i burn, you burn, we all burn for melbourne

radiotherapy finished up last thursday, and thus brought to an end my pre-surgical treatment plan. now i have a PET scan (the one that checks for activity) on the 21st, and an MRI (the one that sees exactly where it's sitting/what it's attached to) a couple of weeks after that. which is the kind of window i need to justify another trip to this beautiful city. currently rendered even more wonderful by the final week of the comedy festival. yes, yes. it's all research. so far i've seen (aside from the 24 hour show, which, while still an amazing experience, could not live up to the almost life-changing experience that was last years)

glenn wool - here describing his dissatisfaction with contemporary swearing. reasonably offensive. while this bit didn't make it into the show we saw, he was nonetheless absolutely fucking hilarious.



daniel kitson - who has evidently decided that embedding is too good for him, but you can find his gala performance from 2003 here. his show went for nigh on two hours and was the most lucid, enervating, philosophically charged, enagaging piece of comedy i think i've ever seen. the man is doing wonderful things with the medium.

josie long - sweet, endearing, quirky female comic from the uk. one of those girls who is so adorable that when she swears it makes your heart melt. not necessarily hilarious (not a huge amount of videos kicking about), but this video of her describing her favourite books remains fairly heart-warming.



reginald d. hunter - this video from the gala is far, far different to his show (though no less funny). his show was slow and measured, filled with odd pauses and drawn out sentences. you don't often see a comedian control themselves like hunter. there's never any apology for the things he says and the way he says them. he'll just let them hang, leave 4-5 seconds of silence, and then resume in an entirely different vein of thought. quite remarkable. also, quite funny.



still yet to come: phil nichol, kristen schaal (mel from flight of the conchords) and mark watson. plus late night comedy and assorted party fun times. oh so good.

and if you're in the mood for my self-indulgence, this is a video of a set i did two weeks ago in perth



and finally, this is the best thing i've seen since that count video. my god he sounds drunk:

almost there

three more bursts of radiotherapy and i'm through phase two of this semi-arduous process. hard to know where the time's gone really. people continually ask me how i fill in my days and i'm constantly at a loss as exactly how to answer them. certainly i'm not bored, but i still haven't made it through the backlog of books and tv shows that i had intended/presumed to by this point in the process. the internet accounts for a lot, surely. google reader is next best thing to a live-in partner given the amount of time i devote to it. i'm also spending a huge amount of time immersed in music of all descriptions, which is rather lovely. another tick next to the internet. then there's the obligatory facebook communiques. internet again. blogs. internet. news. internet. idle wanderings. internet.


and sometimes, i leave the house.

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1. will it blend?: at some point in early 2007 a man by the name of tom dickson had an ingenious idea as to how best market his range of high-powered, ultra-resistant food blenders. he'd use them to blend a range of normal household products, including rakes, ipods, bic lighters and glow sticks, and then release them as a series of videos on the internet. the rest is viral marketing history.



anyone else keen to do a buy-in to get one of these babies? this has theme party written all over it...

2. movies in typography: a great blog post compiling together the best examples of movie scenes told only through animated typography. some of them are brilliantly inventive.



3. the 8 least impressive guiness world records: i can remember the magic of the guiness book of world records dying tragically for me when i realised that the ability to toss a cow pat farther than any other human who had decided to toss a cow pat was perhaps not worthy of official recognition. this list brings together a lovely assortment of those moments.

4. the battle for wikipedia's soul: now anyone who has broached the topic of the internet with me in the last year or so will probably know that i rank wikipedia as among humanity's greatest achievements (notwithstanding this somewhat depressing list of the most needlessly detailed wikipedia entries). with it's ethic of free collaboration, free access and non-profitability, nothing seems to symbolise the potential of the internet to invert/radically shift the power structures of the pre-digital age than the further development of wikipedia. however, the economist here picks out the emerging tension between the inclusionists, those who think wikipedia should include everything that it's contributors choose to contribute, and the deletionists, those who think varying amounts of quality control are needed to prevent the encyclopedia from collapsing into triviality/irrelevance, and how these increasingly bitter editorial feuds are starting to impact upon the collaborative base upon which wikipedia was founded. the missing wikipedians page provides a compelling glimpse of the users and their reasons for leaving. given the recent emergence of google's 'knol' project, with its focus upon individual merit and proclaimed authorship, it's an interesting time for the wikipedia project.

5. the top 25 tv put-downs: a magazine called 'radio times' decided that it was within its remit to do a poll on the best put-downs from the past 40 years of television. my personal favourite, patsy from absolutely fabulous: "one more facelift on this one and she'll have a beard". oh zing. zing.

