Lifestyle Tips for the Lost and Damned: Personal Hygiene the METAL Way

First, take a chamois or face-cloth and DROWN it with HOT water. Brutal. Now, wrap it around some LARGE ROCKS so that the rocks are cradled in the cloth like a sock full of coins. A sock full of coins will also work. Proceed to BEAT YOURSELF all over your body, HARD, until you feel the BURNING PAIN of cleanliness. PUNISH your body in this way every morning to open your pores and promote a healthy SKIN-SUIT. Hardcore. Now, take more BURNING hot water and splash it directly INTO YOUR EYES. This will HURT. PAIN IS YOUR FRIEND. 

 

It is now time to SUBMIT your hair to PURIFICATION. Find a mirror and SCREAM AT THE SKULL until the hair cleanses itself through PURE FEAR. If done properly, this will also CLEANSE your TEETH. Gnarly. Finally, to REMOVE unwanted facial/body hair, simply apply a HIGHLY FLAMMABLE fluid and IGNITE YOUR FLESH. The hair will magically disappear before your very eyes. Sick. Now, you are clean and ready to UNLEASH yourself upon the world. 

\m/

QLD’s Mandate for Change and the Path to Middle Earth

There has been some news this week in the insular world of Queensland politics; some new developments emerging as the new LNP government takes the reigns. Campbell Newman, as part of his first press conference as Premier of Queensland, has announced changes to six of his major state departments.

On Monday, in Premier Newman’s first press conference as our state’s leader, he announced the reshuffle of numerous state departments. For the most part, this was the standard reshuffle, replacing the old Labour-sympathetic government heads-of-department with new, LNP-aligned ministers.

One of these changes, however, has piqued the interest of some observers. Announced on Monday, as part of Campbell Newman’s “mandate for change”, was the institution of Andrew Chesterman as the new Director-General of the Department of Environment and Resource Management.

On its own, this is unremarkable news. In his statement, however, Premier Newman also announced the plan to dismantle the Department of Environment and Resource Management and reassign some of the major duties of the department in order to expedite environmental impact studies and their impact on mining applications.

"DERM (Department of Environment, Resource Management) could be split up, but we would create a department with a stronger focus on environment." Mr Newman said. "Changes would also be made to DEEDI (Department of Environment, Economic Development and Innovation) to create a mining and energy department.”

Elaborating upon this news, regarding both departments, Mr Newman added, "It would promote mining and exploration in Queensland… It should not take seven years to decide environmental outcomes."

This comes as unwelcome news to many Queensland residents who have taken this move as a sign of further environmental upheaval. The government’s installation of Andrew Chesterman would appear, on the surface, to be an acknowledgement of the importance of sustainable environmental practices, as Mr Chesterman’s previous roles included the position of Divisional Manager for City Planning and Sustainability and serving as a member of the Executive Management Team for Mr Newman’s Brisbane City Council cabinet. He holds a Bachelor of Applied Science (Environmental Assessment and Land Use Policy) and his roles within the BCC have both involved environmental assessments and planning the responsible use of land.

However, there is still some dispute as to whether Mr Chesterman can effectively protect the environment in light of the LNP’s “mandate for change” and the veracity with which they are approaching the mining issue. There has been, and will likely continue to be, dispute about the government’s priorities where environmental protection is concerned. Added to this is the knowledge that, despite his impressive credentials, Mr Chesterman was part of the committee that approved the massive construction projects around Queensland and allowed some of our city’s waterways and low-lying areas to become little more than filthy water traps and punji pits. It remains to be seen how Mr Chesterman handles DERM in his first weeks, and, indeed, how he’ll handle the disbanding and reappropriation of the department and its duties.

"We do have a mandate for change, a mandate for the policies we put out there prior to the election," said Mr Newman on Monday.

