buter's BABY blog

Many many moons ago, when I was just a wee tyke, I used to listen to the Muppets singing Christmas Carols with John Denver (oh yes, Rocky Mountain John Denver) every Christmas. We had it on LP and we used to listen to a cassette recording all the way to Melbourne and back each year.Last Christmas I finally caved and bought the CD from Amazon BUT! It was so upsetting when it finally arrived and was missing several tracks. Maybe some doofus thought that they couldn't fit all 13 tracks on the CD so they only put on 10. What*ever* - though it had the joy of the Twelve Days (Badum dum dum) and the Christmas is Coming round (it's finished - oh, I knew that) and and and, figgy pudding (made with figs - and bacon!) it *didn't* have Rowlf singing Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas, which I have to admit is probably my favouritest soppy Christmas song ever, especially when sung by Rowlf.

So imagine my joy when I discovered that this Christmas, Amazon has the limitededitiondigitallyremasteredspecialcollectorsversiononlyforashorttimerelease of Christmas with the Muppets which has all-thirteen-songs.

Now I have to go brave the christmas shopping crowds to see if I can find it before Christmas actually arrives.

Sigh.

Edit: Hiren is a legend.

Jarv recently posted about her NaNoWriMo efforts - she's introduced me to the term dystopian novel.

After looking it up on wikipedia, I realise that I've actually read (and enjoyed) a lot of dystopian novels. That makes me feel all posh and educated (or something). But then, as Jarv said, I wouldn't necessarily want to go ahead with reading books just *because* they are in that category.

Someone told me recently that I must be a fast reader. Why? Because I have read so many books, that I must finish them quickly. Well, maybe. I guess I do read quite fast, which makes it less of an investment for me to re-read something.

I know I've done a list before, of sci-fi that I've read and appreciated, so you know how to calibrate against my taste in geekery. But you don't know my taste in novels overall. So here is a quick run-down of types of fiction I've enjoyed (in terms you don't have to look up on wikipedia). And if you're interested, I've read most of these several times, and continue to enjoy reading them.

1. Period social satire:
Jane Austen - Persuasion
Tolstoy - Anna Karenina

2. Other worlds (fantasy):
JRR Tolkein - LOTR, specifically The Return of the King
Ursula le Guin - Earthsea, specifically A Wizard of Earthsea
Stephen Donaldson - The Mirror of Her Dreams (Mordant's Need)

3. Science Fiction:
William Gibson - Neuromancer
Neal Stephenson - The Diamond Age
Isaac Asimov - Foundation (is this dystopian? probably?)
Douglas Adams - HHGTTG, of course

4. Assorted stuff that makes me *think*, and it can be pretty hard going sometimes:
Neal Stephenson - Quicksilver (and the others)
Haruki Murakami - Kafka on the Shore (but all the rest as well!)
Alain de Botton - Consolations of Philosophy

I leave it to you, faithful reader, to make your own opinions (and your own google/amazon/imdb searches).

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I was in the supermarket the other day, falling into a mild stupor over the choice of fruit juice (Should I get breakfast juice with A,C and E, or instead the one with Iron and Folate? Should I stick to Orange, or get Multi Carrot Berry Blend Plus+++ ?) Ok, so I might have been making those up, and even after I made my choice (because it was 2 bottles for $6 and that's 4.8L of juice so it works out to about 18 cents per glass, which is pretty darn cheap), I was shaking my head at myself for getting stuck on the Added Vitamins. I'm referring of course to the fact that there is no discernible nutritional or medical benefit in Added Vitamins in juice, because there just isn't a therapeutic dosage in there, and if you're really after those Added Vitamins you should either go and eat fruit/vege/meat/etc original source, or if you're lazy just buy some tablets.

Be that as it may, the stupor induced by the juice was nowhere near the stupor I fell into when considering the breakfast cereals. I had one item on my list - "boy cereal" which as we all know means cereal made of small boys. The stupor wasn't induced by the choice of cereals (I knew which one I wanted!) but by the conversation I overheard between Kylie** and Pammy** back at the juice.

"Can Tuscany have apple juice or is it just orange juice she reacts to?"

Tuscany?

TUSCANY?

While I accept that maybe I'm just being a change-hating misanthrope, and that we often name places after people, I find the practice of naming people after places to be absurd.

Sorry. Tuscany? What's the child's nickname going to be? Annie? Or maybe if she has buck teeth she will be just "Tusk". Maybe when she's old enough she'll ask to be called by her middle name, "Helsinki".

Goodness me.

**I don't think these were their real names, but they could have been!

So, last Friday night D™ and I went on a ghost tour of the old Quarantine station at Manly. The guide was doing his very best to make us all spooked out, but I didn't see any ghosts. The tour was fun - and you learn a lot about the history of people arriving in Australia, and how hard it is to keep the country free from diseases (especially if you don't know how the disease is spread, or cured).

However even though we didn't see any ghosts I did have a weird feeling during parts of the trip. At the top of the hill is the hospital wing and we went inside one of the wards. On the verandah outside, I had the strangest feeling, like I was falling, or like something was about to happen, and then as we exited the ward I felt very queasy and had that weird feeling when you just *know* your blood pressure has suddenly dropped.

D™ reckons it's to do with the fact that we were on a peninsula and the wind was changing all the time. At the end of the tour a serious southerly change came up and sent us all inside to have a cup of tea, when the rest of the night was quite mild and humid. So maybe that was it. But the guide told us about others who have seen/felt ghosts on that site so .... /shrug/

But it makes me think about what it is that happens when you see (feel?) a ghost.

I think that a ghost might be an impression left behind by someone when they experienced strong emotion in a certain place. When we went to Wombeyan Caves (or Wombleyan, as I like to call them) we went on a guided tour. In one of the tunnels, the guide said "imagine the 18th and 19th-Century tours down here, ladies crawling along in their dresses and petticoats..." and I had such a massive freakout. The cave, the enclosed space, the darkness, flickering light, all that was fine. But the thought of all those people crawling about just unsettled me. I get the same weird feeling seeing the depressions in old sandstone steps behind Cadman's Cottage - from all the hundreds of thousands of people who have walked there since they were cut. So I'm weird that way, but maybe that's what I'm sensitive to - just the feeling of hundreds of years of people doing things in one spot.

So ... on the quarantine station tour, maybe that's what the weird feeling was - just knowing that hundreds/thousands of people had been processed there. But it was diluted by the modern touches so I was only partially spooked.

Add your ghost stories in the comments.

I was going to write something pithy and witty about how amused I was to hear about the impact that America's latest legislation had on college students. You know the story, they legislated to make sending money to offshore online casinos illegal, and now all these college students have to stop getting addicted to gambling and invest their hard-earned dollars (earned selling burgers, or whatever, to slightly richer college students, I guess) in more salubrious pursuits. Like drugs, or pornography, or file sharing, or whatever it is passes for fun these days.

But, instead I'd rather write about a book. Not just any book. A book my father read to me and his father ... waaait a second, that's a different book.

Someone told me recently that if I was looking for tomes, I should try my hand at the Great Amurrican Novel genre. I'd just read The Great Gatsby for the first time ever, so obviously I thought I knew it all. But anyway. He recommended Underworld ... yeeeaahhhh ... we have that. D™ and I have both tried to read it several times, and neither of us can get past the decades-long description of the baseball game at the start. It would be ironic if the whole book is all about the baseball game. We must just not have enough cultural similarities to "get it". When this friend went on to suggest The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen, I thought ... hmm, if this is another so-called Great Amurrican Novel I'm gonna read it in Borders before I invest in it.

