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Last weekend I bought a digital t.v. set-top converter, but couldn't for the life of me get it to work. Luckily, the salesman at the store was helpful, acknowledging that pretty much everyone who'd bought that particular model had tried to bring it back as defective, when really it was just the instructions failing to mention a few crucial configuration matters. Like which wires to plug in where. (Not just a matter of swapping out the aerial feeds, apparently.) And how to get the menu displayed.

Never mind, it's working now, and I have two whole additional channels, leaving aside the additional public access stuff (one of which broadcasters was presenting the results of the 2007 Sculpture by the Sea awards - a repeat, I guess). Unfortunately, it's also altered my ability to record one program and watch another, and not for the better. Suddenly, entering the digital age returns me to something slightly pre-digital. Not that I record very much generally. Frankly, the DVD mail-order thing is more worthwhile than anything on broadcast television anyway, HD or SD. Other than getting cable, which is expense, this is probably as far as I need to go.

I heard that the digital change-over recently accomplished in the US wasn't entirely successful - I wonder how many people have no t.v. now, having failed to get a converter - but the anecdote's I've seen have largely been in regard to signal strength. What with the numbers of drop-outs I experienced last night, I'd guess there are a few people back home who are not entirely pleased with Congress right now.

Four Straight
New South Wales’ got the Blues, alright, with Queensland taking the rubber in two straight games out of three for the fourth year in a row, and while all credit to them for a fine sporting achievement, the NSW side’s performance was marred from the very beginning by some truly atrocious ball-handling, resulting in egregious turnovers deep within their own territory throughout the night. While in the second half the Maroons started out with some errors of their own, they never faltered in defence, easily outmatching the Blues’ strategy of running sideways along the line looking for a hole that just never turned up.

Olympic Park’s ANZ Stadium is the home field for the Rabbitohs, so I’ve spent many an evening and afternoon there (80 minutes at a time), but I’ve never attended a State of Origin match, or any other event capable of filling the 90,000-seat capacity venue. This one was off that mark by just under 600. It was jam-packed, with queues for food and drink and toilets, and crowds milling through the corridors. It’s an expensive ticket, so I normally wouldn’t have gone, but I had an invite via a vendor, so who wouldn’t jump at such an offer. Of course, your first thought is naturally: sky box! corporate box! – not: ow, my nose! But for all my vertigo being seated so high and at so nearly perpendicular a pitch, I can’t really complain. We were seated in front of and to one side of a group of young men whose enthusiasm for the Maroons could not be contained for a single moment, one in particular of whom spent the entire match foully slanging the NSW side individually and collectively, when not chanting, Queens-land-er, or offering an alternative Queensland-AAH! and managing to instigate a first quarter punch-up – almost – snatching the cap off the guy sitting in front of him following his side’s second try. A bad baiting choice, as the Blues supporter and all his friends were of a size sufficient to use the kid as a toothpick or snap him as easily. Luckily it came to nothing, and for a minute the chants and cat-calls were notably muted, if not entirely silent.

It was a fun night, generally well-behaved coming and going, but I’d still rather have seen the Blues make more of a game of it. Maybe next year.

Summer Blockbuster Checklist
So now that I’ve seen Terminator Salvation I can get on with the art-house movies maybe. T4, if I can call it that, may very well make Sam Worthington the newest Australian Hollywood superstar. The movie itself is as full of holes as most of its characters by the end, but it rocks along with only a few bits where you wonder if they’ll ever get around to wrapping things up. It ought to be the final in this franchise, too, speaking of wrapping things up, although for as long as these things can continue to make a buck, or a million of ‘em, it won’t be. Oddly, however, it must have made an impression, as I had apocalyptic Terminator dreams all night, even despite the typically cheesy ending that ought to have spoiled the whole thing.

Fitness Levels Fading . . .
I’m seriously considering registering for the World Master Games, if just for one event, really, which I guess would be the 1,500, which is the closest approximation to my high school track distance. The fact that I’m present running my marathon training at about 6 minutes per K means I can expect to do very, very badly if I do, so is AU$220 really worth signing up for that much humiliation? Even though that price includes being admitted to compete in as many as four additional indoor events and all the outdoor events, I wouldn’t, especially as that would merely heap humiliation upon humiliation. I haven’t even signed up for the half marathon in September or the City-2-Surf in August yet. Nevertheless, the deadline approaches; a decision must be made.

Nerdiliciousness
I went to see the Star Trek reboot over the weekend, having waited for enough time to have passed so that the larger numbers of the fan base would have already seen it, but also taking the precaution of choosing Sunday at 10:30 a.m. (which helped, but still left me buying my ticket among vast hoards of children attending Bob the Builder and Night at the Museum 2. It’s not terribly comfortable being an older single male adult. Parents seem to regard such persons in close proximity to their progeny with some suspicion. Oh, well, tough.

So Star Trek was fun. It was a bit loud, but it was fairly suspenseful throughout, even if you did always know the good guys would win. Sylar, I mean the guy playing Spock, was a good casting call, as was everyone else, I’d say, except Leonard Nimoy, whose dentures were very distracting, although at least it was nice to seem him having fun with the role, something he had some trouble with in the past, but how believable is it that the only thing that will make him lose control is a series of “yo’ mama” jokes? And are telescopic swords really standard Star Fleet issue when they’ve got phasers? (Nice redesign of those, by the way.) I did get a little tired of hearing McCoy use the “I’m a doctor, not a . . .” catch-phrase as often as he did, and Kirk must have a cast iron nose, not to mention indestructible teeth to get so very punched-out so very often and not to be spitting a lot of chips.

