Archives, eh
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# Links for 2008-12-13
If ‘Twilight’ Was 10 Times Shorter And 100 Times More Honest
I got over my contempt for Twilight when I realised it is the functional equivalent of David Eddings for teenaged girls. ✴ -
# He thinks he's people.
the mere fact that they were not realistic representations of human beings did not mean that they could not be considered people.
You heard it here first. Australian Supreme Court judge deems that, amongst other things:
- Monkeys are people
- Your L70, Tier 7.25 bedecked Human Pally is a person and that Cow Shaman who ganked you last week should be charged with murder.
- So should the handful of borderline sociopaths that I personally know that have trapped a Sim inside a pool or a room with no doors. Murderers!
- The sundry Barbie and Brats dolls I have – in fits of juvenile behaviour – arranged into lewd poses should have me charged with sexual abuse because, damn it, they are people too!
- Oh, and amateurishly drawn Simpsons’s characters depicted engaging in sex acts is child pornography, because Bart & Lisa & Maggie are people.
I wouldn’t – as the saying goes – piss on this Alan John McEwan guy if he was on fire but there is no crime here. No child was abused and arguing that it will “fuel demand for material that does involve the abuse of children” is a first step down a very short path into absurdity.
I’m going to be very interested in what the social conservative whack-jobs have to say to this one. On the one hand they are only a couple of outrages away from being readily parodied as believing ‘bathing your own child == child pornography’. On the other they love to depict all animal rights activists as believing your dog should be given citizenship. I suppose they’ll just be intellectually dishonest and pretend the judge didn’t say the line I quoted.
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# Links for 2008-11-25
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# Links for 2008-11-24
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# P.T. Barnum's League vs Union
The Daily Telegraph today commenced an astro-turfing campaign for promoter Phil Franks’s plan to stage a game between the Australian rugby league and rugby union teams. It’s a splendid idea: it’ll sell a ton of eyeballs on the News Limited websites for the next couple of days; it’ll give Franks’s profile a bit of a buff; it’ll keep the league fans something to talk about during the off season; and it will never be spoken of again after the ARU and ARL tell the promoter to go away. It’s win-win!
Every couple of years this idea seems to crop up again. Every couple of years some promoter, some entrepreneur seems to think they can make a buck out of staging a stunt game and ending – paraphrasing the marketing – ‘ending the controversy of whose is the better code’ or ‘which is the better team’ or whatever. They are probably right, they probably could turn over a lot of money selling tickets. They are, after all, professional promoters who make a living from working out how to capture the public’s interest in one thing or another and convincing us to part with cash to see it. They are marketers: they know how to market. That’s all they know though. Promoters promote and promotion is by its very nature a short term business because once they have got you to part with your money to witness one marvel they’re already looking for the next marvel. If they have to create themselves a product in order to promote it, they aren’t aiming for a long-term business plan; no, they’ll stitch together a monkey and a fish.
There are two obvious problems with the idea. The most important stumbling block is the sporting bodies that run the two games and have the players contracted. The whole idea is a non-starter if they don’t agree to enter the big top. For the ARU that also means convincing the international body, the IRB; for the ARL there probably isn’t so much of a problem, Australia almost is the international body, World Cup loses aside. I’m no business man, but booking a stadium – as Franks is said to have done, but I suspect it is more like a stated intention to book – before you even mention the idea to the people that can say No isn’t a smooth move. The ARL and the ARU were clearly unaware this idea was being worked on again. From The Daily Telegraph :
ARL chairman Colin Love has agreed, in principle, to the game. (...) Australian Rugby Union chairman Peter McGrath was told about the bold proposal yesterday…
and most telling:
“I didn’t want to speak to them until they got a taste of the enormity and benefit of it,” (Phil Franks) said last night.
Enter the Daily Telegraph to help Franks get his message across to the bodies running each game. Well good luck with that, kids. I don’t fancy your chances because I think the carrot you are dangling in front of them, raising money for a childrens charity, is more easily met by other means.
