How Much Is That Avatar In The Window?

Having avoided all the reviews and advertising leading up to Avatar’s release, I managed to see it without preconception. I was aware of it being one of the most expensive films ever made - I don’t live under a floating rock - but I had studiously avoided all the rest of the hype. Anyway, the “most expensive” tag doesn’t sway me either way. If you are investing the money well (smashing cars through shopping centres for The Blues Brothers, for instance) go with my blessing.

So - here’s a review of Avatar by someone who doesn’t know what the consensus of opinion is on the subject. I’ll be interested to see where I fit on the spectrum.

Avatar is the first 3D film I have seen since 1980 when I saw The House of Wax. Made in 1953, it was re-released in the 80s I presume to tackle a worldwide 3D-cardboard-glasses glut. It was the type of film that makes you glad that smell-o-vision didn’t take off, because what leapt off the screen at you was a pure bucket of shite.

The first thing you notice when you go to the 3D version of Avatar is that the glasses are much better now. I liked mine so much I kept them.

(Actually, a friend of a friend was there and he was wearing shoes that have individual toes. Sort of like feet gloves. When I happened to look down at them with my 3D glasses on, I assumed that the glasses had some mild x-ray feature and I was seeing slightly into his shoes. Turns out, the glasses only have a temporal vision thing going on, because looking at the shoes again, I could see exactly how long that trend was going to last.)

So, now that the technology is all taken care of, down to the movie.

Wikipedia says the script treatment and surrounding stuff was in development from 1994. Ho-lly-shit. I hope that’s not right. Fifteen freakin’ years to pump that out? You have got to be kidding me.

I won’t go into detail to avoid plot spoilers, but every single plot point is telegraphed so obviously that I saw them coming while I was in line for popcorn. (And I didn’t even have the special specs on at that time.)

I am a discerning Sci-Fi consumer. Ok, I’m total fussbudget of a Sci-Fi consumer. But I find that if the main premise is slightly plausible, I have an easier time putting the rest of my disbelief in suspenders. The film looks fantastic, but too often they’ve dumbed it down to appeal to the largest possible audience… and I don’t think it’s necessary.

The film is racist. The noble savages are sooooooo African or Native American, it’s embarrassing, but I can look past that.

It’s essentially the world’s most expensive Cowboys and Indians film, but I can look past that.

Floating mountains and unobtanium do not make sense but I can look past that.

I can even look past the fact that we have flown interstellar distances to meet aliens who unaccountably wear bikinis, kiss like Earthlings and have knees that work like ours.

But I can’t look past all those things all the time. It’s sloppy and I would’ve thought that with the development budget and time, they could have hired a decent Sci-Fi writer to iron all these things out.

You’ve got time to ponder them, too. I want to introduce a new unit of measurement. I will call it the ‘Cameron‘. It can be used in the following way.

“So how was the flight in from London?”

“Oh man. It was looooong. It was a total Cameron.”

He needs to walk away from a project every now and then and let some editors do their work. (I waited two hours for that guy to fall onto the propeller in Titanic) What he is indulging in is ego-maniacal. Nobody should be allowed to hog your attention for that amount of time.

So with that criticism ringing in my own ears, I’ll sign off with this.

It is lush. It is unbelievably lush. It looks a bundle. It is really fun to throw yourself into and… and… just watch. The design is superb. The animation is flawless. You stop seeing the CG and that’s a good thing because you need all that gorgeousness to distract you from the crap bits. Despite the gaping holes, the treatment of the audience’s intelligence as pond slime, the crushingly obvious pivot points, the script by four-year-olds and characterisation by numbers, it’s really a lot of fun and I reckon you should go and see it.

I give it six and a half giant, good looking smurfs out of ten.

Happy Christmas Everyone

I was going to ignore it. After reading the new self improvement book "Releasing the Grinch Within" I was going to really snarl my way through this one...

Nah. Have great New Year, too.

