Up now over at RHUM.

Just finished it actually. A dark, interesting little book. I liked it more than Slaughterhouse Five.

I am curious about Vonnegut’s view of religion having read it – some quick research (and much of his novels) suggests he was an atheist, but I can’t see a definitive answer. His characters appear to knowingly participate in grand cosmic jokes – whether objectively they are intended to have meaning in the context of the novel is, perhaps intentionally, hard to ascertain.

Where’s the cat? Where’s the cradle?

Any serious travel is looking like it’s some time away at the moment – I’m thinking of New York (and looking through old photos) and wishing I was over there.

This is a remarkable building which still holds its own in a city full of amazing skyscrapers.

Max!

Fair to say I’m not hating it so far… 43 more free tracks to come, allegedly.

I have been pursuing some non-online interests of late including my health and taking photos

Studying in Melbourne this week.

A stream of consciousness meditation on crime from the perspective of a semi-libertarian bleeding heart cynic whose 1990 Mistubishi Galant was found violated and stripped of its CD player this morning:

1. Fuck.  I am not really angry so much as just really, really irritated at how inconvenient this is.
2. It took me a whole day to do the soldering to get that God-damned Mitsubishi wiring (which was devised by a Japanese mad scientist in the dying days of World War II as a way of exacting revenge against America) to match up with the wiring on that CD player.
3. Actually on some sick consumerist level I am secretly enjoying the silver lining of having a totally legitimate reason to purchase new consumer electronics products… maybe something which plays MP3s and has blue lights this time, probably not another Sony due to their worldwide campaign of pure evil.  What is wrong with me?  Am I happy my car got broken into?
4. Fuck! They forced the passenger lock with a screwdriver or something.  I am not happy that my car got broken into.  20 year old Mitsubishi car locks are not a fun consumerist item which I am gagging to purchase.  How the hell do you even get something like that fixed?  I am having unpleasant visions of arguing with some authorised Mitsubishi representative about the cost of official Mitsubishi parts carved from a single piece of whale ivory using ancient and secret techniques and then shipped by carrier pigeon from Hokkaido to Adelaide.
5. I realise criminals target older (and therefore cheaper) cars because they are easier to break into, but don’t they realise that by doing this instead of breaking into BMWs they are effectively balkanising their own side in the Great Class War by attacking those who are more likely to sympathise with their plight (if any) (on the possibly flawed assumptions that poverty->crime and owning a cheap car->more sympathy for the downtrodden and poverty stricken).
6. Whoever has my stereo now probably needs it more than me.
7. Re #6, fuck that, that’s why I pay half my wages in tax, people who probably need my stereo more than me already get a sizeable chunk of my money because they probably need it more than me.
8. My stereo should at least be tax deductible if they’re going to have that too.
9. Actually they probably don’t get my tax because John Howard and Chairman Rudd have decided that middle class idiots who have too many children need my money more than the poor and needy or me.  Really, Howard and Rudd stole my stereo with their blatant vote-buying and flawed middle class welfare state policies.  Plus Howard would probably steal it anyway
10. I hope that family with a better house than me and two incomes and a four wheel drive and five snot nosed kids living in Rose Park are enjoying my tax money while I use my remaining take home pay to replace my stolen stereo.
    

    Farewell, CDX-L280, may you and the new Muse album you carry within you bring joy to a bona fide puchaser without notice somewhere.

