Music to lose yourself in while getting on with getting on

This, variations on the same theme and all forms of ambient Blade Runner sountrack music have been looping around me as I try to make a bit of progress ... or do I mean retrieve lost ground?  Vangelis. who knew?

And we begin again ...

After Midnight. Happy (and hopeful) New Year to all. Pic by Spike Deane

Sam Dastyari exposes the vile absurdity of Pauline Hanson

Racism is having a worrying (but minor) resurgence in Australia. Pauline Hanson is its best known flag-waver although in recent days journalist Andrew Bolt, television 'celebrity' Sonia Kruger and Norther Territory politician Adam Giles have added fuel to the flames (or been sucked into the vortex ... if you're inclined to feel over-generous when reflecting on their public pronouncements). All four have spoken up or written in favour of banning or keeping out Muslim migrants to Australia.

Sam Dastaryi, an Australian Labor Party Senator with whose right-leaning tendencies I have often disagreed, has been remarkably effective and truly outstanding in challenging attempts to make anti-Muslim sentiment the new normal of Australian political discourse. His performance - sitting next to Pauline Hanson on last night's ABC programme Q & A - is a masterclass in challenging political opponents directly, forcefully and effectively without losing either the plot or - even more importantly - the argument or the audience. You can see it here.

Today he posted a photo and comment via Twitter to highlight the absurdity, the irrationality, the mendacity of Pauline Hanson's racism. You simply cannot fault his analysis or doubt his real courage in these ghastly times. We need more people like Senator Dastyari to be willing to stick their heads above the parapet to say ... Enough, No more! And the rest of us (you know, when is a White, Anglo-Saxon Protestant like me ever going to encounter such a challenge to my legitimacy and background?) ... we need to give whatever support we can to brave, decent, progressive voices.

Sam Dstyari at five years old. Pic: Sam Dastyari
Me @ 5. Never been religious (born Muslim).
Under the Hanson ban I would never have been able to come to Australia.

This does for today

Holding Back The Years by Simply Red

This song went to Number 1 in the USA on this day in 1985, apparently. I was living in my Grassmarket flat when the single came out in the UK; barely three months out of hospital after ten months rehab following my accident. Even at that stage I knew the world needed changing. Thirty-something years later there is still work needs doing.

I bought the CD, of course. I still have it somewhere. 

This'll do for today. It fits, not that one knows why.

High Tech / Low Starting Point

Spike handles one of the art works on display at Imaginarium, last Thursday at the Singapore Art Museum. It was a fun exhibition. The fact that I've been able to upload the file from my OneDrive folders suggests I may finally be following the instructions.

#OldManAlmostJoinsThe21stCentury

Looking ahead ... it's not all straightforward

But I welcome a challenge.

Ashcombe Maze & Lavender Garden, Victoria
Looks like a place worth visiting

A good day to enter my sixth decade

Breakfast at Local Press Cafe, Lake Burley Griffen ...

then the Great Moscow Circus ...

then ...

the flat-packed furniture shop ...

before a little bit of campaigning
for Every Australian Counts

Toasted

Hot cross and straight line buns by Spike Deane, 2016. Yummee.

London Has Fallen

Please. Just Say No!

Two hours of my life I shall never regain

Brevity is an art form

Low floor bus "at present". No telling what height it will be in June.

So I wrote an e.mail to Dumfries and Galloway Council in South West Scotland on Monday ...

Hello,
We are visiting Scotland in June (we live in Australia). We are travelling to Belfast for the weekend (3rd to 6th June). Our ferry tickets are booked.
I use a wheelchair. I cannot walk at all and, therefore, cannot climb stairs into a coach or bus
I see from your web site that Route 350 – operated by McLeans – runs between the Stranraer ferry terminal and Cairnryan ferry terminal. I want to ask if that service is wheelchair accessible?
Regards,
Dougie Herd

And came the reply ...

Dear Customer, 
Thank you for your enquiry.We have now passed this to the relevant department and asked them to respond. 
Kind Regards, 
DG Direct 

Followed today by ...

