The Fermented Brick

No birdsong, no insects.

2009-03-08T08:11:00.001+08:00

No birdsong, no insects., originally uploaded by Dellis.

Rubbish!

2008-11-10T19:38:00.001+08:00

Rubbish!, originally uploaded by Dellis.

Rubbish!

2008-11-07T23:46:00.001+08:00

Rubbish!, originally uploaded by Dellis.

A Fire Upon The Deep

2008-05-28T00:23:00.001+08:00

A Fire Upon The Deep, originally uploaded by Dellis.

Most incredible lunar show the other night, as we rounded the Eastern tip of Bali. Thick, luminous clouds, lit from within by a highly gibbous moon.

I miss you. (Three years today)

2008-04-23T17:27:00.001+08:00

I miss you. (Three years today), originally uploaded by Dellis.

Miniature Seagulls

2008-04-14T12:54:00.001+08:00

Miniature Seagulls, originally uploaded by Dellis.

Tilt shift shot at Coogee Beach, Sydney

Toy Crane and Toy Barge (tilt shift miniature attempt)

2008-04-14T12:53:00.005+08:00

Toy Crane and Toy Barge (tilt shift miniature attempt), originally uploaded by Dellis.

Skips on Dock (tilt shift miniature attempt)

2008-04-14T12:53:00.003+08:00

Skips on Dock (tilt shift miniature attempt), originally uploaded by Dellis.

Ladder and bins (tilt shift miniature attempt)

2008-04-14T12:53:00.001+08:00

Ladder and bins (tilt shift miniature attempt), originally uploaded by Dellis.

Miniature pond (tilt shift trials)

2008-04-14T12:52:00.001+08:00

Miniature pond (tilt shift trials), originally uploaded by Dellis.

Trying out the miniature effect in-camera with the Arax 35mm f/2.8 tilt shift lens. Lens tilted up here, offering an almost but not quite there effect.

2008-03-22T12:20:00.003+08:00

Sound and Vision you ain't Seen nor Heard Part 2

Damn I'm getting lax about this whole blogging thing, but regardless, here's Part 2.

Bogart Shwadchuck -- Bitch Go Buy Me A Hotdog.

It's supposedly a concept album, and while I've been playing it on high rotation I've not had, nor seen anyone themselves grab a hotdog. However, it is as catchy as hell. Download the whole thing, free.

Crystal Castles -- Air War

Sweet Jesus I cannot wait for their debut album. Full of good hooks and 8-bit beeps and blorps, this is one that is on massively high rotation. This is a fan video, which is ok I guess, but I'm more about the music and the weird layback on the vocal processing. Nice.

Dan Deacon -- Woody Woodpecker

Nothing crystalises early Saturday morning cartoons and batshit insane childhood memories quite like Dan Deacon's CD 'Spiderman of the Rings'. Another fan video, this is set to Woody Woodpecker. Brilliant.

2008-01-06T01:37:00.000+08:00

Sound and Vision you ain't Seen nor Heard Part 1

Thought I'd pop up some clips and music of artists I've either loved for a long time or whose video clips are unique in some way.

Yuki -- Sentimental Journey

She's a doll, and it's hard to take in this video as it's all done in a single take. Reminds me of some of Gondry's in-camera effects work.

Polysics -- I Me My Mine

This is more for the music than anything else, but gotta love that dancing.

Lest it get all Japanophile, here's a stunning clip to a beautiful song.

Smog -- Rock Bottom Riser

2008-01-05T10:11:00.000+08:00

"Call the HR department, see if we need more wankers."

I'm a little late to this one, but here's the most woeful video job application you'll ever come across. Aleksey Vayner's application to investment firms made the Internet rounds late in 2006, after it so bemused the HR people that it was readily emailed about. I'll post it here as well, but it's all over Youtube.

As with any Internet meme, humanity stopped trying to cure AIDS, and pulled together as one to investigate this video further.

Aleksey is a little...shall we say liquid with the truth about his life. I know I try to keep the fact that I am a black belt in Wing Chung, that I am the world's greatest assassin, and that I am the universe's most beloved TV and movie star quiet...but not Aleksey. He embraces his fictions with a verve that's astonishing.

If I were ten years old, I too would think Aleksey was as awesome as he does.

And now onto Aleksey's video application "Impossible is Nothing", with long rambling answers about being successful, how believing in yourself allows you to achieve success, and how success comes from determination and belief in yourself and belief in determination. All set to a harrowing montage of Aleksey ballroom dancing, bench-pressing weights, serving tennis balls and punching a stack of bricks.

It's understandable if you can't sit through the whole video, but it's worth it only for Michael Cera's brilliant parody: "Impossble is the Opposite of Possible"

2008-01-05T10:06:00.000+08:00

Damn Right He Did!

Click to embiggen

2007-10-31T03:50:00.000+08:00

It just made sense...

Glass Candy - Digital Versicolor
Uploaded by epb21

...at 7am, after painkillers and stitches and injections...

Also, download the full mp3 here.

2007-10-25T05:55:00.000+08:00

The Unicorn Kingdom Club

It has unicorns, and a unicorn devotee so earnest and enthusiastic that while a parody it borders on the creepily realistic. Dare you sign up for membership?

Also, is it just me or does that hairstyle and freaky mannerisms remind you of the Peter Pan guy?

2007-10-17T21:29:00.000+08:00

They Want Your Brain-Meats

Way back on the 25^th of October 2001, I attended Microsoft's massive Windows XP launch and hoopla at the Sydney Olympic Park along with hundreds of fellow journalists, Microsoft business partners and others.

We had prime seating for the event (being media) and I have to say that it was the first massive launch of its kind I had seen by Microsoft. Morrisey (not that one, the other one) had some models parade his latest fashions, some reality TV contest winning band of ladies plied their easily forgettable music, and Rove McManus, Australian TV's latest fad, was the MC for the event.

All in all it was baffling from an IT perspective, but it was clear that this portion was about the spectacle and less about Windows XP.

After the singing and dancing was all done, all the journalists were ushered to special room for a quick media briefing. The actual presentation was over and done with in minutes, as everyone assembled had been using XP from Alpha to Beta builds all the way through to RC1 and we already had our full copies a few days earlier.

So the presentation was more re-iterating Microsoft's satisfaction with the launch, the new-found stability of the OS, and as one PowerPoint claimed:

17% Increased Usability

This was only up for a moment, but for those of us who caught it it leaped off the screen. During question time it was brought up. How can you know XP is 17% more usable than Windows 98?! How do you measure such a thing?

The figure is so exact. Not 25%, or 10%, but exactly 17%.

There were no answers that day. It had the Aussie reps stumped too and everyone had a giggle, and since then I've often imagined two marketers working somewhere in Redmond, poring over facts and figures to include in the international press kit:

'Let's not forget to mention that it's easier to use.'

'Good idea! It is easier, isn't it.'

'How much easier though?'

'Well, easier than 98 for sure.'

'We can't say “Easier Than Windows 98”.'

'Well, how about we say it's twice as easy?'

'That sounds too much. How about “17% Increased Usability”?”

'Ooh, that sounds like Science!'

When Windows Vista came out I wondered what the Increase to Usability was. I have no idea, but from what I've been reading it looks like Microsoft's on the case for the next iteration of the Windows Behemoth.

Their recent patent application is all about being 'able to determine the effectiveness of a computer-user interface' by analysing 'electrical signals caused by electrical changes within the brain'.

You read that right. Microsoft is looking to hook up people to an EEG while they mess about with the next-gen Vista II Beta, to see which parts make them happy, which make them seethe with anger.

I'd hate to be part of this, but for the test-monkeys that do participate it at least means that the next time Microsoft tell me the new OS features 17% Increased Usability it'll be a fact that I can trust.

I just wonder where they're going to hide the bodies.

2007-10-07T01:15:00.000+08:00

All we hear is, Radio Lah Lah

I've found nothing that typifies the absolute dross that passes for entertainment on the radio in Singapore than this sketch from the fabulous Big Train comedy series.

Of course part of the problem is that the radio stations are all owned and operated by MediaCorp, so homogeny is the go there. Different songs, same inanity.

And for once I'm not on about the stations bleating out the party line -- hell, all media in Singapore trumpets what the Lees tell them -- but please MediaCorp, for the love of god can't you do something about the banality?

2007-09-29T01:50:00.000+08:00

Married to the Sea.

I love finding new webcomics. Stumbled across Married to the Sea today, and am loving it.

marriedtothesea.com

marriedtothesea.com

marriedtothesea.com

marriedtothesea.com

marriedtothesea.com

marriedtothesea.com

marriedtothesea.com

2007-09-27T12:02:00.000+08:00

MY SUPER-ABILITY

We've all had the daydreams where we could fly, maybe lift a car off a trapped child, had x-ray vision or been invisible – whatever the ability, I'm sure you've fantasised at some time about being something more than you are.

A great series came out recently called Heroes. It's about a group of seemingly disparate people who start discovering they have extraordinary abilities. The show taps into that innate desire to stand out, to be somehow special.

Superheroes in comic books have been doing this for years, being above the herd, yet always with a show of humility.

Back then though, your superpowers were earned unlike the gifts bestowed on the characters in Heroes. It's the Me Generation at work there -- something for nothing.

In the good old days you had to work hard to get your super powers. You had to be bitten by radioactive spiders, or be trapped by something that emitted awfully futuristic sounding gamma waves, or you could simply have the tenacity to walk up to a recently fallen meteorite still hissing and steaming in the woods and poke at it with a pointy stick.

However you got there, you got your super-abilities. Hard work always pays big dividends.

When radioactive spiders and fallen meteors fail to appear however, you can always fall back on good old fashioned Mad Scientist Tinkering with Things Man Should Not Tinker With.

Which is exactly what I did as a child.

Once More For Science!

When I was young we lived on the side of a hill in a rather leafy suburb of Melbourne. Being the hillside, our house was partially supported on stilts and those stilts wrapped around with boards. This still left plenty of utility room under the house for storing typical garage things like the lawnmower, plus a lot of nifty spaces where a small child could crawl and play happily for hours.

I have two very clear and distinct memories of this place, the first being the incredibly fine dust that would drift down from the floorboards above and gently coat everything. This dust was was fine, fine enough to have made the filtered journey through the thick '70's carpets above, through the carpet underlay, and then somehow be worked by feet above into some of the tiniest little gaps in the underlying floorboards.

It would then sail in loving little motes through the still air under the house until it came to rest on the bare earth below, waiting for my questing and inquisitive fingers to scoop it up and marvel at the cool smoothness and silky texture of it.

This was dust without granularities, without imperfections. Your common household dust was trapped above, as such inferior things should. This dust, my dust, this was the kind of dust that would be discussed in hushed, reverent tones by people who know of such things.

Each visitation to the under-corner of the house would begin with a ritual dust-marvelling and fingering, but it was the other memory of this place that concerns us. It's the day I took a great step forward for Science.

The Glass Was Definitely Full...But of What?

In my little under-corner I had set up a ramshackle set of shelves made from jamming timber cut-offs into the interstitial gaps in the cladding that ran around the stilts.

On these shelves were lots of cleaned jam jars, Vegemite jars and the like. And inside these jars was a wide variety of liquids and powders scrounged from around the house.

Some of this included two-stroke petrol from the lawnmower, washing powder, washing detergent, brake fluid, and any other mysterious stuff kept in storage down there. Now, I wasn't a dumb kid and my parents certainly kept me informed of the dangers of poisons, and so anything with a skull and crossbones warning label did not make it into my little laboratory set-up.

Anything else was fair game.

I liked to play Mad Scientist down there, pretending to be concocting this or fermenting that. I'd stir in some washing powder into water and watch the results, only to end us disappointed when it turned to sludge. Washing powder in petrol was more interesting, as it stayed as granules.

As pure science went, it was complete crap. I wanted to make some wonder potion by mixing a bit of this, a bit of that, maybe another pinch of the other, but even at that age I was far too smart to think it would actually work. Smart that is, until the day I took down an even bigger jar, and emptied everything from all the smaller ones into it.

I ended up with a large mix of things; a disappointing sludge on the bottom, a liquidy middle, a grainy flotsam top, and all with a hugely petrochemical fumy sting to it.

And of course I was going to drink it.

The reasoning behind it was simple. Logic told me there was no way it would actually do anything beneficial, and that there was every chance it would do something very harmful. The many labels on the many containers I had pilfered from had made that quite clear. But then, what if the labels were wrong, and that Chance was right? I wasn't going to pass up the opportunity.

In the interests of hygiene, I recall finding a cut-off length of two-phase power cable on the ground and giving the concoction a decent stir. I remember looking at the circling grains of powder, having doubts, eyes tearing from the chemicals, and I remember glugging it down.

Super-Ability Aftermath!

I remember waking up in the hosp-- only kidding.

I remember very clearly having some kind of flavour-spasm that involved twisting convulsions until the taste had passed. I remember standing there in the under-corner, poised for change, tense with anticpation. And I remember to my immense displeasure that nothing immediate had happened. I wasn't Bruce Banner. Nor Clark Kent. I was just some kid who'd drank down a large jar of petrol and cleaning products.

My day was actually pretty normal after that. I went back outside, played as I normally did. It was only later that my super-abilities manifested themselves.

I farted the longest, most incredibly noxious fart that the human body was ever capable of producing. It was a one-off thing, but I recall being stunned by the length, loudness and somehow tactile smell of the thing.

Super-abilities, my friends, truly are a gift.

2007-09-23T02:51:00.000+08:00

A couple recent shots...

As above, so below

GRIT

2007-09-23T02:31:00.000+08:00

Read a book!

I gotta say that I find D-Mite's little ditty -- what the kids these days are calling a "rap" "song" -- rather amusing. It's also catchy as hell, and anything that gets more people reading can only be a good thing.

So read a muthafucking book, niggah.

Also, apologies for lack of updates. Been at sea and the weather's been godawful, so those many hours out the back deck have been killing me.

But enough whinging, gotta go read a book, buy some land...

2007-09-05T02:15:00.000+08:00

Helideck and Helios

Not too much to photograph out here, but thankfully as the weather worsens we seem to be getting better sunsets. This shot's straight from my camera, unedited. I would have moved further forward, but the helideck guard rails are lowered for heli-ops tomorrow and so there's nought but a long fall in a darkening ocean and a cold embrace.

2007-09-02T12:01:00.000+08:00

Waiting for emergencies...

