angrypenguin

Striking the union

2011-10-31T10:55:00.000+10:30

Qantas CEO Alan Joyce has won. He played hardball with the unions and a flaccid Labor government was not there for the workers. The $5 million-a-year Irishman can now move forward and "modernise" the country's one-time flagship airline with cheap crew and service from Asia.

This is profoundly sad and negative for Australia - and the sort of compromised dividend one may expect of privatisation and outsourcing.

But I fear an even sadder prognosis long-term for the breaking of the unions which have been effectively vilified by the endlessly indignant dominance of the corporate powers. They bellow at how hard done-by they are when a union stands up for workers' rights or pay entitlements. Just as they up the bizarrely huge salaries of their executives. What is the CEO of crumbling Coles getting now? $15 million a year? With a staff dominated by students on casual hours?

The worker is being systematically devalued.
The idea is that the worker also must be de-powered.

Solidarity has been all the workers have had. The company of peers and the organisation of the working force of the union has been their stability, ensuring that they are able to have planned lives. Workers actually pay for this. Union dues are not cheap. But the union goes in to bat. The union defends workers against exploitation, standing up for their rights, achieving for them things like sick leave entitlements, holidays and wages which have some accord with cost of living increases. They have done this through strength of numbers and, sometimes, some very harrowing conflict. But they have never tried to destroy business - obviously, since they also wish to protect the source of their employment. Doh.

But companies always cry foul and other countries with bigger, stronger, ruthless corporate interests have broken the backs of unions. The word "union" is almost a dirty word in America. And it is becoming so here in Australia. Unions have been merging and fighting for their own existence.

Young, new workers, have not heard of unions and hence have no idea that their fair work conditions were negotiated for them by unions.

The contracts they sign these days have to reflect these rights, long ago fought for by the unions. But contracts remove that old thing, security of employment. Less and less does one see "permanent full-time employment". It is an option companies would rather not offer.

Gradually they have moved on to fairly inviting contracts which may pay more but will call upon certain added commitments to the company - unpaid overtime, perhaps. They present and couch the contracts in such a way that the new employee will feel special.
But that is a well-wrought illusion. The contracts don't have to be renewed, if the company so wishes. This keeps workers on their toes.

Without proper contracts, they can end up as casuals.
And casual work is the direction in which the workplace is headed. It is the dream workplace for the Alan Joyces of this world.
It is the perfect arrangement for big business. It is cheaper to have three casuals than one full-time permanent staffer.
A casual workforce is the corporate ideal. Cheap, cheap, cheap.
They may be paid more by the hour, but they don't know what hours they will get.

And, of course, looking at things like aircraft maintenance, outsourced casual workforce with low pay expectations, are much better for the bottom line.

Casuals only work when they are invited to work.
They may work one day a week or five, depending on demand. Maybe none.

They have no entitlements.
If casuals are sick, they are not working and hence not paid.
The company calls up another casual.
If a casual wants a holiday, a casual may take a holiday. Their time is their own. The company is not committed to them, so there is no holiday pay. Just another casual to fill the gap.

The phenomenon of the casual worker has been growing prodigiously - but quietly. Twentysix per cent of the workforce and rising.
Who is going to speak out for them? There is no organisation for them of which I know.

So, if you don't have a regular or predicable income, how do you get a loan, take out a mortgage, buy a home?

You don't.
Forget health insurance.

But looking ahead, as outsourcing takes over to ensure the company profits required for shareholder affluence and millionaire CEOs, we see a new generation of workers in this insecure condition. A new, growing underclass.

And, unless there is a big change in the way the financial world functions, these young people will not be buying their own homes. Indeed, they may have to have incomes subsidised by pensions to lift them off the poverty line. How would that work? They'd be better off on the dole.

The future looks messy.

I look at the babies of this new baby boom and wonder about what they will face as the workforce of tomorrow.

Renting properties rather than buying, being unable to forward plan their own lives for fear of losing casual shifts...

A culture of increasing socio-economic disparity is emerging - along with it a population growth of amotivated and unfulfilled people.

It is a bit scary.
But maybe, just maybe, some of tomorrow's workers will stand up for each other - and maybe even invent something called a union.

Facebook and the face of history

2011-09-23T11:59:00.001+09:30

So Zuckerberg, Facebook supremo, proposes that his 750 million users use their Facebook pages as lifetime scrapbooks - posting childhood pictures and records of rites of passage and family moments. If I understand this rightly, as detailed in Mashable's

report on Facebook Evolution, Facebook says it will place these things into timelines so our lives are recorded and displayed chronologically. And, of course, stored in perpetuity.

I have some problems with this - mainly choice. I would like to be able to arrange things my way. I am not keen on Auntie FB taking over for me. I feel I have lost choices in the new face of FB and realise that I am going to have to invest time I really don't have in reorganising my world and who is who and who sees what and how much I want to see.

However, ever since email and the Internet became a primary form of communication, there has been a concern about the history record. The loss of letters was a blow to libraries and historians as people turned to email. The very nature of communications was truncated by the easy ping of email and, of course, people quickly lost their records of emails sent and received as their old PCs crashed or they moved from one generation of computer to the next, often leaving old content behind or being unable to transfer it.

How much can one store and how can one navigate through it, especially in these frenetic years of multitasking information overload.

And do not scoff at these cliches. They are the way it is.

So where does it leave historians and academics researching exchanges with people - the sorts of content which was once made of paper and stored in boxes at libraries? Don't tell me everyone prints out copies of their emails and files them for posterity! They don't and can't.

All that data is cached in electronic caves which may or may not be buried under the landslides of subsequent data. I think the archiving abilities of computers has improved significantly in the last decade and the forensics of seeking destroyed data with it. So it is possible there is just the mid-nineties to mid-naughties which may be the black hole of record. But, I do believe there is a gap in the history of correspondence.

And that the status quo of correspondence as a form of record is changed.
We shall see if books such as that which I now am reading, the letters of artist Nora Heysen with her famous artist father Sir Hans Heysen, will be replaced by "the emails of..." Perchance there are some prescient emailers out there. But on the whole, and definitely in work environments where email volume outstrips storage capacity every day, emails are biting the virtual dust by the billion.

We don't do all our correspondence on FB, but we do quite a bit. And there is a bit of spam and unwanted promotion there, too.

We have to realise that nothing is private if we have published it online. Nothing. FB messages are ostensibly private insofar as other FB contacts are not seeing them but they are still in the massive FB data pool. So they are on the record. They are stored for history. Historians may well find themselves supplicant to FB for access to its massive store of human interest.

Just as one's employer has access to a record not just of what you have said and produced and seen on their computer systems but even of how many keystrokes you have made. We just have to understand and live with it.
It is the way it is.
Privacy is not ours if we are using someone else's technology.
We can't expect otherwise. We can only be prudent about what we share.
And we can be positive about history and the public record.

It is vastly different from those wonderful old letters which crossed the world on ships with exotic stamps. It is vastly different to those long and detailed reports in the newspapers of yore. But, add to it blogs and Twitter and the ensuing modes of communication and connectivity, and it is all a wonderful resource.
To which we may add these scrapbooks as suggested by FB.

How many people do I hear moaning and groaning about digital photos and what they can or can't do with them and will they be lost because they have not stored them outside their computers.

Posting on FB and Flickr and other sites is a way of storing for posterity. And let's not get too fretful about it all. We take too many photos now we can take them so easily. If we are wise, we post the best of them just as we used to print the best of the photos we took with film cameras. The rest were culled out and discarded.

All the photos everyone ever took are not around. Thank heavens.
We would be shuffling about knee deep in them.

So things are not as bad as we think.

Now here's a sad thing

2011-08-22T20:55:00.000+09:30

Would it not be great if one could take this as one of those correspondence-exchanged issues reminiscent of the late, great Henry Root? How funny was he!
How not funny is this.
This is the story of a sincere sucker being time-wasted because she was too busy to read too closely. And she was under the impression that she was working with something which seemed to identify itself as "The Society of Professional Journalists".
You can see the cause of this exchange on the right=hand nav bar of this blog.

Dear WebRing,

I have kept your email open on my desktop for a long time, periodically returning to the blogspot address I have inhabited these nigh 12 years and trying to work out why your promotion corrupts my columns.
The bad news is that I don't know.
I am not a web designer or a coder, albeit I was inaugural online editor of my metro daily newspaper and have mastered quite a few evolving print media programs, the latest being the paywall version of Fatwire.

I have managed to keep everything neat and tidy on my wee blog over the years - until now.

Suddenly the penny dropped.

I cannot make your ID conform to the blogspot column sizes because I need to "upgrade" to WebRing Premium.
And then I will get my own FREE blog?

Good grief.
Now, with the "luxury" of a (sick) day off my work on a busy metro daily, I have a moment to solve a problem. And the problem is not me and my blog, but Internet bottom-feeders looking for my dollar.

Fie.

The Internet was a better place before your sort came to parasite it.

Samela

On 17/07/2011, at 12:18 AM, feedback@webring.com wrote:

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2011-08-22T15:44:00.000+09:30

Don't keep these awesome pic's to yourself. Share them.

I've been tolerant. The Dalai Lama could not have been more so. About the forwards which go round and round and round the net.
I've thought, "oh, these bright-eyed and bushy-tailed ingenuous folk who have found such freedom of expression online".
I've thought, "oh, they mean well."
I've abided by the old online protocol of not putting people down when they do forwards. Of not sending back the "seen it" snub.
That is the soul of discourtesy. Bad netiquette from way back.
But, of course, mostly I've seen it over and over and over. The same National Geographic Best of the Year pictures have been the best for a decade. It's okay. They are classics.
But, here's the rub.
They still come as if originating from the same goody two-shoes American moron.
They still come with:
Don't keep these awesome pic's to yourself. Share them.

Who the hell does this person think she is (and it is undoubtedly a she) to be adding these patronising instructions?
I will make on own decision on if and how I share things, thankyou.
I sure as hell won't be sending out something that exhorts my friends to share it. My friends, also, have powers of discernment.

Oh, and there's the personalised bit.
"The one with the zebras is an incredible photo."
Doh!
They are all incredible photos. Isn't that the point?
Oh. Or should I say photo's?

