Year: 2009

While there are many reasons why Sal and I moved over to this supposedly sunny side of the world, we certainly didn’t do it for the quality of Aussie telly. As we’re increasingly discovering during these long, dark, wintery nights, Australian TV is, for the most part, pretty rubbish.

Not that they can’t make decent shows over here–the first series of Underbelly, for example, is testament to what local talent can do given enough money and network support (and incidentally it looks like some gunmen were out on the mean streets of Ascot Vale–which is to all intents and purposes where we live–writing a new chapter in that particular grisly story yesterday afternoon…)

Sadly, quality original drama like that is somewhat thin on the ground. Hardly surprising in a country with such a small population, where even a wildly popular show on the commercial networks might be seen by just a million people. The advertising revenue clearly isn’t enough to sustain the big budgets we’ve been used to back home, and so the schedules are mostly filled instead with cheap, imported tat, usually from the US or the UK. Channel 9 might have been the network behind the aforementioned Underbelly, but the rest of the time it subsists on a diet of Two and a Half Men and Who Want’s To Be A Millionaire? Which is Not Good, of course.

This does mean, however, that every time a Boy with an Arse for his Face-esque documentary comes on one of the local channels, Sal and I get to play the fun game for all the family: “guess which UK terrestrial network produced this piece of rubbish” (and then we have to wait for the credits to find out). The day that I can no longer pick between Channel 5 and BBC 2 will truly be the day that I have finally lost touch with British popular culture…

It’s also interesting how some of the cheap local programming makes shows I wouldn’t normally go near back home look like TV masterpieces. So poor an interviewer, for example, is Rove McManus, the host of the TFI Friday-meets-Jonathan Ross shambles that is Rove, Channel 10’s Sunday night talkshow, that when we stumbled across The Graham Norton Show–something I haven’t watched since I was at uni–one evening the other week, it suddenly seemed as if our Graham had become the world’s greatest presenter and interviewer. Oh dear Australia: what have you done to me?

The one beacon of light is the government-run ABC, who do some great news, current affairs, and comedy, despite having no licence fee and consequentially a minuscule budget. This year we’ve already enjoyed The Gruen Transfer, a discussion show about advertising, the hilarious Lawrence Leung’s Choose Your Own Adventure, the dependable music quiz show Spicks and Specks, The Hollowman, a sort of Australian Thick of It, and most recently The Chaser’s War On Everything, a satirical comedy show that returned a couple of weeks ago only to be yanked off the air following our very own local Sachs-gate affair–this time it was over an ill-judged sketch depicting the “Make A Realistic Wish” foundation (“why bother spending money on terminally ill kids when they’re only going to die anyway…”) Which is a shame–the sketch itself wasn’t particularly funny, but as someone who actually watched the show when it was broadcast (unlike, I suspect, most of the outraged voices in the media…) I don’t think it was worthy of the outrage it sparked. Even Kevin Rudd weighed in on the debate–admitting at the same time that he hadn’t actually seen it. I can’t help thinking that he might have better things to do, though, like, um running the country…

Still, all of this makes me realise–as if I didn’t already know it–just how good the BBC is. People of the UK: next time someone in the Daily Mail is complaining about “TV Fakery” or using some other hypocritical stick to beat Auntie with, tell them where to go from me, OK? Thanks…

Sal and I spent an entertaining couple of evenings down in St Kilda last week, at the Film Festival. I’d picked up a leaflet about the 6 day event one lunchtime a few week’s earlier, and we’d decided to buy a couple of midweek tickets, which would get us in to as much short film as we could take over the space of two nights.

I was a bit worried that we were being overly keen when I turned up in advance to buy the passes only to be sold ones with the numbers “1” and “2” written on the back of them in felt tip, and my concerns were compounded when we turned up to the first session on our list to a half empty cinema to watch an hour and a half of Mexican shorts.

