A Cure Or The Cure ?

04/04/2010 the arts

I’ve been listening to a lot of The Cure lately, maybe I’m depressed, maybe I’m hankerin’ for that pale all-black drawn and pained look or maybe because they’re a brilliant fuckin’ band. My little American friend asked me what would be the best album of theirs to get as her first (she’s 32 and 4′ 9”- she’s dainty but she’s fine ! But what could I say ? Jeez … It’s a doozy of a question and I found myself unable to give any sort of clear answer Which album ? ….hmm Well, prolific, diverse interesting and still relevant today, despite first having been around for almost 35 years They’ve done about 5 billion albums with a similar number of different styles and line-ups.

So hell ! – who were members of this band ? Or better – Who wasn’t ?

Let’s have a look at the chronology

1973 – some of the people who eventually formed The Cure get together under the banner of The Obelisk and did the one single gig – this you can look up for yourself on Wikipedia. The members of The Oblelisk Robert Smith (piano), Mick Dempsey (guitar), Laurence Tolhurst (drums), Marc Ceggano (guitar, lead) and Alan Hill (bass) OK that was just the one show and no known recording of it, but remember the names of the members (that Smith kid will keep cropping up)

1976 – Easy Cure formed with Robert Smith (now vocals and guitar, I guess the piano playing didn’t work out for him, small pianists don’t get a lot of action), Michael Dempsey (bass), Laurance Tolhurst (drums) and Porl Thompson (guitar) – not a lot known about this incarnation except it was

1978 – They dropped the “Easy’ from their name, and Porl Thompson dropped out of the band. Now we have a band called “The Cure”

1979 – released ‘Three Imaginary Boys‘ having signed a record deal – this is the album with “Jumping Someone Else’s Train ‘ and the ever-cheerful ‘Boys Don’t Cry’ (which has been covered ad infinitum by ska bands – Area 7 springs to mind and good luck trying to find that on a CD). This is pretty raw stuff, quite punky which is to be expected considering what was happening on the fringes of English music at the time.

1980 – Yikes ! Dempsey leaves but new members Simon Gallup (bass) and Mattieu Hartley (keyboards) jump on for a ride they release the moody single ‘A Forest’ quite different to their first releases, one might say almost musical. Their second album 17 seconds (another cracker) released Play For today, great single as well as, of course, 17 Seconds – stayed tuned about this album (trivia: The Final Sound only went for 50 seconds because they ran out of tape when recording)

1981 – Crikey ! Hartley jumps off this band’s wagon and tThe Cure is now a three-piece pop combo. This might explain the “Charlotte Sometimes” single and the album ‘Primary‘. Maybe they were all a little bit sad – trios must be very claustrophobic.

1982 – Yeegads ! , now Gallup gallops – what is this is The Cure now a duo ?? The band released the single “Hanging Gardens” and it doesn’t sound like the work of just two dudes – the liner notes credit

* Simon Gallup – bass, keyboard

* Robert Smith – guitar, keyboard, vocals

* Lol Tolhurst – drums, keyboard

Pornography was released, in ’82 a fair bit of pornography was probably released this was the name of The Cure’s album for the year though

1983 They released “The Walk” and “Love Cats.”

1984 The Top and The Caterpillar were released. “The Top” was a hippy pop psychedelic album, Smith played all the instruments except for drums The The Cure were joined by Andy Anderson (drums), Phil Thornalley (bass) and Porl Thompson (guitar)

1985 Andy Anderson and Philip Thornally left the band , or were allowed the opportunity to work with other musicians on other projects.

Boris Williams (drums) and Simon Gallup (bass) joined – is Gallup a sucker for punishment or what ? The Head on the Door album was released. Singles included Inbetween Days and Close to Me two of my favourite singles. Inbetween days was covered by Ben Folds

1986 Singles album released – “Standing on a Beach”. The Cure headlined Glastonbury Festival.

1987 The Cure released a double album, Kiss Me Kiss Me Kiss Me. World Tour called “Kissing Tour”. Roger O’Donnell joined (keyboard)

1989 Disintegration was released, from which 4 hit singles were released. — Lol Tolhurst left for the 3rd time (?).

1990 Roger O’Donnell left and was replaced by Perry Bamonte. The Cure headlined Glastonbury, Mixed Up was released, re-mixed singles of Never Enough, Close to Me and A Forest were released.

1992 Recorded “Wish” and toured with Wish Tour, a world wide sell out show. Porl Thompson left.

1993 Live works included Paris and Show. The Cure headlined at the XFM “Great Xpectations” show in Finsbury Park, London.

1994 Boris Williams left.

1995 Jason Cooper joined on drums, Roger O’Donnell rejoined on keyboard. Work started on the Dredd Song, for the film Judge Dredd. Headlined a few European festivals, including the 25th Glastonbury.

1996 Wild Mood Swings was released, went top ten around the world. The Cure embarked on the Swing Tour, their largest to date. 4 singles were released.

1997 Galore, a compilation of sorts- the singles from ’87 to ’97, and a video compilation to Standing on a Beach was released.

1998 More Than This single, for the X files movie

2000 Bloodflowers was released. I don’t like this one all that much, but after collecting so many of their albums, you sort have gotta have it for continuity dontchya ?

2001 The Cure released their Greatest Hits album, which included 2 new songs, Cut Here and Just Say Yes. The Cure departed from Fiction Records, after 23 years. One can only surmise what sort of hell it was for the A&R person who had to deal with the band, imagine every time you had a meeting and seeing either a sea of strangers or the same old faces or a combination of old and new. The only continuity being the sullen dude (who is now getting a bit porky) bedaubed by eyeliner and hair slathered with Gothic Juice (the strongest hairspray known to man)

2002 The Cure head-lined a number of European Festivals, and rehearsed for a special two night performance at the Tempodrom, Berlin. Performances from both nights were shot in High Definition video on 12 cameras.

2003 The Trilogy DVD was released, and the band signed a 3 album global deal with the Geffen label.

2004 Join the Dots, a 4cd Box Set was released, including B sides and rare singles. “The Cure” album was released.

2005 Perry Bamonte and Roger O’Donnell left – I wonder if the band room ever had a revolving door, did the local newsagent have a permanent scrap of paper thumb-tacked to their notice board advertising for “band members to join working band – no time-wasters.”., Porl Thompson returned – surprise surprise !! . The band headlined at Live 8, Paris.

2006 The band closed the Teenage Cancer Trust Show at the Royal Albert Hall, and started work on their 13th studio album. Robert Smith worked on live DVD projects with re-releases of The Top, The Head on the Door, and Kiss Me Kiss Me Kiss Me.

So what do I tell my American Friend ? The styles are so different, the members line-ups changed more frequently than some people change underwear, there’s all those studio albums, the live albums, the bootlegs, the DVDs – hell. I just told her to make up her own mind.

Anyway I may need to edit this from time to time, because I reckon it’s incomplete as it is now.

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Fighting The Liar

03/31/2010 crossword puzzles, grammar

Following on from the last post.

In 642 ACE a a border dispute/land-grab was fought out between two Anglo-Saxon leaders – Penda and Oswald. Warfare in the year 642 was conducted quite differently using a vastly different technology to the devastating computer games played by recent school-leavers of today who have had the great (or ill-) fortune to have been recruited by some military force. Big knives and axes were pretty-much the cutting-edge  of military weaponry (cutting-edge –geddit !). Oswald is supposed to have been hacked into many bits ‘n’ pieces on this field of endeavour. So I’m guessing that the end result hasn’t changed much, just the method of it’s delivery.

One of the many bits of Oswald hacked off is supposed to have been carried off by an eagle into a nearby tree. His arm – but the news media of then was as unreliable as of now.

Since then the site of this battle has been known as ‘Oswald’s Tree’ or Oswstrey

Skipping forward a millenium or so we remember this place of bloody dismemberment for locals

– Andy Lloyd (the Captain of the English Cricket team)

– the only survivor of (or injured participant in) the successful MI5 assassination of Diana Spencer Trevor Rees-Jones,

– a thinker/writer on matters religious – Thomas Bray and the poet Wilfred Owen

but most of all (for today’s purpose) WILLIAM ARCHIBALD SPOONER (he went to school there).

"it is now kisstomary to cuss the bride"

from National Portrait Gallery, London

Spooner was employed to further the arcane interests of the Church Of England, a cleric, but mostly lectured at New College, Oxford. But I’m pretty sure there’s not many people who remember his vivid and inspiring lectures on Aristotelian Ethics. Described as “an albino, small, with a pink face, poor eyesight, and a head too large for his body” almost a stereotype of a competent but dull lecturer. Nope, most people remember this person for his malformed morphemes. OK ‘morphemes’ are the smallest unit of semantics, an individual unit of meaning. Think of the suffix  “-able” or prefix “-un”, now think of any verb (remember them ? – they’re ‘doing’ words) hell ! — lets just go with “do”. So to try and describe an action that is considered impossible we might combine these 3 and apply the word un-do-able – simple innit ?

Spooner is supposed to have regularly got this wrong, we can’t possibly know what was going through his head (who can know what a person is actually thinking ?) but we do have some record of what came out of his mouth. Whatever he was thinking he’d do some internal mixing and matching with the morphemes before they got from the tip of his tongue to the ear of the listener.

We now call this mis-application a “Spoonerism”. I did a bit of a read on the internet to try and cite a few of Spooner’s originals but guess what ? There are very few to be had, and I have great reservation about their reliability ( rely-ability). But even if he never said them himself it’s probably instructive to provide at least a few examples. Interviewed in 1930 (when he was quite old admittedly) he said “Kinkering Congs Their Titles Take” when waffling on about succession and Conquering Kings but the unreliable examples include …

“The Lord is a shoving leopard” – the Lord is a loving shepherd

“You have hissed all my mystery lectures, and were caught fighting a liar in the quad” – he was giving a student his marching orders for cutting all his history lectures and starting a fire

Anyway, you should have the drift. Again these could just have been made up by his students to take the piss out of a dull lecturer and the ‘Conquering Kings’ reference was from a ‘Funny Words’ web-site. He was supposed to have been a bit odd in other mannerisms, reportedly,  so the language thing is likely to be true, but we are talking about the late 1800’s (he is said to have spilt some salt over a hostess’s tablecloth and attempted to clean it up by pouring claret over it, or another, was in the pulpit for an hour delivering a sermon for an hour on St Paul but in that sermon never mentioned this Christian saint a single time but repeatedly referenced Aristotle, over and over he mis-quoted Aristotle, climbed down and went to his seat, immediately rose again and re-climbed the pulpit and said “Did I say Aristotle ? – I meant St Paul”

He was born in 1844 and died August 1930, try and find his biography in The Oxford Dictionary Of National Biography he was an Oxford Don after all.

But I digress, when you see any reference to ‘Spooner’ or ‘Spoonerism’ in a cryptic crossword you will have to bear this in mind, it may be asking you to re-read the clue incorrectly (??) um, it’s asking you to unravel the clue to get the actual clue (??). The clue has been deliberately malformed to further muddy the waters. Try this…

Spooners Light Wine Divides Lanes (5, 4)

Before you start racking your brain for types of alcoholic fermented grape pressings (wine obviously has 4 letters) that have 5 letters in it’s name and then spending time ‘dividing’ (or  re-arranging the letters of) to come up with an answer that makes some sense out of the clue. You’ve been told that there’s a spoonerism involved and two seem to spring out, “Livides Danes” (livid Danes ?) doesn’t make any sense but ‘Wight Line’ suggests White Line and Eureka ! a white line does indeed divide many a traffic lane and, best of all, it fits. Often you have to take a gamble and just enter into the grid something that fits and come back to it later if it becomes less likely to be correct (which is why we use pencils when we are learning this skill) but if you can complete the puzzle and every other clue is correct then this answer is most likely correct as well.Besides, who looks up the answers in the paper published the next day anyway ?

