According to this news article the latest round of research is telling us that Australia has 18 cities out of the top 50 least affordable cities in the entire world. The shocking statistic for me was that the place where I grew up, the sunshine coast, is the 2nd least affordable in Australia and the 7th least in the world! I was gobsmacked! This was the place where my parents bought a house for five figures in the early nineties. My how times have changed. The average style of home is somewhere in the $550,000 range and that’s not even that close to the water. I remember when Mooloolaba was a bum haven with a shop that sold bongs. Not so anymore.

One positive for me is that at least the world’s most expensive city wasn’t in this country. It’s actually Los Angeles. For residents of L.A. I am sure this is an honour they could do without. We aren’t too far off with people on the Sunshine Coast having to pay more than 8 times what they earn to get a mortgage. To be honest, I will continue renting … for the moment.

Unless you have been living under a rock you would have noticed the LOLCAT phenomenon.   You can see the LOL version of this website by clicking below.  I know it’s lazy but it’s Sunday so what can I say?

Special thanks to Alison for this one:

 http://lolinator.com/lol/lukehoughton.com/

Thanks to the persistence of online commandos we now have the latest Futurama DVD being released tomorrow in the US. Bender’s Big Score was actually released today not tomorrow in the US. It was cancelled in 2002 after the executives at Fox stopped making enough money on it. According to the NY times:

The story, full of elaborate twists, is essentially a time-travel tale loaded with flashbacks to the original series and more than its share of inside jokes, many requiring freeze-frame study to appreciate fully.

There are also special guest appearances by Coolio (what the?), Sarah Silverman, and a nude Al Gore.

All this because we all complained and bothered them until something was done about. This is a lesson on perseverance! I am also thinking of Jericho, Farscape, Stargate and to a lesser extent world series cricket. Professor John Scott told us: the most power form of power is collective mobilisation. He was right.

This was originally posted on the defunct disintimedia.com

As someone who has frequent doings with the so-called ‘Generation Y’ I would like to add my thoughts to the on-going debate about these kind of university students. I have heard everything from ‘one mile long, one inch deep’ to the opposite view which suggests that the older group making the statements are out of touch. Here’s what I think:

Gen Y people grew up with computers

In my day *coughs* I went to a school where I didn’t see a computer until I hit grade 6 (I think). The computer was a commodore 64 with the standard tape player. Wow, I hear you say. Now, there was only a handful who did IT in my senior year. Compare that with my 6 year old who has been using a computer since she was two. Technology is a way of life for her whilst it really wasn’t for me or my (30 something) companions.

Gen Y has the benefit of loads of information

When I was doing high school projects with had the library and the regular old-fashioned encyclopedia. That was it. Now, compare that with the vast amount of information that’s available today. Wikipedia has gained cult status for example. Why is this? Who knows?

Gen Y know how to ’sift’

Sifting is when we sort bits of information and determine relevance based on what we think is useful and what is not. When I was doing an assignment on Hitler in Grade 10 I found that I didn’t have to do much sifting. There wasn’t a Google search engine to distract me… only copious amounts of television. Gen Y have had to learn how to sift, scan and assimilate unrelated bits of information into relevant ‘packets’. This is because of the technology of the web and many things which I won’t go into here. This ability to sift needs to be switched off at University where we force our victims students to sit through boring long winded lectures. Imagine your whole life being exposed to ‘packets’ of information then being told, ‘no wait focus on this one thing for two hours… oh and it’s not a movie.’ You can’t have one and then expect the other.

Gen Y grew up with a ‘disposable’ society

Most Gen Y’ers grew up in a society with two predominant attitudes. If it feels good ‘do it’ and ‘if it doesn’t work throw it away’. My generation was different. I kept hearing, ‘if you want to make it you have to work hard.’ What a horrible lie that was. I work as hard as the next bloke and most people are doing better than me! These ‘disposable’ universal relativist values were based on to the Gen Yers by a societal structure that created them.

Gen Y are not lean mean and unclean: They are the result of what we made them

People are like mushrooms. Why? Because most of them are fed on crap and kept in the dark (hat tip to Mum for that one). Most common knowledge is rubbish and nothing more than fodder for the next generation to stomp on. Of course as we get older we like to place the blame for the shortcomings of any generation on them but who were their mentors?

I see a lot of Gen Y people on a regular basis and personally I think this article from news.com.au says it best: they learn fast but can be a little intolerable at times. Surely, this current rhetoric has to end with positive steps towards the future?

I was wondering what would happen if the narrative structure Hollywood loves decided to not work any more. What do I mean? Well consider this: If the narrative, which has penetrated us like a prison inmate, was no longer working what would they do? Ahh, Fight Club I hear you say… that didn’t have a narrative structure did it? No, it didn’t? Of course it did. It was just shown out of sequence. That’s a non-linear narrative. I am talking about things like the start-middle-finish formula that scores so well at the box office. What kind of movies would be made if there was no narrative. Bad ones?

