Thursday, 31 January 2002

It Began in London-don-don-don

[music] The Chemical Brothers' Come With Us reviewed by yours truly at Records Ad Nauseam (mirrored here).

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O Canada

[travel] We spent most of December in Alberta, flying into Calgary, catching a bus up to Banff for a week's skiing and hiking, then catching more buses to the Edmonton area to spend Christmas with Jane's relatives.

It was my fourth visit to Canada, following visits to Montreal, Toronto, Vancouver, Victoria and Edmonton from 1992 to '99. It's getting to the point where it feels familiar, but I'm still acutely aware of how little I know about the place. Canadian culture bubbles along of its own accord, a self-contained world rarely noticed by outsiders—much like Australia—and a few days wandering around its malls and mountains and watching CBC news do not a crash course in Canadian make.

Australians moan about being ignored by the rest of the world, but at least our physical distance from Europe and America is some reason for it: Canada is jammed up against the US, historically tangled up with it, is like a parallel-universe America seen through a window of ice with all of the intriguing similarities and differences that implies—and Americans still think of it as Minnesota with beavers.

Admittedly, parts of it do feel very American; Calgary is like a frozen Texas, with the same oil dollars and cattle culture. But Canada is full of fascinating details of its own. Like the loonie. And the Red Green Show. And nanaimo bars.

One of the chief fascinations for me on this trip was being able to experience a true Canadian winter for the first time. My last winter visit coincided with a freak once-in-a-century 'brown Christmas', which was great for seeing Albertan grain elevators against golden fields of wheat but not so great for seeing snow. Somehow it made the suspense of waiting for the inevitable Siberian cold front even worse. Surely, my Aussie common sense told me, no mere mortal could survive a transition from five degrees Celcius to minus twenty-five overnight? Isn't that how they snap-freeze baby peas?

But I hadn't figured on those oil fields and thirty dollar quarterly power bills; what Alberta lacks in natural warmth, it makes up for in decomposing dinosaurs. Central heating and polar-fleece quickly and efficiently turn Arctic conditions into a Bahaman beach party, but with Caesars instead of Kahlua. (A Caesar = vodka and Clamato = Bloody Mary with a clam squeezed into it.)

This time round, I was happily walking for hours in minus 23 degrees; the clear skies and still, dry air made it seem warmer than waiting for a bus in Edinburgh. Well, okay, there was that one time when the guy sitting next to me on the ski-lift at Sunshine stepped off at the top with a frost-bitten nose. But the instructor showed us how to swing our arms to drive the blood back into our fingertips, so everything was just fine... except that my glasses kept fogging up, and I had to ski down without them in near white-out conditions, and when Jane saw me at the bottom I had icicles on my eyelashes. But hey! Après-ski at the Burning Brontosaurus! Clamatos all round!

I never minded the cold, because it meant seeing amazing things I'd never seen before. The Rocky Mountains chewing the sky with their jagged black and white teeth. Pencil-thin pines dotted with clumps of snow set against a pure-white landscape, like relics of an ice age. Frozen rivers and lakes under buckled slabs of ice, with snow blowing over their surface like dry sand. Hoarfrost so thick that the leafless trees along Highway 14 looked as if they'd been dipped in icing sugar.

I'll put some photos up when I have time to do justice to them. Right now I'm still savouring the memories.

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Wednesday, 30 January 2002

Oh, What a Blow

[weblog] Back in the mid-1990s, when the Internet still meant email as far as I was concerned, I used to put quotes from random sources—newspaper articles, books, TV shows—into my email signatures. This was one of them:

[On 9 February 1971 in California,] one newspaper reported that a welfare recipient, accused of wasting money on a colour TV set, replied, 'But I didn't want my children to grow up not knowing what colour was.'

It's from Edmund Carpenter's Oh, What a Blow That Phantom Gave Me!, an early 1970s classic of what would now be called postmodern anthropology but would better be called 'an analysis of the effects of global culture on local culture written in an eclectic style'. Since I had just written a thesis that was also an analysis of the effects of global culture etc., I liked the book enormously.

