Okay everyone, me and Jen are hitting the trail and heading off on our holiday for the next four weeks. We’re doing Edinburgh, London and Kota Kinabalu in that order. Feel free to hit me up on Facebook if you think you’ll be free to catch up anywhere amongst that.
25 hour transit survival kit
It just wouldn’t be a complete election without a Liberal party member or supporter providing us with some dodgy race-baiting xenophobia and hardline religious bigotry for us to shake our heads at.
If you recall in 2007, some Coalition supporters in the marginal seat of Lindsay thought that handing out these flyers, posing as the ALP, would be a good idea:
A flyer distributed by the Coalition in 2007 pretending to be from Labor
Well, in 2010, the Coalition hasn’t disappointed!
Everyone, meet David Barker:
David likes to wear tiny ill-fitting clothes and spends his time inciting religious hatred and eating babies. He posted a Facebook status update proclaiming that “I vote for freedom of worship if the worship is of Jesus Christ or The Jewish God anyone else well they are worshipping a false god anyway so who cares.”
Barker’s assertion that Jews and Christians had dibs on timesharing the role of ‘true god’ didn’t go down so well when the story hit the media and the Liberal Party have since disowned him.
It’s been a thoroughly underwhelming campaign so far in the 2010 election. As noted by Aly and other political pundits, there’s not really a lot at stake here. We’ve seen the worst of the Global Financial Crisis, both parties have fallen over themselves to shelve their most devisive policies (net filter and Work Choices) and the two parties have the same stance on other potential election issues such as gay marriage.
There also aren’t really any hot political topics that are holding the attention of the Australian public. Most of the issues being discussed such as the offshore processing centres for asylum seekers are manufactured by the parties and the only people that really care about those sort of issues are taxi drivers. Such is the level of disinterest that the first televised debate between Abbott and Gillard got bumped for the season finale of Masterchef.
This is also an election which is heavy on sloganeering and the personalities of the party leaders and rather astonishingly light on substance. When Julia Gillard announced the election date, she used her campaign slogan Moving Forward twenty seven times in a half hour speech and then a further thirteen times during the Q+A session.
On her campaign trail she has so far given three different speeches called Moving Australia Forward, Going Forward Together and Moving Forward Together. For anyone looking to hold an Election themed party on August 21st, making a drinking game out of every time an ALP member utters these words is a surefire way to get your party guests absolutely plastered.
Moving Forward
When there is so little at stake, the voters turn to the personalities of the candidates themselves and this is where Tony Abbott and the Liberal Party are completely fucked. For all the problems Labor have getting slammed on not delivering on election policies, when it comes to the personalities the Liberal Party is personified by crazy right wing conservatism. Abbott’s antiquated values in this instance has resulted in women deserting him in droves and giving Gillard an election winning lead. Its ultimately the biggest factor in the election and why Abbott is now reduced to giving girl-power speeches to try and win them back.
Its times like these when you have a stale election that people often think about turning to alternative parties to send a message to the big two that they’re not happy with the direction they’re headed. This would have been an ideal election for the Greens to step up big time as a third party option for disenchanted voters which is why the Greens thought it would be a sweet idea to announce that they have struck a preference deal with Labor thus ensuring most of those Green votes end up benefiting Labor anyway and hastens the Greens race to political irrelevance. Good job, guys.
That so far has been the election in a nutshell. It looks like Labor should win handily and so far Abbott and the Liberals seem bereft of ideas to make up ground. Lets see if tonight’s debate brings anything new to the mix.
The other day when I decided that I wanted a new book to read, I remembered that I caught a glance at Stephen King’s novel Under The Dome at Borders and it had piqued my interest. The story of a smalltown in America which inexplicably gets trapped underneath a magical forcefield sounded like just the right amount of gimmicky nonsense to appeal to my sensibilities. Plus the book was a thousand pages long so it was going to be handy to have around for my upcoming 25 hour plane ride to the UK.
Great! Time to bust out the ol’ Kindle and it’ll be on my eReader in under a minute. I went to Amazon.com and there it was for a measely $9 bucks. I click ‘download’ and up comes an error message:
YOU CAN’T DOWNLOAD THIS BOOK BECAUSE YOU LIVE IN AUSTRALIA LOL – JEFF BEZOS
It appears that Amazon have begun blocking offshore attempts at logging into American Amazon accounts and downloading from their Kindle store. They’re re-enforcing that you have to download ebooks from the Australian Kindle store instead.
So I went to the Australian Kindle store to get a copy of the book instead.
SHITOUTTALUCK 
You’re telling me that a book written by Stephen Freakin’ King that is nearly a year old still isn’t available on the Australia Kindle store. Listen you jerks: I’m trying to give you money! Let me give you AUS$10 for a widely available mainstream book that isn’t new and is written by a bestselling author.
Fed up, I went to another website and uh, lets just say I’m on chapter five now and am highly enjoying the book.
