2009 Bushfires

The Firefighters' Union has called on the Australian government to do something about climate change. They are calling for a 50% reduction of emissions by 2020. This is the only real way to fight fires: to prevent the conditions which cause fires. Victorians have been asking what we can do for the firefighters: cutting carbon emissions is what they've asked for, this is what we can do. Firefighters have been so heroic and done so much for us over the last week, I don't think we should let them down:

http://www.theage.com.au/news/opinion/face-global-warming-or-lives-will-be-at-risk/2009/02/11/1234028114642.html

Phantom Pregnancy

I take a pretty dim view of gynecology, and whatever I think of modern gynecology (and that's unprintable enough) it's nothing to what I think of archaic gynecology. Even still, I have assumed, like archaic gynecologists, that phantom pregnancies are the product of a certain hysteria (though I have assumed that the hysteria was caused, not by being female, but rather by a corset-induced lack of oxygen to the brain and resulting weakening of the cardiovascular system).

But the goat who is 16 (the equivalent of 90 for a human) has just had a phantom pregnancy and there's nothing hysterical about her. She has no mobid fancies and she is not trying desperately to produce an heir to the English throne*.

I don't believe I have ever had a conversation on the topic of phantom pregnancies so no one has ever had to suffer from my ignorance. Nevertheless, I would like to apologise for my misconception which is damaging, oppressive and hurtful.



*I know Mary Tudor had a tumour, now conjectured to be cancerous, and is not strictly an example of a phantom pregnancy. But her case demonstrates the historical attitude to phantom pregnancy, and anyway, as Richie says in Filthy, Rich and Catflap after a line which equals mine in hilarity, 'It was just a joke[sic] we were doing'. BlueJ thinks I'm funny (sometimes), so there.

Foucaultean Hollywood

I have become interested in Lindsey Lohan. Well, I say "interested", by which I mean I don't know who she is or what she does or how to spell her name. I only know of her through the constant bagging she received on Get This. The point is, I've become interested enough to read the headlines about her in the women's mags while waiting at the checkout in the supermarket. This week's headlines include that she has a girlfriend, that she's pregnant and that she claims she's not gay or bisexual. So I'd like to stress first off that I acknowledge the possibility that this may not match the highwater mark of journalism and that there is an outside chance that at least some of it is not true. But I'm intrigued. She has apparently posed for the cameras with her girlfriend and yet denied that she is gay and when asked if she was bi said 'maybe', but has confirmed that she is attracted to women.

So the question is, does she not understand what the words mean? Or is this some kind of radical challenging of the hegemonic discourse of sexuality?

I was having an ideological debate with my boyfriend the other day and in response to me illustrating what I regard as a flaw in his argument he told me that I'd really hurt his feelings. I bring it up because I get that a lot from boys, both friends and boyfriends. Yet not one of my female friends has ever said that to me. The irony is that I'm much more forthright with my female friends. Many of my female friends have strongly disagreed with me over the course of our friendships, many have been cross with me for adopting a view which in their opinion is problematic. But none of them has ever felt that their egos were in any way involved in an ideological discussion. (Personally, I suspect that any girl whose ego was liable to get hurt so easily would get it knocked out of them pretty quickly.) Certainly, none have thought that I either should, or was likely to, change my ideological position based on their feeling personally slighted.

Carolina Liar

It struck me as an odd name for a band, especially one which comes mainly from Scandinavia, but it has begun to make sense, because over the weekend I heard an interview with the American guy from the band who claims that he often gets asked what the song "I'm Not Over" is about.

Here's the chorus:

I'm not over,
I'm not over you just yet.
Can I hide it?
You're not that easy to forget.
I'm not over.

If, as is presumably the case, he made up the thing about being asked that question to make himself sound cool, then I think he should ask for a refund from his writers and PR people. Or better yet, he should change the band name to something he's a little bit less talentless at.

Very Rural Victoria

The Old Ballarat Road (or the Old Melbourne Road, depending which way you're heading) runs due west (or east, depending which way you're heading), which would be grand for stage coaches which don't have rear view mirrors and which aren't travelling at 110kms/h. For me, it proved to be a lesson in the dark side of riding off into the sunset (and hoping there would be no cars coming out of it, after having discovered that the sunset wasn't all it might be.) I'd never driven that freeway before so I spent the whole time in a state of anxiety about where I needed to turn off. Under those conditions and in the glaring sun, it seemed to go for ever. When I finally pulled over in somewhere that could well have been Ballan, I was a zombie. I walked into the nearest building, I'm still not totally sure what it was because my eyes wouldn't' adjust to the light difference. Even once I worked out that I was still wearing sunnies.

Insufficiently rested, I was back on the road like Jack Kerouac except less gay, or like Ned Kelly without the beard and radical political agenda. The last FM radio station to give out as I drove into the sunset was MMM. They were having an 80s weekend playing the countdown charts from each year of the decade. We were up to #4 of 1987 when it too finally dissolved into static and I was forced to turn over to Radio National, who were airing a program made in the 1950s about Billy Hughes, one of those ones where people tell stories like this in old fashioned Australian accents:

"Rosie had only been with us I suppose about a fortnight when she got it into her head than Billy wasn't eating enough. So she determined to set it right, you see. Next morning she took him his breakfast tray as usual with tea and toast, and two boiled eggs as well you see, and gave it to him. And he said 'I don't eat eggs' and Rosie said 'you'll eat these' and she sat down next to him on the bed. So he drank his tea and ate his toast and then ate the eggs as well. And ever after anything that Rosie said he did without a murmur. He used to say to me, 'that Rosie, she's a wonderful woman.' When she got married he said 'Just like women, never give a thought to anyone else's convenience' but he was still best man, I believe. He always did well by Rosie."

It was a truely surreal experience.