Foot of Pride?

News Poll recently released some buzzword assessment polling of the relative merits of the two federal party leaders. One of the words assigned to John Howard was 'arrogant', which has lead to some bemusement among the punditariat. This blog piece by Matt Price was typical, and similar themes were voiced in yesterday's episode of The Insiders.

I'll grant that Howard doesn't have the in-your-face arrogance of a Keating, or even a Costello. On the other hand, you don't become Prime Minister without a healthy degree of self regard, and, personally, I think Howard is as well endowed (in that respect) as any leader we've had in my lifetime. I guess that the punditry confusion comes from the Howard shtick, where he presents himself as the quintessence of ordinary, averageness distilled into a balding dag in a Vodaphone tracksuit. I've always felt that this presentation had a Uriah Heep quality to it, where an excessive humility and underplaying of his own strengths is a king of arrogance in itself. Take, for example, his much repeated refrain that he would remain as leader of the party and the country (in order of importance I think) for as long as his party wanted him. So the play is that he's a servant of the party (and by extension the nation), that he's almost forced to continue the role simply because his party is demanding it of him. But of course, you know damn well that he also thinks that he's the best person to lead both his party and the country. Remember that during the long years of the Hawke/Keating governments he was prepared to rip his own party to shreds to achieve this goal.

Howard also seems to be much admired among conservatives for being a conviction politician. Someone who's prepared to do what's right, even if it is unpopular. So the stance on the GST and the Iraq war are, perversely, strengths even though both have been generally unpopular policies. I think there's merit in this argument, and that the electorate probably is prepared to respect a leader who has the courage of his convictions, even if they don't actually agree with his policy. But I think any leader who wants to take this path has to do several things. They have to actually mount a case that the policy is actually in the best interests of the nation, even if it is unpopular. They have to listen and engage in debate, to try and take the people along with them. If they don't do this, then the flip side of conviction is arrogance, a leader who knows better than the people, who won't listen to what people are telling him. Paul Keating, obviously, ended up well into this territory by the end of his term of office. To consistently play this card, it also helps a lot if the leader is consistently right.

I think Howard risks falling into this trap, and that this is what the polling is picking up. Iraq has always been unpopular, but over the years it's become more apparent that Howard's picked a loser. To my mind, he's also never actually articulated a case for Australia being involved in Iraq. Similarly with workchoices. It's damn unpopular in the electorate, and the government, and Howard, has simply not tried to present a case for it. Again it's a similar story with climate change, where the government has spent the last decade twiddling its thumbs, waiting for a mugging from reality. At some point, it you spend enough time telling the electorate that you know best, without offering convincing explanations as to why this is so, then the electorate stops listening and the word arrogant, justifiably in my opinion, starts getting applied.

g-client test

testing testing testing, g-client mode

Limited in Sex?

I did like this story in the Herald today. In a search of child porn, police found that adult shops in King Cross were selling X-Rated DVDs!

Despite the stores openly displaying the apparently X-rated material, worth millions of dollars, on their shelves, Ms Hayes said the sale of the material had been going undetected for some time.

I am SHOCKED. D'ya hear me SHOCKED!

Of course this just illustrates the stupidity of the current law. It's illegal to sell X-Rated DVDs in NSW, even though they're widely available - I'd guess my bus to work (through Newtown, Broadway, then up George St) passes another half dozen adult shops, and I'd lay good money that each of these is carring X-Rated DVDs/videos as well - in shops and over the internet. So its a law that's usually ignored by all, both public and police. There's obvioisly a demand for porn, otherwise the shops wouldn't exist. The ready availablity of porn has done nothing to rot the fibre of society as far as I can tell, so why ban it?

Frankly, if we're willing to allow adults to freely choose to watch Today Tonight in the privacy of their own homes, I can see no reason why we shouldn't allow 'em to watch the odd bit of rumpty pumpty if they want to.

In a voice without restraint

On Saturday (10th Feb) night the Slothette and I went to see the Tallis Scholars. I'd heard of the Scholars, but I'm not sure that I'd actually ever heard any of their music, and we went along as an impulse, on the back of a positive puff piece in the paper. We both enjoy choral music, so it's passing strange that the Scholars had not registered on the radar before this. For the uninitiated, the Scholars focus on Renaissance choral music: no instruments, no accompaniment, simple, pure voices.

