Random raves

This cracked my shit up on the weekend; it's on the wall of the Lyneham post office-cum-laundrette. It was particularly apposite given the fact I'd seen it (the uncommented emblem only) tattoo'd on the back of a young woman's neck, in size LARGE, the day before.

Well, I'm not squeamy about spiders (unlike bugs), but I do confess to having been a little startled when a huntsman spider scuttled across my lounge floor half an hour ago. While I'm normally fine about picking spiders up and putting them outside, this one was just a bit too large for me to want to pick up raw, if you like. Yay spare Chinese food containers, but the bugger did move - I managed to nab him before he got under the couch, and now he is safely ensconced outside.

Kind of on the topic of Asian food, although Chinese food containers hardly counts, I'm really enjoying the re-invented Tasuke in Civic, which has recently morphed into a ramen bar. The ramen is nice and tasty, although not quite the best I've had, and the side dishes are suitable and yummy. And they still have quite a bit of their old range of food if you want to order something non-noodley. But nothing in the sushi line, as far as I could tell.

Finally, and apropos of nothing at all, except for the random web-reading I've been doing lately, I love Carolyn Hax's advice column in the Washington Post. Here's a random sampling of some of her more recent stuff (from the weekly chats rather than the advice page):



She's fab, and I love the way she handles everything from the sublime to the truly ridiculous.

If you were truly devoted to making the Freedom of Information laws truly about freedom of information, you wouldn't charge one red cent for processing an FOI request. Yes, I know they can be vexatious and time-wasting. So what? You build that cost into what it takes to run open and transparent government (although getting the higher-ups to fork out extra budget for those kinds of things could be challenging). That's nice that journalists and non-profits get to have 5 hours free time, while normal punters (and businesses) have to fork out after the first hour. At least querying information held about yourself will be free. But 20-30 years for releasing non-classified Cabinet documents and notebooks? Give me a break. I think that's disgusting, actually (although nearly half the current ridiculous span).

Still, they're appointing an Information Commissioner, and FOI commissioner, who will be aligned with the Privacy Commissioner in a new department. That makes sense. And the new rules will be much better than the current set, including the concept that disclosure should be assumed unless there are sufficient grounds for information to not be disclosed (which would not include such "grounds" as potentially causing embarrassment to the government).

In sum, B-minus, could do better. But it's a start.

ETA: I was also intending to mention a really good economics blog series by John Quiggan, which is about debunking various doctrines:

#1 The efficient markets hypothesis

#2 The case for privatisation

#3 The Great Moderation

#4 Individual retirement accounts

#5 Trickle down

Here's a bit discussing the "efficient markets hypothesis":

More important than asset markets themselves is their role in the allocation of investment. As Keynes said in his General Theory of Employment Interest and Money, this job is unlikely to be well done when it is a by-product of the activities of a casino. So, if the superficial resemblance of asset markets to gigantic casinos reflects reality, we would expect to see distortions in patterns of savings and investment. ...

The dotcom bubble was just one component of a massive asset price bubble that began in the early 1990s and is only now coming to an end. Throughout this period, patterns of savings and investment made little sense. Household savings plunged to zero and below in a number of developed countries (including nearly all English-speaking countries) and the resulting current account deficits were met by borrowing from rapidly growing poor countries like China (standard economics would suggest that capital flows should go in the other direction). The massive growth of the financial sector itself, which accounted for nearly half of all corporate profits by the end of the bubble, diverted physical and particularly human capital from the production of goods and services.

You're doing lots of good things at the moment - apologising to Aborigines, dismantling the stupid industrial relations laws, admitting that certain ministers have too much power. I appreciate it, I really do.

But, for the love of god, can you stop employing the term "working families" when you want to get all inclusive-languagey on us? I work. I don't have a family (ie. children), and I never will. I'm also old-fashioned enough to dislike the term "family" when used to refer to (generally married) childless couples. Plenty of people, who work and pay taxes, are single. Plenty of people, who are contributing members of society, are unable to work, for various reasons. Some of those (*koff*) layabouts aren't in "families" either.

So can we stop using the stupid bloody term? It's not inclusive, actually. Even if it did apply to me (and everyone else), it sounds as patronising as fuck. It's just as bad as the previous lot talking about "middle Australia", and that's saying something.

I'm being very bad, spending oodles of $$$, but since it tis the season, and I've only bought one Xmas present, and haven't travelled home to NZ, what the hell.

So, a sunny day out in Canberra, and a very pleasant 20-something degrees with a moderate breeze - perfect for riding one's new bike around the lake. Eee!



