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.

Sunday night, another Tim with a bit of an unusual hair thing happening. We went to see Tim Minchin on his latest national tour. Being a comedy musical act, I found some of his older material got a less-sharp reaction from the audience than it should have. But that's just because most the people there have heard songs like Canvas Bags, If You Really Love Me and Dark Side before. His new material though, because he was able to deliver it fresh to the crowd, went down a treat. I loved Prejudice and Confessions amongst the new songs, but some of the others were a bit too strongly tainted by his dislike of religion - it's a theme I relate to, but he can go a bit overboard and harp on about it.

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 :)

Home

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.

Phew!

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.

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