Australia through to the knockout stages for the first time (no thanks to Graham Poll the English ref), great stuff, but please do something about your fans before the game with Italy - this is not the way you watch ‘football’. pyMac’s suspicion is these guys just like looking at the players legs.

still fairly recent if you haven’t seen it, take a look and pass it along - not sure if there is a part two but there are further links here

well it was a whirl wind trip to say the least - 12 days on english soil - a pub full of friends to catch up with, several times over - 2 new little persons to meet for the first time - a wedding - a sister and her bloke - a mum and dad - grandparents and uncle to boot. so considering the extent of our short endeavour we did bloody well, with a few exceptions we got to see more than a few of you, special thank you’s to those who gave us beds, food, a lift from the airport, a baby to hug, a beer or soft beverage, or just a thoroughly memorable time. congratulations to Sarah and Jason on their brilliant wedding day, and to Col, Jay’s brother and best-man for the shout out in his brilliant speech. i guess he won’t read this but you never know, so thanks again to gramps for the money towards our flights. thank you Mr Bobbin for the great birthday card (you should be selling those in some wanky art/design bookstore). if you were all trying to remind pyMac how much we love you all and how much we should miss you, we have this to say, tough you failed and you still all suck ; ) NOT, we do and we do as it were. guess the next time we see any of you will be down under so maybe Mac needs to get on and ask py ‘the question’ soon…

... to be continued

just a quick post to say we are back in the UK at the moment. by this time tomorrow our very good friends Jason and Sarah will be happily married, the best of luck to them both for the big day, and so glad we could make it back to be there. nothing much has changed of note, London is still one of the best cities in the world, but after Melbourne it certainly seems so much more hassle than it used to. all our buddies seem to be well, and it has been good to catch up with them… now back up to Macs folks for a couple of days either side of Jason and Sarah’s wedding, before we head down to London for one last fairwell then back to Melbourne. thanks to everyone who has been able to catch up with us so far…

don’t like to be too loose with our complements here at pyMac, but this one is worth the accolades. in general both py and Mac are big fans of cars made in germany and the RS4 is certainly up there on our list… in additon to the car itself the actual mini site they have produced is great. if nothing else it was fun paying tribute to our long lost VW Scirocco GTII (rip). all i can say is give the site a quick go and see if you see our car in there - beware of the spiders! new Audi RS4 this way

thought it was a good time to reflect on this whole blog melarkey. it’s been ooh what a whole month since our first post (April 14 2006 to be exact) and Mac is already beginning to wonder why we ever started. see this is mean’t to be both fun and easy, but somehow it isn’t… well hey of course it’s fun I mean 9 hours a day infront of a monitor for a paid job then back home eat some grub and sit down at the monitor again pretendng we have an interesting life, what’s not fun about that. Ahh yes and the simple bit, at this point it is imporatant to note that py had to sit around eager to blog away while it took Mac about 2 months and several experimental false starts to even get this bloody thing up (ok it doesn’t need to take that long if your not an anal designer). now that it is up, it’s actually far from simple. to start with we actually have a very ordinary life, so unlike Big_Al in the Big_Apple we often have little of worth to report - witty or otherwise. there is also the fact that it is actually quite stressful to think people will read any of this, when we realised people were, it actually became quite nerve wracking (well maybe I’m stretching the truth a bit here). but seriously the biggest issue of all is the use of capital and lowercase characters. seriosuly pyMac has lost maybe 2 minutes sleep over this important issue, and the astute among you will already have noticed that we have strayed from the actual plan. so with these stresses and strains we have come to realise how unfair it is to feel let down when our other favourite bloggers fail to add new entries more often than once a week.

during the past week we had Sally (py’s mum) come to stay and check out Melbourne. depite the cooler weather we still managed to get out and about, trawling the shops, visiting a couple of galleries and driving along the mornington peninsula all the way down to Portsea (i must say i can highly recommend the vanilla slice in Sorrento’s Just Fine Foods Delicatessen! two interesting facts about this famous vanilla slice; they make over 1000 a day and there is a vanilla slice festival held in Sorrento each year!) a good week had by all, well, except poor old Mac who was up to his elbows in freelance!

we are posting extracts from an email sent to us today, originally written by Frances Stonor Saunders, former arts editor of The New Statesman, author of The Cultural Cold War, Diabolical Englishman and The Devil’s Broker and winner of the Royal Historical Society’s William Gladstone Memorial Prize.