So the next time I went to Borders I looked for this Franzen fellow - he was there, all right, but no Corrections in sight. A couple of other random things were there, but I settled for Proust instead. You can't go wrong with a bit of Proust. That's pretty hard going though, sometimes I have the distinct impression that I'm swimming through rapidly setting jelly trying to get from one end of a sentence to the other. As soon as you lean one way you're totally off course and you have no idea where you started or where you'll end up. But, a great sense of achievement from just setting off though. Alain de Botton said, Proust will change your life - I'm coming to believe that. Even if you don't follow it all the way, just the exercise of paying attention to the descriptions will enrich your daily habitation. Proust can spend several pages describing the memory that the taste of tea-cake inspires in our hero. When I put the book down, I had the distinct feeling that I should be paying more attention to things that we normally just don't notice. The feeling you get from the first sip of tea in the morning. The sense of calm when the hot water in the shower first cascades over you. That impossible moment just before you open your eyes on a Sunday morning with the birds singing and the sun shining in the curtains. Even to exploring the feeling of not being able to remember something ... until it suddenly pops out at you. Case in point: Depeche Mode! I've been trying to remember that for hours!

And then .. I picked up a copy of The Corrections for cheap at the local book clearance. It's much easier going than Underworld. Franzen's sentence structure does tend towards the Proustian .. in that the sentences can go on forever, but he is poking fun at himself when he does it. Almost as if he is saying to himself "let's see how long I can carry this sentence on for without losing the thread." It's quite highly amusing to read about losing one's way in the middle of a sentence, likening Alfred's wandering mind to the sentence describing the wandering mind .. or something like that. The book is also not easy going, but I think it does deserve the term "Pretty good so far Amurrican Novel".

And coming from me, the book snob of the family, I think that's pretty high praise ... though it's still not as good as Quicksilver though (so far).

I know I might risk alienating my readership. Oh well. Sometimes you just have to tell the world how geeky you are.

If you use Firefox then maybe you'll like this one. Sometimes I can't be bothered hunting through the list of bookmarks for the one I just know is there - like my bloglines, or smh or whatever. Well in FF you can set a keyword (or words) for your bookmark, that you can type in the address bar and you will just go there! So good.

Go to Bookmarks -> Manage bookmarks.

Right-Click on a bookmark name that you love like ... oooh, jarv's blog.

Then enter a keyword, say "Jarv".


Then save it.

You're done! Open a new FF tab (by Ctrl+t, dummy) and type "jarv" in the address bar.

It's Magic!

Today's geeky fact is brought to you by the Window+D key combo. Never lose your desktop again!

You might think from my Monday that I was suffering from a weekend of shenanigans. But no...

Fri night - a lovely 2-hour train journey home. Bloody cancelled trains stupid telopea train line random connections missing grumble grumble. (oh, and D™ took the car to Canberra..)
Sat day - gave blood, did some book shopping, went to a baby shower in glebe (remind me next time that it's not a good idea to walk from central to glebe in 27-degree-heat after giving blood..) then got on the 6pm bus to go to canberra.
Sat night - weird woozy feeling not at all helped by sleeping on the floor in a house full of paint fumes. In Canberra.
Sun day - woke up cricknecked, painted Someone.Else's.House. all day. In Canberra. Then drove back to Sydney with D™, arrived home 8pm.
Sun night - got to bed around 9.30, woke up at 11.40 when a FIRE ENGINE was flashing its lights and reversing down the fire trail in the reserve opposite our bedroom window (random? maybe!) then woke again at 1.30 with the wind rising, then woke again at 5.20 with the kookaburras then finally woke -again- just after 6 to go to work.

*sigh*

today it's better. Had a good night's sleep, no fire engines, no kookaburras, and I've found this ... I love this one which made me actively chortle. Hehe. I just looked at it again and I chortled again. I love the internet. Time's a-wastin'! (that's in the declarative sense)

Oh and if you're curious about the books I bought - they were tomes:

• Underground by Haruki Murakami.


• Swann's Way by Proust.


• On Seeing and Noticing by Alain de Botton.

I don't understand yodelling. I don't understand how you do it, why you do it, and why you'd listen to it.

Wikipedia says:

According to the Oxford English Dictionary the word yodel is derived from a German word jodeln (originally Bavarian) meaning "to utter the syllable jo".

yoy

That being said, last night we were watching Spicks and Specks - which concluded with a demonstration of classical yodelling. What's that? You thought that meant "yodelling in the classical style" as opposed to "yodelling in the latest alternative-grunge-punk-hip/hop-folk-groove style"? No, no you're mistaken. It means yodelling to classical music. The yodeller yodelled her way through the William Tell Overture.

It was astounding.

As pastimes go though, I suppose her childhood of hanging around in mango trees, yodelling, is better than some. Me, I prefer listening to things other than yodels on my iriver. Did I mention that I don't own an iPod? Well these iPod covers almost make me want one. As Cher would say "I wonder if they have that in my size.."


ed: thought for the day - seeing as we all have blogs and we can be self-published geniuses all over the world, why is it so gratifying to see yourself linked on someone else's blog?

As D™ says:
Now you have to blog about being quoted in a blog and so the intenet fills up just that little bit more with junk.
*sigh*

So last night I was telling D™ a story about my day. We wondered if it's just me that has weird things happen, or maybe it's just me who feels the need to share all the time.

See, I had to go get some USB memory sticks for work. There's an Officeworks on the way home from work so that's easy. I got into the store at about 5pm.

Then I went down to the tech section, and viewed the keys through the locked glass cabinet - picked out the one I wanted by eye. 1GB for $45, you can't beat that, especially when 512MB by the same manufacturer was $60. So then I wandered out of the tech section looking for someone to unlock the cabinet, instantly a helpful assistant in a yellow high-vis jacket came to my aid. Straight away, he gets the key, unlocks it, selects my USB keys (I needed 2 of them), then starts heading to the register.

I said, "oh, sorry, I also need to get some DVDs" .. so he takes me to the DVD section, I stand there with him (he's still holding my USB keys) and so I feel all rushed, anyway I pick some Sony DVD-Rs and he says "oh, they're just DVD-R, is that ok?" and I was "huh? Is there a difference between DVD-R and DVD+R?" and he says, "no, just that they're not DVD-RW" .. oh, right. Well D™ asked for DVD-R specifically so I guess he knew what he wanted. Anyway yellowjacket is now holding my 50 DVD-Rs and my USB keys. Then he starts heading for the register again.

"Oh, sorry, I also needed to get some CD cases." So he walks me to the CD case section, where luckily I already knew what I wanted and just grabbed them. Meanwhile he's still carrying my DVDs and my USB keys. This time when he starts heading for the register I follow him meekly. We get there and there's a queue, and the register attendant has just walked off with a wodge of $50 notes, presumably cashing out, but with customers still in line. So the yellowjacket looks at me, then waves at the manager, and sure enough, someone comes over and opens the next register. Yellowjacket takes my USB keys and DVDs and me over to the newly opened register, waits till he makes eye contact with the attendant, and then finally puts the USB keys down. Then turns to me and says "here you go, have a nice evening". I was back in Maxy and on the road by 5.15pm.

Now tell me, how many times have *you* been to Officeworks and got a parcel carrying service *inside* the store?

Is it just me?

Just to continue a theme, here's some light reading:

Pluto is the outermost planet of the solar system, and the end of the process of breaking down the reality structure of normal consciousness begun by Uranus.