You can now get off the bus or train  and deposit the finished newspaper in the nearest appropriate receptacle. I’m guessing that the crossword page is the last page you turn to, it would be just dumb to buy a paper just for the puzzles wouldn’t it ? Always read the news, it’s important to know what’s going on in the world that’s wider than your own, limited, experience.

I’m hoping that this will help in solving those enigmatic beauties – Cryptic Crossword Puzzles – inspire you even (hence the headline)

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A Rose By Any Other Name

03/28/2010 Uncategorized

Titles for books and essays are important in my view, they set the tone and are an indication of content – unlike headlines which are meant to grab your attention and draw the reader into the article.

I was going to use “How Do You Get To Carnegie Hall ?” as the headline for today. It’s an old saw and you know the answer is going to be “practice, practice, practice’.

Since I was asked recently how to do something, something I have dabbled in for a while. I have formed the notion that it is within my nature to try and make some contribution to the total sum of the body of knowledge possessed by humanity and also contribute in some way to epistemology. Even someone as decrepit, broken, scorned and reviled as I may have something worthwhile to say from time to time

So today I’m going to provide what I hope to be my guide on how to make the first attempts at cracking the cryptography used in setting a crossword puzzle. Not the ‘easy’ or ‘quick’ versions but the convoluted coded versions. I find the straight crossword puzzles a bit tedious, they are often ambiguous and are merely grids where the person solving is directed to find the appropriate synonym that satisfies the clue – fairly boring

So let’s embark on examining the ‘rules’ for solving cryptic crossword puzzles.

Firstly the rules aren’t as hard and fast as some might suggest but can fall within a few general categories. I’m pretty sure that the person creating the puzzle doesn’t want something that no-one can ever solve, what would be the point of that ? You might get a gig for a week, but I’m pretty sure that if you wrote a daily crossword that was unsolvable you’d be looking for something else to do. Even though you may have just established a reputation of being the person that writes the ‘unsolvable crossword’ and you’ll get a bunch of freaks trying to eventually get it finished, if it’s never completed all you will have done is created a neat grid with accompanying gibberish and that’s just a pile of crap.

I’m not going to have room today for a complete guide, it’ll take a few more that a thousand words to complete this task, and besides the battery on this laptop will only last as long as it will take to post this instalment anyway.

The first step is to read the clue, have a look at the number bracketed at the end, now you know that you’re looking for a word of (x) letters. So far so good (you could probably look at the actual crossword itself). The clue preceding this number will tell you two things, what you are looking for and how you might go about finding it. If we can successfully separate out these two elements we’re well on the way to being rid of this clue (and getting the first answer is always the hardest,  a journey of a thousand miles etc etc etc) I should probably start providing examples at this juncture, but intend to leave that for the second installment.

There are a few ways the person setting the clue will point you to the solution. It can be a simple anagram, it can be a string of letters contained within the clue, it can be phonetics. You will have to read the clue a few times to decide which of the rules apply to it, but there are a few common triggers. And it’s rather up to the skill of the compiler how well or ill concealed the triggers are.

If you read a clue that has ‘within’,  ‘inside’, ‘in’, ‘you will find’, ‘buried’ or something in this vein you might try looking at all the letters in the clue to try and find the word you are seeking embedded in that string.

If  that doesn’t work, does the clue contain ‘heard’, ‘sounds’, ‘you will hear’ ? now you may have to read the clue differently, the word you seek could be found by simply reading the clue to yourself and listening carefully. Don’t read it out aloud to yourself on the bus or train people will (rightly) think you a nutjob.

If there’s no joy thus far, have a look to see if you have been, for example, invited to perhaps join two 4 letter words and re-arrange their order to make a single eight letter word. Indicators like ‘make’, ‘rearrange’, ‘change’, ‘alter’ or ‘edit’ should tip you off.

Also look out for switches that invite you to look at something ‘backwards’ or ‘in reverse’

Then for an added bonus there are some clues that you just have to pick up from doing a lot of crosswords on a lot of train trips (I’m going for a million public transport miles). These mongrel hints inside the clues aren’t generally used in puzzles from the US (but may). If you see ‘queen’, ‘sovereign’ or a ‘monarch’ you’re going to get an ER (for Elizabeth Regina – the Queen of England and their current monarch) in there somewhere, if there’s some mention of someone who is a writer there’s likely to be an ED (for editor), Shakespeare is always the bard and the bard is always Shakespeare and it’s a bloody compiler who starts getting you to try and recall all the characters of every Shakespearean drama and everything they have ever said – but they do ! This type of clues is confounding and quite often I have found myself trying to kick my own arse when I’ve seen the solution, because it was so frickin’ obvious (but not at the time I was doing the puzzle – obviously, kicking my own arse for no reason is a fairly recent personal phenomenon).

So the first and hardest step is to keep reading the question and work out what the word you are looking for might be then have a crack at applying the rules to see if the remaining words in the clue might have applied to satisfy the question being asked of you by the compiler

OK KO ?

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Moron, Idiots and Dunces

01/27/2010 Uncategorized

The bastard,
the completely, unutterably stupid, half-witted bastard son of a lead-paint sniffing crack whore
the swine !

What do you call an imbecile who imposes on a whole population an internet filtering system to ‘protect the kiddies’ ?

What do you call a dribbling moron who imposes on an entire population an ISP-level internet filtering system to ‘protect the kiddies’ that many, many people who are knowledgeable in the filtering of web-sites to ‘protect the little kiddies’ say will not work in the manner in which it was intended ?

You call this sort of determined but stupid person “Conroy”. By virtue of his Labor Party connections he sought and won a seat in the Australian Parliament representing the State of Victoria in the Senate and since the party he represents won the majority of seats in the Federal Lower House he has been the Minister for Fuck -Ups and Ineptitude. You can probably tell I don’t like the prick, in my opinion he is a person who imposes whatever brand of weird Christianity he practices without a single thought that others, who disagree with what God has told Conroy is the right thing to do, may have some point in opposing this futile and expensive potential attack on the freedom as despite many experts who work in this field and who AREN’T trying to sell him the hardware and software for this attack on a person’s ability to self-filter internet content keep telling him – it isn’t going to work.

I have a waste-bin full of his form-replies, where he insists that the only thing the filter will be picking up is material that is classified by the quango who determine what may and may not be seen on our cinema screens as “RC” – ‘Refused Classification’

I counted all the internet addresses one idle evening lately and stopped at around the 234 million mark, is this jerk-off trying to tell me that he will be employing hundreds of new staff to classify each and every one of these as if they were movies ? If so he better get hiring because the number of new sites being added each year is growing at an ever-increasing rate (47, 000, 000 added in 2009)

But what is really getting my wick is that this mongrel who is supposed to be providing more and faster bandwidth to this country is taking steps to slow it down, no-one can tell me that adding another bottleneck to my connection to sites is not going to have a hit on my internet speed. AND he wants me to pay extra for a poorer-performing internet connection, he doesn’t expect the ISP’s to shrug their collective shoulders and say that they will have to wear the added financial burden of filtering through every request to be connected to a web-site (he really should be sent to the ‘special’ area of Parliament where they seat the clinically insane Members until they can be removed via a by-election if he does).

I think I should probably start  looking for some proxy service or VPN so my connection to the free world won’t be filtered, or if they do want to filter it they had better have some form of a court order that permits them such an action.

The internet isn’t another TV station, it isn’t an alternative to a cinema, it’s more than that, it’s as valid a medium of communication as the postal service or a telephone company, we won’t be seeing this dirt-bag trying to open every letter or eavesdrop on all phone calls ‘to protect the kiddies’ so why apply different standards to the internet ?

When he loses the next election I hope that the current Prime Minister is happy that he has provided a new Tory Government with quite a powerful tool to filter out any ALP material – however inadvertantly, and with an assurance that their web-sites and tedious blogs will be ‘restored as soon as possible’ which will probably mean the week after the polls have been declared and they have lost another election.

Some democracy

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Time To Make A Record

01/12/2010 Politics, Uncategorized

I’m is getting a bit sick of people who try to re-write history, it’s happening with an increasing frequency, and I expect it to build up quite a head of stem as the elections here and overseas get even closer. I’m guessing that in the next campaign to win the majority of seats in the UK parliament that the Conservative Party won’t be singing the praises of dear ol’ Maggie nor of that dweeb John Major. It would be rather counter-productive for them to brimng back the images of police on horeseback running down striking workers, remindig the electorate of the pensioners freezing to death because they couldn’t pay for the increased fuel costs from newly-privatised utility companies, people getting sick because the private water companies couldn’t be bothered to spend the money to filter out all the shit from the water (quite literally shit)
This is about something that always gets my goat.

David Bowie aand Eric Clapton both expressed sympathy for the National Socialist Party of Germany – the political party who ran Germany all those years ago, yes the one that Adolph Hitler was associated with – The Nazis

Firstly this was quoted in NME, Melody Maker, The Guardian and The Times from a concert given by Clapton in 1976

Do we have any foreigners in the audience tonight? If so, please put up your hands. Wogs I mean, I’m looking at you. Where are you? I’m sorry but some fucking wog…Arab grabbed my wife’s bum, you know? Surely got to be said, yeah this is what all the fucking foreigners and wogs over here are like, just disgusting, that’s just the truth, yeah. So where are you? Well wherever you all are, I think you should all just leave. Not just leave the hall, leave our country. You fucking (indecipherable). I don’t want you here, in the room or in my country. Listen to me, man! I think we should vote for Enoch Powell. Enoch’s our man. I think Enoch’s right, I think we should send them all back. Stop Britain from becoming a black colony. Get the foreigners out. Get the wogs out. Get the coons out. Keep Britain white. I used to be into dope, now I’m into racism. It’s much heavier, man. Fucking wogs, man. Fucking Saudis taking over London. Bastard wogs. Britain is becoming overcrowded and Enoch will stop it and send them all back. The black wogs and coons and Arabs and fucking Jamaicans and fucking (indecipherable) don’t belong here, we don’t want them here. This is England, this is a white country, we don’t want any black wogs and coons living here. We need to make clear to them they are not welcome. England is for white people, man. We are a white country. I don’t want fucking wogs living next to me with their standards. This is Great Britain, a white country, what is happening to us, for fuck’s sake? We need to vote for Enoch Powell, he’s a great man, speaking truth. Vote for Enoch, he’s our man, he’s on our side, he’ll look after us. I want all of you here to vote for Enoch, support him, he’s on our side. Enoch for Prime Minister! Throw the wogs out! Keep Britain white!

The ‘Enoch’in the quote was Enoch Powell a well known racist of the time OK, he might not have been a Nazi as such but commentators of the time described him frequently as a ‘proto-fascist’ and a member of the far-right, so he probably was a bit of a closet fan of the Fuehrer or ar least some of his policies.

Bowie was an even more confused twat.

“Britain is ready for a fascist leader… I think Britain could benefit from a fascist leader. After all, fascism is really nationalism… I believe very strongly in fascism, people have always responded with greater efficiency under a regimental leadership.”

“Adolf Hitler was one of the first rock stars”

and

“You’ve got to have an extreme right front come up and sweep everything off its feet and tidy everything up.”

This he now blames on the drugs and booze, but he can’t really deny making the statements can his publicity stunt for Playboy magazine involving an open-top vintage Mercedes and a Nazi salute staged outside Victoria Station ever be un-photographed.

These two, at least. enraged progressive English  musicians and these two stunts started a movement that was to become Rock Against Racism.

