bill.journee.org

Rolf Harris says what?

Not often am I truely surprised by the things which people utter in the public arena – although those who are least in the position to comment on things are sometimes publically the most vocal on the topic. However, Rolf Harris has managed to take me by surprise.

ROLF Harris regrets a racist slur in a song that carried him to fame nearly 50 years ago, but he has little sympathy for some Aborigines, who he says need to get off their “arses”.

I’m all for him apologising for the racist slur in the lyrics of his song, but perhaps he should have stopped there, because from there he dug himself a deep, deep hole. My favourite of the article is perhaps:

“The attitude is that in their original way of life they would really wreck the surrounding countryside that they lived in and they would leave all the garbage and they would go walkabout to the next place,” he said.

In one sentence he manages to effectively annul his apology and bring a new level of “racist slur” into the equation. I seem to have missed the memo where Aboriginal people “would really wreck the surrounding countryside that they lived in”, and given the fact that global warming because of all the rubbish we’ve pumped into the atmosphere I think it’s a bit rich of him to even approach the idea of Aboriginal people having traditionally ‘wrecked’ the land.

On a more general level, I may be old fashioned, but an apology – especially for something such as he was offering – should not be qualified. They especially shouldn’t be qualified by views which are at best catastrphically naieve and uninformed.

Anyway, off the soapbox.

P.S. Layout soon. Hopefully.

Woohoo!

I finished my honours application today, after being slightly scared but mostly enthused by a meeting with John Bradley about working on the Yanyuwa language for honours next year. I’ll still be working with Simon Musgrave as my supervisor, but John will be helping me by providing his data and personal insights, so it’s a team effort!

The question isn’t set in concrete (and most likely won’t be for a long while yet) but the outline is that I’ll be looking at the kinship system of the language, and looking at what is lost as the language becomes more extremely endangered. In the case of Yanyuwa, the majority of the speakers have unfortunately been lost within the past 12 months, and the language is almost certainly going to have no fluent native speakers within the next decade. I’ll be working with John Bradley and the various resources he has available on the language including other work done by a missionary linguist Jean Kirton from the 60s onwards. The long and short of all this is that there is a lot of information on the langauge, and plenty to be written on. It certainly doesn’t hurt that the kinship system in Yanyuwa is insanely complicated, even for an Australian indigenous language. What it also means is reading. Lots of reading. Actually I should probably be doing some of that now…

On top of the fun of getting honours stuff happening (I’m told there’s many-a-PhD-thesis to be had from the data in John’s collection, too!) I also got my semester results back tonight. It’s all happening today!

Anyway, HDs all ’round this semester, so no complaints there. That certainly won’t hurt my chances of getting into honours next year (not that that was ever going to be a problem, from what I’ve heard they pretty much don’t knock anybody who has grades above the cut-off point – 70% average – back).

Anyway, now that this post has made me sound lovely and egocentric, I’m going to leave it there.

Oh. And I need to make a layout for this thing. Remind me.

The home stretch

Ahoy there, hordes. Not a great deal has happened since last time I wrote a blog entry a week ago (hence the general lack of updates) but I didn’t want the blog to get stale so I felt compelled to write some kind of entry.

I’m on the home stretch with the honours application now, by which I mean I’ve done absolutely nothing since I last posted a blog entry. What is on the home stretch is the actual time I have to do the application and hand it in (it’s due on Friday). To that end, I’m going in to the uni to talk to Simon tomorrow about the questions and more broadly about the other subjects I’ll be doing in honours and such. Then I just need to figure out how I’m going to get any decent reading material either up to Townsville, or source it within Townsville itself.

I’m looking forwards to getting up to Townsville, although now that the weather’s officially been cold here for the last week or so, I’ll probably die of heat exhaustion as soon as I get there.

We’ve finally got ADSL2+ happening here, which is overall much less exciting than it sounds because something’s not working properly and it’s running at about the same speed as what we already had. Technical problems, they’re the cornerstone of a successful fantasy relationship between a hammer and a computer that comes ever closer to being a reality. At the moment, the solution is looking like a complete recable of the line from the front of the house to the router, which is something like 35-40 meters of cable, hopefully we can just pull the new cable through on the old one because last time it was done, roof access was needed and difficult to attain. I’ll keep you updated on the progress (or lack thereof) in here, although I suspect you’ll hear shortly from my good friend Mr Hammer.

On a completely different note, I’m 21 in just under two weeks, so once my honours stuff is under control I can blabber on about that for a while, and then I’ll be in Townsville. Unfortunately, until then, I have very little to actually talk about.

Slight improvement (+ bonus rant!)

