... marvel a day

... this was a bit of a shock...

2011-10-06T00:25:00.002+11:00

Tom Cruise as Jack Reacher has to be one of the biggest miscastings in history. After Tom Cruise as the Vampire Lestat, perhaps... but that underlines that even the creator of the character can still be dreadfully wrong after the movie is made and released.

I only found out about this casting today but the thing that really incenses me is that I actually work in a bookshop and I hand-sell Jack Reacher to all the thriller readers we have coming in through the door. I don't know how I'll be able to look people in the eye as I do that from now on!

Ray Stevenson (played Titus Pullo in the TV series Rome), Gerard Butler (played Leonidas in the film of 300) and Viggo Mortenson (played Aragorn in The Lord Of The Rings) have all been names floated on the discussion boards I've been reading tonight and any one of them would make better choices as actors for Jack Reacher. Lee Child can say what he likes about metaphor but perhaps he should look at those moments when Reacher's size are plot points in his stories (see Reacher crawling through a miniscule tunnel in Die Trying). I've read all his Reacher novels and have never regarded Reacher's size as a metaphor.

If you want a franchise that lasts as long as James Bond (or Jason Voorhees, I suppose) you need to take the audience into account more than less. There are plenty of Reacher movies to be made, if you get the right actor to commit, and for my money Tom Cruise is not that man.

I did like the idea Cruise could play a victim in the opening sequence of the movie. That was cute...

... i am still alive...

2011-08-30T15:19:00.002+10:00

just because i haven't blogged, doesn't mean i'm dead. i've been reading, mostly, when i haven't been out traipsing around portland. and i've been doing a lot of traipsing. i have a few days' worth of traipsing to report on, actually, and i've been writing some stuff about that but to be honest, i'm a bit tired and not going to do it now. over the next couple of days i'll be entering some back-dated blog posts. it might look a little weird but i think it's the only way i'll be able to make sense of it in my head.

as for right now, i've left the guest house i was staying at, which actually turned out very well. i met some nice people there that i'll be hanging out with a bit later on next week. if i'd realised soon enough that it was going to be so convenient, i might have cancelled my booking here and then stayed there the rest of the time. if i come back here again, i'll definitely be contacting them to see if there's room. the hostel here is nice and all but i'm up in the belfry again and it's a bit rowdy.

good night.

... it's 9pm and i'm backdating this entry...

2011-08-26T22:30:00.001+10:00

so. let's pretend that i'm writing this on friday, sometime around brunch. imagine me, having breakfasted and had a shower, dressed comfortably in shorts and a t-shirt while i slowly make my way through virtual history. then i think to myself, hey, i haven't blogged yet. i should do that now. let's pretend that's how this entry is coming about. in point of fact, description is not entirely wrong.

i have been spending inordinate amounts of time sitting outside reading and i feel much improved for it. that being said, i haven't been as diligent with my blogging as i would have liked and have a bit of catching up to do. happily, it's not overmuch of a problem.

yesterday, was last thursday. this happens at the end of each month along the alberta street shopping strip, from the corner of 15th avenue down to about 33rd. it all really gears up around 7pm and i had planned to go along with people from the guesthouse i've been staying at but i was in the mood for something to eat. i wandered up the road to the bus stop and thought i'd get some cheese to snack on while i made my way into the city. it wasn't until i'd bought some cheese and sat down to snack that i realised going into town would actually mean i'd likely fritter away my time in there and possibly miss going to alberta street.

i decided instead to just start walking along and watch people setting up their stalls. last thursday is a very ad hoc thing. there doesn't seem to be any kind of central organising committee liaising with anyone and if you want a particular spot along the strip then you better get there early and claim it. if you've been there before you get to know the regulars and there is an unspoken respect for those people who've made a spot their own.

what an amazing collection of stallholders. notwithstanding the shops, which are by and large pretty nifty on their own, the sheer variety of stuff on offer and to be seen and bought is wonderful. by comparison, the saturday markets by the waterfront are pretty ordinary and... slick. it doesn't really feel like a "market" if there's not a bunch of stalls sellings stuff off of blankets on the ground - that's definitely alberta street and not the saturday markets.

i stopped and talked to a few stallholders as they were setting up, as is my wont. the first thing i did, however, was stop for crepes. the crepe-maker was actually a french woman and it was great to be able to have a bit of a conversation in french for a while. the rest of her fellow stallholders were locals (inasmuch as anyone in portland is a local, given how many people here seem to have come from somewhere else) and non-francophone and seemed to be taking bets on where my accent is from. the crepe was packed full of nutella (her: "voulez-vous un peu de nutella ou en plus?" - me: "trop, s'il vous plait." - her: "trop? bien sur!" - me: "merci beaucoup!") and it was hot and delicious. my sister and i having spent many saturdays wandering around markets with sticky fingers from vienna peanuts, i knew better than to touch anything while i was eating my crepes.

i found a stall where everything looked like prints done on fabric but it turned out that what looked like prints were actually embroidered. the artist's name is jaclyn rose and i'll see her again at the first thursday art walk thing in the pearl district on the 1st. she has an etsy website called holidaytart and the stuff she does really is unique. some of it is very like pointillist work and quite intricate and very beautiful.

i bought some cards from a stall run by a couple of artists. it was the first time they'd done last thursday and i was their first sale of the day! i've written messages on the cards to send out and i need to go to the post office and get a clue about how much more postage to put on them to make sure they get home. at this stage it'll be interesting to see which gets home first - them or me.

there is a building that has multiple studios in it - something like the lady of shalott - and the various studios all have different artists making stuff. one artist, allie bentley, makes some amazing jewellery and metalwork. another person who came to portland for one reason and ended up staying for another.

i stopped at an ice cream place called salt & straw where i had some ice cream that had actually been made with local craft-brewed beer. each day for portland beer week they debuted a different flavour at their "scoop shop" on ne alberta. (they also have an ice-cream van and thought it was hilarious that we call our mobile ice-cream vans "mr whippy" vans...) i had some kind of chocolate ice cream made with stout. it was very nice.

of course, since i was eating again i couldn't go very far and touch things i was looking at so i stopped and looked at some hats being put up on some cyclone fencing in front of a building that was still under construction. raucous goods is another online etsy store and honest to goodness, the hats look like someone had gone on a killing spree on the set of the muppet show or sesame street! justa, the creator of this... headwear said that the biggest time of year for sales was right now - apparently they're huge at "burning man", the crazy art/music/lifestyle festival they have out in the desert.

as i moved further along i found a sign directing me to a "pop-up shop". i was curious - does it just pop up out of nowhere, like some kind of guerilla retailer? no, it was the name the various artists called their little zine and craft store. i picked up a zine called food stamp foodie #1 published by a vegan cartoonist called viriginia, who also has a blog here.

it's a real eye-opener to buy food here. compared to australia, food seems to be quite cheap, especially given that the amount of waste that is thrown away at the end of each day by restaurants and food places seems to be enough to feed a fairly healthy (?) freegan and dumpster-diving movement. the food carts are probably the best tasting food, using the freshest ingredients (i'm certain that many use ingredients grown in their own gardens at home) and are prepared pretty much on the spot.

buying food at a supermarket, on the other hand, is ghastly and looking at the ingredients panel on this stuff is buy turns surreal and terrifying. somewhere in the past someone decided that in america, each man should be his own physician and in that vein there is simply list of ingredients vomited from some company's public-relations wing onto the back of the packet you're buying. in my naivete, i assume that back in australia the people who can tell you what's in preservative 231 (or whatever number it is that makes the soft drink that it's in leave a furry aftertaste in your mouth) and that it's their job to give you that answer when you ask. i assume that they know how the preservative affects people as well as the food it preserves and that if it should come to pass that those effects were unsatisfactorily bad for you, then i also assume that they get the ball rolling in having in banned. like i said, i'm naive.

here, however, it seems that that's all up to you. it's the thinking that allows drug companies to market prescription drugs in the media to people. surely you shouldn't be creating a demand for a drug. i know some will say that they're informing and educating the public. i doubt that very much. advertising is about convincing people to make a choice. public service advertising is about encouraging people to make selfless choices - wear your seat belt; don't drink and drive; quit smoking so you can see your kids finish high school; vote; swim between the flags - but advertising drugs is about selling drugs. full stop.

how did i get onto food? oh, yes. the vegan food stamps zine. lots of vegan cooking zines around, although i love the fact that, checking out the associated wordpress blog (see the link above), there's actually a recipe included from a book called veganomicon. i love the title. i don't know that i could be a vegan - it would require a large number of conscious choices that i'm a little ashamed to say i'm happy to not make - but the title itself reminds me (deliberately, i'm sure) of the necronomicon, a device used by h.p. lovecraft in his cthulhu mythos as well as being the book that tries to eat bruce campbell in the evil dead series of movies.

another stand that i liked was run by a website called fashion mouse. several different designers trade under one room through a website maintained in such a way that all they have to do is supply the stock. not quite etsy but a lot less work for the designers. before i reached the end of the street's stalls, i came across one more stand, called skrappi. they sell things made from re-used material like kitchen mitts, around-the-home knicknacks, and - what caught my eye - childrens stuff. i was quite taken with the bath mitts and with a new niece in my family i thought it would be a very nifty thing to get. i didn't buy anythnig (i was saving my shekels for something later) but i grabbed a card and promised to blog a link.

i think that's enough for now. stay tuned for more exciting stuff.

... not much to say, really...

2011-08-26T06:52:00.000+10:00

it's about thursday lunchtime as i write this and i know it'll say friday on the date stamp above this but that's because i'm usually where it would be friday right now. so there you go. i've only missed a couple of days.

so what have i been doing? well, actually, i've been doing bugger all. reading, mostly. i finished reading one day by david nicholls and i'm currently reading virtual history: alternatives and counterfactuals, which is edited by niall ferguson, a very earnest scotsman who also wrote such titles as empire and the ascent of money (which was made into a great television series, also available on dvd).

one day was great. i finished it off in a couple of days, although if i'd sat down in the morning i could have finished it in one day (hahaha). it made me laugh and it made me cry. some things were surprising and some things felt a bit inevitable, less because they were part of how a story should go and more because that's so often how life goes...

virtual history, on the other hand, is a rather demanding book. ferguson's introduction is a mammoth ninety pages, almost double the average length of the "counterfactuals" presented. in it he explains the lack of seriously investigated "what-if" scenarios presented by the history-researching community and how a few differently-thinking academics are poking these various messes with sticks.

it's already inspiriing me to read more history. i remember reading the penguin history of the u.s.a. and that was heavy going but i'm sure i've read other history stuff since. haven't i? oh well...

the thing is that most "historical alternatives" tend to be the bases of sf novels rather than seriously considered reflections. fatherland by robert harris was a bit like gorky park, i thought, set in a post wwii germany where hitler had actually won the war and the time of the story was on the twentieth (?) anniversary of said victory. most of the alternative history came from the details, although one side effect of hitler's success was the election of joe kennedy as president of the u.s.a.

one really interesting one i like wasd called romanitas by sophie macdougall (i think). it was a drama/thriller set in britain 2000 years after julius caesar... but where rome never fell. some early emperor had chosen to professionalise the army (instead of allowing them to pillage for their pay) and that in turn had enabled greater military loyalty to the imperial throne, more effective suppression of anti-roman activists, longer peace - which also led to exploration of africa and north america, contact with the far east and india, settlement of australia! there was a long history played out.

i think my favourite would be kim stanley robinson's book, the years of rice and salt. using the conceit of recurring characters being reincarnated and meeting up time and again in the bardo in between lives, he explores the development of a modern world where the black death had completely wiped out western europe; where tamburlaine's armies were halted by the fear that whatever had wiped out europe was also waiting for the mongol horde; where maghribi islam resettles western europe through al-andalus (spain); where a chinese fleet intent on attacking japan misses by that much and ends up discovering california and south america instead; where gunpowder and the industrial revolution emerge from a newly expansionist india.

the counterfactuals in virtual history aren't quite so colourful but they're not meant to be. what if charles i had managed to avoid the civil war in britain? what if britain had stood aside in the first world war? what if germany had defeated the soviet union? what if jfk had lived? what if gorbachev had not?

they are more painstakingly teased out, with greater reference to the "what-if" discussions of the day. charles defeating scotland in 1639 wasn't actually a pipe dream, it was a reasonable and pursuable possibility. what if the colonies had received representation with their taxation? with more reference to primary sources, diaries and letters of people considering the alternatives before them at the time the events were occurring, the writers of these "counterfactuals" show how things might have gone and maybe give us now some encouragement and inspiration with regards to how things might now go from here.

so yes, i've mostly been reading. and i did my washing this morning too.

... a brief message from our sponsor...

2011-08-23T06:19:00.003+10:00

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visit us at 4943 ne martin luther king jr blvd, on the corner of ne alberta st. open monday to saturday, 6am until 4pm. 503 764 9727. parking at rear off of garfield st!

... quiet day

2011-08-22T14:55:00.002+10:00

i spent most of today wandering around a shopping mall.

the lloyd center is in ne portland and has pretty much everything you'd expect in an australian shopping mall, although i was extremely surprised by how many shops were closed or vacant. closed is one thing - that's up to the trader and if they can afford to be closed on a sunday then that's a great problem to have! vacant, though? don't shopping malls usually have crazy high rents? i don't know. most places like westfield or even the queen victoria building seem to put up hoarding almost immediately, announcing in bold type that a new and exciting shop is being prepared for you! interesting that they do not do that here.

i went to imago dei for church this morning and learned a little more about how they do ministry and where they plan on going from here. there was a guest speaker there this morning (i think they've got guest speakers lined up for a few weeks until the big push at the beginning their fall programme) and i'll write about that tomorrow.

i did a lot of walking today under a fairly warm sun. it doesn't bake here the way it does back home...

... why i don't crave adventure...

2011-08-21T08:20:00.004+10:00

well, things have gone rather pear-shaped here.

i had planned my trip around my budget and staying in hostels while i was here in the u.s. and for the most part that's gone along swimmingly. it wasn't until leaving seattle and coming back to portland (instead of heading east into the great heat) that things have really become unstuck. (aside from the fact that it just took five attempts to correctly type the word "unstuck"!)

booking digs for when i came back to portland turned out to be trickier than expected when i was doing it in seattle. i had thought that i'd be able to split my remaining days between the portland northwest and portland hawthorne hostels, knowing that it was policy not to allow guests to stay longer than a week at a time. that was fine, i could get around that.

then i found out that that week was actually a week in four months! that i did not know about - that i had not planned for. nevertheless, i felt confident i could press on. there are more than two hostels in portland. i booked a hostel through a website called "hostelz.com" after looking at a whole bunch of hostelling websites for the area. it turns out that two of the other hostelling websites i looked at also funnel through this one group, "aae reservations", whose confirmation email to me had mutliple email addresses on it and who seemed content to let me completely book online without asking me how old i am.

"why would they ask you how old you are?" i hear you exclaim. well, it turns out that you can't book a hostel dorm with them if you're over 35 years old. i'd never heard of that kind of age limit outside of a con-tiki tour (and even con-tiki are happy to take your money if you're not 18-35, i think...) and when i was booking, i didn't see any sign blazing with lights that hostel bookings were limited to under-35s. so i didn't find this out until i arrived at the hostel.

the guy behind the counter was as surprised as i was that i'd booked something i couldn't technically book. he was very generous in not demanding i pay for my booking, or even my first night (which i thought he probably had a right to but didn't actually voice aloud) and when i asked him how long he'd been dealing with this booking agency, he answered, "not long, a few months". we agreed that i would probably not be the first disappointed person he would meet.

so i had no lodgings last night. God bless the zine community! in my hour of need, they leapt to my aid. i lobbed up to the iprc and they had a range of suggestions that i put into effect, including a "stranded in portland"-esque group on couchsurfing.org for just this kind of circumstance. as time ticked on, two people put their hands up to as being willing to house me, although i only knew about one at the time, and i stayed in hillsboro in outer sw portland last night.

after having a pretty good go of it writing while i was on the coast, i thought i might see about visiting seaside, which is a town i passed through on the way to astoria. or i might just go back to astoria. it's a bit of a circular trip but as a german guy commented while we were discussing our holidays at the hostel in seattle, plenty of people fly thousands of miles just to lie next to a swimming pool all day, even when they're at a beach resort! i've been getting out and about, at least, even if i've changed my plans a bit.

aside from being so unimpressed with seattle, this is about the only real hiccup. fingers crossed the rest of the trip will pan out more smoothly. if you're inclined to do so, please don't worry about me. i've every confidence that it will all work out fine.

ciao!

as an addendum to this post, i wanted to let my dear readers know that God has provided me with a great place to stay. i followed up an advert on craigslist for a place that typically rents rooms out by the month, often to people who are coming to portland for work, as a way for them to establish themselves in their work before getting hung up on a lease they may have to break if the job goes south.

it's in northeast portland and as i was coming up here on the bus i saw a bunch of things that in daylight i might like to investigate further... although right now what i'm chiefly concerned with is how much will i actually perspire tonight? it's a bit muggy and the temperature here in portland at 23h26 on saturday night is 27 degrees celsius (almost 81 degrees fahrenheit), and you probably know what a huge fan i am of muggy. hmmm...

it's funny but i think that had i looked on craigslist yesterday, i would have missed this place. so God had a plan for me to be helped by a fellow zinester. maybe. maybe not. i looked and trusted that something would be provided and it was.

it also looks like i'll be able to stay here until my booking at the northwest hostel kicks in on the 29th. that's awesome too, because the rate we've agreed on for the nights that i'm here, and how i'll pay it, has worked out very neatly. it's good. praise God and thank you to all who were praying for me while the situation was worked through. i'll be thanking God myself tomorrow when i go back to visit imago dei for church. i don't know if i'll make the 9am service - although from what i can check out online, i probably will - and on that note i'll send one or two last emails and go to bed myself.

ciao!

... leaving seattle. meh.

2011-08-20T04:26:00.003+10:00

i leave seattle in three hours. i can't believe i'm actually counting down the time but i really dislike this place. there have been people who have been nice enough - i bought the best tasting lemonade i've ever had in my entire life from an azerbaijani guy who emigrated to the u.s. twenty-six years ago. he's lived in seattle the entire time and says he likes it about as much as i do. he's established here and has a regular clientele whose seattle freeze has eventually thawed (somewhat) but as soon as it's time to take holidays him, his wife and his family, all disappear out of state for the whole time. sometimes to vancouver, canada, and sometimes to portland, oregon. they never stay here.

he was really cool, though, and we talked for about ten or fiften minutes about him and his business, how long he's been doing it for, his family, his hopes and dreams for them. he's very familiar with the seattle freeze and when i told him a definition for it that it's read here he laughed and thought it was hilarious but unfortunately true. the quote:

but the dichotomy most fundamental to our collective civic character is this: polite but distant. have a nice day. somewhere else.

i found this even from people in starbucks! (yes, i went into starbucks. it was just the once and i promise i won't do it again. deal with it.) i'm so used to people working in coffee shops having maybe the most... focussed niceness (?) of people in the hospitality, knowing that if the coffee doesn't bring you back then the service might and coffee drinkers, once they have a routine, tend to be quite faithful to that routine. maybe it's the preponderance of coffee shops in seattle: maybe there's no particular fidelity on the part of coffee drinkers here... i don't know. i do know that since walking into a tully's coffee i haven't felt any great need to go elsewhere. the staff i've dealt with there have all been very nice. exceptions to the rule, i think.

the hostel is pretty good. the rooms are very small but the common area is set up quite well. i think the entire place was furnished by ikea! the bunks, mattresses, sheets, comforters, bedlamps, dining chairs, chill-out-room furnishings, cutlery, cooking utensils, towels... all ikea. there is wi-fi throughout, the showers are good (one of my benchmarks) and the toilets, well, they're not too bad either.

my biggest terror here in the states (and no, it's not being eaten by a bear, although from what i've been reading if mum's still in russia she's more likely to be eaten by a bear than me!) is the toilets. i don't understand why they (whoever they are) decided that having water fully halfway up the side of the bowl was a good thing!? it freaks me out that i feel like i have to lift my butt off the seat to wipe myself without risking dumping my hand in the toilet water. ewww. i'm not overly icky about things but that one seriously takes the cake.

so the toilets here haven't been too bad. every one i've seen or had occasion to use has had the water down to an almost australian level (i.e. pretty much right at the bottom of the bowl) and i've been able to relax completely when i've needed to relax... partially. it's nice. alas, portland's toilets weren't quite so consistently relaxing. astoria's weren't too bad. mind you, after visiting china back in 1993, i can suck it up enough to use pretty much whatever toilet i've had to.

you know, i don't think i've seen a cloud in seattle the whole time i've been here? i feel i've been gypped. i know it's the middle of summer but still... is one unseasonably miserable day too much to ask?

so, my train leaves at 14h20 and i need to be there half an hour earlier to check my luggage. so i think i'll check my luggage much earlier (say an hour) and then go up the street to tully's and have a cuppa. cheers.

... bit of a walk...

2011-08-18T15:57:00.002+10:00

while i've been in seattle i've been casting about for something to keep myself occupied. i've been doing some writing and might be able to get a couple of zines out of what i've been doing but i decided to walk from my hostel to the zapp zine archiving and publishing project.

the problem is that the streets of seattle try to be nice and logical but basically fail at it. imagine trying to lay a strict avenue/street grid onto the cbd of sydney. good luck. i often joke that you could possibly drive down a street in sydney, make no deliberate corner turns left or right and end up in the same spot, eventually.

it took me quite a long time to find zapp, especially since i was using the force (and only occasionally resorting to google maps on my phone) but eventually find it i did. see below for my trip. it was about 4.6 miles altogether. i'm tired.

i tried to embed the map below but it was a bit faily. click on this link to see it.

... in seattle. meh.

