California Dreamer + Animal in Your Care

Hmm. I seem to have lost my mobile phone. It's gotta be somewhere in here. I'd call it but I don't know its number, and I leave it on silent.

Yes, I'm procrastinating making my bed

Monsters. I've been thinking a lot about monsters lately, probably spurred on by things Een's said recently. A lot of modern takes on monster stories add in a social level to the monsterous existence, an obvious example being the vampires in the Anne Rice books. Not only only do the vampires have a society to prey on, but their own in group to fight with and seek refuge of a sort within.

The most extreme examples are of course in the roleplaying games set in the World of Darkness, where it does make sense for 'monsters' to be social, seeing as how the game is supposed to be a social experience. But the idea has done over and over. I can't really be bothered enumerating more examples because anyone who cares knows what I'm talking about.

The problem with this it seems to contradict my idea of what a 'monster' is. Grendel only had his mother. Frankstein's Monster only had his even more monsterous creator. But I suppose if you want to look at it that way then the monster was Frankenstein and all he had was his creation. But that's babbling and I've got a bed to make.

So yeah, I can see why it's done, but I'd like to see more modern examples of where it isn't. Stuff like Dog Soldiers, where the werewolves are werewolves, and not people dressed up in dog skins.

Sitting up late reading about carnivorous and protocarnivorous plants and resisting putting my bedding back together. I should put some music on now and go do that. Not too loud though because it's late.

• So Primo Ministerio Rudd thinks the 'Bloody Hell' tourism campaign was a 'rolled gold disaster'. Without bothering to figure out what the hell that means, I'm betting that if we'd had a tourism campaign featuring two beautiful people having sex on a beach with fireworks in the background and a big slogan saying 'COME TO AUSTRALIA, YOU'LL GET FUCKED' we'd show the same tourism losses. Sometimes no matter how much money you throw at marketing, if the targeted consumers can't afford the product you're not gunna get a favourable result. Besides, if the fucken idiots can't abide the words 'bloody hell', we don't want the cunts here anyway!
• Car prices are going up. Something that's always mystified me is the amount of new cars on the road. Surely people have better things to spend money on. I'll admit it does make me giggle when a truck of crushed cars goes by when I'm on the tram. It makes me wonder just who'll buy these flat cars, and what kind of obstacles require the thinnest transport possible
• Speaking of cars, the places in Victoria where road funding is of the most import are receiving the least. If the contract holders for public transport in Melbourne think it's expensive and difficult to run a service here, imagine trying to extend that to the 19,000 kilometres of spiderweb that covers the rest of the state.
• In a shocking display of clear thinking, the Melbourne City Council has withdrawn its support for a tunnel linking the eastern and western suburbs. While I'd like to think it's the start of the end for the road link, they've probably been successfully lobbied by someone wanting to build a glittering new bridge instead, taller than all the buildings in the city, spanning the business district and finally giving Melbourne an icon of its own.

• Rio Tinto has gotten itself an 85% increase in the price of iron ore being shipped to Chinese steel mills. That's fucking ridiculous. At what point did they say 'we're not getting enough for our product' and at what point will they say 'That last increase wasn't enough'? I mean I don't understand the iron market obviously but someone's arse has got to be bitten by this. Why do I have the feeling it'll be everyone who doesn't own parts of iron mines?
• I know it has some historical significance, but can we drop the term 'fuzzy wuzzy angel'? Their recognition is important, but how about their goddamn dignity? Isn't the word 'veteran' good enough?
• Some guy wants polygamy legalised in Australia because of something to do with some book and some god or something or other. Good luck with that. Honestly though if you're crazy enough to want to get married to more than one person go for your bloody life. Make sure that everyone you meet, the first thing you tell them is how many wives you have just so they know how crazy a motherfucker you are.
• Not only were the comments of a McCain adviser inappropriate, but now if an attack does occur McCain is gonna have to put up with so much conspiracy bullshit it's gunna make it seem like he's already in government.