A Grey Area will return to its normal bad tempered bitching shortly.

We Will Not Go Quietly Into That Good Night... Ooo A Banana

Technology is really ruining things for my tiny pea-brain. These days, I have trouble watching thriller movies from any era before there was ubiquitous mobile phone ownership. I sit there watching our hero desperately trying to beat the clock across town/to the aeroplane/to the editor’s desk and all I can think is, “Put in a call, man. Let your fingers do the walkin’. The coverage can’t be that bad.”

Another one: I’m reading a perfectly respectable little sci-fi book at the moment called The Sails of Tau Ceti that has gone hopelessly out of date in sixteen years. The author just didn’t see the internet coming. One of the central plot requirements is that there is only a mainstream press for the aliens of dubious intention to manipulate in order to take a claw-hold on earth.

The baddies take advantage of an old style news ownership model and cleverly fool the various outlets into not noticing some important things. People are still tearing things off faxes and printing out pages to read. The news has to ‘come out’ and people can’t do a search on the subjects of their choice.

It’s funny, but now the conspiracy theorists have access to an international soap-box and we the readers choose whatever the hell we want to consume, I think an intergalactic plot of Earth domination would be harder to pull off. It’s the democratisation of gossip that will save us from the little green men. The sites we go to see the Britney Spears’ crotch get out of a car shots are the same sites that will have the first “A Martian Ate My Baby: Lindsay Lohan Tells” and that’s when the evil space overlords will realise that they’ve mixed it with the wrong monkey boys.

You just can’t take on an interconnected society that is the evolutionary descendant of curiosity, mutual grooming and bum flashing.

Summer TV: Let The Brain Rot Begin

It’s the summer season of telly and that means I’m trying to get to like things that I wouldn’t normally watch. For instance, I’m trying to come ‘round to a show called Castle.

(I know, I know. I should read a book. But sometimes I get home and I’m too tired to read. I just need something to wash over me that features pretty people doing interesting things. Like each other. I prefer to read when I can actually think.)

The lead actor is Nathan Fillion. I got to like him in a show called Firefly. If you like a bit of space-western and haven’t seen Firefly, give it a go. He was a likeable, charismatic, stubborn rogue and that’s exactly what you want in your space-cowboy. But he is particularly charmless in this crime show and I can’t work out why. It’s sort of like he’s run out of acting. Anyway, something cropped up when I was watching it the other night and it annoyed me. Because it’s Christmas, I thought I’d share.

A crime scene pathologist, or whatever she was, as she was describing what she was seeing on the corpse said, “Our vic died of a ess gee double-you.”

Now, I assume an SGW is a single gunshot wound. But why would you say SGW? The only reasons you use an acronym is to hide meaning or to save time and space. This acronym is not useful in either. She wants to communicate clearly to her audience and SGW has as many syllables as single gunshot wound. Not only that, it sounds awkward saying “a SGW”. I became sensitive to the use of W in spoken acronyms when I was little because I thought it was interesting that NSW was slower to say than New South Wales. Just one of those things.

Anyway, the take home message here is that I am getting distracted by things like that. Probably not a high recommendation for the show.

Maybe I’m wrong about SGW. Maybe it stands for Stargate Wollongong. There seems to be a Stargate series with every other address out there. Again an acronym I don’t get. They shorten the titles of these shows to SGA (Stargate Atlantis) SGU (Stargate Universe) but they spell Stargate as one word. But that won’t stop me from going back for the second part of the new Stargate (this one has the Universe address).

I’ve never watched a Stargate series - I didn’t find the movie compelling. Well, that’s the first reason. The second reason is the fans. There’s something about them that warns me off the show. The upside is that, if I’ve been wrong and the collections of SG TV series turn out to be the finest franchise ever to grace our increasingly large screens, I’ve got thousands of hours of the stuff to trawl through. Even though I’m tackling it out of order, I will be giving SGU a go. It had a nice premise and the right pompous characters died in the first hour.

