Whatchoo Readin' For?

The last time I was too lazy to post (most of 2007) I did manage a list of what I read that year. Well guess what…

“Econobabble” by Richard Denniss. Popular economics. Some good points and from an Australian perspective - which these things often aren’t.

“The Three-Body Problem” by Liu Cixin. China’s most popular sci-fi book. Won all sorts of awards. Mostly dreadful rubbish, although the bit set in the Cultural Revolution was interesting.

“The Long Utopia” by Stephen Baxter and Terry Pratchett. Fourth in a series set on a string of parallel Earths. Pretty enjoyable.

“Stoner” by John Williams. Easily the best thing I read this year. Seemingly simple story of a university professor’s life, but the writing is so accomplished it ends up building into a beautifully moving epic, yet built from nothing really.

“Under the Skin” by Jonathan Glazer. The film adaptation of this is one of my favourite movies. The book isn’t as good, but is still an unusual story of dog-like aliens harvesting hitch hikers in remote Scotland for consumption as a delicacy on their home-world.

“The Rachael Papers” by Martin Amis. First Martin Amis I’ve read. First one he wrote. A surprisingly amusing tale of a tortured teenager in early ‘70s England.

“The Run of His Life: The People v. O.J. Simpson” by Jeffrey Toobin. This was the written accompaniment to the screen-binge I was on at the time here. Plenty o’ Juice. Crazy stuff. Good book.

“The First Forty-Nine Stories” by Ernest Hemingway. Great writer. Usual hijinks in bull rings and pursuing manly pursuits.

“Mother Tongue” by Bill Bryson. I re-read this one afternoon in Hong Kong while I was feeling a bit ill. A lot of obscure facts in Bill’s usual readable style, though I think I prefer “Shakespeare: The World as Stage” for its insights into the English language.

“Elric” by Michael Moorcock. One novel in a very famous fantasy series. I suppose a successor to Gormenghast, or even the original Conan novels, and a precursor to ‘The Black Company’ series by Glen Cook. “Eldritch fantasy in a dying land” perhaps? Anyway, a bit dire.

“Lincoln in the Bardo” by George Saunders. Popular and ‘experimental’ hit of 2017. The experimental side of things didn’t do anything worthwhile besides inflating this from a short story into a novel.

“Bright Air Black” by David Vann. A retelling of Medea. It opens with Medea in the stern of the Argo, standing in the decomposing body of the brother she has just murdered, throwing pieces into the sea to slow the pursuit of her father, who must fish each limb from the water. Amazing prose and an amazingly fierce protagonist, unbound by the rules of her society.

“Victory” by Joseph Conrad. Enjoyable psychological thriller set in Indonesia. The protagonist was a bit too icily tortured, but there were some excellent villains.

“The Promise of the Child” by Tom Toner. Elaborate space opera which didn’t really grab me.

“Forensics and Fiction” by D.P. Lyle. Reasonably interesting read where various aspiring crime writers ask the author technical questions around forensic devices in their plots, e.g. “if my hero found the butler’s body buried in the cellar two months after he was killed, what would the body look like?”

“House of Names” by Colm Tóibín. Another retelling of Greek mytrhology, this time the story of the House of Atreus: King Agamemnon and his wife Clytemnestra, their son Orestes and daughters Iphigenia and Electra. This is a very realistic take – no gods or magic – which made it harsh, but I think I preferred “Bright Air Black” for its touches of the divine, even if they were explicable.

“The Secret Agent” by Joseph Conrad. Lighter than “Victory” and not as good.

“New York 2140” by Kim Stanley Robinson. New novel from one of my favourite authors. Fascinating examination of what city life might be like after massive global sea level rises and what it means to inhabit an ‘intertidal’ space.

“I, Claudius” by Robert Graves. Got a fair way through this before I realised I’d read it before. Still, an excellent book and I love a bit of Roman intrigue.

“All the Pretty Horses” by Cormac McCarthy. The first in McCarthy’s ‘Border Trilogy’. A young Texan cowboy travels to Mexico and falls in love. Beautiful, spare prose. Lot of Spanish. Lot of horses.

“The Crossing” by Cormac McCarthy. Second in the ‘Border Trilogy’. A young boy traps a wolf that is killing livestock on his family’s farm, then tries to return it to Mexico. Things end badly.

“Cities of the Plain” by Cormac McCarthy. The last novel in the ‘Border Trilogy’. The protagonists from the first two novels, older now, meet while working on a ranch, and travel to Mexico when one falls in love with a prostitute. Things end badly.

“The Many-Coloured Land” by Christopher Koch. A writer travels around Ireland to explore his family history in company with a musician. Pretty engaging. Made me want to see the Burren in County Clare.

“American Pastoral” by Philip Roth. Once it gets past the framing narrative, this was a great examination of a man’s inability to understand the decline of his business and the motivations of his daughter in bombing the local post office. It also had lots of technical minutiae about how to make really good hand-made leather gloves, such that I now want a pair.

