Friday, April 06, 2001
Just reading the 'E)MAG' in today's Age, and a piece on storage devices starts 'It's all very well downloading tonnes of movie trailers...'
Stop right there. 'Tonnes'? Nobody uses the word 'tonnes' that way. It's 'tons', matey, tons.
Good grief. I grew up with the metric system and wouldn't know a ton from tuppence, but I know my figures of speech. You don't update every phrase just because the official system of measurement changes. What's next?
- I'll bet you a kilogram to a cent...
- He gradually centimetred his way forward...
- God's little green hectare...
- Take your thirty pieces of cupro-nickel, Judas...
- What's the longest word in the English language? Smiles, because there's 1.6 kilometres between the first and the last letter.
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For some unfathomed reason I've been looking back over some old webpages... old, old webpages... pre-this-site webpages... from the days when I used to have time to scan my latest batch of snapshots and post them on a private site for family and friends to look at.
I'll spare you the shots of furniture renovations and gardening, but seeing I was talking about New Zealand the other day, here's a good one from December 1998, when I was flying west over the Southern Alps.
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Since I've been talking about music a little lately, here are a few more album recommendations from the past couple of months:
Mo' Horizons, Come Touch the Sun. Triple J listeners will have heard the upbeat 'Fever 99 Degrees' flogged to death over the summer, but don't stop there: this 1999 acid jazz album from Germany is packed full of fantastic sounds, from an opener that announces 'Many songs have been written... and this is one of them', to a closer that carries you away with softly clacking rhythms.
Ben Folds Five, The Unauthorized Biography of Reinhold Messner. Ben Folds has been one of those artists I've been satisfied to follow on the radio without ever bothering to pick up his albums. This has changed all that. Messner is much more than its lead single, 'Army', good though that is. It's a cohesive and dramatic album that reveals a far greater range than his Randy Newman piano ballads suggest. Probably the best album (as opposed to 'collection of songs') I've heard since Travis's The Man Who.
Combustible Edison, The Impossible World. 1998 outing by one of the better-known 'neo-lounge' bands, this takes the spirit of Esquivel and Arthur Lyman and blends it with the sounds of the minute. Most of the album finds it hard to live up to the smooth opener, 'Utopia', but it's an agreeable listen nevertheless.
Goldfrapp, Felt Mountain. Another 'Utopia' (and another single flogged to death on Triple J) led me to this breathtaking disk, best described as Julee Cruise meets Weimar Germany. Amazing guitar sounds, amazing vocals, and only one duff track ('Oompa Radar', best described as Julee Cruise meets an irritating carnival band).
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Thursday, April 05, 2001
Saw Traffic a few nights ago. Can't really see what all the fuss is about. Drug cartels have a lot of money! Rich white kids take drugs, and even visit the ghettoes to buy them! Some officials are corrupt! It's a big, complex problem, and the whole 'war' metaphor is way too simplistic! Well, yes, that's all true; what's surprising is that this is being treated as news. If Traffic is a wake-up call then we're all Rip Van Winkles.
And I'm sorry, but to give Benicio Del Toro an Oscar for a good, competent performance smacks of tokenism. Wow, he can speak two languages! He must be... the best supporting actor of the year!
My favourite movie of the year to date remains Shadow of the Vampire, which was funny, spooky, touching and beautiful, and featured a knock-out performance by Willem Dafoe, who transcended the hamminess of his role and captured moments of greatness. Imagine, an entire Hollywood movie about movie-making that isn't set in Hollywood: to paraphrase one of the reviews of Traffic, this is Hollywood taking us places we've never been.
And speaking of German film-making, Run Lola Run is absolutely terrific. See it.
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Web-designers: have you entered the 5k yet? Only a few days left!
And don't make my mistake of last year, when I entered a cut-down version of an 'about me' page that I had just written for this site. Of course, I entered it before I knew how big the 5k competition would be, so it got a little embarrassing to have my mini-autobiography up there in such bald terms.