For me it is the untenable notion of developing a rules set that can accommodate the two teams in a halfway balanced game that is most interesting and even more untenable. That it is intractable is a powerful reason why the ARU/IRB wouldn’t want to agree to it and to some extent the ARL. I say that the ARL would be less disinclined because of the rules because I believe that any rules set is doomed to be more disadvantageous to the rugby side than it is to the League side. They say they are coming up with a set of hybrid rules? Well in some ways there already is a set of hybrid rules, it is called rugby league. It is almost like the hybrid between touch football and rugby. That’s a controversial thing to say and certainly the easiest handle on which to dismiss my doubts. If Mark Geyer or Phil Gould ever read it or any passionate league supporter really, they’d switch off immediately and accuse me of saying rugby is a more physical game than league. That’s not at all the case. League is the midway point between the game-long contest for possession that is rugby and the lack of contest in touch1. The scrum; the ruck; the lineout. These are the means by which rugby sides contest possession. Two are gone entirely from league and the other exists only vestigially2. They are also the first to go in any hybrid rules sets.
The scrum is a complete non-starter; they might retain uncontested scrums but even in league games you still get the rare push from one side so you can hardly tell the rugby side they can’t push at all. As soon as they did they’d not just win every scrum hands down but they’d probably be at genuine risk of causing injury to a scrum made up of league players. The league scrum is a joke and the rugby scrum is dangerous enough that making sure the props know what they are doing is a matter of regulation because of the stresses involved on players bodies. How do you ask a referee to police allowing a rugby scrum to push, but not too much? Allowing a full-blown scrum doesn’t just give the Wallabies a massive advantage, it puts the Kangaroos in danger of potentially crippling injury.
Lineouts are dangerous for the league players as well because of lifting; the player being lifted is in such a dangerous position and at the mercy of the ability of the lifter to control the situation. League players obviously don’t have the experience doing this. Could you retain the lineout but bar lifting? Possibly but it is hard to imagine how the rugby side isn’t going to have an automatic advatage due to sheer weight of experience. Really, lineouts would be out and it would devolve, in the league manner, to a scrum.
The show-stopping problem though is rucks. When I started watching rugby with more than passing interest it was rucks and what they imply that took the most acclimatisation. In league you do not need to protect possession like you do in rugby, which frees you up to really charge at the defensive line with everything you have. No worries about being isolated, no worries about being put down facing the wrong way allowing the ball to be taken off you. It took me many games to get used to rugby players hitting the line in the controlled fashion that they do. If a union and a league team played each other the form of ruck adopted would set the tenor of the game because each code’s rucks are alien to the other team. The union team could adapt to a league play-the-ball, but could they adapt to what that means; the charging of the line to crash or crash through? Maybe mentally they could but I have a sneaking suspicion that rugby players would be at a physical disadvantage if they played rucks in the league style; they don’t have the experience of so many powerful collisions in one game. And on the other hand, I think if they played rugby ruck style the union side would make sure they had George Smith playing because even if the league side could train in the ruck well enough to not give away a penalty every time, the flanker would be feasting on poorly defended ball.
I’m only bothering to consider the three obviously glaring differences between the games, the contests for posession. I could talk about one of the aspects of the codes that superficially look the same but are actually radically different. Kicking for example. If you were to make the mistake of using rugby style points awards for drop goals the union side could probably win just by drop goaling over and over again; the field goal has atrophied in league to the point that even the team’s designated in-play kicker can miss from in front of the goal. Or how about marks inside the twenty-two? Retain them and the league team loses half of their try-scoring strategies. Drop the rule and the league team has been given a methodology foreign to the rugby team.
I’ve indulged myself now for a few paragraphs and honestly, I’ve given the promoters of the idea what they want. I’ve given it what little credibility I have to offer even by taking it seriously enough to consider its unsolvable flaws. If they somehow manage to get this off the ground no doubt I will watch it. I’ll watch it in the same way I am sure AFL fans watch International Rules. As a stunt.
1 Not that these is any such relationship between the three games so far as I know. The connections are being drawn by me.
2 What contest for possession that remains in league is basically pressuring the other side to make a mistake or to get repeat sets of tackles.