Indian call centres teach racism

2011-07-24T11:25:00.002+09:30

Indian call centre workers are being trained to speak slowly and appreciate the fact that Australians are ill-educated racist drunks who are touchy about their pets.
They are being trained to have a superior, racist attitude towards their customers.

This revelation comes from an astonishing report doing the rounds of the Australian papers via Andrew Marantz, a Mother Jones reporter who infiltrated the ranks on an Indian call centre training course.

Well, it just happens that I have been having a lot to do with Indian call centre workers lately - and I am not too impressed with their training. Perhaps the sort of crass cultural misinformation they are receiving is why communications with these workers has been so frustrating.

I started out feeling sympathetic towards the call centre workers, even those who cold call with a sales pitch when I am really busy.
I know that most of the interactions they experience are negative. People don't want telemarketing calls and, if the call centres are for help lines, the calls they get are from people who have problems and are not happy with something.

It is not exactly a dream job. Then again, it is a paying job which has been expediently outsourced and someone in Australia is without that job. So my feelings are mixed.

Even now, after many utterly exhausting calls to and from Indian cell centres.

I've been having a Vodafone crisis, you see.
I joined Vodafone more than a decade ago because it was the Telco which offered me good roaming services in the US at a time when it was hard to come by. Voda was wonderful. The moment I reached the US or changed states in my travels, a new provider would pop up and welcome me to the region and I was able to stay in touch with my invalid mother in Australia. For this, I loved Vodafone and was a loudly loyal customer.

This year, Vodafone plummeted from grace.

This has been the year of dead air. I was for months unpredictably in and out of connectivity - unable to make or receive calls, to SMS or Tweetl. I was not in the US. I was at my desk in a metropolitan newspaper office.

Or else, I was out in the city (right) moving around. I was down on the coast. Dead phone. Deadphone.
No mobile reception. Zip. Dead.
Important calls did not get to me. I could not report in. My working life was hobbled. When I most needed it, I did not have it. I could not liaise with a photographer on a job. I could not return call a contact. My aged mother could not reach me with her needs. You name it. For months. On and off, off and on.

I looked up the website to see where the phone tower issues were.
I Twittered about it from my computer.

I called Voda.
And into call centre hell I fell.

Ringing call centres is the most insulting waste of time.

Of course this is part of the Telco strategy. It is as efficient a deterrent as spraying a cat with a water pistol.

Firstly, one has to go through an extended horror of pressing keys on the phone to get to the help line. One has to do it from a land line, of course, because the mobile is not working.
When one finally gets through, one has to give a distant stranger information which allows them into one's private data.
And then the waiting begins, the wait and wait and wait.

The day stops.

The classic line is "just bear with me a minute".
And the line goes dead. And one waits.

The call centre workers have to do a lot of checking. Or is it that they just have to make you wait?

Every simply inquiry is met with some sort of unctuous incredulity.
A smarmy facade of politeness.
And a request to "wait a moment please".
And wait some more.

What are they doing?
Why are these calls endlessly stop-start?
With whom are they checking?

They have the information in front of them once they have keyed in all your personal details.
Where are they going in those silences?

They have access to a disturbing amount of information. All our phone and bill paying activity. Our home addresses and credit card details. They are all there. And they can tell us when we have called them or they us. They have everything logged and they can quote it all. Which is really not at all helpful. I already know that this is my fifth call.

I can get apologies for lack of service but no recompense. That is what I finally learned. It did me no good to vent frustration.

I have tried and tried to speak to someone who works for Voda in Australia.
I sent a number of emails through the website.
A day or two later, I would get an email acknowledgement.

Then, when I expected it least, usually at the hectic tail end of the working day, I'd get a call from some hapless call centre person.
And it would be the same thing all over again. Getting my details and then asking me to wait. The line going dead. "Please wait a minute", "bear with me"...
And I'd be stuck on the phone.
Oftentimes, I could not understand the caller. Their accents were sometimes quite strong. But, mainly, it was the lousy link.

How come a professional phone services specialises in really bad connections?

So the calls stop and start. The Voda call centre person is on line and off line. They are checking something with someone in that mysterious obfuscatory otherworld.

I have tried befriending them. Kevin, Najib, Mary... I am sympathetic towards them. But how they exasperate me.

I am paying for this service.
It is insulting.

And throughout my Vodafone blackouts, the months of incessant lack of connectivity, the mystery of it, the rebooting of my iPhone to see if it was somehow something to do with me or my appliance.
It wasn't.
It was Vodafone. It was service failure.

Vodafone's did not suggest any compensation for its lack of service. Just insincere apologies from Indians service representatives who, now I learn, had been told that I belong to some lower incarnation of boorish, boozy, unschooled, techno retard peasants...

Funnily enough, my opinion of them is no higher than theirs of mine.
I am not with them any more.

Closures! An opening to madness!

2011-07-18T13:41:00.001+09:30

The food industry has lost the plot.
If it was not bad enough to have taste-free tomatoes genetically modified so they will not wet the bread in a sandwich, bananas deceptively skin-ripened by gas but hard and green inside, peaches picked rock hard for travelling but which shrivel before they ripen, beans which are sprayed for a glossy appearance and then go slimy after a day in a plastic bag....
That is all simply vile. It is all a profiteering scam which exploits hapless shoppers - but can be sidestepped if one has access to a farmer's market.

But now it is openings.
The market has gone to work on openings, making things so secure, sterile and tamper-proof that - forget tampering, one simply can't get into them.
My rage at closures has been rising for some time.
For years as a supporting mum, I surmounted difficulties of opening the odd seemingly impenetrable container with determined techniques. And I won.
Now with all that self-sufficiency under my belt, I am older, wiser, more adept and experienced - and utterly unable to get into containers.
My favourite curd cheese requires one to bruise fingers and break nails to dislodge the security flap on the rim of the container.
Delicious dips require one to resort to teeth to get purchase on the wicked pull-tab which needs to be peeled off before the lid can be removed. Oftentimes, the tabs simply tear off, leaving one prising with sharp knives and generally endangering oneself trying to get to the contents.
Then there are the jams and sauces in today's uber-secure jars.
All the tapping on the rims, banging on a flat surface, knocking at the centre...reliable techniques of yore, are fruitless. Calling in the forces of the men is simply to have angry and frustrated men struggling with teatowels and muscle, looking for that pop of release. It is belittling. The other week my super-strong male hero simply gave up and threw the whole jar in the bin. He was too furious even to go and get his money back.

In itself, that is a hassle which should not be so often required of consumers - keeping the receipt, lugging the product back, going to the inquiry desk, waiting around for attention, then the calling of the superior, the issue of replacement or credit. Do we want another impenetrable jar of the thing we want to eat or do we just want money back and deny ourselves the product we needed or wanted? Do we have to unseal the product at the checkout to ensure that we can open it when we get home?
It gets worse and worse.

One needs a PhD to get into many products.
Most recently, it was just a plastic bottle of canola oil. First I took off the tight clear plastic casing on the lid. Then I looked for the usual tear strip to wrench off before removing the top. Oh, don't say the tag bit is broken? No? It is molded into the strip? No? Maybe it screws? No. After much intense scrutiny I perceived a slight indentation into which I could force a fingernail and, hey-presto, I flipped off the top. And there inside was a whole new puzzle of plastic pull tags which uncoiled to reveal a finger-pull. I slipped my finger in and carefully tugged. The plastic stretched and stretched and became cloudy. I was very careful, steady. I've experienced these plastic ring-pulls before. And, of course, the plastic was not strong enough to open the plastic. And there I was with a piece of plastic in my hand and the bottle of oil still firmly sealed. I had to get a sharp knife and stab it open. Bad for the knife and dangerous for me. Insane. Impractical. Where do these manufacturers get off? Who is being paid to invent closures that will only close but never open?

It is an accumulative thing. It has been steadily growing worse as our consumer market is more oppressed by regulations doubtless incurred by people who have sued because they have bought things badly sealed. Well, I'm going to sue, too. I'm going to sue the lot of them.
I'm gaining closure psychosis - a fear of opening anything.
I recoil in apprehension as I load the supermarket trolley. How will I get all this stuff open?
The final straw was the bottle of Vitamin B tablets. I've been buying them for years.
But now, suddenly, they are so well enclosed in their little brown bottles that - well, hell...
I removed the plastic cover, and, oh, bliss, the lid opened with ease. But wait. There's a liner sealing the pills inside. No worries, I'll prod it open. And so began another closures trauma. That internal seal simply would not budge or break.
I poked and pierced and stabbed and prodded, I probed gently, looking for for some new open-sesame trick.
I was suddenly overcome by realisation of the amount of time one spends these days struggling to open things. Those damned stupid milk cartons which I think are downright unhygienic. Ziplock grain bags with the cut-here lines. Candy bars and cheeses with a "tear here" which will not tear. Cartons, jars, bottles....
An increasing chunk of our lives is being consumed by closures.

And I gave up on Vitamin B and grabbed a beautiful bottle of screw-topped wine. At last something I could open. Aaah.

News of the World - a quiet antipodean bleat

2011-07-13T11:44:00.000+09:30

For any career journalist, this crisis in the Murdoch empire is nothing less than heartbreaking. It is not what we are about. Should not be. It hurts us all. Our union has a strong code of ethics and we, as a collective, hold this close to our hearts and work practices.

We are tarred by association - especially those of us who work on tabloids. "Tabloid" does not just mean gossip rag. So many people do not realise that it also means size and shape. Where once I worked on a traditional broadsheet paper, I now work for the same paper which converted to a small-format, that which is known as "tabloid". This has no reference to content which remains mainstream and informative rather than salacious.

The News of the World was technically a broadsheet newspaper - but it featured "tabloid" content which always tawdry and spoke to the lower common denominator of readership. There are a lot of them out there. Throughout history, people have just loved a bit of scandal. Show me a parish pump and I'll show you a gossipy, bitching session.

NOTW had a massive readership, albeit not massive profits, a phenomenon we may perhaps attribute to the money we now hear that it was spending on seeking information.

The US has a tabloid which is different yet again. Its Weekly World News is very small format, sold at supermarket checkouts and is wonderful. Its content takes scandal to new heights and lows. It is right out there. I long have had fantasies of working for the paper, making up fanciful tales of half-crocodile/half-boy swamp creatures, of intergalactic aliens running your local coffee shop, women giving birth to litters of goats, Elvis being found living in a trailer park, dogs who secretly write crime fiction...