“The Natural Way of Things” by Charlotte Wood. Ultimately stupid story about a bunch of ‘overly sexual’ women being kidnapped and held on a remote property for an unspecified purpose. Then they leave.

“The Misenchanted Sword” by Lawrence Watt-Evans. Amazing fantasy book that I’ve read nearly every year since I was about 10 years old. No thought required but a good story nevertheless.

“Goodbye to Berlin” by Christopher Isherwood. Some novellas concerning Berlin in the ‘30s collected into one volume. Bit of old time scandal – abortions, women smoking – made more topical by passing references to Nazis. Some good prose too. Oh, and one of the stories was the basis for ‘Cabaret’.

“Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy” by John Le Carré. The first of Le Carré’s novels I’ve read. Unexpectedly meaty with some good characters, all set in a vanished milieu.    

Apicide

The bees are dying. They’ve died off before, but not in my lifetime. As far as we know, their deaths aren’t related to climate change, but it feels like that. It feels like an intimation of the sadness I felt when I read Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? and realised all the animals had died.

The name for the bees dying is ‘Colony Collapse Disorder.’ In the past it has had better names. ‘Disappearing disease’ and ‘Spring dwindle’ are two of the neater ones. The current dying began in 2006 and we have yet to ascertain the cause. Probable contenders in descending order of likelihood are:

Neonicotinoids – these are a class of insecticide derived from, or chemically similar to, nicotine. They are useful in that they affect insects more than mammals, and because they can be applied to seeds and from there, provide protection to the whole plant, especially from sap-sucking insects. They are relatively new and their rise in agriculture coincides with the death of the bees, so they are a prime suspect. George Monbiot, an environmentalist whom I greatly admire, points the bone squarely in their direction. A more thoughtful view is taken by the American apiarist and biologist Randy Oliver, who keeps abreast of the scientific literature covering neonicotinoids and their effect on bees. He points out that there seems to be little correlation between the use of these chemicals and Colony Collapse Disorder, although more study needs to be undertaken on how long they linger in the soil, their effects when mixed with other chemicals, particularly fungicides, and their real-world application (when used correctly they seem to have a negligible effect on bees, when used heavily in home and municipal contexts they can cause harm, especially to waterways).

Pathogens – a high percentage of beehives can become infested with the Varroa destructor mite, which weakens bees by sucking their equivalent of blood. The mite can also carry viruses such as ‘deformed wing virus’ and ‘Israeli acute paralysis virus.’ The fungus Nosema is also thought to be a likely culprit in many hives collapsing.

High-Fructose Corn Syrup – is there anything it can’t do? Bees are often fed this syrup in winter when there are few natural sources of nectar. Such a bland diet may weaken their immune system. This may be exacerbated by bees feeding on a monoculture crop during Spring and Summer.

Apiculture – transporting a hive from one area to another can make it difficult for bees to find their way home; it can also spread the pathogens mentioned above. Other apicultural practices being touted as possible factors leading to CCD include the artificial control of queen bees, including selecting bees for breeding based on docility (and the concurrent lack of genetic diversity this has brought to bee populations); the use of antibiotics; the selection of which larva is to be fed royal jelly; introducing a new queen every two years (without interference a queen would normally reign for five or six); excluding the queen from some areas of the hive and clipping the queen’s wings. Lastly, the provision of such infrastructure as combs, wax sheets and ventilation, all of which can be taken care of by the hive itself.

Most likely Colony Collapse Disorder arises from a combination of all of the factors listed above, probably interacting in complex feedback loops. Although pointing at a single cause, for example neonicotinoids, is both emotionally satisfying and automatically provides a simple solution, it does belittle the effort being put in on an international level to pin down the causes of CCD and combat them. Bees are vital to our food supply. They don’t just provide honey for your toast, they provide free pollination to a vast array of crops. So, although “ban neonicotinoids” is a catchy slogan you may encounter over the coming years, and may prove to actually be the solution, bear in mind too that these chemicals have been banned already in France with no discernible effect. As yet there has been no reporting of CCD in Australia despite our use of neonicotinoids.

A summation? There appears to be no simple cause or solution for CCD. A combination of better beekeeping practices and more responsible use of pesticides would seem to be a good start. Until the crisis is resolved take a moment, next time you pass a plant covered in flowers, to appreciate the bees fuzzing its margins, their attention to each bloom, their tiny perfection. 

How Long Till I Get Some Fucking Marmite?

Just in case you’ve been living under a rock I’ll summarise the situation:

February 22, 2011: the Christchurch Earthquake kills 185 people and destroys large areas of the city – the damage compounded by aftershocks in the coming months.

November 2011: Sanitarium shuts down production of Marmite at its Christchurch factory… the only source of Marmite in the entire world.

March 16, 2012: I buy one of the last remaining jars of Marmite from New Zealand eBay before Marmageddon.

