Pica Pica

This is the coda to our visit to the Opera Bar. The management had been sufficiently disturbed by our experience on that occasion that they sent us a voucher for $100! The other day we saw a couple of visitors to Sydney, which was the last leg of their half-world cruise.  We decided to take them (voucher in back pocket) to the Opera Bar, and the experience was just as it should be.  Good atmosphere, extraordinarily good view and acceptably good food.  Oh yes, good service too.  Yes, we would go there again, and I felt that we owed it to the management to say so.

A finance spokesman who can’t tell millions from billions – good grief!

See it on youtube.

I hold no brief for Oliver Stone, I find those who would deny the Jewish holocaust to be stupid to the point of evil, and I am no moral relativist.

Nevertheless, Dvir Abramovich’s rant in the SMH is surely missing the point. He quotes Oliver Stone as saying, with reference to Hitler, Stalin and Mao:

“You cannot approach history unless you have empathy for the person you may hate.”

Abramovich then goes on to ask:

“So let us understand: The director of films such as Wall Street and Platoon wants to empathise with Hitler, and thinks the mass murderer was an easy scapegoat who needs to be put in context?”

Well, yes, if that’s what Stone wants, I support him. Empathy is (I quote the OED) “The power of projecting one’s personality into (and so fully comprehending) the object of contemplation.” It is vital that we attempt to do so.

What is the alternative? We might want to rest with Abramovich’s simple view that “When you have killed millions as Hitler did, you are going to be judged as bad and be vilified”. I would add that both Joe Stalin and Chairman Mao were involved in even more deaths, but the point is that none of these people acts in a vacuum; they do not spring out of nowhere as self-existent, singular generators of evil. They come into the world as babies, grow up in societies and operate in contexts. If we don’t empathise, if we make no effort to understand, then we will maintain the conditions that give them form.

Wouldn’t it be convenient if these people were “just” incomprehensibly evil! We could then just kill them, and all would be well! Let’s kill the evil bad guys! No need to worry about why they came to be like that, no need to care about the oppressed groups like Chinese or Russian peasants, Irish peasants, Palestinians, Jews, or about manipulation by the “military-industrial-financial complex”… Kill a few evil guys, and everything will be hunky-dory!

I recently came across a famous quote from Solzhenitsyn:

“If only it were all so simple! If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?”

First, the good, because it deserves praise. “Six Impossible Things Before Dinner” a sort of mind-reading show presented by Philip Escoffey in the Studio at the Sydney Opera House. I say “sort of” because – well, you would have to go to see it. Highly entertaining, totally baffling. Just two tips for you: 1) go, and 2) stay to the end.

And now the bad. Before the show we decided to eat in the “Opera Bar”. Drinks bought and food ordered, we sat with our identifying number (197) on clear view at our table, and waited for the food to be brought. The food order was very simple, but it was quite some time before anything arrived – but it was not what we had ordered. The waitress wandered off to try and find the proper recipient for what she had in hand.

After a few minutes a waiter approached, and asked us whether we had been given the number 197 at the bar, which of course we had. He was about to leave, but I asked him what was happening to the food we had ordered, since the wrong order had been brought to this number at our table. He said “Oh that’s coming, it’s on its way, it will only be a minute”. It felt like a brush-off.

Evidently it was indeed a brush-off, as still nothing happened for some time, until I felt compelled to ask if somebody could check what had happened to our food, explaining that entirely the wrong dish had been brought to us at number 197. More time went by. Finally we are approached again, and asked again what we had ordered. We are told “It’s just on its way, it will be here in just a minute”, but when we ask what “a minute” really means, there is no clear answer, except that we are asked if we would like another drink in the meantime. We decline, since we hve a show to watch, and ask for our money back. We leave.

The shame of this is, as so often, not the original mistake. Mistakes can happen, and it doesn’t take a lot of imagination to see that a busy kitchen serving fast-ish food is a fertile ground for mistakes. But if the original mistake had been acknowledged and acted on, I would hardly be bothering to write about it now. If, having brought the wrong dish to our table, and presumably having found out where that dish was really meant to go, somebody had gone to the kitchen and asked where the right food for 197 had got to, we might scarcely have noticed that anything was wrong. At the latest, the time when I asked what was happening to our food should have been the signal for somebody to say “I’m sorry, we’ve made a mistake, please hang on”, to go to the kitchen and to make sure that our food was being prepared. It was the brush-offs, the “it will be here in a minute”, when it is quite obvious that, as far as the kitchen was concerned, 197 was gone and forgotten long ago – that is what made it annoying.

I am, of course, informing the Opera Bar of this little story, and will let you know of any response.

PS. I must tell you that I received a prompt and unreserved apology from the management. We look forward to going again!

It is rare that I walk out of a restaurant, food uneaten, simply because the quality is so low.

