Saturday Night Pre-Recorded

Things that I need to get off my chest after watching Martin Plaza and Greedy Smith (from Mental As Anything) guest host Rage.

Everyone’s a winner baby. That’s not a fact. That’s not even possible, Errol.*

Freedom of choice is what we want. Freedom from choice is what we get. And freedom furniture.**

Bowie, you might stumble into town just like a sacred cow, but the dramatic high point of the clip is somewhat reduced by you choosing that moment to raise a Prima juice box to your lips.

It’s grim up north. Doesn’t matter how the Dream Academy paint it.

No, I don’t want to go to Chelsea either. But now that I’m older, I have the courage to say this. Mr Costello, you might be one of the greats, but pulse does not rhyme with else.

Turns out, Greedy Smith’s glasses (in the national health, heavy frame style you associate with the little developmentally delayed kids) are not an affectation. He does appear to suffer from some form of… problem. Martin Plaza had the air of a parent just about to reach the end of his tether.

*Hot Chocolate (Look, I just gotta put this out there. Has anyone ever seen Gordon Robinson from Sesame Street and Errol Brown from Hot Chocolate in the same room at the same time?)

**Devo

My Idea. Part 2.

In My Idea. By A Grey Area. Aged Eleventy Oneteen. I laid out the foolproof method to being a rich, lazy inventor.

But two things needed filling in. The idea and the leak.

Well, here's the leak and the plug (so to speak). I've had the idea and now I have to get it out there. What better way than to tell you guys?

Witness to an invention.

Dear (Concerned Party),

Please receive, witness and archive somewhere safe, an idea I've just had. When the evil forces of international retail conspiracy inevitably 'disappear' me and seek to profit from my work, you will be able to go to the authorities and media, and expose the plot... and I can't remember how to copyright without the use of a self-undressed antelope and registered mail.

(I authorise you to use the above, to write blockbuster film in the vein of Enemy of The State. I should be played by Morgan Freeman or Kate Blanchett)

The idea?

A bed friendly cover for an eBook. (I know! Genius! I can't believe I have so many ideas like this and remain so poor.)

It has a stiff, adjustable "spine" (the bendy bit between the front and back covers). Once opened, either to an obtuse or acute angle it doesn't matter, it stays there with enough friction/force to hold the weight of the eBook.

Why is this useful?

Well, someone is lying in bed. If they open the cover 270 degrees, they can have the eBook resting on it's left side, facing towards them (they are on their left side, so reading down-to-up = left-to-right) the inside of the front cover is now the base, sitting flat on the sheet. When the reader turns over, they will need the book resting on it's right side. The cover holds its angle of openness and rests like a stiff tent.

It also allows you to stand the book upright in front of you.

All of this no hands business is especially important in cold countries where it's nice to keep you hands under the covers for most of the time, rather than holding the book.

I have also come up with a little wire, prop-stick (like what you hold a car bonnet up with) that can be added to existing covers that will make them behave the same as above. They will be available next to paper clips and erasable pens at your local newsagent and will turn me into a millionaire.

So long, suckers! Ahem.

Thanks for listening.

Kindle - Part 3

Ok, so, I’ve spent a bit of time with the Kindle eBook reader thingy, and I have the following observations.

It is an excellent bit of hardware and I actually read faster with it. For those of us with the attention span of a kitten, you may recognise the following scenario when you’re reading.

1. Time to turn over the page
2. Might as well make this time to turn over in bed
3. Notice that the mug on the window sill is making the blind stick out asymmetrically
4. Move mug
5. Holding the mug reminds you that you are thirsty
6. Get up to make tea
7. Get frightened by killer dust-bunny in hallway
8. Go back to bed
9. Pick up book
10. Re-read last page to remind you what had just happened (it’s been a distracting and trying time, after all)
11. Time to turn page
12. Might as well make this time to turn over
13. Notice that Emergency Contact has been very quiet for a while, might want to prod or “help” her with something…
14. Ad absurdum, infinitum, and finally, snorrum

With the electronic reader, there’s no real page turning. Your thumb just rests on the ‘next page’ button and you click when ready. I’ve even got it timed so that the very slight delay that the device exhibits as it retrieves the next page, is dealt with by hitting the button as you get to the last line on the display.

The battery life is not quite what they are promising I suspect. I don’t have a definitive answer on this yet, as you do get much better life out of the thing if you turn the wireless off when you’re not surfing, and I've only just started to do that reliably.

But here’s the kicker. Here’s where it’s all going to come tumbling down.

If they don’t make big headway into improving the library that is available to the owner, they are going to get me shouting in the streets.