Luckily this was a one off, though, with bigger and bigger crowds for each subsequent session. I guess the filmgoers of St Kilda just don’t care about Mexican film, but I really enjoyed the selection, most of which happened to be about death for some reason. I particularly liked La Curiosa Conquista del Ampere, in which an electrician survives death to provide free electricity to his friends and family, and Rogelio, in which the protagonist refuses to accept his passing and keeps popping back out of his grave to go drinking with his mates.

The following session was the first of 16 shown throughout the festival to cover “Australia’s Top 100” short films of the year. There were significantly more people in the cinema, but sadly the quality was much lower: it opened with something about a dog playing the guitar that was so bad I didn’t even realise it was one of the films, closely followed by a pointless five minute short about a heroin addict shooting up into herself and then a small bird. In fact I only realised that the dog thing was one of the films when people started clapping at the end. It seemed somewhat unnecessary to me, but apparently this was to continue at the end of each short for the rest of the festival. Even the shockingly poor Lover’s Walk, a film about old people who couldn’t act, got a round at the end, albeit half heartedly and after a short pause.

Luckily the session was redeemed by the excellent Love Market, a well made, interesting, and moving documentary following four hilltribe girls from Vietnam who sell embroidered tat to tourists while dreaming of better lives elsewhere.

The following night we were back for more, occasionally mixing it up by sitting in a different part of the cinema. Thankfully Sessions 2 and 3 were much stronger overall. The highlight for both of us was another documentary: Christmas Lights, a hilarious look at what drives some people to cover the outside of their houses with flashing lights and assorted Christmas paraphernalia every December.

We rounded off our first St Kilda Film Festival with SoundKILDA, a collection of cracking music videos, a bit like one of those Adam Buxton BUG things, but this time hosted by the very amusing Kiwi Alan Brough off of Aussie music quiz show Spicks and Specks.

And as if 7 and a half hours of film wasn’t enough value for money out of our $40 passes, there were free drinks in the cinema bar afterwards. I think we’ll be back next year…

Yeah. Sorry. I know. It’s been a while.

And not for any particular reason. Time just seems to whizz by these days and before I know it another month has passed and I’ve only written two posts. Or in the case of this month, none at all–with only a couple of days left to go in May 2009 I’m in danger of letting a whole calendar month pass me by with no new entries for the first time since I started this thing way back in January 2003…

Even Google has noticed: I’m sure the little “PageRank” bar on my Google Toolbar used to look a bit healthier than it does these days and from a brief bit of vanity googling (at least from the results I’m getting here in Oz) it appears that it’s only my Flickr photostream keeping me in the top ten, and I’m even way behind on that. I may still be taking a dull photo every day, but you wouldn’t know it from looking.

And it’s not like I’m going to get around to sorting that out any time soon–Sal and I are off to the St Kilda Film Festival tomorrow night and the one after, I’ve got an awards ceremony to go to on Friday (long story…) and then we’re out for Elise’s birthday drinks and to watch the FA Cup Final on Saturday night and Sunday morning.

I wouldn’t want you to think that things haven’t been happening here, though: I could tell you how we went to South Australia for Easter (and learnt that you shouldn’t try and have a big night out in Adelaide on Good Friday as all the pubs are shut by law…); I could tell you about all the great stuff we saw at the Melbourne Comedy Festival; I could tell you about the houses we went to look at that went on to sell for silly money at auction; I could even tell you how I spent Saturday night dressed as a Teh Beatles at a fancy dress party… but most of that seems like it happened ages ago now.

But anyway. Sorry teh internets, I know I haven’t written to you for a while. I promise to try harder in future.

I might be in need of some strong coffee this morning, but I’m nevertheless very happy with my decision to stay up into the small hours to watch Everton secure their place in the FA Cup Final early this morning. When I made the decision to stay up for what was a 1AM kick off here in Australia, I hadn’t even considered the possibility of the game going into extra time and penalties, and thus depriving me of an additional hour of sleep, but it was all worth it in the end. Roll on the 30th May, when I’ll have to find myself a pub somewhere in Melbourne to watch the final (it’ll be a midnight start for us, but at least this time on a Saturday night…)

Earlier in the day I’d heard a news report on one of the main Aussie channels describing it as a clash between Manchester United and “Tim Cahill’s Everton”, as if the Australian midfielder is manager and owner as well as being just one of eleven players. I wonder if they’ll be playing down his involvement when they cover the game on tonight’s news, given that he was the only Everton player to miss his penalty…

After the final penalty had gone in, and after I’d finally finished (quietly so as not to wake anyone) jumping around the living room, I noticed that the cameras had picked out a despondent young United fan–maybe about 10 years old–still sitting in his seat next to his dad.

