CityofLadies

2009 Bushfires

2009-02-14T00:32:00.002Z

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

2008-11-18T04:17:00.002Z

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

2008-11-13T01:19:00.003Z

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?

2008-11-13T01:02:00.002Z

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.

2008-11-02T10:11:00.000Z

Carolina Liar

2008-10-23T02:37:00.003Z

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

2008-10-05T22:19:00.003Z

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.

Grand Final

2008-09-30T05:55:00.002Z

I'd really rather not talk about it. But I do feel obliged to clear up a misconceptions.

After the game, I stopped at a petrol station and when I went in to pay the bloke said:

TB: 'So? Are you happy or sad?'
Me: 'Sad' (obviously)
TB: 'Ah well, the Cats did pretty well last year, didn't they?'

Now, as you all know, I am not a Cats supporter, but 'the Cats did pretty well last year' is of no use to me because I wanted revenge.

One of the indelibly traumatic experiences of my childhood is sitting with my then six-year-old Cats barracker younger brother in our uncle's front room and watching the Cats get done by Hawthorn in 1989. For me there are few scenes to equal the pathos of a little kid whose team is getting shellacked. The look of total concentration, the heart on the sleeve.

The 1989 Grand Final left its mark on all of us; Mum, for example, has it in for Malcolm Blight because she holds him responsible for upsetting her little boy. Hawthorn played with the inevitability of the Roman Army and the best Mum could do for my brother was tell him that after centuries of subjugation the Germanic Tribes had finally destroyed the Roman Empire. As far as I was concerned, this weekend was supposed to be Odoacer at Ravenna.

Very Small Government

2008-09-16T02:41:00.003Z

Today, Mr Turnbull positioned the Liberal Party as the party of small government. Unlike the Labor Party, he told us, the Libs are, apparently, not vain enough to think they can make decisions for everyone else.

This came as a surprise to me; I thought that making decisions is what Government is.

As you can imagine, I was even more surprised to hear that his major criticism of the Rudd Government was that they hadn't been doing enough governing.

When are the poor old Libs going to find themselves a leader who is clear on whether or not he is in favour of governing?

Do Me A Favour; It's a Flaming Book Shop, Of Course We've Got Jane Austen

2008-09-11T13:14:00.002Z

I have been staying up with my birthday present; a complete set of The Sweeney and an espresso machine - not really, but you know what I mean - and I have to say that the misogyny and racism (when they actually have non-anglo characters) is starting to get to me.

I love The Sweeney. I do. Men in high heels, paisley ties, skin tight three piece pin-stripe suits and very approximate hair cuts. Denis Waterman, I've loved since I was a kid. I even like On The Up. And it's not like there's some particular incident, its just the relentlessly of the sexism.

A little girl interviewed in 1975 said in response to a question about female characters on Doctor Who 'it's a bit better, but its still mainly the girls falling over and ruining everything'. When I first heard the interview I failed to appreciate her ability to find the nub. I was hoping for subtlety, complexity, deconstruction. I was young and foolish and didn't realise that the problem was a lot more basic than I imagined.

People talk about how no one writes 'good female characters'. When they elaborate, it turns out they mean morally good or psychologically complex or kooky, and most often, just more like themselves. Honestly, I'd just like one female character on The Sweeney who wasn't a drag.

Perspective in Australian Comedy

2008-08-27T05:06:00.002Z

Frontline, The Games and now The Hollowmen are all topical to the extent that we recognise some or all of their characters as fictionalisations of public figures. In each case, they are profoundly unpopular figures. Like their fictional counter parts they are involved in immoral projects and like them their benefit is always at the expense of the public, who is, of course, also the audience of the program. These programs use comedy for social critique and yet, the protagonists are not anti-heroes as such because these shows co-opts the perspective of the audience so that we adopt their perspective so completely that we lose sight of the implications of their actions. This puts the audience in a constantly oscillating position in relation to the characters, whom we develop a fondness for despite everything. We see their ordinariness and that their intention is not born of malice. And yet, the programs constantly remind us of how worrying the outcomes of their actions are. I think it acts against the apathy that is such an inherent part of Australian culture.

And Speaking of Pathological...

2008-08-24T08:48:00.003Z

My favourite event of this Olympics was unquestionably the Men's Javelin. So many extraordinary looking people and all with such visceral energy coming off them, energy which doesn't relate to my everyday experience of humans in any respect. Even Bannister had spooky husky's eyes. The Finns were uniformly terrifying, of course. And as for an act of God like Thorkildsen - so odd in such a calm way.

All of them conformed to the Ancient sense of profound excellence taking humans out of the human realm and making them something really uncanny and slightly worrying.

Freaks of Nature

2008-08-24T07:46:00.003Z

It used to be that Australian Olympians were proper freaks. People like Ian Thorpe; prodigious, superhuman. Thorpe's proportions have more in common with a dolphin than a human and he swam like it. They were fantastically disciplined, of course, but they also were physically set up in a way that made capable of more than normal people.

This time it's different. One of our marathon cyclists competed with a collapsed lung, our Olympic silver medalist short track cyclist broke her neck, several limbs and took the skin off one side of her body a couple of months out from Beijing, and our Olympic Gold medalist 10 metre platform diver suffers from vertigo.

The extent to which each of these incapacities is taylored specifically to disadvantage the athelete in their chosen event strikes me as highly suspicious. I mean, it's a bit pathological, isn't it?

The thing that seems to make these people champions is the extremely relaxed nature of their grip on reality. The cyclist didn't, for example, think 'a broken neck probably takes me out of contention.' Surely, theoretically at least anyone who hadn't broken their necks just before the Olympics would be in an better position to win a medal than our girl. And is it really the case that there's no one on the planet that can dive better than a man with no head for heights?

But more importantly, is "pathological" really the best direction for sport to be going in?

Cultural History

2008-08-20T13:42:00.002Z

My sense of the British post-WWII attitude to Neville Chamberlain is almost entirely based on a Monty Python sketch, "Joke Warfare". Despite Hitler's early failures in joke warfare, the Nazis eventually develop a joke even funny than Britain's great pre-War joke. Cut to a shot of Chamberlain with the piece of paper - peace in our time.

It's in that context that I think Genesis of the Daleks is really quite amazing. There is a clear line being drawn between the Kaleds and the Nazis and the Doctor has the opportunity to blow up the lot and instead, Chamberlainesque, he allows himself to be convinced that Davros' eugenics program can be halted via democratic means. He is utterly and naively wrong, of course, but the program totally endorses his decision as the only viable one, in spite of being wrong.

That must have been quite something, if 30 years after WWII even Monty Python was bitter about a figure who wouldn't accept that war was the only way.

Metaphors

2008-08-16T11:04:00.002Z

In the beginning, all metaphors were God's metaphors, or natural metaphors, if you prefer. And as material culture developed that was incorporated into the vocabulary of metaphors as well but all that is still the way of things.

But computers were made in an extremely primitive form of our own image, a basic and appallingly binary analogy with our own brains. Because they were new, a new vocabulary was made to fit them. Now we use this vocabulary and computer metaphors to describe our own consciousness.

Which means that it is also conditioning our own understanding of our own consciousness because, as Wittgenstein or possibly Peter Greenaway said, 'to imagine a language is to imagine a way of life.'

Without joining the "Replicants Are Coming to Get Us" section of the population, I would like to say that there's really is no bit of that which I think is a good idea.

Ad BlueJunillam

2008-08-15T09:55:00.002Z

I would never have thought of you as 'Calvinist'. Low Church, certainly, but Predestination? Are you? Ex-Calvinist, I mean. And does this explain where I've been getting confused all these years? When you talk about optimism without faith - or perhaps optimism and 'faith' without the One True God - are you talking about the Schroeder's Cat (which is a much less stupid idea in Theology than it is in Science) element of Predestination in Calvinism? That that particular impasse is what allows for optimism?

I find the Gospels and especially what Christ talks about in the Gospels very heartening, though I don't believe in his Divinity, nor Monotheism in general. Doctrine I always find endlessly disheartening. The idea that abandoning Doctrine eats at optimism is rather strange for me, because Jesus says what he does and that's the end of it. Doctrine is the scaffolding we build around it because we don't trust it to stand up - so much for our faith! - and I think, because we're rather frightened some bit of masonry might fall an crush something we hold dear, like, as JayBee points out, Usury.

The nature of faith

2008-08-15T07:57:00.000Z

For many years I fell into that category that might be roughly described as Christian, typically few others describing themselves in the same way would have agreed with me but nevertheless, I was a believer. Now I occupy a demographic group, more numerous than one might be inclined to think, that could with reasonable accuracy be referred as ‘recovering Calvinist’. As far as it is possible to ever ascertain what might precipitate such an amorphous and infinitely complex thing as the loss of faith, it was all the usual suspects. A growing horror of the escapades of both churches and individual religious, loss of patience with the endless and pointless scholastic paradoxes of a faith tied too rigidly to a testament and that disillusionment with the world and its compromises that is the true nature of the loss of innocence.

These days what strikes me most forcibly about the issue is, as I see it now, the utter absurdity of using exclusionary belief in a particular deity with a particular nature as a measure of virtue and scaling ever loftier heights of the ridiculous, as a measure of spiritual evolution and enlightenment. To emphasise my position, I see nothing wrong in it, and often it provides people with the strength to be better people than they could be without it and that of course has infinite value. But as the keystone of doctrine I can see no good in it as an end in itself. As is almost certainly obvious at this stage, my own brand of thought and background places exceptional emphasis on this aspect but it is a principle present in all denominations.

But I was thinking recently that perhaps there is some use in retaining the idea of pure faith - optimism, hope, what you will, as an achievement worth striving for and valuing highly. It seems a very obvious idea but I do believe we underestimate the challenge of maintaining a genuinely optimistic outlook and that maybe our standards for the definition of hopeful are a little low. Or possibly I am just deeply enamoured of the notion of Saint Peter (or your chosen conceptual equivalent) meeting people at the gates and asking, ‘Why are you looking so worried?’

Cyber Gender

2008-08-15T04:23:00.003Z

I notice with cyber space communities that they tend to polarize into those in which the absence of visual contact (and therefore accountability, oddly) has led to the total break down of all forms of regulation of behaviour and those which have, for exactly the same reason, developed highly pronounced etiquette, ethics and ethos. Ebay being one of the latter and indeed just yesterday I was 'reviewed' by one seller as "a first-class Ebayer and a credit to Ebay". No one has ever thought I was a credit to anything, so it's taking a little time for me to adjust my self-perception.

I suppose the development of these communities represents a fascinating social experiment, but the thing is, I hate fascinating social experiments. Any experiments of any real interest everyone ignores anyway, like "Australia" - Q: what happens if you settle an island with criminals? A: you get one of the highest voter participation levels in the world and one of the lower levels of violent crime - or "America" - Q: What happens if you settle a land mass with puritans? A: you get an isolationist interventionist culture.

I recently joined an Envro Community site, using what I now realise was a gender neutral username. Because cyberspace freaks me out, I fall back on a highly diffident, and what I would consider, extremely feminine manner of constantly apologising for my presence, checking I haven't inadvertently offended anyone or indeed, put anyone out by existing. Yesterday, two other member of the site said that initially they thought I was male and only realised I wasn't when I made some oblique reference to my gender.

So, hmmm.

Long Tan

2008-08-15T04:07:00.002Z

I want to know about the Battle of Long Tan pretty much exclusively because no one will tell me. This is reverse psychology at its best.

Clearly Long Tan is a battle of tremendous propaganda value. As one writer says, immediately before he moves on to riduicule propagandist Viet Cong accounts of the battle:

"as a result of Viet Cong stupidity in the face of Australian courage and mateship, 108 Diggers were able to defeat 2500 Viet Cong."

Even War isn't as ironic as War Historians.

But moving swiftly on. The Australian platoon was decorated by the US. Several soldiers were awarded individual Commenwealth honours and a recommendation was made that the Australian Government honour the platoon. But it didn't happen.

Now, the Rudd Government (and by the way, does anyone else wonder if the Government is entirely made up of androids - I mean would it really be possible to get so much done if you were sleeping occasionally as well?) has reviewed the case and is awarding the honours after all this time.

Given that every News or Current Affairs program last night ran the story, why didn't anyone report on why the honours were not awarded in the first place?

And more importantly, why weren't the honours awarded in the first place?

For BlueJ - remember the lilies, and that other bit about birds and anyway, I'm sure they'll work out about the birdfeeder, but in the meantime, this:

2008-08-14T05:59:00.003Z

We Fight in the Shade

2008-08-06T01:47:00.002Z

When I first saw the trailer for 300 I wrote this up and then lost it, you know the drill. Belatedly, here is it.

The original quote is from Heroditus and Cicero retells it in Latin. It is quite appropriate to be adapted to an action film because it is the Classical equivolent of 'you talking to me?'

Simonides promises to send the Spartans to Hell/ the underworld and further that their arrows would be so thick they would blot out the sun. Leonidas says 'then we will fight in the shade.' The pun is on 'umbra', 'shade' which is also the word for 'hell/underworld.'

I don't know if the Persians were worried about a Hell-based resurgence from the Spartans, but if they were, its a great line. If they weren't, I don't know that the pun works on all its levels.

As far as I can tell the point of the story in Heroditus is nothing to do with bragging or chest-beating. The Greek is simply and quietly making the point that the Persian threat is a lousy one since its more fun to fight in the shade than in the heat.

According to Wiki, 'we fight in the shade' is now the slogan of the Hellenic Army XX Armoured Division. I can't tell if this is because they are actually inside tanks when they do their fighting, or if they require opponants to provide a clean, clear battlefield with towels, drinks, refreshments and a predetermined amount of shadey terrain so as to prevent unnecessary stress and strain.

