NaNoBlogMo

Oh far out! Just when I thought I was safe from ever again making a new and completely gratuitous blog along comes Biz Stone and Blogger Knowledge: Blogging Your Novel Part One. In which he suggests setting up another blog.

Arghh.

However I've just rembered the latent "no working title" blog, maybe this is the blog that I should use for "south coast train" thereby avoiding extraneous bloggage.

live show 2

Ah yes, it must be the weather - this afternoon one of the windscreen washing guys down where City Road meets Broadway, was wearing a hat, shoes, and lovely sky-blue swimming trunks. Nothing else. And they were old style swimming trunks with the wide sides, and quite tight. Not boardshorts. He was tall, and lean, and menacing in a nude kind of way.

live show

Yesterday afternoon, up on King St, waiting for the bus, standing against the Marlborough Hotel bottleshop window, looking across the street at Bedrock Hair, the shop all lit up, plastic sheet over the reception desk, over the fish tank, I guess to protect it all from painting - I saw a guy inside in his work clothes, he had a drink of water, then pulled his t-shirt off, then stripped down completely, out of his work clothes, and into his street clothes. He was standing behind the reception desk, but still ... public nudity!

be able to drive to our offices ...

Maybe someone should write their NaNoWriMo novel about this: Blogger User Testing. Blogger want to look at how their users use Blogger so that "we learn how to improve the product." The catch is the usability testing was in Mountain View, CA, USA. And somewhat mysteriously one of the conditions is that you need to "be able to drive to our offices". Did they only want driving bloggers? Or is it a kind of slip, would it be okay if I'd caught a train to the airport, then got a plane to LAX, then a plane to San Francisco, then caught a taxi? Or could my mum drive me? or my best-friend? (Cass would be into it I know.)

Virtual Tally Room

The Australian Electoral Commission's Virtual Tally Room is very cool. You can look at national results, division results, even see the results for particular polling places. Here's the breakdown of votes from King St, Newtown.

autocracy

so now we're in for another term of John Howard - and he will take the result of this election and he will say "you've elected me, you want me to make these choices for you",
well,
I'm putting it in writing here and now - I didn't elect you, I don't authorise you to do anything. The Federal Government can pass laws within the lower and upper houses, but you CANNOT act on your idea of what is right for Australia just because you've been elected for a fourth term. I do not give you the right to make choices and decisions for me.

wrong place, wrong time

In Sydney seemingly normal people are standing out in the street with placards exhorting us to think about how we vote. Matthew has mentioned the man with the Vote for Decency. Don't vote for John Howard placard, and yesterday, as well as seeing him at Central, I saw another man down near Martin Place with 3 hand lettered boards apparently on about the election as well. Then there are the posters put up by a group of musicians - they don't want us to vote for John either.

But the thing is I live in Sydney, a safe Labor seat, where the big competition is between Tania Pilbersek the current Member, and the Green's candidate Jenny Leong. We haven't had one piece of propaganda from the Liberal candidate, we don't get to vote for John at all.

However Cass and Brian live in Adelaide, a marginal seat, a 2% swing could tip it, and Cass is having trouble coping with the responsiblity. She agrees she's a typical swinging voter: uneducated, selfish, couldn't really give a shit. But now she's got to, or she feels she does, so today she's going to somehow go through a crash course in Australian politics and make her mind up.

Good luck Cass.

Good luck Australia.

Lampedusa

It's a tiny island between Sicily and Tunisia. It has sea turtles, and tourists, and an immigrant reception centre.

You may've heard the name because of Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa who wrote Il Gattopardo, which was made into the film The Leopard with Burt Lancaster in the title role. The novel traces the end of feudal society in Sicily, beginning with the coming of Garibaldi, and ending with the stuffed family dog being put out as rubbish.

I'm interested because of the layering - European tourists, African refugees / illegal immigrants / people, culture, history, conservation - all occuring in one small space.

ramen

It seems that in the US ramen is / are 2-minute noodles. Matt Fischer's Ramen Recipe Database is fantastic! It's almost the opposite end of the spectrum to the Cooking for Engineers site. The Ramen Database is not particularly attractive, but it has a wealth of sociological detail, some of the recipes being developed in jail, others in college. Interesting.

(I started researching ramen because on the NaNoWriMo discussion board there's a thread about snacks to have on hand during the writing process, and ramen came up time and again, with adjectives like "caucasian" ... which puzzled me greatly. I'm used to thinking of Japanese noodles when I see the word, but now I find that ramen came to Japan from China.)

Cooking For Engineers

Ah yes! Cooking For Engineers - the tagline is "Have an analytical mind? Like to cook? This is the site to read!"

These people have everything, they've got an "ingredients dictionary", they've got a conversion button (for measurements silly!), they've discussed the shelf life of orange juice, and maple syrup grades, amongst other things.

Nice.

bulldogs

The Bulldogs won. So, last night after work, 11:00 pm, George Street was full of cars, full of people, full of noise. Car horns and sound systems. Sports cars, cars with blue light glowing out from underneath, power cars.

And in Newtown the Marlborough Hotel had a smoke machine going, clouds of vapour billowing out and down the street.

canopic jars

Not canoptic, canopic. Four jars for the lungs, liver, intestines and stomach. Suffice to say I was gutted when I deleted my blog - see below.

oops

Last night, while Tim was asking me what "haptic" means, and I was looking for it in the 1955 edition of the Pocket Oxford Dictionary, and finding that it was not there, and was telling Tim that I thought it might mean taking the organs out of the body for burial - of course I was thinking of canoptic jars, which I can't find in the dictionary either, so I've probably got that wrong as well - and Tim was saying to me, are you online? then use Sherlock, and I was putting "haptic" into Google, and at the same time as all of this, I managed to delete my oldest and best blog.

All gone!

Oh dear, dearie, dearie me. So I'm starting again.