I like to keep my finger on the pulse

No, that's not a line from an adult movie, that's a description of my fondness for news. Which is to say, my fondness for hearing about certain events that are classified by media outlets as news.

Special Broadcasting Service News from 7 April two sows and an eight:

Protests overshadow torch relay
There's still four months until the Olympics start, but at this rate the total number of protesters following the olympic torch is going to outnumber the Chinese population.

Brazen school attack 'retribution'
Police say five armed youths (not to be confused with five-armed youths) may have been seeking revenge. It's time to call a spade a spade. Revenge is clearly an incredible motivator of human behaviour, yet government officials continue to refuse to insert it gently but firmly into the middle of their plans. If I am elected President, I will make revenge a central platform.

Republic on Agenda
A BBC interviewer asked Kevin Rudd about Australia becoming a republic. Some douche decides this means the republic is back on the agenda. Don't get me wrong, I'm a dyed in the dye republican, but just because a politician utters a word, does not make that word 'back on the agenda'. Rudd was also asked how he was enjoying his trip. Looks like 'gruelling visits to strings of heads of state' are back on the agenda.

SBS secures 13 Logie nominations
A lesser known fact is that they are all for the Jim Lehrer News Hour in the category of "Best Imported U.S. Current Affairs Program That Is Light On Sensationalism And Heavy On Serious Examination Of Events But Is Unfortunately Screened At A Time Which Means It Has A Viewership of 380". Have you seen Ray Suarez' beard? It's lovely.

No one dies like Joe Morton

Anyone who's seen Terminator 2 will remember at least two things: John Connor plugging a keyboard into an ATM and Miles Dyson hyperventilating in a soon to be exploded building.

Such a sensitive portrayal of a dying man, and for such a long amount of screen time. Well imagine my surprise, discomfort and elation when I saw Joe Morton lying on a hospital bed, doing the exact same hyperventilation in an episode of House, the TV show about an antisocial maverick doctor. According to IMDB, the two roles were 14 years apart, yet the performance was uncannily similar.

This begs the question: in how many other roles has Joe Morton expressed bodily anguish through hyperventilation? One? Two? 150? It can't be that many.

Which other Hollywood actors have trademark expressions of pain? We've already witnessed Patrick Swayze's amazing range. What about most unusual crier? Most heartfelt whimper? Further evidence that Joaquin Phoenix is taking acting to a whole nutha level - he's expressed mental anguish through vomiting in We Own The Night. [It's a little known fact that he induced vomiting by eating his agent's weight in halva]

***

In other news, Artful Science draws attention to a fantastic speech given by David Suzuki about our current predicament. He makes points that are simple, refreshing (because no one else seems to say them) and usually right on the money.

Easter - a time for giving eggs

Opposition Leader Barry O'Farrell has blasted Taronga Zoo for wasting thousands of dollars on Easter gifts for its animal inhabitants. "Yes, we should feed them, by all means. But do they really need Louis Vuitton bags? I would have thought not."

This is the latest in a sparkling series of Artful Science exposes.

Acting at its best

I used to joke with my sister about this, and now someone has actually put together a list of the top 20 most stupidest faces Patrick Swayze makes in Ghost. Thanks to the Sports Guy (or more likely his readers) for this one.

Bad news about Barry, he's back on the tap water.

Hard drugs in our tap water? It can't be! Of course, alarmist reporting like that would never be found at Artful Science. For a measured, yet schocking report, read on.

Biscuits and cheese

Old Man: I have discovered the most marvellous mixture of foodstuffs, that one may indulge in on an afternoon. Biscuits and cheese.

Young Man: Yeah, that’s quite common.

OM: Well, I wouldn’t be so sure. I’ve only just discovered this combination, but I’ve walked this earth for 73 long years!

YM: You hate walking.

OM: Rather. But you see, the manner by which I discovered this delightful duo – biscuits and cheese – was most fortuitous. I was watching a program on the television, when an advert appeared. The advertisement portrayed a young couple eating biscuits and cheese in the park, nestled on a woollen blanket.

YM: Get to the point.

OM: Well, it wasn’t five minutes after the television commercial screened that I had to leave to catch my bus. Now where do you suppose I was going?

YM: The shops?

OM: You’ve got it in one! I made a note of the brand depicted in the advertisement and asked the young lady at the checkout counter whether they had any in stock. As I asked her, I showed her the piece of paper on which I had written down the product name. The lady pointed in the direction of one of the aisles and I searched for my desired item. To cut a long story short, I’m now utterly sold on the blend of Tim Tams and grated parmesan cheese – the aforementioned “biscuits and cheese.”

YM: You idiot.

Sorrow without bridles

There comes a time in every woman, man and old person's life when they must watch celebrity boxing. I could write a lot about this clip, but it ultimately speaks for itself. Suffice to say, I lost a little bit of humanity by watching Screech fight Horshack. And I encourage you to do the same. Deeply disturbing. Sorry Mr Belding! Post Scriptum: I forgot to add links to parts two and three.

I stayed awake for four days in a row. I was delusional.

Alright kids, quit your yappin and come gather round ole uncle Hammertime. I’ve a story to tell, but I ain’t gonna tell it if you don’t shut yer traps! Alright, that’s better. Now you make yerself comfortable – wassat? Yeah, eating’s alright, just keep yer slobberin down to a minimum. This is a story about music, about life, about living and alrighty I might as well throw it in, about dying. I don’t want to hear any eatin!

Now I know you kids think you know about music. You got your ipods and your itunes and your ishuffles and it’s all about fuckin me, isn’t it? Have you even any idea what an “I” is? Course you don’t, and I doubt you have a mind to figure it out either. Go read some Hofstadter and come back and then we can talk. And don’t think that these two things are completely unrelated, either. As you’ll see, and I’ll try to spell it out for you in the fullness of our sacred and preciously limited time, digging music and understanding a self have quite a lot in common. Now as I was saying, you don’t know shit about music.

I know you think you do, and lest Uncle H-Time be caught with his pants down, allow me to explain. Don’t get you wrong - you like music. Some of the time some of you even love it. It’s the soundtrack to your favourite movies. You worship implicitly cool directors like Tarantino, even if you don’t know it, coz they tell you what’s hip so you don’t need to figure out for yaself. Never mind that he’s not interested in touching you, or getting inside you (don’t be crude) – he’s after the perfect pop movie moment, and he does what he does well. But the closest he gets to reality - to what’s real to you or me or anyone - is his craftily worn reels. That’s a pun right there. He’s havin a whale of a time, and we do too, but does anyone ever listen to his soundtracks after the movie? I said listen to, not buy.

What I mean to say is there’s a great many of you whippersnappers these days that get music incidentally. You bumped into the cinema and some music brushed off on you. You were takin the tv for a walk and you stepped in a song. TV shows, advertising, theme tunes, jingles, movies. Music is no more the focus of these things than it is the focus of video hits and a great many other shows of its plastic ilk. (I’d consider making an exception for Rage, which is a bit of a different story, and a topic for another day and in all likelihood another author. With a bit of luck, persistence and assistance, Rage delivers interesting musical experiences, but they’re of a different dimension to the one’s of which I’ll soon speak, real soon now my little ones.)

I can hear some of you in the back sniggering amongst yourselves, ol’ man Hammertime’s drunk again, he’s lost his wits, if he ever had ‘em in the first place. You’s the ones that listen to music all the time. Screw the soundtrack to a movie, this is the soundtrack of your lives. You were born with earphones in your little baby ears, and damned if they’re not still in there. Don’t worry, I know there’s no music comin out of em right now, you just leave em in there hoping people’ll leave you alone, or maybe realise how cool you are. You take those headphones on to the train, down the street, onto the bus. Sometimes you forge everlasting bonds with your contemporaries by wearing an earpiece each.

You’ve got a million songs in those miracles of modern design, and I’m deeply impressed by Apple’s marketing savvy, but there’s a few things that constrain your listening pleasure. For starters you barely listen to more than 10 seconds of each track. If we take modern day rampant short attention spanism to its logical conclusion - and yes, I’m afflicted too - then we’ll all be just constantly skipping songs, flipping channels – never stopping, ever. Sounds like fun. But I digress. Being out and about, you can’t really focus on the music. You got the friggin platform announcer competing for audiospace in yer head. You can’t give it the time and attention it needs, if you want to get out of it what’s in it, lurking in there, somewhere. Lurking inside the good stuff anyway. And then there’s the lovely shuffle mode, in which you get to listen to an utterly, utterly random selection of your own musical library. Which also prevents any buildup of mood, of atmosphere, and any unlocking of the precious fruits that some albums yield only to complete listening. Have you ever thought about how to create a really, truly random sequence? Is that even possible anyway? As I see it, there’s two kinds of randomness: the kind that’s miraculously built into the fabric of reality at the subatomic level, and the kind that’s for all purposes random, like a die. You gotta tap into one of these things if you want randomness. Either that or talk to someone under 25, who’ll pop it into conversation at quite predictable intervals.

