It is a truth universally acknowledged that, when behind the steering wheel, people are idiots. But when they're behind the wheel when the weather is bad, people are particularly stupid idiots.
Seriously, take care on the roads in this wintry weather.
¶ 8:50 am 3 comments
The ever-enjoyable I'm Not Craig has tagged me in a post
he has entitled
“I
still don't know how to pronounce
‘meme’”. This comes after he ended a
post last week with the line “I promise to
shut up about Richard Dawkins for a while” —
Dawkins's TV show about religion had provoked some
discussion — which is fine and all but here's a
nice coincidence: it was Dawkins himself who invented
the meme!
He didn't invent these “6 wierd things about me” blog posts as such, rather the meme was introduced in his first best-seller The Selfish Gene as an example of the power of self-replication.
The book is, of course, about evolution and describes the mechanism of genetics: how processes that promote the propogation of almost perfect copies of genes from generation to generation are more likely to continue than other processes. It is a well-written, entertaining, rigorous read that attempts to share some of Darwinism's beauty and magic.
At one stage in the book Dawkins wanted to make the point that genes need not be the only type of replicator that does that and suggested that cultural ideas act in pretty much the same way. Popular songs, views on Julia Gillard, jokes about Damir Dokic: they live in one person's mind and can be passed on to the mind of the person next to him through the mechanism of speech.
As with genes, some memes are better at propagation than others. Dawkins elegantly describes the example of the lyrics to Auld Lang Syne. The refrain is almost universally sung ‘For the sake of auld lang syne’ when Burns actually wrote ‘For auld lang syne’. Why has this mutation survived so well in the meme pool? Dawkins suggests that as most people learn this song by listening to other people singing it rather than by looking it up in their copy of the Scottish Student's Songbook. If you are unsure of the words and are nervously singing along with a large group of people belting out this old classic and, no matter how loudly the people who actually know the correct words are singing, if there is even only one person erroneously throwing in the ‘for sake of ’ bit, you will hear it loud and clear — the S and the K really cut through the sound and that's what you hear and, thus, you think that's how the song goes.
This idea of a cultural unit acting as replicating entity entered the language shortly after the publication of Dawkins's book (acting memetically as he himself later noted) and some blogger must have applied the word to this idea of taking some rules about what to post and passing them to one of your blogfriends. The rules are replicated, you understand.
Anyway, for INC's pleasure I'll quote the paragraph where it makes its first appearance:
We need a noun for the new replicator, a noun that conveys the idea of a unit of cultural transmission, or a unit of imitation. ‘Mimeme’ comes from a suitable Greek root, but I want a monosyllable that sounds a bit like ‘gene’. I hope my classicist friends will forgive me if I abbreviate mimeme to meme. If it is any consolation, it could be related to ‘memory’ or to the French word même. It should be pronounced to rhyme with ‘cream’
And to join in with this particular meme I'll say that one of the wierd things about me is that I tend to write pompously when the subject turns to something I once read about.
¶ 10:00 am 7 comments
The movie opens with a panorama of empty desert. Your
focus is on the hills in the distance. Suddenly a tired,
pock-marked face moves in front of the camera filling the
screen. The contrast between the wide-shot and the
close-up is dramatic and stylised.
The opening scene consists of this aging hired gun slowly riding into an almost empty town, slowly getting off his horse, he sees some other unsavoury types slowly arriving in town. They slowly approach each other and the camera follows them slowly walking through the dusty street. A dog runs across the road. It all happens slowly, silently but for some heavy footsteps clumsily dubbed on. They all slowly stare at each other as the point of view changes from close-ups to wide shots. Slowly, you understand. What are they meeting for? Are they all about to shoot each other? Are they all about to sit down to a nice game of backgammon?
They meet at the door of a building, all pull their pistols and suddenly dash through the door. Suddenly you hear a volley of pistol fire cranked up full volume on the soundtrack and suddenly a figure with a napkin around his neck, a half-eaten lamb joint in one hand and a gun in the other bursts through a window. This is Tuco, the “Ugly” of the title. The contrast between the suddenness of this action and the slow build up to it is dramatic and stylised.
The Good, The Bad And The Ugly is very much about style in this sense. Other scenes include a long sequence where Tuco is riding through a desert holding a dilapidated parasol where each shot is framed like an oil painting; or when Angel Eyes (the “Bad” played by Lee Van Cleef — who is awesomely cool in this movie) menaces some retired soldier by staring at him and eating soup; the final showdown between the three main characters is a brilliant sequence consisting of what is essentially three dudes just staring at each other for four minutes while Ennio Morricone's deliciously good soundtrack bangs from the speakers. These scenes and others are deliberately slowed down — a conscious extension of time for the purpose solely of style.
The story of the three main characters takes place through the American civil war. Almost from the start to the very end the actions of the war affect the plot of the small group of money-grabbing gun-slingers. They get caught in artillery from time to time; they steal some uniforms and get captured and stuck in prisoner camps; they converse with soldiers with arms or legs missing; they move through towns abandoned by the locals and taken over by soldiers; even the final showdown takes place in a war cemetary. If the movie has anything to say about that is that neither the North nor the South is any better than the other: the whole war was a catastrophe. All the soldiers just seem to stroll about shooting each other.