But I still like the idea of describing someone's entire adult life in less than 5120 characters. In hindsight, I should have fictionalised it, or used some famous person instead ('Jesus Christ—Half-Life').
Needless to say, I've done something entirely different this year. As you'll see next week.
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It's a link round-up, pardners: dress your unswingin' prose up McSweeney's style; contemplate Peter Singer's solution to world poverty; read about the pitfalls of preserving the perishable art of the digital age; learn when to break the chain of junk email; and make yourself a bonsai kitten. Yee-ha!
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Wow. Learning the Lessons of Nixon: a great title, and by the looks of it a well-written journal-type blog. (Don't start with this week's entries. Go back to the beginning.)
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Hey, speaking of the SF Tower Outlet, Ev notes that it's closing down. Go forth and purchase, my legions of Bay Area readers! (Actually, I doubt I have any Bay Area readers, but you never know.)
Another tip for my legions of Bay Area readers: take the BART to Glen Park, go outside and look for Viking Subs near the corner. Go in and order a vegetarian sub with Monterey Jack, heated through. Absolutely delicious. Unfortunately they're closed on weekends, so you'll have to be passing by 9-5 weekdays.
Now if I could just figure out a way to get a Viking Subs sub, travel instantaneously across the Pacific for a Penguino's ice cream in Nelson, and travel back in time for a vanilla slice from the late, lamented Pantry in Hobart, my perfect lunch would be within reach.
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Successfully downloaded Netscape Communicator 4.77 for Mac at last. The style-sheet import hack still works, so we can all safely ignore it. Move along, nothing to see here.
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Wednesday, April 04, 2001
Just spent the afternoon in the State Library, as I've been doing a bit in past weeks: getting out of the house does wonders for one's writing tendencies (one finds one actually has a tendency to write when one is confronted with a desk in a quiet cavernous reading room, a notebook, a ballpoint pen, and one).
Some (other) one had left a few travel guidebooks on the desk. One (of the books) was the October 2000 edition of Lonely Planet's guide to New Zealand. On impulse I checked the list of reader contributors in the back. Yes! There amongst a thousand other names were 'Rory & Jane Ewins'. So they did get that letter I wrote them in late '97 after all. I forgot to check whether they mentioned Penguino in Nelson, though. (The best gelati this side of the equator. If you're ever out that way, try their peach flavour.)
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Judging by my CD database (kept purely for insurance purposes, ahem, not out of any anal-obsessive data-collecting tendencies, cough), MCA have only had two decent artists on their books: Tom Petty (who's since jumped ship to Warner, but at least left them with the superlative Into the Great Wide Open) and Semisonic. The latter was one of those great chance discoveries for yours truly: eight bucks in the Tower Outlet in San Francisco in 1999 bought one of my favourite albums of that year, Feeling Strangely Fine, which I must have listened to at least 158 times on my return home. I soon found out that their first album, The Great Divide, wasn't half bad either.
At last there's a third, All About Chemistry. And half-way through this first listen it's sounding strangely fine indeed.
Neil Finn, Semisonic, and a new Ash album coming out in a few weeks. Bliss.
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Owen sees the light at the end of the CSS tunnel.
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Tuesday, April 03, 2001
I should have known: MetaFilter is dissecting the NS4.77 release. Apparently there's precious little difference from previous 4.x releases. Which is enough for me to stop banging my head against a 15 Mb download and just ignore it.
Speaking of banging one's head against 15 Mb downloads: an Age article today on why Australian home users won't be getting broadband anytime soon. Sigh.
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Little Green Footballs has noted that Netscape have, in their infinite wisdom, seen fit to release Communicator 4.77 for Mac, not as part of their bizarre habit of non-sequential version numbering, but as part of an even more bizarre policy, it seems, of keeping two parallel streams of browser development going even after their standards-compliant version has launched. It was released on April 2, so we can't write it off as an April Fool's joke.