The complete text is now available on the web, but it's more than just the text: in the spirit of the book, it's a multimedia text with illustrations, maps, links to commentaries and so on. A fine example of how the humanities can and should make use of this medium, and a fine work in its own right.

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Tuesday, 29 January 2002

[weblog] Been a bit of a linking day, hasn't it. Here's some more: William Gibson writing insightfully on Japan and England; and, for those who've long been waiting for a sequel to William Shatner's infamous LP Transformed Man, his performance of Elton John's 'Rocket Man' at the 1978 Science Fiction Film Awards is guaranteed to satisfy.

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[politics] Unfortunate Juxtaposition of Web Ad and Main Story No. 349 (part of an occasional series). Seen at The Age.

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[politics] A wonderful article on censorship in Britain, full of quoteworthy gems [via the 'Filter]:

The entire British press is now running scared of a body that receives just one complaint per million people per year. ... One in a million is also the risk of dying in an air crash, and anyone who takes that seriously is considered phobic. ... We have exchanged censorship by elected government for censorship by random nutter.

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Monday, 28 January 2002

[site news] With this tour of past incarnations of speedysnail, the grand redesign of January 2002 is complete. I hereby declare this site—relaunched! [smashes champagne bottle against side of vessel, wastes thirty quid's worth of perfectly good bubbly, injures small child with shards of broken glass]

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[politics] Release the hounds! [via VM]:

These images of children being taken away now, presided over by a stoney-faced Philip Ruddock—looking more and more like an evil Mr Burns from The Simpsons by the day—just turn the stomach. He has warned that the next in line will be children allegedly in danger from their own parents. How tragically familiar.

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Pale Shelter

[journal] I went swimming yesterday for the first time in several months, at Edinburgh's Royal Commonwealth Pool (built for the 1982 Commonwealth Games; there obviously wasn't a loch handy). It was a surprisingly novel experience: not the swimming, not the Olympic sized pool, but the fact that I wasn't the palest, pastiest looking person there.

Even in Tasmania, which is almost wholly populated by people of pale Anglo-Irish stock, I was always the closest thing to A4 Office Bond at the school pool. Unless it was early in the season before the pool had warmed up, when I'd be more of a bluish off-white.

My Anglo-Celtic-Germanic-Viking ancestry had served as a giant genetic filter, efficiently screening any stray particles of melanin from my skin. Even a whole summer spent underneath an ever-growing ozone hole did no more than turn my arms the colour of pale straw. This was cause for great amusement among the sun-bronzed (or, more often, sun-reddened-and-blistered) kids around me, who would save up this inherently hilarious piece of ammunition for some later battle.

It didn't help me enjoy swimming much, although being forced into an outdoor pool in late spring while the frost was still thawing off the lane-markers didn't help either. But once free of the pressures of the peer group and the PE teacher I liked it fine. Sure, I was still the palest person in the pool on holiday in the tropics or even in suburban Melbourne, but who cared? Those people weren't making unflattering comparisons between my skin colour and an iceberg.

But at some level, I obviously still cared, because now for once the mole was on the other foot. There I was, among my Northern brethren, and for the first time I was the sun-bronzed Aussie. Sort of. On my arms. If you squint a bit, the freckles join up. And see that? That could turn into a melanoma one day.

Ahh, the mighty genetic stock of the conquering tribes of the North. How anyone ever took eugenics seriously, I'll never know.

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Friday, 25 January 2002

[journal] By a quirk of the round shape of the Earth and the relative positions of Scotland and Australia, for eleven hours it's the national day in both my homeland and my current home: it's simultaneously Australia Day and Burns Night. The former is an excuse for a barbie, sitting around getting pissed, and listening to the Triple J Hottest 100 on the radio. The latter is an excuse for haggis, neeps and tatties, sitting around getting pissed, and listening to earnest recitations of Burns's ode to the "great chieftain o' the pudding race".

As if to remind me that I'm a long way from the southern summer, it snowed today in Edinburgh. I was stuck at work without a camera, and by the afternoon the snow had turned to rain and melted away. But it's inspired me to whip up another impromptu instalment of Detail, with four bandwidth-busting images of the Scottish winter. The first was taken on a foggy evening in Fife and the others one frosty day three weeks ago.

