Photojournalism

So I had the kids on my own in M's absence, and we had a great time.

We went to Rouse Hill Library:



We had lunch at the RSL:



We had dinner at the local pizza & pasta place:





We went to the local school fete:



And my mo grew some more (donate now!):



Onwards and upwards!

Emotion through stick people

Beautiful stuff from the web comic xkcd:

Different Worlds

A thoroughly pleasant weekend but a bit of a jumble, so I'll just list what we did.

Friday: Drinks at Sydney Opera House with Lou followed by a so-so play (God of Carnage)

Saturday: Halloween! We had offered to organise the local kids to go round the close together. We ended up with 18 assorted ghosts, goblins, princesses and a SuperBarnaby trolling around the close in a big gang. Afterwards we hosted a sausage sizzle for children and grown-ups, and it was good to see everyone and meet some new neighbours.

That all felt very bourgeois, like one of those Australian films that nobody goes to see, so luckily our seldom seen mate Dale was on hand afterwards to lower the tone, work through some of the left-over beer and watch a very satisfying football match.

Sunday: To a local Posh School for their summer fete, which was very pleasant. I was amused when a couple of smiling older ladies asked whether I would sign their petition:

Me: "What are they for?"
She: "One if for banning pornography in petrol stations and the other is to stop same sex couples from adopting"
Me: "I don't agree with either of those"

Cue mutually baffled-by-warped-morality stares before I wandered off to put Beth in a teacup.

Movember starts here

How would that handsome phizog look with a big bushy beard, an elaborately curled "Belgian Gentleman" moustache, or perhaps a Hitler/Chaplin mini-mo? We'll find out this November, or rather Movember.

Here's the deal. I make a public spectacle of myself for a month by growing inappropriate and itchy facial sculpture, you donate some money to prostate cancer research and depression support services. Sounds fair.

My page is at http://au.movember.com/mospace/your-donation-page/

With a bit of luck, I might even end up as cool as these guys:

Flickr, still the place to be

I just uploaded a bunch of photos to the Flickr account (www.flickr.com/photos/tomgoodfellow).



It was a low-key weekend but an entirely pleasurable one, except for working on Saturday.

Auslan

I don’t usually blog about work, on the basis that if somebody has to pay me to turn up somewhere it probably isn’t very interesting. However, MPOW recently set up a course for learning Auslan, aka Australian Sign Language, and it’s chuffing brilliant.

We’re 3 weeks in and I’m fascinated. It’s very intuitive, and I love the way that you set up a situation in your “signing space” and then can tell a story within that space. That is, if I establish first that my back of my right hand is “car” and the index finger on my left hand is “Jim” then I can easily go on to show that Jim is in front of the car, Jim is behind the car, Jim was hit by the car, Jim was working under the car and so on.

Similarly, you can improvise once you know a basic sign. So if you know “walk” (two fingers on your right hand walking across the palm of your left hand), then you can intuitively say stagger, tiptoe, hop, bound and so on.

There’s a horribly designed but content rich website called Signbank that I spend a lot of time on. Basically it’s an online dictionary and each word has a wee video to show you the sign. The connections between sign and meaning can be straightforward, witty or baffling, but are usually interesting.

The politics of the Deaf community are also interesting. Many Auslan users don’t consider themselves as disabled, and I can see their point – if I turned up at a party and everybody else was signing I’d be the one in trouble. On the other hand, you’d want to be covered by the same anti-discrimination legislation as, say, wheelchair users.

Next week a new teacher takes over who is himself Deaf, and the whole class will be “Voice Off”. I’m a little bit scared at the prospect, but also excited and I expect it’ll be a lot of fun.

Sarah Blasko, I think I love you

Thanks to ever-generous babysitters, and the lovely Lou, M&I were able to enjoy 2 contrasting gigs on Thursday and Friday.

The second one was the amazing Sarah Blasko at the Enmore Theatre, and it was a stunning show. She has an incredible voice, is as poised as Audrey Hepburn, wore amazing clothes and the hometown crowd couldn't get enough of it. It was the kind of gig where even the lighting was good enough to deserve comment. A drum solo and a rendition of Xanadu were the icing on the cake.



Blasko's support was El Perro Del Mar, whose sideshow at the Oxford Art Factory constituted our entertainment on Thursday. We really like her records but we weren't sure that the lush arrangements would translate well to the stage. Unfortunately she was obviously financially constrained, because the show was simply her amazing singing, a laptop, and an odd bearded character with a 2-fretboard guitar. It wasn't really conducive to the otherworldy vibe of her albums. Luckily there was a small posse of us there and we had a good time anyway.