2011-08-17T08:12:00.001+10:00

i think that maybe it was built up a bit too much in my head. maybe that was it. i honestly can't think of why else i would be so disappointed with the place. you can't throw a stone without hitting a starbucks (which i find vexing in itself) and everyone wanders around like their dog just died. in portland you seem able to smile at just about anyone on the street and they'll smile back. unless someone here is already smiling, i haven't seen that many people - markedly few - return a smile.

something else i've noticed is this weird, "i might be moving slowly but i'm actually in a rush" attitude people seem to have. if they're behind someone on the street they seem very keen to pass them, only to move no more swiftly than they had prior to passing the slower person. drivers seem particularly prone to this, as well as ignoring people in crosswalks.

i think i could probably live in america for the rest of my life and never master the art of the crosswalk. cars are able to turn right at red lights but seem quite content to do so while there are already people using the crosswalk. crosswalks in the middle of a block (not at a corner) seem to be unnoticed for drivers unless someone steps out in faith, assuming that once they're using the crosswalk, people will stop, while trying to cross at a corner can mean someone who thinks you might want to cross (and someone looking up and turning in a circle would be someone who i thought clearly didn't know what they were going to do next) will stop a good car length from the line at the corner where they need to stop anyway and hold up a dozen cars behind them while you decided if you're going to cross or not.

my trip from astoria to seattle yesterday actually went off with nary a hitch. i was on the bus from astoria just after 10h05 and the ride over the astoria-megler bridge was actually pretty cool. the local transit connections from astoria were astoria-south bend, south bend-raymond, raymond-aberdeen, and it turned out that they weren't separate connecting buses, merely different route numbers for different legs of the one journey of a particular bus. that made things a lot more relaxed for me.

we stopped in raymond and the bus had to make a side loop so the driver effectively turfed us off the bus (there was a couple heading up to port angeles who were taking a similar approach as me). i used a nearby restroom, terrified i was going to propositioned for something, anything and relieved that i didn't see another soul until i returned to the bus stop.

raymond, were it not so creepy in a "last gas for sixty miles" kind of way, actually seems to have quite the burgeoning folk art community and the town has a tremendous variety of these rusted silhouette statues of people and pets all over the place. i snapped a pic of one standing beside my bus stop - she was even holding her purse behind her back in one hand...

the connection from aberdeen had a thirty-minute wait and the woman working the info booth at the transit centre was super-helpful, not only providing change for my fare (you need exact change everywhere on the bus) but also letting me put my gear in a bike locker while i ducked up the road to jack-in-the-box for lunch.

this was my first (!) encounter with sales tax. i picked out a particular combo (grilled chicken tenders, fries and drink) that was $5.99 and ended up paying $6.49. the sales tax, it turned out, was 9.25% but i later learned that it varies not only from state to state (oregon has no sales tax) but also from city to city. argh.

i can honestly say that the sales tax thing alone is enough to make me gald i'm only staying in seattle for a short time. once i've sorted out my amtrak ticket back to portland i'll be a lot happier. i was thinking i might actually go further down the rail line to sacramento but i've had so many people talk sacramento down to me that my thinking about my 50-20 quest is becoming rather bleak.

it's ironic that the seattle skyline is absolutely cloudless today. i took a photo, because it seems to be such a unique prospect. everyone's out wearing jeans or suits or dresses made chiefly from scarves and spaghetti straps. for such a sunny day, people seem singularly un-sunny. the longest conversation i had today was with another tourist.

the stop in aberdeen continued untroubled and the connection to olympia happened very smoothly. the transit in olympia was a bit longer - closer to fifty-five minutes and the cafe recommended to me by the transit centre, while providing delicious food, had lousy service, either relying on the food and drink for return business or caring for neither in equal measure.

olympia-tacoma was fine although the bus was chock-full of local government workers commuting to the bedroom communities around tacoma. the transit at tacoma went very smoothly and i enjoyed a long conversation with a couple who were on their way into seattle to see the seattle mariners play the toronto blue jays (baseball). bud (the husband) is something of a jazz musician and promised to put my name on the door of a gig this week but i forget which gig and when they got off the bus they farewelled me as "david". it's a mystery to me why i have a name at all, sometimes.

alighting the bus in seattle was easy as pie and the stop was a hair over a block away from the hostel. i've been walking around seattle today - right now i'm looking at an advert on the side of a bus which has a golfer (fred couples) on it and some grafitti artist has given him a toothbrush moustache. disturbing. the couple on the bus to seattle described seattle as a hilly portland. it feels more sydney. maybe that's why i don't like it very much.

i caught a cold in astoria and i'm now dosing myself up in equal measure with drugs, water and sunshine, and i'm going to sign off now and hoof it up-and-down to the hostel.

... lost in astoria...

2011-08-15T08:54:00.002+10:00

my time here in astoria has been a bit of a haze. i've just been wandering around, looking at stuff, not doing a whole heck of a lot... deliberate. i had planned on visiting the maritime museum again but now... meh. i can't really be bothered. there's a tattooing exhibit there and i'm sure that'd be interesting - i know we took our youth group into the sydney cbd one weekend and checked out the police and justice museum at the same time as they had a tattooing exhibit there. very interesting. still, though, it's nice to just hang around and not do a great deal.

i'm also wondering if i haven't caught a bit of a cold. (two sneezes and i have just been offered benadryl by the lovely carly here at the three cups coffee house.

i spent some time here last visit (see here for more) and carly and leah remembered me! i don't know how much had to do with the fact that i made sure i brought a badge that i bought from here to help raise money for a local festival but i was remembered. which was nice. carly, since i was last here, has become the proud mother of a little girl named maggie mae (who has since replaced her mother's face on the badges) and we spent some time oohing and ahhing over the pictures i have in my phone of my new niece. maggie mae is cute but i think my nice is far cuter. (no bias - i sincerely believe my niece is the definition of cute. this may be amended in the future but who knows when?)

it's been very cool catching up with the staff here and finding out everything that's been going on in astoria since my last visit. the roasting here (if you follow the link above to the coffee house, you'll see it's part of the thundermuck coffee roasting... thing... operation - that's it!) has been going from strength to strength, which is great.

astoria suffered a bit of a blow with a fire that burned down a bunch of businesses down on the waterfront. i've been asking around and everyone seems to have their own theories. the general consensus seems to be that (a) the fire seems to have started as some kind of electrical fault in one of the food places, then spread to the building opposite on the same pier, and (b) there may have been some foul play, given that one of the business in the immediate area was in some financial difficulty and under threat of foreclosure.

it really is very sad when you hear of things like that happening. it's not like astoria is necessarily a booming hive of unstoppable activity: the canning has completely dried up and the town itself appears to be making a slow and stumbling transition to a tourism-based economy. for a place so rich in pioneering history - lewis and clark wintered nearby at fort clatsop after being despatched by president thomas jefferson to explore the new property acquired through the louisiana purchase, and the outpost known as astoria and named for john jacob astor, new york fur magnate and all-round business dynamo, was founded as the western end of astor's fur-trading empire, to name but two - there is a rich vein of history here to be mined.

for instance, one thing i've yet to do here - and i don't feel too bad about that, since i watched a parade yesterday next to a man who has lived in astoria for six years and he hasn't either - is go to see shanghaied in astoria. as well as being an enduring piece of local theatre that well depicts the history of a place (see windy gully for a slice of history from my home stomping grounds!), it seems to embody the stories that a place tells about itself that may not begin exactly true but have taken on the feeling of truth, until it's hard to distinguish between the two. i know that once i've seen the piece, i may have to completely rewrite those remarks - i have a sneaking suspicion i may not.

astoria is celebrating its bicentennial this year and that's part of why i wanted to come back and visit. reba mcentire (and i've consistently mispelled her name at pretty much every juncture until now) is singing at a concert here this weekend and while i had every intention of seeing here while i was here, dropping fifty shekels on a ticket for the cheap seats in a quaint local theatre was not what i was expecting. i had envisaged (and i don't know why i automatically had assumed it would be like this) some kind of country fair environment with a stage at one end with a bunch of local acts playing throughout a day-long gathering, all culminating in reba's performance for a slim ten bucks to get into the fair. mystery why i'd imagined that.

there was a parade yesterday because these weekend has been the annual astoria regatta - for those australians in the audience, that's "regatta" rhyming with "barter" (like "bah-tuh") not "regatta" rhyming with "batter" (like "batt-uh"). of all the words to lengthen an "a" sound in, i find it hilarious and a little bit charming that they do it with "regatta" and not "bath". but there you go.

i thought the parade was great. lots of local and regional involvement, along with military personnel from the oregon national guard, the coast guard, local naval station sailors, and what looked to me at first like rotc candidates from local high schools but were in fact navy junior cadets. most people stood up out of their seats when the military folk passed by and i could sense a tremendous amount of respect being shown these serving troops. whatever their personal politics, americans seem to accord their military incredible respect (not at all times but at these kinds of times, certainly) and i can't imagine the kind of public outcry at the way the military was deployed that would result in soldiers being booed or spat on. the scars left on the american public psyche by vietnam and the gulf wars are incomprehensible to me.

i took a gazillion photos of the parade and, after looking back on what i wrote two years ago, i'll be very surprised if i get off my butt and actually post any of them online. i'll look at them and maybe do something with ones i like but, yeah... probably nothing in particular. i also photographed the site of the shops and restaurants burned down last year. it saddens me every time i think about it.

i've been writing a lot. i'll show very little of it around but this trip has given me time and space to simply sit down and type. having my own room at my hostel has been super convenient in this regard and it's been so pleasant with the window open and the night air being so mild that i've been up very late writing. ideas are forming and maybe this year nanowrimo might actually be something i win for a change. (coming up to my third attempt!)

at this point i'm thinking more and more about my trip to seattle. i'm following a low-budget, heavy-time-investment route using local public transit marked out by an interesting fellow calling himself "busboy". i discussed my route with a guy at the astoria transit centre on friday and some of my concerns - especially that the initial leg over the astoria-megler bridge might derail my connections from the very outset due to construction works slowing down traffic entering the bridge fromt he oregon side. i was assured that my fears were unfounded, since the first three legs are in fact one long route, broken up by timing points where the route number on the front of the bus is changed but the bus is not. because of this, a late-arriving #50 over the bridge will become a late-departing #32 from south bend to raymond.

as an aside, i learned something rather weird about place names here in oregon/washington. there is a town called bend set roughly north of centre of the state of oregon. the town of south bend is on the washington state coast, further north than bend, at around eight o'clock if washington state were a clock face. finally, the town of north bend is also situated on the coast, this time in the southern oregon coast region of coos country, which is adjacent but one county to the oregon-california border. north bend is more southerly than bend; south bend is more northerly than bend.

i haven't investigated the possibilities of an east bend or west bend but i think west bend would possibly be sitting on the border with idaho and the east bend might be a coast guard vessel sitting off the coast several miles into the pacific!

so after i eventually get from astoria to aberdeen, i'll connect to another bus line to olympia, wa; thence to tacoma; finally connecting to seattle. all things going well, i should arrive in seattle about a block from my hostel and around 6pm. from the time i board the first bus in astoria, i will have been travelling for around eight hours. the entire trip will cost around $10.

i'm looking forward to seeing urban, suburban and inter-suburban/rural washington. i've been given to expect plenty of greenery and not quite so many hills as we go through on the way from portland to astoria. to take amtrak from astoria to seattle would mean going back to portland before boarding the cascades train to seattle. total one-way trip cost, $70. the thruway connection from astoria would depart at 8am and arrive in portland at 10h30; the train from portland leave 12h15 and arrives in seattle at 15h45. total travelling time about eight hours. assuming the cascades doesn't have to stop to let a freight train go past. ironic. i only hope that i won't be getting in the way of too many people with my luggage.

i think that if i won the lottery, i could do worse than buy a house here in astoria. it's a fairly sleepy little place - moments of excitement aside - while still being not terribly far from portland, and - clearly - seattle. if i were a driver, it would be more convenient still. the marvellously inexpensive cinema (i saw green lantern on friday night for $4) and bowling alley (two games and shoe hire last night cost me $10.25 and if i lived here i'm sure i'd join a league and get even cheaper bowling) definitely appeal and the sunday market is bursting with fresh fruit, vegetables and various preserves.

i'm glad that i visited astoria again this year and the next time i visit portland - if i do - i will be sure to visit astoria again.

... i love the smell of... fish... in the... afternoon...

2011-08-13T11:13:00.002+10:00

i managed to make the early bus to astoria with a minimum of fuss, although i did have to clean some poor washingtonian out of his one-dollar-bills for a fiver i had in my wallet. once i was on the bus into town, it was plain sailing the rest of the way in. i think that the coach to astoria had maybe ten people on it - including the driver.

so that was yesterday, effectively. i arrived just after noon, checked into the hostel where apparently my room was upgraded. i don't know how, since i seemed to get exactly what i'd booked, but that makes no nevermind. it's been nice to not have to lock up all my belongings when i leave the room and i slept particularly well last night in my double (gasp!) bed. much better than clambering up onto the bunk i was terrified i would fall through in the middle of the night. (not just me - the elderly english fellow on the bottom bunk was scared that would happen too!)

the hostel here in astoria has improved considerably since the last time i stayed there. new carpet, the bathrooms are much cleaner and i think they've got new fittings and whatnot. the kitchen is still a bit messy and i have a sneaking suspicion that some of the... longer-term visitors are still treating it more like a halfway house than a hostel. that being said, these kinds of things are not solved overnight and the changes that are being made are solidly in the "one small step forward and no steps back" category.

i'm off for now but i'll write more later. dinner beckons.

oh, and the smell of fish? that's astoria...

... omg - omsi...

2011-08-10T15:49:00.002+10:00

today was a pretty ordinary day. except where i was abused by some semi-homeless looking guy in a take-out joint who then went on to have a long and involved political discussion with a trimet-uniformed bus driver, abused because i was sitting at what he, apparently felt was his own personal booth. clearly, i should have arrived later. alas.

the basic goal today was to visit omsi - the oregon museum of science and industry. after having been thoroughly through museums in australia like the powerhouse museum in sydney or questacon in canberra, i had rather high hopes for omsi. alas.

i think part of the issue was that right from the outset i felt like i was being stung. general admission to the museum was only $12, which wasn't too bad, but there were a few exhibits that cost an extra $8-plus, and if you wanted to see one of the fancy movies (omnimax) or go to the planetarium (and if you've seen the episode of south park just try thinking about visiting a planetarium of any sort with a straight face!), all of that cost extra as well. you could bundle it all up in one price if you wanted to, for certain combinations, but i really felt let down.

i had been led to believe - i felt led to believe that omsi was awesome. i think that if i were eight years old or the parent of an eight-year-old, then i would think omsi was pretty awesome. for anyone else, though, i think it just kind of misses the mark.

i will admit that the rather extensive exhibit on babies from conception to birth was fascinating. i've not seen so many real life embryos at different stages since i visited the museum of natural history in beijing back in 1993. the accompanying text was clear and informative, good for all levels of audience - age, reading, etc - but i did feel as if it were its best foot. having put that forward, i found everything else to be something of a letdown.

the palaeontology section was closed in favour of a narnia exhibit (costs extra); a bunch of exhibits on nanotechnology were clearly aimed at elementary-school level audiences; another section was very deliberately geared for the same audience; the game on 2.0 exhibit was a major drawcard but heaps of the games weren't working properly, wii handsets weren't tethered to their matching consoles, and the volume on a major presentation on arcade games was way too low to be heard. alas.

i was thoroughly prepared to spend upwards of four hours, seriously wandering around omsi - after all, i think i probably managed to spend about four hours at the maritime museum in astoria - actually it was only two and a bit hours but it felt a darn sight longer than that. (click here to read about that!)

so after this singularly disappointing experience, i wandered back into town and had a very delicious coffee milkshake at city coffee, the first coffee place i visited back when i was here in 2009. the staff are a bit more surly than i remember but they were very apologetic about not giving me a hazelnut latte when i'd ordered on (they gave me a plain one) and refused to take my filthy lucre when i offered to buy a plain latte that they could add hazelnut to in exchange.

i really am getting used to the portland street layout. i've worked out how to understand the avenues and the streets seem to be really a matter of familiarity, learning which ones are more northerly (even when you're in sw portland) and which ones are more southerly (even when you're in ne portland). visiting church on sunday proved to be an enlightening experience from an exploring-new-streets perspective and, now that i think about it, it was pretty much on the way to klickitat street, which has a park with statues featuring the characters from beverly cleary's books. i'd meant to go there last visit to portland - perhaps this time i'll make it.

i got my washing done yesterday. i've been reading zines today. some very funny stuff. lots of bavarder in the common area at the hostel tonight. reminiscing about films like gremlins, poltergeist, the blair witch project.

... more on yesterday

2011-08-09T09:53:00.001+10:00

i had a rather wide-ranging conversation with a fellow zinester yesterday afternoon, covering such topics as hypocrisy in religious faith and practice, violent crime in australia, and smelly people in portland. t. is training to become a unitarian minister, is currently a social worker and worked as a divorce lawyer for a while. i asked if all three were connected and she admitted that they probably were but given her heart for social justice, it's something of a chicken-and-egg question to ask.

it got me thinking about violent crime in australia and how much of it is gun-related. i tried hard to think about all those people we seem to feel ought to be able to own a gun or need it for their work - police, the military (former and active), farmers, some security professionals - and then think about the number of violent crimes committed with illegally acquired guns. bank robberies always seem to take place with sawn-off shotguns but i realised that i probably have a better idea of how guns move around the united states than in australia. we've always had guns here but there's always seemed to be this idea that you only need a gun if you actually need one. there is very little sense of needing one "just in case".

i wonder if maybe it's the high place of sports culture in australia that funnels our propensity for violence into a non-violent or otherwise-channelled fashion. it's not quite bread and circuses... or is it? we make such mighty contests of the trivial things that sports are - who can run faster than someone else, swim faster than someone else, lift a heavier object and put it down again than somebody else, plus variations - imbuing them with all manner of honourable virtues - leadership, teamwork, success in the face of personal struggle, and (that perennially australian favourite) seeing the underdog prevail. what's the quote? the race is not always to the swift, nor the battle to the strong... but that's the way to bet.

we do seem to have a strong bias towards domestic violence, though. it may be as "mild" as the "tough love" family of a smack on the bottom when children misbehave or the stern, urination-inspiring phrase "wait until your father comes home"; through to the life-draining and changing climate of emotional neglect by parents withholding love from one child or ignoring internecine conflict among children in a family or favouring one child over others; through to the ongoing tragedy of physical and sexual abuse by family members or close family friends; to the horrifying conclusion of a mother drowning her children, leaving an unwanted baby to die by exposure, or a father throwing his children from a bridge.

i can only compare it to my own upbringing, which i felt was always fairly normal, although i can probably point to a few things that i feel have made a lasting impact on my life for the worse and that i have struggled to overcome. it never occurred to me that physical discipline, in the form of a smack on the bum or maybe a pinched ear to accompany a scolding, could be a bad or unwarranted thing. i remember plenty of kids at school for whom a scolding would have made about as much impact as a bag of fairy floss on a freight train. by the time i reached high school, different kids would have been at the point where no kind of chastisement from an authority figure would have made much of a difference in our immediate circles of parents and teachers and coaches - when such figures are viewed with contempt, what kind of discipline can they impose? it is ceases to be discipline and becomes a battle of wills instead.

perhaps it is because i always felt that i was loved by my parents that it never occurred to me that physical discipline might be a bad thing. i don't think i was ever disciplined on the off chance that i needed it (like some people i know were) and i'm sure i was never disciplined because my parents took any kind of delight in it. i knew people who were made to stay out of the house after their mother had cleaned the house because she didn't want it dirtied or messed up again. others had a boisterous house filled with yelling at one another, a stormy exterior that despite everything concealed a very strong us-against-the-world feeling.

so how does discipline in love become abuse? why would parents neglect one child among several, or turn a blind eye to the abuse of one child by another, or actively abuse one or more children themselves? is it because they themselves were so abused or neglected? is it because they feel disconnected from other parents of a similar generation, such that there is no mutual accountability for how they raise their children, be they friends or family? (how true here would be the saying, "it takes a village to raise a child"?) is it because life demands so much from parents in terms of work that they have no energy left to put into the (highly) energy-costly effort of loving children that sometimes you might wish in exasperation to give back? is it because exasperation finally becomes some kind of poisonous envy and parents then inflict their own internal pains upon their children?

i don't understand it but i have my suspicions. i feel very sure that the cost of living today, coupled with the sense of responsibility to provide materially for family in a manner superior to that which parents themselves received as children, can easily produce a family environment skewed towards prizing (academic or sporting) achievement over inherent worth as part of the family. in a western world world paradigm where the family has shifted from being a source of value to the state to being a source of value to industry, i suppose this is a natural suspicion to have. my concern, however, is what will replace this corporate-rule paradigm? and will it treat family as valuable in itself or continue to see it as fuel for some bigger fire?

talking with t. about these things has really switched my brain into thinking a lot more about it. she has achieved a tremendous amount with her life, given her struggles. she has managed to turn the (what shouldn't be but still practically are) drawbacks of being a woman, coming from an immigrant background, and being physically disabled, into strengths and incentives to drive her to work harder and more solidly than others might without such issues to deal with. her family background seems to be one where she was solidly valued, even when her parents were given every opportunity to divest themselves of an infant who would clearly struggle in life and who would be a greater burden on family for a long time. she is a vibrant, humourous, intelligent woman who seems to be held back by others far more than she holds herself back.

her involvement with the unitarian church she admits stems much from their deliberate inclusiveness. without researching it more, it seems that their touchstone of practice is to deliberately and actively sharing the love of God, which seems to work itself out in a very public social justice position. it reminds me quite a bit of the uniting church in australia, to be honest, at least as far as its social justice stance.

even here, however, human fallibility and pride (in terms of saying, "we are right" and "it's not my fault" and "it's not my problem") continue to resurface. t. was selected as a delegate to the church's national assembly, held at some convention centre interstate. she was not the only delegate using a kind of wheelchair or scooter - almost five dozen others were in a similar boat - but a lack of foresight and planning meant that the main hall used for the assembly's discussion had only one elevator to provide disabled access. that's a tight bottleneck for the amount of traffic.

she continues to confront these issues as she seeks formal training to become a unitarian minister. the colleges that are specifically associated with the unitarian church remain disabled-unfriendly and while the unitarian church has passed resolutions to make every effort to make church institutions fully accessible to all church members wanting to use them, the funds needed to make those resolutions a reality have not yet eventuated. i am assured that this is not a poor denomination; its very inclusiveness means that groups who feel shunned or ignored by other denominations (theologically liberal; disabled; sexually alternative) bring a great deal of energy and resources to grow and energise a church that accepts them as they are.

t. is seeking to pursue theological studies at another institution which will meet the criteria laid down by the unitarian church for their ministers. from what she says, it's not usual but it's allowable. another small barrier which she rolls over (leaping isn't really an option) with much aplomb. it sounds like the places t. is considering studying at are all theologically more conservative than the unitarian seminaries and i can't help but feel that this is not such a bad thing. t. sees clearly the limitations of taking a social justice stance without the will to make that stance a stride and now is wrestling with the question of how to inspire the flesh of her church to work the will of its spirit.

t. remarked that she knows many unitarian ministers who do not use the Bible in their ministries. she recognises that this is deeply flawed and incongruous in a denomination that associates itself with the Christian church generally; i am encouraged that it's not something she is willing to let slide for herself. studying theology in a seminary that places a higher value on God's word (despite how they may value other aspects of ministry) will serve her well, i think, and wherever she ends up, either in lay ministry or formally pastoring a congregation somewhere, it will serve those she ministers to as well.

my prayer for her, as well as for myself, is that by being steeped more deeply in the Bible, there will be a corresponding maturity in love and willingness to serve sacrificially, with a shepherd and servant heart. the apostle paul says, "whatever gain i had, i counted as loss for the sake of Christ. indeed, i count everything as loss because of the surpassing worth of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord." he goes on to say, "not that i have already obtained this or am already perfect, but i press on to make it" [becoming like Jesus in his death and attaining the resurrection from the dead] "my own, because Christ Jesus has made me his own." [philippians 3]

like so many other people God has brought into my life, t. reminds me that the Christian faith is not a sprint but a marathon, which we are not called to win ahead of others but to complete together, helping those weaker and encouraged by those greater than ourselves. the wisdom is see in some inspires me to spend more time in the Bible; the selflessness i see displayed in the lives of others inspires me to work out the love of God more in my own life. i am not the worst of all sinners (i think paul claims that one for himself too!) but nor am i the best. i think i am fairly mundane, which is perhaps most frightening of all. i have no desire to be spat out of the mouth of the Living One in a laodicean fashion; i want to be salty and flavourful, hot and spicy, cool and refreshing. God has blessed me by changing me from wanting to want this to actually wanting it and i praise him for that.

