There are only 25 blimps in the world, but this guy is trying to bring them back. Can you imagine standing in front of a venture capitalist telling them that you're taking blimps back.

The Australian people for the last 30 years: “We want - and will vote for - smaller and governments, with lower taxes, which means less tax revenue, so less money to spend.”

The Australian people in 2020, 2021, 2022: “Arghhh, our government is so small and useless!”

The UX on this Small Child Is Terrible, McSweeney’s:

“It’s as if this Small Child was not designed with accessibility in mind”

Week one of writing an email about life on the southern Gold Coast is that poor that @revue isn't sure how to communicate it to me.

"Yeah, no-one really cares, kid."

I don’t understand magazine publishing in 2022. Today, January 4, a few minutes ago, someone published a pdf to Apple News and it’s about Macs released on November 10 with a release date of next month.

One more Tokyo memory. No man has ever made me as happy as this man, as he handed me the nicest coffee my body has ever experienced. Japan is missing from me.

Whenever Brittany talks about having more kids, I start thinking about buying us a children buggy like this mum in Tokyo I saw in 2019.

I think about this bloke I saw out the front of a Tokyo train station in November 2019 reading a book with a magnifying glass quite a lot.

Nick Cave on Kanye:

Making art is a form of madness – we slip deep within our own singular vision and become lost to it. There is no musician on Earth that is as committed to their own derangement as Kanye, and in this respect, at this point in time, he is our greatest artist.

The trick with life is you have to actually mean it, which can be the hardest part.

As a very proficient speaker of radio, this video burns

I've got an old friend and we share ideas with each other. Then years later we share a news article about how someone "stole" our idea.

James Clear's distinction between our sharing ideas and working on them, stings:

"If you're not working hard, ideas don’t matter. The best idea is worthless without execution. If you're already working hard, ideas are crucial. Most effort is wasted on mediocre ideas."

In Praise of Conspiracy Theories, David Perell:

It’s easy to hate on conspiracy theories, but what are the best arguments for taking them seriously?

Here's one: At a recent dinner, we started talking about John F. Kennedy assassination theories. One guy remarked that historical conspiracy theories are worth studying because they illuminate so much about the culture of the time.

Studying the JFK conspiracy theories is a fun way to learn about the tension between Cuba and America, America’s rivalry with the KGB, the won’t-stop-at-anything political motivations of Lyndon B. Johnson, the mafia’s influence, and the power of America’s Central Intelligence Agency.

Peter O'Dowd and Kalyani Saxena:

"When you were a kid, it seemed like you could walk up to just about anybody and be best friends the next minute. But somewhere along the long, winding road to adulthood, making new friends became an impossibly hard thing to do."

Storytime with Seth Rogen is a new fav podcast and it's going on my inputs page. The most recent episode, The Ballad of Mount Doogie Dowler, is a grizzly bear epic!

Drafting up an email for my #southoftalle email list right now with all my photos from today where Ex-Tropical Cyclone Seth was hitting the Gold Coast beaches pretty hard. Into that kinda thing? email.southoftalle.com to subscribe for free.

Gold Coast afternoon

Ex-Tropical Cyclone Seth brings some surf to Snapper

Ex-Tropical Cyclone Seth is bringing some wind to the waves at Tugun and Snapper Rocks today.

I noticed a Jetstar Boeing 787-8 coming into Gold Coast Airport in some pretty strong winds and broke the camera out quickly.

Happy 120th birthday to the Federal Government, its birth of course being an issue for the states.

Joan Didion on being in the world:

“I’m not telling you to make the world better, because I don’t think that progress is necessarily part of the package. I’m just telling you to live in it. Not just to endure it, not just to suffer it, not just to pass through it, but to live in it. To look at it. To try to get the picture. To live recklessly. To take chances. To make your own work and take pride in it. To seize the moment. And if you ask me why you should bother to do that, I could tell you that the grave’s a fine and private place, but none I think do there embrace. Nor do they sing there, or write, or argue, or see the tidal bore on the Amazon, or touch their children. And that’s what there is to do and get it while you can and good luck at it.”

I never thought I’d be in such a winning position, but if anyone is trying to buy a rat, the ones under my house are of good breeding and honestly I’m happy for you to take as many as you can hold.

Sliding doors.

Daily Mail, 5 December 2000:

"The internet may be only a passing fad for many users, according to a report."