Riiiight. So, after exiting Uranus it's quite likely that you'll lose your reality structure. Uh-huh. <nods>

So, if reality is broken down, does it really matter that Pluto is no longer considered a planet?

I guess not.

This week August 28 through September 3

Aquarius
<snip>

Mars also moves to square Pluto, and this could cause aggravation, possibly even some anger. Don't give way to your baser emotions. Try and diffuse the situation and see it from a more enlightened perspective.

Diffuse?

Come to think of it, I was feeling a little focused.

sorry for the toilet humour, it's that kind of day ...

Latest news: Pluto is not a planet.

After 76 years, poor lil' Pluto has been globally realigned and is no longer classified as a planet but instead is a Kuiper Belt Object. While slightly disturbing to astronomers, and potentially world-shaking to astrologers, I feel the impact of this change has been underestimated when you think of the thousands of school children currently making solar system models for school projects.

Think about it. You've worked hard for weeks, finding or making spheroids representing 9 planets and the sun .. you've been painting ping pong balls, tennis balls, soccer balls, maybe even the odd football for fun ... and then some random astronomy bunch decides to remove one!

This morning a 12-year old rang up parent radio and complained that her diorama, due today, would have to have Pluto removed in emergency surgery. What's more disturbing is that we just don't know whether her teacher knows about Pluto - will she be marked down for missing a planet?

But being pragmatic, I expect most 12-year olds will be happy that it's one less planet to memorise .

Let me see ...

Many Very Excellent Men Jump Straight Up Near Paris

now becomes

Many Very Excellent Men Just Said Utter Nonsense

I can live with that.

I was going to write a post about how I'm such a perfect driver and everyone else out there should drive the way I want them to, but then re-read it and realised I sound like a total idiot, so I deleted it. And replaced it with a total ramble through the trackless waste that is my mind on coffee.

If you suffer from road rage, or even just if you're human, you must read the Consolations of Philosphy (it must be good, my mum likes it), which has an interesting thing to say about other people: you have to remember that they aren't doing what they do *just* to annoy you. They are doing it because they just don't care about you nearly as much as they care about themselves. Just like you. So deal with it.

Speaking of dealing with things, our lunchtime poker game has experienced tragedy of a sort that is hard to recover from: the 2 of clubs has a tear in it. I guess that's what's known as a marked card. Put that together with our "if you've got a pair of twos, go all-in" rule and you end up with an interesting game.

Meanwhile my favourite sister-in-law is getting on a plane tonight to go to Europe. I'm insanely jealous, not about Europe (though I'd love to visit there one day) but because we haven't had our annual ski trip this year due to house-bound imperatives like renovating, and house-hunting. Have a nice time Mandy and don't forget to email us, at least once!

Yeah, I know what you're thinking. It looks wrong. It should be trooper shouldn't it?

Apparently not .

Speaking of trooping though, the other day I caught the train from Telopea with a dozen hand-picked fellow commuters. Not that it was my hand doing the picking, but they all chose to be there that morning.

I've caught that train before, and you come to recognise people on the platform. Commuters, you see them every day, but you never say anything to them, that would be weird.

Like, the guy with the soccer ball.

And the lady in the long black coat.

And the Chinese guys who park their car opposite the petrol station in the closest parking spot to the station. I only mention them because they're the only people I've ever seen who actually drive to Telopea Station. Everyone else walks. If you have a car, you'd drive to a different station, at the very least. Telopea is just above the arse-end of stations (as in, it's one stop closer to the city than Carlingford station).

So anyway, I always see these two well-dressed business ladies, probably in their early to mid twenties. They have immaculate hair and very classy outfits, usually a skirt with a business jacket, and spiky heel shoes of course. They always arrive together. And then get on the train together. And then sit together. And then listen to their (singular) iPod together. Yes, one ear each. And then chat together till about Rosehill (2, maybe 3 stops along).

And then they fall asleep. Together. With their heads tilted. Together.

I can only assume that they doze off while thinking "mustn't.. pull.. earpod.. out.." which is why their heads always rest together.

It's very cute.

If you like reading a book that makes you
a. go, "what the...?", and yet
b. fly along for the ride, and then
c. daydream *really* strange things

then you must read Kafka on the Shore by Haruki Murakami.

Best. Murakami. Ever.

And then, you will agree why it's been nominated for best novel in the World Fantasy Awards this year.

Don't look at me like that - I'm not the one who follows these things, I just follow other people's blogs and they tell me all I need to know.

...

Just like you.

Someone commented to me recently, that I do weird things for someone who's lived in Sydney all their life. I was waxing lyrical about a coffee and chocolate tour DTM and I went on one Saturday morning. More about the tour later. Much, much more!

But the thing is, I guess I do explore Sydney doing touristy type things, because I love my city, I love going in and feeling the buzz, I love seeing the old buildings and I love having stories to tell about all the places you see. Like, "here is a sculpture that looks like a public urinal". "And here is one that doesn't". Stuff like that.

I also like to try seeing things with new eyes every now and again. And seeing as we're not going on holidays till (at least) the reno is finished, (at which time we will buy a new house, and then we will have a new mortgage and we won't be able to go on holidays anyway till 2099), by turning on my "see Sydney with new eyes" ability, it's just like being on holidays in a new city without all the hassle of passports and language barriers. I'm sure at this point all my well-travelled friends and acquaintances will jump on me saying this city or that mountain is "like, waaay better than Sydney", but that's not the issue. What I'm trying to say is, we often don't appreciate things we have right here, and I'm one of the people who wants to try that. That is, in lieu of using passports and language skills to travel, because - well, see above about renovations and mortgages. (Speaking of which, why does the credit card company offer me *more* credit when interest rates just went up? Isn't that just like handing a waterbottle to someone who's drowning in the ocean?)

Aaaaanyway, a very close friend gave me a couple of vouchers for this coffee and chocolate tasting tour of Sydney. Mmm, coffee. Mmmmmmm, chocolate. Here's the rundown:

You start at the Strand Arcade with a cup of coffee then go touring round Sydney's CBD visiting chocolate shops (and sampling! Oh, the samples!). We started at Haigh's - and I very nearly stopped there, I love Haigh's. Oh, the truffles. Oh, the dark chocolate buttons. Oh, the divine hand made chocolates. Oh, the friendly staff. Oh, oh oh ....
Then we visited Darrell Lea (ok, I'm not that much of a tourist here, I must say it bored me), Jeff de Bruges (oh my, it's expensive!), Lindt (mmm, Lindt balls) and the DJ's food hall chocolate store ... which, while conveniently located opposite Max Brenner's, was not our final stop ... no, we ended up at the Sheraton on the Park having a very civilised final cup of coffee.

Chocolate samples, and the two hot drinks, were included in the tour, as well as discounted shopping at all the stores we visited and loads of interesting tales about that good brown stuff. I must say, after 2 1/2 hours of nothing but chocolate, really really good chocolate notwithstanding, I was choc-full! But oh so happy - in fact the entire tour group were getting on very very well by the end ... must have been those endorphins!

Next weekend DTM and I are going on a dinner cruise round Sydney Harbour. Maybe this time I'll take photos .... naaah, I'm a local, why would I need to do that? hehe.

you plugged in your H10 and your USB memory stick at the same time and windows gave the H10 drive letter E: and then tried to give your USB stick drive letter F: except that F: is a network drive, so ever after the USB stick although recognised, is unreachable because it's still trying to connect to F: ?

Well now I know how to fix it.

