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Now the truly terrible thing about this advertisement isn't that Avery Brooks so desperately wanted to be Morpheus, but rather that all that stuff about needing "a different kind of software" was advertising Lotus products. If you go to any reasonably exhaustive pictorial dictionary and open up the page to "Arse Pudding On Toast", you will see a picture of Lotus Notes. Even if IBM was only borrowing the name for some unrelated software, the taint remains. It's the computer equivalent of starting a branch of the RSPCA dedicated to saving kittens and calling it The Nazi Party. Freakish.

But I digress.

"It's the year 2000," Captain Sisko tells us, "but where are the flying cars?" And later: "Because millions of people all over the world can work together on the web twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week: you don't need flying cars..." And that's quite right. And it had better be right! Oil prices are up at the moment because of increased demand and/or increased unrest in those uppity dark-skinned countries that think they've got a right to our Texas Tea, by jingo, by crikey. The unrest won't last forever, gods willing, but the demand will. It will increase. Oil prices aren't coming down.

Unfortunately, people are still looking at this as a matter for the petrol bowser. They're forgetting two things: (1) food transport, and (2) fertilisers. And possibly (3) plastics. Oil is used to produce a hell of a lot more than SUV fuel; a serious oil shortage will mean a serious food shortage in pretty short order. The results will be impressive.

What will happen -- may already be happening, even -- is that people will start thinking locally. In nice civilised countries like Australia and NZ and... ummm, I'm sure there are others... cars and roads will start to be things you deal with on a weekly, not daily, basis. For as long as we have employment and an economy, telecommuting will start to become more common: when it costs $200 to fill your family car's tank, you'll reconsider how desperately you need to attend every meeting face-to-face. People are already curtailing their spending on travel and tourism, preferring to spend at home instead. "Cocooning", they're calling it. That's not going to go away.

A dozen years from now, Daddy won't get up and drive to work every morning. In the best-case scenario, a lot of work will disappear as nations spend more time keeping their populace fed and less time worrying about torch relays and international relations. Canberra's large inter-suburban open spaces, which the more short-sighted of our brethren consider a bad idea because they allegedly make it essential to own a car to live here, will start to be seriously useful: I can imagine a lot of community farming and a fair bit of make-your-own-fun recreation on those "useless" patches. Public transport will actually grow in popularity for a while, then presumably dip again as people realise how utterly useless our bus services are and how unnecessary all that travel is. Neighbourhoods will turn into communities, as people realise that they might as well love the ones they're with.

Well, that's the best case anyhow. The worst case is resource wars, Christofascist governments, excesses that make the Rome of the vomitorium era look like a medieval monastery, and the total meltdown of any civilisation that isn't centrally controlled and probably speaking Mandarin.

I'm hoping for the former. Humanity needs to grow up a little, and part of that involves getting its priorities right. We have to get off this planet and out into the stars sometime in the next several centuries, or we're dead as the dinosaurs. So we'd better start getting some things right now.

My local comic shop is closing down. Their landlord wanted a 36% rent increase come the new financial year. So now I have to pick a new dealer for my drug of choice. Bugger.

Blake says he'll be back in virtuo if not in res: he's planning to put the House entirely online and do 100% mail order with a delivery service. But not being able to pop in and browse at lunchtime will be a pain. And being able to go in every time I had spare cash and put it on my gift voucher meant I didn't have a big hit to the wallet on Fridays. Since Impact and Dees are at the end of a bus ride, I can't do that as often. Probably need to stick a piggy bank on my desk.

Sigh. Life is so hard, y'know?

Fact: Australian labor laws allow employers to pay junior staff less than adults. That is, until you turn a certain age, typically 18, you can get paid less for doing the same work, ostensibly because adults are better at it than kids.

Fact: our Christian traditions treat Sunday differently than other days; people who work on Sunday get paid a different rate than those who work on other days. This rate is a multiple of their usual rate: time and a half, double time, or whatever.

Emergent phenomenon: there is no point going to Spotlight on a Sunday, hoping to buy curtains. The Sunday Kids are on, and none of them know anything about the process of measuring and quoting. That's something you only find out after you've been waiting around for half an hour while they work through their customers at glacier-speed, of course.

And there's no point surrendering to the importunings of your Elder Daughter of DOOOM and going to MacChuck's for lunch, because your "complicated" order will be misheard by the Sunday Kids at the drive-through and misassembled by the Sunday Kids in the kitchen.

In general, it appears the Christians have won this one. Might as well go to church; the secular world is not available to serve you.

Thank the gods! The long, hot summer is finally over!

Oh hang on, wait a minute...

I have an interesting quandary at the moment. Earlier this month, I got notice of a traffic infringement: while we were driving to the Farmer's Markets, I stopped at a traffic light with my wheel about a foot past the thick white line. This constitutes the offence of "proceed while traffic light red" (the Police don't recruit many graduates of English) and is worth a hefty fine. On the advice of a friend who used to work for the AFP here in Canberra, I wrote a polite letter to the Chief Police Officer, requesting that he get someone in the Infringements branch to take a look at the photo with a view to cancelling the offence, on the grounds that one foot over the line in a deserted intersection is in no way comparable to "running a red light", and only a robot would think otherwise. Sadly, the CPO apparently delegated the decision to a different robot, because I was informed that the notice stands. I paid the fine, cursed all boys in blue and their petty revenue-raising bastardry, and decided that was the end of it.

