how videogame concepts can increase pedestrian flow and overall happiness on city streets

Why are there so many frustrated and impatient individuals wandering the streets of Melbourne? 

I don't really understand what winds these people up so much—really, is there any difference between (a) the natural human condition of foraging for berries on a hillside under the midday sun with your loving extended family by your side, and (b) being forced to walk amongst thousands of strangers around a smelly grid-like maze bound by towering grey concrete structures on one side and vehicular traffic hurtling at deadly speeds on the other, with a countless array of signs, lights, smartcard ticketing systems, and persons with guns telling you what to do, the slightest disobedience of which may result in your being sent to a large room where an old man in a robe (and possibly wig) will insist that you hand over your bread-money as punishment for your transgression against the rules of the maze?

I don't see any difference.  Nevertheless, the city overflows with impatience on a daily basis.

One particularly curious behaviour occurs at pedestrian crossings.  It starts fairly innocuously; a man walks up to the edge of the road and presses the button to cross.  He waits around four seconds.  The crossing lights have not changed.  He presses the button again.  But why?

Pedestrian crossing buttons are not like grandmothers.  Grandmothers often require multiple reminders as to your presence and intentions; pedestrian crossing buttons require only one.  Grandmothers wouldn't dare invite gossip by loitering on street corners for extended periods of time while hundreds of strangers touch them up, whereas pedestrian crossing buttons (being made out of metal and firmly fixed to posts) are somewhat more immune from such social and reputational concerns.

Despite this, our subject becomes increasingly annoyed.  He begins to slap the button incessantly, an action made possible by the Australian style of pedestrian crossing buttons.  Unlike overseas models, which generally require the use of an outstretched finger to press the button, Australian crossing buttons primarily consist of a large whackable silver-coloured disc about the size of the Arecibo radio telescope; the perfect size for our large, impetuous, ungainly convict hands.

The slapping soon gets faster and faster.  Occasionally, another passer by, despite seeing the initial person whacking the button, will come up and do the same!  Both individuals are only seconds away from unleashing full-blooded Pete Townshend-esque windmills on the button.  What is going on?  Do these people honestly believe that mashing the crossing button will get them across the road any quicker?

But this got me thinking—what if it did?

Fact: the 26-35 age demographic is in broad agreement that the greatest videogame console of all time is the Nintendo 64—a console that was never complete without a copy of one of the many iterations of Mario Party.

 
Although many remain convinced that Mario Party was designed to sell extra game controllers rather than entertain, and although Mario Party introduced legions of children to the wonders of repetitive strain injuries (or "Nintendonitis") well before they were eligible to take on a spirit/hand-crushing office job, there is light at the end of the (carpal) tunnel.

The undisputed highlight of the entire Mario Party franchise was "Mecha Madness", a rather cruel mini-game starring a masked character that just so happens to have a propeller surgically implanted in his head and a giant wind-up key protruding from his spine.

We are left to assume that this forced invasive surgery also involved the insertion of a giant metal spring around the backbone of said individual, for the object of the game is to make this character fly as far as possible by furiously beating your controller at an outlandish rate, thus turning the giant spine-key and leading to powered flight.

I wonder: could we perhaps transfer the lessons of Mario Party over to the world of pedestrian traffic control?

I propose a system that would harness and channel the city's unnecessary impatience—and regulate traffic flow by making pedestrians earn their road crossings. 

At regular (non-intersection) pedestrian crossings, pedestrians will not be allowed to cross the road until they mash the crossing button at a rate exceeding a specific intensity, calculated by reference to the amount of vehicular traffic currently passing over the crossing.

At pedestrian crossings located at intersections, a button-mashing challenge will take place every minute between the groups of pedestrians seeking to cross in opposing directions, with the group who mashes the fastest earning the right to cross (or to continue crossing).  As this particular setup may lead to one group of pedestrians continuously dominating the flow of the intersection for quite some time to the detriment of vehicular traffic, motorists would be encouraged to sponsor button-mashing "champions" along their favourite driving routes in order to mash on their behalf.

And did you know that it's possible to generate electricity from button-pressing?  Some rough calculations I made on a copy of "acceptable internet usage at work: an employee's guide" indicate that the electricity generated from my scheme (if deployed city-wide) would provide enough clean energy to power a neon "WARD FULL" sign that would proudly be displayed upon the door of the city's leading repetitive strain injury treatment unit.

your mobile phone is making you rude, selfish, and unpunctual

Looking back at some of my writing, I can't help but think that the untrained reader might come on here and take me for some sort of technophobe—which is actually quite far from the truth. I love technology!