That’s enough for now

http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/2007/oct/14/popandrock2

– Pity about Ian Curtis, but there’s a lot not to like about the British Labour Party (Blair has a lot to answer for )

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A First Time For Everything

01/05/2010 the arts

Not really worth the ticket price

Movie Reviews aren’t really my thing, they’re rarely useful and are often most unhelpful in deciding how to spend the now-exorbitant amount of dosh the theatres are charging for a ticket. I suspect that they are about to price themselves out of relevancy, but that’s another story. But this postis going to be both an exception (I’m doing a review) and not an exception (it will be neither useful nor helpful).
There are bad films, really atrocious examples of the cinematic crafts, they’re poorly written, ill-directed, hammish, cheap and nasty. My most recent viewing had a good premise, the direction was acceptable, the actors seemed to be putting a bit of effort into their work and the sets didn’t shake or look like they were made from re-cycled pieces of roadside garbage, it was just – bleh !

Many films have a stupid theme when examined in the cold hard light of day, reason dictates that things like the love story in the film Titanic doesn’t really make sense, that anything with the words “Doctor Who” in the title will defy any test of logic. What is important for viewer satisfaction is that the impossibilities can be overcome and that dis-belief is suspended for the duration of the film/TV show/play.

“The Invention Of Lying” didn’t do it for me, it started out incredibly (and I continue to use this as ‘not credible’ even though it’s a more common term for something really good) continued on with an obvious inconsistency and ended with everyone living happily ever after. Jesus Wept !; – is there any US film being made where there isn’t a happy ending with truth, justice and the American Way Of Life prevailing, then the credits start scrolling down the screen and you get to leave the cinema ?

{- One exeption that immediately springs to mind is “The Visitor” which you probably have never heard of, it never made it to a cinema near you nor any film reviewer who works for a commercial media outlet recommended it to you. It didn’t have a happy ending and yet it was one of the better films I have seen. By the way, the site linked to(At The Movies – ABC Australia)  is one of the better review sites in Australia – but you can’t always trust critics.}

But back to The Invention Of Lying, here’s the gist, imagine if you will some other world, quite similar to this one, except it looks remarkably like the USA, where everyone speaks the truth all the time, there is no fiction, there are no religions, all films are documentaries with a single person reading from the script, acting seems to be a form of fiction, there is no deceit or dishonesty. The main protagonist, played by Ricky Gervais, is a screen writer who at his Mother’s deathbed suffers a brain explosion and comforts her in her last moments by telling her that an afterlife exists and there is indeed a heaven a hitherto unknown concept, this small subterfuge is immediately accepted by the hospital staff in the room as ruth because lying is impossible in this world and he goes on to become rich, successful and establishes religion for the masses based an a few hastily scribbled inconsistent ideas glued to the back of a pair of takeaway pizza boxes. He gets the girl and has a small fat child – The End

I approached this film with an open mind, hoping that it would be sort of pro-Agnosticism, or pro-Atheist, which would be slightly refreshing when culture is being controlled by the fear of Christian fundamentalism in Western societies. But I didn’t feel that. I hoped it it might be funny, truth is harsh and often unnecessary in day to day life – you don’t get too many second servings of pudding by describing the main course as ‘adequate’ do you ? but again I didn’t get that, Gervais was OK, Jennifer Garner (the gal he was chasin’) isn’t going to get any awards for best supporting actress in a romantic comedy, Rob Lowe played himself so on scale of zero to ten I give this a 2+, it killed a bit of time but I spent too much of the film asking myself “why am I sitting here?” and then looking at my watch hoping it would end soon so I could catch the early bus home.

That is until I got the credits, Hoorah !

It’s a pretty sad movie when the closing credits are the most interesting part of it, supporting Gervais and Garner in this boring stinker were

Jeffrey Tambour – he was the Father and the hippy Uncle in ‘Arrested Development’ (Gerorge and Oscar Bluth)

Tina Fey – of ’30 Rock’ fame, who also does a mean imitation Sarah Palin, she also writes gags for Saturday Night Live

Nathan Corddry – was in the cast of “Studio 60 On The Sunset Strip” he did a guest spot on 30 Rock as a gay cop room-mate of Tina Fey and had a recurring role in The United States Of Tara

Jason Bateman – you’ll know this dude from Teen Wolf Too, or if you have a long memory Little House On The Prairie, but Silver Spoons was his first big gig and that wasn’t widely viewed here in Australia but he was also the star of Arrested Development – Michael Bluth, you’ll probably know his twin Sister – Justine Bateman she’s had her face on the telly a lot of times as well, crap like Family Ties. He’s also Paul Anka’s son-in-law

Christopher Guest – from Spinal Tap (“these go to eleven !”), his brother Nicholas is a bit well-known he’s got 139 entries in the IMDB and he’s married to Jamie Lee Curtis

So if the best thing you can say about the film is “the credits at the end were good” then it’s probably better for you to save the $20 it’s going to cost you to see the film and spend it on something that will have a more enduring entertainment effect, like strong liquor or illicit drugs.

I got the movie poster from this guy http://skepacabra.wordpress.com/2009/09/ have a read of his stuff, at least his blog has a consistent theme.

And for Arrested Development fans there’s a movie version currently in post-production – Hoorah !

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Wrong in so many ways

12/30/2009 Politics, technology, Uncategorized

Words sometimes do fail me. Previously I have called the person given the task of managing and administering the Australian digital economy a prick, a moron, a dullard and a die-hard right wing Christian mouthpiece. I am at a loss to describe how this person has managed to fall even lower in my opinion of his actions as an elected representative.

sorry piece of crap

He don't care

Despite many, many expert opinions, despite no small public outcry, depite the counter-productive nature of his actions he has stubbornly persisted in making Australia one of the most censored countries in the world.

We are now similar to Iran and China, many of the Emirates, not even the US has a Government imposed firewall.

Yet in the next sitting of our Parliament this man who seems to have some mental defect will introduce legislation forcing Internet Service Providers to filter each and every request for a web-site and only allow a successful connection for ‘approved’ sites. This has been loudly, and often, procalimed by the proponents for the protectio of Australian children from the evils lurking on the internet. What I cannot understand is how he hopes to achieve this noble aim.

Surely he doesn’t think that 12 yr old boys will gather around a PC when their parents aren’t watching and try searching for child pornography – does he ? (can he be that thick?)

Or does he think that paedophiles will get a bit bored of an afternoon and try to link up to a bit of kiddy porn via a search engine.

I somehow suspect that that neither of these two possibilities are in any way likely. Kids don’t like looking at degrading images of other children. Adults would be quite stupid trying to find any places similar to http://www.kiddyporn.ru (this isn’t a kiddy porn site, it’s just an example I made up as an example of a place a paedophile wouldn’t go for sexual satisfaction and an example of the sort of site that the filter will be able to deny access to) using a simple web-search – that would be just as unbelievable.

So if filtering out sites that kids won’t want to access and criminal child-molesters wouldn’t need won’t “protect Australian Kiddies” what good is it ?

None at all.

It will drive pedophilia into places that will be harder to detect and harder for police agencies to gain access to and seek evidence for obtaining a prosecution

But

It does have some advantages for the censors, the legislation makes ‘the list’ secret, the citizenry won’t know what it’s being denied, and this means that they can add or remove any site they feel like without telling anyone. There is supposed to be an independent quango looking after the list of blocked sites, but I don’t beleive that they’re competent, they’re censors, it’s there job to stop people from looking at things that they find offensive. Movies, books magazines, computer games and now they are tasked with looking at the gazillions of web-sites and blocking those sites that are refused classifiacation.

This is where I get a bit confused, do they expect that the body in charge of the site restriction will look at every site that pops up and give it a classification, will they develop some ‘yay or nay’ algorithm to automate the task, will they be relying on hordes of Christians who will be complaining about any site that mentions ‘breasts’ ‘boobs”bosoms’ and ‘butts’ and start putting them on the list until they get complaints from the other spectrum who might like to look at womenfolk’s bare chests and buttocks and some of the bans might be lifted. All male porn will be banned – that goes without saying no more sculpted male bodies with exposed penii – banned, no lesbian porn – all banned. Despite the Minister saying ‘it’s only going to be the illegal stuff that’s going on the banned list’ I don’t believe him, because he always goes on to say that it’s going to be the sites that have been refused classification. I’m going to guess that this piece of shit will be closing down sites that advocate euthanasia for people suffering agonising terminal illnesses, sites discussing abortion, safe drug use, AIDS prevention strategies and the like because this tool is a functionary for the Christian Lobby and they don’t like none of these things.

Consider a person who is not literate in any sense and has almost no anatomical knowledge, they find a lump growing where no lump should be and are a bit embarressed to ask an actual doctor about the thing growing on or near one of their private parts, I’m pretty confident that I can describe most parts of my body without using slang, others might not be and get caught by the trap set for sites that may contain otherwise swollen cocks and balls.

And another thing, it’s going to slow down my internet, the filter will have to consume bandwidth, and that’s bandwidth I’m paying for. I don’t want to pay to protect other people’s kids, I don’t mind helping them protect their own with domestic level filtering but this is something that’s going to slow down everyone’s connection I wonder if I can renegotiate with my provider ? Probably not, if the ISP promises speeds of “up to 20mB/s” and the filter bumps this back to around 10 then they haven’t really broken their end of the bargain, but I’m being shafted by only getting half of what I paid for.

I’d write to the Minister but he is a complete moron and won’t listen to reason I dropped the clown a few notes saying my position was that censorship is always bad, regardless of noble reasons, that it won’t work, the web is designed in such a way that makes this kind of filtering easily by-passed and that he should listen to the many experst who have said that his stated aims and objectives won’t be satisfied by a simple http filter.

I got the same form letter back each time saying that it wasn’t censorship and that it was what the vast majority of the community expected of this Government. Sadly I can no longer support a Government that misleads and obfuscates to such an extent that it covers up their pandering a conservative minority of the popualtion then it’s time to take a few steps to the left and get a few Greens elected to the Federal lower House.

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Delicious .. and good for you

11/27/2009 Politics, Uncategorized

why isn't there a big bite taken out of this ?

your tax dollars at work


– There’s not enough cash to go around
– There’s not enough cash to go around for all the good causes and noble pursuits people find worthwhile and worthy of support.
Local schools need money for extra stuff so the little kiddies won’t be deprived excursions/field trips/sporting equipment/concert halls/overseas exchange tours etc etc etc
Community groups always have their hands out begging for funds to upgrade this or build that.

But at the first mention of a slight raise in taxation there’s headlines, editorials and panic in the markets – what is this fundraising caper if not a different form of tax ?

You buy your raffle ticket from the spotty kid at your front door, or drop a few coins into the tin being shaken by the old-age pensioner at the shopping centre and move on – you’ve paid your tax and can now spend your money on whatever takes your fancy.

Here’s the rub, where did that donation go ? Have you ever scoured the notices in your local paper to see who was the lucky winner of the 30cm TV or seen an article extolling the virtues of the new playground constructed through community funding ? – not likely (I do, but I’m not your normal donor)

“No taxation without representation” – you don’t know what happens to the money you donate through this method and I bet there’s no way to get your money back, you could track down that acne-ridden kid and shake him/her down but they all look the same.

I was tasked recently to find out if there was something amiss with a scheme being promoted by a major donut producer as an easy way to grab some of these non-governmental tax-dollars

So I should just write about the evils of eating deep fried sweetened processed flour with added sugar and fats
– I will

Donuts are really unhealthy, they make you fat and eventually kill you. They serve no nutritional purpose and as such eating them is imprudent and counter-evolutionary

But I suspect I was being asked whether using this product was in some way politically incorrect.