... marooned in portland

2011-08-08T16:54:00.002+10:00

not me. someone else. n. is a californian who has been systematically marooned by her friends in one city after another, friends disppearing one after another like layers on an ogre, from vancouver (canada), through seattle and portland to san francisco. she just got a message from a friend saying she'd just arrived in san francisco. alas. n. is is unflustered by this. she's going to hang out in stumptown for a while and make her own fun. good on her, i say. yet another entertaining acquaintance made on my trip to the city of roses.

day two of the zine symposium went well. while i didn't feel energetic enough to go to the after-party at a place in north portland, i was comfortably sidetracked into eating at a local burger establishment called burgerville. it was actually pretty nice food, except for the part where you receipt tells you how much of your daily required intake of calories, etc. were in the meal you just ordered. when i order junk food, i don't ask to be told how bad it is for me. i take it on faith that as bad as it may be for me, if i don't know how bad it is, it can't be that bad.

last night after the symposium there was a zinester-feud (a la family feud) and karaoke night at floating world comics in ne portland. that was nice. several of the zinesters showed themselves to be quite the karaoke superstars and while i felt too tired to join in, i was very entertained by one person's rendition of the tina turner/james bond classic, goldeneye. marvellous.

i spent some time going around the tables today, trading my own zine for some and buying others. i managed to find some choice reads, along with things i thought might make nice gifts for people. (my housemate, if you're reading this (and i hope you are) i've also bought a couple of pint glasses on sale from rogue brewery for $2 a pop and a growler as well! we'll be able to get that filled at slow beer, no problems, i reckon!)

i visited a church this morning that was recommended to me by some online contacts i made prior to this trip. imago dei was a very pleasant experience, although i must admit that while i was warmly conversed with, it was more in response and i wasn't proactively addressed by anyone at the church. the speaker was a visiting pastor who had left the church some six months earlier with thirty-odd others to start a church plant in salt lake city (of all places!). he spoke of encouraging starts, followed by committed followings-up, and slow growth. he spoke on exodus 20, and how the giving of the law came after God's gracious salvation from the hands of the egyptians. it was a warm, encouraging message but felt a bit like a pot of tea at a chinese restaurant - filling enough at the time but not really satisfying by itself. the music and songs were good and i took notes on a couple of verses - hopefully enough to find out what they were and to see if we could maybe sing them at my own church. maybe.

holy communion was shared as well. this was a slightly odd process but novel and really made me thank back to the gospels, where Jesus is asked by john (at the apostles' behest) who would betray him to the authorities and Jesus says that the one to whom he gives the bread dipped in the wine - which was judas iscariot. for the Lord's supper, then, we stepped up and were given space to pray as we wished, and then we dipped our pieces of bread into the glass of wine (or juice) adjacent to the bread bowls, then ate. i found it a quite thought-provoking activity and i have to say it did give me pause as i've not had in some time, feeling very much taken back to the last supper, far more than i can easily remember being before.

of course, the other good thing about this communion service was the lack of concord (i had thought this was "imperial") grape juice. the last time i took holy communion while on holiday in the u.s. was in ithaca when i was visiting there. while it was fantastic to be visiting with my friend, i was startled (a little euphemistically) when i tasted grape juice that seemed to me more like hubba-bubba bubble gum than the grape juice i was used to at home. i used the wine this time, although i suppose that without going back and comparing the two, i'll never know if they were offering the hubba-bubba grape juice.

(i just explained all this to a nice, clean-cut young fellow from minnesota who is on a road-trip of his own, having driven from minnesota to montana, thence to portland, from whence he plans on going to california, nevada, colorado and back home again. a trained vocal musician with experience in catering and a fresh, go-getting attitude that is so classically american, i truly think the world is this young man's oyster. good luck to him, i say.)

and now, i'm off to bedfordshire. tomorrow i hope to report interesting things from omsi, the oregon museum of science and industry. (i think.) there's an exhibition of old - sorry: classic - arcade games there. and you can play them. how cool is that? i'll have to make sure i leave that section for last. can't have dessert before i eat my greens.

... yo yo yo coming to you live...

2011-08-07T03:12:00.002+10:00

good morning world! i'm coming to you somewhat live and direct from the portland zine symposium. my shift on the info table starts in an hour or so and i'm kind of mooching around out the back (so to speak) and availing myself of the free wi-fi.

i'm already finding stuff about portland that has changed since the last time i was here. probably the most alarming thing was the demolition of the safeway near the hostel i'm staying at. there's a fred meyer store down the road but after checking that out last night i'm a little concerned that i'm not going to find anything that i really want to eat for breakfast. i'm going to check around for some kind of organic food store (should be too hard here, i would have thought) - i just want to find something to eat for breakfast that doesn't list more adjectives than nouns in the ingredients list! once i get home i'll be looking with a gimlet eye over the stuff i eat at the moment.

i didn't get much sleep last night, what with the early start and all, but i'm hopeful that i will get some reasonable amounts of sleep soon. the symposium finishes tomorrow and i can only hope that there'll be a debrief about how this one goes within about a month. it's something they've tried to do in the past but once things are finished for one year, the last thing anyone wants to do is think about next year! i asked one of the organisers if any work had been done on a procedural manual for the symposium but there have been good intentions of making one but without much progress.

one of the biggest issues seems to be organising the tables. the next biggest thing seems to be finding a venue. organising tables is a perennial problem and i'm sure if there were a magic bullet for it, some wedding reception place somewhere would be taking a percentage for it. the fine details of table organising seem to hinge on the layout and facilities of the venue and finding a venue far enough in advance does seem to be a problem as well. the symposium had things very good for a very long time and now that things are more complicated and expensive, it's all getting a bit tricky. this space seems okay but bumping in this morning only a couple of hours after the gigs from last night finished (almost) bumping out added a bit of a challenge.

logistics aside, this is an awesomely exciting place to be. i would love to see sticky institute do a table but it's a big ask. maybe someday.

i'm going to head off and have a sticky(beak) of my own.

... well, here we are again...

2011-08-05T15:35:00.000+10:00

the trip from melbourne was actually pretty good. i was up at a reasonable, showered, breakfasted and dressed, and all by 7.30-ish. time enough to go out to the tram stop, miss the tram by seconds, then decide to walk to the station anyway.

when i reached the station, i found an express train was due in a few minutes and almost faster than you could say, "jack robinson", i was at southern cross. return ticket to the airport was $26 and it doesn't expire until november. (fear not, dear reader, i expect to return to our fair antipodean shores far sooner than that!)

melbourne to sydney goes a lot faster in an international-route-flying plane and i think i could safely say that i spent longer checking in and going through international departures than i actually did on the plane from tullamarine to kingsford smith.

the trip to san francisco started well enough but i never sleep on these long-haul flights. the best i can manage is a kind of doze and so, like a shark, i'm not quite asleep and i'm not quite awake. we made great time, leaving sydney a mite early and arriving in san francisco almost half an hour early... only to find there was no room for us at the gates and we had to wait until we were expected to arrive! there was a lot of cloud cover and some fog, i think, and so, for whatever reason, almost every connecting domestic flight out of sf was late. my theory, which seemed to be borne out by the announcements that were being made, was that the weather was making it hard for aircraft to land, hence none to make the return trips.

once i was on the plane to portland, however, things went along fine. i bought a weekly ticket with no fuss and that will cover me until i head off to astoria on the 11th.

unsurprisingly, i met heaps of aussies and kiwis on the flights over but even once i was here i kept running into more. it's a bit frightening.

anyway, i'm going to sign off now. i'm exhausted.

... my bags are packed...

2011-08-01T00:27:00.002+10:00

i'm almost ready to go! i decided to do a trial pack tonight and it turned into just a straight-out pack. I've got a change of clothes in my carry-on and everything else pretty much packed into my check luggage. only a few things left to add to that - i've not quite kitted out my toiletries bag and i'm taking laundry detergent with me - but otherwise i'm pretty much good to go. the clothes i'm wearing the rest of this week i'll wash later on this week so they'll be ready to go when i get home. no pressure to get my washing done as soon as i land.

right now i'm pretty tired. good night.

... only nine more sleeps to go!

2011-07-26T21:39:00.002+10:00

it's down to single-digits in terms of sleeps and i'm fairly excited. today i booked my accommodation in astoria (oregon) and in a moment of awesome synchronicity i also bought the goonies on dvd. i'm absolutely going to watch it before i go. i think last time i watched kindergarten cop and on my last trip i also had my picture taken in front of "astoria elementary school" (actually john jacob astor elementary school). i also booked my bus ticket from portland to astoria, so i have effectively locked in my first sixteen days of my holiday. yay.

all the excitement has, i fear, taken the edge off my preparation for my small group bible study. it's very difficult to focus on planning a study - especially using my computer to do it - when with a couple of clicks i could be looking at the next place i'm looking at travelling to. argh! so, i think i'm going to go have a quick shower, reboot my brain, and knuckle down. small group may not be until thursday night and i think have a pretty good grasp of the material but i don't want to be building with straw and sticks when i could be building with gold and silver... so to speak.

if you're so inclined, please keep praying for me, that i'll keep focussed on the things i'm meant to be doing now and not dreaming of the things i'm hoping i'll be doing in a couple of weeks' time.

... getting psyched!

2011-07-25T19:44:00.002+10:00

it's perhaps a little premature to get all Christmas-y about things (even though today there's only five more months until Christmas!) but it feels a bit like it for me: ten more sleeps until i head overseas on my next holiday.

i'm pretty excited, especially since this holiday might not have happened at all, except for some divine expediting of my tax refund. this was the first year i've used e-tax online and it worked a treat. not difficult to use at all and since (despite the fact i do have a couple of computers and an ipod and whatnot around the house, i am something of a luddite) i'm particularly leery of putting a lot of confidential private data out into the ether, i felt a bit audacious using e-tax. this from the man who still has every tax pack he ever used to submit his income tax.

in any case, i have my tickets and travel insurance sorted out, my first lot of accommodation booked and the rest pretty much lined up too. i had been keen to re-visit astoria but their bicentennial celebrations seem to be leaving the place pretty much booked out for the weekend i'd planned on being there. not all that surprising, i suppose, given that it's a concert weekend. meh.

once i've dashed this off, i'll be re-evaluating my travelling itinerary and trying to contact 3m (makers of post-its and micropore surgical tape (i think)) about seeing if they have some kind of public showcase of their history and whatnot. i've been selling stationery now for over seventeen years and much of that stationery sold has been branded with the 3m logo. i'd love to be able to see where it was born. i'm not a motorcyclist and as interesting as the home of harley-davidson motorcycles might be, i'd rather visit the 3m factory!

... long way round

2011-07-03T11:15:00.001+10:00

if you know me at all, you'll probably know that i'm not exactly my own biggest fan. over the past week or so i've had reason to think a little bit about this, think about who i am and where i've come from and where i'm going with my life. hardly the first time i've engaged in this kind of serious navel-gazing and i'm sure it won't be the last but each time i do, i find that i'm bringing a slightly different perspective. this is not a bad thing.

i firmly believe that when i became a Christian, the circumstances were such that God had allowed me to paint myself into a corner that i couldn't get myself out of. i'm fine with that - God in his sovereignty made room for me in my brokenness to pursue a lifepath to its particular conclusion. i often joke that if i weren't a Christian i might be an international assassin or some such. i have some pretty firm ideas about what i think is acceptable and what isn't. if i weren't a Christian, i think i'd be tempted to believe that that would be reason enough to start cleaning up the world... and i know i'm not the only person who thinks that.

the truth is, though, that if i weren't a Christian, i wouldn't be here. period. the day i became a Christian, i faked a headache and got out of school so i could stay at home. i spent a bunch of time in the morning going over a heap of stuff i'd been writing in the previous months, destroying some things and collating others. i ran a bath.

that i let the bath grow cold and had to top it up with hot water several times simply underlined to me what a failure, what a waste of space - and water, it proved - and essentially what an oxygen-thief i was. i was bitterly unhappy with who i was and where i was and where i wanted to go but could see no way of getting to. it was such a long-arse time ago that looking back at it now, details are becoming sketchy and are being filled in by the story i've been telling myself about it all these years.

i remember feeling powerless. i remember hoping that maybe it was what it felt like to be dead because i honestly felt like i had hit rock bottom. i felt unloved by my family and rejected by my friends, like an alien in the community in which i lived and couldn't imagine feeling any different anywhere else. i didn't want to be dead - i most earnestly wished never to have been born in the first place.

thing is, i had been born. i knew that there must have been a reason for that and i didn't think it was so i could be pishing my last in a bathtub. God had worked his way into my life in a variety of ways over the years: scripture classes in primary school, sunday school (after which my sister and i would have a weekly ice-cream), friday night youth group (that new friends at my new high school used to go to and turned out to be at where i used to go to sunday school) and through some relatives in my extended family who were varying flavours of Christian. feeling like i had exhausted all other avenues, i could only conclude that God had a reason for me to be born.

now if there had been a hand suddenly appear and write on the fibro of the bathroom wall, "you are loved", i probably wouldn't be writing this now because an experience like that would have surely burned into my mind, my heart, my soul, the truth of it. sitting where i am now, i know that that's probably not true either - people have an unerringly erroneous ability to ignore God in the face of overwhelming evidence and after almost twenty-one years as a Christian i can firmly say that i am no different.

to my bitter shame i can admit that i have wilfully ignored God, probably more since i became a Christian than before. more, since i knew God more intimately after i became a Christian than i did before. it's hard to deliberately ignore a person you don't know. there are plenty of people in the world that i don't have to put any effort at all into not thinking about because i have no memory or experience of knowing them.

that's not the case with God. i know God. he knows me, intimately. he watched me being cooked, he saw me born by c-section as a breach (or is it breech?) baby, he saw me grow up. he knew the struggles i had before i became a Christian and he knows the struggles i continue to have despite being - or maybe because i am - a Christian.

i'm hopeless with money. i'm a spendthrift who feels guilty about it but never seems to change his ways. i swear way more in my head than i do with my mouth, although that wasn't always the case. i'm thoughtless, inconsiderate and cold sometimes. i struggle with sex, less than i used to but more than i would ever wish on another person. i eat too much and i don't exercise enough. i don't read my Bible enough and i've never been good at praying one-on-one with God. there are a whole raft of thing - from fashion to facial hair, vacation destinations to political preferences - that i have no opinion on and mildly resent feeling expected to. i'm quite content to not drive, aside from feeling that that choice (among several) mark me as somehow unaustralian and irresponsible.

despite all this, i believe that i am a better man now than i have ever been. every day i sense that God has changed me into someone who more and more resembles Jesus Christ. (and i'm not talking about my beard.) every day i feel more confident that when the time comes for all of my deeds and misdeeds to be read out from the book of my life before the judgement seat of God, they will be forgiven and passed over by a Father who is only waiting for the procedure to be over before he hugs me to himself and dries the last tears that will ever fall from my eyes and welcomes me home.

every day i understand better than ever that my relationship with God is founded on nothing that i have done but on everything that he has done for me through Jesus; that he strengthens me from within through the Holy Spirit; that he teaches me and talks with me through the Bible and prayer and the created world around me and through the brothers and sisters he has surrounded me with in the church.

i am here. this is now. and i have an opportunity in front of me that i haven't had for a long time, that requires selflessness and vulnerability and patience. i want to take hold with both hands and not let go, not because it's been a long time and not for any other reason, really, not really.

i want to because i believe that God has his hand in this too. that for all that it feels awkward or strange or new, it feels good and right and worth everything i believe it should be. how often i've prayed to God that he would show me a clear path for where he wants me to go - now it seems he has, i'm praying that i'll honour him in how i walk it - how we walk it together.

... what i would have posted on the age website if the "captcha" worked...

2011-06-15T01:15:00.003+10:00

i spent some time composing this, in response to this theft-of-life of an article, brought to my attention by my housemate...

It’s hard to think of anything to write here that hasn’t been said already. Should I perhaps suggest something that’s completely over the top? A little context first...

Living in Sydney for 12 years, I grew used to buses travelling in threes, heat slowing trains (when they were running at all) and dwell times on platforms little changed between red-rattler single-deckers and Tangara double-deck carriages.

After moving to Melbourne in 2007, I find our trains, trams, and (yes!) even buses to be comfortable, reliable and convenient for almost all of my travel needs. I don’t even have a driver’s licence and rarely feel the worse for my choice.

It vexes me that it’s so hard for passengers to move out of doorways on trains and trams; why drivers struggle with slowing beside a slowing tram and stopping beside a stopping tram; why it’s so hard to have your Metcard or myki ready BEFORE you need it, especially if you’ve been waiting for longer than a minute; why school students sit while adults stand; why men remain seated while women stand (call it sexism or chivalry, I don’t care); why the able-bodied will not give up their seats for the elderly, the infirm, or expecting mothers. The social good manners that I was raised with (not so long ago - I’m only 36 now!) seem to have gone out of fashion.

So, some over-the-top suggestions then? Let passengers who actually validate their tickets kick in the shins anyone who doesn’t. Fine parents whose students don’t validate their tickets or give up their seats to adults. Make the penalty for fare evasion compulsory donation of blood to the state’s blood banks. Maybe repeat offenders could donate bone marrow.

Stop whinging. This is me.

i don't know why i'm surprised. it's always been easier to curse the darkness than to light a candle.

as much as it might be entertaining for five minutes to have everyone who doesn't validate their ticket on the tram kicked in the shins by everyone who does, it's not the answer.

the problem is that people are selfish. they're selfish because they're sinful. they're sinful because they're born cut off from God. even after you turn away from a life without God and earnestly do your best to live a life worthy of the calling you have received, that brokenness still impacts your life. amongst many other things, it means i still want to kick people in the shins when i think their behaviour merits it.

if you're inclined, please pray for me in this regard. i will do my best to remember to thank you, when we meet in heaven.

... who knows the day or the hour?

2011-04-03T12:27:00.002+10:00

well, for the big thing, no-one knows. for this thing, though, abbasolutely. (insofar as a man makes a plan but the Lord directs his steps...)

the portland zine symposium now has dates, which is great because the thing that has chiefly inhibited my planning for next united states trip has been not knowing when they would be. august 6 and 7. i didn't see information on where it's being held but i can only assume at this point that they're going to use the same place as last year. maybe. who can say?

the volume of my writing has really gone down the toilet this last year and while i may have a million ideas for zines (or other stuff) it seems very rare that any of them actually get off the ground. i've been involved in some of the "target" zines co-ordinated through sticky and i've tried to get stuff together for nanowrimo and script frenzy (which i am doing this month, yay!) but i haven't actually done any new zines off my own bat.

i'm still reading plenty, though, and my plan is to do one zine a week starting this month. just mini - a8 size - with some kind of linked image on the back (if it's folded) or maybe with some crappy drawing of mine (if it's stapled). we'll see how we go.

dates for the portland zine symposium is, however, fairly exciting news for me. my next trip overseas beckons... hopefully!

... a taste of childhood dreams

2011-01-13T21:30:00.004+11:00

this tv advert was... well, it encapsulates a lot of what i love most about my life. i like coca-cola, don't get me wrong, but what i loved most about this advert was the idea of a bunch of friends, gathered together around a meal and good music.

it looks pretty cheesey now and this youtube clip isn't the best quality but the ense of it is there. looking back at it now, i realise there's a large amount of hip-swinging that i didn't recall before watching this again. what i did remember very clearly was the spaghetti fanned out into the pot and everyone cooking together.

that's what was in my head. enjoy.

... an idea...

2011-01-04T00:12:00.003+11:00

"I don't know what you're complaining about," she grumbled. "We took your car - "

"I'm not complaining. I'm angry. There's a difference, Karen." He felt as if the entire trip had been matched to a soundtrack of dropped plates in a kitchen, one fall after another, one spinning plate coming to a halt before a brief respite - and the next crash.

"Then I don't know why you're angry."

Dean ground his teeth. "You don't want to know." Just let it go, he thought.

Karen looked out the window at the damp street. Shops on both sides were closed, excepting the odd bottle shop or pizza place. She turned and stared at the side of his face, the slight tick of his jaw muscle working silently as he focussed on the tram in front of them.

Dean could almost sense her about to say something, like bread about to pop out of a toaster. traffic lights ahead, the tram slowing down; Dean shifted gears and slid sideways into the left-hand lane. If he was quick, he could pass before -

"I just - "

"DAMN IT!" Dean slapped the wheel as he automatically slowed at the sound of her voice. He could hear the bell of the tram sounding, saw the doors opening as he moved past, almost saw the face, eyes narrowed angrily, another, eyes wide in shock.

Karen yelped in surprise and shrank back into her seat.

"Can you not just let it go?" Dean growled. "I obviously don't want to talk about it, not while I'm - "

The engine abruptly died, windscreen wipers stopped in the middle of their paths across the glass.

"What the hell is this?" Dean wondered aloud. Karen turned in her seat to look through the rear windscreen, while Dean checked his mirrors. The car was losing momentum: he guided it gradually to the kerb, then braked to a halt. He put the gear into neutral and turned the ignition - silence.

"Shit." Karen was silent, eyes dumbly following the tram as it passed them. Dean unbuckled his belt and popped the bonnet. "I'll be right back." As if knowing he had no umbrella, the rain began to fall more heavily, drumming on the roof.

Dean opened the hood of the car and disappeared from view, then Karen felt a thud as if he'd fallen into the engine. Karen opened the door and raised her voice over the rain.

"Dean! What are you doing?"

She heard a grunt in reply and nothing else. Then the car seemed to shift, as if someone heavy had scooted across the back seat from one side to the other.

"Dean..."

She opened the door, then leaned back and pulled the keys from the steering column, not wanting to accidentally get locked out. She stepped up and out into the rain. It felt like icy needles and she decided to leave the door open instead.

Cars passed and it was with a sudden sense of dread that she stepped past the edge of the car door.

"Dean - " Karen yelped as she saw him lying headfirst in the space under the bonnet. It looked darker, almost... oily -

- and then the darkness moved.

Karen shrieked but the sound was lost as a tram on the other side of the road braked as it approached the traffic lights. She felt herself smacked in the face as if by a slab of meat, but it stuck to her. She realised sickeningly that there were some kind of hooks in her flesh, then she began to shriek again as she was yanked into the darkness under the bonnet of Dean's Commodore and into the smell of salt and seaweed and then she felt nothing more.