For a second, I wondered what it must feel like to be a United fan when they lose a big game like that. As an Evertonian I’m well acquainted with what it feels like to watch the team I support lose–they’ve been doing it to me for years–but for a young United fan it must be a strange new sensation. Perhaps for the first time that young lad in the crowd would be coming to realise that life isn’t quite the way he’d thought; that your team doesn’t always win; that you can’t always get what you want; that life is full of small disappointments.

But then I remembered that, in the words of the BBC:

For United and manager Ferguson, there was only disappointment and they must now turn their attentions back to the pursuit of the Premier League and Champions League.

Oh yeah. They’re only top of the league, having already won two trophies this season and with a Champions League semi final coming up. They must be gutted.

It’s fair to say that the aussies like the odd bit of sport. Although cricket might nominally be the national game (at least when the aussies are winning), and although there’s a growing national interest in “soccer” since the last world cup (at least when the aussies are winning) and while folks in Sydney and Queensland might like a bit of Rugby, down here in Melbourne there’s only one game in town. Aussie Rules. Rules.

With the new AFL season kicking off a couple of weeks ago, vast swathes of newsprint and television time is now being devoted to coverage of this funny game played by guys in short shorts throwing around an oval ball on an oval pitch.

I can’t pretend to understand the rules. Sometimes I can’t even understand the newspaper stories. Many of the articles in the aussie press (at least the ones that aren’t just copied out of UK or US papers) seem to be written with the assumption that the paper’s readers will understand fully the context and history behind the story, which makes reading the papers a confusing business for a recent migrant.

The stories about AFL are no exception–for someone who didn’t grow up with the game they can be utterly baffling. A few weeks before the season started, for example, the papers were full of stories about “the bump” after an incident in a pre season game in which a Collingwood player broke the jaw of an opposing player. The offending player was initially banned by the AFL for four matches, but then this was somehow overturned on appeal, prompting the Herald Sun to ask: “Is The Bump Back In Footy?”

But no one ever explained what “the bump” was. To make matters even more confusing, some people even wrote to the papers to say that it was all the other guy’s fault–the guy with the broken jaw–for getting his face in the way of the first guy’s elbow. Apparently these people were not joking either (something to do with teh kids no longer being taught how to respond to “the bump” these days).

I still don’t understand what this bump is or how it can be the fault of the guy with the broken jaw (who of course was out of action for the first half of the season…) but this weekend I went to my first live AFL game. I did see one on the telly a few years ago when we inexplicably got up in the middle of the night in London to go to a pub, eat meat pies, and watch the “Grand Final”, but this was the first time I’d been to one live, joining Ad and Andrew in a half empty Etihad Stadium to watch Essendon play Freemantle. As an introduction to the game, it wasn’t exactly the finest example of Aussie Rules–I’m not sure what I’d think of football if my first game had been something equivalent to a goalless draw between Hull and Stoke on a wet Wednesday evening, but I could see flashes of entertainment in there in the midst of a lot of dull play. The AFL seem to like changing the rules of the game every five minutes, so perhaps I should write to them and suggest they shave off about 30 minutes from the playing time, at least for the games between the rubbish teams…

Whatever they are, it will be some time before I really get to grips with the rules (I couldn’t tell you, for example, if the home crowd’s annoyance with the ref every time he gave the opposition a free kick was justified or just the usual supporter’s tunnel vision) but perhaps the funniest thing for me coming to the game at this late stage in my life is the way the scoring system is set up. There are four posts at each end of the ground: you get six points for kicking the ball through the central rugby style posts, but if you miss those you still get a point for either hitting the post or getting it through the outside posts. Surely this is the only sport in the world that rewards failure by giving you a point even if you miss.