6. and finally, this. stare at the centre of the picture for thirty seconds and then look away while blinking rapidly. coooooooooool.

cancer: an exercise in stasis

man, things were exciting at the get go. there were diagnoses, treatment plans, scans, life upheaval and emotional superfluity. now it's all just variants on low-impact routine. radiotherapy is monday to friday, but for 10 minutes apiece. as lizzi said 'it's just like a 9-5 job. but 9-910'. with that said, they very rarely get me in and out in the allotted ten minutes, and i have had multiple opportunities to further avail myself of the daytime television force-fed to the waiting patients at the sir charles gardiner cancer centre. so, what have i learnt?

1. ready, steady cook is as good evidence as any as to why we might still be considered minnows on the global entertainment stage.

2. dr. phil is even more odious than previously assumed. at one point he based a show around the dr. phil house, in which he collected together a racist, a black, female social elitist, a guy who hates society and a misogynist in a house while he force-fed them his own brand of social normalcy. and it wasn't the earnest attempts at group personal development that really grated, but rather dr. phil's earnest brand of self-congratulatory, auto-erotic ego massage. and then at one point someone in the waiting room asked if they could turn it up. and they did. and i withered a bit inside.

i also hold out severe worries for the calibre of human stashed in his studio audience. watching an excerpt from the christmas special, in which they 'shocked' the audience by rewarding them with medium-quality giftwares (0.5 carat diamond earrings! a credit card with $200 loaded on it! because that's really going to take the pressure off!) i couldn't help but notice the tears streaking the faces of a number of audience members. to paraphrase lydia millet from her novel 'oh pure and radiant heart', it seems that the idea of secular america doesn't so much refer to a diversification of beliefs as it does a diversification of demagogues. everybody's still looking for their messiah. and maybe dr. phil could be it. what jesus would have looked like if he could have held on for another couple of decades.

3. oprah can get a laugh out of the line 'you know how you always pack too much?'. maybe i'm trying too hard...

but radiotherapy is pretty low impact, and to this point in time i've only been left with eerily geometric radiation burns on my front and back (which are really just low-end sunburns, but 'radiation burns' has that little extra kick, you know?), a slight morning scratch in my throat and some moderate lethargy. i am becoming a nap ninja. last week they kept on rostering me on at 8/9 am, so i'd sleep for 5-6 hours, get up, go for treatment, come home and sleep for another 2-3, get up, do what i do during the day, and then go down again around 5. it's like looking into the lifestyle i'll be living when i'm 80. although hopefully without the tumour.

in other news, my hair is coming back. like jesus himself (that's an easter joke). at this point in time it seems darker than before, and my facial hair is considerably thicker and darker too. other body hair is returning as well. which makes it look kinda like i'm going through puberty all over again. exciting times.

and finally, i'm back in melbourne from the 6th to the 19th of april. make space in your social calendars.

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1. the procrastination flowchart: a fair explanation of why this blog gets updated so irregularly.

2. the best medical pictures from 2007: i'm kinda disappointed i didn't make it in. this is a picture of red blood cells leaking from a ruptured blood vessel. coooooooool.




3. the playmobil security checkpoint: getting kids scared early. playmobil cavity search cubicle sold separately.


4. presumably the dollar palace has gotten rid of wal-marts ever so onerous 'pants' policy



5. what ronald mcdonald used to look like. as someone said, the subtitle to this ad could quite easily be 'how to lure a child into your car in 60 seconds'. or possibly just 'gone in 60 seconds'.



6. let's paint and exercise tv. against a backdrop of hypercolour camera effects, a rumpled, unfit man in a paint spattered suit runs on a treadmill while painting badly, taking abusive calls and pursuing other side interests - in this episode, making blended drinks. all at the same time. so awesome. so overstimulating.



from a list of the 7 most insane moments on cable access television (which is worth browsing in its entirety - if you dare, no. 1, the 'merrill howard kalin show', can be found here)

7. a news anchor and roving reporter crack the shits at each other. fabulous television.




and i'm done. enjoy.

absurdity

and that's me being consumed by the immensity of the stage at his majesty's, photo courtesy of a friend seated well back in the gods. this photo was taken at almost the exact moment that i managed to accidentally turn off my microphone at the very beginning of the set. which was not the best way to soothe my already jangling nerves. as a result my opening gambit kinda fell flat, and i then spent half the set trying to win over the sections of the crowd who were convinced that i was just an aberrant character comic trying to make jokes about cancer because he had no hair. i won them over by the end, but the damage had been done. weird, and a tad disappointing, but still, it was one hell of an experience. especially for my 9th set of stand-up...


