Flerdle, is that you?
Tag Australia
As Long As They Keep The Meatballs Coming, I’m Good
Last weekend we made one of our occasional trips to the Boston area IKEA store, mostly because we couldn’t come up with anything better to do. We don’t ever really need anything at IKEA; we long ago outgrew the assemble-it-yourself apartment furniture (although how we would have loved IKEA twenty-five years ago!), but we always somehow seem to find a cart full of little things to buy. On this trip we ended up with a new shower caddy, two packages of paper napkins, some TV trays (you know, trays for eating dinner in front of the TV), a lampshade, a bag of frozen meatballs, three milk chocolate bars, and a jar of lingonberry preserves. My own personal favorite part of every trip is eating lunch in the cafeteria, where I always enjoy the Swedish meatballs.
Now, the IKEA store in Sydney, Australia, wants to ruin everything by creating a special zone where wives can drop off their husbands while they shop, in the same vein as their “Småland” play area for little kids. They’re calling it “Mänland”, and it’s furnished with sofas, Xbox consoles, and free hot dogs. If this catches on, will I be shunted into this manchild zone, deprived of my meatballs and lingonberries? I actually like wandering around looking at all the furniture with the silly names like “Fäarttunder” and “Tittslåpper”, and I especially love my lunch of meatballs.
The women who author the sociology blog “The Society Pages” have also caught wind of this sexual discrimination, and they are not the least bit impressed, let me tell you. In their view, by treating the men like children, the retailer is also undermining women by reinforcing the message that the men would rather be left behind than spend time with them. So it’s patronizing AND patriarchal at the same time. Plus, hot dogs?
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Crikey!
Via bookofjoe, here’s a longish TV news report from Australia about a rather unsettling product euphemistically called “meat glue” that is used extensively in the food service industries in both Australia and the U.S. to take remnants and trimmings of beef, pork, or chicken, and fuse them together into products that are sold to the public as “filet” or “chicken breast”. It’s banned in the EU, and apparently the Australian news crew had a hard time finding anybody in the food industry in that country who was willing to talk about it on camera.
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A Tale Of Two Storms
While most of the United States has been contending with the continental blizzard for the last couple of days, the northeastern corner of Queensland in Australia has been smacked with one of the worst typhoons in almost a century, Cyclone Yasi. This comes after the region has already been devastated by massive flooding. As one commenter noted somewhere on my Internet travels yesterday, the thing that makes a hurricane so much worse than blizzard is that at least you can shovel the snow.
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Solstice
Somehow, our little sliver of North America has been escaping the massive snowfalls that have buried the entire Midwest and even Europe these last couple of weeks, but yesterday the snowstorm we missed over the weekend gave a little back-kick and reminded us that we’re not immune. It only amounted to a couple of inches, which is negligible by our traditional standards, but because the weather people hadn’t anticipated it, nobody was prepared and the evening commute was a right bitch for most people. There was just enough snow that it needed to be cleared from our driveway, but not enough to start the snowblower, so I shoveled. It’s funny how much longer the driveway seems when you hold a shovel in your hand.
The snowstorm also screwed us out of the chance to see the total lunar eclipse last night. Not that I had the slightest intention of staying up until 2:30 in the morning to see it in the first place. If any of us are still alive in 2094, they say that’s the next time we’ll have the chance to see one on the same day as the Winter Solstice. Here’s one blogger I ran across who DID get to see it and took a couple of fuzzy pictures.
It could be worse. Here’s a picture of some people taking a hike in the snow IN AUSTRALIA WHERE IT IS THE MIDDLE OF SUMMER:
Now the question for us is whether there’s going to be another snowstorm over the weekend. Our Christmas weekend includes driving up to Maine to see our families, but the “Storm Of The Decade” currently washing away all of California could bring all of its moisture with it as it travels eastward due to an air current sometimes called the “Pineapple Express”. Given that the local meteorologists screwed the pooch a little with this storm, they are decidedly non-committal about what might happen over the weekend, saying there’s a 60% chance of a storm somewhere on the East Coast. Thanks, fellas, that clears up everything.
Now that we do have snow on the ground here, I’d just like to remind all my fellow Massholes that you need to clean the effing snow off of the roof of your car before you get out on the road and kill somebody.
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Also Not Me
Like most bloggers, I follow my daily stats religiously, and usually have a pretty good idea of who has been here and what they came looking for. Most visitors are just image searchers, but then there’s the Faithful Forty (my regular daily visitors), the occasional stumblers, people who find me through the other bloggers who are nice enough to link to me, and a small number of people looking for me in the vast sea of the Internet. There are also a few people who stop by looking for one of the other numerous Brian Kanes of the world (which once again reminds me that I should really revise and re-publish my “Many Faces of Brian Kane” page).
I thought I had a pretty good handle on the most common “other” Brians: Brian the jazz musician, Brian the astrophysicist, Brian the radio personality, Brian the artist (whom Bridget actually worked with for a while), Brian the furniture designer, and so on. There’s even a fictional private eye named Brian Kane. Then last week there was a surge of visitors all from Australia Googling for “Brian Kane” or “Les Kane” or both.
