Dr Klig has your medicine

BRB, gone to Indochina.




Back October.

RIP Randy Pausch.

My computer talks to my router which talks to my other router which talks to my xbox, which talks down an intertube to my computer which talks to a couple of external hard disks, which take messages from my phone and talk to my stereo at a distance, shouting over the music.

Sure, there ain't no flying cars, but this is pretty 2008.

O HAI!

CALLING ALL SIBERIANS!

Tomorrow I'm going to Brisbane for a couple of days. I've never been there before and I don't really know what one does in Brisbane, apart from sweat. I'm looking for pointers from people who have been/lived there as to what to do with myself for a couple of days. Bonus points for suggestions which are photographically providential.

I want someone to invent a piece of software which reads the contents of my iTunes library, then compares it to the gig lists of any of a number of major cities, and notifies me when artists in my collection are playing in my city. How hard can it be? Sure beats trolling through a gajillion websites and articles of street press, just hoping to get lucky.

Aaaargh, fucking bibliographies!

I kind of enjoy the research, I enjoy the writing, I enjoy the submission. But honestly, keeping track of footnotes and bibliographies breaks my brain. I wonder if I can outsource this to some Indian subcontractor like the world's shallowest self-help guru.

From here, by imomus

After that, Cory Arcangel played us some very loud Bruce Springsteen live videos off YouTube, playing live glockenspiel along with the tracks. He's recorded a glockenspiel-heavy version of the Born to Run album and put it up on p2p networks all over the world without any warning that it might be anything other than The Boss' original album.

What?

Yet I find myself unsatisfied by art which comes from the margins yet fetishizes the commercial mainstream.

Righto.


Artists who squander their valuable marginality on tapping into the undoubted power of the mainstream are shirking the search: unauthors of a different kind.

But... but... what?

The network that makes Drawn Together must get so much hate mail.

Jimmy Carter is like

(a) Falling asleep for ever more.
(b) Dropping bombs out of the air.
(c) Electric underwear
(d) All of the above







Prove: This suit > Your house.
Express your answer in terms of $.

-Don DeLillo
-Shoes
-High price gyms
-"Leisure time" spent watching a screen
-Gastronomic foams
-Buffy the Vampire Slayer
-Last.FM
-The federal Coalition's political legacy
-Steve Bracks' political legacy
-The potential for Barack Obama to change in a couple of years the resentments that took hundreds of years to build up.
-Melbourne's opinion of itself
-Taking the easy way out
-First aid courses

Laughing off suggestions he had mounted a "pineapple coup" by installing Queenslanders as Prime Minister, Treasurer and now governor-general, Mr Rudd insisted Ms Bryce "intends to be a governor-general for all Australians". - The Age

I think that "pineapple coup" may just be my most favourite phrase ever.

People are constantly banging on in the media about how kids who do drugs or crash cars represent a great loss to the world. Wasted potential and all that, just imagine what they might have achieved, young lives lost, and so forth.

Well, it's all true, I suppose. But when we have people like Michael Jackson in the world, let's not talk about wasted potential in connection with some kid from the suburbs. I mean, Michael Jackson! Musical genius! Brilliant songwriter! Lost to the world due to being much too weird.

He hasn't produced anything good since about 1989. THAT's a loss to the world.

I've spent the last hour learning about the weird and wonderful world of private health insurance. And it sucks a dick.

You see, unlike the USA, Australians have a pretty decent public health system that pays for most things, but is overstretched and underfunded. The federal government, in a half-arsed effort to take some of the load off the public system, decided that people who earn over *cough* dollars per year are required to pay an extra 1% income tax or take out private insurance. Conveniently, entry-level private insurance is exactly equal to 1% of *cough*. Fancy that.

Seeing as I am now a professional kind of person, I have to pay an insurance company 1% of *cough* so that I don't have to pay the government 1% of *cough*. I suppose it makes sense if you earn more than me, but I'm pretty close to the borderline.

The really fucked thing about it is that I'm now looking at insuring myself against things like major road trauma (done better and free in the public system), ambulance cover (free from work), appendicitis (no appendix), wisdom teeth removal (no wisdom teeth), strokes and heart attacks (yeah right), diabetes (yeah right) and optometry expenses (perfect vision). Money down the fucking drain. But this is how the government thinks it's gonna save money. In an effort to sweeten the deal, the government even subsidises the insurance policy! Here's a fucking brainwave - how about putting those millions of dollars of subsidies into the public system!

