Sunny Breaks

Went jigging. Pretty typical huh? I never shut up about things like going jigging. There was a guy there who looked exactly like Colm Meaney. Infact I think it was Colm Meaney with hair dye. Someone said they didn’t let their kids watch the simpsons because it gave them nightmares. I neglected to ask if the kids’ names were Rod and Todd.

Links for the link-hungry:
- A large multimedia periodic table of the elements

- Moodle - an open source Learning Management System. Don’t know what a learning management system is? It cuts out that pesky middleman, university, and allows you to do your institutionalised learning from the comfort of your own home. Just like in The Matrix. Oh open source, is there anything you can’t do?

- Resulting from ricocheted search — because I apparently didn’t know how to spell ‘enema’ - The enema lovers guide to the internet (you must be 18 to enter)
- and Your First Enema. From it: “It’s embarrassing, isn’t it? You have this interest. You may be a girl in her 20’s, a man in his 60’s or anyone else at all in between–the thing that makes you different from “other people” is that you have an interest in enemas…”

-Then spiralling down to ALT.SEX.FETISH.ROBOTS FAQ. Nice.

The Geelong Shell refinery. Darkest of all the black arts of industry - petrochemical refinement.
I was transfixed by this thing. The bulbous thing in the middle. What goes on?
A fairly strong oily/gassy smell coming from it. I wish I could describe smell better. Totally unlike any of the smells to do with putting stuff into cars, or what comes out of them. In a strange way it wasn’t repulsive, like it was tapping into some ancient, familiar, almost comforting memory.

>

I bought a new pushbike today. Iron Horse Adventure. First of all I’d like to thank those folk in China who oversaw the production of its components and whose weekly wage is the same as what I spent on chips last night at the fish n’ chip shop.
It’s a pretty sweet ride. All the gears work and it even has brakes, so it’s already ahead of my brother’s mountainbike that I’ve been riding for the last six months. I took it straight out to the ol’ cementy hill at Fyansford to see how fast it would go. Pretty fast, but I couldn’t lean too far over the handlebars because I had the kamera in my top pocket.

This is all that’s left of the chimneys out there. The photo doesn’t really do its massiveness justice. Looks like a good spot to shoot a scene for a cheap sci-fi movie.

I would’ve written something good on here in the last day or two except I’ve been pissfarting around with this CSS-changer plugin which would enable you, the reader, to choose from a couple of different ways the page can look. But I’ll be buggered if I can make it work. And frankly I have a hard enough time maintaining one theme, let alone several. I’ve been sick of this theme since about two weeks after the last reasonable opportunity I had to put some time into changing it, three months ago.

There was a guy from a bike shop lamenting the whole litagataseousness of society and saying that if the pushbike was invented today it’d never take off because it’d be labelled dangerous. He’s probably right too. And there’s thousands and thousands of people out there who won’t ride a bike because they don’t want to wear a helmet, which is a shame because those fat-arses could really use the excercise.
There was a leaflet taped to the handlebars of the one I bought. One of the sentences is, “If you don’t want to take any risks or are the type of person who blames everyone else for whatever goes wrong in your life, do not use our stuff!”
You’d have to admit they must’ve got a lot of whiney complaints of skun knees to get to that kind of opener, instead of the usual, ‘Congratulations on your purchase of the Iron Horse Adventure model…’
It’s crafty how they hitched a ride on the Ferrari dancing horse logo. It’d be pretty easy to slip up, get home from your purchasing adventure and go, “Hang on a minute! I thought I bought a sportscar! What’s this pushbike doing in the driveway?”

- On that last post about Gmail, I was just thinking that really I’m just as much of a rube as the next person. I wasn’t really saying I wasn’t, but it’s rather clever the way they gradually made it available — first, while it was still Beta, to so called opinion leaders online like a.wholelottanothing.org — who are guaranteed to give it a postitive review. Then to Blogger users - who can invite a friend -> which automtaically creates talk and for a little while at least a small amount of exclusivity in an environment where there’s not much of it normally — anyone can downlaod software if it’s free etc.
If Google had just provided a page to sign up on there would’ve much less said about it.