These stories all based on information from "science sources" and "informants". No one expects them to be true. They are a genre of their own.

Britain's News of the World is believed to be true. Indeed, it sought to and succeeded in breaking stories. It was the newspaper of the human underbelly - the worst of the worst. Infidelity, squalid morals, cheats, crooks, vanity, weakness...scandal. It fed the great beast called schadenfreude - the human pleasure of the failings of others.

What changed and pushed it to unethical extremes in finding scandal? Phone hacking and bribery?

My theory is that it found itself competing with a ubiquity of scandal and gossip. An epidemic. All the newspapers have been adding gossip and celebrity pap to their content in an effort to get a cut of the lucrative lowbrow market. Many papers are dumbing down. There is so much vapid celebrity trivia and scandal out there and a big machine pushing it into the media. Heaven forbid, there are whole TV channels devoted to nothing else. "Tabloid" TV?

Really, it is just content for fairly immature and ignorant people with a stunted world view. However, if their interest are shallow, they also are rapacious . They have generated a big dollar market which, in turn, has spawned a plethora of journalists paid to pursue the minutiae of celebrity gossip. This in the everyday papers. Papers like mine. Straight, conservative, mainstream newspapers. I was gossip writer for eight years. It was wonderful glittering fun and a lot of champagne was involved. But gossip predominantly was locally-oriented in my era. It was a different animal.

Now there is an international celebrity industry as well as local interest to be covered. These days we have two journalists on the gossip round - and the rest of us pitch in when we get the chance. We have two pages of mostly light and amusing goss a day.

But as the gossip industry expands, those reporting for specialist publications such as NOTW clearly have felt that they have had to go further and further afield to keep the paper outstanding in the sensationalist market. It's a business. A market. A job. A career.

There are journalists who actually thrive on reporting that form of information and former NOTW features editor Paul McMullan has bravely spoken out on their behalf - and the lengths to which they went.

Then there is the rest of us - jobbing journalists who believe our role is one of keeping the record. And keeping the record straight.

We are confronted with a lot of obfuscation and secrecy from governments and corporations and we try to find the truth. There are constant power games played with us and there is an ever-growing world of publicists, marketers, PR people and spin doctors trying to manipulate information. In itself, this is a massive industry. Its operators are more highly paid than most journalists.

The same people who are harassing us for publicity often also are lying to us and putting barriers in our way if the stories are not in their favour. And we have to tiptoe through very strict laws of defamation as well as our own code of ethical information-gathering.

There is such a thing is "the public interest". There are such a things as truth and accuracy.

Most of us are committed to that pursuit.

There are wonderful, talented young journalists coming up through the ranks and I am pretty sure that they see this imbroglio as a precedent never to be followed.

I put my faith in them.

Comedy Channel is not being funny - or fair

2010-07-09T23:21:00.002+09:30

At some time, we will have to revolt.

We will have to shout from the corporate balance sheets that "we are not putting up with it any more."
For, increasingly, we are being short-changed - and being as compliant as penned sheep.
It is not simply the packaging in supermarkets - what was once 200grams at $5 is now 170 grams at $5. Same size packaging, just less inside.
We barely noticed as this was inflicted on us. The cynical manufacturers knew it would be so. And they sheared off a fatter profit margin and made their shareholders a bit richer. Of course, once you have achieved that increase of profit, the expectation is that it will continue. Profits must never level out. They must always grow. And so the market manipulations and deceptions continue to be inflicted on hapless and hurried consumers.

As if it wasn't enough for the television industry to cut costs by increasing its quota of cheap reality shows with no writers or production values, it now looks at the profit margin engendered through that strategy and realises that even a constant diet of people cooking in their kitchens cannot get beyond basic cheap so, to keep those profits rolling in, what they need to do is to make fewer shows but run them over and over again. But don't call them repeats. Re-brand them as "encore", that word of acclaim which audiences call when they don't want a brilliant performance to end.

So 100 TV cable TV channels now are running the same old shows over and over and over. The cheapest possible shows with the greatest exposure.

They are sure we are such compliant morons that we will think this is what there is, we will forage among the slim pickings and in desperation to fill the tired and lonely hours, will resign ourselves to a diet of ancient leftovers.

This is cruel and cynical corporate behaviour. It is as if the people who own and run our television have no need to watch it themselves and do not care what consumers think of them. Well, why should they? They are entertained watching their money growing.

The Comedy Channel dropping the Late Night Legends - the American talk shows, Letterman, Leno and Jimmy Fallon - is the last straw. It was an abrupt drop with the explanation that the shows were "not performing" to their satisfaction. They had not been on for long and most of Australia was just getting to know them. One assumes the real reason was that those hugely popular daily US shows cost money Foxtel doesn't want to pay - when they could be paying almost nothing for tired old reruns.

With ever-limited choice in what to watch, the hapless public will watch the same thing rather than nothing at all.
Unless people protest - write, cancel subscriptions, withdraw advertising - I imagine the dumbing down and cutting of content will continue.
There is no industry competition. The corporation has the upper hand - and it expects us to lie down and take what it doles out.
The sad thing is that we will - and pay them for it as we do.

Burqa bizzo

2010-05-11T13:58:00.004+09:30

When I was in Muslim countries, I was expected to dress modestly in keeping with the traditions of the culture.

When in Rome...one tries to fit in. Or so it was before the Islamic disapora.

I might be wrong but I believe that Muslims are the first people to come to live in our country and openly disapprove of us. It's hard to forget the cleric who described Australian women in summer attire as "meat left out for the cat".

There are now a lot of Muslims in Australia. They are spread widely and evenly through the urban population, but they don't blend in. The women's dress makes them instantly recognizable. Their range of religious habit goes from a token headscarf to abaya, those long drab button-up overdresses, and huge hijab around their heads.
The full burqa or niqab face covering is rare here but it is seen.

However, it now is in the news and and we are all forced to think about how, exactly, we feel about this sort of dramatic separation from the rest of the community. As a liberated country, we don't conform. We display our diversity with everything from muted conservative garb to a mass of tattoos and piercings. We are proud of our freedom to self-expression.

This should, of course, including the Muslims. Yet, by dressing differently, Muslims are dividing us.

And, thanks to political correctness, we feel inhibited and compromised about expressing reservations. This automatically makes us racist.

But I am getting to the age when one speaks one's mind. And I have to say that I am disturbed by the sight of Muslim women shrouded under burqas. They rouse a confusion of emotions in me. I am intimidated by them. I feel they are spying on us, shunning us, and hiding in plain sight. I also mistrust that they are actually female. I have no way of knowing.

The thing that most disturbs me is that the Islamic rationale that women are covered from head to foot because of the belief that they are too tempting to be seen. They need to be protected from their own sexuality. Just the sight of their hair is such a provocation that men may completely lose control.

What does this make of Islamic men? They have such crude sexual urges that they cannot safely see women in public?

This religious dress code, therefore, not only oppresses and insults the women, it demeans men.

It makes no sense to me at all.

Photo: CharlesFred, Flickr

Back to bones

2010-05-07T08:19:00.000+09:30

The fashion industry strode forth for, what? All of five minutes? In including larger models and fashion sizes for real women. And let's face it. Today's real women are larger than they used to be a generation or so ago when average height was about 5ft 4in and ideal measurement were judged at about 34, 24, 34. Current generations are tall and strong-boned with less pronounced waists than the girls of yore. To be small, they have to go down to the bone.

Thus has today's fashion created the school of emaciated, Auschwitz bodies. Poor skeletal girls with protruding bones and hollow thighs. And this body form accepted as a model form for the fashion runway drove girls to seek starvation as a beauty treatment. It is old news, how dangerous this was as standard and ambition and it was generally celebrated when the larger models started coming into vogue.

But it did not last. The vapid designers and their neurotic industry craved the bones on the coathanger body for their shows - and the larger models are out on a limb, once again unwanted, according to today's news reports.

If they want to get back into the fashion world, they will have to starve.

And we return to teens striving to find beauty in emaciation and eating disorders.

The bike debate

2010-04-05T10:09:00.004+09:30

It has been suggested that cyclists require training and that bikes be registered for the roads.
If ever a suggestion was welcome, this one is it.
Those goodie two-shoes greenie cyclists have become a terror on the roads.

Cyclists are quick to blame drivers. But there is no protecting them from themselves and they cause a lot of stress among car drivers.
They can be divided into two distinct groups - the people who ride to work and those who have some illusion that commuting is a sport.
The former are just hapless good souls who happen to ride bikes to work or university.
The latter wear skin-tight synthetic racing costumes. They dress up to get on their bikes - wearing garb which may reduce wind shear by some vital fractional degree on their way to work.
These are the cyclists who like to put themselves apart from the rest of the road traffic. They speed in slow traffic and do not heed traffic conditions. They can't bear to put their foot on the ground at a traffic light but have to ride to the front of the queue and teeter dangerously ready for a race start on the change of lights. The do not give pedestrians right of way. They regularly ride though pedestrian crossings. In other words, they do not conform to the road rules which apply to traffic - rules which they would respect were they in their cars. They have double values and a culture of blame.

During some shocking gridlock traffic jams due to closed roads, I witnessed a racing-clad cyclist speeding towards a jammed intersection. He showed no sign of slowing for the obstacle of stationary traffic across his path which rather surprised me. I think he was assuming he could just swing through a gap. When a motorist, not seeing the approaching cyclist, allowed his car to creep forward a few feet, he narrowed that gap and the cyclist was going too fast to accommodate the change. He rode directly into the side of the car at high speed - flying over the bonnet and landing heavily on the road. It was very nasty. Everyone was distressed. An ambulance was called. Haunted, I have thereafter pondered the practical and legal implications of this accident. The car was in the wrong place but it was almost stationary. The cyclist technically had a right of way but, in my opinion, he did not use caution in changed road conditions.

It seems a bit sad to lumber schoolkids and family cyclists with tests and paperwork for registration and licenses. But how else are we to make racing city cyclists conform to the road rules?

Perhaps by restricting the wearing of those awful synthetic racing garments to velodromes and genuine road races?