... it's out there...

2010-12-12T10:36:00.001+11:00

i saw this somewhere and i couldn't keep a straight face the whole time - this guy should be releasing a dvd or something!

... nanowrimo 2.0 (for me, at least)

2010-10-31T21:43:00.002+11:00

well, november begins tomorrow and so does my latest attempt to write a novel. i don't remember right this second where i found out about national novel writing month but ever since i've been planning and trying to come up with ideas that will take me over the 50,000-word mark by november 30. i guess we'll soon find out.

this year, if you're reading my blog, my challenge to you is to likewise take up the challenge. i know some of you who read this were creative writers in times past. if you can crank out 1700 words a day, you too can write a novel in november. the link is www.nanowrimo.org. last year i only managed a few thousand words - this year i plan to be a good deal more disciplined.

give it a try. if you manage 2,000 words a day you get to have a sabbath! and if this appeals but you don't think you can write a novel (and the theory behind nanowrimo is that everyone can write a novel - a good novel comes from the editing... maybe), try script frenzy - it's 152 days away (apparently) and requires 100 pages of script over the month of april. the script itself can be film, television, radio or graphic novel.

wish me luck - comments and text messages with script ideas are welcome and appreciated!

... oops...

2010-10-13T07:07:00.002+11:00

well, it's been a little while, alas. just a short note to let anyone who might possibly be reading this blog that today (october 13) is international suit-up day. suggestions for how you might participate in the day include:

wear a suit to university
wear a suit to work
wear a suit to hospital
wear a suit to school
buy a suit
drink in a suit

my small group at church is going out for dinner tonight and i know there is at least one woman in the group who, instead of "rocking up and frocking up" is actually going to suit-up for the event!

... ready for boarding

2010-08-05T08:46:00.003+10:00

alas, my plane is not. i'm waiting at the domestic terminal at tullamarine for my flight to sydney. i played raiden ii (classic vertical-scrolling airplane fighting game) and realised i'm very out of practice. actually, i rather hope i'm just out of practice - i'd hate to think that my hand-eye co-ordination is decaying so badly!

the gate lounges are very clean but a bit spartan. i don't think i've ever really noticed that before. after having spent several hours wandering (pleasantly) around san francisco airport, my expectations of what a good gate terminal should be like have risen - perhaps unrealistically. given melbourne is meant to be such an artistic and cultural mecca in australia, it seems a shame that there's no art displays to speak of around the departures terminal. when i was in s.f., there were a series of display plinths along the centre of the corridors showing crockery (i know, a little boring, but...) from different eras in post wwi american history. i found it really interesting, especially the accompanying stories of the designers and their lives.

later...

arrived in sydney ahead of time if that can be believed. we left melbourne ten minutes late and actually hit the tarmac here in el norte just a little ahead of schedule, around 10h35. refreshing. so i'm sitting here, enjoying a gloria jeans coffee and whiling away some time while i wait for my pay to be processed by my bank. i'll buy my new myzone multi2 ticket (which i've just learned has replaced the previous travelpass series of tickets.

i find it a little ironic that i've just left melbourne, in a state that has wasted something to the tune of $1.2 billion, and touched down in sydney, where the nsw government has implemented a ticketing system that looks and smells a whole lot like the metcard system that myki is meant to be replacing. not that i'm complaining - i think it's about time that the private bus companies in sydney were finally brought into line with the rest of the transport system's ticketing - i just hope that when the time comes for government to waste the public's money on the public transport system here in new south wales, they'll throw money away on improving rail infrastructure and not one a white elephant smartcard that is more difficult to use than the system it's meant to supersede.

still what would i know? i don't drive or have a mortgage or a credit card, so why would my opinion count for anything? (oooh... bitter much? just a little bit, maybe...)

... not unhinged

2010-07-26T13:22:00.002+10:00

having lunch and catching up on reading phd comics and in a strip about visiting comic-con for the first time jorge cham referenced another online comic called unshelved. i took some time to check it out and while it refers mainly to to the world of librarians, i think there are some gems in there for anyone who's worked in customer service. now that i've been working in a bookshop for a while, i'm enjoying rather a bit more of it than i would have before. delicious. you should check it out.

... visiting el norte

2010-07-16T22:49:00.002+10:00

i have my flights booked - 09h15 melbourne to sydney on the 5th, 21h15 sydney to melbourne on the 8th. i even worked it out that i'll have clean work clothes for the monday and tuesday after i get home that i will have washed on the tuesday night before i leave! (bonuses to being a creature of habit...)

i'm looking forward to catching up with people in sydney while i'm there, as well as kicking back and relaxing a little. i'm especially looking forward to visiting mars hill cafe - it's been such a long time since i had my classic chicken quesadillas and dark horse coffee, i've almost forgotten what they taste like!

... some musings on wisdom

2010-07-10T00:10:00.002+10:00

i've been thinking about wisdom a little bit lately. here are some quotes on wisdom that have stuck in my head:

wisdom for a man’s self is, in many branches thereof, a depraved thing. it is the wisdom of rats, that will be sure to leave a house, somewhat before it fall. it is the wisdom of the fox, that thrusts out the badger, who digged and made room for him. it is the wisdom of crocodiles, that shed tears when they would devour. but that which is specially to be noted is, that those which (as cicero says of pompey) are sui amantes, sine rivali, are many times unfortunate. and whereas they have, all their times, sacrificed to themselves, they become in the end, themselves sacrifices to the inconstancy of fortune, whose wings they thought, by their self-wisdom, to have pinioned.

- sir francis bacon, of wisdom fo a man’s self

in seeking wisdom then art wise; in imagining that thou hast attained it, thou art a fool.

- rabbi ben azai (aze)

the moving finger writes; and, having writ,
moves on: nor all thy piety nor wit
shall lure it back to cancel half a line,
nor all thy tears wash out a word of it.

- omar khayyam, the rubáiyát

the fear of the LORD is the beginning of knowledge;
fools despise wisdom and instruction.

- the Bible (esv), proverbs 1:7

the words of the wise are like goads, and like nails firmly fixed are the collected sayings; they are given by one shepherd. my son, beware of anything beyond these. of making many books there is no end, and much study is a weariness of the flesh.
the end of the matter; all has been heard. fear God and keep his commandments, for this is the whole duty of man. for God will bring every deed into judgment, with every secret thing, whether good or evil.

- the Bible (esv), ecclesiates 12:11-14

... in recent news...

2010-07-09T23:58:00.001+10:00

there's been a few things happening, so this is kind of a catch-up entry: there'll be more to follow of other musings and i may even finally start posting on my movie review blog. don't get too excited - i say may - we'll see what happens.

work continues well. i enjoy my job and work with good people and continue to be able to say that i have fallen on my feet and no mistake. i am reading quite a bit - i just finished john birmingham's new book, after america, and am currently working my way through a book slated for release in the coming months. i've not long since finished a couple of bill brysons - the lost continent and a walk in the woods - and i'm also reading all gone to look for america (peter millar), intercessory prayer (dutch sheets) and thriving youth ministry in smaller churches (rick chromey and stephanie caro). there's quite a bit on the go, as i indicated, but i'm enjoying the richness and variety available. my favourite book of the last twelve months remains the brain that changes itself by norman doidge, m.d. - it's a brilliant book, electrifying in its ability to inspire hope in the face of tragedy and the excitement of possibility in the face of the apathy of assumption.

my sister was married recently. it was a great day and i'm very glad for her. i'm sorry - i didn't take photos - i'm simply hoping to try to acquire some of the myriad photos taken by others i know who were in attendance. i'm a pretty poor photographer anyway. my sister looked beautiful; my new brother-in-law, mon beauf, seemed pretty pleased with himself and my mum seemed wonderfully content with the day. i'm glad. i'm hoping to visit sydney for a few days to see one of my sisters in Christ get married. (my weddings-and-funerals suit is really getting a workout...) if you're in sydney and would like to catch up, please give me a bell. i hope to be in sydney for three, maybe four nights. we'll see how we go.

i've been struggling with a cold this last couple of weeks but hopefully it's on its way out and i'll be back to my usual self in short order.

... what the...?!

2010-06-16T23:12:00.001+10:00

my yahoo id has vanished. i checked my email today fine, last time i checked was about 2-ish this afternoon at work and now it's as if i haven't had the same email address for, oh... i don't know... a very long time!!!

maybe i'll wake up in the morning and it will all be a dream.

... i really like this

2010-05-10T22:16:00.002+10:00

i was put onto this by a friend. personally, i think that the papyrus font has been seriously abused in the video clip and i'm sad to see such a versatile and robust font treated so badly. like ms comic sans before it, papyrus seems to be going through a bit of... well, it would be the font-equivalent of radio over-play, like with teardrops by womack & womack (in its heyday) or love is all around by wet wet wet. on the other hand, i do like the font used in the slideshow...

"Sunday's Coming" Movie Trailer from North Point Media on Vimeo.

... tweet?

2010-02-28T01:51:00.003+11:00

it's only a very short post but i had to pass on a retort i read as a comment on a vlog on youtube.

a canadian viewer commented:

"oh were you making fun of canada?
i couldn't hear you over my health-care benefits."

pithy but, as the vlogger commented in return, "i put this in 'cause it was a good call... that would hurt me if i were american... that would, uh, that would hurt..."

good thing it's an australian vlog.

... this is so true!

2010-01-29T12:33:00.004+11:00

i was going to simply past the url for this image into my post but it takes up way too much of the column-inches. i love piled higher and deeper and today's comic is no exception.

check it out.

... time marches on

2010-01-07T23:29:00.004+11:00

well, nanowrimo was a fizzer as far as my writing is concerned but that's not entirely a bad thing - it got me thinking more about writing and what i want to do with it. one of my new year's resolutions is to write more, and write more frequently. we'll see how we go from there.

Christmas and new year's passed quick as a flash, it seemed. all through 2009 i was dumbfounded at how fast the year seemed to fly by and after a week into the new year, 2010 doesn't show much sign of being any different. i'm hoping to visit tasmania for a brief holiday this year, as well as doing some planning for a five-week trip to the united states in 2011. we'll see how we go from there.

i'm going to be updating my movie-viewing blog more frequently, too. we'll see how we go there. i've got to put my thoughts together after seeing avatar and sherlock holmes. i saw rocky horror on new year's eve and plan to do so again next nye - i'm told it's an annual event at the astor.

as an aside, i'm amazed by the international (read: some american responses) to the kfc advert featuring west indian cricket fans being quietened down by a bucket of kfc chicken. perhaps kfc might broaden their appeal by creating adverts featuring such colourful groups as: hip-hop fans; shire-dwellers; bogans; politicians...

yes, i'm a bit tired and cranky. please forgive me.

... a rod to my back

2009-11-02T13:08:00.003+11:00

i signed up late last month for a month of insanity this month, commonly referred to as nanowrimo, a wonderful, rolls-trippingly-off-the-tongue acronym for "national novel writing month". what began as an american thing quickly evolved into an international thing, as well as yielding other texts besides novels. (i am assured that there is a forum on the nanowrimo website for "nanorebels" - those people who regard the strictures of nanowrimo as being much like the pirates' code: more of a guideline than a rule.)

at present i have managed to knock together a little over 1600 words, or a little less than the daily average required to come up with the fifty thousand words that nanowrimo exhorts participants to achieve. the website itself is unapologetic for its disregard for the quality of the produced work - the emphasis is on quantity. diving for quality (a task not unlike diving for pearls, apparently) is a task left for the editing process. there may be some to be found but you might want to be careful about holding your breath.

so i have three ideas that i have been tossing up between:

a straight-out fantasy story using the campaign source material i created for a dungeons & dragons group i used to play with,
a body-swap story where a cat and the cat's owner wake up one morning in each other's bodies, and
a story about a guy who buys some revenge-of-the-nerds-style horn-rimmed glasses and is finds himself haunted by the spirit of the glasses' previous owner.

i'm not going to say which one i've picked.

please pray for me that i'll stick to my personal plan of 2000 words a day, with a day off a week, and that i'll not let anything else slide (too much) throughout november. like... oh, i don't know... sleep? proper meals? church commitments? getting to work on time?

thanks!

... the five greatest warriors

2009-10-21T00:51:00.003+11:00

disappointed.

too much happening, too many rabbits.

intricate is fine (see temple); plenty of action is fine (see hover car racer); threat to loved ones is great (see contest, ice station, temple) or harm even (see scarecrow, seven ancient wonders).

too

many

rabbits,

alas.

... YAY!!!

2009-10-12T21:52:00.002+11:00

my sister announced her engagement yesterday! she and her fiancé haven't set a date yet but it wouldn't surprise me if the big day happens early next year.

i'm so happy for you. congatulations, sis!

... still in the image of God?

2009-10-12T13:14:00.000+11:00

we had an interesting time at small group on wednesday night, which, of course, is not to say that it's not usually interesting but tonight was a bit of an in-between night for a break between romans and nehemiah. we were discussing the question, are we still in the the image of God?

we looked at several passages in genesis (but none elsewhere in the old testament, it now occurs to me to notice) and several in the new testament (james, colossians, corinthians), considering a fairly general timeline of creation - fall - re-creation through Christ's death and resurrection.

discussion afterwards has really peeled back the lid on a worm-can-full of reading that i'm currently ploughing through. lots of stuff, right back to early church fathers like augustine and contemporary thinkers like john piper. i'm probably going to be pretty quiet on the subject for a little while as i ruminate on what i think about the whole thing.

part of that thinking will include the questioning the worth of thinking much about it at all. it feels to me that there's a certain dancing-angels-on-the-head-of-a-pin quality about the discussion: i'm not saying that mankind being made in the image of God is a pointless discussion subject but it would be so easy to get too caught up in the debate and lose sight of the point of it all, which should surely be an improved relationship with God? i'm somewhat pessimistic that the debate will lead to unanimous glorifying of God at whatever result emerges.

right now i'm thinking that on this side of glory we are simply unable to comprehend the imago Dei concept. it's already taking up a lot of brainpower thinking about it.

... slapped upside the head by God

2009-09-22T22:35:00.002+10:00

so i've been on a fast for the past couple of weeks - a free-to-air-television fast. i don't have cable tv, so i'm not fasting from that much choice, and i'm not including videos or dvds either, so it would be easy to look at the whole thing and say, "well, where's the sacrifice then?" i know that if left to myself i'll happily stare at the tv for three or four hours straight of an evening with nary a blink, especially if i can channel-surf. not difficult most nights. thing is, though, if i choose to watch a dvd or video (yes, i still watch programmes on videotape!) i have to make a conscious decision about what i watch. if i channel-surf on the tv, the only conscious decision made is to turn it on - the channel-surfing happens on automatic pilot until the time/guilt factor kicks in and i decide to go to bed.

so i've been watching less tv, overall, and i've been reading and praying and listening to the radio all a lot more. my kitchen is tidier. i'm cooking more. (i know anything is more than practically nothing but hey...) it was while i was listening to light fm's rebroadcast of focus on the family that i was slapped upside the head tonight.

i can't even say that i've been feeling particularly sorry for myself lately in the usual "i hate being single" kind of way that i can be prone to falling into. it's long been a matter for prayer that God would give me contentment with the single status i currently enjoy (no pun intended) and i believe i can say that that contentment is gradually settling into my spirit. the loneliness that i've felt in the past doesn't have quite the bite that it used to and i firmly believe that it's God enabling me to trust his hand on my life that is the reason for this; i'm no less single than i was a year ago, or five years ago, or twenty years ago - it simply doesn't loom so largely in my field of vision. i pray earnestly that this perspective might continue, and improve.

tonight's focus on the family episode was part two of a discussion between dr james dobson and elisabeth elliot. as soon as i heard that elisabeth elliot was on air, my ears pricked up because i know the popularity and impact her book, passion and purity, had when i was younger. i'm encouraged to hear that that popularity and impact continues to endure. they talked about a bunch of stuff and the thing that jumped out at me - slapped me upside the head, so to speak - was her recollection of jim elliot's letters to her and his reference to amy carmichael's poetry. she mentioned a fragment from carmichael, who wrote:

if thy dear home be fuller, Lord, because a little emptier my house on earth, what rich reward!

i've said that as time has gone by i feel that in my experiences in youth ministry i feel that i have many more children than i could have been a blood brother or father to and that considering those times in that light lets me see the truth that "no one who has left home or wife or brothers or parents or children for the sake of the kingdom of God will fail to receive many times as much in this age and, in the age to come, eternal life." [luke 18:29-30, niv] (i know that the corollary passage in mark mentions persecutions as well but in the depths of i-hate-being-alone depression that usually feels like being persecuted by God anyway...)

what made this a bit of a slap upside the head was elliot's follow-up argument - that we are not our own, that we were bought at a price! the sacrifice that Jesus talks about in luke, above, isn't about trading one-for-many, it's about sacrifice for the kingdom of God. the service that we render to God in heaven begins here on earth and how insidious and easy it is to forgetting/ignoring that fact! satan's lies don't stop at doing everything he can to stop us looking at Scripture but continue to strangle and contort our perception of the truth even as it stands before us! i am certain that i could stand at the foot of the cross and satan would be doing everything to make me see Jesus' self-sacrifice and weakness in that action as human frailty and futility, rather than divine humility and grace.

so i'm praying hard now; not that God would make me content with my life where i find myself but rather that he would make me passionate for the kingdom of God, whatever that might mean. (argh!!!) it's probably one of the scariest things i've ever prayed but at this moment it is the only thing that feels right to ask. i don't want to be a jonah. i want to be a son.

... rhyme and rhythm

2009-09-14T10:10:00.002+10:00

when i was a kid, my uncle (i think) gave me and my sister a cassette tape called "rhyme & rhythm". it had a lot of interesting and old poetry on it - it was the first time i'd heard the hilaire belloc poem, matilda, who told lies and was burned to death - and there were some english folk songs and poems set to music - the death of admiral benbow, the coasts of high barbary and bruton town. this last one was made popular by a group called "the pentangle" and, given the subject matter, i am these days surprised that such a dark and gruesome murder balled should be on a tape given to six-year-olds and not found instead on a nick cave album!

i've been thinking of a poem that was on the tape but i could only remember the last line: "and the moon sank red". turns out the poem is by a war poet named siegried sassoon; here is the poem in its entirety:

middle-ages

i heard a clash, and a cry,
and a horseman fleeing the wood.
the moon hid in a cloud.
deep in shadow i stood.
‘ugly work!’ thought i,
holding my breath.
‘men must be cruel and proud,
‘jousting for death’.

with gusty glimmering shone
the moon; and the wind blew colder.
a man went over the hill,
bent to his horse’s shoulder.
‘time for me to be gone’...
darkly i fled.
owls in the wood were shrill,
and the moon sank red.

just something i had to exorcise from my brain and now i know where i'll always be able to find it if it gets lodged in there again.

... here be spoilers - district 9

2009-09-07T23:34:00.002+10:00

i've decided to start a new blog. since i'm seeing so many new movies these days - i've been bitten by the bug to see more movies again - i thought i'd create a blog that i could just say what i think about a movie without worrying that people might not have seen it. the blog is going to be plainly stating that there are spoilers. no surprises.

we'll see how it goes.

what else has been going on? had church camp two weekends ago - that was quite good. our speaker was rob miller, a minister with st jude's carlton and previous at caringbah anglican in sydney. he gave a series of talks on the Holy Spirit and his role in the life of the Christian. the thing i brought away from the talks that most stood out to me was the idea that the Holy Spirit's job is to deepen the Christian's understanding of God as Father. i don't think i've ever thought of it in those explicit terms, although, thinking back on what i've learned of the Holy Spirit and my understanding, experientially, of his work in my life, it does make a kind of sense.

i've always conceived of the Holy Spirit as a counsellor (quelle surprise), interceding in prayer for me when my own prayers fail, and an agent of change to conform me increasingly to the image of Christ. both of these are true and i've experienced the fruits of both in my life, i think, but i don't know how much it's impacted my understanding of God as Father. i pray, "our Father in heaven...", but it's hard to think of God and my dad as both being my father. they're so different but there are a couple of things they share in common.

me, obviously. dad was my father, making me "born of a husband's will" - although he had no idea of what exactly i would be like, my dad decided that i would be his child (in a roundabout kind of way). when i became a Christian i took hold of the promises in the Bible that tell me that before the creation of the world, God had determined to adopt me as one of his children - making me "born of God".

as i mature i am coming to resemble them more and more. in the almost twenty years that i've been a Christian i think i've changed, become more loving, more forgiving, more certain of what's right and what's wrong, more aware of myself and the immensity and power of God's grace. of course, these changes show my flaws and failings in ever-more(?) stark contrast and the variety of context means that not all the pros and cons show up at the same time - it's not always easy to see the changes but i believe they are there.

likewise, in the (soon to be) thirty-five years i've been kicking around the planet i've grown more and more to resemble my dad. i'm a bit of a spendthrift; i enjoy working in retail and dealing with people (mostly); i have a big gap in my teeth; i have a scottish accent that ebbs and flows depending on who i'm talking to or what i'm talking about. i resemble my dad's dad a bit too - more than once i've caught pop looking out at me from the mirror first thing in the morning... it's a wee bit scary...

typically, i've looked at my relationship with the Holy Spirit as if i am a work in progress and he is the one moulding me to be like Jesus. that's true, i think, but also think that i've been conceiving of my relationship with the Father as a similar work in progress. that's false, since the promise isn't that i will be moulded into being a child of God over the course of a lifetime, "kiln-fired" (so to speak) when Jesus returns and changed in the twinkling of an eye at the last trumpet, then declared to be a child of God. i'm a child of God right now.

so the way i figure it, that means that the more i come to know and understand God as my Father, the more i will be changed as a byproduct of my relationship with my Father in heaven to be like Christ and the more the fruits and gifts of the Holy Spirit show in my life. hmmm... something to think about there. i'll keep turning it over in my head and let you know what i'm thinking. thoughts and comments would be greatly appreciated.

i'm also settled on a small group at church. this was in a state of flux for a while and i'm looking forward to growing relationships with my brothers and sisters, praying regularly with others and getting into the Bible on a regular basis with multiple points of view to hone my thinking. "as iron sharpens iron, so one man sharpens another." this will be a good thing, i think.

i've been reading heaps and here's a brief list of some of the things i've been looking at, since before i went on holidays:

the consolations of philosophy (alain de botton)
cleo - the uppity cat that changed a family (helen brown)
dreams from my father (barack obama)
the brain that changes itself (norman doidge, m.d.)
the girl with the dragon tattoo (stieg larsson)
the girl who played with fire (stieg larsson)
the hunger games (suzanne collins)
hunger games - catching fire (suzanne collins)
pride and prejudice and zombies (jane austen and seth graeme-smith)
viruses, plagues & history (michael b.a. oldstone)

lots of reading going on and i'm loving it! this month a new kim stanley robinson is out (galileo's dream) and next month we see the third stieg larsson book (the girl who kicked the hornets' nest) and matthew reilly's new jack west jr adventure (five greatest warriors). plus, i've joined a book group! phew!

watch this space...