Dear Valued Reader, please note that the place where to be emailin’ me at has changed and I’m giving the gmail thing a go. Thanks to Quanta for offering it, I probably wouldn’t have bothered otherwise. At some poiint just about everyone has a whinge about spam and for the most part I’ve thought what’s the big deal? I’d get one, maybe two a day. Then I made that change of server a couple of months back and felt the full brunt of meaningless, confusing folly that is 98% of what was sent me. The thing that gets me is that while the subject line offers some kind of product, the content is a bunch of random words with no link to what they’re pushing. Anyway, I sure did start missing the filters that the other (otherwise flakey) webhost had. And maybe this new mail arrangement will fix that. Would it be a reasonable trade for everyone to use the same email system (gmail) if they could defeat spam completely? No way Hosé.

Google could be as benevolent as god itself and I still wouldn’t like the idea that so much of the storage and indexing of public (and now private) information is in their hands. It’s not really the immediate and much-talked about privacy issue that concerns me because let’s not be naive kids, The Man was already using gigantic computers to funnel all your electronic based communications through anyway. Echelon? The name isn’t important, it’s way bigger than US + UK based and I’m sure they’re interested in much more than repeated use of words like ‘bomb’ and ‘aeroplane’.

I think it’s interesting how much attention Google pay to the task of coming off as goodie-goodies. Why?
One comment in a thread re: their IPO stuck in my mind — if they don’t [want to] be evil, then why do the IPO at all? Greed, fear, evil. From what I’ve read they were already making plenty of clams out of their existing set up, certainly enough to fund whatever R&D they were interested in. Besides, the pot of gold isn’t gold, it’s ideas — and they’ve already got the biggest drawcard for getting more ideas = the highest concentration of pointy-heads on the planet. Money will only lure a certain amount of nerds, most want to work with other top-notch nerds.

I’ve been going a bit berzerky malerky with the images and that’s totally okay.
I saw this out at the recycle depot and was very tempted to buy it. I may still do. I think it’s $8.99 - although it looked like they’d come into a whole load of stickers that said $8.99, because they were stuck on everything and everything was $8.99. It’s the $8.99 sale.

I just had another exam this morning, in the big hall this time - a gymnasium hall thing but they roll down carpet and hide the basketball backboards real good. Pretty damn Orwellian sitting there at this little table, the tables in long rows, silently filling in circles while overseers silently float past. High, high roof. Everyone seperate and no one overtly goofing off. I was imagining what It’d be like if that’s what I and everyone else did 5 days a week, 9->5 — obediently sitting filling in forms in a big room.
That was the last one, ever. I’m done. I hope I passed because there’s no way I could drag myself through anymore of it for some time. Am I going to take a little break?
No. It’s tempting, but a decade would slip by just like that, he says clicking his fingers. It’s like I’m doing life backwards, I’m the kid who doesn’t think ahead and eats desert first and had retirement first and now I will work until I drop dead on the linoleum.
The people at the institution and going to take a look at my resume tomorrow and I’m going to apply for the same job that keeps coming up, and I keep applying for but never get.

Addendum to the list of stuff I like: I like it when someone stops me on the street, hands me a camera and gestures that I take a foto of them and theirs.
Big analog thing it was too. Good old analog. Mine’s sitting on the bookcase, I haven’t touched it in years. Sometimes it catches my eye and I think, ‘How big!’
After snapping it for them I should’ve whipped mine out and got the fellow to take a photo of me with his family.
________________
‘So, ya like the State Library eh? Well it’ll never show up in this light from this distance with this camera!’
We were on the diagonally opposite corner.
‘I want to put you right in front of those central stone columns. Juxtapose the soft, irregular flesh of the human on to the unrelenting geometry of the sandstone.’
Who was I kidding? They couldn’t understand a word I was saying.
‘C’mon’, I wave an arm at them in gruff signal that they j-walk across the intersection with me. They don’t, and the guy reaches out for his camera. I pull it back out of his grasp.
‘Uh-uh. Not until I get this shot!’

