In words - make-believe.org

Pearson's corollary to Murphy's Law

2008-08-07T00:00:00Z

The thing that goes wrong will activate your contingency plan for what you expected to go wrong, which it never is. This will have disastrous repercussions.

Also: fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck.

Distant splintered glass

2008-08-04T00:00:00Z

I ate alone at Sahara, where four years ago I wrote about the view from a cracked window. The vista has changed — then it was a deep hole in the ground, now it is another city mall. The window is still broken. I liked that.

Pirate statues of Hanoi

2008-06-29T00:00:00Z

I picked up David Foster Wallace's collection of essays, Consider the Lobster, again the other day, and re-found his account of John McCain's failed presidential bid in 2000. It was written for Rolling Stone. An excerpt from early in the piece:

Here's what happened. In October of '67 McCain was himself still a Young Voter and was flying his 26th Vietnam combat mission and his A-4 Skyhawk plane got shot down over Hanoi, and he had to eject, which basically means setting off an explosive charge that blows your seat out of the plane, and the ejection broke both McCain's arms and one leg and gave him a concussion and he started falling out of the skies over Hanoi. Try to imagine for a second how much this would hurt and how scared you'd be, three limbs broken and falling toward the enemy capital you just tried to bomb. His chute opened late and he landed hard in a little lake in a park right in the middle of downtown Hanoi. (There is still an NV statue of McCain by this lake today, showing him on his knees with his hands up and eyes scared and on the pediment the inscription "McCan — famous air pirate" [sic].) Imagine treading water with broken arms and trying to pull the life vest's toggle with your teeth as a crowd of North Vietnamese men all swim out toward you (there's film of this, somebody had a home-movie camera and the NV government released it, though it's grainy and McCain's face is hard to see.) The crowd pulled him out and then just about killed him. Bomber pilots were especially hated, for obvious reasons. McCain got bayoneted in the groin; a soldier broke his shoulder apart with a rifle butt. Plus by this time his right knee was bent 90 degrees to the side, with the bone sticking out.

I went looking for a picture of the statue:

The unseen virtue of keeping a blog

2008-06-22T00:00:00Z

It'll be a decade next year since I started blogging. Like most people who have engaged in this activity for a while, I have a slew of unpublished drafts, discontinued when I stopped to think, or fell into a quagmire of details I could see no way to resolve and consigned to a better, future self. They are rarely ever eventually published, which is a good thing, even if it means my future selves don't live up to expectations.

Though I hit Publish intermittently these days, I am better for having this space. Because it is where I go to express my beliefs, to an audience, meagre but highly valued, and in my imagination deeply critical. Sometimes, often, in my thoughts I arrive at an opinion, and if it is an interesting one I consider bringing it here. And then I wonder what you will think of it, and how, given you are different to me, you would respond. Sometimes I doubt you would respond at all, which makes me question whether it's an interesting subject. That's good. But if I decide you might, then I start to review all your possible objections, any of which might reveal me for a fraud. Then I think of ways to make the assertion so as to deny or invalidate your objections. I rewrite and rewrite the argument in my head, seeking a defensible position against your cleverness.

Sometimes it never comes, and then I understand that I don't really believe in my erstwhile opinion. That I agree with you. And I am better for it. And I have written nothing.

It bothers me when people apologise for not having blogged something recently. Be unrepentant, and wiser for it.

A June-November romance

2008-06-09T00:00:00Z

This appears to be an exercise tailor-made for me. Not because I have much chance of winning, but because it crams the best aspects of political and cryptographic nerdery into 40 characters. I started running my numbers, but two thoughts stayed my hand: first, there's no way I'll keep my trap shut for five months, and second, there is a lot yet to happen. In January I thought Edwards might contest the primaries for longer than he did. Even in March I thought Obama would win over Ohio.

So let's keep the temporal purview narrow. Will the VP choices count for much? It was Edwards and Cheney in 04, Cheney and Lieberman in 2000. No, I don't think it will matter all that much. Americans vote for a lot of reasons, but for veeps rarely these days. As a test of one's analytic capacity, though, it's a bit interesting. I'm intrigued by the possibility of Brian Schweitzer, but I think Obama might choose Kathleen Sebelius, and I hope he does. McCain, I suspect, will pick a friend first and an asset second, but in a toss-up, perhaps Crist.