2007-08-23T17:41:00.000+08:00

Big, veiny triumphant bastard...

Good god I cannot wait for this movie to come out. Superbad...

2007-08-23T02:05:00.000+08:00

Impressive.

I cannot tell whether this Japanese TV thingy is impressive, sexy, decidedly Thai, or all three...

2007-08-17T12:09:00.000+08:00

TBGM: The Little Magazine that Couldn't!

Many moons ago when I worked at Australian Consolidated Press (Australia's largest magazine publisher), I was browsing through the latest men's mag that was being launched to much hooplah -- Ralph magazine.

Both distinct from and eerily identical to FHM, Ralph was the usual mix of fart jokes, boob jokes, drinking jokes and sports jokes, all with a generous lashing of tits.

As the editor of the time once told me over a beer, it was the kind of mag a guy "wouldn't be afraid of leaving out where his girlfriend would see it, but that he could also have a wank to."

And how.

Anyway, the launch of Ralph scuttled my own ill-conceived plans for a similar magazine -- a magazine that has since become lore between my different magazine colleagues and I.

The magazine: TBGM, or as we knew it, Tits Bums Guns & Mud.

I didn't have much more than a catchy, humorous title, but you have to admit that you'd be under no illusion as to the mag's contents should you grab a copy at the newsstand.

Of course we would cover much more diverse topics than just Tits Bums Guns & Mud. Hell, sometimes we might not cover guns or mud for months. The masthead told you everything though, unlike FHM (For HiM? For Him M--? Ralph?). Then again, the generous helpings of airbrushed silicon all three mags would feature on the cover should give a fair bit away.

But it was never to be. The market was saturated with magazines purveying photos of breasts, stories about breasts and jokes about breasts. TBGM, with no business plan, no market research and nothing going for it aside from the title never stood a chance.

Tits Bums Guns & Mud lives on now only as a fondly-remembered dream of what could have been in the hearts and minds of hundreds, if not literally a couple people.

The world has truly missed out.

2007-08-16T10:43:00.000+08:00

Drive Time

Found a classic clip from that brilliant series Harry Enfield and Chums

And I was going to leave it at that, but then I came across some other fabulous driving videos.

Firstly, how is this even possible?

Secondly, is this not the worst example of driving you have ever seen? There's nothing to the right, nothing to the left...and yet, and yet...

2007-08-16T00:45:00.000+08:00

Sometimes when I close my eyes this is what I see...

2007-08-15T21:29:00.000+08:00

The bubble is growing

Mr Brown has a fascinating article on the thread running on the Expat Singapore forum regarding the ridculous hikes in rental going on, and how many expats and companies are leaving Singapore.

Like most threads on Expat Singapore there are your highly salaried expat wankers who simply cannot live on less than SGD$20k per month, but in this case the thread is rather gentrified. The feeling is unanimous -- the rent increases are going to hurt everyone.

For instance, our landlord is increasing our rental from a modest ~$2k per month to a ridiculous $3k per month. This is made even sillier by the fact that the whole apartment complex is up for en-bloc sale, and is due to to be sold and torn down in a nebulous nine-to-twelve month timeframe.

So instead of guaranteeing himself rental of $24k for that timeframe, he is losing out. Jeremy and I are parting ways at the end of this month so the landlord is trying to now rent it out on a lease that will read something like "from now until the place gets torn down."

That's got to instill confidence in your leasee.

Other places have seen the rental increase from 40%-100%, so I guess our landlord is being kind.

Anyway, I'm offshore soon and will be looking for somewhere to live when I return. Since I pay rent for somewhere I don't actually live in for half a year, how much I pay is rather important. If the rental situation continues as it is then Singapore, as clean, friendly and convenient as it is will no longer become a tenable option. You know things are dicey when Sydney rentals look like a saving.

KL (gah!), Pattaya, Phuket, Sydney are all looking better by the day.

It'll be sad to leave. I just hope the bubble bursts in time.

2007-08-15T12:46:00.000+08:00

If Charles Bukowski wrote Peanuts

Full work here.

Lucy

It began as a mistake.

The first time that Charles Branaski met Lucy Van Pelt, she was holding a football. He didn't care for the game, baseball was his thing. Still, she held out that old football.

"Just kick the fucking thing," she said.

"Listen, babe. You just hold that thing steady and I'll kick the shit out of it."

She threw her head back and laughed. She laughed long and hard and propped up the football. Charlie took a running start and he reared back his leg and kicked as hard as he could. Lucy was laughing too hard to hold the ball steady and it slipped out of her hand. Charlie missed the ball and flew straight up in the air and landed flat on his back.

"AUUUGGGGHHH," he said.

"You should have seen your face, Charlie Branaski," she said. Then she laughed twice as hard.

"Listen, you crazy bitch. I think I broke my ass. Jesus Christ!"

She helped him up. "Look, I'm sorry about that. You try it again and I'll hold it real steady this time."

"O.K., Lucy. I'll do it on more time, but that's it. You hold it this time, got it?"

"I promise," she said.

He dusted himself off. God o mighty, his ass ached! He walked a little ways away and Lucy set up the old football again. He took a deep breath and a running start. He could see she was holding it tight. He was really going to kick the shit out of that old football! He threw his leg forward with all his might and Lucy yanked the football away just as he kicked at it. He landed on his ass again.

"AUUUGGGGHHH," he said again.

Lucy laughed and laughed and left with the football. Charlie laid there and groaned. Good grief, he thought. What a cunt.

2007-08-14T17:02:00.000+08:00

David Blaine Street Magic 2

He's levitating me!

David Blaine Street Magic 2

2007-08-12T14:47:00.000+08:00

Know your historical figures

First there was Washington

Now there is JFK.

I'm all about the learning.

2007-08-11T14:09:00.000+08:00

God-damned fucking novel.

Can't you just get fucking written?

All journalists have novels sitting partly written in a drawer somewhere, or in some forgotten folder on a PC.

I'm no different. I've been trying to write and start a sci-fi novel for freaking years and the bloody thing keeps stalling. What a horrid beast.

I've had some ideas for years about what I want to write...and this one germinated from a seed of an idea from a dream I once had. But even that particularly cool premise has become merely a set-piece within a bigger story. And that whole bigger story I had wanted to tell....well that entire novel idea has now become a series of flashbacks that define the protagonist within the current novel plan. Like a literary Russian Doll, every time I have the novel mapped out I suddenly look and there's a bigger story to be told, and the current idea gets folded and kneaded into the uncooked dough of this newer story until I find the next bigger one.

I keep zooming out and out on this fucking fractal what-ifery going on in my head, which is why I keep trying to write the damn thing and get it started. My fear is it this keeps happening the novel is going to become Dellis' Anthology of Sci-Fi Shittery.

That is, save for the protagonist. He is a nasty motherfucker with few redeeming features and I love him so. Part Alfred Bester's Gully Foyle, part Richard Morgan's Takeshi Kovacs, and all kinetic violence. He's got the tools, he's got the death wish, and he's got one motherfucker of a grudge. He's got time on his hands, lots of time. People are going to get hurt. You better believe it.

Now if only I could write the god-damned cunting thing.

(Apologies for the swearing. The future's nasty. Cope with it.)

2007-07-03T13:13:00.000+08:00

Water, the elixir of ... business?

FastCompany has a fascinating article about the bottled water industry. I drink the stuff, a lot, under what turns out to be misguided feeling that it is healthier than tap water.

However when I see little floaty bits bobbing about the eddies in a fresh glass of Singaporean 'New Water' (doublespeak for filtered grey-water) I feel somewhat justified. It's the rest of you who are mad!

In San Francisco, the municipal water comes from inside Yosemite National Park. It's so good the EPA doesn't require San Francisco to filter it. If you bought and drank a bottle of Evian, you could refill that bottle once a day for 10 years, 5 months, and 21 days with San Francisco tap water before that water would cost $1.35. Put another way, if the water we use at home cost what even cheap bottled water costs, our monthly water bills would run $9,000.

Facts like that do make you wonder...and then the article lays into the Fiji Water brand. Astonishing.

Half the wholesale cost of Fiji Water is transportation--which is to say, it costs as much to ship Fiji Water across the oceans and truck it to warehouses in the United States than it does to extract the water and bottle it.

That is not the only environmental cost embedded in each bottle of Fiji Water. The Fiji Water plant is a state-of-the-art facility that runs 24 hours a day. That means it requires an uninterrupted supply of electricity--something the local utility structure cannot support. So the factory supplies its own electricity, with three big generators running on diesel fuel. The water may come from "one of the last pristine ecosystems on earth," as some of the labels say, but out back of the bottling plant is a less pristine ecosystem veiled with a diesel haze.

I was a journalist. I am still an Australian. Both of which mean I am permanently cynical of most things.

I buy bottled water, but I never picture Scandanavian meadows or slowly melting snow caps...I always picture some old guy in a sweat stained singlet, filling the very bottle that is now in my hand from a fungus-encrusted tap at the back corner of a sooty factory building. The guy is always wearing shorts, always has a cold, and always, always has scabby legs.

I do not know what that means.

I do know that I'll leep labouring under the impression that bottled water is better for me than the stuff I get free out of the taps, and will therefore plonk down hard-earned for it...and let's face it -- it's safer than drinking out of the toilet bowl. Sometimes the lid falls on your head.

That's not a mistake you make twice.

2007-06-21T08:54:00.000+08:00

Best 5-second video

Found via CollegeHumor

2007-06-21T03:22:00.000+08:00

New miracle diet pill has interesting side effects

There's a new drug in America that's selling like hotcakes. It works as a fat blocker or inhibitor, and lardos are taking to it with gusto, as it means that you can still spend your days sitting on your couch eating fried chickens, tubs of butter and cookie dough, as the drug alli actually stops you from absorbing most of the fat in the meal.

Still eat fat, don't absorb fat. Pretty cool, huh?

There's is a mild side effect however. You are going to shit your pants. Uncontrollably. Without warning.

As the drug's website says:

You may feel an urgent need to go to the bathroom. Until you have a sense of any treatment effects, it's probably a smart idea to wear dark pants, and bring a change of clothes with you to work

Angry 365 Days a Year has the best write-up.

2007-06-20T17:44:00.000+08:00

Fuck you, China!

China builds highway to Everest base camp

BEIJING - China has begun building a highway to Mount Everest base camp, partly to smooth the way for the carrying of the Olympic torch up to the highest peak in the world, Chinese press reported Tuesday.

2007-06-07T15:47:00.000+08:00

The Big Questions of Science Answered

Well, at least one of them. What happens when you shoot a ball at 100Kms/hr out of the back of a van travelling at 100Kms/hr?

Unfortunately we still do not know what sounds monkeys make when they collide at high speeds.

2007-05-29T02:10:00.000+08:00

Some of the screens I monitor while navigating

.

2007-05-16T15:15:00.000+08:00

An Open Letter to the Little Girl Who Lives Nearby and Screams Like a Banshee All the Time.

Dear Little Girl,

Hello, my name is Darren and I live near you, and I was once a child too.

Youth is a time of wonder, of precociousness and exploration. I urge you to embrace your childhood as much as you can, Little Girl, as you'll miss it when it is gone. I urge you to make the most of every moment. I also urge you to stop that blood-curdling screaming thing you do whenever something does not go your way. Please.

Little Girl, I am in awe of your lung capacity and your vocal chord's ability to remain tethered to your oesophagus in the face of such a gale of exhalation, and while I do understand that screaming is part of growing up and defining yourself in the world, the screams that issue forth from your throat are the kind that are best saved for occasions that truly deserve them.

Some examples Little Girl, would include the moment of dawning horror when you realise your shirt cuff has been caught in the gears of some hulking machine and your arm is being slowly and inexorably drawn towards the threshing teeth, or you have fallen into steep sided pond filled with crocodiles, and you're sliding down the muddy embankment.

The terrible screaming that you are capable of, Little Girl, is not for the playground. They are not for skinned knees, stolen dolls or name-calling. They are not for hair-pulling.

They scare the shit of of me every time, as they are loud, sudden, panic-inducing and horrible in the way the surgery without anaesthetic would be.

The first time this happened I was back from a flight, and taking an afternoon nap when this horrid gargling wailing scream began. I shot up bolt-upright in bed, looking around panicked without any idea of where I was, but knowing that something nearby was in indescribable pain. I thought it was a cat. I thought it was wet metal twisting. It was of such an amplitude that it seemed to come from everywhere at once.

The screaming was shocking, and my heart was frozen in this terribly long squeeze. As I leapt from my bed and scrabbled for the phone, you kept screaming, and it was then to my horror Little Girl, that I realised that these sounds were not being issued by a hyena birthing a litter of broken bottles, but that a human was being hurt.

A female. Maybe being raped. Or stabbed. Or shit, by the sounds of it more like being raped and stabbed now where the fuck is that phone!

As I got hold of it and was about to call the police, I assume it was your father started yelling at you in what sounded like a Tamil version of “Oh Lord Vishnu, why have I been saddled with a cacophonous harpy for a child whose cries shake the very Earth beneath my feet and split the heavens above. The noise, it kills me!”

As you may recall Little Girl, whatever it was he yelled worked, and as suddenly as your wails began they cut off leaving me standing confused in the darkness of my room, with nought but the light from my phone to illuminate my pale face dotted with cold sweat, the thunderous beating of my heart filling my ears, and the realisation that all I had heard was a child screaming at some minor misdeed committed in the playground.

At that moment all I felt was confusion, relief and amazement at your vocal prowess. It also took an hour or so to calm myself back down from the shock.

Subsequent times have been no less shocking, Little Girl, but now that I know some women is not having her skin flayed from her body in my room but that it is merely a child with a over-sensitive sense of fairness and an overdeveloped ability to scream, can I suggest that we reach an agreement, Little Girl? Can we turn down the intensity of the screaming, perhaps? Just a little bit?

Wailing is fine, as is yelling. But this screaming – it's ageing me prematurely.

Regards,

Darren, The Guy Who Lives Nearby

2007-04-16T15:05:00.000+08:00

To me she was beautiful, and so I kept her there in the dark, where only I'd know

2007-04-13T14:40:00.000+08:00

When nothing makes me happy.

In a recent New Scientist there is an article [subscriber-only link] about a new(ish) way of looking at the cosmos, where the distribution of matter within the universe may be fractally spread and not in the uniform way that we've thought. That is, as you look at galaxies, galactic clusters, super clusters and so on the same patterns repeat -- just at larger and larger scales.

