It was 12 months ago today that I first “hit the road” in my new chair. By that time, I’d already been for walks and picnics over the course of about eight weeks, but 29/08/2007 marked a further expansion of my world from my suburb to all of Sydney and the Blue Mountains. It was thrilling, signifying a new life ahead.

The highlights:

The Police: a lifetime of admiration and about 15 years of full-on fandom culminated in this one perfect night. Had anyone told me that I’d see The Police (not Sting) peforming “Wrapped Around Your Finger” live before I was 30, I’d have dismissed it out-of-hand. Unreal. Meeting Marcia Hines was a really fun moment.

Toto: a total surprise that came out of nowhere. An amazing night overall, with great food beforehand, a truly energetic, powerhouse performance by the band, then a meeting with Bobby, Greg, Luke and Simon, followed by the wheelchair stopping dead in its tracks as we made it to the car. How can you top that?

DEVO: another pleasant surprise. No other concert has stirred me like this one did, surpassing both Toto and The Police in terms of sheer showmanship. Meeting Mark and Bob Motherbaugh was the highlight, however.

27 Dresses: it wasn’t the film so much as the wheelchair lift breaking down that made this a whole heap of “fun”.

Q&A: I got to pretend to be a grownup for about an hour.

30th birthday: I got to pretend to be a grownup for about six hours.

Last weekend: marking the true division between my 20s and 30s, this was the perfect send-off to a great year—I got to pretend I was a teenager for about six hours.

And so, we now close one chapter and begin another. Where to from here?

There’s currently an excellent (and quite balanced) opinion piece by Adele Horin at the Sydney Morning Herald that is quite critical of Australia’s funding of elite sports:

But how much public money is a gold medal worth? In Beijing, each gold medal has cost Australia at least $50 million, says Kevin Norton, a professor of exercise science at the University of South Australia. Or, to put it another way, $12 million came out of the public purse for each medal of any colour. Now we’re told these sums are a pittance compared with what is needed to maintain our ranking in London.

[...]

So it would be a brave politician to resist the calls for more sport funding. But brave they should be. Stephanie Rice made us all proud, but that fleeting feeling came with a $150 million price tag. Politicians may consider that a price worth paying for her three gold medals. It bought sport-mad Australians a lot of pleasure, and that can translate into votes.

I’ll be up-front and admit to watching a small amount of the Olympic coverage—if our public funds are being depleted by this empty nationalism, we may as well get some small enjoyment from it.

But with a crumbling health system and a public education system that desperately needs more attention, not to mention a lack of funding in science and technology—you know, stuff that actually has practical, beneficial applications—we are still happy to blow up to $50 million dollars on just one Olympic gold medal. How can anyone justify this with a straight face?

Between this and the fact that the current host nation is a blatant violator of human rights, are these Olympic Games anything but a complete farce?

Those wacky Chinese can’t keep themselves from opening fire on Tibetan protesters, even while the eyes of the world are on them during this delightfully shambolic Olympic Games:

Chinese troops fired on Tibetan protesters this week and 400 people have been killed since unrest erupted in March, the Dalai Lama was quoted as saying in an interview published on Thursday.

The exiled Tibetan spiritual leader denied a comment attributed to him by Le Monde newspaper that 140 people had died on Monday when the Chinese security forces opened fire. But his office said there were casualties.

“The Chinese army again fired on a crowd on Monday August 18, in the Kham region in eastern Tibet,” said the Nobel Peace prize winner who is on a 12 day visit to France.

Zzzzz…

Let’s get back to discussing faked opening ceremonies and under-aged gymnasts!

I had another crack at the Political Compass today. I hadn’t taken the test in quite some time, so I was curious to see exactly where I fell within their 2D spectrum and if there was any change.

Here’s my result: Libertarian Left. No real change there.

But let’s be a bit more nuanced: in regards to social policy, I’m squarely in the libertarian camp (-5.23), but economically-speaking, I’m only marginally left-of-centre (-1.50). This fits my own intuition: I’m too centrist to be obviously left- or right-wing, but still clearly politically-defined in other ways.

Now, here’s the real shocker: according to their assessment of the 2007 Australian general election, I’m closest to the Greens, who were the only party in the same quadrant. The Greens are just a bit further left and much more moderately libertarian, but… Oh dear. I’ve always seen them as left-wing radicals using environmentalism to push an economic agenda and, well, maybe I should rethink things.

Anyway, take a look at Kevin Rudd’s ALP versus John Howard’s Liberals in the same graph. Truly, Rudd is Howard Lite—not that I dislike Rudd, but all those lefty uni students whose political memories reach back to 2003 (if you’re lucky) will surely be feeling like they won the consolation prize in the next year or so.

I personally realise that politics is the art of compromise and so appreciate Rudd’s efforts to bring things back more towards the centre after Howard’s rightward drift. In the current political climate, anything too far towards social liberalism is just a no-go, so people like Rudd and Barack Obama seem refreshingly moderate and sensible when contrasted with radicals like George W. Bush and, in his later years, Howard.