Firstly – it’s those Krispy Kreme donuts
They have a fundraising scheme
I think it’s a way they shove more of their over-priced muck down the throats of already obese children and adults more quickly

But on to the PC business

In the United States this company gave donuts away to celebrate the inauguration of the new President – Barack Obama

Krispy Kreme Doughnuts, Inc. (NYSE: KKD) is honoring American’s sense of pride and freedom of choice on Inauguration Day, by offering a free doughnut of choice to every customer on this historic day, Jan. 20. By doing so, participating Krispy Kreme stores nationwide are making an oath to tasty goodies — just another reminder of how oh-so-sweet “free” can be.

http://investor.krispykreme.com/releasedetail.cfm?ReleaseID=359127

Fair enough, get people into the shops and bung a cake into their gobs, once, they’ll probably come back later for some more – it’s how heroin dealers work after all and their marketing has always been fairly successful

But what I did find when researching this is …

The American right-wing have called for a boycott of Krispy Kreme because

KRISPY KREME CELEBRATES OBAMA WITH PRO-ABORTION DOUGHNUTS

when I say American I mean the USA (not the Canadians nor Central or South American)
and by right wing I mean the American Life League
In a nutshell, American Life League is a 501(c)(3) organization co-founded in 1979 by Judie Brown and nine other dedicated pro-life Americans.
– a no contraception or euthanasia pro-life bunch of right-wing Catholics and when I hear any pro-life propaganda I can always hear this in the back of my head (why I have ears on the back of my head is different music for a different kitchen)

If you’re so pro-life, do me a favour: don’t lock arms and block medical clinics. If you’re so pro-life, lock arms and block cemeteries.
Bill Hicks

Gone, but not forgotten (He may not be everyone’s cup of tea, very confronting and quite crude)

But I digress, it’s the Kreme Monster I have to face

I can’t find out anything much more about it, apart from the fact that they gave away donuts on Obama Day and Obama is pro-choice so the right-wingers are arguing that a child dies every time you eat one of their delicious, cream-filled artery-cloggers.

Or have I been lulled into a false sense of security by this lack of research materials
– can anything else be read into goings-on in the Krispy Kream Korporation ??

http://wikizap.mobi/enuncyclopedia/Krispy_Kreme

I suspect not, they’re a big business that will gouge a buck out of any crevice they can stick their sugar and cinnamon-encrusted fingers into. They’re only as evil as Microsoft or an oil company or a tobacco company under most capitalist democracy they’re unaccountable and can do whatever they like – sure every decade or so an executive of a big company will spend a few weeks in a minimum security institution for stealing a couple of billion dollars from the people who had entrusted to them their last savings to invest in a better retirement or something. Apart from that the free market implies they’re free to chop down forests, pollute waterways, oppress native populations and pay minimum wage to over-worked employees because, well, ‘that’s how business works in the real world’

Have a look at this, a fine film – “The Corporation”

    Ok what have we learned today, children ?

– if you want well planned and well funded community projects raise income tax rates, don’t send kids door-to-door selling stuff to strangers (or park old people in front of supermarket doors selling raffle tickets)
– Krispy Kreme donuts kill unborn children (and will lower the life expectancy of anyone who eats them) and the US Christian Right want them to be boycotted as part of their scheme to undermine Roe Vs Wade
– Bill Hicks is hilarious
– Corporations are amoral and must, I repeat MUST, do everything in their power to maximise the returns to stockholders.

Now get back to your work

2 comments

It’s Probably Not Illegal, But …

09/13/2009 the arts

Consider the cash made available to develop and foster new, up-coming artists by western democratic Governments. Economists have a technical term for the absolute amounts that actually make it into the pockets of these sculptors/painters/poets/etc (it’s actually an acronym) – SFA. Relative to the amount of money spent on self-promotion, ‘the Big Arts’ (Ballet and Opera), Public Servant wages and of course Health, Defence, Transport – it’s bugger-all.

There is an argument that it’s more efficient to fund Arts Hubs who then distribute the funds into the community on an ad-hoc basis. This assumes that these NGOs are efficient in themselves.

Sadly this may not be the case. Managed by well-meaning volunteers, established artists, community representatives, business representatives management committees are as much an intricate web of competing interests as any political party and often the interests of the actual artists and the general arts community can be well down the list of current priorities for a committee. These committees aren’t permanent even during the best of times when there’s lots of spare money floating around. Elections are held, new members elected, older members die of (both literally and figuratively) people lose interest or haven’t the time any more so whatever links these Hubs have with the arts community of an area are constantly being established, broken re-established, new links formed and old links lost.

What does remain constant is the source of funding – the taxpayer

So far there isn’t any real problem, arts funding, by the very nature of the parties involved is always going to be a mess. Muses don’t work Monday to Friday 9 – 5, the artists can be wilfully difficult and the so-called product can be shite to everybody except the person who has created it. Many taxpayers will have a look at what they have paid for and feel slightly cheated – so what ? You can’t quantify art and you can’t expect it to return anything that can be entered into a ledger.

What the hubs do do well, is pass on their reputation to the people they are supporting. For this reason patronage of the long-established (and probably better funded) establishments is highly sought after.

Here’s this weeks beef. What if there’s a young exciting artist, someone who has had a few successful solo exhibitions, (whether it’s painting, sculpture or ceramics is irrelevant) and is starting to make their own name around town. Largely because most people who have experienced the work agree that it’s high quality, it’s consistent and it’s good. Having this person involved with a community-based artistic institution would be mutually advantageous for all the parties involved. But how does one deal with  a situation whereby an informal arrangement (that is there’s nothing in writing) is established to bring a few of the works into the building for exhibition and sale – that’s got to be good for the artist, they get to show their stuff off and make a few quid for themselves, and it has to be good for the institution they can prove to the funding body (the Government) that they are using the tax-dollars as they were intended, to foster the arts at grassroots level. The institution can claim they are ‘fostering and nurturing’

But they aren’t professional bureaucrats, you can say what you like about the public service, but they are uniquely able to allocate the scarce resources that are tax-revenues. How then do we view a situation where our previously-described up-and-comer has brought some stuff in and asked to help other artists by sharing techniques and designs ? this still sounds good and probably looks good on paper. Unless the artist who created the original works decides that they have cultural and personal attributes that can’t possibly be passed on to another person who hasn’t any common or shared story. Normally this would be the end of the game, full-time and the fat lady has left the stand. That project should be quite properly shelved or cancelled. But the institution has already told some kids/new artists that they could come in and learn and decide to continue anyhow, they still have the work on show and simply arrange for the new people to copy the ‘style’

Isn’t this an infringement of the original artist’s copyright ? It’s pretty hard for anyone to separate form and content, both are united to create a style. An outright copy is a pretty obvious theft adopting someone else’s style is more subtle.

While record companies will seek and obtain millions of units of currency when they detect the theft of a few bytes of one of their songs (just because they had almost no role in the creation of the original work is deemed irrelevant by these big business entities) What redress does this painter/sculptor/ceramicist have – probably nothing, unless they can hire their own lawyer and pursue their own redress in the courts.  Then it will become, most likely, a political question. If someone along the food-chain thinks that it’s interests will be best served by settling out of any court then it will be, if not then it will become a fight between who has the deepest pockets and the most time up their sleeves. But luckily in a western democracy there are regular elections and usually members of parliaments become accustomed to their positions as do the elected members of NGO management committees. If we can accept that the skill and talent that goes into developing an individuals style, that the many hours of practice and sacrifice an individual makes to establish a style is worth protecting then we may have established the merit of a genuine copyright protection for artists rather than the protection of the profits of major economic entities.

The whole copyright issue has been clouded and obfuscated by the Hollywood studios and the music labels. rarely are individual artists involved – but they should be !

By the way if you think downloading music off the internet is another form of theft, then you have a different opinion to people like Elton John and Paul McCartney. It’s only the record companies and Hollywood studios who will benefit from having you worried about getting your connection severed because of a download or two, there’s no evidence that record sales have declined at the same time as the use of the internet is increasing and I’m pretty sure that the people who actually wrote the scripts/songs don’t get much of a cut of the (now) multi-million dollar fines imposed on illegal downloaders

Further reading, and, and, and, and finally there’s the $22,500 per song

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Tell me it ain’t so

08/09/2009 Film, Politics
waterboarding - not really torture, just interrogation

waterboarding - not really torture, just 'interrogation'

Sitting at home, a cool cloth pressed against my fevered brow as I was laid up with a debilitating case of astigmatism. I could do little except for manipulate the controls for my multi-media centre – I was as weak as a kitten, enfeebled by agues and wracked by pain. It took all of my strength and determination to press ‘PLAY’ and collapse back onto my cushions hoping for some distraction from the malaise

But I had cued “W.” some weeks before and never got around to watching it – until now !

What was Oliver Stone thinking ?

This homage to the most recent ex-President of the United States of America depicts him as a half-witted privileged playboy who used his family connections to bail him out of difficult situations time and time again. He is portrayed as a drunk, a loud-mouth and slightly retarded (in my opinion) someone who seemed to think that he deserved every success but wasn’t willing to excert any effort whatsoever to achieve his ambitions. In short a spoiled pretentious rich-kid.

I’m not doubting that Josh Brolin did a good job, I liked his work in “No Country For Old Men”, he was OK in ‘Planet Terror’ and “The Valley Of Elah” and I’ve been a fan of Oliver Stone’s work for as long as I can remember. So I’m going to go out on a limb and say that it’s a bit too early to be making comment on Bush Jr’s presidency, that the harm and damage he inflicted on the US and the World is still taking place and so can’t be properly evaluated yet. It’s too much like the right-wing commentators who are saying that Obama is the worst president the US has ever seen

There are a few scenes in thsi film that stand out (apart from GW being pissed as a newt most of the time)  Bush and Cheney are having lunch in the Whitehouse, Cheney asks “if there was a 1% chance that the lettuce you are eating is contaminated with e-coli would you still eat it ?” Bush says that he would, there’s an army of food tasters in the kitchen  to make sure that he’s not poisoned, Cheney presses on trying to get Bush to understand that if there’s a one per-cent chance that there are WMD in Iraq they should proceed with a war Bush takes the lettuce off his sandwich, Cheney takes out a small folder Bush seems to balk at doing any reading but is reassured by Cheney that it’s ‘only 3 pages’. He explains that inside are some ideas regarding possible interrogation techniques that could be instituted at places such as Guantanamo (which George keeps calling Guantanamera ). W. balks at first, worried that there would be stuff like pulling out toenails, but Cheney assures him that it would be nothing lethal, just food/sleep deprivation – water torture – fear scenarios to make his point. W is reassured and promises to look at the three-page report. As lunch ends, W then asks Cheney to kindly keep his ego in check, he doesn’t mind the familiarity when they’re alone but when they’re in a meeting he’s got to remember he’s only the vice-president the only other person party to this discussion was the waiter who put the sandwiches on the table.

Oh and did I say that George was a big drinker ?

I ask because he wasn’t the brightest of the Bush Sr. progeny, he managed a ‘C’ average when you combine that with the Alcohol-Related-Brain-Damage that plagues heavy drinkers – it causes a loss of a few IQ points it may explain why he was so easily manipulated and drew so many wrong conclusions during his terms in office and why he seemed such a loon and a dim-wit.

I’m sure there are other projects going on about the Bush legacy, this was entertaining but I’d like to have heard a bit more on the inter-cabinet debates on the merits of torture, the necessity of waging war.

I shall have to watch this again when I am more recovered from this affliction and the pain has passed from my frail and weak body

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Special Offer – one week only

08/06/2009 Literature, Non-Fiction
what the Grecian urn might have looked like

what the Grecian urn might have looked like

As a one-off this month the Saywot Blog is offering readers a definitive explanation of English Romantic Poetry (1817 -1821)

I know that this seems like a limited time-frame but I had intended to comment on only the one poem by John Keats, but I realised that I preferred to read some of his other work so expanded the range to encompass all three of them. This doesn’t mean I shan’t be throwing in a few quips and quotes from other English Romantics from the time (it’s unlikely though).

How many of you have had the chance, at school or after, to read Keats’ “Ode To A Grecian Urn” ?  The answer is no-one, because as far as my research allows he never wrote a piece “TO” any sort of urn, grecian or otherwise. The bit of verse in question is called something completely different and I’m quite fed up with people calling it by the name of some other poem written by another poet. I don’t know if there is such a poem in existence, for all I know there was 200 crumpled scraps of paper in the bottom of Keats wastepaper basket with Ode To A Grecian Urn and some doggeral underneath it all crossed out and scribbled upon and the title was the result of a printers mishap (but I doubt it)

Here ’tis (see how my style is being adapted by the subject – freaky innit ?)

