An open thread, where at your weekend leisure, you can discuss anything you like.
Life, Culture and Politics from BrisVegas
Larvatus Prodeo was an Australian group blog which discussed politics, sociology, culture, life, religion and science from a left of centre perspective. more»
Farced?
An excellent takedown of Bolt by one of the gurus at Core Economics
PC, Leonard Cohen review by any chance?
Thrid…
Total meltdown yesterday, took me four hours to get from the CBD to Yarraville. I took a kind of grim pleasure in it actually, as in “maybe this will inspire the Vic government to finally do some spending on infrastructure. Oh, and maybe the’ll re-think Solar power. Hey, I can dream ?!
Just heard the weather for the next week and for us here it’s a series of 40c days. I envy Melbournians having some sea southerlies that will take a bit of the edge off it. Sometimes we are heavily influenced by southern weather and get some nice relief of an evening but as with this event we are subject to the northern influence [think Horsham weather]. Although insulated and tree shaded in the house paddock the back verandah temp. of the last 2 days hit 46c and that is very hot. Luckily we have a bore and can hose the dogs down when they need to get out of the house in the mid to late afternoon. The Deerhounds handle the heat very well and still want their early run and swim in the dam and then a swim again late evening. Unless we get substantial rain during this summer that bit of fun will dry up for the first time since it was put in 40 odd yrs ago.
Nick, here you go. It’s not as informative as it could have been, because he was yet to play in NSW and I didn’t want to include spoilers about the show. But there are definitely photos! Amanda from Flop Eared Mule has more — there are links to her blog in that comments thread.
Zorronsky, your phrase ‘house paddock’ made me smile — I did a marathon proofreading job over Christmas and the manuscript included that phrase, against which the editor had pencilled a query: ‘horse????’ Townie, I thought. Pfft.
I have never heard about the concept of not spoiling a gig, like you might not spoil the plot of a movie, until Laura and then you brought it up. Never even considered it.
Finally, I have a reason to read Pride and Prejudice.
Amanda — it was Laura’s idea, and by about three songs in I could see exactly what she meant. It wasn’t just an ordinary concert, it was a show, with its own drama, didn’t you think? I got a lot of pleasure out of not knowing what would come next, and hearing the opening bars of songs I’d completely forgotten about.
And here the money quote on the Victorian govt’s rejection of a gross solar feed-in tariff. Which just goes to show there’s Lies, damn lies, and claims about the flow-on costs of renewable energy.
“Environment groups and the Government’s own Department of Sustainability had pushed for a German-style subsidy known as a gross feed-in tariff.
The Government rejected the model, declaring it unfair to lower incomes without solar, and claiming it would add $100 to all household power bills. However, The Age revealed this week confidential advice from senior Government officers that the real cost was just $7.”
So, since it WASN’T about costs to the public, you lying pricks: what was it? Brumby?
A house paddock is a good place to put the horse, though.
I’m worried about all the unshaded paddocks just a bit further west of here where people who might be a bit marginal keep their horses. Rockbank, Tarneit… Oh hell…
There’s some goats on industrial land a short walk away. Might have a look today.
The house paddock is that fenced off section that keeps animals out of the garden and allows for some shade around the house. The home paddock in an ideal situation surrounds that area and probably includes the implement and shearing sheds. Shade trees in the home paddock should be well away from the outbuildings and the house paddock. Graze the home paddock hard late spring and early summer and you have a great fire-break and animal refuge for times like now!
Helen, a couple of weeks I saw two horses in a vacant lot in a street off St. Kilda Rd! They looked okay and thankfully they’re gone now.
I could think of a few classics that might appeal to yoof by the addition of zombies. eg, Middlemarch; Tale of Two Cities or Miss Frost meets the Revolutionary Zombies; Dracula versus the Zombies; The Zombies meet thew Monk.
If I put my mind to it I could probably go on for ages.
Forecast 37 in Melbourne today. Way better than yesterday, but still hot. Delighted when I saw just now that the midday temp has actually dropped from an earlier 29 to 27! You could easily shut yourself in when it’s quite OK outside.
I think something like this happened in Melbourne last Monday, when the horrible heatwave was to begin. Despite the fact (Bureau of Meteriology Obs) that the temp didn’t go above 30 in Melbourne until 12.30pm, then dipped below 30 until 4.30pm (reaching a late 36, however), many people must have switched on the air-con for the whole afternoon – contributing to power outages.
On that topic, some outages yesterday weren’t system faults but ‘load shedding’. Is that a euphemism for deliberately shutting down power to certain areas? I can understand that might be necessary, but, if so, let’s speak plainly about what is in fact happening. I’d be interested to know what advice the Victorian Government gave to energy intensive industries re minimising demand.
Anyway, I think I at least have a bit of a seige mentality during heatwaves. Does anyone have any comments on the psychology of this likely-to-be-more-frequent phenomenon?
Oh, and the hot weather seems to affect my spelling!
My local petrol stations (and presumably in the name of ‘competition’ this occurred across most of Canberra) increased their unleaded price on Thursday from 91 cents to 124 cents per litre. Even leaving in GST and excise, this is an increase of about 36 per cent.
