Purple Wyrm – Page 125

Hey Hey it’s Bigotry!

We’re not all ignorant rednecks you know…

I thought I’d better weigh in on the whole Hey Hey it’s Saturday blackface incident since it seems to be getting a lot of international attention and I don’t particularly want to be tarred with the same brush (oh man, that sounds like a really bad pun, sorry) that so many of my fellow Australians seem to be being tarred with.

(If you don’t know what it’s all about, just Google it)

The important facts that a lot of commentators seem ignorant of are as follow…

1: Blackface doesn’t have the same notoriety here in Australia as it does overseas. We have a different culture here to the United States and don’t have the long and shameful history of blackface on the stage and cinema. Sadly a lot of Australians are completely ignorant of this history and are hence unaware of the pain and offence it can cause.

2: The performance on Hey Hey was a recreation of an act originally staged 20 years ago. Idiotic football celebrities aside it’s a rare and notable thing to see anyone done up in blackface in modern Australia for any reason (and if it does occur it’s met with disapproval and severe criticism).

3: The performers are of various racial backgrounds, including Indians and Asians. It’s not a simple case of a bunch of white Anglo Saxons blacking up.

4: Hey Hey is (God knows why) a treasured and well loved piece of Australian culture, attacks on which by ‘foreigners’ seems to trigger a strange and disproportionate form of ‘my country right or wrong’ defence from some sectors of the community.

Basically the act was not intended to cause offence, or reference the blackface stereotype. It was just a bit of really badly thought out idiocy that never should have gone to air if anyone at Channel Nine had actually stopped and used their brains for a few seconds. The fact that it did go to air, and that it did cause offence is something that should be unreservedly apologised for.

Now, onto the reactions. While the innocent (albeit thoroughly stupid) intent of the performers can be defended, the resulting act and the offence caused cannot. There seems to be a certain sector of the Australian population (many of them members of the anti ‘political correctness’ brigade) who are leaping up and down over some perceived right to slather boot polish on their faces and go around loudly eating watermelon on the basis that “it’s just a joke” and “people shouldn’t be so sensitive”. A lot of these people are hitting on two particular points in their arguments, which I shall now address.

1: Harry Connick Junior once took part in a sketch parodying a black preacher, and used makeup to darken his skin. Hence he’s a hypocrite.

2: Robert Downey Junior was made up as an African American man in Tropic Thunder and no one complained.

Neither of these points is particularly valid. Yes, Harry Connick Junior was made up with darkened skin for that sketch, but there’s a difference between the slight darkening employed there, and the wholesale boot polish job employed on Hey Hey. Similarly in Tropic Thunder the make up and prosthetics employed actually make Robert Downey Junior look African American – as opposed to a white man painted black – and much of the humour in the movie is based around the inappropriateness of using make up (and plastic surgery) to make a white actor look black. This subtlety seems to be lost of a lot of people defending the Hey Hey act.

So that’s my two cents. I guess what I’m trying to say is that there’s plenty of Australians – such as myself – who were outraged, disgusted and embarrassed by the fact that such a performance should be put to air in modern day Australia, and who are just as outraged, disgusted and embarrassed by the ignorant loudmouths trying to defend it. Insomuch as I can personally apologise for the actions of my fellow Australians I do so, completely and unreservedly. Sorry.

What a lucky man he was!

This is your whale. This is your whale on drugs.

Hmmm, well I haven’t done much posting recently have I? I’ll put it down to getting back into the swing of work and spending much of my time uploading and annotating photos from my UK trip. I’ve almost finished the first day’s worth!

I’ve also got caught up in a writing challenge on Whitechapel. It’s the first time I’ve tried writing anything but mindless blog drivel and role playing material in ages, so we’ll see how it goes. The deadline is November 1st – with luck it’ll actually be readable by then.

Kraft has come to it’s senses and realised that “iSnack 2.0” is one of the worst marketing decisions in history. They’ve posted a bunch of more popular names to their website for the public to vote on and will be announcing the replacement name this week. I didn’t bother to vote – I’m just happy that clueless tech-speech abomination is being banished. Anyway, the only name I would have voted for is ‘Voldemite’ and that wasn’t on the list.

