Tuesday, December 11, 2007

Scooter Rage - It's a mod thing

What is it about the general (generally stupid) public that they feel they have the duty to accost scooter riders and make motherly obtuse comments about our riding ability or behaviours? Not to mention moronic retards driving several tonnes of metal who think it their god given function in life to run you off the road because you sneaked ahead of them in a queue.

I mean for fucks sake if I was on a Triumph Bonneville 850 they wouldn't dare come near me.

Riding to work this morning at a round about a queue of traffic was banked up, my usual behaviour in this situation is to carefully pick my way to the start of the queue - gods sake, that's the reason WHY I ride a scooter. As I slowed scooted my way to the front a car in front of me spotted me and move forward and right to stop my progress, this just made me laugh because I simply ran the diagonal directly behind her and continued up the left hand side of the stationary traffic.

I glanced in the passenger side window as I cruised past only to see this haggard frustrated middle aged cow who's spent far too long sunbathing in her youth mouthing obsenities that I had no chance of hearing - her head was doing figure 8 movements with irritation at the fact that I didn't have to sit like her in a non-moving vehicle.

Anyway - the story continues. I stopped at pak-and-save for a muffin, they do the best muffins, great price too. As I emerged with my muffin, there she was, she was visiting pak and save too. She let rip with this tirade about how I ought to be careful - blah blah blah. I just laughed and scooted off.

***

I think it was Nietzsche that said the 'ideal world' is lie concocted to deprive reality of its value, its meaning, its truth. How can people bear to move through their lives with this collectively imposed ideology of mediocrity. Why should I want to live by the ideals of others, others that hold no importance or significance to me. I feel sorry for that woman, living her life with little more than the empty blandishments offered up via her motherly chastisements and passionless asceticism
.

Ok, enough - I'm going to eat my muffin now.



Monday, October 29, 2007

A couple of post-scripts

Seems like nobody needs or wants Tamiflu anymore - " Thousands of doses of bird-flu medication languish on pharmacy shelves after the public ordered them in a state of pandemic hysteria – but never bothered picking them up."

Doh, wasn't this supposed to be the pandemic that wiped the fucking earth clean? Rush out guys, tamiflu on special at your local pharmacy.

Oil is almost $100 a barrel. Um... I think I mentioned a couple of years ago that by 2007 we'd be looking at $100 a barrel oil. Interestingly mainstream media are still oblivious to the issue, fascinated with pop-gun terrorists in the far north and Heathrow hotel All Black shennanigans. Before long NZ's answer to exburban redneck bogans and their soccer mom wives, "Straight Outa Riverstone Terraces" will be whinging and moaning about the cost of filling up the VW toe rag. The cost of transporting the kids to school 2 blocks away suddenly went postal. How the hell will mum with her 2 hour daily commute to her $35,000 pa job on the Terrace afford the weekly petrol bill?

And to think everyone thought Robert Atack (http://www.oilcrash.com/) was a fruitloop. He told us years ago to expect this... and there is more to come soon - stay tuned folks.







Monday, July 30, 2007

A Previous Comment

I did say it, back in February actually, that I thought blogging was pretty dull. As one might guess from the temporal gap between this blog and the previous, my actions are reconciled with my fingertips.

I think blogging is dull - I just felt like saying it again. It's had it's day. Please note - this doesn't mean I think all bloggers are dull, although most are, I know one that is not.

I've moved to a new more expressive, yet less precise medium. I've always been novelty driven - so call me shallow, do I look like I care.

I suppose I won't be able to help myself and pass comment as I see fit. However, currently I've stuck to minimalistic titles and left interpretation up to the viewer.
Mostly this is where I hang out these days. You get the picture, follow the link.




Thursday, June 07, 2007

I can just about smell the CO2 on your breath

On Thursday 14th June I fly to Amsterdam to attend E-CAP'07, a Philosophy and Computing Conference. Check out the Conference Programme - in vivid technicolour, I am scheduled in to talk on the Saturday, just before lunch in the "Philosophy of Information and Information Technology" stream. After the conference I've been invited to visit Oxford University (PhD Supervisor is currently in residence there) later I'm heading up to Scotland.

To hell with the carbon footprint. I'm there for "academic purposes" and I'm bringing my new toy so I'll post up shots of locations and interesting sights on google maps for those interested. I've set up a "Steve in Amsterdam" map set on Google Maps - keep an eye from Saturday 16th June onwards.

Flickr Photo set (to date)

I'll be checking email and will use my blog site (here!) as a virtual base. Feel free to leave comments.

(I've disabled comment moderation so comment away willy nilly...)

