Category: Life

Here’s one of the main reasons I’m scared to become a famous artist: what happens if you create something brilliantly heartfelt – a book, a song, whatever – which perfectly describes a stage in your life that you later move on from, only to find that people identify with it and keep bringing you back to it, kicking and screaming? Perhaps you compose a scathing attack on upwardly mobile types only to find yourself owning a mobile phone a few years later (To pick a completely ficticious, made up example).
It’s one thing to express an opinion, and later change your mind, its another thing to have it framed, awarded or part of your regular song set. It’s something Cat Stevens/Yusuf Islam is up-front about on many occasions.
Today, we see one of the most extreme cases – Delta Goodrem is in the middle of promoting her new album ‘Out Of The Blue’, which includes as the title track a song’s she’s already publicly dedicated to her beau Mark Philippoussis, only to find he prefers the company of Paris Hilton. What’s worse is that the song is currently Number One on the Australian charts.
If it really was the relationship the song describes, then it can only be harder to move on if market forces stand in the way of your grieving process. To keep singing would be tough enough. To be singing that song, now, repeatedly would be gutting. The fact that the song talks about escaping circumstances she’s now being thrown back into…. you can only imagine.
She’s had a rough time lately, healthwise and emotionally, and every deep breath has been headline news. I hope her fans will understand if it forces her to take a strategic retreat from front stage.
And thus, it would seem the Scud has truly earned his nickname.

… and it only required my Dad to go into surgery for us to find out about it.
Let’s start at the beginning. I’ve always had an interest in researching our family tree, and it’s mainly been an interesting academic exercise of gathering names and dates and making the appropriate links. Now, though, it seems lineage is an important present-day issue for us Cooks.
Dad’s recently been in for treatment for a condition we’ve learnt is Dupuytren’s contracture, a condition which slowly, surely, messes up your hands unless you get it seen to with surgery. It affects the 3rd and 4th fingers, permanently contracting them by affecting the tissue of your palm, so you end up with a sort of half-fist. According to the literature, it most often affects men of Northern English heritage, and points to some Scandinavian blood further back in the line. So, somewhere back there, we were terrors of the sea, it seems.
Dad’s already had some surgery over the years to look after it, but this latest visit was a big deal. Speedy recovery, Dad!
Given it’s a hereditary thing, I guess me and my brother Steve have to keep an eye out for it, too. I hope it’s going to skip a generation or two – it’d certainly cause problems for a keyboard player. However, it seems that I’m hanging onto my hair for a little longer than the old man did, so here’s hoping.

Just got a text message that my little sister Sam has given birth to Indiana Rose. My first (non-Robinson) niece!
And I get to gloat as one of the few people who predicted a girl was on the way. Booyah!
Strangely, it’s less freaky for me to think that I’m a father than to realise that my sister is a mum, now. That spins me right out.
Congratulations, Sam and Steve/Mum and Dad.

With those two words, I get to cross off another of the List Of Things I Gotta Do Before I’m 35: get a credit on amusing.org.
I’m not going to try to explain it. Just go there.

Inspired by a family conversation on the way to school this morning:

a cat on a roof
is an elegant proof
that God guides the fortunes of all
were dogs so inclined
we should all be resigned
to the fate of poor puppies to fall
it should not be as neat
dogs don’t land on their feet
and there’s room for just one cat-a-wall

John Clarke is my hero. His alter-ego, Fred Dagg wrote these prophetic words in 1979, which are as true today as they ever were. Maybe moreso.