• So the US Department of the Interior lists Polar Bears as a 'Vulnerable Species'. Then the Fisheries and Wildlife Service turns around and gives seven oil companies permits to 'disturb' populations of bears and walruses in Alaska. I dunno, seems like they're going the wrong way about this. Polar bears and walruses are essentially oil, really. They're made of the same stuff that constitutes oil, just in giant toothy packages. The oil companies should investigate the possibility of using these animals as a fuel source. Because fuel is the most important thing in the world.
• It's interesting the range of views given in this piece on graffiti being considered for heritage protection. I agree with the guy who says it contradicts the spirit of this sort of art, and I think the guy who says this represents society's decline is funny as hell and should become a professional comedian.
• I guess the ban on lasers isn't working. We'll have to initiate a nationwide campaign of total information awareness, introduce new laws that allow police to search people without provocation or legitimate suspicion, to combat this scourge on our society.
• And a report into the Northern Territory Indigenous Intervention has found the best way to defeat poverty is with jobs and health care. There you go.

Please bury me with it

• The Corby wasn't set up by baggage handlers, in fact the whole thing was made up by her lawyer after he heard some random speculation on TripleJ. Which makes me wonder at the effects of ubiquitous blogging.
• Okay. The Opposition has stated that when the Energy Minister, Martin Ferguson, meets with the 'energy powers' in Saudi Arabia at an emergency meeting he'll be unlikely to achieve much. The statement then went on to beat the unliving shit out a dead horse, mumbling something about the petrol excise. But honestly, I'm sure the Coalition is more interested in appearing lively than reducing any tax dollars they might inherit.
• I guess when you're largely symbolic, then symbolic gestures mean everything. The Anglican Church in BRISBANE has voted to automatically defrock priests found fucking children. They've voted to expel priests found guilty of sex offenses by earthly courts. The judgment of God isn't enough, we've got to remove the terrestrial powers of these people in BRISBANE. Why don't we stop misleading people ABOUT THE FUCKING AFTERLIFE WHILE WE'RE AT IT?! Stand up, say 'Fuck... we made it all up' and end the spiritual abuse of generations. Of course, that would cost MONEY. OATES SMASH. RAAAAAAAR.
• Rar rar rar, more bullshit about petrol prices, there's an independent senator unhappy with FuelWatch and he's going to vote against it once he gains his senate seat in July. Great. If FuelWatch gets stymied one of the major media outlets should take up its mantle and do the goddamn thing themselves. It's easy money for a newspaper.
• Australian troops are no longer in Iraq, prompting the Iraqi peoples to wonder where all the people with bad English accents went. Note this is only combat involvement, which means we'll still be involved in training and infrastructure, so probably there's some poor Iraqi somewhere being told to 'move the bloody pipe or the bloody shitter's gunna fuck ya street'. Or something like that, I dunno, I make all this shit up.
• Okay this is pretty awesome. The Scottish city of Dundee is going to start paying people to stop smoking. It's going to attract cheats, fair enough. But honestly, twenty five bucks a week is a lot less than it costs the public health service to treat smoking related illness. And people fucking stink less. And they're less obnoxious about their right to stink in public. Good job, Dundee.

The Wizard Knight

The Gene Wolfe book is really enjoyable. I love 'fairy tale logic', where the protagonist succeeds by knowing exactly when to be polite and humble, when to be bold, when to lie and when to tell the truth. This is full of that kind of stuff, especially in the beginning when Able is telling everyone he's a knight.

Like everything Gene Wolfe has written, there's layers of cleverness to puzzle through, which is funny because the setting is a divided world, similar to Yggdrasil. He's done his usual tricks: unusual words as clues, having the story related by a narrator that may be lying and has memory problems, stories within stories and revelations about plot twists hundreds of pages before they occur.

