Given that last year on Anzac Day I just recycled two previous Anzac Day posts, I’d planned to write something new this year. But I haven’t.

There’s two reasons for this.

One is that I’d thought I might write something about the way the defence establishment has handled various controversies recently, including the incident at the Australian Defence Force Academy. But once I started doing the research it all got a bit too depressing. And I wondered what I might say that hadn’t already been said. So I killed that idea.

The other is that when I looked back at those recycled posts, I realised they actually still say what I think I’d like to say on this occasion. So, recycled posts it is.

Those posts are Anzac Day Rememberings and Anzac Day 2009: Sacrifice.

They shall grow not old,
As we that are left grow old,
Age shall not weary them,
Nor the years condemn.
At the going down of the sun,
And in the morning
We will remember them.
Lest we Forget

As I wrote two years ago, we trust that our politicians, who decide where and when these men and women serve, make worthy decisions about their most valuable contributions. Sometimes they never return, or return… changed.

Prime Minister Gillard, are you making worthy decisions? Tony Abbott, are your policy proposals also worthy? Please look me straight in the eye when you answer that.

[Photo credit: The rosemary sprig was taken from Matthew Hall's Twitter page from 2008. If I owe someone for that usage, I'll make good.]

It’s Anzac Day, Australia’s national memorial for those who’ve made the ultimate sacrifice for our country, and that other country.

I’ve written two quite lengthy pieces for the last two years, Anzac Day Rememberings and then Anzac Day 2009: Sacrifice. I have nothing more to add today.

They shall grow not old,
As we that are left grow old,
Age shall not weary them,
Nor the years condemn.
At the going down of the sun,
And in the morning
We will remember them.
Lest we Forget

As I wrote last year, we trust that our politicians, who decide where and when these men and women serve, make worthy decisions about their most valuable contributions. Sometimes they never return, or return… changed.

Prime Minister Rudd, Sir, are you making worthy decisions? Tony Abbott, are your policy proposals also worthy? Please look me straight in the eye when you answer that.

[Photo credit: The rosemary sprig was taken from Matthew Hall's Twitter page from 2008. If I owe someone for that usage, I'll make good.]

• The Age of the Essay | Paul Graham: This essay dates from 2004, but it’s still valid. The essay, the kind that’s about exploring an issue, is a natural form of writing online. Plus I like his comments about disobedience and creativity.
• GLAM | Wikimedia Australia: One for your diaries! A little conference called “Galleries, Libraries, Archives, Museums & Wikimedia: Finding the common ground” at the Australian War Memorial, Canberra, 6-7 August 2009. Hosted by Wikimedia Australia, with discussions on four themes: Education, Technology, Business, Law. To be opened by Senator Kate Lundy, Senator for the ACT.
• That 180ms is the bane of my life: Network engineer Glen Turner explains why the 180 milliseconds it takes for Internet data to cross the Pacific causes problems. “You’ve got to realise that Australia is almost unique in being a long way from the centre of gravity of its language. Broadly, almost all German-speakers live in Germany, whereas a tiny proportion of English-speakers live in Australia. That has an effect on Internet traffic. Most Internet traffic in Germany stays within Germany. Most Internet traffic in Australia goes offshore.”
• One thing PC users can do that Mac users can’t…: Crude but effective.
• Media and Brand Supremacy: Why the New Media Brand Could Be Nike | The Huffington Post: Heidi Sinclair notes that individual journalists and commentators are sometimes bigger news brands than the outlets they work for. There’s plenty here which meshes with my complains that some folks don’t separate the content (“news”) from the container (“newspapers”).
• texts from last night: A scarily funny collection of people’s (allegedly) drunken text messages. Don’t click through unless you’ve got plenty of time to spare.
• Death in Birth – Where Life’s Start Is a Deadly Risk | NYTimes.com: The first of three articles on efforts to lower the death rate in Tanzania. Excellent timing, given Project TOTO. Challenging to read, however
• The Angelina Factor | Bitchy Jones’ Diary: A ranty article which, in language which may be confronting for some, explores the social and psycho-sexual issues around the idea that Angelina Jolie is universally sexually attractive. Just for the record, I do not find her the least bit attractive.
• Rethinking the Global Money Supply: Scientific American: China has proposed that the world move to a more symmetrical monetary system, in which nations peg their currencies to a representative basket of others rather than to the US dollar alone. The article includes a little history, too.
• “We did not know that child abuse was a crime,”says retired Catholic archbishop | the freethinker: The retired Catholic Archbishop of Milwaukee, Rembert G Weakland, says “We all considered sexual abuse of minors as a moral evil, but had no understanding of its criminal nature… [I] Accepted naively the common view that it was not necessary to worry about the effects on the youngsters: either they would not remember or they would ‘grow out of it’.” WTF?
• Comedy Thrives in Times of Despair | Spiegel Online: Monty Python’s Michael Palin on what the financial crisis is a boon for comics, and the perils of political correctness.
• Hello Africa | Vimeo: A 42-minute documentary about mobile phone culture in Africa.
• Shell On Trial | newmatilda.com: Next week, Shell will appear before a US federal court on charges of torture, extra-judicial killing and crimes against humanity for incidents which took place in the Niger Delta. Will it be the first multinational found guilty of human rights abuses?
• Genital warts take Shoaib out of Twenty20 World Cup | ABC News: There was a time when someone’s medical history was considered private, even if they played sports professionally. Personally, I reckon the specific of Shoaib’s medical problem are none of anyone else’s business.
• PlugComputer Community: The developer community for Marvell’s Plug Computer.
• Plugging In $40 Computers | NYTimes.com: Marvell Technology Group has created a “plug computer”. A tiny plastic box you plug into an electric outlet. No display, but Gigabit Ethernet and a USB. Inside is a 1.2GHz processor running Linux, 512MB RAM and 512MB Flash memory. US$99 today, probably under US$40 in two years.
• Misguided middle-class moaners | BusinessDay: Ross Gittins explodes a few myths about Australia, class, taxation and social welfare.