Thou still unravish’d bride of quietness,
Thou foster-child of silence and slow time,
Sylvan historian, who canst thus express
A flowery tale more sweetly than our rhyme:
What leaf-fring’d legend haunts about thy shape
Of deities or mortals, or of both,
In Tempe or the dales of Arcady?
What men or gods are these? What maidens loth?
What mad pursuit? What struggle to escape?
What pipes and timbrels? What wild ecstasy?

Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard
Are sweeter; therefore, ye soft pipes, play on;
Not to the sensual ear, but, more endear’d,
Pipe to the spirit ditties of no tone:
Fair youth, beneath the trees, thou canst not leave
Thy song, nor ever can those trees be bare;
Bold Lover, never, never canst thou kiss,
Though winning near the goal yet, do not grieve;
She cannot fade, though thou hast not thy bliss,
For ever wilt thou love, and she be fair!

Ah, happy, happy boughs! that cannot shed
Your leaves, nor ever bid the Spring adieu;
And, happy melodist, unwearied,
For ever piping songs for ever new;
More happy love! more happy, happy love!
For ever warm and still to be enjoy’d,
For ever panting, and for ever young;
All breathing human passion far above,
That leaves a heart high-sorrowful and cloy’d,
A burning forehead, and a parching tongue.

Who are these coming to the sacrifice?
To what green altar, O mysterious priest,
Lead’st thou that heifer lowing at the skies,
And all her silken flanks with garlands drest?
What little town by river or sea shore,
Or mountain-built with peaceful citadel,
Is emptied of this folk, this pious morn?
And, little town, thy streets for evermore
Will silent be; and not a soul to tell
Why thou art desolate, can e’er return.

O Attic shape! Fair attitude! with brede
Of marble men and maidens overwrought,
With forest branches and the trodden weed;
Thou, silent form, dost tease us out of thought
As doth eternity: Cold Pastoral!
When old age shall this generation waste,
Thou shalt remain, in midst of other woe
Than ours, a friend to man, to whom thou say’st,
“Beauty is truth, truth beauty,–that is all
Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.”


It’s not to the urn at all, it’s his description of the images running around the outside of the vessel – I have often wondered if theses Romantic Poets were on drugs or something, still it’s a good story he tells. It doesn’t have all the elements of a Hollywood blockbuster but might be made into a little romantic flick starring Gwynneth Paltrow (if she’s still in the acting caper) along the lines of Sliding Doors

Anyway I digress, Keats went and saw the loot that was stolen from Greece, the Elgin Marbles, did a few sketches one of which was of a Sosibios vase and then did the 5 stanzas of ten lines about his reflection on the engraved images on the urn. It’s a rough and tumble existence being a 19th century English poet. If you want to know how rugged this Keats bloke was have a gander at this http://www.online-literature.com/keats/ – it’s a good a biography as any I suppose.

But I prefer some of his others like ‘La Belle Dame Sans Merci‘ or maybe the one that starts with
My heart aches, and a drowsy numbness pains
My sense, as though of hemlock I had drunk,
Or emptied some dull opiate to the drains

-this is definitely another druggie poem which is not surprising when you consider that this lad was a chum of Shelley who as we all know was a famous junkie  (remember the film Gothic ? where Percy Shelley, his fiance Mary and Byron take heaps of laudenum and try to out-do each other writing a horror story while they are on holiday in Switzerland, well laudenum was the heroin of the day, we only have Mary Shelley’s ‘Frankenstein’ left to read)  I don’t mind Shelley’s stuff either . When the White Star Line advertised their cruises to the United States on “the unsinkable Titanic” I’m reminded a bit of

Ozymandias

I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: `Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed.
And on the pedestal these words appear —
“My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!”
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.’

Shelley 1792-1822

I was holding onto this one for GW Bush, but Obama gave him the push before I had a chance to unleash this cautionary tale of pride and hubris

and that’s today’s hour complete, I might come back and have another crack at more dead poets later, but there are far more interesting things happening here at the moment

I went and had a look at an exhibition opening last night in Adelaide, South Australia

Mandi Whitten Photography exhibition

Mandi Whitten Photography exhibition

quite good indeed, if you’re down that way – pop in, these art works aren’t going to become less expensive to buy in the future and it has been widely and favourably reviewed

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Corris and Maitland (in Maitland)

07/30/2009 Non-Fiction

Imagine a town hall in a small Australian town, 40-50 supporters of the local public lending library and a smattering of patrons of an as-yet-to be opened Art Gallery gathering on a cold July evening to attend the launch of the latest book written by a local author. This writer happens to have the same name as the town he is currently resident in. I don’t know if it’s a co-incidence or not.

But it wasn’t the usual “I’m so glad you could all come out on such a cold night and please buy my book – Thank You”

The guy has written 10 other books, so I’m pretty sure that this sort of event isn’t a novelty or anything You might try and find him in your local bookshop- Barry Maitland or just look in the library of your local town. This was more of a panel discussion about the whole crime fiction caper, how other people approach the genre and the star of the evening shared the stage with one of the ‘Godfathers’ of Australian Crime Fiction – Peter Corris.

I should confess here that I haven’t read anything written by Barry (but I fully intend to) but I have read quite a bit of Peter Corris’ output, I suppose you’d have to be a bit of a fan of the genre to know his work, he’s only had about 40 books published, you might know ‘his’ detective-star – Cliff Hardy or you may have come across his Spy-Character – Ray Crawley but anyway he’s produced about 52 pieces of fiction and a smattering of historical and biographical works as well,, quite a body of work for such a young man ( he was born in 1942). Sadly the kid has allowed his domain name to expire so I am unable to link you to his web-site so you might have a look at what he has available at your local bookshop. But he does have a wikipedia entry, so that’s something I suppose – have a look, it’s a bit scant though.

But of note was the difference between the approaches to this form of writing, Maitland was for quite some time a teacher of Architecture at Newcastle University, Corris was trained as an historian and journalist, Barry looks at the location of the crime, the place is important to the construction of the events that ensue. Anyway as I said I haven’t had a crack at him yet, but it sounds like an interesting premise, to look at somewhere and wonder what sort of crime might be committed there.

Apparently there is some crime writes peer review committee or somesuch malarkey Maitland is in the top 10 of crime writers in the world, Corris (as far as I can tell from the few bits and pieces on the internet about him has only won, been nominated or shortlisted for a half-dozen Ned Kelly Awards – this is some sort of local crime literature thing, Barry got a tie for first place in the Best Novel category in 1996 for The Malcontents (the second in his Brock and Kolla series)

And that’s this weeks news. I shall return to this glamorous event after I have had a chance to read some of the work by a person brave enough to face the bitter cold Hunter Valley winter and a small crowd in a draughty country Town Hall full marks to him for having it in his home town and also full marks to the local council for hosting it, it was just a bit of a shame that the advertised venue for the function ( a brand new glittering art gallery of magnificent design and splendid proportions) wasn’t open in time for it to be held there.

And if you’re in a bookshop or a library, don’t get the two of them confused

This is Barry Maitland

Barry Maitland from Maitland

This is a picture of Peter Corris

Corris, Peter

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The Million Mile Club

07/12/2009 Uncategorized

Dear Diary,

Today I clocked up my millionth mile travelled on mass transit.

Well, not really, but I do wonder how many gallons of fuel I have saved by not driving around in a private vehicle. And remember “a million” is a really big number. Have a look at a biro cap, how big would it be if all it’s dimensions were multiplied by that number ? They’re what, about 2cm long and maybe 40mm wide, so it would be a plastic cap twenty kilometres long and 4 kilometres wide. Biro caps get lost with monotonous regularity but if that was sitting in your back yard I’m betting that astronauts would see it as they orbit the planet.

But I’m don’t want to bang on about big numbers or how pen caps seem to vanish of the own accord.

But If I lived 10 miles from work and caught the train to and from work every week for the 45 or so weeks people travel every year to earn their daily bread I’d only rack up 4500 miles a year. Perhaps I’d holiday once a year in some far-off land, OK lets assume that every year I spend my 4 week break in a place completely different to where I live, so it would have to be grey, cloudy and almost always raining – Ah,  that’d be England ! So now I can add 24,000 miles a year to my total just to get to my transit hub in Europe so throw in a thousand miles for my flits across to France, over to Ireland, down to Spain etc (all done by train/bus, but obviously on my 4 weeks annual leave I don’t have time to train across Asia to arrive at Heathrow) How many miles have a now travelled ? 25,000 for holiday and, say, 5000 for work – it’s still going to take me almost 35 years to crack the million mile mark.

So I haven’t travelled my millionth mile yet, but it’s do-able (providing I can catch up on the missed trips to England in the time I have left on this planet) But I was catching the train home this evening, it was a bit crowded as usual, but it wasn’t packed to the rafters like a Japanese commuter train, everyone had a seat who wanted one, a lot of the younger travellers didn’t, they wanted to gather in their little groups and chatter away about what they’d just done a few minutes before catching the train back home,.

Anyway this guy gets on about 3 stops after me lugging this huge brown-paper wrapped picture frame, the sea of kids wouldn’t part to allow him to walk through and find a place to rest his picture and his arse. He sort of ‘persuaded’ them to move away from the centre of the aisles by nudging with the foot of his jogging shoe and asking them to “get the f&%k outta my way !”, he wasn’t kicking and he wasn’t yelling,the picture raised over his head. he managed to get through this maze of floor-seated teens and sat down behind me out of sight. he wasn’t that bothered, the kids weren’t that bothered nor was I.

But one of the best things about train travel is that if you are of a mind to you can listen to other people’s conversations. The boys and girls were still banging on about their trip into town above the buzzing of their MP3 players and the clickety-clacking of them tapping away at their mobile phones sending a constant stream of text messages to god-knows who, probably to someone in the same carriage. The old lady next to me leaned over to the 3 similarly aged people in the seat in front of us and tapped on the shoulder of the bloke in front of her and muttered that “that was uncalled for”, he replied that he “didn’t give a stuff the mongrels shouldn’t be sitting on the floor anyway” they then wondered what the hell the guy was doing carrying a picture on the train anyway. They’re fickle these old people aren’t they, in one short minute they were on the side of the art-conveyor and then against him, on the side of the kids and then against them – sheesh.

In front of them was a child of about 4, standing on the seat amusing himself by making faces at the old people, he was quite the enthusuastic entertainer, even tried to lean over and tried to ‘High 5’ one of the 3 grim OAPs and they weren’t having any of it – his mother grabbed hold of his arm, this sort of thing on a moving train is a bit risky but this boy knew no fear.

Meanwhile from behind me I heard the guy that started all this talking to someone i can only assume was a friend of his, or at least an acquaintance, because whoever he was sitting next to said “you finally got it then ?” and art-boi said with a voice full of pride, full of achievement almost, perhaps, love said “yes, it took months to get this, but I’m finally taking it home where it belongs” – I can’t swear to this in a court, remember yacking teenagers, multiple MP3 players, telephones and the kid jumping up and down on the seat trying to get attention.

But i was wondering as I tried to calculate how many miles I’d travelled by public transport what was this the picture bound by this large frame carefully wrapped in paper?  I mean it was big, it seemed heavy and he’d put his body between this and any harm from wild children.

I heard the package being opened, but couldn’t bring myself to break that rule of public transport  and turn around to look (the rule that says that you aren’t allowed to stare or look directly at fellow travellers).