So grab yourself a giant lamb sausage stuffed with oatmeal, sip on a single malt, and sit back and enjoy winter in Scotland.

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[code] If you're grappling with CSS layouts, you'll find css-discuss helpful: I've been signed up only a few hours and have already picked up some good tips. [Via Owen, who's in the thick of it at the moment.]

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Thursday, 24 January 2002

For Whom the Dell Tolls

[infotech] I use a Mac. Have done for years; seventeen years, to be exact (oh my God, I'm twice the age I was in 1985; don't panic, don't panic). For a while in the mid-90s I thought they were doomed, that Win95 had overtaken the MacOS, and steeled myself to say goodbye to them for good. The iMac gave new hope, and OS X gave hope again, but it's getting hard to live on hope. In fact, things are starting to look grim.

How can I say that, when Apple have just released another typically elegant piece of hardware? (Which the iMac 2 is, despite those who say it looks like a lamp: what's more elegant, a lamp or a box?) Well, I say it by pointing to Stephen den Beste's technical but insightful dissection of the issues.

First, PowerPC chips are rapidly falling behind their PC counterparts, and the underlying reasons for this give little hope of a turnaround. Second, writing more efficient software to make up the lost ground just won't happen. And third, these factors combined with Apple's low market share will eventually see the Mac pass the point of no return.

I hate to contemplate the death of the Mac: like so many, I have a lot invested in it, not just financially, emotionally and aesthetically but in accumulated skills and knowledge. Because computers are knowledge machines, the demise of a major marque in the PC industry seems more like the demise of a culture or a language than of a manufacturer: with it goes a way of looking at the world, a particular way of navigating around information-space. Yes, there are other perfectly acceptable ways of doing that, just as British and American English are both acceptable ways of communicating. But loss of diversity is still a loss.

The trouble is—and this is why den Beste's analysis persuades me that the end is nigh—the Mac world is already facing a cultural revolution of its own making. OS X was an entirely necessary step for Apple to take, but it's still unclear whether every pre-X Mac user is willing to take it with them. Until this month all newly-sold Macs booted into OS 9.x by default, and many old and even new users will have left them there. By the time they're forced to switch over for good with the purchase of their next machine, the temptation to look elsewhere may be too strong.

Because den Beste is right: in the long run, clock-speed trumps all. Right now, we Mac users can feel that we're not doing too badly: a G4 seems blindingly fast for most of the tasks we demand of it, just as a new Athlon- or Pentium-based PC would. But imagine a time when Macs are only half as fast as PCs, and feel like it; and then imagine a processing-intensive task that PCs can handle quickly but Macs can't; and imagine that task being an essential aspect of the next big computing craze. Imagine if Macs couldn't decode MP3s in real-time, or play DVDs, or burn CDs, or burn DVDs, and extrapolate from there.

Unless Apple can jump the chip-speed hurdle, they're screwed, which means that we Mac users are also screwed. Maybe Apple will take the biggest gamble of all, and switch to Intel when the OS X user-base is big enough, giving us a life-raft if the company does sink. Hmm, and maybe Steve Jobs will be the first president of Mars.

It's depressing. But right now, in January 2002, I'm staring at the most beautiful piece of hardware I've ever had the privilege to use, and sitting at home is the second-most; it does everything I want of it, and could do far more; and the day of reckoning is some ways off yet. Personally, I reckon it's about time to make the final switch to OS X and enjoy a couple more years of playing with what an operating system can be, rather than what the mundane and pragmatic forces of the market say it must be. The alternatives will still be there at the end of it all.

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Clash Photography

[music] Q Magazine has chosen the cover photo of London Calling by the Clash as the greatest rock and roll photograph of all time, and it's hard to disagree... One aspect that never seems to get mentioned is the hunched back. This is no rock-jock he-man flexing his muscles: this is the skinny outcast venting his frustrations at the world through his music and, for one intense moment, his instrument; rock star as Quasimodo. And that, it seems to me, is closer to the spirit of rock and roll—the driving force that keeps it reinventing itself, generation after disaffected generation—than any image of long hair and leathers.

