Since I’m moving house soonish, and am planning to buy a new couch and do a hatchet job in the kitchen with that cool looking but unusable (to me) ancient oven, there seem to be an awful lot of kitchen and furniture catalogues finding their way into my junk mail.

It’s like they know.

I’ve dutifully looked through some of them, trying to find what I like. Which is not easy. I’m finding it much easier to identify what I don’t like, which may mean it’s a process of elimination. I swear the furniture catalogue that arrived today had a full page of leather lounge suites — all hideous. Cross them off the list.

Perhaps I need to get out and about and look at some of this stuff in person. But first I need to get the various house purchase paperwork done: I’ve got wads of the stuff from the bank (the home loan), the solicitors (including a request to measure the place… lordy lordy, must find that tape measure) and the home insurance people.

Blimey, it’s complicated.

Not a single dud:

• Many nice cards
• The new Ocean Colour Scene and Missy Higgins CDs
• One of those super great and almost scarily sharp Yoshikin Global knives — seems to cut through stuff super smoothly… I’ll be sure to keep it out of the way of my fingers
• Michael Farr’s book about Tintin
• All three Matrix movies — must schedule a marathon at some stage
• The last Lord Of The Rings movie (thus completing my set) — ditto, but it’s a daunting prospect
• A very cool scarf
• Robert Cringely’s book Accidental Empires — I re-watched the TV show recently, so this should be a good read
• Really interesting book called Freakonomics
• 1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die — I’ve got a lot of catching up to do
• A very nice looking bottle of wine
• Groovy t-shirt — like the scarf, from the very cool Village Idiom shop in Yarraville
• Some money, which I’ve put towards a pair of new shoes
• The company of some friends and family accompanied by fine food and drink

Thank you to all who contributed to a great birthday.

Here is my scarf (a birthday present from Marita).

Now, ten points to the first person who can name that pattern. (If you’ve already been told, keep your trap shut.)

• Post a picture of your scarf… Link in the comments or trackbacks
• Past photos in this series

Tomorrow I turn 35. Probably a quiet night tonight (I’m still getting over flu from last week), but catch up with some friends and dinner tomorrow, and a family lunch on Sunday.

(34 33 32 31 30 29 … 25)

I hate washing dishes, almost as much as I hate buying shoes. (Oh, I could tell you some stories.)

Due to my current dining habits (at home and elsewhere), I generally wash dishes 4 times a week — Monday, Tuesday, Thursday and Sunday nights.

My new house will have a dishwasher.

The exact date is yet to be determined, but I’ll move in there in late-October, in about 8 weeks.

So I’ll have to do the dishes about 32 more times.

When I was about 8, I got into the Beatles in a big way, after staying at a house in Dromana that had a copy of Abbey Road on LP, and listening to it every day for a week. Of course they’d been broken up for 8 years then, but I started collecting all the albums on cassette, a little later spurred on by the events of December 8th, 1980.

By the mid-80s I had a turntable, and in 1987 I upgraded to the record of Sgt Pepper (bought 20 years to the day since the first release, I do believe) and the White Album (collectors’ edition in white vinyl).

When I got my first CD player in 1989, the first CD I got to play on it was Abbey Road. Subsequently I’ve collected the other official releases on CD (though I didn’t get all the Anthology series — there’s only so many alternate takes of She Loves You that one can take). Though they don’t often get an airing on the CD player, when they come up on random play on the iPod, I generally greet them like old friends.

Though two of the Beatles have left this Earth, their music lives on.

On the train yesterday morning, two earnest young men of about 19 or 20 were discussing music. One was enthusiastically telling the other about the recent Let It Be “Naked” release, how in particular the version of “I’ve Got A Feeling” crapped all over Phil Spector’s original mix.

I was born a little after the Beatles split up. These guys would have been born about 15 years later.

What’s the bet that in 1000 years, as people are queuing for the teleport, they’re still debating the merits of Phil Spector’s production on Let It Be?

It would seem that some great music is timeless.

I’m fumin’.

I’ve seen Frontline, so I know not to watch Today Tonight or A Current Affair and expect to see serious or accurate reporting. But last night Media Watch revealed just how far TT would go in the chase for ratings. This time, they’ve edited comments from Australian Muslims, leaving an impression of them as rejecting the Australian way of life.

The point the interviewee, Ahmed Haouchar, was trying to make concerned Muslims not integrating fully into Australian society because of issues such as it being against their religion to drink alcohol.

What he said: “We will never integrate, the way other communities integrate purely because of the fact that you have to draw a line with what your idea of integration is and what our idea of integration and accepting the practices of other people are.”

What went to air: “We will never integrate.”

This cut-off quote was used as the basis for the story and its promotion. In turn it stirred up the usual nest of bigots on 2UE and elsewhere. I fail to see how TT can justify this, it’s a complete fit-up. Classic Frontline, in fact.

• MediaWatch’s video and the transcript are here.

Well, there’s one bloke I shouldn’t expect a Christmas card from this year…

Maybe that came over as being a bit harsh, but it was an attempt to subvert what was essentially a fluffy publicity piece and provide a view of how well his ministry is actually performing.

Most people, including those who don’t use it, appreciate the advantages that public transport brings to our city. And while there have been some improvements in recent years, we’re playing catch-up.

It’s a little like walking up a down escalator. We’re moving at walking pace, but we really need to be moving faster to get anywhere, especially (to stretch the analogy further) when someone at the top of the escalator (the same government in fact) is pressing buttons to make it accelerate, by way of funding so much road network expansion.

Figures show that PT’s market share of travel isn’t really growing (sitting on about 9%, up only one point in the last four years), and certainly getting nowhere near doubling as the government claims to be aiming for with their 20/2020 target. And market share won’t grow substantially while so many people don’t have usable public transport.

As Graham Currie said yesterday in The Age’s liveability survey “People keep asking me why Melburnians don’t use public transport and I say, ‘because they haven’t got any’. Two-thirds of Melburnians don’t live near a train or tram, they only live near a bus.”

And we know how woeful the buses are. Until there’s a usable network covering the entire city, we’ll continue to be moving, but not getting very far.

See also:

• 5/5/2005: Environmentally unfriendly state budget
• 16/2/2005: Kyoto, transport, all that guff (transport FAQ)
• 4/6/2004: How I became a transport activist