Oooh, you liars.  I know what you’ve been up to, you know.  I’ve seen the police checks.

Anyway, I’ve been a bit quiet of late.  You might have noticed.  Or not, whatever, see if I throw a tanty and scream about not getting all your attention, then.

But fact is, I’ve been busy.  Busy corporating, as is my wont when there are bills to pay.  Busy writing, too.  Busy doing the student-career-business-sleep-only-happens-to-other-people, thang.  Because that’s what I do.  If there’s a spare inch of time, I tend to fill it with some project or another, until I end up having a minor breakdown, much to the entertainment of my nearest and dearest.

Not that I had anything of the kind.  (Well, not recently, anyway.)  I just have a bunch of work on, you know, the type that pays, and sorry my dears, but that old capitalist spirit has captured even my soul.  As has been said before, this blog is written entirely for my own amusement.  If you happen to toddle along and look at it yourselves once in a while, all well and good, but ultimately it’s just my little online world for being entirely self indulgent and you can’t say you weren’t warned.

So when somebody else comes along actually offering cash, you get ignored.  Can I be any more blunt here?  Don’t want you to miss the hint, or anything.

Hmmm.  I promised I wasn’t going to throw a tanty, didn’t I?  Okay, better move on then.

I’m just checking in here for a minute to let you know where I’ll be when I’m not here.  And to remind you I’m not dead, because it’s always worth reminding people of that, as you never know when your name will be crossed off the electoral roll in a bureaucratic bungle or something.

(And by jollies and jingoism, none of us wanted that of late, did we?!  What an exciting election.  So exciting, it’s still going on.  Frankly I, for one, welcome our new regional and rural overlords.  This is going to make being an over-educated, latte-sipping, inner-city leftie who likes nothing more than to hang out in cool urban cafes-bars to tut-tut with the like minded over a glass or five of fine red an awfully interesting space to inhabit for the next few years, don’t cha think?)

Anyway.  Before I get stuck up that tangent tree again – did somebody say politics?!?! – I just wanted to drop in and let you know where you can find me online when I’m not actively hanging around here:

The other blog – yes, I have more than one, because I collect wordpress sites like other people collect illegally downloaded torrents – Wee Bits of Weird.

Actually, WBOW is officially “not a blog”.   Even though it is, kinda.  It’s just the site where I stick weird shit I find online.  For, you know, “research purposes”.  It might be serious articles of some depth.  Or it could just be a funny picture of a cat.  Whatever.  It’s where I stick shit until I have time to look at it later. It’s not original material.  Half the time it’s not even in context.  It’s just a virtual back cupboard in the online hallway of every day modern digital life.  (Wee Bits of Werid = www.kahmelb.com)

Then there’s the micro-blog.  That’s what they used to call Twitter.  Micro-blogging.  So yes, I mean Twitter.  Don’t be finicky.  Now you’re just splitting hairs with a hatchet, thank you.

Me on Twitter.  Find me here.  @kahmelb

Um, where else.  Well, there’s Flickr (kahphotography), but I haven’t uploaded anything for a good couple of years now, so let’s not go there.  And that Facebook thing just seems full of lost pink cows, so best we don’t wander over that direction.  So that’s probably it.  Oh, except for those *other* sites.  You know, the ones where I use *ahem* *cough* a different name.

Um.  No.  No, I don’t think we’ll talk about those.  Best not to conflate the online personalities, especially when my real name is associated with this one, heh.

Enough self-indulgence for one day, methinks.  Catch you next, people. Probably in a month or so, when I turn back up here to write another “No I’m not dead” post.

Kath

P.S.  Yes this blog is still live, it’s just effectively “on hold” for the moment, while I focus on other stuff.  It’s not actually just a collection of “Back soon” posts, although that would be kind of post-post-modern or something and rather funky, in its own way, don’t you think?

http://www.bleedingcool.com/2010/07/26/nick-cave-rewriting-the-crow-remake/

Um.

Look, I love Nick Cave. My teenage years would have been a very different place if it weren’t for Nick Cave. So would my 20s. And, well, my 30s too, come to think of it. And I’ve adored movies he’s written – The Proposition, in particular, was just stunning and brutal and stunningly brutal. What’s more, I loved the storycraft of it; the classical tragedy, the seeds of one’s own destruction found in one’s own insecurities and fears and prejudices. All that writing stuff I tend to go for. Excellente, and all that jazz.

So why do I just start getting nervous when I read that one of my most beloved books of all time – The Crow – a violent, brutal, amazing piece of basic revenge fiction written as catharsis, and which in the early 90s was made into a film I am still extremely fond of, for all it’s flaws, is now being remade and Nick Cave is rewriting the script…?

On first though, Nick Cave should be perfect for this. It would be an entirely different movie than the Brandon Lee one which sits up there with the big cult flicks from my undergrad days. But then that movie is an entirely different beast from the comic book. They’re separate entities and should not be compared. So I’d be all happy for Nick Cave to write a third separate entity entirely and do his own take on it.

Except he’s “rewriting” someone else’s script on this, so who knows what the reality of that is – is he polishing someone else’s stuff? Is he ditching what’s there atnd writing it from scratch? Hmmm.

And secondly, well… there’s Bunny Monroe, you see. Ouch. Less said on that, the better, but what can I say, Nick Cave knows about story, but that doesn’t mean that everything he writes is worth actually reading.

Plus the book of The Crow doesn’t exactly have that elaborate or complex a plot. It’s sparse, it’s dreamlike, it’s in-your-face violent. To translate it into a movie takes some intricate work. Hmmm.

So, anyway.