"THEY LIED" - like the Herald-Sun can talk...

2008-08-05T08:00:00.004Z

No one can blame Shaw for not grassing on a mate, and Collingwood was not founded on the ideals of honesty and integrity.

Obviously, no one could blame anyone for lying to Eddie Maguire.

What is interesting is the absence of a good behaviour clause in Didak's newly-signed contract. Given Collingwood's position on the ladder at this point in the season, I wonder who gains most from that...

Narratology

2008-08-05T03:35:00.003Z

So, this week David Murphy, a fictional character from The Hollowmen, added me as a friend on his Facebook page. I didn't go looking for him, you understand - how could I, he's fictional - he came looking for me - how could he, he's fictional, I heard you say. Putting aside ontology, just for a moment, how did he find me? I mean, I have a quote from the show, but not the name, on the page, did he really search Facebook with a complete copy of the show's scripts?

When TV spins offs started to become overlapping shows, acting in complete alternative universes in which any number of other groups of fictional characters independently participated, I also started to realise how many people would rather live in those alternatives - just look at the rise of fanfic.

People have always needed stories, but I don't think any group of people have ever wanted stories the way we do. There are probably positive aspects to this, but the whole thing makes me uneasy, though, not really as uneasy as being friends with fictional people makes me.

Vandalism

2008-08-02T10:47:00.002Z

There are a lot of new Doctor Who/ David Tennant fans amongst the Ladies, but I am no longer one of them. I have had enough of the babbling. And the melodrama; every week everything explodes, everyone sacrifices themselves (though not really as it always turns out) and everyone cries at how totally rad everyone is. All of this held together by the idea of the Doctor as a 'man' whose awesomeness justifies anything. When it was more true, they said it less.

Let's do a microcosmic side by side.

In The Girl in the Fireplace, the Tenth Doctor makes a flippant reference to meeting Cleopatra or 'Cleo', as he insists on calling her.

In The Invasion of the Dinosaurs, Sarah Jane remarks that the phonebox has probably been vandalised, to which the Third Doctor replies, "That's a very unfair word, you know. The Vandals were mainly very decent chaps."

The first is like the most embarrassing kind of groupie name-dropping. From an historical point of view, it refers to an idea of Cleopatra which is very old fashioned. (Despite the view created in Roman propaganda, Cleopatra was in fact not especially beautiful, which was fine because she was a brilliant astronomer and mathematician, astute strategist and totally ruthless, calculating political operative.)

The second, on the other hand, makes a series of implications about etymology and the agency of a history written by the victors as it is expressed in popular culture. It also assumes a revisionist reading of the 'Dark Ages' which is pretty progressive for the early 1970s.
And better yet, no one cried or spelt it out at tedious length while other people stood around cheering (which is what happened in last week's episode).

There is film, shot by Tennant's girlfriend, of him standing, holding the action figurine of himself, so I suppose the decline and fall of Doctor Who is no one's fault, as such, (not even the Romans).

Newman

2008-08-01T22:25:00.002Z

So Sam Newman has made an idiot of himself again. AFL chief executive Andrew Demetriou said "If everything Sam says is going to be … analysed, I think we're going to start to become terribly unfair," he said. "Analysed"? Like "listen" you mean? That is unfair. Funny the way no one else manages to "accidentally" say anything horribly offensive.

Grrr

2008-07-27T03:50:00.003Z

I was at lunch the other day. The conversation was on the nature of contradiction. My interlocutor found his way onto the topic of whether the world's wealthiest are in fact a race of reptilian-human crossbreeds, or perhaps it was about people thought that that was the genetic makeup of the wealthy.

It is difficult to engineer a conversational segue from there but I did my best; I thought I'd done rather well. But my companion looked at me quizzically and said "What's that got to do with contradiction?"

Oh yes. Absolutely. Why don't we bring in relevance as a requirement at this stage?

Synthesia

2008-07-20T12:25:00.002Z

There is an inevitability to the fact that my best friend at school was the only 16-year-old in the world with a detailed knowledge of Synthesia, even though he isn't a synthete. He diagnosed me; it fascinated him. I've never really been terribly interested because I don't really believe that other people don't have it. Of course, if the existence of non-synthetes is a fiction then it requires a conspiracy of pointless proportions to support, so I am obliged to believe in it. Even still, it just doesn't seem very plausible to me.

I've just been looking through the Synthesia Battery and I don't know what the inside of other synthetes' heads is like, but it does strike me as being very much a non-synthete's conception. The Battery seems to assume that we use a colour-based substitution code. One of the tests boils down to being a test of perfect pitch rather than Synthesia.

So I went looking for descriptions of other people's synthesia. I've always assumed that colour would be important to anyone who had it and that their heads would be full of beautiful, beautiful colours. Even white and black (which aren't colours as Tintaretto, another childhood friend and as you probably guessed son of hippies, told me when we were seven) aren't included in my synthesia (except for zero which is obviously white). What I found is that lots of people's synthesia seems to be focused in a range of dull and drab colours.

I was horrified. It had never occurred to me that I would need to be open-minded about the manifestations of Synthesia but there it is.
Being judgemental about other people's synthesia, that's time to have a good hard look at yourself.

Matt 18:6

2008-07-20T00:26:00.002Z

The Pope says he 'shares the pain' of child abuse victims and Bishop Fisher is complaining about people who 'crankily' insist on talking about child abuse rather than embracing the intoxicating joy of World Youth Day.

Perhaps they are just genuinely stupid and vacuous, perhaps they genuinely don't understand, but certainly they give a lively impression of immorality and religious hypocrisy.

I Hope There's A God, I Hope He's A Vengeful God

2008-07-17T06:43:00.004Z

From the Church that brought us unsafe sex in disease-ravaged countries, we now have an exhortation to populate in this ecologically devastated, massively overpopulated world.

Is this possibly even more irresponsible than the Baby Bonus? Yes, it's all about the kids.

Pell says "we've got to keep our numbers up". We humans have our numbers up, so who's 'we'? Catholics? Christians? Whites? And this on the eve of a visit from an ex-member of the Hitler Youth. Straight from protecting paedophiles to eugenics for Pell; if only someone could get him to stop thinking about sex just for a bit.

Girl Talk

2008-07-12T23:53:00.002Z

On the way to the Ladies last night I walked passed two of the boys from our group talking about their fiancees and their fast-approaching weddings. So this is what boys talk about when girls aren't around.

Back at our table the boys had started the spin-the-bottle-esque 'who would you go home with?' conversation, beloved pickup conversation of boys in pubs everywhere in my experience, though with an Australian twist: the boys very quickly lost all interest in the girls and their answers to this persistently-put question and became instead entirely consumed with razzing each other.

Milling around outside the pub, waiting for the boys to stop fighting with the bouncers and then waiting for them to make up, which despite the patting each other on the back and commiserating at the hard lot of a bouncer's life, is if anything an even more aggressive and belligerent interaction, always threatening to develop into a full-scale pitched battle melee, I heard one of the girls say disapprovingly 'Fuck's sake! Never met a girl who couldn't get along with a bouncer!'

It was a fairly gossip-generating night and our group hadn't seen each other in ten years but as the four girls waved their final goodbyes and turned away one of them said to me 'Did you see the game?' That's what we talked about, all the way home. That's what Australian girls talk about when boys aren't around.

The Adventures of Bingley

2008-07-09T01:00:00.002Z

Bingley has taken to crying or princkling things in the middle of a the night in an attempt to get me to wake up and let him out, which I am not allowed to do because of the curfew and which he can't do himself because he still can't work the cat door.

There do seem to be some conceptual problems. Yesterday, I woke (at 5am) to find him behind the curtains, so I got up and opened the window to let him out. As the window went up he looked at me, double took, then turned, sprang, sped across the room loosing traction on the cornering due to the fluffiness of his paws, up the stairs and so to the back door.

In other words, although there are some times of day at which he can conceptually accept exiting via the window, apparently an opened window in the morning only indicates to him my willingness to enter into negotiations the outcome of which would of course ultimately be achieved via the back door.

Whatever the conceptual issues, there is no question that round went to Bingley, but last night's round went to me.

Last night he was showing all the signs of embarking on a sleep deprivation campaign against me, so I took the precaution of leaving one of those spray bottles for watering plants beside the bed. In the dead of night came the princkling, and I, like a gun-fighter of the old west, quick on the draw, grabbed the bottle and shot, my eyes still half closed. Next time I shall sleep with one eye open.

But for now, Bingley has conceded that I am the better man and has adopted a conciliatory stance.

Garnaut Review

2008-07-06T00:25:00.002Z

A gentleman from the Herald Sun's corner of the Fourth Estate asked Prof. Garnaut whether signing the report would be signing a suicide note for Rudd. Prof. Garnaut answered in such a way that the gentleman regretted the question, but the fact remains that saving the planet and so ourselves, is not going to be popular.

Even self-interest seems to be too difficult for us these days.

As Garnaut pointed out, the time to implement these changes was when he put a submission to the Howard Government six years ago. I hope that is not lost in this debate, that Howard mortgaged our future by artificially inflating the Australian economy and so his popularity by allowing Australian industries to continue running in old fashioned, high polluting ways for very, very short term profits.

When environmentalists say 'non-sustainable', they don't just mean the environment, they mean non-sustainable profits too.

Eastlink

2008-07-02T03:40:00.002Z

I am a little shocked at how shamelessly the news on the commercial networks has been spruiking for this tollway, but not as shocked as I am that it worked. Obviously, even in a world running out of petrol to the extent that in the not-too-distant future it will be unaffordable, you could bank on commuters being excited about saving time. What I didn't expect was that the ploy of opening the road as a fun day out for the kids would work.
It's exactly as ugly as every other big road and yet there they were in their droves from 2am on when the road opened with balloons, clowns and sausage sizzles. There is nothing about this that isn't bizarre.

My incredulous scorn fixed itself upon one man who, when interviewed for the news, said 'Oh, it's great; worth the hype'. But as Dad pointed out...

...Dad: That's what they all said, isn't it?
H: Some of them talked about how much time it would save them.
Dad: Ah, yes, the practical, utilitarian angle; doesn't explain why they were out there sightseeing at 2am though, does it? No, they just drew a veil over that with this 'practical' facade.

It's a very good point. What a rich vein for psychological inquiry.

Some archaeologists think that the people of Rapa Nui knew they were killing themselves through deforestation, but they cut down the last tree anyway. Some scholars argue it was celebrated and turned into a statue to appease the god who brought this complete ecological annihilation upon them.

Someday, some Martian archaeo-psychologist, sifting through whatever remains of our records, is going to write such a fascinating paper.

I Don't Think I'm Going To Be Able To Avoid Entitling This Post "Bunking"

2008-06-27T03:37:00.003Z

So obviously, where I come from, Julian Barnes is a big deal. If you wanted confirmation, then there he is with Rushdie as one of the literati cameos in Bridget Jones's Diary. Is there a higher literary accolade? Much to my undergraduate embarrassment, I found Flaubert's Parrot so tedious I really couldn't tell you whether it's a book with intellectual merit (which is totally different to interest).
So now I'm reading A History of the World in 10 1/2 Chapters and I'm enjoying it as far as it goes. Tony Martin says he couldn't get passed the first word in The Da Vinci Code - TM: "'Renowned curator somebody somebody'... why do we have to know he's 'renowned'?" EK: "Makes it sound classy, Tone" TM: "Isn't that called 'bad writing'? Isn't that crowbarring information in too early?" EK: "Very early." - Anyway, I couldn't get passed (without comment) the first page in A History where it described the women on Noah's Ark as 'too delicate' to muck out the animals. Barnes does realise this is the Ancient Levant these people come from, right? Not Victorian England?
But more bizarrely, Barnes, in his attempt to deconstruct one of our (many) genesis myths and to do it from a non-human perspective, seems to have got hooked on committing character assassination on Noah, as though we were all deeply invested in Noah as a really top bloke in the first place. The Bible isn't especially positive about Noah, and that's nothing to what the English Miracle Play tradition does to him. Why is Barnes spending quite so much effort debunking something we really never bunked?

Geneses

2008-06-22T22:03:00.004Z

Stupidly, I've never noticed that there are two Creation myths, side by side in Genesis, and distinguished, so I'm told, by different words for 'god'. (There is certainly no distinction in the Greek text but maybe there is in the Hebrew Bible, which I will struggle through to make sure, but not today, eh? It's gloomy and I have enough trouble with the languages I actually know.)

The first myth is the one in which God makes the world in six days and rests on the seventh. This one is particularly concerned with the fruitfulness of the earth and here God creates humans male and female, in his own image. I suspect (and will check on a less gloomy day) that personal pronouns are against us, but even still, in this version women are made in God's image too. Think about the implications of that. And now think about it back to front.

The second one starts at Gen 2:4 with the words "This is the book of the generation of heaven and earth, when they were made in the day". It does sound like the beginning of a new Creation myth, which is why I feel so exceptionally daft to have missed it. In this version a fountain rises out of the earth and waters the land and then god makes man out of dust and makes Eden for Adam to live in. Then, not wanting Adam to be alone, He creates birds (made on the fifth day in the first myth) and land animals (made before men and women on the sixth day in the other story) and brings them to Adam to name. It is only then that He makes Eve out of Adam's rib.

So, I gather the consensus is that this represents two competing myths that the writer(s) of Genesis (or Geneses as I am now in no way going to have the restraint or good taste to refrain from calling it) tried to amalgamate. The first probably suggests a more peaceful and agrarian society, in which the abundance of the natural world is evident. The second suggests a society under various kinds of pressure, probable econmic hardship and resulting social change, hence the desire to explain their excusion from plenty in the face of being God's Children through the Expulsion from Eden story and to justify the antagonistic relationship between the natural world and Mankind, not to say towards women.