... already!

2009-08-13T09:06:00.002+10:00

it's been two weeks since i came back to work after my holidays - two weeks already! it's frightening how fast the time goes by; i'm sure it never went so quickly when i was younger but i suppose that as all new experience is accrued and compared to past experience it time must seem relatively faster. what on earth is it going to feel like when i'm in my seventies?

i've been dreaming a bit, dreaming about work (serving customers - "i'm sorry but you'll have to ask b---, i'm still in bed asleep...") and dreaming about portland. the portland dreams feel fuelled somewhat by the zines i've been reading since i got back, especially those by ten foot rule creator, shawn granton.

portland was great, despite all of the downsides of being in a city with such a hipster culture and with such high unemployment (i talked to many people who'd been looking for work for a long time without success - five months or more in some cases). if i had a job stitched up for a couple of years i'd move but it'd have to be ironclad. most people i talked to who'd moved there to live didn't have anything beyond living accommodation lined up...

it's great to be home in melbourne. church is great, i'm looking forward to settling into a regular weekly Bible study, church weekend away (can't call it a camp, apparently!) coming up soon, where i'll be leading a small group... and the weather is lovely. i'm enjoying the chilly mornings, the wet, the fog, especially after the unusually warm and humid (read: sydney-like) summer portland was enduring. it's nice to be among real trams again.

anyway, back to work...

... if you're ordering something that's not on the menu...

2009-07-28T06:06:00.002+10:00

... expect to pay for it. i would have thought that that was common sense. alas, here at portland internaational airport, common sense does not necessarily prevail. i'm stopping in for lunch. my flight leaves at 14h52 and i'm sharing a table with a stranger, since i didn't want to be one person taking up a table for four. the people sitting over from me ordered something and asked for something to be added that wasn't on the menu, hence the subject line. i wouldn't be expecting to be adding anything for nothing... you might just as well ask for crude oil in a bucket as dipping sauce, or gold leaf as garnish and not expect to have to pay. you can bet they won't be tipping, even though they should, getting something that wasn't on the menu for nothing. crikey.

(settle... it's the kind of thing that will be bugging me all the way home...)

checking in was fine. the next hurdle is immigration in los angeles. (wow... they did leave a tip after all... custom trumps worth, i suppose...) two and a half hours flight to l.a., then five hours-ish to transit, then off to melbourne. my computer is telling me that it's now about 6.30am tuesday in melbourne, so my flight time of about 27 hours is right on schedule.

my last porter before i go home. (sigh...) i'm going to check my email and sign off. i'll blog again when i get home and maybe this weekend, maybe next, i'll go through my photos and start posting those too. please fire me off an email and let me know if you received a postcard - i'm curious to know how many of them will get home before i do.

vaya con dios!

... last night in portland

2009-07-27T16:14:00.002+10:00

it's my last night in portland but it feels a lot more like a night in bangkok! rather humid, 36 degree forecast for tomorrow and my flight leaves in the afternoon. i'm planning on getting to the airport about 12.30pm, settling in for a comfortable, unhurried lunch in air-conditioned comfort. it'll be nice. ahhh, but the wisdom of these hostels! i hired a towel so my own towel will be dry as a bone going into my suitcase in the morning...

the russians have gone, the place is much quieter, and i ran into a couple of interesting people. one is a college career advisor in a high school in san antonio, texas. that all sounded very interesting and austin, tx, was recommended to me very strongly. i also ran into a kiwi travelling north america with her daughter looking at colleges to pursue studying under a sport scholarship for volleyball. apparently she shows great potential, so volleyball camps have been booked into to hep get her on the recruiters' radars. she extolled to joys of seattle and remarked how happy she was to be travelling through the classically australian weather that the pacific northwest is currently enjoying - apparently the east cost is suffering under some horribly wet weather with floods in new york, amongst others.

the zine symposium wound up today with some post-symp' drinks at a great little eatery called xv (fifteen), most conveniently located to bring me back hoe to the hostel. i had great plans of going to a restaurant in se portland for macaroni and cheese (allegedly the best in the city). alas, i may never know, now, but if i come back to portland anytime soon then maybe i'll find out how good it is.

i feel extremely tired. i'm almost looking forward to sitting in a chair for fifteen hours on the way home. i'm not ecstatic about having to transit flights in los angeles but tough luck pour moi, i suppose. i was going to buy a game i saw called "bookopoly" over at powell's but that's not going to happen either. i'll have a look for it at home; if i can't find it, i'll get it then. i have one last souvenir to buy, then i'll be off to the airport.

i'm off to bed. i didn't get eaten by bears.

... almost at the end

2009-07-26T16:11:00.002+10:00

it's a little hard to believe that i'm almost at the end of this trip that felt for a long time like it was never going to begin! i've come at what appears to be a warmer-than-usual summer for portland, with the temperatures today getting up to around 31 degrees celsius and it felt (un)reasonably humid (to me) but they're forecasting about 33 tomorrow and happily i'll be on the plane on monday - yahoo!'s weather tracker is forecasting 36 degrees for monday... and i'll be in air-conditioned comfort in a plane. alas, i have to transit in los angeles, where i'll be cooling my heels for about four hours, which isn't as bad as the seven hours i was there between sydney-la, la-ny flights my last trip here.

these last few days there's been a group of russians staying here at the hostel. there's about eighteen, twenty, including as few young fellows about 13 or 14, several chaperones (of the "oh victor you are very unattractive man" style), and the rest girls of about the same age as these young fellows. all raging hormones and thorough clothing-acclimitisation in a foreign country. i'm a tad surprised they only sent five chaperones. they should have lo-jack on all the kids, with a laptop and google maps on it or something. i'd trust any one of these kids about as far as i could throw one. (although most look fairly light...) they're here on a "salmon camp" where they've got a few days here in portland before they're off to study salmon fishing and canning and shipping, all aspects of the salmon life cycle and fisheries. (so i gather.) interesting on paper but i don't know how it'd be. one of them is eating peanut butter out of a jar with a spoon.

given that the portland beer festival (july has been craft beer month here in pdx) is in full swing this weekend, there have been a great deal more inebriated folk about than i'd noticed before.most seem to be carrying some kind of re-usable beer stein, looking to hold about half a pint. being taken up with the zine symposium, i haven't been out during the day to try any of this stuff out and i've been pretty tired in the evenings - i'm less worried about that, since i'll be happy to be a bit out of it when i'm flying home.

the zine symposium is huge! ninety tables, any one of which could be having two zinesters "tabling", with the possibility of two different tablers for each of the three days. going at maximum capacity, you could conceivably have 540 different tablers over the three days of the event. imagine that! and if each tabler brought only two new zines with the that would be over a thousand zines.

of course, that doesn't happen. many tablers take a whole table to themslves, or use the same table for all three days. when the symposium handbook went to print there were 182 separate tables listed, which is about a third of the conceived maximum capacity. that's pretty good and it's worked really well. mad props (apparently that's the style of the time) to the organisers of pzs this year, especially the really visible movers and shakers. there has been an abundance of volunteers, more coming out of the woodwork every day, and i was fortunate to be able to go around the tables again today, get a whole bunch of zines, and go along to a workshop of working to deadlines and how they can increase your productivity! (makes them sounds like some kind of control undergarment... eeek!)

it's been a bit of an experience seeing so many zinesters i've only heard about or read about. meeting alex wrekk has been fantastic and a real thrill; blue (whom i'd not met before making my initial enquiries about pzs) is an absolute championne; jesse reklaw (of applicant fame, among myriad others), who was so laid back about everything and talked with such warmth; katie, who is kind of new to the scene but an all-in pzs sympanista and organiser and who sympathised about my sense of being star-struck; one of the editors of zine world; ciara, creator of love letters to monsters and others; zine distro organisers; zine librarians; etcetera, etcetera, etcetera...

fantastic. i've been feeling like kenny at the portaloo trade fair. there are two other workshops i'd like to visit tomorrow, so we'll see what happens. there may be some post-event get-together (i don't know, i might have heard rumours but to be honest i'm having a bit of a seniors' moment about that) and i've been trying out "mac and cheese" (macaroni and cheese) while i've been here. i've twice now been directed to a particular restaurant for what i've been assured is the best mac and cheese i will ever taste in my life. with a scant thirty-six hours left in portland, i feel the pressure's on to make sure i try the best portland has to offer - this mac and cheese may well be the piece de resistance... who knows?

the symposium certainly hasn't just appeared overnight - copious amounts of planning, with a (classically un)healthy sprinkling of last-minute madness, has brought to fruition the ninth iteration of an awesome concept. i'll be going to the gns trade fair in melbourne in a couple of weeks' time (less, actually) and given the resources they have to throw at that may find that in comparison it is somewhat wanting.

two things that i think are great are the sponsors' efforts and the lead-up events. for the month leading up to the zine symposium, there were several events, including a multi-city 24-hour zine challenge and a kick-off dance party.looking at the list of sponsors, i'm confident many were responsible for the nigh-endless flow of food in the free-food section of the symposium space. i don't remember seeing any of the on any of the promotional material, which i also think is great - these sponsors, to whatever degree, valued the symposium enough that they donated without expectation of more than a mention in the booklet (and, obviously, participants' continued business over the year... maybe). very cool.

i have an idea that perhaps that kind of patronage could be something to use in getting some zine-ish thing off the ground... another tool to keep in the shed, just in case it's useful...

i should get to bed. more later. i'm rather looking forward to cataloguing my photos, and these blog posts will help put me in the mindspace of where i was when i took them, which will be good (hopefuly) for reminding me why i thought a picture of photocopiers might be funny... good night.

... you've got mail

2009-07-25T00:45:00.002+10:00

by the way, i finally managed to mail out the postcards i'd accumulated to send home. they're all gone now (including my sister's - i found the address!) and the interesting thing will be finding out when they all arrive! traditionally, postcards don't arrive until after the person sending them (if it's a short trip) so i guess we'll see.

i should have mailed one to myself. derr...

... brief update

2009-07-24T14:56:00.002+10:00

this is just a brief update on what i was up to this afternoon. not a whole heck of a lot, actually, but what i did do was get the zines i was donating to the zine library at the iprc and get them up there. while i was there, i signed up as a member - not that i'm going to be doing heaps of zinemaking there but because i thought it was a good thing, as a zinester, to do. i'm sure the money will be well spent; plus i get a zine each month mailed to me, which will give me that much more reason to go checking my p.o. box...

i also went along to the iprc benefit show at holocene. (cool website but a bit too much flash for me...) alex wrekk did a reading and an awesome band called "the tagalongs" played a fantastic set, including "cat party" and (i think it was called) "beer can guitar". awesome. (the lead singer is kinda cute and the drummer has this awesome kurt cobain meets cousin itt hair when he starts headbanging...)

i had a sneaking suspicion it was only going to get louder from there so i simply wound my way back here to the hostel. tomorrow (and the next few days) will be mostly taken up with symposium-related things during the days - what happens after scheduled hours, i guess we'll have to wait and see...

fourteen days and bear-free...!

... life was meant to be easy, i think

2009-07-24T04:11:00.003+10:00

yesterday just kind of... dissolved. it was pretty warm and muggy, neither of which i'm very keen on, so i bummed around the faux air-conditioned comfort of the hostel until early afternoon, had a shower and shave, got dressed and traipsed into the city. i'm getting the hang of where the 17 bus goes through town and i rode the portland streetcar all the way around the loop, which was kind of cool. at one end there's a children's hospital, i think, and there are these cablecars that take you up a hill. i don't know why they're there or what's at the top of the hill (maybe the grand old duke of york has men up there) but if i am curious enough by the end of the day i might see about finding out.

in other news, i hung around powell's for a bit, had dinner at rocco's pizza (not bad, especially with the refills on soft drink!) and as the night deepened i made my way to the middle of town to the slightly dodgily-located voodoo donuts. it goes to show how sometimes guidebooks get outdated... i knew that there was a second site for voodoo donuts (follow the link, you'll see there are two - i went to the one on sw third ave) but my zinester's guide to portland (hardcopy) didn't have that updated information (i have the fourth edition). also, it gave a bunch of weird hours but i see on the website that the place i visited is open 24 hours! argh!!!

that being said, i bought a postcard, a t-shirt and three donuts. looking at the menu on the voodoo donuts website, i saw picture of two of them - the voodoo doll and the triple chocolate penetration. the third, the portland cream is portland's answer to the boston cream donut. the chocolate donut was delicious.

even though i know it's a week away (kind of) work is starting to loom as my holidays slowly come to an end. there are souvenirs i've yet to get, postcards i've yet to mail (if my sister could email me her address (i know, i know, i've been given it i don't know how many times and i keep losing it - i'm sorry, okay!?), i'll remedy that immediately), plus i'd like to write a zine to take with me to the symposium (which starts tomorrow). argh! plus there's still one bridge i'd like to walk over (that i think is actually pedestrian-friendly) and i've still not visited the omsi... i may need another vacation...

i think i'll put my photos up when i get home.

so i don't know what i'm going to do today. we'll see what happens. ciao!

... extra, extra

2009-07-22T14:41:00.002+10:00

while i've been here i've seen a bunch of stuff to do with boardgames and role-playing and whatnot. i've been haunting comics shops too and here are some links to stuff i've enjoyed over the last few years games-wise...

atlas games - creators of such awesome games as lunch money, beer money and once upon a time
cheapass games - these guys make games cheap by working on the assumption that most people have rudimentary game pieces - pawns/pieces and dice - that by skimping on packaging they can provide rules and easily replicatable boards for a whole unch of games without paying $39.95 for every box...
twilight creations, inc - makers of one of the most entertaining games ever - zombies!!!

i'm going to copy these links across to the sidebar when i can be bothered but i'm running out of battery and i just finished my drink and think instead of continuing to parasite the free wifi here i'm going to go back to the hostel... ciao!

... check

2009-07-22T13:49:00.002+10:00

i travelled on the 17 past where i needed to get off for the hostel and looked for somewhere that i could use a toilet. well, i found a cafe that has restrooms for customers so, of course, i bought something to drink. alas, after trying the door and finding it locked i saw the fine print that said, "leave i.d. in exchange for the key" (or words to that effect). it takes so little for me to simply cross my legs and wait until i get home...

it appears, however, that i have fallen into a chess-hustling cafe. i've seen something like four tables with chessboards built into the tabletops, as well as a guy off to my right who's settling in for a long night with three (!) roll-up chessboards and a book of chess problems. he even had it all in a little zip-up bag that looks like he stole it from paul newman... i haven't seen any money changing hands but maybe that only happens in public parks in new york... who knows? the weird dichotomy of the familiar and the alien is unsettling to say the least.

i left the hostel after a late shower (about 10.30) and hoofed it into town, as far as burnside, and powell's. i spent quite a while at powell's, browsing through several sections of books on urban design and planning, fantasy and sf, crime, rpgs (role-playing games not rocket powered grenades). all in all, quite a pleasant way to spend an unhappily humid day. the temperature isn't that warm, about 29-31 degrees, but the relative humidity isn't in my happy zone.

after powell's i stopped in at reading frenzy and finally managed to check out the iprc. it's a lot smaller and pokier than i expected but, then, what was i really expecting anyway? i've got some questions to ask about cataloguing in their zine library and i'm going to drop off some of the zines i brought with me for their library too. they were very busy while i was there, maybe a dozen people all in the throes of various activities. i'll call i there maybe tomorrow if i can get my act together with dropping off my zines. i'm thinking of doing some kind of "what i did in astoria" zine, maybe with quotes from terry pratchett's interesting times... who can say?

something that i've really noticed about portland is the staggering number of people with tattoos. it really does seem to me to be astronomical! it's not just the edgerunners, it's everyone. i've seen office drones waltzing down the transit plazas with celtic bands tattooed around ankles or their non-watch-wearing wrists, or ink on the backs of their calves. i'm starting to feel very much that if i want the full portland experience, i may have to get a tattoo. of course, i have no idea what i'd get and i'd still have to deal with the inevitable me-luck (which is why i never got my tongue pierced) that says, "very sorry, sir, but it's all become infected and will have to be surgically removed before you die of sepsis..."

i know... i'm such a yellow-hat!

anyway, tomorrow i'll try to decide between holing up at the hostel to write or venturing out to maybe visit the oregon museum of science and industry. i geuss it depends on how oppressive i find the weather...

... a brief interruption

2009-07-21T04:53:00.003+10:00

i was up at several ridiculous hours this morning, worried that i'd sleep through my alarm and miss my coach connection back to portland. happily, after waking at 2am, 5.30, 6.15 and 6.30 i bit the bullet and decided to get up early anyway. i had my gear set out for today, put my dirty clothes into the front pocket of my luggage (where i'll hopefully remember it is when i come to do laundry tonight) and hoofed it down to the astoria transit centre. my favourite coffee place hadn't yet opened, so i stopped in at a different place where, as it turned out, i paid for a rather inferior coffee with burned milk. i couldn't be bothered going back, so i continued on my way, meeting a similarly paranoid fellow waiting for the same coach.

patrick had been cycling down the pacific coast when he'd had a bit of a fall and bunged-up his knee. he'd made alternative arrangements to get down to the california coast and meet up with family but as we chatted and got to know one another we slipped easiy into a discussion about faith and where God has led us and seemed to be leading us now. he had fallen into the family tradition of studying engineering and while doing very well with the practical side, found the maths of it to be rather hard going. as providence would have it, he met a lovely young woman on a river rafting weekend who was studying psychology but was also seriously considering mission work. she prompted him several times about this line of thinking for the future and as he investigated it he found that God was opening up opportunities for him to pursue it. he's now attending a Bible college and i wish him the best of luck. i'll be sending him an email and i hope we can stay in touch, since i'm very keen to find out how he goes and where God takes him (he's hoping it'll be tokyo...).

i've checked into nw portland hostel, i can't get into my room for a couple of hours, can't use the laundry until around 5, so i've made myself comfy down in a common room, charging my phone and ipod, doing some chores online.

for my friends at work, i stopped into a little bookshop in astoria called lucy's books and snagged a hardcopy of their newsletter. it's a funky little shop and i bought a great book on the history of astoria from there. (i finished that barack obama book - did i say that already...?) they were very friendly people and have a lot of author events - maybe worth sharing ideas with...

i did a scant amount of the goonies and kindergarten cop sightseeing, although i did get my photo taken by some tourists from nevada, whose photo i took in return, most of y sightseeing was just looking around. i'm sure i mentioned that i spent time at the maritime museum in astoria but the entire town is like one big maritime museum. the history that i'm reading actually includes some maps and walking tours that you can do and while i didn't use any (too late into the piece) it would be a great impetus to do other stuff on a future visit. astoria turned out to be far more enjoyable than i expected.

oh, by the way, i went bowling at the lower columbia, or l.c. bowl - this is where chunk is when he sees his friends through the window riding their bicycles and he ends up mashing his hotdog on the glass. (i think... that's how i remember it...) anyway, i bowled two games and had a good old chinwag with the woman staffing the counter. i bowled 194 and 142 and was very pleased with that.

... it's naht a too-mer - it's naht, at all!

2009-07-20T02:35:00.003+10:00

well, yesterday i got a photo of me standing out the front of the john jacob astor elementary school, aka astoria elementary, used as the exteriors for the movie kindergarten cop. i did see the house from the goonies but it has changed so much it's hard to recognise it. i did a large amount of walking yesterday.

i was up and down to my adopted second home here in astoria, the astoria coffee house, for breakfast and blogging, then i walked along the streetcar line to the columbia river maritime museum, where i spent a good couple of hours trawling (heheh) through their exhibits. i bought a little guide book and a postcard, which i later wrote on and posted home (give it a couple of days at least, mum!), and i took a lot of photos as i wandered around.

the history of the discovery and settlement of the columbia river by europeans is fascinating. astoria was the first u.s. settlement west of the mississippi and swiftly grew to prominence as a centre of the fur trade (otter and beaver), then logging. it has suffered badly over the last thirty years with the demise of its logging industry (weird how in the goonies you didn't get to see much of its 30% unemployed, hey?) but is apparently experiencing something of a renaissance with growing numbers of retirees moving here. that in turn has fed a growth in the artistic community here, partly why places like red hare can do what they're doing so well.

from a riverine perspective, the continuing peril afforded by the columbia river bar means that river- and bar-pilots will remain absolute necessities for this town and for riverine traffic in general. fuel and manufactured goods continue to go upriver while grain and other primary goods continue to be sent downstream and whether a boat is comparatively small or relatively huge, these pilots are those boats' best hope for navigating the bar and the shifting channels of the river successfully, instead of ending up like so many other wrecks in the "graveyard of the pacific".

a local historian has written a book about astoria that i've been trying to get my hands on but it has gone out of print, the author is in a... bunfight with the publisher over royalties (i heard that only one cheque was ever sent) and i'm going to do a final pass through local bookshops today to see if i can find it. i think it will be fascinating reading.

i waited for about half an hour for the streetcar to take me down to the eastern end of astoria's waterfront, where it pretty-much peters out at the 39th street pier. i had dinner there - pizza and porter - and at about 5 o'clock started the long walk up to kindergarten cop school and the astoria column.

when i got to the school, two women were taking each other's pictures there. i commented that we were all there for the same reason and asked if they'd like me to take their picture. we traded off and hence i have a picture of myself there now too. they were teachers from nevada (carson city and las vegas) on a last-minute road trip to seattle who were sidetracked by astoria's filmogeneity (?). we traded stories of what we'd seen so far - they were going to visit forks (twilight-town) in washington but even by car it was going to be too far away... i was thinking about going bowling at the alley we first see chunk in in the movie... then we all wandered off.

i walked quite a ways uphill to 28th street where a trailhead to cathedral tree and the astoria column could be found. it was about a mile to cathedral tree and another mile and a half to the column, the forest was gorgeous (no bears), and my water bottle came in very handy. there were plenty of places to stop and take in the view but even so from time to time i could feel my pulse hammering. (note to self - more exercise.) when i arrived at the astoria column i managed to take a few more photos before the battery in my phone karked it.

the column itself is something of a trajan's column, telling the history of the local area from inhabitation by chinook and clatsop indians, to gray's landing by sea, the arrival of lewis and clark, the founding of fort astor in 1810, the growth of trade, and so on. it's very impressive. more impressive is the view from the top. almost 200 steps takes you up the centre of the column to a viewing platform at the summit, around which one can see for miles in every direction. i managed a few photos from up here too.

despite my calves seeking permission to sign up for some kind of transplant programme, i managed to get back to the hostel and clean myself up to go out. i went to red hare to see country singer and local portland (of 10 years) resident paula sinclair perform. what a great voice! i am in the throes of discovering country, folk and roots music at present and found the intimate surroundings of red hare and the subdued mixing to be perfect for listening to her voice and her words and dwelling in the moment of each song. brilliant.

so, today i'm going to see about using my free cup of coffee at three cups coffee house, i'm going to nose around the markets they've set up for this morning, i'm visiting a comic-book shop where i plan of supplementing something i already have to make it even more fun (bwahahahahahah...), then hopefully have an early night so i can be up bright and early tomorrow for my ride back to portland.

ciao all!