This stance on public works and civil planning has the potential to create some amazing reforms regarding the provision of infrastructure and the expansion of mining business in central Queensland. Unfortunately, the same elements of this story that could provide so much benefit to so many people have the potential to turn large parts of the state into ecologically unsound disaster zones. While it may not prove to be such a bad idea to separate the department’s duties to aid in timely and appropriate responses to mining applications and environmental impact studies, there is also a chance that de-regulation of mining in Queensland could open the proverbial flood gates and allow mining corporations to turn large parts of the state into flaming pits from Hell; or large-scale portals into the horrifying depths of Mordor. And with such an overwhelming government majority, there would ultimately be very little anyone on the outside could do to prevent it.

So, with that said, I’m personally curious to see how long it takes before public opinion swings towards the feeling of Buyer’s Remorse. I give it a month.

For further information on the latest departmental reshuffle, a statement released by the Liberal National Party government can be found here.

Karl Anderson

Media Use Diary (or An Analysis of Wasted Time)

Media Use Diary – JOUR1111 – Karl Anderson (s4288383)

Date	Facebook/ Twitter	Book	TV	Radio	Movies	Newspaper	Internet Browsing	Music
19/3/2012	5	1	0	1	3	1	3	5
20/3/2012	5	2	0	1	0	0	2	5
21/3/2012	3	0	1	2	0	0	2	4
22/3/2012	4	0	2	1	0	1	3	6
23/3/2012	5	1	0	2	4	0	2	6
24/3/2012	8	0	3	1	3	1	4	8
25/3/2012	9	0	2	0	2	2	3	12
26/3/2012	3	3	0	1	0	0	4	2
27/3/2012	4	2	0	1	0	0	2	6
28/3/2012	3	2	0	2	0	0	4	3
29/3/2012	6	0	2	0	0	0	3	3
Totals	55	11	10	12	12	5	32	60

The table above represents my media usage, in hours per day, for the ten day period between Monday 19 and Thursday 29 March, 2012. This table was compiled by noting the start and end times for particular activities, although times have been adjusted to the nearest hour for ease of use. There were some notable variables during this period, which I will discuss further, that have affected what I would consider my normal usage but, on reflection, I suspect that the discrepancies between this unusually busy week of local media and what I would consider my normal usage probably aren’t so great that the results would change dramatically.

According to this graph, my most consistent media use concerns internet browsing and music. My music usage is less than completely surprising to me, as I usually have music playing whenever I am at my computer, as well as whenever I’m cooking or cleaning. I also frequently have music playing as I try to sleep, although the volume is much lower and, as I listen to a lot of droning heavy metal, ambient instrumental rock, and classical music, I use the music as a sort of white-noise generator to aid in sleep. As such, I have not included these musical excursions in my table as I felt that adding extra hours where I was, for all intents and purposes, asleep would not accurately represent my real usage and would skew the results in a dramatic way.

The most concerning, but – if I’m honest – unsurprising, result is my online media use. Over the course of ten days, I was utilising Facebook and Twitter for an approximate average of 5.5 hours per day. This does include external links to other websites found within my Newsfeeds but doesn’t detract from the revelation that I spend considerably more time in an average day browsing the internet than I do sleeping. The only gratifying realisation to come out of this particular statistic is that the time spent on these social networking sites is rarely done in one sitting and usually is the gross result of a day’s browsing. On the weekend of 24/25 March, I spent approximately 17 hours using Facebook and Twitter alone, and this is with the added interruption of an 8-hour block spent in a recording studio. Thanks to my shiny, new Android phone (a Samsung Galaxy SII, for the tech-savvy amongst you) I was still able to frequently check my updates and browse during the down-time spent setting up microphones but for the purposes of this survey I have estimated it as approximately 1 hour total spent online using my Samsung Android phone (which I will continue to mention as often as I can in the hope that Samsung will give me some kind of sponsorship, or at least some free stuff), usually in very short blocks of only a few minutes at a time. Then, later, when I returned home, the very first thing I did was open my laptop and log onto Facebook to see if there was anything new worth reading about. This behaviour is not uncommon for me, as I have built myself a very diverse and interesting social network, and it is not unusual for some of the people and organisations in my Newsfeed to bring breaking news to my attention mere minutes after an event has occurred. Admittedly, there are also a lot of dirty jokes and angry rants, but that goes with the territory and it’s easy enough to sift through the junk to find some brilliantly insightful articles, blogs and news reports.