Feel free to lampoon my general wrongness.

The default-position pizza

2008-05-13T00:00:00Z

All sorts of things end up on a home-made pizza when I'm feeling inspired, but when I just have to use the pides in the fridge before they go brittle, there's the fallback, the default position:

Pide base
Tomato paste
Long strips of Hungarian salami
Diced brown onion
Button mushrooms
Pitted Kalamata olives
Jalapeño peppers
Cubes of Australian fetta
French capers

Grill it til the corners of the cubes go dark. Go easy on the tabasco. And use a knife and fork, landsakes!

To the pain means the first thing you lose will be your feet below the ankles.

2008-05-07T00:00:00Z

Ah, wasn't that something? From the first counted votes in the early morning (Melbourne time) until its mid-afternoon denouement, Indiana was a feast of democratic theatrics. If you couldn't set aside the time to follow the narrative as it played out, let me recap.

Indiana belongs to two timezones (Eastern and Central), and has the unusual, arguably dubious practice of closing polls early at 6pm — not so strange to Australians, but then again we don't vote on Tuesdays. So at the groggy hour of just after 8am, results started to trickle in from the Eastern majority of the state. Beginning, as usual, with rural areas. Those deep southern tracts that Bill Clinton spent a week traversing repaid their debts and left a tip. Hillary streaked to a 30 point lead that simmered and settled into a high-teens holding pattern as Fort Wayne proved an Obaman buttress — but while the percentage held, the vote difference grew: first ten thousand, then twenty, then quickly enough forty. Marion County, host to liberal Indianapolis, began its slow churn of results, and eventually the vote difference stabilised at fifty thousand displaced chads. Consequently the percentage shrank, dipping to 53:47 with the surprisingly pro-Obama votes from the Catholic northern county of St Joseph.

Just under four hours into the count, the percentage came to rest at 52:48 in Clinton's favour, a net advantage of some 40,000 from just short of a million votes. The university town of Bloomington in Monroe Country was secreting predictably Barack-loving numbers, but only in counterpoint to the wide rural stretches of lower Indiana turning out on behalf of the woman who wanted to save them $50 at the gas pump over summer and protect them from vile gun-control laws.

Two counties reserved their judgement at 0% counted, hanging like Damoclean swords or waterbombs over the numerical status quo: Lake County in the north-west — home to the city of Gary and 8% of Indiana's population — and Union in the mid-east, in deep Clinton country, which looked ominous until one glanced at the census data (something like 0.1% of the state).

On the 29th of March this year, the mayor of Gary — a man by the name of Rudy Clay, an unabashed Obama supporter — claimed that the city would be the talk of the nation two months later on election night. Gary, you see, has a history of electoral king-making, because it produces results like molasses makes bubbles. Clay said that day that Gary would be the name on the lips of newscasters: "They are going to point at Indiana and say Hillary Clinton is leading by one point but Gary ain't come in yet."

He was only out by a percentile or two.

So we waited. Clay had the numbers — we knew this because other mayors of Lake County appeared on the networks and explained that they'd tendered their machine votes at half-six Central. But Clay had a sense of drama akin to the great Elizabethan playwrights. It was not until 1:45pm, just short of midnight in Indiana, that Clay dropped a 28%-of-the-vote bomb on a frothing commentariat: this quarter of Lake had gone 75:25 for Obama, yielding him an eighteen thousand vote gain, and tightening the margin to 23,000.

The sanest voice I've found in US electoral psephology put Obama's chances of winning Indiana at 30% when this information was divulged. If anything like that ratio held in Lake, the state (and likely the nomination) was his this night.

But Clay had a finer ear for melodrama. He waited forty minutes for the chattering heads on the cable nets to exhaust this tantalising revelation, and then produced the 56%-of-the-vote enigma: Barack's advantage reduced to 65%, his gains in Lake minor but still enough that when extrapolated made every vote count.

Then, gaining my admiration for his gumption, he made himself available to the media. He talked and talked and talked about the so-called reasons for the delay, and said at one point "there's more results coming in about 20 minutes", deftly dodging the ham-fisted attempts to pin him down for (quite obviously) staging the scene.