You have less than three hours to nominate someone or something for “Cnut of the Week”. Sorry ’bout the late notice, but I’ve only just decided that I’m well enough to do Stilgherrian Live tonight.

We’re looking for people, organisations or other entities who are futilely trying to hold back the tide of change. It has to be something in the news in the last week, and you have to explain yourself. Nominees have to be not merely doing bad things, but failing to notice or adapt to the change around them.

Everyone who nominates and leaves a valid email address goes into the draw for a free t-shirt of their choice from our friends at King Cnut Ethical Clothing.

Nominations for “Cnut of the Week” are open until 8.30pm Sydney time, and you must nominate at the website for it to count. And also, when we draw the t-shirt winner, you must be watching the program and email us the code word within 5 minutes of your name being announced, otherwise we’ll pick someone else.

(Of course, neither they nor us are as lame and unethical as to share your email address with anyone else. I for one have site policies about this sort of thing, and so do they.)

At 8.30pm you should be watching Nick Hodge‘s program @NickHodge with special guest Mark Pesce before Stilgherrian Live starts at 9.30pm.

Who do you nominate, and why?

The cat vomited this morning. Again. Artemis has this habit of gorging her food and then, five minutes later, throwing up wherever she’s standing.

Today it was a projectile effort from the heights of the TV stand, a reddish-brown spatter right across the living room floor.

Remember that last time you threw up? How the acrid stomach acids burnt your throat and mouth? How it felt like it was surging up into the back of your nose? It’s just like that. Freshly warm and mixed with the reek of cheap fish.

You can’t help but get it on your hands as you wipe it up.

I’ll bet just the thought of that smell is causing tightness in your sinuses, clenching in your throat.

Wiping up cat vomit first thing in the morning is rather unpleasant, no?

If wiping up cat vomit is the worst you have to think about today, then you’re one of the luckiest bastards on this planet. It’s not a particularly demanding sacrifice to make in return for some furry companionship.

Today is, of course, Anzac Day, our national memorial for those who’ve made the ultimate sacrifice for our country, and that other country.

After writing a highly personal Anzac Day Rememberings last year, today I wanted to write something equally worthy. As I wandered the house pondering possible themes, Artemis did her projectile vomit trick. I was annoyed and, yes, disgusted. Then I was disgusted at myself for having such a strong reaction to such a minor inconvenience.

War is perhaps a little bit more inconvenient.

Especially for those who have to do the actual combat thing.

Australia is at war today — in Afghanistan and elsewhere. It’s a distant thing, though. Unlike the graphic scenes of our first television war in Vietnam, media is now tightly controlled. We rarely see anything but the approved images of Our Brave Boys and Girls.

And yet it can’t possibly be so neat and tidy.

I was moved by the comments of “War Weary” in Crikey yesterday:

I want nothing to do with commemorating the destruction to mind, body and soul that is war. For my father too, who served close to the full six years in WW2, war was a brain-altering experience.

