Monthly Archives: June 2008

anh do, the chasers & akmal

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We really enjoyed seeing a few comedy shows this week at QPac.

We saw Anh Do on Wednesday night who was excellent. He told a dark and serious story of how his family migrated to Australia in a light and humorous way. Kitty was amazed at how funny he was, and he didn’t even need to swear! Not that swearing isn’t funny. One of his father’s sayings stuck in my mind, there’s only two times in life, now and too late.

On Friday night we saw The Chaser’s Age of Terror Variety Hour. We had awesome seats in row BB; the second row from the front! The four seats in front of us were empty as well, so we were practically front row. At the start of the show, both Julian and Chas walked stumbled through our row and Chas tripped on my (long) legs. Funny. Being so close to the front also meant some extra close calls but luckily no embarrassment ensued. The show was funny and included lots of witty powerpoint slides.

Tonight, Sunday night, we saw Akmal Saleh. Akmal was also hilarious as he started by purposefully offending members of the audience. Whilst the structure of his show was similar to when we saw him at the PowerHouse last year, his audience participation and impromptu stories ensured the content was varied yet witty.

It’s probably not fair to play favourites considering all three shows were so different, but Anh Do wins as he was not only funny, but he also delivered a very strong message influenced by his childhood: life is a blessing.

knocking down buildings

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I’ve noticed that a lot of buildings are being knocked down lately in Brisbane.

In Brisbane City, some major multi storey car parks have been knocked to the ground to make way for new apartment and office buildings.

At South Bank, a few buildings of the old TAFE are currently being knocked down as they’ve been replaced with brand new multi storey buildings.

At New Farm, an old heritage listed apartment block was recently partly demolished due to a loop hole in dates surrounding development approval and heritage listing date. Although I don’t think it’s right, I do think the media has sensationalised it a bit too much.

I’m all for retaining heritage but resource utilization and environmental impact concern me more. A lot of energy (trucks, cranes, drills) and resources (concrete, steel, wood) are used to create a building and so to knock one down and build an entirely new building on the same land is pretty wasteful. I’ve noticed that one of the old car parks in Albert Street is having an extension built on top of it which is a slightly better outcome than knocking it down completely and starting again.

I also love it when some one says No to The Man and refuses to sell out. Edice Macefield was one of these people. This picture of her house makes me smile but also makes me feel a little bit sick.

Click to enlarge.
Picture is by Docutorial (Creative Commons).

fireworks in canberra

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Kitty and I spent the Queen’s birthday long weekend in Canberra which was fortunate as it’s the only weekend of the year during which fireworks are legal. I lived in Canberra for about three and a half years and never set one off so I thought it was about time.

It was actually wicked fun. I understand why they’re completely banned in most places in Australia, but it didn’t stop my mini-mancation fun. The multi shots were crazy, especially if they tip and fire sideways.

in stitches @ qpac

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In Stiches is happening at QPac, South Bank in Brisbane from 17-29 June. It is an amazing comedy line up over 12 nights with both paid and free shows.

We’ve decided to attend three of the paid shows:

  • Anh Do on the 25th June;
  • The Chaser’s Variety Hour on the 27th June; and
  • Akmal Saleh on the 29th June.

I can’t explain how much I love attending comedy shows. To me, it’s well worth the admission price. But if you can’t afford tickets, they have a massive free program on every night! There’s really no excuse.

it’s the end of the album (as we know it)

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For the last couple of years, Radiohead has refused to allow its music on iTunes on the principal that it allows its listeners to purchase both individual tracks as well as whole albums.

radiohead

Radiohead backflipped last week and agreed to release its back catalog on iTunes, which means users can now purchase individual Radiohead tracks.

It makes me a bit sad because it confirms what I’ve thinking for some time: it’s the end of the album. The reason I’m sad is that there are so many good albums that aren’t good as a collection of individual songs, but as good albums in their own right.

Many of my favourite albums have some really good songs, but also some not so good songs. The not so good songs only make the really good songs better: if they weren’t there, the really good songs wouldn’t be so good. And this is essentially what happens when you get rid of the concept of an album.

It sounds a bit random but so I’ll try to explain this concept with two different stories.