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1. judge a book by its cover: a librarian in america keeps a catalogue of the worst covers she encounters in her day to day work. i gotta say, i do enjoy this hawaiian pidgin bible:



EDIT: oh my good lord. the pidgin bible has a web page. with extracts. go here now!

But da angel guy say, “No scared. I come fo tell you guys Good Stuff From God dat goin make you guys an all da peopo stay good inside. Dis day inside King David's town, one boy wen born dat goin take you guys outa da bad kine stuff you stay doing. He da Christ Guy, da Spesho Guy God Wen Send. He da Boss." (Luke Tell Bout Jesus 2:10-11)

2. 41 awesome science fair experiments: photographs of some sterling science projects being staged by america's best and brightest. as my mate dave said, i so want to hang out with this guy:



3. LOLTapirs: this is exactly what you think it is.

4. OM NOM NOM NOM: this, on the other hand, is not.

5. song charts: a flickr photo pool where people upload semi-scientific graphs of the logic behind popular songs. this is kinda what my thesis was about. only not really.



and to keep in the mood of the day, here's a video that no amount of explaining could possibly explain:



now go waste your days! back soon

p.s. a casual reminder that i'm also a regular contributor to electrorash, a melbourne based electro/indie/awesome music blog, so head over and see what else is keeping me occupied at the moment

all continues apace

i began radiotherapy last tuesday. despite the process essentially boiling down to me holding very still while they shoot me with gamma rays, it's all a bit of a non-event. well, at least to this point in time. each treatment lasts from between 5-10 minutes, although most of that is just spent positioning you on the table. the actual blasts themselves are completely invisible and last for about 3-4 seconds a pop. then you get up, put your shirt back on and get on with your life. still no signs of potential side effects, but they're probably unlikely to emerge for another week or two anyway. i was rather disappointed to work out that the chances of me turning into the incredible hulk are apparently minimal, but i'm still hoping that at the very least i might end up with an incredible hulk shoulder. and when i get angry it turns green and huge, and shoulder butts its way through a tank. with me hanging on the end like a marionette puppet... even so, everyone continues to tell me that radiotherapy is as nothing compared to the chemotherapy shitstorm... but then i look back to the almost complete lack of tangible effects that the chemo had on me, and i wonder if that adage can possibly hold.

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other news of import:

1. i got through my raw semi-final. next stop is the state final, on at his majesty's theatre on march 8. in front of 1200 people. shit me running. tickets are available through BOCS

2. i had been hoping to do a couple of elective units at uwa this semester in order to chip away at the 15 odd units that i presumed i still had left in my law degree. however, in a rather... odd turn of fate, it turns out that, by a miracle of modern academia, la trobe only thinks i have 5 units left to do. yes, by the mere act of transferring my degree to another state, i have lopped two thirds of it off. i now have less law to do than most of my friends. this is both hilarious, and slightly unnerving. they've credited me for trusts (because it was bundled up with equity) despite the fact that i have never done trusts, and really have absolutely no idea what they are or how they work. hopefully they won't come up in any future interviews...

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odds and sods:

1. stuff white people like: this does exactly what it says on the packet. a blog of things that are peculiarly white, such as #70: difficult breakups"" or "#67: standing still at concerts". brilliantly done.

2. fuck i hate garfield. i mean, everyone does, but for me it goes deeper you know. i feel like he stole certain portions of my childhood. luckily some form of comic redemption is at hand, because similarly resentful individuals have been doing experiments in garfield. first up we have the classic random garfield generator which simply combines three disparate garfield panels and mashes them together to form a newly absurdist take on feline-canine-human interactions. and then we also have garfield minus garfield, a collection of garfield strips that have had the cat removed. leaving jon to speak aimlessly into the air. it's like, existential, and shit.

3. a distressing, but awesome video of a slow motion karate chop. this clip is made by the sound effects.



4. a wonderfully embarrassing video of a man attempting a public proposal at an nba game but being rejected by the object of his affection. i can only hope that if something similar ever befalls me, there'll be a giant mascot on hand to aid with the comforting. commentators would also help.



5. a man using crystal glasses filled with different amounts of water to form music. i can only imagine how many hours of hard work and experimentation it must have taken to get to this point, and exactly how little real world application it actually has.



and that's plenty. more soon. or as warranted.

audiovisuals

back from a thoroughly enjoyable, if not a little flat-strap tour of melbourne and its people. was good to feel part of the rhythms again though. there's a lot to like there. but it remains a future contingency for the moment, and perth has plenty to keep my thoughts busy. my raw comedy semi-final is on this thursday at the charles street hotel, and i'm doing a run through of the material at the shapiro comedy night at the brisbane hotel on tuesday. i'm rather excited actually. and if the prospect of 5 solid minutes of jokes about cancer gets you all hot under the collar then you should come to one/both of them. tumour humour is the new aids.

