via Rushall station bridge, Merri Creek – Photosynth.

i’ve been playing around with panorama shots on the iPod touch. You can use an app called Photosynth (microsoft app on an apple device). I took another one last week that was better, except the app freezes at 27% stitching. [You'll need the microsoft thing called "silverlight" to view this shot.. but that lets you go full screen and move around the whole scene.]

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Such brilliant musicianship, such joyful playing, such contained energy in the singing. It’s modern Northcote music that draws on the traditional jazz styles of the 30′s and 40′s. Songs of love.. songs about the chicken truck that goes up High Street late at night.

My dad was mad for a bit of trad jazz, and i think he would have approved of this crowd as well.

The trombone player just goes off! Her energy is well furious. Eamon’s trumpet is sublime, and his singing is so understated it’s really beautiful. I really appreciate the way the two lead singers sing in their own voice, without American or English accents, and without being affected at all, just straight-up genuine.

At one point, there was a guy in the crowd who was overdoing his enthusiasm – oh yeh it was during the “Naked” song. So much that the lead singer had to mention her state of being married. Which led to some confusion as she implied she was happy about not being married to the trumpeter. Whoops.

Anyway, i’ve managed to track down their Youtube channel. Hopefully they’ll have an album out on the stands before too long.

I’m a poor man (but i’m not ashamed)

Down down down

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Went to a meeting in Richmond, came out to find my bike had subtly changed.

Without knowing the original condition, can you spot the difference?

(This photo was taken after unlocking the bike and moving to another location.)

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i deliberately used some bad English in an email.
(i mean grammatically non-standard English.)

My housemate was appalled.

So i took it all too far, with a genuine LoLcats poster from icanhazcheeseburger.

i’m fascinated by the way new language evolves in a new environment. LoLcats has become one of the latest new English dialects. If i put on my linguist hat for a minute, it’s easy to find a quote from David Crystal (one of the world’s most amazing academic linguist people), in an article at the BBC.

Word play
For English speakers there are cult websites devoted to cult dialects – “LOLcat” – a phonetic and deliberately grammatically incorrect caption that accompanies a picture of a cat, and “Leetspeak” in which some letters are replaced by numbers which stem from programming code.

“There are about a dozen of these games cooked up by a crowd of geeks who, like anybody, play language games,” said Professor Crystal.

“They might not be reading Shakespeare and Dickens but they are reading and cooking up these amazing little games – and showing that they are very creative. I’m quite impressed with these movements.”

Okay that really belongs on my work blog, but hey, everyone loves the LoLcats, don’t they?

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There’s been so much going on in my life lately:

• moved house back to Northcote which is very delightful, Lou and Anto have been putting heaps of energy into making a new dream house with a beautiful garden.. i’m struggling to deal with all my excess baggage newly out of storage (move on, baggage, move on);
• went to Womadelaide music festival, an extremely exciting and wonderful trip involving South Australian salt beaches, Mama Kin, Ojos de Brujo, Nortec Collective from Mexico, and much more;
• went to see Alice in Wonderland and loved it – except for the 3D;
• riding my amazing new bike every day and getting so much enjoyment from it – so super fast i have to be really careful;
• joined in Tim and Sam’s working bee sessions up at Elphinstone Manor, put up curtains in their bedroom, worked on a new carport with Tim, planted some trees and helped dig a long ditch for the plumbing pipes;
• read Russell Banks “Dreaming up America”, a history of the USA through his experience of film;
• went to see Lauren Simmonds’ exhibition down in Footscray, an intriguing paper-based installation;
• saw Monsters of the Deep in 3D at the Comedy Festival – very funny;
• joined the first chorus band of singers in recording with Emma Tonkin at Fairfield tafe studios;
• catching up with Buffy season 8 in comic book form, and it is getting super scary,
• plus all sorts of other things involving meditation and yoga.

But telling stories here on the blog.. haven’t had the follow-through lately. Too busy enjoying life, too nervous about writing in public, too stressed about moving house and finding new workplaces.

So there’s the overview.

Maybe i’ll come back with some detail, one day soon.

photo credit: cloud_nine

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i’m re-reading chunks of Bill Bryson’s “A Short History of Nearly Everything”. In chapter 19, ”The Rise of Life’, he points out that collagen – one of many useful proteins for life – needs 1055 amino acids to be organised in exactly the right sequence.

And collagen organises itself spontaneously. There isn’t someone assembling it each time.

