I’m very tired but I feel like I should write here. I’ve recently been watching a lot of you-tube. I think I’m just starting to fully understand the implications of it. I have been watching people play guitars. It’s fascinating. Bedrooms. Facial expressions concentration. These countless anonymous (usually) white young men wailing on their axes, then sometimes talking about them.

In another leagues is watching famous people, in this instance talking about their Fender Jazzmasters. I don’t usually like to funk up the weblog with utoob windows, but as I said, the whole thing is being deliberated on by the committee. For the moment here’s a few.

Elvis Costello—I’ve only ever been mildly interested in his music, but this interesting hearing of the randomness involved with how he ended up with a distinctive looking guitar. I could relate to how he had a guitar for ages that just wasn’t very comfortable, but didn’t know that much could be done about it. He seems like a pretty don-to-earth kind of guy.

Nb. Ask Elvis if he will be compare/interviewer for my ‘people talking about their guitars’ TV series.

Next was J Mascis formerly of Dinosaur Jr. I always thought he was a wanker—don’t know why, just did. May have had something to do with the way he drawled the vocals in songs like Freak Scene, the only one I can remember.

However, I could relate to things that J was saying, like how he travelled hours to get to this guitar shop only to find that the one he had been saving up for ages for was actually 50 bucks more than he thought, so couldn’t get it. That happens to me all the time. J didn’t seem like a wanker at all.

Next was Lee Ronaldo of Sonic Youth talking about his Fender Jazzmaster. Unlike the first two, there is no Ronaldo signiture model Jazzmaster. In the past I’ve quite the Sonic Youth fan but everything comes and goes. Having dozens of guitars with different alternate tunings is a very convenient way to get around not having to learn how to play guitar. Ronaldo seemed kind of pretentious.

The last one (not embeddable) is Johnny Marr n’ his guitar. I never would’ve guessed it from those effector-driven razor licks from songs like ‘how soon is now’ but Johnny seems to be the ‘goofy but lovable’ type of person when I hear him talking about his kids and stickers from Wamart used to decorate his Jazzmaster.

I had an exam last Monday. I was over on the east coast for the last couple of days taking a much needed break from it all. I’d forgotten what unpolluted air tastes like. Sometimes my patience grows short with the people here and I got to think it was koreans – that was the problem, but I’m more inclined to think it’s actually cityfolk. Could be any huge city like this—people tend to be more in a hurry, more pushy and rambunctious, more likely to stick their nose in.

I was staying in a small seaside hamlet. See flickr for fotos. I walked past an unattended fish place, the kind that has tanks out the front with various live sea creatures stocked for eating. There was a fish flipping on the asphalt. It’d jumped out of its tank and was suffocating in the air. I walked around the place to see if one of the people was there to tell them that one of their fish had jumped out but there was nobody to be had.

I stood for a good minute or two debating what to do. Had the fish jumped out on purpose? Was it nobler to die on the tarmac than in a cooking pot, on the way to being eaten by someone? I got to wondering what Captian Picard would do eventhough I haven’t watched that show in years. In the end I decided it was better to do what I could to prolong the fish’s life now and if it ended up getting eaten later that day it was out of my hands. I put if back in the tank but maybe it was out too long because it was ‘swimming upside down’ as they say.

I’d forgotten how much people out there like telly. Everyone was watchin telly all the time. Dramas mostly, sometimes a little baseball, sometimes christian telly. It made me wonder what all the folks out there, out in the remote villages, the satellites, the two-bit one-horse towns—what do they think of yankee beef and the FTA? I don’t know, I couldn’t talk to them.

For the last couple of months, a couple times a week I get people to read me ‘The Sneetches’ by Dr. Suess. I’m convinced he wrote that and ‘The Zax’ about Koreans, North & South, and the split in the 50s. As much as I like those stories, I’ve been wanting to hear some more and I finally ordered a compilation book of Suess off amajon. For whatever reason I never really got into those books as a youngster.
I would have scanned one of the pictures from the book to put here but hooking up the scanner is a hassle, frankly speaking.

