I recently found myself in a debate with some supporters of the bid for Australia to host the World Cup in 2018 or maybe 2022.
At the heart of the discussion was the idea that hosting such an event would be beneficial for the national economy, in terms of tourism, investment etc. But I've always been a bit skeptical of such claims. Did the Olympics in Sydney in 2000 help the hosting city and state? I've never seen the figures.
So I was glad to read this article today.
In 2000, NSW's share of Australian tourism fell.
When the US hosted the World Cup in 1994, the economic effect was a multi-billion dollar loss, rather than the four billion boost its supporters claimed.
With that in mind, I hope Australia not only does not host the World Cup, but does not even bid. To make a bid for something that'd be detrimental economically would just be daft.
After looking for somewhere to do volunteer work on Christmas Day, and finding noone would call her back, my girlfriend and I decided to go to Newcastle for Christmas Day, and spend it with my mum, most my siblings and nephews.
Despite expecting large amounts of traffic Christmas Eve on the F3, there wasn't. And on Christmas Day when we drove back, traffic was light. And on the way home, no trucks - so there wasn't the speed-differential traffic rubbish you'd normally get on the F3 and Hume Highway.
A much easier trip than I expected.
I want to get some content up here, and I'll fiddle with the appearance and theme as I go.
Earlier this month was The Weekend of Two Tims.
We first went to see The Whitlams perform their Eternal Nightcap album with the Sydney Symphony Orchestra in the Concert Hall of the Sydney Opera House. It was a lovely night, a Friday, and Circular Quay even put on fireworks timed perfectly with the gig's interval. After the interval, they played a few of their hits from other albums. But seeing Eternal Nightcap played as a set was a highlight, and one I wasn't expecting. It's always been my favourite Whitlams album, with its dark themes of self-destruction, broken love and disillusion. The weird thing about the night though was Tim Freedman's hair: ever since I've been a fan of the Whitlams, he's had disshevelled scruffy hair. At the Opera House though, it seems he'd gotten a proper haircut, and with the grey scattered through it, he looked like, well, a banker. :)
I was pretty wrecked for the next day though because we drove back from Sydney immediately after the gig - and got home about 1.30am. Gone are the days when I could do such things and be chirpy in the morning. No, instead I wasted almost the entire weekend lazing around in shorts and a grotty t-shirt, doing some gardening or watching some iView.
Last night, this article was shared with me. It explains how television has sucked up all the "free time" created by modern technology, and so instead of doing something useful, people sit around watching TV.
So how big is that surplus? So if you take Wikipedia as a kind of unit, all of Wikipedia, the whole project--every page, every edit, every talk page, every line of code, in every language that Wikipedia exists in--that represents something like the cumulation of 100 million hours of human thought. I worked this out with Martin Wattenberg at IBM; it's a back-of-the-envelope calculation, but it's the right order of magnitude, about 100 million hours of thought.
And television watching? Two hundred billion hours, in the U.S. alone, every year. Put another way, now that we have a unit, that's 2,000 Wikipedia projects a year spent watching television. Or put still another way, in the U.S., we spend 100 million hours every weekend, just watching the ads. This is a pretty big surplus. People asking, "Where do they find the time?" when they're looking at things like Wikipedia don't understand how tiny that entire project is
Go have a read of the article. It's quite fascinating.
You'll probably have to turn the TV off first though.
If you're lucky, you'll never turn it back on :)
I don't live here by choice.
Some people love this city, its climate, culture, size, geography.
I don't.
I live here because it's a compromise.
My son is in this city.
My work is in this city.
My girlfriend is in this city.
I'd gladly move home, to my hometown. The city where I grew up. But that is quite a distance in the future, if ever.
Except, of course, my hometown is in NSW. And NSW is, for now at least, an absolute fucken joke.
I live here because it's a compromise.
My son is in this city.
My work is in this city.
My girlfriend is in this city.
I'd gladly move home, to my hometown. The city where I grew up. But that is quite a distance in the future, if ever.
Except, of course, my hometown is in NSW. And NSW is, for now at least, an absolute fucken joke.
Okay, that was a heavy post to start off with. And for that reason, it took me a while to let it settle. But now it has, I can move onto more normal transmissions. In future days.
As best I understand it, she expected to die so she wrote a blog post which would be a farewell. Because she used WordPress, one of its features allows a blogger to write a post, and date it sometime in the future, and it would remain hidden until that date. I knew she was unwell - we exchanged SMS messages in the days leading up to the crucial time. I knew her life was falling apart. But unlike most who read her blog, I was more than just a reader of her website - I was a confidante, a sounding board, a support, a special project. I was her friend.
I was at work that day. I think it was a Thursday. And a former workmate who also read her blog daily called me. Had I seen her blog? No posts for a few days, and now her special post was being displayed. It was the sign to those who knew that her battle was over, and she was gone.
The post didn't say she was gone. It said she was leaving her current life behind, and leaving to go start a new one. Only, to those of us who'd spoken to her and had her read the final post to us months before, it was a sign to us. Her story had ended, and she'd died.
On the day, I could do little except advise my supervisor, and leave the office. I rang some of my friends, and told them, and I went to spend the afternoon with my girlfriend.
A week later though, I began to receive spam emails. Invites to join this website or other, supposedly from her. I wrote it off as just one of those things that happen in the unfathomable world of spam marketing. Especially when I learnt some of our mutual friends had received similar messages.
Something else in that first week made me suspicious. I don't recall now what it was, since it's now two and a half years in the past, but something made me curious enough to go hunting for a death notice in the newspaper. Following my father's death, I learnt that a death notice was a legal requirement. I searched both the tabloid, and the broadsheet newspapers. My search was never going to go well: I was uncertain of the date, only able to narrow it down to within 4-5 days; I was only able to search online, because I lived in another state; even worse, I knew she traveled under several different names, and was uncertain of the spelling. Not finding any death notice given those holes in the search was hardly surprising.
A couple of months went by, and there was a storm in blog-land.
Her final post got removed, put back, and a newer post was made by one of her "friends". I got an abusive email from the same friend for suggesting I had doubts about the official story. Someone archived her blog as it originally was, and posted it up afresh.
Almost two years went by.
Around Easter, I noticed someone was using her account in a chat website. I made an obscure reference to it on my own blog, so noone except her would know what I was referring to. She surfaced. I got a comment or two, and had an email chat. She told me things noone else could have. It was definitely her. I got a vague explanation - she'd been very sick, and when she recovered well enough to even know the blog post had been published, it was far too late. Better to leave it all in the past, and so she had.
In the last year sometime though, she'd started writing again, a new blog, a new online persona. And just like the first time, she gained readers, including some who had read her the first time around.
Just last week though, some of them began to realise the styles were similar, and did some detective work. Some digging revealed the links between then-her and now-her. And blog-land went into melt-down. She'd lied to them. She'd faked her death. She was the lowest lifeform imaginable. The righteous indignation of those who thought they deserved to be told two years ago that she'd not died was shouted from the rooftops.
But the world isn't that simple.
She'd not lied. Even though her intent when she wrote that post had been one thing, it also matched the scenario as it'd played out outside her control.
She'd not revived her old blog or told readers individually about the discrepancy because, they just didn't need to know. Those who have spoken to her since, and discussed it with her without the hysterical rantings of the blogerati have come away realising that she did what was right.
As for me, who was her friend then, I still am.
She taught me long ago friends love each other regardless of the flaws and chinks in their suits of armour. Nothing's changed.
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