In short, the concert was sublime. The highlight was the performance of Thomas Tallis' motet for 40 voices, the mighty Spem in alium, performed with the assistance of the Sydney Chamber Choir. So good they did it twice, and I would have stayed for a third helping, had they offered. Also on offer were goodies such as Byrd's Mass for four voices and Parsons' Ave Maria.

I usually listen to music at work or on the bus, making it secondary to whatever distraction is at hand. Music in a concert is a different proposition, you're forced to listen to and concentrate on the music. The concert hall becomes a sensory deprivation tank where your only remaining sense is your hearing. This music allows your mind to float free, to flow with every swirl and eddy in its currents. At times the choir sounds like murmurings of a curiously harmonious crowd, perhaps a busy choral cafe, but occasionally a voice will soar free for a split second, like a silver fish breaching a stream. Other pieces have strands woven together into a tapestry, so that the listener can choose to follow either the warp or the weft of the harmony, or to sit back and feel the warmth and colour of the whole. At other times the choir sings with one voice, an instrument of clarity and power. Spem in alium, in particular, was mesmeric and shattering, destroying the soul for its duration.

So, yes, I loved it. It might be a measure of the concert's success that Sydney's notorious coughers seemed to have been silenced for the duration. The SMH also has a more polished, but still very enthusiastic review.

I even looked deep inside my toilet bowl

According to New Scientist (link probably hidden behind a subscription wall), "Sweden is now the urine-separation capital of the world". A lovely contender for sentence of the year, that one. Technically, last year, but we're solopstistic here in the land of sloth, and year of reading counts for more than that of writing.

Actually, the story's quite interesting, in that it details how much more efficient it is to recycle urine by separating it out from other waste, rather than diluting it with the rest of the sewage. Separating out urine also allows for the extraction and reprocessing of useful elements in the urine. Phosphates, for example, can be extracted and used for fertilizers. Consequently loos have been invented to do just that, which is why Sweden is being showered with such golden accolades.

Sadly, of course, in Australia our politicians are weirdly resistant to the idea of recycling water, apart from Peter Beattie's gun-barrel-to-the-head decision to move towards recycling water in Queensland. In NSW, Labor under Morris Iemma is absolutely digging in its heels, refusing to contemplate the idea, even though parts of Sydney already effectively have recycled water. You wonder why people actually go into politics if they're so paralysed by the thought of losing an election that they refuse to actually do anything.

Anyway, here's to Sweden, home of taking the piss.

Blog Revisited

I've been meaning to revisit the whole blogging idea. My first attempt was rather faint wristed, limp livered and lily hearted. There's a line in Pride and Prejudice, where Lizzy observes that attempting one nice solid sonnet is enough to wither away a feeble attachment. Similarly, one meaty post that I lost when my browser crashed* was enough make me decide that blogging was not for me. And, as a wise man once said, "Kids, you tried your best and you failed miserably. The lesson is, never try."Chez sloth, we take such advice very seriously.

In the end though the temptation to resume blogging has been overwhelming. Chiefly because of the opportunities it provides for procrastination. As a geek, I simply had to migrate the blog to the all new much improved blogger 2. Goodness knows what the difference is but, well, that word upgrade just gets the heart a-poundin'. Then, of course, the template needed to be changed. And surely I could come up with something I liked more than the out of the box template from blogger? Unfortunately a blind hippo has a more sensitive sense of aesthetics that I do, which means that those monkeys are more likely to churn out Shakespeare than I am to design something that looks attractive. So the standard template it is.

Then I thought, where's the XEmacs integration? Atom-blogger is supposed to provide that sort of integration, but it doesn't seem to have been updated to use the new improved Google API that Blogger Mark II uses. But then, the thought process ran, something out there in emacspace must interface to that Google API. A quick search didn't turn anything up (which is not to say that it's not out there. Somewhere.)

The old thought-dreams then tried seduction: "Navigate that plague of lisp parentheses, write your own wrapper ...". "Hmm, sounds good" thought I. This lead to an hour rooting around in google documentation until, finally, the thought struck. Perhaps I should just write something. Anything. And so I have.

* crashed, in this context, means that I closed the browser by mistake.

Atom blog test

Testing to see how well atom blogger works!