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Wednesday, 23 January 2002

[site news] With the addition of a splendiferous site map the speedysnail redesign is almost complete. I've also added an index page (at last) to Detail, which will be seeing some more action soon; and after glancing back through the weblog archives have pulled out a year-old entry and let it stand alone elsewhere.

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[infotech] How the Wayback Machine Works [via Jerry Kindall]: "This is the largest database ever built. It's larger than Walmart's, American Express', the IRS ... and it's built on commodity PCs."

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Tuesday, 22 January 2002

[weblog] Since we're all part of a big ol' weblogging community here, it behooves us to bestow our beneficence upon those beheld having a berth, uh, birthday, before we run out of words beginning with 'be'. Particularly those that have taken our fancy ever since we stumbled across them among the evanescent 'recently updated' links at Blogger. So happy blogday, Wombat File.

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[weblog] A few tasty links in lieu of the long and thoughtful pieces I want to write but don't have time to yet: taking ironing to the edge; the folklore of homeless children; and why didn't the Romans invent photography? (Via various blogs whose names I've promptly forgotten, all of which can be found on the new links page.)

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Monday, 21 January 2002

[film] Speaking of Lord of the Rings: LOTR as PhD Allegory; LOTR in Two Hours; and (less flippantly) Reasons for Liking Tolkien.

And I'm surprised that nobody else has noticed this disturbing similarity:

    

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One Ring to Spellbind Them All

[film] While I'm on the subject of film I should mention something about The Fellowship of the Ring, which I saw on New Year's Day with a few friends.

I watch a lot of movies, and it isn't often that something goes so far beyond my expectations, so far outside my experience of big budget action flicks. I think this as much as anything explains the rapture with which Fellowship has been received: those of us who read the book at an impressionable age somewhere in our teens, who've lived with it tucked snugly in our memories for half our lives, and who have been watching one-note popcorn movies of no particular substance for just as long, went into this with one fervent hope and fear looping through our minds: please don't fuck it up.

For Peter Jackson to dispel that fear, and to do so not just adequately but gloriously, is without doubt one of the miracles of modern cinema. For Fellowship is glorious, no doubt about it, and if Jackson can create an unbearably tense and gripping movie out of the waffling first volume of Lord of the Rings, imagine what he'll do with the later volumes where Tolkien cranked up the pace.

One review in particular captured the experience of watching Fellowship perfectly for me. Since it's buried in a bulletin board without a permalink, I'll quote it in full:

I have nothing useful to say, for good or ill, because this film did to me something that no other film has ever done: it short-circuited my critical faculties.

I read the books just once, years and years ago, and remember only bits and pieces—but the moment the screen lit up, my eyes filled with tears at how fucking right it all was; and for three hours straight I wept and gaped, feeling all the while like my heart was going to burst out of my chest.

I was absolutely demolished, emotionally wrung dry, incapable of coherent speech for a half-hour or so afterwards. Three hours was much too short. I wanted more more more right now now now, goddammit.

SO it was pretty good, I guess.

[Jack Fear, 24 December 2001, at Barbelith Underground.]

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Hollywood Dreams

[film] Saw David Lynch's Mulholland Drive on the weekend, and felt the urge to snort derisively at every critic who has called it confusing, baffling, incoherent, unbearable—and that includes many who liked it. Good grief, haven't these people heard of flashbacks? Dream sequences? Metaphors? Wishful thinking? Intertwined parallel storylines? Must every movie plod from A to B to C, and in that order? Where did they earn their critical stripes, at an Adam Sandler retrospective?

It was great, of course, and the 'confusing' last third of the film was deeply satisfying—far more than some linear extrapolation of the first two-thirds would have been. Lynch has made a movie that captures the stark contrast between Hollywood dreams and bitter reality better than any in a long time. All that, and it has one of the best incompetent hitman scenes and jilted husband scenes in recent memory. Calling it 'weird' is fair enough—with amnesiacs, mysterious blue boxes, ominous cowboys, miniature senior citizens and, ahem, masturbating lesbians, it's definitely that—but calling it 'meaningless', 'moronic' or 'impossible to understand' says more about the critic than about Lynch and this fine work.

