- Dad: I thought I heard something about 1984.
- Me: You may have.
- Dad: Well, in that case you might be interested to know that the British Government is planning a new version of 1984 called 2014, in which the population is under constant surveillance by the state. CCTV, phone taps, internet monitoring, a national database containing information on each and every person. Oppressive laws designed to target perceived threats to national security - a category so broad it includes the majority of citizens on the island.
- Me: …and I’m guessing they’re planning to do this in real life?
- Dad: Oh, sure. The only part of that statement that wasn’t fiction was the part about the oppressive, totalitarian government emerging in Britain.
Fri, 30.10.2009, 11pm • 0 Comments • Tags: UK, life, rights, family
# The thing about doing a year 12 exam is that promptly afterwards, everyone you know starts asking how you went. The definitive answer is that I went okay; I can’t think of any glaring problems with any essay I wrote. The topics were uninspiring, especially the media analysis article, which was rubbish. I usually don’t care how boring the issue is, even if it’s about cutting down trees, because I enjoy deconstructing the manipulative language used by people to persuade. People can actually be sneaky and manipulative on the most mundane of issues (see trees). But this time, we got an article where barely any persuasive techniques were used at all. Disappointment.
# The first of my year 12 exams, English, is tomorrow. It’ll be such a relief to have it over — for weeks I’ve had to live with the guilt of knowing I
should have been studying, but wasn’t. Well, not for English. History, yes; Psychology, to some extent; English, no. On the bright side, I did the practice stuff I was forced to do in class, and the teacher thought my work was so good that she told me to stop studying. Which was great, because I hadn’t started! Thus, so long as the topics don’t utterly suck, I’m set!
I’ve complained before about my prime minister’s obsessive love of hideous repetitive slogans. Well, in the last few weeks, Rudd has found a whole bunch of phrases and has been remixing them into new and slightly different sentences. A representative sentence is the following, with the frequently remixed terms bolded:
…the Australian Government makes no apology whatsoever for deploying the most hardline measures necessary to deal with the problems of illegal immigration into Australia, no apology whatsoever.1
Imagine all of those phrases remixed 5698692 times in very similar sentences and you’ll start to understand my irritation (maybe). In an event that completely guaranteed my faith in our state-funded broadcaster, the ABC ran an item in which they included a compilation of all the times Kevin Rudd stated he made “no apologies” about taking “hardline measures” to “deal with the problems of illegal immigration”… five or six iterations of this remixed sentence, all in a row. Thank you, ABC, I love that you undermined Kevin Rudd’s message without stating outright, “He’s talking shit.” Thank you so much. Read More »
Easiest way ever to force myself to study: to close my laptop.
But not just to close my laptop, because then I could just open it again. To close my laptop and to bury it under vast numbers of Revolutions books. It’s not that I’m really fussy about which books I use to bury it, but Revolutions is the only subject for which I actually have many books, so those books are the ones that tend to get used for burying.
As a strategy it works very well, as it happens. I’m a somewhat lazy person, and the thought of moving half a dozen or more heavy books just to access my laptop is actually a massive deterrent. It makes studying look effortless in comparison. Even if I do start to take books off the pile, I look at them as I do and this often triggers a memory of something I wanted to look up, or something I should have been doing… so I forget about accessing my laptop and do whatever task just crossed my mind.
It probably would have been good if I’d realised this a little earlier than ten days before my English exam. For instance, this knowledge would have been good to have during the holidays. However, at least I’ve learned this now. That has to be a good thing. Read More »