Before I go I’ll direct everyone’s attention to this song, which I discovered over the weekend – “Lucky Man” by Emerson Lake and Palmer. The song itself is (in my opinion) nothing special, a fairly dreary rock-folk dirge about a guy who goes off to war and gets shot. What makes it remarkable is the play out, the only explanation for which I can come up with is that they got a humpbacked whale in to do guest vocals and dosed it up on LSD.

Listen to the first 20 seconds or so to get the scope of the piece (it’s all like that), then jump to 3.20 to be astounded by the assorted wails, shrieks, groans and howls you get when you pump twenty litres of hallucinogens into a giant sea-going mammal!

That’s all I’ve got to say.

I can’t stop listening to this…

I’m not very good at singing songs but here’s a try…

If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch,
You must first invent the universe,
Space is filled with a network of wormholes,
You might emerge somewhere else in space,
Somewhen else in time,

The sky calls to us,
If we do not destroy ourselves,
We will one day,
Venture to the stars,

A still more glorious dawn awaits,
Not a sunrise, but a galaxy rise,
A morning filled with four hundred billion suns,
The rising of the milky way,

The cosmos is full beyond measure,
With elegant truths,
Of exquisite interrelationships,
Of the awesome machinery of nature,

I believe our future depends powerfully on how well we understand this cosmos,
In which we float like a mote of dust in the morning sky,

The brain does much more than just recollect,
It intercompares, synthesises, analyses,
It generates abstractions,
The simplest thought like the concept of the number one,
Has an elaborate, logical underpinning,
The brain has its own language for testing the structure and consistency of the world,

A still more glorious dawn awaits,
Not a sunrise, but a galaxy rise,
A morning filled with four hundred billion suns,
The rising of the milky way,

The sky calls to us,
If we do not destroy ourselves,
We will one day,
Venture to the stars,

For thousands of years,
People have wondered about the universe,
Did it stretch out forever?
Or was there a limit?
From the big bang to black holes,
From dark matter to a possible big crunch,
Our image of the universe today is full of strange sounding ideas,

How lucky we are to live in this time,
The first moment in human history,
When we are, in fact, visiting other worlds,

A still more glorious dawn awaits,
Not a sunrise, but a galaxy rise,
A morning filled with four hundred billion suns,
The rising of the milky way,

The surface of the earth,
Is the shore of a cosmic ocean,
Recently we have waded a little way out,
And the water seems inviting…

Glorious Return

They couldn’t keep me silent forever!

Well, I’m back.

Actually I’ve been back for over a week, but madness involving unpacking, getting back to work and getting my landline fixed (no internet for days! days!!) have prevented me from doing much online. Even the Queen’s birthday weekend was a blow-out thanks to a nasty 24 hour cold that had me coughing like a Dickensian orphan and feeling like death for most of Sunday and Monday, but I’m more or less back on deck now.

I’ve started uploading my holiday snaps onto Flickr. This is quite a daunting prospect as it turns out I took hundreds, if not thousands of the things. I haven’t even managed to get all of the first day’s up yet – let alone annotated and geotagged. It’s clearly going to be a long term project, you can check my progress here.

Other things of note. The new Vegemite product has apparently been named “iSnack 2.0”. If this is the kind of thing that’s going to happen when I leave the country I can clearly never take a vacation again. Also, although I can’t speak as to the accuracy of the last panel, this XKCD pretty much describes every day of my life 🙂

OK, that’s it. Expect more updates soon. Probably.

Hotel

Venting my frustrations…

I have completely failed to make any blog entries while I’ve been here in the UK haven’t I? This is mainly because I’ve been having too much fun to spend time sitting in front of a computer typing away, but since this is my last day with regular internet access I suppose I’d better make some kind of effort, lest everyone thinks I’ve died. So I though I’d write a review of my hotel.

For reasons that will become obvious I’m not going to name the hotel. I’d also like to state that overall my experience there has been good. There are just a few things that got on my nerves…

So let’s begin.

The staff at the “Mystery Hotel” are well organised and friendly. Check in and out are quick and efficient – if on arrival however you are allocated to rooms 114 or 115 it’s best to ask for a map. These are placed far away from the rest of the first floor, requiring extensive navigation to locate. There are signs, but these peter out before you hit the first of several staircases. Be careful – one wrong turn and you could end up battling a snow-witch in a land where it’s always winter but never Christmas.