High above and far beyond all this, you do listen, and you do enjoy, and f’crissakes your music means something to you. It speaks to you. It speaks, it raps, it adds useless and useful extra notes, it sings of life’s big themes – love, (much less often) hate, (more often) loathing (including self), pride. Pride is a big one. So many lucky people getting their pride taken for a ride in pimped out musical cars. And given today’s topic, we must add that it speaks in the voice and spirit of rock! There are beautiful voices, sweet melodies, driving guitars. Honest to goodness, down to earth, rockin’ out, heartfelt but ultimately really, really lame songs which tend to get played on Triple J a lot. Well please, ‘cause you’ve stuck around this long, do me the favour of noting all that, taking it in, and setting it aside. I’d like you to open your mind, and get ready to receive. Cause I’m going to talk about passion, about fury, about precision, about wince-inducing off notes, about strong and strange emotions.

I first heard about the Mars Volta when I was working in the old secondhandbookshop on City Rd. Run by the extreme left SRC, who invariably go on to become middle of the road Laborites. The future of Labor, even. Christ! Right above the footbridge, it was, until they moved it, not the bridge, but the shop, and then they moved the bridge too. I had Yoshimi Battles… on the stereo, and one of the custudents told me if I liked this I’d like the Mars Volta. Retrospectively viewing the comment, it was ridiculous. They’re two very different bands. But he was right, I do like them both, though not with the causality suggested by his remark. I soon fetched myself some Volta. I listened to the song Roulette Dares and was taken aback. It was a little chaotic and challenging at first, but I discovered a darn good rock song in there, complete with tension building intro, loud bits, quiet bits and noisy instrumentals. After a few listens, the song grew on me, and I was struck by just how heartfelt Cedric’s plaintive cry was. Though I had no idea what the hell he was talking about. Still don’t. Something about an exoskeleton and a delay. All the same, I gave it no thought for months. After these months, a conversation with a friend prompted me to invest in Frances the Mute. Now that’s a sentence in sore need of context. In this fashion, a hideously beautiful metamusical mushroom sprouted in my temporal lobes and I still can’t get the dang thing out.

Allow me to lay it out for you, my lovely ones, in big clear letters like George Bush on a battleship, my central thesis. Is that the Mars Volta are one of the top 5 rock bands ever, who have created a unique and good sound, that has an uncanny ability to embed itself into the fabric of your mind and no napisan or new age cleaning recipe could ever get it out, not that you’d want to. With the Mars Volta, there’s much in common with other musical experiences. You bop your head, you grin stupidly, you have your favourite bits. But there’s much in rare too. You try to sing along but it’s fuckin pointless. You realise that there’s no other band for which you can remember 10 discrete mind-numbingly powerful drum solos. There is no other band that quite illuminates the moody, murky, morbid, manic and maniacal backwaters of your mind like the Mars Volta.

Passion and Fury
TMV somehow remain sincere, ridiculously sincere given the lyrics and cd art work, yet it all makes sense. Like all good works of art, it has its internal logic. It sends you down a path of disgusting dissonant sounds and morbid, fifth grade lyrics, but after you’ve been down it a few times, it looks normal and everything else odd. Cedric has an amazing voice, there is no doubt of this. When I was passing through that ineffable first stage of listening to a band, I found it offputting. I was able to appreciate a bunch of other stuff they were doing, but his lyrics were silly, his voice nothing special. How wrong I was. His voice and words are still all those things, but he is flat out the best singer going round at the moment. It’s an implicitly understood fact that if you ever want to make a point in a song, you sing just a touch higher. You find that point of auditory contact that is somehow more meaningful, more sincere, more heartfelt, whatever the emotion involved. Cedric hits this note and then sings the rest of the song an octave higher. But he sings like he is possessed, and heck, maybe he is. After all, Bedlam is an album about a possession of sorts, a ride through the dead side with an ancient evil spirit named Goliath. To pre-empt a recurring theme, uncannily perfectly sense making.

Singing aside, the whole band plays with a passion rarely matched, in the studio or live. And when it is matched, the matching band probably doesn’t compete in areas like musical creativity or depth of emotion. A good example of this is when they were touring Frances at the Enmore theatre, and two band members were grabbing a bite to eat beforehand. Sage concertgoers recognised them (might have been Jon Theodore and the sax player) and said hello. Jon said that they’d try to play harder tonight than they ever have. I’m afraid I can’t back this up with statistics, but I was there and they played fucking hard. Over the two and a half hours straight they played, you became progressively more hypnotised, while retaining the ability to appreciate their excellent renditions. How many other bands can do that? Hell, they can’t even do it themselves all the time. When they toured Amputechture the show was good, but not great. Listening to it afterwards I realised it was great, which is useful but too late for people there on the night.

I’ve little idea what the band members are like. I’d like to interview them some day. Jon Theodore comes across as intelligent and thoughtful, someone who loves what he does. Hardly deserving of being thrown under the bus, but that’s what Cedric did when he said they had to fire him. Yes, Pridgen is a freak, but so is Jon. Maybe it’s a little in joke, but where are his fuckin manners? And I suspect it wasn’t, as it was said in an interview with some Italian kids that you wouldn’t think would be but of course was inevitably going to be translated and made available to everyone out there on the innernet. Bottom line: TMV operate on a plane of passion and force that few other bands match, let alone sustain, far from freakin exceed. They demand attention, and won’t tolerate being a background soundtrack to yer life.

Precision
Goddamn they are good musicians. This is what pushes them over the edge. It’s one thing to have ideas, to have attitude, to have energy, but to back it up with insanely advanced technical execution is just scary. It’s not that they play unplayable stuff, although it would be to the majority of weekend hacks out there. But when you combine the guitar, drums, singing and the rest of it, they’ve left the rest of the pack in their sick wake. You can switch off and listen, but you can also pay attention, and when you do you blow your mind cottoning on to what they’re doing. ‘Course when I say pay attention, I really mean pay attention. Too quick, too complex, too detailed to pick up all in one go. Maybe that’s the banal secret behind their genius, to add more and more layers, with sufficient precision and arranged with sufficient delicacy, until it takes three years of listening to the same song to finally hear everything on it. But I’d like to see someone else try. My ears aren’t sufficiently developed, sufficiently evolved in this lil ol lifetime I’ve got, to hear everything they’re doing. I speak mostly of drums, which I do hear most of, but I guarantee you right now in an ironclad fashion, serious musos will get even more out of a listen than I would. Of course, they don’t have the constellation of tastes, thought patterns and musical history that constitutes my distinct mental sphere, so their reaction will be different, quite different probably, but we’ll get to all that stuff later.

Off notes that’ll make ya wince
Dissonance is an explicit musical strategy of the Mars Volta. For some reason, it often works. Maybe it’s just the sweet, goddamned relief of finally hitting a sonorous note that makes it work, maybe it corrupts your senses into thinking this is normal. I found it hard to explain to my German friend Thomas that this five minutes of repetitive, dissonant noise was actually part of a good song. It’s just that there’s been too many times a horrible sounding song has suddenly wormed its way into my good books. They make you listen to their dissonance, cause you never know when something incredible’s about to happen. Who’s the fool, me or him?

When it comes to musical fineness, consistent high performance levels are hard to come by. It’s something I’ve come to accept, and for some reason relish in a Cedric-kinda way, that no matter which way you cut the steak of musical excellence, you’ll always hit some gristle. You can’t have one without the other. So it is with comedy, so it is with many other creative endeavours. To hit those moments of brilliance or insight or shocking hilarity, you gotta have plenty of misses too. Mars Volta is no exception, and there are some songs I just can’t listen to, and even a few that have gotten old. But that’s some fine gristle, because you’re eating it at the same time as a steak like no other.

Strong and strange emotions
TMV’s breakout album Deloused was accompanied by a booklet, with text. It is the story of Cerpin Taxt, the album’s protagonist, and inside it are found the lyrics amidst a much bigger story. But if you thought the lyrics were odd or hard to parse, you haven’t read the rest of the booklet! I’ve tried to read it three times and I still haven’t come close to finishing it. I think you have to be clinically insane to scan that whole thing, it’s crazy.

This music isn’t afraid of craziness. It looks insanity in the face and sees itself. And when we listen to it, we hear ourselves. Given sufficient lucidity, anyone will admit that the sanity of life and the world is a bit of a knife edge, off which we all fall at times. We could ignore it or forget about it. Or we could stop and take a closer look. Embrace it and see what happens. Deloused and Frances in particular show us a world where sanity is irrelevant, and we embrace it. They manage to make something strange and distant central and heart wrenching. Death is often present, not as a treated theme, but rather as wallpaper. Scratch that, as the air that we breathe, as we go about more germane tasks. The set, on which the real action happens. That which we take for granted.

You find yourself in a song, and they slip a line in, a riff, a sound, that wrenches your guts, that moves you, and not in a Bette Midler Beaches kinda way. No, there is no light, in the darkest of your furthest reaches. Trite, and brutal. One day this chalk outline will circle this city. And you believe it, you contemplate for a second a force so malevolent it’ll wipe out a whole fucking city. When they drag the lake, there’s nothing left at all. Love that line. An abortion that survived. Which makes complete sense when you know the story of the song.

Now I’m lost.

The utter lostness of inertiatic esp. (I hate referring to these songs by their titles.) Forlorn. Simple and forlorn. I’m lost, I’m lost right now, and there’s no friggin way out. You know how it’s a common parable in our society for someone to be lost? Utterly, hopelessly despairingly lost? Until they find a way out. Sweet redemption, sweet foundness. But this song’s protagonist never finds a way out. In fact if you stay tuned, the only way out is suicide. This song absolutely revels in the panic, fear and certitude of being lost, way, way out.

