Saturday, 29th of March, 2003

Here’s an interesting multiple interview: 13 authors speak to s1ngularity, including Charlie Stross, Alastair Reynolds, China Miéville and Lucius Sheppard… Some interesting answers to the 9 questions.

Friday, 28th of March, 2003

Hey, motherfucker, what are you still here for? Excellent Onion issue! Clever parody of moronic warmongering! Go!

Excellent new Onion War issue. Hurrah.

Wednesday, 26th of March, 2003

I’m not sure what to say about this. It seems to be a brilliant act of parodic art. Either that or someone who’s just desparate to form a N London based electro punk band (influences include Joy Division, New Order, Bowie, Smiths, Kraftwerk, Bauhaus, Manics) - and who’s to complain about that, really?

Tuesday, 25th of March, 2003

Here’s something I didn’t know: Cosma Shalizi, longtime web acquaintance & fellow traveler, has a weblog: Three Toed Sloth! It’s a blogspot jobbie, but nicely formatted and very much worth reading. And he links to Stumblings :)

Reading an excellent essay in this week’s SMH Spectrum (which I can’t seem to find a link to - anyone?), which was perhaps the best refutation of Bjorn Lomborg’s Sceptical Environmentalist yet, I noticed that it was by Clive Hamilton, director of the Australia Institute. Since the Sydney Institute is a right-wing think-tank, I was somewhat surprised, and went to look up the Australia Institute, which turns out to be a very much left-wing think-tank, with the motto: “for a just, sustainable, peaceful future”.

Monday, 24th of March, 2003

Charlie Stross (who was at Edinburgh’s anti-war rally on Saturday, and has pictures to prove it) points out Iain (M) Banks’ letter to the Guardian. Short, and to the point (and quite a point!)

Couple of interesting news reports:
3D (Robert Del Naja) is cleared of child pornography charges hurrah.
And Richard Dawkins is, as he very often is, terribly incisive as well as passionate in this Grauniad article on “Bin Laden’s victory”. More hurrah.

thanks to acb for both links…

Oh and by the way, glad to see that Adrian Brody got best actor @ the Oscars - well-deserved! And Polanski got best director; the Pianist is an extraordinary film, as I’ve already said. Absurd (but strangely fantastic) that Polanski can’t even enter the USA.
Even more wonderful was Michael Moore’s acceptance speech for (somewhat astoundingly, I think) winning the best documentary Oscar. His extremely anti-war speech, slamming (as they like to say) Bush, was both booed and cheered vigorously. I have only read it, but Dad heard it and claims that the cheers were louder. Good on him.

Saturday, 22nd of March, 2003

Go to Virulent Memes and see Graham’s latest post. Listen and learn.

I’ve been out handing out how-to-votes for the Greens this arvo, so no guessing how I voted! Here’s hoping Jamie Parker gets Port Jackson!

Remember how cool Ruben Bolling is? Well so’s Tom Tomorrow dammit. Check this out: “The President makes a startling announcement…”; and this: We Tried To Warn You.

Thursday, 20th of March, 2003

Margo Kingston’s feelings on the eve of war. My sentiments exactly (pretty much - although Greenpeace weren’t responsible for the Opera House graffitiing… They were responsible for blockading the Lodge yesterday though, hurrah).

Well it looks like it’s on. Fuck:

British and US warplanes tonight attacked Iraqi artillery positions as thousands of coalition troops stood poised for battle.

The Ministry of Defence described the airstrikes across the Kuwaiti border into the southern “no fly” zone as “standard ‘no fly’ zone activity”.

“We are targeting systems which are a threat to our forces,” a MoD spokeswoman said.

It was unclear whether the attacks were the precursor to the main coalition onslaught - expected to open with a massive aerial bombardment.

Don’t know about Australian troops yet.

Here’s the Grauniad’s “Final countdown”, an hour-by-hour account of “diplomatic efforts to resolve the Iraqi crisis”.

Well, ok maybe it’s just that the war has been on for quite a while (in the no-fly zones) but will be escalating in the next 24 hours or so. Possibly premature to declare it to have started… Not that it makes much difference. I await with dread the first news of civilian deaths.

From Julian Cope’s Head Heritage site: Why you should think twice about upgrading your mobile phone. I’m not sure how true all the details are, but it’s certainly food for thought!

Ruben Bolling is da man. His Tom The Dancing Bug comic (which has nothing to do with any dancing bug called Tom) is superb stuff. Like this one: I love the last speech balloon in the last panel. Or this: “Can you spot the double taxation?” The latter is pretty vicious, and he has a “long winded commentary” at the top of his news page at the moment defending its central thesis (which is that Bush’s new tax cut for the rich is morally bankrupt (so to speak)).

Go do what I did and spend a few hours going through the archives.

Warning: opinion piece!

