Category: Essay

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Wankitecture Sydney: why bother?

These architectural features on Cumberland Street in The Rocks, Sydney, look quite lovely I suppose — until you stop, look and think. Then you’ll realise they’re completely pointless. They’re an architectural wank. Wankitecture.

The things with the red canopies look like they’re some sort of, well, canopies to protect people from sun and rain. But they’re positioned such that they offer no protection whatsoever to the benches and picnic tables. No, the benches and picnic tables sit fully exposed to the elements. The only things the things with the red canopies protect are bleak patches of pavement.

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Twitter: a guide for busy paranoids

[This is a slightly edited version of the article written for “Stories: from The Local Government Web Network”, issue 3, August 2011, which was distributed at the LGWN’s conference in Sydney on 18 August. Some material in this article also appears in Tweeting your way out of Paranoia, the closing keynote presentation I delivered.]

If you’re not yet at least experimenting with Twitter, the real-time social messaging service, you should be.

Suppress the corporate paranoia. It’s a lot easier than you might think. And while Twitter does get far more attention than its relatively small size might suggest — truly active Twitter users number perhaps 20 million globally compared with Facebook’s 750 million active users and counting — it punches well above its weight in terms of connecting with influential community members.

Twitter may not ever become the core real-time service used by the masses. Or if it does, it may only be for a few years. You only have to look at the last decade to see the then-leading MySpace surpassed by Facebook in 2008, just four years after Facebook was founded. Google’s launch of Google+ in June this year has generated plenty of speculation that the search and advertising giant’s foray into social networking will in turn wipe Facebook off the planet. Who knows?

There will always be some real-time social messaging service, however. Whether that’s Twitter as a stand-alone service, or whether we all end up using a real-time component of Facebook or Google+ or something that has yet to be deployed — none of that matters. The principles and practices of real-time messaging will doubtless end up being much the same.

Anything you might do with Twitter will be easy to migrate to any other real-time messaging system. The lessons you learn will carry across too.

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Right, Google, you stupid cunts, this is simply not on!

[Stilgherrian writes: Oh dear. This post has generated a lot of interest. Thank you for that interest. But if you’re visiting for the first time, I strongly suggest you also read my lengthy response to commenters and the fair warning before posting your own comment.]

I knew this would happen sooner or later. Google, a data mining company in the United States, has the ignorant arrogance to tell me, a citizen of Australia, that my name — my legal name — doesn’t fit their scheme for how names “should” work. Well fuck you, arseholes!

What’s worse, this is how they tell you.

They suspend your profile, tell you your name is wrong, and tell you to change it.

Your profile has been suspended.

It appears that the name you entered doesn’t comply with our Names Policy.

The Names Policy requires that you use the name that you are commonly referred to in real life in your profile. Nicknames, maiden names, and so on, should be entered in the Other Names section of the profile. Profiles are currently limited to individuals; we will be launching a profile for businesses and other entities later this year.

Your profile will be suspended until you do edit your name to comply with the Names Policy: you will not be able to make full use Google services that require an active profile, such as Google+, Buzz, Reader and Picasa. This will not prevent you from using other Google services, like Gmail.

We understand that Google+ and it’s [sic] Names Policy may not be for everyone at this time. We would hate to see you go, but if you choose to leave, make a copy of your Google+ data first. Then, click here to leave Google+.

Listen, Googlecunts. This name precisely fits your Names Policy.

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Respect, please, NSW Police!

Respecting someone’s religious beliefs is something I though was basic etiquette. But apparently not so, according to NSW Police Commissioner Andrew Scipione and Police and Emergency Services Minister Michael Gallacher.

I have no idea who the women in the photo are. I cannot identify them. But I know that if I wanted to identify them, asking them to remove their burqas would cause offence.

If I needed to identify them, I know that in 2011 there are methods other than demanding they show their faces. They’re Muslim women, so I’m fairly sure that I could arrange for another Muslim woman to view their faces in private, without men present.

But this is how those aforementioned gentlemen’s views were explained in a NSW Police media release headed Police Commissioner meets Minister to close Burqa loophole earlier this evening:

Mr Scipione made the meeting a priority today, declaring the Carnita Matthews Appeal decision [my linkage] raised “real concerns” for police officers.

“The Minister and I are in total agreement that we need to take action to close this potential loophole and strengthen police powers to demand identification where necessary,” Mr Scipione said.

“We are working together to fix this issue and legislative change may be the answer,” the Commissioner added.

As I said on Twitter, I thought it might have been nice if the Commissioner and Minister had even just hinted that respect for people’s religious beliefs might enter into their thinking.

But apparently someone’s sincerely-held religious beliefs are a “real concern” and a “loophole”. We must change the laws so the police can ignore them. At least that’s what it sounds like.

I would like to think that this is simply a poorly-worded media release. After all, I respect the NSW Police for doing a difficult job that I wouldn’t touch with a barge pole and, looking at the world scale, I know they’re mostly on my side. Unlike some countries we could all name.

I would like to think that the police minister, being an experienced politician, knew how to balance the different factors at play in the community.

But this is the same police minister who reckons we shouldn’t worry that people are illegally arrested because police computer information is out of date. This doesn’t exactly fill me with confidence.

[Photo: Afghan women wearing their traditional burqas when going outside in northern Afghanistan, by Steve Evans. This image is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license.]

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50 to 50 #9A: The Real Space Age

While the superpowers were busy spending billions on a Space Race that would ultimately lead to a series of blurry television pictures, there was another, far more real, Space Age unfolding. In my head.

As B Smith said, in the 1960s there were snap-together rockets in Kellogg’s breakfast cereal boxes, including reasonably detailed models of the actual Apollo spacecraft, some of the more speculative NASA designs — even, as this close-up photo shows, vehicles from Thunderbirds and Captain Scarlet and the Mysterons.

The real imagined future of US and Soviet space exploration blurred with the imaginary imagined future of Gerry Anderson to create, in my mind at least, a gloriously unfolding set of possibilities.

My favourite breakfast cereal toy of all was the Kellogg’s Molab, pictured above — although I’m pretty sure mine was blue. Apparently it’s loosely based on NASA concepts for a manned MObile LABoratory for cruising the Lunar surface, much like this book cover illustration. General Motors even built a mock-up. However once the Moon Landings had happened, the follow-up programmes to Apollo were killed off.

I kept losing my Molab’s wheels. Probably because I didn’t glue in the axle pins. But that didn’t matter. I re-imagined it as a spacecraft. The wheel mounts became fold-down exit ramps for rapid troop deployment.

But my favourite space-related TV series from that era was Fireball XL5. May I recommend the opening and closing titles? Or perhaps this version by Bob Downe.

[Photo: Kellogg’s Molab cereal packet premium image thanks to Wotan of the Moonbase Central blog. If you grew up during the Space Age, you’ll lose yourself there for hours.]