February 18, 2013: I run out of Marmite

March 20, 2013 – Marmite production starts up again

Today, 3 and a half months later, there’s still no Marmite on supermarket shelves. Sanitarium have indicated they wish to stock the product in New Zealand before beginning export. Horrifyingly, I watched this video where, behind the cheesy comedy, you can see the new plant in action. It seems to produce a 250g jar of Marmite every 2 seconds, or 30 per hour. From this we can start to see the true scale of the problem:

Population of New Zealand: 4,468,200

Weeks that plant has been in operation: call it 16

Worst case scenario - plant operates an hour a day on weekdays: 1 jar of Marmite for every 31 New Zealanders.

Best case scenario – plant operates 24 hours a day, 7 days week: at least 1 jar for every New Zealander

Probable scenario – plant operates for 8 hours per day on weekdays: another 46 weeks until every New Zealander has a jar and they can start exporting some to Australia.

Forty-six weeks! And this assumes that the filthy Kiwis are spreading the stuff abstemiously! What if they’re eating it by the spoonful? Slathering it all over their obnoxious, sweaty selves and then licking it off one another with craven delight? If this is the case there might never be enough to satiate their greed.

The solution? I propose we send the Australian Navy to annex Christchurch and divert all the Marmite that is being produced to Australia. Plausibly we could also send raiding parties into the surrounding countryside to secure even more of the delicious spread. If nothing else, now that Afghanistan is a peaceful democracy, it will give our armed forces something to do (other than demeaning homosexuals in between bouts of sodomy/hazing-the-new-guy).

I believe we have no other option.

Sodom and Gomorrah

On Thursday afternoon, by an incredible coincidence, I finished two very long books that I have been reading for a very long time. They are Marcel Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu (or ‘In Search of Lost Time’) and Robert Jordan’s The Wheel of Time. Proust’s is considered one of the greatest works of modern literature; Jordan’s a great work of fantasy. In nearly every respect they are the total opposite of one another. In one respect though, they are the same – length.

Oh, and they both have the word ‘time’ in their titles.

I started reading The Wheel of Time (or WoT as its hoards of devotees call it) when it came out in 1990, twenty-three fucking years ago. Robert Jordan actually died in 2007 and they had to get another guy to finish it, which he did in January this year. It ran to 14 volumes and a touch over 4 million words. In contrast, In Search of Lost Time clocks up only 1.2 million (War and Peace, for comparison, totals 587,000) across a mere seven volumes. Strangely, I read the first volume, Swann’s Way at university, counted myself lucky that was all I had to persevere through, had it itch at me for a while, then started the whole thing again in around 2008.

So, were they any good? They were, but they’re so different I can make no real comparison between them. ‘Exile on Main Street’ compared with Beethoven’s Ninth? ‘Terminator’ compared to Kieslowski’s ‘Blue?’ Jordan himself was an Episcopalian nuclear engineer who served two tours of Vietnam as a helicopter gunner (aside: Michael Herr to a door gunner in Dispatches: “How do you kill women and children?” Answer: “Just don’t lead ‘em so much”). Proust was an asthmatic social climber who spent the last three years of his life confined to his cork-lined bedroom.

The Wheel of Time was epic fantasy of a sort I don’t really read any more – I barely read fantasy at all these days. It was done very well with a big cast of nicely drawn characters, an interesting world, neat descriptions of sword fighting, a novel conception of magic and a satisfying resolution. There was a certain amount of disconnect as the years between each book meant that I started each one with the plot for the previous volume as a dim memory. I do remember that some of the latter ones penned by Jordan, say volumes 8-10, were pretty dull, and having a new author brought in after Jordan died (possibly from RSI after all that typing?) was a definite breath of fresh air to get the whole thing moving and finished.

In Search of Lost Time was vast and infrequently rewarding. It forced me to read slowly and carefully due to its dense, multiply compounded sentences, sometimes running to more than a page. It drew me in with accessible portraits of, and ruminations on, obsessive love, then pushed me away with the tedious minutiae at play between the aristocracy and the bourgeoisie at the world’s longest and most boring dinner party. It left me with an impression of Proust as an expert on memory (and what a fantastic thing on which to be an expert), modestly possessing a huge vocabulary, preoccupied with class and with homosexuality (or ‘inversion’ as he calls it), a pettily jealous mummy’s boy, a tender child filled with love for his grandmother, and someone deeply affected by flowers, particularly hawthorn blossom.

So, let me cheerfully roll out the usual clichés regarding high and low culture. The Wheel of Time was a plot-driven, fun read populated by shallow characters and showing a shallow conception of the world. In Search of Lost Time was disdainful of plot; a difficult book populated by multifaceted characters and displaying an almost painful engagement with existence. I mentioned before that besides being long they also have the word ‘time’ in their titles. A good summation then is the thesis put forward by each about the nature of time:

The Wheel of Time: ages come and pass, history occurs in cycles.