... i heart chunk

2009-07-18T16:01:00.003+10:00

well, quiet day, all things considered. after my breakfast i wandered around astoria, west of 14th street, where my hostel is situated, with the intention of checking out east of 14th street tomorrow. one of the places i spent some time in was called one red hare, where i got to talking with the proprietor, scott docherty, about all kinds of things musical. i'll be there for a gig tomorrow night and would have seen a gig tonight but, alas, the performer never showed up. i hope he's ok. happily, tomorrow night's performer dropped in to hear tonight's guy so we at least have a good chance of seeing her play tomorrow night!

i found a great place called the three cups coffee house, where they forced a free coffee card on me to apologise for putting froth on my mocha (alas!). i walked further west along marine drive, just past the astoria bridge to washington, crossed the road, and followed the astoria streetcar back to my hostel's street (14th). i took a bunch of photos, which i will, at some point, have to put on here somehow (i guess i'll have to open a flickr account or something...) but not right now.

after finding out the gig for tonight was cancelled i walked around for a while, dropped into a diner for a cup of coffee while i finished the barack obama book, dreams from my father. it was pretty good. i had to keep reminding myself of when he'd written it (it was first published in 1994) so that i could keep the timeline of what he was writing straight in my head. worth reading. there is another book i'd like to read, which has lately been credited as being the one that inspired obama to look towards the presidency, team of rivals by doris kearns goodwin. a quick google of the title, however, almost imediately pulled up an article from the los angeles times questioning a certain pollyannaism in goodwin's analysis of lincoln's "team of rivals". by the sound of it, things may well go worse for obama's administration before they get better and in this modern world of truly mercurial public opinion nationwide (and not merely in chicago) he may not have the legs to last the run...

so, tomorrow, i plan to go to the maritime museum and the astoria column, two rich heritage locations here in astoria that will help give me a greater appreciation for astoria's rich and long history. in 2011 astoria will celebrate its bicentennial, a fine thing for a town that burned down twice, built as it had been on pilings over the columbia river. an information plaque down near the maritime museum says that one could fish the river through the sidewalk while waiting for the streetcar. no longer, however, the town's main drag along the riverfront having been built up from the dredging of the riverbed, which also assisted in easing the passage of riverine traffic.

the columbia river mouth remains one of the most treacherous bodies of water in the continental united states, the shifting sandbars (despite some stabilisation afforded by the construction of breakwaters?) continue to pose significant hazards to shipping in both directions up- and downstream and the pilots navigating the bar and the river continue to provide an essential service to the maritime community here in oregon and in washington.

but for now, good night!

... goonies 'r' good enough for me

2009-07-18T01:58:00.002+10:00

greetings from the astoria coffee house cafe. (that's astoria as if it were "sass-story-a" without the first "s"...) i arrived from portland last night around 9pm, later than i was supposed to arrive but still in plenty of time to check into my hostel. all i'm going to say is that it's not quite what i was expecting.

astoria feels incredibly small, very much like an australian country town, with a large number of pubs and empty shopfronts. i think i'd previously likened portland to newcastle but astoria is a lot more like newcastle. i went out walking this morning about 7.30, 8 o'clock and even at that time saw a few people sitting around, shiftlessly starting on the first alcoholic drink of the day.

it feels a bit strange to me that it's taken a trip to the consumerist centre of the world to really get a handle on just how the global financial crisis is affecting the first world. we really aren't seeing the effects of the gfc in australia at all, compared with the u.s. - if the gfc were a black hole, australia is, i think, a bit beyond the event horizon but still feeling the gravitic effects enough to notice, while the u.s. is well inside the event horizon and things here will probably get a lot worse before they get better.

it seems to me that there doesn't seem to be a lot of options for people who are out of work here. retraining courses all require payment in advance, i've seen heaps of people living on the street, or at least sleeping out in the street. i'm told that as bad as i might think it is in portland (and i wonder if it might not be a bit too cold here in astoria even in summer for it to be a very attractive option), the state capital, eugene, has it a lot worse, with homelessness and panhandling a serious problem that has no simple solution.

while it's not completely due to the global financial crisis, the flight of citizenry from the city of detroit is a good example of uncontrolled market forces at work. at its height in 1950, detroit had almost 1.8 million people; it now has almost half that number. many of its workers no longer live within the city limits but in satellite suburbs and while it's understandable that people will seek to improve their living arrangements as earnings and timing present themselves, the gaps left behind were/are not being filled. the more i see neighbourhood as status being played out, the more i think that people are just crazy. i don't think that many people want to move to a place because they think it's fashionable (paris hilton moving to sunshine (melbourne) or redfern (sydney) isn't exactly going to push those cities' glitterati to follow, i'm sure) but rather (i hope) because they feel that it's more convenient to their lifestyle, their workplace, educational opportunities for their children.

the very idea that a house should be bought more as an investment opportunity for wealth than a place to raise a family and make a home is one i'm finding progressively obscene. the idea that value should only ever increase is a nonsense, as we have seen in the last 18 months, an idea built on the premise that people will always pay more for something than you did. how ridiculous is that? when you go buy a new place, you're not looking for the most expensive one are you? maybe you are. i don't know. this is part of why i'm not interested in owning a house. not only does it seem that the house ends up owning you, it seems like the whole system ends up determining how you view the world.

...and i know that my own view is skewed by bitterness about the whole idea, believe me, i know. i just can't help feeling that if the way we've been doing things for the last fifty years has led to massive numbers of foreclosures on people who've been doing what they think they were supposed to - get a mortgage, buy a house, make a home - but who have lost their jobs and can't afford what they were led to believe they could afford, then how can we continue to believe that the way we've been doing things for the last fifty years is the right way???

it's the same kind of insanity that believes more cars on the roads or more people catching public transport can happen without cost to the infrastructure delivering those services! they are like a balloon, that has a nominal maximum volume, which can be filled to 10%, 50% 80%, 100%, perhaps even 110% without bursting... at first. Sooner or later, it will burst. that is simple logic! why is it so hard to believe that housing markets, job markets, share markets, public transport systems, sewage systems, power grids, similarly have maximum volumes? is it because they're not immediately obvious? "we can't see an end so let's treat it like there is no end"? it's that thinking that led to the poisoning of our planet by industry since the beginning of the industrial revolution! before!!! since the settling of vilages beside waterways...

while i was staying at the portland hawthorne hostel, i ran into an aussie guy from gunnedah. he commented that the last time he'd been home he ran into someone he'd not seen for about three years but who asked how he was going as if he'd seen him only the day before! gunnedah guy seemed surprised by this but i was more bemused. time and tide separate people through no fault of their own, necessarily. there is a sense that we are encouraged to think of ourselves first (there was an old insurance television commercial that said the most important person in the world was "you"), so why should we be surprised when people do exactly that? the little social impetus there is to keep in touch with people is on "tweets" these days! 140 characters to shout out to the world (or to whomever you've authorised to be able to hear you) what you're thinking. how is that communication? it's more like talking in burps.

argh! i can't help feeling there's too much information coming into my head that i don't have time to sort through before i have to move it to one side and take in more information. i guess at what's important and perhaps, like a fragmented hard drive, there will sometimes be information left behind that can still be accessed by accident and make sense somehow. i have neither time nor skill in defragmenting my brain.

in the last 24 hours i've been trying to make sense of:

the millions of dollars spent on sydney's new year's fireworks displays that could be spent on education or health
people without jobs when there's things that need doing
storefronts that lie empty when there's people wanting to work
corporations crying poor, cutting jobs, moving manufacturies, claiming net losses, yet who still give their executives bonuses
the idea that if it only costs $22 (us) per month to feed, clothe, immunise and educate a child in a third world country, why is it not already being done?
how could a city like detroit have half the people in it now than it had over 50 years ago?

these are the thoughts in my brain...

... pizza and bellydancers

2009-07-17T03:20:00.002+10:00

yesterday was a fairly quiet day.

i walked from the hostel to the industrial section of western portland to check out microcosm's portland shop. i was a bit surprised to see how small the shop was (sticky is larger!) and it is chock-a-block with stock, floor to ceiling every shelf filled with stock.

on the way to microcosm, i stopped for lunch (a delicious burger and a glass of porter, obviously) at a place called the green dragon, named for the inn in boston that the revolutionaries met up in prior to the boston tea party. stacy, the nice lady who served me, gave me a taste of the coffee porter before i got the glass and it was very delicious. stacy's comment was that it was her favourite drink because it put together coffee and alcohol - i responded that i got into drinking porter because my first taste made me think of chocolate. i've been trying porter a lot since i've been here, mostly enjoying what i've tried and i liked the porter (6 rivers porter). they were also playing the best music - lots of 80s-style karaoke stuff.

i walked over the morrison bridge, which was cool. i took a couple of photos of the hawthorne bridge while it was raised. pretty nifty.

i wandered around nw portland for a couple of hours, dropped into the nw portland hostel, checked out the buses to catch from there. afterwards, i headed into downtown and went to see the hurt locker at a cinema there. the movie is fantastic, right in the vein of such movies as black hawk down and the kingdom. i think it's a great movie and an indicator of the new war movies that are being produced recently. (more in that later, i guess.)

after the movie i decided to stick to wandering around sw belmont street, several blocks from the hawthorne hostel, and lobbed into a restaurant called "it's a lovely pizza". the pizza was very nice (i had the "jerry garcia") and the beer i had was very dark but not quite a stout or porter, apparently. it wasn't bad at all. the interesting thing about the pizza place was that every wednesday night they have a band playing arabic, persian and armenian, to accompany the bellydancers that come in and dance. i waited until halfway through before i left.

last night here and very hard to ignore the conversations around the table this morning to get this blog post up. i'm going to wander up to belmont to stumptown for coffee, then wander back. i'm just killing time today before i head up to astoria. my bus leaves about 6pm, which means that mr paranoid here will be getting to union station for about 5.30. ('cause that's just how i roll, heheh.)

... spring market

2009-07-16T03:18:00.002+10:00

sitting on the front porch of the hostel, watching the world go by along hawthorne avenue, the spring market grocery, seafood and poultry wholesalers a hive of activity across the road.

yesterday was spent wandering around town with one of my fellow hostel-dwellers, andi-k, checking out coraline in 3-d; looking around powell's books (again); going for a ride in a new ford scion (i think it was ford), doing some market research and scoring a $15 food voucher for rocco's pizza (yay!); working how to get wherever when i head off to astoria; back here to do my laundry.

not a lot to tell really.

i've got obama in my bag, i'm going into town to drink coffee and read.

... just another day

2009-07-14T14:14:00.003+10:00

hi y'all, well, just another day in sunny portland... except it wasn't actually that sunny today. it was actually pretty overcast for most of the day, which means that, as per usual, chances are i'll be quite sunburnt. i know, i know... why do you go out walking without a hat if you know you're still going to get sunburnt anyway? i don't know. no, wait, hang on, i think i do know. i am a lazyarse, that'd be it! and i'm very much enjoying the sun! who knows? maybe my arm-tan-lines will be back up to aussie summer standard? perhaps...

i did quite a bit of walking around today. i caught the 14 bus into town, changed to the 9, went up to union station to the amtrak counter to buy my tickets for my side-trip to astoria. i'm almost starting to wish i hadn't decided to go there, simply because of the pain it's going to be schlepping my stuff hither and yon over the next week. i've also been told to go visit long view, washington, which is just across the bridge from astoria and which i've been assured i can get to via a regular service across that bridge. i'm not ecstatically interested in doing that so i haven't really looked into it at this end - i figure that when i get to astoria i'll check it out there.

so after i bought my tickets i walked north to the broadway bridge. it's one of the many bridges here in portland, a town famous for its many bridges, each one unique in its own special way. i'd love to take some photos of those bridges that move to accommodate riverine traffic but i can't be bothered checking with the appropriate authorities for vessel piloting times. if it happens, it happens. i had planned to walk back over the fremont bridge but it didn't have any pedestrian access that i could find. i already knew that it was closed to bicycle traffic, so maybe it was a bit of a pipe dream that i'd be able to walk it. the st john's bridge is further north up the willamette but i'm in two minds about going over that. i've a sneaking suspicion that it may be more trouble than it's worth simply to get there.

i did take some photos from the broadway bridge (it's painted the same colour as the golden gate bridge, called both "golden gate red" and "international orange", or so i've been given to believe), one of the fremont bridge and one of the steel bridge, which i will try to walk across at some other time.

while i was in north portland i had lunch at a yummy pub-place called the gotham tavern; delicious food, yummy beer (i had a "liberty ale" by a brewing company in san francisco called anchor brewing), great atmosphere, wonderfully relaxing in the early afternoon. i decided instead of walking the fremont bridge to find a place called "liberty hall", where once microcosm publishing (see link adjacent) had their digs. the place was locked up tight as a drum when i went past, else i would've stuck my head in. i was starting to feel a bit tired or i might have walked into ne portland to try to find the statues of the ramona characters. going to church the other day, i did go past klickitat street, featured as the home of beezus and ramona from the beverly cleary novels (very popular when i was in primary school oh so any years ago!) there is a park in northeast that has these statues and that is a destination for me.

so instead of doing that, i caught the bus back into the city, connected to the 14, and arrived on hawthorne blvd early enough to go to the bagdad to see x-men origins: wolverine. it wasn't bad, cheesey continuity stuff aside, and i was glad they ended it in japan (post credits). i was less impressed with their rejuvenated professor x (it looked ridiculous in x-men: the last stand so why repeat it here?) and i thought that ryan reynolds was utterly wasted as deadpool. danny huston did a good job as william stryker but i have trouble imagining him ageing into brian cox. look out for max cullen and julia blake! it was turning into spot-the-australian-actor for a while there. i liked the guy who played agent zero - i think that tim kang (the actor playing kimball cho in the mentalist) would have been equally good or better as zero.

when that was over, i went downstairs and enjoyed breadsticks (purportedly with a garlic-herb butter but not that i could really taste) and a glass of porter. since trying (and thoroughy enjoying) the james squires porter, i've been trying other dark beers as the opportunity arises. i've been known to enjoy a guinness now and then but here in portland there are quite a few microbreweries making porter and i'm very much enjoying trying them out. the black rabbit porter was nice enough, better with the breadsticks, had a thick, loamy taste that i wasn't a huge fan of with a mouthful of fruit at the end (which i really didn't like and which the breadsticks quite put paid to). not that i feel i'm becoming a connoisseur but i want to be able to articulate what i like. or not.

i finished the porter in time to go into the next movie, drag me to hell. sam raimi returns to his roots with a simple tale, simply told, or a good girl who does one wrong thing. typically, at least in horror movies since about the mid-70s, the good girl gets the bullseye painted on her back by sleeping with her boyfriend - in this film, she's already living with her boyfriend, brilliantly underplayed by justin long in a role he truly could have hammed up to the max. no, in this movie she gives it up for her boss, a small-town/suburban bank manager played by david paymer (also brilliantly subdued), by going against her gut instincts, being hardnosed with an elderly mortgagee and foreclosing on her house. the woman turns out to be a gypsy - curses her - and so the story unfolds.

i loved the attention to detail that raimi takes with this movie. it's nothing spectacular but if it had gone straight to dvd it might easily have slipped through the cracks. the only personal touch missing was the lack of bruce campbell - although sam's brother ted has a barely-visible-but-you-know-that-voice-anywhere cameo - but i think that the subdued acting (in contrast to the action) would have been hard for campbell to live down to. i found the special effects to feel low on CGI use, giving the impression of effects that one might have seen in a b-movie horror, lots of shadows, creaking doors, wind effects, jump-cut close-ups. the make-up effects are great. i think the lack of name-stars gives the film a cachet and an integrity that bigger celebrity actors would have detracted from and this will yield more enjoyent over successive viewings. i didn't think much of it five minutes later but i walked out two hours ago and i'm enjoying it even more now. alas, i predicted the ending.

one postcard down, four to go, plus a letter. oh yes! i also visited the post office. very friendly. maybe i got them on a good day. who knows?

i'm planning on doing washing tomorrow night, which gives me an extra day to do it if it turns out that i can't do washing tomorrow night. i might just take a book into town tomorrow and find somewhere to sit and read. maybe finish that obama book or read the mary guterson one.

oh, hey! she visited my blog and commented on my post! i couldn't think of how she found it but i realised that she must simply have googled herself and looked for what came up as recent. (i might go try that now... cool - i googled "mary guterson"+powell's+reading and came up on the second page...) there you go. cool.

well, i have a couple of other emails to send, then off to bed. good night!

... quieter day

2009-07-13T10:17:00.002+10:00

well, i was up bright and early today, had a delicious breakfast of home fries and scrambled eggs with rye toast and a not bad cup of coffee. then i took the magical mystery tour to the middle-deep of south-east portland, meeting up with a bus to take me to the middle-deep of north-east portland, where i'd decided to go to church.

church was okay. i think i knew two of the tunes (one being for the threefold amen!) and i wasn't singled out and welcomed, which i felt was nice. discretion can be the better part of hospitality too! through the summer (not that you'd necessarily know it - it's cool and wet today with a forecast top of 21c(71f) and right now i think it's only about 18, if that, so i'm pretty comfortable!) the church has lunch between services, bringing the evening service forward to mid-afternoon so people are, i suppose, freed up to do other things for the rest of the day after spending a bunch of time together through the middle of the day. i won't be there next sunday (since i'll be in astoria) but i plan to visit there again in two weeks' time.

i've not made plans for tomorrow but i think i might just bum around the city, park my butt in a cafe somewhere and just write. which was kind of an overall plan anyway.

... quiet day

2009-07-12T15:13:00.004+10:00

today was pretty quiet. i didn't get up as late as i did yesterday but i still didn't leave until very late - about 2-ish. made a few stops worth mentioning.

i went to the markets at burnside bridge. they're pretty glebe-y actually, and as far as handicrafts go it's all pretty slick, pretty professional. not overly crafty, per se. one thing i did get, however, that i thought was pretty cool was a game that some guy had made that he called "the real game of life". if you remember the boardgame that had the little built-in spinner, with the little cars for tokens, and tiny little pegs for people in them, this game has a slightly different take on how you win. in this new game you accrue "happiness" points through the various events that occur as you progress along life's pathways. the winner is the one with the most happiness points at the end of the game. different kind of money but still a matter of the most toys, i guess.

i checked off one of my big to-do list items, to set a copy of season 2 of once and again, my favourite tv (melo)drama series. i won't be able to get season 3 until the studios bring it to dvd, which doesn't appear to be on the cards anytime soon, alas. tough luck, i'll live. i signed an online petition to get season 3 released on dvd. what else can i do?

one of the funkiest things i've found, which i think i might have seen at a bookshop at the international terminal in melbourne, is a book called, pride and prejudice and zombies. the opening line reads something like:

it is a truth universally acknowledged that a zombie in possession of brains must want more brains...

elizabeth bennett's father wants a husband who will be able to protect his child from the unmentionable menace overrunning regency england. i'm trying very hard not to buy it here - i've only been here a few days and already i'll be carting around more than i should be.

church tomorrow. it's just coming up to 10.30pm now and i'm going to sign off and go to bed. i'm visiting the first orthodox presbyterian church of portland, which i picked after googling a bunch of churches here and checking out their websites. i don't know if i'll visit twice but we'll see.

i'm also going to see about booking my ticket to astoria. i'm taking an amtrak bus, so i'm going to head into union station in the north-east section of the city and check it out and if i'm able to buy my tickets i'll do it then. trying on a sunday is my only concern that i might come a cropper there but, again, we'll see.

good night...

... the world is an amazing place

2009-07-12T05:55:00.001+10:00

i did an awful lot of walking yesterday. I was up at about 12.30, had a shower, got changed and motored out up the road to safeway. i couldn't believe it – i haven't seen the safeway sign like that for about 30 years, not since safeway in crown central closed and it was replaced by best & less and the other specialty shops opening up to the stairs leading to keira street... the supermarket itself was pretty huge and i bought some cheese and some granola (mueseli) bars and some grapefruit/cranberry juice (that was just delicious!).

it was a good way to eat breakfast, munching a bit here and there, because i walked from the hostel to the cbd. took quite a while, it was something like thirty city blocks to get to the willamette river, then more once i crossed hawthorne bridge. i'm planning on taking photos of these bridges at some point. i'm getting better at looking left before i cross the road but i've made a deliberate effort to use the footpaths on the left hand side of the road, so i'm usually facing the oncoming traffic. that being said, it's not going to help me learn to look left.

portland is an interesting city. for all the friendliness i was expecting, it's not that friendly. i smile at people as i walk around (feeling a tad like the village idiot, mind you) and get a few smiles back but not as many as i do walking around melbourne. once you engage people in conversation that sense evaporates and everyone that i've spoken with had been very friendly. there is quite a mix of affluence and poverty here – i've seen lot of panhandlers and homeless people sleeping in doorways and whatnot. i've also seen a couple of people using building fire escape doors as urinals. that's a bit ordinary but it seems to be happening more and more these days, home in melbourne too. as i walked through the city i did see quite a lot of empty shopfronts, which made me feel as if i were newcastle. when i went to tina last year, newcastle surprised me by being so... half empty. that's how it felt – half empty, not half-full. portland feels half-full, as if there's even more that could be happening. the owner of counter media, a shop near reading frenzy, told me that he works six days a week and has one member of staff to open the other day. he used to have two staff members and his last holiday was a three-day break a couple of years ago but the times have required a tightening of the belt, which at the moment remains quite tight.

transport here is great. similar to melbourne, transit ticketing seems to be based on travelling within certain zones situated concentrically around the cbd. i bought a weekly ticket for all zones and it wasn't very much, only about $20 or so. for the freedom to jump on any bus or train or streetcar or max train, it's abbasolutely worth it. portland is also incredibly bike friendly. walking into downtown yesterday i saw bucketloads of people riding their bikes into town and not many wearing helmets, although coming home almost everyone was. i don't know what that means. there are a lot of mass biking events and the portland police have apparently come down hard on some cyclists in the last but now i'm told that as long as you're wearing your helmet and have the appropriate lights on your bike, they leave you alone.

something i did notice yesterday but don't seem to see much today was all this fluff that was floating in the air. i was fronted by a volunteer collecting for a charity who, after i declined to sign up but kept yakking anyway, told me that it was a real allergy-starter. i had coffee at a place opposite a park in the city with a wwii cenotaph and the barista informed me that the fluff was most like cottonwood and/or poplar seeds, similar to dandelion seeds. i wonder how much of it i breathed in yesterday without realising...

one of my visits last night was to powell's city of books. as i browsed the shelves, i heard an announcement for a book signing and reading by author mary guterson. i didn't know her from a bar of soap but i was already in the store and i figured, why not? she seemed quite genial, the excerpts that she read were entertaining enough, so i bought a book, had it autographed, and i might read it on the plane on the way home. the book is called gone to the dogs. I browsed through the teen/young adult fiction while i was in-store – two authors stood out, the aussie author max barry and his book jennifer government (which i think we have at work) and an author named john green whose book, an abundance of katherines, sounded entertaining just from the title.

i got home quite late, after eating a couple of delcious cheeseburgers at a food cart in the downtown area where they were showing an outdoor screening of indiana jones and the last crusade. after a few false starts finding a bus stop, i caught the 14 back to the hostel and despite my good intentions of going straight to bed i stayed up talking with a couple of other guests – claire, who's up from california scoping out the lie of the land in anticipation of relocation; chris, a guy from perth who's been living in seattle these last three years; rhoda, chris' girlfriend, who sounded like a seattle native. all very friendly. but i did get up a couple of hours earlier today, which is nice.

today i've intentions of visiting the markets under the burnside bridge, the iprc, and maybe have dinner at one of the local places near the hostel. tonight i go to bed before 11pm! (my grand plan.)

something i came up with while discussing cats yesterday – cats are looking at humans and thinking, if only i had a thumb i could kill them in their sleep! not necessarily true, though. my theory is that they're waiting for humans to invent robots programmed to feed cats (from catching fish to canning, to serving on cats' dishes), at which point the feline revolution will overthrow humans. coming, but not yet...

well, it feels like it could be true.

