We have a new electronic ticketing system called Opal which was introduced to replace paper tickets. And not a few railway workers too, as the Government refuses to sell Opal at railway stations. Yes, you travel by train and you can't buy a ticket at a train station. Yup, makes sense to me. You buy them through Kwik-E-Marts and newsagencies instead. Tell me that makes sense in any context other than getting rid of station staff. But I digress.
The Opal system has a bunch of quirks built in. You pay by distance but a "journey" includes any number of transfers between trains, buses, ferries etc where you start one leg within one hour of ending the previous one. So when I catch a train then switch to a bus, that's one journey.
The maximum amount you pay in any one day is $15, which (with the distance I travel) I hit every day. However you pay for a maximum of only 8 journeys per week, after that travel is free. A weekly paper ticket (you can still get those and amazingly can still buy them at train stations) used to cost me $63, though it's now $65. So I'm saving $3 week under last year's fares, $5 under this year's. However...
When I caught the bus to see the doctor on Monday it was over an hour between getting off the bus and getting on the train to head home. So I did 3 journeys that day, not the usual 2. And today I needed a new USB stick. So I hopped the tram at lunch time to Haymarket, where a bunch of computer stores are in a building called Capitol Square. Yes, that's right... that made it three journeys that day as well. So I hit the $15 limit on Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday but in doing so I had done 8 journeys that week already. That meant paying $45 (3*$15) rather than $60 (4*$15).
Better in my pocket and all that.
Oh, the "gaming" bit? In addition to all of the IT stores Capitol Square is home to the absolutely weirdest (to western eyes) array of Japanese-inspired gaming machines known outside of the Ginza.
As we see here. I have no idea what I would do if I won that plush stuffed egg-cat thing across the way, but I know a regular cat who would probably shred it within minutes.
On a more serious note this was of course the date that a group of vermin who adhere to a medieval ideology (for want of anything useful to do with their lives) murdered a number of cartoonists and journalists for the "crime" of satirising their holy prophet. They were so stupid that they couldn't even get the right building, but even the stupid can be dangerous when heavily armed. To them and like (un)minded individuals... you are idiots. You are vermin. You are not animals, because you would need to aspire to reach that level. You may cause casualties from time to time. You may have a few victories along the way. But in the end, you will not win, because the hunger for freedom is greater than your hunger to oppress it.
Je suis Charlie.
Post script: On 12 January a text editor that I use called Notepad ++ reported that it had an update available. I downloaded it of course; no big deal, there are regular updates. But when I did so a new document opened and began typing automatically:
"Freedom of expression is like the air we breathe, we don't feel it, until people take it away from us.
For this reason, Je suis Charlie, not because I endorse everything they published, but because I cherish the right to speak out freely without risk even when it offends others.
And no, you cannot just take someone's life for whatever he/she expressed."
The Notepad++ programmers nailed it. I must confess that I was unfamiliar with Charlie Hebdo before, and didn't really know the content of it. Nor did I care, so disproportionate and unacceptable was the response to it. Since then I've seen more. A lot of the cartoons would be hard to equate with true satire. Many of them are not even particularly funny, and are really just spitting in the face not of fundamentalists but of those of a particular belief. They seem to seek to be offensive for the sake of being offensive. Sometimes it's impossible not to be offensive to some people; I'm sure that many theists find Richard Dawkins offensive, but it's a byproduct of making a point, not the point itself. I don't think that some of Charlie Hebdo's work is necessary or useful. But my response to what was done in response to that remains the same. You don't kill people for drawing cartoons. If there was a hell, you'd deserve to go there for doing that. And so I still say Je suis Charlie.
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