Thursday, May 31, 2007

Playing Favorites #3

I said to my gorgeous brother Stu last night, whom with his lovely partner Fritha hosted me for dinner and quality beverage, that I want to totally revise my Top 5 "imaginary Kim Hill playing favorites", incidently it's become a game...

We couldn't agree about whether you ought to include a novelty track, and the definition of a novelty track couldn't be adequately agreed upon either, it could be a reference, or dedication type track, one that you remember whilst growing up, or that your parents played, or it could simply be pure novelty, excluding the chicken dance song, the following selection might help the confused - I'm Too Sexy For My Shirt, Hands Up Baby Hands Up, Baby Got Back - Sir Mixalot. Hammond Organs featured as instruments appropriate for novelty tracks, but by the time we'd agreed to our inability to form a consensus, we'd discussed again all the tracks we know that have dogs barking in them, and I had played the Pixies and Stu was scanning a Joy Division CD cover, and we were onto the single malt.

Anyway - Chris Bourke (what happened to Mark?), I am now officially a D-list celeb, I got mentioned in the first paragraph of Dave Hansford's Listener article last week. So - come on mate. I'd so get on with Kim, and I'd tell her all about (re: the infamous John Campbell letter) how I had to shared a jersey with my younger brother, growing up in Waitangirua. The poor immigrant Scottish family and how I'm doing a PhD in Philosophy - and one of my supervisors is in residence at Oxford University, the other at Australian National University. As Ian Dury correctly points out, "There ain't half been some clever bastards, lucky bleeders"

So, in anycase, and as the case may be, in fact as the case is, at least in this case. My top 5 has a distinctively British rock theme - and so, I may as well continue where I left off.

Here it is number 3. Ready for the weekend. Mark, I am in Holland, Oxford and the UK in a couple of weeks on academic business so will be unavailable until mid july. But, well mate, I'll await the call up.

Nothing Precious At All. Stereophonics, from the "You Gotta Go There to Come Back" album.


I'm a nostalgia freak, like I said earlier, I'm not sure if it is an affliction bought about by listening to music after having a few wines, or if it is indeed a mental condition in it's own right. Whatever, this song does it for me. It burns nostalgia. It reminds me of glory days, maybe it's the old school piano riff at the beginning, but then it slots beautifully into a punchy bass line, and then there is Kelly Jone's inimitable voice. Sublime! "She's got red hair and a motorbike and lime green shoes" - it's hard not to sympathise with the character in Jone's lyrics. The song could have come straight out of the 70s, but it has a distinctive 21st century feel.




If you are going to buy one Stereophonics album - get this one.




Nothing Precious At All


I been people watching again
I think they watch me too
There's a new girl at the coffee house
She's got first day blues
She's got red hair and a motorbike
And lime green shoes
A mohair hat and a summers dress
And black tattoos
And then she fly away
In her high heel feet
And her fire dress
And she's throwing things
That took her time to save it up
And buy what's special
Then she look around
And sees what's left
And it's nothing much
Nothing precious at all
Nothing precious at all
Gonna drink herself to sleep tonight
And that's nothing new
She goes out almost nine every night
And gets high as the moon
She takes photographs of American cars
Where she went to school
She likes fireworks and candlelight
And fake bad news
And then she fly away
In her high heel feet
And her fire dress
And she's throwing things
That took her time to save it up
And buy what's special
Then she look around
And sees what's left
And it's nothing much
Nothing precious at all
Nothing precious at all

Nothing precious at all

Is she a loner or a mother's girl
That's up to you
She got fine lines round her tired eyes
And they're painted blue
She could sleep around with anyone
If she wanted to
Gotta go my time is up right now
Got stuff to do

Tuesday, May 15, 2007

Focus















... however, the dilemma we face is never too far from my mind

Just fingering it out

"I look around at a beautiful life, been the upperside of down, been the inside of out, but we breathe, we breathe" Stereophonics

At the urging of a friend (I was going to say incessant urging but that would be labouring the point, not to mention exaggerating) I've decided to write an entry about - well, nothing at all, about what blog entries are usually about. Life, irritation, frustration, joy, sex (or lack thereof), drinking (are there blog entries about drinking?).

It's meant to be revealing, and honest or at least frank (there is a subtle difference) I think, therefore - something or other. But this kind of "creative" (kick) writing isn't my forte. I'm caught, my life that is, in non-fiction, and on the creative kick I'd usually resort to plaigerising Byork lyrics, like tell me the stories, play me the tunes that crack you up. Or, that I'm no fucking buddhist but this is enlightenment...