I recently read a great book called Fat, Forty & Fired and one of the stories was about going camping and buying jubes. Apparently, for ages, jubes were only sold in a big bag of all different colours: red, green, orange etc. I think the red ones were the best, and no one really liked the green ones so they were the last to go. Anyway, recently the author went camping and was joyous to discover they now sell a bag of just red jubes, the best ones! Towards the end of the camping trip he realised the bag of jubes was hardly eaten, when normally the mixed bag would have been chewed up at the start of the trip. There weren’t any not so good jubes, you see, to make the good jubes good!

When I first started digitizing my music collection I thought it was great as I could make playlists of all my favourite tracks from all my favourite albums. I made a few based upon genres (dance, chillout etc.) but after some listening I realised somehow the playlists weren’t that good: the tracks didn’t feel right out of the album context. I’ve since reverted to predominently listening to complete albums. Occasionally I even rip a whole album as one large mp3, so that I can’t ever play it in the wrong order or listen to it in the wrong context.

This theory applies to life as well. The not so good bits make the good bits good. How good is a holiday when you’ve been working really hard, or when you don’t really like your job!

So, even though you can now download individual radiohead tracks on iTunes, it doesn’t mean that you have to. The choice to listen to whole albums is up to you.

Image from Wikipedia by Kollision (Creative Commons)

really good tattoos

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I was in Coles at West End this afternoon and I saw this guy with a really good tattoo. I could tell that it was well thought out, and that it would have been designed and then inked. It was a mid-arm piece of a bright coloured flower neatly contained by a contrasting monotone background. Completely cool.

got ink 3.0

I pondered and realised that really good tattoos actually shit me. And the reason? They’re too good. All of my tattoos, you see, aren’t that good. Sure, I love them, but they weren’t ever planned, nor designed. They were done as part of my life at the time and done because they meant (and mean) something to me.

It’s weird that something that’s too good can sometimes not actually be that good. Because Kitty and I are flying to Canberra tomorrow for the long weekend, I’ll try to explain this concept with the story of two different Australian cities.

Canberra, Australia’s capital, is a purpose built, planned city of 334,000 that began in 1913. Canberra was extremely well thought out, planned and then built to be Australia’s capital city. Canberra, by the books, is too good. The 2006 census showed that the average weekly wage in Canberra is $600-$699 which is almost 50% higher than the Australian average. Also, 4.5% of Canberrians have a postgraduate degree, compared with the national average of 1.8%. Driving around Canberra is a breeze because of the planned nature of the roads and there’s no tolls and little pollution. Unemployment is also very low. But it’s really quite hard to tell the various suburbs apart so it all feels the same. That’s why people get lost driving around, even though the roads are great.

Sydney, the state capital of NSW, was established in 1788 with a population of 1300 odd people and has since grown to be home to about 4,280,000. Sydney is by no means planned and by the books, not that good. Traffic is congested and housing is very expensive. The trains don’t often run on time and you hear people say that it is very polluted. Many tourists actually mistake Sydney to be the Australian capital, and often haven’t even heard of Canberra.

But if you were to ask Australians whether they prefer Canberra or Sydney, I imagine that most would they’d say Sydney. Sydney is an amazing city. The Sydney Harbor and its Bridge, the Opera House, the city beaches, and the surrounding geography are stunning. You can be in one part of Sydney in the morning and in another completely different part that same day. And that’s because it wasn’t planned.

So, Canberra did all the right things to be a perfect city, but almost four million more Australians prefer to live in crazy, congested and polluted Sydney.

The Minister for Roads in NSW, Eric Roozendaal, recently said it best. Whilst responding to the ‘like traffic that moves? move to canberra” advertisements found on Sydney buses he said:

“Anyone who goes to Canberra knows Canberra is even more boring than Adelaide, and Sydney is the greatest city in the country.”

Because I don’t have any really good tattoos, I’m hoping that my collection of will grow into a Sydney rather than a Canberra.

Photo by theointarifa (creative commons).

personalised number plates & apple macs

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What do personalised number plates and apple macs have in common? To me, they’re both extremely pretentious, that’s what!