Matter -- light matter -- that of the galaxies we can see, is thought to be uniformly spread throughout the expanding galaxy, with dark matter making up the enormous shortfall. This fractal theory posits that matter is not uniformly spread and evenly distributed, but that it is spread like a cobweb. This is after all how things look to us when observing light matter only, but the fractal way says that even the dark matter clusters around the light matter, leaving vast pockets of nothing.

And I kinda like that model. One where this dark matter fills all the gaps just seems a little convenient, even if they think that dark matter makes up the other 85% of matter in the universe. It just seems...a little too ...nonsensical to me.

But a universe spider-webbed by matter is somehow comforting to me. I'm a gravity kind of guy. Matter attracting matter and forming clusters and stars and planets in galaxies and strings makes an enormous amount of sense. Dark matter neatly filling those voids just doesn't cut it.

I'm all about dark matter and light matter clustering together in galactic harmony.

Peace out.

2007-04-09T06:46:00.000+08:00

Songs for Synaesthesia I.

I have a delightful condition called synaesthesia, which is a confusion, a muddling if you will, of two or more senses. For instance some people taste sounds, others see colours when they look at a letter or a word, or some people can feel colours (green things are “sticky”, yellow things “slick”).

In Cytowic's The Man Who Tasted Shapes he begins by describing exactly that – relating an anecdote wherein a friend of his was cooking and while tasting the dinner-to-be declared that the chicken “didn't have enough points”. Once it did have enough “points” (via the addition of salt or other spices) the meal was deemed palatable. Obviously the chicken wasn't physically spiky, but when he tasted things he felt shapes – the chicken could just as well have tasted smooth or hillocky, but when the taste-shape was just right so was the chicken.

Synaesthesia is a little hard to explain, but it's a theme that pops up a lot in art and also features in heaps of bad emo poetry. New Order's song title “Blue Monday” comes to mind, where the Monday isn't really blue (how could it be?) but to a synaesthete it could be exactly that. Or it could be purple. It's different for each synaesthete.

It's important to note that in laboratory tests of synaesthetes that there is nothing wrong with the conjoined senses themselves – the senses of touch, hearing, smell, sight and taste all work perfectly well by themselves. It is just that the synaesthete has what you can think of as additional sense – that of sight-touch, smell-sound or any other combination you can think of.

My form of synaesthesia is one of the more common forms – where audible sounds evoke visual images. In particular, mine is heavily musical based.

In short, I see music.

Not all the time, mind you, but most of the time. I see music the same way I can ask you to picture Superman flying through Metropolis – you're not actually seeing him – but in your mind's eye you are. It's a little like that, although for me somewhat more like the Terminator's visual overlay – it's in front of me, and yet somehow still in my mind's eye.

I thought I might list some songs here that are truly evocative for me – these pieces of music that deliver some really rich visual imagery and are ones that I like to turn to again and again.

Now, to any other synaesthetes with the same form who might read this please note: yes, my instrument's sounds may look totally different to yours. They may not even closely share the same shape, texture colour or movement. Please do not get offended – this is my experience I am sharing. Feel free to leave comments though.

(I once offended another syn years ago by daring to point out that while his piano colour was identical to mine his mandolin was slightly out. He flew into bit of a rage and unleashed some fairly angry verbiage at me. Sorry!)

And now onto the songs!

Marillion: “Season's End” from Season's End

This is the first song in which I became consciously aware of my synaesthesia, and that it may not be something shared by all people. I'd always seen music, but this if the first time I noticed individual instruments. There's a portion of the music where there's a circular tinkling bell thing happening, and it starts off so low that it's almost imperceptible to the ear....except I was seeing a tiny, white vibrating rubber band thing in the lower left hand side of my vision. Sort of how they describe superstrings in String Theory.

I remember thinking, “What the hell is that?” and concentrating on it until the instrument audibly resolved itself and then thinking “oh, it's the timpani-bell thing”. I told my brother about this and he looked at me like I was mad.

And so began a flurry of listening to music to see as many different instruments as possible.

Low: “The Plan”, from The Curtain Hits the Cast.

This is bit of a rare synaesthetic song for me, in that I can visualise Mimi Parker's vocals as if they are an instrument too. Not such a great mystery here, as there are lots of long, drawn out notes that almost blend into the background low-fi music, but it is unique.

The whole song has a warm, russet and yellow look to it – almost like oak leaves in autumn. The guitar undulates nicely, and the whole visual scene is one of peace and golden rays. The bassline when it comes is visually buried, but has sharp edges like a concrete step – crenelated up close but smoothed from afar. Hard to describe really.

The Plan is just one of those songs that's soothing to the ears and absolutely gorgeous to look at. It's a favourite of mine. Beautiful, beautiful colours, and very autumnal. Warm.

Godspeed You! Black Emperor: “Moya” from Slow Riot for New Zero Kanada

There's so many GYBE tracks and Silver Mt. Zion tracks I could add here and since the music can be quite similar there's little point in me listing the whole lot. But for Moya not only is the music richly layered so are the visuals. This one's hard to explain as there's so much to it, but the strings are layered undulating hills of yellow, browns, reds and gold. It's gorgeous, gorgeous stuff. Plus, like all GYBE music the song changes and develops and builds over time into a musical and visual ... orgasm. Heh. Sample here.

I'll add more songs as time progresses, as I recall and listen to more that are particularly evocative for me.

2007-03-16T13:50:00.000+08:00

Hit Parade

I don't get many hits on my blog, which isn't difficult to understand given that I rarely update, and that when I do it's an explosion of piffle.

I have a little statistics counter thingy that soothes my ego, so when I have a massive day and maybe five people look I can sometimes see from whence they came. My Flickr account generates a lot of traffic, Vealmince's page does too, but what I absolutely love is the fact that I can see what people were searching for when they looked at my blog.

Especially so, when search terms such as the following sent people here.

God bless the Internet.

2007-03-13T16:01:00.000+08:00

Rib-cracking fun in the FRC

Kneeling in the bow of the Fast Rescue Craft, preparing to attach the bowline...

2007-03-01T03:40:00.000+08:00

Alarm!!!

Oh lordy. I sleep like shit, every night. T'is the gift and splendour of having sleep apnea. Oddly though, for years I have not needed to use an alarm clock as my internal clock seems to work rather well -- I look at my watch or clock before slumber, tell myself what time I need to rise and roughly two minutes before the appointed time I wake.

The flipside is the deliciously naughty feeling I get when I slip into bed and deliberatly avoid any and all eye-contact with my various chronometers, and fall asleep safe in the knowledge that I need not rise for any reason...

Bliss.

Recently though, my roving eye has been caught by some awesome clocks.

There's the DANGERBOMB alarm clock, which requires you to reconnect the wires in the correct order to turn it off. There's this round up of other annoying clocks, but the one I crave most emphatically is the VOCO clock, voiced by Stephen Fry!

As the page says, we all like a little admiration in the morning. The Alarm has 50 phrases from Stephen which it uses to rouse you in the AM, from "The world has been very anxious to hear from you for the last eight hours. Shall I inform the news agencies you are about to rise, Sir?" to "Oh dear...come, come, let us not be defeated, Sir. Let us 'seize the day and take it roughly from behind', as the Colonel used to say in his unfortunate way."

I need one!

2007-02-19T04:35:00.000+08:00

Shit I hear.

I work on a vessel now, and some of the blokes here are so rough and tumble that you could never ever see them working a white collar job. These are the guys that are the mechanics and the brickies of this world – salts of the earth. No pretension, no bullshit.

Some people are just so unabashedly themselves, that I find it very amusing and often shocking when they open their mouths.

I've heard the guys onboard openly discuss the previous night's whoring – who paid what for whom – the way you or I might discuss a movie we watched together the night before. Hardly breakfast conversation. I find it hard to make the motions that cuts my food and brings my food to my mouth and makes my mouth chew my food and swallow my food, when there's a supernova of complete shock and surprise fizzling out the motor-skills part of my brain.

At a recent crew change, I bid farewell to one of the guys and asked him what he planned for his break thinking he might mention family, a holiday, or fishing.

“Fucked if I know, but this time tomorrow I'm gonna be up to my nuts in guts!”

Indeed.

Anyway, it was after one of the mechanics onboard summoned some help from a Malay guy and a Thai guy on the vessel with “Hey, can one of you useless black cunts come and give me a hand?”, and neither of them batted an eyelid and stepped forward to help, that I've been ruminating on some choice phrases I've heard over the years.

My friend Mick's Dad was a classic, and was responsible for such timeless lines as:

Holding aloft a glass of perfectly brewed stout, taking a draught, smacking his lips in pleasure and declaring the brew to be “black as a nigger's arsehole, and twice as dirty” (a good thing, apparently)

Or there was the time he found out that I had once dated Mick's new girlfriend, and wanted to know “What's it like to stir Darren's porridge?”

A classy gent, Mick's Dad was.

Once, I went to my parent's friend's house for a long and laborious Christmas BBQ full of talk of farming, and cattle, and cattle farming, and the farming that one might do should one be interested in cattle, when my parent's friend's daughter grabbed her mewling baby from the pram that was set near the prawn festooned table, hoisted her top, and shoved a nipple into the tyke's gob.

The boob was out before we could politely look away, and I heard my mother “oh my” and tut as she does. Anyway, breast feeding does not bother me – it's a healthy natural thing – but I do get self-conscious about not looking anywhere near the baby-proffered mammaries lest my gaze be taken as some perverted thing, and instead I tried looking around the garden for something to both capture my gaze and to free me from the boredom of the day.

Perhaps the cattle dogs were fucking on the lawn again?

No such luck.

So I'm gazing at the dried grass, wondering when we're going be able to politely leave, ignoring the suckling going on directly opposite me, when the baby coughs and splutters a little, then burps. Mother loudly exclaims: Ooh, did you get a bone in it?

I think I threw up my mouth a little.

2007-02-04T03:18:00.000+08:00

This is no game!

"You go skipping and prancing through life, skipping through a field of dandelions. But what you don’t see is that on each dandelion is a bee, and on each bee is an ant, and the ant is biting the bee and the bee is biting the flower, and if that shocks you then I’m sorry."

Ah, the wisdom of Jack Handey...

2007-02-02T04:03:00.000+08:00

Awesome insectoids!
(plus an Aphex Twin-ish rocking tune)

2007-01-27T10:32:00.000+08:00

Everything has consequences

Sometimes you do something so simple, so inconsequential that you don't really give it a second thought...but you really should.

Because that inconsequential thing can grow -- the tiny thing gets DNA of its own, the cell divides again and again, replicates, , develops bone, muscle and malice and soon it returns -- a ten foot tall monster that smashes everything out of its way in its haste to fuck up your life.

Yes, you can guess that I've recently has such a visitation and it's earth shattering stuff.

I said something wrong. Actually, I didn't so much as say something as lie. The lie was small, I thought inconsequential, but it was the flap of a butterfly's wing in the dense and swirling atmosphere of my own stupidity.

The thing is, the actual lie's contents don't matter so much -- it's the fact that the lie was told. I should have known better.

All lies are hungry things. They need feeding and maintaining, often with bigger and bigger lies. Just as I had clamped down on my shame and thought all had passed -- the truth was revealed and the whole thing laid bare. Deservedly so.

When it comes to the affairs of the heart men can be completely and irredeemably dimwitted. I'm no different, except I may more dimwitted than most. What an idiot. What an absolutely perfect shining example of Idiot of Man I am.

If you end up reading this (and you know full well who you are and I doubt you'll be here) then you know how sorry I am and that I never intended harm to you. Such a stupid thing to do, and such a massive and hurtful loss.

Everything has consequences. Everything.

2006-12-23T12:51:00.000+08:00

It's what's for Christmas.

(courtesy of Andy and Justin Timberlake on SNL)

2006-12-14T00:18:00.000+08:00

I am Evil

Sitting here on the boat can be a little mentally taxing at times, particularly considering the sedentary four-day trip from Singapore to Palawan in the Philippines and that we've been ready to roll for two days now.

Anyho, while we're all keeping ourselves busy checking and cross checking things, swabbing the deck (yarrrr!) and such, we do find ourselves talking up an immense amount of bullshit.

We were discussing IT, and in very general terms about some of the terrible things that can be found on the Internet. To the assembled group of around five or so I am the PC-guy, and so I square my shoulders, stood tall, and in my best fatherly tone declared:

"There are some things on the Internet that if you've been online for years you'll have encountered and will no doubt recall. For the rest of you, do not, DO NOT ever search for the following terms: Goatse, Tubgirl, lemonparty.org. Note that last is dot org, not dot com."

Joe, a 23 year old Brit laughs and asks what they are.

"Joe," I say, laying a hand on his shoulder, "two are jpegs, the other is a site. I cannot stress enough how much you should keep away from these things. Do not ever look at them, Joe."

"This is great advice," I add.

"Should I search for them tonight on the company machine?"

"Joe, you should not search for them at any time ever, on any machine. Certainly not not on the company machines. Remember this sage counsel."

He looks into my expression to see if I'm playing a joke, but I am not. Joe really should not search for these terms, but I can see he's thinking about it.

"Joe, some things that are seen cannot be unseen."

He ponders this. "What about that site? Melon thing."

"Ït's lemonparty.org. Lemon. Party. Note the org. It's not a dot com. And no Joe, do not ever go there." In this I am serious, and very, very earnest.

“Then how did you see them?”

Ah. Here’s the rub.

“Joe, I was a technology journalist for a decade, it was my job to see these things as they were part of the Internet zeitgeist. I had to see these…things…and then maybe forward them on to others…as dire warnings, of course.”

“I see.” He didn’t.

Later that night, Joe is almost begging me to bring up either image or site on my laptop, but I refuse on the grounds that these are things that no man or woman should ever see. And the more I refuse the greater Joe's need becomes.

It seems I cannot warn him enough.

My work here is done.

I am Evil.

[Coda: All jocularity aside, DO NOT search for that gear. Honest.]

2006-12-09T20:43:00.000+08:00

World War Z

[Darren Ellis was a trainee navigator aboard the seismic vessel the Viking II when the war broke out. He spent the duration of the war at sea, sailing constantly and rarely docking. With satellite TV feeds keeping him informed, he turned to his previous career as a journalist and worked on documenting what he though was the end of mankind. I interviewed him in a bar over a few beers.]

