luminiferously yours

Everytime I got in a tro-tro or a taxi, it seemed that half the productive population of the town, fit and healthy young men and women in the prime of their life were walking up and down the streets in between commuting vehicles trying to sell miserable amounts of goods for miserable amounts of money. These were well-turned out people, people who took pride in their appearence and people who, with the right amount of training, I could see pretty much doing any job that a developed country could offer them. But there they were walking from car to car selling everything from individually wrapped portions of PK chewing gum to t-shirts to extremely tacky cushions.

Continue reading PK, PK, PK – street selling in Ghana…

I had close to zero expectations or knowledge of Ghana before I arrived but I never imagined that I would be sitting at a bar in Kokrobite watching hunters circle their prey to the sound of a cover band playing Bob Marley badly.

Kokrobite has two faces. The first is an extremely poor fishing village about 30 km from Accra, the capital of Ghana. The second is a booming resort with its long relatively clean beach covered with speculative development although in Ghana it is hard to tell whether the decaying husk of a hotel has been abandoned or just a stalled project. After all, many of the McMansions that have sprung up around the hills of Kokrobite are in the same condition – half constructed unsightly piles of poorly made bricks with only a pot-holed dirt road leading past them. The government has not caught up with the expansion of suburbs.

Continue reading Big game hunting in Ghana…

Six weeks goes pretty quickly when you’re not paying too much attention to time.

I’m writing this entry back in my white air-conditioned room above Darwin. I’m especially thankful for the AC because the build-up started while I was away. The humidity has risen significantly and tonight as I was walking back from the gym, build-up clouds were forming above me. I may even see the Wet start towards the end of my final eight weeks here.

Anyway, I’m hoping to post a few retrospective entries in the next weeks. I wrote less than I wanted to. I hardly sketched. And I dont think I took more than a dozen photos. But I did jot down some notes which I’m hoping to expand.

After a marathon 26 hours on Monday, this phase of the project is finally over. It resumes in 6 weeks. The evaluation period will take 8 weeks and at this stage, it’s looking like as much work if not more. It depends of course on how many respondents we get but the RFT over all of its components consists of approximately 1000 questions. I’m estimating around 2500 answers in total over the 14 packages every one of which I and the rest of the team will have to evaluate. And some of those answers are going to be very detailed and quite long. I’m not anticipating many weekends free when I get back. Continue reading over for now, and away again….

As this isnt a review of “Let the Last One In”, there’s going to have lots of spoilers after this break.

Continue reading The three futures of Eli and Oskar…

Before I got into the caveats I should start of this entry by saying that I had a great time. Because I did, I had a great time. But then, I’ve also been working 6.5 day weeks for longer than I care to remember and having 1 whole day off with two half days on either side would probably make any outing quite wonderful.

Being in the Pethericks rainforest where there’s some thermal pools about 100 m from the main dance floor, trickling clear streams wending its way through palms and greenery, cascades that keep going forever also helped. I doubt that I’ve been to a more beautiful party site and I doubt I will again.

Having said all of that, I dont think I’ll go back to Isotopia even if I am in town next year. I’ll probably give its competition a go instead. The Darwin Winter Solstice Festival is located at the same site after all. One of the main problems I had with Isotopia was the lack of choice in music. On Saturday night, only the main stage was on and until 1am or so, there were only local bands playing.

Continue reading Isotopia in Darwin…

After being hooked on the Facebook game Warbook for a little while and writing a stupidly popular entry on it in this blog, I jumped across to the D&D based Tiny Adventures – an almost no-brainer piece of fluff which didnt really last very long.

Now, I’ve discovered My Heroes Ability, a super-powers based Facebook game. It’s really not worth writing about either even if it does have more parameters to manipulate and the fighting is in real time thus adding marginally more strategic interest.

Continue reading My Heroes Ability…

There was a benefit gig in Darwin last night for one of the longstanding members of the alternative music scene here. 17 bands of various quality and 2 stages all for the princely sum of ten bucks. There was a bbq too and a salad table that various people had brought dishes for. I couldnt help but notice that a bowl of pasta salad was uniformly avoided but everything else went and the sausage sizzle went all night long.

It was pretty well organised actually – the inside stage had the heavier louder music for the handful of younger kids who’d turned up in a pack and was busy trying to create a mosh pit of five. Looking at them jump all over each other in mock aggression like a bunch of puppies, I felt strangely sorry for them – the rest of Darwin is strictly down the line mainstream or hiphop. Young post-punks like them wouldnt stand a chance in the schoolyard or on the street. But I guess it adds more grist to the emo mill.

Continue reading Small town…

I found the site http://asianposes.com today. As far as a site goes, it does its job well – lots of pictures of cute asian girls doing cute poses all roughly categorised into the different poses. Mudras for the modern asian girl.

Continue reading Nyan nyan!…

The film based on this novel by Phillip Roth was on the plane on the way up from Melbourne but I couldnt bring myself to watch it seeing as it didnt have anything to do with scifi.

However, I found the novel in the library the other day and am now reading it slowly. Slowly because even though it is a short novel, it has the sense of a lifetime of experience distilled into it and every sentence rings as true as a bell. I am enjoying this novel in a way I havent enjoyed a book in a long time. I like Roth’s meditative reflective style, I like Roth’s unyeilding unsentimental inspection of the narrator.

Continue reading The dying animal…