I am excited to read this. I’m also nervous. And I’ll be keeping an eye out for this one…

… and in the meantime, I’m going to go dig out the original Crow from my DVDs and sit down for a watch, methinks.

Kath

P.S.  Yes, I’m still alive.

P.P.S.  This is a dual post with Wee Bits of Weird

Actually, that’s not in the least bit true.  I’ve just stuck it in there because it’s late in the afternoon, I’m seriously sleep deprived, and making awkward, meaningless references to 90s Brad Pitt movies is the kind of thing I do when I’ve been burning the candle at both ends for several days straight, but still can’t convince anyone to let me drip hot wax all over their quivering naked flesh…

Um. Sorry. Wrong blog.

I did mention I’m sleep deprived, didn’t I?

See, the Fight Club reference would work if this post were in any way about Fighting, or Clubs, or Fight Clubs, or movies with Brad Pitt in them where he takes his shirt off or indeed, anything vaguely relevant to such matters. Except it’s not. And the fact is, bloggers talk about blogging all the bloody time. You can’t shut most of them up. In fact, some of them keep going on and on about it to the point where I’m prepared to sick a paranoid schizophrenic Brad Pitt/Fight Club/Tyler Durden guy (without his shirt) on them just to shut them up, and maybe he can do that thing with the battery acid on the back of the hand, and they’ll all wail and promise to never speak of such matters again, and…

Oh. I’ve wandered down tangent lane again, haven’t I?  I did tell you about the lack of sleep, right?

Apparently, though, one of the actual rules about blogging – because there are lots, so I’m told, though I didn’t realise this when I started out, I just figured it was only a matter of learning the technology, then sticking up a bunch of words into the public domain on a semi-regular basis, more fool me – is that you don’t talk “Hiatus” or “Break” or apologise for not having posted for ages either. You don’t pause in the content production, nor do you post about it if you do. Should you dare even let a little slip through, the global blogging police – dark and shadowy figures in big long black coats and a tendancy to play Cluedo when bored, or alternatively, Barrel of Monkeys – will come and get you and withdraw all online blogging rights, or something.

See, if you blog, then damn well blog, goddammit. No excuses now.

Hey, I can see the reasoning. If you’re a blogger, then that assumes that you are actually regularly blogging, not just letting your site sit about online like a lazy uni student, stretched out on the couch at 2am eating salt-and-viniger chips while watching bad late night sci-fi and complaining how the university has it in for them because they dared schedule classes for Friday, and before midday, what’s more. (Or was that just me?  What can I say – I was an arts student.)

If you’re a blogger, then you’re blog has to be a lean, mean, word-crunching machine that’s spitting them out there and pushing them on and just generally displaying your wordsmithy prowess to the online reading public in general. Or so I’m told is the first rule of blogging. But then again, as we’ve all noted before, I’m not a particularly good blogger and this isn’t a particularly good blog. Posts are too long, I don’t post regularly enough, there’s no real central theme but is just whatever I feel like crapping on about on any particular day – because we all know the internet just doesn’t have enough unsolicited opinion espoused in unstructured rants out there for all to see – and even the humour is patchy and entirely unreliable.

And don’t even get me started on the dreadful font size.

So when somebody tells me the first rule of blogging is to make sure you are, well, actually blogging, then my natural instinct is to tell them to go shove their regular, well-crafted, thoughtful and intelligent, visually wonderful blogs up their proverbials and choke on them, while the black cyber-ink poison trendrils suchs the nutrients out of their withered judgemental souls…

…sleep. Oh gods. I really need to get some sleep…

Anyway.  It’s not that they’re wrong. It’s just that I don’t care. This is my blog and it exists for my amusement only and if you come here and occasional have a gander at the words, then that’s your problem, don’t come crying to me afterwards.

See, all this is my way of saying that if I’m a wee bit slower than usual getting the blogs out at the moment, then so be it. There’s a lot going on in my life right now. I’m busy. Live with it.

Which does not in any way whatsoever mean that I am going away.  Oooh no, you don’t get off that easily, my little crawling wonders.  Unlike what may have elsewhere been suggested – *ahem* – I am not about to “take a break”.  Sure, paid words will always take precedence over the self-indulgent unpaid games I play on this blog, and the long-fiction project of priority is currently sucking up the bulk of my writing time to the exclusion of all else, including food, conversation and fresh air, but that doesn’t mean I’ve disappeared.  Oh no indeedy, my freaky friends of the internet, I am still here, still haunting the shadows and loitering around the dark spaces of online, wrapped up in my tight leather trench-coat and looking suspicious with a nasty grin and a flogger at the hip, all the while sucking on a boiled lolly.

(Are you sure I can’t sleep yet?)

And just to prove I’m still here and still blogging, even if I am a little slower and less prolific than usual, I’ve written an entire blog post about it.

This one.

So just be patient. I’m posting, I’m blogging, even if not as much as usual.  You know your bad Aunty Kath wouldn’t leave you all alone out there in the untamed wilds of the interwebs, now, don’t you..?

‘Till next, folks…

Kath

And it’s not like I’m just sticking up a bunch of cute animal pics on the last day of the month because I’ve set myself a rule of two posts per month on this blog, and I’ve been particularly busy this month, or anything.  No, really.  It’s not.

Oh, just shut up and look at the cute animals, then.

Catch you in a bit

Kath

Meet Dante. He was my Bassat, who sadly died. It's okay, though. His ghost still haunts our couch, and we know when things go missing off the benchtops, that it's him. Trusies.

And this is Bishop. He's a labrador, which means he's fat. He's still alive and lives on a farm, which means he sleeps inside the farm house and occasionally goes out into the house garden to look at the cows in the distance. None of the other animals except the dogs on this page are mine, of course, because all the other animals are wild creatures who live in their natural habitat - the Melbourne Zoo.