As I sat down to write this I realised that the narrative formula has been used so much that it’s hard to think of any movie that does not use it. In particular, I was wondering where is it used and/or abused the most. Some would say David Lynch movies? I think not. His movies are just … plain… strange. Now, I am a Lynch fan but I have been sitting on the sidelines doing a PhD for a long time so I fell out of love with cinema. Actually I think I fell out of love with Hollywood when I couldn’t get my book published. The worse thing that can happen to a writer is for their work not to be published. It’s probably my fault for writing horse plop. *Coughs*.

The narrative is so powerful that if Disney stopped using it, the whole show would collapse. Let’s retell a story from Disney… Cinderella… without a narrative:

Part 1: Cinderella and her two wicked step sisters received an invitation to the royal ball. Her wicked step mother givers her all these hideous chores to do so she can’t go and really screws up her evening.

Part 2: Cinderella is cleaning the floors when suddenly her fairy godmother appears and says, ‘Look sweetheart you have are not going to make it to the ball because you have too much crap to do. I mean, have a look at how dirty this house is … you really don’t give a dam about how things look do you?’. The fairy godmothers disappears.

Part 3: Cinderella stays where she is cleaning until she spontaneously combusts.

Well that just sucks. The narrative is a piece of culture. It’s a fantasy well all believe in but nobody actually lives… kind of like winning the lottery. It’s right old load of BS yet it gives us false hope. In short, I think the literary, film and print media (you know who you are) rely on this thing called narrative. Personally I would like to see Cinderella retold as irony and not make any sense (like the one shown above). You know what, life isn’t fair to most people. So why do we buy into this? I think it’s because we want to believe in happy endings because the only time we come close to anything like that is when we get to knock off work early.

I am big fan of CSI Miami and an even bigger fan of the First 48. I have noticed that the First 48 only solve some of the crimes they get where in CSI Miami they solve them all! And still they get heat from the boss. They are what 999/1000? The narrative only makes it sometimes into the First 48 where as in CSI Miami they always win. Cops never win in real life. They have a job that is demanding, they get abused and for what? To protect us from each other.

Yesterday I went to target with my kids to buy some stuff and I went to look at the book section like I always do.  To my horror I was amazed… shocked… surprised when I couldn’t find one science fiction tome on the shelves?  I have a theory but my guess is that people just don’t read popular science fiction anymore?   If they do… I guess they don’t buy it at target.

Angus and Robertson had no more love either

I left target and went to a dedicated ‘book’ store to look for science fiction because I thought what the hell is going on?  One, maybe two shelves in the science fiction section and the rest was fantasy?  I mean really what’s going on here.  You know things are bad when the shelves are littered with Mills and Boon and there is no science fiction.    What gives?

Science fiction slowly but surely disappearing of our television sets

It’s a great irony that Australians made Farscape pretty much and we never watched it.   Now, Stargate’s disappearing, Red Dwarf can’t get any more love from the BBC… it’s a global conspiracy I tell you.

What can we do about it

Ultimately we have the power, people who made the Farscape miniseries possible (you know who you are).  We must do something about this.  I don’t what but surely there has to be an answer to the vaporisation of science fiction of our time dilated portals… I mean television sets and bookstores.

The answer to this question may seem very simple. University lecturers (like me) should not be responsible for teaching students how to manage real problems. However, I disagree. Why?

High school does not teaching practical skills as such

While I admit there are a lot of useful ideas for reaching teenagers and getting them to cope with real life issues and problems, there is still a long way to go.  What happens is that students leave high school and then go into university then go into the workforce. Some, do trades or just get a job. Yet the process of learning is exactly the same. They go from high school to the outside world and then that’s it.

University courses are not that practical in general they are specific

Most university courses I have taught will not teach you how build great responses to problems. One of the reasons I started this blog was because I noticed people who were coming through university courses with no life skills. Yes, they could read and write (and do maths) but where were their problem solving skills? What about creative thinking skills? What about learning how to cope with relationships? If life is all about work then what do we do the rest of our time?

90% of what you do at work is NOT academic

This is hard to admit but how often do you reach for your economics book? Or wonder what Maslow would have thought about your jerky boss. It’s time for bone dry honesty… how useful is the information you get at university, high school or college (TAFE included)? Theories are wonderful… I have a lot of them. But unless something helps me to solve a problem I throw it away. What good is knowledge that doesn’t work? It’s like having a Porsche with no motor OR a Monet with a hole in the centre of it.

Once upon a time university was a place where people expanded their minds. Now, I think it’s a sausage factory. People go out to work after studying and I wonder all the time just how useful this knowledge is?  I have written papers in the past and then thought… is this even meaningful… I mean is this ever going to change our lives? I doubt it. We should be teaching people at University, high school and other places of education how to manage and cope with life. Why? I think there is a responsibility here for educators to realise that a portion of what we teach should be how to manage real life problems. If it isn’t then we are not preparing people for a life in the business world where learning curves are steep and lessons are harshly learned.