I have been keeping a tally of the increase in the library, as reported by the device. You can see that it looks like a pretty good jump each day. (Over there under the search field.)

Yeah, well, with not much evidence other than to say that I’ve seen this on more than one occasion, I don’t think that six different versions of the one book should really count. It’s not like I get the choice between hardback and softback, colour or black and white.

And without wanting to thrust myself too deeply into the maw of the self flagellating beast that is America’s reading habits, is all of that religious content really necessary? And why isn’t it under fiction?

My Idea. By Grey Area. Aged Eleventy Oneteen

I’ve decided that the way to get ahead is to be the world’s laziest inventor.

This is how it will work.

1) Have brilliant idea.

2) Document brilliant idea to prove beyond all doubt ownership and conception date.

3) Sit on it. Don’t do a damn thing with it other than to…

4) Leak it. (Details on how best to leak still a bit hazy.)

5) Allow development, manufacture, distribution and proof of profitability to go ahead.

6) Don’t make a sound

7) When brilliant idea has proven not to be attracting damages claims…

8) Sue for lost earnings and get a little punitive.

You have outlaid nothing. You have risked nothing. You have sweated nothing. It’s all gravy, baby! What’s the worst that can happen? (You know, other than that other guy having thought of it independently and going you for vexatious whatchamacallit.)

Pug-o-Vision

Many people say to me, "Why do pugs turn their heads on the side like that? It makes them look so cute and intelligent"

I answer, "It's a byproduct of a survival trait evolved in the wild."

I am then usually looked at with skepticism.

Allow me to use diagrams.

In the top figure, we see a pug from the top (a plan view) and the field of vision (FOV).

The placement of the eye has more in common with fish and parrots, than with other mammals. The two FOVs will eventually overlap, giving stereoscopic (depth perception) vision.

(Uniquely, this happens over the horizon, so in other words; Not on this planet. The pug only has depth perception of objects in space. This ability is offset by being short sighted.)

In the middle figure, the FOV from the side. You will note that if the pug is approached within 1.5 meters by an average size human it cannot see above the level of the human's knees.

In the bottom figure (side view with head tilted) the FOV shows that the pug can perceive an entire human at a single glance. A further useful trait to the pug in the wild, is that inside the range of 1.5 metres, the pug can also perceive juicy treats that have been thrown on the ground in front of it, as well as the human throwing them.

Kindle - Part 2

First, a short, non-nerdy explanation of the device (Aus facts only), followed by how to justify the purchase when there are so many arguments against getting one, floating around in the meme-set.

What is a Kindle?

It is an electronic book. It is chained to Amazon.com and you can buy books on it from their library. The book content is delivered over the “Whispernet” which is a jumped up phone network.

It has a black and white screen that does not project any light and it measures 15cm diagonally across. It is as inert as a piece of paper and can manage 16 shades of grey. It uses what I call “Growed up Magna-Doodle” technology.

In a nice leather cover, it is the size and thickness of a 300 page, new release paperback. In the same case, it weighs 450 gm, 170 more than the paperback. It has noticeable heft. I like that sort of thing, but then again, weight equals quality when it comes to my primitive quality assurance criteria.

Justifications.

I live with another inveterate reader in a two bedroom flat. We are out of bookshelf space.

When we moved out of our last suburb, we were excited because we were getting a new library catchment area. To our tastes, we’d finished the local ones. Sure, there were stands of bodice-rippers and Mills and Boone to get through, but we decided it was easier to change pads, than palates. I started thinking about electronic books a few years ago. It seemed a sensible way to store the pulp, one-off reading.

I used to subscribe to the fetishist arguments about the niceness of owning “the book”. The artefact itself was important. The book wasn’t just the words, it was a full sensorial thing (including the smell… that often comes up) but I had to examine my beliefs on this, and they were just beliefs.

I’m tough on books. I don’t treat them with reverence, and the only thing that needs to work are the words. If I’ve read a book, there will be no mistaking it for new. I loan them out and never get them back and I've got used to that. I’ve re-bought tens of titles over the years for one reason or another. I’ve lost count of the times I’ve said, “Never read Hitchhikers?! Take this.”

The whole thing about having them up there, so that there is a collection, doesn’t really bear scrutiny, either. What are we collecting? Ideas? No, I keep them in my head. What exactly are we displaying? “Look how smart I am. I’ve read all these books.”?

I’m not in the dating game, so I’m not actively advertising my intellectual credentials. And to be honest, I enjoy some outright crap, as well. Probably an even bet as to what you would think of me if you peeked at my bookshelf. If I mention in conversation that, “I was once reading…” or “I just read…” or “Yeah, I liked that one,” I’ve never once had to furnish proof. (Trusting bunch, my friends.)

