In the age of digital everything, using reality makes you stand out.

Watch the Heart of Sound video by The Softlightes (.mov).

Melbourne Cup Day.

Hyped locally as “The Race that Stops a Nation”, is the highlight of the spring carnival for horse racing. As a Melbourne resident for most of my life, I’d assumed that other states merely had a passing interest.

I may be wrong.

Queensland doesn’t have a holiday for Cup Day, but my office has chosen to host a party for the day. This involves watching the race, drinks, fancy dress competitions, etc.

At first, it seemed like an isolated incident. Trolltech looks after its employees, so can also use the event as part of general morale and team building. Then I discovered that my netball team also can’t play due to the Cup, and that other teams would also have player availability issues.

Maybe this race, for Australia, really does stop the Nation.

Then again, I am generalizing from a very small data set. Either way, happy Cup Day!

If I were just curious, it would be very hard to say to someone, “I want to come to your house and have you talk to me and tell me the story of your life.” I mean people are going to say, “You’re crazy.” Plus they’re going to keep mighty guarded. But the camera is a kind of license. A lot of people, they want to be paid that much attention and that’s a reasonable kind of attention to be paid.

– Diane Arbus

via MoCP.