The Resident Judge Wonders 12/11/09

…whether we really need ARMED security guards at railway stations?  Bailleiu seems to have picked a winner as an election policy. But two ARMED security guards down at the little station in Macleod?  Every night?  I don’t think so.

The Resident Judge wonders 6/10/09

…if the American private security firm Blackwater changed its name to “Xe” so that people would stop talking about it because no-one could pronounce the name?

What we know and what we don’t

Just in case you’d forgotten, here’s good old Donald Rumsfeld with his known unknowns.

Or Slate has expressed it more poetically:

The Unknown
As we know,
There are known knowns.
There are things we know we know.
We also know
There are known unknowns.
That is to say
We know there are some things
We do not know.
But there are also unknown unknowns,
The ones we don’t know
We don’t know.

—Feb. 12, 2002, Department of Defense news briefing

Oh, the horror, the horror as gobbledegook (albeit true, but gobbledegook nonetheless) best left in the M.B.A. seminar room escapes out into the real world!

As for me, I’ll go with Mark Twain (or IS it Mark Twain? I don’t know for sure….)

It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble; it’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so.

A good little aphorism for life in general, and especially for historians, I reckon.

Uncivil ugliness

Saturday’s Age had a feature about the rising anxiety over the State Government’s proposal to move the city’s urban limits out further, and the opposing anxiety over high-density living and local amenity.  It pointed out a number of inner-city sites that had been left vacant for many years where high-density development could add to the city’s housing stock without moving further into semi-rural areas.

One of the aerial shots accompanying the article showed a large expanse of land near North Melbourne station that has lain vacant since Solomon Lew purchased it 17 years ago.  What struck me was the huge FCUK sign draped across the deserted factory building on the site.  Unfortunately the Age online article doesn’t show the photograph, but you can see the building I am talking about  here. You might also want to consider the vacuous, clinical approach that the advertisers have taken in this “project”.

I also don’t want to post the picture here because I find it crass and offensive.  I’m well aware of the smarty-pants, smirking, superior marketing decision behind the choice of the FCUK brand.  But why shouldn‘t people find it offensive?  Why should an obscenity suggested on a  billboard impose itself so insistently and aggressively onto the public consciousness?  The brand proprietors can take the high moral ground and protest that the word in itself is not obscene, but these four letters have not been chosen randomly: they know full well that the cognitive pathways of a population literate in English will automatically read the word differently.

This is swaggering, arrogant visual pollution, and I resent having it forced upon me.

Of artistry and benchmarks

Should  Melbourne University should be known as “The White Knight for Struggling Arts/Music Institutions” or as  “The Institution That Ate Its Competitors”?   The  Victorian College of the Arts amalgamated with Melbourne University as the “Faculty of VCA and music”, and last year the Australian National Academy of Music, based at the South Melbourne Town Hall,  also fell under the auspices of the University of Melbourne when the Federal Government withdrew its funding. So much for choice.

Enter the new Dean, Professor Sharman Pretty.  Employed as a “change agent”, she is charged with restructuring the VCA’s six schools into three, shaving $11 million dollars from the budget and fitting the schools’ offerings into the Melbourne Model.   And so we see the music theatre course, which started this year with 32 students accepted from 370 applicants, suspended from 2010-  but “Professor Pretty says it will return if it can be made to fit the model“.   Yes, that’s the way- fit the course to the curriculum model- not to the students, not to the work environment, not to the demands of the genre itself.

I’ve done my time observing the nursery of music theatre from the outside:  the tap-dance lessons,  the end of year dancing school concerts,  the examinations,  the auditions, the hair rollers, the tap-shoes, the false eyelashes.  Consider the mainstay of musical theatre today, the franchised musical, shipped into a capital city for a financially-lucrative, solidly-marketed period with its authorized sets and carefully mandated cookie-cutter characters.  Is this really post-graduate study???

But Professor Pretty knows how to play the market game.

Our benchmark partners are institutions such as the Sydney Conservatorium and WAAPA and there is no reason we can’t compete with them to produce internationally competitive graduates.