Mary MacKillop - a tough, smart saint

2009-12-23T09:04:00.003+10:30

Mary MacKillop - Australia's first saint.
One does not need to be a Catholic to be thrilled to bits with this news.
Its symbology is more far-reaching.
Mary MacKillop long has been hailed for the exceptional woman she was - but this recognition has been largely from and within the religious world she avowed.
She was a nun who created her own order, using the Catholic system as a way of spreading not just the word of God but the word itself - literacy.
Her brown-clad Josephites, affectionately known as Brown Joeys, opened and ran schools wherever they went. They provided an education for the downtrodden and repressed of the time - girls.

Mary MacKillop was a feminist - way before the word was coined.

Among her wonderful nuns were women for whom life had been harsh, for whom other opportunities may never have arrived, among them women of the street. One could say that she saved them or made them - just as she saved and made all those girls who otherwise would never have had the emancipation of education.

Her schools are still outstanding and progressive.

They are, of course, Catholic schools, but they accept Muslim and Buddhists and Secular students. In Mary's spirit, they are without prejudice.

With all this erudition there is one wild irony in the years and years of waiting for Mary MacKillop's Sainthood.
The highly patriarchal old Church of Rome, which once excommunicated Mary MacKillop for her fiesty disobedience - has rules, absurd archaic canonical rules. It decrees that, to be a saint, one must have performed miracles.
Miracles must be directly related to the act of prayer to the saint-to-be. They must involve cures of the incurable. They must be accompanied by medical "proof".
This sort of thinking seems incongruous when set against the principles of enlightenment Mary MacKillop represents.

Well, I think so. The fact that Australia has had to wait for decades until a woman emerged with the claim that praying to Mother Mary had cured her cancer is to oddly sideline the wonderful works and meaning of Mary MacKillop.
The woman in question clearly thinks this, too. She has refused to be identified saying that she does not want her cure to detract from the Saint herself and her pioneering work. One likes this woman.

I love Mary MacKillop.
Just as my late father, Max Harris, did.
He campaigned through the national media for recognition of Mary MacKillop as the brilliant pioneer educator that she was. He was a boy raised in the South East of South Australia, near Penola where Mary MacKillop's work with her mentor, priest and scientist Father Julian Tenison Woods all began. Penola is where Mary's first school was - a lovely wee town which is about to boom with tourism.
Max had an immense respect for early female achievers. He read all there was to read about Mary MacKillop and he cited her as one of the great (then) unknown Australians while doing his utmost to ensure that she was not just known but properly celebrated. He adored her spirit and her legacy and used his high media profile to champion her.

The Josephite nuns, an order of particularly interesting and intelligent women, were quick to take note and make themselves known to Max and so the bond became formed between the poet/columnist campaigner and the women who today represent the work and ethos of Mary MacKillop.
Those nuns were to give Max extraordinary comfort and support through his years of illness and, after his death, they were to tuck him under their eternal wing. Hence, his ashes are interred beneath a memorial rock between Mary MacKillop College and the Josephite Nunnery. The Mary MacKillop Centre museum is right there, too.

Max recognised Mary MacKillop's religion - and also the battle she had with that religion's patriarchy to do her work. She had to take on those fusty old Bishops. They excommunicated her. She had to live in hiding and plead to do her wonderful work. She succeeded and her work went on - away from Penola and Adelaide where it all began - across the country. Mary suffered Dysmenorrhea for which she needed analgesic nips of brandy. One always hoped it was St Agnes brandy, a saintly cure if ever one there was. But Mary was in no way airy fairy. She lived a tough life and she was a fighter. She worked truly and humbly for the benefit of others - for girls and education, for Aboriginal children and their cultural displacement, for the poor and their needs and for the sick and aged and their comfort.

Religion or no religion, one could not fail to recognise the extraordinary qualities of this wonderful woman. Her work was 19th Century but it remains vital and contemporary. She was a true pioneer. She is a role model for us all. And, as my late father so perfectly put it all those years ago, she is:

A SAINT FOR ALL AUSTRALIANS.

Clockwork Orange is on steriods

2009-11-29T12:29:00.004+10:30

It is so easy to feel enveloped in the comfort zone. I think of my narrow world - gentle home life amid educated people, theatre, looking forward to a good white wine at the end of the day, the pleasure of cooking wholesome and interesting food...
It is a fortunate world.
But it must not be blinkered.
The world is changing. Demographics is changing. Even here in this pleasant city of a million, the status quo is shifting.

Even if only from time-to-time, we really must turn our minds to the horror stories of other lives, of kids on crime sprees because they have squalid and unloving home lives - drunks, dropouts and addicts as their role models.
More and more we have created a whole society of people who have never worked. Never held a job at all. Just been supported by the system and now believes that this is the only way and, further, that this is an entitlement which should be providing rather better income and standard of living, rather more like that of the people who work.
They are arising as a restless, angry and growing underclass - now boosted by immigration policies of recent years.
We are surrounded by a generation of idle people, bored, lacking in interests, unable to find distraction between the covers of a book or in tending a garden or helping others. They are the market for violent video games and porn websites.

Teachers despair, unable to control them, influence them. Teachers have breakdowns. Fewer people want to be teachers because of them.
Education is the solution - but it has failed.
Clockwork Orange is on steriods.

I think of the power of those people not only in disrupting and undermining urban life in an immediate physical and cultural sense but also in being able to wield political clout. They vote.

I simply don't know what to do about this alarming growth. I see it is an obstacle to saving the environment, to the economy even to peace.

Ignorance is a very, very scary enemy.

Where is that sand? I want to bury my head.

Calm alarm - one of the greatest inventions

2009-09-20T09:42:00.005+09:30

"Not a morning person" doesn't begin to cover it.
Or it didn't once.
That was my mantra.

All has changed. Technology has made me a morning person.

I wake up softly these days, gently roused by sweet sounds.

No longer am I shocked into consciousness by strident, jangling, aggressive, head-hammering clocks.
Nope, it's my handy mobile phone.
My darling iPhone. Before that it was my Nokia.

The pretty wake-up calls available on the mobile phone are one of the significant inventions of our time.
For all the great technological advances of our time, the way in which mobile phones have transformed wake-up calls would seem to have been the least appreciated.
I wonder has anyone really contemplated how many marital arguments did not happen because couples were not jangled into the new day? How many bosses did not bite the heads of employees because their wake-up was non-aggressive?
What larger differences may there be in our world when people's wakening is greeted by beauty instead of abrasive alarm?

I know that my cellphone alarm has absolutely improved the way I meet the day.
I wake up relaxed - not rattled into awareness. I hear the gentle sounds and my mind reaches out, at first wondering as one does out of sleep, and then identifying this as the tune of the dawn.

It is years since I had to wake up just to grasp out and stop the noise, to kill the ugly bell.
And I realise that a whole new lucky world will have known nothing other than cellphone wakeup calls - and perhaps may be a better community for it.

Whoever thought of programming harmonious wake-ups into cellphone technology might well deserve a Nobel Peace Prize.

Feedback, the tragedy

2009-08-10T23:42:00.004+09:30

What is it with feedback?
Why does it bring out the worst in so many people?
Not all, I hasten to add. Not all.

But a whole new breed as been unleashed.

It is as if the anonymity of the Internet gives permission for behaviour your parents would never sanction. It is an excuse for releasing all the bile one has never dared expel, for fear of the terrible consequences.

So many people seem to have this inner anger.
All it takes is a blog or even an online newspaper report to fire up the demons of feedback, the instinct to tell the writer where to get off.

I recall when the LA Times tried the grand Internet experiment of opening up its editorials for the people to have their say. True equality. Absolute respect for the views of the readership.

But what did the paper get?
It got a deluge of vitriol. Such tirades of unspeakable spite and hatred that it gave up on the grand idea of the people's editorials and went back to the old ways.

People online are not content to disagree. They have to bellow personal insults.
As if they, themselves, are paragons of some sort, that they stand all-knowing in judgement, talented and wise. Well, the sort of paragons that can't frame a sentence let alone spell one.

Literacy and feedback do not go hand-in-hand.
And the worse the literacy, the more adamant the feedback sender is that they can tell the thinking writer that he or she is not worth the time of day.
Is it jealousy? Is it the tall poppy syndrome? The classic hostility of the under-achiever?

Whatever it is, it is bloody sad.
The feedback writers show a lot of cowardice. They think they can't be identified although, especially when it comes to newspaper feedback posts, guess what? They can.

The odd thing is that these people who have so much anger and such paucity of articulation also are out there actually reading.

Silly meditations on the hybrid car

2009-07-07T12:41:00.007+09:30

Hybrid cars are too quiet.
So say the reports about the new era of eco-friendly vehicles. They are so quiet that they can just come up on one from nowhere.
One is not prepared. One gets a fright. If one is not flattened by the oncoming silent vehicle, one may die of fright.
Truly, silent cars are a serious hazard.

Sound is a vital part of our world and of our danger warning system.
It is basic to human communication.

We like and need to hear things and people coming. Noises alert us. We find stealth threatening.
Well, stealth IS threatening. Think panthers stalking prey. Think cat burglars. Think stealth bombers and submarines.

Bikes have bells so cyclists can ping one as they come up from behind on the seaside trails. I mention this since it is a bane of my life.
We put bells on cats to help save hapless birds and marsupials.

So, should they put bells on hybrid cars to save hapless pedestrians and animals?
If so, how would the city streets sound? Oh, be-jangles. Ring-a-bloody-infernal-din of a ding.
Tinkle traffic all the way.
And if the urban soundscape turned into a constant mighty cacophonic windchime, how mad would we go? Come to think of it, just driving in tinkerbell cars would drive one a bit nuts.

So perhaps not bells for cars.

How about horns? But would that be a quiet constant horn from oncoming cars or lots of blasts every time another car or a person gets within striking range? Like those reverse beeps on trucks and SUVs? A constant hoot of traffic?

How dire would that be? Could pedestrians hear each other speaking?

Or maybe pedestrians could hear the cars speaking. Hybrid cars could have voices. They could talk, warning people of their passage. They could say "here I come", "I think I can", "I'm a travelling man", "I'm on a mission", "get off the road", "yoohoo I'm a hoon" or just "car-car-car-car" or "shopping, shopping, shopping"... Self-centred cars could just say "me me me".
Cars could have electronic programmed voices or they could even have the voices of the drivers on recorded loops, just like phone messages.