I’ve been lost before, many would say I’m lost now. But goddamned if I’m ever this lost, I’d probably go crazy. And listening to this song is a concession to craziness in a way. Jon Theodore’s drums that keep the beat and meld with the bass. The rhythms he keeps, the patterns he creates are so furious, so heavy, so precise and crisp and so perfectly in keeping with the flow of the song, that he really is irreplaceable.

Of course, they replaced him, and they’re not the same band any more. But Thomas “Theodore on coke” Pridgen somehow fits in, and we have a new Mars Volta, and they’re just as crazy as ever. Over time, I thought they lost something. They lost an edge, a fearfully crazy and soul piercingly emotional force, that was clearly present on Deloused and Frances, but that departed or turned into something else on Amputechture and Bedlam. Listening to Bedlam now, I’m not so sure. They’ve lost something, but they’re still there. They’re still massive, a presence, irritating, complex. In a word, intense. And as I keep listening, it’s building. Maybe Amputechture was an aberration. Freakin good album though.

At The Drive In was a darn good band, all things considered. Yet I doubt anyone who listened to their strange mix of anxious punk guessed it was harbouring the nascent mutant foetus of the Mars Volta. Or that Cedric Bixler Zavala would go on to sing like this. Or that Omar Rodriguez Lopez would go on to play guitar like this, or create music like this.

I won’t for a second argue the band’s perfection or incapacity to produce rubbish. But their music reaches such heights, so often, and they’re not the same heights. They somehow manage to keep finding new patterns, yet all somehow stamped with the same Mars Volta superpattern. If music were a balloon, and musicians the gas molecules inside it, then most artists would float about the centre and never glance the edges. Some pioneers make contact with the interior surface and push it in slightly different directions. Mars Volta pushes the surface so hard they pop out the umbilical cord onto the other side, and start twisting the balloon into different shapes like a clown. Okay, I may be exaggerating, but you’ll grant me that in my old age, won’t you?

If you want to understand the human mind, you can’t omit music. Every piece of music we hear succeeds to varying extents at impinging upon our constantly evolving selves. Multiple points of musical contact get sifted through the sieve of our senses. It’s like a little dance between you and the song, sometimes the dance works, sometimes it doesn’t. Some music never makes it within cooee of our beckoning arms, some gets there and steps on our toes, some fits so well with us that we never knew there was a separate dance partner. Good music fits so well that it changes the way you dance. And by that I mean it changes us, our selves, our souls. You couldn’t understand my soul without knowing something about the Mars Volta, Split Enz, Crash Test Dummies and Ween. Hey! Stop fuckin laughing! I’ll smack you for your impertinence. There is surprisingly little research out there about just what the fuck goes on when we have a song in our heads, when a song speaks to us emotionally, when we discover hidden aspects to it. But these are real, real phenomena, realer than a whole heap of bullshit which many professional government funded fully accredited paper publishin self respectin idiot cognitive scientists fritter away their hours on.

Let’s just take a little time out here, because you know what I’m talking about. Let’s suppose a sufficiently complex new song you hear. First few listens, you pick up on the chorus, overall flavour. Over time, you notice different things – bass line here, drum fill there, understood lyric over yonder way. All of a sudden, you’ve built up an expectation for a particular little bit – what the hell is a unit of music anyway? We’ll coin that another day – that is so sweetly satisfied when you hear it. A line, a note, a lick. Classic example “Hey now don’t dream it’s over.” Everyone knows that, right? When a song goes through your head when you’re not listening to it, you don’t hear the whole thing. You hear sections, especially these catchy bits I was talking about. And as you listen you accumulate these little patterns, and notice different levels of patterns and so on until your understanding of this song rivals your understanding of complex concepts and any other ideas you care to mention. The ideas we know make us, and songs are that integral to the way we think and who we are.

Back track to the dance. Some music you have to dance with a few, ungainly times, before you hit full swing. Like two clocks out of sync, it may take a while to line up, but when you do, the match is absolute. Some times you do five different dances with the same song, as you peel away the layers of a particularly fragrant aural onion. I’m going through that stage with Bedlam right now. And no, I do not associate onions in any way shape or figure or form with the Bedlam in Goliath.

Back track to the process of acclimatising to a song. As I said, and I saw you all nodding your wee heads, everyone who’s into music knows what I’m talking about. For music you grow to love, it’s quite a precious time, only you can’t appreciate it at the time cause the music doesn’t sound quite right. But you have faith that it will all come good. After a few listens, it starts to grow on you. Then you love it. I occasionally wonder what it’d be like to go back to that first listen. Not just of any Mars Volta song, but of what it was like to discover just what in god’s name they were doing, that Mars Volta thing they do. It’d be a bit like going back to the first beer, when it tasted wrong. We can still detect that first taste if we try, but it’s been so overridden by our accumulated knowledge and expectations about beer, it’s an afterthought, an aftertaste and not much more. It doesn’t change, we do. But it is nothing without us in the first place.

I’ve never had a band inhabit my mind and start shifting the furniture around like the Mars Volta. They take a seat, settle in and set to stabbing darkly coloured shards into your brain and into your mind. Jagged fragments left all over the fuckin place, and each time you pick one out you find another one lyin around in the vicinity. There’s even one shaped like Candy and a Currant Bun. I could write four'n'half thousand words about that song alone. Brilliant.

Well, I can see you all scratching yer itches so I’ll release you from my sweaty, greasy grip. But do check em out. If you’ve a mind a little like mine, or like mine was a couple of years ago, you may have a musical fit.

Gorillas caught in face

to face love action. A rich and compelling story.

I'm sorry

Norm MacDonald

In case you haven't heard, Norm's been gathering some votes for most underrated comedian of the last 20 years. Here's an ooold stand up clip, and it's part hilarious, part unintentionally funny and part unfunny. Thing is, I think the unintentionally funny stuff might be funny on purpose.

Can you believe what those crazy scientists are up to?

Another round of the latest research headlines, delivered sizzling to your door. Ow, the sizzle landed on my arm!

Yes, I Am

A few days ago, I started writing a post under the title, "Am I a man of hate?" Sadly, I have come to the conclusion that I am. My post, which was scrapped for operational reasons, revolved just how irritating I found the two champions of the Australian Open tennis this year - let's call them Djokapova for short. So much shrieking, so much pre-serve ball bouncing, so little good will engendered.

I mention all of this only by way of introduction. For tonight I have once more discovered the ugly, fiery, hate-filled side of me. I had planned to watch the Superbowl tonight, for a few reasons - it is a spectacle, it is sport, it had a decent story line (one of the teams was undefeated heading into it), and perhaps most of all, I planned on winding down from a stressful day by becoming a zombie in front of the telly, as is the fashion in our society.

SBS screened the Superbowl live this morning, but they were replaying it at 10:30pm. I steadfastly avoided the media during the day so as not to hear the result. Aussie media doesn't give a rats about gridiron, but they're guaranteed to report on the Superbowl, it's just the way it is (Mike and the Mechanics).

I watched a bit of South Park (still paper-cut sharp) and Drawn Together (underrated, by me) and even saw ads promoting the replay during them. Then I turned the telly off, and returned to the Joy Luck Club, which I am reading as part of PBC committments. My TV and internet-warped attention span and inability to delay gratification saw me turn the telly on to check the news headlines on SBS. In the news today: carnage, carnage, carnage and Giants win.

What the?! They're about to show the game, which probably 95% of their viewers won't have seen yet owing to the fact that they don't, and will never in their life, watch SBS on a Monday morning at 10am, and they announce the result! No warning, no suggestion to look away or leave the room. Nothing. Just a few words, a picture, and in case you weren't sure, GIANTS WIN in caps. This never would have happened on Channel 10. Sports Tonight would have been all over this.

I make three obervations. Firstly, I hate myself for turning the telly on unnecessarily. Secondly, this hate is quickly and satisfyingly shifted to SBS, the most stupid and inept of sports broadcasters I have ever had the misfortune of viewing. Thirdly, I am ashamed at myself for my non-zero care factor in all of this.

Is this what my life has come to? Emotional slavery to professional sports? I need help. *help you* *help me*.

Anyone interested in nanotechnology?

If so, check out artmus scientist's latest expose on the scandalous world of nanotech.

The many shades of... Darth Vader

Retrieved from ol' dependable (The) Sports Guy. It's a little long, and slow in parts, but it got me real good a few times.

"I quit on you when you ran outta Dee-troit with Willie The Pimp!" - Get This worthy.

Spilling the beans on edge

There’s a bit in the Spectrum section of the Sydney Morning Herald on Saturdays called Big Questions. I really hate it, because it’s often used to ask where certain proverbs come from. Gee, I wonder who coined the term ‘to coin a term’? Talk about boring!

That’s why today I’m going to talk about where the phrase “to spill the beans” comes from.

Once upon a time Maria Bevilaqua was sitting by the local watering hole, cooling her heels. She had just been given a recipe by her grandfather, Louie, for bean lasagne. She should have had the recipe months ago. “I don’t care what it’s been, what is it now?”, she had said at the time. Louie spat on the ground in disgust and walked away, and it took him a full 7 months to invite her once more to receive the recipe.

This recipe had been in the family for 12 generations, and was a closely guarded secret. Once it was leaked to a neighbouring village, and Old Vinnie Bevilaqua was forced to doorknock the whole village, getting them to sign affidavits saying they would never use or pass on the recipe.

