi! Oi!
A relatively modern nun’s gotten the nod to become Australia’s first saint, which got rather extraordinary media coverage in a supposedly secular country, but I’ve never found it so to begin with. (Look at our public holidays: Good Friday, Easter Saturday, Easter Monday, Christmas, Boxing Day – half are religious. Hardly surprising, I suppose when about 26% of the population identifies as Catholic, 19% as Anglican, and 19% as other Christian.) But if anyone’s going to get elevated in the 21st century RC Church, MacKillop seems a good choice, if not so much on the basis of the requisite miracles, than in her order’s role acting against child sex abuse by clergy, resulting in MacKillop being excommunicated for two years, until the bishop who’d issued the order, rescinded it on his deathbed. Already there are calls for her to be nominated as the patron saint for victims of abuse. There’s a good else deal about her life that makes her fairly interesting as a person, and certainly respectable as a nun. I don’t much hold with saints – a little too much like semi-demigods, I suppose. I mean, if you’re going to believe in God, there doesn’t seem any need for intercession off-siders. But congratulations to the order, I suppose.

Nobel Tipping
Ngugi wa Thiong'o is looking good for the Literature Prize this year, the first African since Wole Soyinka, but with Haruki Murakami and Cormac McCarthy as competitors, it's still hard to call. I guess the Nobel Committee's recent statements regarding American literature may leave McCarthy out. Ngugi would be the political choice, which seems in line with recent picks, and Murakami doesn't have as extensive a body of work. I'll go with the Kenyan. "Wizard of the Crow" was a good read.

About Art
Sydney's Art & About is, I think, one of the better public arts events around. Sculpture by the Sea being the other one. I particularly enjoy the Hyde Park photographic exhibition.


(Can't say I much like the staturary dress-up, all a bit more foppish than seems necessary, but I understand the impulse and enjoy the humor anyway.)

Still, I had the chance to wander through town and take a couple of photographs of the city. The light here is amazing, something NYC is known for differently, and this building shows it off.

Age Appropriate
I don't remember the last time I saw Todd Rundgren in concert. It was probably something like 30 years ago and most likely it was a Utopia show. All that tech and exuberance was not on show last night at The Basement, where he ran through his latest incarnation: Bluesman. "Todd Rundgren's Johnson" is a tribute to Robert Johnson, although it's more Chicago than Delta Blues. While there's plenty of expertise on display, there was little heart in it. That could be the size of the venue, in part, although I did get the impression that Todd's feeling a little put out that he's never lived up to his reputation. I mean, I loved the guy back in the '70s, buying all his records and going to pretty nearly every show that came through town, but a Wizard he may be, but not a True Star. He had a very appreciative audience and ran through some of his back catalog (although I thought "Open My Eyes" was a bit muddy) for us, so it was a decent show, and I'm glad I went.

But I'll never go back to The Basement, even if Jesus Christ and His All-Star Prophets Revue Featuring Joseph Smith on Bagpipes turned up. It's a dinner club, but if you don't book one of the very few tables, you're standing up all night. Since the doors open at 7:30, you'll stand for three to four hours before the opening act comes on stage and then three or four more to see the finish of the headliner. (And the opening act, an unnamed duo on guitar and keyboards, were horrible last night.)

Fits and Starts
Or Fitnesses. Or something.

Today I started my new job. I had a week off inbetween, which was nice (and unusual for me), during which I recovered from the Blackmore's Running Festival Half Marathon (see previous entry) and lazed around getting nothing accomplished other than, by Saturday, finally having achieved sleeping in past my usual waking hour of 6 a.m. Sunday felt like it came too soon.

Today, however, my appointed hour in the CBD was not until 9 a.m., so I slept in by about forty minutes, went for a 5k run, had some breakfast, and still made it into the office by 8:30.

First days are all about orientation, and there was little enough of that, as the project proper hasn't really kicked off. That will change. I'm scheduled to head up to North Sydney a few times over the next weeks for training on the new system, and there are meetings and presentations to attend as well.

This is my first job since coming to Australia where I'm working close to home. Not only that, but by reason of being pretty much in the center of town, all the amenities I've been lacking heretofore are lacking no longer. Record stores, clothing shops, pharmacies, doctors, dentists, the post office, decent places to have lunch . . . it's all here. This could well turn out to be the best job yet.