Dear Mr Herd
I refer to your email below.
At present this bus is low floor
Regards

Confirmation we can travel from Ayr, where my mother lives, to Belfast and back over land and sea by public transport. When I started out on this wheelchair malarkey - thirty-two years ago - I wouldn't have been able to make it into the train station unassisted ... never mind the rest.

Back to the future

Sitting in the shade of the house this morning there came a moment of epiphany. It was hot. The late summer sun - following on from what record-keepers report today is the hottest February recorded in more the seventy years - the front garden looked stressed  That's not helped, of course by the poor soil here in Canberra.

Spike stood opposite me, across the garden, beneath the shade of the trees at the roadside. It was pleasant over there, she said. And that's when epiphany struck. A lawn. Give up the almost certainly doomed attempts to cultivate vegetables in the meagre soil under a burning sun. Grow some sort of hardy grass with underground watering of some description. We can grow vegetables in large terracotta pots (as our wildly enthusiastic tomato plant is proving ... I know, I know ... a tomato is a fruit not a vegetable but you get my point). We shall redirect lost water from the roof to the pots, the apple tree that'll be going in and the grass.

Spike and Thistle-the-cat will have a shaded spot to sit or lounge or sleep in summer. We'll have grass. How retro. Who knew?

We are sailing ...

Ship ahoy! Pic: Stena

Almost all the 'nuts and bolts' of our trip to the UK in a few months are in place now. I've just finished making our Web booking for the ferry crossings between Cairnryan and Belast where we'll see my old mate Trevor Gill perform the role of Bottom in The Royal Shakespeare Company's A Midsummer Night's Dream. How exciting is that?

We have all but one of our flights booked now, both our ferry trips (Belast and Kirkwall in the Orkney Islands) and all of the hotel accommodation in Tokyo, Prestwick, Belfast, Kirkwall, Edinburgh, Manchester, Weymouth, London and Singapore. And all the accommodation is wheelchair accessible. Hasn't the world changed in thirty years. All that's left to do is book the travel between 

• London and Prestwick, 
• Prestwick and Belfast, 
• Prestwick and Aberdeen, 
• Aberdeen and Edinburgh, 
• Edinburgh to Manchester, 
• Manchester to Weymouth and 
• Weymouth to London. 

All train journeys, apart from the first leg. The online booking system at Scotrail hasn't reached the 6th June yet. I think that will tick over tomorrow. Choo, choo!

No one (still) expects the Spanish Inquisition ... do they?

I am mildly perplexed by my response to Week 4 readings on my course, Digital Culture: Being Human in the Information Technology Age, at the ANU. I ask myself repeatedly, “why am I not more concerned? Why am I comparatively relaxed about the future?” It’s a worry (for me if no one else) because I’m not naïve. So, the erstwhile left-wing activist in me wonders why I’m seemingly complacent in the face of evidence of increasing concentration of access to and control over the world’s information in the hands of a few (just one?) giant corporation(s)? I don’t have an entirely satisfactory answer; personally or intellectually.

Siva Vaidhyanathan in the Introduction to The Googlisation of Everything and Eli Parser in the Introduction to The Filter Bubble both make compelling cases for what one could describe as citizen vigilance or oversight and greater transparency over Google and (by implication) any information platform or gatekeeper exhibiting monopoly tendencies in the digital age. Parser’s observation (in 2011) that a paradigm-shift occurred in December 2009 with the personalisation of Internet searching seems beyond dispute seven years after the fact. As both Parser and Vaidhyanathan observe / predict / caution-against the processes of Internet searching – particularly the cultural, technological and market dominance (perhaps even hegemony) of Google – have moved with startling speed from the domain of ‘cute new idea from the geeks in Silicon Valley’ to a position of ubiquity.

