Does your hive mind¹ know why ThinkGeek want US$30 to ship one solitary T-shirt to my inconveniently located postbox here in Perth, yet Threadless manage to ship two T-shirts here for US$9? There’s rather a lot of stuff I’d like to get from ThinkGeek, but the shipping costs are a bit too prohibitive even for me.

Having said that, since I already have close to fifty T-shirts, it may be a good thing that I can’t justify buying any more at the moment.

¹ Hmmm. I wonder if I can just ask Wolfram Alpha when it gets launched, since it’s supposed to answer questions with the power of the Internet, a new kind of science, and most importantly the power of Grayskull.

First things first: yes, I really was asked the question in the title last night while walking back from the Muse gig at the Riverstage. Apparently when I’m with my mate Ian, his sister and her partner, I look like the sort of guy who (a) is a local and (b) would frequent Hooters. Maybe a career playing the sleazy guy in porn awaits.

Before the Muse concert last night, I spent the afternoon hanging with Ian and checking out Brisbane City and Southbank. The last time I was here was in 1993, and although my memories of that trip are more focused on the Gold Coast portion, I remember enough of Brisbane to know that things have really gone ahead since then, particularly in Southbank. The progress is a lot more pronounced than Perth’s over the last fourteen years, too, and it reinforces just how much we’ve wasted our mining fortune and our foreshore to date.

Muse were awesome! As I mentioned last week, I thought they were a little off their best in Perth, but they were astonishingly good here in Brisbane — I’d say it’s the best set I’ve seen them do. Bonus points for the esoteric set list: Fury, Microcuts and Ruled by Secrecy in rapid succession confused some of the teenyboppers.

Other bits and bobs:

• The very first conversation I heard when I got here was while perusing the menu at an Italian restaurant in Fortitude Valley: two young women were discussing Oxford Street. In Leederville. In Perth. At that point, I wondered why I’d just spent four and a bit hours on a plane.
• Be careful when organising hire cars through Webjet. Although I was careful to select Brisbane CBD as both my pick-up and drop-off point, they managed to book me a car on the Gold Coast. I got lucky — the Hertz in Brisbane was flat out, but the helpful woman behind the counter was able to rustle up a car that I gather wasn’t even on their computer.

That said, their definition of fix isn’t all that reassuring, since it basically involved replacing one temporary line (complete with bite marks — the finger of suspicion is pointed squarely at the two rabbits that have taken up residence on our block) with… another temporary line. Great.

Ended up going to the Pinnacles this afternoon to spend a sunset there, which has been on my list of things to do for a while. It might have been more impressive without the cloud cover that swept in late in the afternoon, but it was still seriously cool in a way that I’m sure my mobile phone camera has completely failed to reproduce. Still, I got a bit of writing done for next semester’s film units, so at least today wasn’t a complete wash.

So, I’ll be back in a couple of days, give or take. Guess I’ll take it as an enforced break.

Sods: My car decided not to start tonight when I wanted to go and pick up a pizza. It’s definitely an electrical problem and the battery’s definitely fine, so I can already feel part of my tax refund slipping away getting it fixed. (Well, that or the Google Summer Winter of Code mid-term payment.) Will probably spend part of tomorrow morning looking at it myself before coming to the inevitable conclusion that I’m going to need to get some sort of professional to do so if I actually want it fixed.

Procrastinatods (which I’m claiming as a word, dammit, if ginormous made it, so can this): I resolved to write my short film script for next semester during the break, along with a rough outline for the documentary proposal I have to do. Thus far, I have done neither, and classes start again in two and a half weeks. I also have plenty of work left to do on the GSoC project (more on that later). This isn’t looking good. Guess I’ll have to revise my estimates of sleep for the rest of the year down from two hours per night to 90 minutes.

Gentlemen and, uh, gentlemen, I think we have a final cut.

After one of the most insane months (eh, no one of about it, on reflection) of my time at university, the visual cut on my film project is signed, sealed and delivered, which means that my role as editor is done. I’ve now handed the project off to our sound man for music and foley work and it should be in bright and early on Monday morning. That is, before the due time. Which, considering I thought we were toast four days ago, is nothing short of miraculous.

Therefore, I go to Albany for a four day weekend with some friends. Back next week, when I will bitch about having to write a full-blown television script and start serious work on my Google Winter of Code project.

Peace out, y’all!

It’s been fascinating reading. We don’t know all that much about Martin for a combination of reasons (most of which are related to the fact that very few people in my family would find a good word to say about him) — most of what we have is some fragmentary correspondence and some birth records that may or may not be especially accurate, given the state of record-keeping in late 19th century Ireland. Getting nineteen pages worth of service records from the National Archives was more than we would have expected, and fills in a few gaps, both in the obvious sense of his service history but also his personal details, some of which are now a bit clearer. It’s also raised some new questions: his application form lists a year of prior military service in the 25th Light Horse, which neither mum nor I knew about. (It doesn’t show up on the National Archives, but Wikipedia indicates that the 25th was named so in 1912, so it may have been pre-war.) That being said, Martin has a reputation as being a bit of a liar, so it’s entirely possible that it was made up, but it seems like something that might be worth checking out some more.

Still, what’s not in dispute is that Pte Allen enlisted in early 1917 and spent a period of time in camp in England in late 1917 before being dispatched to the front line in January 1918, where he quickly became ill (what he was ill with is not in the record). After being patched up and sent back to the front, he then fell ill with influenza and diphtheria in March. After a period of convalescence and assignments at a depot, he was then sent back to the front in late August, just in time to take part in the second half of the Second Battle of the Somme and, more broadly, the Hundred Days Offensive. From there, he remained with his unit through the armistice and into 1919, when he was granted a couple of leaves (presumably to visit his family in Ireland) before being returned to Australia in August 1919 and discharged in September of that year. Somewhat surprisingly, his disciplinary record during the two and a bit years he was with the Army was spotless.

It’s an unremarkable story in many ways. Films aren’t made about such men. Grand epics skim over them. It’s fair to say that his post-war life was not a particularly happy or productive one, with the exception of his children, one of whom was Keith Allen, my maternal grandfather, who I knew a bit better. (Incidentally, summary records of Australian soldiers in World War 2 are also available, and since I can link to it fairly easily, here’s the record for the late Cpl Keith Allen.) But being able to read these records has, in a small way, made me feel as though I know — if only fleetingly and second- and third-hand — another of my ancestors who died many years before I was born.

That’s the beauty of these archives, which many governments lock up, charge for access to and wouldn’t dream of making available on-line for no cost. (For example, I’d love to be able to get even summary records for my paternal grandparents, who both served for Britain in WW2, but as far as I can tell, there’s basically no way to do it without spending a fair amount of time and money.) These free, comprehensive archives are a treasure trove for people like me who want to know a little more about their family. So, kudos, National Archives, for spending the three and a half years it took to digitise the WW1 records. I look forward to the WW2 records in due course — and that any eventual descendants of mine can look back at the records of their great-(great-)grandparents as well, and feel some small connection to them as I have.

It’s eerie, beautiful, something I don’t look at enough, and really hard to describe. I hope we get out there someday and explore its wonder.

Also, bought a new mobile phone, which took the above picture and then (after a bit of jiggery) even managed to transfer it to my laptop via Bluetooth. Sweet.