Today was a TWO Situationist slogan day! This morning on the bus, written on the back of a seat, I saw this: "In a society that abolishes adventure, the greatest adventure is to abolish that society."

Then, on the way home, I saw this stuck to a pole outside the NSW library: "they try to keep us permanently at war, permanently in dept and permanently in the dark, but they don't know there IS no permanence".



(Actually, a little Google tells me that second one is more of a reference to the epic of Gilgamesh than Situationist rhetoric, but the spirit is the same.)

Check this out - the front page from todays Daily Telegraph. Sydneys most popular tabloid newspaper, a News Ltd publication, unrelentingly right wing, often called the Terrorgraph because of it's alarmist headlines.


It really caught my eye today with this headline. It's got an interesting back story. The news is about how the government is cutting a deal with the US to allow troops to train and be stationed in Darwin, the capital city of the Northern Territory, on the tropical north coast. There's already a large navy port there, but this seems to be more of an army deal.

That's all very well, but this headline is also a reference to a line from a song by a band called Midnite Oil, once king of the pub rock bands in the 80s. The Oils had a strong left wing lean, often writing songs about indigenous land rights and US imperialism. This particular song was called US Forces. The first verse went like this:

US forces give the nod
It's a setback for your country
Bombs and trenches all in rows
Bombs and threats still ask for more.

The lead singer of Midnite Oil was Peter Garrett, an angular giant with a shaved head who came from surf culture and was notorious for his jerky spastic dance stye on stage. Garret went on to become a lawyer I believe, although there was no mention on the Wikipedia page, and then got into federal politics.

As minister for the environment, he presided over a government initiative to subsidise installing metal foil insulation into the roofs of houses, to cut down on the energy needed for heating and cooling. This became a fiasco when the media started investigating claims that shoddy installation of the conductive foil by contractors was causing house fires. The Telegraph lead the charge, as they usually do, and conveniently let the story die when it was revealed that there was only a slight statistical increase in the number of fires caused by foil installed under this scheme, and that Garrett had been doing his job and any blame was really the fault of his advisers and the contractors who were rorting the system.

The Telegraph has always hated him, and his recent policy of following the party line on environmental issues hasn't softened their ire. If anything, it seems to enrage them more, as though he can't even be a consistent target as a commie pinko. I would bet good money that this headline reference, to a now obscure and mostly forgotten song, was a deliberate stab in the back for him and his party. It really is fascinating that a large popular newspaper can have such focused ire and anger, to turn this important news story into such a well directed barb at a single individual.

A few months ago, I mentioned having a strange and puzzling memory surface in my brain. It was of a newspaper comic about a town called Weatherby, where it was always raining on one side of the street and sunny on the other, and the strange adventures of a boy and girl who lived there. I remembered especially the last issue, in which the town was destroyed by a terrible disaster and the couple disappeared into a void, and my parents telling me it was because the artist was dying of cancer and wracked with existential pain. All my online searches turned up nothing but references to Mr Weatherbee in the Archie comics.

Well, I found it.

While working in the NSW state library, I couldn't stand it any longer, and went and wasted a couple of hours in the microfilm section. I started in the Sydney Morning Herald reels for 1980 and worked my way back. Finally I caught it around 1976.

The comic was called Max and Min the Weather People, by one Max Foley. I immediately did a web search with this info, and amazingly found a reference in a blog from only a couple of weeks ago. There isn't much info about the artist either, this entry here is about it. He seems to be still alive, and under 70! I wonder if I can contact him and see about getting the series scanned and put online?



Rereading the comic again after all these years, it's just as good as I remember. It had a very sweet and dreamy vibe, and seems to hark back to the surreal dreamlike comics of the early 20s like Little Nemo, although much more modern, with a lot of self-referential humour.

The final destruction sequence was roughly as I remembered it, although it went on for several weeks. No wonder it stuck in my mind, I must have been appalled by the way this entire fictional world was being undone week by week, with dozens of familiar characters meeting their end in various ways.

I have a faint memory and I can't seem to back it up with research. I seem to remember a comic in the Sunday papers when I was young, in the 70s. It was about a boy and girl who lived in a strange city called, I think, Weatherby, and everything in this comic was about the weather. I remember the town was split in two by the main street, and on one side it was always sunny and on the other it was always raining. There was a dome like an observatory, but the devices inside were used to control the weather.