John Milton. Pic: Cambridge University

Omnipresent and perhaps omnipotent, the Google search may become so powerful, so influential – even essential - that if it continues unchecked, with little or no scrutiny, and outside any semblance of democratic framework, future generations may not think at all of its corporate construct, its imperatives or the technology’s mechanics. Google – like the sun to Neolithic humans – will simply ‘Be’. The power of information technology itself, the deep as well as superficial benefits we derive and enjoy from search engines such as Google (my personal spectrum of Internet searching in the last few days includes finding the complete text of John Milton’s Areopagitica for ENGL3005 at the ANU to John Oliver’s critique of Donald Trump[1] and much in between) may increasingly be taken for granted, seen almost as a natural part of the human condition rather than a purposeful project at risk of accelerating beyond public accountability.

The history of convergence that permits (possibly encourages) information industry monopolies, recounted in Wednesday’s lecture on the Course, coupled to the increasingly sophisticated (and secret) algorithms at the heart of rapidly developing technological capabilities of both hardware and software do justify the questions and concerns raised by Parser and Vaidhyanathan. One cannot help wondering, however, if their articles / books from 2011 were – even at the point of publication – already too late; urging us to close the stable door long after (in Information Technology terms) the Google horse had bolted.

As Vaidhyanathan points out, by 2011 the dynamics of the relationship between us and ‘the machine’ had already been irrevocably changed. We are no longer Google’s customers (allowing the possibility that we might have been, once upon a time) “we are its product.” We may see ourselves as purposeful seekers of information, freely and consciously selecting Google as our search engine of choice. The reality may indeed be opposite. We are data packets being delivered to any corporate entity willing to pay.

A partial explanation for my relative comfort about our current circumstances (but not a justification arguing against the need to protect the future through citizen vigilance within a democratic framework) may be found in the past; with John Milton’s Areopagitica oddly enough. It is a famous historical text sometimes misrepresented as a defence of unfettered free speech when in fact its reach is much more modest. It is a powerfully argued case against pre-publication (but not post-publication) censorship and an appeal to legislators not to sanction a single all-powerful, state-sanctioned publishing house and system of official licensing of published works – all that’s fit to print so to speak.

The Name of the Rose - Umberto Eco

The optimist in me sees parallels between Milton’s period (and his recent past age) and ours. By which I mean, humans protected and extended their access to and use of information, including written works. (To be clear: I don’t advocate a return to Medieval practices that would hang, draw and quarter people who illegally download Game of Thrones.)

The Protestant Reformation emerged as opposition to the Pope’s omnipotence routinely enforced by his agents using brutality and violence. Radicals were burned at stakes for diversifying and democratising access to information (e.g. printing the Bible in languages other than Latin). An oligarch – it could just as easily have been a Chinese Emperor or Russian Czar – sought to exercise total control over their world’s information – the content (words in Latin), platform (the book), delivery (the priesthood), access (attend church and hear the words being read out by a priest). The algorithms of the day, governing who got access to which packets of data, were set secretly by Cardinals in locked rooms.

Francisco De Goya - Inquisition

We got beyond the copyright protection practices of the Spanish Inquisition. The optimist in me believes / hopes an engaged citizenry, producing content (even if it’s no more than cat videos at times) as well as consuming content, will find was to survive, circumvent, use but not succumb to Vaidhyanathan’s ‘Googlisation’.

---

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TGc2nN9OguQ from ‘Last Week Tonight’ Show on HBO

Mr. Angry from Gilmore comments ...

Failed politician and former Chief of Staff. Pic: Mick Tsikas/AAP

Down here in Australia there has been a flurry of journalistic activity arising from the anticipation of the publication today and extracts from a book about the downfall of Tony Abbott, former Prime Minister of Australia.  Much of the current excitement revolves around the fall out last September from perceptions (which means tittle-tattle and gossip) within the parliamentary Coalition group that Mr. Abbott might have been having an affair with his Chief of Staff, the reputedly fearsome Peta Credlin.

I neither know nor care about the depth or otherwise or the precise nature of the pair's personal relationship. It's simply none of my business.

