But this space nags at me like a sore tooth. I feel obliged to update, obliged to put myself out there. But I want to be somewhere else.

So this post is punctuation. An official recognition of a pause. But more a semicolon than a period. I’m not saying goodbye, just see you later. A little holiday in the real world.

“Well that is that and this is this.”

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Modest Mouse’s outstanding 2004 album “Good News for People Who Love Bad News” is available from Amazon.

Because nothing brings that paternal pride cascading to the surface like watching one of your sons successfully executing the lady killing skills that you’ve been so carefully teaching him.

Don’t wait up, Dad.

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The great Dwight Yoakam’s “Buenos Noches from a Lonely Room” is available from .

It’s probably a good thing, especially for a middle class socialist like myself. Rudd was plummeting in popularity – he was ineffective in getting the Labor message out there and pretty effective at being a dickhead. And it certainly won’t hurt blokey Australia to have a woman running things for a while.

But most of all, it is good news because Gillard may be the only hope to keep this guy from taking power after the next election:

This budgie smuggling buffoon is Tony Abbott, the bastard child of George W Bush and Sarah Palin. And the leader of the opposition Liberal Party.

“Laugh and think, this is Australia.”

It’s a shame about Rudd, but I have been impressed this week with Labour Environment Minister, and former Midnight Oil frontman, Peter Garrett. Want to know why? Check out my monthly post at The Greenists.

Images:

Gillard

Abbott

Pick up some of Peter Garrett’s greatest hits with Midnight Oil’s “20,000 Watts R.S.L.: Greatest Hits” available from .

Especially over these ones:

That last one, in particular, got to me. I’ve noticed lately, particularly with Boy Z, this primal need for recognition from his Dad. We do swimming lessons on a Sunday morning. After the rush of pride over seeing him swim on his own for the first few times, it starts to get a bit redundant. Boy Z floundering through the water up the lane. Boy Z floundering down the lane. Sometimes, midway through the class, I reach for my iPod  for a quick game of solitaire to while the time away. But inevitably, Boy Z looks up with a smile whenever he passes me to make sure I’m watching. To make sure I’m bursting with paternal pride.

As you do.

Because apparently, for a nearly three year old boy, paternal recognition/pride is as important as three squares a day. And it isn’t just the near three year old. These days, Not Max makes sure to make eye contact with me before he pulls plates full of food off the table. I can see that this business of raising boys is just chock full of paternal responsibilities of which I never even conceived.

So there you go. Happy belated Fathers’ Day to all you Northern Hemisphere dads who have spent countless Sunday mornings bursting with paternal pride – genuine or adequately feigned. Especially to my Dad, who has photographic evidence of his presence in the bleachers.

Based on the relative position of ball and bat/glove in these photos, he must have gotten pretty good at feigning pride.

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Cannonball Adderley’s “Somethin’ Else” is available from .

*For the record, Father’s Day Down Under is September 5 if you want to plan your shopping.

Postcard images from PostSecret.

But when it came on last night I was reaching to skip the track, thinking that Not Max would probably not consider it the best dining music. But as Gary Rossington’s slide guitar chimed in with Roosevelt Gook’s mellotron, Not Max looked up, cocked his head, smiled and started beating on the table in apparent ecstasy.

I said to Not Max, “Really, Not Max? ‘Free Bird‘? Why?”

To which Not Max replied with more vigorous table smacking. And the longer that very long song went on, the more fervent the table beating became.

“Well, Not Max”, I said, “I guess we’ll turn it up.”

And really, the better question is: Why not ‘Free Bird’?

Fly on, Not Max.

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The great Lynyrd Skynyrd’s “Pronounced Leh-nerd Skin-nerd” is available from .

More auspiciously, however, her debut novel “STAY” is being released this week by Dutton.

I got my review copy last week but before I could get into it, Dr. O’C snatched it up and devoured it over the weekend. She declared it an ideal beach book, so good timing for those of you in the Northern Hemisphere.

Once I got my turn, I read a bit more slowly, I like to savour my books. And while Dr. O’C is right in a sense – I think there’s a lot more to it than, say, the latest Sophie Kinsella effort. (Not that I know too much about the genre. What?)