Maria, who’d always had a sharp tongue, was now just enjoying the moment. A carp swam past her foot. She pulled out a bb gun and shot it in the groin. Receiving the recipe was like being admitted into the family proper. She held her head high, her face a picture of serenity now. She’d already memorised the recipe, including the optional inclusion of a sprig of sparrowbane for when the moon was full – La Luna Spumante was what the old folk called it.

Slowly Maria picked up her things and headed off to market. She knew precisely which ingredients she needed, and picked them all up without a hitch, although the Spanish onions were a little dull. She shot the vendor in the groin with her bb gun and returned home with 6 full envirobags worth of fresh produce.

When Maria got home, Louie was waiting for her. “Maria, you little s.o.b., the family tradition is that the first time you learn the recipe, you gotta cook it for someone else. And not just anyone else. Us Bevilaquas is well connected. You gonna cook the recipe for the Countess of Guidonia and her family.”

“What?! That’s ridiculous.”

“The hell it is! You gonna cook for her, you gonna cook it well, and you gonna come back and tell us all about it. Off you go.”

With that he pushed her out the door before she could even put her bags down. He stuffed the address into her skirt pocket, and ignored her incredibly obscene protestations. When she finally turned around and started trudging off, he called out.

“Maria! You’ll pass the Sfaggis of Lago Maggiore on the way. Those pricks have been trying to get this recipe for 145 years. They don’t know you’re coming, but don’t raise any attention anyway. Keep your head down and your palms pointed outwards for good luck. Now do what I say and off you go.”

By now Maria was in a sour mood, but knew she’d better heed Louie’s instructions. Ingredients in hand, she hopped onto Angelo the family mule and headed off.

It was a beautiful road that she rode down, and her mood soon lightened. What was the countess’ family like?, she wondered. How many were there? Surely gramps wouldn’t send me away with insufficient ingredients? She was genuinely excited about the possibilities of the evening. She pulled out a hipflask and knocked back a fifth of vodka. Onward she rode.

Occasionally she passed villagers going about their daily business. Some said hello, others ignored her. She remembered Louie’s warning about the Sfaggis, but was unconcerned. She pulled up beside a massive baobab, and reckoned there was another 15 minutes of riding before she got there. She hopped off Angelo to stretch her legs. The shopping bags were secured tightly behind the saddle. Just as she was about to hop back on, someone spoke to her.

“Excuse me madam, where are you going?” said a friendly middle aged woman.
“I’m off to Guidonia. If you’ll excuse me, I have an appointment to keep.”

The woman smiled politely, and continued on her way. Maria rode off, but glanced back. The middle aged woman had broken into a sprint and was running in the direction of a homestead just off the road. Maria thought this unusual, but kept riding. A moment later she looked back again, and she could now see the lady talking to some other people, gesticulating frantically and pointing down the road towards… Maria!

Maria brought Angelo to a trot, and was beginning to feel very uneasy. She looked around again, and saw several people running towards her. There was a young man out in front, followed by some children.

Maria decided she would not look back again, and she rode Angelo as fast as he could go. The people didn’t seem to be catching up with her, and within a few minutes she saw Guidonia castle looming in front of her. She was confident now of making it, but still somewhat anxious. Sweat covered her entire body and she had saddle sores. Finally she reached the castle gates, and she hopped off Angelo and looked around. No one seemed to be following her, so she allowed herself a smile. She was here!

She was greeted at the gate by a portly doorman in fantastic garb. “You must be Maria. Let me help you with your bags.”

She unfastened the bags from Angelo and slapped the mule on the butt. With that Angelo rode away in the direction of home. She handed five of the six bags over to the doorman, but hesitated when it came to the all-important sixth – the home of the beans. There were green beans, red beans, white beans – you name it. She peeked inside to confirm the contents, and turned to the gate.

“Madam? There is a sixth bag. Please let me take it for you.”

“Umm, well – actually if it’s okay, I’ll hang onto it.”

“Madam, you don’t understand. Let me take it for you, it’s no problem.”

“Thank you, really, but I’d like to carry it. My wallet’s in here too.”

“Listen, I get paid by the bag. That bag is worth a lot of money to me. Please?”

“Alright! Crissakes.” She handed the bag to the doorman, but kept a watchful eye on him.

As the huge gate swung open, she stepped forward – and tripped over a cobble stone. She cried out: “Fatherf*cker!” An elderly couple standing nearby glared at her and shook their heads. Maria’s only thought was: thank God I wasn’t carrying the bag! It’s contents would have been revealed to all the world – although the Sfaggis were nowhere in sight.

As she pulled herself up the doorman rushed over to help. In doing so, he switched hands, moved the bags around and lost his grip. A single bag fell to the ground. Time seemed to slow down. The beans spilled everywhere. Maria cursed audibly and bent over to collect the beans. As she did so, she heard a high-pitched, whiny laugh. She turned around, and the laughter continued.

It was the man from the road, who had been chasing her.

“Ha ha ha! I’ve done it! I’ve discovered the secret ingredient to the Bevilaqua Lasagne. It’s beans! BEANS!!!”

He shouted it out, again and again, and walked away, still shouting.

“You idiot!,” she said to the doorman. “Do you realise what you’ve just done?”

“There there, Madam,” said the doorman. “It’s okay, we wash the beans.”

Maria felt sick. She had to act quick. She raced after the man, who was still laughing, and tapped him on the left shoulder. As he turned around, she produced an affidavit. “What’s this?” he said quizzically. Ah screw it, she thought to herself, and she pulled a knife out of her skirt pocket and stabbed the man in the chest. He dropped to the ground, and sputtered the word ‘Beans’ one last time before carking it.

Maria went on to cook the most wonderful bean lasagne for the Countess, and she lived to pass on the tale to her grandchildren, and later her children, about the fateful day she spilled the beans.

***

Of course, all of this is by the by. What I’m spilling the beans about is Edge. Edge is a science website (and notfer profit) created by literary agent John Brockman. I wouldn’t mind working for him. It contains articles, essays, videos and more, with an impressive range of regular contributors. Prominent are zoologist-cum-atheist flagbearer Richard Dawkins, maverick* molecular biologist Craig Venter, author Ian McEwan and astronomer Paul Davies. Sadly no Hofstadter there, but I like to think he just hasn’t sold out. I have to admit, there’s something a little wanky about being on the list of Edge contributors, but to be fair, if you have to be on a list it might as well be this one.

Anyway, there’s always something stimulating to read there, whether it’s about the definition of life, the end of the universe, or the vagaries of human nature. Even better, it’s meant for a lay audience but never dumbs down, there’s conflict a plenty but it’s usually respectful and with justification, and it celebrates life’s big questions.

Speaking of questions, what prompted me to make this post was the annual question and answer frenzy from Edge’s World Question Centre. Questions are posed and heaps and heaps of insightful, amusing or controversial answers are provided by the aforementioned range of contributors. This year’s question is: What have you changed your mind about? Why? Hey wait a minute, that’s two questions!

There’s always a few writers whose answers I look for – Judith Rich Harris, (she of the “peers are more influential than parents in determining our behaviour” theory), Simon Baron Cohen (similar name to Ali G’s creator), Susan Blackmore (author of the Meme Machine and a cool user’s guide to consciousness book. Am I present?), Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, Daniel Goleman (of emotional intelligence fame), Jaron Lanier (who once proposed a more useful question like: What’s the single most effective thing we could do to make the world a better place, or something like that), John Allen Paulos (wrote Innumeracy and I Think Therefore I Laugh) and Robert Trivers.

But you never know who will write something that makes you think. So far this year I like Karl Sabbagh’s response, that he used to think experts knew better than he, but now realises they may be knowledgeable but that doesn’t make them wise. So except for their field of expertise (I would argue even in their field of expertise sometimes), you’re just as likely as them to be right about any given issue.

Here’s a list of all the questions, one per year starting in 2008 and working backwards. Sorry about the caps and underline - I abhor them. The last few have been turned into books – a great Christmas or Birthday gift for the whole family, nerds and idiots alike.

WHAT HAVE YOU CHANGED YOUR MIND ABOUT? WHY?

WHAT ARE YOU OPTIMISTIC ABOUT?

WHAT IS YOUR DANGEROUS IDEA?

"WHAT DO YOU BELIEVE IS TRUE EVEN THOUGH YOU CANNOT PROVE IT?"

"WHAT'S YOUR LAW?"

"WHAT ARE THE PRESSING SCIENTIFIC ISSUES FOR THE NATION AND THE WORLD, AND WHAT IS YOUR ADVICE ON HOW I CAN BEGIN TO DEAL WITH THEM?" —GWB

"WHAT'S YOUR QUESTION?"

"WHAT NOW?"

"WHAT QUESTIONS HAVE DISAPPEARED?"

"WHAT IS TODAY'S MOST IMPORTANT UNREPORTED STORY?"

"WHAT QUESTIONS ARE YOU ASKING YOURSELF?"

* this word is always used to describe him in the media. I prefer Word’s thesaurus alternatives: unconventional person, odd one out

Free Will, research taken in vain, googly brains

Over at Ye Artful Science, there's
- chatter about free will. Insightful, yet humiliating.
- a ridiculous take on some research reported in the Herald today
- a superb analysis of the pitfalls of brain research

Surely it's just a matter of time before the Artful Sciencer is snapped up, by something.