I have two photos of him from that time: in one taken just before his departure he looks like any other young bloke of his era; and in the second, taken barely 18 months later, he has the gaunt, harrowed face of a man at least twice his age. He survived not one but numerous life-threatening incidents, each of which alone could have led to post-traumatic stress disorder — a condition he never fully recovered from to his death.

My father didn’t drink to drown his terrors. He put a tight lid on them and felt largely ashamed of his inability to keep that lid on. “I’m just not tough enough,” were some of his final words. Ours was a home strictly controlled and dominated by my father’s chronic and largely untreated anxiety and hyper-vigilance, and the necessity to keep him functioning at all costs so that he could earn our keep. It was a different, more subtle kind of violence than that of the alcoholic, but no less destructive.

As a Lebanese friend (born when the war in Lebanon started and knowing nothing else until well into his teens) remarked to me once: “It sounds like there was a war going on inside your home, whereas for me the war was always outside.”

My mother was granted a war widow’s pension after his death — but I felt moved to write a long letter to the Department of Veteran Affairs at the time, describing in summary the damage to all of us, his children. Where was the help for us? Each of us suffered long-term psychological damage, leading to enormous difficulties in establishing and sustaining intimate relationships. All of us have had to fund our own psychological help over many years. Not least this meant that our capacities to contribute positively to our communities were negatively impacted.

While Veterans Affairs and the military today clearly do recognise and attempt to mitigate the psychological damage of war, the grim reality and perniciousness of it have not yet permeated our cultural consciousness.

“War Weary” is right about the psychological damage of war, both on those who serve and on their friends and families. Their story is far from unique.

I remember one long night of chatting and drinking with a mate who’d just returned from… well, from some time away doing whatever it was that he did. He paused for a while. He looked into the distance at nothing in particular, the thousand-yard stare.

Then he started talking again.

Slowly.

Quietly.

You know, the first time you line up someone in your sights and you pull the trigger and see them drop, it’s pretty confronting. After you’ve done it a few times, you don’t… you don’t get used to it, but it does become a little less confronting.

In a firefight, look… everybody’s shooting, all the confusion… you don’t really connect specific acts with specific…

Then he paused again. He took a long slow sip of his beer. What seemed like an eternity passed before he said just one more sentence:

A knife, on the other hand, is a whole lot more personal.

Yes, “War Weary” is right. The psychological damage of war is appalling. But he or she is wrong about Anzac Day.

We don’t commemorate “the destruction to mind, body and soul that is war”. We commemorate the strength and fortitude of the individual men and women who face it, sometimes never to return, or to return… changed.

These men and women make their sacrifices in what we hope is a valuable exchange. Sometimes it’s to protect our very way of living from a clear global threat, and the exchange is clear. Sometimes it’s part of a more complex trade, where the motives are less clear. And sometimes, despite public rhetoric about some great terror, we fear that it’s really just for convenience or commerce.

Yet those men and women choose to serve and, perhaps, to be sacrificed.

They shall grow not old,
As we that are left grow old,
Age shall not weary them,
Nor the years condemn.
At the going down of the sun,
And in the morning
We will remember them.
Lest we Forget

We trust that our politicians, who decide where and when those men and women serve, make worthy decisions about this most valuable exchange.

Prime Minister Rudd, Sir, are you making worthy decisions? Please look me straight in the eye when you answer that.

[This piece was inspired by re-reading How I decide what and when to blog, and especially the quote therein from Umberto Eco. Photo credits: The rosemary sprig was taken from Matthew Hall's Twitter page from last year. If I owe someone for that usage, I'll make good. The two soldiers were found on a defence industry news website, but I believe the image is © Commonwealth of Australia and therefore usable here.]

Not since Saturday Night at The Duke and Another brain in my notebook has a notebook page ended up on this website.

Nicola, your attempt to pass blame to ’Pong is completely transparent. We all know you wrote this. There are witnesses.

I’ve written a rather challenging piece for Crikey today, Twitter: enabling the new global rubberneckers. Challenging to write, and maybe challenging to read.

I was disturbed on the weekend to see Twitter become some kind of morbid deathwatch. As every increment in the Victorian bushfire death tool was reported, it was retweeted and retweeted endlessly — even once the mainstream media had geared up and was providing live updates.

For people threatened by bushfires, or those concerned for the safety of loved ones, up-to-date news is vital. No argument. We also need to share our emotions as a community — that’s what makes us a community. It was heart-rending to see one 17 year-old tweet (and I won’t link), “Just got told that a few friends who live in the bushfire area haven’t been found yet. Where’s a tissue, I have a tear in my eye.”