:)

If I had categories, this would be filed under "miscellaneous geekery". Coming soon: how to make categories. Or I could just copy what's out there ;)

That last comment about using writely reminded me of the last time I experienced the joys of beta software.

Here is a transcription of a conversation that took place between D™ and me recently. Hang on, that implies there was actual talking going on that needed to be transcribed. In fact this was an email conversation. Anyway, whatever, here goes:

1. Me

YYYAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAYYYYYYYYY

my links now work.

bloody stupid IE7 beta preview thing.

If you have:
1. Firefox as your default browser
2. MS Outlook 2000 (presumably also outlook express) - maybe other versions, whatever
3. IE7 beta 2 installed
4. Oh but then you have to reset FF as your default browser coz IE doesn't even ask, it just sets itself...
then: when you click a link in outlook you either get nothing, nada, zip zilch, not a thing, or you get an explorer window into C:\Program Files\Common Files\System\MAPI\1033\nt - wtf?

So then after a little bit of a hunt around MS forums I thought it might be something in MAPI or DDE or some such, but without running registry-killing fixmapi I thought I'll just check the forums. And lo and behold someone else had it. Love the internet.

So now I've uninstalled IE7 and things are all better. You can shove your beta software up your arse, microsoft. (uninstalling IE7 returns me to IE6 and I can cope with that thankyou very much).

2. D™

two words
well 2 acronyms
. . . well 6 words . . .
and some punctuation

ie7? wtf?

3. Me

yessm? didn't you know about microsoft's attempt at tabbed browser goodness? internet exploiter 7 (which is now in beta2, whatever that is).

Remind me again why I don't use beta software.

:)

4. D™

Because you write betas and you know what unwholesome goodness goes into them
And besides, betas are bad for you and they rot your teeth.

He's full of wisdom.

The other night, $1.2million was the winning bid at an auction for a Victoria Cross and assorted other medals of an Aussie soldier killed in WWI. Or was he a kiwi. Anyway, a big deal is being made of this record amount being paid. And a bigger deal is being made of the anonymous patron who is going to generously loan the medals to the Australian War Memorial in Canberra for permanent display.

What I want to know is, who was the previous owner. The person who put the medals *up* for auction. They get $1.2million and they laugh all the way to the bank. Wouldn't it have been better all round if they'd loaned the medals to the War Memorial in the first place?

Then the mysterious War Memorial patron could spend his $1.2million (or perhaps a wee bit more) to upgrade Caves House and preserve some 340-million-year-old Australian heritage instead of this paltry 90-odd year stuff.

Seriously though folks, if you're looking for somewhere to spend your $1.2million you can't go past this place. It's not a shopping blog, and frankly, it's shall-I-say awesome. D™ reckons he can hear my voice when he goes there, either because they write in a style not dissimilar to my own, or because I'm usually talking to him while he's surfing.

Hmmm.

edit: I posted this using writely and it garbled my $ symbols into a very long weird looking string of characters. Remind me again to stop using beta software.

A totally fun aspect to living in Telopea is the absolute mind boggling astoundingness of the daily commuter train to the city. There's 1, count them, one, (which by the way is neo spelled backwards) train that goes direct from our little station all the way into bustling Sydney town without having to stop and cool your heels, your backside, and other important parts, at Clyde for 20 minutes waiting for a connection. So if you've got any brains in your head, you'll either buy a dinosaur, or you'll make sure that you get to the station in plenty of time to get on the commuter train.

Once you've arrived at the station, with nothing to do apart from fight with the ticket machine, you might stand at the railing watching cars, err dinosaurs, go past. And if you do, you can't fail to notice the big ol' gazebo summerhouse thing...

Or is it?


Yes well I've been staring at it for nearly a year's worth of train trips and I still don't know what the tank thing is for.

Here's a close up in case you thought it really was a summerhouse:



Yeah. Didn't think so.

... well, if they don't make it worse, at the very least they don't make it all better either. My loyal following will recall that I've had headaches off-n-on since about March this year, and that the headache when it comes will last for days, and nothing seems to relieve it. Painkilling medication doesn't actually "kill" the pain, just makes it so that though you can feel it, it's not ruling your life.

I could review the painkillers I've been taking in terms of their headache removability:
1. aspirin, pretty commonly regarded as "good for what ails ya" but in fact it's only really good for hangovers or dehydration headaches. Not for my special kind. But at least it didn't make it worse ...

2. paracetamol, always recommended as a first choice after aspirin, but didn't have a huge impact on the headache either.

3. ibuprofen, well this was not too bad. The neurologist recommended taking it as soon as the headache started and it seemed to reduce its severity - but then I'd have to take another dose or combine with another drug for full functionality so it's not awesome - but a good standby and very cheap.

4. "nurofen tension headache" - this is ibuprofen lysine. The pharmacist (whom I asked for advice, as you're meant to) said "oh, well it works better than normal nurofen because it's targeted specifically for the tension headache." Funnily enough the package next to it, " Migraine pain" was the same dosage and same everything except "targeted specifically for the migraine headache". She knew nothing, so I researched it a little bit and it's meant to act faster than straight ibuprofen. It was ok, acting faster is fine but the net effect was the same as the regular stuff. And it's twice as expensive as homebrand ibuprofen which brings its rating down to

5. prodeine forte (a strong paracetamol/codeine blend also marketed as panadeine forte) - wow, now we're getting into the strong stuff. Its main side effect is incredible wooziness, though it's also very effective at helping you ignore the pain. In fact you can ignore just about anything! So I would recommend taking it if the pain is stopping you sleeping, but that's about it. And then the sleep you do get when you have taken one, is pretty weird (you'll notice the same effect with codral night time tablets) so it gets

6. tramadol ( Zydol, or Tramal) - or as I like to call them, "tiny little capsules of joy". These were the most effective, least side-effective of all the drugs I tried. They work reasonably fast, you can combine them with nurofen, and they don't cause any weird drowsiness or hallucinations. So two thumbs up and from me.

Unfortunately as you'd probably gathered from the title of the post, in the end though the drugs weren't solving the problem, only addressing the symptom. I'd been to see my GP a couple of times, with no conclusive diagnosis, a neurologist who said it *might* be a migraine brought about from muscle tension, and I'd had CT and MRI scans which showed nothing abnormal. So despite being reassured that there wasn't anything wrong, and being about $600 poorer for the knowledge, in fact I still didn't know anything at all. (Relax, this story has a happy ending - I went to medicare and got nearly $400 back so I'm only $200 poorer after all.)

So this week when I had a debilitating headache on Tuesday, I went to a physio recommended to me by a good friend. The physio poked me in my neck and said "does it hurt here?". When I recovered from the intense pain of said poking, she informed me that the headache was probably referred from tension in my neck and that my neck shouldn't actually feel like a solid lump of bone but should feel like the soft tissue which it in fact is. When I told her I'd been renovating and this so far involved repainting our house, she said "well there's your problem" and told me to stop painting for a few weeks. (what a pity!)

So here I am, two physio treatments later and drug free and loving it. I'm going back for more treatments quite possibly for the next couple of months as there are neck, shoulder and back muscle issues that she has yet to deal with. But in general ... I'd say it's a good outcome! And for the physio!

or, how to spot a nerd at 5 paces ...