Adam's rib is a truly strange story. There's a relief sculpture of it in the Museo dell' Opera del Duomo (right). BlueJ and I watched a group of Koreans looking at this and, through their body language, I got a fleeting glimpse (I can't speak for BlueJ) of what an unnatural myth this is and how inexplicable the story's idea seemed to them. This sculpture, of course, stresses the already fairly pronounced womb-envy aspect of the myth, but even without that, what strange creatures we are and how strange our ideas and our religion.

But to go back to the Book; what I can't help noticing is that, although, the first myth is the more commonly known, we have opted for the story of the creation of humans from the second. Since it seems to me the more cynical and mean-spirited of the two and since we have used it as the basis of so much of our theology, I am wondering if we couldn't do a bit of a rethink on some of these issues?

So Get This...

2008-06-22T04:08:00.002Z

I was listening to old podcasts and I came across the one where Tony Martin is talking about the French Revolution 'way back in the 15th century or whatever.' And it struck me that he has a fairly good grasp of the manners, customs and events of the French Revolution, so it's not that he doesn't know when the Revolution was, he doesn't know when the 15th century was.

Shocking Cock Up, The Mice Were Furious.

2008-06-18T03:51:00.006Z

I have been attempting to teach my cats, Bingley and Lucrezia, to use the cat flap. For months now. Unsuccessfully.

Millions of years of human evolution and decades of personal education combine in me so that in approaching a problem like this I try to make out the pattern behind every failure. I try to work out how cats learn, how they think, why they don't seem able to grasp this concept when they are able to grasp others, but of course I missed the most obvious thing about the way cats think.

In Bingley, it became clear pretty early on, I had simply taken on a lost cause. Bingley really is loving and warn and heart on sleeve and very stupid.

But Lucrezia, Lucrezia knows how to get out through the cat flap and given her love of independence I was sure I could teach her to come in by it too. But no, she would sit by the back door waiting for me to notice her and let her in. Ever the diadact, I would take these opportunities to demonstrate the utility of the cat flap and she would look at me with her mesmeric eyes behind her most innocent sorry-Hannah-I-no-speak-English expression until I let her in by the door.

But last night she got caught out in the storm. There was the creak of the cat flap and then the drenched Lucrezia was by the fire.

I don't speak English indeed.

I suspect she has been able all along but was caught up investigating my capacity to learn and think and also that she has not been overly impressed with the results.

Toclifane

2008-06-12T10:25:00.004Z

First there was the Eurovision Song Contest. Well, no, I suppose first there was 1066 and all that. But the Hundred Year's War didn't help and neither did Mary Stuart or Napoleon or the Rugby. And now (well, now for me, I'm only just finishing series 3) Russell T. Davies implicitly compares William of Normandy to the Toclifane. If the French watched Doctor Who or cared what English people think anyway I'm sure they'd be outraged.

Fountain

2008-06-08T10:01:00.003Z

A couple of weeks ago one of the most innovative shows on radio, Hamish and Andy, broadcast a pissing contest they held between themselves and which Hamish Blake won to his obvious delight.

I know.

I know, too, which Rudyard Kipling quote you are not thinking of: 'It's very clever, but is it art?'

But, I've been asked by grown ups to take Surrealism, Dada and Duchamp seriously. I have been told that Fountain interrogates and challenges my prejudices about what is and is not art. (In fact, contrary to the experts, I have always thought that Fountain is a work which powerfully advocates conservative attitudes towards art, but then, I always was a bit of a death-of-the-author girl.)

So anyway, if it ever comes to a choice of one or the other, I really hope the Tate take Hamish and Andy.

Get Smart

2008-06-05T22:56:00.004Z

I never thought Get Smart was subversive so I'm a bit freaked that the makers of the Get Smart film remake do.

In the TV series, Agent 86 was an incompetent though highly regarded top operative constantly being made to look good (after a period of looking bad) by outrageous fortune and 99. In the film (according to the trailer, I don't think I could face the film itself), Agent 86 is a depressed junior desk spook, disliked and ridiculed by his masters, who is, of necessity, thrown into field work as a clean skin when Kaos discovers the identities of every Control field agent.

Can it be that the premise for an American TV show filmed at the height of Cold War paranoia is too subversive for America now? Or is it that the secret services have, after Iraq and Afghanistan, been shown to be so incompetent, that they feel the original premise would amount to letting out trade secrets?

Thoughts on the Cultural Implications of 'Guess Which Supermarket Aisle'

2008-06-05T13:34:00.004Z

On today's Hamish and Andy Show, the boys played the gnomically titled 'Guess Which Supermarket Aisle'. Hamish described it as a game, but essentially it came down to the question 'do you think the olive oil is shelved in the aisle with the pasta or the aisle with the vinegar?'

Hamish answered 'vinegar', Andy 'pasta'.

Much to my mother's disgust, Andy was right.

My interest is anthropological. In Ong's famous Orality and Literacy he describes a question which demonstrates one of the cognitive differences between people from oral societies and those from literate societies. The question is 'axe, spade, block of wood, saw: which is the odd one out?' Literacy tends to produce the answer 'block of wood because all the others are tools of one kind or another', while orality tends to conclude 'spade because all the others are to do with wood.'

Hamish and Andy's answers reflect the same divide: oil is like vinegar, it has a related place in cooking and eating, while oil and pasta are associated because both are used in the cooking of Italian dishes.

After all the trouble the Greeks went to to straighten these things out in the first place and millennia, we are quietly shifting our mental processes backwards, but without the culture to support it. Such a big shift at such a small level implies a massive shift on higher levels.

I'm pretty sure it's computers. Computers developed so amateurishly that early models show the odd thinking of their creators which then becomes the template upon which later models are built. Now, no one even notices how odd it all is, unless they have to try to teach a pensioner to navigate around email. The logic needed to find things online or to do things on computers is closer to Andy's answer than Hamish's.

This is bad news for me because a quick look round Silicon Valley, then and now, gives me a remarkably full list of people I don't want to think like.

I'm not saying they're not brilliant people and I'm not saying that computers haven't made the most amazing things possible, I'm just saying I don't want them wearing away at the organizational structures of my thought. My thoughts are unstructured enough without any more help.

Serendipity Update

2008-05-29T03:57:00.001Z

BlueJ tells me that the 14th of May is also the date that the wiki entry for de Pizan was most recently updated. Someone tell me what's going on with de Pizan!!!

Serendipity

2008-05-28T00:36:00.003Z

According to our sitemetre, on the 14th of May, around twenty people, all from the American Midwest, and particularly from Missouri, Kansas and Nebraska, all searched for the same quotation and were directed to our site. The Midwest has a population of over 66 Million, so twenty people aren't a lot in the grand scheme of things. It's just that the quote they were searching for is an unusual and unusually long one:

...we have not come to do you any harm, but rather, out of pity on your distress, we are here to comfort you. Our aim is to help you get rid of those misconceptions which have clouded your mind...

No one has ever been directed to our site before through that quote, which comes, of course, from de Pizan. If any of you find your way back here, what were you looking for? And what happened to prompt you to look in the first place?

Spam

2008-05-27T23:52:00.003Z

My email has randomly started putting important emails in my spam folder. This means I have been forced to undertake the totally icky job to going through my spam mail to check nothing has been misdirected. This is a generally depressing and thoroughly unrewarding experience, so I was grateful for this comic relief this morning; I found an email entitled 'Bomb her womb with your enormous cannon'.

If anyone is actually getting off on this stuff and is wondering whether they are normal or likely to be happy at all, ever in their lives; I'm so, so sorry. No Dice.

Bees

2008-05-09T05:45:00.003Z

I was at the exhibition of Light at Trinity last year with BlueJ and it was completely great, except that one of the exhibits was a collection of 3D rendered bee-maps, showing the exact path that the bee had flown. The paths were being mapped because some snotty post grads had made a grid of different coloured dots with sugar water behind one of the colours and wanted to see if the bee would come to associate the colour with sugar water and fly more directly to it. I don't know whether it was an experiment meant to demonstrate that bees, like every other living thing, learn from experience or to demonstrate that they can see colours. I thought everyone knew both those things... unless it was designed to demonstrate the bees learn a lot quicker than Science post grads?

Haints and Saints

2008-05-08T04:27:00.001Z

So I am completely not going to write about the article in the paper today on how women deserve to be paid less because they don't work as hard as people.
Partly, I'm not going to write about it because it will only annoy me, partly because biological determinism is so last century but one and even then it was only really the National Socialists who really got off on it, partly because it's silly (we all know that what we're talking about is women being financially punished for having children - academics and social scientists, out of the pool!) but mainly I'm not going to write about it because the guy who conducted the study is called 'Prof. Wooden'.

'"It's a well known fact that women are indolent," quipped Prof. Wooden, woodenly, "This is no laughing matter."'

You see? I'm not going to be able to be grown up about this, not even close. So instead I'm going to write about how I find Bluegrass music confusing.

I really like every sound in Bluegrass music, every instrument, I just don't like it when they all play together at the same time. (Yes, I know, for all of you humming "Mama Don't" in their heads at the moment.) When Torvill and Dean were awarded their honorary doctorates, the speaker joked that the definition of an intellectual ought to be anyone who can hear Ravel's Bolero without thinking of them and I have the version of a same problem with Bluegrass; it's very difficult not to think how twee redneckism really is.* Finally, it does have the unfortunate characteristic of making every song sound the same. I think that's mainly to do with not being able to vary the rhythm so much if you're getting strings to do the job of drums and because at the heart of it, it's playing not listening music. So, virtuosity is more important than not homogenizing everything.

Partly, of course, this is all Bill Monroe's fault. Anything earlier than the Bluegrass Boys has more variety or sound and rhythm and fewer instruments which lets the music come out from amongst all that talent a bit more. Clarence Astley is a great example of that haunting high and lonesome sound in the banjo music before Bluegrass. The Newgrass movement made some progress on that front and I think people like Gillian Welch who are on the edge of it have been even more successful because they're going back to pre-Monroe music. Rick Danko is my favourite male singer (all his early influences were Bluegrass but he did something with them) but Tim O'Brien is my next favourite and I never listen to him because there really is only so many times you can listen to the tiddle-ti-tees.

*Anyone who is going to write in to tell me that a) the term 'Redneck' originated in the South, not Appalachia and b) 'Redneckism' isn't actually a word, and please God, never will be, don't because know and I'm very sorry, really. (Actually, I always thought "Redneck" came from Mississippi, but according to the OED doesn't.)

Post-Feminist Australia

2008-05-02T00:21:00.003Z

First Troy Buswell's bizarre chair-sniffing incident and now Sam Newman fondling a lingerie clad mannequin with a picture of Football journalist, Caroline Wilson's face attached to its head. In some quarters there has been a suggestion that, despite how tough it is being a female journalist in the football world that she should 'just get over it'. Troy Buswell doesn't seem able to 'just get over it' although he won't stand down as Liberal Party leader and although it wasn't actually him who was victimized. He seems to have been traumatized by victimizing someone else. According the The Age:

Tears in his eyes, Mr Buswell said he needed a short break, turned his

back and then asked his press secretary to bring him a glass of water.
Mr Buswell said his wife was aware of the allegations before they were published

on Sunday. He said it had been a difficult time for him "on a personal level".
"These are difficult issues for me to deal with and they are very difficult issues

for my family to deal with," he said. "It's hard dealing with these matters and

having to face up to your responsibilities behaviourally, publicly, and it's

harder to do it privately."

Is it hard? Really? All we're asking of him is that he not snap female MPs bra straps as he did a couple of years ago and that he not publicly sniff chairs in which female members of his own party have been sitting.

I am genuinely perplexed by his comments - perhaps he also does these things when he has people round to dinner? Perhaps he does such things to his mother? Or this mates? If he doesn't, then why would he do it in this circumstance?

In the cases of both Buswell and Newman, there has been an attempt to down play it as a joke. But the point is that in both cases these men tried to embarrass women in their profession, tried to make them feel awkward and excluded. In both cases, aside from the sexual harassment aspect, it was a very nasty insult.

One letter to the Editor attempted to cast this as a civil liberties issue, but given that we have defamation laws and no one thinks that that's the kind of censorship which, as the letter-writer put it 'has no place in a liberal democracy', I think we can put his letter down to his weak grasp of what constitutes censorship in the first place.

What is really lovely about the public response to both these incidents is that the vast majority of people have been outraged. Men, in particular, have been vocal about how embarrassed they feel that there are still men out there that behave like this and how offended they are about this kind of behaviour generally.

That's what this comes down to; it's not a women's issue, it's a human issue. It happened to women because in both cases the women work in professions in which they are in the minority, but it is nothing more than the bullying, excluding and victimizing of people who were already at a disadvantage. Gender clouds the issue, if not for that, there would be unanimous support for the women; all Australians step in if they see that someone isn't getting a fair go.

Pod Death; a modern tragedy.

2008-04-29T02:23:00.006Z

There's an album come out a couple of months ago called 'No Man's Woman'. It is 'an Australian male compilation, saluting the female perspective in rock & pop'. The idea came about because You Am I did a cover of a Patti Smith song and the idea of men covering a woman's song was thought remarkable enough to raise comment. (In fact, "House of the Rising Sun", a song covered by every British male group and quite a few American ones as well, is a woman's song. Most early Anglo-American music is 'women's songs', but that's a story for another day.) On the cd, Tex Perkins, inevitably, wonderfully, sings Helen Reddy's 'I Am Woman' accompanied by his comment that he's always felt he was a 'woman in the body of an ape', which, as K-Rudd would said, is too cute by half. And yet, I find it endearing. One of us is seriously special and I'm not game to call it.

