Up the workers
Tens of thousands – perhaps more than a hundred thousand – people have marched through Melbourne this morning, bringing the city to a standstill in protest against the government’s planned changes to industrial relations laws, which take effect at midnight tonight.
I joined the march in support (I’m a union member after all) and took a few snapshots. Some more on Flickr in a minute.
View/sauce
Funny the things you see when you view source in web pages:
<!–
40% of people who know they are HIV+ do not tell their partners. Show you care about your partner and yourself. Use a condom every time. Show you care about your partner and yourself.
–>
1 in 4 people living with HIV find it difficult to tell their
partners… because they don’t even know they have HIV. Use a
condom every time.
<p>Trojan®, America’s #1 Condom.</p>
</td>
From www.trojancondoms.com.
Brisbane: the wrap-up
Just a quickie while I have a coffee before heading out to the airport and home to Melbourne.
Brisbane has been nice to me. A bit chilly, but the sun has shone and I’ve been amused. As I was arriving here on Wednesday I wondered why I’ve been in this city less often than places much further afield like Paris, Vancouver and San Francisco. Well, admittedly Brisbane holds no claim to being one of the world’s great metropolises, but it’s right on my doorstep and it does have, as I’ve said repeatedly over the last couple of days, a certain “down-at-heel charmâ€. (I’ve already been made to pay for that remark, so any Queenlanders who take umbrage, I’m sorry already).
It’s been great to spend some time with my family – brothers Bill and Andrew, nephew/godson Jo and theirs – in Melbourne I realise I’m a lot further from home and hearth than I was in Sydney and as I grow older I learn to value my family ties so much more. My nephews are young men now when last time I saw them they were just kids. Time passes too quickly.
I’m going to run out of either battery power or net access shortly, so I’ll leave it at that, get my mail and go home.
Brisvegas
I’m in Brisbane this morning. I flew up for a couple of days to attend my nephew’s 21st birthday party and make the most of the dying days of my holiday. Back to Melbourne tomorrow.
The nephew in question, Johti, is also my godson, so he holds a special place in my heart. I was glad to have been able to make it to his passage into adulthood, having been a frequent witness to his life since he arrived in a PostPak from India all those years ago. He’s grown up well.
Had a couple of hours to wander around Brisbane yesterday and I have the whole day today, but everyone I ask for advice on what to see/do gives me the same weary shrug. Brissie is a town for living in, not for visiting.
I’ll head out today and see what I can stumble across.
Some more pictures from yesterday (and today, probably) on Flickr.
Update, 7PM: Posted a bunch more pictures after a day filled with museums and other thrilling touristy bits.
Jackson acquitted – now the fun begins in earnest
Not guilty:
Michael Jackson was acquitted today of all charges in connection with accusations that he molested a 13-year-old boy he had befriended as the youth was recovering from cancer in 2003.
Mr. Jackson’s complete acquittal - a stinging defeat for a retiring prosecutor who had spent more than a decade pursuing the singer on pedophilia accusations - ends a nearly four-month trial that featured 140 witnesses whose testimony painted clashing portraits of the 46-year-old international pop star as either pedophile or Peter Pan.
“Mr. Jackson, your bail is exonerated and you are released,” Judge Rodney S. Melville said after the verdicts was read.
It would appear that justice has been done. I’m not a fan or supporter of Jackson – I’m as perturbed and disquieted by his peculiar worldview as anyone – but I’m even less of a fan of witch hunts, and the spectacle we’ve been witnessing is a witch hunt, plain and simple.
So now he’s free to go, back to Neverland or perhaps, as has been suggested, to leave the United States altogether. As well as the obvious destination of somewhere in Europe, I believe I heard a rumour that he’d expressed an interest in Australia. I’m sure that’s no more than a rumour. But like O.J. Simpson, Jackson is now destined to be placed in that guilty-despite-the-verdict category that celebrity trials in the US, with the media’s attendant prurient interest in details like gloves and witness accounts, seems to create.
Poor bastard.
Irony isn’t dead
Via Boing Boing (who got it from Agnes…), these Soviet-style posters are apparently to be seen encouraging paranoia on trains travelling between Baltimore and Washington, DC.
Fresh from being told they’re running the “gulag of our times,” it’s great to see the Americans taking the allusion so much to heart.
Modern phrenology
Yesterday I donated my brain to science.
Both Brent and I decided a while ago to volunteer for a project called the Australian NeuroAIDS Brain Tissue Bank, or “the brain bank” for short. Basically what this means is that we have signed up to have our brains removed and used for medical experiments. The good news is that we get to retain possession of our grey matter until we die, but after that we’ve agreed to have all manner of unspeakable acts performed on our lifeless corpses to remove the brain, the brain stem, and samples of CNS fluid, lymph nodes and god-know-what-else. I wrote an article about the brain bank for Positive Living a while ago.