This story revolves around my love of parent radio, you know, the radio station that parents listen to when driving the kids to school, because it has a nice mix of news, current affairs, opinion and music. See when I was a kid, it seemed pretty boring. Then I discovered JJJ and "rebellion" of a kind ... and then Adam Spencer left JJJ and I was adrift in a sea of podcasts and MP3s on my iRiver. Ah! But then I found Adam again on the aforementioned parent radio ... then started listening to other programs there ... and decided that the mix of news, current affairs, opinions and - well - Adam's choice in music - really suited me! So here I am, a triplej convert (or maybe I'm just getting old ..) and the other day I was listening to the Drive show and there was a segment about fake movie reviews, someone was trying to guess which of a series of wildly improbable descriptions was the real movie review.

One of the reviews was for the movie "Dummy" (1979) which turned out to be "A deaf and dumb young man is accused of murdering a prostitute and defended by a deaf lawyer, starring LeVar Burton as the young man" (rather than "Babies see red when clinical research into pacifiers gets contaminated").... waaaaaaiiiiit a minute. Isn't LeVar Burton that guy who was in Star Trek? Wow, turns out he did a lot more stuff than that.

So anyway they had fake reviews for other films, one of which was "A hairdresser sets up shop in the trenches of WWI" - which was referenced in an episode of Black Books that we watched the other night. The world really is fundamentally interconnected**.

... but wait, there's more ...

The inspiration for this blog was that I was sitting watching other people play poker (because I had lost already) and somehow, somewhere, someone said something about "Potemkin" .... and I said - that's the name of the Starship in the episode where there were 2 Will Rikers ... *gulp* ... instantly I was hounded about the depth of my nerdiness, not only did I know of Will Riker, but I know the names of the starships in the episodes ... at least I didn't know the episode name, I had to google for it. So I did, and that led me to LeVar Burton, which led me to Dummy, which led me to Black Books, which led me to ... well, wherever we are.

Oh and btw - in that episode of Star Trek, Will Riker wins a hand of poker (with Worf and Data) with a full house. And then plays against himself and there's a whole lotta bluffing .... but anyway - I believe we have come full circle.

I am going to take my nerdiness off to bed now.

*megaphone diplomacy has nothing to do with this blog entry, but it was mentioned on parent radio recently. And I liked the term.

** oh and hey, it's funny how the java thingammy that shows how all weblogs are fundamentally interconnected, has failed because there are too many blogs. Hehe.

.... we're hunting WABBITS!

Last night we played a game of Trivial Pursuit - those two words that meant so much back in 1983 have been revamped with a shiny new board. Whoever came up with the idea to change the names of the categories should be shot though, because whatever "GT" is (Gran Turismo, maybe?) it's still full of sport questions... but I digress.

One of the questions we had was what is the common name of Sylvilagus palustris hefneri - well it seems Hugh Hefner has had a species of Rabbit named after him. Isn't that interesting. I wonder if the writers of the new Tribble Forsooth used Wikipedia as their main information resource. That, and the Big Print Guide to the Sydney Olympics ....

And of course the inevitable controversy arose - should they be called "Pie" or "Cheese" or just the boring "Wedge"? When I played it was always Cheese. But D™ thinks it should be Pie. And the rules say Wedge. So who knows, but at least it's consistently about food.

In unrelated news, yesterday a young man was taken to Goulburn Hospital suffering a gunshot wound to the thigh. Apparently his dad mistook him for a rabbit, or something.

Son: "Dad, what are we hunting again? Rabbits, or ducks?"
Dad: "DUCK, SON"

*kapow*

---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: 7 May 2006 21:26:44 -0700
Subject: Weekly Horoscope
To: butercup

************************************************************
This week May 8 through May 14

Aquarius

Mars continues to move through your health zone and is spurring you on to greater things. You want more for yourself, and you also want to look better and feel more wonderful than you have in some time. The Sun squares Neptune on Wednesday which may blur the edges of reality and make it more difficult to find out what is fact and what is fiction. You could also be the one blurring the edges of reality because you aren't prepared to take a stand - so check out your attitude if you have a problem with someone.

************************************************************

It seems that this week I'm going a bit soft at the edges, but that I'd like to feel more wonderful that usual. I'm not sure exactly what that's all about, because I make a point of being happy in my skin - and not to spend too much time regretting things I can't change. That being the case, though, I am obviously willing to better myself - q.v. recent completion of one MBA.

The thing about horrorscopes, is that I firmly (or blurrily) believe that we make our own come true. If you read one of these things, and that changes your outlook so that you (for example) take a stand where you have a problem with someone, then you can either say "wow, my horoscope came true!" or you can get real, and understand that all it's doing is reminding you to look at everything you encounter and maybe squeeze some opportunities from that.

So this week, I guess I should sharpen up. Time to focus those blurry edges and become even more wonderful than I have been to date.

... oh wait, maybe that's because I haven't put in my contact lenses today.

The last man on earth walks into a bar.
What does he say?

Drink, I'd like another bartender.

I'm reading a book called The Rule of Four, which has been described as "The Da Vinci Code for people with brains" ... which in itself was enough of a recommendation for me to read it. It's about some Princeton students delving into a 15th Century mystery hidden within the Hypnerotomachia Poliphilii. Dare ya to say *that* 10-times-fast.

(deep breath) that that that that that that that that that that

Although I'm not going to devolve into a book review here, you should know that this book is truly astounding. It covers Renaissance theories of art, philosophy, music, mathematics, and religion, all while preparing a final graduate thesis at Princeton. But even apart from that, it surprises me with genuinely laugh-out-loud moments, like the joke above. If I haven't convinced you to check it out, then I give up.

If you'd done as I asked, and calibrated yourself according to my sci-fi top 10 books, then you still won't know why I liked this book so much.

So here, for your literary amusement and edification (edifiction?), is my mostly-not-sci-fi top 10 book list. To make it on the list, the book must be well written, thought provoking, and above all, readable more than once. Depending on my mood, the order of books in the list will change, but this is the order in which they sprang to mind... (tonight ...)

• The Secret History (Donna Tartt)
• Anything in the Sherlock Holmes Canon (Arthur Conan Doyle)
• The Return of the King (JRR Tolkein) - yes, the third book. I know what I'm talking about.
  
• the Mordant's Need duo (Stephen Donaldson)
• The Number of the Beast (Robert Heinlein)
• Kafka On The Shore (Haruki Murakami)
• Quicksilver (Neal Stephenson)
• His Dark Materials trilogy (Philip Pullman)
• Persuasion (Jane Austen)
• The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy (Douglas Adams)

There you have it. Another list. I haven't finished The Rule of Four yet, so I can't tell you if it will make it onto my "must read again" list. But it was definitely worth all $4.95 to get it at the clearance table at the local bookstore. Did I ever tell you my failsafe for picking a book to buy? I call it "The Middle Page Test". Open the book in the store, at a random page somewhere in the middle, and determine if the paragraphs you read there make you want to read more. If yes, it passes The Middle Page Test. If no, then put it down and pick up the next one. If it's not well written enough to make you want to read on from some random page, then it's not worth starting.

Oh and it makes for a nice glitch in the matrix when you come across that Middle Page later on.

I recently became the proud owner of a dinosaur. A bright blue, shiny four-wheeled dinosaur. It's a mode of transport that unashamedly uses non-renewable resources and contributes to greenhouse gases, blah blah blah, but it's also cute and enables me to get to and from work, appointments, or shopping centres fairly consistently. If I was to rely on public transport (another dinosaur, only slower) then I'd either never get anywhere, or if I did go places, I wouldn't carry anything. But the fact of the matter is, it's time for the internal combustion engine to evolve. Into something that's more efficient at converting even deader dinosaurs into propulsion. Or something that converts a less non-renewable resource. Or whatever.