I remember when I first heard about the outbreaks, and my first reaction was one of anger -- who’s playing this fucking joke? But as we sailed on and we kept getting feeds from the satellite TV system onboard I realised that no, this was no joke and that the world was fucked.

We kept sailing for weeks, but we’d stopped working by then. What was the point? There was nothing like mutiny on board, but things weren’t quite as civil as before. The camaraderie was still there, I mean it had to be -- 57 people in close quarters, just sailing along, no end-goal or port in mind.

Head office sent a directive to the fleet too. Keep sailing, don’t dock. And trust me, we had a meeting with the crew and although some wanted to return home it was voted that we sail as long as our stores would last, and we keep away from land. Zack was infesting the world, and while we were in deep waters we were safe.

Of course that didn’t last long -- after two months we were running short of supplies and we had to dock somewhere to re-supply.

We chose one of the Philippine islands that we were near, figuring that they would be safer and more isolated from the infestation.

Fuck were we wrong.

[Did you get supplies?]

Oh yeah, we got enough to keep us running for years. We’d pooled everything we had that was non-essential, including our watches, jewelery, cash, even the ship’s DV D players and stereos. Some people still thought that consumer goods were the way to go, where from two months of sailing and watching the satellite feeds, the “how to be self-sufficient” shows and the news, the fucking news, we knew that food and water was what was going to keep us alive.

And so these guys, these poor peasants on the island helped us clear out an entire warehouse. Half the time we didn’t know what we were getting, but you could see them eyeing off the 52in plasma, or the LCDs we used with our PCs and we knew we were loading pallet after pallet of boxed and canned food.

The whole town was pretty much there, helping out on the dock and stealing anything that wasn’t nailed down. They seemed really nonplussed about the rioting and infestations in Manilla and Cebu and were more interested in scoring some immediate riches.

When Zack came, all this changed. At first there was a commotion at the head of the dock, where the boom gates were, and the crowd was surging forward. A lot of screaming. And then suddenly there was panic in everyone’s eyes and boxes were dropped and people started running and boarding our vessel.

I saw my first real Zed then -- already in the crowd, swinging and biting and moaning. God, that sound.

[He shudders, looks away, clears his throat]

I don’t know who it was, but the engines started and we began to leave the dock. I could see more of Zack, hear the moaning over and under the screaming and the panic, and the engines getting louder and screaming too. People were leaping from the dock onto the ship. Some made it, some didn’t. They were there, scraping at the sides, trying to find a grip. I saw someone get yanked under.

We weren’t moving. The moor lines were still affixed.

Someone yelled at me, and I ran to one of the thick lines and started sawing at it with my knife. The other line went first, and I didn’t get to finish cutting mine as the tension snapped it. I wasn’t hurt, but as we sped away from the dock and people poured into the water, I saw our Captain standing frozen at the edge, staring at us in disbelief.

The last I saw of him was when the crowd knocked him into the water and he went under. He was a speck by then.

I hope he survived.

2006-12-09T17:02:00.000+08:00

Under the belly of the beast

2006-11-08T11:31:00.000+08:00

About as far from journalism as a job can get

2006-11-07T13:39:00.000+08:00

The Boat Diaries correction

I feel so stupid, and so wrong. While I wrote the below post in jest, there was a chance it could have been real, but I was very, very and horribly wrong.

The Captain is not a Russian called Vasily -- he's a Finlander called Leif.

2006-10-31T11:04:00.000+08:00

THE BOAT DIARIES

Day 1:

Well, I was pretty nervous about joining the vessel, thinking it would be a rough boy's own club, but so far all the men on board have been really nice and very, very friendly.

I was in the galley and all their eyes were on me, and I've got my tray of food and as the boat lurches in the swell I stumble slightly. At first I hoped no one saw, but they're all staring at me, and staring hard at my shorts. Lots of the other guys are wearing shorts but I guess mine are non-regulation or something to make them stare like that.

Anyway, I say brightly "I guess I haven't got my 'sea legs' yet!” then add “Ha ha!"

No one laughs, but one of the sailors says he doesn't know about my legs, but that he reckons I’ve got a “fine sea arse”. I'm not nautically trained, so I'm not sure what that means, but it's met with nods and murmurs of approval.

What a friendly bunch!

Day 2:

I'm working with our Ukrainian captain, Vitaly, moving boxes around the wheel house. There's a steep ladder next to where he stands, and all day he watches me climb and descend, climb and descend. At first I was paranoid thinking he was staring a little too much, but then I realised he was just looking out for me.

You may no know it, but when you're on a working vessel safety is paramount, so I'm grateful each time Vitaly grabs my hips and guides me to the floor, even though there's barely room for both of us to stand and we end up mashed together.

When I am done he gives me a manly slap on my rump to show his approval. His hand lingers a little, and he says something Russian under his breath, and I want to say something but after all I don't want to offend. This is the way of the Ukrainian peoples.

Day 3:

Disaster! Something has gone wrong and flooded some of the quarters. John, one of the swarthier sailors, informs me that in such situations it's custom for shipmates to "hot bunk".

Poor man. Of course I agree to share my bunk and he tells me he'd do the same in such a situation.

As we spoon out of necessity I just wish he'd removed the spanner from his coveralls as it's very uncomfortable.

Day 4:

Neither of us sleeps well, but Swarthy John looks worse for it. His mood worsens as the other sailors argue with him when we emerge from my quarters. He's done something the other sailors don't like, something about "the fresh fish", but I don't understand what that is.

He promises to tell me later what it refers to.

Also sometime in the night the flooded rooms have cleared. Odd.

Day 5:

I...

2006-10-30T12:41:00.000+08:00

Re-press-ion

Inconceivably, Singapore drops even further in the Worldwide Press Freedom Index which is released annually from Reporters Without Borders.

As the report states, Singapore “slipped six places because of new legal action by the government against foreign media” which initially I thought was a reference to the recent Far Eastern Economic Review (FEER) shenanigans, which has seen FEER banned from the land. If you're unfamiliar with the case then it's worth heading to the FEER website where they're hosting every lick of correspondence between MICA, various legal eagles and themselves – all of which constitutes a most entertaining read.

Oddly, it isn't. The Index focuses “solely on events between 1 September 2005 and 1 September 2006. It does not look at human rights violations in general, just press freedom violations.” So while the IMF/World Bank shenanigans most assuredly make the list, the FEER saga does not.

Of course this is just one instance, and it only helped Singapore drop six countries down the list. Coming 140^th is absolutely nothing to crow about, but 146^nd is worse. Especially when you consider there are 168 countries on the list, and that places like China, North Korea and Cuba fill the bottom. Turkmenistan ranks second last, for general press oppression, but propelled down the list mainly for the torture killing of a journalist there earlier this year.

Considering that, we are fairly blessed as journalists here, but for a supposedly booming and progressive country like ours to be ranked 146^th it's a little, well, embarrassing.

The ranking of 146 puts us just ahead of such freedom-loving societies as Russia (where incidentally a journalist was executed Mafia-style in previous weeks) and a mere eight countries ahead of Iraq.

So who has better press freedoms than us?

Kenya, Kenya for the love of god is ranked 118! In May this year government forces stormed the office of the Standard newspaper and their television station, burning thousands of copies of the paper, taking the station off the air, and arresting swathes of journalists. Even journos in Kazakhstan and Somalia are having a better time of it, apparently. Our neighbour to the north (and south), Malaysia, ranks 92^ndand the Philippines, where seven journalists were murdered last year, ranks a much zestier 142^nd.

Out of all of Southeast Asia, only Vietnam, Laos and Burma rank lower, but that's hardly surprising.

The meritocracy of mediocrity

Repression of media leads to a terrible problem, and that's that a non-critical partisan media is terribly, terrible stale in everything it produces.

It's an open secret that the media here is non-critical of the government, and while to me an outsider I find this a horrendous abuse, it's the way this censorship has permeated the entire culture of journalism beyond the political arena that mostly damns the Singaporean media industry. The government doesn't really need to crack their whip much – the rest just runs under its own momentum and the need to censor spreads into all nooks and crannies.

This self-censorship permeates the entire industry, regardless of what media you work for, regardless of who or what you write for, and it results in some of the blandest and most flavourless reading imaginable. Not too critical, overwhelming favourable, and unlike Goldilocks the result is far from being “just right”.

This “everything's rosy” gloss on everything tends to make for amazingly dull reading, and it makes you a terribly dull journalist. Yes, you! Always walking the middle road, never branching out. When there's juicy scandal reported it's never anything truly interesting, but it's manufactured bullshit with scant interest to the average reader. It's the same with things that are hyped (do we really need six stories in six consecutive days telling us how Singaporeans are losing their minds over the new SPH Buzz kiosks?)

Pick up an alternative to the local papers and see what's really happening in the world and in Singapore. Great starting points would be the Bangkok Post, International Herald Tribune, the Asian Wall Street Journal and the South China Morning Post. For magazines just pick up a foreign edition of a local magazine, or a foreign mag that deals with the same topic.

The quality is there, where in Singapore it is sorely lacking. It's an entire industry that supposedly runs as a meritocracy, yet pumps out mediocrity. In journalism here, it seems that near enough is good enough. Unfortunately it's the Singaporean way to meekly accept this as just being the 'way is it is'. I do the same when friends ask me about it – although for me it's less apologetic and more incredulous, but the response is the same – that's just the way things are done here.

And the people accept it...because there's no alternative. I dream of the day when we no longer see the ridiculous proclamations that the Straits Times is “Number One!”, when they are the only one. Hell, it would be awesome if there was an alternative paper. I'm not suggesting that it be a 'free' paper, but maybe just one that cuts down on the fluff and makes the ST actually work for its ad-dollars and its circulation.

But you and I know that that is never, ever going to happen. Not while everything's rosy. Not while coups are most certainly not created in neighbouring countries by government interests. Not while billions of CPF dollars are not lost on share prices alone by the same interests. Not while the Singaporean machine keeps chugging along without a hitch.

And for all you journos out there, why risk your career by rocking the boat? Maintain your course, think nothing, act on nothing, you're doing a bang-up job already.

2006-10-17T22:33:00.000+08:00

White Dork Down

I’m sitting in the helicopter, idly fingering the collar of my survival suit, making small talk with the other passengers and looking out the window at the water below, when the pilot screams the three words I did not want to hear:

“BRACE! BRACE! BRACE!”

Without thinking I’m down, one arm braced across my chest and grasping my shoulder, the other across my lap and grasping my knees, and I’m hunching as small and compactly as possible.

In seconds the ditching helicopter hits the water surface, and for a brief moment it bobs there, before the liquid begins to pour into the vehicle. I sit up, one hand grasps for the window, the other checks the buckle on my my lifejacket -- secure -- then confirms the location of my seatbelt buckle. In all, maybe two seconds has passed since impact, and the water is already surging over my calves.

While tearing out the rubber seal around the window with my right hand my left is pulling out the Emergency Breathing System (EBS) fitted to my chest. I fit the breathing tube into my mouth and the clip to seal my nose even as my right elbow is knocking out the window pane. As the water reaches my neck I take the deepest breath imaginable and engage the EBS as water closes over my head.

The chopper is now completely submerged, sinking, and I’m still strapped in tightly to my seat. Worse, the air in my lungs is all I have to survive on and I exhale the lot into the EBS.

That’s when the top-heavy helicopter rolls upside down, the engine dragging it down to the sea floor. This is also my cue to get out, now, or die.

I release the seatbelt as the life-saving nasal clip also releases its firm hold on my nose, and water shoots into my sinuses. I panic, and inhale stale air from the EBS in my mouth and water through my nose.

Suddenly all calm is gone and the lizard part of my brain takes control. It’s telling me that I am inhaling water. It’s telling me that what little air I am getting has far too much CO² and far too little O². It’s telling me that something is grabbing my waist. It’s telling me that I’m going to die.

Instinctively I gasp again and get another mix of water and air, but this time there’s even less oxygen in the mix and even more carbon dioxide.

It’s a second since capsizing, and out of the six or seven breaths the EBS affords you, I’ve only got five lef--- four more gasps left before I run out. Even though I’m upside down, feeling panicked and scared, I still manage to unbuckle and slide out through the window frame.

In moments I bob to the surface where I rip the EBS from my mouth and cough up fluid, and in my first panicked breath I swallow more air and water than I breath but this time the panic’s gone. Treading water, I take my first real breath and then belch loudly and involuntarily, which draws an appreciable applause from the assembled students waiting for their turn to ride in the helicopter crash simulator.

This is Day 1 of my three day Basic Offshore Safety Induction and Emergency Training session, and I am having a ball.

2006-10-17T20:55:00.001+08:00

Hunger

Photoshoot with Faz

2006-10-10T05:28:00.000+08:00

Soylent Green was people, now it's foreigners

A surprising flavour hidden among the chips. I have no idea what ethnicity the chips taste like, but I might give them a go soon.

2006-10-04T12:58:00.000+08:00

I thought we were friends?!?

I had a full medical today, my first comprehensive ever, and the doctor at the end when poring over the charts, results, x-rays, graphs and doodles had the gall to tell me that I was overweight. I mean, what the hell?!?

Sure, to the layman I may appear overweight, what with my protruding tummy and love handles, but to a professional medic? No way. Surely the gamut of his tests I had to run through and even his machine that goes bing should have detected the sleeping coils of muscle just underneath my dermis.

And then I thought, wait a minute! This bloke's been to university to become a doctor and done lots of courses and tests and exams and I bet he's even done that one course where they learn to tell if people are fat or not by flipping through albums with hundreds of photos of people in them and they have to declare the person in the photo fat or not and every time they guess correctly a sweet grape rolls out of dispenser into a food tray in front of them.

So now I'm thinking that you cannot argue with a thorough education like that which means that I may in fact be fat, or in the thinking man's parlance, a little heavy, and that none of you, my supposed friends never had the decency to run across the room and slap the fork from my hand or just point and scream.

I thought we were friends? I thought we told each other everything? I mean, I confided in you about my deep remorse and horrible shame at the one time when I didn't pay a bill and the gas company cut off the gas. It still upsets me to this day. And you told me all about that time you accidentally killed that hooker in Vegas and when you were burying her next to the highway some kids on bikes stumbled across you and you had to kill them too and then you had bury them next to the hooker and dig more graves for the bikes.