But wasn't it a dream? For a long moment, Obama had the nomination if he could just pull out 20,000 punctured ballots, and how couldn't he in Chico Gary? Of course Clay gave us his third act right on time, a 98% fizzler, when the inevitable south of Lake County redressed the imbalance initiated by Gary, leaving Hillary comfortably 30,000 clear.

All of which means that West Virginia looms next Tuesday, a presumed victory for Clinton, like Kentucky a week later. But when Kentucky votes, so does Oregon, and it is the likely win there for Obama that should finally resolve this, if Clinton does not tender her handkerchief in the face of the inevitable this week. And not before time: this has been good, but it has become damaging, and we've seen multitudinous sides of her that really we'd rather not have. I'd like Oregon to bring this thing to an end, in part because it and Wisconsin are my two favourite American states I've never seen.

Murder in the red barn

2008-05-06T00:00:00Z

Don't get me wrong, I'm as much an admirer of the opening scene of Lost in Translation as anyone. But this, this is execrable. Its only virtue, perhaps, is that Scarlett Johansson has demonstrated for all time how to murder a Tom Waits song. No-one need ever try again.

There's a whole album of this shit.

Awesome.

Things I like when I'm durnk

2008-04-25T00:00:00Z

Berocca
Computers
Sunshine
Moonlight
Socks
Kelly

Also, the prickles of stars when the moon's hid. G'night.

The two-four-two

2008-04-17T00:00:00Z

This guy says that the perfect pop song runs for two minutes, forty-two seconds, no more, no less. He claims to have proof, which is sporadically convincing.

So I created a filter in iTunes: File->New Smart Playlist..., select Time from dropdown, 2:42 in the text field, OK. And my doubts disappeared. Not a bad set list, if from a small and biased sample.

Text message pack rat

2008-04-03T00:00:00Z

I don't use my phone much. Certainly not for talking to people. I do everything in my power to avoid talking to people on the phone.

I message people a bit. Not enough to be all that quick at it. Not enough for it to cost me anything — my phone bill has been $16.50 every month for the last 12 months, except in December when Kelly's ute broke down and we wasted 20 minutes on hold to the RACV. Not enough to have given up my regard for punctuation or my disdain for abbrs.

What rankles me about my phone is that despite some 2Gb of storage, I'm only allowed 4Mb for my messages. It's infuriating, because those messages are part of my written history. They're the best thing on my phone, and Nokia has granted me no way of exporting them. Everytime I'm forced to do a cull, twenty or thirty koans vanish into the void. I hate to tell you this, but I tend to delete your messages rather than mine. Not your good ones though — I'm trying to keep those, although Nokia has other ideas.

I have 1099 messages in my Sent Items folder. For a random sample, I'm going to take the 30 middlemost messages (534-563) devoid of context and dump them here. It's navel-gazing, but this is a blog, right?

Hang on, it's going to take a few minutes to scroll to them. Typing one-handed. Bring on the 3G iPhone already. Dum-de-dum. Is Everybody Knows This is Nowhere Neil Young's best album? I sometimes think so. Oh look, 420. If you recognise one, let me know. Alright, here goes nothing. (Reverse-chronological, for the record.)

! Poor bugger. It does sound a bit exotic when described that way...
I reckon you picked it. So, Sarko v Sego - not sure she can make up the ground..
A-ha! Thanks. Il sera interessant s'ils font cela! ... croissant.
Any last minute tips on l'election for me?
Hmm, he said he'd be there... Possibly he was getting some lunch with a friend
Not a bad idea actually. At this stage we're planning to go to the G, but if that changes I'll give you a buzz.
Good night, mon cherie
I wish!
I don't know!
Oof. Peter's.
Losing at poker.
No I am gambling!
Yas.
Yes.
No wrong jesus.
As in sugar man.
Jesus rodriguez playing at the corner.
I suddenly need a fridge. But no drama.
How busy are you today?
1:30am. Back momentarily.
Fergot it were on.
[Audio MMS message]
Myp2p.eu. There's a list of software in the sidebar.
Yep there's some blue sunnies here; I'll be here for a few hours.
Excellent! I will get the cupcakes.
Up for some virtual golf and a barbie on Friday arvo?
WHAT ARE YOU DOING?
My indian name is johsaf.
Didn't hear a thing - heard it on the radio half an hour later. Quite sad
On our way

So obviously that was my francophilean phase. For a lot of them, my guess is as good as yours. Incidentally, I won that poker game. And bizarrely, the only two text messages I've ever previously transcribed on this blog were in that random sample. That was unlikely. In summary, Nokia sucks.