Right, that’s it from me.  Bugger off elsewhere for a bit then.  I’ll post again when I’m not so busy.

Kath

P.S.  Hi Matt!

]]> http://www.letmedigress.com/?feed=rss2&p=719 0 http://www.letmedigress.com/?p=714 http://www.letmedigress.com/?p=714#comments Tue, 18 May 2010 03:55:54 +0000 kahmelb http://www.letmedigress.com/?p=714 Apparently, Facebook sux at privacy.  Yeah, I know.  Who wudda thunk it? 

This shocking development seems to have stunned the online world as if no-one were previously aware that if you stick your privates out there online, then they might not be quite so private anymore , at least not so private as they would be if you didn’t, well, stick them out there online.  Trusies.  Digital punters around the world are gabbling on about Facebook privacy issues as if the whole issue is making them turn as faint and tottery as a bunch of eighteenth century gothic damsels-in-distress at a “how to lure in your heroic rescuer” self-help convention.  All in the cause of looking horrified that social media sites might not be the most secure sites in the world when it comes to your personal information.

And there was me just hitherto assuming the only real response to such an issue was:  Well, derr. 

It’s not just little old grandmas or the tiny wee kiddies who haven’t quite clued into how ze intervebs work yet that are apparently leaving behind them a scattering of personal information for just anybody to pick up.  There seem to be a lot of people who previously made a big fuss about loving new digital fads and getting all obsessive about social media who are now making just as big a fuss about retiring early from the digital age.  Because, hey, they’re not just making a fuss because they like making a fuss and showing how up-with-it in regards to the latest technology-thang they are.  Nor would the declaration that one is removing oneself from the cyber-world to take refuge in the real-worldbe not just the latest online fad, or anything. 

Not that I’m a cynic or anything.

Oh, except I am.  Heh.

Anyway.  For those of you existing in a state of stunned horror that Facebook, Twitter and other social networking repositories of your information may not actually be the greatest at keeping said information secret, I have only one question:

You didn’t actually put key personal information which you needed to keep private up on Facebook, did you? 

I mean, not really?  Not truly?  Please don’t tell me you did, because I was starting to think that maybe humanity wasn’t so collectively imbecilic – after all, we made it to the moon, right, and we’ve got hundreds of conspiracy websites out there demonstrating otherwise just to prove it.  But if I’m to take all these pronouncements of shock and horror about Facebook leaking people’s info seriously, then apparently everybody has up until now been blissfully toddling along under some assumption that every detail you punched into your favourite social media site was completely safe. 

What, were you all keeping your bank account details in your Facebook accounts, or something?  Your home phone numbers?  The address of your kid’s school?

And did you respond to that unsolicited email from the Nigerian prince who just needs your help to transfer the missing millions out of his country and into your accounts too?

For goodness sake, people.  You’d think you were all five years old and needed the lecture about not talking to strangers in funny coats who offer you lollies by the side of the road.  The internet has been around a good twenty one years now, in its current form, and if there hasn’t been a scare story in the mainstream media about the dangers lurking behind the anonymous keyboards and computer screens of the world at least once a week for the last twenty years and six months, then I’m a bright pink wildebeest.  And frankly kiddies, for all you know, back here behind my computer screen and keyboard, I am.

What is it about the illusion of anonymity that turns everyone into trusting children?  There used to be jokes about how that really hot young blonde chick you’re chatting to in the txt-only chat box is actually a middle aged, balding, overweight guy… except now we have Chatroulette where it’s all out there to view, so we can all get our fill of middle-aged balding practitioners of the zen-like art of one-handed typing whenever we need to.  Haven’t we all learnt by now that just because you think the only people who read your online commentary are your close mates, that the moment you make one tiny derogatory comment about how your ex is sucking out your will to live by not leaving you alone and could be put to better use as a weapon of mass destruction on the geo-political military stage, then he’s guaranteed to see it and make you feel guilty all over again?

Or was that just me?

Anyway.  Fact.  The internet’s a big public place.  And like anywhere public where lots of people can mingle about, some of them are nice, some of them are smelly and some of them you wouldn’t want to take home to meet your mother (which clearly means fun times ahead, ahoy!)  And then there are the dodgy ones you just want to avoid.  It’s a big, bad, lovely, exciting world out there and the internet just mirrors the same in cyber-land, so if you go about pinning up your personal details to every community notice board in the place, then some of them are probably going to end up in great big marketing databases sending you emails about cheap pharmaceuticals and how to keep going loooonger, haaarder, faaaster, whatever that may mean.

The upshot of all this is if you’re a grown up – i.e. old enough to think responsibility about this stuff - then you should know better.  If you’ve stuck stuff into Facebook, Twitter, My Space, Tumblr, onto your blogs, your profiles or your photo sharing sites of choice, but you’re not happy for that stuff to be out in the public domain, then maybe you really should consider retiring early from the digital age.  It’s not that hard.  Nothing is private online.  And no, I don’t care if you clicked the “private” option on your profile.  I care even less for your claims that Twitter just feels oh-so-intimate that it encourages you to behave accordingly.

Bollocks.  Only say what you’re willing to stand by.  Only show what you’re willing to have the rest of the world gawk at. 

Or at the very least, if you’re going to reveal all a hugely, embarrassingly public fashion, then at least do it under a fake-ID.  Come talk to me if you don’t know how to create one.  I’ve more than enough of my own to share.

But most of all, for the sake of all the digital deities despairing at your gullibility, just make sure you learn not to trust everything you read online.  Most especially from smart arse blogs with a tendency to favour sarcasm over substance.