In Search of Lost Time: people change so radically from day to day and throughout their lives that there is no consistent ‘person’ left by the passage of time and the process of forgetting. This is only counteracted occasionally when some chance moment throws us back to the memory of an earlier time in our lives – this gives birth to a new being who briefly exists outside time who can look at the past and the present simultaneously from an atemporal perspective.  

Review: The Hobbit

Peter Jackson’s adaptations of Tolkien’s works are equations in which addition and subtraction are crucial. In The Lord of the Rings, Jackson solved the equation well. Subtracting extraneous elements, such as Tom Bombadil, the Barrow Downs and the Scouring of the Shire from Tolkien’s narrative made for a better movie. Additions were minutely scrutinised and, for example in the case of a stronger ‘warrior Arwen,’ largely abandoned.

In The Hobbit, Jackson has made a number of additions, both to the story and to the viewing experience, which are largely unsuccessful. The Hobbit is of course a far lighter text than The Lord of the Rings, really a children’s story largely free of the deeper mythology and symbolism present in the LOTR, and, as such, open to additions in order to improve character and story. Unfortunately, Jackson’s additions seem largely to be present in order to create enough material for three movies rather than any other consideration.

Least successful is Radagast and his rabbit powered sleigh. The character, barely mentioned in The Hobbit, is given a larger billing in the movie as part of the sub-plot concerning Sauron’s rise as the Necromancer of Dol Guldur. In some respects this is a good addition; it presents the story in the wider context of a prelude to the LOTR, and the scenes in Dol Guldur itself, and the meeting of the White Council, are satisfying additions. Radagast however, is drawn as a largely comic character in a story already full of comic dwarf, goblin and troll characters.

A second large addition is that of the orc Azog. As the conventional hero of the story, Thorin Oakenshield requires an antagonist not present in The Hobbit, and voila, another character, mostly reproducing the role already filled by the Great Goblin, is introduced.

The addition of a major character is a symptom of Jackson’s largest change to the equation, that of form. The Hobbit could have been adapted as a single movie with some of the less successful elements, for instance Beorn, removed. It could have been adapted quite faithfully over two movies, perhaps with a little playing up of the Dol Guldur/Necromancer subplot to give it more coherence and relevance as a prequel. To make the adaptation over three movies, introducing multiple characters and story arcs not present in the original text is an addition that would not have been tolerated in a LOTR adaptation, and is only permitted now that Jackson has attained golden child status amongst Tolkien fans.

My last gripe about form is the choice to shoot in HFR 3D. From a purely personal and aesthetic standpoint 3D has been completely pointless in nearly every movie (Avatar is the only exception) I’ve seen. HFR was continually distracting for the first hour of the film, after which either I was used to it or the proportion of action sequences was higher (it is most noticeable in non-action sequences). We are a media savvy/saturated culture, and that that saturation has occurred in 24fps. Until the visual language of our culture is migrated to 48fps it will always seem jarring for the first hour of any film. But, since our culture is unlikely to swap to HFR en masse any time soon, I will have to call the horse bolted on this one. Beta video might be better quality but VHS won. HFR might be better, but it’s too late.

Final word: Decent movie, a few cringeworthy scenes, a few spectacular scenes. See it in good old 2D, 24fps. 67%  

The Good Doctor

Doctor Who’s back on ABC this Saturday. Of all my nerdish predilections, sci-fi is the one I can’t refuse, and so I’ll watch, but I won’t enjoy it like I wish I could.

I have some memories of the Doctor from my childhood, mainly Jon Pertwee and Tom Baker, followed by the disappointments of Peter Davison, Colin Baker and Sylvester McCoy. I was terrified of the Cybermen and, to a lesser extent, Davros. For some reason the interminable four episodes of ‘The Greatest Show in the Galaxy’ episodes from 1989 seem lodged in my brain.

I tried watching when the ABC re-ran a lot (all?) of the episodes a few years ago, but found the plots too laboured. In contrast, the ‘re-booted’ series from 2005 onwards seems massively frothy. And shouty. Does every piece of dialogue have to be delivered breathlessly fast or yelled in a panic?

I thought there might be a change in the stories too, so I did a little research. Taking Seasons 12-15 (1974-78), Tom Baker’s heyday, and comparing them to Seasons 1-4 (2005-2008) of the new, modern Doctor I can say:

-         the ‘70s episodes were set pretty much equally on Earth or on an alien planet. A minority occurred on a space station

-         the new episodes occur most often on Earth. The remainder are split between alien worlds or space stations

-         the ‘70s episodes are set most frequently in the future, then in the present (i.e. the 1970s). A minority occur in the past

-         the new episodes occur most frequently in the present. The remainder are split pretty evenly between the past and future, with a slight preference for the future

So we have a move towards present day Earth as a setting. Not what you’d expect for a bloke who has a box that can travel through time and space. A change in writers? In budget? In that the stories are now produced by a culture that lacks some of the wonder and anxiety about the future that was present in the 1970s? Looking at the plots for old episodes there seemed to be a lot about warring cultures and blasted, post-apocalyptic landscapes. It seems odd that the threat of nuclear annihilation hung over the older episodes, but the threat of climate change fails to produce a similar anxiety in our current imaginings. I suppose starving to death in a dramatically impoverished biosphere just doesn’t have the same sex appeal as a massive thermonuclear explosion.