A Sports Guy - Monday, January 14

KISS AND MAKE UP
Australia and India are on the road to cordiality with the opposing captains engaging in a passionate kiss at a press conference today. The kiss was initiated by Australian captain Ricky Ponting, who said afterwards "Anil and I go way back. Way, way back. F*ck!"

FEDERER RECOVERS FROM ILLNESS
Ominously for the Australian Open field, Roger Federer is no longer feeling the effects of a flu that had him sidelined for the Kooyong Classic. At least one seed was reported to withdraw from the Open on hearing the news. "It's a tough call to make," said Dmitry Tursonov. "But it's not really worth playing if Roger is feeling well. I miss my home."



MOTHER LODE DRAWS DAVENPORT BACK AGAIN
New mother Lindsay Davenport has declared the reason behind returning from induced-pregnancy-induced retirement to play at this year's Australian Open: money. "I'm gonna get me some cash, my diggers," said Davenport. "That's what it's about now. I have a child to feed."

Above: Davenport was gracious in victory, allowing her opponent to share the spoils. (Photo: AP). Davenport was criticised for scheduling overmatched opponents in her return to competitive tennis.

Warwick Capper

I hate to build things up, but this really made me laugh a lot. Once again, credit goes to Tony Martin, although to be fair I think the sea lion's share of the credit actually goes to his accomplice Richard Marsland.

Wait on, let me build it down for a sec. This is an audio file, so the footage is at best distracting. Do yourself a favour and look away. Also, the sound quality could be better. Shop around at YouTube though, you might find a better one. The original file was located at Triple M's Get This page, but for some reason they've taken it down! You can still get it from the podcasts page, along with their final episode and others. While we're here, there's also some high quality ringtones up for grabs. My favourite: Brian Boyd and David Dickinson (tie). There's also a decent summary of capers at Wikipedia.

Diary of a Mad Man

Dear diary,

I am a sane woman. What you think about that? Pee pee.

Yours,
Sphagnum Bog

January 14, 2008

When you don’t understand why someone you like isn’t famous

I’m rereading I Am A Strange Loop by Douglas Hofstadter. I wouldn’t say it’s his best work, but it’s still damn good. It’s essentially a summary of his thoughts on how a self, an ‘I’, a ‘light on inside’, a mind’s eye can come from a lump of squishy grey stuff.

I’m only a couple chapters in, but I keep feeling compelled to write notes about what he’s written, on account of it triggers so many thoughts and ideas in mine head. In fact, if I go through with this audacious, yet bodacious plan, I’ll have a book by the end of it! It could be the first ever book written entirely in response to, and while reading, another book. At least I assume so. The working title is I Know You Are But What Am I: Reflections on DRH’s I Am A Strange Loop.

Look, what I’m trying to say is I get sick and sleepy with having to all the time explain who Douglas Hofstadter is. To my way of thinking, he’s one of the clearest, most perceptive, easy to read, riveting authors out there, and he’s written about many a topic that would interest many and many a person. Yet he just isn’t up there with the Richard Dawkinses, Carl Saganses and Tim Flanneryses of this world.

Likewise in music, there are phenomenal performers who go unheard of, unrewarded, and unsullied day in, day out. I must confess I make no claims to know and like any obscure but brilliant bands (but watch this space for Looking Glass). Though they are in an overall minority, I know there are thousands of others who, like me, really dig the Mars Volta, Crash Test Dummies, Split Enz and Ween (almost certainly not this combination though).

Anyhoo, I believe that each and every person that this sentence refers to could list several awesome authors, musicians and creative whoevers that have touched their lives, delicately and deeply, but that can’t seem to get no respect, or at least general public awareness. I challenge these people to make that list.

These days the situation isn’t so bad with the internet. F’cryin’ out loud, I can now find people with a mutual interest in my newly acquired, top 10 All Time Coolest book, Codex Seraphinianus. Without the internet, I challenge anyone, anywhere to have heard of this amazing book (yes, I know the challenge was issued using the internet, a’F’eh!).

I guess this is all about information – how we get it, who controls its flow, and what it smells like. It’s also about personal differences in the kinds of things that profoundly resonate with (in?) our minds and hearts.

One last thing, it’s interesting to note that there is no analogous situation in sports. The best basketballers, sprinters and football players aren’t competing in D-Leagues, mid-week suburban track meets and lower grade Auckland comps. Aside from the scouts’ mythical undiscovered sporting geniuses tending sheep in a field somewhere, this phenomena just doesn’t happen in sport.

Alternative Lyrics - PJ Harvey's The Devil

As soon as I
turn left on a road
The Devil wanders
into my zone
And I pretend to myself...

Come, come, come here at one.
Come, come! On a day at 1pm
Because all of my being is now in Wyoming.

~~~

Welcome to lovesong dedications. This next song goes out to Jarryd in Bexley, and it's from his long time girlfriend Francene. Jarryd, Francene just wants to thank you for all the little things you do that make her life so special. This is for you Jarryd.
[ABBA's Money, Money, Money]

Not starting, finishing

In the summer of 1982 I was sent to Thistlethwaite Finishing School for Tenn-aged Males. The postage cost over 350 dollars and I bruised my coccyx repeatedly in transit.

When I arrived I was quickly ushered into the ceremonial hall, where I witnessed the graduation rites of the class of '74. I personally considered 8 years of finishing school excessive, but my future employer insisted on it. Alas since that time standards have slipped at Chicken Wizard.

During the ceremony the graduands displayed an astonishing range of grooming, etiquette and posturing. More than one lecturer was brought to tears. It was two.

I never did complete my studies, my early withdrawal necessitated by the sudden release onto the market of an exciting and fresh new salted snack called Burger Rings. Still in my finishing school garb of flippers and old newspapers, I furtively thrust a twenty cent piece on the milkbar counter. For this I received a portion of 34 Burger Rings.

It was the best day of my life, even if the law courts saw it differently.

AJ Ogilvy

Dammit! I just pour my heart and soul into talking up Patrick Mills, the Next Big Thing in Australian sport and what happens?

I decide to wet my feet and enter the strange and full on world of talent scouting men’s college basketball, and up and coming Aussies therein, and what happens?

I get slapped in the face with this. Freshman Ogilvy has Vandy poised for big season. The article's even got a bit about him wearing what I can only assume are ugg boots.


A.J. Ogilvy? C'mon! This is the kind of name I’d come up with as a joke with friends. And here is the fine specimen, fresh from the mean streets of Sydney (I wonder if I've ever walked past him, or dominated him in a game of street ball?). More than a passing resemblance to Milo Kerrigan, wouldn't you say?


There’s nothing to it but to merge the two into the single greatest dual prospects this nation is seeing at the moment. The Mills/Ogilvy Combine. They could dominate the NBA from 2010 to 2020.

It's be great if they were drafted onto the same team. I can just picture it now, the twentytens version of Stockton to Malone, in reverse colour, with a bastardised Aussie accent, making max money, wanting to play for Australia at the Olympics but not being released by their teams ...

Ah, college basketball, I love you even though I've never watched a single complete game in my whole life.

The Previous Small Nothing!

Sorry, I mean the Next Big Thing!


Of course, you know and I know that I'm talking about upstart Aussie baller Patrick "Patty" Mills. From humble beginnings at the AIS, our national monument to sporting excellence at the cost of cultural necrosis, he's now the starting point guard for the small Californian St Mary's College. The team is affectionately, and just generally known as the Gaels, after hot young Mexican actor Gael Garcia Bernal (no relation to Sandra).


Patty garnered some U.S. press a coupla weeks ago after he torched a higher ranked team for 37 points and was compared to a fine NBA player, Tony Parker (the dude married Eva Longoria from Desperate Housewives).


I am now on the bandwagon, and while I may be behind the the Boomers, the Deadly's and Bill Simmons, I'ma still ahead of most Aussies. And Sports Illustrated, who may have beaten this post by 8 hours, but sadly lagged days behind my initial decision to hop on.


Here's Mills, looking rather Quattoesque.



Mills is part of a fine tradition of amazing Aboriginal athletes and has a chance to be a bona fide superstar in his home country, in a way that Andrew Bogut just plain doesn't. For those who don't know, Bogut was not only drafted straight into the NBA, but taken Number 1 – the same spot as Shaq, Magic Johnson and LeBron James. He reckons he could and should be the best basketballer to ever come out of Australia, and he may be right – but not yet. He’s playing decently in his third year with the Milwaukee Bucks.

Despite his relative success in the U.S., Bogut has been unable to pique, or even vaguely arouse the interest of a lot of Aussies back home. It could take a feelgood story like Mills (about whom I know virtually nothing) to ignite the country's passion, forests and interest in basketball. It’s early, early days yet, but I for one am excited, perhaps as excited as a fat kid who’s about to eat a cake he loves deeply but previously lost and believed would never be his again.

The same person?

I was going through some papers while packing up for the big move. I came across something I'd come across a couple of years ago, probably when i was going through the same papers in a clean out. I'd kept it, but done nothing with it. Well, now I've done something with it, probably the worst thing a man can do with papers he finds while packing - publish them unedited on his brog. The mind reels at what this young (mid to late teens?) author was thinking. Best not go there.

This was on the reverse page, or alternately the first page.