Benchmarks??  Internationally competitive?? Sheesh. I don’t really understand what drives the artistic character, but I strongly suspect that it has nothing to do with academic excellence, grade point averages and assessment tasks, and an awful lot to do with dreams, drive and ambition.  I wonder if we can “benchmark” them?

When I rule the world…

I will mandate that car horns be modified to the highest standards of emotional intelligence.  There will be a friendly little toot for “Hey, the red light’s changed!” or “I’m here- don’t back your car into me!”.

There’ll be a happy little wave for “Hello! Haven’t seen you for ages!” and a cheery call of “Hey, I’m here in the driveway waiting for you!” when you pick someone up from their house.

There’ll be a slightly more impatient “Come ON, I can’t wait all day!” and a derisive “Get off your mobile phone, you wanker!”.

And of course, there’ll still be the loud, strident “IDIOT!!!!!!”

On TV tonight

And what will your Resident Judge be watching on television tonight? Rock + Roll Nerd on ABC 1 at 8.30.  that’s what.

I saw it late last year- here’s my response at the time.  I thought it was absolutely fantastic.

Not the Tim Tam surely…

Say it is isn’t so.   The Sydney Lord Mayor, it seems, has banned Tim Tams in case the chocolate is produced using child labour.  Not only Tim Tams, but also bottled water, fat-rich cakes, dairy desserts and “bad” fish species.  That’s it- no more Sydney Town Council functions for me.

But where to get a good nosh-up at a function these days?  Some ten years ago, in a dual-sector university where I worked, Arnott’s Cream Assorted were loftily derided by higher-ed staff as “TAFE biscuits”.  Nothing but danish pastries and blueberry mini muffins would do. Now we all  pounce avidly upon the Monte Carlo and- even better still- the Kingston with servile gratitude at such bounty.

Mind you, in my day ANY sort of chocolate biscuit was luxury, child labour or not.  I come from good home-cooking stock and can rustle up  chocolate chip biscuits, chocolate brownies, date loaf and my special lemon slice with nary a thought.  In fact, I am becoming increasingly aware, faced with tables of ‘bring a plate’ suppers all bearing their Coles labels, that home cooked biscuits and cakes are becoming quite endangered.

I have breathed Melbourne air for over fifty years and have never yet done a Tim Tam dunk.

At my age, I think it would be rather undignified.

Little Historians

I see that the History Teachers Association of Australia has raised questions about the primary school component of the proposed national history curriculum.  Good on them.  As a member of the Heidelberg Historical Society, I had a brief peek at the consultation draft which recommended that local history be introduced at primary school level.   I had no problem with the idea of arousing children’s curiosity about the street, suburb and town in which they live, but the “core components of historical understanding”  seem to be a trifle…um….optimistic?

How does this sound for an 8-12 year old?

“examine and critically assess the value of available primary and secondary sources, study human motivation, develop an understanding of viewpoints held by the people of the past, and recognize causal relationships between events and draw conclusions about their historical investigations”.

Have the stages of conceptual development suddenly been thrown out the window?? What happened to my good friend Piaget??  The last time I spoke to an 8-12 year old (which, admittedly, has not occurred recently), I was not particularly struck with their insight into human motivation.

And to be honest, I’m still grappling with these core components with historical understanding today.  Perhaps I need to find a 9 year old to show me how.

Danger!Danger Will Robinson

I see that the robot from Lost in Space has died.  Well, sort of.

‘ROBOT’ ACTOR DIES.  Los Angeles. Bob May, who won a cult following as The Robot in the 1960s hit television show Lost in Space, has died of congestive heart failure in California.  May, 69, was a veteran actor and stuntman when he was tapped by Lost in Space creator Irwin Allen to play the Robinson family’s loyal metal sidekick in the hit series that debuted in 1965.  Although May did not provide the robot’s distinctive voice (done by announcer Dick Tufeld), he developed a devoted following of fans who sought him out at memorabilia shows.

Oh, so he didn’t do the voice.  Just that highly artistic arm waving and spinning round and round when under stress.  So who would you say actually played the Robot- the voice or the driver?  Where lies the essence of Robot?