I’ve become quite the professional amateur photographer.

In other news, Spencer street station has slipped into another dimension that still has large-scale ciggy advertising, and is near impossible to navigate.

It’s not like I’m a complete slacker. Agreed, I’m indulging in a form of slacking right now, but have you ever tried to squeeze an orange house brick in your ear at this time of day? There’s no more room. I did read some of the text book during the year, but same as last semester i get to the night before and am sitting reading through vast tracts of stuff I didn’t really know was there .. and I’m thinking ‘hey this is pretty interesting! I wish I’d spent a bit more time on it’. And there’s this whole chapter on the biological basis of personality, probably one of the more dodgey areas.

On the exam tomorrow half of it is ‘pick a school of personality psychology and write about it in depth’. I was thinkiing, what if I’d swotted all the year so far for this one pay where I’d go in there, write a scintilatingly brilliant knife-sharp essay on biology-psychol. and then in the last sentence or two get a bit rabid and let slip ’supermen’, ‘rise of the aryan nation’ … the written equiv. of twitching eyelid muscles, the smallest amount of flying spittle.
I wonder how they’d mark it?

ps. I’m not a fascist.

If I could have one super power it wouldn’t flying or any of those things, it’d be the ability to always pick the right answer on multiple choice questions, because half of the fun would be finding ways to actually use it.

In this highly individualistic society, perhaps the most direct way to suceed is not to be swotting, but focussing on how I can vanquish my foes — ie. my classmates. There’s no room for teamwork in this business. They even tell us that in the lecture theatre - they call it collusion. You get chucked out for it.
So at this late stage, what I can do is run into the exam hall 20mins into it, and yell, “I’m not retarded! I’m just running a little late!” — which, by my predictions, should unsettle up to 25% of the competition.

Since their already chopping services and quality out of education like mad buggers, I should suggest to them that instead of running all the exams they should work on a threat-like basis, where there’s a 50% chance of not actually having to sit the exam. Students won’t be sure, so they’ll study and learn anyway, and the vice-chancellor won’t have to pay those old bats who hover around to make sure you’re not cheating off the nerd in front.

Yeah, I’m desperate alright.

How cool is Add n to (x) with song titles like, ‘Steve’s going to teach himself who’s boss’, and ‘Old lady Ealing does man experiments’ ..? I think they’re from Germany and inspired the whole local SpaceRock thing here a while back in Shaolin Woodmen, Dave Thrussel and Ollie Olson.

I had to take down the wiki because people were abusing it.

I’ll let you in on one of my eternal, universal truths: if you have an idea get it out there because sitting on it only guarantees that someone else will beat you to the punch. Even if your idea is stolen you can still take the moral high ground and tell yourself that you thought of it first, but if it’s not Out There First, then you just look llike a copy cat.
And so, still half-baked and at an highly (pronounced ‘eye-lee’) inopportune time in that I have freakin’ exams to study for, I’ll tell you about THE BOX.
It will have lights and whirring bits and make noises. There won’t be any way to see what goes on inside the box. I will invent it and what it does is I feed a bunch of information into it and it gives an answer. It will make me rich.
Specifically - it will predict which suburbs in a city/town will rise in property value based on the migration patterns of how funky hipster people move into a divey/industrial/backwater ‘burb which the yuppies/gentry then eventually catch on to and buy up at much more exorbitant prices in a feeble attempt to purchase souls for their wretched cappo shells of bodies.
The bigger a city, the more complex the equation — lots of variables. For instance, the historical development patterns of a city like Sydney are way more chaotic than Melbourne. Of course the workings will have to more-or-less break it down to a street by street basis, but for resell purposes (that is, the information to the land-owner class who may or may not be yuppified, they could just as well be slobs - as long as they have they money for a) the information b) the property bought off the hipster and resold to the yuppy at many hundred % markup) I’ll only give general ‘burb names.
In fact the box won’t really do anything except blow smoke up people’s arses. I’ll be making the decisions, but it’ll look good. Here’s one for free: the arrow here’s pointing at North Geelong.