Hopefully the new episodes are good. The last two Doctors have been great. Rose was the only companion worth her salt, but maybe they could kill Rory. A little bit less mocking and a bit more verisimilitude in the science would be great. Oh, AND LESS SHOUTING. 

Home-Grown is a Crock

Perhaps I’m just being contrary here, but I’m starting to think the whole slow food, home-grown, organic thing is a bit of a beat up.

Perhaps reading through a Christmas gift, Matthew Evans’s The Real Food Companion, then seeing repeats of his show ‘The Gourmet Farmer’ on TV recently raised my expectations too high, but my experience of home-grown over the past few days has been distinctly underwhelming.

I’ve heard this year has not been a good year for tomatoes; certainly this was my first year growing them. The effort, water, spray (not organic I know, but it was the white fly or the plants) paid off with barely a dozen actual tomatoes. Tasty tomatoes, yes. Tastier than tomatoes from the supermarket? Again, yes. Difference in taste worth the effort put in to get that taste? Not even remotely.

Could it be my sub-par gardening skills? A friend gave me some lovely looking little yellow cherry tomatoes. They were sweet inside, but the flesh was mostly bland and mealy. Another friend owns a house in the country. Her corn, fresh from the garden, was tough and bland. McCains beat it hands down. Her beets, again freshly plucked from the soil and boiled for a salad, were watery. I prefer tinned.

I’m not suggesting that home-grown, or organic, or slow food is pointless. Obviously on a continuum where one end is sitting on the couch eating KFC and the other end is spending your time outdoors growing your own food the Peter Cundall option is the better one. But this elitist, lapsarian and increasingly pervasive view that fruit and veg from the supermarket is basically evil and tastes like plastic, whereas the stuff you grow yourself, or buy from the local farmer’s market, is some sort of rustic orgasm in your mouth is simply untrue.

I freely admit the truth, and the necessity, of the other arguments for slow, organic and home-grown. We should buy local, we should minimise pesticide use, genetic diversity in our crops should be preserved. But does that pumpkin you grew really taste better than the one I bought from Coles? How about now when they’re both roasted to perfection with some garlic, thyme and rosemary? I say they’re pretty close to identical.

I grew up on a farm. My grandfather was an outstanding gardener. Looking back through the mists of nostalgia, was the food of my childhood better? Some was, some wasn’t. The potatoes were better, but that was the variety. I can get that taste if I want it by finding bintjes or pink-eyes. The carrots and tomatoes were the same. Beans were the same. Peas were better but that’s because I was eating them off the vine. If they were picked, podded, stored a few days and then cooked they weren’t as good as frozen. Fruit was mostly better, but again I was eating it off the tree or vine. I can get as good a punnet of blackberries from the supermarket now, but I have to pay $6 or $7 for the experience, rather than eat them from the patch by the river until I feel sick for free.

To go off on a tangent (a little) I watched a show recently called ‘Willie’s Chocolate Revolution.’ Same idea I’m banging on about here. Massive foody, loves chocolate, hates Cadbury’s, sets up cacao plantation in Venezuela, grows own beans, hand-makes own chocolate on antique machinery – result? “People have no idea what real chocolate tastes like! I’m going to convert them.” Cue dopey British people suspiciously tasting Willie’s 80% cocoa solids chocolate, then sneaking back to the Cadbury Family Block. Willie’s shocked. Fucking idiot public can’t wean themselves off their too-sweet junk-food chocolate. Tellingly though, Willie intersperses all this with a few recipes. No straight out my-Christ-that’s-bitter 80% cocoa solids chocolate here. Instead the 80% is melted and mixed with a load of sugar and cream. No-one picks Willie up on the sell-out, and I’ll shut up about it now too because I found a block of his product in a shop and it was bloody tasty.

So what’s the point of all this? I guess to applaud the idea and the ideals behind slow, organic and home-grown. To agree that in a world of increasingly commoditised food a movement away from that slippery slope is a vital voice that needs to be heard. But don’t tell me that by failing to grow my own I’m missing out on undreamt of flavours: that until you’ve had a home-grown tomato you don’t know what you’re missing out on. That’s a crock.

