Meanwhile, In Paradise

Mother Teresa: Oooo. Look, it’s lovely. Look at those fluffy clou... ahhhrr. Bugger.
Howard Florey: Yes, I know what you mean, it’s absolutely glorious it’s like a aaahhhhr fuck, are they biting?
Albert Einstein: No. There would be no biting. It would mess with the aaaarghh fuck. I think they are. Bugger.

Lower.

Ve cum back as ze mosquito. Ya?

The Wire

Buncha ya'll be watchin the nu series on channel too bout the crime an shit
I'z 2 steps aheda ya an i can gi you da skinny
Shit duz not pay
Evry polise on dis show duz 1/2 the da work o' da crims
Da crims is sum hard workin muddas

Judges Agree With Sailor

It’s not often that my little breast swells with nationalistic pride, but I found myself getting a little misty and turning towards the flag while I was listening to the news last night.

One of the great joys of living here is that we have a constitution. We can put that document in front of learned minds, and test the legal validity of our institutions and the decisions of our leaders.

We have recently ripped down the entire edifice of our military justice system, based on the challenge of one badly behaved Naval seaman and ratified by our High Court.

That’s all well and good. That shows we're still not beyond 'taking on the man'.

But what I like more is, that the honourable, esteemed and blustery institutions of this wide, brown land, were brought undone by a tea-bagging.

Australia: Where you can stuff the government, just by lofting your nads onto the forehead of a workmate.

They Are Out There

Earlier in “Close, But No Bamboo” one of my specialist roving correspondents saw through a vile conspiracy to dress up certain non-panda animals as pandas.

Another from the crack roving team has uncovered further developments in this insidious game. There’s more to this than just pandas, though.

I thoroughly recommend visiting and laughing at the poodle shaved to look like a buffalo.

A big thank you to Field Specialist Sarah for the tip off.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/picturegalleries/howaboutthat/6087174/Poodle-power-dogs-creatively-groomed-to-look-like-pandas-and-camels.html

Status Update In A Self Referential Universe

Time for some blog housekeeping.

So, the first thing I hope you may have noticed, is the search field top right of the page (been there a little while now). It will first give you results from A Grey Area and then some choices.

You might be thinking to yourself, “I wonder what that wise, kind and modest fellow at AGA thinks about this particular subject?" Or you might be thinking, "I wonder what I can sue him for?"

Enter your search term in the field, it pulls out the blobs where the subject has been mentioned. If you click on “More Results” it takes you into a nifty little personalised Google search where you can choose “Search Blogs” or “Search the Net”. So, you can see what your uncle Nick (me) has been saying about things, and then check if he’s even close to being right about it. Bags I know the answer to that little chestnut.

Got what you wanted? Click on the subtle little “X” to the left of the search field to fold the search results back up - you’re back in the standard view.

Another addition I like is the widget that takes you into the Goodreads site. It has a nice picture of the book I‘m currently dribbling on when I fall asleep after two pages. I have only recently joined the site and think it’s suitable social networking for me. It’s not about updating your status and trying to have heaps of friends. It’s about sharing good books and in my case, I am doing reviews where I feel I can be helpful because I am very sensible and you should listen to me. The bummer is, now I have to be a bit careful about what I actually admit to reading. That Neal Asher book on my bedside table is just resting on the Proust so the literature doesn’t get a tea-ring on the cover. Yeah… that’s it.

Next month, I’m putting in a water slide, just over there next to the “Themes” list, and maybe a bug-zapper.

Heidi Called. She Wants Her House Back

With this sort of house design, you’re shooting yourself in the foot while accidentally banging your head.

Its attraction must be that it's a cheap method of construction, because you’re only really paying for two thirds of a normal house.

Instructions: Put up two walls. While cement is wet, let walls fall towards each other. Return unused roof and nails for full refund.

The thing that keeps looming large in my mind is the crap that must collect behind the furniture that can't be pushed any closer the wall.

When I first met Emergency Contact, she was living in an attic and throwing cats at passing school children. (One of those things is not actually true.) The pitch of the roof meant there was only a two foot stripe down the middle of the room where I could actually stand up. The rest of the room was essentially unusable.