Ok I can’t say I’ve changed this layout on any meaningful level, all I’ve done is change the colour of the header and do a crappy little image to replace the layout’s logo. I will do a proper layout shortly but I have other stuff to attend to. That, and where would we be without the prologue/epilogue of every post where I promise that I will eventually get around to making a layout for the blog?

I might get off my arse and modify this layout heaps in lieu of having something that’s not WP to replace this with (which will also be when I make a proper site, rather than only having a rambling blog talking about the fact that I can’t be bothered making a layout for my own site.) If you’re intending to get a website designed by me, I actually do make layouts, and I’m not generally this lazy. My lack of enthusiasm for this stems more from its lack of use, rather than anything material in terms of layout-ness.

On the honours front, not much has happened since my last blog entry. I’m waiting in Simon to get back to me on a new meeting date (I think he’s trying to coordinate a meeting with a few people to discuss the potential of having shared honours supervision between a few different people in the linguistics and possibly the anthropology departments.) The next step beyond that will be filling in the application and getting it to Anna in time (the last Friday of this month). I’m doing some reading to try and get my head around the question I want to look at, and get an idea of what’s already been done before. So far as I can see, my question isn’t as original as I thought it was, but I think most people who start properly looking into an honours question would find that there’s things which come awfully close to what they want to look at yet aren’t quite the same.

Speaking of linguistics… Continue reading…

3 days later…

Since I promised to make a new blog post 3 days ago, I’ll make one now.

I had that meeting, and I’m back to my first idea for an honours topic. That’s a good thing, because the reason I decided not to do it was because the person who head(ed) the endangered language program at Monash wasn’t available for honours supervision. When I actually have the wording for my topic, I’ll post it on here, but as yet I still don’t have it.

Other than that I can’t say I’ve done a huge amount since my last blog post. After 2 weeks of insanity-inducing lag brought about by my use of a (relatively new) 8400GS graphics card in this computer which somehow lacked the ability to run Windows Vista, I’ve got a new graphics card. Hooray, stuff works again. I blame Matt for having used the 8400 at all, ’cause everything was fine before that came on the scene.

I’m thinking of sticking another pre-made layout on the blog, because this one’s getting on my nerves, and I can’t be bothered writing one from scratch. This time, though, I’ll choose one which I can update a little more easily with some graphics and stuff so it’s a little more ‘mine’ even though it won’t be ‘mine’. I’m sort of off coding for WP at the moment. Actually sort of off coding more generally…but specifically WP.

Anyway, I need to deal with some red tape at Centrelink now, so I might write some more useful stuff later after I *headdesk* the morning away.

Well that was a while

I know it’s been a while – ages in fact. I just logged on to find a 1000 word draft-tirade I wrote back when the world economic crisis just began. Strangely enough there were no snide comments about Sarah Palin – I must have been feeling particularly focused at the time.

I haven’t forgotten about this blog, but basically I’ve been insanely busy, then I’ve been so un-busy that I haven’t wanted to do anything as cerebral as write in this blog. That said, a layout is coming. One day. I blame Matt at this point, ’cause back in the day he was working on some kind of CMS or something for me because I’m a lazy lazy person.

I have a meeting with my (potential, and very likely) honours supervisor tomorrow to figure out a question and generally figure out what’s happening with honours. That should actually be interesting, because I’ll actually have to put my idea into some kind of coherent sensible wording which works with what Simon specialises in. I’ll say exactly what that is once it’s known – hopefully tomorrow afternoon (“Two updates in two days!” I hear you say, dropping to the floor with euphoric excitement and just a little boredom.)

There was actually a reason I came in here to type a blog entry, but with all the general stuff – and the excitement of re-reading my theories on climate change and economic viability which I won’t bore you with now – I’ve forgotten just what that was. Never mind, I’m sure it’ll come to me at some point.

Part of it was something to do with wanting to take more photos, which will become somewhat more easy once I’m in Townsville and have some awesome stuff to take photos of. I have a week in Townsville on my own (or at least I should be on my own) so I’ll:

1. Get some preliminary studying done for honours, which I’ve been told needs to happen over the summer break, and a week all on my own in a strange town with nobody around is probably the best chance I’ll get at this for the break
2. Break out the camera and get some interesting photos of places around Townsville. This’ll be easier when nobody else is around, because otherwise me wanting to take photos of things which I find interesting becomes a drag for everyone else. Random house-sitting FTW.

Now, I might get back to the photoshopping I’m meant to be doing, haven’t started, and can’t remember my idea for. I’ll (hopefully) be back tomorrow with more riveting news.