Probably that is enough, I mean above. But I haven't told you much at all. I wish I was, just for a moment a beat poet. Then I could say something cool and subliminally meaningful or at least evocative, stirring and

Maybe I need a topic - Nostalgia. There you go. I'll create a whole new blogger label for it. It's a funny thing (nostalgia) it's almost like a mental condition. He's suffering from nostalgia, which is contributing to his alcohol abuse. Or perhaps the causation runs the other way, it's the alcohol that causes the nostalgia. Don't ever drink alcohol whilst listening to this CD. That should be a warning sticker on CD's that contain ballads from about 10 years ago...

What happened to my youth? It feels like someone else lived it. Not me. That doesn't seem fair.

Thursday, March 29, 2007






Playing Favorites #2

Thought it was about time I published song number 2 on the list of 5. "Playing Favorites" is slot on Saturday morning Radio NZ National. The producer of the show hosted by Kim Hill is a bloke called Mark Cubey, quite an affable character, check out my previous Playing Favorites selection, over time I will produce five of them. If you reckon I'd sound ok ranting and raving about nothing on National Radio, email Mark Cubey and tell him "put Steve on playing favs..."

Wot a fuckin tragedy


In 2003 I read an interview with Paul Weller, he rated this band I'd never heard of called the Libertines, (produced by The Clash's Mick Jones it held some mysterious promise, particular given Joe Strummers untimely death).
I scoured Wellington for a copy of Up The Bracket, their first album that barely made it onto the UK album charts despite good reviews from NME. What the fuck were you listening to back then - Westlife?

The Libertines changed everything. As Anthony Thornton rightly argues - post-Libertines bands rule the UK charts now - Arctic Monkeys, Brightons Kooks, and Scotlands Dundee boys The View. All couldn't have existed if Pete Doherty and Carl Barat didn't.

The tragedy, Doherty's obsession with heroin and cocaine. If only he could deal with this the project that is the Libertines would no longer be on hold and the music world would be better for it. The last Libertines self-titled album (pictured) was released in 2004, since then Barat went on to form Dirty Pretty Things, and Doherty when coherent has dabbled with Babyshambles. Doherty who studied English literature, I reckon, is a genius!

If you loved The Clash, The Jam, you will find your mid-life-nirvana in the Libertines, if you like Arctic Monkeys and the nu-uk-rock - discover the roots.

My second favorite is from the first album, Up The Bracket, track 4 - Time for Heroes.

Did you see the stylish kids in the riot
We were shovelled up like muck
Set the night on fire
Wombles bleed truncheons and shields
You know I cherish you my love

But there's a rumour spread nasty diseases around town
Caught round the houses with your trousers down
A headrush in the bush
You know I cherish you my love
How i cherish you my love

What can you want now you've got it all
The whole scene is obscene
Time will strip it away
A year and a day
And Bill Bones
Bill Bones he knows what I mean

Yes it's eating no it's chewing me up
It's not right for young lungs to be coughing up blood
Oh it's all
It's all in my hands
And its all up the walls

Well the stale chips are up and the hopes stakes are down
Its these ignorant faces that bring this town down
Yeah I sighed and sunken with pride
I passed myself down on my knees
Yes I passed myself down on my knees

What can you want now you've got it all
The whole scene is obscene
Time will strip it away
A year and a day
And Bill Bones
Bill Bones knows what I really mean

There are fewer more distressing sights than that
Of an Englishman in a baseball cap
Yeah we'll die in the class we were born
That's a class of our own my love
Were in a class of our own my love

Did you see the stylish kids in the riot
We were shovelled up like muck
Then set the night on fire
Wombles bleed truncheons and shields
You know I cherish you my love
Oh how I cherish you my love.

Monday, March 19, 2007

Planet of Slums

Jeremy Harding gives a great review of Mike Davis' Planet of Slums - here is a snip:

Homogeneity, Davis would argue, is what late capitalism does: already a billion people live in roughly the same extraordinary way in roughly similar environments. Vast, contiguous slums are the habitat of the future for even larger numbers, yet the future looks more and more like it did the day before yesterday.

By 2015 there will be at least 550 cities with a population of more than one million.

Already this aggregate population is growing ‘by a million babies and migrants each week’.


The peak will come in 2050, when ten billion people, by then the great majority of humankind, will be living in cities: ‘95 per cent of this final build-out of humanity will occur in the urban areas of developing countries, whose populations will double to nearly four billion over the next generation.’ ...



On another front I picked this superb little article up from Antonio Lopez's blog Media Mindfulness.