Some of Betty White’s best recent work was for Air New Zealand

In 2016 Leonardo DiCaprio finally won an Academy Award. Many scholars believe this upset the gods and brought torment on our people and the only worthy sacrifice would be Betty White. May her sacrifice lead to peace in our land.

Some personal news, I’m changing the definition of fun to things that take less than four hours to do.

James Cameron walks into the boardroom and “wrote the word Alien on a board. Then he pluralized it, making it Aliens and insinuating he was about to up the ante on this planned sequel. Finally, he drew two lines through the S he had added, turning it onto a dollar sign.”

Song idea: Nugget Connection.

A song about why there are so many songs about chicken nuggets and why they look like little maps of Australia if Australia would just let Tasmania be free from its reign.

This is the first episode I’ve heard of Seth Roger’s Storytime podcast, but it’s a beautifully made podcast, and this episode is gripping and the story is so good! • The Ballad of Mount Doogie Dowler, Storytime with Seth Rogen

Productivity inversely affects creativity, and vice-versa. So, welcome to the lowest productivity week of the year. May your creativity flourish.

A letter to a newborn child, requested of Desmond Tutu by the girl’s father, July 2016:

Dear Juliet

Hello, little sister.

You don’t know me. I am a very old grandfather from South Africa nearing the end of my journey on earth while your journey—on another continent many miles away—is just beginning. We may never meet on earth, so I thought to send you a secret. Well, it’s not really a secret because we should all know it. So I don’t mind if you tell everyone else.

Did you know that all people belong to one family, the human family? That although we may look nothing like each other, live in separate homes, practise our own cultures, subscribe to different religions—and some of us have more money than others—we are all sisters and brothers of God’s family?

You and I, and everyone else, were born with the same purpose. For love, for goodness and for one another.

God Bless You.

Archbishop Emeritus Desmond Tutu

Cape Town, South Africa

Whenever I hear Carol Of The Bells I have this tribal urge to run home to protect it because I think it’s about to get robbed.

Disney+ thinks that Iron Man 3 is a Christmas movie. Is everything a Christmas movie now?

Bob Lefsetz, self-proclaimed boomer, on boomers:

“Going to see McCartney, the Stones and the Eagles has become a ritual. Because their music reminds us of when we were our best selves, when what we had to say was important, when we were against the man before we became the man, when we wanted the new instead of the old and familiar, when we wanted change instead of stasis.”

“A tribe without enemies is, almost by definition, not a tribe. As a consequence, tribal dispute and warfare is part of what defines humanity.”

...

“Things have changed a lot since. The biggest enemy we have to fight against right now is our tribal past. What served us so well for thousands of years is now an obsolete concept. It’s no more about the survival of this tribe or that one, but about Homo sapiens as a species. … For the first time in our collective history, we must think of ourselves as a single tribe on a single planet. ... We are a single tribe, the tribe of humans. And, as such, not a tribe at all.”

— Marcelo Gleiser in “The Trouble with Tribalism” via Tim Ferriss’s email.

I met a Betty once and told her that when she calls me she can call me Al.

She just nodded in reply.

I think about this a lot.

If you got your professionally shot wedding, couple, or family photos printed at Officeworks, Harvey Norman, Big W this Christmas, know that you broke your photographer’s heart.

Kate Lindsay in Embedded:

“In the not too distant future, learning video editing will be the new learning cursive.”

there is no perfect monitor ra…

When I’m elected your President I will legislate that bakeries are allowed to make and serve real rum rum balls. None of this bullshit chocolate ball stuff.

A lot of people whinge about Jesus being taken out of Christmas, my issue is much more important. My two local grocery stores have zero Christmas food. Who took the rum balls out of Christmas?

There’s a very late model MacBook Pro on my kitchen table and aside from all the power in that chip, I’m getting serious PowerBook Titanium G4 vibes from the body shape.

I’m that old that I’m having nostalgia for old computers.

Pretending to be important.

Sophie Zhang and a Honduran disinformation researcher on Facebook’s election problem:

“We don’t expect Philip Morris to solve tobacco addiction”

Read on Rest Of The World

The British Medical Journal fact checks Facebook's false fact checking of the BMJ's “news blog”.

I can't help but feel that the skill of knowledge, the skill of knowing something, will be a superhuman skill in the future. Because we can't leave it up to algorithms.

PSA: next year isn’t actually 2022, it’s 2020 Two. It’s the sequel.

2020 II: 2020 and the Chamber of Secrets.