The stories within stories is probably my favourite of his devices. It was really effective in Peace and the Book of the New Sun, but he's used it sparingly here. At one point Sir Able of the High Heart, sometimes called 'The Green Knight' loses a duel and tells the winner about how he once challenged a knight to decapitate him and lost that as well. The other knight says it's a preposterous story, but since it's Able we can't be sure. What I do know is it's ripped straight from a Middle English romance called 'Sir Gawain and the Green Knight'. What's cool is the story both illustrates what's happening and alludes to one of the purposes of the book: the romance has been translated JRR Tolkien.

There's a little too much pondering the metaphysics of the created universe, especially when Able is trying to explain why he's done something, or why he can't do something. That's getting on my nerves a little. But apart from that absolutely loving this.

Kissing the Beehive

Cough cough

cough cough cough cough cough cough cough cough cough cough cough cough cough cough cough cough cough cough cough cough coff coff coff.

Wolves

Today is an awesome day of awesome wolves. I got outta bed at around midday, which is usual, and found one of the books I'd ordered had arrived. I'm done with Iain Banks for now and I've decided to get one of Gene Wolfe's new books. All of the stuff I've read by him is at least 20 years old, so felt I needed to read something more recent by him. I've read four chapters so far and Wizard Knight is proving better than the Book of the New Sun. I read it on the way to work and on the way home and I'm excited to go read some more once I'm done with this. Secondly the new Wolf Parade album is finally out and I'm listening to it right now. After the eighteen month wait I'm willing to give it a few listens before declaring a verdict, but goddamn I have a new Wolf Parade CD. There doesn't seem to be an 'I'll Believe in Anything' but honestly I wasn't expecting one. I'm sure I'll locate a favourite song once I've listened a few times.

• This is fish in a bucket, but why does it seem like Bush's last major act in office will be ensuring conflict with Iran? If Obama does win a war with Iran would make it very difficult to gain a second term, and it wouldn't be the first time a Republican president had used Iran as political tool.
• Today the Federal Opposition declared the Government's 'Work Standards' will increase business costs in a statement prepared long before the work standards were released. The Government replied 'No they won't' to which the Opposition declared 'Yes they will'.
• So private schools get two billions dollars a year more government funding than public schools. That can't be right. I must be reading that wrong. If it's true that's absolutely fucking bonkers.
• Measures that will cause an ease in the cost of housing will cause an escalation in the cost of housing.

So at work today we rolled out the prize centrepiece of our new promotion: free syrup and extra shot Monday. Anyone who ordered their coffee with syrup or an extra shot of espresso got it free. It's like that every Monday until the end of next month (I think?) We've got signs up everywhere, there's internal emails flying about predicting a huge upsurge of business and crap from our district manager wanting precise numbers on how it was going. I dunno why she wanted that. She has no way of affecting the customer reaction to the promotion because NO ONE FUCKING CARED. Thassright, no one gave half a toss. Every fucking customer that came in I'm all 'oh and today we've got free blah blah blah' and they would just stop for a few seconds while they absorbed and discarded the information and ordered what they always have.

The problem has its roots in the 'do you want fries with that' attitude of fast food joints. Customers are so used to hearing shit like that they are completely uninfluenced by it. Sure when people started doing it, it showed success, but the idea is saturated now. We're supposed to 'suggest' a food item and a customiser to every single drink we sell and the only people who go for it are hicks just in from Bumfuck, Western Victoria. So when they hear us offer free shit they automatically think 'oh these fuckers are just trying to sell me something I don't want' and say no. Which is fair enough. When people try that crap on me at McDonalds or whatever I usually shout 'JUST GIVE ME WHAT I FUCKING ASKED FOR' and start throwing straws at them.