Know Thine Enemy

You measure a man by the quality of his friends.

Yeah, sure. But, that’s quite an anodyne test. I mean, your mother loves you… and she’s wrong.

No, I measure him by the quality of his enemies. Now, there’s a real window into a person’s soul. Who has he bothered to piss off? Who has he taken the effort to wind up? Who is it he’s willing to throw the conventions of polite society out the window for? Who really gets up him sideways with an arm full of deckchairs, enough for him to declare, “Right. You are now my enemy?”

When I was a kid, I was going to have the best nemesis. My nemesis was going to be Darth Vader, a Cyberman and Moriarty all rolled into one. (My nemesis always had a touch of Servalan from Blake's 7 thrown in, as well.*)

The brainy, violent, universe spanning, hyper-sexy battle that I was going to be involved in was going to be the stuff of legend.

As it turns out… my nemesis is a slightly overweight, balding, 60 year old cafeteria lady who just cannot seem to remember me and can turn the instruction, “Two bits of bread, nothing on them, with two rashes of bacon between them, please,” into a Kafkaesque nightmare.

*Servalan and Avon were my first introduction to a proper, sexually charged ’love/hate’ relationship. This was later complicated by me being unable to tell Servalan and Marc Almond from Soft Cell, apart.

The Diary of Grey Frank: Day 4

We have moved into the attic and all must be very quiet.


Mother plays cards with us and says that we must be brave. We dare not move during the daytime, they might hear us.


Black and white terror is about us.


We have enough food for a week.


Father says the Panda Division has arrived.

(Ok, Emergency Contact said she didn't get it and I'm worried that I'm assuming too much WWII knowledge here. A Panzer Division is a German armoured corp and Anne Frank hid in an attic from the Nazis and as you know I like to pretend to be afraid of Pandas and they have been delivered to Australia, so I thou... forget it.)

Weather Widget Gets Into The Christmas Spirit

I have a little gadget
It is up there on my screen
Designed to tell me what sort of

Weather I’ll be seein’
But it's shuffled north for holidays
Its weather eye is blind

It's bunked right off for santa
It has lost its freakin’ mind

Despite the coming weather patterns

The rest of us expectin'

The little weather gadget

Is in need of some correctin'
Copenhagen couldn’t work this fast
Pacific islands will all still drown
The only way those temps are possible

Was if the world was upside-down

Attack Of The Fifty Foot Santas

There are arms races everywhere you look. Forests are an evolutionary arms race. Suburban mothers in four wheel drives are in an arms race. I got caught in an auditory one last night.

The forest is a good example of how a natural arms race starts up, to no single organism’s advantage. Trees getting taller are using valuable resources to get tall, so that they can get more sunlight than their neighbour. Taller and taller they get, using up more and more resources on big, sturdy trunks. A forest all laid out at ground level would work just as well at catching the sun. Or would work just as well, of course, until the first little ground level collection of leaves disobeys the rules, gets a little taller than his neighbour and becomes more successful.

The mothers in their four-wheel drives are in an arms race that is actively harmful to the overall collective. It’s all about momentary individual advantage. Four-wheel drive cars are not actually safer, they just appear it, which in this instance is all that’s important when it comes to being attractive. The first person sees the vastly bigger car and gets it for its implied safety, others are now at more risk from the monster car and have to follow suit. Pretty soon, everyone is driving around in three tonne cars, chewing up resources and space, and they are now all in exactly the same amount of peril as they were when they were dropping the kids off in a Datsun 120Y.

(Actually, there’s more total peril. Crossing the road once, I was hit by a Datsun 120Y doing about 40 km/h. It ruined the ironed crease on the left leg of my pants and made a little bald patch just above my ankle. Some years later, in the same area, a four-wheel drive turned on its headlights, and because of the power and size of the thing, it left me with a tan and permanently blind in both eyes and one ear.)