I really don’t get personalised number plates:

  1. Why would pay heaps extra (to the G-Man) for something when you can have the vanilla standard issue for no extra cost?
  2. Why would you want to be singled out? Personalised plates make your car stand out, and this can’t be good when you’re somewhere you shouldn’t be (like at the 24-hour KFC drivethrough at 2am on a Wednesday morning).
  3. What happens when you’re checking into a motel and they asked for your number plate? Especially if it’s something like HOT-69.
  4. Personalised number plates on a pretentious car makes it even more pretentious. Like the Porsche I saw with the numberplate SOLD. But vanilla plates on an expensive car can even make it ok: I saw this new 300K+ Bentley with stock standard vanilla plates and I was like “yeah”.
  5. Personalised number plates on a cheap car (bomb) just look stupid. Isn’t your money better spent on basic vehicle safety and maintenance?

Likewise, I really don’t get apple macs:

  1. I’m so not a fan of microsoft but no matter how many ads apple make it isn’t ever simply a binary choice of windows or mac. Because there’s this thing called Linux that is as simple and elegant as a mac, but without the associated pretentiousness and price tag.
  2. Apple try to sell this whole ‘operating system’ thing but that’s so 1998.  Every one uses the internet and the internet doesn’t really care if you’re running a mac or not. You can use firefox on any operating system, and the internet is still the internet. You can still read this post and you can even create a web 2.0 blog, all without a mac!
  3. Apple profit on how prententious its customers are. For example, they bought out a notebook called the BlackBook. It was cunningly US$150 more than the same white MacBook for one simple reason: it wasn’t previously available in black, and it wasn’t the standard apple white. What other computer company can get away with charging you hundreds of dollars for a different colour paint?

So, if you want to be less pretentious, sell your personalised plates and 24 inch super glossy imac on ebay. Then buy an cheap computer somewhere and install Ubuntu on it for free. Apple won’t pester you to buy their new increasingly bloated operating system every year, and besides you can get a new version of Ubuntu for free every six months. You can then donate all that spare cash of yours to help someone less fortunate, or at least earn 8.25 % on it. I don’t think that’s pretentious.

Update (10 June 2008): Apple’s new 3G iPhone is only available in white as a limited edition, more expensive 16 gigabyte model.

the hungry hungy landlord

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The unit that we rent was recently sold, albeit slowly and after many frustrating rental viewings. We’re under a fixed term lease until the end of October, so, although we have a new landlord, our lease remains intact.

This week we received a note from the our new landlord; who I will refer to as The Man. He suprised us by saying that come lease renewal time (end of October – about five months away) he is going to increase the rent by $50 per week to, quote, “market value”. The Man is such a hungry hungry landlord.

I have a few issues with The Man’s actions, these being:

  • He doesn’t know the value of having good tenants. The onsite manager said The Man would prefer to get more rent from 3-4 overseas students who will share the unit, than slightly less rent from us, a dual income couple, both with full time jobs, who have lived in the unit for the last 2.5 years and have always paid the rent on time and kept it immaculate. The students usually stay about 6-12 months whereas we will probably stay a few years.
  • He doesn’t realise that his plan may backfire. If the apartment is empty for just a few weeks then his weekly rent increase has been entirely lost and he is no better financially off than if he didn’t raise the rent so dramatically in the first place. If he gets a bad tenant it takes a lot of time, and money, to evict the tenant and get another new tenant.
  • He is doing Australian society no favour by investing in existing real estate. Unlike actually investing in real estate by building new housing, he is instead using negative gearing to speculate on future price increases of existing housing. This simply adds to real estate demand and increases housing prices. Struggling first home buyers are being gazumped by cashed up hungry hungry investors like The Man. It doesn’t help that the government encourages him to do this: he pays no land tax, can claim all his rental expenses and shortchange on tax, and then he receives a generous capital gains tax concession!

It is a sad day in Australia, as we are now at a point where current and future generations will not only find it increasingly difficult to buy a home, but to rent one as well! And it’s not at all being helped by the actions of my hungry hungry landlord, known as The Man.

Update (10 June): Here is a link to an excellent article that explains the difference between investment and speculation.