I just want to enjoy the words and in most cases, I will not re-read the book. So what am I keeping it for? Expensive and dusty wall paper? I know when I’ve read a book. I don’t need to prove it to anyone else.

Another argument against electronic books is how hard the screens are to read for extended periods. I will say this for the Amazon Kindle - without a breath of hesitation - they have licked that technological problem. It reads like a page. In fact; it’s better. You can magnify on a whim and change the number of words per line with a click.

“But, my book never runs out of batteries.” With the battery life they are advertising on this thing (something I will be testing and reporting on) you shouldn’t ever be caught without something to read, either. You got used to your mobile and your iPod, what’s so challenging about this?

To me the battery argument is akin to, “But, in an emergency you can’t wipe your bum with the torn out pages of the Kindle.”

No, you can’t, and there are just some situations grown adults should be able to avoid.

So, I’m not going to throw out my coffee table books, my rare editions, my classics and anything else that fits into a vaguely ‘valuable‘ bracket. I simply want to convert the torrent of titles that damn up against the walls of my place, the books that I don’t particularly want to display, to a flow through. A passing electronic stream. Now, that’s gotta be good feng shui.

Kindle - Part 1

Eddie Izzard has a condition called techno-joy. It’s the opposite of techno-fear. It doesn’t necessarily mean being good with technology, but being unafraid to chuck the instructions out the window while trying to make the new computer work better… with a hammer.

I have a touch of techno-joy. I am a hapless gadget junky, early adopter and Australian. This lethal combination means I have a disposable income in the lamentably tiny market of a first world country populated by what can only be described as an idiosyncratic bunch.

This can be upsetting to someone who finds that six months after a brilliant, life-changing purchase, the spare parts are no longer available, the consumables never got shipped, or the broadcast network the device is designed to work with has just gone into receivership and fallen out of the sky.

How unpredictable is the Australian market? How badly can it go wrong for big venture in this country? Well, as one small example, Starbucks had to close nearly 70 stores after failing to spin our beanies. (Between you, me, and the unfilled cappuccino mug, it actually makes me a bit proud and, perversely, no less risk averse.)

But I’m taking another risk. I don’t go in completely blind, but I will admit to going in a bit half-arsed. I got a Kindle and I’m going to review the device for all of you less reckless, more, can-we-just-see-what-happens-when-you-feed-it-after-midnight, type folk. (If you don’t know what a Kindle is, don’t worry, I’m going to explain in the next blob.)

Just a mention or two in the coming days and weeks, and we’ll see how you feel about getting one.

Who knows? We may change the landscape in the Australian market to a more egalitarian playing field. Scoff. Choke.

It's A Wrap

Watched The World’s Fastest Indian on Saturday night, which was a bit of a surprise.

I thought it was going to be the sequel to Slumdog Millionaire but it turned out to be Anthony Hopkins, playing Anthony Hopkins with a… with a… what the hell was that accent?

I’m not fooled, Tony. You might have Hollywood believing that you’re one of the great actors of your time, but I think you’re a one-trick-pony.

The Scene: Office of Non-Specific Production Company - Hollywoodland.

“The studio just rang and they’ve worked the figures. Apparently, we need a new vehicle for T. Hop. They say the public are ready to go for his brand of emotionally repressed, wooden thingy... you know. His schtick. Got anything in mind?”

“How about an emotionally repressed butler who works for a Nazi?”

“Good, but done it.”

“How about an emotionally repressed guy brought up by gorillas?”

“Crazy, but done it.”

“How about an emotionally repressed guy who goes into the wilds with his hot wife and young rival?”

“Embarrassing, but done it.”

“How about an emotionally repressed guy who just wants go really fast on his motorcycle?”

“Hey I like it. What’s the grab? Where’s the angle?”

“He’s from New Zealand.”

“We want emotionally repressed, not unintelligible.”

So, anyway, despite the fact that you’ve just got through 200 words of me sniping away at it, I actually enjoyed the film. I’m not saying rush out and rent it, but don’t avoid it, it’s really quite… nice.

But the film review isn't really why I'm here. What I really want to address is the alarming thing I learnt from it.

The film is set in the not-so-distant past and, without giving anything away, our hero Burt, is getting burnt by the bike’s exhaust pipe when he’s in full record-breaking mode. His answer is to wrap his leg in asbestos. Where does he scrounge the asbestos from?

An electric blanket. To anyone over the age of thirty who reads this - How the hell, have any of us survived?

A Little Window Into Self Delusion

Sichuan fish in Sichuan Province - in a Sichuan sauce. All those little balls you can see are Sichuan peppers.