Allie writes with a precision and a dedication to detail that sucks the reader into her world. She’s got a gift for dialogue and bringing her characters to life. The musical references that pepper the book really add to it for me, almost like a soundtrack for the story. And if you’re a dog lover, or like me a dog lover temporarily without a dog, it’s an absolutely heart warming story. Makes me think it’s time to get another dog.

Most of all, however, it’s a ripping good yarn.

In short, if you’re looking for a great summer read then STAY would be a great place to start. It’s out Thursday, but you can pre-order by clicking the little ad over there on the right.

Allie was also kind enough to take the time to answer a few questions for me, largely about the craft of writing:

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AFM: I would be willing to bet that a majority of my readers – including myself if I’m being honest – would love to be sitting where you are. First novel finished, picked up by a major publisher. So, how do you do it? How do you decide to write a book and then carry it out?

AL: The characters and the story really kept me going. STAY started as a short story, and I hadn’t originally intended to write it as a novel, but I kept wanting to know more about the characters. Not finishing the book would have been like watching half of a movie you’re completely enjoying. I needed that sense of completion to the story.

AFM: I was talking to another author friend of mine the other day about the ritual (or lack thereof) of writing. Do you have a special place where you write? Pen or computer? Music or silence?

AL: I go through phases and rotate through work stations (my desk, couch, reading chair, kitchen table, lawn chair, bed) depending on my mood. I write on a computer for the majority of what I do, although, if I’m doing writing exercises, I like to write in pencil on paper.

I set up playlists for my main characters when I write. The playlists are a combination of music my character would like, and music that somehow makes me think of the story. It’s a great way to snap into writing mode and put myself in the right mindset for my character. When I first heard the song On Your Side by Pete Yorn, it made me think of Van’s relationship with Peter, so it went on the playlist. When I worked on some of the Van/Peter scenes I would listen to the song to put things in context for me. But in the last few rounds of revisions, I couldn’t listen to anything (and neighbourhood noises drove me nuts). Even the smallest change that I made had to be carried out through the entire storyline, so it’s like doing a 300+ page word puzzle. Anything that pulled my mind away from the process was hard to manage. I wish I had a sound proof room for that stage of the game.

AFM: For you, is blogging helpful for ‘proper’ writing or a distraction?

AL: Blogging, Twitter, Facebook, etc., are so helpful. I don’t have coworkers in the traditional sense. There’s no one to chat with in the break room. Being able to have a sense of community and a way to reach out to people on a daily basis while I’m working by myself is amazing. Of course it’s easy to procrastinate and get sucked in to spending too much time in the wrong direction, so I have to be disciplined about how I spend my time. But I think the chance to connect with people like you and the other Greenists and bloggers I’ve been following for years, adds so much to my life, and I really appreciate that connection.

AFM: One piece of advice for a fledgling author with a book in his or her head?

AL: Get your butt in the chair and start writing. Little deadlines are best. I work with a writing group. The first few drafts of STAY were written at a rate of eight pages a week that were due for my group meetings. That writing rate was a very good pace for me at that stage in the game. It was doable, even with work and other responsibilities that took up a lot of time. And I think that’s a stumbling block for a lot of writers. The blank page is scary and the idea of writing a whole entire book gets overwhelming very quickly. Don’t sit down and expect to write your book in a week. Allow yourself to outline, or write badly, or storyboard, or whatever you need to do to sketch out a first draft. Then go back and edit. Know that you will need to go through many drafts. Know that it will take you time. And make sure you like your characters enough to spend that much time with them.

BIRD BY BIRD by Anne Lamott is an amazing book about the writing process, and I would recommend it to anyone who wants to write. I read it several times while I was writing STAY, and found helpful advice at every stage of the process.

After you have a solid, polished draft, start doing research on how to submit work and how the publishing industry works. I found AgentQuery.com particularly helpful. But don’t get ahead of yourself. You can’t submit until you have finished work anyway, so finish something before you clog your head with all that other stuff.

AFM: Who is your favourite living author? Who most inspired your writing style?

AL: Oh wow! Hard question! I have many favoured authors. And one of the coolest things for me about this whole process is the authors who have come through with advice, support, and kind words about my book. They are people I’ve admired for a long time as a reader, and I am in awe of their kindness.