Seeing as about 10 million* of the 4 million people who live in Sydney** own at least 1 car*** and drive it to work every day, it's not surprising that almost everyone you talk to about driving, complains about the high fuel prices at the moment. Something like $1.40/L is about the average this week. There are ads for those current affairs shows where they promise to "find Sydney's cheapest fuel" or "expose politicians worsening Sydney's fuel crisis" or whatever. But the fact of the matter is - oil is a global commodity. Developing nations rely on oil for all that development they are doing. Developed nations - which should know better - consistently don't bother to research alternative fuel sources, because as soon as prices drop, public awareness drops, and governments divert funds to whatever is higher on the political impact scale. A columnist recently said that higher prices at the petrol pump are actually a good thing - because they spur research into alternatives, for one thing. Why is this the first column saying "hey guys, think about the environment! If petrol's too expensive for you, catch the train!".

I don't get why people complain about petrol prices, and why do people expect the government to "fix it", and by "fixing it" do things like lowering fuel taxes, lowering or at least not raising, interest rates, lowering personal taxes, blah blah. Why not "fix it" by researching alternatives. Or making roads more suitable for public transport and much less suitable for personal cars. Or offering more alternatives to being "at work" (maybe improve broadband infrastructure so more people can telecompute for more time). Think outside the box? Or car?

I'd like to add more content here, but time's a wasting, so go read that column from SMH. Meanwhile, I'm a normal person. So until it's more uncomfortable for me to sit in my cosy blue dinosaur than not to, I'm going to carpark my way to work, shops and other places. With the other 9,999,999 car drivers in Sydney. Hang the expense.


* Didn't you read my post on statistics before?
** See note 1.
*** See note 2.

So the other night, I watched about 10 minutes of Cold Case before giving up on it, but it was a veritable who's who of where are they now. Cast members from one of my favourite TV shows that's no longer being made and from my favouritest movie ever were in it, as well as a cast member who left one my least favouritest TV shows ever to go make movies ...

Are you confused?

The episode was Volunteers.

Buffy's Amber Benson was there, ok as "dead body", but she had a couple lines at the start before she got shot. Hmm, she got shot in Buffy too. For Buffy fans out there, she's now dating the dude who played Warren. Who shot her. Now *that's* irony.

Then there was the chick who plays Shannon in Lost (in a brown wig)... the wig threw me, that and the fact that I can't stand Lost ... but I recognised her eventually ....

And the evil Prince - yes, Humperdinck from The Princess Bride (Chris Sarandon) was a sleazy Life Coach. You could just see him telling his pupils "I always think everything is a trap. Which is why I'm still alive." ... And prefacing every claim with "Unless I am wrong, and I am never wrong ..."

And (I can't resist one more..) "I knew it! I knew you were bluffing! I knew he was .. <gulp> bluffing"

So, once again, credit for this post's inspiration goes to The Man. He's so helpful.

-----Original Message-----
From: D™
Sent: Tuesday, 18 April 2006 1:40 PM
To: butercup
Subject: Re: that cold case show

Cold case, sounds like a blog entry to me, since you are card carrying, buffy and princess bride, FANatic and very anti-lost.

Overheard outside the Art Gallery on Saturday:

Mummy: "So what do you think priceless means?"
Junior: "Priceless is when something is so expensive even Nanny can't afford it"

- cue Mummy peeing her pants. As did several assorted bystanders.

Anyway so I was at the Art Gallery on Saturday to absorb some culture, or at least some secondhand pretentiousness by seeing the Archie-bowls with Jarv. I could have it completely wrong, but it seemed that people were there just so they could say "I went to see the Archibowls". They clustered around the paintings, made "hmmm" sounds and stroked their chins, then exited with alacrity - without seeing any of the other exhibitions ... like the Wynne prize, which is one of Australia's longest running art prizes ...

But what really bugged me is that they cluster so *close* around the pictures. These things are about 12 square metres!! How on earth can you absorb the impact when you're 20cm from them? What, are you critiquing the brushwork? Geez people, for some things it's actually better to be a bit *further* away from the action.

[deep breath]
<mantra>
I must remember that every single person in the Art Gallery has their own problems, their own inspirations, their own concerns. I can't project myself onto them in order to understand their motives. Just because I wouldn't do the same things as them doesn't make them any less worthy of respect. It's a lesson in patience.
</mantra>

Oh dear. I've hijacked a line from HMS Pinafore for a post title. No matter how much I resist, the damn musicals have permeated my reality matrix.

So anyway, last night DTM and I sat around sipping cocktails in the Monkey Bar before going to see Phoenix's latest production. Okay it's not the Slip Inn of the title, but it's still an establishment that serves alcohol, and maybe a Danish Prince will turn up there one day....

Being a bar, on a Friday night, there was the typical "Froiday Noight Footeee" on the screens with associated garbled noise blaring from the overhead speakers. One of the more annoying things about Froiday Noight Footeee in Sydney (or maybe Australia..) is that it spawns "Tipping Competitions". These things might be more interesting if they actually involved tipping of say, cows, or tipping as in gratuity, but in fact it's not. It's about picking the teams which will win over a given weekend of the annual Footeee season. Highly interesting, I know.

So despite my sport-free world, somehow I got roped into joining a tipplefootle competition at my place of work. I'm still not sure how it happened. I think I'm just too nice. The first week, I made a little bit of effort and chose teams based on which uniform I liked best. The second week, I used the "randomiser" function of the tipping service provider. Both methods provided very average results (I got less than 50% right). So I've got a new theory: the team name that comes earlier in the alphabet is going to win. It's less effort than choosing the uniforms, and more thought than bonking on the "randomise me" button. I figure it's a nice compromise, and anything over 50% right is a bonus.

The other annoying thing about Froiday Noight Footeee is the way it overwhelms almost any medium of news or current affairs on Fridays .... but that's another rant.

I'm going to see the Archies today. I think that will be a good antidote to Footeee Tipping.

Michael is known for complaining that the English language is imprecise, and there are far too many words which can be misunderstood. For instance, a word may have two (or more) distinct meanings dependent on context. Also, there are many words that sound the same, so in spoken conversation you can get all confused. Like what? you ask. Let's consider an ordinary conversation:

Me: Hi Michael
Michael: High.
Me: Did you have a great weekend?
Michael: My weak end was grate. Ewe?
Me: Err.. good, thanks. Would you like a cup of tea?
Michael: Yes, I wood like tee.

... and so on.

<<warning - if you don't understand French, you're likely to be extremely bored by the next bit. Go read Dilbert instead. Today's wit: "[A marketing biathlon is] where you ski up to people who don't buy your crap and shoot them".>>

Consider this poem.

Suivez le guide!

LE GUIDE

Suivez le guide !

UN TOURISTE

Je suis le guide.

SON CHIEN

Je suis mon maître.

UNE JOLIE FEMME

Je suis le guide.
Donc je ne suis pas une femme
puisque je suis un homme.

LE TOURISTE

Je suis cette jolie femme.

SON CHIEN

Et moi aussi, je suis cette femme,
puisque je suis mon maître.

LE GUIDE

Suivez le guide.
Moi , je ne suis pas le guide,
puisque je suis le guide.

LE TOURISTE

Je voudrais bien savoir qui est cette jolie femme que je suis.

SON CHIEN

Je ne suis pas mon maître,
puisque je suis mon maître
et que cela m'ennuie.

LA JOLIE FEMME

Je suis le guide, je suis la foule,
je suis un régime, je suis la mode,
je ne suis plus une enfant... Oh ! J'en ai assez !
Je ne suis plus personne.