Perhaps it’s a consolation for the fact that you can expect to have your jaw or neck broken at any time (and it will probably be “your fault”…)

So I’m about three weeks late on this one, but anyway I just stumbled across this blog post explaining Facebook’s philosophy behind their latest redesign.

When I first saw it I thought that the philosophy behind the redesign was “let’s try and make Facebook look as much like Twitter as possible and maybe all the people going on and on about Twitter will come back and start talking about us again…” but for some reason Zuckerberg doesn’t mention this at all.

He does say…

In 2007, we popularized the term Social Graph to describe how Facebook maps out people’s connections.

Jeez. Yeah, I remember 2007. You couldn’t move without someone talking about the Social Graph. Social Graph this. Social Graph that. It was everywhere. By December I was sick of hearing about the Social Graph, frankly.

But mostly he talks about how they’ve made Facebook as much like Twitter as possible. In fact, why not read through the whole thing but in your head add “Just Like Twitter!” to the end of every sentence:

Starting today, we are announcing new profiles for public figures and organizations. Just like Twitter! Just as you connect with friends on Facebook, you can now connect and communicate with celebrities, musicians, politicians and organizations. Just like Twitter! These folks will now be able to share status updates, videos, photos or anything else they want, in the same way your friends can already. Just like Twitter! You’ll be able to keep up with all of their activity in your News Feed. Just like Twitter! This means that you can find out that Oprah is reading a book backstage before a show, CNN posted a breaking story or U2 is working on a new song, just as you would see that your friend uploaded new photos from her trip to Europe. Just like Twitter!

We’re also going to make some changes to the home page. The new home page will let you see everything that’s shared by your friends and connections as it happens. Just like Twitter!

And so on. It’s a fun game for all the family.

Sorry Zuckerberg, you’ll just have to face up to the fact that you’re no longer the hottest property on the web. I mean, do you have Stephen Fry? Can I use your social networking service to shout messages in his direction? No? Sorry. Not interested, and no amount of rearranging the deckchairs is going to change things. But don’t worry, it’ll happen to Twitter too, eventually.

I’m intrigued by the messages from “Craig” that have been doing the rounds amongst the Melbourne peeps I’m following on Twitter. Apparently these have been “found” taped up to lampposts and mailboxes in Windsor, which is a suburb of Melbourne and also happens to be the place where I get off the train most mornings on my way to work.

You can see the full set here: http://users.tpg.com.au/morepats/Craig/

And also here and here and here (although the Channel 7 Sunrise peeps incorrectly claim that they are from a Windsor in New South Wales…)

I haven’t seen any myself (if they even really exist and aren’t just put up, photographed by whoever is responsible, and taken down that is…) but I’ll be keeping my eyes peeled from now on.

Perhaps it’s someone’s art project, or more likely–like everything on teh internets these days–some kind of viral marketing (suspiciously, although this has popped up in several corners of the net, it’s the same photos each time), but if it is a viral, what’s it for?

I’d like to think it really is some crazy guy with a printer and plenty of time on his hands, but I’m prepared to be disappointed when it turns out, like the Guerilla Gardeners who did this to St Kilda, to be just some advert for a shabby tv show…

Anyone?

Update (12th March): Apparently someone called “Chris” has been posting very similar notes in NYC. Which came first? (Chris claims it’s him). What is this all about? Just how disappointed am I going to be when I find out what this is designed to sell? Should I just be less cynical and enjoy the joke?

Answers on a piece of A4 paper taped to a lamppost please…

I swear that the Daily Mail only write these stories as fodder for Ben Goldacre, but surely they’ve reached a new self-parodying low with their Facebook causes cancer story.

Inspired by reading the excellent Bad Science book, and the fact that Ben posted the link, I read the original magazine article on which the story is based. Go on, have a look: it’s worth it if only to see the amusing use of tenuous stock photography.

This story comes to us from a chap by the name of Aric Sigman, who seems to have been banging on on a similar theme for some time: watching Batman will make your kids violent, he told us back in August, and TV is literally killing us he claimed back in 2005.