I’ve always loved women’s fiction. From Willa Cather to Claire Cook, I love stories about strong women who are trying to figure out who they are and what choices they need to make in their lives. And I’ve always read those stories voraciously. I also grew up reading any Mark Twain, John Steinbeck, and Pat Conroy book I could get my hands on, and I know that sense of story and a love of complex characters influences my work as well.

AFM: And finally, the obvious one: what’s next? Have you started working on your second book? Any hints as to what we can expect?

AL: I am working on something new with completely new characters. It’s still in the early stages, so I don’t want to say too much. I’d also love to revisit the characters from STAY some day. Van is one of my favourite imaginary people.

Allie Larkin’s debut novel STAY is out Thursday and available at a bookstore near you, or from Amazon.

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Belly was Throwing Muse Tanya Donelly’s brief solo project in the early 90’s. I had almost completely forgotten about Belly until stumbling on “Star” while browsing through eMusic a wee while back. Listening to”Star” after more than a decade was good fun. It’s not the best album of that period of time, not even the best dreamy girl rock band album of that period of time, but there are a few good tracks on “Star”. This is why I like eMusic, you can find albums that you may not want to pay iTunes or CD prices for, but would be willing to shell out a few bucks for on a whim.

Ah, footy. For a couple of years now, I’ve been trying to develop a passion for the game with only minimal success. Why bother, you sensibly ask? A couple of good reasons. First of all, tea time conversation topics. I work for a pretty ‘blokey’ school and was advised early on in my employment to choose a team as it would make Monday morning tea conversations flow a lot more easily.

True that. Most of the words bouncing around the walls of the tea room on Monday morning are ones like ‘Crows‘, ‘Power‘, ‘Cats‘, ‘Magpies‘, and so on. Over the last couple of years I’ve been able to learn the jargon well enough to feign interest, but I still don’t care that much about who’s atop the ladder or the weekly Crows crisis.

Secondly, and more importantly, I’m on a mission to give my kids a true blue upbringing despite being the children of immigrants. They’re boys. Aussie boys like sports. Aussie sports are cricket and footy (at least in SA and Victoria). Now we’ve got no problem with cricket, I took to cricket straightaway. It’s baseball, more or less, so no problems. (No worries.)

But this damned football, or footy as the locals call it, is just a bit too bizarre for my taste. Far too much punting. And I don’t understand why they haven’t developed the forward pass. I mean, I know Australia tends to lag a bit behind their North American and European cousins in adopting technology, but the forward pass has been around since 1906.

Whatever. We need a team. How to pick a team if you don’t really care for the game? Well, I figured it out – let the kid decide.

Now, without getting too inside footy, we’ve got a couple of AFL (major league) clubs in Adelaide – the Crows and the Power – both of whom suck. They also play in one of the worst stadiums I’ve ever seen and charge an obscene amount of money to sit in the rain and watch bad teams lose badly.

But we’ve also got the South Australian National Football League, a collection of local teams that would be kind of homologous to a AAA baseball league. They play at smaller ovals around the city, charge $10 for adults and nothing for kids and, best of all, let you go out on the pitch during the quarter breaks and kick your ball around. The latter, for a two year old, is the clincher.

A couple of weekends ago, Boy Z and I headed off to watch the Sturt Double Blues play host to the Glenelg Tigers, the two closest clubs to our house. I made the decision before we went that whoever won this game would be ‘our team’.  But while we were watching, I had a moment of genius  – ask the boy who he liked.

“Boy Z”, I said, “the blue ones are the Blues and the black ones are the Tigers. Who do we like?” Maybe an unfair question, because Boy Z knows that ‘tigers’ are fierce giant cats and ‘blue’ is just the colour of our Mazda hatchback.

“Ti-ers.”

Ti-ers it is my boy. Ti-ers it is. We’ve got ourselves a team.

We’ve been to a handful of games now and everything is now Tigers. He wants to wear his ‘Tigers’ shirt every day. We’ve hunted down ‘Tigers’ socks, although a few sizes too big. Stupid Australian sizes. He sleeps with his ‘Tigers’ football. We have endless conversations about the next time we’re going to see ‘Tigers football’. (Answer – the next time it isn’t raining on game day).

And I’m actually starting to like the game myself.