As a child, I would tinker around with electronics kits, creating such immensely useful gadgets as a machine that could detect whether something was wet or not. This early childhood ingenuity would later flourish when, aged only 21, I built my own air-conditioner (as pictured below) after finding out that one's first sharehouse rental is much less climate-controlled than the family home.

And just the other day, I marvelled at my friend's magic flip wallet. If you place a loose ten dollar note inside this wallet and close and re-open the device, the note by some unknown process becomes secured within the wallet behind two elastic straps. "Sorcery!!", you cry, to which I respond with a knowing half-grin—technology, my friend, technology.

But I think I often give the wrong impression of my technological leanings because my well-rounded appreciation for human innovation is tempered with prudent scepticism, involving critical thinking about the real effects and drawbacks of technological developments.

Which leads me to today's contention: has the mobile phone has turned us into a nation of unpunctual, selfish dilly-dalliers and do-nothings?

Two weeks ago, I heard that a Royal Australian Air Force C-130 Hercules aircraft would be conducting a sunset flare drop over Port Phillip Bay. This promised to be an absolutely spectacular occasion. A Hercules performing this manoeuvre creates what are known as "angel flares" (pictured below), which are so named because looking at angel flares make you so happy it is like you have died and ascended into heaven.

As the momentous evening arrived, a like-minded friend and I checked the official flaredrop map and staked our positions on top of Point Ormond, Elwood. We had pizza, ice cream, and a panoramic view of the bay. Low on the horizon, the glowing red sun broke through a line of cloud, sending out a shower of colour across the bay. Everything was perfect.

All of a sudden, about twenty minutes from the scheduled start, a lone fellow rose from his seat. "For everyone that's here waiting for the flaredrop", he cried, "it's been cancelled!" The crowd murmured with indignation. Cancelled? Surely not! The Air Force had been spruiking this event all week!  The conditions were perfect!

Confirmation soon began to flood in from other sources.  There would be no flaredrop.  The crowd's indignation turned to anger. Photographers that had travelled all the way from country Victoria began to vent their frustrations in front of any who would listen. Children began to sob as they were told that taxpayer-funded hellfire would not be unleashed from the skies that night. 

As for me and my friend, we were less than impressed. Only five minutes ago, we were two enterprising young men who had plotted the ideal location to watch as incendiary devices were fired from a military aircraft for our enjoyment. Now, we were just two fellas sitting on a picnic rug licking ice creams in the glow of the setting sun.

When I got home, I pulled up the Air Force's official Twitter feed. Sure enough, the pin had been pulled on the event at short notice—in fact, when the Hercules was already airborne!

I began to think: could the Air Force have pulled off this cancellation without Twitter? 

While the Air Force would later claim that they had "sent someone out" to bring the bad news to the crowds along the foreshore (an unlikely claim, given that the Air Force would have had to transport this person from A to B via mechanical means, a task which they had already demonstrated their ineptitude for), I had a sneaking suspicious that if this were 1954, the year that the first Hercules took to the skies, this flaredrop would have gone ahead even with the plane spewing smoke from two engines and a crateload of escaped snakes on board—because to cancel at such a late stage would've been a practical impossibility!

These days, however, mobile telephony has given us carte blanche to cancel or be late for all manner of events, with little or no consequences attaching to this inherent thoughtlessness. Never before in human history have we had such ability to keep someone else waiting at no cost to ourselves (minus, of course, the cost of a "I'm late, too bad for you!" message).

But back in "the day", the consequences of such lateness were far more severe.  A tale, if I may, from close to home...

In August of 1860, the explorers Robert O'Hara Burke and William John Wills set out from Melbourne on an expedition to map a route to the north coast of Australia, a return journey of around 6,500 kilometres. The mood upon departure was bullish, with the trip expected to be a great success.  This was despite the expedition's wagon train breaking down at Essendon, 5 kilometres into the journey (or 0.077% of the total planned distance), possibly from the weight of carrying such survival necessities as a solid cedar-and-oak dining table and a Chinese musical gong.

At Cooper Creek, near the Queensland-South Australia border, the expedition split into two. Burke, Wills, and a couple of others decided to take advantage of the searing December heat by carrying on northwards into the desert at an increased pace, while the remaining members of the expedition were ordered to set up a long-term camp and wait four months for Burke and Wills' return.

True to their orders, the men at base camp waited for four months.  Eventually, having waited an additional five days, they gave up Burke and Wills for dead, packed up camp, and departed back for Melbourne on the morning of 21 April 1861.

