Saturday, April 21, 2001
I'm a big fan of the Adrian Mole books. Adrian is almost exactly my age, and his first 'secret diaries' came out just after I'd started my own. The first two were perfect encapsulations of the young nerd's life. Although they haven't been as phenomenally successful, I've found the later ones just as good. Even though Adrian has become less of an everyman by accruing his own particular experiences (as opposed to the general school experiences we all share), Sue Townsend has charted brilliantly the drift into domesticity that occurs over one's twenties and thirties.
All of which is a prologue to my sudden thought that the next Adrian Mole book shouldn't be a book at all. It should be a weblog.
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This one's for my own future reference, seeing that newspaper archives always get buried in impenetrable URLs: The Age's reviews and previews of The Boosh, Tripod, Dave Gorman, Greg Fleet and Ross Noble (cf. my reviews over recent weeks).
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This Planet Earth: new zoom-in and time-lapse satellite images from NASA. I've only looked at the San Francisco zoom-in and the Aral Sea time-lapse so far, but they all look worthwhile. [Via lgf.]
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Thursday, April 19, 2001
Rescue Tenure From the Tyranny of the Monograph is a fair critique of the growing trend in the humanities to publish at all costs, perhaps even more applicable in Australia.
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The excellent [electrotone] web design guide is more than just an HTML how-to. And its author's 2000 5K entry, 5k haikus, is amazing. [Via Sylloge.]
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Wednesday, April 18, 2001
I was just thinking this morning, in that half-awake state when all the best insights occur: wouldn't you feel pissed off if you had a whole country named after you, like British colonialist Cecil Rhodes did, and then nobody even pronounced it properly?
'I hereby name this country Rhodes-ia, after—myself!'
'Hey. Ro-DEE-zhia. Like it.'
'Rhodes-ia! It's Rhodes-ia!'
'Good one, Cee-cil.'
And then a century later they change the name and make the same mistake all over again. Colonel Zimba Bwe must be feeling mighty annoyed.
(Hmmm: 'I hereby name this country Rorysia.' 'Hey. Ro-REE-zhia. Like it.' 'Noooohhhhh!')
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A friend pointed out last week, after I hit him with a spectacular dose of my current state of indecision about Everything, that I was suffering from writer's block. Leaving aside the fact that for someone suffering from writer's block I sure have written a lot lately, I could see that he was right. Actually, that's only the half of it. I've been suffering from living block.
I'd kind of hoped that restarting this 'personal' log would kickstart me out of this state I've got myself into, but whenever I feel myself about to post something personal I back away, not wanting to tell only part of the story but not knowing how to tell the whole story. Instead I've been going over everything in conversations and in my head and gradually building a new plan for living, a new contract with myself and those closest to me, out of the ashes of the old one of the past few years.
You could call it a mid-life crisis, but you'd be wrong. For one thing, I don't intend to drop dead at 66. For another, because of the delayed onset of Career brought about by an extended dose of higher education I still feel I'm at the beginning, and that the choices I make now will shape the next ten years of my life. I guess that feeling becomes stronger when you can look back at more than a decade of adult life and chart your personal journey: you start to see the forks and branches more clearly, the decisions made and unmade that led inexorably in a particular direction and closed off others.
For the past year I've been at one fork after another, and just as I act decisively on one of them three more take its place. It's been exciting, but it's also been increasingly exasperating. A few months ago part of me seemed to seize up like a computer in an old B-movie—'does... not... compute'—and I unconciously started focussing on smaller things, leaving the big decisions to one side while I waited to see how external events, like the collapsing web industry, played out.
But as the saying goes, not making a decision is itself a decision. It's time to move on, and to get some certainty about the future back into our lives. So: the decisions are finally being made, the distractions are being eliminated, and sooner or later I'll be able to stop being so quiet and cryptic about it all here.
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On Sunday Jane and I scored some free tickets to the Raw Comedy Grand Final. Over five hundred competitors had been culled to fifteen through a series of state-based heats, winning the right to parade onstage in the cavernous Town Hall and suffer stage-fright to end all stage-fright.
A few years ago I tried to do the same, once in Hobart and once in Canberra. Needless to say, I didn't get through to the finals and/or win, or else you wouldn't be reading this—you'd be reading a three-page GeoCities fan-site for Rory Ewins, professional stand-up comedian.
