A little too late to be of any significance in the Hornsby Girls Jersey Wars, but...

Who is adidas?

The money: $8.3 billion annual consolidated revenue in financial year 2005
The labels: Reebok, adidas, TaylorMade
The boss: Herbert Hainer, Chief Executive Officer
The workers: In 2007, adidas-branded products were made by workers in more than 1,080 contract factories in 65 countries.
The locations: China, Vietnam, Japan, Korea, India and Indonesia to name a few. Also the Americas and some European countries. Source: http://www.adidas.com/

What's the problem?

While conditions have improved in a few of adidas' supplier factories, most workers producing for adidas still work long hours under extreme pressure for poverty wages. Among other things,adidas needs to do much more to ensure that trade union rights are respected within its supply chain. In 2006–2007 adidas removed orders from suppliers with a track record of respecting unions rights and placed them into a supplier factory with a history that is far from clean. adidas needs to be ensuring workers rights, decent wages and conditions are being upheld across all of its supplier factories, all of the time.

We are encouraging adidas to change – find out more at Offside! update

Poverty wages

adidas won’t commit to a living wage for workers making adidas products. We define a living wage as one which, for a full-time working week (without overtime), would be enough for a family to meet its basic needs and allow a small amount for discretionary spending.
We are on track to deliver on all our integration synergy targets for 2007 including €100 million in revenue synergies and €17.5 million in net cost savings. And net income will increase at a rate approaching 15%.
– Herbert Hainer, adidas CEO. Source: adidas quarterly report 2007

Who pays when adidas saves?

Rights denied

adidas continues to get its gear made in countries and free trade zones where it is either illegal, extremely difficult, or prohibited, for workers to organise themselves into trade unions. It is near impossible for workers to get better conditions (such as better pay) if they cannot get together and form a united, organised group to approach their boss.

Job insecurity

Two huge adidas supplier factories in Indonesia closed in November 2006 leaving 10,500 workers without jobs. A third factory employing more than 9,000 workers has been significantly “scaled down”. We are concerned that adidas’s actions are likely to be one of the main reasons the factories had to close. These workers were left high and dry with no work and not all of their back pay and entitlements. Find out more

Commitment phobia

adidas moves its production where it likes, whenever it likes and does not give any bonuses to factories that respect workers rights. adidas does not ban or severely restrict short-term contracts in its supplier factories. This means that workers can lose their jobs from one contract to the next and be left with nothing.

Find out more about how sports brands are tackling the problem of sweatshops in their industry in our Offside! report

What's the solution?

To take action now

Source: Oxfam Australia

If you ever need a stranger...

In the name of procrastination (Iamterrible):

Fifty People, One Question: New York by Crush & Lovely.

The goddamn friggy embed code won't work even for Vimeo but click it and see.

The other thing I'm checking out on a vaguely related note (strangers you see!) is Richard Renaldi's not entirely outstanding photographic series 'Touching Strangers', the premise of which is he asks some total strangers in the street to touch each other then takes a picture. Awkward, yes. Occasionally moving. I quite like 'Kim and Yoshi'.

Also, fifty things you might not know about Barack Obama! He is a leftie (left-handed, that is), speaks Spanish, listens to Bob Dylan. Favourite movies: Casablanca and One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. Favourite TV shows: M*A*S*H and The Wire. He applied to appear in a black pin-up calendar while at Harvard but was rejected by the all-female committee. Fools! In other news, Joan Jett has released a version of Silent Night for seasonal compilation album A Blackheart Christmas featuring excerpts from Obama's victory speech... My iTunes is malfunctioning along with everything else on this dang computer, but sounds bizarre oui?

Zip Zip USB Memory Brick

Aw! Not that I particularly care for or lust over techy stuff, but these are Australian and pretty cute:

"Each Zip Zip Memory Brick is a high speed USB 2.0 flash
memory stick disguised in a plastic toy building brick.

Zip Zip Memory Bricks connect together.

When in use the lid clips onto the memory component, preventing accidental loss.

1 GB - $29 USD
2 GB - $40 USD
4 GB - $59 USD"

I wanna play lego now! I used to have the coolest dragon castle set...

Earth to Roadrunner Records: AFP is not fat, and neither are we!

I will preface this by saying there is something terribly wrong with my internet connection and I can't embed anything from YouTube, do help if you can. Anyway, on with the show!