But for everyone else, obsessively tracking every latest horror “to see what it looks like” is nothing but selfish “recreational grief”. The morbid rubbernecking so hated by police and emergency workers.

And I’ve written about recreational grief and recreational outrage before.

The article isn’t behind the paywall, so it’s free for all to read.

Just 24 hours ago, actor Heath Ledger died. Before most people even knew he was dead, I’d set up a web page asking for jokes about his death and I placed an advertisement (pictured) on Google. Tasteless. But there was a porpoise. This was Science!

Here’s what I’ve learned so far. If you have any questions as you read this, please ask them. I’ll be exploring the data more deeply over the next few days.

Actually, before we get to the juicy numbers, my motivations:

• I’d just read a great article reminding me how Google AdWords can bring traffic to your website quickly and cheaply. How fast? Let’s try!
• My page of jokes about Steve Irwin’s death still pulls a couple hundred readers every month. Regular readers know that shits me.
• Here was a breaking news story and I was ready to pounce. A perfect opportunity to see what I could learn.
• You didn’t think I’d respond to the media circus of a star’s death by mourning, did you?

According to Crikey‘s media timeline, Ledger died around 7.30am Sydney time. News broke 45 minutes later, and by 8.35am it was in Australia’s mainstream media. Just 65 minutes from death to TV news. Such is the imperative to stay ahead of the media pack by being the pack.

My jokes page was ready for business just before 10am, around 2.5 hours after Ledger’s death. The first joke was posted at 10.25am, and 8 minutes later I was called an “asshole”.

I’m not exactly sure when my Google AdWords effort went online, because I had to create an account and figure out how it worked. I’m guessing around 11am because that’s when the real flood of traffic started.

I’d bought spots in the search results for “heath ledger”, “heath ledger dead” and “heath ledger joke”. The last two cost 6 cents a click-through, but “heath ledger” by itself was 50 cents. Murdoch’s news.com.au was already advertising their own story on Google too, as were some celebrity gossip sites.

I burned off $20 in about half an hour, showing the advert to 2,758 people. 41 of them clicked through to my page. That’s a click-through ratio (CTR) of 1.48%.

I threw more money into the pot at lunchtime, but the price of a “heath ledger dead” click had gone up to 38 cents. Still, another 7,279 views generated another 168 readers, a CTR OF 2.3%. Interestingly, they all came from searches for “heath ledger” rather than “heath ledger dead” — a reminder that most people don’t think very hard before typing in their search terms.

Another 19,319 people were shown the ad on Google’s “content network” — that is, non-Google sites which show Google AdSense advertisements. That generated another 41 clicks.

For a total spend of $115.25 I got 254 new website visitors. That led to more than 40 comments posted.

Let’s put that into perspective…

My page was visited by 254 people who wanted to know about Heath Ledger. It happened in under an hour, and cost me less per person — just 45 cents each — than sending them a letter. That’s as an absolute beginner, with no planning and certainly no fine-tuning.

I’d like to have brought another batch of punters to the page once there were a few jokes online but, 8 hours after I started my experiment, the price of “heath ledger dead” hit A$6.50, and it’s still there. Too expensive for an initial experiment, but perhaps worth it if you were selling expensive Heath Ledger memorabilia.

So, the initial lessons:

• Yes, Google AdWords deliver traffic fast. Very fast. Have everything ready before you start.
• Have a clear goal in mind, and tailor your “landing page” appropriately. My goal was “Let’s see how this works,” so I didn’t think too hard. If you have a commercial goal you’ll need to think more clearly.
• General search terms like “heath ledger” are usually more expensive that more specific ones. Like “heath ledger joke”. But more specific terms can tailor traffic to your exact needs. Specific terms can change price rapidly if they’re part of an unfolding news story.
• You can monitor it, and tailor things on the fly. Google’s reports can be a couple hours behind in giving you data, but that’s still “immediate” in most business timeframes.

None of this is new to anyone who’s used Google AdWords before. But most small businesses aren’t even aware that you can even advertise on Google! So as I orient some clients to all this I’ll share my lessons.

More details as I dig through the numbers. Any questions?

Yes, Australian actor Heath Ledger is dead, possibly from a drug overdose. So now it’s time to collect all the jokes, ‘cos he can’t sue you for libel. Please add them in the comments.

Tasteless? Yes. Exploitative? Probably. Too soon for this? Yeah probably that too.

So why do it?

