... almost at the end

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

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

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

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

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

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

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!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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"

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

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

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!

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

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)

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

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...

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

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...

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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...

... 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...

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?

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

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!

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

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:

1. how much money you want to spend,
2. how much time you have available,
3. how much time you want to spend,
4. how creative you'd like to be,
5. how creative you know you actually are,
6. how many flunkies you have available to you in the time you have available, and
7. 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?

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...

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

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...

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?

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

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

...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

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:

1. sleep;
   
2. read a book;
   
3. watch a movie;
   
4. follow the united states presidential election on various tv channels;
   
5. play dune 2000;
   
6. make a zine;
   
7. do some washing (if you feel confident you can get to the laundry without needing the loo!);
   
8. update your weblog;
   
9. clean the bathroom;
   
10. 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!