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# The Bird
We have a bird problem. Actually that is inaccurate. We have a rabbit problem. Then again, that is still laying the blame…not incorrectly – as the rabbit is still at least halfway to blame – but it doesn’t tell the whole story of culpability. The core of the problem is our accommodation. As in, we don’t own it.
Because we don’t own it, we tell the owners that the rabbit is an “outdoor rabbit”. Whenever the owners cross our threshold in order to wander about our home, inspect the condition of our belongings and draw a conclusion from such how we might be caring for theirs, whenever this occurs the rabbit is exiled to the far back corner of the “yard” [1]. It would undermine this carefully and (probably mutually) acknowledged lie if we were to then turn around and make allowances for the rabbit in the construction of the building. That is to say, why would we want a pet door installed somewhere if the rabbit doesn’t come in the house?
And we would like a pet door. Like other pets, the rabbit likes variety in her lazing. She wants to spend part of her day sleeping underneath the kitchen table – or next to the toilet – and part of her day sleeping outside in an arse groove she has invested no small effort in constructing. Being a silent animal she is not in a position where she can let us know when she wishes to pass between her duo-verses unless we are there in the room and paying a modicum of attention so we can see, for example, her hopping over to the screen door and sitting with her back to us, gazing outside at the grass like a cat spying a likely bird; an act that in the universal language of inter-species communication between slave and cat/dog/rabbit clearly indicates the desire to egress. It is more convenient to allow the rabbit to go in and out as she pleases. A pet door would allow that but since we can’t have a pet door, we tend to leave the screen door open with enough gap for the rabbit to squeeze through, a distance that is trending towards “wide open”.
This presents certain issues. This being Australia and especially this being a household that maintains a tray full of cat litter and hay for the rabbit to use as a combined toilet/kitchen – thus proving that rabbit technology is far ahead of ours – the open screen door also allows flies to come and go as they wish. With a definite and noticable preference displayed by these bugs for the ‘come’ part of the phrase and thus defeating the entire purpose of having a fly screen door. Eh, I can deal because I have chemical death for them. However, we also get larger avian pests tempted by the leavings of the rabbit. Minah birds. They just strut on in, even in the face of someone yelling at them with indignation, and pick over any food pellets the rabbit might have missed because sometimes she can’t see past her dewlap. It’s a less common occurence than it once once because we have altered the rabbit’s diet, giving her less food in the morning and making her pick over the grass in the yard. Last year it wouldn’t be unusual to have to shut the rabbit in- or outside because the Minah birds were flocking and encroaching with impunity, two or three in the yard taking turns to steal inside and forage for a quick meal. If you didn’t pay attention or didn’t hear the claws they might also go for a wander. I remember walking out to the kitchen one day a couple of years ago to find a bird on the sink top. I hadn’t heard it come in over the din of music playing but it certainly heard me and panicked, tried to go out through the window and then had to be herded towards the open door.
Yesterday D found one in the house for the first time in months and chased it out. And then discovered that the bird had gone exploring. All good explorers – those worthy of the name rather than just itinerants, wanderes and vagabonds – must be sure to ensure that their public know that they have been there. The best class of explorer does this via cartography and enumeration and naming of the landmarks and occasionally flora and fauna. The lower class of this explorer is in some ways difficult to distinguish from the aforementioned unworthies; this is the typo that vandalises the area to let those who follow know that Killroy woz there. The Minah bird, not having the digital articulation required for the kind of tools that cartography uses, and largely being limited to naming and enumerating it’s own tree must, by necessity thus fall into that latter category of explorer. The vandal.
From henceforth whenever I watch the 9/11 conspiracy episode of South Park I will know exactly how to answer Mr Mackay during his extended rhetorical questioning regarding the emotional reaction to finding, in any of one’s refuges, a dirty mud monkey. I would be angry. And annoyed. And I would google where I could purchase a pellet gun. Little bastards1 I feel compelled to use scare quotes because I just don’t feel right referring to 16 square metres as a yard. It takes me five minutes to mow that thing, and three of those are starting the mower.
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# A couple of days ago, we were all Australian
Sports. Yeah.
