Have a look at this amazing video. It’s one of a series of mixes created by a musician/DJ/producer called Kutiman. What he’s done is trawled YouTube, looking for interesting sounds/chords/songs/instruments and has cut and pasted and reworked them into the most amazing songs. Just blew me away.

You can find all of the songs here. I listened to ‘em all, one after the other and was trying to imagine how long it must have taken him to piece them all together. Love it.

Money for old rope …
And in other news, the next of the governments big anti-recession ‘incentives’ has hit our bank account. While I’m not complaining about the sudden appearance of an extra $1000 in the bank, particularly since it’s exactly half our next mortgage payment, and since it’s far preferable to being poked in the eye with a short stick – I still don’t understand what Kevin’s hoping to achieve. There again, what do I know – couple of people on the expat forums have commented that the car parks at the big shopping malls were absolutely heaving today as people rushed off to K-Mart, Target and Harvey Norman in their pursuit of Tivos, Tents and Mobile Telephones. Maybe it will stave off a recession.

Unlike a lot of people, Liz and I work for ourselves, so in some ways we miss the worst effects of any economic downturn. Short of firing ourselves, our jobs are fairly safe. If anything, my work (fixing PCs) has actually picked up because ($1000 gift vouchers aside) people are deciding to patch our their old PCs rather than splurge on a new one. They’re also rapidly discovering just how reliant they’ve become on their PCs. Without even noticing, they’ve started banking on ‘em, doing the household and business accounts, storing all their photos, bargain hunting on eBay, using Skype, playing games, listenign to the radio, watching movies … they’ve become as essential to the household as the family car.

But of course, the fact of the matter is that the economy in this country is nowhere nearly as badly fucked as it is elsewhere. The government had in fact, borrowed from abroad for the first time since the Keating administration in the early ’90s. This proved slightly problematic as Australia had no credit history – the banks were faced with the same problem a new migrant to this country has – how can you prove you’re good for debt if you’ve got no track-record showing you’re a safe prospect? The GDP here fell by 5% – which is pretty bad until consider that Japan, for instance, is down 100%! I’m not saying the streets are paved with gold or that we’ll come out of this downturn unscathed, but the fact is that the Australian economy is already proving far more resilient than any of the other OECD countries.

Autumn …
Jeez – don’t know what came over me there – back on track. It’s autumn. The sort of tedious fucks who get up at 6am tell me that there’s a definite ‘tang’ to the air at that ungodly hour – but by the time I rise, it’s usually warmed up. Autumn here means temperatures in the mid-’20s – which is ideal by anyone’s standards. Today I thought the weather was pretty much perfect – lovely and warm, blue skies – I turned the car’s air-con off for the first time since October and wound the window down. Life is good when there’s a warm breeze, good tunes on the radio and a wide car door sill to rest your elbow on. Temperatures will of course head south from here on in and I’m sure in a couple of months I’ll be whining about the cold, but hey-ho.

Anyway – it was so nice that early evening we headed for the beach to walk the dog. It had clouded over a bit by then, but it was still lovely down there. Near-deserted save for a couple of shore fishermen and us.