After seeing *Avatar*...

I finally got around to seeing Avatar last Sunday. Nice. It came across to me more as fantasy than science fiction. For me there is a big difference between the two (and using the mashup term "Sci-Fi/Fantasy" is a cop-out) for the purpose of this exercise. Science-fiction as the term implies explores possibilities grounded on reasonably plausible conjecture. Fantasy, on the other hand makes use of, well, fantastic concepts, settings, and characters as literary devices for telling stories or delivering messages. I guess in a sense, science fiction is a fantastic story built upon scientifically or logically plausible conceptual underpinnings.

Going ga-ga over Polaroid

I read recently that Lady Gaga was appointed Creative Director at Polaroid. Actually it is supposed to be a "strategic partnership" between the fashion icon of today and the iconic brand of yesteryears (or maybe even more appropriately, yesterdecades). As if that weren't bizarre enough, according to the Herald,

The partnership is designed to help Polaroid appeal to a younger demographic after its technology was rendered obsolete by digital cameras offering a more effective form of instant photo gratification.

And here I was thinking "I wonder what Polaroid's been doing since the 70's when they did instant film photography...". Turns out that they are still doing instant film photography!

2010: we should have been travelling to Jupiter by now

One of my favourite movies of the 1980's is the film 2010. It is the sequel to the classic Stanley Kubrick film 2001: A Space Odyssey which ended with its lead character Dave Bowman uttering the words "My God, it's full of stars". If I recall right, those words were said as he approached that big black alien monolith that he, his crew, and the self-aware computer HAL-9000 were sent to investigate aboard their interplanetary space ship the U.S.S. Discovery. I've seen 2001. The novelty of space travel at the time the film was made is quite obvious in the way the minutiae of such things as the dynamics of moving in zero-g or the architecture of spacecraft and space stations were highlighted and focused on.

Yakkity yak all around

Several years ago, a consultant was employed by my previous employer to conduct one of those Myers-Briggs personality profiling tests on us. The test determines what sort of person we are inclined to be, presumably if removed from the pressures of stepping up to (and in some cases stepping down to) a particular archetype required in your chosen line of work. As expected, one of my parameters showed that I tended towards introversion. No surprises there. I didn't really need a test to tell me that. In fact, I was a consultant myself for most of my career, and I needed to step up from my introversion to succeed as a consultant. So I did. But that did not change my inclination to introversion. That's what off-duty hours are for, aren't they? They're for us to spring back to our natural selves.

How to enjoy *Avatar*...

I haven't seen Avatar yet. But what I have seen thus far is a flurry of great amateur reviews about it, mostly on my Facebook newsfeed, some on the odd blog or two, the rest on various channels of the hype machinery of Big Media.

Then I read Miranda Devine's review on the Herald...

The New Year in the cosmic scheme of things

Tonight in Sydney we're going to be among the first cities on the planet to welcome the New Year and the new decade. Speaking of which, I was reading this week's edition of Time on the train (the one with this year's "Man of the Year" on the cover, wait, "Person of the Year" lest I be accused of being politically incorrect). In it was a letter from a certain "Lisa" who was arguing (with regard to that magazine's welcome of the new decade) that the decade is supposed to begin on 2011. If I recall right her argument went along the lines of her kid knowing how to count and always starting a count from the number one.

Funny. Even funnier if she was being serious there.

Would you consider 1970 part of the 1960's and 1971 the beginning of the 1970's?

I don't think it really matters in the cosmic scheme of things if we are to consider the brainwave I had while commenting on noted blogger Mr London Street's We kiss with dry lips when we say goodnight:

Strange, all the silliness of these holidays marking what are really just our planet's location at an arbitrary point in space and time.

Happy New Year all!

Victims of clever marketing

This blog post is based on a comment I made on Kevin J. Gamble's blog article Jobs: The trend line is not positive. Gamble's article in turn was also based on a comment he intended to make in another blog article that also describes the magnitude of the job creation challenge that faces most advanced economies in the aftermath of the "global financial crisis" (GFC).

The thesis of Gamble's article and the article he refers to is the reality that there may be no jobs to go back to despite all efforts to "create" new ones to replace those that were obliterated by the collapse.

And here is what I think:

I think there are no jobs to go back to because most of the ones that were lost were created on the back of a layer of perceived value that coated the core of tangible value in our economies' asset base before this crisis. The GFC I believe and as I have read in many articles, at its most fundamental, serves as a severe test of asset value. Not surprisingly, it is assets that lack substance that are at biggest risk.