Dsico (that no talent hack) has released an aborted album, Touch Me (not like that). I like it – I like the realism of it. As some who farts around with instruments, it’s inspiring to hear stuff like this because it’s a reminder that Hey I can do that!
The track (Wait) Take your time is perhaps the overall best example of his style. It features a guitar riff ripped from the 60s song, “I’m not your stepping stone” and some whacky backing vocals, which while they are performed by dsico, sound like a bloke called Trev from over the back fence dropped by to help out with the track. Note the album cover is probably the men’s toilet at Enmore station, I don’t know for sure but Tony would. Other noticable influences on the album include The Cure and Tinny Tim. It doesn’t cost any money to download.

There’s been a few things lately that’ve been reminding me that life could be a lot worse. Sometimes I need that kind of divine intervention to jiggle my senses for it to register. This semester I have one of the best classes I’ve ever had. They’re not mind-blowingly fluent or with IQs of 200 but they’re really cohesive and that can make all the difference in the world. All social science students, with one of them who is a year older and had done one year of PE before transferring majors (see under half of leapfrog). She’s a natural leader and so, leader of the class. The rest of them are of the mind that this is okay so there’s never grumbling.

Each class I give a codeword name so as to remember them by which is vaguely related to what they’re studying, such as Komputor, lil pharm, kinda. This class started as Socio , but after a couple of weeks and a couple of pen-strokes it became Soccer—because they’re just like a soccer team. I am the coach. I lay out the basic game plan. I talk to the players individually when they need it. Occasionally there are orgaisational details that the captain will deal with. Everything always works like clockwork.

Last week was spring festival. The Social Science faculty was involved in these competitions and most of my class was together as one team. They didn’t win but it was good to watch. This multi-legged race reminded me of a scene from my favourite woody allen movie take the money and run.

If you’re unfamiliar with the movie then watch the scene here and as an added bonus learn some spanish! I love that music that goes with it, it makes me think of elephants.

I wrote to the APRAs and said,

YA I’M COMING

AND I WANT TO BRING FIVE MATES SO BE PREPARED.

BE VERY PREPARED

They replied saying, “Bring it on!”.

I guess the other [first name] [last name] will get a nasty surprise when APRA INCORPORATED rings up demanding to know why he didn’t show.

Mental note: short science fiction story where a man is split in two—one gets the email address, one gets the phone number.

This is something I might give a regular spin here on the sunny breaks. I’ve always thought of myself as a supreme being when it comes to solving other people’s problems but unfortunately people will not often tell me there problems in order for my supremeness to solve them, so maybe it’s one of those give a litlle, get a little situations.

I have many problems. Some of them are huge—but here’s a small one. Let’s suppose my name is “yak sox”, and that I am the owner of the “yak.sox  at gmail dot com” email address. Now let’s suppose that there’s another yak sox back in australia, which apparently there is. Apparently this guy is some sort of musician and is on some kind of APRA (australian performing rights association) mailing list, but instead of the email going to him, it goes to me.

He keeps getting invited to this, or is being updated about that. There is no visible way to unsubscribe from this list. Here is the most recent thing:

Invitation:

Rob Collins, APRA’s National Indigenous Representative, will be coming to Brisbane on Thursday 29th May. Rob is based in the new APRA Northern Territory office, but will be regularly visiting Queensland to support our indigenous writers and offer advice with regards to APRA and copyright.

Rob would love to meet up with local songwriters and invites you to come to the APRA office between 5-6pm to meet with other local songwriters and learn about how to increase your APRA royalties.

Thursday 29th May
Venue:	APRA office Brisbane 3 Winn Street Fortitude Valley QLD 4006
Time:	5-6pm

Please let us know if you can come along.
Light refreshments served.

RSVP essential by Monday 26 May to nt@apra.com.au
or 07 3257 1007

I am thinking that the only solution is that I reply saying, “YEAH I’M COMING AND I’M BRINGING FIVE FRIENDS SO YOU BETTER PUT OUT SOME EXTRA SEATS AND BUY ANOTHER PACKET OF TIM-TAMS”. My hope is that they would be so irritated by the no-show of my erstwhile doppelganger that they would not tell him about the next thing that came up. What do you think? C’mon tell me, I’m desperate for the comments.

Incidentally, if you live in Brisbane and you want to go to that thing, please do. Tell them I said you could come.

It’s been a little interesting hearing about this china earthquake thing. It seemed like it took a long time for the state to respond to it. The first couple of day’s reports were minimal in the damage mentioned. They were slow getting in there to do anything about it.