What I mean is that we confide in each other in the little things that matter, so I kept asking myself why didn't you tell me I was 'fat'?

Then it occurred to me. By following my own awesome powers of reasoning I can also say that since none of you have been through the same arduous fat/not fat education as my doctor you had no idea, and that I was left with no option but to let you of the hook.

You lucky bastards.

2006-09-16T15:21:00.000+08:00

Fortress Singapore Welcomes IMF and World Bank delegates

Quite a big hoo-hah is going on in the old S'pore at the moment, with a large part of the city in full lock-down mode while the IMF and World Bank does its thang. What's kind of amusing in a firghtening way, is the manner in which the government here has assured security for the delegates and procedings.

A section of the city containing an entire exhibition centre and a few hotels has been completely locked down -- razor-wire-topped barricades surround the enclave, anti-ram devices are in place at the few entrances, and everywhere there are armed soldiers and ghurkas. Nearby, ranks of firetrucks, armoured personnel carriers and ambulances are on standby.

Is the government worried about terrorist attacks? Hell yes they are, especially since they consider any form of protest seditious.

A protest with more than four people is illegal here, and the government has no qualms about confusing a demonstration with a full blown riot -- the implication being that if any protester is let loose on the streets the average Singaporean will totally lose his shit and start destroying the place.

So they've banned protesters at the IMF/World Bank summit, aside from those pre-approved by the government. Even then they have to submit to stringent searches, background checks and more. And where can they protest? In a special 8m x 8m area within the cavernous exhibition site, far away from the populace and international media.

Brilliant.

Furthermore, they've also detained, questioned and deported other protesters who were pre-approved by the World Bank and IMF. Oddly, this has raised the ire of the IMF/WB delegates as it contravenes a clear agreement between them and Singapore.

Singapore has inflicted enormous damage to its reputation because of its reluctance to admit 27 activists accredited for the World Bank and International Monetary Fund meetings, bank president Paul Wolfowitz has said.

"Enormous damage has been done... A lot of that damage has been to Singapore and it's self-inflicted," Wolfowitz said at a meeting with non-governmental organizations.

Singapore said it had security concerns about 27 of the hundreds of activists whom the World Bank and International Monetary Fund had already accredited to attend the institutions' meetings in Singapore as part of a formal dialogue.

"I would certainly argue that at the stage of success they've reached they'd be much better for themselves if they (took) a more visionary approach to the process," Wolfowitz said.

Interestingly, once this went global and Wolfowitz slammed Singapore, the government suddenly decided to allow 22 of the 27 activists in. Awesome. Gayle Goh has a local opinion of the whole affair, and you need to remember as you read it that she's only 17.

Everyone knows Singapore is authoritarian, so it's nothing new, but the levels to which they will not compromise is quite an eye-opener. Especially for the delegates.

I think the last word should go to the Minister Mentor (yes, they actually have that position) Lee Kwan Yew speaking from this Yahoo story about free speech and an alternate government. It really puts the polish on how the government sees the populace here and the xenophobic nature of the Singaporean Chinese about our Muslim neighbours. (My bold for emphasis.)

Lee acknowledged that there was growing support for opposition parties among Singapore's voters, but said the office of the elected presidency had been put in place to prevent a profligate opposition government from touching the island's vast monetary reserves.
"Without the elected president and if there is a freak result, within two or three years, the army would have to come in and stop it," Lee said.

This is democracy, Singapore-style.

2006-09-16T11:26:00.000+08:00

You may not know it, but I harbour warm feelings for simians

This time I'm posting a story that I've been forwarding about for roughly ten years now. I have no idea where I came across it, who wrote it or even how old it is. All I know is that it has monkeys and it brings the funny.

I LIKE MONKEYS

I like monkeys.

The pet store was selling them for five cents a piece. I thought that odd since they were normally a couple thousand each. I decided not to look a gift horse in the mouth. I bought 200. I like monkeys.

I took my 200 monkeys home. I have a big car. I let one drive. His name was Sigmund. He was retarded. In fact, none of them were really bright. They kept punching themselves in their genitals. I laughed. Then they punched my genitals. I stopped laughing.

I herded them into my room. They didn't adapt very well to their new environment. They would screech, hurl themselves off of the couch at high speeds and slam into the wall. Although humorous at first, the spectacle lost its novelty halfway into its third hour.

Two hours later I found out why all the monkeys were so inexpensive: they all died. No apparent reason. They all just sorta' dropped dead. Kinda' like when you buy a goldfish and it dies five hours later. Damn cheap monkeys.

I didn't know what to do. There were 200 dead monkeys lying all over my room, on the bed, in the dresser, hanging from my bookcase. It looked like I had 200 throw rugs. I tried to flush one down the toilet. It didn't work. It got stuck. Then I had one dead, wet monkey and 199 dead, dry monkeys.

I tried pretending that they were just stuffed animals. That worked for a while, that is until they began to decompose. It started to smell real bad.

I had to pee but there was a dead monkey in the toilet and I didn't want to call the plumber. I was embarrassed.

I tried to slow down the decomposition by freezing them. Unfortunately there was only enough room for two monkeys at a time so I had to change them every 30 seconds. I also had to eat all the food in the freezer so it didn't all go bad.

I tried burning them. Little did I know my bed was flammable. I had to extinguish the fire.

Then I had one dead, wet monkey in my toilet, two dead, frozen monkeys in my freezer, and 197 dead, charred monkeys in a pile on my bed. The odor wasn't improving.

I became agitated at my inability to dispose of my monkeys and to use the bathroom. I severely beat one of my monkeys. I felt better.

I tried throwing them way but the garbage man said that the city wasn't allowed to dispose of charred primates. I told him that I had a wet one. He couldn't take that one either. I didn't bother asking about the frozen ones.

I finally arrived at a solution. I gave them out as Christmas gifts. My friends didn't know quite what to say. They pretended that they like them but I could tell they were lying. Ingrates. So I punched them in the genitals.

I like monkeys.

2006-09-12T23:44:00.000+08:00

I saw a tit! And there was a snake on it!

'You want to see it. You have two people goin' to screw in a bathroom on a plane and you know that there are some snakes on there... you know that when that tit comes out, you want to see a snake on that tit! At some point you gonna go, "Man, I know a snake's going to show up somewhere... and hopefully that snake's going to be on that tit."'

True words, Samuel L. Jackson, true words.

2006-09-10T21:49:00.000+08:00

Lest we forget...

Today marks both the five year anniversary of the September 11 attacks in America and the start of at least a week-long bout of masturbatory frenzy in the mass media.

No doubt we'll see those planes smash into those buildings again and again, because you know, we just haven't seen that enough and it was five years ago after all. Happened in New York, I think.

But, I am not here to mock nor denigrate the losses sustained on that day, nor the losses in the Madrid train bombings, the multiple bombings in Bali, the London underground bombings (in which I lost a friend), the bombing of the Australian Embassy in Indonesia, the bombings in Cairo, nor the other equally as heinous terrorists attacks since that day in New York. What I do want to discuss is the fear. The perfectly manufactured patina of fear that covers us all. To continue momentarily with that awful metaphor -- Osama laid the undercoat, Bush. Blair and Howard have been layering on top coat over top coat until now no one remembers what the original colour was.

I found myself watching an anchor on CNN the other day, presenting statistics from polls conducted both in the months after the 9/11 attacks and followed up last month. When asked if they felt more unsafe now, in the months following 9/11 44% or respondents said they did. The follow-up almost five years on had seen that number rise to around 68%. (Note: I was not entirely paying attention but there had been a remarkable increase.)

In this time we've seen public freedoms repressed and suppressed more rapidly and markedly than the terrorists could ever hope for. While the nebulously defined War on Terrorism continues, we've seen new Wars -- the War of Shoes and the new War on Moisture. I'm all for finding and quashing the bastards responsible, and I'm particularly for pressing them hard and deep into the Earth's crust, but what I cannot abide is this terrible and insensate fear that's permeating society.

Fear is a powerful force. It's a primal, survival force in fact. The best horror movies never show the creature or ghost who kills. When it's left to the imagination the effects are starker and more horrific, but they are also personal to each person. Compared to the delicious terror of the imagination, the blood-spattered animatronic that shuffles into scene is laughable. Poe knew this, as did Lovecraft, and their stories are timeless.

Bush must watch a lot of these classic movies (I doubt he reads the books) as he's telling us everything, but showing us nothing. The War on Terror purports to say a lot, but means nothing. It's nebulous, ill-defined. I'm not the first to comment on this, and won't be the last, but other things that similarly sound good but mean nothing are Bush's assertions that the terrorists 'hate our freedom'. Bush says a lot of dumb things, but that's a whopper to swallow.

And here I pass the baton to David Cross, a very funny comedian, who said while discussing Bush's 'they hate our freedom' rhetoric:

"I don't think Osama bin Laden sent those planes in to attack us because he hated our freedom.

I think he did it because of our support for Israel, and our ties with the Saudi family and all our military bases in Saudi Arabia.

You know why I think that?

Because that's what he fucking said!

It's sad that that has to come from a comedian, but there you have it. That's why Osama had the planes hijacked. It's the same reason why he had them blow a huge fucking hole in the U.S.S Cole years earlier, and why they even tried to bomb the WTC earlier than that.

Saying it's about a hatred of freedom just muddies the waters...and that's probably Bush's point.

So here we are, five years on from one of the most horrific acts of war on America, and we're all feeling worse off. The boogeyman could be anywhere, anytime, and he wants to kill us because we are free.

To be honest, I fly a lot, and I never really dwell on terrorists. I'm more worried about the idiot driving the taxi to the airport, or just how much job-satisfaction the low-paid maintenance ground crew who are responsible for checking my plane have. Statistically you are vastly more likely to slip and die in the shower, get kicked to death by a donkey or be killed by a falling coconut than you are to be killed by an act of terrorism.

Anyway, security expert Bruce Schneier has an excellent Scorecard from the War on Terror with some interesting findings. As he says 'This is absolutely essential reading for anyone interested in how the U.S. is prosecuting terrorism. Put aside the rhetoric and the posturing; this is what is actually happening.'

In the twelve months immediately after 9/11, the prosecution of individuals the government classified as international terrorists surged sharply higher than in the previous year. But timely data show that five years later, in the latest available period, the total number of these prosecutions has returned to roughly what they were just before the attacks. Given the widely accepted belief that the threat of terrorism in all parts of the world is much larger today than it was six or seven years ago, the extent of the recent decline in prosecutions is unexpected. See Figure 1 and supporting table.

Federal prosecutors by law and custom are authorized to decline cases that are brought to them for prosecution by the investigative agencies. And over the years the prosecutors have used this power to weed out matters that for one reason or another they felt should be dropped. For international terrorism the declination rate has been high, especially in recent years. In fact, timely data show that in the first eight months of FY 2006 the assistant U.S. Attorneys rejected slightly more than nine out of ten of the referrals. Given the assumption that the investigation of international terrorism must be the single most important target area for the FBI and other agencies, the turn-down rate is hard to understand. See Figure 2 and supporting table.

The typical sentences recently imposed on individuals considered to be international terrorists are not impressive. For all those convicted as a result of cases initiated in the two years after 9//11, for example, the median sentence -- half got more and half got less-- was 28 days. For those referrals that came in more recently -- through May 31, 2006 -- the median sentence was 20 days. For cases started in the two year period before the 9/11 attack, the typical sentence was much longer, 41 months. See Figure 3.

Yowch. Maybe we are right to feel more frightened.

2006-09-08T09:02:00.000+08:00

Who doesn't like Japanese girls?...oh.

How about some tea then?

2006-09-06T13:40:00.000+08:00

The Doctor is in...

(test shoot at abandoned mansion, part of the Haunted Spaces project)

2006-09-05T09:25:00.000+08:00

I used to be a carpenter...

2006-09-03T13:41:00.000+08:00

Energy for nuthin’ and your chicks for free.

It’s bit of a dream really, free energy. No more power bills, no more raping wilderness areas for oil, no more raping other countries for oil, no more changing freaking batteries all the time. Could it be time to take your house off the energy grid?

The guys at Steorn think so.

They’ve developed what they say is the world’s first energy generating device that outputs more than is put in. There is a technical scientific term for this kind of contraption, and it is ‘bullshit’.

Perpetual motion machines and energy-for-nothing generators are considered not just wrong, but completely impossible. It’s right up there with ancient alchemists trying to transmute lead into gold (even Newton did his damnedest to get that one to work), to the more modern fallacy of Fleischmann and Pon’s claims to room temperature desk-top fusion in 1989 and the less modern attempt I made to fly in the late seventies by stuffing my arms into white plastic trash bags and leaping off a chair (failed).

Looking for a way to create self-powered mini security cameras, Steorn’s team stumbled on what they are calling an invention that will change the world. The device features four minutely calibrated magnets, spinning about a fifth magnet. Somehow, this apparently produces more energy than is fed in -- they say around 285% efficiency.

The Laws of Thermodynamics (note the capitalisation) are very clear, and have withstood the test of time. The First Law states that the amount of energy in a closed system remains the same. While a thrown ball has more kinetic energy than a stationary one, this energy is converted from kinetic into heat as friction works on the surface, heating the ball and air. Energy converts, it never disappears or appears. In this example kinetic energy becomes heat,. Measured as a whole the amount of energy never, ever changes.

So Steorn’s claim to have a system that is 285% efficient totally and completely flies in the face of one of the most fundamental building blocks of science. They say that their closed system has even delivered just under 400% efficiency in tests. What they don’t say is how exactly they’re ‘detecting’ this energy.

Now, this may be true. It could actually be pumping out more energy than is being put in, but the First Law states that this energy must be coming from somewhere so it could be that it’s coming from somewhere unexpected.

Arenas that pop into my head could be that the interlocking magnetic field could be creating a Casimir effect somewhere nearing the Planck scale, but the problem with this is that although quantum mechanics fully allows for enormous energies to be released via this effect, it also dictates that it must also disappear just as quickly. Maybe what they’ve developed is a detector of this unleashed energy. Harnessing it is a different matter.

The second way I can see this happening is that the conjunction of magnetic fields is allowing for the energy of the quantum foam to be detected. Again, and incredibly similarly to the Casimir effect, this is happening at the Planck scale so how they’re detecting this I do not know. Also like the Casimir effect this energy is transient.