LATER THAT DAY, starving, exhausted, and close to death, Burke and Wills (now six days late, tsk tsk) returned to the abandoned camp. If this were 2013, a quick text to the rest of the group ("sry, delayed due 2 horribly inhospitable terrain will brb 6 days") would've ensured that base camp sat around and played Angry Birds for a extra day while the heroic explorers returned.

But as it was, Burke and Wills never caught up with the rest of their party.  Lost in the outback, they survived for a couple of months thanks to the aid of some helpful aborigines—helpful, that is, up until the point that Burke attempted to shoot them, at which point the aborigines quickly departed and left Burke and Wills to unceremoniously perish.

You know, part of me secretly longs for the return of those Darwinian times, where survival of the promptest reigned supreme.

"can I ride the tram?": a flowchart explaining melbourne's new myki ticketing system

Some of my favourite childhood memories from the late 1980s and early 1990s were our family trips to Melbourne.  We didn't actually move here until I started high school, and so before that time, every trip down here took on an extra-special aura.

More specifically, I loved riding the clunky old trams.  I'd dash straight up to the seat behind the driver, and kneel on the worn vinyl seat cushions to peer through the wooden-framed front windows, watching as the driver worked his magic with all manner of handles and switches.

Meanwhile, my Mum would be paying our fares by way of a rather quaint system, where she would say "two tickets please!" to a person selling tickets, following which cash would be exchanged for tickets and we would happily travel on to our destination.

However, these glowing childhood recollections have now been ruined by the state government of Victoria, which has spent more than $1,500,000,000 trampling all over my youth by implementing a new ticketing system.

Now, I could have been vindictive and written an article about how this new myki "smart" card is so plagued by bureaucratic incompetence and general nonsense that even Terry Gilliam would struggle to design a more convoluted system.

However, I'm not going to do that.  Instead, I've produced a handy flowchart that you can print out and stick up on your wall (or carry around as a giant scroll) to help you navigate the new system.  The flowchart also includes a comparison as of fifty years ago, in case you happen to travel back in time to 1963 and need to take public transport to get to one of the nation's eighty computers, perhaps to start the world's first blog.

Enjoy (click here for full-size version).

how to synchronise channel nine's TV cricket coverage with ABC radio commentary

Like many Australians, I woke up this morning hungover—and therefore ready to watch some cricket.

I was prepared for an enthralling day's play.  Ricky Ponting would soon be due at the crease, and across the land, millions were tuning in to Channel Nine to farewell the former Australian captain in his final test match over an illustrious seventeen-year career.

I made a stovetop coffee and settled into the couch, watching what I hoped would be the first of at least thirty Ricky Ponting highlight packages over the course of the day.

But I was soon shaken from my happy stupor.  Barely had the cricket begun when Channel Nine decided to show off their newest bright idea—a live cross to a magical, touch-screen betting desk where some nitwit in suit and tie (so you can trust him!) yammered on about gambling odds for five minutes. 

This was just not cricket.  "Punter" he may be, but I do not want to hear what the gambling industry thinks of Ricky Ponting's chances of failure.  Where were my highlight packages set to emotional radio hits?

Moreover, I had seen this magic desk before!  Unless my eyes deceived me, Ian Healy sat behind this very same table of sorcery during segments in the Adelaide test, where he would madly poke and swipe at the tabletop in order to convince us that it was actually him bringing statistics and replays up on the TV screen, rather than the editors and production crew that have capably handled this task for the last few decades.

Things grew increasingly insufferable.  As the lunch break drew near, Mark Taylor saw fit to discuss remote-controlled helicopters for the third or fourth time that day, informing us of Bill Lawry's head-scratching belief that a grown man can fit into and pilot one of these devices—much like Mr Burns and his "Spruce Moose" in The Simpsons' casino episode.  I needn't remind anyone that only one of these occurrences was actually amusing.

And as always, the chance of finding pure nonsense behind Ian Healy's "analysis" of the match was roughly identical to the chance of finding chocolate behind an advent calendar.  Luckily, my fortunes were about to change—thanks to some unintended interference from my stomach and my television.

Hungry for snacks, I had gone to the shops during the 40-minute lunch break, and returned to find my TV as mute as a fish.  Having obtained this TV from the side of the road during my local hard rubbish day, it's not surprising that it has several bad habits, this particular one being that it sometimes refuses to provide me with any sound whatsoever. 

Usually a quick on-and-off solves this problem, but today, no amount of button mashing or switch flicking would return the warm sound of willow knocking on leather to my cricket pictures.