Thursday, March 08, 2007

Saudi Oil Production Down 8%

Matt Simmons, peak oil guru is on record as saying "once Saudi peaks the world has peaked" (End of Suburbia). If he is right the the Reserve Bank won't have to worry too much about quelling the volatile housing market with interest rate hikes - hyperinflation will be the wolf at the door.

Yet breaking news that Saudi oil production figures are down 8% for 2006 has barely registered in the mainstream (braindead) media.

The other day I responded to an "associate professor" (Jason D Scorse) who with all the critical analysis skills of my first year computing students, claimed peak oil was debunked because he spotted this article in the New York Times. "Sure looks that way from the available evidence. it's comforting that, yet again, the doom and gloom crowd gets it wrong." Scorse declares. To be honest as is typical in this debate, it appears Scorse is expressing an emotional response, usually associated with those that wish (upon a star) that life will continue "business as usual" @ 3.5% growth per annum. Anything that doesn't fit within the happy go motoring/shopping future as imagined by people like Scorse is just ridiculed and dismissed with lashings of fuckwittery that all 1st year philosophy students would see through immediately.

It's lucky Associate Professor Scorse isn't one of those first year students - he'd fail his assignment.

Here is the guts.

To make the claim that peak oil is debunked you have to claim that oil production will continue to grow annually forever. In debunking peak oil one must necessarily assume that oil is an infinite resource. If Scorse believes that then not only is he a bloody idiot, but he probably shouldn't be an associate professor.

The debate isn’t about whether the peak oil observation is true or not. It is! As is evidenced time and time again with every oil feild, every country, every region on the planet that has already passed peak. Please check out the BP Annual figures for the empirical evidence supporting this claim. It isn’t up for debate. It is merely a fact.

The issue, as many of us have said time and again, is not if there will be a peak but when will the world peak?

And, it looks possible, if Matt Simmons is correct that that date has arrived. (Unless of course Saudi intentionally cut production)

If it is indeed so then the last pint in the pub has been consumed, and we are faced with scrounging around the cupboards for half empty bottles of sherry. And the drunks are brawling on the pavement outside.

Sunday, February 18, 2007

Blogging : It's so 2006

Well and truely back into the work-life, so I spent 3 minutes browsing a few blogs that I was reading last year, and to be honest the NZ blogs - the ones linked from Scoop.co.nz - well they are so goddamn boring.

So much so, that to be frank, I can't be bothered participating in such nonsense. This isn't called apathy, it's just that I'd rather do something more fun. Like skating, or sitting on the deck with a cold beer. Even my PhD is more fun than writing some shite about the state of the world. We all know it's in a shit of a mess. You don't need me to remind you.

There is always an exception to the rule - I've become a bit of a fan of Antonio Lopez read his blog, it's way more entertaining than mine. Don't read any of those NZ blogs - esp the ones linked from scoop - they are all a pack of dreary wankers.

In the meantime, here is a photo of Jack (my son) throwing a backside ollie out of our quarter ramp at home.

Barrels of fun and minimal carbon footprint.

Friday, February 02, 2007

Clueless Fuckwittery Continues Unabated.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report issued Friday argues that the effects of anthropological emissions on climate will be with us for 1000 years. Worst case scenarios involve millions dead and trillions of dollars lost, extreme weather, droughts, wildfires, melting ice sheets, sea level rises, hurricanes - roll out the usual suspects.

However those clinging to a business as usual fantasy still don't get it. NZ Business Council for 'sustainable' development - read that as sustain economic growth at all and any costs, view the report as "an exciting opportunity" what a pack of clueless fuckwits - this is like arguing complete and utter chaos and anarchy is an exciting opportunity for looters, thugs or, freely accessible Rohypnol an exciting opportunity for sexual predators.

The Business Council for Sustainable Development says "a gloomy attitude towards climate change is not helpful". Oh dear me, somebody should tell those pesky scientists that reports like this just ain't good for business. Can they please tart up the message or at least hire Satchi to market the report with a positive spin.

Responses such as this just go to show how much the gap between science and popular culture has grown. We live in a world where personal success is determined by how much money you have, or how big your car or house is. Where technology like the calvalry will come to our rescue, where "they" will come up with something "won't they". Opportunity and sustainability have been hijacked by those seeking to increase their wealth out of others misfortune.











Tuesday, January 30, 2007

Interesting Headlines

Scientists 'pressured on climate findings'
The US continues to live in a fantasyland where the oil supply is infinite, entropy doesn't exist and anyone they don't like have WMDs.

Sydney will boil if PM fails: Iemma
It's already boiling - isn't it the worst drought in living memory? No matter, the Federal Government don't recognise climate change so everything should be ok.

Happy New Year.