Trimming de fat from de DoD

Earlier this year the former Chief of the Australian Army, Lieutenant
General Peter Leahy, suggested that the Department of Defence's annual
budget of $27 billion should be cut and the money directed to diplomacy
and foreign aid. This amazingly sensible proposal takes into account the
fact that the current role of our defence force is not to prepare for
some sort of invasion from China or Indonesia, but to stabilise
countries such as Afghanistan and Iraq, where militant factions and
political instability currently serves as both an indictment of the
West's wars in these regions, and a base for terrorism. When it comes to
stabilising a country, erecting a fortified structure in an area like
Tarin Kowt, running daily patrols, finding the odd 'Improvised Explosive
Device' and shooting a few goat-herds turned Taliban guerrillas will
probably cost more, and achieve less, than putting diplomatic pressure
on Afghanistan to adhere to transparent political practices while giving
them concrete aid to do so.
Leahy's proposal was picked up and run with by exactly no-one, despite
the fact that in the preceding months a number of negative reports about
DoD spending had hit the news. These included:
- The National Auditor, following up on a 2006 audit, found that the
Defence Materiel Organisation (the bit of the DoD that buys the bullets)
had failed to tighten its procurement process, despite promises in 2006
that it would. The audit also found $1.2 billion worth of munitions were
not ready for battle, being either broken, in need of maintenance, or
past their use-by-dates.
- The fact that the DoD has replaced its fleet of Leopard-class tanks
(which had never seen battle, Australia never having been invaded by
land) with a fleet of 59 second-hand Abrams-class tanks at a cost of
$550 million, despite the fact that these tanks were prone to engine fires.
- The revelation that, in line with the DoD having to publish all
private sector contracts worth more than $10,000 to the internet:
a) $37,000 had been spent on horse transport. The private
contractor named had no record of said contract.
b) $30,000 had been spent on "stuff" from a marketing and
promotions company.
c) $33,000 had been spent on hiring a Lear jet. The private
contractor named had no record of said contract.
d) $250,000 had been spent for one night at the Hyatt Regency Hotel
in Adelaide. The Hyatt had no record of this contract.
Such waste and lack of concern for public accountability is more
important than the non-issue of Asylum-Seekers which is currently the
focus of public debate. The DoD obviously has money to burn. The
Australian people need to take back $7 billion or so and direct it in a
smarter and more productive direction.

Happy Solstice

Today is the Winter Solstice in the Southern Hemisphere. It is a
dislocated solstice. My ancestors, for hundreds of thousands of years,
huddled in the darkness of Winter and hoped that once again the Sun
would begin to travel higher in the sky, the days would get longer and
warmer, and humanity would avoid freezing to death on an icy plain in
the eternal blackness of some apocalyptical night. It was the time when
Sun gods and goddesses turned their chariots, the time for purification
and for sacrifice.
But that all happened in December - the 21st or 22nd to be exact. When
my (somewhat less distant) ancestors moved to Australia the time of cold
and darkness was suddenly inverted. Long days and sunshine baked the
midwinter festival of Christmas, and the already ailing midsummer
festivals sickened and died here in the antipodes. Modernity and
capitalism ground away these ancient festivals and rites. Where is my
anxiety over the return of the Sun today? Why aren't I rubbing butter on
my front fence and slaughtering a white animal in the backyard tonight?
Even Hallmark has failed me.
I hope the sun sets tonight and never comes up again. Science is left
witless. Civilisation collapses. Prophets and mad men will gather huge
crowds. We will burn everything in huge bonfires; throw virgins and
babies to the flames. And when everything and everyone is burnt and
frozen and dead we will not know why.

Letter the second

Apple

PO Box A2629

Sydney South NSW 1235

Wednesday, July 1 2009

To Whom It May Concern:

I am writing to express my dissatisfaction with Apple’s decision to charge $10.95 for the new iPod Touch 3.0 Software Update. The charge is unnecessary and sets a disturbing trend – would Microsoft get away with charging for a Windows Service Pack? I do not think so.

I believe Apple may have also charged for the 2.0 update – I do not know as I purchased a 2nd generation iPod Touch which had up-to-date software included on it. Too bad for those customers who now have to pay $419 for a 16GB iPod Touch, then take it out of the box and pay another $10.95 to have it work properly.

Luckily those customers with an iPhone receive the update for free. Why is Apple suddenly creating differentiated pricing policies for its customers?

Finally, I would like to inform you I am speaking to Consumer Affairs Victoria regarding this matter as I believe the above is in breach of the Trade Practices Act. The Act states that ‘goods must be fit for the purpose for which they are sold.’ As the Software Update is essentially a security fix it should be provided free of charge in order to render the goods fit for their purpose. If Apple wants to charge $10.95 for the bells and whistles included in the update, it should also provide the necessary, bug-free software, as a free package – as every other IT-based manufacturer does for firmware or software upgrades that fix errors in the original programming.

Looking forward to your speedy response,

Sincerely,

Scott Howard.

PS - I am not the trite and pedantic person this letter would, on first glance, indicate me to be. At least not most of the time. XX

What I've Been Reading...