I needed a solution, pronto.  I had often heard of people muting Channel Nine and listening to the far-superior ABC radio commentary instead.  I tried this—but the pictures and audio were well out of sync.  This would not do.

So I fixed it.  And here's how.  Tell your friends. 

STEP ONE

Download and install this program: Radiodelay, by DaanSystems.  It's free, small, and very easy to use.

STEP TWO

Find an audio cable with a male jack on each end.  They're pretty cheap to buy if you don't have one.  As pictured below, I used a guitar lead with a 3.5mm adapter attached to each end.

STEP THREE

Mute your TV.  Phew.  Get your radio and tune it to the ABC—alternatively, get your smartphone, tablet, or similar and stream ABC radio online.  Then, use the audio cable to connect the radio to your computer's microphone input.  Don't put the radio too close to the TV; you may get interference with the radio signal.

STEP FOUR

Open up your computer's mixer/audio control.  We'll need to check your microphone settings.

A quick lesson for those who want it: there are two basic ways in which you can affect the level of sound that comes through your microphone jack.  You can change the input of the jack (ie, how loud the computer "hears" what comes through the microphone), and you can change the output of the jack (ie, how loud the computer repeats through its speakers what it "hears").

You should make sure your microphone input is selected and turned up enough so as to "hear" the audio coming in from your radio.  However, you should make sure that your microphone output is either muted or set to its lowest setting.  We don't want your computer repeating the radio audio just yet.

STEP FIVE

Finally, open up the Radiodelay program.  As the ABC commentary will be ahead of the TV pictures, we need to delay the audio coming in through your computer's microphone input. 

Press play in Radiodelay (you should now begin to hear the radio through your computer's speakers) and then experiment with moving the delay slider until your pictures and sound match up.

Personally, using Melbourne ABC 774 as my audio, I set the delay to 4.8 seconds if watching the cricket on Nine, and 4.4 seconds if watching on GEM.  This lines the audio up with the pictures near-perfectly!

Keep in mind that these delay numbers might be very different for you.  For instance, they may change if you are:

• listening to a different ABC station;
• using streaming internet radio rather than broadcast radio;
• watching via your Foxtel box rather than over free-to-air; or
• living in a different place.

And there you have it!  Rather than let your living room suffer the gruesome sounds of gambling tie-ins, vitamin commercials, and head-numbing "memorabilia" spruiking (I'm really not sure why this one hasn't sold out after three years and counting), you can instead indulge your ears in the ABC's delights: descriptive and succinct ball-by-ball commentary, in-depth analysis from a great bunch of cricketing brains, and of course, during breaks in play, the inimitable wit and laughter of Kerry O'Keefe.

Or you could stick with Channel Nine, and listen to Ian Healy continue his one-man rage against phoney Twitter accounts.

Up to you, really.

high school revisited, part 3: teenage views on the peoples of the world (read: racism!)

Over the past couple of weeks, I've delved into the "wilderness years" of my high school education by regrading and revisiting some of the most insultingly lazy work ever to come from teenage hands, covering everything from how to avoid paying for your drinks in ancient Babylon to a true account of NASA's duct-tape spaceships of the 1950s.

After reading these two previous installments, skeptical readers of this blog might harbour suspicions of exaggeration on my part.  Perhaps you might think I have taken liberties in describing the extent of my pubescent idleness.  Maybe you're of the opinion that I've neglected to describe the good, alongside the bad.

Before writing this post, I thought long and hard about how to best allay such suspicions, to no avail.  But then, I found this.

This is a screenshot of a text file I found in my hidden folder of high school "treasures".  As soon as I opened the file, I remembered exactly why this file had been created.

For geography class, we had to complete an assignment comparing the lives of Guatemalans, Mexicans, and Americans.  Unsurprisingly, I had barely begun writing when the due date arrived. So what did I do?  Did I admit my failure and ask for an extension?  Did I suffer my error with honour and accept a late penalty?

Of course not.

Instead, I concocted an elaborate story about how I had finished the assignment and brought it into school for printing, only to find that the file had been corrupted.  As proof of this story, I constructed, from scratch, the text file shown in the screen shot above as proof of this supposedly "corrupted" file.  I then loaded that file onto a floppy disk and tossed the disk around the room a little, just for good measure.

My plan worked!  The teacher bought the "corrupted file" ruse like an on-sale ham, despite the screenshot clearly showing that the alleged corruption of the file also somehow managed to remove all sentence structure from the remaining text whilst magically preserving the text's meaning in point form.

