Benjamin Hourigan

Well, that’s the last time I go to Mount Gambier!

I would link to this story, but that would push its Google PageRank even higher. As it is, I’ve already had my place as the #1 result for “Ben Hourigan” usurped. Given that I tell people “if you’re not the top hit for your own name on Google, you don’t exist,” this provokes a minor existential crisis.

Honestly, what does a dead guy need to be #1 for?

To see what I’m talking about, copy and paste the URL below. Or Google “Ben Hourigan.”

http://www.news.com.au/adelaidenow/story/0,22606,22776627-5006301,00.html

(And yes, I know this is in poor taste.)

With this blog having been out of action so long, there’s a lot of upgrading to do. I’ve upgraded to Wordpress 2.5, and to K2 RC6, losing my custom CSS and header image of the Melbourne skyline in the process. Expect to see some of it back soon.

Watch out: if you ever find yourself writing homogenous, you probably mean homogeneous.

According to the New Oxford American Dictionary:

Homogeneous: “of the same kind, alike … consisting of parts all of the same kind.”

Homogenous: “an old fashioned term for homologous,” which means “having the same relation, relative position, or structure.”

This is one of those distinctions you never notice until you become an editor.

It’s been over a year. Towards the middle of 2007 I became unsure what image and content this blog was trying to put forward, so I put up a basic placeholder with this short bio:

Benjamin Hourigan is the editor at the Centre for Independent Studies, a libertarian think-tank based in Sydney. He has previously been an assistant editor and subeditor at Architecture Media, publisher of magazines including Artichoke, Landscape Architecture Australia, and Houses. His writing has been published in a range of venues, including The Age, News Weekly, Australasian Drama Studies, and the IPA Review. He has given lectures at RMIT and at the University of Melbourne, where he has also tutored. He has been interviewed on Melbourne radio station 3LO, and for articles syndicated in the Christian Science Monitor and USA Today.

He is currently enrolled in the MBA program at the University of Technology, Sydney.

Benjamin is available for freelance writing and editing work. He has specialized experience in architectural publishing, editing for business, pharmaceuticals, videogaming, policy analysis, cultural studies, English literature, and Asian studies.

Now I have a better idea of what I want this to be, expect a few changes, including a header redesign. Postings will now be on matters I have a professional or journalistic interest in. The personal will take a back seat.

More soon.

From an interview with Lewis Wolpert, developmental biologist:

why should there be a meaning? I mean, we want a cause as to why we’re here, but I’m afraid there isn’t one. I don’t find it depressing at all. #

It’s exactly what I believe. Unfortunately for me, I do find it depressing, at least when I’m dissatisfied with other aspects of my life (love, career, money), which is almost always. Not believing that there’s any higher meaning puts a lot of pressure on one to achieve material success.

Where others might take their solace in religion, I tend to take mine in fiction, where I can brush off the fantasy that events fall in place according to an overarching plan and purpose as a conceit for the sake of aesthetics or entertainment.

I’m frequently impressed by the quality of Guy Rundle’s thinking, and in an article in today’s Australian, which is otherwise one of those all too frequent and tiresome explorations of the supposed excess and malaise of contemporary consumer culture, he comes up with this little gem:

Surrendering to snack food and TV in the US is a way of taking yourself out of the competition—for power, beauty, sex, fame. #

True, perhaps, but then, to surrender is to lose. It does no good to leave the competition. The best thing to do is win.

Update: The article gets better. Later we have this:

If we were a genuinely Apollonian, Promethean culture, space travel would have become a global human project, governments throwing trillions at it by public acclamation and we would have colonised Mars by now.

Instead we have devoted ourselves to making devices that allow us to watch Everybody Loves Raymond while waiting in the queue at the bank, and may get back to the moon in five years time, where we were half a century ago.#

Hear, hear. Raymond can go to a drab suburban hell populated by whiny losers. I want to live in space.

I’m now trying out Peter’s Custom Anti-Spam Image Plugin for Wordpress to keep the spammers at bay. Let’s see if it works.

Over the last couple of days I’ve been hit with hundreds of spam comments that Akismet isn’t catching. Comments on all posts are disabled until I can find a way to filter out all this trash. Sorry.

This in today’s Age, in an excellent article by Guy Rundle on sexual morality:

there has been a decisive shift in ethics in everyday life, from the centrality of the “good” to that of the will. What has become most sinful, as evidenced across the cultural field, from the art avant-garde to reality TV, is to not do as thou wilt, to abnegate, to pull back from the pursuit of satisfaction. To us, meekness – put at the centre of Christian belief by the sermon on the mount, as a riposte to the Roman Empire’s will-to-power – is genuinely repulsive, a strangling of one’s selfhood by a renunciation of what one wants.

Nietzsche would have been proud if this were so. I wonder, though, if this has indeed become the ethics of ordinary people. It takes enormous strength not to pull back from the pursuit of satisfaction, not to strangle oneself, not to renounce what one wants. It is easier to be consume than to produce, easier to follow than to lead, easier to be passive than active, easier to be slave than to be master. To stand on the strong side of these binaries is still something extraordinary, a position that belongs to Nietzsche’s übermensch (overman), the one who endeavours always to overcome his own weaknesses.

The full text of the classic writing guide is online. Use it.