I have included my perusing of external links found within Facebook and Twitter as part of the accumulated time spent on those particular networking sites, but I have included a separate heading for other internet media use. This represents the period in which I browse other websites without the aid of Facebook or Twitter links. The sites I most frequently visit, and ultimately lose hours of my life to, are the news sites for Russia Today (http://rt.com/ ), the New York Times (http:// nytimes.com/ ), the English site for Al Jazeera news service (http:// aljazeera.com/ ), and the comedy/parody websites Cracked (http:// cracked.com/), and The Onion (http:// theonion.com/). It is also not unusual for me to spend extended periods jumping from link to link, following arbitrarily chosen topics and related hyperlinks, across the Wikipedia website (http://en.wikipedia.org). Sometimes you can find some amazing things by doing that. I followed a series of links last week and found myself reading about exploding frogs. Fantastic.

There is little to say about my radio usage. It is only present at all because I don’t have a CD or MP3 player in my car, so I tune to Triple J as I drive, with the very occasional switch to ABC Classical FM as a break from the inanity of popular music.

I will speak briefly about my use of television and movies as a combined result, although I have tabled the results separately for the sake of disseminating the information properly. The time spent watching movies and television combined is quite small when compared to some of my other media use. This is largely because I don’t really watch television very often, and when I do it is usually to watch either a news report or to catch up on one of the many television shows I have failed to keep up with over the years. My television use over the last 10 days was mostly concerned with watching reports on the state election, or catching up on old episodes of It’s Always Sunny In Philadelphia. There is no particular pattern to my television usage, as it varies pretty wildly depending on how much free time I have and how many interesting things might be on. My movie usage is only slightly more consistent, as I am a massive nerd and spend time watching – nay, analysing – movies a few nights a week, although it is often interrupted by more internet use, which is probably the most interesting revelation of this statistic. What that tells me is that either my attention span is getting shorter (which there is some scientific evidence to support), or that movies are getting worse (which there is also considerable evidence to support).

The results pertaining to my use of newspapers are the only results to be higher than what I’d estimated. I have not included the time spent reading free street press, like Brisbane Times, Rave Magazine and Time Off Magazine. I have only included the time spent reading the newspapers I buy out of sheer boredom, which usually include weekday editions of the Courier Mail and The Australian, as well as the occasions where I pick up a copy of the Sunday Mail. I don’t spend a great deal of time reading these papers, however, because – as a direct result of the time spent browsing the internet – I have frequently read considerable amounts of news reports pertaining to the interesting articles of the day long before I’ve gotten a newspaper in my hands. If this is typical of people my age or younger, then the alarmist reports about the “death of print media” are possibly quite accurate, at least on the larger scale.

I have spent less time reading books lately than I normally would, as I am normally a voracious reader and will often finish a book every few weeks at least. However, life gets in the way sometimes and, between reacclimatising myself to responsible study practices, being caught up in the media frenzy surrounding the state election last week, and the time spent recording music, I have simply not spent the amount of time reading that I normally would. I have spent a considerable amount of time at the Queensland State Library this week, but I have not included required study and research as part of my media use as I felt it was not representative of the time I voluntarily spend reading for my own pleasure and amusement.

As mentioned earlier, there were some noteworthy variables within this period that have, no doubt, affected my results and changed the final picture of this diary. Most notably, on the weekend of the 25^th/26^th of March, there was a Queensland state election and, as such, there was a greater draw to the world of social networking so as to keep tabs on the progress of the election, both via official news reports and the anecdotal reports supplied by the 200+ people on my Facebook Friends list.

The results found within this diary are surprising. A month ago I entered my estimated media usage for a survey on media use for University of Queensland School of Journalism students, and it appears my estimates were considerably lower than my actual usage, although there is some indication that elements of my media use have changed over the last few weeks as well. Ultimately, what this diary, and the information we can glean from the results, is telling me is that I definitely don’t get enough sleep in an average week. Definitely.

Karl Anderson

S4288383