I got out at my stop, and as the train pulled slowly away from the station I think I saw through the window, a gilt picture frame, very ornate and it looked heavier with the paper removed exposing it’s wooden heaviness and  a dog smoking a cigar holding a hand of cards at what appeared to be a gaming table of some sort

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some notes for later

06/14/2009 technology

I’ve been avoiding using proprietary software for some years now, I prefer my computer be able to do what I tell it to do, rather than what some people from 1 Microsoft Way, Redmond WA think might be best for me. Of course they don’t do it gratis, they do it because there’s a dollar or two to be made from selling me (and about 90% of desktop computer users) with what they claim is a safe and secure operating system. This is a load of tosh, I don’t want my plumber/painter deciding what is the best colour for my walls or what is the best tap fittings for my bathroom – I want to be able to modify my home as I see fit.

This is why I have been using one of the many Linux distributions.

Sadly since I rely on a community of software developers who code in their spare time and for free it’s often a bit of a nuisance Microsoft is big and ugly enough to be able to influence hardware manufacturers that they should form a partnership with this (almost) monoploy and I’m sort of stuck getting graphics/sound cards to work as good as they are able.

For this reason I’m including here an aide-memoir to install the approptiate computer code to enable my PC to take advantage of my ATI graphics card

-here’s a geek-joke

‘Why are ATI graphics cards like London buses ?’

: ‘because they’re big, they’re red and they have rotten drivers’

But with some fiddling about I have my Fedora 10 installation running an ATI card well enough for me to not feel like dashing the whole machine against a brick wall

1. Update kernel

Code:
su
yum update kernel

reboot to the new kernel

2. Install driver

install the F11 rpmfusion driver

Or (akmod builds the required kmod on bootup )

3. Backup Old initrd

Code:
su
mv /boot/initrd-`uname -r`.img /boot/initrd-`uname -r`.img.backup


4. Remake initrd for the kernel (So the radeon module is not force loaded)

Code:
su -
mkinitrd -v /boot/initrd-`uname -r`.img  `uname -r`

5. Edit grub.conf

Code:
su
gedit /boot/grub/grub.conf

and add this “nopat” to the kernel arguments.

i.e

Code:
splashimage=(hd3,1)/boot/grub/splash.xpm.gz
hiddenmenu
title Fedora (2.6.29.2-126.fc11.x86_64)
    root (hd3,1)
    kernel /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.29.2-126.fc11.x86_64 ro root=UUID=f372564c-f1a7-430e-b97f-b250812e2c30 rhgb quiet vga=0x318 nopat
    initrd /boot/initrd-2.6.29.2-126.fc11.x86_64.img

Optional (in case libdrm change breaks things due to relationship with KMS):
add “nomodeset” to end of kernel arguments

6. Reboot

due to the akmod, it is *absolutely necessary* to reboot after the install, otherwise the kernel module won’t be compiled.

OK that’s the first bit done.

I like the ‘wobbly windows’ and other fancy graphics-gimicks of Compiz

so the next bit is to install the compiz-fusion gear

Instructions for F9, F10 & F11

1. Install the compiz-fusion-release rpm

If this fails try

Code:
su
yum -y install wget
wget http://www.linux-ati-drivers.homecall.co.uk/compiz-fusion-release-1-6.noarch.rpm
rpm -Uvh compiz-fusion-release-1-6.noarch.rpm
rm -f compiz-fusion-release-1-6.noarch.rpm

2. Install compiz-fusion ( you will need to delete the old compiz configuration files /home/username/.gconf/apps/compiz )

For a Gnome compiz install

Code:
su
yum -y erase *compiz*
yum -y --noplugins install compiz-gnome fusion-icon-gtk compiz-bcop ccsm emerald-themes compizconfig-backend-gconf compiz-plugins-unsupported compiz-plugins-extra

For a KDE compiz install

Code:
su
yum -y erase *compiz*
yum -y --noplugins install compiz-kde fusion-icon-qt compiz-bcop ccsm emerald-themes compizconfig-backend-kconfig compiz-plugins-unsupported compiz-plugins-extra

For both KDE & gnome

Code:
su
yum -y erase *compiz*
yum -y --noplugins install compiz-kde compiz-gnome fusion-icon-all compiz-bcop ccsm emerald-themes compizconfig-backend-gconf compizconfig-backend-kconfig compiz-plugins-unsupported compiz-plugins-extra

__________________________________________________ __________________________________________________ ________________________

xorg.conf options for the intel, nv, radeon & radeonhd drivers ( should help graphics lag and CPU load )

add to the device section

Code:
         Option          "AccelMethod" "EXA"
         Option          "MigrationHeuristic" "greedy"

compiz-check utility

Code:
wget http://blogage.de/files/4359/download  -O compiz-check
chmod +x compiz-check
./compiz-check

since I’m not a programmer this has all been lifted from the guide in the Fedora Forum
http://forums.fedoraforum.org/showthread.php?t=155503

and

http://forums.fedoraforum.org/showthread.php?t=173317

I haven’t a clue who the author is “leigh123linux” but he’s a very busy lad in the Fedora community and I tried his tips in previous incarnations of Fedora and they haven’t failed me yet

so here’s hoping

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Worth a pullet surprise

06/02/2009 Fiction

I went to visit a friend at his farm last weekend, on Sunday afternoon he dropped me at the bus stop back to town, as the bus approached, he thrust a live pullet into my arms to take home with me “for meat or eggs”. I stuffed the bird into the inside breast pocket of my jacket and got on. The bus dropped me off 2 blocks from my place. As I walked along the footpath a book thudded through the roof of a car parked nearby. I looked up ans saw a man with a box hurling books down from the roof of a block of flats and screaming biblical quotations. He threw another and another and another. One landed near my feet, it was a bible and looked heavy. His next hit me straight in the middle of my chest. I awoke on my back on the footpath, winded, but otherwise unhurt with the bible sticking up out of my chest …

If it hadn’t been for my pullet the bible would have gone straight through my heart

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Car Keys And Other Shiny Things

05/30/2009 Politics

I was about to write about some recent events. sadly, I got side-tracked  (I like to think that I’m highly  adaptable and able to multi-task quickly and surely. This is a marketable asset ).

But my chums all tell me that all they have to do is shake a key-ring or something shiny  in front of me and I forget all about what I was just about to do/say.

Not everyone's cup of tea

Not everyone's cup of tea

The car keys in this instance have been rattled by a shill for the British Conservative Party, a dullard who seems to think that she (and the entire United Kingdom) will be deprived of  the pleasure of a cup of tea if the Labour Party and the TUC campaigns for a fair minimum wage nationally and internationally

What would it cost if the tea picker got the minimum wage we are accustomed to, on top of that come the costs of the company who picks the tea, the shipping, the import, the distribution in the UK. A simply cup of tea would become a luxury for us.

Now I am afraid that I am not fully able to vent my spleen about the ramblings of this sad old-school tory as she will sue the pants of anyone who attempts to “use quotes from this blog for purposes, which are criminal or libellous or otherwise indecent and immoral, offensive and defamatory of others. “. But being in a different country and subject to different criminal statutes, a different set of laws regulating libel I think I will have to take the safest course of action and just be indecent, immoral and offensive as I’m pretty sure that there isn’t yet an objective  yardstick here for what might constitute an action. But this person is such a half-baked windbag I intend to quote the crap out of her attack on the minimum wage in an attempt to be as IMMORAL as possible in the short time I have to knock this thing out.

If you’re a sucker for punishment go and have a read of this tory  here, she has a blog somewhere here, but I’m reluctant to provide a link to that excrescent drivel but in the interests of balance and fairness go and have a look at  <blech> this fruitbat should be old enough to know better than to try to sugar-coat the last time that the Conservatives held the majority of seats in the House Of Commons. Dare I mention the name ‘Thatcher’ ? Has she forgotten the strikes, the social upheaval, the distress and the misery that tories (in general) and Maggie (in particular) have inflicted on the populace in the past.

I mean sure they might be an  OK government for a few but let’s recall a few headlines/quotes from the period of Thatcher’s premiership

“Where there is discord, may we bring harmony. Where there is error, may we bring truth. Where there is doubt, may we bring faith. And where there is despair, may we bring hope.”

-a doorstop in front of No 10 Downing Street 4/05/1979

“We’ve had riot shields, we’ve had riot gear, we’ve had police on horseback charging into our people, we’ve had people hit with truncheons and people kicked to the ground…. The intimidation and the brutality that has been displayed are something reminiscent of a Latin American state.”

– a coal miners representative after the police descended on picketing strikers

Thatcher’s embrace of conviction politics came after she abandoned her previous convictions.

– The Guardian on the Thatcher Mythology

I could go on and on, but I have but the single hour to finish, but there is reportage on the dramatic rise of old-age pensioners dying fro exposure due to the increased costs of heating fuels (privatisation) , there were reports of the decline in the quality of water (to make the cups of tea this kooky Johanna seems to fondly reference) due to faecal matter because private water companies didn’t think that proper filtration was worth spending the money on and policing (more privatisation) and,  despite the Iron Lady twittering-on about fighting inflation,  inflation went through the roof.

With regard to her ambition to curb inflation, she presided over a doubling of inflation between 1979 and 1980, from around 10 to over 20 per cent, and a return to ‘double-digit’ inflation at the end of the 1980s. Myth and reality – aren’t they wonderful?

– again the Guardian article

So if you like freezing in the dark and drinking shit with your increasingly more expensive favourite hot beverage  then the Thatcher years were, indeed, golden but this tired old hack, this bully from Bethnal Green glosses over all this trying to restore the British Conservative Party to their ‘rightful’ position

And now she has the barefaced gall to rail against the right of a worker to have a fair wage for their labour, not just in Britain but in the developing world as well. I hope that this twit is at the forefront of the Tory opinion leading team, I hope that this is the best that the ‘born-to-rulers’ have to offer

Anyway, that’s my hour completed I shall probably return to this theme and the loony British right soon enough

this picture ‘Boing-Boing‘

look at this up-side down !!

look at this up-side down !!

Here have a sing-along with this little number from the US

In this short video, sneering rappers from the young conservative movement bust rhymes about drilling in Alaska, forcing women to bear foetuses to term, eliminating social programs and merging Church and State. Lines include: “Three things taught me conservative love: Jesus, Ronald Reagan, plus Atlas Shrugged;” and “Everyone can succeed because our soldiers bleed.”

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Wanted: A new Dunstan

04/22/2009 Uncategorized
Don Dunstan - South Australian Premier

Don Dunstan - South Australian Premier

Remember this for next time.

Before you wail, moan and gnash your teeth at disappointments or failed ambitions, faulty equipment or your bathrooms new colour scheme

  • just consider this.

Is it the outcome of your efforts, is it the object itself that’s causing the foul taste of bile to rise up the back of your throat

or,

perhaps,

just perhaps

the deficiency lies within you and your expectations.

That you want your ‘ideal world’ and instead find that you’re in an ordinary world full of ordinary things, or maybe even an ordinary world full of extraordinary things but your vision of this ‘real world’ is clouded by unreasonable expectations.

More often than not it’ll be you.

After the “Hamlet Debacle (2009)” I decided to hang around town for a while, get the vibe, see what was happening, catch a few shows, see the sights, take the air and generally sample the night-life.

{and also be amazed that there’s not a Don Dunstan Boulevard or a Don Dunstan Theatre even a Dunstan Memorial Garden – there probably is and since I’m a stranger here I just don’t know where to look but in these mean and lean times it’s not hard to credit that the petty chuckleheads who have control of this Capital, stuck between the freezing Southern Ocean and Australia’s desert centre could not bring themselves to remind the citizenry that there was once a state government that didn’t prize a balanced budget above all other things, that a leader of Government would value qualities that were artistic/creative/pretty in nature rather than functional that would have a bugger-all return on the money spent, but nevertheless would be money well spent. Don Dunstan was a forward-thinking State Premier  who wore pink hot-pants once in public but  should be remembered for much more and the current drop from around this place won’t be remembered for the tiniest scintilla of eccentricity or individuality

Those heady days are long gone. We’re at war !!}

I came this close to the Indian Ocean over twenty years ago and found the place to be a gentle, pleasant almost-city with too many over-sized churches and under-sized cathedrals. It now has the reputation Nation wide as being the Murder Capital, there are more murders per capita than any of the more (and less) populated cities in this wide red land. The locals of course deny this and try cooking the books to prove that this is indeed a worthy place to spend your tourist dollars and perhaps put down roots and raise small chubby children. I prefer the former description to the official position. Too much niceness is a mask for the under-current persecution complex.