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Image credit:

Glenelg Tigers

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Due to my connection to the place, I’ll always listen with a tender ear to any band from Athens, Georgia. But Laminated Catis pretty special, regardless of where they come from. There seems to be a bit of a resurgence of Sixties-esque garage psychedelia happening right now. I’ve been hearing a few bands that sound like they were the spawn of 13th Floor Elevators. These Athenians, however, are the best that I’ve heard, seemlessly blending psychedelia with fuzzy grunge guitar. Laminated Cat’s “Umbrella Weather came out last week on Garden Gate Records and is available from . If nothing else, Jeff Tweedy fans have got to love the Loose Fur reference.

This is my new favourite photo of Boy Z. I think it just personifies him. In motion. Hair flying (Enjoy that hair, little one. Male pattern baldness is hereditary). A cheeky crooked smile. A little bit feral. It’s just essence of Boy Z.

It has been kind of a lost weekend. Not like those that were frequent in my 20’s – days of memories lost to booze, drugs and the trappings that went along with them. No, lost in the sense of time that is irretrievable. Lost to a combination of driving rain, a dodgy tooth, a croupy kid and the subtle malaise that accompanies the beginning of winter.

I don’t mean to imply that it was a bad weekend. Weekends are never bad. Time with Dr. O’C and Boy Z and Not Max is never bad. Trying? Sometimes. Challenging? Often. Stressful? Usually. But also filled with laughter and the serenity of a good life. This weekend, however, a rapidly festering abcess sent me into a haze of self-pity and analgesia. A haze that made much beyond a basic level of function impossible for your underwhelming narrator and a fair bit of Friday evening was spent supine on the couch emitting soft moans.

Then the rain came and put the kibosh on our planned football outing. And then Boy Z started barking like a seal, which meant a Saturday planted in front of various kids movies on autorepeat. Boy Z wheezing and croaking and me whinging and moaning.

And then the lights went out.

A power outage, a minor occurrence to adults, is a source of much excitement and consternation to little boys, one of whom has a mild fear of the dark. “Where are the lights?” “Turn the lights on, Bubba!” “When the tricity coming back, Bubba?”

But we settled into that rustic groove that a blackout inevitably brings – reading books by candlelight, bumping into various bits of furniture and relying heavily on my battery powered iPod dock for dancing in the dark. But strangely, not to Springsteen.

And to put the final brushstrokes on the whole Laura Ingalls Wilder scene, the after-hours doctor turned up for a house call. He checked Boy Z by candlelight and declared him croupy. Of course he spoke with a strong Persian accent rather than a Minnesotan and trotted off in a Holden rather than on horseback and then the lights blazed back to life and with it 21st century Australia.

But there are a hell of a lot of worse places to be than 21st century Australia. And a lost weekend in 21st century Australia with these particular 21st century Australians isn’t ever really lost.

This post is all over the place and I don’t have much to say, really. I just wanted to point you to my monthly post at The Greenists. And show off some pictures from a weekend past. One that wasn’t lost.

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Calexico and Iron and Wine’s 2005 joint EP “In The Reins” was one of the finest collaborations of the decade. The only weakness is that it’s only an EP. Buy it from .

Actually, it’s probably a bit unfair to make Neandertal jokes about Neandertals. Most people who study these sorts of things think that Neandertals were probably pretty decent folks. They used tools, “they took care of individuals that would not have been able to provide for themselves, there are burials so we know that they cared for the dead, there is evidence for symbolic behavior, and it is clear that they were intelligent.” Maybe even more civilised than our human ancestors who very possibly killed them and ate their Neandertal cousins and may have wiped them off the face of the planet entirely.

You may have already worked out that I’m a bit of a human origins anorak. This is my fourth post about Neandertals, meaning that the only topics I’ve spent more time on in this blog is my kids. And the Georgia Bulldogs.

Some of you may have seen the news stories about the sequencing of the Neandertal genome a couple of weeks ago. I intended to sort of leave it alone. “Self, it’s just another sequenced genome”, I said to myself. But it turns out that this one, in the words of the American vice-president, is a big fucking deal*.