Take a look at the graph for the U.S. primaries, then examine the world’s current political landscape. Really, anything other than the authoritarian right is very, very unusual.

So that’s where we’re at: if you want to survive, politically, you need to simultaneously court (or at least not alienate) the authoritarian right (represented by the Christian right more often than not), then differentiate yourself by the degrees to which you’re authoritarian and right-wing. So, if by February next year we have a Rudd leadership in Australia and an Obama administration in the U.S., I’ll be very happy indeed. It’s the best we can do at this point.

Edit: I just want to add that, on the social axis, I’m closest to the Dalai Lama, and on the economic axis I’m closest to Pope Benedict XVI. I find that strangely appropriate, given my previous post…

That’s the topic for debate tonight.

I’m going to give a clear, resounding “No”… with plenty of qualifications.

Religion, as a series of unquestioned, unchanging beliefs, has consistently been used to justify and perpetuate evil throughout history. As an institution, it has often reflected the uglier side of the human race.

But when used not as a tool of oppression but rather as a vehicle for exploring the mysteries of life, religion has great value. The problem is when literal-mindedness comes into play.

The “truth” of so many of the world’s religions lies not in how factual they may be, but rather in their statements on the experience of living life itself, as expressed through metaphorical language. This is what makes these stories resonate in the soul—that’s where their truth resides.

Think of it this way: each religion is like a different lens with which to view the transcendent (i.e. what some of us call “God”). We’re all blind men grasping parts of the same elephant, in other words. So what ends up happening? The blind men begin arguing over exactly what it was they were all holding onto. Wars occur over this sort of nonsense, and real people end up dying over dogmatic minutiae.

Does any of that invalidate the reality of the elephant? Religion is the expression of the human psyche at its most profound, which necessarily means both the sublime and the corruptible. Would the world be better of without religion? Only if it would also be better off without humanity as a whole.

I’m going to try and catch the Eels game tonight, particularly because it’s make-or-break time for them for this season.

I lost interest in all this stuff for two reasons:

1. the Eels’ overall performance has been abysmal (and the Bulldogs’ even worse), and
2. study and other  annoyingly practical concerns have dominated my attention.

But now that things are marginally exciting again, I may re-cultivate an interest…

UPDATE! The Eels won 40-12. It was a great game with a bit of biffo and an attempted decapitation. Unfortunately, Mateo buggered his knee in the final minutes; still, all hope isn’t lost for the season at least.

Okay, it wasn’t me, but I secretly wish it were:

A MARAUDING gang of teenage gatecrashers got more than they bargained for when an angry householder used a whip to eject them from his 16-year-old son’s party.

Dion Driman pulled out a South African sjambok when more than 30 youths attempted to storm into the party at the rear of his home at Wahroonga in Sydney’s north.

I think his name makes him even cooler…

One of the down-sides of being known as a pretty serious Star Wars fan is how everyone expects you to be dying to see everything with the brand name on it. Even at age six I had zero interest in Caravan of Courage, and now, 23 years later, history seems to be repeating itself with Clone Wars, another made-for-TV theatrical feature released in the wake of a Star Wars trilogy. It almost makes me nostalgic. Almost.

People are acting like this new movie’s badness as a Star Wars spinoff is unexpected and, indeed, unprecedented. Anyone thinking that needs to look into the aforementioned Ewok movie or, if they’re really brave, read Shadows of the Empire.

By all accounts, Clone Wars is terrible—it certainly looks it. Still, it can’t be worse than the Star Wars Holiday Special… can it?

I finally managed to see The Dark Knight yesterday. I’ll admit that I was pretty tired and didn’t quite catch how everything fit together, so I’ll wait for the DVD in order to fairly assess the film. My present opinion, however, is that, while I personally loved Batman Begins, The Dark Knight is superior in almost every way. Seeing Eric Roberts in it was just icing on the cake!

Aaron Eckhart isn’t getting enough praise as Harvey Dent, in my opinion, but that’s due mostly to Heath Ledger’s fantastic portrayal of the Joker overshadowing everything else in the film. The Joker has always been a great Trickster figure, but here he really is the perfect embodiment of the archetype, with all its confusing contradictions. The goal here is to blur the distinctions between “good” and “evil” by introducing sheer chaos—brilliant stuff.

The highlight, however, was when a woman brought a full shopping trolley into the cinema about 20 minutes into the film. What kind of socially-retarded misfit even considers doing that???

The next film I want to see: Tropic Thunder.

Tonight I was giving a techie walkthrough for a friend via MSN (a.k.a. “Windows Live Messeger”) when I had the dreaded Blue Screen of Death (BSOD).

Man, was I pissed off. So it was that much sweeter when I read that the BSOD itself had a cameo during the Olympic Opening Ceremony. How cool is that?

At the exact moment Li Ning was rounding the lip of the Bird’s Nest during the amazing torch-lighting climax, someone snapped this photo of our good friend the BSOD nestled amongst the Nest’s steel twigs. Perhaps an Opening Cermonies IT dude spit out his coffee on the machines in the server room when Li took to the sky?

Resolved: This is more embarrassing for China than their smog and human rights record combined!