• A study has found that no one behaves normally in 'cyberspace'. 'Cyberspace'. That's the space where 'cybersex' happens. No one outside the media or academia has used the prefix 'cyber' to apply to anything else in at least five years. Also typing 'cyber' more than a few times in a paragraph makes it look ridiculous. Cyber cyber cyber. Syba. The team told New Scientist that it hopes their findings will 'inspire better models of online behavior' and 'improve network security'. What they forgot to mention was the major application of the data modeling: attracting fatarsed advertising dollars.
• The G8's worried oil prices may stunt growth, meanwhile back at home the Reserve Bank is happy oil prices are stunting growth. For a while OPEC and oil speculators will be the bad guys.
• A dude in Sydney lost 217 cannabis plants and his freedom when he didn't invest in enough Glade and incense.
• Apparently the scent of coffee alone can help to get you up and moving. It does this by activating genes that otherwise might be slacking off and not performing their needed functions properly. The team hopes to identify the specific molecules that trigger the gene expression so they can be duplicated suggest 'pumping them into factories to help revive tired workers who can't sip coffee while operating machinery'. The next project for the team will be to discover genes that allow human beings to be curious and imaginative. They estimate a serious improvement in factory efficiency once these are removed from the worker castes.

Been to sick to care about the news lately so I haven't been caring about the news. Maybe something later tonight. What I've mainly been up to is reading Iain Banks and playing S.T.A.L.K.E.R. Which I'll just call 'Stalker' because the full name is dumb to write.

The Iain Banks book is called Use of Weapons and it's the last of his Culture books I've yet to read. I've really got no idea what's going on in this one, but that's usually how it goes in his stuff. He loves him his macguffins.

And I've been playing Stalker. It's really fucken hard. There was a point where I was swearing and vowing to never play again, but I picked it up again and it's been kind of rewarding. It's not strictly a 'post apocalyptic' game, since the rest of the world is carrying on regardless outside Chernobyl's zone of alienation. But this is really how I would like to see Fallout 3 done, not like the hokey-jokey nonsense Bethesda seems to be lining up for the series.

The setting is really bleak. Most people you meet are vicious fortune hunters, the people you fight are there to kill for sport or gain. A lot of the monsters were once human but now something else. There's one group of mutants called 'snorks'. They crawl along the ground on their hands and feet, snuffling at the ground with the hoses from the respirators that didn't save them from their fate.

The game was made in Ukraine and to save money they haven't translated everything, which makes sense, and increases the feeling of alienation when you wander into a camp of fellow stalkers and one of them turns to you and starts muttering in Russian. I'm really enjoying playing it.

And that's that

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Guess what I want

I want them thin and crispy with sugar sprinkled on top and lemon juiced squeezed over them.

So I'm at home alone. Cat's in 'Laide and Nik's not working so he's staying with Joli. So it's just me and Smokey. Thing is lately I've been sleeping with earplugs in because little princess loves to run around and complain and scratch at doors after I'm in bed. But now since I'm on my own I'm feeling a little anxious about putting them in. Not for any sensible reason: any situation that'd be bad with them in now would turn out exactly the same if the other guys were here. I wish the part of my brain that was smart was the same part of my brain that was sensible.

• So of course Bill Henson's not a pornographer, not obscene. The photo the police seized has been deemed 'mild', which is fair enough. It's not like the guy's Mapplethorpe. If anything, this whole situation should be viewed as a piece of unintentional performance art, questioning our society's obsession with the body, sexuality and 'the other'. Which in far more interesting than anything Henson seems able to come up with.
• This week Kevin Rudd unveiled his plan for replacing our diminishing workforce with labour imported from Indonesia. I mean, his plan does include all of the Asia-Pacific region, but he's probably just shooting for the high mark in the hope of hitting somewhere lower. Okay, that's cynical even for me. But the idea does remind me a lot of 1984, with the world divided into three competing blocs. If he does somehow, miraculously, succeed I would love to afterwards interview John Howard and ask him to compare his legacy with that of his successor. 'So your proudest moment is introducing the GST. Rudd managed to unite a third of the world and plunged us into unending war. How does that make you feel?'
• I'm not a millionaire. I suspect you actually have to enter these things to win them.
• This is a bit weird: a guy in St Kilda got anaesthetised then mugged. Just hope this doesn't turn into a serial thing. It does remind me a little of a guy back in Portland, though. Claimed he got attacked in an alley on Julia Street by two guys, fended them off but they got away with all his money. The local paper praised his courage and he claimed to have found strength in his love of the character Batman. The local paper also printed his restatement of the facts and that he'd lost the money gambling. Not saying that's the case this time, Occam's razor isn't always accurate.
• Clinton II claims she's not looking to be Obamaman's running mate. I'm not really sure the Democratic Party is ballsy or crazy enough to be running with both a woman and a black man on the ticket. Her advice has probably been something about not wanting to alienate too many people. Which is crazy but that's politics. I bet she bows out with a strong endorsement for the Obamaman, then he gets someone white, male and inoffensive as his vice presidential candidate.