‘till next folks.

Kath

Uh.  No, sorry, I don’t mean ‘untouched’ as in virginal goddess, though plenty of them want that kind of photograph of themselves because they figure it’ll boost their careers or something.  I mean untouched as in not airbrushed or – ahem – in any way “digitally manipulated”.

Our modern day gorgeous goddesses of beauty seem to be doing this with some kind of regularity, or at least whenever they need to drum up some publicity for themselves or their politics.  None of that untrue visual action for them – no photographic digital trickery, thank you very much.  Stay away, you evil airbrushers and dastardly digital photographers, who must all be laying in wait for the latest average looking, plumpish, approaching middle-age chick to come along, so they can perform some of their “digital manipulation” and turn her into a paragon of modern beauty.

Bastards.

Apparently, it’s all part of their plot to achieve world-domination by forcing millions of teenage girls into eating disorder clinics simply via the power of photography, or something.  And the professional models, Hollywood starlets and even the odd former world-class athlete turned politician or two, have decided they are the ones to save us all from it.  By going ‘untouched’, by refusing airbrushing.  By stamping their wee, perfect feet and saying they want to be their own naked selves in the magazines.

Because hey, their natural state is so completely attainable by the rest of us, clearly.  The fact they make their living from their appearance and do so because they have the natural genetic edge in that department to begin with and then spend every spare second and cent on honing it to utter perfection, well that doesn’t count for anything, I guess.  So when the professionally beautiful and in-your-face gorgeous decide to appear photographed only in their natural glory, the rest of us average looking chicks with a few wrinkles, lots of grey hair and more waggly-armed-dimply-thighed plump bits than your average Michelin Man logo just all breathe a collective sigh of relief that finally feminism seems to have done something for us, you know…

So there you go, ladies, you heard it here first.  Stand up for your rights – or at least for the rights of professional supermodels to forgo a bit of airbrushing when they are next on the cover of international Vogue.

Look, I’m not having a go at models for being beautiful.  That’s what they do.  Astro-physicists do what they do because they’re better than the rest of us at, well, astro-physics type things.  We writers of the world are generally better at stringing words together than other people with more sense and better paid careers.  And them modelling types happen to have the edge over the rest of us in the beauty department.  I know, it’s a shock.  Yes, you could have knocked me down with department store cosmetics counter when I first heard that one, too.

Now, others before me have wisely pointed out that if this whole airbrushing kefuffle really is the extent of feminist debate in Australia today, then we’ve clearly lost it long ago.  Really, ladies, if this is what they’ve got us chattering about over our lunch time wines, then we might as well all just get back into the kitchen and stop complaining so much.  It’s not like there aren’t real gender issues out there to consider, from equal pay through to gender-biased attitudes towards child rearing.  But if the state of our nation’s magazine covers – and the state of the high paid beauties on them – is all we are really concerned with, then who are we kidding with this feminism lark, right?

But hey, that’s already been said, so go read it.  Or if you prefer, my previous statements on the subject of photographic trickery.  And then you can come back to your devilish Aunty Kath here for a good telling off, just the way you know you like it.

Right, you back?  Suitably informed?  Docile and obedient and ready for your lesson, kiddies?  No talking up the back now…

Now, I’m not a teenage girl (and thank the gods for that – I had to endure a whole decade of teenagerdom in my youth, and it was just weird, frankly.  My advice to all teenagers: just sweat it out, kids, because soon you’ll be in your twenties, and that’s when life really gets fun.)  But it does strike me as somehow self-defeating to pretend to hold (*cough* *splutter*) a “debate” about the damage being done to the self-esteem of teenage girls everywhere, and then paint all said girls, each and every one, as vacuous, empty vessels of mindless consumption without independent through of their own.  As if they were entirely unable to analyse or think pro-actively about the media they are consuming.  Frankly, I’d trust a teenage girl’s analysis of the media she consumes over some fifty-something politician’s any day.

But.  Point.  Let’s get to it.  See, if you really are worried, why not try something innovative.  Something new.  Instead of fretting over whether the professionally beautiful are airbrushed, why not just assume that they are.  Every photo in the media.  Every image.  Every billboard.  Every advertisement.  Every brochure.  Ever catalogue.  All of them airbrushed, post-processed, touched-up (in a purely photographic way, of course.)

Because that would be – surprise, surprise – true.

It’s a digital world folks.  Every single image in every single magazine – every one – is digitally manipulated in some way.  Just how do you think a camera makes that image to begin with?  What about how that image then gets out of the camera, onto the computer and into the magazine you’re flicking through?  Digital manipulation, colour correction, cropping, processes, all that dark-room jazz now up on the computer – it has to happen just to make the image in the first place.  It’s all just mixed up pixels and stardust, peoples, only minus the stardust.

And if you think it was much different in the film days, go read up on Frank Hurley and his like.  From angle to composition to darkroom fun-and-games, photography has never been a medium which shows the truth, it’s always been a manipulated form, and the sooner we all accept that is the sooner we’ll get over this ‘Beauty and the Airbrusher’ thang.

So forget about stopping all airbrushing and photoshopping of images, forget about starlets and professional beauties appearing au-naturel in the magazines, as if it were some kind of advance for all women kind.  And start thinking about something far more useful – like education.  Give those teenage girls you’re so worried about – not to mention the rest of us – the knowledge to actually understand what it is they’re looking at.  Arm them with ability to be able to analyse it properly for themselves.  Teach them about modern media and how it works, how it is created, and why it is created in that way.