Wouldn't traffic be a riot!
Everybody talking at once. Which way to look? Who is talking to whom?

But this presents more problems. Overseas, cars would be speaking in different languages. One may hear them coming but not understand them.

So how about music? Singing cars? Mozart cars? Hip hop cars?
Argh.
It all ends up with noise.

So what is the answer for the silent hybrid?
A special noise of its own. A hum? A purr?

And full circle we come. Silent eco-friendly cars are only going to be people-friendly if they sound like cars.

Welcome to the new car engine recording industry.

Loxton the lovely - a travelogue

2009-06-06T17:35:00.013+09:30

In an era when history seems to have been made redundant by by the phrase "that was before my time", it is heartening to find official, state-wide celebrations of the past - reminders of our roots and both the triumphs and failures of what we like to call heritage.
I was charmed and honoured to be invited to a town called Loxton to given the opening address for History Week. I was assigned the topic of "Pioneer Women" and instructed to speak on this subject for an hour. I could have wished for less of a maelstrom of a domestic and working life to make the writing of such an epic somewhat easier. Elective time has become elusive. This is a reflection on the history we are living now - the era of information overload wherein the days grow shorter and more pressure cooker, work presses and thinking time has vanished into the archives.
Irony, irony.

However, thanks to History Week and a Loxton man called Bert Haslam, I earmarked my owed overtime from work to pilgrimage to Loxton.
What a revelatory experience.

It is about a three-hour drive from Adelaide -beginning by heading up the freeway to lovely Tailem Bend. This town on a bend of the River Murray has a fabulous roadhouse with a stunning view and decent food - not to mention wireless Internet. Heading out the Karoonda Road we suddenly were in another world - we were in the almost remote countryside. Wheat country with railway lines and tiny silo towns. Marvellous mallee groves along smooth, open road. We saw few cars. But we did see ruins and bleak little settlements.
Approaching a place which was called Sandalwood, and which had nothing much more than the sign saying it was called Sandalwood, we found a roadside pallet with a mound of pumpkins for sale with a wee honour box. We bought one of the $3 ones.

It was a beautiful road, but there was a strange spirit of desolation to its environs, sometimes uncomfortably so. We turned off at a semi-derelict settlement which, incomprehensibly, bragged a racecourse. I wanted to see this racecourse. We drove past cracked and abandoned tennis courts with knee-high weeds, past a lovely but very sadly abandoned house with its rainwater tanks toppled alongside it.

We bumped onto a dirt track with, of all things, a 15k speed sign marker. Not a car in sight, but I slowed from my wild and crazy 25kph to the required speed we wound our way to a fenced compound, at its gate, a corrugated iron ticket booth with $10 entry fee signed. Within, there was a fairly respectable country racing set up - all made of corrugated iron. There was a grandstand, horse boxes and parading ring. One wondered how often it was used. It seemed a bit surreal out there in the desolation of disuse. Like a ghost racetrack.
However, as we were turning back onto the main road of this little ghost town, a big white ute crept out of a road on the other side, one of those big vehicles with bull bars, spotlights, huge tyres... And it drove behind us. It drove close behind us. And we started to feel rather oppressed by it. If I drove fast, it drove fast. If I slowed, it slowed. Eventually we hit another sad little settlement and I pulled over outside a rusty General Store. The white ute went on by and turned down a side road. I thought it may emerge again when we continued, but it didn't. Twas all in the imagination. Too many movies about weirdos in rustic country towns.

There were many ruins and abandoned buildings along the road - telling tales of droughts and lost dreams. There was even a side road signposted "Deferred Works Road".
But the countryside generally is lovely out there. Beautiful mallee.

Loxton was a surprise. A massively wide main road with a huge median strip leads down towards glorious meandering bends of the grand old River Murray. Loxton is, or was, a citrus town. It is surrounded by "fruit blocks" created by a post-war irrigation system which provided opportunities for returned servicemen. The town itself was originally German-settled, however. There are lots of German names in the community, but now also Greek and multicultural ones. It is a famously sunny town and, despite the dire economic crisis which besets it as the river water allocations dry up the once-lush fruit blocks and vineyards, it still seems to have a thriving and progressive atmosphere. At least, that was the impression that big-hearted Bert Haslam, a former school headmaster and now a member of the Loxton Council, conveyed to us as he took us around the sights. Retirement communities are big business in Loxton. A very wise move by the council in a time when Baby Boomers are looking for alternative lifestyles. Loxton is attractive for tree changers.

The fruit blocks are a sorry sight, however. It is heartbreaking to see dead orchards and piles of bulldozed dry orange trees, abandoned fruit drying racks and sadly shuttered houses.

Fortunately some alternative crops are emerging - olives and almonds among them.
We were to meet some of the grape and fruit growers at the History Week opening and to learn that they had been paying something like $300,000 a year for water to keep their orchards and vineyards cropping. They are deeply in debt.

Banrock wine flowed, however, for the opening event.
It was held in a large marquee in the grounds of The Pines, which is Loxton's simply gorgeous old heritage house open to the public. The house was left to the people of Loxton and is lovingly maintained by the council and staffed by keen volunteers. Built by the Thiele family in 1909, it was handed down to Ella who married a car dealer called Kingdon. It would seem to have been an odd, childless marriage but Ella outlived her chainsmoking husband by a long time and was to become beloved of the townsfolk for her gracious ways and her regular, brandy-soaked tea parties. The house has been kept as she left it - a window to a more gracious era which, for some, is still in living memory. It was another thing one had to love about Loxton, another thing that makes it different and better than most country towns. The fact that it also maintains an historic village is another. And then there are the mammoth old gums along the river and the sandy river shores which won the award of Best Inland Beach in Australia. And there is The Big Pelican, a piece of glorious fibreglass folk art which was made originally for a street parade and now sits in all its naif glory on a big water-motif plinth at the entrance to the riverside campgrounds. It is a cultural treasure.

I was a bit anxious about speaking to the people of Loxton on the requested subject of Pioneer Women. It was my feeling, rightly, that Loxton people are already very well informed about their own and the country's history and that, whatever I said, it would seem like teaching granny to suck eggs. I angled my address to pioneer women journalists which meant that I could move through time from first settlers to my own experiences as the first woman journalist on the news floor at two newspapers.

A wonderful array of people turned up to fill the marquee and the school prefects did a sterling job of serving drinks and nibbles. There was even a jolly pioneer folk trio. I was made to feel really welcome and, indeed, despite some very unusual improvised lighting at the lectern and a bit of trouble with the mike, it as all rather good fun and the audience seemed engaged. They were certainly responsive and I had a lovely time talking to lots of them afterwards. They presented me with a hamper of superb local produce - quandong syrup, olive oil, fruit conserve...
My general impression was that it was a really civilized place full of interesting, intelligent and community-minded people. It added to my sense that Loxton was a place a person could happliy live.

With Bert and Kath Haslam, we repaired to the Loxton Community Hotel for an agreeable, albeit not gastronomically brilliant, dinner and a last glass of wine.

Again, it was the pleasure of the people. The Haslams are special - both lifelong career teachers now retired. Bert is one of those golden men whose energy, enthusiasm, knowhow and warmhearted skill with people is the glue which sticks a rural community together. He is a doer and he makes doers of everyone around him. As Kath says, he has two speeds, full-on and stopped.
In the morning, we took a beautiful stroll along the banks of the River Murray. Slow, brown and beautiful. Bird life vivid and raucous. Oh, those ancient eucalypts. Reeds and duckweed...
Bert and Kath met us after our walk and we drove around to see places where Daisy Bates had come to live and work after her famous years of working with the Aboriginals at Ooldea. We explored little backroads, some of them impassable, and saw all sorts of fruit blocks and stretches of the river before arriving at Banrock Station where the wonderful wetlands were dry and there were no waterbirds to be seen.

More evidence of the seriously sad state of the River.
Banrock Station is a very impressive enterprise way out there in the Riverland - an elegant upmarket restaurant with the best possible art and a produce store and wonderful views as well as a conservation enterprise.
Many times living in New Hampshire I have pulled up its webcams to look at the birdlife.

It was disappointing not to see it in real life. We continue to hope for long, drenching and reviving rain to resupply the rivers.
And perhaps the Government could start buying up those cotton farms and rice fields upriver and in the eastern states which have been allowed to divert our precious water.

For Banrock. For the fruit growers. For all.

Shore thing

2009-05-31T12:02:00.005+09:30

Encounter Bay will never recover its lyrical picture postcard beauty now that the classic little wooden jetty is gone.
Modern boaters demand modern facilities - so, with loud justifications about sea rescue, we now have the pontoon style metal boat ramp with its priapic stability poles and room for boats to come and go four at a time. Heaven forfend a boatie should queue.
I remain disappointed that the Council chose to bulldoze earth onto the beach to create more parking and to change the shoreline. I continue to think that the pontoons are downright dangerous as well as ugly. And I can't say how sad I was when I wandered down there to find a boatie throwing stones at the pelicans who roost on the huge and ancient Erratic rocks (dropped by the Permian glaciers 240 million years ago).

I actually stopped and said; "I don't believe what I am seeing. Why would you want to throw stones at those beautiful birds?" The lad, aged late teens, looked at me with dumb insolence. Then his father popped his head up from whatever he was doing with the boat and laughed: "He couldn't hit them if he tried! He's just seeing how close he can get a stone without hitting them."
The logic of this dumbfounded me. The psychology of it sickened me.
I have always liked boaties, albeit that I have not liked the fact that they have been allowed to vandalise the coast with the ugliness of these now ubiquitous pontoon ramps. Some marketing person has done a major coup flogging those to councils right across the land. They must be very rich indeed by now.
But, while I like boats and fishing and fishing people, I definitely did not like these particular boaties - who may symbolise the tip of the iceberg of ugly new people attracted to launch boats and jet skis from our new multilane ramp.