This is where the house design above seems like a false economy. Look at how much space is actually wasted - all the floor area you can't really use because you can't walk up to it. I reckon you'd have to measure in about six foot from any floor/roof join before you found enough useful airspace to stand... and you haven't even got the furniture in yet.

In the snow fields of Nordic countries and Switzerland, maybe there's a call for it. The terror of tonnes of snow busting through the shallow pitch of your roof might be a real thing.

But this place is just up the road from me. Sydney’s land prices are steeper than that roof. It's the middle of winter and it was 25 degrees C yesterday. Global climate meltdown and economic warming (what - ever) lead me to ask, “Come now, chalet you can’t be serious?”

Thank you and good night.

Bitter and Twist Tops

Had a birthday yesterday. Not just any old birthday, either. Mine.

The thing about going over the hill is, you start to pick up speed.

I just want to have a go at all those people who say, "Better than the alternative," when I complain about getting old. I think that shows a lack of imagination. What about remaining eternally youthful? What about becoming a cyber Grey Area. What about being uploaded into a vast alternate reality where no-one gets dodgy hips and old lady knees?

I'm just saying, is all.

Nature: That's Just Species We Haven't Eaten Yet

On the same day that I was laughing at the uproar caused by a Tongan family eating their dog, I heard an environmentalist complaining that the flying fox was moving south.

To both these things, I have to ask, “so what?” (This is not existential angst driven by another approaching birthday, either.)

First of all, and I reckon we can knock this one on the head pretty quickly, some people ate their dog and the New Zealand SPCA got their knickers in a knot about it. The Chief Exec had this to say:

"Over the next few days, we hope to talk to Tongan community leaders and enlist their involvement in making the community more aware that slaughtering and eating pets is unacceptable,"

This racist goes by the name of Robyn Kippenberger. Her family were obviously famous for slaughtering kippens for their meals, so she needs to pull her head in. I bet she’s a vegan, so, you know, she’s undernourished and in a bad temper. I hope the Tongan community leaders answer the front door to her while thoughtfully chewing on terrier leg.

She’s a speciesist, as well. The last time I met a cow, it had the biggest brown eyes, and the cutest eyelashes, and it knew when to go in to be milked and definitely recognised its name. I also had the yummiest steak for dinner. Robyn hasn’t ear-bashed my community leaders yet.

Why does this relate to flying foxes moving south? Well, yet again, I feel there’s some one-eyed self importance going on, but this one is harder to justify.

The flying fox is moving south, reportedly because of climate change and there is a significant risk that more cases of Hendra virus will occur because bats are excellent carriers of it.

Apparently, the virus is particularly rough on horses. If the horses are stupid enough to be kissing bats, they get what they deserve. But, with the equine flu epidemic fresh in my mind, I have to ask again - what the hell do we use horses for anyway? They are not useful for anything other than gambling and I bet Aristocrat could fill that gaping chasm if it appeared.

Ok, I’ve gone off track here a bit, but the same person who was bleating on about bats migrating, was also telling me how bad species extinction is in general. Like it’s never happened before. On any other day, I would probably basically agree with them, but the holier-than-thou tone stuck in my craw, so I started thinking of how I would argue with them if I was doing the interview.

First of all – preservation of species. Really. For what reason? We haven’t been able to do it in the past. In fact, we’ve only been here for ten minutes and before us there were mass extinctions all the time. The Cambrian explosion saw the beginning of most types of complex life, but almost none of it survives today. What nostalgic yearning makes us believe we can halt the process? There’s epochism going on as well. Suspending evolution maintains things in their niche. Where are the niche fillers of the future going to go if we’ve stopped everything? (Like we could.)

If the answer is that we are the cause of the die-off and therefore should stop it, that’s sort of like saying we’re operating outside nature and shouldn’t really be here. In the grand scheme of things, we should also legislate against big meteors slamming into the earth.

If the argument comes from flat-out self-preservation, I can respect it. We need the Amazon because of all of the likely cures for stuff we will find in there, but don’t get all misty eyed about the spiky haired, six toed marmoset, he’s done nothing for you lately, except look cute.