Either way, it was reading the liner notes for the album that I realized that I was not alone in an everyday tragedy I suffered recently. In fact, it must be on the scale of zeitgeist by now. So, my everyday tragedy is this: I accidentally wiped my pod. So did one of the guys from The Vines. When they asked him why he choose the song he did for 'No Man's Woman' he said that he'd accidentally wiped his ipod and it meant that he had to go round borrowing and finding and buying albums so that he could build up his music library on another computer. In the process, he ended up hearing a whole load of new music, one song of which he'd liked so much that the band covered it on the album.

As with all death, my pod death (and his ipod death) lead to new life. Like The Vines, I ended up listening to a pod full of music that was new to me while I dug through my cupboards looking for my favourite cds that I bought and put on computer so many years ago I don't remember what the cover art looks like.

Gillian Welch's Soul Journey, Bernard Fanning's Tea and Sympathy, The Cat Empire's So Many Nights (which I took against the first time I heard it, but love now), solo John Lennon, Hijack Oscar and Dave Graney, At Speed's Ashtown Sessions, and particularly, Tex Perkins and Tim Rodgers' My Better Half, which, if I had no other reason, I would love just for the cover art. The album has been rightly criticised for its poor production values, but I don't mind that. I haven't heard an album as direct as this since I was 15 and heard Dylan's Another Side of Bob Dylan for the first time; an equally poorly produced album. My pod death was worth it for the song You Should See Her Now alone.

Well I Don't Know If I'd Go So Far As "Fascist", I Mean You're Not Actually Proposing a State-Enforced Ban On All Reduced-Fat Products...

2008-04-29T01:55:00.005Z

...oh, you meant that rhetorically, didn't you?

BlueJ is one of the best cooks I have ever met. I used to do her ironing in exchange for her cooking dinner and, much as I hate ironing, I absolutely got the sweet end of the deal. In fairness, she has also cooked me dinner because I was poor, hungry, ill, sad, helped her move, because she needed someone to experiment on or just because. So, she's paid her dues and has every right to be a fascist, although she isn't. It is true that when she comes to power she genuinely will ban all reduced-fat products, but at the moment what she is talking about isn't fascism, it's the pursuit of a way of life that's all about people who 'sing songs, spin stories, love, laugh and drink wine'. It's about the understanding that sheer pleasure in life is a virtue as well as a profoundly practical thing. It's about generosity to others and ourselves, the staff of life metaphorically and literally. For her, not surprisingly, reduced-fat food stands metonimically for the opposite.

And I utterly agree, except that, without being in the least 'Skinny Jean' about it, I just like reduced fat milk and cheese better than the full fat version.

Food fascist?

2008-04-27T11:43:00.003Z

This issue of Observer Food Monthly contains fifty of Nigel Slater's most popular recipes. In his introduction he says that while recipes were mostly chosen because they are either his favourites or those most requested by readers, one or two are included because they were unclear when originally published. One of the clarifications is a recipe for cheesecake which failed to specify full-fat mascarpone, and results in cake soup if low fat cheese is used. Personally, I'd think that anyone attempting to make cheesecake with low-fat cheese deserves everything they get.

Lest We Forget

2008-04-25T01:27:00.003Z

... and yet every year ANZAC Day is an exercise in forgetting. We remember it as the newly federated Australia's first military campaign and we remember how proud young Australian boys were to serve. We remember that they lied about their age in order to sign up. And we remember that over 10,000 ANZACs died at Gallipoli, not to mention the casualties of other nationalities. It is only human to remember and honour their sacrifice and above all to say that they did not die in vain.

But, historically, they did die in vain. What we don't remember about Gallipoli is that it was a futile campaign, orchestrated by Winston Churchill; it is no wonder that after this, in WWII, he felt he could commandeer Australian troops against the express orders of the Australian Prime Minister, John Curtin. Although we talk about this as our nation's first war, Australia had in fact sent troops to the Boer War as well. We don't regard this as such an important event because Australia was unfederated and its troops were very much Britain's troops.
So there is a terrible irony in our valourization of ANZAC Day; by sending troops to a war which had nothing to do with us we weren't breaking past patterns and asserting our Nationhood, we were confirming that we were still at Britain's beck and call, still willing to put Britain's interests ahead of the lives of young Australians.

The First World War, a war of disasters and unimaginable casualties, achieved nothing except the creation of the resentment which allowed Hitler to come to power in Germany and the onset of the Second World War. Worse, perhaps, it was fought for nothing. It was begun by the assassination of an aristocrat for reasons to do with the regional history of Eastern Europe, and the rest of the world was dragged in by virtue of treaties. Each new country obliged to join by their treaties, forced their allies to commit to war too and then theirs, until the World was at war.

So, historically, the ANZACs died in vain. We have a duty now to change that. The Australian Government under Billy Hughes allowed Australian boys, too young to know better and fired with the kind of misplaced patriotism the WWI soldier and poet Wilfred Owen called 'the old lie' to die, not to protect our way of life, but to ensure their standing with the British. Later Sir Robert Menzies put Australian troops entirely at Churchill's disposal in hopes of being given a seat in Churchill's war cabinet. The Australian Parliament at the time was horrified enough to throw him out on that basis, and his successor, Curtin, realizing the recklessness of the British attitude towards Australian troops, threw our lot in with the Americans. During Vietnam, Menzies, once again PM, again introduced conscription in order to be able to provide troops to support America in such an unpopular war. His successor, Harold Holt, whose slogan was "All the way with LBJ", once again put our troops utterly in the hands of American President Lyndon B. Johnson. And most recently, John Howard, in the image of his hero Menzies, committed Australian troops to American causes which have made the world less safe and have greatly increased the threat of terrorism to Australia, apparently for the glory of being termed a 'man of steel' by George W. Bush.

The lesson of ANZAC day, the thing the ANZAC deaths should teach us never to forget, is that the lives of young Australians should never be spent by their government except in direst need, and solely in our own national interest, not to impress our allies as though we were their poor cousins. It's a day which, of all days, should remind us of how terrible war is and how cautious we should be in committed ourselves to it.
This is the only patriotic way to honour the ANZACs and their sacrifice.

An extraordinarily good way with chicory

2008-04-14T19:55:00.004Z

This is a story that illustrates two great truths about cooking, firstly, that often it will go wrong and more importantly, that fabulous alchemy that a really great recipe displays - of simple ingredients simply prepared that produce something ridiculously tasty.

So, I was feeling vaguely fishy this week but a combination of sheer laziness and circumstance meant that Aldi was going to be the extent of my market place. Which left me with two rather sad looking trout to do something with. To be frank the trout was not a success, I decided to bake it with lemon and dill and to serve with an old stand-by of mine, a variation of the creme fraiche-citrus-herb theme. Take it from me, don't serve even really crappy trout with creme fraiche. Were I to do it again I'ld keep the dill and capers and incorporate them into a dressing based either on vinegar or lemon but the fish needs something sharp and clean rather than anything in any way luscious. So the star of my meal bombed but salvation occurred in the form of the side I was eating with it, the chicory (which I'm in possession of because it was it was the last packet left in Superquinn and was reduced to Eur1.40, oh sweet serendipitous chance).

To make really amazing chicory:

Chicory
Salt
Pepper
Olive oil (decent if you have it)
Unsuccessful fish sauce:
Creme fraiche
Lemon Juice
Capers
Salt and pepper

1)Loosen the creme fraiche with the lemon juice to a thick pouring consistency and then add more salt and pepper than you think you're likely to need.
2)Add 1 tsp of capers for every two (heaped) of creme fraiche, you could chop them if you fancy but I can't say I was bothered.
3)Remove a half inch at the root of each chicory and cut length-ways in half.
4)Drizzle each half with the oil, season enthusiastically and pour a couple of teaspoons of the creme fraiche mixture on top.
5)Put under a very hot grill for about five minutes until the creme fraiche has browned and the edges of the chicory are blackening very slightly.

And you come out the other end with pure magic.

Through one of those vaguely ominous but almost certainly meaningless motifs, strawberries and fish frequently occur in my life together. In this case the strawberries arrived on the scene through the agency of a two for one honey-trap offer in Superquinn. So I finished my decadent, dilettante little repast with a deeply drinkable sparkling rose (Aldi Eur8.99 - worth every red cent) while polishing off half a pound of surprisingly good strawberries (which will almost certainly give me hives, mais c'est la vie). The presence of the bottle of wine will quite probably mean that I will wake up tomorrow to the presence of rather a lot of fishy dishes. If there is any sense no mind justice in the world, some day someone, who considers that washing dishes in return for being well fed to be a good deal, will marry me. But only those who consider chickpeas 'real food' and don't sermonise people for consuming perfectly reasonable quantities of bloody good single malt need apply.

Iraq

2008-03-28T08:23:00.003Z

We've just had the five year anniversary of the Invasion of Iraq and a curse on the houses of all the journalists who are using the word 'invasion' now that it's gone so horribly wrong and that public opinion is so much against it, but didn't use it five years ago.

Five years ago a group of boys on a train pinned me up against the wall because they could see from my black arm band that I had been at a demonstration protesting the War. One of them said 'How are you going to feel if that fucker Hussein does have weapons? You're going to be responsible for all the babies that die.' Everyone from undergraduate history students up knew that the War would make the world more dangerous, not less dangerous, especially if Iraq really did have nuclear weapons.

At the time I was teaching poetry to first year undergraduates and I made them read Wilfred Owen; a class full of kids who thought we should be at war berated me for my ghoulishness in turning their stomachs with Owen's descriptions of the war dead.

Just recently, an American friend of mine looked confused when I said that the upcoming election was in the context of America being at war. Then he said '...Oh! you mean Iraq? Most Americans don't think of us as being at war.' I told him, in my insufferably self-righteous way, that most Iraqis do think of America as being at war.

Our attitude to war is only maintained by the absence of wars at home, which is what Owen, who died in the Battle of Sambre a week before the war ended, meant when he said that anyone who had seen or heard what he had would not urge war. My great uncles, who signed up underage like so many Australia boys, were POWs in Changi and the Burma Railway and it broke them. But believe me, it made pacifists of them.

The best reason not to vote for McCain is that he is a man who fought in Vietnam, was captured and tortured, and still believes that the war in Iraq will achieve any worthwhile purpose. I cannot imaging the depths of the kind of pathology that would drive a man to such a delusion.

You be the Kremlin and I'll be the saint

2008-03-19T04:24:00.004Z

I'm starting to feel that feminism is a bit conditional in its attitude to women. I am angry about Prof. Greer's comments on Clinton-actually livid is probably closer the mark-, but I have to concede that it is a malaise which Feminists have always suffered from.

Feminism immediately understood that the Patriarchal definition of the Good Woman was a hiding to nothing for us, but made the awful mistake of trying to oppose it with an alternative definition and then crucifying those women who don't 'live up' to it.

As early as the Renaissance, De Pizan invites all good women to live with her in the City of Ladies. Her definition of a 'good woman' was -is! - groundbreaking, but her invitation is still conditional*.

Centuries later another Frenchwoman, De Beauvoir, argued that if women want to have the same rights as men then they have to behave like men, without any sense that perhaps not all women regard male behaviour as a dizzying height definitional of civilized humanity.

Even De Gouges, in many ways the most free from this conception, campaigned for women to be subject to the Death Penalty, then suffrage, so that no one could say that women do not deserve the vote. Of course, De Gouges was executed in 1793 during the Terror and women didn't get the vote in France until 1944.

Women seem always to have felt a pressure to demonstrate that they, that we, deserve equality, in contradistinction to most disadvantaged groups. I suppose that this is why women, generally, seem so paranoid about appearing to be self-serving. There is no question that African Americans will vote for Obama while American women are often reluctant to vote for Clinton, not least in order to make the point that they wouldn't vote for someone just because she's 'one of their own'.

Certainly, conditional equality is totally absent from the masculine equivalents. The Rights of Man and of the Citizen begins "Men are born and remain free and equal in rights." It continues "Law can only prohibit such actions as are hurtful to society. Nothing may be prevented which is not forbidden by law, and no one may be forced to do anything not provided for by law." It doesn't say "your rights are conditional on you being a really top bloke", the only requirement is one made in the interests of order; that men obey the law. Equally The Declaration of Independence claims that "all men are created equal", and though this truth turned out to be a little less self-evident than everyone had hoped, in its language and conception it imagines that the essence of equality is that we are born with it and that it is not dependant upon our actions.

And now Prof. Greer has joined the list of Feminists who believe in women's equality subject to their virtue by joined the endless succession of people who want to criticize Clinton on personal rather than professional grounds. Greer is quoted saying "She's so bossy and cold and manipulative." (Can anyone remember when such things were said of a male politician? Must be because male politicians do not have these qualities. No. Wait. What about John Howard's entire front bench?)
Not that Greer is against female leaders, but she seems to feel that it only furthers the cause if they are women who's lifestyle meets with her approval. Now not only do when have to succeed, we have to be saints too, her kind of saints.

Greer, who was in Melbourne promoting her book Shakespeare's Wife, was quoted in The Australian 11/3/2008 as saying, without any apparent consciousness of the irony, "I can't see that Hillary would appeal to feminists because, why is she there? She is there because she is Bill's wife."

Surely, people as feminists are delighted to see any indication that the idea of women in every aspect of society is becoming more acceptable, and surely as individuals they vote their consciences across a range of issues.

*Boccaccio's On Famous Women, one of the inspirations for De Pizan, by contrast gives the biographies of great women who have performed great deeds, regardless of whether they were 'good' or 'wicked'.

2008-02-13T17:34:00.002Z

The Drover's Dog

2008-02-06T20:16:00.001Z

A friend of mine is hoping that Obama gets the nod, not least because, as she said this morning, he unites the centre and the centre right around a democratic candidate. A minute later she went to town on Clinton for 'courting the republican vote.' This girl's a highly educated feminist. grrrr. ahh. buah boor bahno grrrrr, etc.

