Smithology

I’m not sure how we got into it but Sol is a big fan of Midnight Oil (20000 Watts RSL. to be specific) and often requests we play it when we are driving. Apart from Power and the Passion, he loves to sing along to White Skin Black Heart. Since starting school he’s been curious about skin colour and he often asks me about it. We have discussions about why Peter Garret seems so angry about white skin black heart and we talk about racist attitudes to Aboriginals.

When he went to pre-school he was in a mostly fair skinned class which had a couple of brown skinned kids. We were shocked one day when he informed us that he couldn’t be friends with X because X has brown skin. Naturally we tried to point out that X was a person just the same as him and also talked about how everyone has different coloured skin but he has continued to think in binaries: according to Sol people are either “skin coloured” or brown.

Sydney is the most multicultural place we’ve lived and in fact Sol’s class is mostly comprised of non-anglo ethnic origins: chinese-ish, indian-ish, african-ish and any mix in between. Yet Sol continues in his belief that normal people are white and then you get those strange brown people. Being at this new school has forced him to overcome his aversion to brown skin and he has made friends however today we noticed he’d drawn a picture of himself playing with his friends and he’d had to make a decision as to whether to use the brown pencil or the anglo-skin pencil. I can’t imagine how he made the decision but it seems he still prefers to play with kids that he thinks of as “white”.

Is this evidence for natural racism, a natural aversion to difference in our genetic psychological make-up or is it evidence that our culture still somehow promotes “whiteness”? Maybe it’s just that he identifies that all the important adults in his life are white: his mum and dad and teachers are all white, most of the people on TV are white. And here’s a final thing to throw into the mix, some of Sol’s brown skinned friends (maybe one quarter or half chinese in ethnic origin) classify themselves as white and refer to other browner skinned kids as being “chinese”. Go figure.

fatherhood, racism 2 comments

A girl (probably in late teens / early twenties) jumped off the highwall of an excavated construction site next to my workplace today and died. Beforehand, a coworker saw her standing around near the fence, sensed something was not right and asked if she was ok. She told him she was fine and said she’d just called her dad to come and get her. The coworker came in and spoke with our receptionist thinking she seemed out of place but when they looked for her again she was gone. It seems like my coworker was the last person to speak to her before she ended her life. She told him she was ok, waiting for Dad, just a few minutes later she was dead.

He felt terribly guilty of course, as we watched the forensic police investigating the site, he told us that he thought he could have stopped her if only he’d known she was thinking of jumping. He could tell she was upset but he said she seemed so calm and in control, he didn’t think she was about to kill herself.

Coincidentally, I got back to my desk and noticed this little article on the front page of the ABC News website: Helping people at risk of suicide. The article talks about how the signs of impending suicide are so easy to miss and how we are not aware of them because suicide is such a taboo topic. The article states (and I’ve heard this advice before) that the best thing you can do if you think someone might be suicidal is to ask them if they are suicidal!

It seems obvious yet it is the most difficult question to ask “Are you thinking about suicide?”: embarrassing if the person you are asking is not suicidal and there is the fear that if they are suicidal, somehow talking to them will make them more likely to do it: this is absolute rubbish (unless you are planning on quoting Nietzsche at them perhaps). Put yourself in the other persons shoes: if you are depressed and someone shows an interest in how you’re feeling, then you want to talk about it. It helps to talk about it. If you’re not suicidal, you’ve probably considered it on some level so it’s not a ridiculous question, if you are suicidal, it’s a huge burden lifted to talk about it with someone who cares. As a friend it’s important to take the rest of the advice in the article, especially getting help for your friend from an agency that specialises in suicide prevention rather than trying to handle it yourself.

Getting back to my coworker: I categorically do not think he is to blame for the girls death, he had no idea of what she was going to do, she was just one of many disturbed people that you come across from time to time in public spaces. Also I can’t speculate on the girls history or situation: she may have had a mental illness complicating things or already have been in contact with an organisation that was helping her (or trying to). On the other hand, it doesn’t hurt for us to spend just a few minutes educating ourselves on the signs of impending suicide and how to talk about this issue with those closest to us.

See also:

• Helping people at risk of suicide (also linked above)
• Lifeline: Suicide Prevention
• ReachOut – If your friend threatens to take their own life
• Reach Out – Worried about someone feeling depressed

life, suicide Don't just sit there, post a comment!

On the way home from work I loaded up some vintage U2 on the mp3 player and it tripped a memory from being back at uni, just newly arrived in the big city (Brisbane not Sydney) and cruising the back streets of Tarragindi in my friend’s mother’s light brown Mitsubishi Magna with the windows down and volume up. We were so damn cool. My friend used to stage mock interviews with Rolling Stone magazine: Oh you know, we’ve been working on the new album, Matt’s been experimenting with some new sounds, coming up with riffs and I’m just pulling in song ideas based around what comes out of that.

