Send My Conscience Home in a Taxi

Hey I am still here....

Fri, 04 Nov 2022 11:33:49 GMT

I am still here, and I do mean to do teh BloGgiNg more often. In my copious "spare time"...

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Why yes, there was an earthquake!

Sat, 25 Sep 2021 13:18:27 GMT

As if 2020 and 2021 couldn't get any weirder... On Wednesday (22nd Sept. 2021) there was a sizable earthquake here in Melbourne.

There have been noticeable quakes here before. About 10 or 11 years ago there was a cluster of quakes, about three of them as I recall. At the time I worked on the 9th floor of a building down on St. KIlda road. One morning, the building shuddered just slightly, just long enough for one of my co-workers to say "Oh, is that an earthquake?". And that was it. I remember another when I was in a cinema at ACMI, which is semi-underground. The light fittings rattled for a few seconds. I just assumed it was a particularly heavy tram going by outside, except a number of folks quite a distance from me mentioned it on Facebook. But that's about it, they were trivial at best. They're incredibly rare in here geologically stable Australia. In my lifetime there has been exactly one quake that's actually caused deaths, and they were confined to two partly collapsed buildings. It's not like New Zealand where quakes that size are almost weekly.

This one was a proper quake. I was in the kitchen having a very late breakfast, when the whole house started shaking in a way that looked exactly like the videos that get posted online from New Zealand and Japan, where these are regular events. A security camera somewhere will catch a whole office shaking, although of course this was way less powerful. The house felt for about 30 seconds like it was being shaken from side to side like it was on ice or jelly. I stood there going "What the fuck is going on?"

Poor Pip (Mr 8 years old) was freaked out. He was swearing for a few minutes, wide eyed, and frankly I couldn't blame him. He wandered around going "What the fucking shit was that? What the fucking shit was that? Was that an earthquake?", which, to be honest, was what I was thinking. I looked outside, everything seemed to be normal. I got on facebook, and everyone I know who lives on the east coast of Australia was posting "Earthquake! Earthquake!". Which confirmed that it wasn't something weirdly localised to my place - so I relaxed after that. Pip needed a lot of reassurance but calmed down after a few minutes. And now he can say he's been in a real earthquake.

The sum total of the damage? One of my Lego minecraft bigfigs took a flying leap off a bookshelf, and now I can't find one of the pieces! It's probably under the bookshelf....

There were some wild reports of structural damage to buildings, but it turned out that all the footage being shared was one building in Pahran that lost part of it's veranda.

Possibly the best video was from the Collins Street Peregrine Falcons, who are currently sitting on four eggs. The male was on the nest at the time, and he pulls the best "WTF was that?" face, and dives off the ledge with a screech!

Oh, there was one other amusing event at my place. I have a lovely old antique clock, a biggish thing from the 1930's, belonged to my grandfather. I usually don't run it because it rings chimes on the quarter hour, and on the hour performs a beautiful little solo for bells... all of which is bloody loud. About fifteen minutes after the quake, I heard it chiming from my study where it hangs on the wall. The quake had given just enough momentum to the pendulum to set the clock going!

And that was it. We chatted about it in a few meetings I had that day, there were meme's doing the rounds almost from the second the shaking stopped. And we go on with the latest... Lockdown...

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Twenty years since September 11th 2001

Thu, 09 Sep 2021 13:03:27 GMT

I note that In a few days it'll be 20 years since the horrible events of September 11th 2001. In a previous generation, people would ask each other "Where were you when Kennedy was assassinated?", or for another generation "Where were you John Lennon was assassinated?" People my age can ask each other "Where were you on 9/11?"

For the record, let me tell you where I was.

It was September 12th in my timezone. On the evening of our Tuesday September 11th, I called it a night and turned off broadcast television about 10.15PM. Had I stayed awake some 15 more minutes, I might have witnessed the events in real time - every channel in Australia cut to coverage almost immediately. As it was, I got up on the the morning of Sept 12th, and my housemate turned on the television. The first images I saw was a loop of two people being interviewed in front of the burning north town of the World Trade Center, just as the second plane hit the south tower. I can still remember how they ducked in shock.