Now, while you may dismiss all of this as a complete load of bulshit, Steorn are putting their money where their mouth is by purchasing a full-page advert in The Economist, challenging scientists to come and investigate the device in-depth, and then present their findings. This panel of leading physicists, chemist and presumable quantum physiscists must publish their claims as other scientific bodies who have studied the device refuse to out of being named and shamed by the rest of the community.

As of time of writing, 4,581 scientists have applied for position on the panel.

It’s interesting too, as they don’t seem to be asking for funding until the panel’s results are out, and then it’s either rolling-in-cash time, or shunned-by-Science time.

Validation Process

The process of testing Steorn's technology shall consist of three test phases. The process shall commence with the scientific jury appointing its own chairman. Steorn shall then provide an in-depth explanation of the operation of its technology and shall present the tests and test data conducted on the technology to date.

Steorn will cover all direct costs relating to the validation process.

Phase I

Confirm that the Steorn technology has a coefficient of performance greater than 100%.

Phase II

Confirm that the operation of the Steorn technology does not affect the component parts of the technology.

Phase III

Carry out a full thermodynamic analysis of the technology.

What Happens After Validation?

The jury’s analysis will be published on the company's website where everyone can register to receive the results.

The Company will then be seeking to license its technology into a variety of markets including the consumer electronics and automotive sectors. The company will also be releasing several products that it is developing itself.

So it’s very interesting. Steorn is canny enough to know that they’re in a position to be completely ridiculed by the scientific community if they just come out and say ‘our product does this’, but by inviting the community to openly investigate it they’re potentially cutting off that route. And after all, it could turn out that it’s a completely known effect and that the device may appear to be over 100% coefficient but is really 90% and that the detected energy cannot be harnessed.

Who knows? Regardless of what happens, I’ve signed up for the results. As have 57,682 others.

2006-09-03T13:40:00.000+08:00

Rust my Nuts!

2006-09-03T13:28:00.000+08:00

A place to sit

Part of my haunted places project

2006-08-29T12:08:00.000+08:00

Osama Bee Laden

I was out on the weekend at the gardens doing a photoshoot for a friend, and when that had finished I broke out the macro lens for some insect/flower action. I saw a frog doing frog things in a pond, and then noticed little mini frogs jumping about. It was almost too much when one leapt onto a lily flower.

Anyway, I take photos of the little frogs and when I come back to Momma (or Daddy) frog I see a little-un has climbed atop its head. This is a photo opp that could not be passed up, so I start snapping photos of it. I wanted to get a good front-on shot, but the pond was bordered by a foot and a half high bush teeming with flowers and bees.

I have a healthy respect for bees, what with a mild allergy and the painful memories of being stung on the same finger twice in the same day when I was about six, but to get the best eye-level perspective of the frog I have to lift my tripod (on its lowest setting) over the flowers to a low brick retaining wall.

This leaves me with the issue of setting the camera focus and taking the shots while I cannot easily get to it. So I do the only thing possible -- hpist one leg over the flowers and put it on the bricks, and lower myself so I can get the shots. As I am performing this graceless manoeuvre a cloud of bees swarms up out of the bushes and starts darting about. Angrily.

I’m actually doing the splits over these bee-filled flowers, crouching ever lower so I can get my eye to the camera’s viewfinder, and all the time I’m thinking please please please do not sting my nuts. Please stay calm, bees. Not. My. Nuts.

So anyway, this is a long intro about a frog photo (that didn’t really work - above) but most importantly it’s about bees. While my nuts remained un-molested by these little apic drones, as I was resetting my camera I took some time to watch the bees and pondered my lucky escape from being stung, and the bee’s even luckier escape from certain death had it stung me.

Not that I was going to the kill the bee in question in rage (quite likely that I would) but had I done so that would have been a hollow victory as once a worker bee stings you it dies. I remember thinking about how shit that was when I was a child, as it’s the ultimate lose-lose situation: I didn’t want to be stung, was not a threat to the bee, and the bee wasted its short life in delivering what it must have seen as ultimate justice. No one won, and although the sting hurt like almighty hell, the bee came off worse for it.

Bees are well prepared to give their lives for a higher goal. Now stay with me here: this actually makes bees the suicide bombers of the natural world.

They are little terrorists, willing to sacrifice themselves for a greater good. Their hives are Al Q’aeda cells, and they’re on a honey-jihad.

God help us all.

Allāhu Akbar!

2006-08-26T13:56:00.000+08:00

Children ran here once...
Photo from my haunted places project

2006-08-26T13:53:00.000+08:00

How I'd like My Music Reviews to be Composed from Now On.

Pete Ohs, from www.theanchorcenter.com

2006-08-23T17:42:00.000+08:00

My Super Pre-Op Ex-Girlfriend

It looks like the kind of movie I’d watch only out of entertainment desperation, or if I wanted to impress a girl on a date with how sensitive I am, but I cannot say that My Super Ex-Girlfriend excites me. I’ve only seen the trailer though, so maybe I am depriving myself of an entire universe of larfs.

There is one part of the trailer that kind of disturbs me a little. It’s a sex scene where Uma is riding Luke’s character in bed, and being the demanding Super Ex-Girlfriend that she obviously is she’s riding him super hard. So hard in fact, that the bedhead is being driven through the wall, most probably into the neighbour’s apartment where hilarity and hijinks must surely ensue.

What worries me in this part of the trailer is that the bed is being driven through the wall as Uma thrusts forward, in what for anyone who’s had sex like this would mean Uma is essentially coming off Luke. Had Luke been on top and been the Super Ex-Boyfriend then the laws of physics would remain unchallenged, and Einstein and Newton could stop oscillating in their graves.

But no, Uma’s on top which means only one thing: for the thrusts to work as depicted Uma must in fact be Luke’s super soon-to-be-ex-man ex girlfriend, and he’s being penetrated like never before.

Which also explains the horrified look on Luke Wilson’s face.

Fin.

2006-08-16T13:00:00.000+08:00

I don’t know why I don’t get more dates.

Hey baby -- you’re looking awesome tonight. I’m really glad you could come. Here, let me get that chair for you…there you go. Gentlemanly? Please! I was just brought up right, with manners and the proper respect for woman.

Ok, so here we are. What a beautiful restaurant, and what a beautiful woman to be here with. Wow…even more so when you blush like that. No, no, don’t hide your face -- I like to see you.

So. Shall I order the wine or would you like to? You would, great. I’ll finish off my story while you peruse the list.

So there I was, about the 32^nd floor of Nakatomi Plaza, and without my-- Japan? Yes of course. Have you been? Oh you should, it’s a wonderful place -- great food, great culture. I love it. Where was I? Oh yes, so there I am, about two floors above the reception area of Nakatomi Plaza when terrorists break in and start shooting up the place.

Now most people would lose their cool in a situation like that, but not me. Wait -- try this aperitif, just a mouthful, here…isn’t that delightful?

No, I wasn’t scared at all. What worried me was that I didn’t have any shoes, and later they shot out all these windows and I had to run barefoot through the gla--. What do you mean you’ve heard this before? I’m pretty sure I haven’t told you this one. Alright, fine.

Did I tell you about time I was in San Francisco, and I had to recruit this old con who was supposedly the only person to escape from Alcatraz, and I needed him to break me in! See these terrorists had set up missiles there with biological payloads, and they were threatening the city.

Huh? You know this one? That makes no sense, I’m pretty sure I haven’t mentioned this one yet. Alright, you know what you haven’t seen? This is awesome. Check this out. It’s a bicep. Want to feel it? Go on. I don’t care who’s watching. Feel it. Come one. Yeah, that’s it! Like a rock, huh? Knew you’d like it. You’re impressed, I can tell.

So what was happening? Oh right, so there I am, coming out of the foyer lift of this company, and there’s like a full SWAT team running in, yelling drop this and drop that. Now, I only kill people who deserve it, and these are just guys doing their job, so I shoot them in the thighs. Thwap, thwap, thwap. Once they drop, I walk forward, letting bullets bounce off my huge frame and pick up this excellent tear-gas gun, and start firing all around -- at the squad cars outside, into a few guys inside.

The SWAT and the cops are all like, noooo run, and I’m all like haha, indeed!, but anyway I walk up through the mist of tear-gas an-- huh? Oh it hurt a little -- it probably would have killed a normal man but it just tickled my nose a bit -- so anyway up I go and rip gas masks off two SWAT members and they drop like stones. See, I needed the masks for Sarah and John who were holding their breath back in the lift, as they’re not strong like me.

What’s that? Cyberdyne Systems? Terminator 2? Never heard of them. I don’t watch movies.

So anyway, I get the masks back to them…alright, I can see you’re getting a little bored now, so they get the masks and then we drive off and everyone lives happily ever after. Geez, I didn’t even get to tell you about the tanker of liquid nitrogen or the lowering into molten iron.

I bloody well did get lowered into molten iron! Of course I survived, I’m here aren’t I? What?!? I’m being ridiculous?!? You’re being ridiculous! Yes, a man can surviv-- A man CAN survive being dropped into-- How? You want to know how? You want to KNOW HOW?

Lower my voice? I wasn’t shouting…you were.

A man can easily survive being lowered into molten iron because…sit down!...because IT'S A DRY HEAT!

And I did it, and I survived it, and if that makes me a hero to you then that’s ok, but you don’t have to call me a hero unless it gives you some form of comfort in these post-911 times.

Wait, where are you going? Aren’t you at least going to pay?

2006-08-09T10:34:00.000+08:00

Why walk when you can shuffle?

Singapore

. I love this place. The food's awesome and cheap, the lifestyle's great, it's clean, it's ordered, things work and it doesn't have that patina of dirt and open-sewer smell that I recall so fondly of my years in KL.

However there is one thing that drives me absolutely around the bend, and that's trying to walk from point A to point B in this place. It's not that there's a lack of pathways or dangerous drops through missing concrete slabs into deep drains (How ya doin', KL?) the problem with being a pedestrian in Singapore is well...the pedestrians.

I can handle the glacial pace, I can handle the throngs, I can handle the aimless shuffling, but what I can't handle is the Singaporean innate ability to randomly veer, merge into your trajectory, sideways block and cover as much of the footpath as possible with zero regard for other pedestrians either approaching from behind or walking toward them in plain sight.

Side Note: The shuffling gait may not be exhibited by all locals, but it's very prevalent. So much so that it's been dubbed the Singapore Shuffle, while a friend calls it the I-have-a-mate-who-runs-a-shoe-factory walk

Although Singapore is one of the most densely packed cities on the planet, please remember that at whatever moment you are walking, wherever it happens to be, you are the only pedestrian.

Here is a quick list of tips to ensure that you can be the most Pedestrian Pedestrian that you can be:

Have a goal in sight, but give yourself at least thirty minutes to shuffle the 100m there
Meander from side to side
Randomly stop, but take a half-step left or right when you do so. This is a brilliant manoeuvre that confounds all
Should you be walking in a group, please ensure that you spread out into a line that covers the entire footpath. Do not move when other pedestrians approach
Should we come face to face, whatever you do please do not move to your left when I move to mine, nor should you move to your right when I move to mine. In fact, the best course of action is to stop. Let me navigate about you
Should you require the assistance of an escalator when you tire from the intensive shuffling, please, please, please ensure that you stand on the right hand side -- effectively blocking all traffic from moving past
By all means stop at the top or bottom of an escalator while you ruminate on world politics, wonder what colour to paint your lounge room, or contemplate the mysteries of where you are and how you came to be there. As a bonus, please do get huffy and annoyed when the 6'2" guy bumps into you when the escalator spits him out directly into your immobile back

Side Note 2: Another friend has a theory about the Singaporean jag, turn, sudden stop and other blocking manoeuvres. He posits that it’s the little man’s way of fighting the government’s ordered uniformity. It’s a damning protest that shoots a bullet directly into the heart of the government machine.

That’s right Singapore -- don’t walk the way They want you to walk!

Side Note 3: I took some shots of the pre-national day fireworks last night, and then faced the ordeal of ‘walking’ amongst hundreds of shufflers on the way to MRT station. Oddly, the people had congealed into a single shambling brainless bio-mass -- one that took up the entire width of the twenty meter wide concourse between Suntec and Raffle’s Place.

Normally they form nearly unnavigable algal rafts where you do your best to plot a course between, but last night must have seen some extra nitrogen or phosphates introduced to the water because the populace had flourished, congregated and then congealed into this single homogenous mass.

And if this bio-mass had not been glacially undulating in the direction I was headed I may well have totally, irrevocably, lost my shit.
As it was, a ten minute walk turned into a 30 minute ordeal.

Eldorado: The rumoured pedestrian-free escalators of Singapore. Myth or reality?

2006-08-07T21:11:00.000+08:00

Homemade Tilt Shift Lens for Canon 300D

I bought an extremely old Japanese Auto Chinon 50mm prime lens second-hand the other day, so I could play about with creating a new tilt shift lens for my Canon 300D.

I've been playing about with mounting options, and believe it or not the most effective I have found to date is black fibre gaffer tape. It's not a permanent solution at all, but until I find one that is it will have to do.

This is a test shot hurriedly scraped together on the first day or lens creation.

It's a random page of The Economist, taken at an angle. With a normal lens you'd expect a band of words to appear focused, with the foreground and background out of focus, but by angling the lens I was able to almost lay the plane of focus along the page (you’ll notice “Europe” is fuzzy).

As a first attempt it’s great. The lens mount (not sure what it is, but the lens is for a 35mm camera -- Pentax, I think) is much smaller than the opening for the EOS mount, so while the lens needs to settle flush to the body for perfect focus, the smaller mount means I have leeway to move the lens about in the opening.

Not bad for a $20 lens with perfect optics. Lens specs:

50mm
Aperture: f1.9-f16
Focal range: 0.4m - infinity
Manual Focus

What tilt shifting does is allow you to move the plane of focus about in accordance with the Scheimpflug Principle, which as well as allowing perfectly aligned architectural photography (sky scrapers no longer warp to the centre of the frame, but remain straight) but to also mess about and change perception of everyday objects.

Often this is referred to as the miniature effect. Here's a few not so good samples I've taken, but the bitter*girls blog has many professionally shot ones that illustrate it better than I ever could.

What I have found though is that the tilt shift lens makes for interesting portraits. Here's the current crop.

2006-08-06T16:36:00.000+08:00

Wicker World

Many years ago, some friends and I came up with the ultimate store that would make us rich: a store to rival the 24-hour drive-through pet funeral service’s brilliance and convenience. Our store concept?