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remember prince? me too. what i don't remember is this 1987 incident involving james brown and a black michael jackson all whiling out on stage together. only problem is that prince seems like he may be a little... hepped up. as they say on the streets. best vocal performance ever? almost definitely



if i was manager of an office, everyone would be using hawaii chairs. hell, i'm tempted to get one for home. i just can't get that jingle out of my head...



and finally for some audio. radiohead's 'in rainbows' was not only a pretty stonking album, it was also a pretty stonking exercise in the capacities of digital distribution. their 'pay as much as you want' policy was both reasonably revolutionary, and awesome. of course a subsequent experiment by the slightly less cultish trent reznor and saul williams entitled 'the inevitable rise and liberation of niggy tardust' has not fared so well, but the idea of freely available music underpinning a new musical economy is kinda intoxicating. but i digress. yesterday i stumbled upon a project by producer/dj amplive called 'rainydayz', a hip-hop recreation of 'in rainbows'. despite being hit with a cease and desist halfway through, amplive managed to plead his case and now the album is available for FREE from the website behind these words. While it's a little patchy, there's some pretty cool tracks on there and it also features vocals by a whole suite of mcs, including perennial favourites chali 2na (who has the deepest voice in the universe) and del the funky homosapien (who doesn't). definitely worth the download though. think of it as doing your bit for the new musical age.

of idle delays and imminent returns

somehow my flight to melbourne has been delayed by two and a half hours, meaning that it now leaves 15 minutes prior to its immediately subsequent melbourne-bound brother. how a flight which takes little more than three hours can be delayed by close to the entirety of its duration isn't wholly clear to me, but it's given me a fine opportunity to take advantage of the free food, beer and internet available from the wonderful world of the qantas lounge. i'm onto my second rotation on the buffet. they've introduced pan-asian finger food. exciting.

more exciting (probably) is the fact that i'm actually going back to melbourne. albeit briefly. still, a week in this fabulous city is more than enough to get me all hot under the collar. it's coming courtesy of the enforced break between chemo and radiotherapy, which doesn't kick in until the 19th. and there's people to see, festivals to attend, bars to frequent and stand-up to do. oh my lord yes. had a meeting with oncologist last tuesday which seemed to clarify the likely shape of the next few months as well. i'll have radiotherapy from the 19th of feb to the 4th of april, followed by another six week break as i wait for my body to de-irradiate itself before we look into surgery around mid-may. best case scenario (i.e. no chemo post-operatively) i should be done around my birthday, medium-case (i.e. chemo post-operatively) and i should be done some time in auagust. which might be too late for second semester, but i think this city's going to struggle to keep me in place for another 6 months. ah, melbourne. you're so close i can almost smell you.

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and while we're in the mood for filling in time, here's a few odds and sods to occupy those idle minutes.

1. want to feel worse about your place of employment? then spend a while browsing 'this ain't no disco, it's where we work', a collection of workplaces that have poured more money into their office design than you have into your house. makes those demountable cubicle partitions we know and love look pretty sweet if you ask me.



2. while we're on the topic of design, hows aboot some floating salt and pepper shakers. fuck to the yeah. i could live in cardboard and still be content if i had some of these.



3. show some valentines love. order chocolate miis, for your significant other/tennis arch-rival. send your mii designs to paul pape and enjoying eating each others digital representation in chocolate form. how... lovely.



4. jennifer maestre makes sculptures out of pencils. i'm sure she does other things with her life as well, but this is too cool.



5. news from the world of science that men could be made redundant, as scientists have successfully created sperm cells out of female embryonic stem cells. while the process is still incomplete, it raises the possibility that viable, genetically diverse human pregnancies could be produced from two women alone. interesting...

