The name “peacocks” is obviously a mistranslation. After dodging another peacock poo today I decided they are meant to be called “poococks”. This would also give us “poofowl”, “poohens”, and “poochicks”. All of which seem remarkably appropriate given their amount of excrement that they continually leave underfoot.
Archive for October, 2006
Coprophobia
Sunday, October 15th, 2006Protected: Testing password protected Wordpress posts
Sunday, October 15th, 2006Wadworth on Chocolate
Saturday, October 14th, 2006‘Twill make old women young and fresh.
Create new motions of the flesh. And
cause them to long for you know what,
If they but taste of chocolate.
- James Wadworth
Rabbits, names, goats and Josh Pyke
Saturday, October 14th, 2006Warning, eating of cute fluffy bunnies follows.
On Thursday night I headed into Freo after work to catch Josh Pyke at the Fly By Night Club. I wandered randomly to Frarri Café (sic. note the cunning attempt to dodge a law suit for trademark infringement). On offer I noticed they had rabbit, something I rarely get the opportunity to try (this would be only the second time). So, I opted for it, accompanied by a glass of the Hayshed Hill white. The serve was quite generous and the rabbit came on some slices of pumpkin and triangles of polenta in a watery sauce. If I wasn’t trying to experience the taste of the meat itself I would have described the dish as bland, but it certainly let one taste the meat. I guess the taste could probably be described as ’stronger chicken’ or something along those lines.
Glancing at the menu I noticed that rabbit, in Italian, is “coniglio”. And the colloquialism for rabbits is “coney”, as in “bag a brace of coneys for lunch”, which probably means it’s derived from the Italian. And of course “Coney Island” is probably not named for its abundance of icecream holders or large circular pyramids, but for an abundance of rabbits. A glance at the Wikipedia reveals that I may be partially right. Except it was Dutch. And it may have been cone shaped hills. Or something.
Full of food, wine and a cappuccino for less than $30 I head off to the Fly By Night club, which at 22 minutes before the advertised 7pm start time seems quite deserted. Conveniently, the Sail and Anchor is located around the corner, and a quick walk there nets me a middie of Brass Monkey Stout fresh from the top of a new keg. Quite yummy. I hear some eastern staters at the bar referring to Fremantle as Freo (Frio?) di Janeiro, and calling the place a boomtown. Interestingly I must have wandered through the bad part of town, because I noticed a pawn shop, detox centre (although it may have been a ‘new-age’ one), and a Good Sammy outlet. I’m not sure if parts of Freo are slipping back into the pre-America’s cup boom state of existence.
A brief glance in the Sail’s bottle shop (must try that chocolate beer sometime), where I don’t see anything more special than I could find at the International Beer Store, then it’s back to the Club where a short queue has formed. After buying my ticket and getting my stamp (”Stamped by Brad”), it’s a beeline to the bar and then acquiring a seat on which to sit and drink it. The supporting acts are Princess 1.5 and Jen Cloher and The Endless Sea, both of whom were entertaining. The Fly By Night club is sort of a big yet intimate venue, last time I was here I fell in love with Hope from My Friend The Chocolate Cake.
Jen made the mistake of asking what is there to do in Perth, and before anyone sensible could answer, someone piped up with “Chase goats”, which I’m sure is something our tourism industry isn’t pushing as hard as a recreational activity.
About 10:45pm Josh and his band come on stage. He looks familiar as he’s wearing the same shirt he wore in his “Memories and Dust” film clip. As well as content from the new album he plays “Private Education” and of course “Memories and Dust” and closes the set with “Middle of the Hill”, as an encore performing the older “Vibrations in the Air”, and “The Doldrums”, both of which I liked. I would have been much happier if other club goers hadn’t decided that during the main act was a good time to try to have a chat with their friends over the music.
Josh Pyke is playing the Hyde Park Hotel tonight (Saturday).