Regular readers will be aware that Emergency Contact and I just had a little jaunt with some mates through parts of China.

In previous blobs on the subject, I will have given the impression that this was a highly cultural tour, mixed with unusual activities that provided a thorough immersion in that amazing place. That we made a well rounded and proper connection to the Middle Kingdom and its multifarious peoples. While that is largely true, I want to refine that impression a little.

We ate our way round China.

Man, the food we consumed! Holy cow, did we pull on the nosebag. I mean, two 15 course meals a day (and they usually followed a pretty healthily sized breakfast). Not to mention snacks and of course, the local beer Tsing Tao (And it’s a good brew).

Every meal was an event, an adventure, and I was never disappointed. If they do decide to act on it, the Chinese approach to world domination should be to over-feed us until we can’t move, quietly walk in and take over our businesses as we sit there belching and fizzing away, and efficiently turn a profit as our overloaded hearts give out.

I could rave on and on about the various brilliant plates, but suffice to say; Sichuan fish in Sichuan province - full body experience. And that body was getting larger and larger, day by day, under the food onslaught.

So, how does this get us to self delusion? Well, upon return to Oz and a normal diet, I immediately felt that I was losing the extra weight, which pleased me until I realised how I was getting that impression.

You see, it’s a mirror thing. I’ve gone from decent hotels with disturbing, full-length mirrors on a lot of surfaces, back to our little flat in Sydney. There’s only a tiny mirror in the bathroom and you can only get about 30 centimetres away from it before you fall in the toilet.

I’ve only seen myself from the neck up since getting back home. Anything could be going on below my collar.

Drowned In Their Own Saliva

I googled the catchy phrase above, to see if there were any recorded cases. (My 45 second “research” is inconclusive and not enough to stop a blob... but it is not looking terribly likely.)

It does appear there are a lot of people who can give themselves a coughing fit by breathing their own saliva, but that’s old news. I’ve been able to do that for years. In fact, it’s contagious. The first time I did it in front of Emergency Contact, she thought I was a complete weirdo. But on learning that it could happen, she took it up with gusto.

The reason I’m out on the pointy end of science like this?

I’ve had a throat infection for the last few days and I’ve given up swallowing. At the same time, my salivary glands took this as a que to really put in. The phrase, ‘Produce enough saliva to drown a man with acute pharyngitis’ is unlikely to replace ‘to cut one’s nose off to spite their face’ in the short term, but I want it considered for down the track.

Over the last three nights, I've woken up every 30 seconds. I was either choking, drowning, or just being disturbed by the pain of swallowing.

I’ve had enough, I tells ya!

Actually, that’s why you’re getting a blob about it. I can’t tell you anything. It’s also driven me mute.

Emergency Contact thinks it’s brilliant.

Don’t Make A Spectacle Of Yourself

It may interest you to know that we in Australia cannot have 20-20 hindsight, foresight or even a 20-20 plebiscite. Not because we’re stupid; because we’re metric. It’s not measured over 20 feet, but 6 meters. Doesn’t that ruin some song lyrics?

Last week, I found myself at the optometrist. It wasn’t an accidental thing, like wandering around with my arms out and lucking on the right door, but it did have the feeling of coming on suddenly, and without my permission. Apparently, this happens precisely at a point when you hit your very, very (extremely) late twenties.

So, we do the testing and it turns out that, beyond a certain distance, I have better than nominal sight. I get 6.5 out of 6. In semi-practical terms, this means you can move the contract 7 metres away from me and I can still read the fine-print. But it’s inside that distance that led me to the optometrist in the first place.

After the test (and the distinctly odd experience of having my eyeballs anaesthetised and the Optometrist rest a piece of equipment on them to measure their pressure) I received her quirky analysis and prescription.

“As you age, the eye muscles are less able to refocus the lens for the close in, reading-type activities. You can buy standard, non-prescription glasses from the service station and it won’t harm you and it won’t change the strength of the prescription that you will eventually need. But if you can muddle through, you might as well…”

And then she said the thing that tickled me.

“… and you might as well muddle through, because you’re tall.”

“Oh, and why does that matter?” I ask. I just don’t see the connection.

“Because you can hold the book a long way away from yourself, and it won’t look too odd.”

Bugle Quintets Prohibited

In Training

I will be talked about in China for years to come. I’m surprised there’s not already a Wikipedia page dedicated to my achievements.

First, I got a nickname. It’s 'One Per Basket'. Which inevitably got shortened to 'One Basket'.

I like it. It sounds philosophical, or maybe to do with a mental illness. As in,

“Hey, what’s wrong with him?”