Regarding the “No War” on the Opera House. I of course am in full agreement but I think it’s a shame that they decided to desecrate the Opera House to express that opinion. The cleaning cost is going to be huge, and presumably it will be paid for by the Opera House Trust. Why should they suffer? I’m sure they’re mostly anti-war!
It’s a shame… Oh well. The red paint marks are still there.

Yes, of course the red blood of innocent Iraqis is going to be flowing freely in a couple of days, and that’s absolutely sickening. What fun.

Wednesday, 19th of March, 2003

Michael Moore letter to Bush on the eve of war. Begins “Dear Governor Bush”. Hurrah!

Monday, 17th of March, 2003

The other night, Ange & I went to see The Pianist, Roman Polanski’s new film about Wladyslaw Szpilman, a Polish pianist who survived the Holocaust. I must say I wasn’t quite prepared for it - stupidly, since it was clearly going to be about surviving the Holocaust.
It was absolutely shattering, almost too hard to bear in parts (as was Schindler’s List when I saw it years ago). Adrien Brody’s performance as Szpilman is stunning, and on the whole the other actors are also fantastic and convincing. Only a few scenes seemed setup or unlikely (like when Szpilman, near the end, is discovered by a German officer, and in his starved, emaciated, prematurely-aged condition, plays the entire Chopin G minor Ballade - note perfect. Still, despite the incongruity, it’s a beautiful moment.
The inhumanity of the Nazis’ treatment of the Jews is depicted without compromise, and I felt a strong empathy with people who almost could have been my ancestors (although the Hungarian Jews had a slightly different experience, and my Mum’s Russian Jewish side were over in China).

Polanski does a great job of restraint combined with verisimilitude. I can’t recommend it enough, but do be emotionally prepared.

Saturday, 15th of March, 2003

This is fantastic. Thanks to Charlie for the link. The article is still up as I type - not sure how long it’ll last, unless it’s actually bona fide and cleared by the editors…

Here’s an amusing poster/ad by the NSW Greens… It’s part of their “Take a Stand” campaign: “THIS IS NOT OK”
It looks like I’ll be helping my Dad man the Greens’ stand at our voting booth in Vaucluse… I’d like to see the how-to-vote card first, but I pretty much agree with all their policies so why not?

Friday, 14th of March, 2003

The Observer has another article from Terry Jones.

Mr. Bush is right, Saddam Hussein is a nasty man and nobody I know has the least objection to Mr. Bush killing him. It’s just the way he proposes doing it that worries me. Dropping 3000 bombs in 48 hours on Baghdad is going to kill a lot of other people who, as far as I am aware, are not nasty at all.

And:

And yet it worries me that Mr. Bush says that one of the reasons he wants to kill a lot of Iraqis is because Saddam Hussein has also been killing them. Is there some sort of rivalry here?

Tuesday, 4th of March, 2003

The Guardian, last week, had more “Voices Against The War”. You can find them here, here and here. Writers include Julian Barnes, Zadie Smith, Will Self, Noam Chomsky, Terry Eagleton, Harold Pinter, Margaret Drabble, JG Ballard, Woody Harrelson… Quite a list. I like what most of them say - particularly Zadie Smith, from memory… Time to finish packing for Perth!

In Saturday’s Guardian, Mary Midgely reviews, almost completely positively, the new Daniel Dennett book Freedom Evolves, which I’m currently reading and enjoying thoroughly. It’s interesting and encouraging, as I feel that Dennett, in this book, and Steven Pinker in his recent The Blank Slate are really doing a good job of addressing the problems that some people have with the scientific materialist/evolutionary/etc perspective of the world. Midgely has tended to fall in the anti-Dawkins, anti-”neo-Darwinist” camp, so for her to come out almost completely in favour of Freedom Evolves is testament to how good the book is. Hurrah!

Here are some clips by UK comics Bremner Bird and Fortune… The one with Tony Blair reading an autocue pre-prepared by the Bush administration is particularly amusing. Silly but amusing.

Monday, 3rd of March, 2003

on Wednesday! We’ve got a FourPlay gig at the Fly By Night in Fremantle on Thursday night and then we go down to the Leeuwin Valley Estate to play with kd lang, of all things, in front of apparently a huuuuuuuge audience. Will report back when it’s happened.

Looking forward to visiting Perth. It’s a lovely place, and I shall wander the streets as I do in foreign (so to speak) cities - both in Fremantle and in the city. Some nice shoppies to visit, although nothing incredibly special - but there’s lots of Elizabeth’s second hand bookshops, and some nice science fiction specialists, and I’ll look for comics shops and go into 78 Records and DaDa Records (one of the first interstate record stores in Australia to stock the independently released first FourPlay album!) and Mill’s Record Bar in Fremantle. Bonzer!
I’m taking the lappie and shall hopefully make some nice music in my spare time as well. Raven to take over the world!

Here’s another excellent article by Terry Jones from the Observer - this time talking about language as a casualty of war.