Catching Spiders with Honey
Friday, October 13th, 2006Much as I think blogging sucks time out of your life, one of the cool things about running your own blog is that you can see how people find your page, and what they’re looking for when they find you (Puggles, recipes, and the seemingly no longer available NCIS transcripts). You can even see the search engines that haven’t been announced yet spidering your site and gathering your content for whatever nefarious purposes they have. Or see exactly how frequently the Googlebot pays your writings a visit.
The advantage of this is that you can then tailor what you write to better match what people are searching for, or explore other areas around the topics to see if maybe there’s some other closely related topic that’s even more popular. Combined with Google’s Adsense feedback about what parts of the site are making money allow you to further optimise what you write, attempting to search for local maximums in what you might earn you money.
Interestingly, it seems not unsurprisingly that content is king (as Philip Greenspun’s been saying for some time now). People don’t find pages through the flash animations at the start, or the carefully designed front page, they find sites by starting in the middle at the page that’s got the info that the search engine indexed and for which they were searching.
Sadly though this leads to those strange sites which consist of people paid to write essays about high paying Google Adword keywords, like “Asbestosis Lawyers”, “Aromatherapy” or something (note subtle insertion of those keywords into this post :). These sites for whom search engine optimisation is their sole reason d’etre.
Really smart people create sites they don’t have to create content for themselves. They can throw a bone-like meme to the rabid dogs of LiveJournal and other social networking sites and then wait for them to spread it amongst them, each linking to their meme pages with ads upon them. Hopefully with some less-than-small clickthrough ratio. The rest of us schmucks still have to write their content themselves.
Or there’s always something like DunkinDonutsTalk.com or other ‘Brand Talk’ sites which provide brand news and gateway comments from consumers to management and back.
Most advice is that your blog should focus on a specific area of interest. Unfortunately I find that the internet has commoditised most of my interests, and being some sort of science fiction loving computer geek who role plays just doesn’t cut it as interesting in the days of the Internet. However I guess I’ll probably just keep writing about what I know, and that’s most easily summed up as ’stuff’. Or my spinoff Mac blog 
The Iranian President
Thursday, October 12th, 2006From the September 19th address to the United Nations General Assembly by Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad:
he Islamic Republic of Iran is a member of the IAEA and is committed to the NPT. All our nuclear activities are transparent, peaceful and under the watchful eyes of IAEA inspectors. Why then are there objections to our legally recognized rights? Which governments object to these rights? Governments that themselves benefit from nuclear energy and the fuel cycle. Some of them have abused nuclear technology for non-peaceful ends including the production of nuclear bombs, and some even have a bleak record of using them against humanity.
Which organization or Council should address these injustices? Is the Security Council in a position to address them? Can it stop violations of the inalienable rights of countries? Can it prevent certain powers from impeding scientific progress of other countries?
The abuse of the Security Council, as an instrument of threat and coercion, is indeed a source of grave concern.
His speech was boycotted by the United States representatives.
Full transcript available on the NPR site.
His Wikipedia entry is less than stunning though, although its neutrality is disputed.
The camera frequently lies
Wednesday, October 11th, 2006HP’s new digital cameras offer a ’slimming’ feature, just in case you don’t like the look of the people whose photos you’re taking.
Cool name
Tuesday, October 10th, 2006If you’re going to be an investment company, you may as well have a cool name - Fat Prophets
Andrew Denton in Perth
Monday, October 9th, 2006Watching Andrew Denton interview Joanne Lees tonight on Enough Rope reminds me that Andrew will be in Perth at Luna Leederville on Wednesday 1st November talking about his movie about a Televangelist convention, “God on My Side”. Tickets are available online.
It also reminds me of travelling the Stuart Highway during the World Solar Challenge soon after Joanne’s life changed, and the unknown places that still lie in the heart of Australia.
The Road to Iraq
Monday, October 9th, 2006Tonight’s Four Corners episode investigates how the war in Iraq is being used as a recruiting ground for Muslim extremists (the episode includes mention of documents on the internet about how to get to Iraq).
The thing that struck me was how much some of the recruits looked like the average geeks you see at science fiction conventions (well, the thin ones at least). Perhaps they’ll be the new recruiting grounds.