as Mr Bobbin (who mailed it to us) points out, “it is well worth reading, although i am not certain of its absolute veracity, it seems realistic enough!”. further more it opens up some cool conspiracy ideas that wouldn’t be so far fetched as we will highlight later on.

in short the new proposed id cards and the adjoining ‘National Identity Register’ will create a situation where total government surveillance on individuals will be an actual reality. the crux of this being the way in which we presently need to identify oursleves in every day actions like going to the bank, buying a new mobile phone, buying alcohol or going on holiday to a foreign country. all of these actions require us to provide some kind of id information. once the id card has been established this will be the recognised format for proving/confirming you identity - no longer will you walk into the bank, to set up a new account, with a recent gas bill and one other piece of id to prove who you are.

so what goes the cry! well Frances Stonor Saunders, suggests that since we pretty much validate our id in some way or another nearly everyday - using your cash card for example - in every case where we are presently required to do this it is conceivable that we will now swipe our id card as well as or instead of. that swipe in turn will talk to the NIR and while it confimrs our id it is likely it will also record the data and circumstances surrounding the use of the id card, for example £50 of shopping at High Street Sainsbury’s plus £20 cash back. in short our every move could quite easily be on that database, our every phone call, our every financial transaction or visit to the garden centre (more on the threats of gardening later).

to read all of Frances’ comments click here

if this scheme exists solely to exert total surveillance and control over the ordinary free British Citizen (or citizen of any other state toying with the idea), while lining the pockets of the companies that will create the computer systems at the expense of your freedom, privacy and money, then my question is how worse could it hypothetically get??

fictitious scenario to ponder: one weekend you visit the garden center and buy various pots, plants and fertilizers for some spring gardening. a few days before hand you had been in the computer store for some hardware to upgrade your old PC that had decided to melt on you the evening you had been searching for cool communist propaganda posters on ebay. three weeks after the trip to the garden center you are kicking back lazing in your lovely new garden when it comes on the news there has been an unkown explosion at a railway station 35 miles from where you live. over the next few days the death toll reaches about 35… 6 days later there is a knock at your door you look out the window and there are armed police…

now stitching people up or at least arresting them on the notion that a few tenuous facts fit is certainly possible, there are people in Guantanamo Bay purely on the basis of being Muslim and files found on their PC’s!! so not that far fetched if it’s already happening. scarier still is the notion suggested by V For Vendetta that governments could stage there own terrorist acts and with an id card NIR system in place, pin them on the politically active gardeners amongst us!!

PEOPLE SHOULD NOT FEAR THEIR GOVERNMENTS, GOVERNMENTS SHOULD FEAR THEIR PEOPLE - maybe for once people can become informed and take some actions towards maintaining a sense of democratic civil liberty.

every now and then some ninja madness seems to crop up around the world. well the latest offering seems to be askaninja.com. not entirely sure which way this goes, but i was amused by the line about giving a ninja a present, where the dude suggests giving anything black to a ninja is like giving crazy to Angelina Jolie. click here to visit the ninja

technorati tags: ninja

out on an Easter Monday evening bike ride we stopped off at St. Kilda pier and took some photos back across the bay towards our new home. in the shot you can see the city sky line from right to middle then easing out to the left from here we live somewhere behind the boats, we think!! the photoshop skills are by py, her first attempt at stiching a panorama together. click on the image to see a bigger version. more Melbourne shots at our flickr account for anyone interested.

now i (Mac) have been known to vent my spleen from time to time, (py nods and grins knowingly). well it just so happens the last time i felt obliged to do so was last week via email to a stranger, little did i know what would follow. so i have decided to post a transcript of said correspondence.

the background is that recently we have been scouring ebay for letterpress type bargains. while i was at work py stumbled across a website selling furniture made from what appaeared to be reclaimed letterpress type stuck together to make up large wooden blocks for lamp stands, clocks, tables and the like. feeling a little hyper after a hard day in the office i decided this apparent butchery of type was just not on and feeling inspired i penned a creatively damning email to the ‘furniture maker’ as follows:

Hi ‘name omitted for privacy’,
I’m sorry to say that it’s businesses like yours that makes me want to tear the walls down. As a designer, a typographer and someone with a huge passion and respect for the craft of letterpress - a dying craft may I point out. It sickens me to the core to see people destroying type in a manner that seems to have no skill or accomplishment itself. Whoopdedooo look at me I can stick some type together and make a clock - purlease release me!!!!!!!!! Leave the type alone and stop destroying what is a dying resource, there are so few complete sets of letterpress type left that what you are doing is tantamount to murdering history.