Half Baked
I went to bed nice an early, but living in the precincts of Sydney University doesn't guarantee a good night's sleep, so about midnight there was a fair bit of very loud foot traffic returning from some exciting excursion or another, and it was all downhill from there. I was set to get up at 4:30 for my 6:20 start, but actually spent most of the hours wakeful with a bad stomach. When I did get out of bed, I realized there was no coffee and not much for breakfast, either. These things happen.

I filled my pockets with Gu and some money and headed out to flag a cab to Central Station (the buses don't start until 6 a.m.). And forgot my keys. Luckily, I keep a door key stashed, so I'd only have to climb the garden gate on my return. My impending lack of flexibility was dismaying but not daunting.

The race was good. I was finished with it by about 13k. After that I had to periodically walk a bit to relieve my cramping legs. Still, if not a personal best, all things considered, 2:07 (by my watch) is a result I can live with.

And it's not even lunch time yet. Perhaps a nice club sandwich and a quarter of a dozen schooners.

Update: 2:10 clock time, which pretty well tallies with my watch, as it took at least three minutes to get to the mats, but 2:00:06 chip time. I feel much better about my performance. A decent night's sleep would have made all the difference. And more consistent training.

Minority Majority
Two out of three Independents newly elected to the House have opted to formally back Labor, so along with the sole Green elected, the ALP now have a minority government. It's a relief not to have Mr Rabbit as PM. It's frustrating to know that the Coalition will spend the next three years behaving with exceptional childishness, when they and their supporters (and the national media, perhaps especially) take the full set of pages from the USA's Republican and Tea Partier playbook to set themselves up as aggreived and disenfranchised. Already calls for a new election, branding of the government as "illegitimate", and smears and sneers thrown at the Independents are setting the Australian political conversation into a shouting match. Hip-hip-hooray for the Lucky Country, still "lucky."

I Wantz Roomba

see more Lolcats and funny pictures
And a dog, I guess.

Job Changes
After my current employer budgeted and awarded increases of 2%, after skipping a year, I reckoned that I was falling far behind the rate of inflation, which, while low, is not insubstantial, so I switched on my job alerts to see what was out there. Lo, and behold, almost immediately I got an interview and very quickly thereafter an offer.

The thing is, I'm not really disgruntled. My employer has been very generous with me, overall. These guys took me seriously when no one else would. They've let me take ownership of the role. I've got friends I hope to keep - and that's a little unusual in itself. We're running top-notch software in a market that, as in my last job search, takes that as an important consideration.

So why change? Well, the money's hard to beat. Yes, I'll probably have to face low annual budgets in the future, as I would anywhere, but these guys have an incentive scheme and stock purchase plans that would mean potentially earning a third again of my total remuneration. O.k., a stock purchase plan means they're publicly traded, which adds market pressure to career longevity, but the stock'd still be mine, and that's a plus at my age.

Sure, I've got a team of analysts working for me, but so what? Being a manager has never been part of my aspirations. I like the work, and with the software we're running, I'm never going to have the depth of knowledge that I might get with a different product at a company that doesn't have the breadth not to let me learn it.

Although I've got a great place to go for a run, even a long run, as much as 16K without traffic, the new job is in the CBD, so I could get up at my usual hour, go running, and still have time for breakfast before heading to the office. Almost. Maybe just a coffee. And if lunchtime runs aren't any less an option, if a bit trickier. Up the stairs and across the Harbour Bridge, for example, or cross-town to the Domain and Botanical Gardens.

Anyway, I think I've talked myself into it. I've worked in publishing, twice, consulting (sort of), financial services, legal, whatever Chubb was, education, and ITC. Add insurance to the list.

Hung Parliament
Too bad it's not hanged, to make a bad joke.

Julia's campaign was awful, but worse was Labor's decision under Rudd not to pursue a carbon tax and the failure to implement the Resources Super-Profit tax, and worse than that was a leadership spill just ahead of election season. Not that I have any objection to Julia Gillard per se or to her being PM; I rather expected it to happen more naturally. Nevertheless, bad decisions and a punishing result in the polling booths leaves us with 3 years of childish bickering and name-calling, and nothing else. No great leaps forward or backward can be expected out of Canberra. What I can anticipate is that the backlash will continue in the States. Look for Labor to fall in NSW, for sure; whether to the Liberals or the Greens is unknown, but that's how I'm calling it.