So here we are in 2010 and the iBook store in Australia has precisely zero books for sale and the Australian Kindle store is still totally gimped. Lame.
Under the dome - a book about Mike's head
Death At Intervals
I’ve just finished reading Jose Saramago’s Death At Intervals. I don’t really know what to make of it. It’s about the strangest thing I’ve read all year and thats including a book that has KFC’s Colonel Sanders appearing as a pimp in Japan.
So in Death At Intervals, an unnamed country discovers the complete absense of death one New Years Day. Not only does no one pass away from natural causes, the ability to die appears to have ceased period. So unfortunately, for people on their deathbed or those who are terminally ill, they too remain alive. Overall though, the country initally reacts with jubilation to the news that death is a thing of the past. Unfortunately, those in the undertaking business and religious leaders react less favourably. After all, why bother with church if you can’t actually get to heaven?
After a period of seven months (and about half the book) Death eventually returns to the unnamed city. Then Death decides to leave memos for people giving them a week’s notice of their impending death. Then Death takes on the physical form of a woman and starts spelling her name with a lowercase ‘d’. Then she becomes infatuated with and eventually falls in love with a musician who was given the week’s notice memo but doesn’t die.
…huh?
This book is one of the weirdest I’ve read in a while. The tone at the start is comparable to Blindness but then its as if two thirds of the way through, Saramago decides he can’t really be stuffed to keep writing the story but then catches Nicolas Cage on the television in City of Angels and then decides ‘thats a sweet idea’ and goes off on that tangent.
Seriously, what the hell?
Okay, so Flipboard, a free RSS reader app which came out recently is pretty freakin’ awesome. I can easily see something like this becoming of the one most popular apps on the iPad.
Its a program that can connect to your Facebook and Twitter account and convert the links, images and status updates into a magazine style format. In essence, it creates a continually updating personalized magazine about the people and shit that you care about. It’s pretty goddamned genius.
Flipboard: a personalized magazine filled with all the shit from your friends' Twitter and FB updates
A sample page taken from my Flipboard magazine earlier today
There are a lot of ingredients that have to come together for a film to be truly great. Sometimes a film will come along that blows you away with spectacular visual effects or striking costumes and imagery only to be let down by shoddy characterisation, poor pacing or a clunky script. For every great ‘effects’ movie that comes along, such as Pans Labyrinth, Children of Men or Amelie, where they deliver substance to go with the style, there are others that have a similarly lofty ambitions but don’t quite get there for one reason or another.
I recently went through my DVD collection and rewatched a selection of scenes from the following films. They’re far from being favourites but I think there’s no harm in watching them at least once for their highly polished or unique visual charms. By a strange coincidence, all three films I picked were released in the same year.
This film is about an emperor who returns to his kingdom and his wife who he suspects of having an affair with some guy. Meanwhile Other Guy is interested in a princess and Gong Li is all like ‘oh no you di-n’t’. At some point ninjas get involved.
While the story didn’t hold my interest, just look at the range of colour that permeates every single frame of this movie. Each still looks like its been through Photoshop with the contrast cranked up to full. Everyone in this movie chills out in ornate solid gold suits of armour or expensive silk robes like the kind Ric Flair used to wear in the Eighties. It looks amazing.
The cool thing about The Fall, a film in which a bed-ridden man narrates a tale to a little girl who sits at his bedside is that all of these fantastic looking scenes were done without the aid of computer effects. Each image is artfully composed and full of patterns and symmetry which are pleasing to the eye. The story isn’t actually too bad here either. I like how the visual representation of the story told by the man is occasionally misinterpreted by the little girl. At one stage, there is confusion when the girl thinks an ‘Indian’ that the man is referring to is a Native American when he actually means someone from the sub-continent region. Once she realises this, the Indian in the story changes to reflect this.
While its not a badly told tale but its not all that memorable either. It doesn’t have the lasting appeal of something like The Never Ending Story and it isn’t up to the level of a Pan’s Labyrinth either. It just looks really nice.
Renaissance is an animated French feature that came out a year after Sin City. This is close to being a literal black and white film. There is only a small amount of grey used to pick up some of the detail.
The story is set in the future and is a generic film noir tale about a missing girl. The English dubbed version is of decent quality and obviously had a bit of money behind it (Daniel Craig and Iain Holm are involved) so don’t feel you need to track down the original French copy with English subs. However, as with The Fall and The Curse of the Golden Flower, you won’t remember the story at all in a few months, just the nifty black and white visuals.
The Wire Season 4 & 5, Tickets to the Wallabies vs Springboks (halfway line), Zombieland (BluRay), Super Mario World (1991) and the new Alan Wake book. All up, a pretty sweet haul for my birthday. Not to mention a champagne breakfast served up by Jen.
Rasha turned me on to this. It’s a 17 minute long promo for a festival of awesome. I smell a road-trip coming, you guys game?
Check out this sweet movie-style trailer for the upcoming election. Fair shake of the sauce bottle indeed.