Because the sooner we all understand that what we see in a photograph is not real, but from angle to composition to all the digital trickery in the world, it is designed to manipulate some kind of desired response in you, the viewer, then the sooner it is we can all just get on with life in the modern world.

Stop freaking out people.  Give it a rest and just enjoy the damn photo.

Catch ya

Kath

P.S. Here are some photos of me which have all been digitally manipulated and just all round touched up.  By me.  Yes, I do it to myself.

Right?

Oh, just go and crawl back into the slimy residue from out of which you came.  But when you do, make sure you are very, very aware of the incontrovertible fact that if you scalp Christine Nixon, or indeed, if you scalp anybody else over the tragedy that was Black Saturday, then that doesn’t mean you’re actually solving anything.  Not one single little thing will be improved anywhere for fire victims past or potential fire victims future by dragging her down and crowing about your victory in doing so.

Let me just repeat that, because right now I’m doubting the intelligence of humanity in general, and forgive my cynicism, but between asylum seekers being used as political footballs and health reforms which entirely forget about mental health, it’s been that kind of week:

Making Christine Nixon your scapegoat isn’t going to have the slightest positive impact anywhere.  Excepting you lot – and by that I mean all of you out there in chattering Victoria land and beyond who are going “ooooh, Christine Nixon went out to dinner while other people died, quick lets sack her”, as if there was some kind of direct correlation between her evening meal and the deaths of others (hey, I knew the woman was powerful, but I didn’t realise she was so powerful that the very act of her going out to dinner could cause death in complete strangers) – and oh, hang on, where was I…?

That’s right – it won’t make a snot of different except you lot will have found someone you can safely blame.  And in finding someone to blame, you’ll then all be able to rest easy in your beds knowing that you’ve pilloried your scapegoat in the media and sacked your scapegoat from their job and whatever else you plan to do (drawn and quartered?  public pie in the face?), and thus the tragedy which this is really all about will never happen again.

Right?

Bollocks it won’t.  In case you haven’t noticed, Victoria is one of the three most flammable places on this earth.  No, I’m not joking.  We’ve got lovely gum trees full of explosive eucalyptus oil, a weather system which is only getting drier (and wasn’t all that damp to begin with), and we have this hankering to live out amongst all this bush, because, hey, it’s really pretty out there.  At least when it’s not burning down around you.  I know, because I do – I’m one of those buggers out in the urban-rural fringe without any real comprehension of the explosive nature of the environment I’m living in.

So let me tell you a wee secret that those of us who still have operating brain cells in our heads, and are not obsessed with finding someone else to blame so we can pretend we don’t have to take responsibility for ourselves, are already well aware of:

Living amongst the gumtrees in Victoria is absolutely lovely, and potentially bloody lethal.  Regardless of who is in charge of the CFA, Emergency Services, or the Dept of Shouting Out Warnings From The Rooftops. 

A fire like Black Saturday will happen again.  Fact.  Sacking Christine Nixon, or anybody else, isn’t going to change that.

And I hate to say it, but I rather suspect that people will die again – though I really hope that we’ve all got a bit smarter by then and taken responsibility for our own safety, rather than simply trying to make others be responsible for us – and I say that as somebody who gets as complacent as anybody else on the urban fringe. 

You see, that’s the problem of this Royal Commission, or at least, the way it’s been presented in the media.  It appears to be set up to find culprits.  To lay blame.  And I know it’s human nature and all that – that’s one of the reasons I’ve really got it in for human nature this week, so come here you buggers, because you all deserve a right kicking – but blaming people is not going to help.

We – and by that I mean everybody in the state of Victoria, and anywhere at risk of wildfire – need to understand what went wrong in our warnings, our preparation and our response, so that we can try to ensure it doesn’t happen again next time.  Understanding what went wrong means understanding the mistakes people made.  It most especially means undersatnding why those people made those mistakes, the situations they were in which encouraged the mistakes, and the pressures they were under.  The culture the operated within.  The habits of three decades without such a firestorm. The contributing factors, one and all.  You know, the actual reasons for the mistakes being made in the first place.

We can’t just be happy by forcing someone to admit “I fucked up, sorry”, then dragging them through the public mud.  It won’t help, it won’t change a thing. But if we approach this instead by understanding that people do screw up all the bloody time and even more so under pressure, and instead of laying blame, we focus with far more interest on the why and how, then maybe, just maybe, we have a chance. 

You know, if we forget about what revenge we can take and instead try to learn.

Because let me tell you a little something about blame cultures – and I know because I’ve worked in a few – when everything is set up to find someone to blame, to point fingers and shift responsibility, nobody is going to own up to anything unless they’re forced to, and nobody is going to be willing to admit responsibility for anything.  If jobs, reputations, livelihoods, and general goodwill is likely to be lost by you standing up and saying, “shit, I really think I might have made the wrong choice on the day”, then nobody is going to stand up and say that.  Not openly, not willingly.  They’re going to be defensive.  Protective.  Scared.  And in the desperate need of self-preservation and fear, the real understanding of why such errors occured will be lost.

Am I making any sense to you lot at all?  Are you getting me, Victoria?  Even slightly?

Anyway.  I know why you all want Christine Nixon on a cross.  And I’m in something of a mood this week, obviously, what with all the horrendous political manoeuvres of the last days, at which I know I shouldn’t be surprised, what with that whole “Election Year!” thing lit up in the background like so much flashing neon.  So that’s why I’m going to help you all out.  Yes, me, martyr for the cause.

You want a scapegoat?  Well, I’m sticking up my hand.  I’m here.  Pick me, pick me!

