TheGeoffRe(y)port

Thought I’d better wait until they’d announced this themselves, but huge congratulations to Scott and Christina who have just welcomed  Johanna Keren Aitken into the world. A little sister for Jemima, and just an exciting thing to tell people about. Sounds like all involved are doing well.

Photo at Scotty’s announcement post.

…not much happening here. There’s a few things in the back of my mind, waiting for a post. In the meantime,there’s a prediction for 2008 post up on The Wounded Tiger.

(image from xkcd.com)

photo credit: Howie_Berlin

Immediately after Heath Ledger died, especially for the time that it looked more likely that it was a suicide rather than accidental death, the reactions were remarkably interesting. There was the standard fan response - tributes and the like, but there was another response that I found to be remarkably interesting. It came in letters to the editor and blog comments and went roughly along these lines:

• “Why would he do this to himself?”
• “This guy had everything, and yet he’d kill himself”
• “How dare he do this?”

It wasn’t just disbelief - this was an angry response. The very same comments could be heard about Britney Spears’ latest breakdown, or whichever celebrity it is who has been caught drink-driving or checked into rehab. There is a real anger that these people would have everything - and “everything” is the word that gets used to describe it - and yet that’s not enough for them.

It seems to me that this anger doesn’t look much different to the sort of righteous indignation we get from fundamentalists at having their nicely boxed theologies challenged. Celebrity, and with it the concept that fame and fortune are somehow the pinnacle of human endeavour, is the state religion. So it doesn’t go well when someone’s actions come along and challenge that. 

For those of you who skip over the Richmond related posts, help is at hand. And for those of you who only visit in the hope that I’ve written something about our fearsome yellow and black warriors, I can help you too! I’ve decided that the next adventure in my blogging career is to quarantine off the Richmond related posts over to “The Wounded Tiger” - thewoundedtiger.com

From the about page:

The Wounded Tiger is the heartbroken lament of a Richmond supporter who has undergone far too much trauma with his team to ever give them up.

I’m mostly doing it because a) I saw a cheap deal on domain names, and b) most of my Google traffic is for Richmond related content, and I couldn’t handle forcing people who have come to find out about Richo and Browny instead looking at wedding video and theology. So tell all your yellow and black friends: thewoundedtiger.com

I’ve been meaning to do this for a while, but I wanted to recommend a great blog. Jess (famous in these parts for things like that engagement story video, as well as being one of Bec’s bridesmaids) is a film student who writes great film reviews at Gold Stars (goldstars.wordpress.com). She’s not always right (she can’t agree with me all the time, but on the whole it is very rare that Jess would recommend a film that’s not worth your hard-earned cash, at least as an overnight rental.

So for really honest and genuine film reviews, as well as a bit of cheerful banter, head on over to Gold Stars and tell her why The Notebook was such a magnificent achievement in modern cinema, or why Daniel Day Lewis is a hack. (Not because it’s true, but it would be funny to watch!)

Ever since I saw the movie with Natalie Portman and Hugo Weaving (possibly the most underrated Australian actor in the business, I’ve had a bit of a “thing” about “V for Vendetta”. So after I made some noises about the graphic novel when we saw it at Borders on our honeymoon, the lovely Rebecca duly took note and made sure that a copy came my way when it came to birthday time. It hasn’t taken long for me to devour the book, and it’s rekindled my intrigue.

At it’s heart “V” strikes at a number of things that resonate with me, as well as draws attention to a few things that I’m not as sure about. For starters, there is the revolution against a fascist totalitarian state. And it strikes at something deep inside (likely put there by WWII movies and computer games) that makes is just fantastic for someone to be beating up the fascists. There’s just something deep down that wants to barrack for the guy who is starting the revolution. I came out of the movie the first time ready to bust some heads.

But it poses some big questions, particularly around justice. V kills - not indiscriminately but with the moral self-certainty of a vigilante. The ethics of “just-war” type thinking, mixed in with the problem of cheering for a terrorist (particularly in today’s climate) give a great opportunity to re-evaluate exactly what you believe in these situations.

The graphic novel is noticeably different from the film (partly out of necessity: the novel was written in the early 80s and set in the late 90s) but the film certainly stayed true to the heart of the comic. It’s a really fun read, but I must admit I couldn’t read “V” talking without hearing Hugo Weaving’s voiceover ringing through my head.

I thought the cartoon on the right was interesting, given the recent excitement over on Bec’s blog.

(Cartoon from xkcd)

Jess posted this over on all said, and you’ve heard the story before, but I thought I’d put this up here.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6NyGdiAC6js

(If you’re reading this in a Feed Reader, it looks like it won’t come through - so make sure you visit the actual page to see the video) 

I’ve written before about my obsessions (and I’m thinking in particular about the whole “stacking thing”), but partly due to the whole being married thing, I’ve become aware of some funny little things I do. So here they are:

1. Once I get home from work, I’m unlikely to have a proper conversation for about half an hour, or an hour if it’s been a long day. Then, I suddenly get a rush of talking-ness and everything is OK.
2. I have a nasty habit of bidding on things cheaply, thinking: “it’s OK - I’ll never win it at that price”. That’s how come I’ve got Original Munchkin which arrived on Friday.
3. I frequently talk back to the news. Worse to “current affairs” shows. Even Especially when there’s no one else around.
4. I think better when I have something in my mouth, which leads to either bouts of obesity, or an inability to lend my pen to anyone other than my wife. I’m flipping between the two.
5. There’s an air freshener in our public toilet at work that goes off periodically and sounds like someone sniffing. Every single time it goes off, it makes me freak out that there’s someone standing over my right shoulder.
6. My Google Reader is currently subscribed to 186 feeds. I know that’s too many, but there aren’t any that I’m willing to give up. Not all of them are blogs: I check the news headlines from the BBC World News, and The Age, and I also get things like IT security notifications just to keep an eye out. But it’s way too many.
7. Despite my football team only having made the finals twice while I’ve been alive, having also won the wooden spoon last year, and our prospects for this looking faint at best, I still bought a membership for my wife and I for the upcoming season.

So there you are. Does anyone share any of my freaky-ness?

Purple-hearted Mark will love me for picking a fight with his arch-enemies the wee-girls, but when I read this on The Age (stolen from the West Australian) I couldn’t let it pass without comment:

“WEST COAST chief executive Trevor Nisbett has accepted responsibility for the scandals that have rocked the club but defended his job and said calls for his sacking were naive because no single person could change the player culture at a football club.”

So it’s naive to suggest that you should remove a significant part of any problem, because it doesn’t make up the whole problem. Nisbett is right though - no one person is able to change the culture of the football club, and so as a result the entire management of the club should resign if they are serious about changing the culture.