The auditory arms race that I got caught in last night is one that would be so easy to avoid, I just can’t believe it still happens:

1. Public Room.
2. Slightly too many people.
3. Alcohol.
4. Music a bit loud.
5. People raise voice and glass.
6. Music increases in volume to be heard over talking.
7. People talk louder to be heard over alcohol induced deafness and music.
8. Music goes up.
9. Ad infinitum, ad clothearum

And pretty soon, you are actually yelling at the top of your lungs with your mouth three centimetres away from the ear of the person you are yelling at. Imagine taking that out of the room and putting it at a bus-stop. It’s assault.

This natural instinct to compete for local advantage will ensure that, no matter what they come up with at Copenhagen, my suburb is going to ignore it all. Every festive season my neighbours generate a footprint that can be seen from space.

The Christmas decoration arms race is on in earnest around my place, and some of the displays are so extravagant, I’m pretty sure I can hear backyard generators ticking over.

In her usual well balanced approach to these things, Emergency Contact was so impressed by one display (character snowmen riding a neon-illuminated ferris wheel next to life size neon reindeer) that she said,

“Cor. I can’t wait till we get a big house. Our display is going to black out the grid.”

Armageddon Off Your Friends List

I had a dream that I ended up in Purgatory. Not the S&M nightclub in Melbourne*, but the real make-believe one. I ended up on Mount Purgatory because I am not on Facebook.

I don’t do Facebook. I tried it for a while but it’s just not my speed. It annoys me and if you want to chat, my email‘s on this page.

But in my dream, judgement day came and the blessed and the fallen were divided up just as you would expect, by who was who's Facebook friends. God got a scare as his friend count was actually lower than Satan’s, but he covered the resultant nasty mood swing by getting all snooty about quality over quantity.

I watched from halfway up the hill. It felt nice to be a bystander, as usual.

*The toughest thing about S&M nightclubs is bumping into people in the darkened corridors. You don’t know whether to apologise or thank them.

Off The Wall

It's 2.14 am on a school night, and like a drug crazed presidential candidate with a dead hooker in my hotel room, I'm on the phone to my lawyer.

“I dunno Nicky. I've been able to bail you out of some shockers, but this is a new one on me,” he says, by way of encouragement.

But let me backtrack a bit.

Removable hooks.

These things are brilliant. They are an adhesive hook that has a sticky, two-sided tab with a little flange that sticks out below the hook. This allows you to remove the hook (when Emergency Contact has an aesthetic crisis) without any chunks of your wall coming with it.

In fact, I'm underselling the product. They are so advanced they can have an aesthetic crisis and decide your artwork shouldn't be where it is without human intervention. This is achieved by being manufactured with enough glue on the adhesive pad to make it through a winter, but sudden, warmer, temperature changes will cause them to have a seasonal change of heart about your interior decorating.

We have killed close friends who didn't please us by bedding them down under framed pictures that were suspended by nothing more than removable hooks. (These hooks are advertised as pieces of equipment designed to hang framed pictures from - it's the perfect crime.) Fellow blogger and undeserving victim, Pink Patent Mary Janes, has been killed dead on two separate occasions like this. (She's quite resilient, don't worry.)

So, at 2.11 am, the removable hook just outside the bedroom door decided that the Hong Kong, hand-cut fan with slightly reflective (mirror-like) background is better on the floor in several pieces, rather than on the wall amplifying bathroom window fung-shui. By my estimation, that is three culture's bad luck symbols in one go. Twenty one years bad luck.

My lawyer thinks he can get me off with nine.

Aisle Remember You

So, I was in a hardware mega-store called Bunnings the other day… but I must digress. Around our place, Bunnings is not just Bunnings. It is known as Evil Bunnings.