So a few weeks ago Amanda Palmer released the music video for Leeds United - I love the song, not huuge on the video but that's not the point - and it must be said that she is not fat. Not that it matters, but not in the video and not at all. I think she's a fucking babe. So one has to wonder why Roadrunner Records, on top of giving her shit about putting out a record that has "no commercial potential" amongst other things, wanted her to re-cut it so that shots of her belly wouldn't be included, basically telling her she looked to fat. She told them to fuck off! Woo!

So she blogged about it here and all her fans are full of righteous indignation, and they're starting a Belly Solidarity movement! From http://www.theshadowbox.net/forum/index.php?topic=6054.0, lads and lasses are sending in pics of their own big/small/hairy/smooth/stretch-marked/scarred/pierced/pregnant/WHATEVER bellies to make a statement about healthy body image for all and generally stick it to the man. You can email your own photos to doritojoe89@gmail.com, who is going to send them to Roadrunner HQ in protest.

Look at pictures of gigantic metal dudes on their label, eg Dino from Fear Factory, and ask yourself have THEY ever been censored? I could go on a huge rant here about the media & society's sexist double standards and unrealistic goals of "perfection", but I wouldn't want to insult your intelligence- if the hypocrisy and general awfulness of it all isn't plainly evident to y'all, someone needs a thinking cap and/or an independantly functioning brain. Long live the punk cabaret! Long live Amanda Fucking Palmer! Long live Rebellyon!!

P.S. For more on AP & The Belly, watch this. It's so cute!

Marjorie is dead.

Above is Stephen Fry and Hugh Laurie being amusing about language and pseudo-intellectualism, they remind me of that pair of sexy academics in The Crucible analysis video we watched last week. This is Stephen Fry being clever and charming and interesting about the joys of language. I particularly like the rant at pedants, which I am kind of sometimes sort of, but not about everything! Mainly about apostrophes! And I'm usually wrong anyway... But yes, the man has an incredible mind and he blogs, whoopee! Anyway, an excerpt:

"My language (as the sum of my discourses, as linguistic strata that betray my history, as geology or archaeology betrays history) is my language and it is a piece of who I am, perhaps even the defining piece. In my case it is in part a classical ruin, inherited boulders of Tacitus and Cicero bleaching in the sun along with grass-overrun elements of Thucydides and Aeschylus … not because I was a classical scholar, but because I was taught by classical scholars and grew up on poets, dramatists and novelists who knew the classics as intimately as most people of my generation know the Beatles and the Stones. Without knowing it therefore, heroic Ciceronian clausulae and elaborate Tacitan litotes can always be found in the English of people like me. In part classical ruin, then, my language in particular has also mixed in it elements of my three Ws, my particular world wide web, my w.w.w, Wodehouse, Waugh and Wilde, three writers who greatly excited my imagination and stimulated my language glands like no other. I would add Vivian Stanshall of the Bonzo Dog Doo Dah Band, Peter Cook and Alan Bennett as others of whom I am consciously aware. But the language of British movies, classic novels, sixties and seventies broadcasters like Malcolm Muggeridge, James Cameron, Alistair Cooke, John Ebden, Anthony Quinton, Robert Robinson, they all played their part in informing my spoken and written utterance too, not to mention the elemental styles which in turn informed their language. As Henry Higgins reminds us in Pygmalion, English is for all of us the language of Shakespeare, Milton and the Bible. We unconsciously use the tropes, tricks and figures of our great writers, just as we might without knowing it use a tierce de Picardie or a diminished seventh when humming in the shower. And to our native English today we have added the language of American sitcom and drama, American movies and Australian soap operas.