Of course, it blends in perfectly with contemporary design elements:



(I buggered up seeing what the lighting was doing here - the bike looks kind of grey here, where it's just as shiny as the sculpture.)

Most comfortable bike I've ever ridden. I'm a wee bit saddle sore, but I just need to toughen up a bit.

Also, while Canberra has its drawbacks with a kind of innate small-c conservatism, lack of cultural variety or interesting (to me) events/venues, combined with a higher level of bogan presence than I generally prefer, one of the best girlfriends evar lives here, working here is good, and it certainly is pretty around the lake here on days like these. It's fun checking out the sculpture garden by the NGA every once and a while, and the swamp hens had chicks! *squee* I feel grateful for days like these.

I was just checking flight prices, and what I'm looking for is around $US2000. My brain was reflexively going "eep!", but it works out to $2361 Australian dollars. Cheep! So much for the days when you had to multiply everything by 50%.

Also, I have... to... say... something... .... Ok ok, Canberra is better than Wellington in one respect (other than sunshine hours). It has a fab farmers' market at the Epic showgrounds. Nice tasty fresh veges of lots of kinds; organic meat; organic and tasty baked goods; an Asian lady with fresh wontons, noodles, tofu and plump bean sprouts (I had despaired of finding fresh ones here); two kinds of freshly roasted coffee beans (the Wagonga brand is there, yum yum - the other one isn't so tasty); a man with live chickens (for eggs); fresh fish; gourmet mushrooms; and nice cheeses. There are only a few things I could wish for. A few more Asian veges is one, although there was an Asian herb stall there, which is very handy. Also, for some reason, no-one seems to be selling (dead) poultry. A bit more range in the cheese dept would be good. I'm not into preserved meats (other than bacon), but no salami stall seemed like a bit of a lack. But, all up, very good. saluqi and I have been on two expeditions so far, and the only hard part is trying not to spend too much. Oh, and there are chocolate-covered liquorice supplies for the Bear.

I love farmers' markets, especially when they're not overrun by general traders selling cheap tat, and there is plenty of prepared food to fortify oneself with while shopping. It's not quite at the level of the Borough Market in London, or the fab places on the Continent, or even the Queen Vic markets in Melbourne, but it is most excellent. Just makes it more glaring that Wellington, a place stuffed full of foodies and with more restaurants per head of population than New York, doesn't have such a thing. (Well, there's the Asian vege market on Saturdays, which is fantastic, but deli stuff and meats are part of what make a great market, IMO.) But I'm happy there's one here.

I'm currently in Melbourne and will be off to NZ on Friday night, yay!

It's been fun roaming around - I'm currently doing birthday present shopping for a friend of mine's baby (a year old on Sunday).

However, I'm doing this on very little sleep. When in Melbourne, do not stay at the Greenhouse Backpackers. For $78 a night I expect:

• Walls that actually attempt to provide a modicum of sound-proofing. If the wall is barely attached to the ceiling (pinpoints of light shine through from the corridor from (admittedly small) the gaps at the top), that aim is not achieved. While I didn't hear too much from the adjacent rooms, if no-one talked, everything from the corridor came through crystal-clear. Including the goddamn squeaky door to the Ladies', which was directly opposite my room.
• A bed that it at least somewhat comfortable. The foam mattress is so thin (5-6cm thick?) I can feel every single link in the wire bedframe. And it's a crappy bunk bed... and the whole thing squeaks every time I move. I've had more comfortable sleeps on leaky airbeds in wet tents in the middle of nowhere in the middle of winter.
  
• One of those holey plastic mats in the dressing area of the shower cubicle that allow the water to drain from under your feet, so that you don't dip your trousers into the pool of water on the floor while putting them on.
• A bathroom floor that has a non-slip coating, so that you don't skid across the entire place when trying to walk slowly from your shower.
• A light that doesn't flicker on and off in your room throughout half the night for no apparent reason. It stopped, eventually, again for no apparent reason.
• The showers are hot, at least.
• Free breakfast before 9am (which I was not up for, oddly enough).

In Sydney, I often stay at the Billabong Gardens backpackers. It's also central, and for $10 more, you get an adequately comfortable bed (no poxy bunk) in a large room, with tea/coffee, ensuite shower/loo, and thick brick walls. Ok, there can be noise if people are loud in the atrium area (through the door), but they are told to shut up by 11. Oh well, there's obviously a cost level I shouldn't go below.

Anyways, it's nice here in Melbourne, and I'll get back onto my tootling around shops. :-)

I was about to go insane from the steady pressure of the last few weeks at work, and took Friday off and went to Melbourne for a couple of days. The initial plan was to rendezvous with an ex-colleague of mine who was going to be over for a training course, but we somehow managed to miss each other in our preparatory email interchange. I decided to go anyway due to the preceding work insanity.

