Schinckel.net

John Williamson’s “masterful final act” (according to The Australian, but I didn’t know he’d stopped writing plays) Influence is currently playing at the Dunstan Theatre in Adelaide. Since we haven’t been to see anything since A Number, and Jaq won a raffle with a season ticket, we went to see it on Saturday night. John Waters is “Ziggi Blasco”, a conservative, hate-mongering talk radio host, along the lines of John Laws, Alan Jones and their ilk. His wife was a former ballet dancer - she was never really top of the heap but once performed the lead role of a production in London, but only because the two top dancers were both injured. Anyway, she is the most vile, vapid creature who is unable to believe that a) she isn’t going to make it big again, and b) other people have challenges in their lives that are much harder to live with. Things begin to get worse when Ziggi’s daughter from his first marriage, and his father, move into the Blasco mansion on the same day. Both have their own issues, which deepen as the story unfolds. This time of upheaval is made worse by the fact that Mrs. Blasco doesn’t seem to be able to find a good housekeeper (or, at least, one that will stick around), and hires a member of the “working poor”, a Turkish single mother of three, who has to travel hours every morning and night to and from work. The other characters are Ziggi’s sister Connie, a very left leaning psychologist, and Tony, the Blasco’s driver/butler/gardener. Most of the characters were believable, if somewhat stereotyped. I found John Waters a little hard to understand when he was “on air”, as his speech was somewhat unlike that of the “golden tonsils”, or most talk radio hosts whom he was based upon. But he was a perfect copy of Laws’ style of radio, with even the obligatory “Now just wait a minute, I was having lunch with some of my friends who are pharmaceutical company executives the other day, and they are really nice fellas.” Zöe Carides was magnificent as Zehra, the housekeeper who doesn’t seem to be able to say the right thing, ever. “Better not to be that good looking. More time to spend on doing schoolwork.” Not quite what you want to say to a (clearly) jumpy Year 12 student, who has just complained about always being called a dog by the boys on the train. Zehra, and Ziggi’s father (I’m not sure that we ever heard his name) nearly brought me to tears as they showed the depth of character that made them real. My only hassle with Influence was the cheap laughs. Williamson took the easy track in a lot of situations - he didn’t have to work hard at all to get laughter from the audience. Which really annoyed me, because at other times, he clearly had put the effort into making stuff genuinely funny. Or, at least I, and a couple of others in the audience, thought so. By all means, if you get the chance, go and see Influence. Laugh if you must, but don’t let that stop you taking away the message I did: Australia is in trouble now. I’m not sure how we stop the slide to right-wing nationalism, (aptly hilighted by Blasco senior’s dilemma) but I hope we can.

Central Scorpions Touch Association Mens Open had their first training session yesterday. I am the coach. I’ve coached plenty of Womens and Girls touch, and the occasional boys team, but this is the first time I have coached a team of Real Men (tm). It is kind of intimidating (and I probably need to stop worrying about stepping on feelings), but I’m quite looking forward to it.

I wrote iTunesRater because I wasn’t happy with only having six possible ratings for each song - I have 5665 songs in my iTunes Library, and this isn’t a fine enough grained distribution. I’ll be honest, at times 0-100 isn’t enough! I also wrote it because I wanted a window always open that can be used to rate tracks easily as I listen to them. My Party Shuffle grabs tracks from an Unrated playlist, which is every song with a 0 rating. (I use this as the base, and songs I hate get a 1-10ish rating. Because of my setup, where a server contains all of the songs, and multiple people can add tracks to this location, and every now and then you need to import the folder containing music, removing a track just means it would be added again later). Today, just out of interest, I looked at how many songs are in the Unrated playlist. 4472. That means I have only rated about 22% of my music. I could short-cut it a bit, and rate according to album, but I don’t usually like every song on an album. And lots of times, I don’t know the names of songs, I have to wait until I hear them. If I had an iPod, I might rate more, but then it would only be a 0/20/40/60/80/100 rating again. And I’d have to sit on the train with my iPod in my hand, and I like to read on the train.

I read every word in the first issue of The Monthly. I must say, having read it, and looking back, there aren’t many advertisements in that magazine, it is mostly articles. And some of the articles were great! I hardly ever watch Enough Rope with Andrew Denton, but after reading the article on him and his interviewing techniques I may start to. If I can ever get my ABC reception better then the crap it is now. Speaking of the ABC, there was an article on how the culture of this great instution has changed over time, and how it may change in the future. And then in the Australian yesterday, I read how funding has reduced the number of hours of local drama created to an all time low of 21. Twenty-one hours of local drama created in one year, by the corporation that once created greats like Brides of Christ, and Love is a Four Letter Word. I’m also looking for a CD, I am a bird now, by Antony and the Johnsons, based on a review in the Monthly. Maybe it’s just me wanting desperately to be an intellectual (or, as the dopey tart in Big Brother [now that is quality drama. NOT] said: “an intellect”), but I may just start regularly reading this magazine.

Yesterday afternnon, as I was on the way to the physio, I bumped into some old students of mine from a previous school. I chatted to them for a few minutes (Hi Bree and Steph), and was about to head off to catch my bus, when some random derelict man came up to us and said something. Now, I didn’t understand a word he said, so I just responded with a “Look, I’m sorry, but I really have to go now”, and turned towards the girls to make my goodbyes. And the guy punched me. Hard. Luckily, it was only in the arm, but I didn’t see it coming, and I’m glad he didn’t hit me in the face.

I moved blogs from one server to another some time ago, and luckily I was using ecto to post, so had an archive of the posts on my computer. I wrote an AppleScript to move a post from one server/account (ecto calls them personalities) to another, and popped it into the ~/Library/Application Support/ecto/scripts directory, set up a shortcut key, and then it was just a matter of opening a post, pressing the key, and it posted the old post to the new server. Some posts caused ecto to crash, but I could live with that. Anyway, here is the script: tell application “ecto”     set _draft to document 1     tell _draft         set _date to entry date         set current personality to “Blogsome”         set entry date to _date         do post     end tell end **tell **

We wanted Jason & Sharon to call the boy Helmut, but they chose Max. So I’m posting this image…

I discovered PostSecret some time ago. I love it! Basically, it takes postcards (real, live ones) that are sent in anonymously, with a secret on them, and posts them online. This one today made me laugh:

Cellphone Dieting : Gizmodo:

The process is pretty low tech: take a picture of the food you eat, send it to a dietician, and then they send back a video message telling you… …These kind of personalized/techno services should be making things interesting in the next few years. I could see a personal trainer doing this, as well…

There’s an ad doing the rounds on Australian TV at the moment that reminds me of this article, but I can’t remember what it was advertising. It had a guy who sent a picture to a personal coach, or something.

I’m currently altering Connections (Blogsome) to be an orange motif, for the CSTA site. View what it looks like so far at CSTA.