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Friday, 18 January 2002

[weblog] Snow crystal photographs of amazing clarity and beauty.

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[politics] Hmm. The Australian refugee 'crisis' rant I've had in me since the Tampa affair has finally made its way to the surface (mirrored here). We Aussies may be laconic, we may be wry, we may even be egalitarian, but when it comes to refugees a lot of us have the empathy of a spud.

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[minutiae] The recent discovery that the colour of the universe is shifting from blue to red and is currently turquoise suggests two things:

1. Marx was right, and the dialectical process is heading towards a communist 'classless society'; and
2. We're still in the bourgeois phase when everyone says 'stuff it' and heads to the Caribbean for a holiday.

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Thursday, 17 January 2002

[weblog] Hey now! Twernt is back after a five-month hiatus, and I didn't notice until now. Also recently returned: Sylloge; Spoonfed (and gone again, rather fatally this time); and Wetlog. Dammit, my new links page is going to be another back-breaker.

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[minutiae] 'So you two are catching the bus to where?'

'Southampton. No... Northampton.'

'This place has all the Hamptons. North. South. Wolver.'

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You Say Tomato

[language] I'm halfway through Nick Hornby's How to be Good, which as usual is an example of how to write good. But one minor quirk is annoying me, and it's no fault of Hornby's. You see, this is the American edition, and like many transatlantic editions of British novels it replaces 'obscure' anglicisms with their more 'obvious' Americanisms. Since the main characters of Hornby's latest are Guardian-reading North London lefties, these most English of pages are scattered with the word 'liberal'.

Ahhh, 'liberal', such a useful word. What Brits and Australians would call 'Labour' or 'left', Americans call 'liberal'. What Australians call 'the Liberal Party', Brits would call Conservative and Americans would call Republican. When Brits hear 'liberal', they think of their laissez-faire middle-of-the-road Liberal Party; what Brits call Liberals, Aussies would call Democrats, and what Americans call Democrats, Aussies would call Labor (without a 'u'; at the time the ALP was founded, dropping the British 'u' was a mark of independence, even though it persists in everyday use). Australians usually use the qualifier 'small-l' when talking about 'liberalism' to distinguish it from the Liberal Party, but that's no help to Americans, who have shifted the long-standing political science definition of 'liberalism' into the territory other Westerners would call 'social democratic' or even (gasp) 'socialist', since even uttering that word would give many Americans an anxiety attack.

It's a tangled web, but each naming system is understood within its own country, and is in fact inextricable from any discussion of politics in that country. So it's strange to see the UK terms replaced by Americanisms in an English novel written by an Englishman.

It isn't just American publishers who pull this stunt, though. British publishers do it too. There's something wrong about reading Dave Barry with '-or'-ended words and US terms carefully replaced, as if colorful American prose would give the British reading public Boston Tea Party flashbacks.

Worse, though, was to be an Australian reader in the days before our British-dominated book market was opened up to US imports; we would get American books with their obscure Americanisms replaced with almost as obscure anglicisms, and be left to untangle it all ourselves. It hadn't dawned on British publishers that the colonies may not be familiar with every word used in the mother country.

(When I first lived in the UK I found one word particularly amusing. In Australia and the US a 'bun' is both a sweet bread product served with tea or coffee and a white or brown bread used to hold hamburgers or salady fillings. In England the former is a bun, but the latter is a 'bap', although the US usage is widely understood. 'Bap' still sounds regurgitative to me:

'What did you have for lunch?'

'Bap.'

'I asked you to tell me, not show me.')

