I distinctly remember a time when I enjoyed reading The Australian. It hasn’t been that way for a while, and they seem to just keep putting nails in the coffin, becoming more and more conservative and petty (among other adjectives).

Here is a post in reply by the blog being heavily trashed by Kerr. I hope this unavailing and pointless slinging match is abandoned by both sides soon.

Update: More of the same sentiment from Andrew Bartlett.

1. Yeah, it’s not really a debate, is it.

Highlights

• Muse. Best gig of the weekend.
• The Presets. This was the first act we saw and the only disappointment was its extreme brevity. 25 minutes is not enough Presets. We were left wanting more, much more.
• The Hoosiers. Don’t think I’d heard of them before, but they put on an awesome show.
• The Zutons. After listening to their latest album You Can Do Anything a lot, I was really looking forward to seeing these guys. They sure didn’t disappoint. Their version of Valerie was amazing live and really highlighted how boring the Amy Winehouse gig was, as we’d heard her sing Valerie about 15 minutes earlier.
• The Kooks. I’d never really got into their music, but seeing them live was a treat. There was something about their gig which just screamed quality.
• Kaiser Chiefs. Closing the festival, they put a huge exclamation mark on the weekend. What a show.
• Friends. As always with these kinds of events, the friends we hung out with really topped it off. It wouldn’t have been as great without them.

Lowlights

• The camping facilities. The other three day music festival I’ve camped at a few times is Splendour In The Grass. The toilets and showers^[1] at V are seriously lacking when compared to Splendour. You definitely have to expect a degree of disgusting shit when you camp at a festival, but most times I visited the toilets at V there was very literally^[2] shit up to the rim of the bowl. They were simply unusable.
• Amy Winehouse. Boring! That’s all I can say, not that I expected or hoped for much.
• Line-up changes. Spending ages in the crowd working our way right to the front and waiting for Sam Sparro didn’t pay off when we found he’d been switched with Robyn, who was also cool, but we were there for Sam.
• Waiting. There is too much waiting between shows.
• Missing The Prodigy and The Chemical Brothers. I’d seen them both before so we chose Muse and Kaiser Chiefs instead, choices I don’t regret, but it would have been awesome to see them both again.
• Unidentified flying liquids. There was far too many unknown liquids being thrown around for comfort. I don’t mind a bit of water being thrown around a hot crowd, in fact I love it, but it’s simply rude to throw anything else. It’s very sad that people do because they can. An extreme lowlight was being hit (along with many people around us) with a distinctly warm liquid; much to warm to be a warm beer.

Other shit

• Extreme inebriation. Seeing a chick who had pissed her self and was left stumbling around looking dazed with soaked jeans was a bit funny - in a sad kind of way.

The whole weekend really was a blast, and it’s re-invigorated my love of (live) music. The other acts we saw were: Royworld, Alphabeat, Taio Cruz, Lost Prophets, Alanis Morissette, Lenny Kravitz, The Pigeon Detectives and Stereophonics.

1. Oh, wait, there were no showers at V.
2. I mean the literal meaning of the word literally, not the ‘I literally shit my pants’ kind of literally which is used far too often for comfort.

I am sick of stumbling across websites labelled as blogs which are missing one or more elements which I believe are essential to the blog paradigm. This miss-labelling is particularly prevalent within traditional media organisations and other businesses who want to have a blog because it’s now the done thing.

Today I found an article by Merlin Mann (via Daring Fireball) which is a much better, and more comprehensive (even if slighlty different) list of what he thinks consitutes a good blog. I can’t say (as he suggests I should) that I disagree with any of it but, that doesn’t mean this blog meets the mark (or, neccesarily that I’m trying to have it meet the mark).

The long summer days of latitudes above 51° 30′ really are something to treasure. It’s a new and delightful pleasure - if only it wasn’t so fleeting - to get off work at five (or so) and have a full 4 hours of daylight left to play with. Picnics in London’s oasis where the bright blue sky and impossibly elastic twilight provide a catalyst for the friends, cheese and wine to coalesce into memories that should last a lifetime.

I must get around to taking some pictures of the estate we live in before the summer leaves disappear entirely.

The English autumn will be a new experience to enjoy, and the winter has its own charms which I can look forward to, but the summer will be missed. How time flies.

1. Excluding the weekend, which was amazing weather timed very well.

As useful as fear of events like Port Arthur is for finding public support for firearms bans, the (possibly) increased likelihood of mass killings are not the reason I would oppose any relaxation of firearms laws^[2]. The comments over there are have a bunch of statements like this:

Except that nowhere in the world has there been a situation where strict gun laws have made citizens safer.

The trouble is I haven’t seen any evidence^[3] that to suggest that that’s true. At least one commenter argues that an armed population would result in fewer people ’starting trouble’ because of a fear that their victims may be armed, even going to the extreme of saying:

Two 100kg body builder type guys who want to victimize a 50kg woman can be immediately met with incapacitating or lethal force, their size and strength advantage means almost nothing^[4]. People won’t victimize others if there is a good chance that it will end your life. The “Hey lady, give me your purse” phenomena may come to and end when it results in the dude’s brains being scattered behind him.

I can’t for a moment believe that’s true. For that to even have a chance of working you first of all have to get to a point where a high proportion of the population is armed with lethal force, at any given time - there would be a long lag between legal sanction and meeting this requirement. Second, the distribution of lethal arms among the population must be perceived to be even across pretty much all demographic groups. Unless at least these two conditions are met, the people ’starting trouble’ will continue to do so. The only difference will be that they’ll make their decisions about who to start the trouble with in a way which minimises the likelihood of the victim having immediate access to lethal force. I consider the possibility of meeting the second criteria above to be near enough to impossible.

Given that the baddies will likely begin choosing their victims from groups of people who are perceived as less likely to have immediate access to lethal force (much as they do already), we end up pretty much at the status quo, only with more guns floating^[5] around because gaining access to firearms is easier^[6]. I’d also venture to suggest that the groups of people that are most vulnerable now are likely to remain much the same, as they’re probably less likely to embrace gun ownership as a means of personal protection.

High levels of gun ownership, especially for the purpose of personal protection, is a bad thing. It breads a gun culture, which is an even worse thing.

1. I agree, by the way, the use of pepper spray for personal protection probably should be legal.
2. Although, that would be a good reason, assuming the likelihood does increase.
3. If you think I haven’t looked hard enough please point me to some.
4. It doesn’t really fit the flow of my post, but I disagree with this too. Given the additional advantage of surprise (not that hard to get), a size and strength advantage like this will mean exactly the same thing as it does now. Unless of course, the victim is carrying the gun around, in hand, cocked, loaded, safety off and ready to blast!
5. And all the potential for problems which that entails.
6. The argument could be made that because of higher levels of firearms ownership, the pool of vulnerable groups is smaller so there is some overall gain. Even if the pool of vulnerable groups does get smaller, that’s no guarantee that there is any gain at all. It’s entirely possible that it just makes the groups that remain vulnerable more likely to be targeted.