Turns out that the most famous Brian Kane in Australia is…or, more accurately, was…a notorious gangster. Brian Kane and his brother Leslie were a pair of thugs who were part of the underworld scene in Melbourne in the 1970s and were participants in a famous heist known as “The Great Bookie Robbery” . Les Kane was gunned down just a couple of years after the heist. His widow once referred to him as “The Most Violent Man In Australia”. Brian Kane was killed, apparently to prevent him from killing the man who killed Les, in a hotel lobby in 1982. By the following year, everyone who had been involved in the heist was dead. Here’s a picture of him:
All the Googling about Les & Brian Kane was in response to a mini-series that has been airing on the Australian television network Channel 9 called “Underbelly: A Tale Of Two Cities” about the gang war between the Kanes and gangster Ray Chuck’s men. From Channel 9′s website, it looks like there is still one episode left to go. You can watch a few clips here, but if you aren’t in Australia, you’ll have to snag the torrents to watch the whole thing.
And ladies, check out the handsome bastard who is playing me…er, that vicious monster Brian Kane…
Please, no drooling.
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“The Front Doesn’t Come Off These Boats”
Earlier in the week I snuck in a link to a video of an “interview” about the sub-prime mortgage crisis NOT affecting Australia.
The sketch is by a comedy pair named John Clarke and Bryan Dawe who are a regular feature on the Australian ABC1 program “The 7:30 Report”. It’s not a comedy news show like “The Daily Show”, it’s an actual news program, but Clarke and Dawe appear typically once a week with these interviews.
As I was learning more about them, I found this older clip at YouTube that ranks right up there with any Monty Python or SNL sketch for sheer brilliance:
There are a bunch of their interviews on YouTube as well as on the ABC’s own website. They remind me a lot of Bob Elliot and Ray Goulding, especially John Clarke, who seems to be channelling Ray from the Great Beyond. Bob & Ray practically invented this comedy premise and remain the undisputed masters, but these Ozzies are a wonderful modern version.
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There’s Fucked, And Then There’s REALLY Fucked
It’s about 3:00 p.m. as I’m writing this post, and the DJIA has lost a bit over 725 points, taking it below 10,000 for the first time since 2004. There’s an hour or so left in the regular-hours trading day, so it’s pretty safe to say at this point that it has been a pretty bleak day for the market specifically and for the economy in general.
Our most serious problems are waiting for us just around the bend as the meltdown of the banks and now the plunge of the stock market begin to make their presence felt in the “real” economy. But in some places, the proverbial shit has already hit the proverbial fan.
Despite borrowing from the Bush playbook in their recent scuffle with Georgia over South Ossetia, the Russians are mostly just a lot of hot air…at least according to this article by international relations scholar Murray Feshbach in yesterday’s Washington Post. Russia’s economy is almost completely reliant on selling oil, so they are just as badly impacted by the downturn in the world economy as everybody else (although they might be in a better position later on). Last week I had a link to a website from a Russian fellow who says that his country is better prepared to withstand the hardships of a global depression because Russians are more accustomed to doing without, but that’s a pretty back-assed way of looking at how bad things are going to be in a country that is only just emerging from two decades of internal turmoil. But it’s not just the economy, Feshbach says. The Russian military has completely fallen apart and won’t be rebuilt anytime soon given the suddne lack of funds. The most devastating thing, though, is the burgeoning health crisis in Russia. Russia is actually depopulating at a rate so high that it cannot recover from the loss of people. The average Russian male only lives to the age of 59, compared to 72 in most developed countries. Russians suffer from heart disease at three times the rate of Americans, they drink twice as much as the WHO considers safe, and tuberculosis is becoming a national epidemic, with crumbling medical infrastructure unable to handle the uptick in cases.
Iceland, on the other hand, is in deep doo-doo right NOW. Iceland’s economy has seen a huge boom in the last decade or so, mostly from playing the numbers game in the international credit markets. Oops. The third largest bank in the country failed last week, and the government doesn’t have enough money to bail them out. They seized the bank, but the seizure may take the government down with it. Contributing to the problem is that the national currency, the krona, has collapsed and is as worthless as the currency in Zimbabwe. Over the weekend, there were bank runs as people tried to salvage what they had, and there have been reports of people beginning to hoard food. Iceland has asked for emergency inclusion into the EU so that they can abandon their now-worthless currency and convert to the Euro, but with the EU looking at rough waters, too, they aren’t terribly inclined to bring in a country that’s already failing.
If you need a laugh after all that…go check out this very amusing “interview” by the Australian comedians Clarke & Dawe explaining why Australia is insulated from all this hullaballoo.