There appears to be no reason for this increase other than “extreme” capitalism in the form of massive profit taking. This makes Wall Street bankers look like angels.
I wonder if this increase (to line the pockets of the garage owner and oil companies and distributors) by fueling (pun intended) inflation will have an adverse affect in the long run on RBA thinking about interest rate cuts?
So can I suggest to Rudd and Gillard that they tackle this extreme capitalism head on? Price controls on these bastards might be the way to go. Or nationalise the whole industry and cut out the profit gouging of extreme capitalism.
John I think the guy least likely to be making huge profits from this sickening increase would be the petrol station owner. The others are definitely complicit. Can you see this happening in say France? They’d all be on the wrong end of pitchforks amongst burning tyres.
Zorronsky at #12 — well, indeed. I explained this carefully to my editor. I guess if one were a townie who had never heard of a house paddock, it would be logical to think the U was a typo for the R; I should be more admiring of her for her careful proofreading.
Amanda, Pav – it was things like the Webb sisters’ cartwheels, the new? (to me) revised lyrics to Bird on a Wire that I loved being surprised by and didn’t want to mention. I didn’t read any reviews of any earlier shows before going to mine and it’s a testament to the skill and sincerity of all the performers that I was deeply surprised to see how little ad-libbing there was in the show I saw. It felt and sounded as fresh as milk.
Laura, exactly — I loved being surprised by the Webbs’ cartwheels (and their eerie sibling harmonies, especially when LC handed over ‘If It Be Your Will’ to them — that was just sublime), and by lots of other things, so thank you for not mentioning them. I didn’t read any standard reviews either — didn’t want to go with preconceptions or pre-emptions. After I read your post I was just much surer that it was going to be good, and given the drawn-out suffering in the heat beforehand, it was very nice to know we weren’t getting fried for nothing.
The whole ‘review’ issue is interesting. It’s MSM critics’ jobs to write conventional reviews of shows, but I think one can be much freer and more creative en blog about these things. Mind you, one thing about making a living by reviewing books is that it’s an ongoing challenge to one’s skillz to write a half decent or even just comprehensible review of a book without giving away the plot and spoiling the reader’s pleasure, so that issue was on my mind regarding LC as well.
Paul B, Middlemarch with zombies — what a sublime idea! Will you introduce new zombie characters, or simply transform some of the existing ones?
Horse is in the house paddock right now looking longingly through the window for dins Mark II.
Helen there are too many horses ’round here, agisted in some of the most obscenely wealthy studs who have no choice but to stand all day, every day in extreme heat with not a tree or a skerrick of shade in sight. I’ve got a feeling its actually illegal not to provide some sort of shelter for horses and you have egged me on to write to the local Aggravate. It makes me hopping mad and I feel like grabbing the bastards who inflict this treatment on horses (oh yes and a paddock of goats just outside town) and suggest to them that they stand in a shadeless paddock all day and see how long they last.
PC @ 21,
Causobon could be a zombie, but he’d probably have to be turned into one halway through. If he was one from the very beginning, he’d probabvly kill off Dorothea, and then it would be a very short book indeed. (I’m assuming Zombies kill people off. My knowledge of them comes mostly from movies and some very limited reading on voodoo.)
(Is that how you spell his name? It’s been about 15 years since I re-read the book. Enjoyed it much more first time round, when the whole work was a kind of tragic shock.(Except that awful first chapter. I know it was absolutely necessary, but …) It puts Eliot up there with Doestoyevsky but not quite with Tolstoy. Ah, Anna Karenina! Think what zombies could do to that.
I think it’s Casaubon. He was more vampiric than zombieish. Middlemarch is one of my favourite novels.
Thanks, Fine. Me too. And I have to admit being extraordinarily moved by Silas Marner when I re-read it for the first time since school. I actually shed a tear or two.
One of the interesting things about Casaubon is that he’s named after a real person – an Elizabethan scholar.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isaac_Casaubon
Perhaps that factors into the zombification?
Middlemarch is a great book – I must reread it.
Gosh, Mark – I never knew that. George Eliot is just an inspirational woman, I think. Her achievements and the way she chose to live her life, are just incredible. My second favourite novel of hers is Daniel Deronda.
Agree about Eliot, Fine.
Casaubon also turns up in Umberto Eco’s Foucault’s Pendulum – or rather a character with that name!
The Mill on the Floss is pretty fab, too.
Re Middlemarch though, couldn’t Peter Featherstone also be a zombie? And I think the twitty younger sister Celia is a zombie ready-made.
Re Mill on the Floss. I always thought it interesting the way she chose to live her life in defiance of her culture’s mores and imperatives. But there was such a dissonance in Mill where she did not give her main character the same choices she took for herself. Maggie, the woman who ruins herself in similar ways to Marianne, was killed off, dying in her brother’s arms in some kind of watery eodipal reunion in death, rather than living on with the same freedoms as the author. Some kind of wish fulfilment there. The reunion with her brother I mean.
But the bit at the end of her life, when she married the very much younger man and he tried to jump out of the Venetian hotel window on their honeymoon was interesting too. I must say.