However: the former-AFP friend reckons I should take further steps. Ask for an appointment with the CPO's deputy who signed the rejection letter, on the grounds that (a) he's a good bloke, and (b) it likely wasn't he who made the decision to reject my appeal. And if that fails, write to the Police Minister, Simon Corbell, explaining the situation and asking if he felt this was a situation that needed his attention. And if that failed, bundle up all the evidence and do a care package for whoever it is at the Canberra Times who has such a mad-on about our local government and their speed-camera-addicted ways.

The ticket cost me $250 and three demerit points. It's the first ticket I've received since before I started going out with thelancrewitch five years ago. I could end up talking to all these people and still have that cost, or I could get some relief from the escalation of the matter and possibly even encourage the police to rethink the way they use cameras as fund-raising tools. Or I could attract the attention of the police in an unwelcome way, leading to all the sorts of petty interference that Moslems, aboriginals and greenies know so well.

The real question is: do I want to prolong this agony on the off-chance, or should I just say bugger the Australian Financial Police and teach my children to avoid and mistrust the men in blue?

fire_babe is a firefighter (in the CFA, I think), which is pretty cool.  Firefighters are pretty much the ultimate superheroes.  They're like the ethical opposite of real estate agents.  But that's not the coolest job.

One of kirmish  (the -mish rather than the kir-) used to be an ambulance driver.  That's the other kind of ultimate superhero.  They maybe risk their lives a little less than firefighters, but they have to pull more tricks out of their hats (delivering a baby today, reviving a drowning man yesterday, extracting the driver from a totalled car tomorrow) and they always have disgusting work stories to tell.  And besides: Spider & Rose was a much better movie than Backdraft.  But that's not the coolest job either.

damned_colonial is a Perl geek, one of the ones you recognise the name of, just because you can't miss it.  OK, she's not Audrey or chromatic or Damian, but she's done a huge amount for the language, that's pretty cool.  She doesn't risk her life in the process, except when she gets too near a bunch of rabid Pythonistas, but she hardly ever does so that's OK.  But that's not the coolest job.

I'm not entirely sure what alpha_angel's job is, other than that it involves setting up emergency centres and testing out all sorts of equipment for just-in-case scenarios possibly involving insane seismic events, but it sounds cool.  Not the coolest though.

Getting away from my f-list, I used to know a guy named Chris, who is now a fairly frequent talking head on the ABC, rolled out whenever they need the voice of reason to talk about economics.  Kind of like erudito, only with fewer cross references.  I remember him when he used to be a good Catholic boy; now he's an economist.  Like finding out that the nun who took you for sacramental studies is now on the cover of Hustler.  Still not quite the coolest though.

The coolest job of all belongs to a guy I went to school with, one Peter J Casey.  I ran into him a while back and told him his job was the coolest job of all, and he agreed.  Today, I saw his name on some credits and was reminded of it, which is why I bring it up.  And what (you ask with bated breath) is this job, that's cooler than "superhero" and "pundit" combined?  Peter is an accompanist on Play School.  Inventive, musical, quick-thinking and completely out of the limelight (there's another accompanist who they show occasionally, but Peter has never appeared, as far as I recall).  That's just plain cool. 

Even the machines are getting on the bandwagon now.

Looks like the Doctor's got his chameleon circuit working - but what on Earth is he doing in Civic???

We decided to celebrate a long-overdue windfall with some takeaway food. The Chinese New Year killed off our first choice -- the Vietnamese Kitchen in Giralang is closed tonight -- so with trepidation we went for what one friend calls "Chang Fang": a chinese takeaway in the local shops. The verdict: not bad at all.

( In Detail )

I saw a familiar figure boarding a bus last week, and I had to think back to my pre-Eric days to remember his name.

It was while I was going out with Megan, a buxom Queensland student at Canberra University, that I was first introduced to an odd plastic contraption with a double life. The contraption was a circular plastic bra hanger, with pegs around its circumference. (I've looked in vain for an image online, but my Google-fu is oddly lacking. The one pictured here gives you the vague idea, but lacks the pink-beige plasticky goodness of the original.) Usually she used it to hang her bras to dry, reasonably enough, but every now and then its secondary ability became useful.

Greg was a born-again Christian, one of the cretinous type who take first year biology so they can argue against evolution. He developed a sincere but oafish crush on Megan, and since he was living on the same floor of University Residences, he often found excuses to pop in for a chat and a not-terribly-surruptitious ogle. This irritated Megan greatly, because his charisma was matched only by his dress sense, so she hatched a plan. She got into the habit of keeping her bras on the plastic hanger even after they were dry, and keeping the device handy on her desk. Whenever the distinctively limp knock on her door heralded the arrival of Greg, she would quickly hang the hanger from her bookshelf, and stand right beside it. Greg was too nonplussed by the sight of all that (gasp!) intimate apparel, and never stuck around. I'm fairly sure he eventually got the message and moved on to stalk some other lass.