Your room will be clean with a wardrobe, a dresser, tea/coffee making facilties, a television, a phone and a safe. If you’re shelling out enough cash there may also be room to swing a cat – this is however London so a lack of space is only to be expected. You will have an onsuite bathroom, which is just the perfect size for you to brush your teeth without difficulty while sitting on the toilet. Hot water is both hot, wet and plentiful – in an unusual twist however cold water is in short supply, your tap producing just a half hearted trickle which refuses to alter in volume no matter how far you turn it.

Your toilet is a source of unending wonder – you will wonder for all eternity how it manages to produce noises akin to the base stop of a major pipe organ for several minutes after being flushed.

A continental breakfast buffet is provided in the basement restaurant. This is clean, well organised and packed to the gills with Spaniards by 8:00am, so get in early. The selection of food, drinks and condiments is perfectly adequate. The restaurant may be open for other meals – I’m honestly not sure. I did go down to check it out one evening but it was like the Mary Celeste down there, so I fled.

Eating options in the immediate area include the Pride of Paddington pub which does a very nice grilled chicken, three separate Italian restaurants in the space of about twenty metres of road, and a diner named Garfunkle’s just past Paddington station. I can recommend the gnocchi at Bizarro (perhaps that should be ‘me can recommends tasty potato dumpaling things’?) which comes with a free floor show from the serving staff who race around the place without break like their pants are on fire. Garfunkle’s is also very nice, but beware of the tendancy of the waitstaff to assume that any change they owe you is intended as a tip.

But back to the hotel. It offers a laundry service where you place your dirty clothes in the bag provided and leave them in your room. By the time you get back from your day’s activities the maid will have tidied your room, made your bed and neatly left the bag of still-dirty clothes on top of it. I found the best laundry option was to haul your clothes one block along the street towards Paddington Station to the Harlequin laundrette where a nice Muslim lady will have them washed, folded and ready to pick up by 5:00 that evening for about ten pounds.

Your hotel room includes a phone. This will not work. The procedure to get it working involves heading down to reception where they’ll explain that you need to pay a deposit of either 40 or 50 pounds (depending on who you’re talking to) before they’ll switch it on. It’s best to do this before you head out in the morning, as it gives them the full day to do absolutely nothing about it. On your return in the evening confirm that the phone is still not working. Head back down to reception and query this. They will express puzzlement and poke at a computer for a while before stating with confidence that they have no idea what’s going on. Ask them to look into it again, and with any luck your phone line will be sorted out by the time you return to the hotel the next day. Probably.

Transport connections are excellent with the hotel only two blocks from Paddington station. Busses charge up and down the street at all hours, and if you feel lucky you can try to catch one of the wildly bucking black cabs that hurtle around the Hilton in the nightly running of the taxis.

There is an internet terminal in the bar. You’re probably better off heading down the street to the Reload internet cafe. A weekly or monthly membership is fairly cheap and you not only get decent hardware and speeds, but you can enjoy the sound of the Underground trains as they whiz back and forth only a few metres through the wall from where you sit.

So, that pretty much sums up my hotel experience here in London. Tomorrow I’ll be heading to Southampton for a few days before flying home mid next week…

PS: The wedding was excellent! I’ve put some photos (note that “some” – I’ve got heaps more) up on my Flickr Stream

Chavs and Rude Boys

I think they’re kind of like bogans…

Well, this is it. I fly out tonight for the UK. As is usual for these kind of things I am in equal parts excited and terrified. And I haven’t even finished packing yet.

The terror in particular is compounded by my discovery yesterday that I totally screwed up my dates and am arriving in London a day earlier than I thought. On the upside this means I have an extra day to do stuff in. On the downside it means I have no accommodation booked for my first night. I imagine the hotel I’m staying at will be able to fit me in, but if not I may end up sleeping under a bridge, fighting off chavs and rude boys with a pocket knife.

So yeah. My plane leaves at 1:05am tonight. Wish me luck!

Foolish Musical Ideas

If I had the tools I’d do it myself.

Back in ancient historical era known as the 80s, British House giants Cauty and Drummond (perhaps you remember them as the KLF – also known as the Justified Ancients of Mumu, and furthermore known as the JAMs) sat down to create a House remix of the Doctor Who theme.