• Five joints of pot a day gives you brain damage. I'm guessing the reason this has gone unnoticed for so long is that no one who smokes that much actually cares, and no one who knows them can actually tell.
• It's finally over. The Obamaman will be fighting the Bomberman to be king of the world. Mark it in your calendars for November. In case you, you know, forget and no one tells you between now and then.
• So Australia won't let aid money sent overseas be used for abortions. Of course this should change. I don't get why people would think procedures like this are performed out of frivolity. How can we expect to be represented by people who hold weird, selfish ideas like that?
• I want to be mad about the cost of World Youth Day, I really do. It's a religious festival that's costing tax money. At the same time it's tourism and promotion for Sydney, benefits that are long lasting and can't really be measured. It would have been nice if the famously rich Catholic Church footed a bit more of the bill, though.

I'm working on a novel about multidimensional unicellular entities that come to earth and assume it has been completely exploited by colonies of 'flat' single-cell creatures that communicate with each other using chemical signals. It'll be a horror movie told from the perspective of the entities as they try to fight off the attempts of the locals to consume them and use them to create more monster-cells. I haven't thought of a name yet.

It's not a work day, ante meridian, and I'm up and active. What the fuck? I have things to do, but not this badly. I made some coffee, ate some food, but I really just want to go back to bed. Yawn yawn yawn.

It's a damned clear sign that you've got a media addiction, that you use the internet too much, when you've gotta have a book nearby to read when whatever is on tv becomes boring for a few moments. Goddamn I hate ads.

• So a bag of money was found in a Perth front yard and turned in to police. My first thought was they should have kept it. My second thought was of how bloody scary Javier Bardem is. They did the right thing.
• More crap on petrol prices, a reminder that rising fuel costs are an example of a feedback loop. Although it costs so much for petrol in remote areas because it has to be transported there, it's not a phenomenon restricted to fringe populations. Oil always has to be first gotten out of the ground then transported, both processes which use oil derived products. So any rise in the price of oil therefore causes a rise in the price of oil. I doubt it's gonna quickly become catastrophic but it makes the idea of lower oil prices seem far fetched.
• People in space are allowed to poop again.
• The Democratic primaries are finally coming to a close. Meanwhile Hillary Clinton's running-mate is claiming Hillary's campaign's failure is the fault of the media. Sure, the media has seemed to favour Obama, but Bill's naivety is surprising considering his experience. Maybe he's confused about the actual purpose of the media and thinks they're just supposed to talk about what he does with his dick. All I know is that if Hillary questions Obama's experience and age much more, Teddy Roosevelt will travel through time and knock her out with the Nobel Peace prize he received while President, Barack Obama's age and over a decade younger than she is.

Sitting up late: sleeping in late.

Goddamnit

It annoys me when I've seen music videos and I can't find them online. This is the audio, but not the video the ABC has. They've got one where there's no camp silliness, the visuals are all in black and white and it looks like it's done in a studio. And it's not compressed to hell. Seriously. RAGE needs to let me program one night.

Find more videos like this on www.truveo.com.