So when I saw him on the bus, twenty-odd years later, I had to think a bit to remember his name. What did we call that hanger again? Ah, that's it: the Greg Scarer. That was it!

I didn't say hi.

Interviewer: So, have you always wanted to be a hairdresser?
Hairdresser: Not at all! I started out as a copy editor for The Guardian.

I'm not remotely a fan of cricket, but I listen to NewsRadio so it's impossible to miss this story, and I'm just wondering:

If a person in a position of authority makes repeated, public mistakes in judgement, to the detriment of "co-workers"; if he refuses to accept correction or advice, and his supporters insist he should be allowed to go on making the same mistakes without any change; and if his superiors respond (eventually!) by removing him from his job and replacing him with someone else who doesn't make the same mistakes or demonstrate the same poor attitude... how is this setting a "dangerous precedent" for anything at all?

Cricket: Because Anglicanism Just Doesn't Cut It As The National Religion.

Read this if you have a strong stomach:

... She did say, afterward, that she didn't advise other women to follow her example.

My eyes watered. Yay for uncomplicated births!

If you're in Melbourne and planning to come up to Canberra some time in the next couple of weeks, and have some spare luggage space, we need you! thelancrewitch wants to bid on a birthing pool, but they don't deliver and they're in Melbourne. We need someone to:

1. Pick up the pool, presuming we win it -- not sure where in Melbourne this would be;
2. Bring it to Canberra before about mid-October; and
3. Be somewhere in Canberra long enough for me to race over and get it (you don't need to deliver!).

Can anyone help? We will repay you by naming the child after you, provided your name is LaTreenah Sherr'ylle or Jaxxson Florian.

Edited to add: She was outbid at the last minute, so never mind. Thanks anyhow!

The word from seagoon, who is resolutely Not Panicking (possibly because it would interfere with lunch, or possibly because he's already passed through panic and out the other side to the magical land of Whatever):

There is no specific wet-weather venue for this afternoon's once-in-a-lifetime occurrence. There's plenty of shelter nearby, and the BOM Site says it won't be absolutely urinating down anyway, so it'll be fine. Bring an umbrella and don't be queasy about a few patches of life-giving moisture; you can tell your kids you remember back when it used to rain, and they'll look at you like you're mad. 'Tis all good.

A major Australian industry is in trouble. Already this week, according to someone or other, the NSW betting industry is down one hundred million dollars in lost betting income.

So, in other words, a bunch of horses have a bit of a sniffle, a bunch of short guys are having a holiday, and thus it's temporarily impossible to continue ripping off a collection of superstitious idiots to the tune of nearly a hundred thousand times the average Australian annual salary¹.

This is a tragedy?

---

¹ Calculating $100,000,000 per week multiplied by 52 weeks per year, divided by the $52,000-odd mentioned in the linked article. As back-of-the-envelope calculations go it's pretty wobbly, but it'll do. Shall I start weeping softly now?

Perfect zinger from Paul "Doug Who?" McDermott on Sideshow tonight:

The aboriginal population of the NT couldn't be here tonight. Prime Minister John Howard said it's past their bedtime.

Listen, when one of the most purely evil men on the planet announces his retirement, the appropriate thing to do is to cheer. Among the inappropriate responses, I think "expressing sadness" is fairly high up the list. I always suspected Tony Abbott was a bit of a futtock, but come on; this is a new depth.

Let's make it clear: John Laws is an evil, loathesome blob of congealed weasel vomit. You can hate him, or you can try to ignore him, but if you respect him and think you'll miss him, then you should have a chat with your local doctor about getting that long-overdue lobotomy. Really.

Sad.


Edited to add: Would you believe some sad-sack posted a comment here that I should "have some respect" for the above-reviled bastard? Apparently the fact that he's "a legend of Australian radio" means that he deserves to be treated like a human being. Fortunately, I screen non-logged-in comments, so the poor commenter has only revealed his lack of clue to me, and not to my loyal readership.

Listen, S___: there are lots of Australian legends. The slaughter of the Tasmanian aboriginals. The Rum Corps. The stolen generation. The introduction of the cane toad. All seven seasons of Big Brother. The Tampa "crisis". Many many more. They're famous, they're influential, and they deserve no respect at all from me or anyone else. Sorry if you're having trouble seeing that, but it's not as if it's a difficult concept. The only reason I wouldn't piss on John Laws would be if he was on fire.

It takes all sorts to make an internet.

Apropos of nothing -- no, strike that: apropos of minus infinity. We're talking seriously irrelevance here. But I had to share. Ready? Good.

I just discovered that Ian Thorpe has an ex-girlfriend named Amanda Beard.

I am amused.

I usually listen to the news on ABC NewsRadio, so I don't see the pictures. But once I saw this one of "Fat Tony" Mokbel's mad dizgyze skillz, I had to respond...