Tuesday, February 7, 2006
I found this sign one one of many abandoned buildings in Canberra, which not only appeals to my affection for the walking (or writhing) undead, but is suspiciously apt. Not that the city is a burned-out husk or anything. In fact, it’s pathologically clean, neat and orderly. It just… has a certain feeling that it was made to hold far more people than live here, and something Stepfordish has happened to the rest, and the remaining Australians have abandoned their, um, more increasingly Australian characteristics to live out lives of urban planning and business casual and faux-Irish pubs in office blocks.
Still, the weather has been fantastic. High 20s every day and barely a cloud in the sky. I’m already sunburned.
The Machine Learning Summer School has been great. While not every session is applicable to me, I’ve gotten a lot out of hearing Bernhard Schölkopf talk about kernels and Satinder Singh talk about Reinforcement Learning. They’re the kind of people you want to hear at this kind of thing: experts who have the skills ( mad skills, some would say) to present the information clearly, and with an infectious enthusiasm for the material.
Link to my Canberra pics.
Saturday, February 4, 2006
I was not woken by the rooster
Nor by the crow’s tough song
But the midnight cry of a blood red bird
Brought this sleeplessness on
— (smog)
What Canberra lacks in humans, it more than makes up for in the quantity and variety of its bird life. This is one of many, many, many birds I’ve seen in Canberra, which I have nicknamed “Birdtown, Australia”. I must have seen a dozen different species while I was out jogging by Lake Burley Griffin this morning, including wild cockatoos. Many of them are remarkably colourful and just as remarkably noisy.
Link (from my flickr photostream).
The ancient celts supposedly believed that on Halloween, burial mounds would open up and spirits could cross back and forth from their world to ours. I like that a lot more than store-bought cartoon ghosts in the window, so this All Hallow’s Eve at die Kommune, we decided to paganize things up a bit with sacrificial pumpkins and stick men spirits all over the yard.
Not that it has anything to do with actual celtic belief, it’s just that I love the idea of Halloween’s primal, pagan undercurrent, and the dark, fall-inspired creativity of the holiday. Usually I get that out of my system with the Parade of Lost Souls, but since it was canceled this year, I had to do it all myself with zombie costumes and creepy yard decorations.
Link (via my flickr photostream). You can also check out my I (heart) Halloween photo set on flickr, which I suspect will get more pics added to it over the next day or two…
Also filed in
|
|
Yesterday was the first Vancouver Zombiewalk. I’m a huge fan of zombie movies. I usually zombify myself for Halloween, and I even wrote a short (unfilmed) zombie movie back when I was in film school. So naturally, when I heard about the Zombiewalk, I was pretty excited, but maybe a little apprehensive. The thing didn’t really seem to have much central organization, and it seemed to be spreading only through a few local blogs and word of mouth. How many people would hear about it and be enough into zombies to put together costumes and spend a Saturday afternoon in August wandering around Vancouver?
A lot, it turns out.
I was expecting maybe few dozen people, tops. But we were an army. A mighty army of the living dead, lusting after the brains of the living.
We shuffled around the Vancouver Art Gallery, past the war protesters, into the the Pacific Center mall to the shock of the shoppers, stumbling down the escalator and into the bowels of the earth to catch the train. The skytrain passengers could only watch helplessly as their train pulled up into a sea of zombies which invaded the cars, only to be disgorged at the Main Street station. We staggered up Main Street, surrounding buses and police cars, past the trendy restaurants and hipster hangouts and into the residential streets and parks. People came out to their front lawns and balconies to gawk at us, until finally we lurched into Mountainview Cemetery to rejoin our resting brethren.
It was a fantastic experience — unexpected and surreal and pointless and bizarre. The people we passed were (mostly) completely surprised and amused to see this invasion of the dead. Even the police escort we eventually picked up was entertained, joking and posing with the zombies. Hopefully, we made helped make everyone’s day just a little more surreal.
- Link (to my pics of the event).
- Link (to hundreds more pictures by other people and zombies).
-