Tony Abbott has, justifiably in my view, refused to comment on or respond to questions about whether or not he and Ms. Credlin have indeed been inside each others underpants. But if I understand correctly what Nicki Savva, the journalist and author at the centre of row, has asserted or reported in her book it's this. She doesn't allege or comment on claims our former PM and his Chief of Staff were at it. She does, however, quote from named sources in the former PM's own political party (who have subsequently gone public) who confirm that Coalition gossip about unfounded, firmly-denied and unprovable claims of an affair were what finally tipped Abbott Government supporters over the edge to unseat their leader.

But the whole 'did they / didn't they?' business of salacious tittle-tattle misses the point. And even the defensive Mr. Abbott sought to turn the gossip to self-serving advantage. In having a go at the (presumably) false and almost entirely irrelevant question of sex (unless you're Mr. and Mrs. Abbott or Mrs. and Mr. Credlin) Tony Abbott sought to reclaim his tarnished reputation by defending his own and his Government's political records and so-called achievements.

It was at this point of reading an article in today's Guardian that Mr. Angry from Gilmore added to the frenzy by submitting a comment below the line of my favourite journal.

Abbott said in a statement on Monday the best response to the book was “the objective record of the Abbott government”, 

It's none of my business and I truly could not care less about Tony Abbott's sex life. 

NOT - INTERESTED - IN - ANY - WAY - SHAPE - SIZE - OR - FORM. 

But it is disturbing how demonstrably delusional Mr. Abbott seems to be. The 'objective record' of the Government he led - and of which the current PM was a member - was so astonishingly bad, so inept that not even his Tory mates could do anything but dump Mr. Abbott - unambiguously the worst, most incompetent, failed Government leader in Australia's history.

My saving grace is that 16 fellow readers recommended my comment. One reader, however, contradicted my assessment, suggesting that 'stopping the boats' was part of the good 'objective record'. A Guardian reader? Please.

Final booking made and paid for

After a week or so of back and forth with hotels in Singapore trying to confirm the existence or otherwise and circumstances of any wheelchair accessible shower area ...

• Novotel - no but have a good day
• So Sofitel - yes but there's a marble bench
• Ibis - yes but it's in a single-occupancy room

Rendezvous Hotel, Singapore

... we finally made a booking today. We'll be staying at the Rendezvous Hotel on Bras Basah Road. It's central, near the art gallery and museum, not far from Raffles if Spike insists on another Singapore Sling. I'm hoping it won't be too far from a Singapore Chilli Crab dinner which I missed out on last time we were in Singapore (my mother sought out more familiar fare).

This booking means we've arranged wheelchair accessible showers at every stop on our trip: Tokyo, Prestwick, Belfast, Kirkwall, Edinburgh, Manchester, Weymouth, London and Singapore. That's nine towns or cities in five countries. Ten years ago, maybe more recently than that, I doubt if I could have arranged that. Thirty years ago, when I first started travelling between continents, it would have been impossible. 

So we're moving ahead. There is some way yet to go but all one can ask is that we keep moving forward, keep making progress. The Dougie Herd who boarded that flight to Hong Kong back in 1988 would be impressed how far we have come. And he would be pleased to know he would play his small but important part in kicking along greater inclusion. For sure, though, he'd tell me to keep up the work because we've not yet reached the end of the road.

Rave on John Donne?

Earliest known image of John Donne, around 1590

I'm back with the metaphysical poets, in particular John Donne. This morning's English Literature lecture focused on the social, religious and political context for his work and our course director, Dr. Ian Higgins, gave an impressive, historicist-reading of key poems from the poets early, libertine period.

It's not hard to be seduced by the bravado of the early-period poems, their common tongue, their focus on sex, the irreverence of their implied commentary on the hierarchies of the poet's time. He would lose that outsider's edge as he advanced through Courtly patronage and his misogyny seems never to have been far from the surface in any period. But here we are, more than 400 years later and there is still much to be said for and learned from the inventiveness and daring of a poet who would be dead by my age. 