Ah, yeah g’day. Now I’d like to have a few words with you concerning the very interesting remarks made during the year by that nice little Mr Howard who is employed as a reader by Malcolm. And now that the dust has paid settlement tax a couple of things do seem to demand analysis.
The first of course is that Small John has been making a courageous attempt to redefine the concept of the honest man. Now you, or I and certain other head-in-the-cloud no-hopers I can think of might cling to the antediluvian view that an honest man is a man who is honest. And, on a purely superficial level, this would appear to be not totally unreasonable. But apparently, on close and heavily subsidised inspection, this transpires to be unsatisfactory thereby failing to incur satisfaction tax as laid out in Schedule 6E of the annual map of the buried treasury.
An honest man is not a man who is honest; an honest man is a man who is dishonest but is quite honest about it. A man who hides his dishonesty, now he’d be a dishonest man. But disarming honesty about previous dishonesty is apparently OK. Of course the dishonesty in the first instance is annulled by the subsequent honesty and any reference back to it would be the act of a dishonest political point scorer.
If a man decides to be honest about his dishonesty, not only is he an honest man but, if he does it consistently, he can be said to be a man of principle. Although having to be dishonest in the first place, in order to be honest about it later might worry some of you older people who foolishly accept that being a man of principle is something akin to being a man of principle.
A good example of all this, is the way Malcolm and the Gang of Plus Fours have turned the country upside down in order to get inflation down. And now they say this time next year, inflation won’t have come down. And unemployment won’t have come down either and the CPI won’t have come down and the only thing that will come down is the honest and highly principled August Budget and with any luck, it’ll go down with all hands. I’ll get out of your way now, I’ll see you later.

This one’s been bugging me for a few days. A programmer responsible for one of the world’s more destructive computer viruses has been given a chance to ‘rehabilitate’ himself by getting a job with a big anti-virus software company.
Presumably, the company had one eye on the benefits of hiring someone ‘in the know’ to help strengthen their defences, and another on the publicity the hiring would generate.
There’s a wider issue here – are the people who commit the crimes the best people to be defending against them? It could be said of any protective organization – police, military, bouncers – that you have to think like a crook to catch a crook. It’s important for someone to at least consider the mechanics of commiting a crime in order to build appropriate defenses against that behaviour.
Does it necessarily follow that someone who actually carries out criminal activities is better qualified to defend against them, than someone who has had to consider multiple opportunities and threats for criminal gain and has the self-control and integrity not to pursue them?
I don’t buy it. It doesn’t follow that just because someone’s sinned more that they’ll make a better saint.
Remember that, come election day. See the following post.

I’ve rediscovered some of my respect for Windows (the operating system) today.
I’ve been tinkering with my first desktop PC trying to squeeze just a little more juice out of it. Having been built in 1995, it’s a venerable old bucket o’ bolts, but it’s still got more computing power than the entire Apollo moon mission. Surely it could be useful for something around the house.
It’s been serving the kids well as a games machine for the past few months. However, being a 486 DX2 with a 340MB hard drive and 20M memory, it’s not exactly up the task of throwing polygons around the screen like it needs to these days: games have moved on. So, having found a disused laptop with more grunt, I’ve freed up a little piece of computing power.
I decided that it might be a good test bed for Linux. However, I haven’t found a useful Linux distribution which installs in less than 700MB. If anyone knows of one, I’d appreciate the pointer. I’ve tried a ‘live CD’ of Knoppix, which magically runs everything off the CD Rom, but even that’s too slow.
Now, having installed a fresh Windows 98, I’ve got it networked and patched, with good performance, with 150MB free to play with. I’ll turf the keyboard, mouse and monitor and remotely operate it with good old VNC. I’m thinking it might be a good jukebox for streaming music off Launchcast, or for keeping an eye on network traffic. Any ideas welcome.
I’m a little disappointed I couldn’t get Linux on there. I’d assumed it was more lightweight than Windows. But, it seems, when the chips are down, Windows can find its way onto any disk. Nice one, Gatsey.

I don’t normally go for this “I gotta get this new, latest game right now” caper, but David Weller settled it for me: I gotta get this new, latest game right now.

It’s been said of a lot of situations, but What Would Jesus Do about the internet if his ministry began today? Would he register ‘nazarenechippy.com’ and set up a weblog, or would he opt instead for personal, face to face contact?
I haven’t figured out an answer in my own mind, yet.
Jesus used the technology of his day; like church buildings, boats and public meetings to speak to people where they were. In many cases, they came to him.
On the other hand, Jesus wasn’t a prolific journalist – the only record of him writing anything down was when drawing in the sand before a crowd of people ready to punish a Samaritan woman. He left it to others to document his teaching.
The internet is a broad, popular medium, able to reach millions of people. Is it a power Jesus would use or refuse?