Back from the bush
[Still trying to get text to actually post to this goddam blog. Now trying a non-Flock browser. God, this reinforces my techno-cretin status...]
Trip to the Block was exhausting. Forgotton how weary listening to the unwanted blather of others can be. Still, a few good ideas, but none that would not have otherwise seen daylight given serious planning.
Interesting to hear Ms J report back after her visit to Mr Architect.
Retrospectively speaking
Hmmm…this was going to be a first entry to this page. It appeared on my Flock blog toolbar and I wondered where it had got to. The text I’d laborously chopped in also seems to have vanished and makes the label pretty meaningless. No wait! Now I am writing this retrospectively. Or something.
Anyway it was to be some palaver about the importing of all those dusty northbysoutheast entries and how they had acquired all those big number headings. Expressly designed to test my innumerate consciousness. All the links in the imported stuff seem broken so the one above is so I can retreive any important to me, perhaps to you Dear Reader. But, now I’ve viewed a couple of them, the postings are very hoary – be warned.
Plumbing buggery
Somewhere down in those imported entries is something about the plumbing hoodoo that has followed me around. Well today once more, flooded bathroom, scalding water everywhere, rooftop solar hot water danger, missed breakfast….not happy.
Another bitch about the music industry
I read on another of these wordpress thingies about cd copy protection that prevented a bloke’s mother from feeding her iPod with her own cds. Yep…pissed me off too when I found that lockout on the first disk I’d bought in yonks (my status as nouveau pauvre has made me grateful for my youthful good taste in music).
Yesterday’s reminder from OS-X’s software updater had me download iTunes 6 with its new video stream, that reminded me of how record companies here have dragged their arses in negotiations for an Australian iTunes music store. Here in country Qld the shops sell a predictable stock of standard teen/sad-boomer fodder. I’ve been able to satisfy my admited minority taste on the odd trip to the capital, but I’m really getting pissed off. Especially with their sanctimonious humbug about supporting musos as they sue the p2p guys and lie about the effect of illegal downloads. Stuff about decline in cd sales with no admission of that hole being filled by dvds. If anything sales are probably static and will decline because they don’t sell what we want in the way we want to buy it. For Chrissakes it’s all digital and should be available whether I’m in this burg or at the bottom of the harbor.
If I can’t buy it, I’ll download it.
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I felt mildly sorry for author, Nikki Gemmell when she broke down on LNL the other night. I think it caught Phillip Adams a little off guard too. It left him strenuously denying any kind of set-up in the face of Nikki’s accusation of cynicism on his part or that of online guest, Dr Rebecca Peelan from the National University of Ireland. Before this I’d not taken much note of her book The bride stripped bare whose authorship is attributed to “Anonymous”. But some time after publication and subsequent success, apparently including translations into several European languages, little Nikki was outed by the British press on the strength of infomation from some malicious “publishing executive” from Sydney. Since then, her identification as author of the sexually explicit roman � clef has “made her life hell.” I did a bit of googling around and there was last week’s article from the Guardian in which Gemmell relates all this, concluding with how her husband read it and although he was “turned on” by what he read they “haven’t made love since.” Hmmm. Then on a tape timeshifting Andrew Denton’s Monday night interview, there she was in floral-bright cheong sam and Valley-girl intonation, her dirty-coy promotional-tour script spilling from her Luna Park mouth. This pretty much put the seal on it especially as I seem to recall the tearful breakdown on LNL coinciding with Dr Peelan alluding to issues like marketing and the Helen Darville/Demedenko fraud. It stretches credulity publishing as “Anon” and claiming surprise at getting found out. Really. LNL asked the question “What makes a writer decide to write a novel anonymously? I think the answer has to be “Sales,” Phillip, “Sales”.
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A lot of whacky events in the week past, hey? Mick Jagger turned 60 and PM Howard finally reached his 64th (not out) the one where he said he’d consider retiremens. The fact that he has and isn’t seems to have sent the journos back to questioning the longevity of Leader of the Opposition, Crean. I know I’m tired of how political analysis in this brown land seems preoccupied with questioning leadership. It’s got something to do with our recent decision to make it an article of faith that whoever holds the treasury portfolio or its shadow, is annointed as successor to the leader. One of the newspapers noted the youth of our present PM relative to many of his predecessors and other world leaders. He has a good decade or more on so many of them. So when its time for him to go by choice or electoral mishap (barring divine intervention, an unlikely occurrence) the present treasurer could be long gone, or if not, looking very stale and tired indeed.
Meanwhile no sooner had runner and Olympian, Cathy Freeman announced her retirement from sport, than political leaders were canvassing her suitability for public office for their respective opposing parties. Astonishing. I have to wonder at a system which privileges image so readily. I mean the dear girl is an unknown quantity as far as intellect is concerned, but her public speaking alternates between rambling and incoherence, but then again I guess the party reps see this as evidence of her fitting in with the pack. One hopes Cathy will take more note of Mary G.
And the execrable Big Brother ends with this country’s first female winner. It was refreshing however to hear “Reggie” who has become the most famous Tasmanian woman since Truganini, say that winning and the loot has changed everything. Thank god – I can’t stand hearing people who come into largesse saying they’ll “…still be the same as they’ve always been…” . I feel like telling them to back then. Fools.
Then this morning, woke to hear of Bob Hope’s death. He made his hundredth birthday as did fellow comedian, George Burns and we all thought ill of the Reader’s Digest dictum that Laughter’s the Best Medicine.
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Been spending so much time reading about events in Asia lately that I have kind of lost track of a lot of the old faithful blogsters that used to keep me from my studies. Noticed that Tom picked up on the masturbation preventing prostate cancer story. I thought it would have appeared in more blogs than I’ve noticed, blogsters being such wankers. But then again that term (along with “tosser” in the UK) seems to have become somewhat disengaged from its onanistic origins.
And not veering too far from the topic (one too that’s close to dear Tom’s heart) down south on the Murray Graham has quite the definitive list of differences between blogsters and journalists. It’s in the 17 July Request a Rant© and is nicely boxed and gussied up to aid comprehension. V. Good.