I said "What film is this from?"
Rebecca (my housemate) said "It's not a film, this happened last night."
"What's happened to the World Trade Center?"
"It's gone, they've collapsed."
I paused and said "There's going to be a war."

I also assumed immediately that it was Al-Qaeda, because they had tried before, back in 1993. That time they only managed to damage the basement, and were only caught because one of the stupider plotters tried to claim his deposit back on the rented van they'd packed the explosives into.

At the time, my sister, who works in international aid, was based in Indonesia. I made at least one panicked phone call to her to check she was alright, in part because unfounded reports from around the world suggested all sorts of related events were taking place. Including air raids in Afghanistan.

Happily, despite knowing a lot of keen travellers and ex-pats, no one I know was caught up directly in the destruction. But a friend of a friend died when the towers collapsed. Because just about every city has at least a handful of Australian's in it.

For more than a week, everything stopped. The FAA ordered every plane in the air in the US or approaching the US to land at the nearest airport. Sporting events and any event of any size were cancelled. We watched as many of the other towers at the World Trade Center collapsed, and then watched as they combed the extraordinarily mangled piles of debris looking for survivors. US Air Force fighter jets patrolled the skies over New York. I still remember a photograph of an African-American man, in a suit and carrying a briefcase, walking through a swirling cloud of dusk and sheets of paper, covered from head to foot in grey dust. For about ten days every television channel in Australia was rebroadcasting American news services. Remember, these are days when we still got news largely from the radio, TV and newspapers. Indeed, somewhere I have a copy of The Age reporting the attacks.

Across the world, there was an extraordinary wave of sympathy towards the United States.

And then what happened... the United States, being the United States and at the time run by neo-cons and cold war warriors, lashed out at the nations it felt were responsible. Within a month they were bombing Afghanistan, and flying in troops, starting a war that was ill-advised and ended in defeat, at least from the US's point of view, only a few weeks ago. It could be argued that Afghanistan was a haven for terrorists, being in turmoil and almost ungoverned. But the US didn't learn from the Soviet Union's pointless war there in the 80's, and thought that if it they just used enough planes and bombs they'd succeed...

The world's empathy was strained to put it mildly.

And then they blundered into another war of choice by invading Iraq.

To quote Senator Robert Byrd at the time:

"Anti-Americanism based on mistrust, misinformation, suspicion, and alarming rhetoric from U.S. leaders is fracturing the once solid alliance against global terrorism which existed after September 11."

and:

"This Administration has turned the patient art of diplomacy into threats, labelling, and name calling of the sort that reflects quite poorly on the intelligence and sensitivity of our leaders, and which will have consequences for years to come."

And indeed here were are, years later, long after Byrd was laid in his grave, suffering the consequences...

I didn't make it to New York until 2009, by which time the World Trade Center site was cleaned up and was largely a construction site.

I loved New York, what an amazing city. Vibrant, multicultural, fascinating. But also a centre of world finance - I was there for the galleries, but it's also the home of Wall Street. If you had to think of a symbolic heart of a nation you hated, the twin towers make sense as a target. But I was retrospectively furious. How dare anyone kill innocent people from all over the world - including many Muslims - in this amazing city? You could argue that the Pentagon and the White house are military targets (in fact the British burned the White House in 1814), but not New York. Not the city which houses the headquarters of the United Nations. Not the birthplace of Rap, Abstract Expressionism and so so many bands. Not the home town of Lou Reed, Basquiat, and thousands of other amazing people. Not the de-facto capital of the world. How dare anyone attack a city like that.

I guess the dust is still settling....

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Rewatching "Bad Santa" and really not liking it now

Fri, 20 Aug 2021 12:56:58 GMT

One o' my favourite films (used to be) Bad Santa. For a while it was something of a christmas tradition for me to watch it on christmas day.