Adelaide is pretty small, and it’s not that far away, on a fast jet plane you can be here from one of the proper capitals in a few short hours.

Perth on the other hand is miles away.

People from Western Australia quite rightly feel and act as if they’re from another country. There are other countries closer to the east coast than Perth. They are victims of the tyranny of distance but sheltered from the cares and woes of the Sydneysiders and the Melbournites (don’t get me started on Brisbane, Queensland hasn’t quite entered the Twenty-First century yet, they have been retarded by too many years of the Joh Bjelke-Petersen criminal dictatorship which still hasn’t been properly excised from their memory or polity and have about twenty years of catching-up to doy) and so the Perth people can literally think of the rest of the country as foreign to their ways of life.

But they are digging up their state with huge big mechanical diggers and flogging their valuable earths, minerals, rocks and ores to any and every person who’s willing to sling them a few bucks, these days it still gives them a sense of satisfaction to think that it’s their entrepreneurship and energy that’s helping keep Australia from free-falling towards a depression. They aren’t but it’s probably better to let those red-neck loons keep thinking what they want lest they leave from their distant environs and start spreading their peculiar lunacy throughout the civilised world. For non-Australians just watch any John Wayne western where citizens and soldiers are in constant and mortal battle with the indigines and you have the WA attitude delivered unto your good selves in a nutshell. They’re Texans without the Bush dynasty, their from Utah without the polygamy -they’re just crackers and I hope that they’ve saved a few dollars from their recent mineral boom because as soon as the US stops buying cheap gadgets from China there won’t be much more money coming in as it once did

So back here in the city of churches and car-parks there’s a developing ‘small-man with a chip on his shoulder’ syndrome being developed and it’s starting to make people mean and crazy (or at least it seems that way if you read their one and only popular daily newspaper which is a delight to glance through as you’re travelling on the modern and convenient public transport network – the locals think it is a rubbish way to get around town but they don’t seem to travel much anywhere else in Australia “The Advertiser“pretends to be a real grown-ups paper but it is one from a stable owned by a crude American media baron and would have topless big-breated women’s pictures prominent on page 3 if they could sell more papers using them and contains bugger-all real news and nothing devoted to artistic or progressive issues) .

Or they’re stressed-out by trying to be nice to people 24/7, Adelaide people are quite nice and helpful. Until they murder you and hide your rotting corpse in a barrel. They have collectively reached breaking point and haven’t yet learned how to more constructively to vent their spleen without reaching for their illegal magnum pistols or 12 bore pump-actions. They haven’t gone crackers but may well be on the precipice looking down on the nest of writhing vipers below. It won’t take much more of an economic decline to push them over the edge. One more car plant closure away from a massacre to get their homicide rate back to world’s best practice.

I’m going to a party here on Saturday evening with kind and gentle people, but I’m going to have a weather-eye open and be ready to hit the road at the first raised voice. I’m not expecting trouble – but you never know in this place in these times. Who knows it could be me, striking out first, worn down and broken by the weight of all the constant civility and politeness that has surrounded me on this trip. But I’ve enjoyed myself so …….

– see youse awl in another twenty years

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Inevitability

03/29/2009 Fiction, Uncategorized

It was only a matter of time before I uploaded this timeless classic

                       I LIKE MONKEYS
I like monkeys.

The pet store was selling them for five cents a piece.  I thought that
odd since they were normally a couple thousand each.  I decided not to
look a gift horse in the mouth.  I bought 200.  I like monkeys.

I took my 200 monkeys home.  I have a big car.  I let one drive.  His
name was Sigmund.  He was retarded.  In fact, none of them were really
bright.  They kept punching themselves in their genitals.  I laughed.
Then they punched my genitals.  I stopped laughing.

I herded them into my room.  They didn't adapt very well to their new
environment.  They would screech, hurl themselves off of the couch at
high speeds and slam into the wall.  Although humorous at first, the
spectacle lost its novelty halfway into its third hour.

Two hours later I found out why all the monkeys were so inexpensive:
they all died.  No apparent reason.  They all just sorta' dropped dead.
Kinda' like when you buy a goldfish and it dies five hours later.  Damn
cheap monkeys.

I didn't know what to do.  There were 200 dead monkeys lying all over my
room, on the bed, in the dresser, hanging from my bookcase. It looked
like I had 200 throw rugs.

I tried to flush one down the toilet.  It didn't work.  It got stuck.
Then I had one dead, wet monkey and 199 dead, dry monkeys.

I tried pretending that they were just stuffed animals.  That worked for
a while, that is until they began to decompose.  It started to smell real
bad.

I had to pee but there was a dead monkey in the toilet and I didn't want
to call the plumber.  I was embarrassed.

I tried to slow down the decomposition by freezing them.  Unfortunately
there was only enough room for two monkeys at a time so I had to change
them every 30 seconds.  I also had to eat all the food in the freezer so
it didn't all go bad.

I tried burning them.  Little did I know my bed was flammable.  I had to
extinguish the fire.

Then I had one dead, wet monkey in my toilet, two dead, frozen monkeys in
my freezer, and 197 dead, charred monkeys in a pile on my bed.  The odor
wasn't improving.

I became agitated at my inability to dispose of my monkeys and to use the
bathroom.  I severely beat one of my monkeys.  I felt better.

I tried throwing them way but the garbage man said that the city wasn't
allowed to dispose of charred primates.  I told him that I had a wet
one.  He couldn't take that one either.  I didn't bother asking about the
frozen ones.

I finally arrived at a solution.  I gave them out as Christmas gifts.  My
friends didn't know quite what to say.  They pretended that they like
them but I could tell they were lying.  Ingrates.  So I punched them in
the genitals.

I like monkeys
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Permanent Revolution – results and prospects

03/12/2009 Fiction
Two Tone

Two Tone

Imagine, if you can, a dark club, preferably underground, 400 shaved or spikey heads, a cloud of smoke wafting over their heads (some of it tobacco) all  bouncing up and down to the rhythm of the syncopated beat of the 10-piece band crowded on a stage that a folk guitarist might find small. The Mosh Pit the slam dancing, sharkskin suits Dr Marten’s boots pork-pie hats, braces, Fred Perry shirts. That’s how I like to  remember my youth spent skankin’ to ska, one the few that I still recall.

Perusing the national newspapers last week I noticed a small mention that there might be an event happening across this country which would re-kindle my affair with this pre-reggae Jamaican pop music.

So I threw the barest necessities into a suitcase and sallied forth. This, I’ll have you know, is no small feat. I trudged down the road from my cliff side mansion overlooking the verdant valley, far above the turbulent world of industry and commerce, to my neighbour’s house, we left on a pair of his burros wending our way down the narrow mountain pass to the village where I caught the night bus to the railway station – the train track was severed mid-way to where I hoped to take refreshment,(by  mal-contents no doubt – venting their spleen on the means of transport). But I managed to journey part of the way until .. This train terminated and I was loaded onto another bus to skirt the area of damage, so bumping along unpaved roads on which donkeys would refuse to tread I was lodged at another station to wait for a train to come for my collection. This train seemed to arrive early and destined to leave well ahead of schedule as well – this can happen when half of the employees of that state-owned railway system are drunks and the remaining 50% are anarchists who believe that timetables are a tool of the bourgeoisie infringing on their right to run the dilapidated machinery as fast as humanly possible with neither pause nor respite or any common sense. I tried to sleep on this run to the city an impossible task, being shaken and stirred bounced from the walls subjected to wild screeching and an odd light show as the internal electric power flickered,hissed and spat, US interrogators at Guantanomo Bay would have been mightily impressed by the train driver and his assistant’s dedication to the task of ‘distracting’ the passengers who dared ride this train on this route. I’m guessing that comfort and safety were also bourgeois affectations.

The train arrived and everyone ran, the two guys at the front of this contraption shot out, jumped a fence and disappeared into the crowds. The passengers adopted a strategy of all rising as soon as the carriage approached a standstill and rushing the doors simultaneously, those that manged to stay on their feet swept en-masse to the exits.

So 26 hours, no sleep, no food but I am close to an airport only a short hop across the state line and I am more than ready  to D.D.d,d.dance !

Why did I undertake such an arduous and dangerous journey ?

Well I am by no means a young person. When I was the headlines screamed hymns of hatred and violence. It was the era of  Thatcher (in Britain) and her chum Reagan (in the rest of the world). Maggie was giving the Miners  a kicking Reagan wanted a nuclear solution to the Cold War. This was no Summer of Love and we weren’t putting flowers in our hair.

In 1976 Eric Clapton openly supported the views of the racist Enoch Powell and supported this arch-conservative’s “Rivers Of Blood ” speech

“In this country in 15 or 20 years time the black man will have the whip hand over the white man. Here is a decent, ordinary fellow-Englishman, who in broad daylight in my own town says to me, his Member of Parliament, that the country will not be worth living in for his children. I simply do not have the right to shrug my shoulders and think about something else. What he is saying, thousands and hundreds of thousands are saying and thinking – not throughout Great Britain, perhaps, but in the areas that are already undergoing the total transformation to which there is no parallel in a thousand years of English history.”

“We must be mad, literally mad, as a nation to be permitting the annual inflow of some 50,000 dependants, who are for the most part the material of the future growth of the immigrant descended population. It is like watching a nation busily engaged in heaping up its own funeral pyre. So insane are we that we actually permit unmarried persons to immigrate for the purpose of founding a family with spouses and fiancées whom they have never seen”

and Blah Blah Blah more of this excrescent white-is-right racist crap

When this made the news quite a few people were, quite properly, angered. A rock photographer ( that’s not a person who photographs rocks but someone who captures images of people involved in that particular musical genre) – Red Saunders and an activist for anti-capitalist anti-racist capaigns – Roger Huddle (you could probably call this guy a socialist, he went on to become a photographer of some note and was employed by a trade union). this is him now and some lads from a band so obscure I don’t recall hearing any of their music ‘Kartoon Klowns’ anyway Huddle wrote this article – have a read. Anyway they wrote a letter to what was then the premier Rock Magazine (that’s not a magazine about rocks nor a magazine printed on rock but a magazine on the subject of a particular musical genre) “New Musical Express’ or what we groovy and wild kids called NME which in part said that Clapton had his first hit covering a song he stole from a black man

”

When we read about Eric Clapton’s Birmingham concert when he urged support for Enoch Powell, we nearly puked. Come on Eric… Own up. Half your music is black. You’re rock music’s biggest colonist… We want to organise a rank and file movement against the racist poison music… P. S. Who shot the Sheriff Eric? It sure as hell wasn’t you!

They called on people to join a movement they called ‘Rock Against Racism’ and hundreds of people did just that almost immediately. Support for this campaign increased after David Bowie was photgraphed making the nazi salute from the rear of a convertible. Clapton stands by his position but Bowie now blames this period on an excessive interest in occultism and his drug use of the time he says of the incident

“I have made my two or three glib, theatrical observations on English society and the only thing I can now counter with is to state that I am NOT a facist.”

Then, and significantly for me, the RAR (along with the Anti-Nazi League) started to hold marches that terminated with a concert to demonstrate against the growing influence of the National Front. It was these events that were reported in passing by local media, but imagine 80,000 people marching the 6 miles from Trafalgar Square  to the East End of London to see The Clash, The Buzzcocks, Steel Pulse, X-Ray Spex, The Ruts, Sham 69, Generation X and the Tom Robinson Band. Or maybe if you were up north there was a rally/march concert at Manchester with  The Buzzcocks, Graham Parker and the Rumour, and Misty in Roots.