“The chances of a 1,055-sequence molecule like collagen spontaneously self-assembling are, frankly, nil” (p351). Bryson compares it to a poker machine where you have 1055 slots instead of the usual 3-5, where each wheel has 20 different amino acids to choose from. How long would you have to pull the handle of this one-armed bandit? Forever. The odds against winning are 1 in 10^260*.

Not only that, but as well as amino acids forming themselves into proteins, somehow DNA manages to get in on the act – so that the whole thing can reproduce itself – and then there’s a cell membrane to contain all this activity.

Freakishly unlikely.

Fred Hoyle the astronomer once said that it was as if a wind swept through a junkyard, and a fully formed jumbo jet arose by chance (p352).

No wonder the creationists go mad trying to bring their paternalistic version of god into the equation.

Even the Nobel Laureate scientists like Francis Crick (who sorted out the DNA double helix model) have come up with outlandish theories like aliens “deliberately seeding” the earth with life ingredients such as amino acids via meteors and comets.

So we’re incredibly lucky to be living on earth..

Then why am i feeling so glum?

Better get active. Do the dishes. Find a costume for the Chinese new year dinner party. Get off the couch. Start spontaneously re-assembling myself. etc.

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(* 10^260 means 10 with 260 zeroes, and it’s more than the number of atoms in the known universe. That’s big.)

—————————————-
Bill Bryson’s “A Short History of Nearly Everything”, Black Swan edn 2004.

Bryson’s book is such a great read. You find out all sorts of things, for example the universe is 13 billion years old, and the earth is around 4 billion years old, and life on earth actually started around the 3.85 billion years ago mark..

..and in 1946 Reginald Sprigg discovered pre-Cambrian fossils in the Flinders Ranges, but nobody paid any attention because.. i don’t know, maybe it was his name.

—————————————-

photo credit: Steve took it,

photo credit: 8#X

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“i’m sorry, i didn’t hear anything. Please tell me the registration number..”

second attempt

“Did you say ROFL w t f 6 8 3 ?”

another go:

“Did you say LOL w t f 6 8 3 ?”

i was sure the insanely cheerful machine at the other end of the phone line was giving me some kind of internet speak as well as the registration number. In fact i’m sure the eastlink machine with the personality disorder was laughing at me.. in LOLCATS language.

“For F sake,” i cried, “What does it take to get a live human being around here.”

“Now transferring you to an operator.”

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$5 to drive to Frankston these days.

But all that ART along the way makes it almost worth the cash. The mini-hotel? Hilarious!

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photo credit: (creative commons at flickr) Thanks: peter forret, and Vermin Inc.

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“You are invited to join Sanctum Theatre and Fenestra Productions in celebrating the 233rd anniversary of Adam Smith’s seminal work, Wealth of Nations as part of this year’s Melbourne Fringe Festival. The ship may be sinking, the ‘invisible hand’ might have lost its grip on the invisible wheel, but there is an alternative. For two weekends in September Sanctum and Fenestra break away from the globular economic system to realise Smith’s ideal of a true and unfettered market on a small patch of turf in Brunswick – ‘Wall Street on Barkly’.”

Lachlan read us the Business Age yesterday, because the economical journalists there had noticed the number 233 in connection with Adam Smith. They suspect theatrical shenanigans. They would be correct: here comes the Nut Economy. The roller coaster of free trade.

• Opening Thursday 24th September. 6 evenings only. (1, 2 + 3 October still to come!)
• Music, performances and more. Street hawkers, snake oil merchants.. etc:
• Mamushka (Thursday 1st October!)
• Suitcase Royale, the GFC dj masters (Grand Funk Connection).. Pete & the Tar Gang.
• Visit Sanctum Theatre dot org for full details.

Here are some photos from the previous incarnation back in May ’09

Oh and here’s the official publicity line: ‘Merchants of mania, hawkers of hubris, snake oil salesmen and peddlers of useless pendants’ peddle their wares in the Wealth of Nations market place. Do you have anything to offer? Come up with a product and a pitch, fill in a Trader’s Application form, get in for free and earn your peanuts to buy drinks for the evening. Get your Trader’s Application form from Sanctum Theatre.

WARNING: MAY CONTAIN PEANUTS!!

Each night will feature a different band and guest performer. Bands include:

• Pete and the Tar Gang, Sex on Toast, Mamuska
• The Kurtletts, Minstrels of the Revolution, The PANTY CHRI$T$

Guest performers include

• Suitcase Royale, Daniel Oldaker, Cabaret Existenz, The Gibbon Twins
• The Sewell Family Cabaret, An Inconvenient Spoof, The R.S.P.F.C.L.B.H.M

How exciting! Can’t wait.