The next time some sandal wearer marches into an area and announces that it’s of environmental importance, they should only be allowed to stop people from farming there if their own family is willing to live on exactly the same income as the locals.

I want to hear an environmentalist get righteous about the extinction (or near extinction) of polio and smallpox. If they don’t, they’re just being hypocritical. The bio-diversity argument is only attractive while you’re defending charismatic mega-fauna. As soon as the kids are put at risk, all bets are off.

The mosquito is the deadliest animal on earth. If you could drive into extinction the mosquito that carries malaria and save a million human lives a year, I reckon you’d be mad not to give it a go. (And possibly immoral. I’m not sure. I find ethics confusing.)

As for those panda breeding programs that are finally starting to become successful… well, there we are just fooling around with the forces of evolution in ways that will come back and bite us on the bum anyway.

Jung At Heart

I had a dream that whenever I heard an uncommon word spoken in conversation, I was instantly transported back in time to when that word was first used.

It sounds like a relatively good idea for a short story, but true to form, my psyche teased me and didn’t supply an interesting twist.

Rather than appearing at great historical events to witness the fall of kings, the inspiration behind revolutionary ideas or the coining of great phrases, I kept on appearing in muddy fields during the dark-ages to see a couple of short people dressed in hessian sacks, saying, “Flargle blurgle the quotidian mith tramble.”

In the long run, that’s not much better than having involved and detailed dreams about doing housework. Something my psyche has also seen fit to treat me to.

Accelerating Down Fascination Street

The internet sucks. It’s too easy for you to check if what I’m saying is right.

So just pretend we’re in a bar and I’m relaying something to you because I like it and I know you will too. It might not be totally true. It might be that it’s one of those things that is nicer to believe is true.

I think of this simply because of the previous blob that mentioned The Cure‘s album, Disintegration. It’s a big fave of mine and I’m not alone in holding it in high regard. It even cracks a mention in South Park, when Robert Smith saves the world from the Mecha-Streisand. Not only does he save world, but as he leaves, Kyle yells, “Disintegration is the best album ever.” When you think about how rude the South Park boys are about most things, that is high praise.

It’s alleged that a music CD is 74 minutes long because that’s how long it takes to play Beethoven’s 9th. Slowly.

Why that piece? Well, Sony and Phillips looked at the most popular sales of classical music in Japan, saw that it was the 9th, worked with a sampling rate of 44.1 KHz, at 750,000 bits per square millimetre, and 74 minutes of Beethoven gives you a very reasonably sized 12 centimetre CD.

It’s also alleged that Robert Smith heard that this technology was coming down the line and said to his little lipsticked self, “I can now record 74 minutes of gloomy, synth guitar, fun, I can. Rather than a much shorter vinyl offering.” Or words to that effect.

So, Disintegration is a much longer album than a lot of its peers because Bob knew that he had the space to play with. If you buy the album in vinyl, you lose two tracks.

This spurious preamble is to set the scene for why my Spanish speaker, mentioned in the previous blob, was even thinking about The Cure. We had been having a conversation about driving distances and I mentioned that I have made it to Newcastle from Sydney inside a single playing of Disintegration. “Plainsong” on at my driveway, hammer down, “Untitled” fading as Emergency Contact and I pull up at Pink Patent Mary Janes' house. Done. (With stains on the carpet and stains on the memory.)

It doesn’t carry any particular, universal, significance. It’s just one of those things. I don’t break any laws to try and repeat the phenomenon… but if I do repeat it, I have extra special good luck for a period of 4 hours and no babies catch freckles. But apart from that, no special meaning whatsoever. Oh, and no one’s back get’s broken. Yup.

By The Way Robert, They're Not

A lot of my incidental at-work-giggles are delivered when someone is confused or saying something bizarre when coming in half-way through a conversation. Or mishearing what was said. You grow snot Eileen.

In talking about stretching before the City to Surf, one of my Gen Ys sagely said, “Prevention is better than the cure.”

To which my Spanish speaker popped his head over the divide and said, “Oh, are they that good? I haven’t heard of that band.”

Exkayplosmdee.

Score update: XKCD:0. Grey Area: -2

(Click to enlarge.)