It's Tuesday night in the 'bush

2008-04-01T00:00:00Z

So, two facts. Both rendered indisputable like erosion renders things indisputable: by the steady drip-drip of me saying it over and over. First, I live in Carringbush and the Tote is my local. Second, I do like my booze.

Except, one of these isn't quite true. With a good arm I could throw a stone from here and hit the Tote. But as this posited stone approached the top of its arc, it would fly past another watering hole. That one, if you're being pedantic, is my local. It's a corner hotel, built in a Walt Disney castellian style, with bright turquoise spires projecting from every perpendicularity. From a distance you'd say it's almost cute. Actually it's rough as guts. The closest I've ever been to mugged was walking past the front bar one Sunday afternoon, when a bloke with one arm wrapped around his girl put his other hand on my chest and inquired after my finances. That was something of a quandry, because you don't want to antagonise a belligerent man in front of his woman. The situation was eventually defused by the security guard who (oddly tenderly) embraced my assailant, turned to me and said "You'd better get the fuck out of here, bro".

I probably owe that guy a beer.

Anyway, the Tote is my local. The alternative doesn't even really register anymore. But this evening I had some work to do, and by extension that involves a dose of the great programming elixir. This pub is by any measure the most convenient of my available liquor vendors, and tonight I figured that having navigated the shadier streets of Gotham, nothing in Carringbush could hold any terrors. So I ducked across the road into the bottle shop, looking for a white wine. I cast my eyes about the shelves for a second, and then the proprietor appeared. "Have you got... oh," I said, as I found the fridge on the other side of the counter. She sort of snorted, and I looked at her.

She was a short, stocky woman with close-cropped hair. And a well-groomed moustache.

"...Could I get the Jacobs Creek Chardy?" She snorted again, we swapped bottle for change, and I was almost laughing. God I love Carringbush.

Darlin don't you go and cut my hair

2008-03-27T00:00:00Z

You might think I cut my own hair because I'm a cheapskate. There were times (good times) when that might have been a fair accusation, but these days I like to think it's demonstrably false. It's not because I'm anti-social either, though to a certain extent I am — unless I've been drinking. But of course there's Dr Follicles on Gertrude, where they ply you with Coopers ale as they tame your tresses, which would be the perfect cure if shyness or misanthropy were the ailment.

In fact, I cut my own hair largely out of obstinacy. When I was five (yes, twenty-five years ago), my mother took me to a hairdresser on Hamilton St, Mont Albert, and I got freaked before I even sat in the chair. I don't remember why, but I ran out onto the street, and no cajoling nor ultimatum could bring me back into the shop. I swore to my mother that day I would never, ever go to a hairdresser, or hair stylist, or hairmonger, again.

So for the next seven years, Mum cut my hair. She had a whole armory of scissors, I remember: some thin, some curved, some tapered for the fringe, some with teeth like crocodiles, all very cold against my skin. Despite the professional quality of her arms cache, and her diligence and patience, she usually managed to nick my ear or the back of my neck, and always, without fail, I looked like a bucktoothed goofball at the end of the procedure.

Now when you are being stubborn, and people are being accomodating, and then you have the temerity to complain in spite of their goodwill — what usually results is a stand-off. So by twelve years, when my appearance, I guess, started to matter, and yet I still would not betray my five-year-old self, but nor could I have my hair cut by my mother, she devised an ingenious plan. "You will go to the barber," she said. "He's different from hairdressers." I remember being doubtful. But I was in a no-win scenario, so I took her at her word and for two years, on an occasional afternoon, I trudged down Broughton Rd to Elgar, where Joe the Barber had a shopfront. It said Joe the Barber in the window, even if it had no white and red poles. He was old and Italian and loved his soccer and cigars. He'd say "How would you like it?" and I would mumble something like "Short back and sides" but it didn't matter — he just got out his shears and gave me a uniform #2 every time. He didn't talk much, which was really how I liked it.