These concerts inflicted such a blow against the National Front that they were rarely mentioned in the press, perhaps a few individual nazi skinheads might get a mention from time to time but as a political force they were pretty-well a spent force.

I was then, and still am a great fan of The Clash, who were also big fans of reggae and so, by association and inclination, did I come to be a fan of reggae. All the ‘really big’ bands in my album collection were from bands that had signed to Two Tone records. Alongside The Clash were records from The Selector, Bad Manners, The Beat, Madness, The Special AKA the Specials and some UB40 (but they weren’t really two-toney)

And so I started to follow these second-wave ska bands, I’d travel many a mile to see shows from obscure local groups in these dingy out of the way clubs, blow a week’s pay to get tickets to as many Peter Tosh/Desmond Decker concerts I could lay my hands on. I was one of these bobbing baldies at the smoky underground clubs swinging my Dr Marten’s around to The Allniters, Strange Tenants.

But we all grow older and I eventually stopped going to see much live music, the venues were closed, the promoters didn’t bring the bands to these sunny shores. And the bands stopped recording so I started to listen to Japanese ska, French ska (very French/not very reggae) and there were a few bands from South America I started to like.

So last Wednesday as I scanned the ‘What’s On’ column I saw that one of the bands I had enjoyed was doing a gig half-way across this vast continent and I thought “I’ll have a piece of that !”  and so this journey began….

…. To see ‘Ska Cubano‘  I had their album, liked their style. So I hopped on a ‘plane and flew (eventually) to distant South Australia a place not dis-similar to the wild west of the early US on the edge of two vast deserts where the fresh water is salty and the beer sold in small measures.

After coming through customs ( they don’t object too strongly to guns and hard drugs, but they’re adamant about bringing pieces of  fruit into the place) I hailed one of their delightful cabs to take me into the centre of town. The driver, a lantern-jawed and laconic chap didn’t have a bad word to say about anyone or anything during the time I hired him to drive me into the town square, he didn’t say a word at all. maybe that’s part of the international brotherhood of cab-drivers rules). He deposited me a mere mile and a half from where I intended to de-cab. It gave me time to gather my thoughts and prepare mentally for the ska-fest I eagerly anticipated.

Right, I had heard this band, but knew very little about them, not a big deal – right ? How different can one band be to another. They all have a drummer, 2 or 3 electric guitarists, a horn section (with two trumpets, a saxophone or two and maybe a trombone) an electric bass player who hangs around with the drummer and is part of the percussion section and a show-off who sings a bit and dresses like a nob, he’s also supposed to keep the patter going with the audience some of the bigger bands have an extra percussionist and a specialist dancer, some back-up singers. Ska bands are quite big.

I walked past a hotel that rented rooms by the hour (well you would walk past wouldn’t you ?) and fronted the reception of the next place along the main street. ” Here for Wormaddled are ya ?” the person behind the desk said, I sort of mumbled in the affirmative because I didn’t know what that was. Grabbed the key and lugged my bags upstairs. I hung my suits in the wardrobe and logged into the ‘free internet for guests” which was an unusual description because it really meant you could disconnect the phone from the wall socket and plug your modem in, then dial up anyone who would be prepared to sell you a really, really slow connection for something like 2 quid a minute.

WOMADelaide is an annual cultural festival, which surprised me a bit, I suppose they have to import some from time to time. And the receptionist was indeed correct I was indeed going to this event, because that’s where the band was performing. This snippet of info cost me the equivalent of 3 euros, buying the ticket took another 10 minutes plus the price of entry. But I was now all ready to get up and boogie. I still had a few minutes left of slow and expensive internet left and this is what I found.

Ska Cubano has members from all around the world, Cuba, Jamaica, Montserrat, UK.

My time ran out (or I was cut off).

Anyway I ‘d be seeing them the next afternoon, Womadelaide is in the centre of town, all I need do was bed down, eat some food and be up with the larks.

Ha !

Jet lag is a kicker and I was in a foul mood when I woke up the next afternoon, with only time for a small sandwich and a glass of tepid salty water before I headed out

I got through the gate and fought the crowd to get to Stage 2,

They (Ska Cubano) had done their sound check so we were all ready. Now I should pause here. The gig was taking on some weirdness, firstly it was stinkin’ hot and the sun was still out (weird #1), I looked around the crowd for the two usual tribes that would come to such a performance (ska-skins or punks) there were none from either. the place was full of hippies and naked children playing in the dust drinking vegetable juices (weird #2) .

The band started taking their positions on stage, there were almost the right number of people, 4 people on stage right (2 x saxophone + trumpet + trombone) 2 people at the back ( a drummer and a percussionist) just in front of them was a guy with an acoustic double-bass and another guy with a semi-acoustic guitar, a singer took a microphone leaving a spare mic at the front. This spare microphone was taken up by a guy in a nice cream suit and a feather head-dress. So the right number (10) but not the expected types of instrument (weird #3)

They were good, different to other ska bands I had seen insofar as they were talented, disciplined and had learnt how to deploy the musical instrument of their choice. Weirdness No 4 might be that only the singer did the gags and conducted the banter between songs, usually everyone near a microphone has a crack at being a stand-up comedian.

This is them

This is them

Ans so I got to see an exquisite blend of Jamaican/Cuban musicians playing the music I grew up with, I wished they had done a gig in some small dank underground cavern and I wished they had a few electric guitarists, but you can’t have everything.

This post is called “Permanent Revolution” after the book of the same name by Leon Trotsky. If we are to keep a check on racism it has to be kept at the forefront of our consciousness it is pervasive and insidious. RAR may have defeated the National Front culturally and politically but there needs to be similar campaigns against the British National Party in the UK, Terza Posizione ‘the third postion’ in Italy and the far right in mainstream parties (notably the Liberal Party of Australia here and the Republican Party in the USA)

I didn’t really travel all the way across Australia to see Ska Cubano, my girlfriend (a constant source of delight and succour) lives there the band was the cherry on top

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about time, years ago

02/28/2009 Film, Politics

During the G.W Bush Presidency an Australian television network broadcast “The West Wing“.

I was quite a fan of this show, it allowed me to drift off and wonder what it would be like to have a Democrat as President instead of that churlish ne’er-do-well who had the reins of power at the time. It was a niche programme, appealing to those who

(a) had some interest in politics

and/or

(b) had some interest in US politics

That was always going to be hard for my local station to keep on the air. This was well-scripted, well-directed and well-acted – a fine example of what television could be. It also didn’t matter where one’s politics lay (on the left or  the other side). But for whatever reason they experimented with an 8.30pm start, changed the days it was broadcast, gave it ‘special’ viewing times, rested it for weeks on end then it just seemed to disappear, came back again and then it was finished. To this day I don’t know why or by whom Josh Lyman was shot

Anyway the series ended and an Hispanic guy was elected the new President, and whatever his name was (the actor not the character) went on to play a serial-killing psychopathic district attorney in “Dexter”.That was the last I ever heard of the production team and the writers until a pal said to me “have you had a crack at Studio 60 On The Sunset Strip ? – it was made by the people who made that TV show about the American president” he always used too many words that pal o’ mine I think it’s a confidence thing, where if you speak a lot the irrelevancies give you that little bit of time to think about what you actually want to say. Politicians do that a lot, maybe it has something to do with that ‘lot of hot air’ descriptive term that people often apply to pollie-speak. They either speak for too long (so they have time to think) or for too little (they are only interested in a 30 second  sound bite). I replied in the emphatic negative and he lent me a DVD,  I was caught up in this show as well.

Recently a guy asked me if he could borrow some TV recordings, he has a wife who is ill or something I gave him this show, but before I di I decided to revisit Episode 1 for it’s brilliant monologue which set the tone (and content) for the whole series.

To set the scene “Studio 60” is a comedy TV show broadcast on Saturday evening in front of a live audience from … well you can guess where from the title. Episode one opens with the Producer of the show in a heated argument with a network executive about some sketch which had some Christian connection. the network wants the sketch cut, the producer is arguing that free speech means that sometime people are offended, watch it, you might like it (if you work in television, as I do, then it will have further resonance that fine line between commercial realities (censorship) and artistic expression (freedom of speech))

He (the producer) relents and orders the segment be removed from the running list, while watching the broadcast from the wings what is replacing the cut sketch is un-funny, lame and offensive to him, he storms onto the set and orders the actors off. this is as much of that section of the script as I can find on the internet as a monologue wikipedia has a link to a script draft but watch it yourself the show transcends the page. If I have got any of  it wrong I apologise to Aaron Sorkin and Thomas Schlamme

Opening

Wes Mendell:

It’s not going to be a very good show tonight. *audience laughs*

I think you should change the channel, change the channel right now or better yet turn off the TV, ok?

No, no, I know it seems like this is supposed to be funny, but, uh, tomorrow, tomorrow you’re gonna find out that it wasn’t and by that time I’ll have been fired. *audience laughs*

No, this is not a sketch. This show used to be cutting edge political and social satire, but it’s gotten lobotomised by a candy ass broadcast network, hell-bent on doing absolutely nothing that might just challenge their audience.

We’re about to do a sketch that you’ve seen already about 500 times. Yeah, yeah, no one’s gonna confuse George Bush and George Plimpton,

now we get it.

We’re all being lobotomised by this country’s most influential industry. It’s just thrown in the towel on any endeavour to do anything that doesn’t include the courting of 12 year-old boys. Not even the smart 12 year-olds, the stupid ones, the idiots. Which there are plenty thanks in no small measure to this network. So why don’t you just, change the channel?

Turn off the TVs do it right now. (they cut to the control room, then back)

The struggle between art and commerce. Well, there’s always been a struggle between art and commerce and now I’m telling you art is getting it’s ass kicked and it’s making us mean and it’s making us bitchy.

It’s making us cheap punks.

That’s not who we are!

People are having contests to see how much they can be like Donald Trump. (cuts to the control room then back) We’re eating worms for money. “Who wants to screw my sister?” Guys are getting killed in a war that’s got theme music and a logo. That remote in your hand is a crack pipe. Oh yeah every once in a while we pretend to be appalled. (cuts to the control room then back)

(pause)

Pornographers! It’s not even good pornography. They’re just this side of snuff films, and friends that’s what’s next because that’s all that’s left. And the two things that make them scared gutless are the FCC and every psycho religious cult that gets positively horny at the very mention of a boycott. These are the people they’re afraid of. This prissy, feckless, off-the-charts, greed-filled, whorehouse of a network. And you’re watching this thoroughly unpatriotic mother-fu….

Sadly despite the fact that this was, too, quality TV it never had an airing here and was pulled in the US and replaced with the very type of television that Studio 60 railed against “The Real Wedding Crashers” It went on ‘holiday’ was promised to return to TV sets May 2007 but it appears to have not made that return October 2008 the official web-site for this fine programme was pulled.

If you read down towards the end of the Wikipedia entry for Studio 60 (it’s a link up above somewhere) you will notice

On July 19, 2007, the Academy of Television Arts & Sciences announced their nominations for the 2007 Primetime Emmy awards. Studio 60 was nominated in five categories. The pilot episode earned three nominations: Outstanding Directing (Thomas Schlamme), Outstanding Cinematography For A Single-camera Series, and Outstanding Casting in Dramatic Series. Both John Goodman and Eli Wallach were nominated Outstanding Guest actor in Dramatic Series. Even with some criticism, Studio 60 nominations surpassed critics’ darlings such as Friday Night Lights and Dexter, which got two and three respectively. The show also tied with hits like CSI and 24.

It looks like US TV is a medium that doesn’t appreciate the cameras being turned in on itself

I hope my friend’s wife gets better and I hope I get the disc back

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sc1Ti-ehJ00&feature=related

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