Despite the fact that Encounter Bay is as sheltered and quiet a water as there is in the world, they have built a massive breakwater beside the new boat ramp. This, apparently, is because the pontoons are dangerous if there is water movement. They are unstable. you see. They roll up and down and undulate with waves, making them hard to balance upon if there is a hint of weather. Well, there is rarely a hint of weather in this gentle and shallow bay - but millions of massive rocks have been carted in and a giant breakwater now reaches out into the bay.
Fortunately, the Council has done something I have not seen on other boat ramp breakwaters. It has ordained a path to be made on top of it so the real people, the locals who walk dogs and stroll the shore, can actually walk out as they did on the old jetty. It is not yet finished, but it is a positive - and I am looking forward to spending many hours out there as the years roll on. I do hope they put a bench there.

Well, oil be darned

2009-03-14T10:09:00.007+10:30

Scouring the WWW for signs of manufacturers still using partially-hydrogenated vegetable oils and thus encumbering hapless people with poisonous trans fats (one of my campaigns - trying to pressure the Australian government into labelling products) I came upon these.
Well, we knew the Obamas were foodies!

What's the bet President Obama has not the faintest idea of this bizarre namesake!
At least they seem to be trans-fat free.
Now I'm trying to work out the 90 countries where this is supposed to be best-selling. Not this one.

Cornelia Rau and the irony of freedom

2009-02-22T09:27:00.005+10:30

Australia's most famous detainee, Cornelia Rau, is in trouble again. Now she is detained in Jordan, of all places.
I feel profoundly sorry for her - and cross with her.
She was given $2.6 million compensation for being wrongfully detained as an illegal immigrant in a hideous Australian detention centre after she was picked up wandering in Queensland and concealing her identity as an Australian citizen. She is, in fact, a joint German and Australian citizen but she has psychological problems. They would seem to have been exacerbated by a traumatic experience which she explained to me when I did a huge "Cornelia Rau - her own story" feature on her a few years ago. The magazine section in which that was published was not included on the website but Cornelia refers to it on her own website.

The problem with Cornelia is that, so long as she is taking her medication, she feels as if she does not need medication.

This is an issue with many people with psychotic disorders.

On medication, Cornelia is one of the most delightful people you could meet. It is truly impossible to dislike her. I took to her immediately - and subsequently spent time with her both on the quest of getting to the bottom of her story and, just for the pleasure of it, walking the beach with her or talking on the phone when she needed someone to talk to.

It was clear to me from the outset that Cornelia needed the medication she so resented having to have. She said it clouded her world, made her feel hazed.
But she claimed to have no recollection of the psychotic episodes that led to her incarceration. These were all blanks - the only memory being a sense of shock and injustice at police intervention. Over and over again, I plied her for clues about those pivotal incidents. It was always the same nothingness. Just Cornelia's indignation at the situation in which she found herself - under the Guardianship Board's supervision with a psychiatriast she had to see fortnightly and medication to which she was compelled to submit.

Cornelia, or Conny, as she prefers to be called, confuses physical health with mental health. She is a fitness freak, swimming in the sea every day whatever the weather, jogging miles on the beach... She had a lovely apartment within walking distance of the beach.

The calm of her disposition was clearly medication-related, and it made for a really pleasant companion, albeit one preoccupied with being free of all medication.

Conny was absolutely confident of her ability to get back into the working world but she had enrolled in several courses over the time I knew her and had not seemed to go through to the end with any of them. One was a sort of justice course, another a language course. She was obsessed with being able to get out of the country, go back to Germany, get back into air hostessing...

Clearly intelligent, charming, interesting, warm - she felt caged by the limitations placed upon her. She had friends, but was also rather lonely. Her family have stuck by her throughout. I met her parents briefly and the family relationship I saw in those minutes seemed very strong and loving. Perchance Conny could not accept what a worry she is to her family any more than she can accept that her stability is dependent on the drugs she so loathes.

Anyway, the Government compensated her for her wrongful detention and she is now a wealthy woman. I worried that she would become an instant target for exploitation but she said that the money was not available to her in bulk but that she could draw upon it.

At that stage, she was being "managed" all of a sudden by a colourful woman lawyer who told me she thought Conny had "celebrity" value she could make more of. This arrangement did not last very long. The "manager" had disappeared from the scene the last time I heard from Conny. She was on her own again and still trying to get her passport back.

Clearly, she did not pause to tell me when she got it back. She must have been at that airport within minutes. And out of Guardianship jurisdiction - away from anyone who could force her to take the medication she despised.

Catch 22, poor Conny. She gained that freedom which has so obsessed her. The gift the freedom has given her is more detention.

If only she would accept the meds. Dear girl. If only.

Exploring Yorke Peninsula - a travelogue

2009-01-18T23:21:00.015+10:30

Thanks to a work assignment, a weekend on South Australia's Yorke Peninusula.
Moonta is an old copper town, part of South Australia's Copper Triangle. It is a popular holiday town on the quiet waters of Spencer Gulf. It is about two hours north of Adelaide - not the most pleasant of drives. One sets out amid heavy transports and rather scatty and impatient traffic which gradually branches off to rural destinations or interstate highways, until one is almost alone on the scrub-lined country road.
Moonta is a very neat country town which treasures its copper history with a tourism focus but it soon becomes apparent that the intervening generations have lacked forward thought and an astonishing percentage of the cottage-dense historic areas is simply gone, the land reclaimed by scrub creeping around rock piles and scattered shards of glass and china. This, apparently, is legacy of the dominance of the mining companies which owned all the land upon which the miners built their solid little stone cottages. When the mines closed, they lost not only jobs but the right to live on the land. Some exceptions seemed to occur since some cottages remain, one of them restored as a National Trust exhibit.

They were tough days, the 1850s-80s and the largely Cornish mining population suffered no end of privation and exploitation in carving out their lives. In one add-on room at the show cottage was a huge wooden wringer with a big black winding handle. This, apparently, was the gift that the mining company would give to women whose husbands had been killed in the mines. Wringing washing and becoming a laundress, was the gift of a widow's potential livelihood.
What "compensation" for a heartbroken woman!

While I pursued my work day, hooking up with an historian and, later, with the photographer who was to illustrate my feature, Bruce drove off and explored the old mines and museums. We reunited late in the day at the charming Henry on George's cafe.

We overnighted in Moonta Bay. It's a shallow gulf bay with an immensely long jetty - characteristic of the peninsula's history of grain exports via mighty sailing ships. Our motel, the Patio, was perched on a hill looking down to the jetty and the bay with its rocks and and rocky dark waters juxtaposed against the almost lime brightness of the shallow waters over white sands. The patio must be the most trusting hotel in the world. I'd made a phone reservation, told it was the last room in the place (summer school holidays) and when we arrived to check in, the receptionist sitting with her back to a breathtaking view and surrounded by the most lavish and long out of date Christmas decorations, simply pushed a key across the counter and told us how to get to the room. "You want a credit card?" we asked. "Why?" she responded. "Do you want to pay now rather than when you are leaving?"
The room was utterly adequate in every way for a cheap Aussie country motel. Good fridge. Soaps and shampoo, extra pillows and towels, kettle, toaster, good telly, tea and coffee, a double and a single bed, room service...and very clean with chilled wine glasses waiting in the fridge. After a restorative glass of icy white wine, we strolled down the slope to the very new and modern ..... restaurant with its array of window tables looking to the sea view.Oops. Afternoon sun was so fierce that the windows had to be covered with dark blinds, cutting the fabulous sea views to an impressionistic shaded vista.
A friendly place. We sampled some lovely Grant Burge Barossa wine and gorged at leisure on an interesting starter of chorizo sausage in balsamic-glazed onions as a form of bruschetta, followed by an over-creamy chicken dish and a sublime rice pudding with stewed apricots.
We truly needed our after-dinner walk down the gusty jetty in the fierce pre-sunset light. If only weather had been less windy, there was a lovely area netted in half way down the jetty for shark-safe deep-water swimming. How nice. Intrepid fisherman rugged up against the wind lined up on the jetty railings with half a dozen rods each plus a few crab pots.

Friday morning, after paying our super-honest motel and having the room maid chase the car to give us B's belt, which he had somehow managed to cast off behind the curtain, we paid an exploratory visit to Port Hughes to see what attracted Greg Norman to create a golf course and housing development there. It is a pleasant little port township - mainly jetty.We walked the long jetty which, despite a brisk wind, was crowded with fishermen. The only convivial ones we encountered, some Greeks at the end of the jetty, were pulling in squid and blue swimmer crabs which they were carefully measuring to ensure they were legal scale.

Port Hughes is not much of a township or anything much else - but a lot of housing development with and without Greg Norman. Mostly, away from the lovely coastline, the land seemed dry, dry, dry. The drought has cut hard on Yorke Peninsula as we were about to observe more and more as we took to the road south. There was a lot of pretty relentless long, straight road passing through vast expanses of stubble - parched yellow wheat-lands. Struggling native vegetation gave some relief to the harsh landscape, but abandoned farmhouses and the ruins of old farm buildings were regular melancholy reminders of the tough conditions and dreams laid waste through drought years just like this one.

Maitland was a fairly welcoming site, a sedate little country town in the peninsula's hinterland. A very neat and tidy town with a broad main street . We found a cafe for lunch - a large and welcoming place, albeit that the food was a bit primitive. I thought they could not go too far wrong with a hamburger. They did. It was just edible. Bruce ordered half a chicken - one of those ready-roast numbers. It was very oily and very salty. Best thing, I think, was my cup of tea. I was to find this in most meals.
We checked out the local market in a vast corrugated iron shed set way back across an immense brick-paved parking lot. It was lots of very unremarkable crafty things and assorted Ikea vases and things on resale. The only people there were a couple of stall-holders drinking coffee, Certainly, I could find nothing worth buying. I sought, instead, the public lavatory which, to my surprise, bore a name plaque honouring some local personage. First time I've seen a loo block with a name plaque. It was an interesting loo block, too. Very spacious. Well, it had one very spacious room with a long, broad shelf on which one could change at least half a dozen babies. It had two small sinks and, tucked in the corner, were two lavatory cubicles. They were so tiny that one could barely close the door when one went inside. One had to shuffle sideways against the toilet pedestal. I am not exactly a fat person so I wondered how obese country women ever managed to get in for a pee. This meagre size seemed extremely odd considering the very large expanse of unused space in the rest of the building. But, in a perverse way, it matched the vast parking lot outside, all so beautifully paved, with a pavilion in the centre. Why the big fancy parking lot in this small country town?