One lesson from all this is that the campaign was a media triumph. That is, the media won. They spun this campaign disgracefully. Gillard was never presented except in the context of charged adjectives. She was "strident", for example, not forceful. Abbott was only ever presented with a bit of humor, never with any seriousness taken of his reactionarism, his inarticulateness, his transparent lies. Television decided this contest more than the voters did.

Sensed
When the Talking Heads toured their "Speaking in Tongues" album, Jonathan Demme was there to make a concert film of it, Stop Making Sense. What's of note, here, to me, is that after all this time, I've finally seen the concert.

At the time, I was one of the Talking Heads' biggest fans. They'd found a groove that resonated with me; my appreciation for more complex pop music was finally finding some bands that could provide the content, and David Byrne & co. were seeing audiences that other New Wave acts could only aspire to. The Forest Hills concert I went to was the pinnacle of their career and an ecstatic high point for me as well.

But I didn't really see the show. Yes, Burning Spear burned up the stage as the opening act for an inordinate amount of time, but I wasn't even tired of them before they were finally ushered off. Yes, the opening was enthralling, and every song thereafter well known and deeply felt - but now we get into the concert-attendance problem. At some point, I abandoned my seat, heading up into the aisles to dance along and groove with the music, deeper and richer than records allow and also far more communal.

So I didn't see the floor lamp or the big suit or how the modules were progressively rolled out song to song until the whole band was there, didn't see the performances Byrne put out for the different songs, or the other band members grooving themselves, or at least not in such a way as actually registered.

Watching Demme's movie I finally got to see the show. And I still love the music.

It's not the print I'd have chosen, but insofar as the artist selected a commemorative shot for 5,000 people to have for free, it's more than all right.

I was a little disappointed that there wasn't an exhibition to go along with the distribution, but that's o.k., too, although I'm quite certain that some of the other poses Spencer Tunick ran us through would have been remarkable images, especially the final pose, splayed out across the interior of the Opera House; quite Bocshian, I reckon.

When you look back over Tunick's career, with a dozen models and a step ladder in Times Square, for example, having to get the shots in before being arrested, what he's doing lately is almost mind-boggling. Look how dense this image is. And anyone who's been there can tell you, that's actually quite a lot of space to fill.

Oh, and that's me, at the top of the steps, over to the right, kind of in the middle.

Oops
I knew the Blackmores Half Marathon was an early start, but somehow I thought it was in October, ten weeks from now, not five weeks. I'll have to adjust my training schedule for the last three weeks, but I should get some long runs in the meanwhile. 76% as it stands now; I can bring it up to 89% before the race, barring accident or injury.

Klaatu Barada Nikto
Patricia Neal, R.I.P. Robert Wise's "The Day the Earth Stood Still" was an eerie and excellent 1950's science fiction movie, in an era when a lot of science fiction in cinemas was pretty bad. As an adaptation of Harry Bates' short story, "Farewell to the Master", it isn't anything like faithful, but as a nuclear scare movie, very effective. Patricia Neal was the best actor in it and I like everything I ever saw her in thereafter.

Industrial Inaction
I support the right of workers to act collectively in their interests and to strike, even if it inconveniences me. But “free fare days” don’t affect me either way: I have a quarterly ticket. Yesterday, as part of the City-to-Surf, buses and trains were free for anyone with a bib number, but I carried my ticket anyway, just in case, and because I already paid my fare, thanks, so why not use it? I guess if I bought a weekly ticket, it’d be possible to take advantage of these things, but, oh, well. Good luck, rail staff. I wish I could see a 5% raise again someday.

Postscript
I collect book reviews until such time as I need a new stash of unread books to work through, at which point I hit the Strand Book Store online and get my weight in literature shipped down for about the same price a new hardcover runs in this country. Or Book Depository in the U.K. One of those books I've read in the last two years was Postwar, Tony Judt's account of Europe from 1945 onward. It was terrific, by far the most edifying work of history I've read since A Distant Mirror. And now he's dead, just 62. Well, he's got a body of work out there, including an appraisal of the world at present, so I guess I know what's on my list for my next shopping excursion.