... on deck in portland

2009-07-10T12:38:00.002+10:00

after almost 27 hours of travelling, here i am. interesting people. i'm in a co-ed dorm. it's warmer than i expected but there's an almost constant cool breeze. i kept running into some fellow travellers - one billy-crystalesque guy visiting relatives in new york; one woman visiting relatives in las vegas; one woman, who turned out to be a flight attendant for a rival carrier trying to get home to indianapolis. (i hope she made it.)

clearing customs in san francisco wasn't too much of a trial but perhaps it was because i was one of the first people to check my luggage at the airport in melbourne (arrived about ten to eight - great going allison!) that i ended up being one of the last to get my luggage at sfo. i had planned to have plenty of time between drinks at san francisco, so i wasn't worried about time. i had southwestern corn chowder in a sourdough loaf-bowl for lunch, which was nice. the area i was sitting in was very interesting - a large open space with a high, almost vaulted ceiling, with a big octagonal ceiling formation of windows to make a giant skylight. very pretty.

they also had a bunch of exhibits featuring the work of two designers from the 50s, mary and russel wright. very interesting stuff! i noticed many people on their way to their departure gates being distracted by the big glass boxes featuring items designed at a broad range of stages in their careers. i have the feeling that their book, originally published in 1950 and reprinted in 2003, somewhat precursored the ikea catalogue i love so much.

the flight was a bit weird, though. i felt like i was in a movie marathon with really loud air conditioning... and a very small screen... and very bodgy editing and bleeping. saw the pink panther 2, confessions of a shopaholic, duplicity and 17 again. to borrow a phrase all pretty craptastic, actually. shopaholic was probably the best and only because it tugged at the heartstrings none too subtly but that's ok with me. isla fisher pretty fun to watch (see definitely, maybe) but the lead male (hugh dancy) was also seen recently in the jane austen book cub and did a very competent job with a fairly lean role.

i'm really tired. i'm going to just duck out and organise brekkie for tomorrow, i think, and maybe then come back here, read for bit, and hit the sack. i'm reading barack obama's book, dreams from my father - very easy to read and written (if he proves as good as his election word, i suppose) from the heart. he wrote this after he'd been elected president of the harvard law review. worth look.

plans for tomorrow are still a bit sketchy. i think i'll most likely wander around downtown nd suss out places like the iprc (independent publishing resource centre), reading frenzy, powell's books, etc.

bye from pdx!

... you could put a tail on it and call it "weasel"

2009-07-08T12:59:00.003+10:00

i have a cunning and subtle plan, my lords and ladies. this time tomorrow i should be well and truly on my way to the u.s. via sydney and san francisco - to portland, oregon. home of zines, city of roses, whose name was decided upon by the flip of a coin - birthplace of such characters as henry huggins and beezus & ramona, bands like everclear and sleater-kinney, home of myriad cafes, microbreweries and bridges. (i'm also planning to visit astoria.)

my intention is to blog daily about what i've done and sketch my plans for the following/upcoming day. this is partly to allay any fears my family have of me disappearing in a puff of smoke on the far side of the world. partly because it's probably not a bad thing to do and good writing discipline. partly because such an activity will give each day of mine something to hand from, i suppose. we'll see. i've blogged daily before and i don't remember the posts towards the end being anything spectacular.

right now, i'm finishing up lunch, finishing receiving in some stock, and tidying up my desk. wish me luck. pray for my safety and thank God for the safe arrival of my friends' newest child, henry.

please note a new link to a musical podcast/blog series off to the right, cassettes and chocolate milk. it's deff triff! music i haven't heard in ages, or had forgotten about, or never heard before, all put together by my friend eleanor.

... ghosts of farscape past

2009-06-27T12:57:00.003+10:00

i miss farscape... i was watching the last episodes of it today and there was footage of producer david kemper reading comments from tv guide - i'll repeat them here:

we didn't do anything wrong. we did a great job, and they cut us off before we finished telling the story. and i've talked to a lot of people, and andrew, and ben, and the big regret is: we didn't get to finish the story, and we all know that the house is like eighty percent painted... but we didn't screw up.

now, for those of you who know who matt roush is - he's the influential tv critic for tv guide, the biggest magazine of its kind in the states - he's been our supporter, and, uh, he called me last night about three in the morning, while i was writing the crap that went on over there. and he wanted an interview for the next magazine. and after we talked, this is what he wrote on-line. (he brings the piece of paper up to read it) and i think some portion of this will end up in the magazine. he wants to talk again tonight.

whew. "moya..." this, this, again, this is the guy... "moya no more . i couldn't be more disappointed to hear that scifi has opted not to support a fifth season of its signature series, farscape. since its unexpected and unheralded arrival in march, 1999, this lavishly produced space adventure quickly established itself as the most irreverent, unpredictable, sexy, intelligent, and exciting sci-fi show on tv. by comparison, enterprise is a lumbering dinosaur.

"ben browder and claudia black have incredible chemistry, and are surrounded by some of the most vivid and compelling fantasy creatures ever created. farscape is a joy to watch, and i've always been puzzled by why its rabidly loyal audience hasn't swelled in numbers each season. the show requires attention to be paid. maybe it's too much tv for some people. but the rewards are great. meanwhile, an inert movie like the latest blah star wars epic rakes in the bucks for no discernable reason i can think of except for genre fans' lemming-like devotion.

"for scifi to cite economic reasons for denying fans a final year of farscape would seem to be at odds with the network's mission as an entertainment brand. this decision is likely to be compared, years from now, to nbc's short-sighted cancellation of the original star trek."

this was made in australia by australians. this is the best science fiction show that's ever been made for television. you guys are great.

i miss farscape.

... coming home after watching transformers 2

2009-06-26T00:49:00.002+10:00

i feel as though i should feel colder than i do. the night is clear and crisp, the stars shining through scattered rags of cloud suspended high in the sky, though not so high that they escape the illumination of the gradually sleeping city below them. am i warm from walking home from the tram stop so swiftly? warmed by adrenaline the way i read once that you can be, before the onset of hypothermia? or maybe simply warmed by the exertion of stalking the two hundred-odd metres from the tram stop to my front gate, stalking with that swift step that comes from the excitement of the movie you just watched the end credits roll for, or the song that just finished playing through your earphones, or the book you just slipped the old receipt into, breaking the action the way you wish television networks would learn to break the action of the movies they broadcast?

my nose isn't sniffly with the cold, there's no drip, though there was one before earlier in the day, in warmer environs than these, the front yard at my latest rented abode. i feel no itch in my throat, no cough expectantly expecting expectoration, though the dust that accumulates on every retailer's shelves teased out a stunning staccato when i returned to work after lunch. one single defiant sneeze, as if to say my cold would not be sneezed at.

it's a beautiful night outside. i felt i could have walked much further than i needed to but i think that that feeling was half-predicated on knowing that home was so close by. stopping by woods on a snowy evening, robert frost said what i think i may be feeling:

whose woods these are i think i know,
his house is in the village though.
he will not see me stopping here,
to watch his woods fill up with snow.

my little horse must think it queer,
to stop without a farmhouse near,
between the woods and frozen lake,
the darkest evening of the year.

he gives his harness bells a shake,
to ask if there is some mistake.
the only other sound's the sweep,
of easy wind and downy flake.

the woods are lovely, dark and deep,
but i have promises to keep,
and miles to go before i sleep,
and miles to go before i sleep.

... not long now!

2009-06-22T12:54:00.002+10:00

my holiday to oregon is rapidly approaching and there is now less time until i leave than there will be time that i'm away! (if that makes sense.) i'll be in portland for two weeks with a break in the middle where i intend to be in astoria. i've also been playing around with checking out vancouver (washington state, just across the columbia river from portland), a place i know nothing else about besides its proximity to my main destination. i thought about going to forks but it looks like such a long way from portland (i think it was right up near the border with canada) so my twilight pilgrimage will have to wait.

work is great. i've definitely fallen on my feet here and it's hard to believe that i've already been here for nine months now! i feel like i'm a useful member of staff that may be missed while i'm gone on holidays, which is not a bad thing to feel, i think.

i gave a short talk at a men's breakfast on saturday. not very long, five minutes or so - i actually made a little a7-size zine to use as my notes! - and it seemed to go ok. generated some good conversation afterwards, which is nice.

still trying to get to see state of play - hopefully i'll be able to see it before I go away. (who knows what i'll see on the plane to sf/pdx?)

... sidney nolan

2009-06-04T23:28:00.001+10:00

i was channel-surfing after the end of law & order: criminal intent tonight and i hit upon a documentary about sidney nolan. i really don't know much about the man, aside from the iconic paintings of ned kelly, but i learned one or two interesting tidbits. chief among these was that he died on my eighteenth birthday.

he had a rich and varied life. he was a painter from a ridiculously early age - wiki has him working on advertising displays with spray paints during the mid- to late-1930s - and went through periods of intense absorption of his surroundings and experiences which later translated in intense bursts of creativity. one person interviewed in the documentary said something about some flak that nolan faced for spending seemingly so little time on his work, capable of producing three or four paintings in only one morning. he'd made a comment to nolan who (typically having an answer for everything) said something along the lines of "five years thinking about it, half an hour painting it".

his personal life was something of a disaster area (a wife, child until an open and marriage-rending affair with sunday reed, during which time he created the kelly series of paintings) it seems until he married cynthia reed in 1948. the two sounded like they were great for each other and they travelled the world, he becoming quite the internationalist artist, seeking to become a world-citizen, while cynthia wrote constantly, producing several books of memoirs of their lives together. she died in 1976 and her daughter jinx, nolan's step-daughter, remarked that "he didn't mourn her... no, i don't mean that, that sounds terrible... i mean that he simply... closed a door. he closed the door on that part of his life, on those feelings..." (or words to that effect). in 1978 he married mary boyd, with whom he remained happily married until his death... on my 18th birthday.

my birthday in 1992 was a little less than a week after my end-of-school exams. i was thinking of little besides Christmas, a new year's eve party in sydney, then flying to china for two weeks' holidays before uni began in late february. i certainly wasn't thinking about this man who'd led such an (apparently) interesting and full life, of travel, of creativity, of reckless and feckless disregard, and of passionate commitment to his craft. he seemed to want to suck the marrow out of life and wasn't content to wait for the body to be carved up first. i didn't have the words then for what i wanted from life - i thought i knew what i wanted but that turned out to be not so.

"a loaf of bread, a jug of wine, and thou" - i don't need a car or mortgage or ladder-climbing career for these things. i do know that, for a Christian, they are both too much and not enough. in the bewildering array of life goals in the world today, mine barely rate, which might uncharitably be called the end result of western consumerist apathy and human selfishness. i know how much my selfish wants loom large, interfering in my relationship with God - i am not separated by miles and time from God, i so often simply have my back to him.

argh.

... finally (argh)

2009-05-24T23:00:00.002+10:00

well, i downloaded my recording and had a listen to it and was pretty surprised that i couldn't really spot the moment where i started speaking too quickly. please have a listen. i'd love feedback - emailed or posted, i don't mind which.

thanks again to all for their prayers and words of enouragement while i was preparing this. i was wearing brown trousers the whole week, however much it was warranted. i'm sure it'll be easier to prepare in the future, if i do preach again in the future, but to be honest i want to stay nauseatingly nervous. i'd be worried if i was feeling confident in myself. better i be confident in the Word i'm preaching from than in the words i choose to say.

after a day spent mostly in bed nursing a nasty migraine, it's ironic (or typical?) that i should be posting this after 11pm!

... call me eddie murphy

2009-05-02T09:33:00.002+10:00

i'm coming to america! yay, i bought my ticket to portland yesterday and i'm really looking forward to july.

(omg - i've got rage playing in the background here this morning and kate bush is on!!! singing babooshka!!! - i haven't seen that film clip for about a million years - probably on countdown when molly meldrum was still hosting it back in the early 80s? - wow... rage is playing some awesome 80s-90s music this morning... two versions of bizarre love triangle and now moloko, the time is now)

anyway, portland zine symposium, here i come!

... awww...

2009-04-22T23:19:00.000+10:00

i don't generally post a lot of videos but i was thinking about what makes me go, "awww..." today and this ad always puts a smile on my face:

before this one, my favourite advert was the "falling in lamb" commercial (this is the long version! can you believe they made two and i only ever saw the 45-second version up until now?):

how could you see these ads and not love them?

... afters

2009-04-22T12:51:00.003+10:00

funny old week, feels like thursday already but it's only wednesday. not sure what to make of that.

uncle kevin's come through, so now i'm waiting for my next non-rent pay period to roll through so i can buy my tickets to portland. i've made contact with some people there, zinesters and hostel staff and others, so when i arrive i'll hopefully have some local knowledge bwanas to show me around. i have a bit of a shopping list of places i'd like to see, mostly taken from the zinester's guide to portland, but we'll see what happens.

... a(rg)h...

2009-04-19T22:50:00.002+10:00

ahhh... that is the sigh of relief. of course the whole thing wasn't as scary as i expected but you can only know that after the fact.

it was recorded and once i have the .mp3, i'll be able to pass it on to whoever wants it. i didn't notice anyone nodding off and i did my best to make eye contact as much as possible throughout. didn't speak too quickly until about the beginning of the last third but i did notice and managed to rein it in. i gather that i was otherwise clear and measured throughout - i'll be interested to listen to myself and hear what it's like.

positive feedback from all. i hope i don't get tapped for this kind of thing again any time soon.

thanks so much for everyone who has been praying for me over this last week (and beforehand, of course, but especially since i was asked to preach tonight). thanks especially to two friends, one of whom jumped on a train yesterday to be at church today to listen to me, and who will be back on the way home tomorrow.

i stand by my argh. i've slept poorly this last week and been extremely anxious to do a good job. God alone knows the value of this offering - I only hope it's pleasing to him. one day maybe i'll say ahhh. until then...

by the way, i think this is my 200th post.

... 19 hours and counting...ish

2009-04-19T00:38:00.001+10:00

it's done. printed, put in a display book.

i'm off to bed, i'll read it again a couple of times in the morning and a couple more in the afternoon.

... 21 hours and counting

2009-04-18T22:15:00.002+10:00

in the throes of my third draft for this sunday. i've pared stuff down a bit further and beefed up some other bits.

read the second draft to myself this morning and it only took about fifteen minutes. read more slowly in front of people that would have been maybe about twenty, so i expect this last draft to be delivered in about 10-15 minutes.

it'd be nice to get some sleep tonight. i've not been sleeping well since last sunday. maybe i'll sleep better after tomorrow...

... 51 hours and counting

2009-04-17T15:34:00.002+10:00

argh!

i got feedback today that was very encouraging. i'm going to go out for dinner tonight and relax a bit and the rest of the weekend will be taken up with laundry and sermon refinement.

later folks!

... update

2009-04-16T23:21:00.002+10:00

draft number 2 is done and emailed to the guy who's been helping me out with this sermon. i was planning to have an early night tonight, but beauty and the geek is on in the background as i write this. hopefully, when i publish this post, i'll just go straight to bed.

i don't know. thank you all so much for praying for me. it's good to know and i truly believe i've already seen some of the fruits of that prayer support already. i think the sermon will be about twenty minutes... i'm sure it'll be pruned down and i just don't want to talk too fast! argh!

argh...

... we have progress

2009-04-14T12:53:00.003+10:00

still wearing brown trousers but i've done a first draft and forwarded it along to be looked at by my assigned... coach? whatever. one of the guys from church is having a look at it. depending on feedback there i may also pass it along to my minister or go over it again and then bounce it back. argh.

i'd feel a bit less frazzled with more time to prepare but in a way it's good: i've only got a short space of time to have my nerves fried - any longer and i might really go berko. i don't think i'll be able to build up enough of a head of steam to go berko over this. argh.

argh.

... honest to blog

2009-04-13T10:11:00.001+10:00

after commenting to a friend that not really enough was happening in my life to blog about, i have some news: i will be preaching a sermon this sunday at my church!

i'll be considering john 1:1-5. i was up very late last night thinking about it, reading through books i have and comparing different versions of the Bible to see how it's translated. hopefully i'll be able to bring out one or two points that will link last week's passage (on the post-resurrection appearances of Jesus in john 20) and next week's passage (genesis 1, first in an 8-week series on genesis 1-3). something that stood out for me last night was john "why" for writing his gospel:

now Jesus did many other signs in the presence of the disciples, which are not written in this book; but these are written so that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and that by believing you may have life in his name. - [john 20:30-31, esv]

i guess we'll see how i go.

i'd really appreciate prayer for this endeavour. i was only asked to do this yesterday and had only a few hours to consider my answer but who knows if this might not be God asking me to step up and try something i've not done before? i've given talks and run small groups for a long time and perhaps this is a chance to exercise a nascent spiritual gift i didn't know i had.

plus, i'm very scared. i want to do a good job.

... thoughts on moving house

2009-03-07T11:23:00.002+11:00

i hate moving house. i've done it a few times now but i think i can solidly say that i hate moving house.

as an aside, i saw watchmen at the pictures last night. two thumbs up. i thought it was a more powerful story than v for vendetta but for contemporary audiences i think it's less accessible than v.

i've heard rumours that there's a movie version of shazam in the works. if that's so then i'm intrigued that such a dark and morally/ethically murky story like watchmen could be followed up with a film about a character like captain marvel, whose heart is the purest of any character in the dc comics (and probably marvel) universe(s).

... let's have a meeting in a brewery...

2009-02-25T22:53:00.002+11:00

... and another thing i was thinking was this:

i received a letter from citicorp the other day. not me, actually, it wasn't addressed to me personally but i figured, "i'm the householder, i guess i can open it..." guess what it was offering?

yep. a credit card.

i hardly trust myself with money i have, let alone money i don't have. if i may paraphrase groucho marx, i wouldn't want a credit card from a corporation that would give me one.

surely, at least in australia (where statistically i feel like i have more personal credit card debt than i'm ever likely to pay back, even though i have no credit card of my own), it might be considered reckless endangerment to be giving anyone any kind of encouragement to engage in further credit card use.

i know, i know - credit cards can actually be a strong and positive force for wise and productive use of money in modern society. of course, that would be why there's a global credit crisis, wouldn't it? because obviously we're all being so wise and productive in our use of credit cards.

using credit cards isn't even using money. using credit cards is promising to use money to pay the debt incurred by using the credit card. using money is taking cash from your wallet, which you earned through your mode of employment or received as some form of allowance or stipend, and giving said money to (or maybe - if we're really stretching it - using an eftpos transaction with) another individual or business in exchange for goods and/or services. well, actually, that's spending money. you could use money for all kinds of things... lighting cigars, chocking a table leg to level a wobbling table, marking a place in a book, fertilising your orchids...

i think sending applications for credit cards to australians is like advertising an alcoholics anonymous meeting in a brewery.

... bet you didn't expect to read this...

2009-02-25T22:26:00.002+11:00

i've been taking salsa dancing lessons. don't get excited, thinking i'm going to burn up the dance floor at your next formal event - i'm looking at it more in terms of a growing experience. apparently the instructor believes that i have a good sense of rhythm and if i can relax more, my instincts for the mechanics of the movements will stand me in good stead learning the dance moves.

hmmm...

in other news, i see that bonds and king gee are moving 1800-odd jobs offshore. that, to me, in these hard economic times seems, on the one hand, to be shrewd business sense. on the other hand, it does seem to be the kind of business practice that will harm australia as a whole, certainly in the short term and probably in the long term.

call me crazy but putting almost two thousand people out of work must be tantamount to commercial terrorism, don't you think? if a drunk person were to drive their car into someone's house and in doing so caused a fire that burned the house down, wouldn't they be held accountable? so how can a business in cold, sober deliberation, effectively set a match to almost 2000 people's lives? not to mention families, their debt loads, other businesses that rely on their money earned being spent with them?

i've said it before and i'll say it again - this is what happens when accountability is shifted from the stakeholder to the shareholder.

here's an idea. turn businesses into co-operatives with a cap on the number of people involved. have the co-operatives organise into unions or whatever but keep the business decisions made by people actually involved in the businesses on a coal-face level.

how about this? make it the responsibility of corporations to find work for those workers who are being "let go" before they're fired, or made redundant, or whatever lame-ass phrase the business community is using to deflect from the fact that a person who has a job today won't have it tomorrow. say, "sure, move those 1800 positions from here in australia to overseas, that's fine, but find all those out-of-work people jobs first".

maybe this kind of labour externalisation could be called treason. it might be acting in the shareholders' best interests but it's hardly acting in australia's best interests...

... immoral?