Melbourne is one of those places, like Wellington, San Francisco, Brussels and Hawaii, where I immediately felt that it was my kind of place on first going there. You can walk across the CBD in a bit more than 1/2 an hour. There is a CBD. There are cool and funky inner-city suburbs. There is decent public transport. There are tall buildings (which I can take or leave, but they also give a certain density of people in the area), the river (nice for lunching by), the dinky little alleyways, swanky shops and grungy shops, people from zillions of cultures, fantastic food, and great coffee. Other than the ethnic mix, there are recognisable queers and goths and students and arty types and the lot wandering around and mixing and matching. There are even shops selling clothing I'd like to wear (suits! pretty pretty shirts!). There are lots of very attractive women in their suits roaming the streets in the lunch hours. Getting back to the coffee, it amuses me that I found no less than 3 cafes serving Coffee Supreme, which is based in Wellington. I think it's the best commercially-roasted coffee in NZ at present. It appears that they've started another roasting operation in Mebourne, and the stuff here tasted just as good as the coffee brewed in its city of origin. So I overdosed a bit, oh well.

I realise that I'm experiencing the place as a tourist, but some places are more "homelike". As I mentioned, I had that feeling about Wellington the first time I visited, and when I finally got to live there, I loved it. So, yay for spending time in a place that just fits.

I got to spend some excellent time with damned_colonial and her SCA buddies. It was probably a little bit bad of me to take over the stoking and feeding of the experimental pizza oven that a couple of them had built, but it was a cool contraption, and well, I can't help myself around fire. And being controlling about properly-cooked food. :-) Also, it was nice to have an appreciative audience, and anything that gives me scope for my butchly liking of fixing things is good. Heh. damned_colonial and I also hit the Victoria Markets the next morning, which is the best indoor food market I've encountered here in Oz so far. I admit to being biased towards places which have a good deli section. Sydney seems to have a much better seafood selection, interestingly enough. So, yay, hanging out with groovy people who like doing fun things is always a bonus. I will be doing it more often.

I also got to meet the charming goatsfoot yesterday, which was fab. It's nice to put faces to names (and L/Js), and it's even nicer when they're people you hit it off with. I did my usual shy-and-talking-too -much thing, but oh well, that's better than the opposite problem. I'm looking forward to catching up again in a month and hopefully in a more leisurely fashion. Also, Plans were Being Hatched.

After getting home again (I made the airport with 5 minutes to spare, due to being engrossed in conversation with goatsfoot, bad me) and having some decent sleep, I got to spend some nice quality time with the CDL today, which involved some good and affirmatory "checking-in" conversation, healing massages, inspection of a few purchases I made in Melbourne, and other excellent stuff. Fucking yay. You know, this weekend, I pwned the world, and it was good.

We've all heard about climate change. One thing that's hard for me to adjust to in Australia is the climate. Canberra has a huge temperature variation over the course of a year, but it's getting hotter. Being a New Zealander, if you're not a farmer, it's easy to be complacent about climate change (although I don't personally know any kiwis who are complacent, since we love our country so much), whereas here in Australia, the marginality of human civilisation on this continent feels more acute every day. It's in your face.

I went to see An Inconvenient Truth a couple of weekends back. It was interesting enough, stuff we know, yadda yadda, but for me, it was noteworthy for two things. One, if Al Gore's prestige makes the complacent tossers in certain large industrialised countries wake up and get their heads out of the sand, great. Forgive my cynicism in saying that big business won't make enough changes fast enough until they are made to do so. We'll see if people start putting their money where their mouths are, and, more importantly in the short term, if certain governments do as well.

Secondly, I was shocked by the graph representing the rise in atmospheric carbon dioxide levels in the last few years. Follow the link to look at a version of that graph. It shows the cycle of CO₂ levels found in Antarctic ice cores, going back a few ice ages. It also shows the trend for temperatures over that time, which you can see is closely associated with the rise or fall of CO₂ - all well and good. What shocked me however, was that I'd read previously that the carbon dioxide levels had been fairly elevated compared to previous levels. Sure, 10% more, 15% more? Whatever. Silly me. Check out the graph again. See the red line heading up vertically at the far right of the graph? How about a concentration of CO₂ nearly 50% more than it's ever been? The graph shows long cycles between the ice ages and warmer periods, with carbon dioxide ranging between 180 ppm (ice age) to 280 ppm. This is over 400,000 years. Since the modern age, that amount has gone up to 360 ppm. If we translate to the associated rise in temperature that has always gone with the rise in carbon dioxide levels in the past, the picture is not a pretty one. Ok, most of us knew that, but I seriously didn't realise it was so bad.