Race Day Minus 2
City-to-Surf on Sunday, 14k's of road-running madness. Thousands and thousands of people will be running out of the city to Bondi Beach, and I don't know how they do it, but within the first two kilometres, even though I'm in the second start, there will be dozens, at least, ahead of me walking. Where do they come from? They can't be tired already, can they?

Anyway, I'm down to 76% of full marathon training, having run 188k out of the scheduled 246. Given that the race on Sunday is 33% of a full marathon, that's not so bad. But on the principle that I'm really training for a half-marathon, I'm only 10% over where I'd hoped to be at this stage. But it'll be fun, and I'm as ready as I'm gonna be.

Results Update: 76:32 by my clock, and I might get a few seconds on the chip, since I hit the button early. A better result than I expected.

Worm Turns
I watched the leadership debate last night, although I wasn't expecting anything of any interest to come out of it, and Tony Abbott and the Liberals aren't getting my vote anyway. It seemed worth watching nevertheless, if only to gauge the respective performances. No kidding, these are acts, stage shows, scripted to the greatest extent possible, even with the moderator throwing in follow-up questions and pressing for answers more directly to the point than provided.

Julia Gillard was assured and calm throughout, never off-message. She was good natured, even when zinging Abbott, pressing home on sore points from the last election, points Abbott could only disingenuously respond to. His repetition of "respect for the decisions of the electorate" mean only that if he gets back into power, that has to mean the electorate wants John Howard back. That ship has sailed, Tone.

Abbott generally performed poorly. This was schoolboy vs. schoolmarm. He stumbled, mis-spoke, and looked shifty. His attempts to re-smear Gillard and Labor with their errors and failures - and there have been a few - painting them as an ineffective government, fell flat. I admit they would have done so with me anyway, but I think I can be assured in my assessment, based on the other reason I watched the show: the worm.

As the debate proceeded, audience members, selected for their purported "swing" status, rated the statements and query replies each leader provided. The real-time line graph running along the bottom of the screen was split between men and women, with a third line showing the overall rating. There are a couple of points worth making here. First, the worm is distracting. It's difficult to focus on what's being said if you're watching to see how it's coming across. I expect it's no less so distracting to try to key in a rating while you're listening, and seeing the line ticking up and down second by second it's pretty clear that the audience members had to be pretty frantically hitting those keys.

Another aspect is how consistently the audience was split. Women favoured Gillard substantially above men's ratings, even when men were positively inclined. Women also pretty consistently rated Abbott low, but where he failed to resonate with men, the women were more in line with the ratings men returned, so that the average overall tracked very closely.

Finally, by running the worm in three lines, the broadcasters have made the gender divide the central issue of the campaign. They've been pushing this line from day one of Abbott's leadership, as his standing with women has been a consistent theme of his political life, but that's been more a joke than a serious analysis of the state of play. Not anymore. Gillard's the new Thatcher, or the new Hillary, anyway, and that's where the campaign will stay. Once Labor are returned to power - and they will be - we'll have Australia's first elected Prime Minister. I don't doubt that Labor and Gillard see this as a message to hold on to. The Liberals, on the other hand, may wish they had someone other than Julie Bishop to put forward.

The Next Three Years (approx.)
So having taken the leadership and the Lodge in a spill, Julia's now set to take the country to the polls: 21 August will see us decide if we want the Mad Monk or Ms. Gillard to lead. I like her chances, although it does seem the media's pretty well intent on bringing down Labor, if for no other reason than that they think they can. God knows their take on Abbott is disparaging when it isn't simply incredulous. My own take on this is that the Fairfaxes and Murdochs and Packers and Stokes think they were instrumental in the downfall of Howard, the longest serving PM since Menzies, so doing in Labor as a one-term government, largely if not entirely unprecedented, would see the MSM as king-makers for years to come. It's a fanstasy, not unlike Osama bin Laden's belief that having seen the exit of the USSR from Afghanistan he could do the same easily to the "sole remaining superpower". Even if Labor is ousted, newspapers and television news are going to struggle for audience share and profitability, not to mention credibility, something they sorely lack here as it is.