The film is not so much about this kind of message, though. Certainly not one about plot (a bunch of guys take it in turns to gang up with each other and then betray each other in the hunt for a case of coins) or about character (Tuco is pretty much the only person in the movie to have one) but it is a string of great scenes, humour and action. Sort of like Princess Bride except with rather more murders than romance.
There are just cool bits throughout like where a pistol barrel is pointed right at the camera which becomes a mortar that destroys a building; a mammoth set-piece showing a battle over a bridge of which Blondie says “I've never seen so many men wasted so badly” (one of a very small number of examples of him earning the “Good” name — he's good only in comparison to the other two); the scene where Tuco searches Sad Hill Cemetary for Arch Stanton's grave — it is just two and a half minutes of Eli Wallach running in a circle to another Morricone masterpiece and it is utterly superb.
I don't suggest that some of the crappier bits couldn't have been cut out but it remains one of my favourite movies.
The Good, The Bad And The Ugly airs at 11:30 Friday night on Channel 7.
¶ 3:40 pm 6 comments
Some people here are about to suffer a shock from my
outrageous, bohemian, aberrant lifestyle but I don't
drink coffee.
Yes, I know. Sorry for springing it on you like that; just take a deep breath and try to recover. But it's true: I no longer drink coffee.
I have no wish to present you with a long spiel about the health dangers of habitual coffee intake — I don't know whether there are any and don't particularly care. My choice is not one of health nor one of morality, vegan-style, rather one of deliberate self-abnegation.
Being a software developer I was living the cliché: drinking my long blacks happily and with merry freedom. Nothing better than sitting in a café reading a recent Wired, perhaps, with a slice of cake and a tauntingly bitter espresso with strong body and impressive crema. Mmmm.
Our development team were working on a particular project a couple of years ago and the company rented a room for us several suburbs away from the rest of the office which was delicious and very productive — just the three of us in this one tiny room with three laptops, a test server, a big sheet of butchers paper on the wall with lists of tasks and the woman running a freight company on the phone in the room next door (“Or moy gord. Did he really? Or moy gord” every minute and a half. Christ, she drove us nuts). But there was nothing to do when we wanted a break except to make ourselves more coffee and or moy gord were we floating on the ceiling by mid-afternoon every day. I would go home and suffer dizzy spells and strange heart palpitations. I would wake up in the morning awash in sweat and with shaking hands: it was actually kind of groovy.
And in the midst of this my girlfriend, a lass I was particularly fond of, dropped my sorry ass leaving me a crushed, self-hating, shell of a lad. I lived the cliché again: standing at cliff-edges staring mournfully out to sea with biting offshore winds pulling at my hair as the orchestral soundtrack swelled and the camera swooped in a helicopter around me etc.
I guess that in order to regain the sense that I had
some sort of control over myself I decided to give
something up of my own choice. There was, of course,
no way I was giving up the smack so given our recent
experiments in coffee insanity I just stopped drinking
it — cold turkey — and have been enjoying my
Earl Greys ever since.
Now, as much as I enjoy rambling endlessly and
in dull detail about my own history there was a point
to this: there are a couple of hints in making a decent
cup of tea which I would like to share:
- The water must be boiling when it hits the tea leaves. Not merely having recently boiled but actually boiling. That's the secret.
- Get everything hot beforehand and keep it hot. Warm the pot with a splash of boiling water before you put the tea in; warm the cup too; tea cosies… the whole production. So yes, heat: it's all about the heat
- The whole cuppa tea things works better when your conversation is about show tunes. I don't try to explain it; it's just true.
- Full cream milk. I may have ranted about low fat milk here before. I predict fat is making a comeback — fat is the new black.
- A good cup of tea is a little harder to make with teabags but certainly not impossible: just remember to let the teabag steep before you add the milk. The fat (see above) will coat the bag which obstructs the infusion.
I just had a delightful weekend visiting my brother and
his family in Perth.
A few days leave from work made it a long weekend which was a brilliant idea given that we Victorians get an extra day off next weekend: the Queen's Birthday holiday.
Surely many of you know that it is not the Queen's actual birthday; she turned 81 back in April, bless her cotton socks, etc. Apparently her birthday is celebrated publicly in June because the weather is better in England in June than in April and is that not utter genius.
I hereby wish to celebrate my birthday both in September, which is the actual anniversary, and let's say the second weekend of February, just for kicks. The weather will be better, to borrow Liz's excuse. A day off for everybody: Harpo's Birthday Holiday.
And while we're at it, let's move Christmas Day to late April in order to liven up the start of the footy season and get the religious festivals over together. We could move Cup Day to the Wednesday just so we don't have to spend our day off bothering with that horse race they have. And, dammit, the Dawn Service on ANZAC Day is just too early. Let's make it Comfy Brunch Service.
It turns out that they don't have the Queen's Birthday holiday in Perth — they had a Federation Day off yesterday, celebrating the birth of Western Australia — which is a surprisingly republican move for a state that voted 59% no in the referendum.
How the rest of Perth celebrates Federation Day I can't say: I didn't see a great deal of enthusiasm for the concept. But in my brother's family it apparently involves bribing small children with icecream and reading about Gruffaloes — and perhaps some of the “jumping game” you see us playing here.
Can there be any better way of celebrating?
¶ 2:10 pm 2 comments