Score. XKCD: 0. Grey Area: -1 (recurring)

With a respectful tip-of-the-hat to the excellent XKCD

(Click on the image to enlarge if you are having trouble reading my handwriting.)

Robots Are Good For War

War will become more ethical.

The shareholders can’t afford it otherwise.

The battlefield of the near future will still be the rich versus the aggrieved poor in asymmetrical brawls, it's just that the rich will be using more robots instead of live canon-fodder.

When it comes time to put a robot on trial for war crimes, it will start as Chain-of-Command precedent... until the military guys work out that it should be a corporate law issue. The robot was made by a corporation that was ultimately responsible for the behavioural programming.

The first few military tribunals go against the manufacturing giants and it makes everybody feel better. It appears that justice has been done because something has been held responsible - but no actual humans had the finger pointed at them.

But making the robot the fall-guy is easy until it starts to hurt the profits of the manufacturing company. Shareholders go up in arms and apply such pressure that the robots are programmed so that they almost never open fire, even when they are in immanent danger of total destruction. They just stomp about, shouting, “Stop that. Stop that right now. You are making me very angry and I will be forced to stomp around and shout some more.” The insurgents, while making mincemeat of the robots, eventually become so pissed off with all the stomping and the shouting, that they just leave in disgust and the fighting is over.

I have seen it and it will come to pass.

Pull Your Pants Up

There’s an ad for boxer shorts on telly that fills me with hope.

It features three old boys sporting the sartorial style known as “Harry Highpants”. They’re sitting at a café table, shaking their heads at the three young blokes with their pants under their butts in the style known as “Barry Bare Arse.”

There’s hilarity all round as the generations disapprove of each other in their own charming way, and we are all left with the satisfying feeling of having been voyeurs on a scene that reaffirms our suspicions about everyone.

While I don’t side with the Harry High-pant brigade, it is less obnoxious than the low pant mob. In my area, I’ve even seen the ‘style’ worn without underwear. Ewe! Specially “ewe” on public transport.

I'm certain it’s possible to look good wearing your pants somewhere between scrotum-smashing-high and crack-on-display low.

But the good news is, low-pant is almost over. A mainstream brand has used it in an ad and most large corporations are waaaaaay behind the actual trend-on-the-street. They usually cotton on, just as it dies. Even if, by some miracle, they are getting on the band-wagon at the top of the trend - They nullify the rebelliousness of the fashion and thereby kill it.

Filthy fashion trend… OVER!

On Air And Out Of Your Mind II: This Time It's Moronic

Since my blob on Kyle Sandilands not knowing where his dump was, it has been revealed that it was wilful stupidity, rather than his normal kind. He doesn't like to use a delay - he feels it's better radio without.

From Channel 9 News Site, on the subject of 7 second delay: A 2DayFM staffer said Sandilands believed "pure" live radio was "better entertainment" - an approach which has long made his colleagues nervous.

I suspect it's more likely that people explained to him how it worked, over and over again, and he kept on getting confused and scared and didn't want to be sent seven seconds into the past when he hit the big, red button.

Whatever, it illustrates his thinking on the subject nicely.

I, Kyle Sandilands, will go without the industry standard safety net because what I do is so important, you must not mess with the purity of the truth. We are truth telling mavericks at this Top 40 pop-music FM station, man! It’s all about me anyway, so I’m the only one taking the risk.

Not:

I, Kyle Sandilands, even though I'm lightning-quick and razor-sharp and really, really gorgeous, may one day need to use that dump button to protect an innocent third party. Even from my own, fabulous self.

We know that Kyle is pretty fond of his own opinion, so if there’s one bit of wisdom he can take from his own words, it is that it is “entertainment”. You don’t burn teenage rape victims for the sake of entertainment.

This Isn't Serious, Mum

If you’re older than 20 and want a pleasant, minor, antipodean mystery to remain that way, don’t read on.

My colleague Smurf is a typical kind of Australian. He’s a bit of a mish-mash of cultures because he lived in England during some formative years. He holds three passports, one for here, one for there and a small blue one for when he needs to go back to the village in the woods.

This means that there are funny little blank areas in his popular culture reference map. I don’t mind this at all because it means I get to instruct him on some of the important stuff and shape him in mine own image… sorta.