Sure, I save about $100 a year. But I'd almost rather pay the Medicare levy, because at least then I'd know that it was going into consolidated revenue rather than shareholders' pockets. And given the exceptional unlikelihood of me claiming on this insurance, the only people getting a benefit are the chronically ill 65+ year olds who I am subsidising.

I'm going to take out the insurance regardless, since as my income goes up it'll become more worthwhile. But if I ever go into hospital again, I'll be going in as a public patient (I have the choice). It'll presumably be for some kind of accident or injury, in which case I'd be going to a public hospital thank you very much, since the private hospitals are incompetent at anything other than chest infections and heart attacks. I'll get the exact same treatment, won't have to pay the excess, and the only thing it will cost me is cable TV in my ward. Just like last time.

quuf

This is a modified version of a comment I made in someone else's journal discussing the implications of raising a non-religious child.


I was raised as not so much an atheist, rather a non-religious person. Which is to say that if I showed interest in religion my parents would let me investigate it in any manner I saw fit, but never sought to convince me that any one position, including atheism, was correct. By the time I was about twelve I'd decided that the whole religion business was a redundant non-question, a position I've maintained. As regards "moral" tuition, my parents made it abundantly clear what was good or bad (which pretty closely aligned to generic Christian moral philosophy), but encouraged me to ask why. I went to a religious high school, which gave me a thorough education in the etiquette of churches, but further convinced me that Anglicanism wasn't for me.

I don't currently identify as an atheist, because I see the term as being relevant only in opposition to "religious person". It's like saying that I'm a non-Albanian: true, but relevant only in a very small number of circumstances. Most of the time I'm just a guy.

Thus far I haven't got in trouble with the law, am a generally upstanding citizen, give to charity, work in the "caring professions" and so forth, not because God/Jesus/etc tells me to, but because I think it's the right thing to do. Yes Virginia, it is possible to have a rich and rigorous ethical existence independent of religion.

Consistent with what I've said about my own (non)religious beliefs, I don't much care what anyone else's are. Give me no grief and I shall not return it.

ANGELA Merkel, the German Chancellor, will face several empty seats during her address to the Israeli Parliament next week, after an MP said he would rather boycott the speech than listen to the language used by the Nazis.

Dr Merkel was given special dispensation to address the Parliamentarians during an official visit next Tuesday.

The honour is usually reserved for presidents and monarchs. At her request, she is to speak in her native language. But several Israeli politicians say the sound of German in the Knesset will be a disgrace, and want her to speak in English instead.

"German was the last language my grandmother and grandfather heard before they were murdered," said Arieh Eldad, from the far-right National Union party. "I plan to stand up and leave."



Pathetic. Just pathetic.

I could try to be all self-righteous and point out that Japanese was the language my grandfather heard constantly for three years while he was systematically starved and brutalised and while his mates were murdered all around him, but I honestly don't think it'd help. Because Mr Eldad seems to have managed to mentally transfer the sins of one generation of Germans onto the shoulders of another, while claiming to have been personally hurt by things that happened before he was alive.

Insert usual disclaimer paragraph here about how the holocaust was bad.

I believe that a robust and unfiltered knowledge of the past is a vital part of being a decent human being, but there comes a time when blame has to be limited to the people actually responsible for the deed. The modern German state has almost no continuity with the Nazi state, and implying that the two are somehow comparable is insulting. Nazi Germany was destroyed and most of the people who were involved in the holocaust are dead or dying.

A deep and intimate knowledge of the holocaust is vital, not just for all Germans and Israelis, but for everyone. But making modern-day Germans pay and continue to feel guilty for events they had nothing to do with is just not fair.

By the way, I like the Japanese. Japan is excellent, and I have Japanese friends my age with whom I don't discuss the war except in abstract, seeing as how it ended nearly forty years before we were born.

Oh, and before anyone brings it up, the Stolen Generations issue here in Australia is different because the current Australian government is the direct political descendant of the government which perpetrated it. However I accept no personal responsibility, since it all finished before I was born.

A bit late, this one. I saw a few people post it at the start of the year, but I forgot about it until now.

Please comment with something you think I should do or try to do in 2008. Big or small, silly or earth-changing.

Go your hardest.

Is anyone in the market for an extremely cute white kitten, approx 8 weeks old?

My mother has found it lurking around her house, but despite her pro-feline ways she already has two and the council won't let her have any more.

Can anyone tell me what this is in aid of?.

Military disco cowgirl. Now THERE's a fashion concept!