Disappointed with the last Test in India. I can’t stand Peter Roebuck, but I begrudgingly agree with him; Ponting blinked and didn’t push the advantage Krezya had somehow managed to engineer for him. Was he mindful of a personal suspension because of the slow over rates? Ehhh; I don’t know. I am mystified by the last session of India’s second innings though.
On the other hand, Australia vs New Zealand. The first Australia vs New Zealand, in Hong Kong, made me query the multiverse in general and William in particular why Australia was even allowed to play rugby. Watching the All Blacks wink and reveal that they’ve been in third gear all along is starting to get really really depressing. I didn’t get to see the test in Twickenham – and yes, I do just like to see them lose – which I regret beyond the telling given that by all reports we beat them by beating their scrum. And by kicking a lot of penalties. So we showed them how to play like an English team. Hah!
It is raining in Brisbane. Hope it stops tomorrow because the First Test against New Zealand starts at the Gabba on Thursday. We’ve already played one game la mode Anglais and that had the charm of laughing at them while doing it. What, we’re going to laugh at the English while we play The Shire? Doesn’t seem much point, really.
Um…yeah, that about wraps up the games between Australia and New Zealand. I mean, assuming there’s no netball games on at the moment.
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# Annual Pet Blogging Post
The rabbit has moved into her summer palace.
Well, it has a throne at any rate.
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# Further Adventures in My Child
Last night as I was preparing dinner – pizza made with lebanese bread, surprisingly workable – I told tWM to take the bins up to the street last night. A task that hitherto she has not been required to perform but since her yearly exams are over and she is beginning to settle in for some serious and athletic slacking I figured she should undertake pointless manual labour as a character building exercise and..well, because to see her suffer makes me happy.
She made all efforts possible to register her complaint and displeasure at the onerous burden I had placed upon her whinging shoulders, but in the face of my implacability, evil smirk and suggestion that if she didn’t take them that I would henceforth delete the illicitly acquired episodes of 90210 that she has yet to be supplied with, she reluctantly trudged off. With my keys. Within the minute she was back to inform me that she could not possibly achieve the quest given her as there was “stuff” in the way. Such stuff consisting of two wheeled devices – an unused dress rack and an empty garden waste bin – that could probably be moved aside using only the power of breathing hard upon them. I informed her of such because…well, because to see her suffer brings me joy.
She departed once again on her legendary journey with my wife’s keys. Five minutes later I wondered what was going on; I could still hear her, vocalising the depths to which her discomfort ran at this nadir we have come to in her enslavement to an uncaring parent; still hear things moving. So I put up the kitchen knife – with only the briefest of hesitations, I assure you – and ventured forth to ascertain what might be holding up what would otherwise seem a profoundly simple task. Lo! Not only have the two wheeled devices been moved but also several heavier items that to the untrained eye – that is, the eye untrained in the theatrics of complaint via the medium of props – would seem to have been far indeed from the path that needed to be cleared in order for the bins to be transferred from the back of the house to the driveway. Also, she had prepared to take the recycling bin; it wasn’t recycling night, a fact I had not conveyed to her because…well, because to see her suffer makes my heart sing.
I informed her that she could go, go with the garbage bin to the street and I would restore the gentle tranquility of the garage’s prior arrangements. I then locked the back door of the garage, shut the fron t door, went back into the house. Some hours later I once again repaired to the garage to put the car away for the night and lock the doors.
This morning, my wife calls me as I arrive in the office to ask me if I had seen her keys. No, I replied. But they must be somewhere because you went out yesterday but still managed to get back into the house, so clearly you unlocked the front door at some stage. Wherever could they be? Where, oh where? Where indeed, says tWM with affected innocence.
Where are they, we inquired of her because we know through bitter won experience that when tWM appears innocent, it actually means she is guilty of high crimes and misdemeanors.
Well, she replies, when His Heartlessness forced me to take the bins out, he forced me to take the keys and forced me to put them down while I moved things, he must have locked them in the garage. It is his fault. He might as well have held a gun to my head and forced me to throw them into the Pit of Doom in Mordor.
Lo! And I repented of my sins. Or at least I will. After I murder her. Or would it be self-defense, the defense of my sanity?
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# Links for 2008-11-09