I remember that in 1971 I had ordered sweet and sour pork balls in a Chinese fast food place on the corner of Fosse Road North and King Richard’s Road in Leicester, but found them too disgusting to eat. In 1998 I left of the Parkway Hotel in Dunmanway, West Cork, for a similar reason. Allowing for the possibility of something having slipped my mind, I am willing to grant that the same thing might have happened somewhere, sometime in the 1980s. So the events of last Sunday were about the fourth such event in nearly 40 years.

We decided, spontaneously, to go out to Norton Street (Leichhardt) for lunch. We started at the “cheap and cheerful” end, and decided to go into a cafe/restaurant known as Grind. “Grilled fish and chips” sounded interesting enough, and we both decided to have it. Before sinking to describe the food, I will mention that the waitress, who spoke hardly any English, made a genuine attempt to be charming.

The food came. Being “cheap and cheerful”, although far from dirt cheap, I could just about accept that the salad was uninteresting, and that there was too much on the plate, presumably in order to make it look as if there was more food there than was really the case. I could just about, although with disappointment, accept the stick-like little “chips”, the sort produced with the least care and attention possible. The fact that all the other food was plonked on top of the chips has no excuse, but would not cause me to walk out, merely not to go back. The main part of my fish did not taste too bad either. However, on the top was a curious spirally-flowery cut piece of fish, whose taste can fairly be described as utterly foul. Only a death-wish would have inspired one to eat it. It is impossible to believe that anyone in the kitchen knew what it tasted like.

We wondered whether to make a scene, but decided for the “quiet life” option of commenting if we were asked whether the food had been all right. So after a few minutes of toying with what was on our plates, I went to pay. No, nobody did ask whether we had enjoyed the food, not even the common courtesy of that question, let alone the genuine concern that should have resulted from customers leaving with their plates nearly full after five minutes.

As an amusing coda to the incompetence of the staff, the bill was for $41.30. I gave the waiter at the till a $50 bill and a $2 piece. He opened the till, shut the till, open it again, put some money in, took it out again, shut the till. Clearly it was beyond him to work out that I needed a $10 bill and 70 cents. He then turned to the “manager”, gave him my $52, and asked him to “sort it out”.

I should mention, in case the managers and staff were different that day, that this happened at lunchtime on Sunday 27 December.

We then went down the road to a French place for delicious food, served with care, and costing very much the same.

Beginners dipping their toes for the first time into the Irish session music scene often ask this question. The answer is not nearly as simple as you might think.

It’s a question that concerned me a lot. Admittedly I had my first exposure to traditional music as a student back in the 1960s, and admittedly I learnt a tiny bit of whistle, a scraping of fiddle, and even had a flute (modern, cylindrical, metal) for a couple of years. Admittedly it was in the 1990s that I made myself the worst flute that I have ever seen out of a piece of polythene tubing. I did hear of a flute, although I never saw it, fashioned from a large carrot. That one may have been even worse than my polythene effort, although I wouldn’t count on it. And admittedly it was later in the 90s that I got my first half-way reasonable wooden flute. But it was not until a year or more into this millennium that I decided to make the effort to get somewhere with it.

I was living in Ireland at the time, and sessions were easy to find. Some seemed quite relaxed, so although I didn’t have many tunes I began to dare to go on and join in a bit. I do remember turning to a neighbour at one of my first sessions (I won’t name him, RIP) and asking “So what tunes get played a lot here?” I did find the answer of “Oh, there are so many” unhelpful, but bit by bit I asked people “What was the name of that last one”, I got hold of tune books, I spoke to the friends I was making at the sessions and began seriously to build up the stock of tunes that I knew.

Starting at this latish stage in life, I did find that I was playing “catchee-upee”. Some people, of course, had grown up with traditional music, and many of the non-Irish “blow-ins” had been interested continuously for a couple of decades, so they had lost count of the number of tunes they knew. Eventually, after about four years, I started to feel that I had, in a sense, got “enough” tunes. In another sense, of course, you can never know enough – it is only natural and proper to always be learning new ones. But with the best part of 200 tunes under my belt I found that at most of the sessions I would go to I would know at least a fair number of tunes, perhaps one quarter or one third of those that got played. Not as many as the hardened sessioneers, although my repertoire did have a relatively high proportion of odd tunes from odd places – my 200 were not actually 200 “session standards”. But it was enough not to feel that I simply sat at the edge all night hoping that one of the tunes that I knew would come up. It was a good working basis.

And then I came to live in Sydney. I tried one session (in Paddington) for a few weeks. I wasn’t too comfortable with it, as it leant in the FARTing direction (that’s FAst Reel Thrashing, by the way). After three or four visits, however, my enthusiasm waned even further when it was pointed out that I would have to find another seat, since the one I was in was the one for “Mick” the banjo player (I think it was Mick). Mick had been away for a few weeks, and Mick had not turned up in time to get a good seat for himself, but Mick was expected today, so I had better let him have “his” seat. I got the message.