Well, why not?  Sure, I may not have been in charge of the police force on 7^th of February 2009, and nor was I in charge of the fire agencies, or even was anywhere near any fire anywhere.  But I am one of the many Victorian’s who choose to live out in the rural-urban fringe.  Who perpetuate that urban sprawl into the bush, with more and more of us pushign out into the gumtrees, and who then get utterly complacent. 

I don’t clean my gutters regularly.  Yes, I know, I’m evil.  I should go straight to jail, do not pass Go and do not collect your $200 dollars.  But it gets worse.  There are big gum trees right next to the house!  And the leaf litter is left lying everywhere, too.  I never sweep it up.  My house is built on a slope – I live in the hills, we’re all on a slope – and I’m surrounded by extremely flammable, native vegetation. 

So go ahead.  Make me your scapegoat.  I am far more guilty than Christine Nixon.  But if I take the blame for this, then so does every other person just like me, living amongst the gumtrees in Victoria.  Every other complacent resident who forgets just how bad the firestorms can get, or thinks we can somehow defend, armed with mops and a garden house.

But in the end it’s just easier to find someone else, someone in the media who you don’t really know and who was in some kind of position of responsibility and so therefore should have saved them, who should have saved us all.  Then once we have found that person to blame and have got our revenge upon them for all the pain and suffering of Black Saturday, then we can just go about on our own merry way, forgetting once again.  Never taking responsibility for ourselves. 

Until the next firestorm.  When it all happens again.

Kath

P.S.  I went out to dinner on Black Saturday, too.  And I was in a potential firepath.  So come on, bring me your blame.  I’m waiting.

Yeah, I know, the universe just twists in strange and mysterious ways, don’t it?  But it’s an incontrovertible fact – I wasn’t one of the beautiful people when I was a teenager.  I didn’t get invited to all the really cool parties, I didn’t hang out down the far end of the oval bumming cigarettes off the other cool kids, I didn’t spend each class rocking my chair onto two legs in the back row while amusing myself, if nobody else, by cracking witty wisecracks.

No, I was just an awkward nerd, really.  Which isn’t to say I didn’t have my friends, boyfriends, parties or teenage fun, of course.  Just that I was also a socially self-conscious, academically nerdy, library-hanging, sci-fi reading geek with a fashion-disaster of a wardrobe and a shit taste in music.

Ah, dems-da-dayz.

But what the hey, by the time you hit your adult years – somewhere around thirty three or four I think – you’ve long since realised none of that actually matters.  Especially as it’s the nerds who grow up to rule the world anyway.

Trusies.  What, you think the corporate boardrooms of this word, it’s corridors of political power, the tops of its religious hierarchies, or those mysterious tanks in the influential think-tanks, are actually populated by the starlets and jocks and hipsters?  Oooh no.  The secret bunkers where power is discussed, negotiated and allocated out in this world are most certainly not filled with the beautiful people.  Those pretty shiny-surface types might turn up on the covers of the magazines you flick through while waiting for your fish and chips, but in the seats of actual power?  Nerds one and all.

If you don’t believe me, just go check out footage from the last G8 get-together.  Or maybe when the UN Security Council last met, or APEC even.  And then come back and try to tell me, with a straight face what’s more, that you still think they any one of them was a cool kid in high school.

(No, Obama doesn’t count.  I don’t care if he was obviously cool, he was obviously a nerd as well, and probably superhuman, to boot.)

Anyway, when I say “nerds grow up to rule the world”, I don’t mean me, obviously.  I haven’t been hiding some presidential post or bit of political ambition out the back behind the shed where I know you won’t look, or anything.  I gave up on any ideas of powerful ambition well back in my twenties (if I ever had any at all), pretty much around the time I discovered it was more fun to commentate on other people’s desire for power, rather than try for it myself.

And hey, it’s been a fun path to have followed, and not merely because it’s lead to more than one election night spent downing a bottle of red or five with like-minded friends watching political results play out on the tele, while providing Gordon Solie style commentary over the top.  I bet you G8 leaders never manage to find the time for that sort of thing.

Now, I know what you’re thinking, and it’s not “Who’s Gordon Solie?”  (Really, people, click on the links once in a while, I provide them so you don’t have to look ignorant.  You are expected to know about obscure professional wrestling references these days, you know.)

You’re thinking, but hang on, just up the page there she declared the reaching-adult years to be somewhere just prior to your mid thirties, so now you’re all making furious mental calculations because you know I happily admit to being in my mid-thirties, which means I must, in some way, some how, be actually admitting to…

Adulthood.

Well, pick your jaws up off the ground, my delicious internet floosies, because yes, I do consider myself to have somehow got to actual real adulthood somewhere in these last few years, and it’s a rather fun thing.  See, my twenties were an insane mashed-up, messed-up, black-clad decade in which I had no idea what I was doing whatsoever, though I did have brilliant fun sampling lots of bits of life, finally developed a decent taste in music and a fashion sense which was reliable, if not remarkable.

(Black.  That was the entirety of my fashion taste in my twenties.  Black jeans, black t-shirts, black eye make-up.  Doc Martins (black).  The odd chain or two hanging out of back pockets, so as to set off the black.  Oh, sure, I also had a wardrobe full of suits and pin-stripe, but that doesn’t count, that was for work.  And even then most of my suits were black.)

Obviously, the energetic blur of being twenty something was a significant improvement on the awkward, freaky years of teenagedom, in which I was far too young to know what to do with my youth.  But now I’m in my thirties… well, now I know what I’m doing a bit more.  Now this life thing is starting to make some sense.  And even better, if I keep going like this, with each decade surpassing in fun the one which went before it, then my eighties are going to be *really* rocking.  I’ll need my nineties just to recover from them, with any luck.