I’ve used this analogy before, but I’ll use it again. Think of London. Some of its outline was determined by the Romans who conquered it two thousand years ago, since then atop the ruins of the Roman, Saxon, Dark Age and Norman London was constructed a medieval city of winding streets, jostling half-timbered mansions and soaring stone cathedrals and churches. Then came, after the Tudor and Jacobean palaces and halls and after the restoration a period of renewed classical elements, the squares and avenues of Georgian and Regency London, elegant, spacious and harmonious. The Victorians brought long suburban streets, warehouses, libraries, schools, town halls and railway stations and in the twentieth century arrived a new architecture, office towers, corporate headquarters, airports, housing projects in glass and concrete, American and European statements of self conscious modernity, statehood, brutalism, socialism, capitalism and democracy. It isn’t I think, too much of a strain to see the history of our language in similar terms. A long sticky flypaper onto which at varying times of their importance the church, royalty, aristocracy, industry, commerce and international entertainment have accreted themselves. Saxon and Roman elements overlaid with the Norman French and Chaucerian and Church medieval English. A great renaissance of Shakespeare, the Bible of King James, Milton and Dryden leading into the classical English of Johnson and Pope. The Victorian English of industry, Dickens and music hall giving way to the English of the twentieth century, all the way through the arrival of radio and cinema, the political language of fascism, communism, socialism and finance, the Americanisms, the street talk, the rock and roll, the corporate speak, the computer jargon … and here we are. Glass and concrete sentences right next to half-timbered Elizabethan phrases, a Starbucks of an utterance dwelling in an expression that once belonged to a Victorian banker, an Apple Store of an accent in a converted Georgian merchant’s lingo. You get the point. Whether or not we are aware of the difference between a transitive verb and a preposition, a verb and a vowel, we are willy-nilly, heirs to Marlowe and Swift, just as that new Waitrose is a descendant (albeit a bastard one) of the Parthenon. Bear in mind that phrase willy-nilly, by the way – I shall return to it later. For the meantime, seal it in a baggie and stash it in your hoodie. Or fold it in scented tissue and lay it tenderly in your hope chest, according to taste."

Bit o' this, bit o' that

It's my mum's birthday today, there are bugs in my hair, all the gel pens are running out. My legs are itchy and my feet are SO GODDAMN ITCHY. Today was pathetic, I am a waste of space. Procrastination! Who needs to pass year 12? Not I!

Urrf Patrick Wolf is no longer a ranga, to add to the utter awfulness of my life. He has new hair, it's silvery blonde. He also has a new double album coming out next February, half of which will feature Alec Empire of Atari Teenage Riot. That half will be "punky and aggressive" and named 'Battle'. These are all the wonderful things I learn from month-old NME articles when I should be starting one hundred million assessments!

"He said that 'Battle' was inspired by a period of depression he suffered a few years ago."I was having to play songs about a past relationship, I'd been through three management changes, I was breaking up, going insane," Wolf told NME.COM. "I revelled in my depression and began attacking politics and the people around me. It's an aggressive noise punk record."Wolf added that the 'light' side of the album, in contrast to 'Battle''s sombre tone, will be more uplifting. "I've found my true love, who has practically saved my life," he explained. He added: "That's in contrast to the inspiration for 'Battle', which was me thinking, 'Will I ever be in love again or will I be a bachelor for the rest of my life?'"

Wine of the day: Zonin Asti Dolce. So sweet, so sparkling!

Art of the day: The Truth About Comets and Little Girls
by Dorothea Tanning, 1945


I was trying to find Conposition with Figures on a Terrace by Leonor Fini or Judith by Richard Oelze, because they fit my mood today very rather better, but Google images has let me down. This painting is undeniably lovely though. Apparently it's a reaction against the rhetorical use of the femme-enfant by Andre Breton and other male Surrealists... Stick it to the maan Melusine!

Word of the day: dingle: (n): a small wooded hollow.

Now as I was young and easy under the apple boughs
About the lilting house and happy as the grass was green,
The night above the dingle starry,
Time let me hail and climb
Golden in the heydays of his eyes,
And honoured among wagons
I was prince of the apple towns
And once below a time
I lordly had the trees and leaves
Trail with daisies and barley
Down the rivers of the windfall light.
- Dylan Thomas

I have a mandolin, I play it all day long, it makes me want to kill myself...

...going on eighteen!

While 16 will forever be saddled with a sweet image, even if the song is about sullying that very innocence, 17 is pure angst on wheels. To hear the songwriters of the last 40 years tell it, to be 17 is to be miserable, angry, depressed and quite possibly suicidal. Songs celebrating the free and easy side of 17 are very much in the minority. Boyd Bennett, an unheralded rockabilly player who reckoned Bill Haley had ripped him off, had one lone hit in 1955, with a rocking number called “Seventeen.” It went, “Seventeen, hot rod queen/Cutest girl you’ve ever seen/Tell the world I’m really keen/On my hepcat doll of seventeen.” A charmingly dated scenario, to be sure, but not the true 17. In “Sexy + 17,” the Stray Cats looked backward to the ‘50s—as they did in all their musical endeavors—to find something unthreatening to admire about the number. The dearth of positive 17 songs certainly stems from the fact that the number has become inextricably associated with its age equivalent in human years.