Cold Regards. Tony

well i guess in my haste it hadn’t really occured to me that this guy would email back, most likely seeing me for the sad twisted loser i am. but he did and i am genuinely glad of the correspondence that followed between us. at first he was possibly less defensive than could have been the case, but i suspect he saw some of the sarcastic overtones in my email for what they were:

Tony,
I’m 71, served a 6 year indentured apprenticeship as a Compositor. 1 pound ten shillings a week for 45 hours. I bought my collection 20 years ago, aiming to do the right thing with it. Unfortunately a Bastard caught me and my wife an illustrator who I met at Art school for all our hard earned money. You can have the lot for 85,000 quid. That’s what I’ve costed my Poster type, using as a yardstick the prices on ebay. Mine is in the correct founts, made by a firm you’ve never heard of in York. Go on see if you can find their name. Bet you can’t.

Its all yours. So put your mouth where your mouth is. You haven’t a clue. A Typographer? please don’t make me laugh. I do it on my PC like you, and its a joke. You would’nt have a clue what it was like in a Chapel, full bore with no breaks.

Hold on I’ve just an order for a coffee table from a well known Englishman, not thefirst I hasten to add. At this rate all 100 cases will soon be gone. Now thats the best news today. By the way there is no flavour in conscience. Keep witing the letters, have you tried writing scripts?

first rate reply, and one that deserved to be respected with at least a thank you email and an endeavour to guess the type foundry from me - script writing eh, now there’s an idea:

I’m glad you replied, my mail was intended to at least get some kind of reaction. It is interesting to hear your background and as you say we all have to make money… While I have obviously never worked the hard shift as a true type compositor in the old skool sense - I’m only 31, my first introduction to type and design at the age of 15 was under a designer who had formally trained as a compositor for a national newspaper in the UK and it was here that my passion for type and typography started. Unfortunately it is something that designers tend to take for granted in this computer age… I wish I had 85, 000 cos I’d quite happily take it all off you, just picked up a full face from a guy in the UK for £50 tonight…

Any hows glad you took up the challenge and mailed me back, script writing eh not too sure about that ; ) thanks for the response and no hard feelings...

it followed that i had guessed the type foundry correctly and this guy had been a very close personal friend of the owner. he had, as a last ditched attempt, tried to find backers for the foundy itself and then the type museum (which never gained successful funding). unfortunately his efforts were unsuccessful, but he managed to buy the last of the collection and has around 100 trays of the stuff. now this must be an amazing collection, the quality of the foundry was highly recognised, but life deals its blows and for financial reasons and the death of the letterpress trade this guy has been forced to make ends meet as best he can - hence the ‘furniture’. it seems a real shame and i guess no one feels the situation harder than the guy himself. as a nice touch he commented that it was not a challenge but a matter of courtesy that he replied to my original email, seems that both an honest trade and an honest bloke have felt the rough end of progress.

i hope that someone out there might read this and maybe, just maybe, have the funds to buy his collection and keep it intact. visit his site here.

technorati tags: letterpress

Easter weekend has been a mixed bag for weather, something we have be warned about getting used to in Melbourne. ref Crowded House - Four Seasons In One Day which was inspired by either Melbourne or New Zealand weather, depending on who you speak to.

well for a continuation of our journey into the cultural aspects of our new home we headed off to the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art or the ‘ACCA’ for short. at this time every year they host a ‘New’ art show for the year presenting younger up and coming Australian artists. this year the pieces are mostly installation type works but surprisingly they aren’t SHIT!! now call us cynical traditionalists but most installations leave us cold, however this show is great. if you are reading this and are in Melbourne we recommend you go. if not sorry, maybe you can check the gallery out when/if you come to visit.

well here we are, or rather here you are - pyMac - our lovely new blog.

if you have somehow stumbled here and are a bit confused, check out the about section to find out who or what this is. if you are friends or family or general associates thanks for coming, we hope you are entertained or enlightened.

enjoi