Anyway, I eventually completed the assignment, and it's with a few select quotes from therein that I'll open the "ridicule section" of this post.  At this point, I'm beyond the re-grading exercises of the last two weeks—I think today will be a simple point-and-laugh exercise.

Oh—this week's theme!  I almost forgot.  Today we're talking about the "sensitive six": multiculturalism, globalisation, poverty, immigration, indigenous rights, and refugees.  Who says our curriculum needs to be revamped to reflect the 21st century world?  Nonsense!  It's been good for years.  Sit back and observe just how much it taught me...

Immi-great expectations: Guatemala, Mexico, and the USA

Resources in Guatemala are very limited.  There is no technology for use by average Guatemalans, not even running water, flush toilets, or electricity.  The only technology evident is guns and cars. There are many shops and restaurants in Mexico, something that is unfamiliar to the eyes of many Guatemalans. 

It appears that I've developed a strange fixation with "technology", despite the fact that this assignment was supposed to touch on the sufferings of the Guatemalan people following their bloody civil war.

I wonder how technology compares elsewhere?

There is more technology on offer for most people in Mexico.  In the USA, one of the most developed countries on Earth, technology is highly advanced.  Even illegal immigrants get technology that is not evident in their home town.

Technology for all!!  Forget going to Mexico; if you are Guatemalan and sneak into the USA, you will get technology.  Your whole village will be playing Mario Party before you can say "green card".

But wait—technology is a double-edged sword; one that the Mexicans are not very adept at wielding:

In the example of Mexico City, the residents are buying cars by the truckload, and the factories are pumping out tons of noxious gases just to produce technology demanded by the Mexicans.  Pollution in Mexico City is the highest in the world, with children discouraged from playing outside, and many people wearing masks to work. 

The paragraph continues.  You'll notice I've emboldened a section of the following quote for the benefit of those who are not very good at picking out casual racism at first glance.

If the first world cut back on cars, and goods, then the third world will follow suit, as it is in their nature to follow the doings of those above them.

How, exactly, was this allowed to pass unnoticed through the school system?

An analogy, if I may.  When my brother was very young, he swallowed a button.  In order to make sure the button didn't lodge somewhere within my brother's digestive tract and cause irreparable harm, the doctor ordered my Mum to sift through his shit, night and day, until the button came out.

Where was the shit-sifter here?  The teacher who should've raised his/her hand, and said: "you know, headmaster, I just noticed something odd while marking the Guatemala assignments—don't think me crazy, but it appears that Joseph Goebbels has reincarnated himself as a young boy and is peddling his ideas about innate racial superiority to all who will listen in the ninth grade..."

Herr Stüdent continues with a discussion of an immigrant's life in the USA:

Guatemalan (or Mexican) immigrants are automatically at the lower end of society because of their race.  Employers can set any wages they want for immigrants, unlike white Americans who mostly know their rights.

Since writing this in 1998, I have watched a lot of Judge Judy; I can safely say that white Americans do not know their rights.  But I, apparently, knew a thing or two about the challenges faced by 16 per cent of the US population:

US born Hispanics face similar problems to immigrants because even though they are US citizens, they still look and talk like the immigrants, and therefore are considered to be the same.

Oh dear.  Let's see what other baseless (and borderline offensive) generalisations lie in my box o'mediocrity...

The global village (idiot)

After the Second World War, Japan was in ruins.  The occupation by the U.S. changed the Japanese economy and government to a western style, and Japan made an amazing recovery.  But this was only possible because of the tremendous work ethic the Japanese people possessed, something that sets them apart from the western world. 

I really wish, just for a day, I could shift my mindset back to a teenage perspective—not just to sell my brain to marketers, but to also find out whether I actually pictured the entire Japanese community as a race of frenetic nation-building automatons, as opposed to us sloth-like Westerners who do little else than sit around, eat bread, and debate the limits of media freedom (the "sandwich free press" movement if you will, har har har).

But I can't be so hard on the following quote.  This one can be put down (without blame) to the blissful optimism of adolescence:

In the USA, money made from resources is not hoarded by dictators or the military.

Oh little one, if only you knew.

"F*ck off, we're fools"

Let's bring things a bit closer to home.  Here's my 1998 attempt to summarise Australia's relationship with refugees:

Refugees are fleeing to Australia from Asian countries such as Vietnam and Thailand, and hope to have freedom and a better standard of living.  All the refugees come on boats.  There are sometimes hundreds crammed onto one boat.  Very few make it undetected to Australia.  The refugees that get caught are held in detention camps, where most of them are sent back to where they came from after a period of time.  Some refugees are allowed to stay in Australia if they can prove that their lives would be endangered if they went back.