Seeing as I’ve posted nothing since August it’s perhaps time to explain myself. As usual I’ve been reading instead of writing because I’m bad bad bad. But, while reading I’ve actually managed to do something I’ve been attempting since 1996 – keep a record of every book that I’ve read in the year. Here then is my list of “What I Read in 2007” and, just so I can’t be accused of simply filling out a list, I have included a short review for most titles (where my memory is up to the admittedly small, but daunting, task).

“The Left Hand of Darkness” by Ursula LeGuin – Classic and rather icy sci-fi. Explores slightly interesting gender issues in a mostly dull manner.

“One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich” by Alexandr Solzenytsin – Another chilly one. Extremely detailed account of the minutiae of life in a gulag that I enjoyed a lot. Better than Levi’s ‘If This is a Man” and way more readable than the only other Solzenytsin I’ve read – The Gulag Archipelago.

“Flow My Tears, The Policeman Said” by Philip K. Dick – Nicely paranoid, if dated.

“Solar Lottery” by Philip K. Dick – Not his best.

“Martian Time-Slip” by Philip K. Dick – This one was pretty good, I liked the native Martians.

“The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid” by Bill Bryson – a nice little lament for ‘50s America. I also liked learning about Bryson’s dad, who was apparently a very good sports writer.

“The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time” by Mark Haddon – Cool window into life with Asperger’s.

“The First Man in Rome” by Colleen McCullough – a wholely unexpected introduction to a continuing love affair with all things Roman. This series is jaw-dropping.

“The Nasty Bits” by Anthony Bourdain – gritty chef voyeurism. Whenever I read his stuff I wish I could go back and tell myself in grade 10 “Become a chef!” – even though I’d probably hate the demands of the job and give it up after a few months. Still…

“Why Don’t Penguins’ Feet Freeze?” – a collection of the Q&A section from the back of New Scientist magazine. Unfortunately I can’t remember why penguins’ feet don’t freeze and can’t find the book either – so a wasted exercise. Something to do with reduced blood flow I suppose.

“Exultant” by Stephen Baxter – dire space opera. Can’t believe I finished it.

“Revelation Space” by Alastair Reynolds – lovely space opera. Reminded me of Stephen Donaldson’s ‘Gap’ series.

“The Children of Hurin” by JRR Tolkien – much better than I expected. A coherent tale, instead of the usual cobbled together dross Christopher Tolkien usually turns out under daddy’s name. Beautifully tragic.

“Collapse” by Jared Diamond – Not as good as “Guns, Germs and Steel” but interesting nevertheless. He certainly can belabour the point sometimes though.

“The Shadow of the Wind” by Carlos Ruiz Zafon – nice romantic literary travel-guide. I wish I’d read it later in the year when I was actually in Barcelona.

“The Collapse of Globalism” by John Ralston Saul – the opposite of Jared Diamond. You’re constantly going ‘What? Tell me more…’ but Mr. Saul does not oblige. I liked “Voltaire’s Bastards” when I read it a few years ago but the scope here was a bit reduced. Still, a very very smart guy.

“The Sword of Shannara” by Terry Brooks – a fantasy classic I’d never read. The precursor to 90% of what’s on the fantasy shelves – to make a million you basically want to write something halfway between this and “Lord of the Rings.” Sadly, it’s a piece of shit.

“The Year of Magical Thinking” by Joan Didion – a writer with lovely prose who I liked immensely when I read her at Uni. This is a very sad book about the death of her husband and the illness of her daughter.

“Redemption Ark” by Alastair Reynolds – sequel to the one above. Nice meaty sci-fi.

“The Grass Crown” by Colleen McCullough – the second of her Rome series. Again, superb.

“The Italian Secretary” by Caleb Carr – a Sherlock Holmes novel that is stylishly very similar to Conan Doyle’s, but lacking in any actual mystery. At all.

“Absolution Gap” by Alastair Reynolds – a good conclusion to the trilogy, but I think I’ll give him a break for a while.

“Interventions” by Noam Chomsky – a quick summary on who America’s killing and fucking over at present.

“The Road” by Cormac McCarthy – Stephen King’s “The Stand” with 99% of the plot removed. Lurvely prose though, you slow down and savour it.

“The Sea, The Sea” by Iris Murdoch – I’d been wanting to read one of the Dame’s since I saw that movie about her (that made me cry, they were so old and loving). The book was odd. The protagonist was quite unsympathetic, which kept me at a distance.

“Elementary Particles” by Michel Houellebecq. Smart, funny and sexy stuff. Those French…

“Coming Up for Air” by George Orwell – one of the few books he wrote that I hadn’t read. It left me vaguely obsessed with fishing.

“We Need to Talk About Kevin” by Lionel Shriver – pretty readable book that in the end seemed quite conservative and copped out completely at the end.

“How We Are Hungry” by Dave Eggers – a man made much more readable by confinement to the short story. Very enjoyable. Cool cover too.

“The Undercover Economist” by Tim Harford – a very interesting book explaining why organic stuff shouldn’t cost so much, amongst other things. Something I need to read again as I can’t recall things from it when I need to.