Anyway, I'll preference Labor, I suppose, if only because to preference the Greens is futile and might see Tony Abbott too often at Kirribilli House for my taste, not to mention the hash he'd make of this country if he had half a chance. I'm just sorry he's got half a chance in August.

Run, Walk, Sit
If it's true that sitting will kill you sooner no matter what, maybe this weekend I should go buy one of these ergonomic chairs.

Calamari
The octopus is a witch! Cook it!

(O.k., that's not nice. Instead, let it go.)

Elections
Julia Gillard is Australia's new Prime Minister, taking over from Kevin Rudd in a leadership spill. I think I prefer my elections direct, but Ms. Gillard is a forceful and intelligent person, likely to do quite well. That she was portrayed throughout the '07 campaign as sharpening a knife for Kevin's back was just mean-spirited, but Rudd's popularity drop over the last couple of months has made the transfer of power inevitable, so here we are. We'll have to see where this takes us regarding policy. I don't anticipate a return of the ETS, but the Resources Super Profit Tax - which I rather like - could also take a hit, which would be bad, politically, anyway.

Meanwhile, I reckon the Liberals leader, Tony Abbott, is going to find it tough dealing with a woman willing to stand up to him. Look for meltdowns.

Like the Sound of Enormous Bees Right Up in Your Face
I've tried to watch the world cup. I got home from the game late last night so stayed up for the Socceroos, but I can't stand the constant drone of the vuvuzelas. I know it's part of the experience of a game in South Africa (although I'll bet it's nothing like this bad normally), but surely television broadcasters have the technology to eliminate it? Even live games are digital, so it seems hard to accept that they wouldn't be able to introduce some sort of noise-cancellation filter in place.

League Experimentation
I've been a season ticket holder for the Rabbitohs three years now, and other than those occassions when the game is technically an away game but hosted at Souths' home ground, I haven't visited any other team's pitch. Tonight I'm headed for the north shore for the Manly match-up and will get to see whether the behavior exhibited by the fans at ANZ bears comparison with the Brookvale crowd.

Update: A one-point loss for the Bunnies, but generally more cheery than I get coming back from a home-game loss. That may be a function of the venue, one not a thoroughly serviced by public transport, as anything else. Still, it was fun, and a much different experience than my norm. Attending a game with 20,000 people in a 80,000 capacity stadium is one thing. Being there where the fans fill the available space? Feels more like a game. My ANZ sightlines are good, but I'm fully 20 to 40 metres further back from the sidelines than at a standard oval, so I don't get quite the sense of the size of the players and speed of the game normally. League is fast, and meant to be so, and I got a good feel for that tonight. Not that I'm going to switch teams.

Turn of the Century
I suppose I had to know that there'd be issues with moving into a building as old as this one and as small. With only 4 units, there isn't a lot of money coming in, so ovderall maintenance has largely been restricted to what's been required more than what would be proactive. When the big hail storm of 2001 tore up roofs all over town, a special levy was required for repairs, but there's been little else. That's about to change.

The building's old. Probably 1920's old, with an extension maybe 20 years on (and apparently clad in asbestos, although opinions differ). The damp course is limited, it seems, to the exterior walls, and one thing and another has led to a significant interior wall rising damp problem. There's a lot of expansion-contraction cracking, interior and exterior, some worse than others. There's sewer-vs.-storm drainage issues - more a regulatory problem than anything else - and pointed need for exterior painting.

The engineer's been through this morning and will provide a report and a recommendation on a builder. It's going to cost us plenty. How much remains to be seen, but I'm figuring on $20-40k, i.e., $5-10k apiece. Still, it'll be worth it, as the actual structural problems we don't have at this point will be avoided.

Wear & Tear
One of the things I meant to do following last month's half marathon was to review the performance of the super-terrific shoes I bought back in January.

I'd meant to buy the trainers, but all they had in stock was the racing model. On the advice of the salesman, who claimed to use the racers exclusively, I went with that choice, although they were far more colorful than anything I'd normally buy.

Back in the days when New Balance was new and Nike were experimenting with waffle irons, it became a principle that the laces would be set back up away from the toes, allowing a better fit and less problems with blisters, or so they said. The Newton pinches a bit around the toes, I find, which was surprising, but in the end it didn't offer me any trouble.