Actually, not all of the past winners have gone on to comic greatness. Last year's winner, Drew Rokos, has a show in this year's Comedy Festival, as does a previous finalist, Sarah Kendall. Chris Franklin had a hit with '(I'm a) Bloke' a couple of years after he won Raw Comedy with it. And then there's Australia's favourite maths-babbling DJ, Adam Spencer, and Anh Do, two more previous finalists. Who else? None that I've noticed.
So Raw Comedy isn't quite the ticket to automatic stardom that it's made out to be: as in any field of endeavour, the promise and potential revealed by those few minutes onstage have to be accompanied by a hefty dose of drive and determination for them to lead anywhere.
Whether this year's finalists have that drive, only the butts of their merciless schoolyard taunts can say. But most of them had what it took to keep a large audience laughing, and showed the potential for greater things. Particularly noteworthy were Michael Chamberlin, Ross Janetzki, Penny Tangey and Yianni Agisilaou, although the last flew dangerously close to the wind by suggesting that anyone could write a Fawlty Towers script in ten minutes: mock Scooby Doo if you must, but mock not the high priest of sitcom scriptwriting, ye mortal!
The most natural and comfortable performer was the one who won, Emily O'Loughlin of Adelaide, and on that basis she certainly deserved the prize, but I wondered whether her 'fat and proud of it' humour showed the same potential for future development as, say, Michael Chamberlin's fast and physical free-associating on the different jobs he was considering applying for. Which is only to say that it's bloody hard to pick a single winner out of fifteen.
It wasn't all polish and professionalism, though; the final also had moments when you felt like you were watching a car-crash in slow motion, as a couple of performers faltered at the sight of thousands of people and several TV cameras. That sort of crowd is a whole different proposition to a state heat in a Sydney pub, and that sort of pressure must be scary indeed. It's hard enough performing stand-up in front of fifty people, let alone a thousand; at the best of times it's a naked bungy jump of the soul, with everyone watching. So in my eyes they were all winners, even if the laughs weren't always there.
Which leads to the final show we've seen (last night) at the 2001 Melbourne Comedy Festival: Are You Dave Gorman?
This was, without question, the funniest show I've seen at the Festival this year. The premise is simple: English comedian Dave Gorman embarks on an obsessive quest to meet as many other people called Dave Gorman as he can. The delivery is something else again: this is the only comedy show I've seen that uses slides, overhead projectors and graphs—certainly to such hilarious effect; and, conversely, is the only slides-and-overheads-based presentation I've seen that was in any way funny, let alone this funny.
With this show Gorman has said something definitive about the trainspotter in us all. When he asked at the end if there was a Dave Gorman in the audience tonight, every one of us was hoping there would be; and when he said 'You disappoint me; but even more, you disappoint yourselves,' we all knew he was right.
I haven't laughed so much in ages. Which is why, even with five nights still to go, this will be my final Festival show this year. I can't imagine another one topping it.
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Tuesday, April 17, 2001
The joy of scaling: From Hot Concept to Hot Site in Eight Days.
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Monday, April 16, 2001
Good grief. The Twisted Bell was Grouse yesterday, and I didn't even notice until today.
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Sunday, April 15, 2001
Greetings, readers of Speedysnail.com. We in management have been following developments in this site with some interest, particularly in light of the deteriorating financial situation in the Internet industry world-wide. No longer can we afford to plough millions into the development of Speedysnail without taking a more hands-on approach towards every aspect of its day-to-day running. The rampant hiring that has taken place over recent months is unfortunately no longer sustainable, and we have regretfully had to lay off 800 employees as of this morning, reducing our staff to a total of one.
The creative department has long resisted the introduction of advertising on the questionable grounds that 'banner ads are annoying' and 'personal sites with ads are uncool', but with its closure the way is now clear to introduce a tasteful and unobtrusive line of advertisements to the site. We shall be trialling them in this so-called 'web-log' over coming weeks, and trust that you will find them refreshing, entertaining and stimulating. Without further ado, here is Speedysnail's first ever advertisement.
Transactionally yours,
THE MANAGEMENT
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©2001 Rory Ewins