The wholesale substitution of regional words is a relatively minor irritation, a legacy of publishers' attempts to justify having separate US and rest-of-world editions, but one that reinforces longstanding misunderstandings and mutual ignorance. One kind of book that never suffered in this way, though, was the comic strip collection, because no publisher would pay an editor to hand-letter replacement talk balloons and paste them over the originals before printing. The first place I ever encountered the word 'faucet' was in a Peanuts collection, and at age seven it seemed every bit as exotic to me as Charlie Brown's snow-shovel. That one word opened up a world of different dialects, different cultures, difference: it showed me that regional linguistic differences involved more than just accents. By the time I figured out that 'faucet' meant 'tap', I'd started a life-long fascination with words, all because the editors at Coronet hadn't discovered Tipp-Ex (UK; a.k.a. Liquid Paper [US], white-out [Aus.]).

I suppose I'd have got the message from television eventually; even the most condescending Australian television producer wouldn't dub US and UK shows into Strine. American producers, though, have no qualms about remaking UK sitcoms for a US audience, and Hollywood even dubbed the entire first Mad Max movie into pure Californian for fear that Valley girls wouldn't understand what Mel Gibson was saying. I have visions of UK and Australian TV stations enjoying sweet revenge by casting Hugh Laurie as Kramer in the London-based remake of 'Seinfeld'—not 'woah, mamma' but 'what ho, ma-ma'—and Steve Vizard as David Letterman in a Melbourne-based rip-off of 'Late Night'. (Erm, hang on. That one actually happened.)

All of which saves readers and audiences the stress and mental anguish of having to deduce for themselves what words and references mean: 'trunk' for 'boot', 'elevator' for 'lift', 'Daryl Somers' for 'Noel Edmonds'. And leaves us with the illusion that the rest of the English-speaking world is exactly like us, just living in a slightly different climate.

Fortunately, this cultural dike-building is under seige by a medium that moves too fast for editors to control. Every time someone uses UK or Australian slang on an American-dominated web forum or mailing list, they end up having to explain themselves. Every time an American publisher decides that readers won't understand what a 'philosopher's stone' is, those readers learn from the web that non-American Harrys have never heard of a 'sorceror's stone'. The cultural broadcasters that are the United States and to a lesser extent the United Kingdom are being challenged by pirate radio operators from the rest of the English-speaking world, and the results can only be Good.

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Wednesday, 16 January 2002

Snail Trail

[weblog] Two months of wandering the web like a virtual David Carradine and not much kung fu action to show for it. While I was away I spent too much time staring at the blue screen and the grey, but on reviewing my posts find that I said precious little worth noting here. So that was a collosal waste of valuable thinking time. (Except when I helped to spread the KPMG meme; but that was my sworn duty as citizen of this noble virtual land.)

Then there was my attempted coup over at One Day Soon, thanks to still having posting rights from helping James first set up the blog. I also chipped in a wombat for the mighty Wombat File, and left various comments at the sites of the usual suspects, some of which were a little too tetchy in hindsight.

Meanwhile, those of you who checked in here may have enjoyed my bandwidth-munching experiments. More of those to come in the next few weeks.

There once was a wee speedysnail
Who left a most curious trail
Without reason or rhyme
He wasted his time
Chasing around his own tail

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Tuesday, 15 January 2002

Everything Old is New Again

[site news] A new year, new site design, new logo, new weblog. Not having a place to bash out random words was getting to me after two months off the wagon. The temptation to resurrect Walking West was strong, but I wanted to make a fresh start. Instead I considered several possible titles, most of which turned out to be taken or didn't take me: Minutiae; Random; Untitled; This is Not a Weblog; Ceci N'Est Pas Un Weblog.

I was stuck. And at the same time, trying to rethink the design of the site as a whole, which I guess made the amalgamation of site and blog inevitable. Now you've got a one-stop shop for 2002 speedysnail content, though some of it will live in separate areas alongside the old stuff. A few pages are still unfinished, but will be filled in over the next week or so.

Taking advantage of Movable Type's category features should improve the usefulness of this year's archives. And at last I'm taking the plunge into the wonderful world of reader comments.

So: brain switched on, enthusiasm rekindled, site looking good (except in pre-5.x browsers; as usual, you're looking at pure XHTML+CSS), and a fresh new year awaiting us. Let's go.

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