So yesterday morning we trundled off to the Alfred Hospital to have our heads measured, our bumps catalogued, and to be subjected to all manner of physical, neurological, cognitive and psychological investigations. This will become a yearly event for us from now, as the idea of the project is to collect ongoing data about the cognitive functioning of people with HIV, which will be used in future medical research along with the stored brain tissue. It’s a brilliant, if slightly creepy, project, and both of us were quite unhesitant in wanting to get involved.
Several things I learned yesterday:
- I’m surprisingly good at recalling sequences of numbers, both forwards and backwards.
- I’m not so good with pictures.
- I have no reflexes. None. Zip. I’ve known for some time that I don’t have a patella reflex (that’s the one where the doc taps you on the kneecap and your foot moves) but it turns out that I don’t have any involuntary reflexes anywhere. Apparently this is rare but no cause for concern.
- My blood pressure is way too high at 150/100. This came as a surprise as my BP is usually really good. But yesterday it was sufficiently elevated that the doc seriously contemplated shipping me down to the ER for further tests and antihypertensive medications. Eventually we decided we’d leave it for a couple of days and I’m going to see my regular GP about it. This has me quite worried seeing as how my father died of heart disease.
Following our altruistic endeavours in the name of human advancement, we went down to Docklands for the Sydney-Carlton match. The second outing to the footy in two weeks, and a much more enjoyable experience, seeing as how we won and all. I’ve had rather a bad run of luck with the games I’ve seen live in recent times, so it was a nice change to be able to sing the old team song after the final siren, even if it was only Carlton we beat.
Just for illustrative purposes, here’s a picture from last week’s game, Darren Jolly in full flight, but I don’t recall anything quite this exciting happening so maybe it’s the camera angle (click to enlarge).
Quarter to five in the goddamn morning
Can’t freaking sleep. It’s been like this for at least a week — up at 4, or 6, or 5 every bloody morning. Observant readers with good memories will know that this is something that happens to me from time to time.
The good news is that this morning after getting up at 4 am I didn’t just mindlessly start working, which is what I’ve been doing for the last few days. I’m not usually a workaholic but I’ve been doing the hard yards to get this website up and running for my employer. It’s utterly, utterly, utterly standards compliant (I hope), super-accessible and a jolly good read in parts.
Officially launched at midday yesterday, a full 24 hours ahead of schedule.
Launched, I say. How does one “launch” a website? Does one crack a bottle of Pol Rodger over the computer screen and intone “Good luck to her and all who surf to her”? Does one procure a gold-plated switch and a local celebrity to officiate?
I can’t help thinking of Michael Frayn’s The Tin Men (1965), a novel set in the William Morris Institute of Automation (chortle), where a team of very British boffins are distracted from their work (devising ways to use computers to do all manner of drudgery, such as pray, write newspaper headlines and generate cricket statistics) by the news that H.M. The Queen is coming to open the new Ethics Wing.
Naturally, there will be a ribbon-cutting ceremony, which requires a suitable pair of ceremonial scissors:
‘Now here’s rather a nice model, sir. This is the Sandringham. A very nice scissor - a very nice scissor, indeed. Perhaps you’d like to hold it, sir. Do you feel how snugly it sits in the hand? Try it on this demonstration tape here … that’s right, sir. Lovely action, isn’t it?
‘Or perhaps you’d prefer something more traditional? Have a look at the Osborne. A very conservative scissor, this one. I expect some people would think it was a bit old-fashioned, but as a matter of fact we sell quite a lot of them. Oh yes, there’s something about tradition, sir, whatever they say…
‘This one, sir? This is the Holyrood. It’s a heavy-duty scissor for the thicker tape. You’ll find some of your big contractors and engineering firms put up a very heavy gauge tape if you don’t watch them.
‘Now this one’s the Balmoral. Very fashionable now, sir.’
(Extract from the other fan of this book.)
Anyway, we didn’t get a pair of ceremonial scissors or anything fancy, we just flipped the switch and sent out an email. A pity, really, I could have made use of a Sandringham around the office.
So now, having rebuilt the firm’s website, I wake at 4 am with nothing more to occupy me than you, gentle reader. After tying up a few loose ends today, I’m taking holidays for the next two weeks, to lie on the beach in St Kilda being pelted with freezing rain.
Perhaps this will mean a return to more regular blogging habits, or perhaps soon I shall sleep the sleep of the just, like I used to. Either way it’s a win.
