The Twilight Report

I know it shouldn’t be shocking, but it turns out that Sydney Uni is a hotbed of left wing sentiment. With the upcoming election and a few recent tea times thick with political gossip have cemented this cliché in my mind.

Unrelated: a little research on the interwebs and I’ve finally figured out how I’m going to vote in my first Australian federal election.

Many people hate having their photographs taken. They don’t like how they are going to come up and as a result, they tense up insuring that they look uncomfortable, thus making the photograph of them look even worse than the real thing. Being a good portrait photographer is as much about making people feel comfortable as it as about knowing f-stops and shutter speeds. I am not particularly good at it, my solution to this used to be to concentrate on (semi-)candid photography, not giving people time to make themselves feel uncomfortable.

I don’t like having my picture taken, because I hate how they come out, but I’ve realized the above and so I just sort of let photographs happen and as a result they come out a little less bad. Ironically, this meant that when I took that lighting class at Dutchess, everyone thought that I loved having my picture taken (we generally used each other for models in that class). I explained this approach to a friend of mine also taking the class, but (unsurprisingly I suppose) it made it even worse for her.

Today I went to Sydney Uni to take pictures of staff and equipment for the website that I am putting together for the Structural Biology Group (MMB). Obviously I had the usual cross section of ease-in-front-of-the-camera-ish-ness. The most photogenic people were, naturally enough, the ones that didn’t really care that their picture was being taken. Every once and a while I would get someone who hated having their picture to feel natural for just long enough (a second or two) to take a nice picture of them.

So I really like the preferential voting system that they have here. When I lived in New York, I pretty much voted for whom I wanted to win, not for whom I thought was the lesser of two evils anyway, but now I can actually do both! The downside to the Australian system is that you are more or less voting for a party and not a candidate (especially if you candidate is in the cabinet, where he or she can’t really even vote in the interest of his or her own electorate if it goes against the government), but at least there are more viable parties here. The actual process of collecting ballots seemed more chaotic here, and I missed the curtain that gave me better privacy when I voted in 2004 (I don’t think anyone was watching over my shoulder, but still). Voting is still exciting for me, I think because I’ve only done it twice. It’s kind of dorky, but I’m tempted to vote in the 2008 US presidential election because I enjoy being part of the process. I decided on principle that I would only vote in Australia since that is where I live now, but now I must confess I am thinking about it again.

“ “I come in peace,” it said, adding after a long moment of further grinding, “take me to your Lizard.”

Ford Prefect, of course, had an explanation for this, as he sat with Arthur and watched the non-stop frenetic news reports on the television, none of which had anything to say other than to record that the thing had done this amount of damage which was valued at that amount of billions of pounds and had killed this totally other number of people, and then say it again, because the robot was doing nothing more than standing there, swaying very slightly, and emitting short incomprehensible error messages.

“It comes from a very ancient democracy, you see...”

“You mean, it comes from a world of lizards?”

“No,” said Ford, who by this time was a little more rational and coherent than he had been, having finally had the coffee forced down him, “nothing so simple. Nothing anything like so straightforward. On its world, the people are people. The leaders are lizards. The people hate the lizards and the lizards rule the people.”

“Odd,” said Arthur, “I thought you said it was a democracy.”

“I did,” said Ford. “It is.”

“So,” said Arthur, hoping he wasn’t sounding ridiculously obtuse, “why don’t the people get rid of the lizards?”

“It honestly doesn’t occur to them,” said Ford. “They’ve all got the vote, so they all pretty much assume that the government they’ve voted in more or less approximates to the government they want.”

“You mean they actually vote for the lizards?”

“Oh yes,” said Ford with a shrug, “of course.”

“But,” said Arthur, going for the big one again, “Why?”

“Because if they didn’t vote for a lizard,” said Ford, “the wrong lizard might get in.” ”

—Douglas Adams, So Long and Thanks For all the Fish