But then once the whole machine kicked in, apparently, it’s been state-enforced mourning. At 2.28pm bells go off and everyone has to stand up and stand still for three minutes. All the state run telly has been 24/7 earthquake stuff—for three days. Newspapers are a strictly B&W affair. Websites have monochrome enforced. I’m told that no one’s allowed to smile.

Hi.
I have to say it’s irritating. Something that seems to have crept into the speech patterns of North American news announcers is this over the top sing-song cadence. It’s as if they think that the audience will lose interest unless they are over-empasising every third word.
As for the woman, I imagine she’ll be replaced with an ALICE-like bot within 24 months.
http://webbalert.com/

I had to get rid of the cutline theme, it looked too much like a magazine or something and besides – the creator is a gimp. There are a few drawbacks of this one too, but looking at the templates, it’s very simple and therefore easy to modify.

You know, I’m studying via USQ this year. For those not in the know, that’s the abbreviation for University of Southern Queensland. The main campus is located in Toowoomba, a smaller city in Qld. When I’m having a panic attack about some detail I neglected to get sorted, such as paying the fees on time, or finding out where my exam centre is, I ring the USQ (via Skype). The call gets through to one of the service desks there—USQ has a lot of overseas students so they’re appropriately staffed for it.
My call always seems to go through to a middle-aged, country-accented sounding woman named Val or Pam. It’s a comforting sound. Here, 9/10 native English voices I hear are N.American.
More to the point, Val always knows what the score is. She is calm, efficient and all-knowing. If I got to choose what the first AI name, personality and voice would be, it would be V.A.L.

In a bid to make this site popular again, here is the first in a series of Saucy Dames of the Orient.

Maybe it’s my conspiracy-fueled mind at work, maybe I’m reading between the lines too much, but when I saw this article, block-quoted here ad infinitum, I began to wonder… could that smart-but-casually dressed Zeta Reticulan standing behind the Federal Tresurer have anything to do with it?

The Federal Government will use the Budget on Tuesday to outline plans for a major review of Australia’s taxation system.

The 18-month review will look at all aspects of federal, state and local government taxes, other than the GST.

The review team will be led by Treasury head Ken Henry and will include prominent academics and business leaders.

Federal Treasurer Wayne Swan has told Channel Nine changes are needed to ensure Australia’s economic prosperity into the future.

“We will look at personal taxation, we will look at the transfer payments system, we will look at how that effects individuals, how it affects families, how it affects retirees,” he said.

“We’ll look at—we. will. set aside large amounts of funding in preparation for. . . The Arrival. Vast nitrogen-filled domes will be constructed in the Woomera desert as part of Stage One. A new plant form known as Plankflora will be sewn into the Australian soil to make the air more breathable.

“It will be a comprehensive takeover.”

Mr Swan says the Government is likely to take a series of reforms to the next election.

“Certainly we will go to that election with a—_New Overlord_,” he said.

“I can’t predict what the review might say … I mean the review might say that—_All Hail Zeta Reticulum!_.”

Opposition treasury spokesman Malcolm Turnbull supports the review but has questioned the Government’s move to appoint the supra-intelligent, 2.3m tall praying mantis named Vasscorm, to lead the review team.

He has told ABC TV’s Insiders program the Government’s review cannot be considered independent.

“Vasscorm is a very smart man(tis) and we all respect him, but he is the head of the Treasury and the bureaucratic side of things,” he said.

“One would think that a review of this kind should be independent so this looks like a very in-house and insect controlled review.”

all the memories of everything that I wanted to mention about the recent trip to Shanghai and surrounds is blending in to nothing, so I better try and write it now, with fotos.

First the food. I really like food from the different parts of China. I feel like I’m over Korean food. I guess it’s just a thing of mass. China is massive and made up of a bunch of different cultures that have their own food. Maybe it’s the result of being in Korea for some time now, but the Sichuan style of food, (spicy) is probably the kind I like best.

In this particular night we went to the appropriately titled Sichuan Restaurant. On the right is a kind of fried potato dish, lending further weight to my theory that chips are universal and that you could go to Mars and they would be eating chips there too. On the left, according to girlfriend with e-dictionary in hand, is a dish entitled, ‘an excess of saliva’, which we’ll shorten to ‘drool’ for the purposes of this blogpost. It was chicken in a spicy -hot oil. It really did make you drool! Very tasty once you get over the not-so-western style of chopping—they cut straight through the bone rather than filleting or sectioning the way folks like me are used to.