We looked at one of his post-coital, morning after poems in today's tutorial. As Van Morrison urged, Rave On John Donne.  Well ... up to a point Van, up to a point.

The Good Morrow by John Donne

I wonder, by my troth, what thou and I
Did, till we loved? Were we not weaned till then?
But sucked on country pleasures, childishly?
Or snorted we in the Seven Sleepers’ den?
’Twas so; but this, all pleasures fancies be.
If ever any beauty I did see,
Which I desired, and got, ’twas but a dream of thee.

And now good-morrow to our waking souls,
Which watch not one another out of fear;
For love, all love of other sights controls,
And makes one little room an everywhere.
Let sea-discoverers to new worlds have gone,
Let maps to other, worlds on worlds have shown,
Let us possess one world, each hath one, and is one.

My face in thine eye, thine in mine appears,
And true plain hearts do in the faces rest;
Where can we find two better hemispheres,
Without sharp north, without declining west?
Whatever dies, was not mixed equally;
If our two loves be one, or, thou and I
Love so alike, that none do slacken, none can die.

Three priceless points

PTFC makes it two in a row against St. Johnstone

Who would have thought something as ordinary as football could matter? But I was very pleased indeed to read this morning that my team had won away from home in the Scottish Premier League. We rise to seventh place and despite the hard games ahead (against numbers one, two and three in the League - Celtic, Aberdeen and Hearts) our future in the top division looks secure for another year. Phew.

It seems one can take the boy away from the football but the game remains within the boy. The beautiful game indeed.

Seven hours of classes on my long Thursday

I need to prepare better. Pic: imgur.com

Today's assignment for HUMN1001 - Digital Culture

Asked to respond to a series of articles orbiting around the question, "is the Internet making us dumber?" I offered these thoughts in advance of tomorrow's tutorial discussion:

Reading Carr’s article in the Wall Street Journal and his comments about detrimental changes to human memory in Genevieve Roberts’ article ("We're missing the real danger, that human memory is not the same as the memory in a computer”) or re-reading Douglas Rushkoff’s ‘Cassandra-lite’ narcissist hyperbole (“As we obsessed over the future of this and the future of the, we ended up robbing the present of its ability to contribute value and meaning” … you may have Mr R but the rest of us got on with lives with their usual share of value and meaning, successes and failures, etc.,) it’s hard not to think of Monty Python Flying Circus’s sketch, ‘What have the Romans ever done for us?’ 

Apart from the world wide web, smart phones, Massive Open Online Courses everywhere, 160 million mobile Internet-users in a country like India where not so very long ago (most of the 20th Century) almost no one had access to a telephone), readily accessible information on almost everything (from Google and Wiki to peer-reviewing networks of Professors in Astrophysics and everything in between), 24-hour banking, instant hotel reservations, pizza delivery real-time tracking and the ubiquitous cat videos … what have the new technologists ever done for us? 

I do not mean to sound like some starry-eyed Pollyanna salivating at the prospect of the next ‘latest thing’ from the Apple Corporation (what can I say, I’m an Android man). Nor am I ignorant of the underpinning social, political and economic realities of this supposedly post-industrial, information age – control and ownership of the worlds means of production, distribution and exchange is more concentrated today in proportionately fewer hands than at any time in modern history since the world was run by Kings, Emperors and Popes. 

But … 

I am genuinely intellectually shocked by what I would describe as the naïve, ahistorical, un-analytical, almost intensely personalised reflections of (debatable) loss by commentators such as Carr, Rushkoff and (in week 2) Lanier, whose “Something started to go wrong with the digital revolution around the turn of the twenty-first century” seems to be built on a personal disappointment that MIDI doesn’t do the sounds of sax with the flair of John Coltraine or the violin with as much invention as Yehudi Menuhin.  The ‘glass half empty’ gang need better arguments than those I’ve read so far.

Just say NO

4 times in 2 weeks . Am I becoming an addict? Or is IKEA simply poor at organising its supply chain?