After messing around with it for some hours and getting nowhere they realised that it’s in triplet time, and you can’t do House in triplet time. So they threw the House idea out the window and just mashed the theme up with perhaps the most famous triplet rock song ever – Garry “I want to touch your children” Glitter’s Rock and Roll Part 2.

The result was one of the most successful and annoying novelty tracks of all time – Doctorin’ the Tardis – which transformed them into millionaires almost overnight.

The reason I mention this is that in the shower yesterday morning I realised that Marilyn “Oo! I’m so Evil!” Manson’s Beautiful People is also in triplet time. Which means you could easily do a Doctor Who – Beautiful People mashup!

Go on! What are you waiting for?! 😀

You might have Aspergers Syndrome if…

Your sexual preference is ‘get the hell away from me!’

Some applicable examples from an old list I stumbled over…

You have passed many a happy minute watching a fan spin.
On the one hand you think you are the most interesting person you know, but not too many other people are trying to get to know you.
People sometimes check you out to see if you really do, “know everything”.
You know the historical derivation of the word, “trivia”.
You get extremely disappointed in yourself if you don’t know something when you need to know it because you really *SHOULD* know that.
You choose the grocery aisle that you go down based on whether or not there are any other people in that aisle.
You will go many extra steps and take lots of extra time to figure out the answer to something rather than taking 30 seconds to ask someone.
You ever stayed with a hobby so long and with such intensity that you hurt yourself (can you say “carpal tunnel syndrome”?).
You talk back to the people on the TV and radio and call them idiots or say sarcastic things to commercials.
You think an old fashioned egg beater is a very cool toy.
One of your favorite hobbies is “autie spotting”.
You get irritated when people come up to talk to you when you are doing something important like staring at a wall.
You get irritated when people come by unannounced when you are totally getting into some research topic or painting or doing mosaics or whatever.
You feel somehow privileged to have insights into the subject of cultural anthropology because you have been studying anthropo’s your whole life trying to figure out what makes their culture tick.
You think “Cure Autism Now” ought to be called “Eliminate Autistics Now”.
You can smell the storm before it starts to rain, But you go and check the weather channel anyway just to be sure.
You’re friends with the church secretary, but can’t recognize her when you run into her in the store.
You keep bumping into people but the only time you actually remember to apologize is when you bump into a tree.
You forget to eat or drink for a few days because you are working on an interesting project.
Someone wants to get past you and says “excuse me” and you reply “sure” without moving a bit.
Someone asks you for directions but because you can’t remember streetnames you reply with “second chewing gum machine right, then left at the yellow fence the dogs use as marker…”
You constantly forget taking the trash out even if you walk past it all the time because it isn’t on your mental agenda of things to do.
You spend hours trying to figure out how someone could find a meaning in your words that was not there.
You clean up the house and later find you put the oranges in the shoeholder and the shoes in the fridge.
You are asked to write a short report and it gets over 10 pages long because otherwise you’d not fit all the important details in.
You are at a tour at a science museum and can’t help correcting your touring guide on matters of quantum mechanics.
You sit around trying to decide what to work on today, and by the time you are done deciding the day is over.
Someone tells you to “smile sometimes” and you reply “I’ll do it later.”
Your standard reply to any “when” questions is “In a moment” but your definition of a moment never agrees with anyone else.
You still remember poems you learned at school 25 years ago.
Someone tries to wash the dishes for you and you freak because your home is part of your personal space and you feel like they’ve touched you without asking.
As a child you didn’t comprehend the concept of lying or “teasing”. So if your older brother told you that clouds are floating rocks you believed him until you learnt otherwise in school.
You can’t stand kids but you spend inordinate amounts of time browsing through “Toys ‘R’ Us”.
You’ve ever re-enacted all the parts of a one-act play in the shower.
The words “Do you want fries with that” aggravate your PTSD.
You keep a couple of shoeboxes full of love letters you wrote but were scared to death of delivering.
Every couple of months you have a chuckle over the sword-on-the-table scene in “Get Smart” even though the last time you saw it was over 30 years ago.
You have to ransack your entire home a couple of times a week trying to find something you often need, and even though you usually don’t find what you’re looking for you find half a dozen useful other things you thought you’d lost.
You get your front door key out and ready to insert in the lock while still a minute’s walk from your house
You need to reinforce the foundations of your house to allow for the sheer tonnage of books you own and insist on keeping around, even though you remember everything in them.
You shop for new clothes once a year or less and only retire old ones when they are no longer providing enough coverage to avoid indecent exposure charges.
You own 7 sets of identical fleece trousers and soft cotton T-shirts.
You gave up on ever convincing people that you are not odd ages ago.
You hate having to talk on the phone and confine your conversational depth to ‘Yup’, ‘Nope’, and ‘Bye’.
You refer to what is supposedly your own species as “the humans”.
You shake your head and mutter “humans….” when you see some example of social behavior that you find unattractive.
The last time you moved house, you had 25 large boxes of books to every one smallish box of clothing.
It took you, your parents, a friend, and 4 movers 3 days to move all your stuff, and you were only moving out of a 2 bedroom apartment.
You don’t mind visitors signing their names in the dust on your furniture… but you’ll get pissed off if they add the date.
You’re the only person around who will decline an invite to a big party to stay at home to watch a TV show.
You wear jeans to the beach in the summer.
You can remember the exact date The Flintstones premiered (Oct. 1, 1960) and the name and production number of the first episode (P-1, “The Swimming Pool”) but completely forgot about the now-congealed casserole that’s been sitting in your microwave for three days.
You get really annoyed because you realize the first episode of “The Flintstones” to air on Oct. 1, 1960 was episode P-2, “The Flintstone Flyer” (it aired out of production order) but didn’t catch the mistake until you sent off the e-mail, and now you’re going to look like an idiot.