I did several of the touristy things the first time around when I was there in late Feb but there was one that had eluded the tackyness-magnet. There’s an underground train that runs under the river which was like Journey to the Centre of the Earth meets Star Trek: The motion picture meets Boards of Canada’s album, Geogaddi.

I think it’s worth noting down that weather-wise, late April was a perfect time to be in Shangers. It was warm but not humid and the nights were just nice.

For a day or two we got out of the central city to a place an hour na a half away on the bus, Xitang. It’s a small place and not as on the map as Hangzhou or Suzhou. Xitang’s claim to fame is that a few scenes from Mission Impossible 3 were shot there. In several of the restaurants and shops you can see fotos of Tom Cruise and cast standing around.

Personally I found it interesting to see how the place filled up with the new Chinese Upper-middle class on Saturday morning. there’s all these people with money in their pocket in china and now all they need is Disney Land.

In any case, Xitang was a nice little place and the canals didn’t smell.

I felt like being daring and upgrading the wordpress installation to the latest version. (just press the button it’s not rocket science!) Sunny Breaks had been using the very old 2.01, a technological laggard more’s the pity, but the last attempt at a big upgrade resulted in flipping out the HostCentral server. Let’s hope it doesn’t happen again.
Also the theme, or ‘look’ if you will. Cutprice is not just a theme, it’s a platform. Also, they rent trucks. It will be modified to look a little less mundane in the near future. We’re even intending to reopen comments—after about five or six years of not caring what you think.
Lastly, note the “tags”. This is a clever device THEMAN has invented to get The Kids to do their own indexing.

*Update:* Comments n’ pings are now enabled. Comment til ur little hearts are content. Comment til you can comment no more. Comment like it’s going out of style.

I have a week’s intermission at work and so have come back to Shanghai. I didn’t bring the appropriate cable so any fotos will have to be inserted post-trip.
Girlfriend, Je, has made friends with some of the locals and so we have been meeting with them. An ‘Aunt’ invited us to her family home a bit further out in the ‘burbs. It was a huge meal. I counted and there was 15 plates of food on the table. There was just the mother father and daughter, plus us two.
Without knowing it I ended up eating dog, and then I ate pigeon too and that was just for breakfast. Before I knew it was dog I thought it was some kind of beef, and the pigeon tasted like bad chicken.
The family were very nice and the dad cooked it all so it was one of those situations where there was no real way to say no.
Although there was a couple of times where Je stepped out of the room, and the people couldn’t speak any english so it was a bit awkward, but I couldn’t help but think how great it was – this precariousness, and how many ways there were that I could do something inappropriate or weird or offensive to a level of being kicked out of the house. I was envisioning being kicked out of the house.

Doing a little shopping in Carrefour supermarket at Zhongshan Park on Saturday night and Je said it seemed unusually quiet. Mostly it looked like young people in there, which may have had something to do with it being a saturday night. In any case, some of the chinese people are boycotting because France <3’s Tibet. We’ll be going back to Carrefour today because it’s so much nicer to shop when it’s not so crowded.
I had been thinking about going to see some of the Olympic Games for no other reason than girlfriend may still be here then, and it’d be interesting to see if the whole shithouse goes up in flames, as Jimbo Morrison would say.

Went to a restaurant last night that had english translation on the menu. Here are some of the more choicer dishes:

• The Beijing onion explodes the fat cow
• The cotton rose one is fragrant
• burns the beef (I had this – beef and potato curry – very good!)
• Characteristic cowpea
• Burns the pigeon
• blood is flourishing
• Heineken
• Fried icecream
• Chaozhou style understands stove fish
  Plus the above title of this entry, which is what I think I will call my band when I finally make a band.

It’s worthwhile noting that while some people may well be afraid of Roumanians, for some reason we just can’t seem to let them go. Blackula, Count Chocula breakfast cereal and Sesame Street’s The Count.

(ref The Count & cookie monster.)

One thing I always wondered about Cookie Monster was, Where do the cookies go? Is there a hole there or something? And what kind of biscuits are they, because they break pretty easy.