~~~
AIRPORT

It was a normal day in New York. I was at the airport with a suitcase full of clothes in one hand and a one way ticket to Lamibia in the other. I was headed there on a basketball coaching clinic for their national team.

You see I used to coach for the Knicks: three Championship rings and 3 coach of the year awards in 5 years. I was on a roll, was being the operative word. 2 weeks after our last championship, 3 years ago, I got busted for using blood doping, human growth hormones, steroids, and panadol in illegal

~~~

There it ended. Who knows why, or where this tragic tale of hope ended up ending up? At the bottom of this page were the words:

boy – down – real
meets girl – goes up

On the reverse page was this, longer piece.

~~~

boy meets girl
I remember the day clearly now. 21st of February 1994, 3 days after my 23rd Birthday. The air was exceptionally cold but that was probably the air conditioning: I was in an airport. I was quite warm though, as for my birthday my brother gave me a duffelcoat and balaclava. The reason I was in an airport was another present – my parents + brother gave a plane ticket to Lamibia. It is a very serene place. Where foreigners are welcome. I was going for a holiday and was very excited. The 1st time on a plane ever and I was going overseas!
My plane left at 1:30pm and I was going through luggage, (not literally) I mean the luggage department and I had 2 carry-on bags. I never give the airline my luggage because I once won fifty million dollars in the lottery and had it in my luggage, in the form of gold bullion and it was “misplaced”. I suspect an airport employee that I didn’t tip burned the bag in vengeance. I never got a cent back.
Anyway I was passing through the metal detector when I got a beep. “That’s strange” I thought. “Please pass through machine again” the woman with the hand-metal detector said with an interesting accent. I passed through again. “Interesting accent” I said. She smiled at me, showing all her bottom teeth. “Interesting smile” I said, but just as the smile disappeared I said I was joking. She said “quit the B-S and double talk and hand over the knife. Or do you have a gun?” “I’m unarmed” I proclaimed. She ran the mini-metal detector around my body in a way that must have aroused us both. She finally pinpointed my front shirt pocket. I emptied it to which she replied “Aha! Metal nodules. I’m terribly sorry for the delay Sir, perhaps you’d like extra refreshments when it comes to afternoon tea. Here, this card entitles the bearer to 12 free peanuts. The peanut is the national food of Lamibia”
“Really?” I said, “I s’pose it’s your job to know those juicy tidbits of information”
“No – I just come from Lamibia”

~~~

Assuming I actually wrote these, they could be the finest words to have ever rolled out the ball of my pen.

The latest science headlines

Delivered fresh to your door.

A message to you, HsiDub

When your best friend jets into town unannounced and plays a sellout show on Tue 16 Oct, without telling you, and indeed without telling you that he's now the "Stone King", well let me tell you something for nothing, your head is spinning like a top. You can't comprehend how such a turn of events could ever turn around and slap you on the fannypack with a wet hammock. But it did. And this [pointing up] IS THE PROOF!




We had such good times together - together at that place. When I think Vanguard, I think a couple of things - good times, and Sime Nugent.

The only humane response to a situation like this? Inhale, exhale. Just got a mouse in the mail.

Thinking about Dean Moriarty

Many great ideas for TV shows go unrealised. So it is with werewolf tax attorney, courtesy of the bad folk at cracked.

It brings to mind well spent youthful days playing balderdash. Some fantastic movie plots and word meanings were confabulated, but perhaps none as sweet and graceful as the "1932 drama about a troupe of tap dancing grizzly bears". Ah Tasathanas, I need another dose of your humour.

ps I believe the above werewolf is the father from Teen Wolf (part one)

On the road

A week after arriving in 'complex' Istanbul, I met Hidayet. He was a friend of a friend of a friend, first one Sydney, second Sultanahmet via Hotel Empress Zoe, the last in Unkapani. I met him in a tea house in Tophane, which is where all the good tea houses are. Apple tea tastes like absolute sickly sweet shit, but if you pipe it through a nargileh, it's a light sweet smooth and not at all intoxicating.

My wife had gone to do some shopping, and judging by the length of her list she wouldn't be back for a few days. I figured that a bit of tea and nargileh couldn't hurt my throat too much, and might even help. Hidayet agreed. "Turkish apple tobacco, very good for sore throat. Cigarettes, not so much, but I don't have sore throat." You only realise how succesfully Sydney has marginalised smokers when you see them in full flight elsewhere. People blow smoke in your face here and expect you to say tessekurler.

I ordered us both an Efe, 70cl, and we knocked it back in between puffs. I ordered another round and Hedo told me about his life. He'd had a tough life, or it seemed so to me, but it wasn't any tougher than most other Istanbullu. He started working for his dad at 9, taking customers drinks and clearing up. Sometimes the customers would swear at him when he dropped things, but his dad never came to his defence. He dropped out of school at 15, unlike most of his friends, and he travelled around central Anatolya for a few years, working odd jobs for food and board. Right now he was doing some work as a travel agent, helping in the office at his friend's mannequin shop, and doing a little fishing from the Galata bridge for fun.

He knew a better place we could go, somewhere with a more diverse crowd, the drinks a bit more expensive, but i didn't mind. i hadn't bought any presents for anyone yet, so i was flush.

Fenerbahce beat Besiktas 2-1!

Can you believe it?

Today's Zaman called it a feast of fast flowing soccer, which included arguments between players as depicted pictorially.



It really was quite a game, with incredibly many chances, some taken and some missed. Besiktas hadn't lost at this stadium in seven years, and they can consider themselves hard done by, missing a last minute (figuratively speaking) equaliser due to a questionable refereeing decision. I quote former soccer player and FIFA-ranked referee turned soccer analyst Erman Toroğlu on Lig TV on Saturday night, “If you call that position a foul, then this means the end of the world.” Fenerbahce keep their nose in front on the league ladder, but the season is far from over. In fact it hasn't even started. Yes, it has.

I was strongly considering attending the game, owing to my ongoing presence in the Fenerbahce district, but I became convinced it would be too dangerous for a non-partisan supporter such as myself, and indeed myself. I later found out the game was sold out anyway. I was treated to extended highlights the next day on tv, repeated fairly well ad nauseam. On tv I also found out there was some thuggish, loutish, riotish behavious after the game, confirming my suspicion that a fellow poorly trained in rock-throwing such as myself, indeed myself, would be better off not attending. The Turkish media has a far higher attention span than in Australia, with long interviews and highlights packages. This is probably limited to football.

I have a chance to attend a basketball game, and I wonder if I'll take it.

Ever so delicately she vaporised her enemies

Father of 200, John Peterson knows what it’s like to come home to a house full of plexiglass prisms. Amazingly, all of his children share the same first name: b*ttlicker. No really, it’s Norgas Pecker.

Who would have thought that the Dalai Lama has a coke habit.

Bioaccumulation is a problem and it’s only getting worse. Arsenic is a good case in point. Used in manufacturing processes, it works its way into ecosystems where it concentrates the further up the foodchain you go (in the lingo, it bioaccumulates). By the time you get to a lion’s arse, arsenic is present at up to 35cc per litre. This has repercussions beyond the health of the lion. Dung beetles which are known to roost inside lions’ steaming turds are also at risk. And the new wave delicacy of lion ass takes on a more sinister tone given bioaccumulation (it’s not enough that the ass must be prepared extremely carefully to prevent fecal contamination of this dish). Ultimately this is a matter for the courts, but it's sad to see it so overlooked by the mainstream media.

When I was sitting in the bus I overheard the following exchange: NASDAQ.

Passenger One: How do they know?
Passenger Two: As I see it, it all comes down to runcibles.
P1: Runcibles?
P2: As far as the eye can see.
P1: Yeah, but how do they find out?
P2: Oh! Sorry, I thought you were asking something else. It’s basically a bureaucratic process. Fill in this. Stamp that. Wait 7-10 working days. Then they post it to you.
P1: What’s your sperm count?
P2: 400 parts per million.
P1: Same as -
P2 & P1: Agassi!
P2: That’s right. I’ve always felt that a man with his flair, his charisma... he should’ve produced far more children.
P1: You’ve got no right to say that.
P2: Well I just did. Deal with it... As I was saying, it grieves me to learn that he and Steffi haven’t fired up the kiln more often. I feel that what they’ve opted for instead is a relationship where they devote themselves almost exclusively to each other.
P1: Mutual masturbation?
P2: Don’t be foul. Theirs is a love that they keep to themselves. Do you understand?
P1: Eff off.
P2: No. For some people it makes perfect sense. For others the thing is kids so that’s where they go. They develop their parenthood – or not – while Agassi and Graf develop their marriage-based relationship.
P1: But they’ve got one kid. Jaden Agassi-Graf.
P2: Oh Sh*t! I forgot!!

I don't want to be your friend

I just want to be your lover
Infrastructure will collapse
Denial
etcetera etcetera
Whatever
Forget about your house of cards.

On a rainy downpouring night, on a quiet shaken day after, coming into and out of numbness, out there in the elements, visceral sadness, sadness and beauty. A cold and bleak future, a soaring silent vista, an underwater dream. The present, from the outside, or another side.

It all comes back to chicken

"We used to have one al-Qa’ida and now we have ten al-Qa’idas. It’s like Kentucky Fried Chicken."

So said Abdel Bari Atwan, editor-in-chief of Al-Quds al-Arabi, a London-based Arabic daily newspaper. The quote is from a fascinating interview with him about al-Qa'ida, which you can read in full here.

High quality comics

I don't know about you, but I sometimes find all the websites I go to are merely informing me, however fascinatingly, or humouring my unjustifiable interest in professional sports. What about laughter? The world needs laughter, and so do I. Laughter is a many wondrous thing, and there's no excuse not to embrace it warmly given the opportunity.

I hereby recommend the Perry Bible Fellowship and Dinosaur Comics. Two high quality comics, with very healthy doses of bizarrity, nonsensicality and offbeatness. Do yourself two favours, and check em out.

Undercounting leads to underunderfunding

Already underfunded, it turns out that Aboriginal people are actually underunderfunded, because the census has been systematically undercounting indigenous Australians for years. This is a huge story which, unsurprisingly, our mainstream media looks to have ignored.

Who's got hand?

Did you hear the bizarre story of the little Chinese saboteur at the women’s World Cup?

You know how at major sporting events the players are often escorted onto the field hand in hand with a bunch of cute kids, selected from the host nation’s most prestigious kindergartens? They send a message of world peace and love for children.

So this little girl, God knows who’d gotten to her, had a noxious substance on the palm of her hand. If you think you know where this is going, think again. The victim wasn’t the player being escorted by the little girl. It was the other team. You see the substance was faithfully transmitted to palm of the Brasilian goal keeper, but went from there onto the palms of every single US player as the goalkeeper shook hands with them! Think of it as an en masse stinkpalm.

And it caused havoc.

Apropos of nothing, I’ve often wondered what goalkeepers are shouting to their teammates as they line up to defend a free kick. “Hey! HEEYY!!!” I’d say that’s about it.

9:22pm

They call it the witching hour. I call it El tiempo de las aceitunas - the dark bosom of the evening. That seductive, highly charged time balanced precariously between sunset and midnight. It's a time Ernest Hemingway once said showed you who your real friends are. "See who sticks around at 9:22pm", he said, "if you want find out who's true to you and who's a total asswipe."

Photoessay from APEC summit

A rare glimpse into the tightly protected
security zone. Photo by C. Bass.



Islamo-fascist radical eco-terrorists. Photo
by C. Bass.




An innocent bystander felt the full force of
the security crackdown. Photo by C. Bass.

To collect or not

Have you noticed that there's sometimes a noisy desperation to collect things? It be household items, witty sayings, computer files or loved ones and more. I think this can be traced back to the time when we were sea cows, and in order to survive against the mad dugongs, it paid to stockpile resources. Of course, in our current evolutionary environment this is preposterous, maladaptive even.

So when you find yourself having things, and wanting to keep things, or perhaps not lose them or smash them, take three steps back, inhale deeply and, after a while, exhale. It's ok. So long as you have your mind, and the people, and lots of cash, everything will be fine.

It reminds me a little of the joke about the man with everything. What do you give a man with everything? Medication, because if he has everything, he has the bubonic plague and anthrax. Kills me every time.

Number of unique visitors since June, 2006

None

apescat monkeysphere

One of the things I like about cracked.com is they sometimes sneak interesting ideas into their humour. A case in point is this article monkeysphere

It’s a rambling discourse on the shocking nature of society. The central thiessis is that humans are ill-suited to hanging out with or caring about more than 150 or so people. Writer ramblingly explores implications of this then ends with advice in the form of a total cheat acronym: TRY. T stands for you are a Total moron. R stands for undeRstand there are no supermonkeys. Y stands for don’t let anYbody simplify it for you. I think it means 1) humility 2) they’re as bad as us / we’re as bad as them 3) hurray for complexity and be suspicious of those trying to simplify.

File it under
Odd, mixed messages, refreshing read

This things I believe

So I've been inspired by some things lately, that I'm hoping will translate into some kinda action, somehow.

Reading the Shock Doctrine, a bit shocking and depressing really. I find some of Klein's arguments a bit weak and unoriginal, but she puts it all together quite well. It reminds me a bit of John Pilger, but not as harrowing and more journalistic (whatever that means). Anyway, it's still a mostly compelling read.

By the way, Pilger's compilation Tell Me No Lies is really required reading for anyone interested in, well, stuff.

I'm also reading Worldchanging, which is a coffee table book, but also a fantastic and inspiring compilation of good ideas, grouped under headings such as community, politics and business. Unlike the Shock Doctrine, it's not depressing. It contains stacks of information but does a good job in showing how it can easily be translated into action. Here's their website.

I have several awesome coffee table books, including Homework and Heaven & Earth. When we have guests, these books entertain and inform them, and reflect positively on me, their owner and displayer.

Finally, I went along to a couple of events from the TINA festival at Newcastle on the weekend. One was about post-paper publishing (omg, so self-referential!) and the other was about art and politics. We do not need to make political art. We need to make art politically! A chap in the audience commented that we need to stop talking about art and start talking about how to communicate effectively. When I pressed him afterwards for examples of effective communication, he gesticulated wildly and shouted that he was not here to deliver a doctrine, adding that personal communication beyond the bounds of corporate media was essential, a good example being F*CK APEC being written on a wall. Very direct and simple.

Came across some interesting folk at the post-paper publishing session, and I will soon be checking out litmusphere, the new critic and engagemedia.

Dem Blues

Once Wenceslas Winced

Wang Kar Wai. Isn't that the name of a director?

I smacked the hay. Got busted by ticket inspectors, tried to get off at Nod, they sent me back to Slump. When I awoke, the dinosaur had already left. That's not the shortest story ever.

Three men have been arrested trying to steal an ATM from Stanmore Plaza. One of them was armed with a hacksaw, which he was seen using to enter his PIN. When that failed, his accomplice, named Bilson, tried to lift the ATM out of its socket. He hurt his calf muscles, so a passerby alerted security, who called a medic. "Medic! I need a medic for christ's sake!" cried the security.

The third man appeared to panic, obtaining a screwdriver from his bumbag and undoing the metal casing used to enclose ATM receipts. The receipts scattered about the floor, but behind them was the real booty - gold bullion. It is not known what the highest prime number is.