For those not familiar, Billy Bob Thornton plays an alcoholic Santa and safe cracker, because that's plausable. Every year, he and his accomplice, having spent the shopping season as a mall Santa and helper, rob the mall of all it's cash takings. There are lots of other sub-plots, somehow Santa gets involved with a bullied kid who appears to have no parents, but lives in a huge house with his vague grandmother. And hooking up with a woman who works behind a bar because she has a Santa fetish.

I've watched this film a lot of times, at least six times over the years. And during this here pandemic, I've been re-watching familiar films because that's all my mind can really cope with. So after about a decade, I fished out Bad Santa. And... something's changed. I found it really distressing. Santa clearly has delirium tremens, his shaking hands are presented mockingly often in the film. The bullied kid is largely left to his own devices, having no responsible adults in his life, and befriends... what the fuck is his name in the film? Willie, of course. The kid befriends him because he thinks he's really Santa, and eventually Willie moves into his house - without ever bothering to learn his name.

Somehow it felt slightly exploitative. Most of the characters are shown as degraded losers, in fact that's the basis of most of the film's humour. I actually found myself feeling sorry for them.

I'm not sure what's changed. Maybe the film hasn't aged well. Maybe it's me. Maybe I'm becoming more sensitive as I get older. I am also a father now, although I'm never going to be that "Speaking as a father..." kind of man. Parenthood does, however, radically alter how I respond the stories involving children in distress or simply not being cared for. I got about five minutes into the file Grave of the Fireflies before I had to turn it off when a child dies unwanted in a train station. I find myself desperately concerned for, say, refugee children I see on the television.

Or maybe I've been spoiled by more and better films and indeed television shows. When you know what a medium can do, when you've seen some amazing stories, maybe it makes you a harder judge of older material...

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Boy did I get stuck in a Wikihole....

Sat, 14 Aug 2021 13:26:07 GMT

High time I did some more blogging.

So I went from a song I quite liked to the death of RFK on the Wikipedia. Let me tell you what happened.

I quite like the song "The Silent Boatman" by Parliament, which is relatively out of character for them, being better known as a Funk band. It's themes are a little too christian for an atheist like myself, but I still quite like it. What is it that Tim Minchin said? "Some of the hymns that they sing have nice chords but the lyrics are dodgy." As one sometimes does, I decided I wanted to learn more about the song, so I started on the Wikipedia entry for the album Osmiun. And it turns out the song was actually written by a young British woman called Ruth Copeland! She indeed recorded a version of the song for one of her few albums.

In fact, this was the first song she write entirely by herself. Sadly, she left the music industry entirely in 1976 after her singles failed to sell...

And this is where I started to get lost into a Wikihole. Ruth was briefly married to the NFL player Karl Sweeten. Which lead me to read about a film he appeared in, called Paper Lion, which is based on a book and articles written by George Plimpton. The film, and the book, tell the story of Plimpton attempting to actually play as a member of an NFL team, despite being 36 and by no means an athlete. As an aside, I dimly recall reading one of the original stories in a collection of New Journalism writings - a genre that Hunter Thomson was also known for.

Plimpton, it seems, was good friends with Robert F . Kennedy, and was not only present when RFK was assassinated, but was one of the people who tackled the assassin and disarmed him! Which of course led me to read up on Sirham Sirham, who at the time of writing is still in prison. And that lead to me reading about other people with duplicated names. And the notable inmates of California State Prison, Corcoran - currently including the Golden State Killer. Also took diversions off to read about the assassination of Heuy Long, all the members of the US congress who have almost been assassinated and... well, I went on, but can't remember where after that. I would have read up on Gabby Giffords, except I already know how she was nearly killed in a shooting in 2011...

So apparently this how I'm spending this lockdown. I will try and find the film Paper Lion, it sounds interesting, and perhaps will keep me away from what I now realise is a fairly morbid series of clicks...

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New Gym Program.... I kicked my own butt!

Sun, 14 Oct 2018 11:41:09 GMT

So I've been working out for just over twenty years now, for which I should get some kind of award - so many people join and then drop out after a couple of months.