What a piece of work. I say favourite in the sense that it’s already become an artefact and could be seen as the exemplar of ‘Bond’. –
- 007 style sexism rampant throughout
- a level of cultural insensitivity I don’t think we’ll ever get back to.
- character names: Chu Me, High Fat and Miss Goodnight.

Kooky: Lee

- several safari suits and safari style shirts
- Roger Moore — the trashiest of all the bonds
- The main baddy, played by Christopher Lee, was more kooky than threatening or scary
- Knick-Knack -> thee GoTo midget when you need good midget acting action. (aside: why don’t more midgets become actors? Everyone would be happier if they did.)
- a really dippy attempt at a trippy ’60s ‘The Prisoner’ style set, 4 years after the ’60s had ended
- some of the lamest martial arts scenes I’ve ever seen
- Eurovison winner, Lulu, singing the theme song
- some pretty nifty bits in the score
- that cork-screw jump car stunt
- one really obnoxious Lousianian tourist

That’s right, I’m the birthday, I’m the birthday, I’m the birthday boy or girl. And it’s one of those numbers where I’m tempted to start comparing my life to that of the normal man’s. But I won’t because thiings are always going forward or backward and sliding around or staying still.
Sure i don’t have a job n’ car n’ partner like the norms, but that doesn’t worry me. What is worth stopping to think about is that I still have the same head I had when i was eleven. I found this the other day – the first ever diary i kept, starting mid-1985 and kept regularly for all of two weeks:

Thursday 13 June,
Since it is a 13 I thought it might be bad luck. I had a stacker on the roller-skates. I think my teacher could be rollin in the cash I have one reason why I say that, she has a number plate that says VB and that is her initials. Here is some other things with V.B.: Vic Bitter, Vampire Bat
Aircraft: 4
Today was pretty normal.

Wednesday 19 June,
Today i got the June Mad and it is a spechel rock issue out of my pocket moneny. I am adding a new segment called the school report that will tell you about school. By the way the spy mission is on Tuesday the 25
Aircraft: 4
by the way this was not written before the dinosours were around.

Thursday 20 June,
Today two of my Pacer rubbers and my Pacer were stollen    my suspects are virgil, Tim k, Shane, David and russel    Tim and Shane have each got one of my Pacers rubber each. I am not sure but I think Virgil has got my pacer so I have taken out all of my good things out of my pencil case in case they get stollen too. Today I tried out my boat at the dam. It sunk
Aircraft: 5

The rest are mainly about a girl i had a crush on and even after 19 years are still embarrassing. I counted aeroplanes because this was not long after the family sox had moved from a 5 year stint cash-cropping early strains of high-grade skunk deep in the remote south west, to smalltime gun-running in the hip off the leg that is the Mornington peninsula. Steel birds were a novelty. Back down there, the only plane I’d seen was some old puddle-jumper that’d crashed into the jungled cliffs of Port Cambell. It became the central object of worship for a cargo cult that sprang up not long after.

I don’t know. Things aren’t always what they seem. I’m not writing this. I’m not here right now. That’s not even me.

Believe me, you probably wouldn’t want to read anything I post at the moment anyway because I’d keep slipping into essay-speak, “While, such as, contrast this with, however, however however, yet blablabla”. It’s ugly. I gotta get me some new words. I vowed to myself that until people start saying “moreover” in the milkbar then I will never write it. Now there’s not even any milkbars.

On the last assignment i got back—make that the only assignment I got back – how d’ya like that for a clevernation education system—one of the comments the marker left was, “Use academic language”, and I’m like, Pfft, how do you think that expression, “well, it’s academic now” = it DOESN”T MATTER .. came about??? Because the academy shut itself off from the normal man.