(elle disparaît.)

LE GUIDE

Oh ! J'en ai assez !
Je démissionne.

(il disparaît.)

LE TOURISTE

Oh ! Je ne suis plus le guide,
je ne suis plus un homme,
je ne suis plus une femme,
je ne suis plus rien.

(il disparaît.)

LE CHIEN

Enfin ! Je ne suis plus mon maître,
donc je suis mon maître
et je ne visiterai pas les châteaux de la Loire !

Jacques Prévert

It's very funny if you understand French. The humour is a play on the words "je suis" which can mean "I am" or "I am following" - it doesn't really translate into English, but you get the idea, right? Ok you can go back to Dilbert now.

(Je disparais.)

A little while ago I tried to write a complete post about the RU486 controversy in Australia. The story goes like this:

1. Drug availability in Australia is generally regulated by the Therapeutic Goods Administration
2. The Federal Health Minister, (currently Tony Abbott), has veto power over "restricted goods" of which one happens to be RU486
3. The aforementioned RU486 induces abortion
4. Proposed legislation before Federal Parliament would remove the Health Minister's veto power, effectively giving the TGA final say over introduction of all drugs, not just the "non-restricted" ones.

Add some content-free media circus performers and you get
Conclusion: Tony Abbot wants to have a say in abortion.

Does anyone else see the problem with this? As Buffy said, "your logic does not resemble our Earth logic".

Anyway my original post was going to be some pithy remarks about how the TGA is best placed to make decisions on drugs, and it should *never* be in parliamentary hands because at least the TGA has a better chance of finding out the real science behind the drugs where the MPs are influenced by/able to cast blame on the amorphous mass of "public opinion" or "the electorate" or "lobby groups" (or "plain pig-headedness"). And that the debate was not, and never was, about whether the Government Controls Abortion, and the planned usage of any particular drug shouldn't even be considered in the debate.

Luckily it was all over by the time I had barely started the post, so I never had to try to finish it or massage it into some kind of shape suitable for publishing. And the decision? That the TGA should make the final decision about drug introduction to the Australian market. And all thanks to those level-headed politicians who actually seemed to be voting in the best interests of the country rather than today's favourite lobby group. (I'm not referring to Tony Abbot, of course).

But! It seems that the aforementioned media circus has finally realised this! At least - they have finally published some comments from real medical professionals saying that RU486 is not about abortion, it's about more control over reproduction, and by the way that parliamentary debate wasn't about RU486 at all so can we please just get on with it?

Ahh. It's times like these I wonder if I really need a blog. The world seems to be able to sort itself out without me.

We have a guest poster today. The man behind the grander spanner and co-producer of the story of my life that is buter's blog.

Yes folks, it's time for (drum roll please) D™'s first story.

So it was another tri-annual, super fun, Super6, waterskiing weekend last weekend. The story being 3 couples, of whom a disproportionate third supply both the place to stay and the boat to ski behind whilst the other 2 thirds supply alcohol (not while boating of course), good company and good looks. The favourite spot is the Wisemans Ferry area of the Hawkesbury river north of Sydney. Through several years of trial and error we have discovered that the best time to ski there is March, towards the end is better for cooler days but the water is a fairly consistent 24°C and extremely pleasant for a dip or a ski. The middle of the day also coincided with the ebb tide for the river and some of the finest water anyone had ever seen. Michael helpfully stated that if anyone had trouble skiing it can only have been due to their complete lack of talent.

The flavour of the weekend this time was wakeboarding. It's usually a mixture of 1 and 2 ski waterskiing with some wakeboarding. This time it was pure wakeboarding and with spectacular results. Great leaps were made by the 3 n00bs with Nicko actually landing the aforementioned great leap. Michael maintained the grade with wake clearing leaps (from a the toe-side approach) and mastered both the mid-air and cross-wake switch. D™ made lots of holes in the water with his head and is on the waiting list for a new spleen. The People's Choice award went to Vic (Vodkatoria) C. After a previous wakeboarding effort which ended badly with a cranium-first-entry and ringing ears, she sucked it in, got up first go and made great strides towards wakeboarding greatness. Other on-water entertainment included two girls mudwrestling in the black mud exposed by the low tides of the weekend and the extraordinarily good conditions.

The downside of the weekend was the affirmation that a weekend of boating is great for everyone except the owner of the boat. A dislodged accelerator spring made for interesting boarding for Michael when the boat took off with much-gusto before unceremoniously dumping him when Vic killed the engine to prevent him trying to wakeboard at 80km/h (the boat's top speed). But more was in store the next day when a suspected overheated engine stranded Power Play on the quiet side of the river, 3 km from the boat ramp and against the tide. Paddling provided extremely trivial headway and after 45 minutes of failed attempts at flagging, help arrived when we were rescued, Bundaberg-Rum-style, by a boat of beauties and enough engine to get us back to the ramp in 20 minutes. Our saviours refused payment upon condition of upholding the boat code and returning the favour if required, and we were as always happy to oblige. We found a really nifty use for plastic money too. You can swim with it.

And to round off the day, the electric winch on the boat trailer conked out with the boat halfway out of the water. Thankfully the backup hand winch came to the rescue but left Michael with quite a to-do-list and more proof that boats are fun, but they are also money pits.

.... or as I like to put it, we were just messing about in boats.

For the record, the mudwrestlers were not the two girly girls whose complete lack of talent at wakeboarding was entirely due to not even trying.

Yep, it's that time. The 'Friendly Games' have started in Melbourne. You all know I'm not really a sports freak. In fact my only skill probably lies in fooling people into thinking I can fence. That came to a head when I was appointed a competition president for the fencing portion of the World Junior Modern Pentathlon a couple of years ago. After that, fencing seems to have gone by the wayside.

Anyway, today's story is about .. "which games?" "The Commonwealth Games". So being a non-sporting person, I always approach the television coverage with cynicism. All those youthful athletic sweaty bodies, all that competitiveness and ambition ... but then when I sit down and watch it, something comes over me .... seeing the competitors from the low-profile nations entering the stadium ... there's the team that took 9 days to travel to the Games because they had to catch the mail ship out to England and fly from there (they have to leave before the closing ceremony to catch the mail ship back) ... there's the team that had no uniforms until Channel 9 organised some for them ..

It's like, these really are a friendly competition. Apart from all the winning, and stuff, there's a whole bunch of people who are just so glad to be there, representing their country. It's a very warm'n'fuzzy feeling to see their faces when they entered the MCG and all 80,000 people cheered for them. In some cases that's probably more than their entire population! As someone said, these countries are sub-olympic microdots on the face of the earth, and this is their only chance to shine. In spite of - or perhaps because of - the missing Americans, Chinese and Eastern Europeans, these Games are more about fun than winning. Or it could just be that we all had to learn English ... so the teams and officials can actually all converse reasonably freely in the same language. (Is that why the Americans don't come?)

Well, except for Australia. For us, it's still all about the winning. Isn't it?

No, I don't know what it means either. But tonight I was at a loss for things to not watch on telly, so I whacked in the ol' Serenity DVD. If you haven't heard of Serenity, shame on you, and if you've heard of it but you haven't seen it, shame on you twice over.

But, gratuitous movie links aside, very early on in the film, oh about 6 minutes in, one character says "The neural stripping does tend to fragment their own reality matrix".

Errr, what? Of course this is an endearing bit of pseudotechnopsychobabble on the part of Joss Whedon (or some hack) but the term has lodged itself securely in my reality matrix and it's doing its part to fragment what's left there.