As Hayden said, I think a drover's dog could lead the democrats to victory in this election, so I'm not that pushed either way, but then, I don't really understand Americans, despite dating them, living there and watching The West Wing.

Errata (Dialects)

2008-01-30T16:33:00.001Z

BlueJ just pointed out that there is a pocket of the Newfoundland population which retain a pronounced Waterford twang, albeit with other influences. And, of course, I spent last Easter with a group of Australian nuns living in the Chianti whose accents were certainly closer to the Australian accent of the period (1960) when they left Australia than to anything else.

Sorry

2008-01-30T15:11:00.001Z

When Rudd won I told my American boyfriend that the new Government would apologise to Indigenous Australians. Said boyfriend isn't especially racist, but he couldn't see the value: you either compensate people or you shut up, there's no point saying sorry.

I was standing in the changing rooms in my gym in Dublin today when it was reported on the radio that Rudd's first act in the new parliament would be the apology. I can't speak about what it means to the first Australians, but the sense of relief that I feel is beyond words. I was alone, which is just as well because I burst into tears.

For all that Howard was PM for 11 years, the thing, maybe the only thing that will be remembered about him is that he is the man who wouldn't say sorry. We actually do need the word. There was an annual Sorry Day instituted while Howard was in power and the organizers would have skywriters write the word. People would sign petitions saying that they wanted to apologise personally, if the nation wouldn't do it. Clarke and Dawe's The Games made an episode around the apology, the text of which they offered to 'any other John Howard' who might want to use it: http://www.abc.net.au/tv/thegames/howard.htm

The opposition to the apology has always argued that no living Australian is personally responsible for the Stolen Generation. This is utterly untrue because people were still being taken as late as the middle 20th century. It actually doesn't matter whether it's true. Howard said that it wasn't the role of Government to apologise. But that's just it, it is the role of Government. When a Government apologises, the collective, not the individual acts.

Howard always said it played into 'the Black Arm Band' view of history - something that never bothered the ex-PM when he was mourning soldiers fallen in WWI. Paul Keating said in the famous Redfern speech 'However intractable the problems seem, we cannot resign ourselves to failure - any more than we can hide behind the contemporary version of Social Darwinism which says that to reach back for the poor and dispossessed is to risk being dragged down.' He went on to say, in a Don Watson phrase (one of many) which won him my undying love, and pissed off nearly everyone else 'That seems to me not only morally indefensible, but bad history.'

Everything about the Western World's self-narrative at the moment is to do with bottom-lines and what Australians call 'Economic Rationalism'. But actually, everyone is most profoundly concerned with culture politics and ideology. Howard was an ideological politician. Kennett was about balancing books, but Howard wanted the hearts and minds. Bush is the same. Which si why there has been such a kick in the opposite direction. When Australia voted for Rudd, people started to adopt Whitlam's election motto and talk about the First Hundred Days, just as people are trying to make a Bobby Kennedy out of Obama. The War in Iraq is about ideology as much as the Crusades were. (I am the historical consultant for a production of Macbeth at the moment and when I mentioned the Crusades continuing on into the 17th century, one of the actors said 'They're not over yet.')

Dr Nelson stills thinks we shouldn't apologise - he got the leadership of the conservatives at least in part because Turnbull said he would support an apology. But seriously! Even Ted Bailleu thinks we should 'do the decent thing.'

So, we are finally going to get the word itself. This is a section from Keating's Redfern speech:
We non- Aboriginal Australians should perhaps remind ourselves that Australia once reached out for us.
Didn't Australia provide opportunity and care for the dispossessed Irish? The poor of Britain? The refugees from war and famine and persecution in the countries of Europe and Asia?
Isn't it reasonable to say that if we can build a prosperous and remarkable harmonious multicultural society in Australia, surely we can find just solutions to the problems which beset the fist Australians - the people to whom the most injustice has been done.
And, as I say, the starting point might be to recognise that the problem starts with us non-Aboriginal Australians.
It begins, I think, with that act of recognition Recognition that it was we who did the dispossessing.
We took the traditional lands and smashed the traditional way of life.
We brought the diseases. The alcohol.
We committed the murders.
We took the children from their mothers.
We practised discrimination and exclusion.
It was our ignorance and our prejudice.
And our failure to imagine these things being done to us.
With some noble exceptions, we failed to make the most basic human response and enter into their hearts and minds.
We fail to ask - how would I feel if this were done to me?
As a consequence, we failed to see that what we were doing degraded all of us.

Rudd wants to 'get it right'. I really hope he asks Watson to write it.

PR

2008-01-29T11:23:00.001Z

In the last couple of weeks, I've found myself arguing against Obama a lot. Not because I think it would be a disaster if he won, but because I am profoundly suspicious of the reasons that people like him. I am dismayed by the fact that the whole world seems to want to vote for Change, when no one I've meet knows what that would be. Very few people seem to know much about him at all except that he is in favour of Change and Hope. As am I, by the way. But it all sounds suspiciously like the War on Terror. I'm against Terror, but I am not at all in favour of the War on Terror, a war which has caused so much Terror. Words, words, they're all we have to go on, and they're leading us astray.

Now the Kennedys have endorsed Obama. Caroline Kennedy wrote an article published in The Age today which actually stated this position frankly. Kennedy writes:

'We have that kind of opportunity with Obama. It isn't that the other candidates are not experienced or knowledgeable. But this year, that may not be enough. We need a change in the leadership of this country — just as we did in 1960. Most of us would prefer to base our voting decision on policy differences. However, the candidates' goals are similar.'

The article presents Obama as a special politician and - without missing a beat - says that, actually, on issues of policy, he isn't especially distinguished.

Also, what could she possible mean by 'a change of leadership'? Bush's term expires; America is getting a change of leadership no matter what.

No, I know what she means, of course I do.

But I'm really concerned that language is being used in such a sloppy way. When democracies are as big as America, everything is PR, everything is words. So if people use them imprecisely they are devalued to the point where no one can be held to account. Also, it effects people's ability to think clearly. When every word has an entirely amorphous value, its much easier to make mental slips - and if you're a good spin doctor, then it's easier to make people make mental slips.

I have a healthy terror of what politicians as charismatic as Obama can do, what, historically, they have done. But I'm more worried that no one - until now - seemed to have noticed that no one is focusing on policies. I don't know whether I'm more or less worried now that someone has but just doesn't care. A democracy really depends on people being more thoughtful and more insightful than this.

Picture from Cuthbie's Girl

2008-01-27T18:20:00.000Z

Love this! Thank you Cuthbie's Girl.

South Carolina

2008-01-27T14:02:00.000Z

I've noticed that I refer to female politicians either by their first name, or their full name if I subconsciously think of them as being feminine (Hilary or Hilary Clinton, Maxine or Maxine McKew) and by their surnames only if I don't (Thatcher, Gillard).

A friend said to me yesterday 'There's no doubt that Hilary's the better candidate, its just a really unfortunate thing that she's so personally unlikeable. I feel it too, even though I've seen how hard she worked for us in New York.'
I couldn't count the number of times I've heard that particular 'special case' argument in relation to female politicians.
My friend also said 'America is so ready for a female president and because Obama's black, its not even an issue; no one's even talking about the fact she's a woman.'

I'm hearing that a lot too.

And I don't think its true. I don't think the fact that it's not being talked about means that people are any more comfortable with women in politics. My friend says last time there was a female presidential candidate, all the debate was about whether foreign governments would take her seriously. (I didn't have the heart to tell him that gender is the least of the prejudices the world holds against American leaders.) There is also a slip there; he was talking about America 'being ready' but said the debate (the sign that America wasn't ready) had been around whether the rest of the world would take a female president seriously. That slip demonstrates how good we've got at justifying, rationalizing and hiding prejudices. The unintentional implication of what he said was that foreign perception was being used as a way of disguising American sexism and that subconsciously, at least, he knew it.

What we want from a politician is so utterly at odds with what we want women to be that I think it is entirely possible not to be sexist, to be a person who is in favour of women succeeding in any number of previously male-dominated areas and still find it difficult to like a female leader. Clinton is unlikeable because she's a potential presidential politician. Gradually, we are coming to a view of minor female politicians which is positive. In those roles, women are able to be either more maternal or more ball-breaking, and there isn't such a problem. But for a president, for a leader, we want her to be tough enough to do the job and comforting because women who aren't are bitches. Simultaneously, we want her to be maternal, but also not, because you've got to be tough to fight wars and protect us all from the big bad world. And because we are happy (enough) with women in other public offices, it always feels like we don't like whoever it is personally, rather than because of her gender.

Maxine McKew, the woman who took John Howard's seat (and therefore, although not vying for a leadership role nevertheless occupies that space because she defeated the Prime Minister) was almost entirely able to escape these contradictions. Her public profile was developed over years as a journalist and people still relate to her that way although she is now a politician. Having said that, it was shocking to hear her speak on election day (and no one was barracking for her more than me) because she wasn't tough like politicians are, she wasn't aggressive, and it was only the remembrance of her intellect and dedication as a journalist that stopped me from wondering if she was up to this. And all because she speaks softly.

In the presidential debates, when all the candidates walked onto the stage together, Clinton's height (a foot shorter than everyone else) and her hips made her a completely recognizable silhouette. Obama didn't stand out for being black; Clinton was the odd man out.

Australia Day, pt 2

2008-01-26T15:05:00.000Z

I got absolutely shellaqued by a friend of mine for saying that the cultural cringe still exists. But today's edition of The Age has an article on the Australian accent. I don't think other people worry about this the way Australians do: http://www.theage.com.au/news/national/bcultureb-strine-feels-strain-as-austrayan-twang-on-the-wane/2008/01/26/1201157739206.html?page=2
The article isn't stridently anti-immigration, but it does say that our broad accent is under threat from 'wogspeak'. No, seriously. Just try to imagine what the article would have been like if it had been anti-immigration and used the 'word' 'wogspeak'? Also interesting is that fact that parodying second generation versions of the Australian accent - as long as they are European - isn't really seen as being problematic, where as if it were Chinese or Taiwanese it would be (to steal another Get This term) a bit me-no-rikie.

The whole article surprised me because TV has played a much bigger role in altering the accent than immigration has. In Australia, it did what the railways did to accent in America. Accents always change, they change everywhere and all the time, so I don't even really know what we're talking about anymore. Even the good people in Lost, without any outside contact, would change their accent over time. (I'm just guessing that last sentence makes some sense; I've never actually seen Lost and I don't know anything about the plot. For all I know they might be stuck on an island with a major international airport.) Actually, contact stabilizes and neutralizes accent rather than the other way about.

While I think we should be more concerned about the loss of Indigenous languages (the only people studying Aboriginal languages at my alma mater were visiting Americans) I don't know how much of a good idea I think it is to put it in an article about accents. Indigenous languages aren't an accented variation of English.

Just easing up on the moral indignation for a moment, I was interested to note that pronouncing 'eh' as 'ah' (as in Malbourne for Melbourne) is a Victorian thing. I thought it was a me thing and something that had only started to happened after I moved to America. Also, why isn't the article asking why Australians famously pronounce more diphthongs than any other group aside from Texans, and yet, equally famously, tend to elide actual diphthongs? So many unanswered questions.... Speaking of which, I see that 'strayan' is now being pronounced as 'strine'. I thought we had cut down 'australian' to its shortest possible length while still saying the word, but I was wrong. This is what happens when I leave the country.

The article includes a list of expressions not found in other Englishes, some of which caught me out badly. 'Light globe', 'icy pole', 'silver beet', 'bora' and 'doona' spring to mind, but it was 'short black' and 'flat white' that nearly got me killed in America. Actually, that wasn't the worst of it. One of the most common snakes in Victoria is the Yellow-Bellied Black snake, a charming creature which, according to the guy who came to get one out of our house, is most commonly grey with a red belly. Australians always drop the end off words and expressions, so we tend to call it the Yellow-Bellied Black. That was the expression which caused the greatest tension in a room full of middle-class, educated white Americans, even ahead of 'spit the dummy' which many people, with better imaginations than me, thought sounded like a lot of fun. I swear, it had never occured to me that it could mean anything else.

Also is enterprise bargaining and scruntchie (pronounced 'Crunchie' by my German skating coach) really just us?

Australia Day

2008-01-25T18:07:00.000Z

This is such a difficult day for Australians, though it's been pointed out to me that I find really quite a lot of things difficult.

http://www.theage.com.au/news/opinion/blarissa-dubeckib-why-its-australian-to-be-unaustralian/2008/01/25/1201157665918.html

Heathcliff

2008-01-25T12:38:00.000Z

This is exactly the kind of thing that doesn't happen in Ireland.

http://media.theage.com.au/?category=BreakingNews&rid=34892

Julia Gillard

2007-11-22T11:13:00.000Z

I see that Julia Gillard is being labeled a 'fanatic' in the latest scare campaign. I don't have anything to say to that, except that it's not all that surprising that the Conservatives (or the Tories, as Keating used to call them) are doing so badly in the polls. They really think people are that stupid; no wonder people take offence.

I'm not really a feminist these days. I still call myself one, because I couldn't bear to be the kind of person who is ashamed of the word, or who thinks that feminists are women who are too bossy or are scared that men will never go out with anyone who calls themselves that. (Rik Mayall used to say 'all men are feminists; its the only way to pull birds'; O! for the good old days...) I'm not really a feminist because I lead a life that is so privileged that I can surround myself with people with whom it is not an issue. And I am not really a feminist because I think that most social constructions of gender are pretty unhelpful, whatever gender you are. Men have had more obvious advantages in the construction of gender, but I think it comes at a price too.