After a while another session started in Newtown, and I began to go. The pace was much more enjoyable and while, of course, there were “senior” musicians, there was more of the sense that they were first amongst equals. But I soon came to feel that the number of tunes I knew was hopelessly inadequate. The “old favourites” of Skibbereen were either altogether unknown or deeply unpopular. How many did one need to know? This difficulty was exacerbated here because two of the “senior musicians” have, for different reasons, a phenomenal, even encyclopaedic knowledge of tunes. I started to look at the lists helpfully provided by various people of what were held to be “core” or “stock” tunes, tunes that almost any player should know. You’d think this would be a good idea. I did, at least, but close examination led me to the understanding that this approach is a dead end.

First, there is only a limited overlap in the contents of these lists of “core tunes”. I analysed several such lists, as well as lists of tunes that were actually played at certain sessions and festivals, with the help of Excel data sheets. It turns out that the majority of tunes on which there is agreement that they are “basic” are hardly ever played, because they are considered to be hackneyed. On the other hand, a good proportion of the allegedly “core” tunes seem to be idiosyncratic choices with which other list compilers disagree. In the middle, tween those two groups, we find a sample from a large body of more or less popular, more or less well-known tunes, but the sample depends on the background of the list compiler.

So what happens to the beginner who, in contrast to my experience, does get given a list of, say, 100 “important” tunes? Let’s imagine that the beginner is very enthusiastic, and manages to keep up properly learning a tune a week, or even more. Because they are unlikely to be learning in a vacuum, a beginner will also be learning other tunes not on this list, so nevertheless it will take them something like two years to learn these tunes. Now suppose they take the list seriously, and go away to learn them all. When they have the courage to turn up at the session again, two years later, they will find that of the tunes they have learnt, about one third are hackneyed and corny, so that nobody wants to play them. Another third were not popular tunes at all, and one could sit in sessions every night for a year and not hear them. The third in the middle were popular at one time, but things have moved on, and most of the third are now either forgotten or hackneyed. The beginner has spent two years and has no more than a handful of useful tunes. Not thrilling.

The whole approach is clearly just wrong. We could learn 500 tunes (and that will normally take quite a few years), sit in sessions, and still find ourselves waiting and waiting for a tune that we know. The number of tunes that we know is in fact not very important at all. Of course, we do have to know tunes, and it is good if the number is high, but the way we can play is far more important. If we know just a few dozen tunes, but we can deliver them with drive, with lift, with joy and with musicality, people will want to hear them. If we know just 100 tunes (which in this context is not terribly many), but can deliver them as just described, we could make a really valuable contribution to a regular session; some of our tunes might be played often, some less often, and of course a good player doesn’t join in every tune or every set.

So if I am asked again about how many tunes are session player needs to know, the answer will be that although in time one will certainly know many more, a few dozen is enough to get started, and that from then on the way we play them is more important than the number that we know. And as to which tunes they should be, the answer is that we should learn the tunes that we like and the tunes we can share with our fellow musicians. Whether they are hackneyed, obscure, generally popular, last year’s tune, next year’s tune – these are also unimportant questions.

I recently pointed out that we have a civic duty to learn about encryption, anonymization and other such techniques that we should use, by default, to hide our information, however innocent, from unethical government intrusion. I would like to give some further reasons.

The Australian Security Intelligence Organisation, more commonly known as ASIO, has the right to detain a person, even when they are not suspected of a terrorist offence, for at least seven days if it is believed that they can “substantially assist in the collection of intelligence”. The Attorney General (an entirely political appointee, be it noted, nothing to do with the judiciary – in the Prime Minister’s pocket, in essence) must consent to the application for a warrant. The application is made to certain magistrates and judges who have volunteered for this job, but these seemingly judicial persons do not act in their judicial capacity, just as designated persons. The application is made without the prospective detainee being present, and the detainee is not informed of the reasons for the application. If the detainee wishes to challenge the sufficiency of the grounds, their legal adviser is not allowed to see any of the supporting documentation; the detainee, in any case, does not in fact necessarily have a right to legal advice, or even to contact anybody at all.

On top of this vile law, it has been made an offence to disclose that someone is subject to such a warrant; journalists are not allowed to report the existence of a warrant, even when trying to expose abuse or misuse of the system. ASIO and the AFP have made themselves into laughing-stocks over, for instance, the Haneef case, so we can be quite certain that sooner or later these powers will be abused again.