It's like, I am exposed to so much information and so many new ideas, every day, that I don't have time to process them all adequately. And so they either go into weird dreams about peaches and Clueless, or they just float around in my subconscious, taking up valuable real estate, and giving me a vague sense of always having forgotten something. Or of someone watching me. (I get mixed up sometimes.) But what tends to happen is that I feel a bit - well - fragmented. I think making blog posts serves as a way to mildly defrag the reality matrix. A chance to say some random things that were inspired by other random things, and let it all just flow.

Speaking of flow, here's a segue into some more random thoughts. I don't know about you, but I sometimes feel a little swamped by all the "stuff" there is out there on the InterWeb. There's so much information, so many jokes, so many games, so much weather... just so much, well, stuff. It's hard to sift through and find things that are not only interesting on first read, but that remain interesting, and are worth revisiting.

For instance, there are approximately 6.5 billion people on this planet*. From all those people, how many blogs do you think there might be that are actually creative enough to draw in passers-by, and of the creative ones, how many that manage to maintain that without degenerating into stories about "grilled cheese and potty training"? Speaking of reading blogs, the story I linked by WSJ just there, has some funny statistics which you should read if you have the time (or the attention span).

I feel much better now. I think the reality matrix is no longer quite so fragmented, (apart from a few minor glitches) so I shall bid you adieu.

Have fun storming the castle.

* from this point on, approximately 87.4% of the statistics are made up. Including this one.

What makes a blog or a book worth reading?
What makes a podcast or a radio program worth listening to?
What makes a TV show or movie worth watching and then buying the DVD so you can watch it again and again?

You guessed it folks, the answer is - "content".

I've recently started listening to an excellent podcast called The Daily Breakfast. It's produced by a fellow called Father Roderick who happens to be a Catholic priest in Amersfoort, a town in The Netherlands.

If you've been a loyal reader of this blog you will recall that I mentioned my philosophy of religious tolerance - why then, you ask, am I listening to a Catholic podcast? Well first off, it's not about Catholicism per se. It just happens to be produced by a Catholic priest. Secondly, my philosophy of tolerance means that I will be happy to listen to podcasts by practitioners of any religion - as long as they satisfy one key requirement - good content.

That's the thing, folks. Content is key. Fr Roderick knows this. He advocated it in one of the podcasts I listened to this morning. (I think from early January). His podcast is informative, easy going, and interesting. Which is just what I need sitting in my car in the Victoria Road car park in the mornings.

Not every story can have a good ending though. This morning my iRiver decided not to work (some blah about running out of battery power..) so I was stuck with listening to CDs or to the ever-so-crappy morning radio programs. It's good, but really there's only so much of Classic FM that one person can handle .. and all the other "breakfast programs" are totally content free!! Take for example, the radio station that is running some insane competition where the prize is $1000 for every medal Australia wins at the Commonwealth Games in Melbourne. (For the record, Australia won 82 gold medals last time) .... aaaaah, but don't get me started on sports.

Aarrrrghh ... I have a whole bunch of stuff to write about. But in the interests of actually posting this - you will have to wait.

So in other news, books you must read this week are:
Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials series (sorry, you can't borrow them from me as D™ is still reading them)
Garth Nix's Old Kingdom books
The Red Queen by Matt Ridley (about the evolution of human nature)
William Gibson's Neuromancer
And anything by Haruki Murakami , but in particular Kafka on the Shore.

If you've read them already, then re-read them.


// content ends

The waiter has a nice Valentime story, and I've shamelessly pilfered words from that for the title. But then, it's not like they're copyright, after all he heard it from a customer.

So anyway the whole Valencrime Hallmarketing exercise bores me to tears as I'm sure it does for most of my loyal readers. If you know D™ and I you know that we don't bother with it. Why don't we bother with it? Because it's foolish to save all your lovin' up for one day of the year, and then spend far too much money buying cheesy crap that you could get cheaper in the post-Christmas sales and then throw out in the post-Christmas cleanup. Besides we subscribe to Stevie's philosophy (I didn't realise we did so until I read about it today - but there you go, I guess everything's been done before. And posted on the internet.)

But the thing that truly bugs me about Valenschwein's day is the proliferation of "V-day sux" websites. Here's one for example. Frankly people, don't you think that posting blogs, editorials, what-have-you about how bad the whole thing is, would have the opposite effect to what you intend? Isn't the point of your rants that you want people to ignore the whole thing? And yet by posting such (sometimes) well-written rants you raise the awareness of the day all over again.

I advocate religious tolerance, which also includes tolerating random celebratory days for saints, prophets, boddhisatvas, diseases, what-have-you. But my own special brand of tolerance (which let's face it can't be unique, see above) is basically apathy. If you want to observe said celebratory day, I don't care, just don't force me to do so as well. And I'll choose which celebratory days to observe for myself. I pick Invasion Day, We-Lost-The-Battle-But-Not-The-War Day, and October-Random-Long-Weekend-Because-We-Needed-Another-Holiday Day. The people I work for also tell me not to come to work at assorted other times throughout the year. Who am I to disagree?

So in the end, I think if you disagree with any particular religious or secular or marketing "International Day of" then the best thing to do is ignore it and maybe it will go away.

But then, what would I know. After all I'm posting too! But technically my rant is directed toward the rants. It's a rant rant. Or an anti rant rant. Or something.

When we were kids, we would often spend at least one morning of the weekend at the local library. Once we started going to high school, though, there was either no time for the local library, or maybe we had enough books at school. I dunno. But it's one of the things I miss. Making the time to go to a library, and wandering round, choosing books, reading anything that looks interesting, seeing new books there and borrowing them to take home .. I really enjoyed that.

Nowadays we still don't go to the library. I'm all growed up, and still living in the vicinity of the same public library as when I was a kid. And although I still think about going to the library, I'm more likely to get my new book fix by going to the bookstore and buying whatever it is. Or getting the DVD ... I think I could probably save a lot of dollars if I stopped buying books and started borrowing them again. If I read it once, and think it's worth reading again, then maybe I could buy it, but otherwise I'm saving not only money but shelf space. The other day, D™ was stacking my Christmas present-load of books onto the bookshelf and we've actually totally filled it up. Double stacked.

So imagine my joy when my mate Hiren somehow managed to smuggle this into the country for me. I'd like to take the time to say WOW. For sending me a present, for managing to put an Australian stamp on it, for it arriving just in time for my birthday, all from Heidelberg. Give that man a pat on the back, he's pretty clever!

In other news, T-day is rapidly approaching and I'm dead certain it's going to rain. Bob said so.

p.s. Thanks Hiren, you rock.

Edit: Yay for the University of Michigan for supporting Google Print. It looks like one day I won't have to even go to the library to borrow books!

Happy Chinese New Year, for those of you who follow the tradition.

We had a nice gathering at my parents' place, dinner (massive) with relatives (many). A small selection of the dishes served are shown below, but trust me when I say it was all Fabulous and Filling!


Now that we are well into the new year (of the Dog) you should take the time to have a look at what your horoscope predicts for the year. For Dragons like me, it's a year of caution, rather than letting loose with normal dragon tendencies. Which corresponds nicely to the advice for Rabbits like D™ - which is to throw caution to the winds. Well, I think we will just forge ahead in our own way, and make the best of what life has to offer. It's too short to do otherwise.

So, 恭喜發財 (Gong Hei Fat Choi) - Congratulations and be prosperous!