Well, this is messed up, and I'm not referring to my laughable attempt to pick two random "Asian countries" in order to pretend I actually did research for this question—only to choose THAILAND, which actually takes in four times the amount of refugees that Australia does!

No, the above passage is bothersome because it parrots back (with alarming accuracy) the questionable messages spread by less reputable members of the Australian news media, including myths about a flood of boats and needlessly confrontational rhetoric about refugees being "sent back to where they came from".  And sadly, although this was written nearly fifteen years ago, it reads as if it could've been penned yesterday.

If I have kids, there'll be no tabloid newspapers, rap music, or videogames for them.  As the above passage shows, youth are attracted to populist ideas easier than a duck is attracted to bread.  Instead, I'll be locking my kids in a room with nothing but a lamp and a crate of Dickens novels.  My success as a parent won't be evident until later life, when my offspring command a pickpocket army of street urchins that will battle the Boy Scouts for control of the streets.

Tales from the book of Cook

I am going to conclude this post with a passage so absurd, it almost warrants the inclusion of a permanent disclaimer on this blog.

Around year 10 or 11, I wrote a research essay on the spiritual beliefs of Australian Aborigines.  Upon re-reading it, I was quite impressed, finding the essay interesting and well-written.  And then, in the middle of a discussion of the indigenous concept of the afterlife, I suddenly watched as the essay changed topic to THIS:

Aborigines possess very dark skin, which ranges from a copper colour, to a very dark black/brown.  A thick and short neck supports the head, which often has a backward lean.  Their head hair is curly and wavy, and is deep black in colour, much like the rest of the body hair.  The facial hair is quite abundant, large beards are often found.  The appearance and length of chest hair varies from area to area.  Although aborigines do not have a muscular appearance, they are quite strong for their weight.  They have small hands and feet, but both these appendages are notably tough, as they are used continuously in day to day life (Parker 195-7). Appendix A depicts barefooted aborigines clearing the ground of spinifex, a spiny, prickly desert grass that is native to Australia.  Also depicted are wind shelters.  The body averages a height of 5’7” for the males, and 5’1” for the females.  There still is extremities in height, with 6’ plus males being found all over the country.  The senses of aborigines are highly developed, as a result of the life they lead, where they must constantly remain on the alert (Parker 196-7). 

........................?!?!

What is this, which reads like a colonial-era extract from a ship captain's discovery log, doing in my essay?  What relevance, exactly, does the beard length or "tough appendages" of Australia's indigenous population have to an essay on spirituality?  "Appendix A"?!!  Neck lean??!  What in f***'s name is going on?

There is no way I made this shit up.  This has to be filler inserted out of word count desperation.  Despite all of my failings in my mid-teenage years, I was neither stupid nor motivated enough to come up with such patronisingly inane text for the purposes of an assignment.  This has to have come from somewhere else, I thought—and this citation to "Parker" might be the clue.

A check of my bibliography and a quick Google later, and I had my answer:

Parker, K. Langloh (1897), Australian Legendary Tales.

Eighteen-ninety seven!!!!   Holy shit.  I don't know what's more ludicrous—that I inserted a nineteenth-century quasi-racist physiological description of Aborigines into an essay on the Dreamtime, or that my teacher went right ahead and graded this without batting an eyelid.  What did I say about shit-sifting earlier?

Wikipedia has the follwing to say about Ms Parker, a reasonably well-known recorder of Aboriginal folklore and mythology:

...her testimony is one of the best accounts we have of the beliefs and stories of the Aboriginal people.  However, her accounts reflect European prejudices of the time, and so to modern ears her accounts contain a number of misconceptions and racist comments.

Mind you, would I, aged fifteen, have been aware of the bias inherent in using a text over a century old as reference for an essay on indigenous peoples?  No.  No, no, no.  Unquestionably, definitely, irrevocably—no.  I had not the slightest shred of such awareness.

Why?  Because in my final paragraph—after a nice summation of the longevity, global uniqueness, and depth of Aboriginal culture—I chose to end my essay with a quote.

From Captain Cook.
 
And that, children, is the story of how the irony became lost.

Did you enjoy this?  Through the magic of hyperlinks, you can read part 1 and part 2 of the "high school revisited" series now!

an open letter to Melbourne regarding your earthquake of 19 June 2012

Dear Melbourne

Did you have an earthquake tonight?  If so, I have three questions for you.