So the point is, that in my privileged little life, I forget just how hard some of the battles have been and I forget the number of battles that haven't been won. I saw on the news that Brad Pitt was paid twice as much as Angelina Jolie for Mr and Mrs Smith. BlueJ made the argument that if twice as many people see the film for Pitt then that's valid marketing (but only if there is twice as many). On the other hand, in most Third World countries, there is less of a pay gap than that.

And this morning, reading up on Gillard to see what, if anything, might inspire someone to describe her as a fanatic, I was reminded of how recent and how skin-deep some of our equality really is. In 1983, Gillard became the second woman to lead the Australian Students' Union; in 1990 she became one of the first female partners in one of Australia's most prestigious Law firms, Slater and Gordon. As Chief-of-Staff to John Brumby, she drafted the Affirmative Action guidelines which set as a goal that Labor have women in 35% of winnable seats.

In May this year, Bill Heffernen called her 'deliberately barren' and said that because she'd had no children she was not qualified for public office, which, as she pointed out, was ironic, because if she'd had children, she probably wouldn't have the possibility of serving in public office with such distinction that she is the most prominent female politician in Australia today.

Well May We Say 'God Save the Queen'...

2007-11-20T09:44:00.000Z

The Australian Federal Election 2007 is my St. Crispin's day. Keating said that his victory in 1993 was 'the sweetest victory of all, a victory for the True Believers'. That victory gave a mandate to, in my view, the best government Australia has ever had, but if Howard gets voted out next weekend, I will count the end of him being able to do harm as a greater victory than Keating being able to do good.

All the same, Australia does seem to have become a much stranger place in my absence (though I'm not sure that thats the differentiating factor.)

Yesterday I voted and I have to say, I have never seen a more insane line-up of political parties. Obviously, you have the guns and God crew; not a lot of loving their enemies going on there. At the hysterical end of this group is the Citizens Electoral Council which, I gather, is more or less a cult. The conspiracy theorist Lyndon LaRouche is their leader or their God, or possibly, in a bid to cut out the middle man, both.

There is the What Women Want Party which is going to set the cause back about fifty years. Why would you make it an organization which doesn't allow male membership? Women have been trying to get men to come to the Party for years now. There is the Non-Custodial Parents Party which is essentially the Angry Dads who oppose 'state interference in people's lives'. As BlueJ said, who would they like interfering in their lives? If they could have sorted it out themselves, it would never have got to Court anyway.

In addition to these two gendered parties, there is the Family First Party. Everyone's part of a family one way or another, so I assumed this would be the most inclusive party in Australian politics.
That wasn't born out on closer inspection.
In fact, it turned out that my assumption that any party in favour of families would be in favour of really a lot of sex also proved false. Most confusingly, however, they are opposed to people* having families. So I've renamed them the Misnomer Party.

The environmental parties are always attacked for being single-issue parties and it is in this context that its worth mentioning the Carers' Alliance Party. Carers are profoundly under-recognized and that ought to change; I just don't want them running Australia's foreign policy (not, I suppose, that our policy could be much more insane than it is at the moment.) There is also the Hear Our Voice party. A party needs 500 members to be registered; this one has 509. So this was not quite the listen-to-the-people kind of party that I had hoped. Moreover, I've never been able to work out what they are in favour of, except good listeners. The crowning jewel though, is the fact that Australia is sporting two pro-fishing parties. One is the Australian Fishing and Lifestyle Party. I'm not sure if that means that they are only in favour of Australians having lifestyles and fishing. The other party is more Catholic in its outlook and is called The Fishing Party. I would love to see them debate some of the tough issues.

In fact, we seem to be doing a Noah-like line in parties coming in twos. There are two socialist Parties. There are two Climate Change parties; one for conservatives, and one for Business. Climate change is progressing very steadily, so I'm not sure what their concern is. Moreover, inexplicably, Aryan Women's Hall of Famer and ex-prison inmate, Pauline Hanson, a woman who shouldn't be allowed to start a sentence (except her prison sentence), has been allowed to start two political parties, both of which are in favour of uniting all Australians through the banning of non-racists.

But the one that really caught my eye was the On-Line Senator Party. This is a group with no policies. They are in favour of putting every issue to an online poll and abiding by the results. I see the merits of direct democracy, but this isn't their policy. They also don't specify how they would make sure that everyone had internet access, but more interestingly, the polls would only be open to people who are not members of political parties. That is, they wish to exclude those sections of the population who are committed to thinking about politics and society and who are knowledgable from voting. It is almost a distilation of the worst of direct democracy.
The real kicker here is that it wouldn't exclude memebers of parties which are so insane the AEC wouldn't register them. I have included a list of those parties, just to give you a taste of what it might be like:

Advance Australia Party
Australia First Party
Australians Against Further Immigration (AAFI)
Communist Party of Australia
Country Alliance
Ex-Service, Service and Veterans Party
Four Wheel Drive Party
Great Australians Party
Grey Power
HEMP (Help End Marijuana Prohibition)
Hope Party
Human Rights Party
Liberals for Forests
Libertarian Party
Lower Excise Fuel and Beer Party
New Country Party
No GST Party
One Nation NSW (Oldfield group)
Outdoor Recreation Party
People Power Party
Progressive Labour Party
Save Our Suburbs
Secular Party of Australia
Tasmania First Party
Unity Party (Australia)
Workers Liberty Australia
Workers Power

*Or at least, they are opposed to people who aren't People Like Them having families.

Please look after this bear

2007-11-19T12:42:00.000Z

Just a quick entry for Cuthbie's Girl, who I thought would like this pic!

Judas and the Flesh-Coloured Christs That Glow in the Dark

2007-10-01T13:07:00.000Z

Just noticed last night that the riff in It's Alright Ma (I'm Only Bleeding) is a variation on the riff in See That My Grave is Kept Clean off his first album. Can't believe I never noticed it before. Lends further creedence to my ongoing rant about how going electric was a return to origins, rather than a defection.

The Cats

2007-10-01T12:50:00.001Z

So, I was very ornery about the Brownlow, but like everyone else, I've been completely won over by Jimmy Bartell. He played a blinding game but also a solid one on the weekend. He kicked goals, but on the other hand, he was always lurking in the backline stopping the ball and driving it back out of the defending fifty.

Saturday was a great day for me. My brother is a Geelong fan and so, despite being a Demons girl myself, I spent a lot of my childhood going through those terrible defeats in 1989, 1992, 1994 and 1995 with him. My mother used to compare Geelong's style of play to that of the Germanic tribes who fought the Roman Empire; they play like beserkers, rather than with the steely inevitability of machine teams like Hawthorn and West Coast. Mum always used to point out that those tribes won in the end. Geelong still play that way and they still think that if you kick in the direction of the attacking fifty, an Ablett will take the mark.

Good Weekend To Be A Victorian

2007-09-30T12:32:00.001Z

...I mean, I don't care about League or anything, but its still good.

'Do You Think Craig Starcevich Will Win The Brownlow Medal?'

2007-09-24T13:26:00.000Z

The Brownlow is the most bizarre aspect of football. Everyone agrees that umpires know nothing; it is one of the few points upon which Collingwood fans and everyone else concur. And yet, the Brownlow is the highest individual honour in football. Which is insane, I mean, Gerard Healy won one.

Every year its the same. There will be a Brownlow favourite adopted by the Press, usually some kid who has played brilliantly and deserves it. And they will be endlessly interviewed about it. Yesterday, Gary Ablett jr made the front page of The Age with the story that he was favourite - not that any actual thing had happened, but that there were people out there who though, yes, on reflection, he might win. Really? Wasn't there anything else going on in the world that day? And then there are the questions: 'How do you feel about being the Brownlow favourite?', 'Do you think the extra pressure has put you off your finals campaign?', 'What do you think your chances of winning are?'. The only answer to any of these questions is 'Ah geez, I dunno, mate.' Which is usually what they say. Does that discourage the Press? No, not really. And then we come to the actual night and the camera zooms in on whoever it is as in round after round he doesn't get any votes. The zooming becomes more vicious as it goes from a statistical improbability to a mathematical impossibility for him to win, looking for signs of disappointment or bad sportsmanship.

I don't think I remember a favourite ever coming in, which possibly just demonstrates how far the distance between the umpires and everyone else really is.

State of Origin*

2007-09-22T14:52:00.000Z

I always thought my dad looked like Achilles (above) and he thought his dad looked like Jack Dyer (left), which we agree is more or less the same thing. I was looking up the history of Essendon on Wikipedia to settle an argument about when the club was founded and noticed that wikipedia have disputed the neutrality of the section on Dick Reynolds - love it! - and in part it was this that made me think of my dad. But I'd been thinking about fathers, and sons, anyway.

The two most important Grand Finals of my lifetime have been, for me, 1989 and 1992. The first was the last Grand Final of the VFL before it became the AFL, in which my brother's team, Geeling, was beaten by hated Hawthorn. In the second, Geelong was beaten by the Eagles, an interstate side then less than ten years in the competition wearing a jumper which wasn't in any of the proper football patterns. That side was coached by Mick Malthouse (right), for whom (bizarrely) I have always had a soft spot, even then when he was coaching a side I despised. (I love the way Malthouse never looks less than confident when he's in the box. It means that when something goes wrong and they flash a shot of the coach on the big screen, the young players on the field who are coping lots of talk and having their ribs broken behind the play they don't have to contend with seeing him lose faith in them on top of everything else.) So Friday's match between the Malthouse-coached Collingwood and Geelong had the feeling of being a replay of that contest. It was an intense game. All the more because, at the time, I thought that if Collingwood lost it would be Buckley's (left) last game, but he has since said he'd stay on. Buckley is old-school, honourable on the field and the best all-round player and game-winner, strongest and hardest-working, that I've seen play. I'd even give him the edge over Voss.

But of course the thing which most gave the game the intensity and the feeling of Geelong getting a chance to change the score was that both Ablett's sons were playing.

If you didn't grow up with Footy then its a bit difficult to explain about Ablett (left). He always had the most ungainly and unpromising-looking build; the exact opposite of a player like Buckley who is what my dad would call 'a real good-looking footballer'. Everything about the way Buckley moves and handles the football is dynamic and elegant; he's always got perfect form and he never takes his eyes off the ball, even when he's being tackled, which is not that often. Ablett, on the other hand, was stocky with massive sloping shoulders and always slightly hunched. Yet he was the most miraculous, freaky player. He was said to be the fastest man over five metres in the league, which is the most important distance for anyone playing up front. He usually had three defenders guarding him, not that it made much difference. He was arguably the greatest full forward ever, one of the greatest ever players. His nickname is 'God'. He played for Geelong, which unlike most AFL clubs, is not an inner city suburb of Melbourne, it is a city in its own right: no one in Geelong doesn't barrack for the Cats. But despite all this, he never played in a winning Premiership side. Now both Ablett's sons, recruited under the father/son rule, play for Geelong, which must be a tough gig. Especially for the elder (left), also called Gary and he looks like him. He's built like his father, but more disconcertingly, he moves like his father. And he's a champion, which is amazing in its own right because you would expect that the son would be dwarfed by the father. It is something which so rarely happens in our culture, and yet that we so wish for. It is the thing that Hector wishes for in Book VI of the Iliad:

'"grant that this my child may be even as myself, chief among the Trojans; let him be not less excellent in strength, and let him rule Ilius with his might. Then may one say of him as he comes from battle, 'The son is far better than the father.'

Of course, it didn't happen in the Iliad, but perhaps it will here.

The Cats won on Friday in a great game, against tough opposition - Didak kicked what may be the best goal I've ever seen! - so now both sons are in the position to play in a Premiership side. Port Adelaide won the other final, so this Grand Final is going to have the feeling of a State of Origin match.

*The title is a pune, or play on words, but not a good one. For anyone who knows anything about football it will be particularly irritating in its irrelevance and general inapt-ness.

The Last Word

2007-09-20T12:02:00.000Z

I don't know what to say about Beazley's resignation. He was, I think, disastrous for Labor because the public liked him but no one really wanted him in power. He's a politician who has disappointed me so often, not least because he seems to suffer from the lesson of Whitlam's defeat (don't let anyone know what you stand for because people won't vote for you) more than anyone in a party seriously afflicted by it. The result of that, of course, is that when it comes to last words, his are good. Good enough to make you curse him for not saying them earlier, all the more so because he seems not to employ spin doctors, or at least, not good ones, so he doesn't say the diplomatic thing, he uses the opportunity to say the thing he wishes he'd said all along.

He set a couple of records straight, particularly about the inconsistency of the conservatives' record on financial management, which was just a joy for a True Believer like me. Today he also said "When you wish to assault democracy, first you attack the unions; when you wish to restore democracy, first you start with the unions." He talked about the ability of solidarity to break dictatorships both Left and Right. And further that 'One of the great things about politics is it extracts you from your natural selfishness; you cannot help it.'

This time, his last words mark the distance between old and new Australia, and old and new Labor. Not surprising, given his history with the party. His father was in Chifley's parliament and went on to be Whitlam's Minister for Education, in which role he put in place one of the most remarkable tertiary education systems in the world, for all that he was very much on the Right of the party. But its Chifley's conception of the party and of politics that marks Beazley jr. even now. For Beazley, Unionism isn't a means to the end of better working conditions; it is an end in itself. A trade union is the basic and most fundamental political unit, the means by which people participate in politics and exercise agency in their own lives and in the means of production (of their income).
I don't know if that's true anymore, and either way, Labor isn't the party of the Unions anymore. I am really sad that the Australia described in Kim Beazley's valedictory speech is passing.

Painting for BlueJ

2007-09-18T14:04:00.000Z

I'm going back and looking at Whiteley again. Almost all of it perplexes me, though not as much as my reactions to it when I was younger. I can't imagine what I was thinking. I also realize that I've edited some of them in my head. The chaos and destruction of American Dream, for example, resolves much more completely and organically into the beak of a honeyeater hovering in an idyllic and vaguely Asian landscape in my head than outside it. The thing that has remained constant and accurate in my memory is the shade of blue he painted Lavender Bay. His sense of colour is extraordinary and when he misses it, it is a kind of devastation.