In the face of such severe threats to our safety, it would be helpful if we all know how to publish anything that we know about such things, whether we are reporters, friends of the detained or just concerned about human rights. We should know how to publish any information anonymously, to do our best to ensure that ASIO and the AFP are held to account. It is, however, ethical but illegal.

 See the Australian Human Rights Commission for more details.

But do remember, it is legal to know about these techniques, it is unethical for ASIO and the AFP to have such powers, but if you actually publish information such as the existence of the kind of warrant mentioned above, you are breaking the law. I cannot urge you to do it.

 ”Australia is becoming the Iran of the South Pacific”

Crikey tells us that Reporters Without Borders has written to the PM urging him to abandon the invidious filtering scheme:

Quoting from Crikey:

The letter, signed by RWB Secretary-General Jean-Francois Julliard, spelled out the organisation’s disquiet with the broad criteria and uncertain goals of the censorship plan. In particular, they felt the lack of judicial oversight was a key problem:

Firstly, the decision to block access to an ‘inappropriate’ website would be taken not by a judge but by a government agency, the Australian Communications and Media Authority (ACMA). Such a procedure, without a court decision, does not satisfy the requirements of the rule of law. The ACMA classifies content secretly, compiling a website blacklist by means of unilateral and arbitrary administrative decision-making. Other procedures are being considered but none of them would involve a judge.

Read more through the link above. Remember, this is not about the few unpleasant things they are talking about banning now – it is about the way they want to take power to secretly ban anything they feel like. Fascism is an easy insult, but it it not an exaggeration here.

You might also enjoy and learn from this spoof site.

So the Communications Minister, Stephen Conroy has announced that he will introduce legislation before next year’s elections forcing ISPs to block a secret blacklist of “refused classification” (RC) websites for all Australian internet users.

The debate, thank goodness, has got vigorous. The issue, of course, is not the tiny number of sites – probably revolting and abhorrent in many cases – that are the ostensible target of this move. OK, there is indeed a question as to whether any information should ever be blocked – perhaps it should not. If we grant, for argument’s sake, that it should there is indeed a question as to whether we grant the little catholic boy Stephen Conroy the right to control the choice of what that blocked information is – in fact I don’t. And there are questions about whether it will bring any significant gains in terms of its ostensible target – probably it will be almost useless. And again, indeed, there is a question as to whether it will also block perfectly acceptable sites – the evidence suggests that it will.

But these are trivial questions. They suggest that the proposals are useless and stupid, and that makes us smell a rat.

The truly worrying thing is the proposal that the government will arrange, in secret, for otherwise public information to be banned, for reasons that it will keep secret. We will not be told what we are not allowed to see. An unelected committee will not tell us what is banned or why. We will be led to believe that, for instance, the blocks are being applied to child pornography. But further down the line, perhaps not under this government or even the next, you can just bet that some special circumstances will require a “small, temporary, provisional” extension of the blocked material. “National security” will demand, for instance, that sites explaining government involvement in environmentally unsound projects are blocked; or that sites that challenge the reasons for going to war will be seen as traitorous – WMDs, anyone? Perhaps sites with pictures of the PM cavorting naked with his/her illicit lover will be blocked; and we will not be allowed to know where it will end.

We therefore have a civic duty to learn about and use the technical tricks needed to circumvent these things. We should learn to encrypt the most innocuous e-mails, learn to anonymise ourselves when we wish our aunt a happy birthday. Otherwise we are conniving in the government cover-ups of the future. Does anybody believe they won’t want to?

The back story: we had two computers, a desktop and a laptop. Internet connectivity is through a wireless router provided as part of the package by Telstra (the dominant telecommunications company here, formerly owned by the Australian government).

The main story, in bullets:

• Laptop computer meets very serious accident.
• Order and receive new one from Dell.
• New laptop will not connect to Internet.
• Spend an hour or two on this – it becomes clear that although the laptop sees wireless networks belonging to neighbours, it simply does not see our own.
• Contact Telstra support. Spend two or three hours on the phone to them. They cannot fix the problem. They blame the new computer, and the fact that it is running Windows 7. They say “We do not support Windows 7 yet, it is too new”. They also say that they do not support the router any more, because it is too old.
• Contact Dell support.
• Spend considerable time on the phone to Dell. Eventually one of their technicians says “If your computer cannot see your router, perhaps your router is set to be invisible. Try changing these settings: xxx”.
• This works.

Coda:

A week or so later, somebody rings up from Telstra, wanting to know if the problem was solved. I tell them that yes, it works now, but no, it was no thanks at all to Telstra. I point out that although it was outside the scope of Dell’s responsibility, they spotted that the failure to see the router might be due to the router being invisible. The caller says that he is just looking for some feedback. I suggest it would be a good idea if their support staff knew about the equipment they are supposed to be supporting.

“And is there anything else I can help you with?” I decline the offer, but I do remain polite.