It’s probably only because if telly that normal people know what psychology is, and I reckon that on average, twice a week for the last two n’ a half years people have arxed me, “so what’s communication studies?” and y’know what? I STILL DON”T KNOW.

___

I see there’s some paintings by the Impressionists on tour at the moment. I don’t know a whole heap about art but I’ve always been able to identify with VanGough due to his craziness. I’ve got cut out pictures from calendars and magazines all over the joint here.

It struck me the other night while watching A Clockwork Orange that I tend toward anything that’s nicely exaggerated. Afterall, art in any form will always be some kind of facsimilie of life, so why bother trying to make it like reality when it clearly isn’t? So I thought clockwork was pretty good, – the way the main charcter just lay there with his mouth open waiting to be fed etc.

And Vincent’s bright colours. Nice.

Y’know it was when the Manchester sound went into decline, around ‘93 that Bristol expanded, and now ‘unemployed yoof’ has fallen to no.3 on Britain’s main exports. Behind no.1 what is loosely termed ‘Documentary’ – but often are done in collaboration with US-based media companies and contain just as much CGI as real footage. No.2 with a bullet is these things I’ve mentioned before – saucy recreations/dramatisations of various periods in the last 600 years.

They should do a sitcom based on the time when VanGough and Gauguin were housemates in the south of France.

Gauguin: Vincent, have you seen my new tube of ultramarine?

VanGough: I threw it in the fire!

{Laugh track}

Gauguin: You did what?!

VanGough: It kept talking at me and it wouldn’t shut up—

{laugh track}

VanGough: wouldn’t … shut… up [anguished]

{audience: awwww}

I mentioned last year how the channel ten weather guy, mike larkan, often does the roaming around bit popping up here and there to do the weather.

Well he’s still out there and I’m experiencing a new kind of anxiety because it’s cold, dark and rainy and he’s out there with hands firmly stuffed in pockets, telling us how cold its gonna get tonight. I think they rented out his office and now him, the sound and camera dudes are permanently holed up in the back of an OB van, ceaselessly rolling along the ring-road and arterials like one of those toxic ghost-ships that’s not allowed to stop in any port

Please channel ten, let him come inside! It’s raaaining! boohoo

Mal Walden is the closest thing to a real-life Kent Brockman I will ever know. I remember when i was six or something, a visit to Camperdown and spotting Mal get out of a red ferrari GTO with I think the weather lady. This was when he was on Ballarat BTV 6. There’s that 1-2 second gap where mike larkan throws back to the studio Mal and Jennifer, and the way I imagine it Mal’s only input in the whole hour is what he can say in that gap; its the only unscripted bit and generally he has some comment on whatever the heck Larkan is up to.

But sometime in this last 24 years mal’s lost a few marbles. Tonight he says, "Venus rising in Gemini", which may or may not have been in relation to Venus passing in front of the sun tomorrow. Maybe Mal’s become a hardcore astrologer. He always says wacky stuff sometimes it doesn’t come out properly at all. I bet he spends most of the afternoon in his office, (out of harm’s way say the real journalists) thinking up what he’s going to say.

I feel sympathy for news readers. It’d be a crap job reading out all the disinfo night after night, even for folks like Mary Kostakidis who get material of a relatively higher quality its still grisly and I’m glad I don’t have to deal with it every night. Some, like Brian Nailor get silently, gradually very resentful and it shows on their faces, and others like Mal just go senile.

I feel bad for mal and jennifer too because they just dont gel together. Always accidentally talking over eachother in that bit and the transition to the end-feelgood story and saying goodnight. Terribly awkward. Jennifer reminds me of that scene out of Batman where personalities starting going toes-up with Joker grins on them.

All of the newsreaders on the ABC try to sound like Brian Henderson. He must take valium or something.