~~~

Obligatory post-mortem on dogs defeat: I was telling my pops, i said, i said i knew all along earlier this year, the dogs would make the semis and bomb out, say week two. Well it happened. Already there's talk back at the Kennel that Folkesy's gotta go, that Hazem's gotta go, that Perry's gotta go, that the Dogs need to revamp their roster. I revamped my breakfast. I predict that next year they'll either really bomb out, necessitating a proper clean out and glorious resurgence in 09, or plod along and finish 6th again, followed by another semis bombing out. Bring back Ben Barba!

Prediction for the rest of the season: Melbourne will definitely win it all. Parra's looking good too. I think Manly has a chance to win it all. North Queensland could win it all.

Disaster Capitalism

Excerpt from Naomi Klein's new book. I can almost hear the pitter-patter of Australian idiocrats trying to catch up with the U.S. on this one.

Bivouac

I am reading Jack Kerouac's Mexico City Blues aloud (ich lese vor), and it is really agreeing with me. I am up to the 80th chorus (there's 242). It's a quick read, but I can see myself going back over it and reading it again. I don't have strong record of returning to books. I can see myself reading it aloud to others, with their mutual consent. I can see myself mutualise.

There's something very familiar about the writing. I recognise something of myself in there. There's parts that leave me stone motherless cold.

"I have no plans
No dates
No appointments with anybody

So I leisurely explore
Souls and Cities"
...

"F#ck is a dirty word
But it comes out clean."

Gotta get my props

Cops gonna come and snatch my crops. So sang Cypress Hill, and they were referring to devices for hiding things, police, and tomato plants respectively.

Now I am referring to Police behaviour. I had no intention of doing so, until the best and greatest blogger in the world said this. I went to a protest during APEC (Arthur Pectoralis Endosphagnum Changeling) and was struck (metaphorically writing) by the so-far-over-the-top-that-it-was-flying-through-the-air police presence.

At cw's world words have been spoken about Australia being better in terms of complaining to the police, or standing up to them, or having information about your rights. Nowadays, I'm not so confident this is always the case.

First we had the APEC Powers Act to cover said pec, and now with the upcoming Philatelists and Dramaturgs Convention at Darling Harbour the Labor Government has rushed through the Stamp Collector 'n' Playwright Act that expressly forbids anyone from looking at a policeperson, or even thinking about one. Exempted from the act are police and basshounds.

Dogs a mortal lock

Where does that phrase come from anyway?

The Dogs are really building momentum at the right time of the season. Heading into next weekend's grand final qualifier qualifier against Parramatta, the Dogs will be looking to record their fourth straight loss.

Dogs players are already talking their chances up. Lock O'Reni Maitua said the Bulldogs are full of confidence after their great defeat at the hands of the Cowboys. "We can beat anyone on our day, especially Melbourne." What the hell? Every team can beat every team on their day, but it hasn't been the Dogs' day for quite a while.

My prediction: pain.

The game is Saturday night at Homebush, and I am strongly considering going. So strongly, in fact, that I shall soil myself presently.

Election 2007

This year some Australians (not those who haven't enrolled within a few hours of an election being called, nor those who've got gaol terms of three years or more) have a choice. The choice is between a turd sandwich and a giant douche.

Who will win?

I was walking down Enmore Rd a few weeks ago

I was walking down Enmore road a few months ago, as I’ve done more times than I’d care to count (but while we’re here, it’d be less than 1500).