The Chatt centre purported Internet access - and, indeed, it had a couple of PCs on which one could access the Internet. I was looking for a hotspot for my laptop. A pleasant chap there said that there were wireless accesses so I took in the lappy and sure enough, the local council had an open network. All very well, though. I could not access the net on it - and I decided it was not important to keep trying.

We headed off to find a service station to clean the gluey suicidal remains of some poor insect off the car windscreen and top up the tank. Couldn't find one in the main drag but a Toyota dealership had petrol pumps - plus a very nice dealer who came out and cleaned the windscreen with Windex. Yet another lovely person on Yorke Peninsula. If the landscape was benighted, the people were turning out to be uniformly delightful.

Our destination was Port Victoria - a wee coastal town of which I had fond childhood memories. I'd stayed in the country pub there with my parents on a holiday - and my father had taught both my mother and me to swim in the shallow bay beside the jetty. I particularly recalled a seal coming to play with us in the water there - and getting to know an Aboriginal girl who worked at the pub.
The pub is still there much as it was - except that it has motel rooms out the back and poker machines inside.
We popped in to buy a bottle of wine. But we were staying at a cabin in the camp ground. Since I had booked at the last minute, it was not a sea-front cabin but, set back one row, there were goodly sea glimpses from the little deck of the cabin and, inside, with a full kitchen and satellite TV, there was not much we missed. Well, mobile phone coverage would have been handy. I didn't even bother to pull out the laptop. Instead, we lolled on our deck with books. The pub menu had not looked too impressive. More fried everything. So we took a walk down the main street to see it there was a cafe. Another very broad main street, albeit a tiny wee town. There was a cafe but, guess what? More fried frozen everything. It seemed ironic with all the emphasis on fishing - fishing boats all over the camp grounds, people fishing and crabbing off jetties - that there was no fresh seafood to be found. But we did find the fresh fish on sale just off the main street - and Amanda, a small, tough girl in black wellington boots and white overalls. She skippers a fishing boat. She is a third generation fisher. And she was selling fish she had caught herself. We bought a big fillet of snapper - and then went to the funny little grocery store cafe and purchased garlic,frozen peas, olive oil, dried herbs, a courgette and some spaghetti. With a lemon, some home-grown tomatoes and chillies, I later turned this into an unspeakably delicious pasta dinner which we consumed with lovely, cold Hollick wines from the Coonawarra. Oh it was a relief to escape a meal of fried everything.

We spent the afternoon lolling on the deck and reading, going for walks, marvelling at the vivid greens of the sandy-bottomed sea and watching all the people in the camp site. Again, everything was friendliness - and there was generally a very convivial spirit in the camp ground.

We were out, as the instructions dictated, by 10 am and on the road. As we drove south, the landscape seemed slightly less godforsaken. Perhaps because the terrain was not so flat, perhaps because the roads were better and not so straight... There was evidence of the felling of pine trees along the roads. Lots of evidence in the form of lots of chain-sawed pines piled up. There is a general policy among councils of eradicating pines because they are not native and because nothing grows beneath them. Ironically, however, there would seem to be a disease afflicting a lot of the native vegetation on the peninsula and the pines thrive and a relief of greenery beside sad, dying and dead eucalypts.

Minlaton is another very neat and tidy country town with a very, very wide main street. They even have picnic tables on the generous medians in the main street. Picnic tables with plaques in honour of local dignitaries, even. Bruce was glad to score a copy of The Weekend Australian from the friendly newsagent and I visited the local arts, craft and Internet centre where, eschewing the possibility of connecting to their broadband, I actually found some lovely local craft and oils and did a spot of shopping. Even Bruce made a purchase - a lovely redgum bowl. A wonderfully olde-worlde bakery, very popular among the locals, turned out to be still using trans fats so we did not stop for brunch there - nor across the road in the cafe where the scent of ancient and overused deep frying oil was overwhelming. We drove on to Yorketown.

Yorketown is set on the edge of a salt lake.
Blinding white. It is like an ice lake but whiter.
The town itself is odd. It is really just a big junction with the peninsula's main roads intersecting asymmetrically. We chose one of the two pubs for lunch. Probably the wrong one. The handsome old two-storey corner pub was huge and a man, finding us wandering through its corridors, escorted us to the dining room which was immense. A very elderly couple sat there dining in silence, dwarfed by the cavernous proportions. They were all dressed up, I noticed. A large and brightly-lit salad bar adorned one wall. The salads seemed very cold and fresh. But where were the people? It was a bit surreal.
We ordered from the "specials" menu on a blackboard. Fish and Chips for me - and when the waitress asked if I wanted the fish battered, crumbed or grilled, I jumped at the grilled option. Bruce ordered chicken breast in satay sauce. My fish was terrible. It was one of those awful frozen Vietnamese imports, I think. The chips were not too good, either. I enjoyed my cup of tea while Bruce wolfed down his chicken.

A few miles down the road, Edithburgh was a much better little town with a great big ocean grain terminal and extremely broad streets. It had some nice cafes - but on closer inspection, they were closed.-

We paused outside Edithburgh pausing to detour for a close up look at the Wattle Range Wind Farm.
Those great minimalist windmills are so linear and elegant - I have long wanted to get in among them. People tell me of bird strike and of noise. I saw sheep, gratefully lined up in the shade of the windmills. A quirky site, actually. And I listened to the soft machine hum and realised why people were never quite able to describe that sound. I can't describe it, either. It was not unpleasant, though.

We drove on up the coast past the towering white grain silos and gleaming white conveyors which take the grain out to modern boats resting at the modern facilities. It was a pleasure to encounter a coastal road - the first sealed coastal road we had found on the peninsula. So many of the roads are unsealed, dusty with sharp stones and, in many places, bone-shattering corrugations. We had hit them a number of times, most recently to and from the wind farm. It is astounding how much of this peninsula functions on graded dirt roads, "metal", I think they call them. Plumes of dust announce all cars which venture onto them. My dark green Forester is now a very dusty beast, thanks to those roads.

Our destination for the night was Stansbury and its Holiday Motel.
Stansbury was instantly likeable - and obviously much-liked since its camp ground, which wraps around a little promontory called Oyster Point and provides dozens of campers with million dollar foreshore sea views, was crowded with holiday makers.

We found our motel, perched up on a hill. At first glimpse it looked a bit downmarket and kids seemed to be swarming everywhere and squealing from the enclosed swimming pool.

"You'll like your room," the proprietor, Iain, promised as he handed over the key. He was right. We liked our spacious and well-equipped room, we liked our hosts, we liked their part-Aboriginal grandkids, we liked the spirit of the place -- despite the fact hat a massive phone tower loomed over the buildings and that the police Drug and Alcohol Unit bus was parked across a series of rooms which, said Iain, were occupied by a large party of police who were on operations down here. We'd be well protected, he said. Too true. When I woke next morning, there were about six cop cars lined up outside.

The grandkids had caught a mass of blue swimmer crabs that morning, Iain said. They were cooking them up and serving them at $10 a kilo, if we would care for some. So we ordered a kilo and went out to buy another bottle of wine and have a meander around Stansbury. A beach walk was an essential - so we walked the coast in front of the camp ground from heaven, looking at the campers.

They lolled under canvas awnings beside caravans or family tents, groups around tables, very comfortable ensconced while children played on the beach. The tide was out and, as we crossed over the point, it was to the most extraordinary expanse of tidal flats occupied by a few kids digging, a few pelicans hanging about and, far out in thigh-deep water, people crabbing. We could not believe how far out the tide had gone - when we turned around to see the shore, it was miles away.
There were vast shoals of shells we traversed and, further out, crystal clear pools of water which danced with tiny crabs and darting fingerling fish.
We were falling in love with Stansbury. And when we walked the long cement jetty, it was to get another thrill - two of the most immense stingrays you could ever imagine, softly cruising the shallows. This was their territory, Iain later told us. One of them was known as Harold. I wondered if the other was Maude.

We sat on the steps at the front of the motel to drink our wine with the mighty view of fishing boats coming and going - and repaired to the room in time to get a lesson in little crabs from the granddaughters, Chantal and Destiny. When our platter of crabs arrived complete with nutcrackers, newspaper, herbed vinegar and a rubbish bag, we simply feasted and swooned and made a mighty mess. Oh, they were good. We finished our dinner with some excellent watermelon we had purchased at the Stansbury IGA - and drifted into the night.

I had a glorious swim in the pool before leaving in the morning. It was very nippy - but heavenly. I love a swim - especially with no one else in the pool to splash me. Bruce read his paper and kept me company - and the motel kittens came and scrutinised my activity. 'Twas all rather pleasant - and I was a bit sad to leave this sweet niche.
Ironically, we were in quest of some fresh local fish to take back to town but found the quest disheartening. Seems one really needs to catch one's own. Perhaps that is why everyone takes their rods.

We drove up the coast, popping in on Port Vincent, Black Point, Pine Point and, finally, Ardrossan. No fresh fish to be found. We paused at Ardrossan's award winning bakery where they the make the award-winning best pasties in the state, asking, before we purchased, if they use a trans-fat-free shortening. They did. The baker himself came out to tell us - and to say that we were the first people who had ever enquired.

We took our trans-fat-free pies and pasties in their paper bags and sat on the point, looking out at the red cliffs and the boats coming and going and shared bits of pastry with raucous seagulls before hitting the road for the push back to the city.
All quite smooth - via the carwash to rid the Forester of its dusty coat.
And back to get ready for the working week.
Sigh.

Still not finished

2009-01-10T07:51:00.004+10:30

The boat ramp is still not finished. The pontoons are in. But the pontoons seem to have problems. They move around on the water. They do not stay still like a jetty. Nor do they have any rails to hang on to.
Little Rosetta Bay, the corner of Encounter Bay, is arguably the quietest piece of water on the south coast of South Australia, but it is not quiet enough for the floating pontoon.
So a huge breakwater of dirt sits across the peaceful edge of the bay. This, they say, will be replaced by a huge breakwater of rocks - because a huge breakwater is needed to ensure that no movement of water rocks the metal pontoons.

Meanwhile, no one can walk down the pontoons and enjoy a view. They are a bit scary. They are not stable.
The metal tie-up lugs are a real tripping threat if one raises one's eyes from the metal floor.
But, of course, the pontoons are not meant for the non-boating people, for the walkers who used to like to stand on the wooden jetty and watch the sea grasses, the fish, sometimes a squid and ever the optimistic pelicans, not to mention the mirrored stars at night.

