WYRMLOG

Hey Hey it's Bigotry!

Sunday October 11th 2009

I thought I'd better weigh in on the whole Hey Hey it's Saturday blackface incident since it seems to be getting a lot of international attention and I don't particularly want to be tarred with the same brush (oh man, that sounds like a really bad pun, sorry) that so many of my fellow Australians seem to be being tarred with.

(If you don't know what it's all about, just Google it)

The important facts that a lot of commentators seem ignorant of are as follow...

1: Blackface doesn't have the same notoriety here in Australia as it does overseas. We have a different culture here to the United States and don't have the long and shameful history of blackface on the stage and cinema. Sadly a lot of Australians are completely ignorant of this history and are hence unaware of the pain and offence it can cause.

2: The performance on Hey Hey was a recreation of an act originally staged 20 years ago. Idiotic football celebrities aside it's a rare and notable thing to see anyone done up in blackface in modern Australia for any reason (and if it does occur it's met with disapproval and severe criticism).

3: The performers are of various racial backgrounds, including Indians and Asians. It's not a simple case of a bunch of white Anglo Saxons blacking up.

4: Hey Hey is (God knows why) a treasured and well loved piece of Australian culture, attacks on which by 'foreigners' seems to trigger a strange and disproportionate form of 'my country right or wrong' defence from some sectors of the community.

Basically the act was not intended to cause offence, or reference the blackface stereotype. It was just a bit of really badly thought out idiocy that never should have gone to air if anyone at Channel Nine had actually stopped and used their brains for a few seconds. The fact that it did go to air, and that it did cause offence is something that should be unreservedly apologised for.

Now, onto the reactions. While the innocent (albeit thoroughly stupid) intent of the performers can be defended, the resulting act and the offence caused cannot. There seems to be a certain sector of the Australian population (many of them members of the anti 'political correctness' brigade) who are leaping up and down over some perceived right to slather boot polish on their faces and go around loudly eating watermelon on the basis that "it's just a joke" and "people shouldn't be so sensitive". A lot of these people are hitting on two particular points in their arguments, which I shall now address.

1: Harry Connick Junior once took part in a sketch parodying a black preacher, and used makeup to darken his skin. Hence he's a hypocrite.

2: Robert Downey Junior was made up as an African American man in Tropic Thunder and no one complained.

Neither of these points is particularly valid. Yes, Harry Connick Junior was made up with darkened skin for that sketch, but there's a difference between the slight darkening employed there, and the wholesale boot polish job employed on Hey Hey. Similarly in Tropic Thunder the make up and prosthetics employed actually make Robert Downey Junior look African American - as opposed to a white man painted black - and much of the humour in the movie is based around the inappropriateness of using make up (and plastic surgery) to make a white actor look black. This subtlety seems to be lost of a lot of people defending the Hey Hey act.

So that's my two cents. I guess what I'm trying to say is that there's plenty of Australians - such as myself - who were outraged, disgusted and embarrassed by the fact that such a performance should be put to air in modern day Australia, and who are just as outraged, disgusted and embarrassed by the ignorant loudmouths trying to defend it. Insomuch as I can personally apologise for the actions of my fellow Australians I do so, completely and unreservedly. Sorry.

What a lucky man he was!

Tuesday October 6th 2009

Hmmm, well I haven't done much posting recently have I? I'll put it down to getting back into the swing of work and spending much of my time uploading and annotating photos from my UK trip. I've almost finished the first day's worth!

I've also got caught up in a writing challenge on Whitechapel. It's the first time I've tried writing anything but mindless blog drivel and role playing material in ages, so we'll see how it goes. The deadline is November 1st - with luck it'll actually be readable by then.

Kraft has come to it's senses and realised that "iSnack 2.0" is one of the worst marketing decisions in history. They've posted a bunch of more popular names to their website for the public to vote on and will be announcing the replacement name this week. I didn't bother to vote - I'm just happy that clueless tech-speech abomination is being banished. Anyway, the only name I would have voted for is 'Voldemite' and that wasn't on the list.

Before I go I'll direct everyone's attention to this song, which I discovered over the weekend - "Lucky Man" by Emerson Lake and Palmer. The song itself is (in my opinion) nothing special, a fairly dreary rock-folk dirge about a guy who goes off to war and gets shot. What makes it remarkable is the play out, the only explanation for which I can come up with is that they got a humpbacked whale in to do guest vocals and dosed it up on LSD.

Listen to the first 20 seconds or so to get the scope of the piece (it's all like that), then jump to 3.20 to be astounded by the assorted wails, shrieks, groans and howls you get when you pump twenty litres of hallucinogens into a giant sea-going mammal!

That's all I've got to say.

I can't stop listening to this...

Wednesday September 30th 2009

I'm not very good at singing songs but here's a try...

If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch,
You must first invent the universe,
Space is filled with a network of wormholes,
You might emerge somewhere else in space,
Somewhen else in time,

The sky calls to us,
If we do not destroy ourselves,
We will one day,
Venture to the stars,

A still more glorious dawn awaits,
Not a sunrise, but a galaxy rise,
A morning filled with four hundred billion suns,
The rising of the milky way,

The cosmos is full beyond measure,
With elegant truths,
Of exquisite interrelationships,
Of the awesome machinery of nature,

I believe our future depends powerfully on how well we understand this cosmos,
In which we float like a mote of dust in the morning sky,

The brain does much more than just recollect,
It intercompares, synthesises, analyses,
It generates abstractions,
The simplest thought like the concept of the number one,
Has an elaborate, logical underpinning,
The brain has its own language for testing the structure and consistency of the world,

A still more glorious dawn awaits,
Not a sunrise, but a galaxy rise,
A morning filled with four hundred billion suns,
The rising of the milky way,

The sky calls to us,
If we do not destroy ourselves,
We will one day,
Venture to the stars,

For thousands of years,
People have wondered about the universe,
Did it stretch out forever?
Or was there a limit?
From the big bang to black holes,
From dark matter to a possible big crunch,
Our image of the universe today is full of strange sounding ideas,

How lucky we are to live in this time,
The first moment in human history,
When we are, in fact, visiting other worlds,

A still more glorious dawn awaits,
Not a sunrise, but a galaxy rise,
A morning filled with four hundred billion suns,
The rising of the milky way,

A still more glorious dawn awaits,
Not a sunrise, but a galaxy rise,
A morning filled with four hundred billion suns,
The rising of the milky way,

The surface of the earth,
Is the shore of a cosmic ocean,
Recently we have waded a little way out,
And the water seems inviting...

Glorious Return

Tuesday September 29th 2009

Well, I'm back.

Actually I've been back for over a week, but madness involving unpacking, getting back to work and getting my landline fixed (no internet for days! days!!) have prevented me from doing much online. Even the Queen's birthday weekend was a blow-out thanks to a nasty 24 hour cold that had me coughing like a Dickensian orphan and feeling like death for most of Sunday and Monday, but I'm more or less back on deck now.

I've started uploading my holiday snaps onto Flickr. This is quite a daunting prospect as it turns out I took hundreds, if not thousands of the things. I haven't even managed to get all of the first day's up yet - let alone annotated and geotagged. It's clearly going to be a long term project, you can check my progress here.

Other things of note. The new Vegemite product has apparently been named "iSnack 2.0". If this is the kind of thing that's going to happen when I leave the country I can clearly never take a vacation again. Also, although I can't speak as to the accuracy of the last panel, this XKCD pretty much describes every day of my life :)

OK, that's it. Expect more updates soon. Probably.