I was watching the (1992) Francis Ford Coppola version of Dracula last night. It seemed rather dated. Where is Winona Ryder these days? Where is Keanu Reeves these days? They are, as it is so succinctly put, ‘past it’. In four years, 1992 will be twenty years ago. That’s alarming because to me 1992 seems like Not That Long Ago. The 70s—now that was a long time ago, it’s okay for things from the 70s to seem dated but not 1992.

The second thing that occurred to me when watching this movie, billed as ‘Bram Stoker’s Dracula’, was how badly it sucked. What a fucking travesty of a retelling. Stoker was rolling in his grave in 1992. He’s still rolling!
Rolling.
Rolling, rolling, rolling.

Rolling.

I was going to write about how being back studying and dealing with the academia was reminding me of how out of touch with reality they all are. What set that off was finishing up reading Dracula and Carrie and then reading some of the analysis pieces as well as the other students’ discussion on the board. In relation to Carrie someone said, ‘uh yeah, it’s about feminism’, to which I scoffed at my computer screen, It was just about a guy hacking out some pulp to get a bit of money to pay the bills.

Of course, I was right, but it’s also about other things, but feminism isn’t one of them. Dracula is about a lot of things. one of them being how Roumanians want to marry your daughter and make little Roumanians—in England.

A message to Googol: work your satellites, update your images. According to the above image, my current workplace hasn’t even been built yet. That makes the image over two years old.

Another reason not to doubt the cosmic order of things: I just looked up obscure early nineties Kiwi indie band, StraightJacket Fits on BTJunkie. It had no leads but offered me the suggestion, ‘did you mean straightjacket fist’? No, but thanks. Everyone will get what they deserve. The members of Straightjacket Fits are probably selling Holdens in Dunedin these days, and so need the money. I’ll probably buy their self-titled album from some obscure Kiwi music web-shop.

The same man???

I went out and bought a mac book pro. In the last six months I’ve given away three laptops. But the philanthropic feeling wore off pretty quick and left me with the condition of mobilelessness.
The hardware itself is okay I guess. I remember back to when they changed from the Powerbook to the MBP and was not impressed with the new design. The Tibooks looked great. I thought to myself that I would pass on getting an apple laptop til they changed their look again.

However, since I got the mac mini 18 months ago, the software OS X has slowly grown on me as I got used to it. Windows has been digging its own grave for several years ago, and those smart-arsed what if Microsoft designed … things are funny because they’re true. When I got the sony vaio it was a neat looking little computer but was weighed down with a whole bunch of rubbish from companies like Norton anti-virus. It’s insulting. Even on the mac I find iTunes a little too in-my-face. And as far as I’m concerned Linux still isn’t ready to be used by normal people living normal lives.

After a couple of days of using the mbp I’m enjoying the built in webcam (great for talking to that overseas g/f on) and the quietness. I’ve d/loaded a couple of things and they’ve come screaming through (metaphorically) in that typical S.Korean way yet the laptop has made none of those ‘I’m getting busy!’ noises. The key depression depth is greater than the old sony—that’s something I’d become used to but this is nice too. The size is about the size as a normal keyboard. When it gets a bit dark in the room the keyboard starts glowing. Welcome to the 21st century.

Most of the time I’ve found trackpads on laptops to be pretty difficult to use – the one on the Vaio certainly was, so there would always be a mouse plugged into the side of it. The old jelly-bean style iBooks had really comfortable trackpad/mouse button combinations, although I never really got used to there being no right-click. The white iBooks were a step backward, the mouse button was difficult to click, and if I was only ever using someone else’s, as was the case, it’s not kosher to go messing with people’s mouse configurations. If I could’ve I would’ve set it to tap, which is what I’m doing here now, but then the mbp mouse button seems a bit easier to click anyway.
I like the multi touch idea. The two fingers for scrolling is very handy but so foar I haven’t had much need to be rotating or zooming images.

The last thing is that the socket where the power cable connects is on the left hand side which feels altogether wrongo. It is as if it was designed by someone who sits on the left hand end of the couch, who sleeps on the left hand side of the bede. For the rest of us this means having the power cord snaking around under our feet, and the (“it’s a feature too!”) power-cord slipping out of its socket rather easily. When it does come out it says there is 5 hours, 52 mins of battery power—not bad. I bought it on Wednesday April 2.