11. I can’t believe they had the poor taste to leave some of these albums behind.  Look, they didn’t even steal London Calling, fucking idiots.  Fuck, they did take my new Muse album which was in the player.  This is just like the time all my old REM tapes were stolen from my Gemini.  I miss my Gemini.
12. Let’s check… yes, despite prising open every other container/drawer/door in the vehicle, the genius individual who did this failed to open the one drawer which actually did contain real money.  Joke’s on you, this $5.75 in loose change is testament to your life of failure and poor decision making.  You could have bought a discount packet of donuts and an iced coffee at Coles with this change instead of risking your life down at the docks hawking my CD player to the triads.
13. Who the hell actually buys a stolen 4 year old car stereo in this country anyway?  A new one is like, $100, why would you buy an old one?  If I wanted to buy one, where would I even go?  Is my stereo going to be shipped to the Ukraine and sold there?
14. Does the fact that when I visualise the person who did this (let’s call him Phil) I see Phil as either a drug-addicted, 35 year old white guy or a somali teenager wearing a Fubu shirt mean that The Advertiser has succeeded in its mission to turn me into fearful, xenophobic white trash after all, or am I just being realistic about demographics and crime?
15. Do many upper class, non-drug-addicted Scottish females break into cars in their spare time?  Probably not.  Or they just don’t get caught.
16. Does my car smell?  No (well, no more than it used to).  That’s good.
17. Actually Phil was pretty neat and tidy when I look at it.  He even moved the section of the dashboard holding the stereo to the back seat and appears to have been reasonably careful in unscrewing it to get the CD player out.  Who the hell is nice enough to not totally fuck up the interior of your car but nasty enough to break into it in the first place?  Is this some kind of weird car stereo thieves’ honour code?  Is Phil the Scarlet Pimpernel of car vandals?
18. Do I even bother to call the cops?  Will they be able to take the time out from issuing huge fines to people driving 2km/h over the speed limit and harassing innocent people in the CBD to deal with an actual crime?  Will they, instead of doing anything productive, merely lecture me about how I should have taken the faceplate off my stereo/not parked my car where it was/[some other variant where it's all my fault that someone stole my stuff]?  Yes, yes they will.
19. Is my decision not to have comprehensive insurance now looking stupid?
20. Re #19, no, not really, considering that would cost me $1000/year or something ridiculous, this is the first such incident in 5 years, and this is highly unlikely to cost me more than $5000 given that my car is probably only worth $5000 total.
21. Re #18, what does it say about my levels of cynicism and mistrust of the police (or about the police themselves) that my instinct when robbed is not to call the police?
22. Am I zen/Jesus enough to wish Phil all the best despite his crime?  After all I can afford a new stereo and Phil probably has a pretty fucked up life.
23. No, I am not.  I still hope Phil slips over on the way to Cash Converters and breaks his arm.  But cleanly, and only in one place.  If he does it again we’ll move to compound fractures.
24. I find that despite this experience I am not driven to demand “tougher sentences” or harsh new laws to deal with criminals or mandatory brain monitoring chips to weed out the potential car stereo thieves lurking in our midst.  My respect for suburban conservative windbags has dropped another notch as a result.

I found this article interesting – new research suggests that exposure to the absurd or irrational may provoke higher levels of thinking – for example, pattern recognition – in humans.  The theory appears to be that when confronted with input which breaches the predictive model that our brains have established, we go into overdrive seeking plausible explanations.

Also interesting is that this could sometimes be a counter-productive process:

people in the grip of the uncanny tend to see patterns where none exist — becoming more prone to conspiracy theories, for example. The urge for order satisfies itself, it seems, regardless of the quality of the evidence.

I knew there was a higher purpose to all those hours I spent watching Monty Python.

Having recently been to (and hated) Las Vegas, I found it fascinating to read this article about a hidden city of homeless living in a network of tunnels beneath the city, including right under the strip.  The scenes described sound like something from a post-apocalyptic film:

There’s a lot of older people, senior citizens, people in their 60s, war veterans, people who have cancer and AIDS. It’s not a very healthy environment down there – just very enclosed and wet

Above ground Vegas struck me as a horrible, bleak place hiding under a very thin surface veneer of glamour and excitement.  It seems fitting somehow that the city literally hides such a dark and hopeless world below its streets.

Near Kapunda, South Australia.

Along with the wonderful V, I am reading The Slap by Christos Tsiolkas.  So far, I am hard pressed to think of a novel I have enjoyed less.

The novel apparently examines “identities and personal relationships in a multicultural society” and “taps into universal tensions and dilemmas around family life and child-rearing”.  So far, though, I have found the ‘multicultural society’ to be utterly contrived (roll call: indian, greek, anglo saxon, aboriginal, jewish, christian, muslim, working class, young, old, feminist, sexist, etc etc etc) and the ‘tensions’ and ‘dilemmas’ to be predominantly the product of characters who come across as fundamentally unpleasant, selfish, self-obsessed people with few, if any redeeming characteristics.  I remain hopeful that the next chapter will contain a bus crash which finishes the lot of them off.

If this is contemporary, multicultural Australia then I want out.

I am thoroughly enjoying V by Thomas Pynchon so far.

The novel is roughly divided between the listless drifting of post WWII New York City, the byzantine European intrigues of pre-WWI Florence and the surreal horrors late 19th Century/early 20th Century German colonial Africa.  As well as being a fascinating read in its own right it presages the event’s of the wonderful Gravity’s Rainbow via certain characters and events, such as the extermination of the Herero tribe by the Germans and the character of Kurt Mondaugen.

Many of the themes are typically Pynchon-esque, such as the theory of dentists as the natural replacement for psychiatrists and the notion of a plastic surgeon who regards surgery as a means of revealing the authentic nature of his patients rather than hiding it.  At its heart is the quest for the unknown (and perhaps unknowable) ‘V’ – a city, a woman, or something else.

Shock, horror.

Kudos to Kelvin Thompson, federal Labor MP, for having the courage to stand up to the “eternal growth” fools who currently dictate economic and development policies in the western world and point out that excessive population growth is the root cause of most of our serious problems.

It is time for governments and policy makers around the world to come to their senses and take steps to stabilise the world’s population,” he said. “It needs to happen in every country, including here in Australia – especially here in dry, arid Australia.

This probably qualifies Mr Thompson as a member of the ‘green fascists’ that The Australian is always banging on about.