“Oh, him. He’s only shopping with one basket.”

It came about totally logically. We were about to go hot-air-ballooning, and the head pilot (?) was dividing us up into groups, for the balloons. Everybody got the same number of people in their basket, except my group. He indicated that because I was a big round-eye, I was worth two people in a basket. Much hilarity and the name is born.

My second big achievement this week was a relativistic one.

Shanghai has a maglev train. It’s a monorail type arrangement that levitates the train magnetically. This means it can go quite fast. When I say “quite fast” I mean faster than Veyron. Faster than bullet trains. I mean doing the Kessle run in 7-and-a-half minutes. It's fast enough for you old round-eye.

“How fast, One Basket?” I hear you ask. Well, it routinely shuffles between downtown Shanghai and the airport at a 441 km/h. When you are doing 441 km/h alongside an expressway (where you know the cars are doing somewhere between 100 and 130) you get a real feeling for how unbelievably quick that is.

They’re just standing still.

The blurred image, above, is me trying to hold steady enough to get a photo of the speed read-out in the carriage. There is so much vibration from the air, I just couldn‘t get a still shot. When the maglev going in the opposite direction passed, I almost had a heart-attack. They have a combined closing speed of 900 km/h (that’s very nearly the speed of sound) so you don’t see it coming. There’s just a huge bang with the air-pressure change and all the windows move in and out and that’s it. You don’t get to see it. You just hear the bang.

So, I’m on the maglev - and it gets to 442 km/h. A tiny bit faster than normal (they’ve actually trialled it at over 500 kph, so it was really only just starting to stretch its mags) and I take the opportunity by the horns. I go down to the back of the train and run up to the front.

I estimate that I have now run at 452 kph.

A new PB for One Basket!

All Roads Lead To Pollution

If Rene Descartes was to appear before me, I’d kick him in the epistemologies, point at China, and say, “Solipsism hey!? What do you think of them apples?”

You can’t make this place up. The human mind is not up to it. If it’s not the numbers, size and variation, it’s the freakin’ driving. I will never get used to it. I’ve spent too long driving in places that have rules. I have acclimatised to being on the wrong side, but that’s because it’s the least of my worries. And really, that whole, “We drive on this side. You going the other way, drive on that side…” is only the vaguest guideline. Sort of like a serving suggestion.

China has properly started its love affair with the car. Fifteen years ago there were almost no privately owned cars. This year, Chinese citizens bought more cars than Americans.

Sure, there are a billion more Chinese than Americans, but that just means the manufacturers have only just scratched the surface of the market. I’d be surprised if we didn’t see that number trumped, again and again.

There will be a couple of factors that will eventually inhibit continual growth in the car market; one of them being the natural limit to how many cars can fit on the roads.

If you arrive in Shanghai from one of the many freeways, you slam to a quick halt in the face of the most amazing traffic. Fifteen hundred new cars hit Shanghai streets every day. If that sounds like a lot, Shanghai’s registered population is nearly 14 million. But that doesn’t really tell the story. That number is boosted by unregistered people and those who live outside the municipality and come in to work. It’s guessed to be over 20 million. Let’s put that into some perspective. That’s the population of Australia in a city you can drive across before lunch.

Yet, in strange contrast, there is no shortage of roads in China. It just depends where you are. They have built roads all over the country in preparation for the traffic increase. It’s possible to be belting along nearly empty expressways between quite large population centres. There are flyovers and cloverleaf exits that would make a Texan proud.

Some other transport facts stand out. Mainly because you almost get killed by them several times a day. The Chinese have gone for electric scooters. I saw one for sale in our local hardware in Australia last year and thought it was interesting enough to prompt a blob. I’ve not seen one since (in Australia) and that's because the Chinese bought them all.

Here, they are a swarming, ubiquitous, inescapable presence. A good proportion of the population in big cities have given up pedalling and scoot around on these funky, totally silent, electric bikes. The state owned Flying Pigeon bike manufacturer has had to consider outsourcing to SE Asia and Africa to cut costs because they used to sell over 4 million bikes a year. Now, it’s down to just over a million. I like the look of them, but they do weigh over twenty kilos (partly because of the reinforced crossbar for carrying pigs) and are not considered fashionable.

There’s also an industry that adds motors and batteries to the hundred-year-old tricycles. These are the things with the tray on the back. All the farmers seem to get around on them (silently) carrying enormous loads that will squash you flat as you step off the curb.

Facts and figures used here have been checked against National Geo, The Age and various 'pedias, to put some substance around the type of conversations you have on a bus - when you're going through a town like Shanghai. Besides, if you're reading AGA for factual accounting of the world...

One China