I eventually wised up though. The bloke was a hairdresser. And I had sworn off them. So I started cutting my own hair when I was fourteen or fifteen. At first I did this with Mum's ordnance of cold steel, pointing one mirror at the front of my head and one at the back. The results were mixed. But I was entering a period of my life where mixed results were good. I started dying my hair — for a long time fixated on a product that gave me a lustrous "Mahogany Copper" mane, before I moved to jet black. When I got a girlfriend, Suwindi, she cut my hair a few times. She once shaped the crown of my head into a crude Eye of Osiris, it was completely awesome. You can still kind of make it out in my Year 12 handbook. At the end of that year I attended Presentation Night and accepted a prize with a small, skin-white X shaved into the middle of my head. And when I moved to Sydney there was the relatively notorious occasion where I asked my friend Elanor to "make me look like a mangy chicken." She (bless her) said "okay!" and deftly wielded the scissors, both of us giggling maniacally. I sort of did look like a black-feathered moulting rooster at the end of it.

Usually though, I was the one responsible for the crimes against my coiffure. In my twenties, as my radicalism faded and my contentment grew, I discovered these things called clippers, which you could buy at the supermarket for fifteen bucks. I had always assumed they were the exclusive property of barbers, like scalpels for doctors. Ever since, my routine has been largely unchanged. At an interval of two or three months, I go to the bathroom and (NSFW warning) strip naked, not out of any bizarre fetish but simply because I hate getting stray hair on my clothes or towels — it prickles my skin. Then I just do what Joe the Barber used to do — roll the #2 across my head for ten minutes. When done, I jump in the shower.

Of course, every time I'm obliged to do this, I feel the need to improve my technique a little. I learned that "jigging" the clippers around my head, rather than a smooth push, was much more efficient in claiming chunks of hair. I devised an ingenious method for keeping the back hairline mostly straight: wrapping one hand from earlobe to earlobe, and then pushing the #0 clippers up my neck until I hit my index finger. I have a canny knack now for hearing when the clippers are full and need to be tipped into the plastic bag in the sink.

I suppose with all this practice and conscious technique improvement, if the digital economy ever goes south, I'd make a pretty good barber. Five-year-old Joseph didn't say anything about that.

A few tunes

2008-03-26T00:00:00Z

Muxtape is a great, simple idea that suffers from a few inadequacies in the execution: uploading several songs is a click-click-wait-click-click-click-wait-etc process, songs are listed in reverse order by default, only one tape per account (so no making a tape for someone in particular, or doing a Theme Time Radio Hour), and so on.

Still, I'm sure they'll figure it out, and if they don't, someone else will. Probably the RIAA will stomp all over the idea before perfection is achieved, anyway. Meantime, here's mine. A fairly random sample of internationals I've been listening to recently; I was planning to create a separate Australian list.

Post one in the comments, if you're so inclined.

No sleep since Brooklyn

2008-03-24T00:00:00Z

I'm back in Melbourne after two weeks in the States. There's one less thing I haven't done, and it sort of feels that way.

I asked a few people about the election when I could. Not an easy thing to bring up with strangers, and particularly Americans. Most of the people I spoke to about it were my age and younger, and most of them said something along the lines of "I'm not interested in party politics". Of the committed, they divided pretty evenly between Barack and Hillary. I didn't meet anyone who identified as a Republican. The sample was small enough to be incredibly pointless (maybe 10 out of 270,000,000 or so), but I was struck by the level of disinterest anyway.

In other news, apparently while I was at SXSW, Ms Fits' Reasons You Will Hate Me won a Bloggie. Of course it's for Fits' skillfully crude humour, rather than the design or functionality of the site (for which I'm broadly to blame), but still. Congrats, ma'am, even if you didn't get a statuette.

Anyway, if you read one or two of the entries in my American diary, cheers. It was fun to write regularly, gave me a helpful prism through which to comprehend what I was seeing and doing, and I enjoyed channelling the ghost of old Tocqueville for a few weeks. Also, thanks to the folks who made suggestions on my itinerary — I acted on most of them, and improvised elsewhere, and saw a lot more than I otherwise would have. Now, who's up for a beer?

Over there

2008-03-12T00:00:00Z

In case you hadn't spotted it in the sidebar, for the next week or so I'm taking notes in my American diary.