The shoe does indeed encourage, even force, you to land on the forefoot. This didn't cause me much difficulty as I largely run that way anyway. But in some circumstances, such as wet roadways, where the rain interacted with the petroleum by-products lingering on the surface made things a bit slick, it sometimes felt less secure than landing more flat-footedly might have. Still, I didn't slide around all that much, so it's probably just my own insecurity interacting with Sydney drivers, who only get more aggressive as driving conditions deteriorate.

The mesh upper kept my feet pretty cool, a positive, as I'd been experiencing problems with blisters. This was more a condition of running on hot pavement in high summer than the shoes, however. Once things started to cool off a bit, it became increasingly less of an issue.

What I was especially interested in seeing was the wear. From January through May, and putting in something like an average of 20k per week, the shoes held up remarkably well, as you can see.


I'm still using this pair, but in the end, seriously debating whether to get a new set or reverting to standard issue Asics/Nike/New Balance/Addidas/whatever. The main point is that other than the gimmick of the cleats or lugs or whatever you want to call them that force your landing, there was no benefit to these shoes I couldn't get for $50+ less.

Happy Birthday, Queen
Thanks for the day off.

Of course it isn't really Liz's birthday, it's just the commemoration or some such, a practice observed throughout the Commonwealth. Last week it was NZ's turn. Funnily enough, it isn't even her birthday across Australia. I think WA gets next Monday.

I suppose the idea is that in days of yore the monarch would travel through its dominion collecting tributes. Travel being what it is, different days across the year would become the official date for such payments.

I don't know about NZ, but if you want to guess what HRH would have gotten from us? Opals, sure.

Power & Serenity
As part of the Vivid Festival, Lou Reed, as he does whenever he's touring, brought his tai chi master, Ren GuangYi, who graciously consented to teach four sessions for beginners. The rain stopped late on Friday night, but I didn't go for the 7 a.m. session on Saturday, electing to sleep in and go to today's eleven a.m. class. Again, the weather held, and there I was without about three or four dozen others, running through the basics of the Master's Power 21 set, movements meant to be performed in a limited space, but for maximum effect. You see tai chi here and there, but doing it, having it explained - where your weight should settle, how to turn and pivot, you get the sense of the martial arts behind it. The best part: Lou Reed came along and even helped various of us move into the correct stance.


PS: no cats.

see more Lolcats and funny pictures

Vividity
Slow Music Night was definitely the right choice of show for the Vivid Festival. Not only did Laurie Anderson act as host, Lou Reed turned up to perform, along with the rest of the showcase musicians, and they were a cast of stars in their own rights, mostly. I could have done without the violinist, who was a bit of a noodler, and Holly Miranda didn't exactly wow me with her Feist-meets-Beth-Orton-crossed-with-Cat-Power performance. But Shara Worden, of My Brightest Diamond, whose cover of Blind Willie Johnson's "Lord I can't keep from crying" raised the hairs on my neck, and Colin Stetson consistently blew me away, and the Blind Boys of Alabama (formerly the Five Blind Boys... - only three left) were a stand-out. Emily Haines was o.k., but couldn't keep up with Lou on her duets with him, which was a shame. I hope the rain holds off for some of this weekend, so I can get some Tai Chi in.

Winter
So let's see: it's rugby league season, and I have my home games tickets to ANZ Stadium for Rabbitohs home games, so pretty much at least every other weekend more or less there's an event to attend; the Sydney Film Festival is on (but not much I'm really interested in, although that hasn't stopped me from buying a ticket to a documentary on the roots of Reggae on the same day at the same time as a Rabbitohs game - smart!); the Vivid Festival is on (tai chi on the Opera House forecourt, with Lou Reed & his tai chi master - is Lou an early riser? Saturday morning is the way to go; or does he sleep in? Sunday midmorning, then); and today Leonard Cohen tickets go on sale for his triumphant return in November. So much to do, so little time to do it in.