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I Dream a Highway just had their 2nd birthday gathering.

(If you don’t know yet, it’s a funky retail outlet on the Northcote Hill opposite the Wesley Anne, with clothes and cds and lovely arty stuff.)

Ben and Rhi laid on the liquor and some scrumptious Mein Leibe pizzas for all their friends, family and neighbours.

• Yum.
• Lovely glamorous lusciousness on the top of the Northcote Hill. So stylish.
• Hats and weird-stuff jewellery and crazy little punk voodoo dolls.

So of course i had to lay out a tiny bit of shopping moulah. Stimulate the local economy. It’s all about fighting the GFC you know.

In the end i bought another one of the Bohjass discs, “Chocolate Ice” (2001). Bohjass are a very cool and creative outfit from the heart of Northcote, led by Tim Pledger who also plays with The Boys, Opa.. and half-a-dozen other jazz impro bands around town.

..and this really sweet ring made out of a number 10 knitting needle.

Lynne came across too.. we danced a country jig, and then headed over the road to see Lou and gray release their first single, “animation in my head” at the Wesley Anne.

Here’s Bea the shop dog, featured on the IDAH website.

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i haven’t been this fascinated by aussie rules football since i was an 8 year old. Which is a long time ago.

St Kilda has won more wooden spoons than any other club in VFL history (26), nearly a quarter of all of them in fact, and twice as many as their nearest competitor (North Melbourne with 13).

i’ve always barracked for St Kilda, because Bruce my dad and Auntie Nance both did. i guess they grew up on that side of town, around Bentleigh and McKinnon. Back when you barracked for a team because you lived in the area.

However during the 80′s i confess i had a second team. i chose Essendon because their colours were similar and my mate Andrew barracked for them. This action made me a religious heathen in the eyes of the majority, but it was nice to have one team at the top of the ladder to balance my favourites at the bottom. i never really cared as much even though Essendon would often win, and in the 90′s i paid barely any attention at all.

But this year, i’ve found the game can inspire real emotions. You get swept up in the possibility that your team, your real team, could keep winning. You start to really care about it. You love the way they play as a team. And the mass hysteria that surrounds Victorian rules football can be intense. i find myself shouting at the television.

So now there are 5 teams who could take the flag:
St Kilda, Geelong, Footscray, Collingwood and Adelaide.
Saints, Cats, Dogs, Magpies and Crows.

What is going to happen?

Well there we go.

Only 6 teams left now: Saints, Cats, Dogs, Magpies, Lions and Crows.

What happens next?

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Really interesting things (i think), like the Melbourne film festival, the funeral of Martin Martini and the Bone Palace Orchestra, the day i juggled listening to St Kilda get whalloped by Essendon.. outside the Corner Hotel while legendary Melbourne band The Ears were setting up inside. Plus.. the time that i sang with the very amazing fIRST cHORUS choir at the Victoria Hotel Brunswick.

So much culture, and so little finished blog product. How totally slack. Must be the hibernation thing. How do i work a blog backlog like that?

Better get my editing shoes on about now, eh.

photo credit (thanks): thorinside

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Gilbert Rd., Thornbury.

i shouldn’t have looked, but i saw a car sandwiched between 2 big trams.

Scrunched up to about half its length.

Ugh.

Police cars everywhere, paramedics, the fire brigade.

Here is my artist’s impression of the event. 

Then 5 minutes further down the road, police cars around a house, and someone is being stretchered out into the ambulance.

This is days after the mad 7-11 incident at the end of my street, where some lunatics killed a person with a pram.

Hey everyone – be careful out there.

Roads + rain + night = very freaking danger.

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Last week Tim and i hit the city for an early movie ..

11am in the central place, the new beginning/ prequel version of star trek, with Sylar Guy as Spock. Ooh he’s a good actor. 

The action is non-stop.

i’ve never ever cared about the original star trek characters, but this remake brings everyone back to life. Superbly!

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Then a whole day of mooching around the city looking for new and exciting ways to stimulate the economy:

• the latest buffy comic at minotaur (Dawn is still suffering from that awkward spell by the jealous thricewise)
• some music including the latest spoonbill venture at collectors corner (can’t wait to listen !)
• lovely smelly things from the body shop.

oh yeah, i’ve been at the forefront of the GER (global economic recovery). Spending my way to freedom. Woohoo. On the Stimulation train. Oh yeh.

mm. Retail therapy .. much needed.

Ooh look here’s Zachary officially denying that he’s in the film. 

 photo credit: Roby©

 photo credit: TCM Hitchhiker

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