Anyway, I’ve meandered down the wrong fork in the road again and stopped to taste the funny looking mushrooms.  My point is that while it might not have lead me to world domination (yet – there’s still time, you know), high school nerdism has certainly stood by me well over the intervening decades.  And not merely for the fact I can still recite just about every bit of dialogue from the original Star Wars trilogy.  Hey, it comes in handy in more situations than you would expect.

What it did was lead me to an extensive, kick-arse, wonderful education which hasn’t finished yet and which I don’t plan to complete until after my recovery-90s, when I might start thinking about wrapping things up on this earth.  Eventually.  If I can find time to get around to it.

And if the Wrestling and Star Wars references don’t make it obvious, I’m no more cool now than I was back when I was a kid.  I’m still as much of a geek as ever, I just have the confidence to enjoy it now, and power over my own life, if not the world.  And that, my friends, is what comes with growing up.

So celebrate with me, fangirls and fanboys of the world, for one day you too will grow up and realise that real life ain’t like it is in the comic books.

It’s much *much* more fun.

Catch you next peoples…

Kath

See, to me, I can’t see a difference between Christian faith, or Isalmic faith, or Judaism, or Hinduism, or belief in Wicca or Buddism or Paganism or Astological new-age wisdom.  To me, they are all very human constructs just trying to answer some very big questions; why are we here, and what is it we’re all meant to do while we hang about waiting for the answer to that question?

I don’t really know if there’s some kind of God.  Personally, I suspect not.  The need for one just seems too human for there to be much divine about it. Ever since humanity organised itself into social structures complete with politics and power-bases, we’ve seemed to need to create some kind of maker, an all-knowing creator, and a life after in which we can all live on.  I understand that need, it’s part of being human.  But nobody’s ever explained to me why Zeus is an obviously untrue construct from an ancient mythology, but the Christian God is meant to be real.  To me, they’re one and the same.

To me, they’ve simply human.

But that’s just me.  Lots disagree with me, including some of those I love very dearly indeed, and that’s just fine.  It would be a boring place, this world of ours, if we all thought the same things, and I respect the need to believe in gods, and I respect the belief of others that such gods are real.

I would like a return respect, of course, and I get a bit narky when others try to push their faith onto me and mine, because that’s not respecting my personal choices in a way they expect me to do theirs.  If I turn around and try to get evangelical on their patch, try to push my atheism where it’s not wanted, I get a good slap in the face for not respecting other’s beliefs. Nobody’s going to thank me if I light  up a sausage sizzle out the front of St Peters on Good Friday, and I get why.  But when they come knocking on my door, it’s all okay?

No.  It’s not okay.  But I just smile and tell them they’re wasting their time here, and let it go.  It’s not the door knockers who cause any damage in this world.  They’re benign.  They don’t try to force anyone or anything, they just want to get others to think about it, and atheists can do the same, so that all evens out.  It’s the others who are more dangerous.  The ones who would mess with legislation or regulation, or who try to prescribe social expectation and understanding, or who want to confuse faith with evidential science and promote that confusion for their own political ends.  (And there I thought the point of faith was that it didn’t need proof.)  The intolerant.  The forceful.  The violent.  The ones who think they’re better than others simply because of something they believe in.

Belief doesn’t make you better than anyone.

Myself, I believe in doing good.  I believe in helping others.  Not because I believe it will bring me everlasting paradise, a God’s love, or my selection of favourite virgins, but simply because it is the right thing to do.  It is the good and moral and kind thing to do.  I believe in helping those less fortunate than myself because I know that there, but for the grace of…  Well, I know that there I could so easily be myself, except for a quirk of fate or slip of chance or just plain luck  I believe in doing right just because it is right.  Not because of any ethereal reward or punishment system.

But hey, faith of all kinds and in all sorts of things brings a great strength and a purpose to many.  It brings to them something I probably can’t define, because it’s not something it brings to me.  And because I’m a hopeful, optimistic kind of gal, I choose to believe it brings more good to this world than it does evil.  It provides much to millions the world over and I’m not suggesting it should be taken away from anyone.

So all this is my way of saying I don’t believe Jesus Christ was the son of God.  I don’t believe in God.

But you know, when I consider the Beatitudes, the Sermon on the Mount, and the words ascribed to Christ there about love and compassion, then it doesn’t matter that I’m atheist.  Those are still some of the most beautiful words ever recorded to the page.  And what he says about love, about compassion, about the need to reach out to fellow human beings with care and selflessness, that’s divine.  Even if, like me, you don’t believe in its divinity.

Blessed are the Meek.

Happy Easter.

Kath

Or not, of course.  But what the hey, when somebody asks if I’m an expert, I say yes.  There’ll be time enough later to figure out what I’m actually agreeing to be an expert in.

Anyway, the resulting conversation then progressed something along the lines “go ask marketing” (ah, how they love me in marketing) and “sure I’ll support it, if you do the work”, which is only what an expert does, really.  At least when they’re not really an expert, but are just in the practice of nodding in a knowing kind of way at all appropriate conversational junctures and letting other people make the assumptions.

Look, I’m not about to start advising this business or any other on getting value from social media just for the sake of it.  Not when all I have done in my personal life is take the Steve-Jobs-Blue-Pill-of-Cult-Apple and got myself an iPhone. 

(Before you start on the product placement accusations, I’d happily jump ship to another brand and another product, and no doubt will sometime in the brilliant and sparkling future, when there is a comparative product available to effectively meet my needs.  Which there isn’t at the moment, because I’ve tried.  And before you ask, I work on a PC and hate Macs.  Yes even for the photo-video-graphics stuff.  There, that’ll throw some lean and hungry cats amongst the big fat pidgeons of brand loyalty theorists.)

