1984

Dear Diary,

By some curious method (Fixing my 17 year old second cousin Asher's PC, backing up his 55 gig of MP3s onto one of my computers by patching his hard drive into one of my computers) I've come to possess an un-abridged version of an audio book of George Orwell's "1984".

(Hmmm, is the above a mighty long sentence or what?)

I loaded the whole 200 gigs - it appears to have come on no less than NINE cds - onto my MP3 player. And yesterday started listening to it.

Boy, I'd forgotten a lot of the grimy detail. And I'd forgotten, well, frankly, how it's slowly all coming true. Listening to it at work is probably not a good idea - I have headphones in my ears basically all day, with, I'm beginning to think, dire consequences for my hearing.

All the descriptions of the "huge concrete grey pyramid" of the "Ministry of Truth" where Winston Smith toils away at a desk... Well, here I sit, as it says in one of my sigs "I rage in a blue shirt in a bright room at a brown desk."

A few relevant quotes:

"Whether he went on with the diary, or whether he did not go on with it, made no difference. The Thought Police would get him just the same. He had committed - would still have committed, even if he had never set pen to paper - the essential crime that contained all others in itself. Thoughtcrime, they called it. Thoughtcrime was not a thing that could be concealed for ever."

"He who controls the past controls the future. He who controls the present controls the past."

There's a whole lot more here on Wikiquote.

I was reminded of this article over at Adbusters I was reading the Other night. Welcome to the future.

It's called Chroming.

Some dude from Connex called me today - I dropped them a line yesterday about the two teenagers I saw on the train yesterday sniffing paint (see below).

Seems it's called Chroming, which I did already know at some level. Fuck, how does one get so miserable that spraying aerosol paint into a bag and sniffing it can seem like a good idea? That'd have to hurt your fucking lungs, airways, face.

The guy from connex seemed more interested in the time and location of the incident, and a little confused by the idea that I might want to get them help rather than just reporting "Anti social behavior".

Still.

Getting back on Public Transport has proved educational. Interesting cross section of society one doesn't see in my usual happy white middle class world...

Angry Suburban Whiteboy signing off.

Books are ace.

Dear Diary,

I'm the secretary of a CAE Book Group, we had our first meeting of 2006 last night.

No less than four new people rocked up, which was interesting to say the least. An American woman who we got to explain how she got here (a boy), an English woman who also explained how she arrived here. So then I had to explain how I'd escaped from North Balwyn (see if you can guess which part of that page is my edit, assuming it doesn't get clipped out in a matter of minutes) and migrated to Northcote (I've had a go at that page in the past as well) - all of 12 kilometres. One of the other newbies made a living for years as a singer, mostly at Jewish weddings. And the fourth new arrival lives in... North Balwyn...

We had a lively discussion, some of which was actually about the book, "The Road from Coorain". Don't go read it, it's an annoying Australian memoir aimed squarely at the American market.

Nice to see this mob again, although I feel a bit weird sometimes. There are about 8-9 people in the group, all of whom are women except for me and one other guy. What is going on there? Surely men read books! Someone must be buying them all!

We quickly established there was about one degree of separation between one of the newbies and long time member Claire, as usual. And most of the new arrivals appeared to work in child protection or something related. Hardcore stuff.

Unrelated note to self: post Henry Rollins review here sometime.

In other unrelated news, what the Rumsfeld???