He did one called Sensoreno of his dog looking sheepish which I thought BlueJ would like, but apparently the rest of the world (except Bob Dylan who devoted an entire episode of his radio programme to songs about dogs; it was special) don't share the dog thing. So here, instead, is one of his bird pictures. Not my favourite, especially in terms of the colour and then again I think the colour is perfect too. Perhaps that only makes sense in terms of the scope of his palette.

Luciano Pavarotti

2007-09-06T08:43:00.000Z

1935-2007
Death of a great man.
Many thanks sir.

Two Court Cases

2007-08-28T14:36:00.000Z

Recently I read reports of two court cases involving assault and bodily harm, there is nothing really to connect these other than the fact that, while surfing randomly, I just happened to read them in quick succession.

Case 1
I could only find a Daily Mail report for this one, which admittedly is far from ideal, but presumably even the Mail has to get the facts of the case correct, whatever they intend to do with them.

In the UK, a Cambridge graduate earning upwards of Stg90,000 a year was brought to court for assaulting his wife. He ended up there after he branded her with an iron, although on other occasions he had cut her badly with a knife and beaten her the old-fashioned way. After the iron incident she was so traumatised, she had to be subpoenaed to give evidence in court. The court fined him two thousand pounds. Apparently the judge felt that, given the provocation for the assault hinged on the circumstance of him living with his wife and this was no longer the case, that no useful purpose would be served by sending him to prison, or indeed giving him a suspended sentence. The judge also felt that community service would be unfair given the long hours the accused worked.

Case 2
And I can't find a decent newspaper report for this one at all because my stupid uni doesn't subscribe to American broadsheets. So it's mostly from this blog here.

In the States, in August a group of seven African-American (what are described as lesbian-identified) women were walking down the street heading for a night out. Some randomer propositioned one of them and received the expected response. He followed them down the street hurling insults and abuse. Eventually, they turned and faced him, where he spat on one of them and threw a lit cigarette. It devolved into a physical confrontation, and at one point where he was either throttling one of the women or repeatedly banging her head off the ground, (depending on which report you read) another woman drew a steak knife she keeps in her bag. Two other men joined in to help(?) the women and one of them ended up stabbing the original man in the abdomen. There is CCTV footage for most of this, it is not reliant on witness testimony alone. One way or another neither of these men ended up in court but the women did. Four of the women were sentenced to between three and a half and eleven years for injuring the propositioner.

That is all.

Shelfari

2007-08-28T11:52:00.000Z

I've just joined Shelfari, I don't know why. All my life I've constitutionally been a non-joiner. I don't like being part of groups. I'm not even a member of the CFA, Melbourne Football Club or ALP. I support them actively, I just can't join. Just like some people get claustrophobic.

But I'm getting a little circumlocutory.

I invited other people to join Shelfari and I got an email saying 'X has accepted your invitation. He/she must think you're incredibly smart.'

(I checked this proposition with X, by the way, and no dice. )

Whatever they're paying their marketing people it just isn't enough.

Ask and it shall be given unto thee

2007-08-24T11:30:00.000Z

I was moaning recently on my Facebook page about how long it's been since I read an even half decent piece of fiction. (This is the great thing about Facebook, when you're not arsed turning something into comprehensible English which I do feel more or less compelled to do for the blog you can just whack it up on Facebook.) I was wandering round my local public library in blind desperation and I fell over Jonathan Strange & Dr Norrel which I've been meaning to read for ages, but due to Viola-related circumstances never got round to.

I am only ten or so chapters in, so I can't really say how good a book it is. But what I can say is that it is the most beautifully written novel I have read in a very long time. His prose is an absolute pleasure to read, and the whole thing is written with a wonderful subtle and benevolent humour, a sort of cross between Austin and A A Milne. I have yet to confirm, but I suspect I am reading yet another book much better than Rowling's.

21st Century Spinster

2007-08-24T11:02:00.000Z

No one is able to put things in quite the same way as one's parents are they?

Last week I met my father for a few drinks, and we got to talking about a friend of my brothers that we don't see that much of anymore. I still think of C as a sunny faced eight year old who had quite a bit of difficulty pronouncing my name. In C's case this is a particularly ridiculous attitude given that the boy is now six foot seven and about two feet across. There's eight years between The Brother and myself and C's a little bit younger than him. The thing is, on the infrequent occasions when I run into him this adorable giant still speaks to me likes he's eight. "Heya C, how you keepin?" "Oh hello Miss (well alright he doesn't actually say Miss but it's there quite clearly in silent brackets) Bluej, I'm very well thank you, how are you also?" He will then shuffle about the place looking at his feet, till I get through the obligatory list of relatives I have to enquire about and release him. I'm treated to a million watt angelic smile and off he goes.

While I was talking to Dad about what he's up to and such I mentioned in passing the way the boy still treats me like I'm a sort of favourite maiden aunt. Dad looked thoughtful for a moment or two and then announced "Well I suppose you are, but you needn't worry you already like cats". He then grinned like Jack Nicholson at me. I, of course, responded with the only two word pithy and cutting retort possible under the circumstances.

Honi Soit Qui Mal Y Pense (no one enjoys Medieval chivalric orders underwear jokes like I do...)

2007-08-21T10:38:00.000Z

What mad genius invented the sports bra? Whoever it was ought to be knighted for services rendered to damsels in distress everywhere!

(Yes, that's right, thanks to Cuthbie's Girl who finally just marched me to M&S because she knows what a procrastinator I am, I now have a new sports bra. Hurrah!)

So Many Nights

2007-08-14T10:08:00.000Z

Today is working out as a good day, apart from the fact I busted my knee at the gym this morning (I'm not usually that unco and I did warm up and everything) but other than that, a good day. Melbourne won on the weekend against the Dogs (who I've always been prejudiced against), I got some good feedback on something I wrote, work remains comical, I successfully defrosted the frige (it took me two days and a lot of soggy carpet, but you've got to count all the victories), I've worked out a new recipe and best of all, there is a new Cat Empire Album out on the 22 of September called 'So Many Nights'. I think their albums are released in the States and the UK now, but its still hard to get their music in Europe. Never fear, its all available from their website. Go and find it, you'll be a better, happier person.

Hey Mam! Look at me! Maaaaaaammmm, are you looking? Are you?

2007-08-10T08:51:00.000Z

We've all been sucked into Facebook, for which I blame JBee, and rightly so. I've held out against this for a long time for two reasons. Firstly, I didn't really see the point and secondly, the last thing I need in my life is another time waster. But that's the thing about a lot of 2.0 stuff isn't it? It sounds rubbish and pointless and dull on paper, so to speak, and then you're bullied into registering to make someone shut up about it and suddenly you're hooked. Twitter has to be the ultimate example of this, of an exercise in pointlessness, but there again I've not tried it.

Anyway, I'm well into it now. While the novelty still gleams I'm obsessed with making it pretty, making it sing, dance and make tea and ......the other thing. The other thing has not just effected me by the way, it's not just my weirdness it's all of us. We've all gone from being reasonably well balanced young women with full and healthy (ish) lives to now being trainee stalkers. There is no ex-colleague, boyfriend, friend, classmate, ex-anything you like who remains unturned. This cannot be healthy, apart from anything else it ensures you end up viewing your life from the angle of a string of failed relationships of one kind or another.

I discovered myself this morning, composing, as in giving thought to, what my status update was going to be when I got into work. Aghast, I wondered what it is about them that makes these things interesting, why in the name of God do I care? Now Facebook offers a handy and usefully informal (and therefore low obligation) way of keeping in touch with people and of course, provides the instantaneous response that apparently this generation demands. (Though I have recently discovered that I am, if barely, Generation X rather than Y, which may explain a lot.) But I don't think that's really it, the key to all these applications, Twitter (particularly the inexplicable Twitter), blogging, Youtube, social networking, to a greater or lesser extent, is that they all sponsor and in many cases actively encourage rampant narcissism. What other possible motive could explain the urge to declare unto the world whether you're sitting at your desk in work or your desk at home? Who cares? - You do, and I'll listen to you if you listen to me. It's all part of the BB phenomenon, a society where privacy is valueless when compared with even the outside possibility of petty levels of fame. It doesn't matter what you're famous for, it's not the achievement that's the thing, it's the fame itself. It's a symbiotic social arrangement based on culturally vindicated voyeurism.

The ultimate in alienation, if you don't see me I'm not here? Or just levels of decadence that would give the final days of Rome a run for its money. Mind you I'm one to talk, I'm trying to think of witty ways of saying 'I'm not working'.

July 31st, First Sunny Day of Summer

2007-07-31T14:33:00.000Z

So, apparently at work today I said 'I'm appalled to discover its July 31st'. I wasn't listening; I don't always listen to myself because I'm really not that interesting. I try to tune in just for edited highlights.

In this case, I got the slow motion replay as everyone started laughing.

Disconcerting.

If only I could make people laugh like that when I wanted them too, and also, not at me.

I was quizzed on what other dates appall me. And I made the major tactical error of being so surprised to have found myself in this conversation at all that I told the truth. In fact, I dislike many months (and thus dates) on account of not liking some letters of the alphabet, and, in particular, disliking some combinations of letters. Hilarity ensured (but once again, not with me). Its an aspect of me no work person had suspected until now. They're worried and I'm worried and its all because of the sunshine.

Dissertation Update

2007-07-31T09:13:00.001Z

I decided way back in Spring of this year that I was going to defer the submission of my diss till the Autumn, I may have many faults but I've always been an eminently realistic person. Given the appalling levels of general messing round I've got from the university, I sent of the form daring them (digitally speaking, which alright consisted of my giving the email a good, hard look before I sent it) to turn me down. I told the super this at the time, February or March, ish.

Back in May, about three days before the summer submission date I got a rather paniced phone call from my super, whom I hadn't heard anything from for about six months, saying that I didn't appear to have handed my dissertation in. She suggested I might like to send her some drafts. I patiently explained about the deferral, which she thought was a fabulous idea. I got a full apology (something that involved me falling off my swivel chair), and promises to respond fully now that x, y and z was no longer a problem and to support my application for deferral (which had yet to actually be judged) explaining about the total lack of research support. I didn't bother telling her the course co-coordinator had been in touch to tell me the sitting was only a formality in my case.

In this new spirit of industrious community she requested I send various documents, summaries etc. on to her. This I duly did, and haven't heard anything since. I find myself regarding all this with a zen like calm, which may indicate achievement of a higher state of spiritual being, or just that you can only maintain certain levels of total fury for a limited amount of time.

2007-07-27T13:33:00.001Z

The sitemetre patterns are quite interesting. Most of the continental Europeans get to us through blogger, not surprisingly, I suppose. The British and Americans both seem to have the flapjack searching market sewn up, though the Americans also go in for Biblical quotes. We hardly get any hits from Australia; the ones we do seem to be searching sport-related topics.

Someone today searched 'Hannah', though I doubt they were looking for me; I'd be curious to know what they were looking for. Hannah is a Biblical figure. Because its spelt the same backwards and forwards its all pretty tripy from a numeralogical point of view - or so I'm told by one of my friends who knows about, like, numbers and stuff. Its also the name given to the sun in African American prison songs (or river songs).

I refused to tell Vin what our blog was, but he managed to track me down with the serach 'hannah afl cormorant'. These are the things that make me identifiable; I find this even more worrying than the earring thing.

In respose to......

2007-07-27T08:44:00.000Z

This referrals thing from site meter is just brilliant. Given the expressions of indulgent bewilderment (something of a trademark production of mine, that expression) on the ladies' faces when I was rattling on about this before, a short explanation may be wise. This bit of sitemeter lets us see, how people got to which bit of the blog, which search terms they used and so on. I'm kind of glad that I started this whole blog business, even if it's just for the knowledge of what sort of astoundingly detailed information Google etc hold, I had no idea, makes you think....or more acurately worry. Anywho responses to recent/funny/scary searches below:

Q. Can I soak oats overnight?
A. Yes, but you need to reduce the cooking time by half.

Q. What does your 'mother is a hampster' mean?
A. (With patience) It is a quotation from the Monty Python film 'The Holy Grail', it is an insult, mostly.

Q. Herbs to go with steamed fish?
A. Hah! I love it I've totally nailed that one already, the interweb (my new favourite word) works.

Q. Wisdom in Gallic?
A. I have deep, dark suspicions that this query contains a spelling mistake, and if this is indeed the case, then given that the searcher ended up here, it is a highly amusing example of the cosmos giving you what you need rather than what you want.

I am actually beginning to find the sheer numbers of people Googling 'Oh lord, why hast thou forsaken me' so disturbing that I'm thinking of changing the title of the post. To these people and the individual seaching 'Purgatory, get me out of here' I can only apologise that you ended up here. Mind you this wouldn't be the first time my sense of humour got me into trouble.

"Don't be stupid man, there's no angels in Ireland, they'd bloody rust"*

2007-07-27T08:32:00.000Z

Right well that's it, totally, really it. My sweetpea are actually starting to float away, the sage is dead from mildew, half my courgettes are rotting on the vine, and, this being the final straw, my tomatoes have blight, bloody blight (as in potato). How am I supposed to work under these conditions? I demand to see the manager, where's the original contract?

*Slightly adapted from the original by Dorothy Dunnett, can't remember which book.