The main thrust of the article is the assertion that a lack of social interaction causes health problems. Even if this is true, though, I’m not sure how you get from that to the screaming headline claim that Facebook causes cancer: why is online social networking worse than the offline kind? And yes, the screaming headline is the Daily Mail’s, but Sigman subtitles his article with the heading “The biological implications of ‘social networking'” despite the fact that he doesn’t seem to say anything about ‘social networking’ in the Facebook sense. Further, the Institute of Biology’s press release tells us that:

In our latest issue of Biologist, Dr Aric Sigman warns us of the dangers of sacrificing old-fashioned social contact for the current trend towards more online interaction. It appears that there is no substitute for face-to-face contact with our family, friends and communities, when it comes to maintaining good health. A Facebook poke cannot replace a good old hug, it seems.

I’m not sure the article says that at all: perhaps this was written by someone who hadn’t read it.

But anyway, if we’re going to claim that social interaction has health benefits, wouldn’t it be the other way around–shouldn’t we be looking to Facebook, MySpace and Twitter as a valuable means of bringing together people who might otherwise have been lacking any kind of social interaction at all?

Talking about dementia, Sigman refers to research conducted by the Harvard School of Public health that

…examined the influence of social integration, including frequency of social interaction, on changes in memory in 16,638 subjects aged 50 and older. Ertel et al (2008) concluded that memory loss among the least integrated declined at twice the rate as among the most integrated.

So what has that got to do with “social networking”? Maybe the non-integrated group were huge Facebook fans, but I think that’s unlikely given that the study’s title was “Social Integration on Preserving Memory Function in a Nationally Representative US Elderly Population” (my italics).

Elsewhere, he talks about people with less social interaction having reduced immunity to diseases, and makes claims such as:

Lack of social connection or loneliness is also associated with increased risk of cardiovascular disease.

I’m guessing, but is it not possible that people who are either lonely or don’t have a big social circle might also happen to lead sedentary lifestyles: isn’t it the “sitting around on your arse all day” bit of watching TV that causes the health problems, rather than anything intrinsically harmful about watching too much television.

I could go on, picking holes in the article and looking at more examples where the effect doesn’t seem to be due to the claimed cause, but I think I’ve already spent more time on this than it’s really worth.

It’s just rubbish. Don’t believe everything you read in the papers, kids.

I’m about a month or so behind everyone else on this one, and so as usual I have nothing new or original to say, but anyway Sal and I finally got round to seeing Slumdog Millionaire earlier this week. We had been planning to see it at the moonlight cinema, outside in Melbourne’s Royal Botanic Gardens, but after I stupidly left it too late to get tickets, we decided instead to go to the old Sun Theatre in surprisingly lively Yarraville, a little suburb just over the river from the city. As well as being in a lovely old theatre, it’s one of those places where you can take your beer inside with you, which always gets the thumbs up from me.

We enjoyed the film, of course, but I’m not quite sure how it’s become the runaway-hot-Oscar-nominated-success that it is: I couldn’t help thinking that it was all just a tad contrived. How convenient, for example, that all the significant life moments that give Jamal the answers to the questions just happen to have happened to him in chronological order…

I’m also not sure they ever plausibly explained why our Mr Slumdog lost his Indian accent: he did sound an awful lot like the very British Anwar from Skins by the time he’d grown up.

And I can’t surely be the only person to have spotted how they play fast and loose with the rules of Who Wants to be a Millionaire? at the end: the host repeatedly tells Jamal that if he gets the last question wrong he’ll lose everything. Surely everybody knows that’s not how the game works, no?

Or would “if you get the last question wrong you’ll only win a 640,000 rupees” (nine grand, apparently, which is presumably still a life-changing amount for a “slumdog”) not have worked quite so well as the climax to the film?

For Sal’s birthday, I decided to make her a present this year. Via the excellent Blurb books, I produced Adventures in South America, a 72 page hardback book of our best photos from our travels in South America. It came out really, really well.