Anyway, I mention this because that’s how I ended up showing him a couple of TISM clips from the interwebs. (Greg, The Stop Sign and You’ll Never Be An Old Man River). For those of you that aren’t familiar with the band, they started in the early 80s and were noteworthy because, a) They were funny, and b) They remained anonymous by using pseudonyms and wearing masks. It was always one of those titillating, urban-myth type arrangements, to know someone who knew someone who went out with one of the guys who could be in TISM.

So, the band was fresh in my mind when I sat down to watch Spicks and Specks the other night. (La la la laa. Aaar. With me now.) The show had a "garage punk group" on that goes by the name of Root.

As I was sitting there thinking "these guys are pretty funny", a small underpowered globe went on over my head. (Actually, honestly, it was more like a guttering candle). The voice, the lyric style - followed by four seconds on the interweb and I now know what one of the TISM boys looks like.

It’s not a great moment, but it's not a disappointment either. It’s just one of those things. My life has been enriched in a small way by discovering this one small thing. I thought I’d share.

On Air And Out Of Your Mind

I want Kyle Sandilands to punch me in the throat.

Or at least give it a red-hot go. (For those of you not aware of his particular 'style', this is how he threatened a detractor a while back.)

The good and the great are rushing to condemn the oxygen-thief right now, and fair enough. For those of you not in Australia, or those who’ve been living in a cockerel’s boot, he acquitted himself with his usual aplomb when, after a 14-year-old girl tearfully admitted live on air that she had been raped two years ago, he treated it as a normal sexual experience and kept on pushing the topic. From the ABC news site:

After initially sounding uncomfortable with the questioning, the girl started crying and said she had been raped when she was 12.

Then Kyle Sandilands replied: "Right ... is that the only experience you've had?"

For Grey Area readers, my dislike of the radio 'personality' is well travelled territory. If you put his name in the search field on the right, you’ll see that I’ve had a consistent opinion about the guy - this isn’t just Johnny-come-hately for me.

His response to criticism is often to threaten the messenger. His ethics are questionable (his wife, a singer, unaccountably received a lot of air-play on the station he infests) and he is entirely too ready to let everyone know how damn good he is. He comes straight from the venal breeding grounds that gave us Laws, Jones and Price.

It’s very rare I actually get to write about something I know anything about in these posts, but I know a little about radio. The excuse he trotted out for this fiasco was that he panicked, but if you don’t know where your dump button is after years of on-air experience, you’re an even bigger pillow than I had previously suspected.

As a former broadcaster, I can say three things with authority.

Firstly, start with the mother who put her daughter on the spot. Start with her good and proper.

Then, go to the producer. What was the producer doing putting those two to air? That’s exactly what producers are supposed not to do. They’re supposed to find interesting material that‘ll make good radio and, you know, do it without setting people on fire or publicly putting lie detectors on teenage rape victims.

And then finally, we can take to Kyle Sandilands, who didn’t know where his dump was.

For those of you who haven’t been broadcasters, live radio that involves the public calling in usually happens with a delay. At the stations I worked at, the delay was traditionally about seven seconds. I cut my teeth broadcasting in the lean, mean hours of the night where I also panelled myself. (As well as doing the talking, you drive the technical bits - sliders and buttons and stuff.) If you didn’t have one digit hovering over the dump button, you weren’t saying the right things.

If someone called in and said something that was going to land everyone in jail, you dumped it, lost the last seven seconds of broadcast, cut to an ad break, built your delay up again and pushed on like nothing had ever happened.

I hesitated to even write about this, because you just know that Sandiland’s radio management, while wringing their hands in public at the unfortunate event, are clapping their hands with glee behind the boardroom doors. You can’t buy this sort of PR. I didn’t want to fall for it and give it any more attention. But, as I mentioned, I do actually know something about this. It’s really simple. THE DUMP BUTTON, DICKHEAD. IT’S THE BIG RED ONE OVER THERE ON THE RIGHT! You don’t even have to think that fast. Count out seven seconds and ask yourself if you could recognise danger in that time.

And he pouts for photos. ‘Nuff said.