That Blackfella Bloodsucka Dance!

"That Blackfella Bloodsucka Dance!" A novel in which a part-blood Aboriginal Australian becomes a full-blood vampire (see the above pdf for the first 50 pages FREE!). Synopsis. In this bold and cheeky meditation on religion, middle-aged muscleman, uncertain Catholic and wanna-be academic Sterling de Bortoli is a self-described Octaroon: a one eighth Aboriginal Australian. Neither black nor white this part-blood Blackfella struggles with concepts of identity, moving between the two worlds but not really belonging to either. Thus he pursues a frustrated, anarchic, homeless existence in Canberra and Melbourne, until, through the influence of the Anti-Christ, his Dark Lord Maria, he travels to Islamic Morocco. It's a land completely foreign to his Dreamtime totem, and it's where de Bortoli learns to be a full-blood vampire ... a monster who never says sorry. ISBN: 978-3-8454-4518-2 Available in hard copy and E-book.

'You're not fit to wear the shirt': towards a cultural sociology of the football shirt

The world of football is a matter of life and death for many of its fans, and has also attracted much sociological attention. Much of this scholarly work focuses on issues such as deviance, identity, globalisation and commodification (Elias and Dunning 1986; Giulianotti and Robertson 2009). More recently, there has been some evidence of a cultural approach to football and to the football shirt (Benzecry 2008). In this paper, we seek to develop this trend by examining the football shirt as a totem, and by understanding it as inserted into circuits of the sacred and the profane, and the authentic and the inauthentic. Through examples such as shirt throwing, badge kissing, shirt swapping and supporters‟ efforts to construct alternative, protest strips, we show that the football shirt is deeply embedded in narratives of authenticity, sacredness and profaneness. In doing so, we aim to represent football as a rich cultural practice, which involves secular rituals and performances.

An isolated MOSFET gate driver

Traditional methods of isolated MOSFET/IGBT gate drive are presented, and their pros and cons assessed. The best options are chosen to meet our objective— a small, high speed, low cost, low power isolated gate drive module. Two small ferrite bead transformers are used for isolation, one transmits power at 2.5MHz, the other sends narrow set reset pulses. On the secondary these pulses drive a transistor totem pole to ensure high current drive, and the value is held by CMOS buffers with positive feedback. An alternative design for driving logic level devices uses only an HC buffer on the secondary. Double sided SMDconstruction (primary one side, secondary on the other) yields an upright module 40x18x5mm. Propagation delaywas 20ns, and rise/fall time 15ns with a 1nF load. The design places no limits on frequency of operation or duty cycle. Power supply requirementswere 5V@20mA for operation below 100kHz, dominated by magnetising current.

Family tree

Artist's Statement: These suspended shipping floats symbolise the artist's grandfather's home on Keriri (Hammond Island), where the trees are decorated with floats of all colours that have washed up on the beach. Across the entire Torres Strait, these floats, often from Asia, wash ashore and become decorative objects, strung from trees and hung from island shacks. Their vivid colours, and sometimes reflective glass surfaces, play against the lush tropical setting, while their re-use reflects the innovative character of island life. This arrangement of the floats represents the artist's family tree, which he has traced back six generations to Mer (Murray Island) and Keriri. The strings of orange floats represent his immediate family and direct lineage, each member of which is named on a float, with the totem of the family painted on the base. The remaining floats trace additional ancestry and spread further back through time and space, spanning the Torres Strait from west to east.