The Concatenate

For those who haven’t noticed the ABC has been showing a most remarkable series at 8.30pm on Tuesday nights (but not this week because they’re going to show us pictures of the HMAS Sydney instead). It’s called “How Art Made The World” and if you’ve got any interest in history you won’t want to miss it.

While the first half of the show is taken up with regurgitated psycho babble about the importance of images in the world and how our brains process them; the second half, at least in the first two episodes, has hightlighted some real treasures.

They’ve got a lot of newer archaeology, things that have not had a lot of play in the media but are stunningly important, to back up their arguments. And the art is just gorgeous.

In particular their visit last week to Gobekli Tepe in Turkey blew my mind. The 10,000 BC ruins of a vast temple complex built with 50 tonne hewn pillars and decorated with sophisticated art throws a spanner in the works of most models of human civilisation I was brought up with.

That the site was also home to the original cultivation of wheat, thousands of years after the temple was built, means that architecture pre-dates agriculture. The temple came before the city which came before the farm.

Even more intriguing is that 8,000 years ago someone moved vast amounts of earth to bury the whole complex.

This YouTube video is in German but gives a good indication of the vastness and quality of what they’ve found there.

Anyway keep your eyes on the guide. This show will teach you new things and show you artifacts beyond your imagining.

Four Stars.

Newteevee bring the very exciting news that the creators of South Park (the bravest social commentary in the English speaking world aside from being a crude funny cartoon and heavy on the allegory) are putting everything online for free including clips for embedding in blogs. (Email readers should click this story link for an example).

So where’s the money going to come from?

Well it’s never been easy to buy their DVDs in Australia, so no loss to them there. And Matt and Trey have already made vast fortunes from South Park, so no danger of starving until other revenue streams come online.

They also have extensive merchandising lines in place.

So I see this as a move to massively bolster the mindspace of South Park in the hope that the merchandise sales will pay for all this.

It’s also likely to bolster their position for selling new series to networks, and this way the banner ad revenue will come to the creators rather than YouTube/Google.

Any other thoughts on the how’s and whys?

An interesting story on RugbyHeaven.

It seems when an aggressive drunk made a goose of himself on a recent Qantas flight the staff turned to the Cape Town based Stormers rugby team who happened to be on board.

They in turn “gave him a bit of a slap. That seemed to do the trick”.

Aside from placing their rugby playing passengers in danger through inadequate security (while it’s nice they helped out they’ve taken an awful risk) can we ask if Qantas will ensure all flights have a handy group of professional footballers on board? And who will they turn to if the footballers get pissed?

Finally it’s a bit of a worry that a single drunk was beyond the control of the flight crew. That hardly bodes well for real trouble.

The extra-constitutional exercise in corporatism known as the Council Of Australian Governments (COAG) has met once again in secret, allowing elected representatives to shuck their responsibilities as it suits them and blame everything on the shadowy meeting.

They have, however issued a communiqué with which to share with us little people the outcomes of the deliberations we were unworthy to witness.

Headline points are:

– The bogus round number du jour, $1 billion, to be thrown at State run hospitals by the Commonwealth. We can sleep easy in the knowledge that $1 billion of State funds will now be freed up for fun stuff.

– A “commitment” to agree to an unfinished long term health funding agreement in December.

– A national registration and accreditation system for health professionals. So the next doctor death scandal will be the PM’s problem and not the Premier’s. Nice work by the State leaders to let the control freak grab this rod.

– Agreement to an MoU on water.

– The CSIRO to spend more time thinking about what constitutes a sustainable water yield thereby punting the whole process out past the next election.

– A 27 point business regulation reform agenda.

– A national education agenda.

– A Commonwealth pork barrel for the States to access via Specific Purpose Payments

– An “embrace” of a national emissions trading scheme. Let’s not kid ourselves, these things are ways to entrench established polluters and transfer wealth to them. They don’t do much to reduce greenhouse emissions and they can encourage far worse pollution.

– “a nationally-coordinated approach to planning for, and facilitating, Australia’s infrastructure needs,” meaning the Commonwealth to pay for things the States want.

– “initiatives to assist housing affordability and reduce the number of homeless people”.

– “23 specific actions across its agenda, aimed at closing the gap on Indigenous disadvantage”. Good of them to try but believe it when you see it.

Now here for mine is the really interesting bit, the agreed statement of intent:

“The COAG Reform Agenda will boost productivity, workforce participation and geographic mobility, and support wider objectives of better services for the community, social inclusion, closing the gap on Indigenous disadvantage and environmental sustainability.”

Don’t think for a moment the order of these motherhood statements is anything other than carefully calculated. And there’s a new boy towards the top of the list: “geographic mobility”.

Not exactly a BBQ stopper is it? You can’t help wonder if they’re talking about shutting down the interior of the country (not enough water remember?).

The SMH has broad coverage of the kinda sorta death of AWAs which will now be known as other things but continue much the same.

Despite our glorious leader’s typical rhetoric as to the momentousness of the occasion here in The Concat bunker we doubt anyone noticed a change in their own workplace yesterday.

Somewhat more interesting were Julia Gillard’s efforts to make the Liberals swear to never again introduce something like WorkChoices. While it was mostly political theatre, and poorly executed at that, it was also something rather more sinister.