It isn’t just the sequencing of the genome, a massive technological accomplishment in its own right. A gaggle of researchers from around the world managed to obtain the sequence of the Neandertal genome from a handful of bones found in a cave in Croatia. Modern humans and Neandertals are genetically very similar. The biggest problem that researchers face when trying to sequence the Neandertal genome is DNA contamination from human scientists. Any of you who have watched a single episode of the myriad CSI’s and their clones on TV know that we shed DNA all over the place in the course of a day. The researchers go through great pains to minimise this contamination and also get rid of random microbial DNA that builds up on bones that have been lying around in caves for 40,000 years or so. The result of all this work is the first published report of Neandertal sequence that is really convincing.

What makes this a bigger deal, however, is a couple of things that the researchers managed to work out by comparing the Neandertal sequence to modern humans and our closest extant relative, the chimpanzee.  First, they’ve found some particular parts of the genome that are unique to modern humans. These parts of the genome are of interest because they may represent regions that have undergone positive selection. We all (hopefully) know that the driving force of evolution is natural selection. Well, selection can be negative (weeding out an undesirable trait), neutral or positive. The latter occurs when a particular trait is so beneficial to the organism and thus becomes dominant to other traits until it becomes fixed – or present in all of the population.

Well, the Neandertal researchers found a handful of genes in which a particular variant appears to have become fixed in modern humans that wasn’t present in Neandertals. Some of these are in genes that are expressed in the skin, which seems to imply that there is something special about modern humans’ skin morphology or physiology that gave us a selective advantage over our ill-fated Neandertal cousins. Other genes that exhibit evidence of positive selection in humans are ones involved in cognitive and skeletal development, though these are rather unsurprising.

But the real BFD finding for me is the evidence presented that our modern human forebears and Neandertals, well, got it on. I teach this stuff in my genetics course. And every year I present data that ‘proves’ there was no viable interbreeding between the two species. All the genetic evidence generated to date supported that if humans and Neandertals got a bit frisky on a cold winter night in the cave that they didn’t produce any kids that are related to you or I.  The current paper compares the Neandertal genome to present-day humans from sub-Saharan Africa, Papua New Guinea, China and France. What they found absolutely floored me. They showed that Neandertals share more genetic variants with the individuals from China, Papua New Guinea and France than with the Africans. What this means, unequivocally, is that Neandertals and anatomically modern humans mated and produced viable offspring. They did so before modern humans began to spread northwest into Europe and east into Asia and the Pacific but after they migrated out of East Africa. And it wasn’t just a one night stand – between 1-4% of the Eurasian genome is derived from Neandertals.

The implications of this are not entirely clear. If you’re of European or Asian ancestry are you part Neandertal? Almost definitely. Does it matter? Did these Neandertal sequences that have been retained in the modern human genome give Eurasians a selective advantage as they spread around most of the rest of the world? Well, that’s harder to say. But most analyses I’ve read suggest that the Neandertal sequences are neutral, just a relic of a little interspecies loving ‘surfing’ the DNA wave. But I’m not sure. I think that we don’t have all the information that we need to make conclusions about the evolutionary significance, or lack thereof, of this Pleistocene interspecific shagfest.

I guess what it does mean that there are Neandertal descendents roaming around Whyalla after all.

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* Actually, in the grand scheme of things, this is probably a bigger fucking deal than a half-assed health care compromise that isn’t likely to do much of anything to solve the morass that is the American health care system.

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Image credits:

Whyalla

Neanderthal woman

I don’t really want to ‘recommend’ The Bloodhound Gang’s “Hooray for Boobies” because a) I’m not a 15 year old boy and b) “Hooray for Boobies”. BUT, “The Bad Touch” is kind of a classic and there are a few more pretty damn entertaining tracks on the record. So, hooray for boobies! Buy it from .

I’d probably drift away from this blog for weeks at a time if it weren’t for BlogHer, who kindly pays my hosting costs through their advertising program. If I vanish from cyber world for more than a fortnight, they kick me off their teat. So here’s a bit of faff for 1) those of you who are related to us and like baby photos and 2) my cyber sugar mamas at BlogHer.

But don’t fret, the semester is wrapping up and I can see glimpses of that elusive ‘free time’ on the horizon.

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PJ Harvey’s 1995 album “To Bring You My Love” is one of the finest of that decade. But Harvey tends to get overlooked when people think about great artists of the 90’s. This track is a good example of why we shouldn’t forget about her. If you like it, buy the album from .