I write my own programs these days, because in fact there's really not much to them. Your body has, what, five or so muscle groups, so as long as you're working them you're doing OK.

I do about twelve sessions for a given program, so it came time today to create a new one. I thought rather than more pyramid training I'd try something else. So I re-arranged my program, and started with working my biceps and triceps, rather than doing them last, and then rather than doing an arbitrary number of sets I'd just keep doing sets until I could go no more.

Turns out I'm stronger than I thought, but damn actually training to failure is tiring! By the time I'd done five sets of preacher curls (a type of Bicep exercise) of 50 pounds, I was genuinely fatigued. It all worked, but by the end of my session my body had pretty much decided it was done. I went to do the leg press, where I can usually do three sets of 420 pounds (that's about 190 kilos), my legs just went "yeah no we're done" and I barely managed to do ten repeats.

But it's good, my body now has that pleasant ache you get from getting decent exercise.

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Reviewing an Australian film from 1970 - 2000 Weeks

Mon, 02 Apr 2018 07:31:56 GMT

Cross-posted from maxcelcat.com

Recently I became aware of an Australian film which I'd never previously heard of. Which is not that unusual, many of them fall through the cracks or are so awful they deserve to be forgotten, and I'm by no means the film aficionado I once was.

The film was 2000 Weeks. I was interested in it because of the unusual title and because when I looked it up, it appeared to be the first of a wave of Australian films after literally decades in which none had been produced. The title refers to how much time the lead character has left in his life in which to achieve his goals.

Actually getting to see it proved difficult. It had never been issued on video let alone DVD, and appears to have not been shown since it's first run nearly fifty years ago. It had made a loss when first shown, and had been savaged by critics and audiences, hence the lack of later releases. I searched the usual locations, and could only find a few clips on something called Australian Screen. But the clips fascinated me, if only because of the what they showed of Melbourne and it's people back in the very late sixties. Here were some people of my parents generation in the city they lived in. In fact I bet if I did some digging I could find some connection between my parents and at least an extra from the film.

Eventually I made contact with the National Film and Sound Archive, who had at least six copies in various formats. I thought it woulkd be a struggle to see a print, since the NFSA is based in Canberra. But to my delight they have a small office in Melbourne, crammed into the back of something called ACMI X. If you ask nicely, they'll let you view any item in their collection at their shoebox office.

The print I saw was a washed-out VHS copy complete with timecode. And... I can see why it was not a huge success. It's a very interesting film mostly for the time it documents, the way people dress and talk, and the views of Melbourne. But it's almost like it's three or films or plots mashed into one. There's a story there about the lead character's father being on deaths door. He was, by the way, the one who utters the phrase "two thousand weeks". The lead character also having an affair, which seems to at most trouble his wife. Meanwhile an old friend returns from the UK and there is some quite interesting arguments with him about what we'd call the "cultural cringe". Oh, and the lead character is also busy writing for a major newspaper, which appears to the The Age.

The film is full of details that interested me. There are a number of locations that were probably accurate for the time, but seemed odd to my eyes. For example the protagonists house, which he shares with his wife and two young children, is large, spacious and well furnished, which seemed at odds with his apparent struggle with his job and ambitions. There's a long party scene in the middle which takes place in a house that looks like what would have been a modern home on the fringe of Melbourne at the time, and is decorated with paintings by Boyd, Tucker and other Australian artists. Works that these days would fetch hundreds of thousands of dollars, if not millions.

The film is all over the place. The plot, such as it is, revolves around Will Gardiner, a frustrated journalist who wishes to be something more - a play write or screen writer, telling uniquely Australian stories. But he's also having an affair with another young woman, openly it seems. And is father is in hospital, dying. And finally, and probably most interestingly, old friend has returned from the UK, where he appears to have evolved into an arrogant elitist prat who looks down on the art and culture of his home country.