One weekend a few years ago, I did a search looking for store locations in preparation for a hardware shopping trip. The first five pages of results were articles all describing how Bunnings was the end of the world. I got sucked in and Emergency Contact, wondering when we were going to get moving, asked if I had managed to work out where we were going.

I answered, “Straight to hell if these sites are to be believed.”

I had discovered Evil Bunnings. The name has stuck, not because of the truth of it, but because it’s fun to say. Evil Bunnings.

For history sake, the claims were that it was driving small hardware stores out of business. Even worse, its buying power was killing small rural communities that survived by supplying some commodity or other, vital to the hardware retail business (Crops of hammers. Paint cows). In short, all the usual objections that are levelled at big business when they get into some part of the retail world - with all of the venom and hysteria the net can produce. I personally don’t know where to stand on all of that. It may be true, but I also don’t like spending 100% more than I have to on items like cup-hooks. Evil Bunnings has cheap cup-hooks.

So, I was in Evil Bunnings the other day and I walked up to one of those people who I’m certain I’ve seen on telly… actually, let me digress again.

Why do these places think it’s a good idea to put the ‘real people’ on the ads? I don’t want a ballet dancer pretending to be my car mechanic. I want a car mechanic. I don’t want my car mechanic pretending to be my dentist. Why do retail people think that their store’s staff should be TV actors? If I went "In to see the good good Good Guys", it would be to punch them on the nose and tell them to stick to selling white-goods. Each to their own, please! I want good looking people who don’t fluff their lines on my telly, thanks. But one of the conceits of the ad is that Evil Bunnings staff really know their stuff.

So, I was in Evil Bunnings the other day and I walked up to one of the staff and I asked,

“Can you tell me where the ladders are, please?” and she said,

“What sort?”

I thought that was odd. I mean, yes, there will be variation in build, but the concept is so homogenous that surely you’d keep them all in the one place. I was in a playful mood.

“A corporate one that only goes up, please.”

“Hmmm. I’m not sure about them, but try aisle 2.”

So Wong But Feels So Rudd

Coffee Anon (and that's not the head of the UN)

OK, look, I'm sorry, but I have had it with you coffee drinkers. You are as painful as smokers.

You are always running late because you just had to stop and get one. You can't carry anything because your shaking little hand is permanently wrapped around a paper cup. You are crabby when you can't get one, can't concentrate until you get the next one and YOU ARE ALWAYS SPILLING THE BASTARD STUFF INTO IMPORTANT PLACES!

I get in the car and there are drying tide marks splashed up and down the console and in all the crevices. The milk will start to smell if there's been enough slopped around. The slick and dangerous surfaces of the corridors where I work have an endless selection of fresh and aging spatters. There is not a single two meter expanse of carpet that has not got some brown stain on it and the number of times that work has come to a crashing and dramatic halt because someone has decided that a full cup of coffee is just what the keyboard ordered, are too numerous to count.

The endless search for the perfect cup is boring, the endless whining when it's not good enough is tiresome and that's because coffee is the great lie. It smells fantastic but no-one anywhere in the history of all things has ever made a cup of coffee that tastes like it smells.

Grow up and get a real habit would you? Get into heroin or something, for god sake. It couldn't be much more annoying or disruptive (at least I'd get some peace when you go on the nod).

There. I'm glad I got that off my chest. Geez, I get cranky when I run out of tea bags.

P.S. I have committed most of the above sins at one time or another. I'm just all growed up now and irritable

I Prefer Turnbull

I’ve just been trying to estimate the chances of me uttering that phrase. There was a period, around the referendum on the republic, where it was possible... but unlikely.

At the moment, though, the chances have increased from ‘a snowflake in the deeper recesses of hell’ to ‘your chances of survival when standing between Joe Hockey and a TV camera’. Slim, but not impossible.

I have had the rare pleasure of telling Tony Abbott that, if he didn’t leave my table, I was going to insert “that” (pointing at chair) into him. I have done my bit. Wherever possible, you must resist as well.