The most joyous moment in pop 17-ness has to be the opening couplet of “I Saw Her Standing There.” “Well she was just seventeen/and you know what I mean” is as much a part of the rock vernacular as “I can’t get no satisfaction.” Maybe if that crooked number had been part of that ecstatic song’s title, things might have turned around for 17. But the Beatles went for “I Saw Her Standing There” and henceforth, 16 out of every 17 “17” songs have been sung from the point of view of someone extremely miserable.

Janis Ian, who had an unlikely hit in 1966 with “Society’s Child,” at the precocious age of 15 (and that’s pre- Tiffany and TRL) scored an even bigger hit nearly a decade later, with “At Seventeen,” a first-person chronicle of that age’s particular pain, with details that we may never see the likes of again. Lines like, “To those of us who knew the pain/Of valentines that never came/And those whose names were never called/When choosing sides for basketball” will always send douche chills shooting up the spines of people who lived through the era when this song was all over the radio. Winning a sort of Oscar in its field, “At Seventeen” has earned a hallowed place in I Hate Myself and I Want to Die: The 52 Most Depressing Songs You’ve Ever Heard by Tom Reynolds, which I highly recommend, and a cursory Google search reveals that many people feel share the belief that the song reaches dangerous levels of moroseness. Because of its ubiquity on the airwaves during the singer-songwriter-friendly ‘70s, “At Seventeen” had a virtual lock on the number for several years, successfully withstanding a gob of spit and an elbow jab by the Sex Pistols, whose “Seventeen” declared “I’m a lazy sod!” but alas, the only number Mr. Lydon utters in the song is actually12 more than 17 (“You’re only 29/Got a lot to learn”). Pistols contemporaries The Cure went for “17” glory with “Seventeen Seconds,” the catchiest song ever written about the last 17 seconds in the life of a person who has just committed suicide. Tracey Ullman obviously saw the appropriateness of 17 for her song “You Broke My Heart in 17 Places” (a pretty nifty song, the chorus of which adds to the titular phrase, “Shepherd’s Bush was only one.”) Unsung Chicago rocker Ike Reilly has a sleazy masterpiece called “Hip Hop Thighs #17,” but it gets disqualified for numerical arbitrariness. Jimmy Eat World’s “Seventeen” gets disqualified for never mentioning the number. Tim McGraw’s “Seventeen” gets disqualified for being by Tim McGraw. Ditto “Seventeen” by Winger.

Rising from some strange, pillowy planet, “Anthems for a Seventeen Year-Old Girl” by Broken Social Scene is a favorite song of robot geishas worldwide, as well as one of mine. Sadly, and I do mean that, there is no mention of the titular number, although the line “Park that car, drop that phone, sleep on the floor, dream about me” gets said 13 times in a row. There is no justice. Ladytron’s “Seventeen,” which is as icily cool as one would expect from this gelid Liverpool outfit, decadently declares, “They only want you when you're seventeen/When you're twenty-one you're no fun.” With its throbbing dance-floor beat, this one really gives my winning choice a run for its money.

Keren Ann, the exotically heritaged singer songwriter who cannot seem to garner any negative press, comes close to seventeen-ly sublimity with the stately “Seventeen,” sounding something like what a young, alto-voiced Leonard Cohen might have written. A beautiful song, but the sophistication of the arrangement and the singer’s knowing perspective serve to belie the song’s central plaint, “Look at me/I’m only seventeen,” rendering it an odd choice for the quintessential “17” song. For that distinction, a song really must embody the whole seventeen-ian ethos. And that’s why there’s only one real choice.

Stevie Nicks’ “Edge of Seventeen” from 1982’s Bella Donna has the quaking, feverish intensity of a very confused, very sexy teenager, on the cusp of adulthood. It announces itself boldly in a spray of 16th notes (16th notes—that has to be significant) and Ms. Nicks delivers a whomping vocal that I defy you not to respect in the morning. Even Joan Cusack’s campy performance of the song in School of Rock only serves to reinforce Eo17’s iconic status. Here’s a song that’s embraced by the once and future nerds and the whirling ingénues among us, as well as those of us who fall somewhere in between.
Stevie Nicks - "Edge of Seventeen"

* Random fact about “Edge of Seventeen” – The title comes from a mishearing of the phrase, “the age of seventeen,” reportedly drawled by Mrs. Tom Petty, in response to Ms. Nicks’ query as to when she had first met her husband.

by David Klein, via http://www.merryswankster.com/ Thank you to everyone who made my birthday awesome, love you kids! :)

In which I punch The Lucksmiths in the face...

