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.