“Fortune’s Favourites” by Colleen McCullough – the general politics here were less interesting but Caesar is coming to the fore, and is amazing. If he was anything like his depiction here I would have been glad to submit to his dictatorship. Fuck freedom, let’s Romanise everything.

“Fatal Revenant” by Stephen Donaldson – looking at the inside cover I found I’ve read every novel this guy’s written. In hindsight I wouldn’t recommend such a course of action to anyone, though his ‘Gap’ series was good.

“Interview With the Vampire” by Anne Rice – like “The Da Vinci Code” really… inexplicably popular.

“Heaven’s Net is Wide” by Lian Hearn – a prequel to the other four books in the Otori series. I like em all sir.

“The Essential Dave Allen” – essentially a collection of transcribed stand-up. Funny stuff.

“The Man Who Loved Children” by Christina Stead – this is what I’m reading right now, as 2007 draws to a scorching close. An Australian classic sadly out of print that I borrowed from the library. It’ll want to get a lot better quite soon or it’ll be sent back to the library. Plus it’s set in America! Christ.

A Rather Free-Ranging Ramble

I thought I should try and post something before the end of July since it’s been many months now since I tacked anything up here. My last missive was rather political/environmental – attacking my own upbringing as a son of the land! Not long after I wrote that I did some more research about some of the statements that I’d repeated. I found a very credible sounding article repudiating a lot of Jared Diamond’s facts and conclusions, something I was willing to go along with because one of the chief faults in Diamond’s Collapse is its lack of sources and figures.

But. This interesting article was from the journal Energy and Environment, which has a distinct lack of credibility due to its lack of peer review and industry sponsorship.

I hate conundrums such as this. Short of going out and learning climatology, soil science, agro-botany and a host of other disciplines then making one’s own measurements there are always competing points of view on controversial issues such as ‘should Australia largely abandon agriculture?’ That’s why we have peer-reviewed scientific papers. Diamond’s book maybe a long way short of rigorous science, but why couldn’t the article I read that contradicted his findings have been published in something a little more prestigious if the science it was espousing was so sound?

I suppose all of that is why I find the whole climate change ‘debate’ such a non-event. If 99% of the experts think we’re heading for a long hot future then I’m happy to agree.

Speaking of climate change, I saw in the news last night 3 consecutive stories that 15 years ago would have had no metanarrative, but today seem rather ominous: 1) the biggest floods in 60 years in Britain, 2) a massive heatwave in Greece, and 3) a very rare tornado in Poland.

I find myself very jealous of children being born now. Things have been chugging along very nicely for a few hundred years now, with essentially just more stuff and more convenience as the years roll on. By the end of my lifetime though there will be serious changes, but I’ll be dead by the time the world starts to take on its new shape. With no oil, massive population, and climate change all mixed together there will have to be some radical shifts to prevent us all lurching back to something approximating 1200AD.

I think our climate will end up at the hottest end of all the models – I couldn’t be more positive that we’ll burn every drop of oil we can possibly extract. So, very hot, no oil, and China and India wanting to live a Western middle class life. We could possibly try and use the 1000 to 1600 billion barrels of oil left to set up some sort of future society, but all good pessimists know we’ll just use it to kill people in the middle east and tool around town. Once it’s all gone our grandkiddies will have to get their shit done with something else – in a nice future that’ll be hydrogen or solar sourced electricity; in a bad future it’ll be horses or good old fashioned elbow grease. Maybe black people.

Rantings of a Farmer's Son

There’s a lot a debate about water use in Australia at the moment. Should we drink recycled water? Should we build a desalinization plant? To those questions I’d answer yes and no respectively, but ask a better question: Why don’t we save water by largely abandoning agriculture?
But what will we eat, Scott?
Well, at present we use 60% of our land, and a massive 80% of our water on agriculture. What does this get us? Not much. All that expenditure of scarce resources contributes less than 3% of GNP.
Even more shockingly 99% of that farmed land is running at a loss. 80% of all Australia’s agricultural profits are derived from about 0.8% of the land under cultivation – land in south-western Western Australia, around Adelaide, in south-east Victoria, and in eastern Queensland. Land in these areas has the benefits of fertile soil due to volcanism or glacial uplift, and/or reliable rain. The rest of our agricultural enterprise is carried out on exhausted soils whose few nutrients are held in the layer of vegetation covering them. We pretty much clear the vegetation (nutrients), plant some crops, exhaust the soil, top it up with massive doses of fertiliser, run sheep and cattle on it, till it either blows away, becomes irretrievably saline, or becomes too expensive to grow plants on. The government subsidises this uneconomic business in the form of below-cost water, tax concessions, and subsidised infrastructure.
“Abandoning the Bush” is not the best headline for governments to generate though, so it looks as if we’ll continue with the status quo, at least until more serious problems crop up, e.g. we run out of oil and start starving to death.