The thing that really stands out is my dim memory of the end of the comic and the end of Weatherby. I remember a devastating final issue where an asteroid crashes into the weather dome, causing disaster throughout the city, the main street split down the middle, stranding the boy on one side and the girl on the other. Then reality itself dissolved away and everything vanished. All expressed in about 16 four-colour panels in the Sunday funnies. I think my parents said the artist who drew the comic was dying of cancer and this was his angry final comic when the paper told him he had to wrap it up.

The problem is, every time I google "weatherby" and "comic" I end up with Mr Weatherbee, the principle of the high school Archie went to. Even [weatherby comic sun herald -archie -jughead] doesn't do the trick. Anyone out there confirm I'm not tripping here?

Yes, I am still alive. I just haven't been feeling much like posting anything here for some reason. Perhaps it's just the psychic contamination from the mass exodus leaving LJ. I'm not interested in shutting down my blog, but I would like to do something else creative online in another forum.

One thing I've been contemplating is using a box of Polaroids I picked up when I did some volunteer work at Reverse Garbage. The set contains over 700 blurry amateur Polaroids, many with Dymo labels attached to the white frame describing the scene. I think of them as shots from the Deserted World, because I can't think of one which has an actual human face or figure in it. This could be because whoever donated them to Reverse Garbage removed the shots of their family or friends, but it could also be the mind of the photographer. I also find it difficult to photograph people, especially strangers, but these photos tend to be snaps of the most mundane, ugly and empty sights you could imagine, like the sign of a seedy motel in Woop Woop, or some red tile roofs under a cloudy sky, or a swan shaped plant pot made from a tire. The only signs of human presence anywhere are a bizarre shot of an outstretched arm holding a melon, and a few shots of pets pawing at disembodied knees. It's a desolate, melancholy world, and I might set up a Tumblr for it if there is any interest.

Michelle and I are recovering from a serious bout of that intestinal malady which are notorious on cruise ships. We got it from a friend of ours we visited on the weekend. She was recovering from it, and we caught it. We both woke up with a chunder on Tuesday and spent most of the day in bed. It made me feel like I had been thoroughly beaten all over with hammers. Luckily I had a canister of Gatorade powder in the cupboard, so I was able to keep us hydrated and avoid the worst of the side effects.

It was interesting to me because it's the first time I've vomited in about 18 years. I well remember the last time, I was living in the storied Cyberspace warehouse in Glebe. I had just eaten a tasty doner kebab, and washed it down with a sixpack of VB stubbies. I got the signal, and made it to the dunny just in time to regurgitate a large quantity of still-clear beer and a floating raft of chopped parsley. The fact that my insides had so cleverly sorted out the nights repast was highly amusing to me.

Today's amusement courtesy of the AACR2 rules:

22.14. SPIRITS
Purported communications from spirits are entered under the name of the spirit (see 21.26). If the spirit is supposed to have been a real person, follow AACR2 rules and establish the name of that person (if not already in the authority file). Add the word (Spirit) in subfield ‡c to the complete heading for the person. Note that if the name established for the living person includes dates, these will be retained (cf. LCRI 22.14, Jan. 5, 1989), e.g.,

100 1 ‡a Beethoven, Ludwig van, ‡d 1770-1827 ‡c (Spirit)

I was talking with some friends recently about the large number of brothels in the area. In Sydney brothels tend to advertise their existence by putting up their street number in large red neon on the front of the building. They usually also have the front windows of the building obscured in some way, and there are other signs.

One of my friends then said "And what about Lip Spa down the road?"

I've been catching the bus past Lip Spa for most of the past decade, it's a major landmark on Parramatta road. It's a two story concrete block of a free standing building, that used to be a nightclub. It has a large sign on the front that reads LIP SPA and a big photo billboard of a pouting set of lips. All this time I've been riding past twice a day thinking it was a day spa which specialised in doing things to womens lips. Honestly, I thought it was a place where girls went to get highly specialised and technical things done to their lips. If I ever wondered I thought it might be where you got those collagen injections from, or they did expensive exfoliating and professional lipstick, or that permanent tattoo lipstick, or perhaps there were girls sitting at tables carefully lowering their pouting lips into little bubbling spa baths! I had no idea it was a brothel, and in hindsight it seems so obvious. Those big lips will never look the same to me. I feel like such a wallace.