I think that might’ve been the day we blew a tire and realised neither of us knew how to change it. Sometime between then and now I grew up.

life, memories, music 6 comments

I just added a few paragraphs to my previous Going Postal post. I really wanted to write something that wasn’t about vomit last night but I think I was also suffering brain fuzz.

Brain fuzz might be a familiar thing for busy people who aren’t getting enough sleep. It’s when you feel like everything you do is somehow rushed between all the other things you need to do such that you can never really just enjoy what you’re doing or even give it your full attention. Whenever you try to have a break and do something to unwind, there seem to be a small crowd of voices clamouring for attention at the back of your brain.

Brain fuzz is really bad for creativity and effective problem solving: it’s a sign that something has to give, that maybe you’ve bitten off more than you can chew. Hopefully in my case it’s just a few teething issues while I try to get into the rhythm of doing some part time study and being already behind from last weeks sickness. In any case, I feel like I’m starting to come out of it which is why I’d better go get some sleep and de-fuzz a bit more.

life 1 comment

I watched the television adaptation of Terry Pratchett’s Going Postal the other day and in the tradition of these adaptations (previously The Colour of Magic and The Hogfather) it was excellent entertainment.

For those not familiar with Pratchett, he is mostly known for his Discworld books set in a flat world that rides on the back of four elephants that stand on the back of a giant space turtle. Over the last few years, a few of his books have been made into TV movies (all two parters so far)

The following may contain some minor spoilers.

Going Postal is the story of Moist von Lipwig and his charge to revive the ailing Ankh-Morpork Postal Service. Standing against him is the evil Reacher Gilt who runs The Clacks – a kind of steam-punk telegraph service using signalling lights to send messages across country. Various other characters come to aid or hinder Moist in his quest, notably the huffy and strict Adora Belle Dearheart whom Moist predictably falls for instantly. It might sound a bit boring but throw in a golem (a living clay man), some nutty postal workers, an assassin banshee, some steampunk hackers, sentient piles of mail, neat magical special effects and some tense negotiations over a crossbow bolt or two and there’s enough to keep you entertained.

The portrayal of Ankh-Morpork (and other Discworld locations in previous adaptations) is very close to how I imagine them when reading the books – perhaps because Pratchett draws on well understood shared images. While the Discworld novels are set literally on a different world, there is a familiarity to the underlying whimsical relationship between things that is very earthbound and makes the characters sympathetic and believable even while they fire crossbow bolts during quarrels and befriend golems.

The comedy in Going Postal wouldn’t make most people fall off their chairs but it does provide a steady flow of smirks and smiles. Apart from the obvious slapstick, there is a subtle form of humour which is about recognising things in strange places.

[start spoilery paragraph]
For example, I had to laugh when the evil Clacks service was brought to its knees by subverting its protocols to cause it to lock up. The perpetrators of this crime were immediately recognisable as hackers in their smug self appreciation and mastery of the arcane.
[end spoilery paragraph]

The visual effects were well done in my opinion and while I realise they were done on a budget, I felt they made the magical bits suitably magical and where the sets were a bit obviously staged, I can forgive the producers for not being able to have the whole city stretching out behind every shot.

As far as the acting goes, it was probably just a touch theatrical in approach which I suppose is needed for comedy but the levels weren’t too annoyingly high and there were still moments of genuine drama where I felt a strong affinity with the characters.

Pratchett is often compared to Douglas Adams as a writer and I agree that their style of comedy is similar. If you liked Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy TV Series, you’ll probably like this. Definitely worth a look if you come across it and enjoy a bit of comedy in your fantasy

Wikipedia Going Postal

comedy, fantasy, terry pratchett, tv Don't just sit there, post a comment!

Now that I’ve mostly recovered from the vomiting bug that ripped through my work and family, I thought I’d finish off with a helpful list of vomiting synonyms:

Vomiting:

• spewing
• heaving
• chundering
• chucking
• hurling
• throwing up
• driving the porcelain bus
• painting the pavement
• checking the tyres
• puking
• regurgitating
• barfing
• blowing chunks
• doing a technicolor yawn
• launching lunch
• ralphing
• whistling beef

vomit 1 comment

Last night I had further occasion to reflect on vomit as Sol added his two cents to the conversation. At about 2am I awoke to panic and mayhem from Sol’s room. Rushing in I came upon the messy scene where Sol rather redundantly informed me that he had done a vomit. As I ran the tap on the Toy Story 3 doona cover, I asked Buzz and Woody how they managed to still smile in this situation and they told me that it was the prozac and I should just go back to bed.