Julia was attempting to bind successor parliaments, a big big no-no in parliamentary democracy. That right is reserved for we the little people through constitutional amendments.

Given the foundation warping loopholes which the Liberals chocked, lubed and drove WorkChoices through the constitution there’s actually a good argument to be made for putting up an amendment clarifying what the Commonwealth can and can’t do in this area.

But that would mean reducing the powers of her own Government, not reducing the options of a future one, something Julia appears to be less keen on.

One of the greatest innovations in drinking in this country over the last decade was the 30 can block replacing the slab. Today I have discovered that innovation has been flung into the dustbin of history.

Imagine my surprise on walking into Cronin’s Liquor when I couldn’t see the familiar shape of the Tooheys New 30 can block.

And then I saw it, our eyes met across the crowded cool room and it was like love at first sight.

For the same price those lovely, beautiful people at Tooheys are now selling a 36 can block!

There would appear to be only one way to celebrate this momentous day.

Looks much the same from this angle…

Ooh wait! Holy crap!

See what you can do with just one tier!

It seems to be quite the day for minor celebrities to pop their clogs.

The London Telegraph is weeping into its gin over the sudden death of Anthony Minghella at 54.

For those who have expunged the memory Anthony Minghella brought a seeming eternity of pain to the men of the world who were forced to sit though his movies, particularly The English Patient.

Ripley was kind of cool though.

Google informs that Arthur C Clarke has died in his beloved Sri Lanka aged 90.

He didn’t write particularly well, his subject matter was often stunningly dull, and his vision was of a world in which the military-industrial statism of 1950s America proceeds unchecked into the universe.

But until something better came along his ideas represented the future to millions.

In many ways his books offer a vision of the alien past where American engineering and industrialism combined with mad German science flung rockets the weight of battle cruisers into the sky (for young players: they really did you know).

It couldn’t be left as a romantic mystery could it?

The light cruiser which tore up the might of the Italian Fleet under John Collins only to go missing with no trace under a new captain, last seen steaming over the horizon on fire. Just an enigmatic bullet-ridden life boat washed up.

What a great story! Now we’ll just have a tale of complacency and incompetence which saw a minor fleet unit sunk by a much smaller merchant raider.

The SMH is, of course, going absolutely gaga with the finding of the Kormoran (Sydney’s nemesis), the finding of wreckage believed to be from the Sydney, and a half hearted effort to excuse the miserable failures of command that caused her loss.

Over the weekend the frequently excellent Annabel Crabb had a story in the Herald examining the sly jokes enjoyed in the corridors of power about their own drinking.

All too often our leaders think themselves beyond the laws they make for us so it should really come as no surprise.

There are a couple of things that perhaps haven’t been looked at closely enough in the current farce.

First is the forbidden fruit; would kids really want to get stuck into the hooch with such gay abandon if no-one told them they weren’t old enough to do it?

Then there’s the matter that under-age drinking is already illegal. An ad campaign and some hypocrite sports stars seems a minor dis-incentive by way of comparison.

Will telling kids that something is bad for them while everyone else indulges in it be very effective? Or will it further increase their well deserved contempt for authority?

Perhaps we can blame the media for publicising the mis-behaviour of politicians and sports stars? Ah wait, I can see two groups who’d be quite keen on that…

The SMH has a wrap of the fragmented reporting coming out of Tibet where protestors are violently clashing with forces of the Chinese Government.

This being China’s big Olympic year we probably could have predicted this kind of trouble.

The two real questions from here are:

1) How much trouble can the Free Tibet agitators make before they’re all rounded up?
2) How much carnage would lead to the games being cancelled?

It’s really hard to tell with Dragonforce if they’re taking the piss or not.

They claim they aren’t. And their younger fans take the primally adolescent songs very seriously indeed.

But the rips are obvious, imagine the tour buses of Helloween, Yngwie Malmsteen, and Iron Maiden collided what you’d have left would look and sound a lot like Dragonforce. It’s so overt it screams out at you.

And then there’s the name? You have to be having a laugh at the whole early 80s hair metal genre to call your band Dragonforce right?

Let us not forget the song titles “Operation Ground and Pound”, “Revolution DeathSquad”, “Storming the burning fields”. Anyone else having flashbacks to teenage Shadowrun sessions?

Parody or homage it’s done exceedingly well. If you were missing something fun to bang your head around to where you can actually make out the lyrics then Dragonforce might just be for you.

Three and a half stars.

Intriguingly News informs that due to the plunge in the value of the US dollar the euro-zone is now a bigger economy.

That’s going to take some getting used to.

For mine David Mamet is the 20th century’s closest answer to Shakespeare.

So excuse me if his lengthy essay in the Village Voice confirmed my prejudices regarding an intelligent view of modern political discourse.

‘White was a pretty clear-headed man, and he’d seen human nature as few can. (As Twain wrote, you want to understand men, run a country paper.) White knew that people need both to get ahead and to get along, and that they’re always working at one or the other, and that government should most probably stay out of the way and let them get on with it. But, he added, there is such a thing as liberalism, and it may be reduced to these saddest of words: ” . . . and yet . . . “‘