The Effluent Society

My brother tells me how his son throws things out when they no longer work. There's no asking "Could it be fixed?" It's just abandoned, then replaced if it can be afforded. At other times something's thrown out simply because there's no apparent immediate use for it. This attitude bewilders me.

I have lots and lots of stuff that's older than this teenager (I have shirts older than he is). I have stuff that's older than me, or my parents. Some of it works, some could be repaired and, to be honest, a fair amount is just junk. Yet if I can spare the storage space, I keep it on. I even find myself buying more stuff with no apparent immediate use, almost solely for the purposes of preservation.

Recently I bought an old, working, Imperial typewriter for a few dollars. At the same time I bought a box of film gear - some Super 8 movie projectors and accessories. I've already had what I consider to be my money's worth in playing with these items. The sound and feel of a manual typewriter is something that will soon be alien to my nephew's generation; I suspect the Super 8 movie already is. I really don't know what he or his younger siblings would make of the home movies that came with the projectors. They're silent, showing complete strangers doing mundane things in the typical Australian suburban milieu of the 1960s. I find them fascinating and poignant but doubt if these 21st century kids would last a minute's bewildered viewing before drifting away to their iPods and Playstations.

Does it really matter? I think it does: the past should not be abandoned.

Many years ago - I was probably aged twelve or so - during a roadside cleanup in my neighbourhood an enormous pile of stuff appeared outside the house in which "the weird old lady" lived. It turned out she'd died and someone - presumably a near relative - had come and cleared out the house and simply dumped everything unwanted out on the kerb. My brothers and I quickly laid claim to the bulk of it and made some amazing "scores".

What soon dawned on us was that an entire life now lay in a pile out on the street. Clothing, books, mementoes - everything not of immediate value - had been discarded. We extracted what we could from it before the rain and the council destroyed it all. For my part I eventually devoted myself to recovering the diaries this spinster had kept from the 1930s to 1970s. I have most of them still, though some have been lost during various moves of my own over the years. I consider them not only a record of a forgotten life but the eventful times in which it was lived - mundane details too easily overlooked amongst world-shattering events. (My hope is that some day I will have the time to transcribe these diaries as the kernel of a minor history of Australian suburbanite culture in the first half of the twentieth century.)

I suppose the point I'm making is "Don't throw anything out" if you can spare the space. You never know when it may come in handy again or become totally desirable and/or collectable.

A case in point: in my university days I somewhere/somehow picked up a Roland SH-101 analog synthesiser. These days you can get software that reproduces it on your PC but the original units are now very desirable and being used by many of the significant popular musicians of the here and now. My nephew is a very talented drummer and his band is not just a garage one. One day they may feel the need for the 'phat' sounds of an SH-101 but until he shows a lot more respect for the past and the artifacts that represent it, he's got no chance of laying his grubby paws on it. He is further handicapped in this respect by the fact that he destroyed a pair of speakers and sub-woofer I once lent him and showed total indifference about doing so.

Ur so l33t, m8! Not.

I like to use proper punctuation and paragraphs in my writing. I also try to write with a passable English grammar. It would seem, however, that I'm in the minority.

Much of my time is spent working online. (Yes, I'm an internet geek and proud of it.) Many of the people I work with I know only via their e-mail and an occasional 'phone call, so my fundamental impressions of them are often derived from what they write. Or, more significantly, HOW they write.

An internet pundit once observed that "The internet has done wonders for people's ability to communicate, whilst doing nothing to improve their grammar or punctuation." I have to agree with this sad sentiment.

In e-mail, chatrooms and online forums you constantly see writing from people who appear to be psychically channelling Jack Kerouac and e e cummings - simultaneously. Or perhaps James Joyce (on a bad day). Punctuation, grammar and coherence is lamentably absent.

It wouldn't be so bad if it was comprehensible but sometimes you have to wonder what sort of drugs these people are taking and may I have some too, please? I have on record many examples of streams-of-consciousness, fervent religiosity, lunatic ravings and sheer gibberish, but time and column space here prevents my presenting a fair sample for your delectation. I'm sure you can find your own examples - try any online forum (or blog site). Written language is not spoken language; you should not write exactly as you speak.

One thing that I am becoming quite militant and uncompromising about is the increased use of "SMS-speak". I get emails from people where "you" is consistently substituted with "u". (The artist formerly known as "The Artist Formerly Known as Prince" has a lot to answer for in that respect.) If they're amused they say "LOL"; they've never heard of the ellipsis and end every sentence with seventeen dots......... My responses become increasingly florid and byzantine in deliberately direct inverse proportion to their brevity, just to make the point. "Oh, but it saves time when typing." they say. Sorry, not good enough; if you're in a hurry, pick up the 'phone.

I concede, though, that a lot of what is written makes perfect sense and I would read it - really - were it not for a complete absence of formatting; by which I mostly mean PARAGRAPHS.

Break it up, folks! Give your readers space in which to draw breath occasionally! Let them pause to think about what you've just said, without losing their place. They should only go back when they want to re-read something profound you've written, not because they lost their place in a twenty line paragraph.

The web is truly vast and there are millions of voices clamouring to be heard. I've decided to only heed those that at least acknowledge the elegant standard characterised by the Victorian era, or the often breathtaking prose of American Civil War era correspondence. It's not an easy style to achieve or maintain but it's worth a try because it can be an utter joy to read.