WICKER WORLD: YOUR 24-HOUR CANE CONVENIENCE STORE

Brilliant, isn’t it! How many times have you been drinking with friends, and at 3am you’ve had an inexplicable desire for cane or wicker products but were unable to slake that thirst?

If only there was a WICKER WORLD nearby, you could sate your every wicker desire.

Baskets, chairs, pot plant hangers, shelving -- we’d stock the lot. And lest you think WICKER WORLD caters only to the lowest common denominator I’ll have you know that we fully intended to stock a full range of products made from the thinking man’s cane: rattan.

I bring up WICKER WORLD only to highlight how ahead of our time we were. Right now a new Nicolas Cage movie is about to be released called The Wicker Man, which is a reimagining of the original 1973 movie starring Edward Woodward. In both cases the movie deals with Captain Lucius Wicker, the discoverer and some say inventor of, modern wicker and wicker-based products.

Cage fears a world without cane.

Captain Lucius had a dream, a dream of products made of wood, and yet somehow not wood. While his dream becomes an obsession his life hits the rocks, and the movie deals primarily with his hunt for the elusive fibrous construction material and his attempts to reconcile with his estranged wife. It’s part tragedy, part drama, all wicker.

Right now wicker is in. It’s the hip thing and interest in wicker is high. Expect to see cane popping up on MTV soon, and maybe a WICKER WORLD: YOUR 24-HOUR CANE CONVENIENCE STORE opening up next to your local Starbucks soon.

2006-06-19T12:18:00.000+08:00

Psychedelic Coffee Commercial.

Odd as hell, but I love it.

2006-06-17T02:48:00.000+08:00

Dellis makes the world better: #3 - Soylent Green should be people

First, a confession: I just watched all of season two of Wildboyz, the MTV show featuring Steve-O and Chris Pontius from Jackass travelling the world, harassing and being harassed by all manner of dangerous animals. I’ve watched them lure a wild leopard into a tree with a chicken breast on a fishing rod, I’ve seen them get bitten by numerous snakes, and seen Steve-O attach more stinging/biting/pinching things to his arse and nipples than I ever thought possible, and all on the same day that a new trailer for Jackass 2 was released. And now for the eagerly awaited confession! Wildboyz is dangerous, it’s stupid, and I could not stop laughing.

At the start of each show there’s a disclaimer, warning you not to try anything you see at home, and that all stunts are performed by or in the presence of trained professionals. Ok, this is a standard freedom-of-liability disclaimer that saves MTV’s arse in case any more kids try and replicate what they see (for instance the kids who set themselves alight, broke limbs etc.)

All of this is well and good, but you know some people are just meant to die, and you certainly know plenty who should not breed under any circumstance.

I don’t mean that in a horrible way, but honestly the more children are mollycoddled and protected these days, the more we’re heading for a generation of mentally and genetically inferior dullards.

These days kids are protected from evils with baby-aspirin, the overuse of antibiotics, and most importantly and worst of all: the super-armour of Mummy and Daddy’s litigation-happy lawyer.

When little Patrick eats a few fistfuls of ants and dirt at school because he didn’t know better, it’s now the teacher’s fault for not keeping a closer eye on him. Back in the day, it would have been the fault of the parents, and even now with Science! we can point to either their genes, his upbringing, or combination of both for the production of this little genetic proto-tard.

Medical science has a lot to answer to for keeping the human genepool green and murky, but I look forward to the day when we return to good old values:

“Yes, I am a Doct--what have we got here! I haven’t seen this before. What? Oh, he did this on purpose? I see. Well, he has to go to the back of the line, while we treat people who have had genuine accidents. Yes, I am serious, now if you’ll excu--Ma’am, stop yelling. Stop yelling. Yes, I see your point, it probably is going to kill him and yes Ma’am, I can see that pencil jammed up his nostril, and yes, it is my medical opinion that it is buried deep in his frontal lobe and probably is scratching the inside of the top of his skull…but Ma’am, here’s the thing -- he put it there. I’m afraid here at Beagle II Hospital we treat accidents first, stupidity last. May I suggest you settle yourself down there with a nice cup of coffee for the wait, and Ma’am, you might like to read this helpful pamphlet on hysterectomies while you’re waiting.”

Darwinism as a system of separating the wheat from the chaff is amazingly good. As George Carlin once put it so eloquently: the kid who swallowed all the marbles does not get to grow up and have children of his own.

I keep thinking back to those kids who nearly immolated themselves on film, emulating a Jackass stunt. It was almost as if they had no concept of fire, what it did and why setting yourself alight may not be the greatest of ideas.

“Say Jimmy, check out how my skin first bubbles, then blackens, then…how would you describe that Jimmy?”

“Why Peter, I would describe that action as your skin sloughing off.”

“Interesting. And this is ‘fire’, you say?”

“Yes, it goes by many names, and fire is merely one of them.”

“It’s pretty.”

“That is is, that it is. Say Peter, are you in any form of pain?”

“Pain, huh? Is that that sensation where something’s happening and no matter what you just want it to stop?”

“I think so. Remember when I swallowed those thumbtacks? I think that was pain then.”

“Then yes, Jimmy, I would consider myself in some pain.”

“Who would have thought?”

“Ooh, look, my arm meat is cooking with gas!”

“Fire, Peter.”

“My fire is cooking with gas!”

“Peter, what say we put that fire out by jumping into the pool.”

“What’s a pool, Jimmy?”

“It’s that watery wobbly thing over there.”

“Let’s do. By the way, is one of your neighbours having a barbeque? I smell steaks.”

I’ve done some amazingly stupid shit in my time, and I mean amazingly mind-bogglingly stupid things, but somehow without medical or parental intervention I pulled through. It’s quite obvious that Darwin (or Jesus, god, God, Allah, Budda, L. Ron Hubbard, and Cthulu) have plans for me as they’ve been keeping me alive all this time, so once I start spreading my clearly evolutionary desirable seed around look out!.

Checkmate, ladies. Checkmate.

2006-06-15T10:50:00.000+08:00

Dellis makes the world better: #2 - Moths

I can’t say it’s such a problem in Singapore, but back in Australia at night you’d always end up with moths flying around the light bulbs, casting ghastly shadows around the room and setting up this tiny orchestra of *tink* *tink* *tink* noises as they futilely bashed their little heads against the light’s bulb.

I always thought that was a silly thing to do considering the white-hot nature of light bulbs, but oh no, not for the stupid moth with its stupid pre-programmed biological imperative to invade my lounge room while I’m trying to watch TV. Stoopid moths.

Years later I read somewhere that moths astronavigate using the moon as a focal point, along the lines of keep the moon to the left and keep going ahead.

This obviously worked wonders for millions of years, that is until the electric light bulb was invented. Now moths have billions of little moons to astronavigate by and it’s truly killed any and all sense of direction the little blighters might have had. This also explains why you see clouds of moths around street lamps at night, and why you see them endlessly circumnavigating single bulbs -- they're keeping the "moon" to the left.

Now, you'd best sit down because here’s the genius part of my plan:

One night, when the moon is full and bright, everyone everywhere turns off all lights, and the moths fly to the moon.

Brilliant, huh?

Now, before you start to argue I’ll have you know that my Science Kung-Fu is strong.

Consider the following:

For millions of years moths never flew to the moon. Why, you might ask? Well, because they never bothered to. Sure some early Neolithic moth tried, and failed, and no moth ever tried again. But since the invention of the electric light (the moth’s moon) it has been shown that moths can indeed reach that celestial goal. They do it all the time when I’m watching TV, and they’ve been doing it for successive generations now.

It’s been inculcated in them by the experience of hitting light bulbs that the moon is attainable.

Now, you and I know that moths will never actually reach the moon, but the moths don’t know that. Of course their little wings can’t get them that far, but I reckon they might be able to get so high up that they’ll just orbit the Earth.

This plan is foolproof and simply cannot fail. In fact the only problem I can foresee is that the Space Shuttles will need windscreen wipers as they orbit through the moth-thickened mesosphere layer.

I’m a genius.

That's the spirit!

2006-06-15T10:31:00.000+08:00

Dellis makes the world better: #1 - Sleep Safe

Was at the pub the other night, and since the World Cup’s on the place is festooned with flags of different nations. We had a hell of a time working out whose flag a certain one was as we’d never seen it before, and were intrigued by the complexity of the design, which included shields, castles and more.

Turns out it was the Portuguese flag (thankyou Blackberry and teh Intarwebs!), which was a far cry from our African-based guesses.

Anyway, to conserve precious wall-space the flags are being hung like banners, which led one friend to remark that in some cases that may actually be illegal, at which point my other friend interjected that in some cities it’s illegal to hang sheets as curtains.

My first thought was, there’s laws against that?!?

Then my flag-defending friend made the very good point that it’s actually a fire hazard, as sheets flare quickly and vertically whereas curtains are by design supposed to be more flame retardant.

I instantly blurted out that if you smoke in bed, why not sleep under curtains instead of sheets, preventing you from burning down your house when you nod off.

That’s right, friend, I just saved your life!

2006-06-06T10:48:00.000+08:00

Singapore's Public Disgrace!
(as originally posted on the Nature Photo Society)

I was doing some macro shooting at the Botanical Gardens this morning when I came across something that truly sickened me. It was a couple, engaged in an act so primal, and in such plain view that …well, I have never been so shocked, horrified and disgusted as I was when my gaze fell upon them.

There were school children about, and yet this randy couple just did not care.

They. Just. Kept. Rutting.

Shamelessly.

Isn’t the Singapore government there to protect our innocent eyes from this corruptible filth?!?

I was so stunned by their shameless and flagrant display of carnal hunger that the only thing I could do was turn my camera on, turn my flash on, position the tripod, set the flash, focus the lens, check the aperture settings, plamp the branch and snap off a few shots. How I managed to repeat this from a different angle I’ll never know.

Anyway, here are the photos. It’s what you came for you dirty perverts!

1) Double-Decker Happiness
300D, T180, 580EX, ISO100, f8, 1.3secs

2) Yeehaw!
300D, T180, 580EX, ISO100, f8, 2.5secs

2006-06-05T21:07:00.000+08:00

When real is too real.

I watched Over the Hedge the other day, and must confess to having rather enjoyed it, but it made me wonder when we’re going to see a proper animation along the lines of Final Fantasy: Spirits of Every Good SciFi Movie Plot. Over the Hedge is chock full of anthropomorphic animals cracking wise, pulling goofy faces and getting into all manner of hijinks. Much like the Toy Story series, Shrek, Chicken Little, Monsters Inc, Antz, Shark Tale, Robots, In the Wild/Madagascar, Bug’s Life, Ice Age and so on. Soon we’ll also have anthropomorphic cars in Cars, and even more animals in Open Season. And if Shrek 1&2 hadn’t raped fairytales enough for you, please don’t fret as the necrophiliac Hoodwinked is coming along to roger what’s left of that corpse. Hooray!

Hoodwinked: We Couldn't Be Bothered With Decent Looking Animation

How good would it be though to have a people-based animation from Dreamworks, Pixar or Disney, but one with realism. Sure Sully was blue and purple, but his fur looked and moved like hair. And shit, it was years ago when Final Fantasy: We Rip Off Plots But It’s Animated So That’s Ok first came out. The Incredibles did a great job, but the animation in that movie was kept unrealistic on purpose. There are no faults in The Incredibles. Move along.

What I would like though is all that awesome rendering power to make a movie that’s animated but with human characters in it. Just for once, you know, to give us a break from cutesy fucking animals and such.

Only, there’s a problem with introducing too much reality into a completely rendered or manufactured person, and it’s called the Uncanny Valley.

While the Uncanny Valley sounds like the nickname some incomplete gender reassignment transvestite from Singapore’s famous clap trap The Orchard Towers gives his vagina, it actually refers to the tipping point where a human-like android with realistic facial expression and movement becomes so real that the figure turns from something that is no longer lovingly anthropomorphic but into something terrifyingly inhuman and ungodly.

This still sounds like the trannies at the Four Floors of Whores, but with the Uncanny Valley the more realistic the creation the greater the repulsion felt. Transgender vagina jokes aside, the Uncanny Valley it seems, is frighteningly deep.

Animated animals are easier to mess about with, as fur overlaid on the model’s skin hides a multitude of sins, much like my hair hides my 666 birthmark. Seriously though, deformation of an animated human model can often stretch the skin texture making for stretched moles or scars. Humans, it seems, are extremely difficult to render properly. And the more proper they are rendered, the more improper our reaction to them becomes.

Which is really sad, because shows like Battlestar Galactica have shown me a possible and glorious future, filled with sex-bots. Or something.

The future

2006-05-17T16:10:00.000+08:00

Cyanide & Happiness @ Explosm.net

2006-05-06T14:11:00.000+08:00

Brush up on your Q'uran, you're gonna need it.

Dan Simmons, novelist extraodinaire has eschewed his typical monthly 'Message from Dan' and has instead delivered a fantastic piece of writing for April 06. It's chilling, frightening, and I hope to god in no way prophetic.

In the piece, Dan gets a visit from a stranger with news from the not so distant future:

I tried to relax. “What do you want to talk about?” I said.

“The Century War,” said the Time Traveler.

I blinked and tried to remember some history. “You mean the Hundred Year War? Fifteenth Century? Fourteenth? Sometime around there. Between . . . France and England? Henry V? Kenneth Branagh? Or was it . . .”

“I mean the Century War with Islam,” interrupted the Time Traveler. “Your future. Everyone’s.” He was no longer smiling. Without asking, or offering to pour me any, he stood, refilled his Scotch glass, and sat again. He said, “It was important to me to come back to this time early on in the struggle. Even if only to remind myself of how unspeakably blind you all were.”

“You mean the War on Terrorism,” I said.

“I mean the Long War with Islam,” he said. “The Century War. And it’s not over yet where I come from. Not close to being over.”

It's well worth reading, so I'm going to link to it again. And maybe once more.

He is also the author that has inspired me most, particularly as he seems to get nominated for and win awards for his genre-hopping bibliography. (Check the link here -- especially for the awards -- wow). Horror, sci-fi, fiction, noir, spy thriller -- it's all great stuff. Good jumping off points would be the Hyperion/Endymion series (sci-fi), Carrion Comfort (horror) and The Crook Factory (spy thriller based around Hemmingway)

2006-05-03T16:18:00.000+08:00

When there's no more room in hell, the dead shall head to the Sydney Opera House

Makes me proud to be an Aussie! I believe this has to be the greatest flashmob in Sydney so far, where around forty zombies appeared at Town Hall, then lurched down to the Opera House. There's some great shots of this on Flickr.