On to the personal. Canberra is arid, and it's not weather that works for me, at all. The last time it rained in Canberra was nearly a month ago. Remember, it was spring up until the beginning of this month.
( Canberra rain graph )
November was quite wet, since it rained on 7 days, for a total of 40mm of rain. In all of October, there was 4mm of rain. In September, there was 18mm of rain, nearly half of which fell on one day, the 4th. Canberra's rainfall, for the entire year, has been 363.2mm They've just put in Stage III water restrictions, which means using a hand-held hose for watering, alternate days, during 4-hourly time slots. Why wasn't this done in October, with the piddly 4mm of rain then? Half of the rain this past year fell in two months: Jan (79mm) and June (74.4mm). How sustainable are dam levels when you have rainfall patterns like that?

If you look at the graph line with the yellow triangles showing the number of rainy days a month, you can see why it's not terribly sustainable. Even that number is somewhat misleading, since a large proportion of the days I've graphed had less than 0.2 mm of rain fall (which would pretty much evaporate when it hit the ground). On average this year, less than 5 days a month have had rain. For another disturbing trend, the pink line shows the highest rainfall on a single day in a month - see how closely the total rainfall navy line approaches that pink one. It's happening more often than not, showing that in most of the months of the year (except, again, January and June), most of the rain in that month fell on one day. In August, it all fell on one day (since the other day it rained that month, it was one of the 0.2mm jobbies).

Just for comparison purposes, the total rainfall in Los Angeles last year (you know, that place right next to a big desert) was 693mm. Since the average for LA up until the 90s was 391mm, it's obvious where the rain has gone. Heh. Wellington gets about 1700mm of rainfall a year, while London gets about 500mm. Before you think that only ducks live in Wellington, it's all in big storms which leave lots of clear days in between - and a lot more sunshine hours than London, as I can vouch.

Regarding sunshine, Canberra isn't at all short of that, given the lack of rain.
( Canberra temperature graph )
It's already hotter than this time last year, oh joy. The max and min temps refer to the hottest or coldest one day reached that month. The averages for all the days that month aren't that far behind. See the 20 degree flucutation in max and min temperatures across the year? Auckland's range is half of that, only about 9 degs over the course of a year. One certainly can't get complacent about the weather here. And I won't even start on about the 14 bushfires currently burning 234,000ha (578471 acres) of bushland around Victoria... at least a couple of months early. I suppose that by peak bushfire time, February, there won't be anything left to burn.

So, while the NZ government is considering what to do with the Tokelauan and other Pacific refugees that will be turning up on the doorstep when their islands get flooded out, they might want to think about how many Aussies are going to think "bugger this" and go somewhere that it rains. As for support on the Kiwi side of the Tasman, while several groups of firefighters are over here helping out, big business is doing its bit too. Fonterra, the dairy export board, is "looking at markets Australian companies would not be able to supply". Well, how nice. Of course, I'm wondering why on earth Australia - given the unsustainability of large pasturelands here - is farming enough dairy to export bloody low-cost milk powder, but that attitude of Kiwi farmers saying "give us higher prices now" gives me the creeps. Of course, given the latest UN report saying that cows produce more greenhouse gases than cars, we'll see just how long that attitude lasts. I'd like to see that UN statistic verified, although I note they're counting all the ground clearance, fertiliser and feed costs into that output.

Finally, in the movie, Al Gore says that hope isn't lost, and points to the progress made with the ozone hole as evidence that people can smarten their ideas up. I think this particular problem is less tractable, although I suppose improvements made might work as precipately as the problems developed. But I can't help thinking a huge part of the problem is Malthusian, and what are we going to do about that? I'll qualify that slightly. I believe we might be able to adequately feed the existing population without overburdening our resources - if we start managing them properly now - but I don't think the Earth is capable of doing so for the projected population in the next century. And certainly not if we don't make any changes.

Good:

(?) Industry House, which is a new building that has gone up over the road from work, is using a bark-and-(possibly) native-grasses garden as part of the surrounds. There are still a few too many concrete slabs covering the rest of the space, but at least it's not a water-hungry garden or another fucking fountain. It amazes me how a city, which has been in a drought for 8 years, can still be so gung-ho about running the stupid things.

Bad:

I don't know if it's a "trend", but the number of women walking around in dark outfits and light-coloured heels is astounding. I don't pretend to be a fashion expert, but it's just a bad look. Also, to the woman with the navy suit and lilac heels, I hope you're colourblind, because otherwise there is no excuse.

PS. Got both eps of Torchwood today. Eee!