Social networking entirely depends upon mobile connectivity.  For me, anyway, but this is my blog, so that’s all that matters in Let-Me-Digress-world.  When I’m at my desk and sitting in front of my computer I don’t have time to go social networking.  I’m working.  Yeah, I know, it’s a freaky kind of concept for me to espouse, but fact is, the words won’t write themselves and it’s up to me to string them together in new and imaginative ways.  Or old and dull ways when such is called for, because let’s not get precious here.  It’s whatever pays the bills, dears, whatever pays the bills. 

But when I’m hanging about on a train station, or waiting in the queue at the supermarket, or, indeed, sitting in that teleconference where everybody’s talking consulting speak so I can’t understand what in the hell it is they think they’re saying – that’s when I get a hankering to update my status bar with some witty brilliance, or at least a bit of cynical t’whining about the state of plain English, or the really interesting stuff, like my train being bloody late *again*. 

Remember the 90s email jokes about wank-word bingo in corporate meetings?  Just try it these days, when everbody’s in different offices spread across the country and every single one is on their iPhone.  And they’re all saying one thing over the telecon while tweeting something else entirely.  Gives a new dimension to office politics, let me tell you.

Best of all, the bit of mobile technology I currently carry with me has a little thingy which allows me to post to as many social media sites as I like all at once.  Which does serve to confuse the Facebookers when I refer to people as @somebodyorother and start adding #hashtags, but that’s just their bad luck if they’re stuck in an old fashioned social media network and just can’t get up with the times.  What, haven’t they heard of Chatroulette yet?

(Yes, this is where you can call me out on the tech-hipster young-and-into-it image thang I’m not so cleverly doing here.  So go on then, tell me Chatourlette is soooo last week and all the youngsters are into x or y or z today, and that while I’m poking fun at FB, I’m actually outing myself as entirely old-hat.  Go on.  You know you want to.  And I’ll just tell you that I’m well aware of it, if only because in my day FB meant something else entirely, and I still can’t help but giggle in a very juvenile manner when you all call it that.)

Anyway, Facebook is filled with people I know personally – as in real life, remember that? – but Twitter streams all those who have never heard of me, let alone are ever likely to vaguely recognise me in the street.  And that’s why the latter is my personal preference.  I can keep up to date with actual friends by doing innovative things, like calling them on the phone or, you know, popping round to their place for a coffee.  Or a red wine.  Or maybe a Bloody Mary or five.  Whle good old Facebook is great for the Christmas Card list and works as the online equivalent to a pleasant once-a-year “so how have you been going?” coffee catch up, it’s Twitter that’ll metaphorically take you out to the seamy late-night clubs where everybody’s wearing leather.

Or am I just contorting my metaphors into awkward and unusual positions, again?

All I’m trying to say is that in my humble opinion – which can be considered the oppressive and tyrannical ruler of this blog, with a vast army of nastieness ready to squash dissenters without trial or due process – Twitter is more fun.  And forget all about that “but I have nothing to say” crap.  Neither do I, but that’s never stopped me before.  Besides, I tweet like once every leap year on the second Saturday in June.  I have stuff all followers because of it, but unless you’re trying to promote yourself or your work via the Tweets, which I’m not (though there are plenty out there who do), then who cares how many are following you.  No sirree – Twitter is all about who you’re following, not the other way around.

Let me elongate. 

My Twitter following list includes includes writers, journos and fake-politicians, comedians, porn stars and a squirrel.  It has news organisations and literary organisations, scientific organisations and that guy from the Edinbough-Comes-To-Sydney Tattoo who hates babpipes.  There are human rights champions, civil-liberties champions, and Darth Vader, and I even follow the odd real politican or two, though that’s usually because I mistook them for a fake one.  They all tweet interesting news, links, video clips and updates in their area of speciality, and I got a hell of a lot more interesting news about Haitian earthquakes, Iranian elections and Tony Abbott’s speedos via Twitter than I ever did waiting for the regular news media to catch up with such issues. 

By contrast, my Facebook friends list contains… my friends. 

Look, friends, it’s not that I want you all to feel inadequate or anything.  You all have wonderful, exciting, thought-provoking things to say, which is why I hang out with you in, you know, real life.  It’s just when I log in online, I’m not really all that interested to know that you found a lonely pink cow on your farm or you’ve taken the which-movie-star-would- bonk-me quiz.  Sorry. 

Until you guys start spending all your hours trawling the web and sending me decent content, I’ll just continue to ignore your status updates about what you’re doing on the weekend and just stick to actually talking to you face to face.  Yeah, shocking, I know.

Because in that great big information playground that is the internet, I don’t want friends – they’re for real life – I want something other.  I want articles.  Information.  Opinions.  Content.  I want smartarse tweets that will make me laugh out loud in a boring teleconference and more of those Hitler Rants vids (because they just never grow old, do they?)  Twitter might not have farms or walls, but it does have a good number of interesting types ready to tweet links to other sites, articles and funny youtube clips just for my content consumption.  And while I used to scan a myriad of news and media websites, manage elaborate RSS feeds and inevitably miss out on the juicy bits currently rocking everyone else’s internet anyway, now I just follow a bunch of media and tech types on Twitter and it all just scrolls down in my feed.

It doesn’t matter what you’re into, there will be somebody prepared to assume the mantle of ‘expert’ in it out there on Twitter, pumping out interesting content for you to take away.  Which, most importantly, you now don’t have to go find yourself. 

Twitter: for when you can not even  be bothered typing a new URL into the address bar.  It’s pure laziness.  Ah bless.

Enough for today, folks.  Catch you next…

Kath