It’s an experiment…

More than a year after the event, a collection of jokes about Steve Irwin’s death is still one of the most heavily-visited pages on this website. More than half of the searches bringing people here are for Corey Worthington Delaney.

Tasteless is what you want, so tasteless is what you’ll get.

We’ll even throw in the phrases “heath ledger porn” and “heath ledger naked” to help things along. Index that, Google!

The comments will be moderated, but not heavily. They may take a while to show up because — oddly enough! — there are other things to do.

[Update: Scroll down to find the comments thingy. Try to spell properly. And if you're going to whinge that "It's too soon to make jokes," then at least suggest how long someone has to be dead before they're not sacred any more. And try to spell properly.]

[Update 27 January 2008: The two rules about relevance are now being enforced. Comments will not be published if (1) they repeat jokes which have already been posted, unless they're substantial improvements, or (2) they're just some anti-gay comment that doesn't have any relevance.]

[Update 3 January 2009: Comments have now been closed. See my very last comment for the reasons.]

Oops.

Five years on, I’m not mourning. I didn’t know anyone there. There’s only subdued anger. I’m angry that the deaths of 2749 human beings (plus 19 terrorists) have since been used for questionable political ends. Angry that Australia seems to have gone along with everything that’s come out of it, like a faithful little lap-dog. (However even the most cowardly little lap-dog will bark when he’s asked to do something wrong.) And angry that America’s worst ever terrorist attack has such a stupid name.

In 1945 a B-25 crashed into the Empire State Building. It splattered and left a hole in the wall. So my initial non-reaction to the 2001 crash is understandable. How was I to know the goddam Twin Towers would fall over? And when three decades of Star Wars and HHGG have inured you to entire planets being vapourized, as TV entertainment goes, a couple of buildings falling down is a bit tame.

Now I suspect I’m not alone. So it disturbs me to see every publicity-seeking politician and TV puppet engage in an orgy of necrophiliac frottage, hoping to improve their credibility through feigned concern for people they never knew. Naomi and her lizard was one thing. But this…!

On the other hand, Richard Farmer’s article The politics of funerals in Wednesday’s Crikey ponders these quotes from Encyclopaedia of Death and Dying:

Broadly shared emotions produce a sense of community. Political regimes have long understood this and have capitalised on the power of state funerals as a mechanism by which to enhance social solidarities and to reaffirm the legitimacy of the power structure.

The degree of public mourning following the deaths of Lady Diana and John F Kennedy Jr led social observers to wonder if grief is an ever-present latent feeling just waiting to be exploited by the political elite, if people’s lives are so empty that they engage in recreational grief… Perhaps individuals are emotive puppets manipulated by the mass media and/or political elite, and people cry because they are shown other people crying for a celebrity.

Perhaps he’s got a point. With (supposedly) less emphasis on the extended family, with (supposedly) our social institutions falling apart around us, people are yearning for some sort of connection. So blast them with imagery of strong emotions and they’ll hook themselves in — voluntarily. 9/11 or Big Brother, it’s all grist for the mill.

And finally, the name…

Remember the Alamo! goes the great war cry. Remember Pearl Harbour! Rich, evocative names.

“Remember 9/11″ sounds like it was invented by an accountant.

All “Remember 9/11″ tells me is that it’s the day we finally stopped even pretending that we’ve lost out to American culture. Without a complaint, we parroted “9/11″ — even though for 96% of the planet’s population “9/11″ means “the 9th of November”. Or, to Commonwealth citizens over a certain age, “nine shillings and eleven pence”.

(And, as an aside, when did we decide that we express dates as “September 11″, not “the 11th of September”? I’m guessing about the same time we decided we were too cheap to re-voice TV adverts for new movies.)

If a week later you’re still after some 9/11 material, here’s four suggestions:

1. Read the words This hole in the ground or, even better, watch the video so you can hear the power of this words as US TV presenter Keith Olbermann delivers an 8-minute piece to camera, ripping into the President. I can only dream of writing such a powerful, angry yet focussed speech. (Thanks for the pointer, Zhasper.)
2. Consider Paul Sheehan’s op-ed piece The war is over: now to proceed on our terms from the Sydney Morning Herald. (Thanks for the pointer, John Birmingham.)
3. Review How 9/11 changed America: In statistics, a fascinating info-graphic from BBC News. (Thanks to information aesthetics for the pointer.)
4. Do some reflection of your own on 9/11, and on Australia’s response. Write down your thoughts. Send them to your federal member of parliament.

Oh, and Garth? Next time, mate, tell me “A war has broken out, a big one,” and maybe I’ll get up and put on the coffee.