a shortcut to a stomach ulcer

So I’m seriously rethinking how I booked my travel for this trip. Everything was going fine: I got up at five in the morning, and I got the taxi on time, I arrived at the bus terminal super-early. And then, the wheels on the bus did not so much go round and round, as come off the wagon. The Greyhound bus-man responded with mirth to my rather tight schedule, leaving me imagining which rotisserie he will be occupying in the afterlife. I met another fool who had booked the bus for the airport who came up with the idea of hiring a car. Which meant we had to go to Canberra airport to get it. Which meant that we had to deal with “Thrifty”: by which they mean they are thrifty with the number of IQ points you need to work there. An inordinate amount of time later, they handed over the keys to a car other than the one we had hired, and we started driving. And I started calling Air New Zealand, to find out how late I could be before I missed the flight. The goal of 10.30 was set and so we drove, and I palpitated. My stomach slowly came to grips with the reality that I had decided to replace its rightful six other hours of sleep with a cup of coffee and a boatload of stress, and decided to introduce me to how it would feel should it every try to burrow its way out of my body. I’m not good with flight deadlines at the best of times, I panic that I’m going to miss them and turn up hours early, so actually being late was not my ideal start to the trip. Or the best way of conducting normal social chitchat with my travelling companion – as small talk inevitably does, it wormed it’s way around to the ‘what is your phd topic’ question and I think a direct quote of my response is: “Art history. Australian. 1960s.” After which time I got to account for the prices in the art market and the claims to value of Aboriginal art – reasonably complex issues that I would normally struggle to answer in an articulate fashion after only two hours sleep and before nine in the morning, but add a nice haze of stress and I think I start to borrow Yoda’s sentence structure. “Art it is, Aboriginal, yes, unique it is.”
We made it with ten minutes to spare. And the plane was late. It turned up, the tortuous boarding process was completed (oh, and if you are late you get to sit up the back with the kids, joy). And they had lost the food. So we waited another thirty minutes. Finally the food arrived, and we set off for Auckland. Where I now am, making the most of the fact that wifi doesn’t effect navigation systems when you are inside the airport, apparently. It’s now three p.m. Sydney time, and I’ve got another twenty hours of travel to go. Gah. I have, however, noticed that there is some tasty looking NZ beer on tap here in the compound, so after I have read through my paper there will be treats, oh yes.

more about the 'head. And some other stuff because I get distracted midway.

I started writing a response to my previous post in the comments area, and realised I was, in effect, talking to myself online, which which is surely taking the narcissism of blogging to that level with which I'm not comfortable.

On the prices people are paying for the Radiohead album - I saw something in the SMH website the other day that said about 1/3 of people are paying the adminstration fee of 49p but nothing for the album, and another third at least are paying four pounds or so (about half of the price of an album downloaded from itunes). Cutting out all the middlepersons means that they are absolutely raking it in. So it will be interesting to see record companies response to bands doing this - as it seems that it is those bands that are longterm successes that finance the money that goes into supporting promotion of newer bands, and offsets the ones that don't obtain that kind of success. If bands with the stature of Radiohead, that has been built through the promotion and support of record companies, can move away from those businesses and release an album online and mean that the longterm cashcow relationship is even less certain, I wonder if the companies will change their approach to how they find new talant to promote? They seem to be fairly woeful at catching up with the changing nature of the consumption of music - their obsession with grinding out illegal distribution rather than finding out what people are prepared to pay for music online and letting market forces determine it seems wrongheaded to me.

I really like that Radiohead have found their own way of doing it too. They refuse to let their music be sold through itunes because they don't want people to be able to buy one song at a time, as they see their albums as a unified work, rather than something to pick at. And the alternative they've set up seems to work really well, particularly as you don't have to download any software, as you do with itunes, and particularly any software that then proceeds to annoy the crap out of you. (In itunes case only superseded by the monumental irritation caused by iphoto. Oh the ranting! It annoys me even more than the inappropriate use of brush script fonts, and that has been consistently annoying me since the mid-1990s. I kid you not! Although not as annoying as the Howard government, also consistently annoying since the mid-1990s.) (oh, and you should take out your frustation on that matter here.) (on reflection, that's a really dumb scale of how annoying something is - between font use and political frustrations? Like giving something a rating as somewhere between how much I would enjoy a glass of creme de menthe sitting in an airport terminal versus a fine glass of red sitting in the south of France. ) (must stop stream of consciousness parenthesizing. To coin a verb.) I like that they've stood up for their work as unified albums, and surely anyone would agree who's ever sat back after a couple of shandies and listened to one in the dark.

Regarding the contents of the album, I love it, I've become slightly obsessed. Particularly hearing Thom Yorke sing "I don't want to be your friend, I just want to be your lover" is bizarre, because it harks back to odd Spice Girls memories, that do linger long unwelcome.

My office seems to be slowly filling with moths and spiders; I think nature is trying to take back the ANU.

Or I could just shut the window.

Or even, just shut up...

a bit o'stuff

So last week when I was watching Oprah - an infrequent event I hasten to add out of a lame sense of elitism - Bill Clinton was on and jointly they were promoting Kiva. This website facilitates loans to businesses in developing countries - something like 98% of them have so far successfully repaid their debts. After the coverage on Oprah and in Clinton's new book they have had to limit the donation limit to $25 because so many people want to give. Such a great idea.

Two and a half weeks before I leave for Philadelphia. Would be heaps good had I finished the paper I have to present - which it turns out is the first morning at the conference, after I arrive at the hotel sometime in the early hours of the morning. Will be interesting to see how much coherence I eke forth after travelling for an incomprehensibly long time, but that is, after all, what adrenaline is for isn't it? Fighting with bears and public speaking. Both clearly vital to the evolutionary advantage.

Thinking of evolution, I bought really, really awful shampoo recently. Purely because it was called 'Natural Selection' and I was taken by the idea of it somehow offering some Darwinian advantage. A thought which I somehow couldn't express to my hairdresser when she was making me feel bad for not buying expensive hair products and attributing my fly-away ends to my poor consumer choices.

I'm listening to the new Radiohead - it's excellent. I want to know what the average price is that people are paying for it (you nominate how much you want to pay, if you had not heard, and it is only available as a download from http://www.radiohead.com/).