Which reminds me of that time that Steph accidentally put the stilnox in the panadeine box. It was State of Origin night and I had a splitting migraine so as Steph went out to be social with friends, I downed a couple of pills (that’s twice the normal dose of stillnox) sat on the couch and flicked on the TV. The next thing I remember is lying on the bed with no shirt on, a pounding headache and Steph banging on the door begging me to wake up and let her in. We found my shirt in the bathroom where I’d managed, in my sleepwalking zombie state, to … well I’m kind of glad I can’t remember it and that I was still too zonked to be of any help cleaning it up.

life, vomit Don't just sit there, post a comment!

Sorry to be posting a followup on this subject but this blog has a life of its own and it wants me to write more about vomit today so this is what you get. It seems that not a week goes by in my life without hearing a coworker or someone in the public crowd referring nostalgically to alcohol induced vomiting in their youth (or on the most recent weekend in some cases).

I was talking about binge drinking with a coworker last week as we drove past a lady pulled over on the side of the road “checking the tyres” from the front seat. It seems like being so drunk you vomit is a right of passage in our society. There’s something about having the access to the alcohol and the space to be completely blotto that acts as a signifier of having reached adult independence thus proving that you are ready to take on the responsibilities of life in the grown-up world.

In my early twenties I used to get so bored with what seemed like endless conversations with friends about vomiting. The stories always have the same format, first you list the people you were with, who you dragged out of their house to go with you, which clubs you went to, various forms of alcohol consumed, a hazy listing as best can be recalled of how much was drunk and then all the fun places you vomited afterwards: in the friend’s parent’s car, in the friend’s parent’s fridge, in a pot plant, on a police officer etc…

Personally I find vomiting repulsive and have never felt particularly nostalgic about it. I’ve never been one to binge drink and when I have had enough that I start to feel woozy, it’s usually remembered as a bad night. For me alcohol is best when it gets you to that point of happy enjoyment of the people around you.

So thankfully I can end this post here without any nostalgic stories about vomiting: unless you really want to hear about the time Steph accidentally put the stillnox in the panadeine box and I didn’t realise.

life, vomit 1 comment

Last night Felicity was having trouble getting to sleep. I was in the middle of singing her my soulful rendition of All the Pretty Little Horses when she sat up and disgorged half of her dinner on the pillow. The other half came out moments later as I ran down the hallway with her extended before me at arms length heading for the bathroom.

I remember back when her vomit was cute. When she was just a little squirrel, I thought it was wonderful when she did her little milky pukes. They didn’t smell and I had a secret pride in them. Looking back I can now see this as strong evidence for the phenomenon known as baby brain where normally clever people are reduced to stupid senseless gibbering after they’ve had a baby. Maybe it’s a form of survival instinct – like the forces of natural selection must favour parents who descend into utter denial that their child could be anything but perfectly cute – even while they spit out globs of milk on your shirt making you late for work.

After the 8pm vomit, we had the 10:30pm vomit which required a second change of sheets and the 2am vomit which I knew about because she was sleeping next to me on a towel and I miraculously managed to catch by shoving a bucket in front of her at the crucial moment.

Ah the joy. The ceaseless privilege of parenthood.

fatherhood, vomit Don't just sit there, post a comment!

With the finale of Season 5 of Doctor Who upon us, I thought I’d share a little project I did a few weeks back. Since being at work, I’ve switched my desktop to Ubuntu Linux and discovered a TimeTunnel screensaver in the settings.

By default the screensaver shows the xscreensaver logo floating in the tunnel because apparently the author was unable to get permission from the BBC to distribute images of the Doctor, the Tardis and the Doctor Who logo which would normally appear.

However, on further investigation I found that the author has made allowance for any images to be shown floating in the tunnel so I knew immediately that I had to make my own face float out of the tunnel.

First I had to make three xpm images. Generally you just fire up any image editor and edit up a photo of your head and any other objects you want in the tunnel. I decided on a coffee cup seeing as the screensaver would be at work, it would provide a hint as to my whereabouts should someone come to my desk.

I’m not a photoshop expert (actually I used Acorn on the Mac) so the cutting out of my face and hair is a little rough on the edges. The procedure I used was to get the select tool to draw the boundary of my face and hair and then used the ‘invert selection’ menu item, then with the eraser tool, i could make the background transparent without erasing my face (since the selection was inverted). I saved my work as PNG with transparency enabled.

On linux I used the convert command that comes with ImageMagick to get an xpm: it’s simply ‘convert face.png face.xpm’

Finally I had to muck around a bit with xscreensaver in Ubuntu. First uninstall gnome-screensaver. Then install xscreensaver. Xscreensaver is the original package that has the ability to customise the screensaver parameters. Under the screensaver setup screen, select TimeTunnel and then click ‘Advanced’. In the advanced settings you can specify the command. I changed mine to be ‘timetunnel -head /pathto/face.xpm -tardis /pathto/coffeecup.xpm -logo /pathto/coffeecup.xpm’

And here’s the result (the music is usually hummed by my coworker when he walks past but I haven’t got a recording of that)

doctor who, scifi, tech Don't just sit there, post a comment!