Bring on more Zombie Lurches!

2006-04-25T13:34:00.000+08:00

I’m not a happy little Vegemite

There was an advertising campaign in the early nineties that revived the whole black-and-white “I’m a happy little Vegemite” campaign from the ‘60’s, and it was updated in colour and yet still filled with footage of kids of all ages engaging in the sort of strenuous activity that preoccupies children: jumping on a trampoline, popping balloons, running through a sprinkler on the lawn, etc.

It was all good wholesome stuff, and nostalgic for many.

What used to jar me out of reality was the final image of a chubby, happy baby sitting in a high-chair, with Vegemite smeared over his mouth and face, and globs of it clinging to his fat little chipolata-like baby fingers. This kid had obviously been shoving fistfuls of Vegemite into his toothless craw like it was chocolate sauce, and was going giddy with the salty insanity of it all.

I remember first seeing this, and being shocked out of my fucking mind.

Much like when a bright light is suddenly shone in your eyes and it takes a while for the afterimage to fade, so too did my mind flare out to whiteness when I beheld this hell-spawn. It was a least a minute before any thoughts started trickling in through the phosphor fog, which is a good thing, because in that space I’m pretty sure I’d forgotten how to make my heart beat.

Actual child-beast from ad not pictured

Subsequent screenings were viewed with a mixture of awe and revulsion, with a smattering of scientist’s curiosity. What manner of hellish chimera was this child? Was it even human? And if not, what hideously demonic womb issued forth this gibbering salt-fiend?

The most frightening thought of all, was what happens when chubbo’s fingers scrabble at the last smears of Vegemite in the jar and there’s no more left in the house? I’m thinking the terrible Mephistophelian poltergeist fury unleashed would make even Damien shit his pants. Twice.

What has brought this anti-Cupid back from suppressed memory is that recently I have been indulging in some Vegemite and cheese sandwiches -- a bit of Australian culinary culture that reminds me of home. It’s also bloody tasty, and even though I’m a good cook I can whip one or two of these bad boys up in a minute.

Here’s your recipe guide:

Ingredients

Two slices of bread
One slice of cheese
Vegemite
Butter/Margarine (optional)

Instructions

1. Lay out both slices of bread.
2. Optional step: spread butter or margarine on the bread.
3. Place the cheese on one of the slices.
4. Using a butter knife, smear a thin coating of Vegemite across the cheese.
5. Place other slice of bread on top of cheese

Congratulations! You have now formed what the scientific community calls a “sandwich”.

Girls eating sandwiches can be hot

I have been hand-crafting these wonders for years, and when it comes to the ol’ Vegemite and cheese sangers I am Jamie-fucking-Oliver (only with 100% less twunt).

All of which is a concern, as recently instead of step 4 being the creation of a uniform veneer of Vegemite across the unsullied cheese, I’ve become more like Pro Hart or Rolf Harris, in that I dip my knife into the jar like it’s a bucket of paint and I liberally smoosh huge chunks of the vegetable tar onto the cheese. Uniformity is out the window, and it’s not uncommon for me these days to bite into a section of sandwich to find a huge bolus of Vegemite there.

Most damning is that sometimes I eschew the cheese as a foundation for the Vegemite and attack the bread itself.

Maybe I’ve lost what it is to be Australian, or maybe my diet over here doesn’t include enough salt -- but I do know that I’ve been voraciously attacking these sangers with the gusto usually left to a cow stampeding toward a fresh salt lick.

The last thing a salt-lick sees

I should probably impose a Vegemite moratorium for a while. Just ban myself from it for now. I know that what’s left in my current jar cannot withstand many more attacks…

…but then again I also know where a ready supply can be had.

You sexy, sexy temptress

2006-04-23T08:56:00.000+08:00

I love you Josè.

You were always an inspiration to me, and the best sister a guy could have. All through your illness, I kept remarking to myself at your incredible strength, determination and humour.

If only I could have a tenth of that I would be a much better man.

I love you.

2006-04-20T14:38:00.000+08:00

The Ebola Man is coming

I'm not entirely sure what brought on my (morbid?) fascination with new and emerging diseases, but the fact that H5N1 is a ticking time bomb, plus stories like this one and the quote "...these are good times for pathogens to be invading the human population", actually give me a tingle of excitement.

I'm not against the human race, nor some tree-hugging powered-by-tofu kind of guy, but in some bizarre way I find this fascinatingly...fascinating. I see it as a whole War of the Worlds kind of thing, where in that scenario these hulking "immeasurably superior" aliens are undone because one of them didn't wash their hands after taking a shit.

Wash your damn hands.

And while human health and medical technology is making immense strides, it's amazing how much money is pumped into research and analysis of the human organism and how many billions are spent each year on health care.

All up, the human body is an incredibly complex series of interlocking systems -- and I suggest you watch House to see how one failing thing can mess it up*.

The human body is intriguing, but with this vast complexity, this intermeshing of mechanisms, it's amazing how something so simple, so basic, and so primordial can stuff things up.

Viruses (virii?) and bacteria are very, very simple things. Hell, viruses aren't even considered a living organism, and the prions that cause Scrapie, bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE), Kuru, Creutzfeldt-Jakob and Variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (vCJD) are actually caused by mutating protein crystals that the body's amino acids cannot break down. You can’t burn them, irradiate them, inoculate against it – once a prion gets in your brain you are stuffed.

Currently as I’m living in Asia, I’m watching the gradual encroachment of H5N1-infected chickens, and the way tiny outbreaks keep popping up around the world I reckon it is only a matter of time before there’s a wide-scale outbreak again. And once H5N1 mutates and becomes easily transmissible, we are going to be fucked...partially.

The WHO estimates 5-150 million dead worldwide. Keep pumping out the Tamiflu, guys.

BTW, there’s a movie coming out this year called Poultrygeist: Attack of the Chicken Zombies. Hopefully when it comes out bird flu is still contained, so it looks like a bad B-grade horror movie, and not a real-life documentary.

We're doing what now?

Singapore at the moment has a freaking massive outbreak of hand, foot andmouth disease in children, and yet the papers aren’t really hyping up the “fucking outbreak, run!” aspect of it, rather they’re keeping the populace calm as usual. So here’s a Singapore foot and mouth Fun Fact: In the last week of March, cases of the potentially fatal disease in children jumped from under 400 cases reported the week before, to 800.

More worrying than H5N1 and foot and mouth, is the fact that I am writing this as one of the first generation born without smallpox vaccination. There’s an entire planetary generation completely susceptible to small pox. Luckily the deadly strains are kept under lock and key, in the States and Russia, although the confessions that Russia had a full program of weaponising strains of smallpox, by the ton, doesn’t exactly ensure the world that all smallpox stores are safe.

So is a global Captain Tripps coming? Who knows, but the not knowing, the encroachment of H5N1, and the rapid emergence of entirely new pathogens keeps things lively…for now.

*I have noticed recently that many House episodes rely on the MRI a little too heavily, with subsequent episodes running along variations of “Run a full MRI!”, “We can’t!”, “Why not?” and so on, with the rest of the episode showing how they get a workaround to stuff the patient in the thing, or how they somehow manage to band together and find some way to diagnose and heal the patient without the MRI. House really should have the MRI in his adjoining office – it would save a lot of limping about and definitely save the producers a lot of money by getting rid of one set location.

2006-04-15T11:29:00.000+08:00

God bless you, Internets!

Please enjoy the following galleries.

(dogs in cars)

(dogs with Mona Lisa)

(dogs in shawls)

(and of course, dogs in bee costumes)

2006-04-14T19:30:00.000+08:00

Screw you, Medical Science! Let 'em all die...

As anyone who has lived through any age can tell you, theirs was the golden age. Ours is an age of boundless innovation in many disciplines: energy, physics, biology, manufacturing, computing and so on. What is possible today was not possible yesterday, and what we only dream that may be possible in ten years may actually only take five to come to fruition.

But it's medical science that's got me worried, and the major breakthroughs that happen every few weeks. See, I'm all for long-life and I'll guess we'll cross the social and economical implications of that soon enough, but what's got me irked is the development of new wonder drugs...wonder drugs, that those arseclown spam-kings think I wouldn't mind getting forty or fifty emails about each day.

I mean, just what in Christing fuck is Cialis?!?

No, no, I don't actually want to know, but I just want the Cialis-spam pain to stop. What about returning to the good old days of spam when it was mainly porn? Sure it still jammed your inbox and was frustrating, but I don't know of anyone who really complained about a glimpse of animated-GIF boobs.

And I figure that since we can't seem to catapult the spammers into the Sun -- no matter how many letters I write to the Queen -- then maybe we need to halt all research and production of new drugs. It just makes sense.

Please Medical Science, give a guy a break!

2006-04-13T17:12:00.000+08:00

One of my formacidic buddy photos used in APC Magazine

(click for larger)

Yep. All that time futzing about with my camera and insects has paid off. The May 2006 issue of Australian Personal Computer has come out with one of my ant macro shots used to *ahem* ball-tinglingly awesome effect.

I've many great macro photos, and am more than happy to discuss deals if anyone want to use these shots.

2006-04-13T16:37:00.000+08:00

In a world without laws, an outlaw runs from the law...

I've recently borrowed a friend's notebook, and have come crawling back to the warm and loving embrace of teh Internets. Ah Internets, how could I leave you so?

While this means I have been engaging in all manner of Internet shenanigans, a large part has been catching up on a few month's worth of movie trailers. I'm a massive movie buff, and I revel in the delights of a well put-together trailer, but unfortunately this is a hard-to-find treat these days.

Every time I see a one-sheet for some amazing pap like Cheaper By The Dozen or Bringing Down the House, I shake my head at the shit that the movie-viewing public wil put up with. Now I don't mind an endless stream of garbage churned out for the teeming masses of mouth-breathers out there -- it gives them something to do between eating sticks of butter or raw cookie dough -- but when lowest common denominator infiltrates what could be potentially good or great movies and makes ok movies, I object.

And nowhere is this more evident than in the humble movie trailer. I consider the late seventies/early eighties, the absolute zenith in movie trailer editing. Back then you'd get a couple choice shots of the movie, some shit sample from the soundtrack, and whole fuckload of exposition about what watching this movie would do to you and your brain. You still wouldn't know a great deal about the movie, but damn you'd want to go to see it.

These days, you're pretty much given the story of the movie in truncated form, including all the fucking spoilers, and then you're expected to see this Cliff's Notes version fleshed out in full?!?

I totally get pissed with the mystery being taken out of movies from the fucking trailers. I blame the American public for this, and since most movies are churned out of Hollywood, and the trailers similarly so, I feel justified in giving a big fuck you to Hollywood, and fuck you to the mouth-breathing American Idol watching dullards who need their information spoon-fed to them.

Movies are about the mystery, and joy of seeing the story unfold. At least for me. Ah stuff it, I've broken an anger-vessel in my brain.

Codacil: While I cannot help but jump on the bandwagon for this, the only movie possible that the trailer cannot tell me anything I do not already know (and that's not a remake) is whatever trailer they come out with for Snakes on a Plane.

2006-01-25T14:12:00.000+08:00

Dreams of whale vomit in my head

Why the hell when I go to the beach, I end up with sand around my nads, but these guys end up with a 14kg lump of whale vomit!

Why can't I find whale vomit?!? I like the beach. I like whales. I've vomited before. I want to be instantly rich too.

2006-01-25T13:11:00.000+08:00

Things I love

The other night I got back home from a late-night beer-fueled meet-up with the lads that went slightly too long, and as I entered my room I realised I'd left the air-con running so instead of a steamy room I entered one with a glorious arctic chill.

I dropped my duds where I was and leapt into bed, slid under some cool, crisp and clean sheets, and was immediately transported back to my childhood. One of the great thrills in life is that second when you jump into bed and the cool sheet settles over you. In summer months or perpetual hot weather like we have in Singapore it's a moment of sheer bliss.

It got me thinking about the other small pleasures in life -- the little things that are just distilled awesome:

It's flipping over a pillow so you can put your head on the cold side.

It's the first mouthful of beer after eight hours of manual labour.

It's putting on a pair of pants/jacket/shorts that you haven't worn in a long time and finding $20 in a pocket.

It's the exact moment the credits roll on a good movie and you think to youself "Fuck me that was great!"

It's the mental pumping of a fist in the air when you go for a job interview and the pay's higher than you expected.

It's the moment that you're rocking along to a song with your headphones on and the world disappears.

It's discovering a new author and falling instantly in love with their wordcraft.

It's a degustation meal at Tetsuya's when each mouthful hits your tongue and dissolves.

It's opening a door to find a puppy or dog about to have a fit from the joy it cannot contain on the other side.

It's the moment you realise you're actually in love.

It's taking a risk and uprooting to move to a new country/city, and the joy that freedom brings.

It's running down the beach into the water and finding it's not as cold as you feared it would be.

It's laying on your back in the grass in the sun, without a worry or a care in the world.

It's sampling a new wine, and the flavours and richness burst through your mouth.

It's the exact moment you crest a steep hill you've laboured up, and see what's on the other side.

It's pausing when you're hiking or jungle trekking alone, and you let the stillness of nature descend around you.

It's finding a new song or passage of music that evokes incredble synaesthesia.

It's getting an unexpected gift that you've actualy desired.

It's leaping off a cliff over water, the instant before gravity claims you.

It's falling alseep, knowing you do not have to get up for anyone.

2006-01-19T03:27:00.000+08:00

The Ultimate Showdown of Ultimate Destiny is, as the kids say these days, completely "awesome". Where can you find a song that's catchy, has a cool animation, and features Godzilla, Batman, Bill and Ted, Chuck Norris, Indiana Jones, Marty McFly, Shaquille, Gandalf, Lo Pan, the Terminator and heaps more icons having an all-in-brawl? On teh intarwebs, that's where.

But then in a cosmic ultimate showdown that only happens once in ... well never ... you stumble across a video of Tony Danza reading "Chuck Norris Facts" to Chuck Norris.

(the video quailty is absolutely dire, and the sound's out, but Tony Danza + Chuck Norris + Chuck Facts = something so awesome that not even ten cloned Jesus could equal)