The abandoned post office on the corner, where once the words “Anthony Hopkins is a drug dealer” and “Julia Roberts is a crack addict” adorned it.

The drycleaner with the newly installed rotating sign outside it. It was a rotating triangle, if you can imagine that. Along each edge of the triangle was writing, advertising the services inside. Why was it triangular? Why did it rotate? The sign spun and spun, a marketer’s dreams snuffed down a vortex of nausea.

I passed the newsagent, an attentional black hole if there ever was one, my unwilling eyes being sucked onto the magazine displays and forcing me to learn of celebrities. Furrowed eyebrows were the only clue to the unease I felt for unintentionally looking.

I strode ahead.

As usual, I glanced upwards at signs, light globes and railings from awnings, rooves and the like. Looking for something to jump up at, testing my vertical leap and at the same time demonstrating to passers-by that I was a man who could, and would jump for no apparent reason.

Usually when jumping, it suffices to lightly glance the target with your fingers. If it’s real dirty, you may want to avoid making any contact whatsoever. On this day a few months ago, I decided to hang on to the railing just after the convenience store. Quicker than I could think, I’d pulled myself up to shoulder height, whereupon I jiggled my legs and with surprising ease hoisted myself to the top of the railing. There was a small gap between the roof of this shop and the convenience store’s, so I sprang up between it, absent-mindedly wondering if there was a guillotine waiting above.

I rose to my feet and took a look around. There was a corrugated iron roof that sloped up to an apex at the centre of the building. Before ascending, I turned around and peered down the gap I’d just scrambled up. I saw my shadow on the street. I shifted from side to side and tried to make out my fingers, but it was too blurry. A couply walked over me and the infant in their pram looked straight up at me. It gave me a smile of recognition, then its eyes drifted to my left and the smile disappeared. I spun around to see if anything was there, but I was alone. I looked back down but the sun had passed behind clouds and my shadow was gone.

I returned my gaze to my surroundings and noticed a collection of drink bottles lined up by a wall. There were beer bottles, soft drink bottles and a motley collection of other beverage containers. They were all half empty, or half full if you like. Whoever’s been hanging around here enjoys a wide range of beverages, I thought to myself. Hang on, they can’t enjoy it that much if they never finish the bottle.

I walked up to the bottles and saw that propped up against each one was a little piece of paper. I leaned down to inspect one. On it was printed an address, and each piece of paper had a different address.

Corner of Cleveland and Elizabeth St.

Underneath big Coke sign.

Carillon Ave opposite university entry.

Plot. Thickens. Thoroughly perplexed. I couldn’t see any other signs of life up there, so I quickly climbed back down to street level. My mind was racing, trying to fit facts with reality. Homeless guy with printer? Drunken slobs’ party game? Some sort of conspiracy? How far up did this thing go?

I went home and told my wife about it and she chastised me for climbing up dirty buildings. After a heated discussion, she agreed to come and take a look with me. By then night had fallen and we agreed it would be best to wait until the next day. That night I dreamt of Alf, the TV alien.

The next morning I felt a sharp pang in my stomach. I instantly recognised it as the body’s need for food, so I ate some toast. After being chastised once again by my wife for leaving the knife protruding out of the vegemite jar, I thought to myself how all would be forgiven when she saw the mysterious addressed bottles.

She was walking in to work that day and we left five minutes early. I figured that would be sufficient time to climb up, take a photo with my phone, show it to her and agree on a plan for further action.

I found myself a little reluctant to jump up in my wife’s company, but up I jumped nonetheless. Before lifting myself onto the roof, I cautiously poked my head up and looked around. I almost fell over when I saw a woman up there. Just as my wife was about to start questioning me, I gave the shoosh sign, which fortunately she obeyed.

The woman was crouching down by the bottles, only there were less this time. She was wearing brown slacks and a beige blouse. Her shoes were black as night. She started to turn around and I quickly ducked my head, coming face to face with a pigeon. The pigeon pecked my cheek a single time and returned to the nest it had fashioned for itself.

I felt for blood, and a reassuring look from my wife confirmed to me that no blood had been drawn by the peck. She dilated her pupils and pointed to her watch, although she wore none, and I knew I would not get my photo in time.

I went for one last peek and saw to my horror what the woman must have been turning around to. A homeless man, rank in odour and tattily clothed, was slowly approaching the woman. I called out: “Stoppit!” Both of them turned towards me and then to each other. The last thing I saw as I dropped to the street was a look of recognition on their faces. They knew each other.

I tried to explain everything to my wife as we rushed towards the city, but nothing sense making seemed to fall out of my mouth. She comforted me and at last I had to bid her farewell.

I returned home and wasted three and a half hours surfing the net.

About a week later I was walking home from the library when I noticed a bottle of Lucozade on the ground. It was half full. I bent down to pick it up and caught the disgusted look of an onlooker. My eyes tried to explain, but the passer by was gone before my mouth could open. When I get to the bottom of this, I thought to myself, it will only be looks of approval and understanding that I receive.

Before lifting it, I withdrew a handkerchief from my pocket. It was a gift from my father in law. I felt the weight of the brown bottle in my hands. Little condensation beads had formed on the inside. Even through the kerchief, the bottle was warm from standing in the sun all day. Looking up, I saw the entrance to Sydney University. I did a double take – the kind you see in the movies – and looked down at the bottle. I knew I was in danger.

My body said drop the bottle and run, but my mind said no. I held onto the bottle tightly, so tightly I feared I might break it, until my fear passed. It was a quarter to five. There was still time.

I took a plastic bag from my backpack and carefully placed the Lucozade bottle inside, making sure that no liquid spilled. Rather than tying a knot in the plastic bag, I held the handles, and spun the bottom, forming a watertight seal. Looking upwards, I caught another look from a passer-by. This time it was from a too-cool-for-school inner west type, so nonchalant they were practically agreeing with my strange actions.

In less than a minute I was standing in the office of Professor Mick Horner. Mick, a renowned expert in mass spectrometry analysis, had tutored me in a proteomics class a few semesters back. As far as I know, I was the best student in the class, and I figured he would be nice to me because of this. I quickly explained to him my situation, intermittently prodding both palms towards him to allay his concerns.

As you probably imagine, my thinking was that some sicko was spiking drink bottles with dangerous chemicals and leaving them in public places. If Mick could run a quick mass spec for me, we’d know in half an hour whether the bottle of Lucozade was positive for a number of known harmful compounds.

'Why are you wasting my time?”, Mick said.

“Mick, you’re the best in the business. I know you can help me.”

“What are you talking about? Look, I have a busy schedule, the machine is booked solid until 3pm on Wednesday.”

“Can’t you blow somebody off? This could be life or death stuff. The fate of a twelve year old girl rests in your hands, Mick. Twelve years old!”

Mick appeared to waver at this little white lie, but it was no use.

“Come back on Wednesday, I’ll see what I can do. But without a lead compound, something you at least suspect, it’ll probably be a waste of time.”

I thrust the plastic bag-enshrouded Lucozade into Mick’s arms but he recoiled in horror and the bag fell to the floor.

“Get out!”

“But the bag!”

“Out!”

“It’s leaking!”

“You can shove your leaking bag up your leaking arse!” With that he kicked the bottle through his doorway, where it rolled around the floor in the corridor. Liquid had spilt everywhere and I was in no mood to clean things up.

As I glumly walked home, I thought of many things. The lost bottle – my only evidence, the feeling of that rusty railing on my fingers the first time I hoisted myself up on it, the pigeon peck, the woman and the homeless man. None of it made sense. I consoled myself with some fried chicken and chips and I ducked into Better Read Than Dead.

Absentmindedly thumbing through the latest non-fiction paperbacks, I came across an expose on the pharmaceutical industry. ‘They’re evil, but that’s yesterday’s news. In this hard-hitting expose, investigative journalist Lisa McLaughlin reports tomorrow’s news: drug companies are experimenting on you right now, and you don’t even know about it!’ Wouldn’t put it past them, I thought, and I made a mental note to see if the book was in the library.

I went to walk out of the store but a whiny voice apprehended me. “Sir, you’ve just put greasy fingers all over that book, I’m afraid I’m going to have to ask you to buy it.” Cursing my carelessness, I forked out $24.95 and started walking home.

I looked in the index and discovered that it was only third world people that were being tested on. Somewhat disappointed, I threw the book into a bin and continued home. It did get me thinking though – just what is in those bottles, who’s putting it in them, and who would be stupid enough to drink half-empty bottles lying at the side of the road anyway?

Perhaps due to the chicken, I had a moment of clarity.

In my mind’s eye I saw dark, disturbing forces at work. Something this complicated would require a lot of time and even more persistence. Sadly, I was about to start a new job, and I had made a commitment – to myself, my wife and my future employer. I filed the case of the mysterious addressed bottles under ‘complete next time inbetween jobs’ and let it go. That night I dreamt of 100 billion stars in 100 billion galaxies.

Since then I’ve started my job and everything’s been going well. I’m writing on a lunch break now, so I’d better wrap up. I still notice those bottles from time to time, but my work’s so interesting that I don’t think about it so much. Meanwhile my wife and I are planning on starting a family, so it looks like my detective days are behind me. But that’s okay with me. Just so long as no one I care about drinks from those bottles, I’ll die a happy man.