When email first appeared I fondly imagined it augured a return to the 19th-century practice of regular and erudite correspondence as something very close to art. (I'm not a very good gambler, either.)

So be warned: if you send me an e-mail, or post to an online forum or blog and you type whatever your brain spews out, I am unlikely to bother to read it. Frankly, it's not worth the effort on my part if you haven't made one on yours.

The Suburban Book of the Brain-Dead

I call them "suburban prayer flags". They appear on telegraph poles, at traffic lights and in shopping centres. At first they're fresh and clean and have neat frills of tear-offs bearing mystical text and numbers. Over time they lose their frills and become increasingly grimy, torn and illegible. New ones appear and are plastered over the old and a geological strata of paper and sticky tape develops.

I'm speaking, of course, of those "I need ten people to lose 30kgs" and "Are you lonely?" and "Jiu-Jitsu Training" flyers. They come in sizes from small to huge (I include the corflute "Free Beer Band, Saturday, Green Slug Inn", "Kitchen Showroom" and "Spit Roast" posters) which can be stuck, glued or nailed to just about anything that stands more or less upright.

I call them "suburban prayer flags" because they represent the unattainable aspirations of those without hope; those without riches of any sort; those with an unthinking selfishness; those without a proper job; those without a clue.

The flags never appear on Mondays. Like burglars, their creators seem to only come alive after the sun has set on the first day of the week. In furtive groups these opportunists prowl the streets - much like graffitists prowl alleys and railway viaducts - in search of an easy target. It's illegal, of course, to use public property for advertising of any sort without permission. In NSW it's covered by Section 9 of the Summary Offences Act. But just try and tell these idiots.

Imagine these losers: they're running some fly-by-night business that's got a cash-flow problem, almost certainly because they're criminally hopeless at running a business (or hopelessly criminal). So their tactic is to print up a bunch of low-quality flyers and spend hours at night pounding the streets, or hopping in and out of a kerb-crawling car, using miles of sticky tape putting the flyers up in the vain hope that some fool will take one of the "feathers in the tail of a turkey" and actually do business with them.

They're fools. Their nocturnal detritus is easily rendered futile because their posters happen to come down much more easily than they went up. I know because I remove this junk frequently whilst walking. It takes no special effort at all. It was whilst removing a poster once that I was challenged by a woman who demanded to know why I was taking down her poster. I replied that I was cleaning up litter, to which she responded "Well, I pay taxes and I'm entitled to put them up." An interesting point of view, if utterly incorrect.

"Madam, you can keep putting them up but I'll keep taking them down. I walk this way every day, so we'll see who gives up first."

It's all just "street spam". As spam is to us when we read our e-mail, so is street spam to us when we walk about. And like spammers, the perpetrators of street spam deserve to be pilloried, ideally by being handcuffed to a traffic pole with their own posters attached to them in the method they originally used to put them up. (Hand me those self-tapping three-inch screws, will you?)

From the Wayback Machine: Doof Doof Cars

Monday, May 13, 2002 - 11:53 pm

Sometimes I lie in bed at night and I hear a low thud... thud... thud...

After about twenty seconds the thud has become a boom, or rather a 'whoom'. A low, gut rumbling 'whoom'. You can occasionally hear the windows rattle slightly in their frames. Water in a glass ripples like it did in that scene from "Jurassic Park".

Then the rush comes as the lowered, rotary-engined testosterone display grunts past playing a form of music of which an African elephant or a whale would be proud. The low frequency component is beyond comprehension.

It takes at least another twenty seconds before the 'whoom' fades into silence, the bearer going on to wake entire neighbourhoods on his way home to sleep the sleep of a complete ponce.

All I can hope is that these people become deaf before thirty, develop kidney problems, and fail to hear the horn of the train or semitrailer bearing down on them with no chance of stopping before turning them into really hip, cool and sticky confetti.

"If it's too loud, you're too old." the stickers say.

My response is "If you don't turn it down I'll strap your head to the speakers and turn it up full blast playing the 1812 Overture until your ears bleed and beyond. Twice."

"Let's try that again."

Several years ago - long before the invention of "blogging" - I set up a site for, well, blogging. It was called "The Ned-Ludd Appreciation Society" and intended to be a forum for anyone to have a general bitch about stuff that should never have been invented. (Like blogging?)

The Society was "dedicated to the ridicule of useless and unnecessary technologies". It used a fairly early type of discussion forum software and was open for anyone to contribute. I put up a few items railing against things that get on my nerves: leaf blowers, "Razor" scooters and plastic fish with soy sauce in them were just a sample.

The site was eventually discovered by at least one complete moron, whom I had a bit of sport with, but then the blog spammers hit it and I had to shut it down. I still operate the domain but only as an email placeholder. Maybe someday I'll find another use for it. Anyway...

Lately I've felt the need to let off some steam so I've capitulated to the mainstream and set this site up. I wonder how long it will last? And where do I start?

The title of this blog is "Praeclarvm", which comes from a Latin motto I've adopted. I hope it indicates the main theme I'm likely to follow as I rant and rave.

"Quidvis recte factum quamvis humile praeclarvm"
"Whatsoever is rightly done, however humble, is noble."

That was the motto of Sir Henry Royce, the engineer behind the early Rolls-Royce motor cars. He's something of a hero to me because he was uncompromising, pragmatic, visionary and a brilliant designer and engineer.

The title of this first post is a quote from another hero of mine: Daffy Duck. Make of that what you will.