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Tech and Media News Linkapalooza
- Now You Can Get A Latte AND An Espresso at Your Bookstore — The Espresso books-on-demand printing system was first unveiled at the beginning of 2007 and made it’s American debut last summer with an exhibition at one of the New York Public Library’s special collections. Now this revolutionary device is making its first big commercial appearance in the Australian bookstore chain Angus & Robertson (which is owned by Rupert Murdoch). The initial intended use of the machines is to allow customers to obtain copies of out-of-print and hard-to-find books, but the chain plans to use them to offer up to 10,000 titles by the end of next year. A typical “big-box” bookstore like Angus & Roberts, or American retailers like Borders or Barnes & Noble, generally stocks about 20,000 unique titles, so this will allow them to increase their offerings by 50% without having to spend money on store expansions or increased inventory. Borders, which bought itself (along with Waldenbook) back from Kmart about ten years ago, is struggling pretty seriously these days. Their talks about merging with B&N failed, and now the chain is trying to sell itself once again. So the arrival of these “ATMs for books” could be either a saving throw for them by adding titles, or it could be the final nail in their coffin as it could quite possibly make big-box bookstores irrelevant. Stay tuned.
- Coming Soon, The Complete MGM Film Library On A Grain Of Rice — Last week I mentioned a re-imagining of selling movies on USB sticks instead of DVDs. This week, I ran across this news item about a plan from SD-card maker SanDisk and four of the major record labels to sell record albums on SD cards instead of CDs. Those teeny-weeny fingernail sized micro-SD cards now range in capacity from 64MB to 16GB, and a typical music CD only holds up to 700MB in the first place. It’s no problem whatsoever to put the original uncompressed WAV files on the tiny micro-SD cards, which could then be directly inserted into even the smallest audio players as well as your full-sized home stereo system. The micro-SD cards are so small that you could carry dozens of them with you, if you were so inclined, and the ability to use them in the entire range of audio electronics would make them extremely flexible. Plus, if the group behind this idea could get portable music players to support the media format, it would let those manufacturers stop chasing onboard storage and make all the companies that want tougher DRM very happy. Keep your eye on this, as it has the potential to be a big, big deal for the record labels AND the electronics makers.
- Pay As You Go Everywhere — Last week, Time Warner Cable CEO Glen Britt told investors at a Goldman Sachs technology conference (oh, the humanity) that he thinks metered broadband service is the likely service model of the future. The cable companies are all in the midst of testing the waters of various schemes for changing the nature of broadband service, and TWC is piloting a pay-as-you-go plan in Texas. Comcast, of course, has just rolled out a bandwidth capping policy that provides the average user with so much bandwidth that it might as well be unlimited but will slow down the heavy users. A metered use system would let the cable companies offer price reductions to low-use users, place the burden of paying for extreme bandwidth usage on the actual high-end consumers, and potentially reduce the likelihood that the cable companies would feel compelled to abandon net neutrality and cram tiered Internet service down everyone’s throat. They should be just as enthusiastic about a-la-carte cable TV service, except that the cable companies OWN 90% of the cable networks themselves and don’t want to lose their sweet sweet revenue, but one can always hope that they’ll see the light. Meanwhile, Verizon Wireless has announced that they’re rolling out a month-to-month plan that would also let you use any cell phone you want. This announcement goes along with their “any device anywhere on our network” plan that they introduced last year. It’s another step in the right direction of returning the network providers to their rightful roles as providers of the pipes and not the means of access or the content.
- Slavery Is Freedom — Last week I posted about the upcoming “enhanced” driver’s licenses in the State of New York that will come embedded with RFID chips that can be used for border crossings (among other things). While the United States is on the slippery slope to a police state, the U.K. has already descended into nothing short of Orwellian nightmare with its ubiquitous (and mostly useless) CCTV systems, ASBO classifications, and so on. Now they’re going one step further by introducing RFID-embedded identity cards for resident aliens that are chock-full of biometric identification (i.e. fingerprints, etc.). The cards will be issued to foreign students and to foreign nationals living in the UK on spousal visas. Cory Doctorow, the editor of BoingBoing and well-known privacy advocate, happens to be one of those “married aliens” who will be affected by the new system and has quite a long post about it today. The British government’s plan has been widely decried as a test balloon for forcing ALL British citizens to carry “enhanced” identification cards and be incorporated into a national database system which could be abused any way the government fancied. The Tories have also made the valid complaint that the cards will do little toward the stated goal of “fighting terrorism” because they won’t apply to short-term visitors from the EU, who can move freely in and out of the U.K. and who can stay for up to three months without any additional visas or papers.
Meanwhile, here’s a bit of good news about less sinister applications of RFID technology: Researchers at the University of Manchester in the U.K. are developing a tag technology based on RFID that would create very inexpensive tags that could be applied to produce, meat and other food that spoils quickly to detect the relative freshness of a piece of fruit or a cut of meat or a container of milk and update the displayed expiration date of the item on its packaging. Accurate expiration labels are presently non-existant, using “best guess” efforts only, causing tons of food to be wasted everey single day. This is a different system than the highly-touted “self-inventory” sort of RFID tag that lets warehouses track stock or lets your “smart” refirgerator tell you when you need more eggs, but could probably be included in the same sort of systems and would be very beneficial to consumers AND producers alike.