For Casaubon and zombies try Rats and Gargoyles by Mary Gentle. OK, no zombies but lots of other creepy things.
I’ve seen more than a few ponies around my section of the Sydney Inner West lately.
Mine, to be clear, is one of those bits that’s gloriously asphalted, apartmentful and brutal. No species are really welcome here unless they have a $54 fortnightly train ticket, a motorised wheelchair with a miniature Australian flag and the shopping, or more than four fully sick fuel-injected turbocharged cylinders with a blow-off valve and a copy of Fast Fours And Rotaries. Even the birds don’t feel very welcome, and the cats fight a battle against the leaf blowers. I had thought that every piece of nature around the People’s Haiku Republic was dynamited and poisoned off sometime shortly before Queen Victoria’s Jubilee.
So, it’s more than a little bit odd to walk home of a warm evening and walk by an old guy taking his f&*king Shetland pony for a walk. On the footpath, with a leash. What the hell? Perhaps it’s a zombified pony.
I haven’t drunk *that* much.
Liam, a bloke taking a Shelty for a walk? Awesome. My first horsey job was taking an ex-racehorse wiith a bad leg injury for daily walks around the streets of Caulfield, which is very inner city. It was like walking a huge dog. But there’s a lot of horses in Australia’s inner cities. look at Randwick. You’d have about 500 horses there.
Yes! That’s it exactly. Except for the clopping and… the different… smell.
I used to live in Glebe, near Harold Park, where you see trotters a bit, so I can tell the difference between a pacer and a pony. I’ve spent a bit of time in Randwick too, though given the choice I’d go to the doggies for a bet. There’s always greyhounds everywhere Inner Western, especially with gentrification, it being a very Hapsburg kind of dog. I’m sure the bourgeois will start getting their sprogs into falconry clubs sooner or later.
But a Shetland pony? Off New Canterbury Road, near the infamous Oxford Tavern? No.
I have received your message, oh universe, and I will reduce the number of psychoactive drugs I do from zero to some negative number. Will you please reduce my hallucinations accordingly.
Paul @ 14.
There isn’t a piece of literature that can’t be improved by adding zombies. A well known secret of the trade.
Liam — I hear ya, brother. I once had the rare pleasure of seeing a llama strolling down the hallway in a mid-town Manhattan office building. Unfortunately I did not keep my wits about me, or else I might have been able to warn the public by stating, “Look out. There are llamas.”
I reproach myself for my cowardice to this day.
Some bloke occasionally walks a snow white llama down Ackland St, St Kilda, where I live. I hafta say it has far more spatial awareness than all the dickhead tourists who infest the place at weekends.
Mind you, if you have four tough little hooves and a supercilious six foot high eye line, I bet the whole spatial awareness thing becomes quite moot.
Yo #14 and the other zombie classicists beyond, you guys are so asking for it to happen.
I’ve seen that llama in Acland St! The owner was having a coffee with this impossibly patrician animal standing calmly next to him. Much better behaved than most tourists. Liam, you should have followed that pony home. Find out the end of the story. You’re taking the good drugs obviously. And greyhounds – love ‘em. All the sighthounds have marvellous self-possession.
The AGE “Odd SPot” yesterday was about how some hackers in the US got into one of those information roadworks signs. Instead of “Roadworks next 5 miles, speed limits apply” or whatever, it said “Zombies ahead! Run!!!” or something.
Which, as everyone knows, is ridiculous.
At times of zombie attack, it is of course better to stay in the car with the doors and windows locked.
I don’t know, I know some people who’re marginally involved in breeding llamas. They’re supposed to be subject to unpredictable mood swings, and you have to fence them strictly—they’re known to kick stray dogs and feral cats to death.
And in zombielit, I’d quite like to see For The Term Of His Unnatural Life.
Ah well, this one must be a supremely well socialised, inner-city kinda llama.
Defence against zombies – stay in car with doors locked and windows up. If the heat don’t get you, the zombies will.
On another topic – exactly how far can llamas spit, and what does it feel like to be spat on by a llama?
Defence against zombies? The Zombie Survival Guide is your friend.
Melbourne Cinematheque is starting soon. There’s seasons of Bergman, Rossellini, Duras, Marker, Japanese noir and Soviet ’60s cinema amongst others. It’s a great deal to buy a season’s ticket.
http://www.melbournecinematheque.org/
Paul the bloke who ignored the BEWARE THE LLAMA SPITS sign will tell you …He was!
Zorronsky [12]:
Spot-on. House Paddock it is.
Pavlov’s cat [19]:
Proof Reading? Screamingly funny howlers still slip through in the local newspapers even with computerized proof reading.
Everyone:
Instead of complying with the media stereotype of pensioners blowing Uncle Kevin’s Christmas Present on the pokies, on booze, on plasma TVs and on overseas cruises …. I used my Economic Stimulus Package to support local businesses, including the nice people in the computer repair shop …. so as soon as I get everything together again, I shall crank up my steam-powered 186 end get back into all the converations. [It will save having go all this way to use community access internet]
Looking forward to it Graham. Have missed your insights.