Vindication

2007-07-26T11:46:00.000Z

I find that the massive quanities of rampant glee I'm currently feeling outway the moderate levels embarressment about blogging about this, so there you are. Anyway I was so totally right about Snape, totally, completely and utterly right. And ye, ye know who you all are, are wrong, very very wrong cos I'm right. Mwah ha ha ha.
Update: And no I did not say that just because Alan Rickman plays him. Also, before anyone gets all judgemental, this is only a spoiler if one has listened to me rant on this topic before, and everyone who cares has read it, so there.

Random, unconnected things

2007-07-24T11:44:00.000Z

I'm back at work and still wallowing in a warm glow of a surfeit of sleep, good nutrition and a general lack of chronic exhaustion. It's really good, I'ld forgotten what it feels to think clearly. I am in fact so totally laid back that yesterday, I was able to listen to an extended conversation between two colleagues about whether a coffee table in the tea room would constitute a health and safety risk without showing any signs whatsoever of hysterical breakdown.

I am also coping admirably with the weather, I'm coming to terms with the shocking traumatic realisation that we are actually running out of summer and this is probably our lot. Mind you, you could be worse off, I'm sure I remember reading something somewhere once, that Noah was supposed to be a once off but this doesn't appear to apply to Gloucester, poor buggers. So how does one deal with our less apocalyptic but eminently depressing weather? Umbrella as accessory!! There a some seriously snappy ones turning up all over the city at the moment, so get out there and buy yourself some sassy wellies and a funky brolly. And the great thing is, it's guilt free - you actually need this stuff, its an essential rather puerile retail therapy. I already have a dippy little pink job and am going to hunting tonight for something in a darker colour, pinstrips would be cool - tres ironical. That might be a bit on the puerile side I suppose.

Very Worrying Indeed

2007-07-24T08:14:00.000Z

Over the last 48 hours I've had about six hours of sleep and, for the second morning this week (out of a possible two) I am hungover at work. Basically I'm the best employee ever. My boss is a strange combination of Capt. Jack Sparrow and Christopher Robin, which is brilliant and alarming by turns. Anyway, perhaps its a combination of these pressures that have prompted me to write about 'earrings' today.

Also, I have a new pair of earrings.

From the ages of 15 to 24 I wore the same pair of earrings, so new earrings are a big deal. My criteria for jewelery is that I be able to sleep in it, shower in it and run in it. You would think that this would be roughly the same jewelery criteria adopted by Angles, Saxons, Jutes, Danes, Vikings and other early medieval Northern European marauders. But it's not. These groups really go in for bling. And like all groups whose taste moves in this direction, they are sufficiently armed to discourage constructive criticism of their aesthetics. Comically, their taste in jewelery is inevitably and indelibly imprinted upon Anglo-Saxonists, who wear the most enormous and golden jewelery, however reserved those scholars might be in other ways. (Anglo-Saxonists are armed with philology, which is worse.)
I am, apparently, armed with nothing at all, and so, upon running into an Anglo-Saxonist, I was told 'Your earrings are a bit... big.'

All things considered, very worrying indeed.

Happy Harry Potter Day

2007-07-16T14:18:00.000Z

I was jet lagged about five years ago and I read a couple of the Harry Potter books. So in me talking about them now, you're not dealing with someone who is versed, or in fact, knows what they're talking about to any degree at all. There are several Harry Potter fans among the Ladies. Visitors to the City, who, in their search for healthy flapjacks or the meaning of life or spiritual solace, find this blog shouldn't be disheartened; the others aren't as Philistine as me. (I'm serious, by the way; check our sitemeter. The only people, apart from the Ladies and our friends, who read the blog are those asking Google why God has forsaken them (the fact that they end up here is the proof that Google is a false prophet; I can only assume the confusion arises amongst those with poor spelling*) and those trying to eat better.)

The most usual criticism is that Harry Potter is derivative. Most narratives adopt narrative motifs from somewhere else because cultures develop a cultural vocabulary of narratives. Its only really within the context of that vocabulary that any narrative we construct can make sense. In that sense you would have to say that the final episode of the first series of David Tennant Doctor who was very derivative of the Gospels. (Actually, in fairness, that wasn't just the sharing of narrative motifs. It was really intertext, what with identification of the Void with Hell, and the scene where he re-appears after the crossing from one world to another and says 'Noli me tangere'... I mean, 'Don't touch me'. In that case, the narrative motifs are being used for the same reason that they always are; that the writer is trying to express something present in narratives that share that motif.**) What strikes me as interesting about the 'narrative motifs' used in Harry Potter is that they are historically specific scenes from everyday life which mean nothing now and yet are being treated as signifiers of genre. These scenes designate, not setting, but rather that we are dealing with a magical version of our own world. I think its interesting in terms of our relationship with the past, if nothing else.

*No one got my West Australian Football League pun or, at least - more accurately - no one liked it. Could someone make the effort, if nothing else, with a bit of token laughter on this one?
** The 'Noli me tangere' scene is one of my all-time favourite narrative motifs and it turns up all over the place; its not particular to the Gospels.

Togetherness

2007-07-16T10:49:00.000Z

Jaybee has introduced me to the wonders of Facebook. I've decided that Facebook is only for the angelic, the pure of heart, the clear of conscience, as Jaybee indeed is. My staunchest defenders will tell you that I'm not of this elect. Amongst my many faults is a deficiency in perseverance and a dislike of hard work. The one exception to this is my dedicated pursuit of avoiding people. Life's too short and I'm not that much fun. The people I'm avoiding should be spending time with the, no doubt, limitless supply of people who do like them. Avoidance is an Olympic event for me and I excel; I have to because if I actually do run into someone I'm trying to avoid I will be so appalled that I will have to invite them to tea.

Vin, a very dear friend of mine, finds this endlessly amusing.

This is how Facebook has undone me. Never have more people I'm avoiding been able to track me down. Worse still they send those creepy emails which ask you if you would 'would like to be friends'. I always imagine it being read out as Bill Bailey says 'are you alone?' in the sketch about travel dictionaries. What I find amazing though, is the number of people who've found me, on the one hand, and the fact, on the other, that I don't like any of them. Statistically, given that there are many people I adore, and countless numbers to whom I am indifferent, how is that possible? Can it really be that the set of these people who are at least indifferent to me and are also on Facebook is actually nil?

Slightly Soggy Nirvanna

2007-07-06T14:27:00.000Z

I am on holidays for two weeks, off to the wilds of Ireland, well it's moderately rural anyway. There will be no phones, pda's or laptops. I will not talk to anyone unless I specifically decide I want to, no matter how much mymother mutters about me being anti-social, dour and indeed, 'just like your father'. If I'm really lucky it may at some point stop raining and I can go and be anti-social out on the cliffs. In many ways it's as good as it gets really.

Go You Little Horse

2007-07-02T13:43:00.000Z

This blog entry is named in honour of my brother who loves piss-takers and hates shit-talkers and, who used to say 'Go, you little horse' after that Simpsons episode. It is one of his terms of approval, hence, 'Buckley, he's such a little horse'. My brother has always maintained that I know absolutely fuck all about footy, so he probably doesn't agree with the blog entry...

I've been so despondent about the Daniher news that I actually find myself reading The Herald Sun in an attempt to get more information about it, so I shouldn't be surprised if things go from bad (reading that fascist paper in the first place) to worse. According to an article in The Herald Sun, Gerard Neesham, a mate of Riley's, says that anyone who thinks 'playing record is relevant' is an idiot. He would; he only played nine AFL games. Interestingly, he has a corresponding coaching record at AFL level; he won 32 from 88 games. But my favourite bit of the article is where he makes an analogue between being an AFL coach and being a horse trainer. He points out that you don't need to have ridden a horse to be a good trainer.

Arguing by analogue is stupid because you ask the audeince to form an opinion, not based on experience, common sense or even theory, but rather by drawing a conclusion from a gratuitous generalization about something completely unrelated. However, this particular analogue doesn't even do that. The analogue would be right (if pointless) if we were talking about training jockeys; that is the example of doing the thing yourself in order to be able to teach others. (And as it turns out, I'm pretty sure most jockeys are taught by people who, at some stage in their lives, have ridden horses.) In fact, the proper version of his analogue for this situation would be that horse trainers have to spent time as horses competeting in races in order to be a good horse trainer. Actually, we would ask that of horse trainers (at the AIS anyway) if we possibly could.

Pancake Footy

2007-07-02T10:54:00.000Z

I have barracked for Melbourne all my life, and my father before me, and his mother before him. We have been Melbourne supporters since the club was formed in 1858. We have been Melbourne supporters for longer than we've been Australians (Australia was only federated in 1901). My cousin (briefly) played for Melbourne. My grandmother made it a condition of marrying my grandfather that he convert from Collingwood (!) to Melbourne. Collingwood, for anyone who doesn't know, isn't the kind of club that people desert on a whim, especially not to Melbourne, who were their arch-rivals (we now play Queen's Birthday in some sort of weird commemoration) at that time.

When the club started they were known as the Melbourne Fuchsias. It was a sign of things to come - though, curiously, they aren't the only football side in Australia to have a floral mascot; I'm thinking here of the Waratahs. (I know I'm not going to get it, but I'd like a little bit of credit for knowing that; the Waratahs are NSW and league, as a Victorian its amazing I've even heard of them.)

My time as a Melbourne supporter hasn't really been like those fortunates who grew up with Ron Barassi. The first game I ever went to, Melbourne was defeated by what was at the time (actually it may be still) the largest margin in AFL/VFL history, while John Longmire kicked an MCG ground record of 14 goals. Most people remember Longmire as a solid, mild mannered full forward, eclipsed by Wayne Carey, who had a good day one day at the MCG; for me he will always be an antichristal, avenging angel.

My point is, I've taken a lot of knocks as a Melbourne supporter, not least this year. And now, Neale Daniher, a great player and coach, and a top bloke, resigns and is replaced, albeit temporarily, by Mark Riley, a player who never made it to seniors, not even in WAFL football (or pancake footy as I like to call it in honour of two Freo boys I met in a pub once).

This really can't be happening to me.

The Wonderful World of Nature

2007-06-26T12:58:00.000Z

I was out on the balcony at work yesterday, on my coffee break, supporting my various dependencies. We have quite a nice selection of visiting birds, drawn by sandwich corners and the occasional bit of bird seed someone remembers to bring in. Anyway, so I'm sitting out there reading and a pigeon starts to sidle towards me, despite the clearly non-edible nature of my handbag but then pigeons aren't known for their acuity. I looked over at the pigeon and when it clocked me looking it stopped, regarding me suspiciously, so far so normal. I went back to reading and the next time I looked over the creature is very close, only six inches or so from the side of my chair. This time when it saw me, and this is God's truth, the thing turned it's back on me and pointedly looked at the ceiling. I went back to my book but continued watching it from the corner of my eye, it cast a leery glance over it's shoulder to check I wasn't watching and then continued it nonchalant progress towards to my bag. If it had had the physiological equipment to whistle it would have being doing so. I look back and it does it again, I swear to God, it turned it's back and looked at the ceiling occasionally casting casual little glances back to see if I'ld stopped. You would think this sort of behaviour would be eradicated through natural selection, but maybe cats are responding to socially cutting behaviour these days.

In other news, RTE ran this last week: Squirrel goes nuts in Germany, injures three. "An overly aggressive squirrel attacked and injured three people in the southern German town of Passau before it was taken down by a 72-year-old man." On it's bloody rampage, the squirrel attacked an elderly woman and a construction worker who fortunately had a measuring pole to hand with which he managed to fight the vicious animal off. Experts are unable to reach a consensus as to what may have caused the squirrel to go postal.

The Good, the Bad and the Rampant, Egregious Stupidity

2007-06-22T09:01:00.000Z

The Bad first: is the appalling treatment of an individual of good character with a valid complaint by a fatcat company, again. The ridiculous, juvenile, farcical response of said company to their actions being made public - really this has to be read to be believed, more than slight elements of Pythonism.

The Good: the individual is Damien Mulley, High King (without opposition) of Irish blogging. He is not backing down, he is maintaining, what I can only assume is a maddening level of calm and reasonable response, he is going to cream them. Dear God, but I love it. The very impressive stats on the readership of this whole farce here.

The stupidity: having (presumably after some thought on their part) pursued at each juncture the course that would do them the most harm in the eyes of the public. They followed this up, winning points for consistency, with another PR balls up this morning.

It is impossible to express how much I am enjoying the obvious discomfiture of this company, a goodly portion of the world is watching, while grinning and it's clear who we're rooting for.

Look upon me, Oh Lord, and smile, for I have bled.....

2007-06-22T08:45:00.000Z

Apparently (this is according to Beaut.ie in this post) Victoria Beckham was recently spotted reading a book, 'Skinny Bitch', a diet book. It would be difficult to express how much I loath the whole of premise of books like this. I have nothing against maintaining a sensible weight that makes you happier and healthier but the idea that one's goal in life should basically be to eradicate most real and meaningful pleasures in favour of being thin and wandering round so people can see you being thin is one I truly despise. I also happen to believe that food and the sharing it is much more than either pleasure or fuel which sends books like this one into the realms of the blasphemous, but that aside.

Anyway my point here is that while the extent to which I find philosophies like this truly odious is huge, Beaut.ie has picked out one quote that I found really quite charming, behold:

'Whenever you see the words “fat free” or “low fat” think: chemical shit storm.'

Kings of the Earth

2007-06-21T09:22:00.000Z

Studies have shown, well alright my own meandering, entirely anecdotal and non-empirical experience has shown, that any human being left on their own in a room with a tea-cosy will, at some point, put it on their head. I wouldn't be in the least bit surprised if a proper double-blind study, proved this and indeed, further stated that the tea cosy would be much more popular than an actual hat. It makes you wonder.

The Ashtown Session

2007-06-19T14:44:00.000Z

At Speed, my friend's band, has just put out an album called The Ashtown Session. Listen to it here, http://www.atspeedsound.com/ its good.