Well, now I can get on with some art-house stuff.

Fever Fever
I understand that the new influenza variant is rated as being dangerous and appears to be less so among the usual groups warned to be extra cautious, the infirm, elderly, and infants, which is kind of scary in a 1918 way, but the hype seems exaggerated and the responses beyond silly. Here’s a family quarantined in a hotel (and no word in the article who’s paying), and even more, here’s a whole cruise ship stuck at sea because a couple of passengers and crew have been diagnosed. It puts me in mind of 28 Days Later, or any of the modern zombie movies. How realistic is it to enact quarantine this way? Doesn’t it mean that you are deliberately exposing 2000 people to infection? And the hotel staff delivering room service, coming in to clean, etc. – are they wearing biohazard suits? With over 100 cases (which doesn’t even rate as a percentage and is only nearly as many as there have been deaths worldwide) confirmed in Australia, and 13,000+ overall are we even at pandemic? Is it really that bad? Well, keep washing your hands, cover your mouth when you sneeze or cough, and stay home if you’re feeling unwell, as you should anyway.

”Adios”
When Sol Trujillo arrived from the States to take over Australia’s largest (and formerly state-owned) telephone company, he was met with mockery for daring to be so presumptuous as to provide the press with a pronunciation guide to his surname (in a country that pronounces the “j” as a “j” in “jalapeno”). Jeers reverberated for days, and his chairmanship was denounced and derided throughout his tenure. Granted, he did a lousy job, and quitting early, and sneaking out of the country as he did, only serve to point up just how bad his performance was, regardless of whether the stock price did anything notable (which it didn’t, unless you count a 37% slump), so now he’s more than welcome to sit at home in Texas or wherever and claim PM Rudd’s farewell jibe, “Adios”, was a racist taunt.

I have to agree that there is racism here, and I believe Sol was on the pointy end of it, but I doubt that was Rudd’s intention. I also have to agree that the country itself can be experienced as being some years behind the U.S. or Europe. It’s a slower pace for pretty much everything here in many respects. Maybe not twenty years backwards, but still not quite up-to-speed everywhere. But every day that changes. New undersea cabling is bringing higher capacity internet access, we’re second to none in new technology take-up, and we’re the ones who just invented a multi-terrabyte capacity DVD, not to mention our terrific record of medical advancements.

Australia isn’t New York – looking at our major cities or the country as a whole. There isn’t that incredible capacity and diversity in the performing arts that’s available in NYC, LA, London, et al. It can be years before any major acts even tour here. But our home-grown production is excellent, often, at least on a proportional measure.

There are days that I find myself walking through my leafy suburb wondering at the change in fortune that brought me here, how different my life has turned out to be from any expectations I might have had previously or even entertained however briefly in my former circumstances.

As for the racism I’ve seen at work here, it’s only denied by those who hold their bigotry more dearly than any vision beyond the perimeter of their quarter-acre Australian Dream (the only kind of “Dreaming” they’d ever acknowledge as having any legitimacy for that matter). The idiots celebrating the so-called Chk-Chk-Boom girl’s use of the term “wog” (fraudulently, as it turns out, in every respect – not a witness, the shooter was probably a white bikie, etc.) can’t admit the term’s objectionable content because they’d have to admit when they used it on Sol or their Italian or Lebanese neighbor it wasn’t an endearment. But they’re passing away, too, off to the trash heap of history, just like all the other discredited systems and recalcitrant, recidivist know-nothings are everywhere.

So I won’t join Rudd’s “adios” to Sol, but I will say: good riddance.

Update: See? What "back in time"? We've got Eno. He's totally futurific.

Upper East Tel Aviv?
ZOMG - this Starbucks that just got blowed up is on the corner where I lived. Glad nobody got hurt. Don't recognize any of the names in the article.

Rugby Is an Autumn Game
Friday night I had to debate with myself over going out to ANZ Stadium to the Rabbitohs vs. the Parramatta Eels. Souths were sitting well above Parra on the ladder, so it seemed a good opportunity to enjoy another win, but the rain last week, for all it was intermittent, was tumultuous. By 5 p.m., it had seemed to ease off, so I went home, fed the cats, geared-up and headed out. I made it halfway to the entrance of the stadium before it started pelting down again. My seat is about twenty rows back from the field at the forty-meter mark, and well out from under cover, so I headed up a couple of tiers to be under the overhang. The field was far away, but in some respects it was a better vantage, maybe because I see more games on t.v. than I do live, so the overhead viewpoint was helpful in keeping track of the passing.

There were a couple of times during the course of the 80 minutes that the rain was coming down so hard it nearly obscured the playing field from view, and you’d have to wonder how those guys stood up under it, but it’s a game traditionally played in mud, just like American gridiron (even though that’s not true anymore, outside of high school & university). Ball-handling was remarkable for how fewer errors were committed than would reasonable be expected.

Anyway, it went to full-time tied at 16-all, and two overtime periods of 5 minutes apiece failed to resolve the situation., sending the Mighty Bunnies down one rung. We’re still playing better than last year, so even a draw is satisfying.

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.