6. and finally, the good people at reuters have compiled a debunk-heavy list of the seven greatest medical myths. as someone who has for years been arguing that shaving body hair could not possibly cause it to come back thicker, i can't help but feel slightly vindicated.


and would you look at that, my plane boards in ten minutes. thank christ.

the politics of failure

i was doing a set of stand-up at, of all places, the ruby room last week, and i found myself newly acquainted with the sweet taste of failure. the experience was thoroughly educational. performing to an audience of 25-30 casino glossies in a lounge designed without the rigours of comedy in mind, i went down like a sack of spuds. i'm not sure if they appreciate my type down there. also, i missed out on the sympathy laughs because i went the entire set without using the word cancer. having wanted to do something different upon realising that my raw comedy set used it 14 times in five minutes. or once every 20 seconds. which may have been a little slef-indulgent. still, i managed to acquit myself reasonably well doing a set last night at the brisbane, so at least it kinda feels like i've got the shit back in the horse.

when i grow up (he's 27...), i want to be russell howard:



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but while we're on the topic of failure, there appears to be a LOLcat-esque phenomenon occurring with the word FAIL. which you can keep up to date with at the aptly named fail blog. me, i like spelling bee fail



also of interest from the last few days is this listing of 'books that make you dumb', a brilliant and, by their own admission, flawed piece of statistical analysis that has indexed people's purported favourite books on facebook with the average SAT scores of the colleges that they attend. fun facts:

1. 'lolita' corresponds with the highest scores (closely followed by '100 years of solitude')

2. 'the book of mormon' scores higher than 'the holy bible'

3. dan brown is on par with 'fight club', but both are beaten by 'he's just not that into you'

too funny.

but just to prove that not all is lost in the world, here's a stunning stop motion video of a steadily evolving room-as-art. ah, this brand of ingenuity makes it all better.

russians: better than australians?

had my last burst of chemo yesterday. at least for the moment. when i have this charming fellow extracted om my back we might consider having a bit more, but that will depend upon post-operative pathology tests. not that i'd be entirely opposed mind you. without chemo i lose half my material...

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i feel that as we come to commemorate the brutal occupation of this fine country, perhaps we should start to think about the alternatives, the possible paths for the future. and i'm sure that when you do, you'll have to agree with me when i suggest that perhaps we should all think about becoming a little bit more... russian.



loan me your sister is a semi-regularly updated celebration of all that is drunk, provincial and russian. the guy's knack for finding photos and videos of eastern bloc people in states of heightened steretotype is almost overwhelming.



and while you're in the neighbourhood, how about you pop over to one of soviet russia's former favourite sons, lithuania, for a trip to grutas park, perhaps the world's only stalinist theme park!.

It's called "Gulag tourism." And Grutas Park offers visitors a journey back to 1984 to remind citizens what life was like under Soviet rule. Organizers believe that for those old enough to remember life in the Soviet Union, visiting the park can be therapeutic, filled with old memorabilia and humor[...]

After an amiable introduction, visitors are quickly transported back 25 years. They are ordered to stop smiling or thinking and are chased through an elaborate labyrinth of corridors. Any misstep can result in a violent encounter with angry KGB agents. All of the activity lasts two hours, costs more than 35 Euros, and takes place inside a bunker located in the woods.

sign me up! i can thoroughly recommend watching the video to be found at the bottom of the news story...

and finally, dancing. good ol' fashioned zangeif-style cossack dancing. if this don't convince you that the russian's are superior to us feeble westerners in all ways, then i don't know what will. perhaps a victory in the cold war would have done the trick...



now if you'll excuse me, i'm going to go barbeque some meat rations in vodka. i'll see you when i'm naked and trying to stuff an elk into my boot.

the animals! the animals!

the love that dare not speak its name? a british octopus called louis has picked up a live in lover: mr potato head. apparently louis cracks the shits when people try and come between him and mr potato head. makes sense. bbc version of events here.

and while we're on the subject of marine life, a video especially for the (relatively) newly ocean obsessed ms giggs. taken from the eclectic, interesting and informative TED archives (it stands for technology, entertainment, design), this particular batch of videos on the absolutely astonishing things that underwater creatures can do with their appearance impressed me no end. and there's even some more awesome octopus action at the end. yes sir, it's a fine time to be an octopod.



and now for another casual interest of mine, which i've probably never expressed in anyone's presence: ANTS. seriously, the shit these little tykes get up to blows my mind. not so much when they're simply setting their sights on your precious, precious sugar supplies, but out in the wild they definitely get props from me. from a distance. distant props. the video below shows a team of researchers (somewhat sadistically) filling an ant colony up with concrete so that they can create a mould of the interior. and maybe it's just the latent sci-fi nerd within me, but the end product is one of the cooler things i've seen in a while.



ah, sweet, expendable ants. we ended up with a low end ant infestation in our laundry at the beginning of last year and i was delegated the envious task of morteining the mother fuckers out of existence. which is all well and good, but there was a point, as i relentlessly unleashed the chemical apocalypse upon a steadily mounting tide of ant corpses, that i couldn't help but feel that i was effectively engaged in ant genocide. but then again, they were trying to steal our honey (probably...), so i couldn't feel too bad. could i?