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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.

In Rockpool, Melbourne
Who’s that tall chap over there?
Swimmer, Grant Hackett.

I almost forgot to mention: on Saturday afternoon, after we’d retreated back into the cool air-conditioning of the Fitzroy Bowls Club I went to the bar for a jug of Bullmers.

“You wouldn’t be used to this, would you?” said the barman.

When I replied that no, I wasn’t and that it was really quite hot out there, he asked me where in the UK I was from.

“Well, I lived in London for 8 years, but up North originally, near Liverpool” I said.

To which he asked: “Southport?”

I almost fell over. Apparently that’s where his mum’s from. It is indeed a small world.

*

In other news, I feel I should broadcast to the wider world the fact that I’m also twittering, sporadically on the new fangled Stephen Fry information service. Although I haven’t really twittered that much so far and am mostly interested in following the inane mutterings of assorted slebs.

The local papers cracked open the hyperbole last week, giving last Saturday the advance billing of “the worst day in Victoria’s history”. We’d had five consecutive 40+ degree days the week before last, and now the sun was back for revenge, for one day only.

In the event, it proved to be something of an understatement: the mercury topped out at a record 46.4 degrees in Melbourne on Saturday afternoon, half of the state ended the day engulfed in bushfires (some of which are apparently still burning, days later), whole towns were destroyed, and upwards of a hundred and eighty people are dead.

Here in Melbourne we’re both very close and yet very far away: life here continues largely unaffected, albeit with ever grimmer news being reported as each day passes…

I was going to attempt an amusing blog about our Saturday afternoon in the heat (it was Ange’s birthday, and we went “barefoot bowling” in North Fitzroy) but anything I could tell you about just how unpleasantly hot it was outside in the middle of the afternoon seems a bit irrelevant (we survived about half an hour before retreating to the air con…)

We might have been sweating in the heat, but at least we had a home to go back to at the end of the day.

And relatives who were still alive.

Links:
– Australian Red Cross Appeal
– UK Red Cross Appeal

I continue to enjoy seeing British bands in tiny venues in Melbourne. I suppose eventually after I’ve been here for long enough I will run out of bands I’ve heard of from over there that haven’t yet made it over here, but for now it’s great to be able to go to somewhere like the Hi-Fi, the tiny underground venue on Swanston Street, and watch a band who I’d be lucky to see in somewhere the size of Brixton Academy if we were in London. Here, instead, we were able to see them in a venue the size of someone’s (admittedly large) living room.

We stood to the side of the stage, within touching distance of the band, close enough to read the setlist taped to the floor, to see every bead of sweat on Johnny Borrell’s ugly face, to verify that, yes, the chords I worked out for Golden Touch are indeed correct, and close enough that when we had a text the following day from a friend of ours who we hadn’t realised was also at the gig he said that he’d spotted us across the room, adding that it was “hard not to, as you were practically on the stage”. Not that we’d particularly tried to be that close to the front, just that the Hi-Fi has a central sunken dancefloor area, so the best place to stand, we reckon, is on the step that runs around the edge of it–not only can you sit down while the support is on, but when you do stand up, no one can block your view–and the only free spot when we arrived was just to the side of the stage.

And despite no one over here knowing who Razorlight are, the tiny venue was packed out, and the mix of ex-pats and locals who’d presumably done time in London at some point loved every minute. We were even joined somewhere inside the venue, Sal reliably informs me having spotted him on her way back from the loo, by none other than Dr Karl Kennedy off of Neighbours.

At the end of the gig, as the last chords of Somewhere Else faded out, Mr Borrell signed off with “thank you Melbourne, you’ve been great, we’ll see you again in the summer.” Ahem. Johnny: it’s forty degrees out there. This is summer. Bloody Northern Hemisphere types…

So said Ben Ottewell, midway through Gomez’s set at the Espy last night. I’d spent most of my day in an air conditioned office, and couldn’t believe how hot it actually was when I stepped out of it at half past five and almost got knocked over by the wall of heat that hit me: thirty eight blistering degrees, apparently, and it didn’t cool down quickly.

After having dinner down by the beach in St Kilda, feeling like the most overdressed person in town (we were surrounded by people more properly attired for enjoying the beach on the evening of the sunniest day of the summer so far), we headed for the Espy in search of somewhere cool to sit: we didn’t find it. It was sweltering inside and outside.

We were there to celebrate the tenth anniversary of Bring It On (the Gomez album, that is, not the shabby US teen cheerleader comedy), and to commemorate the event the band had decided to play the whole thing in full, in order.

Oddly, they also decided to do this twice on the same night: the original gig that I’d booked tickets for was shunted back to 9pm doors, and another one was crowbarred in before it from 6 to 9. All of which meant that I at least was sweating profusely after we’d hung around in the sweltering Espy for a couple of hours, and then squeezed in to the front of the long airless Gerswhin Rooms waiting for the roadies to test every drum and tune every guitar string (just what is it that takes so long about setting up a band? Especially considering they’d already used all those instruments just a few hours earlier…)

But I forgot all about that when they finally arrived on stage and launched into album opener Get Miles: I was instantly taken back to my wooden floored room at Wills Hall, where I listened to the album ten years ago as a fresh-faced innocent in my first year at Bristol Uni. I can’t quite believe that that was a whole decade ago.

Where did it go?

It’s a shame I’m not around in the UK to see the fruits of the atheist bus campaign trundling around the capital telling everyone that “there’s probably no God. Now stop worrying and enjoy your life.”

Still, even from this distance it’s nice to see something positive in the news for once.

Of course it was inevitable that someone would start complaining about it eventually, and it’s no surprise to see that it’s the notoriously publicity shy Stephen Green (he of Jerry Springer The Opera fame) who has stepped up to the plate.

According to the BBC, his complaint to the Advertising Standards Agency is on the basis that the atheist bus ads “break rules on substantiation and truthfulness”. Apparently the ASA’s code states that “marketers must hold documentary evidence to prove all claims”.

Now I suspect that this will probably be thrown out by the ASA at least in part because of the use of the word “probably” in the phrasing of the slogan–I’m sure Carlsberg never had or needed documentary evidence to support their claim that their fizzy piss represented the pinnacle of brewing excellence–but I wonder if it could have some more far reaching consequences.

In fact, I wonder if perhaps Stephen Green is really an atheist mole, working deep undercover as a religious nutter. He’s already managed to get the UK’s blasphemy laws abolished, thanks to his hard work on the Springer case. Is this latest campaign designed to get rid of all religious advertising of any sort in the UK?

Because if the atheists have to prove their claims, then so do the people behind any religious advertising. And as no one can ever possibly prove or disprove the existence of God, then it will all have to go (and no, Stephen, “documentary evidence” does not mean quoting from some book that some people made up a couple of thousand years ago…). On the other hand, if the ads get to stay on the buses, then all he’s done is give the atheist message a lot of extra publicity.

All of which is a fiendishly clever scheme. I wonder if he got the idea from the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy:

Now, it is such a bizarrely improbable coincidence that anything so mind-bogglingly useful could have evolved purely by chance that some have chosen to see it as the final proof of the NON-existence of God. The argument goes something like this: “I refuse to prove that I exist,” says God, “for proof denies faith, and without faith I am nothing.” “But,” says Man, “the Babel fish is a dead giveaway, isn’t it? It could not have evolved by chance. It proves that You exist, and so therefore, by Your own arguments, You don’t. QED” “Oh dear,” says God, “I hadn’t thought of that,” and promptly vanishes in a puff of logic. “Oh, that was easy,” says Man, and for an encore goes on to prove that black is white and gets himself killed on the next zebra crossing.