Fixing Cat
I don’t see any good reason to deny the artist formerly known as Cat Stevens a visa. I also don’t see any reason to reward him by attending any of his concerts or buying any of his music, past, present or future. He supported the fatwa on Salman Rushdie no matter what he claims now. He wasn’t joking, he wasn’t taken out of context, but he is an ass for trying to avoid saying he was wrong and apologizing. Let him go where he wants, but let him play to an empty hall.

SMH Half Results
2:02 clock time and 1:59 chip time is much better than I had any reason to expect. I'll take two weeks to rest before training for the half in October and see what kind of result I can manage then.

It Can't Happen Here
From the Department of Good Thinking, 31 new offshore drilling projects for Australia. I guess it'll be o.k. so long as we don't use BP.

We have more solar energy beaming down you'd think we could make a go of that, but I guess we'll keep digging coal and pumping oil until every last molecule is expended. Thank goodness the ETS was abandoned until 2013.

Around the World in 210 Days
Phileas Fogg's got nothing to worry about, but all props to Jessica Watson, sixteen years old and alone on a pretty small sailboat for all that time. What do you bet she tends to wobble a bit for a week or two now on dry land again? She doesn't get a record - some miles short and the category "eliminated" - but it's quite an accomplishment. I won't go into the whole "what were her parents thinking" trope. That's nonsense, clearly, now. And whether or not technological assistance made this possible only in the last twenty years hardly matters either. Good job, kid. What next?

Half Measures
Tomorrow is the Sydney Morning Herald Half Marathon. I am less ready than I was supposed to be, and my right achilles tendon is pretty sore. Excuses, excuses, but I'll be satisfied if I can stay close to two hours.

Iron Man, All Jets Ablaze, He Fights & Fights with Repulsor Rays
And not just Iron Man, because Iron Man 2 features 'Rhodey' Rhodes as War Machine (basically Iron Man's suit with additional guns). Best of all, it's got Mickey Rourke as Whiplash, and he's about as menacing as you could want in a villain. Sam Rockwell slimes his way through the picture as the egomanicial and ultimately incompetent corporate bad guy so well it hurts to watch him, kinda like Ricky Gervais in "The Office", and Garry Shandling is perfect as the sleazy Senator. The rest I could take or leave. Scarlett Johansen's pretty, sure, and I'm sure she enjoyed flying around on wires as the Black Widow, but that's about as far as that goes, and don't get me started on Gwyneth Paltrow, stuttering her way through every movie I've ever seen her in like she's desperately seeking a good ad lib. But so what? People complain about the Hollywood blockbuster like it's a bad thing. It's not true; they should all go back and watch Sullivan's Travels.

Minimal Maximal Marimbas
Synergy Percussion put on a program of Steve Reich compositions at the City Recital Hall tonight, including Part 1 of "Drumming", one of my favorites, and a new piece, "Mallet Quartet". The highlight of the evening, however, was "Sextet", a piece involving four different marimbas, two of which were, over the course of the piece, played with violin bows. I attended on the mistaken impression that Reich's "Double Sextet" would be performed, the one he got the Pulitzer for last year, confusing it with the "Mallet Quartet", due to my usual vagueness, but that hardly matters, as it was a highly enjoyable evening. The one non-Reich piece, "Kalabash", by Nigel Westlake, was very funky, as advertised, but put me in mind of nothing quite so much as music from "West Side Story", whereas the Reich pieces, for all the staccato sections' resemblance to newsflash dit-dit-dit-dit-dit, really sounded like nothing but themselves, unique compositions finally, not lacking in any way any complexity for all their "minimalism". An excellent evening worth staying up for.

Swing Votes
I’m not surprised that PM Kevin Rudd isn’t polling so well lately. Backing off on even a bad choice on carbon reduction was enough to get me seriously thinking about going Green. Even though, as usual, tax reform gets me nothing, I’m not unhappy with the cherry-picking and slow pace of implementation Labor conducted following the Henry Tax Review, I am unhappy with other, more or less consequential implementation failures. Do we have hospital reform yet? What about water management? Whaling? Getting scared out of the home insulation scheme was just stupid, not to mention ineffective communications management. (I don’t blame the government for contractor errors; I do blame them for letting the Liberals control the message.) A one-term Labor government wouldn’t make me happy, though. If the Coalition does come back into power, and worse, under Abbott, we’d be reverting to anti-labour schemes and the culture wars altogether too soon.