Countdown to arrival in the UK – 7 days…

The Invisible Wandjina of Coode Hill

You know, I can’t remember if it was Google Maps or Google Earth actually…

My life is getting more and more frantic the closer I get to my trip to the UK for Ali’s wedding (I have mentioned that on here before, right?). It’s madness at work, and madness at home as I try and get things sorted to jet out in the early hours of Monday next week (that is the Monday after the next Monday – we really need some more precise time-based terminology in this language).

Anyway I had reason today to think about the Wandjinna of Coode Hill. So I went looking for it.

Coode Hill is what I call the fairly impressive rise on Coode Street between Broun Avenue and Railway Parade in Bayswater. I don’t think it has an official title, but I’m all for giving local names to local features. As such I regard Coode Hill to be an outflung western arm of the Collier Hills, overlooking the Chisholm Valley and the Meltham Basin (names you won’t find on any map). Coode Hill is fairly impressive – rising a good 20 metres (65 odd feet) above the surrounding landscape, and its eastern side is particularly impressive, the hill having been carved out to make a nice, flat cricket pitch at Hillcrest Reserve. This cliff was the location of the Wandjina.

What’s a Wandjina you ask? Well, for the last few years, someone (or more likely a number of someones) has been painting Wandjinas all over the northern suburbs. Wandjinas are the ancestral creator spirits of several Aboriginal nations up in the northwest, and are famously depicted in sacred rock art sites throughout the Kimberly. The mysterious artist has been adding them to walls, bins, rocks and even trees scattered all around the place. This has caused a fair bit of debate and consternation within the Aboriginal community – according to some Elders the Wandjina is a sacred symbol and should not be painted by anyone who hasn’t been properly initiated. Other people (such as myself) have watched on with interest, and kept an eye out for new ones – there are quite a few sets of them on Flickr.

In any case, the biggest Wandjina I’ve seen was either daubed or painted on the slopes of Coode Hill for a while. I know this because although I never saw it with my own eyes, it was clearly visible on Google Maps.

So today I went to take another look at it, and maybe post a screenshot of it to my Flickr account, only to discover that it was gone! Removed in the latest update of imagery – which I have to admit does a much better job of showing the local area.

So, the Wandjina is lost. I tried looking for it in the historic imagery in Google Earth, but no dice. It has disappeared completely. Boo!!

That’s about all I’ve got to say. Depending on how crazy the next week is my next post may well be from merry olde Englande.

(PS: Aha! Someone else got it!)

YouTube is Over

No, it’s not Will Ferrel!

Allright, that’s it. No one bother uploading anything to YouTube ever again, because no matter what it is, it will never be more awesome than this.