What I like is when someone stops me in the street and asks me for directions and I’m able to give them to them. That makes me feel good. Like I have a point. Also I like delivering things people like to get. Admittedly community newspapers isn’t top of the range here, but at least they’re free, and you’d be surprised what kind of crap people will accept if it’s free. But something quality would be really tops.
I want to get a plastic bowl, spray paint it gold and attach wings to the sides then wear it. Also wings for the heels of my shoes. I already practice the leaning bit. Rather than walk right up to someone I stop at about four feet away, stretch out an arm and counter-balance with a leg swung out in the other direction. I couldn’t find a picture of him doing that on the net, but there’s one in my bulfinch book. Wait until the scanner’s working.

You’d never know it but I updated to nucleus 3.0
Mostly this entry is just shunting so the page load isn’t so big.
My favourite song at the moment is Xcentric by Monolake - nice to get back to ‘pure’ electronic. All the voice bit sample grow tiresome, particular when I hear bits from the same sources. Xcentric sounds like there’s a whole bunch of ping-pong balls in it.
KLF played in Melbourne last night but the first I heard about it was Friday. Sigh.

Uh, so I was talking to ma on the telephone last night and she asks me what I want for my birthday, and I can never think of anything when I get asked that question. And as always i see something neat now, several hours after ->the energy dome The whole Devo site is pretty good.

Here’s an idea: why doesn’t anyone make a wireless toaster and kettle a la wireless computers? That would save me a lot of hassle.

Uh, so I was talking to Ma on the phone last night and she took the little cat in to get her fixed up. They sliced her open but couldn’t find any of the girl-gear, had a closer look and found out it’s a boy. Bloody hell!
I suppose we were all a little bit to blame in this snafu, and by “we” I mean Mum. The vet said it should be called Kevin instead of Seven. My wanting to call him zorro was right all along — I thought it was a bit odd the way she was into the rough-housing so much.
Because cats and humans don’t have that much in common to talk about (like - we can’t compare fur or claws) so it comes down to sex - as in, ‘you’re a boy, just like me’, or ‘aren’t you a pretty girl?!’ — it’s been getting a lot of the latter this last six months. Needless to say he’s going to have gender issues for some time.

He’s a bit of a freak anyway — eating rolls, salad and cheese etc. What kind of a cat eats cheese??? A strange cat.

Here was two post ideas:
title- ‘Hey, Nice Beaver!’ (a loaded gun line) - about how my food cupboard has been steadily filling up since the start of the year. It’s unusual for me, thus worth writing about.
title- ‘do you feel like DarthVader?’ (line from dj shadow track, usnsure where it’s sampled from) observation about how I can move forward through time if I start Wed. Morn early enough.

The title of this entry is a line from the simpsons - Bart in relation to a ‘where’s waldo?’ book.

I had a social sciences software test on Monday. It’s called SPSS which stands for stoopid psychology sduhdistics software. I almost had a full scale panic attack because I blanked out trying to remember what to do when someone doesn’t indicate what sex they are on a questionnarie. I think I passed it, but it was supposed to be really easy, a “gimmie”, which doesn’t bode well for the actual research methods exam. What the fuck am I doing maths for? Most people figure out what they’re good at, and do that. I figure out what I’m good at, and do the exact opposite.
On the upside, I made smalltalk on the bus afterward. An international student, from Singapore, who sometimes wears this wincheater with a picture of koalas on it. I think that’s totally awesome. 1) We australians take it Bigtime for granted that we live in a koala-filled country.
2) Her wearing that top is, like, My working Definition of COOL. Take something that you’re present-day peers and the mainstream consider uncool, distasteful, loathesome, cheap, child-like, inferior — and make it your own.
The thing is, this can’t be done consciously. I couldn’t wear that top - I would be a pretentious wanker. No one in geelong could pull it off. This town needs an enema. Seriously. I’ve been thinking about making a category called that.
It’s possible that there’s nothing wrong with this town, and it’s possible that there’s nothing wrong with me, but together - it’s disaster.

So anyway, fellow australian, when you get a moment sometime today, have a think about our fantastic and wacky natural fauna.
Peace.