But I want to take the long view on this.

The way the Liberal Party is burning through its ‘talent’, I think it’s probably good timing to have Abbott take a swing at the leadership. It means we wouldn’t have to suffer him leading the country. He’ll be chewed up and spat out before we get to an election he can win.

I just want to remind you what the odious, sanctimonious slime-ball is about, just in case you’ve been thinking of nicer things. Like fatal shark attacks.

If he had the chance, he would tell women what they can do with their bodies. He’s pro-censorship, which means he thinks he can know things that you shouldn’t know. He’s anti-euthanasia because he doesn’t trust us not to off our parents for the money. He would insert his religion into Australian politics and while he’s playing at being such a principled, moral beacon, let’s look at one policy position of his.

In the middle of this year he was pro-emissions trading scheme. Last week he flipped, citing no other reason than the reaction of the business world… because the business world is where we should be taking our guidance from on this issue, for sure.

At least, with Turnbull, you know you’re dealing with a straight up and down, self aggrandising, power-hungry mutt. He doesn't try and dress up what he's about as something honourable.

Designed To Care

As an Australian (or honorary Australian - a title you inherit simply from reading this blob) it is your moral duty to become instantly suspicious of any entity that is becoming too successful or well known. But, I’ve just noticed another bubble come off the top of the think-tank over there at Google Labs and as all powerful as they are, I take my pants off to them.

There’s a gadget you can turn on in Gmail that will not let you use it until you have performed three quick mental arithmetic functions. And the questions vary, so you can’t learn the answers.

That is brilliant.

When they work out how to get a breathalyser onto a mobile phone, it'll kill a lot of next-day comedy, but it will preserve a few jobs.

(You know who you are - sms tragic.)

If You See Pea-Brain Minchin, Send Him To My Place

...along with any other climate change skeptic. I’ll be able to deal with them in a domestic “accident”. That floor is quite dangerous. Someone is liable to slip and hurt themselves on the puddles of sweat that pooled yesterday, and then froze solid today.

Oh, and tell ‘em to bring a saw. We need to get the tree out from where it has inserted itself into our balcony from the crazy winds last night. The cleanup guys will probably bring around a wood-chipper and… well, you’ve seen Fargo.

Kindle - Part 4

I try to keep a sane approach to cleanliness versus neatness. Clean is quite important, neat not so much. The outside of the car closely resembles a potato farm, the inside is fine. I sit in there, so that needs to be clean. I only look at the outside.

The bed is rarely made (why bother? I’m only going to be back in there in a few hours) but the sheets are clean. Same principal. “In” versus “look at”. But I break that rule and become a bit compulsive when it comes to the cleanliness of my display screens.

The TV is clean. The laptop is pristine. The PC screen has been officially disowned as it has a spot on it that I can’t get off. Don’t touch my screen, man. Don’t touch my screen with your grotty, greasy little paws.

So, imagine how ripe for disappointment I am, owning an eBook? By my own admission I am tough on books and once I sneeze, spill wine on, or in some way ruin the glorious expanse of the eBook display screen… well it’s not like I can turn the page and forget about it. It’s always going to be there, taunting me.

So, there’s the first problem with the hardware. You don’t get to move on when you’ve splodged it and I am inevitably going to splodge it. You spend a lot of time with books doing leisure things. Leisure things equals splodging.

Second problem – you can’t confidently take your book into the bath. This I consider a real blindspot in design and they better seriously be working on waterproof Kindle for the 3rd or forth generation. How hard can it be?

And finally, a big one. You can’t lend your book to your partner when you’ve finished. I just finished something that I wanted Emergency Contact to read, and realised I couldn’t lend it to her. How am I going to read my next book, if she’s got my eBook? I know what you’re thinking – get another eBook, but there’s a slippery slope. Next she'll want gifts for birthdays and Christmas and stuff.

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 Cate 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 artifact 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...