Not really of course. Tali and the boys are sweet and lovely and brilliant but if one more band I love comes up to Sydney and doesn't play any all ages gigs I'll... I'll... Make some more empty threats! And on my birthday weekend too! (15th and 16th Nobember at the Hopetoun Hotel if you're overage and interested.) On the plus side, their new album is finally up for sale here. I'm not in any hurry to get it personally, seeing as I don't have a live show coming up to get-to-know-it for... Bastards. But looks promising! And I will eventually! Sigh, today is so not a good day for Bodhi...
"Happy as ever to cast their rod into exotic waterways, for First Frost The Lucksmiths decamped to Tasmania during the wintertime and found themselves in a rustic shack, working with producer Chris Townend who has crafted the band’s most dynamic album to date. Germinating from The Lucksmiths’ well-honed strummy lyrical folk pop, First Frost drifts casually into fresh terrain for the band, touching at times on glam, fuzzpop, krautrock, shoegaze, country, and even a little classic rock..! With assorted strings, horns and organs peppering the guitar-happy mix, and Tali White’s duet with The Harpoons’ Bec Rigby on the twangy "Lament of the Chiming Wedgebill", First Frost is one of the band’s finest and most diverse albums yet. And with all four members delivering the songwriting goods, The Lucksmiths’ disarming lyrical hooks shine warmer than ever."

No matter what, once midnight hits, Bjork is genius.

Top 100 Crime Fiction Novels

Dear People Who Are Studying Crime Writing For HSC Extension English 1, also People Who Happen To Be Into That Sort Of Thing Anyway:

I found some lists compiled by two crime/mystery writers' associations of the 100 greatest crime novels of all time, ten categories with ten titles each (eg. "The Golden Age", "Thrillers", "Humorous", etc...). Seeing as we're advised to read about 30 books to get a grasp of the genre and to select some related texts from, I thought I'd share with y'all what are generally accepted by the whodunit cognoscenti as worth reading-

This is the UK list from 1990 from The Hatchards Crime Companion.
This is the US list from 1995 from The Crown Crime Companion.

Enjoy!

Owned Palin. (Ahh elections are so soon aaagh!)

Palin falls prey to Canadian prankster
Posted Sun Nov 2, 2008 12:20pm AEDT Updated Sun Nov 2, 2008 12:55pm AEDT

Related Link: YouTube: Listen to the Palin prank call

US vice presidential hopeful Sarah Palin fell prey to a Canadian prankster when he called her impersonating French President Nicolas Sarkozy and got her to accept an invitation to hunt baby seals.
In an over-the-top French accent, a member of the Quebec comedy duo The Masked Avengers, famous for tricking celebrities and politicians including Mr Sarkozy himself, asked if Ms Palin would take him on a hunting trip by helicopter, and then in French said they could also go kill baby seals.
An apparently oblivious Ms Palin said she thought that would be fun.
"We could have a lot of fun together as we're getting work done. We could kill two birds with one stone that way," she said.
The prankster also got Ms Palin, Republican John McCain's running mate in Tuesday's US presidential election, to reveal a potential ambition for the top job in Washington.
Asked if she would like to eventually become president, the Alaska governor responded, "Well, maybe in eight years."
Ms Palin's office quickly admitted they were hoodwinked.
"Governor Palin was mildly amused to learn that she had joined the ranks of heads of state, including President Sarkozy, and other celebrities in being targeted by these pranksters. C'est la vie," Ms Palin's spokeswoman Tracy Schmitt said in an email.
During the phone call, which was played for a Montreal radio program, Ms Palin complimented the fake Mr Sarkozy on his beautiful wife, Carla Bruni, and asked him to give her a "big hug" for her.
"You added a lot of energy to your country with that beautiful family of yours," Ms Palin said.
The prankster responded by complimenting Ms Palin on a notorious Hustler porn film Nailin' Paylin, which he said was a documentary of her life.
"Oh good, thank you," Ms Palin said.
Ms Palin also reassured the fake Mr Sarkozy when he said he would not want to bring Vice President Dick Cheney on a hunting trip. Mr Cheney once accidentally shot a hunting partner.
"I'll be a careful shot," she promised.
- Reuters