Archives, eh
-
# Coffee and APEC
APEC.
∗sigh∗, yeah okay, whatever.
I’m probably supposed to complain about it now, certainly seems to be the style of the time. Fashionable to compare the security fencing to the Berlin Wall. I met a German tourist this morning while getting my coffee, but didn’t think to ask her what she thought of that particular comparison. It would have been somewhat offensive to do so.What is it with the overblown and hysterical comparisons anyway? Bush is a war criminal, a new Hitler? Howard is a racist? Greenies are little Stalins waiting for their moment? Yeah, ok. Whatever, I’ll be over here talking to someone with credibility.
I read a lot of Australian-based political blogs but last week I had to start marking their feeds as read as soon as updates were downloaded. It’s like suddenly I lost the ability to understand their glossolalia; it was wall-to-wall ‘derka der’ no matter the political leanings. It’s not just the stupid attempts to paint those that disagree as evil; it is possibly that Australia is heading into an election in early-November – most likely – and with drawn lines comes the standard deliberate obtuseness and point-scoring.
To me though, it just all starts becoming a buzz; talking points devolving into meaningless with contextless repetition.
This did present me with something of a problem, since I’ve been helping out some nice folks by aggregating and filtering the feeds of a number of Australian blogs down to a subset of the Interesting and Well Written for a twice-weekly round up. There’s a core set of blogs that are the source of 99% of each round up, and there is definitely a bias towards the political – the greater majority of the blogs are segregated into Left-, Right- and Centre-aligned. How does one edit a group of political blogs when one is wondering how to cook up a plague for all their houses?
Mockingly. Not that they would know, they’re all too insular anyway.
But APEC. It is supposed to be a public holiday tomorrow, but a lot of the staff at work are coming in anyway – they are sales and support staff that have to handle calls for the rest of NSW, the bits that don’t get a holiday just because Sydney is getting shut down for security reasons. I was thinking of coming in as well, because I have so much work to do and I’ll never get any of it done at home; too many distractions. I was going to ignore the fact I would have to walk further because my normal train station is shut down. I was going to ignore the inconvenience of having to negotiate the checkpoints to get through the security fencing.
I will be staying at home though. I can’t ignore it when my barista is staying at home. No coffee, no workee.
image by rainforest