Firewall Tuesday

2008-03-03T00:00:00Z

A lot of people have been asking me what's going to happen, whether Hillary has a chance. I find it difficult to refuse any opportunity to pontificate, but this time an illustration does the job:

Image courtesy of pollster.com. Weighs about a kilowordage.

Quite separately, what do I hope will happen? I quite like old Hillary, and there's a part of my brain that's clamouring for the mercy rule. She doesn't deserve to slog out a hopeless cause, so a quick kill would be a great relief. That happens if Obama takes OH and TX, which I think he will.

The moderate in me favours the scenario where Hillary takes OH and RI, but not TX or VT. That pushes the contest forward, though the result is effectively certain — see Figure 1.

But of course I'm a hopeless radical, and therefore I'm unable to resist the longshot scenario where HRC takes OH by 5, and TX by 1 or 2 (with RI giving her a treble; tiny VT being out of the question). Because while things are starting to get vicious, this contest is only working in the Democratic Party's favour. Nobody gives a shit what John Mac is doing right now — there's a great festival of health care and informed foreign policy debate going on. Would that it might continue.

The end of things blues

2008-03-02T00:00:00Z

Last night I dreamed the sun went out. All over the world, and in the town where I was, we sat and absorbed the news. Observable and scientific ramifications slowly dawned on us. It was about to get very, very cold. The stars were already incandescent, the moon was lost. Nothing could be grown ever again, and the atmosphere was already depleting. Soon, basic services -- electricity, gas -- would cease, as their operators grimly awaited the fate we all shared. The end was inexorably nigh.

The feeling was far worse than the fear of my own imminent death: the entire legacy of humanity, everything I had loved and stood upon and striven towards, was suddenly abrogated. All things became pointless.

Our course was clear: we went to the pub, and drank our rapidly cooling beers in the dark.

It's up to you, New York

2008-02-25T00:00:00Z

A few years ago now, I made a list of things I hadn't done. The second item on that list was "left the country".

Well, today is my 30-and-one-half birthday, and next week I leave Australia's territorial waters for the first time. I'm spending 3 days on a junket in Austin, Texas for SXSW. Then I fly to JFK airport, New York — the city I've spent ten thousand words describing in various essays — and check into the Chelsea Hotel (yes, that one) on March 10th for ten nights.

On St Paddy's Day, I'll be drinking and singing in Boston.

But the rest of it? I haven't really planned anything. Being a free software advocate, I thought I might try open-sourcing my New York itinerary. Where should I go? What should I do?

I know this blog doesn't have a huge readership anymore, so this exercise might be a flop. But if you could, help me fill in the blanks. I probably need to finalise this by Saturday.

The plan so far:

Mar 10: Texas to NYC.
Mar 11:
Mar 12:
Mar 13:
Mar 14:
Mar 15:
Mar 16:
Mar 17: Lucky Star bus to Boston, 7am, St Paddy's Day (drinking venue suggestions welcomed)
Mar 18: Return to New York, 8am, and sleep
Mar 19:
Mar 20:
Mar 21: NYC to MEL.

Notes:

I'm there to see America, not prop up her economy. Let's keep this cheap.
Somebody get me the hell to Katz's for a pastrami on rye!

The tally

2008-02-06T00:00:00Z

How did I do? Why thanks for asking! Click on the image below for a comparison — my prediction on the left, the apparent final result on the right.

I didn't see the caucus states of Alaska and Minnesota ending up in the Obama column. He might still get up in New Mexico, in which case I misjudged that too. In the other 20 states I picked the outcome, and occasionally nailed the margin. Massachusetts and Arizona were not as close as I imagined, and I under-estimated Obama's support in the predominantly caucusing Mountain region. That goes some way to explaining how I think Obama won the day in both states and delegates.

What about my other prediction though — that any win for Obama on delegates would be a famous victory? The US media has not yet tallied the delegate counts, and they might come up with marginally different numbers by factoring in the district-level results. But the verdict is already delivered: it's a draw. This is based largely on Clinton's solid numbers in Massachusetts, New Jersey and California, and I don't expect they'll revise it as the delegates are known. So I was wrong on this count. But that's good. The media has been hostile to Hillary's front-runner status, and this is a realignment that better reflects the reality of a race between two well-matched candidates.