The print I saw was so washed out - it's black and white - that in a few scenes I wasn't too sure if it was his wife and or his girlfriend whom he was interacting with. And the film jumps about with no real structure. In one scene Will is talking to his boss in his office. In the next scene he's suddenly on a beach with a woman who turns out to be his wife. The next he's on a ship saying goodbye to his girlfriend who is, of course, heading to London like everyone from Australia does. And his children seem to feature in only one or two scenes, and then are not mentioned nor is their welfare of any concern to any of the characters. This was confusing to me as a parent, and added to an air of unreality for me. And in there Will is visiting a hospital room where his father is dying, but somehow manages to terribly over-act. Or Will is driving or drinking or often drinking then driving with his old friend, arguing about Australian culture or lack thereof.

There's one particularly stupid flashback, where Will catches his wife cheating on him. His response is to strip off her dress and burn it in a fireplace. This was accompanied by an overwrought voice-over by Will talking about Love and it's meaning. The voice-over is present in most of the film, when Will is not actually talking at one of the female characters. Both of whom would have been well advised to give him the arse.

This should have been two or three films really. At most it's a very interesting document of the times, the attitudes and even just the cars, clothes, buildings and the endless cigarettes. These were young people at the time, but look today like that group of baby-boomers whom are now the establishment. I envied their enormous houses filled with great art, and their relatively untroubled lives, and their lack of concern for anything like money or having spare time. This film made today would have been set in some much smaller spaces, and paying the rent would have been a plot element. The one theme that particularly interested me, the lack of an Austrlian cultural voice, is well and truly not an issue. At least in part because of films like this, it must be said.

A footnote: In response to the commercial and critical failure of 2000 Weeks, the director Tim Burstall, whose previous work included Sebastian the Fox, helping found La Mama Theatre, and documentaries about Australian artists, went on to make the cringeworthy "sex romp" Alvin Purple. Which, by contrast, was a huge financial success... can't beat boobs...

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Things I learned from my kid being in hospital

Tue, 14 Nov 2017 11:12:20 GMT

Long story short, my kid ended up in hospital for six days a in October. I won't go into details, but he's fine after IV antibiotics and very minor surgery.

I learned a few things being around the Royal Children's Hospital.

Firstly, it's a really good hospital. It's never good to have to stay in hospital, but when your kid does it's great to have a place as good at this. They even gave him a certificate when he got out of surgery for being so brave.

Secondly, I can now report that my kid is not allergic to CT contrast fluid, like his mother is. Nor does he have an negative reactions to anesthetic. There's no good way to find this out, although this was the least bad way.

Also turns out my kid is a very good patient. He did what was asked of him, he lay still when he had to lay still, he opened his mouth when he was asked so his throat could be examined. He didn't complain when he needed to get a new IV put into his hand. He was well behaved when he had to have a CT scan. I put on a lead vest to keep him company while they scanned him, but he didn't need me to keep him calm. In fact he was quite excited because it had a large spinning thing in it.

He did get grumpy and bored with being in bed all day, which is understandable!

Other minor discoveries:

Driving from our place in Lalor to the RCH via the ring-road during non-peak periods takes only about 25 minutes
A sandwich purchased at 11PM from a roadhouse restaurant attached to a petrol station on the way home tastes fucking delicious
If you're at the RCH for more than two days you can get cheaper parking.
A child watching YouTube on an iPad will get through 1Gb of mobile data every 90 minutes or so!
It is possible sleep on a seat that folds out flat, but a hospital is an inherently noisy place.

Anyway, if you must go to hospital, or at least if your kid needs to, I can recommend the Royal Childrens,

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Weird Dream with Subarus

Mon, 05 Jun 2017 04:38:20 GMT

So I dreamed I was driving around Brunswick in my white Subaru Forester, looking for a marriage celebrant. For reasons unknown, the celebrant had changed their name to "Jar Jar Smith" or something like that.

I ended up driving down Royal Parade, but while I was at it apparently I was also controlling, remotely, another Subaru Forester in front of me. I kinda lost track of the other car and pulled over somewhere. Then I realised the remotely controlled car had wound up in someone's swimming pool!

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