Topic: Whatever
Have been having various meetings about tutoring (a tutor in the Australian university system is the equivalent of a T.A. in the American system) over the past couple days - what's involved, what to expect, etc. Glad to get this all sorted this week since the semester starts on Monday. However, I am not worried about the last-minuteness of all this, as I predict that by the end of the semester I will be popularly acclaimed:
(Self-portrait created here, via Jellyfish)
Hung out with the Good Doctors and grandkids after all the meetings were over. It was a low-key evening after the children trundled home - sat around watching TV, which is really about all the mental stimulation I can handle after an afternoon with the kids, energetic little darlings that they are. Mr Dr professed annoyance that the footy pre-season matches are already starting, complaining that 'it's too early for football'. Mrs Dr said she couldn't believe that he'd ever complain about there being too much football. I really must get to a game this season - I feel like if I don't, I'll be missing out on an important part of local culture, given the number and the intensity of footy fans around here - this discussion illustrates just a bit of the madness caused the footy.
Watching the news tonight, I was struck by how normal most of the people on it look. The on-camera talent here has not yet been overrun with the 'plastic people' syndrome so prevalent in the States. It's weird to see newsreaders who aren't coiffed to within an inch of their lives and who appear to have never even considered plastic surgery. Some of them even look as if they might actually dress themselves without the help of a dedicated wardrobe assistant - which isn't to say that they dress badly, necessarily, just that they don't look as if every last item of clothing has been chosen based on how it will appear on camera. I like it, it makes the newsreaders seem like people, not like fabricated approximations of humans that are pulled out of a drawer and propped up in front of the camera every evening at 6:00 and 11:00 to look pretty while reading the teleprompter.
There's a great illustration of how far magazine and publicity pictures push that plastic perfection at FluidEffect (found at Antipixel). Click on 'portfolio' and 'before/after' to see how just how much celebrity and fashion photos can be manipulated before their published. They airbrush people's knees. It's fascinating from a technical perspective (for more of that, see 'composite/manipulation') but it's kind of creepy to see exactly what gets wiped out of people's faces and bodies to create a more slender, youthful look. It's startling how much more personality some of the unretouched photographs show. If it wasn't so late I might be tempted into a rant about the ridiculousness of a media culture that's so youth-obsessed that it promotes the airbrushing out of smile lines (really, is there anything more attractive?), but it's not as if I'll lack future opportunities to be prompted to write that post.