First, are you sure?  Seeing as I was there, let me take you back to around 8:53 pm on this cold Tuesday night in June.  I was in the kitchen, stealing Nutella from my flatmate's jar.  With a teaspoon in my hand, I was attempting to follow a pre-existing track left in the spread by past cutlery, so that my theft of hazelnut and sugar would go unnoticed.  I was doing a damn fine job of it.  All of a sudden, my flatmate shouts: "can you feel that!?"

I couldn't feel a thing.  Granted, the building was rattling slightly as if buffeted by a heavy breeze, but my teaspoon's path through the Nutella remained flawless in its direction.  My balance remained sturdy.  I sat down on the floor—still nothing.  I looked over at my record player.  Englebert Humperdinck's This Is Englebert was continuing with nary a fault.

I'm just kidding, of course.  I believe you—there was definitely an earthquake.  I know this because, as I sat down on the couch to plate up a discussion on tectonics with my flatmate, I looked over at my laptop and noticed that my twitter feed was going insane with earthquake talk.  I typed "melbourne earthquake" into the search box, and no less than three hundred and sixty fresh results popped up.  This was about twelve seconds after the shaking had subsided.



So, my second question: how in the world did you get the word out so quickly?  By my calculations, you were tweeting and posting about the earthquake during its happening!  I don't see how this is possible.  As a start, I doubt any auto-correct is of a magnitude powerful enough to enable operation of a keyboard during seismic activity, especially one of those weenie keyboards that comes with yer' smartphones these days.  The only other possibility is that you prepared your tweets in advance—but this makes little to no sense unless you are a dog, goat, or farm-dwelling animal with the ability to sense earthquakes before they occur.  If this is the case, I suggest you get off Twitter, and scope out a book deal as soon as animally possible.

My third (and most important) question is this: why can't you just enjoy a good earthquake like you used to?  

My sources tell me that this particular tremor measured 5.2 on the Richter scale—smack-bang in the confines of the earthquake "novelty zone"!  For the uninformed, the "novelty zone" extends from 3.0 to about 5.5 on the Richter scale, and consists of 'quakes that thrill and delight the first-world population without fear of any real harm.  Especially considering that Melbourne only gets a novelty quake every two or three years, this was the perfect earthquake to sit back and enjoy!



Ideally (had I not been stealing Nutella) I would've been seated in a chair, preferably a hard one with no springs or soft cushions to absorb the shaking.  I would've had a glass of scotch in one hand, replete with ice cubes that would clink together as the Earth shook.

During the quake, I would've first allowed myself a brief moment of raw terror (because we all need to feel alive!) and then I would've closed my eyes and reflected on (a) general facts surrounding geological processes; (b) the sheer absurdity of hurtling through space on a large ball of molten rock whilst several flatter, more solid rocks shift and bustle about upon the molten rock; and (c) whether or not the bin I just placed outside might need to be placed upright again.

Following this, within two shakes of a lamb's tail (shakes which hopefully did not foreshadow the coming of another earthquake, given the aforementioned psychic abilities of barnyard animals), I would've immediately organised a gathering of people for a discussion group to examine the effect of earthquakes on latte foam across Melbourne.

But you didn't do any of this though, did you?  Oh no.  You had to grab your smartphone or run to your laptop within microseconds of the first tremor.  You had to tell everyone that there was an earthquake afoot, lest (by some geological marvel!) the tremors were confined entirely to your living room.  You couldn't even enjoy yourself.

Hey, at least you got the word out though.  In fact, you are pretty damn selfless, Melbourne.  Here I am, waffling on about how I'd simply sit back and marvel at nature's fury—but there you are, like a teenager with an iPhone at a nationally televised event, foregoing any sort of reflection or enjoyment to rush to your computers and selflessly inform other people also rushing to their computers that—yes!—there is in fact an earthquake afoot!

Confound the universities!  Confound the scientific installations!  Confound the government bureaus!  I no longer want my earthquake information from them.  Watch as their time subsides—and the new thrust of seismic reportage begins.  The future of earthquake journalism has arrived.

It is you, Melbourne.
 

wizards, magick, and innocence: microsoft office 2010

Back in November I wrote about the oddness inherent in the delegation of important Microsoft Word tasks to "wizards". Shortly thereafter, I upgraded my still-robust copy of Office '97 to Office 2010.