And it seems that this isn't just a download-15-meg-to-get-updated-security-certificates job, either. One user at VersionTracker comments that:
Netscape 4.77 is definitely an improvement over previous versions of Netscape 4.x.x. Many cosmetic web display issues were fixed, such as issues with certain types of style sheets and the tiling of images as table backgrounds. Those using Netscape 4.76 and below should definitely download this update.
'Issues with certain types of style sheets'? Will this mean that the style-sheet import hack won't work? God help us. (I've yet to confirm this; still downloading it.)
Netscape's own site still links to 4.76 as the latest Communicator for Mac, but the FTP address is definitely theirs, so it looks like this is for real. Seems that old browsers, like soldiers, never die.
Meanwhile, some of us bravely struggle with the new ones.
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Now that I've been back in the personal-blogging game for a week, I suppose I should tell you a bit more about what the personal is up to. I will, I promise. I've just got a few more things to sort out first...
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Shauny points out that driving naked is not a crime in Victoria. Seems like the Victorian Parliament never got around to considering the implications for law and order of leaving nude-driving un-banned (along with eating cardboard, balancing dolphins on your nose and thwacking premiers with custard pies). It makes some sort of sense, though: the space inside your car is private, so you can be just as naked there as you wish.
As my flatmate Steve has pointed out, it's also the perfect defence against being asked by the police to 'step out of the vehicle'. That would be entrapment.
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There are any number of things you can do with a personal site. You can write a weblog. You can post fan fiction. You can try out your design skills. You can display flashing gifs of bungy-jumping baby elephants. (I haven't seen any like that, but I'd like to.)
Or you can post pictures of Toyota Crowns taken around the streets of Adelaide.
Bryan is interested in 'most cars regardless of origin or mechanicals if they are stylistically interesting'. A shame he's not interested in image-resizing, because these pages take forever to download, but some of them are worth the wait—like the one with the photos 'taken hurriedly as the occupants were preparing to depart!'
Indeed, Bryan seems to be the Crown-stalking equivalent of Allen Funt, as Crown owner after Crown owner is caught on his candid digital camera. So dedicated is he in his pursuit of this automotive legend that he has even travelled to Malaysia to pick up a shot of a recent model.
As long as Bryan's on the case, the good citizens of Adelaide can rest assured that no Crown will go unturned. Bryan, I salute you. [Via my bro-in-law Toby, who is in the market for a Toyota Crown himself.]
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Monday, April 02, 2001
Well, my personal Melbourne Comedy Festival has started with a bang, with two shows on Saturday night and three more booked for next Saturday. We're planning to see others over the next few weeks as finances permit.
Ross Noble (UK) was an excellent improvisational comedian whose mind latched onto the strangest ideas and just ran with them. Whales catapulting across car-parks, Bon Jovi in a pony costume stealing cushions from cars, imaginary banjo-playing, a plan to set fire to a small child at the end of the show, and a wonderful way of handling late-comers. Good stuff.
Adam Hills (Aus) had some good jokes about being Aussie and about English reserve ('I'm so angry I could redecorate!'), but spent a little too long labouring the explanation for his show's title—'Go You Big Red Fire Engine'—and talking about what had happened at previous gigs. But he did have some of the funniest audience participation I've ever seen, featuring the 'half-cut' Shane. On the whole, good, but not quite as mind-blowing as hamsters dressed as whippets chasing sunflower seeds dressed as rabbits (Noble, again).
Next week: the Boosh (UK), Peter Helliar (Aus) and Greg Fleet (Aus). I love the Comedy Festival.
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However, I can't guarantee that I won't play more April Fool's Day jokes in the future. I've got to keep up with Jane somehow.
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You cannot know how relieved I am that April Fool's Day is over.
Why? Because I played a practical joke that backfired enormously when it seemed that someone had taken it at face value... until I learned (to my great relief) that they were turning the tables on me. For a while there I thought I had single-handedly destroyed a thing of great beauty...
Kids, take it from me: don't spoof emails.
In less nerve-racking news, I also played around with this log yesterday, as those of you who dropped by will have noticed. If you missed it, have a look here.
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©2001 Rory Ewins