2009-02-19T22:35:00.004+11:00

in an offhand comment a couple of weeks ago in discussion with a work colleague about aspects of different faiths, i mentioned that one of the things i like about Christianity is that, in a sense, we not only get our cake but we can eat it too - and before we've had dinner! we are offered heaven on a stick and need do nothing before saying yes in order to receive it. (kind of true and kind of not, i know.) she remarked that she felt it was immoral.

it's a remark that's been bugging me a bit over the last few weeks while i've been trying to finish a zine about how i came to be a Christian. it's an aspect that i want to address in my zine, since it does form a part of my understanding of my salvation experience (if i can use the phrase), but every time i try to pin down what i think about it my word count blows out. i'm thinking maybe this would make a good issue #2...

that being said, i thought i'd voice a couple of things here and see if people had any thoughts.

i guess the thing that bothered me most is, in the absence of God, from where does a person's moral compass gain its direction? or, if the person does believe in God, or a god, then what do they believe God to be like and how does this, if at all, inform their own moral compass?

it seems to me that, absent God, there is no real need for a moral compass. one simply acts according to one's desires, weighing outcomes against risks and rewards, and considering the gains or shortfalls of long- or short-term investments in pastimes and relationships. if a person feels there is no God and they do not believe they will be caught and punished by authorities, then it truly is up to the whim of that person what they will do with their day - they might be a murderer or a meals-on-wheels driver for invalid shut-ins. they choose their own moral north.

social mores and norms vary with the group, obviously, but even if one does not consciously choose to adopt the moral north of their "developmental context" (shall we say), not consciously choosing an alternative may well yield the same result, albeit with less conviction of belief. however, in the absence of an unchanging moral north, immoral is merely a question of perspective. (see star wars - return of the jedi for more discussion on truth and disparate points of view.)

my faith in Christ is rooted in the Cross and in Jesus' resurrection from the dead. i take these as matters of historical fact, aside from their salvation-meaning for me and in the sweep of Bible history as a whole. that Jesus lived and was killed is corroborated by sources external to the Bible canon, with no vested interest in such corroboration and with far less reliable history/provenance of transmission from antiquity to now.

the Bible tells me that Jesus' death is a sacrifice that turns aside the burning anger of God towards me and directs it upon his innocent Son (mercy, where i do not get what i deserve) and that since i am now counted, according to what may be considered the legal salvation framework within which God deals with human beings, as entirely and completely innocent of any and all wrongdoing, i am accorded adoption as one of God's own children and entry into heaven and eternal life with God (grace, where i get what i do not deserve).

so, heaven is my cake and i can effectively eat of it immediately. there is, of course, a but.

if i claim to be a hawthorn football club fan but dress in essendon bombers red and black, go to training at windy hill and can sing every word to "see the bombers fly up!", people would be forgiven if they thought that i were simply saying one thing and doing another. likewise, if i become a Christian but make no change in the way i live my life, who can say if i'm a Christian at all?

i think that this is what was being thought of as immoral, this salvation-before-works mechanism, that is so alien to pretty much every other religion i've heard of. many seem to be variations on a theme: do this, do that, make enough converts, kill enough chickens, kill enough infidels, do enough good deeds and maybe you'll get into heaven.

maybe. there's no assurance that i can see. the idea popularised in movies like the siege, that islamist extremists believe there to be seventy virgins waiting for them in paradise after a successful suicide bombing attack, is something i don't know the truth of. i've not had any serious discussion about this kind of thing with any muslims. it is about as close to the tangible assurance that Christians are offered as i've seen or heard of anywhere else. the idea that annihilation is the best chance of escaping an endless cycle of reincarnation jells with me, since an eternity in hell and an eternity of reincarnating on earth might (tongue in cheek) not look terribly different.

so how much is enough? how good is good enough? and what yardstick is there to measure by? "i've never killed someone" holds little water if you've never actually wanted to and yet restrained yourself, but is the person who genuinely wants to kill somebody the kind of person you want to meet in heaven? this moral north is pretty wobbly, especially with a good so relative!

Christianity is a funny thing. it offers salvation at no cost to the consumer with a three and a half thousand year old manual on care and feeding of that salvation. God didn't say to the israelites in egypt, sacrifice ten thousand bulls and i'll get you out of there. nope. he said to pharaoh (the guy in power who'd enslaved the israelites), let my people go. once they were let go, then he told them what to do. he took them camping, fed them, their shoes never wore out! once they got to the promised land, conquering it was pretty easy - when they did it the way God said to do it. follow the manual because you have salvation, not in order to have it.

God loves human beings and God loves his creation. the Bible makes pretty clear throughout what it considers to be moral. basically, love God, love others. in many ways, to love is to serve, thus: serve God and serve others. loving someone doesn't necessarily mean agreeing with them, or letting them run riot, or letting them hurt themselves or ruin their life or the lives of people around them. restraining a child from running across a busy street might be a slam-dunk moral choice to protect the child - so why do we not automatically put convicted heroin addicts into that fast detox programme they have in israel, or bring that programme here? if market forces combine (if not conspire) to make medical care or pharmaceutical treatments expensive beyond the reach of people requiring those treatments, why should those forces be allowed to persist?

why should people starve or be homeless when there is anecdotal evidence aplenty, if not statistical proof, that the west produces more food than it can eat, and has unemployed people who could be employed building housing for those who have none?

when enough is as good as a feast, a few in this world stand on their right to keep the leftovers to themselves and despise their responsibility to feed those who have not eaten. this is what comes of having a moral compass that points due relative north.

i'm not perfect. i believe that i am being made perfect. the Bible says it and I believe it. what do you believe?

... travelling man

2009-02-09T07:38:00.004+11:00

well, i'm moving house - again.

before i moved out of home, i think we'd moved twice, the third house we lived in being the one my mother still lives in. i shared a flat in north wollongong for a while before making the big move to sydney, where i lived in:

penshurst,
penshurst,
carlton,
mortdale,
hurstville,
kogarah,
chatswood,
then chatswood again.

since leaving sydney, i've lived in:

carnegie,
elsternwick,
and soon to be glen iris.

that's a fair bit of moving around, since i moved to sydney in may of 1994.

i never expect the next place to be the last, so i wonder how long it'll be before the next move? hopefully not until some other similarly life-changing thing...

... ahhh! the southerly change!

2009-02-07T18:09:00.001+11:00

hot damn! bring on the rain, bring on a decent storm! (or is that too much to ask for?) bring on the cooler temperatures!

roll on winter!

... postgrad wedding blues

2009-02-04T19:04:00.002+11:00

i'm not married, i'm not a postgrad (on account of never having grad'd) and at the moment i'm not blue, but i saw this comic strip on phd comics and felt it was a ripsnorter.

two jobs ago, while i was still living in el norte, we used to have a lot of people coming into the shop looking for paper products for creating their own wedding stationery. it's the kind of combination logistical-creative problem i love, since you can work out what you're going to do by considering such variables as:

how much money you want to spend,
how much time you have available,
how much time you want to spend,
how creative you'd like to be,
how creative you know you actually are,
how many flunkies you have available to you in the time you have available, and
how many friends and relations would disown you if you actually did elope after all...

i think it's an interesting challenge.

having been involved to varying degrees with a number of weddings now, i have considered from time to time a variety of wedding-related career paths, including:

professional m.c. (for about five seconds),
wedding planner,
wedding stationery consultant, and
celebrant...

crazily enough, the last one has had the most lasting appeal and i've actually looked into courses and whatnot regarding this.

all of which is thinking-out-loud, random, by-the-by thoughts, sparked by the funny comic strip.

... bitter and cynical?

2009-01-28T22:51:00.001+11:00

hmmm...

wow! how amazing. scorching temperatures and the public transport system collapses. quelle tragédie!

why is this a surprise? just as i'm not surprised we have tennis players passing out or retiring hurt at the australian open, i'm not surprised we had the "transport chaos" we experienced today. i'm expecting bushfires and do you know why? because people do stupid things all the time (i know i do) and it doesn't matter how many fire warnings you put up or how many bushfires you fight, there will always be people who want to set fires. so many people operate under the assumption that whatever the statistics or conventional wisdom (neither of which are always right, either), "it won't happen to them".

the australian open operates during summer under insanely variable conditions, usually varying for the worse regarding the players' health. wimbledon always seems to be stopping and starting for rain - certainly the cricket seems to stop and start with the rain. one of the risks you run playing in the australian open is that you may collapse from heat exhaustion.

if you rely on public transport during a heatwave, expect problems. take some water bottles and a book. charge your ipod. do dinner and a movie after work. carpool. do not expect to catch your usual train/tram/bus and have everything working perfectly. think.

i saw a story on a current affair (i think it was) tonight, reporting on drivers who will not wait for rail crossing signals and instead drive around boom gates to cross ahead of trains. how insane is that? this is the world we are living in, where people have such an infinitely high sense of entitlement that even in the face of six train cars full of passengers and travelling at up to a barely brakable hundred kilometres per hour they persist in believing that whatever might happen to someone else stupid enough to try this, it won't happen to them.

perhaps it's too much to expect that people who will try to beat rail crossing signals that have already dropped boom gates might seek to elect governments that will provide infrastructure for the future of people other than themselves...

... i'm reviewing... the situation...

2009-01-20T07:56:00.002+11:00

i'm thinking about moving house. i looked at a bunch of for lease ads last night and actually sent out a few tentative inquiries. i don't know if i'll do anything straight away but i feel i'd like to live closer to church and closer to work. it's something i'm toying with at the moment, so if you feel so inclined, please pray that i will make a full, prayerful, considered, thoughtful approach to this... rumination.

... happy new year

2009-01-14T07:48:00.001+11:00

it was asked of me that i update my blog. here, then, is the news...

it's a new year. i don't know what you did on new year's eve. i was invited to a boozeup in northcote. since i'm such a boozer, i gave a reluctant "maybe", thanking that it's probably not a terrible thing to get out and meet people and maybe even enjoy myself. however, after buying a bottle of bailey's, having a shower and a shave, getting dressed and heading out with a locked door behind me, i decided that i didn't really want to go.

hard to say, really, what the kicker was. could it be my utter lack of desire to get plastered? my poor inclination in meeting new people and making friends of strangers? my general preference not to surround myself with uncreasingly drunk strangers in any given situation, especially at new year's? or my eminently reasonable desire not to navigate melbourne's otherwise stellar public transport system in the wee hours of new year's day from northcote to south caulfield? hmmm...

so for new year's i ended up at home, listening to music and reading, with a cup of coffee (and some bailey's), and sent a few text messages when the hallowed hour rolled around. happy new year to everyone.

Christmas passed quietly also. my mother visited from el norte and i enjoyed dinner with my mother and sister, and my sister's boyfriend. it's taken me a long time to meet him and i like him. that my sister is happy to hitch her wagon to his speaks a lot more to me for his character than my first impressions, which were good. he seems to me to be very down to earth, which i think is a good thing.

Christmas day i was at church. i had been invited to join my minister's family for lunch, which i gratefully accepted and thoroughly enjoyed. there had been an orphans' lunch planned for some of us neighbours here in my block of flats, which i had factored in but which everyone, it seems, did not. the invitation was providential and i am very glad of it.

my minister now has been my minister before. i think he was at the church i went to when i was at school - certainly he was there when i left - and i'm confident he was there before my conversion but to be honest, i can't recall. i remember being given a copy of leon morris's book the atonement, which i was meant to read a chapter of and then meet for breakfast with my minister and another man at church. it was a great thing to do and i'm glad the effort was made by these two men, whom i so poorly repaid with my efforts at reading the book. i learned important lessons about meeting regularly with people outside church, about deliberate fellowship (and accountability, a lesson that i never seem to stop being taught), lessons which served me in good stead for the years i was part of a prayer triplet at another church. it's something i miss.

work is good. i realised that this Christmas just passed was my 20th retail "xmas". i began working at venture ("venture - value - value with a double-v!") in october 1989, making december 2008 my 20th working in retail. frightening. also, my first rostered sunday in about eight years. i am getting to know better my workplace, my role, my co-workers, the customers and the area we service. all places (workplaces or workplace locales) have their quirks. i'm told i'm doing very well but i continue the pessimist, convinced that i'll make a mistake and the rug will be pulled out from under me and i'll be revealed for the fraud that i fear i am... so nothing really new there, i suppose.

i am looking forward to visiting el norte in february for a while, seeing some friends and taking in a trade fair while i'm there. with any luck i'll get a decent thunderstorm or two, which i sorely miss down here, south of the border. i would like to visit the united states in august to attend the portland zine symposium and i am hoping to sock away enough cash to make that happen with a minimum of fuss. we'll see.

i finally saw grindhouse at the astor on friday night - i can't believe it took me so long to see it! it was great. i'm just over halfway through the peter biskind book, easy riders, raging bulls, about hollywood in the 70s that i have borrowed from a coworker. i'm thoroughly enjoying it and every chapter brings with it flashbacks to my cinema studies at uni and the marvellous lecturers i had then.

i was invited along to a cafe after church on sunday night and had a grand old time. the cafe had to serve us on split tables because we didn't all fit in at once but that was ok. i ate a thoroughly delicious lemon tart and enjoyed very pleasant company throughout, something definitely to be repeated on both counts.

coming up next, what are the obama kids having for lunch today? (ask jon stewart on the daily show) then sports...

... reading...

2008-12-22T22:36:00.002+11:00

wow, i've been reading a lot lately.

eragon, christopher paolini
twilight, stephenie meyer
breakfast at tiffanys, truman capote
the jane austen book club, karen joy fowler
the gargoyle, andrew davidson
notes from undergound: zines and the politics of alternative culture, stephen duncombe

...and they're just the ones i've finished!

i'm also working on (albeit infrequently or haphazardly):

how to eat, nigella lawson
war and peace, leo tolstoy
type, david silverman
easy riders, raging bulls, peter biskind
intimate ephemera, anna poletti

... and, of course, the Bible!

all this in the space of the last three and a bit months, since i began my new job. imagine if i were working in a video store!

... do we really think they'll be left out anyway?

2008-12-15T23:11:00.002+11:00

bloody telstra!

how long did they have a monopoly (virtual or otherwise) in australia? under whatever name?

so if all there is to the report is what appears on the face of it, why should they whinge and moan about being left out of the tender process for our national broadband network?

this is classic. what is the thinking? "wow, we live on this huge island and we're so far away from each other! why don't we just try and make more people talk to each other on those really long pieces of string with tin cans attached instead of making new strings with better tin cans?"

it is yet another example of what happens when responsibility to the stakeholder is superseded by obligation to the shareholder. the consumer is consulted only in order to find some new product or service to sell back to them!

with better communication lines, broadband, satellite services, whatever, the need to clump people together like a tonne of marbles on one corner of a giant trampoline is reduced further. large-scale administration can be decentralised and opportunities for growth can be passed to rural and provincial cities, such as grafton, dubbo, cobar, broken hill, griffith, shepparton, warnambool, mildura, ballarat, bairnsdale, mount gambier, mount isa, cairns, longreach, cunnamulla, port hedland, geraldton, albany, kalgoorlie. why not encourage the growth of as many of these rural cities as possible, instead of contributing to the ridiculous urban sprawl that is such a blight on our country?

wow... perhaps with better communication and people moving out of the capital and satellite cities, there might be a greater demand for better rail and air connections? (oh don't be an idiot! people will simply bitch about having to sdrive their cars so far! what were thinking?!)

i don't know. telstra sucks. we could have had a far better network if we'd invested more in it decades ago. of course, that would have required a bit of foresight and that was so abundant in the 1980s...

... not quite in the club yet

2008-11-23T11:48:00.002+11:00

i watched the jane austen book club today, just now (about half an hour ago, in fact), and i really enjoyed it. i think i'm tempted to actually read through the jane austen canon. pretty scary, given my terrible experience of jane austen at high school.

we had to study persuasion and i really didn't enjoy it at all. i enjoyed less that austen had lengthened the book from 29 chapters to 44! that said, i always felt guilty that i hadn't given the book a better chance, especially since our teacher was such a huge jane austen fanatic - i always worried that my dislike for the book was received more as a personal insult and less as coming from a sci-fi nut having to read period romance and social commentary.

so i'm going to get the novel of the jane austen book club, read that, and then perhaps read the novels afterwards.

... i am wrong

2008-11-22T18:08:00.002+11:00

...apparently.

i was told today that i cannot be discriminated against.

not that there is a law that says discriminating against me personally is illegal but rather that, by virtue of my skin colour, sexual preference, religious preference, socio-economic background, personal tastes, age, country of birth and place of residence, it is a political-logical impossibility that i should be discriminated against.

... things to do when you're home sick

2008-11-05T10:00:00.002+11:00

well, when you're home sick, feeling nauseous and dealing with diarrhoea, sometimes you end up casting about for things to do to pass the time. here's a list:

sleep;
read a book;
watch a movie;
follow the united states presidential election on various tv channels;
play dune 2000;
make a zine;
do some washing (if you feel confident you can get to the laundry without needing the loo!);
update your weblog;
clean the bathroom;
trawl wikipedia and other websites, trying to understand how the u.s. electoral processes work.

of course, i could call refund home loans and try to find out how on earth buying into a home loan provider franchise could possibly be a good thing for anyone but me (maybe). o me! o life!

... and among other things, i took a test!

2008-10-30T23:45:00.000+11:00

Your result for What Your Taste in Art Says About You Test...

Traditional, Vibrant, and Tasteful

1 Islamic, -2 Impressionist, 1 Ukiyo-e, -2 Cubist, -4 Abstract and -12 Renaissance!

Islamic art is developed from many sources: Roman, Early Christian, and Byzantine styles were taken over in early Islamic architecture; the architecture and decorative art of pre-Islamic Persia was of paramount significance; Central Asian styles were brought in with various nomadic incursions; and Chinese influences . Islamic art uses many geometical floral or vegetable designs in a repetitive pattern known as arabesque. It is used to symbolize the transcendent, indivisible and infinite nature of Allah.

People that like Islamic art tend to be more traditional people that appreciate keeping patterns that they learned and experienced from their past. It is not to say that they are not innovative personalities, they just do not like to let go of their roots. They like to put new ideas into details and make certain that they will work before sharing them with others. Failure is not something they like to think about because they are more interested in being successful and appreciated for their intelligence. These people can also be or like elaborate things in their life as long as they are tasteful. They tend to prefer geometric patterns and vibrant colors.

Take What Your Taste in Art Says About You Test at HelloQuizzy

... what have i been up to?

2008-08-23T09:24:00.002+10:00

i've been reading war and peace... but not as regularly as i'm supposed to be (i've fallen a little bit behind, partly because...)
i've been reading the penguin history of the u.s.a. and i've been learning a great deal about the revolutionary war, the declaration of independence and the years and conditions leading up to the civil war. i'd heard of andrew jackson but knew little of him. i'd never even heard of alexander hamilton until about a month ago, when i read a book by gore vidal about some of the figures surrounding the early years of the u.s. constitution and became interested in learning more.
i've been looking for a new job. i have had a couple of promising leads and may have more to say about it in the near future!
i'm off to church camp next weekend. my new church is friendly and interesting and i'm still working out how i'd like to be involved in church life. i was so long out of a regular church context it feels kind of weird and a little artificial trying to acclimatise myself to a new church environment.
i've got several ideas for stories and screenplays that i'd like to get stuck into and i'm exploring some new software i've downloaded to help me do that called celtx - it really is chock-full of writing goodness.
i bought some language learning software and i'm teaching myself spanish. i learned the days of the week a couple of days ago... lunes, martes, miércoles, jueves, viernes, sábado, domingo!
it's raining in melbourne (quelle surprise, i hear some people mutter) and i'm really enjoying the melbourne-ness of it. winter actually is winter here and while it's my second winter in melbourne it is still a heartwarming thing for me. i adore the cold weather and melbourne has been most generous in warming my heart!
a few weeks ago some of the buildings in melbourne that you don't normally have the chance to see up close and personal threw their doors open for guided tours. i wandered around the city a bit with a friend from the library and ended up seeing less than i expected to see (some of the queues were extraordinarily long!) but it was very cool looking at the capitol theatre (i think it was) that had been designed by walter burley griffin, the same man largely responsible for canberra! such an obsession with geometry...

... and that's about it for the time being...

... time for a change

2008-08-12T23:12:00.002+10:00

i've resigned from my job.

talking with people about it has yielded a few interesting remarks but the general feel is that i shouldn't be quitting my job without having one ready to go into. i agree that such a course of action is a wise one but it isn't one i feel works with my current situation.

for starters, when it comes to work i don't generally flitter from pillar to post. in the last eighteen years i've had three main jobs, with a couple of other jobs here and there. i also feel (whether that comes across in my work life or not) a genuine commitment to my workplace, to make it a better place for the long term and to be able to say that when i leave it will be better than it was when i arrived (and, no, not because of my arrival and departure!).

the time has come for me, in my current work environment, to leave. i have my reasons and i'm hoping that i'll find a new job sooner than later. contacts in the industry i work in have already been very encouraging and i will be following up on at least one of them tomorrow! if you feel so inclined, please pray that i won't be looking for very long and that the place i'm meant to be at will be quickly made apparent to me.

several people have asked if i'll move back to sydney. my answer (at this point) is no. my reasons for leaving sydney have not changed and nor have my reasons for moving to melbourne. i love this city. the weather suits me down to the ground, it's easy to get around and people here are so friendly. i love my involvement with sticky (at sidebar, right) and the great friends i've made through it. i'm gradually getting to know people at my new church and i'm looking forward to church camp and joining a small group Bible study very soon. i started my current job because i was moving to melbourne - i didn't move to melbourne because i had found my current job.

i have a cold. my video recorder is kaktus. a friend from school got married last weekend (yay!). God loves me. my life is pretty good.

... the end of an era?

2008-08-03T08:57:00.002+10:00

imagine my surprise to find when, in a fit of public-spiritedness and interest in current affairs, i decided to turn on channel 9 on the tv while i was eating breakfast this morning, only to find that it's the last broadcast of the sunday programme.

sunday has been screening since i was six years old, its first broadcast in 1981 featuring laurie oakes interviewing then-prime minister malcolm fraser. today, in the last broadcast, laurie oakes is interviewing kevin rudd.

it came as a complete surprise to me that sunday is winding up. all tv programmes come to an end sooner or later - i imagine even 60 minutes will end one day - but i had no idea, had seen or heard nothing about its end in other media outlets - until this morning as ellen fanning reiterated for newly-switched-over viewers that today's is the last broadcast for sunday.

what will come next week? what programmes on australian television will now pick up the baton for investigative, "who knows what we will find?" journalism? helen dalley (now on sky news) commented that the difference between sunday and 60 minutes schools of story production was that on the latter, journalists and producers had researched the stories to the point that when they went into production they would know exactly what they wanted to say and exactly what they were looking at; on the former, journos and producres might not know what they'd find - only that there was a story there worth pursuing. who will do that now? (by the way, how gorgeous is nell schofield??? i think she's even more beautiful now, 27 years after puberty blues, than she was back then...)

it's difficult to get myself excited about news and current affairs programmes on australian television. a current affair and today tonight are barely worth the name of "current affairs" and much more like... the magazines they sell on the shelves nearest the checkouts at supermarkets! for mine, shows like dateline, landline, and the 7.30 report are genuine current affairs programmes.

perhaps it's even scarier that the 6 o'clock news programmes are advertising stories they're going to run (so-called "special reports") when i would've thought there's plenty to report in the news on an ordinary day without using stocking stuffers that they could put into their 6.30 current affairs (sic) programmes...

peter thompson commented that the australian film industry at the moment is in "deep schtuck". i don't think it's just the film industry. when decisions to cancel programmes like sunday come down from the people who are supposed to be far-sighted about such things, i fear the continued dumbing-down of australian television. calling it "making tv relevant" is a cop-out. in a world that wants to talk (it seems) in a language of icons, top 40 soundtracks and emotion, television seems to be leading the way to letting people slip back into a common baby-talk, instead of encouraging critical thinking and thoughtful consideration of the world around us.

our forebears' fears that television would make people stupid seems to be coming true.