This was a bad day for talking paperclips, but a great day for smugness, as it enabled me to send .docx files to friends and colleagues with impunity, flush with delight at the fact that many recipients would be unable to open them.
But my joy was short-lived. Needing to write to the Lord Mayor about extremely serious business, and lacking an administrative assistant to set out the particulars of the letter for me, I set out in search of the mythical "letter wizard" to conjure up my correspondence. Given that Office 2010 required around sixty times the disk space of Office '97, I naturally assumed there would be an even greater range of wizards for me to to choose from than before. Perhaps there would now be good and evil wizards—one of whom would be perfect for writing a letter to your grandmother, the other of whom would be great for forging your grandmother's will.

Strangely, this flourishing community of wizards was nowhere to be found. Perhaps I was not yet worthy of their presence? Did I need to complete a tutorial in magick and memos before they would appear? Baffled, I hit "F1". I typed "wizard" into the help box. What I saw destroyed the last vestiges of my lost imagination:

What happened to the wizards?

After the Microsoft Office 2003 release, the wizards, such as memo wizard and resume wizard in Microsoft Word 2007 and 2010 and chart wizard in Microsoft Excel 2007 and 2010 were replaced with templates that are available on the Microsoft Office.com website.

Oh dear. They've killed them all.

Immediately I was reminded of that poignant yet heart-wrenching scene in Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith, where Jedi across the galaxy are in one fell swoop betrayed, murdered and annihilated by the dark lord Palpatine. The same fate had befallen the race of Microsoft wizards. As I was when I first watched that film, I was close to tears (but, let me reassure you, Star Wars III has not and will not make it to the vaunted list of Films Which Have Made Me Cry—those being Shrek, Shrek 2, and Beethoven).

As the wizard is replaced by the downloadable template, so is the bank teller replaced by the ATM, the corner store by the vending machine, the train conductor by the ticket barrier, and the supermarket cashier by the self-checkout station. With each of these changes we lose a little of our humanity—save for the self-checkout station, in which you can discreetly place your finger under the scales to score a 5-cent bunch of bananas. Here I am sure you will agree that the potassium gained more than replenishes any humanity lost.

Vale, the age of wizards. Here's to 1997.

the best thing i have ever done (which sadly involves word document "wizards")

Earlier this year I posted the following on Facebook:

"Why does the word document 'wizard' always ask so many questions? Surely a proper wizard would already know all the answers."

It attracted sixteen "likes", the most I have ever received.

This was a momentous occasion! No matter how hard I stretched my brain, I could not think of any other time in my life in which I had sixteen separate people congratulating me for something. All the memories dredged up from childhood successes—be they related to school, sport, boy scouts, piano recital, electronics club, state poetry championships, or construct-a-hat-based-on-a-nursery-rhyme-competitions—came with the realisation that only two to five "likes" would have attached to those achievements, varying depending on the amount of family members present.
Even my performance as lead male in my primary school Christmas play (read: Jesus) would not have garnered sixteen "likes", despite my insistence that I perform without glasses in order to portray a more "authentic" son of God (although I have doubts that Jesus ever had to improvise His lines due to an inability to read cue cards).

So, just like the well-known parable about the farming family who sliced open their magical golden egg-laying goose to find even more gold inside than they had previously dreamed possible, I will take The Best Thing I Have Ever Done and extrapolate further comedy from it likewise.

Onwards: why a "wizard"?

As already indicated in The Best Thing I Have Ever Done, these "office wizards" seem to be quite uninformed. Many famous wizards can read minds and see through time. The MS Word Letter Wizard does not even know what day it is.

Furthermore, the office wizards were brought into creation in order to help us lowly, mortal end-users, who do not know a professional memo from an elegant memo, or a return address from a carbon-copy. But most well-known wizards are not actually helpful! Observe.

Exhibit A: Gandalf. Highly egoistical. Has nasty habit of showing up to save the day at times very convenient for furthering his own glorification. Fakes own death. Wears cocksure smile throughout film series; as if to say, "I know what's going to happen, and I'm not going to do anything about it, baby".

Exhibit B: Wizard of Oz. Grade-A phony. Is to real wizards what the tomato is to vegetables, George Lazenby was to James Bond, and Pope Benedict XVI is to the papacy—an impostor.


Exhibit C: Merlin. Senile. Relies on an owl to get him from one day to the next. Sometimes goes by "Merlin the Magician"—weak self-promotion that suggests his actual wizarding prowess is underwhelmingly shocking. Is there a need for "Roger Federer the Tennis Player", or "Freddie Mercury the Singer"? No.

Exhibit D: Mickey Mouse in "Fantasia". Incompetence personified. The Greeks can manage an economy better than this 'wizard' can control even a single magical mop-and-bucket. There's a "bail-out" joke somewhere in all of this, and I'm going to let you find it.