Who the hell came up with the idea that unstable floating pontoons were better than the jetties enjoyed and safely used by generation upon generation?

The sad story of Encounter Bay

2008-08-31T10:48:00.015+09:30

Once upon a time, there was a scenic little jetty beside a boat ramp on a picturesque and peaceful South Australian bay.
Children played on the little sandy beach beside the little wooden jetty. Pelicans sat on their favourite rocks, seven to thirteen of them, preening and snoozing and waiting for fishermen to cast away bait fish or fishtails. Elderly couples sat on the shore watching the birds and the sea, the islands, the sky, the timeless and serene view.
Even by night, the little jetty was a joy-bringing beauty - particularly in summer when the sea lay dead calm and the stars twinkled not only from above but from the water's inky mirror around the little jetty.

When a Council has something this exquisite within its bailiwick, there is really onlyone thing it can do.
Destroy it.
Who wants picture postcards in a resort town on the sea?

What we want is industrial views.

Little hobby fishing boats are not revenue for a Council. They may be pretty and pleasurable, but they don't compete with big boats.
So what we really need is a really big boat ramp for really big boats.
And we need facilities for those big boats. Carparks and parking meters and lighting.

And so it has come to pass that the City of Victor Harbor in South Australia has descided to destroy the prettiest picture in its album.

At the same time that it has erected signs warning people of the delicate ecology of the ancient reef in Encounter Bay, it has vandalised the bay in the name of - well, I am not sure what.

As the moves develop to respect the fragile nature of the intertidal marine ecology, and the fears about over-fishing lead to increased moves for marine parks, this Council has invested many hundreds of thousands of dollars, maybe a million, into providing access to huge, polluting motor boats.

Here in the bay where the mother whales bring their young in the winter.
Where, most mornings, I can see a seal rolling and playing and fishing along the reef line...this reef, described as a "nursery" for fish.

What the bay needs is diesel slick and bigger boats.

Well, it is what it will get.
And what it needs is less beach and more cars.

To that end, they have just bulldozed earth onto the beach - pushing the carpark out to sea.
Who owns the beach? I thought beach was common land and no one in this country had a right to destroy it, let alone impede people's access along it. The law has changed? I was wrong? It is Council land which may be infilled and used for other purposes at whim?

The pelicans which have been such a joy to all (and the subject of my photo website) and who have long lived on the round rocks of the shallows, have gone. Of course.

So have quite a few of the rocks themselves.

The excavations just get deeper and deeper and the boat ramp is looking as if it has been designed to accommodate oil tankers. Huge groins encircle a vast cavity whence towering black metal piers reach for the sky. These may be anchors for the industrial metal pontoons which the Council, with its high sense of aesthetic, has chosen to replace the wooden jetty.

We shall wait and see how it all looks when finished.
Perhaps we shall have to look to the art of Jeff Smart to see beauty in the industrial impact on this once-pretty bay.

Perhaps, however, we shall just have to avert our gaze and ponder sadly why any Council should wish to be remembered for such travesty.
Then again, people have short memories.
Perhaps, in a few years, only the pelicans will miss the old jetty.

Visuacy? Visuacy? Idiotuacy, I say.

2008-08-17T10:31:00.007+09:30

Where do teachers get off, making up words?
They'd mark students down for making up a word and yet here they are, introducing "visuacy" not only as a word, but as a whole educational concept.
It's a travesty, or should I say "travestuacy".

The teachers are reported in The Australian to be creating this word to encompass a broadening span of education in the arts. It opens students to further possibilities in visual arts education - the possibility that they should see fashion models as art. This, of course, may extend to seeing Paris Hilton as art, for she is her own work of art, as we all know. Next students will be able to do PhD theses on Paris Hilton as an art object. Why not?
Already they study Buffy, the Vampire Slayer as part of the university English curriculum.
She, apparently, is preferable to the onerous erudition of those hideous "dead white men" responsible for that vast body of English literature.

So, we have the dumbed-down contempory teachers adapting education to what interests them, what they are able to deal with without the requirements of too much education of their own.

Students can forgo art galleries and dead classic artists for the joy of gossip magazines and young celebrity adornments. I daresay the fashion accessory puppy-carrier will be provided extensive source of study.

An academic called Mr Strong (dare I laugh that his name sounds as if it came straight out of that high literature, the Mr Men books)
has "called for the visual arts to form the basis of the national curriculum alongside English, maths and science, arguing that it had more of a right to be among the first curriculum to be developed than history".

Huh?
Ditch history for visuacy?

Yes, siree. It's now and tomorrow, the great dumbed-down tomorrow shimmering with its indifference to the achievements and enlightenments of the past. The brave new world in which knowledge is excused by the fullstop statement "that was before my time".

Today's educationalists suggest that students should be able to look at Picasso's work alongside the pure and glorious art of lingerie ads like this one on WikiBuy. "Viewers can respond in different ways to each image in still enjoy both," says an arts professor, potentially relegating the great galleries of the world to dust-coated tombs.

As one commentator put it, this is like equating a ship's foghorn to a Beethoven symphony on the basis that they are both made of sound.

And who knows, "sounduacy" may indeed follow "visuacy" as the world steps backwards into a sea of trite - and idiotuacy becomes the outcome of an ever-declining education system.

How Seven sins

2008-08-13T11:32:00.003+09:30

Like so many people, I'd really been looking forward to the Olympics.
Only once in every four years do I find myself glue with abid fascination to marathon cycle races, gymnastics, judo, swimming and equestrian events. That once is always an addictive joy. I defer other activities for Olympics-watching.

But here we are in Australia witgh Channel 7 providing coverage of the 2008 Olympics in Beijing. And it is just dire. It is the most lacklustre and crass coverage I have experienced.
The disappointment is immense.

Where are Roy and H.G.?
They were always the element which gave us a truly Aussie sense of involvement.
We were, I think, the only country in the world to be taking the mickey out of the Olympics and ourselves - with those well-informed and intelligent comics. We went without sleep in previous Olympics just to tune in to Roy and H.G.

This Olympics they are absent.

Channel 7 has made an executive decision - and has said that it has provided an alternative Olympics diversion, a morning panel show.
My god. How moronic do they think we are?
That lowbrow lineup of tedious egos is sheer insult.

The disappointments go on.

I needn't go in to the chopping and changing of the event coverage which leaves one never quite knowing outcomes unless we learn, retrospectively, that we won something.

Then there are the ads. They broke into the Opening Ceremony to place ads! How rude.

As for their talking heads, the Opening Ceremony commentators....oh deary me.

Shame, Seven. Shame.

Gold at the Olympics you are NOT.

Street View dilemmas

2008-08-07T10:58:00.005+09:30

Google Maps have released Street View and caused quite a flurry in the world of citizen's rights and privacy. As we all leapt online to look at our homes and see just how well the Google camera cars performed, a general kerfuffle of anxiety erupted.
There is a lot of concern among some people about vulnerability to crooks "casing" their joints from afar, checking entrances and exits. Indeed, if one adds the satellite imagery to the street view, one does get a pretty comprehensive look at properties. A boon for the real estate trade. A boon for people trying to sell roofing, too, perhaps. But the general paranoia is a bit much, I think. The photos are old. They are not live. Car number plates and people's faces have been cleverly blurred. This is not spying. It is not Big Brother.
It is, however, a comprehensive mapping of the world. And it is a joy for squizzy people - for those who think they can tell a lot about a person by the house in which they live. I, as you can see, am decidedly secretive and inscrutable.

Things which fascinated me about this development were, firstly, the revelation (which somehow I have missed these last years) that Google Maps were in fact developed in Australia by Google's Sydney team.

Secondly, despite my unfortunate brush with Google guards when I went to pay homage to its home in Silicon Valley, my experience here in making contact with the media office to find out about Street View was unbelievably prompt and friendly and helpful.

I was a bit peeved, I have to say, when responses sought to the new facility were met with legal caution, criticisms of Australian privacy laws and of Google - and the call for reform of said privacy laws. It sort of took the wind out of my own sails - and demonstrates howone's own opinions so often end up buried under the informational process known as news-gathering.

A sentimental journey

2008-05-17T12:21:00.007+09:30

My late grandfather kept moving further north - "for the air", he used to say. He ended up living in a small, dreary town in the middle of the wheat plains of the north. Hardly anyone has heard of Booborowie, a tiny little grid of streets out there in the vast agricultural no man's land. But why should they? I only discovered it because my old Pop chose to live out the last of his years there.

The other day, I made a sentimental pilgrimage back there.

Actually, it is relatively hard to find Booborowie at all. No roadsigns brag its presence out there amid the vast wheatfields. Even the GPS said it could not find it.
But we did, off the road between Burra and Spalding in the South Australian mid-north.
"We" were my husband, Bruce and I with our cherished friend Peter. The trip was prompted by Peter having to open an Antiques Festival in Burra - a job he did with immense wit from the stage of the Burra Institute Hall (which is probably the only theatre in the world which has a real, functioning fireplace on the stage). While Peter schmoozed with his adoring public, I took Bruce to see the old copper mines and some of the town's history before we all grabbed a sausage sizzle snag for lunch and went off in search of Booborowie.

The drive was a chance for me to recount stories of my grandfather and the strange, sour woman he married after my darling Nanna died. I loved Pop - but it was hard ever to really know him. He had been a bully as a husband and father, a braggard, a bigot, a loudmouth and a very generous man. He'd been the spoiled baby of a family of 7 and his big sisters always said he was still the spoiled baby, even when he was a ripe old man. He had some sweet characteristics - he could sing zany little ditties of bastardised Yiddish words to which he would dance a lively jig. And he was a terrific cook of sauces and pickles and jam. His Kryne was the best in the world. Actually, so was his tomato ketchup. He loved to do things first, biggest and best. He usually did - and we never heard the end of it.

When he retired as MD of a large meat and dairy produce company, he headed north, bought a beautiful small farm, and bred Border Leicester sheep with which he won all the blue ribbons there were to be won at the assorted agricultural shows. To the amusement of the other farmers, he had a miniature poodle which was very good at working the sheep, albeit superfluously, since Pop's flock came when he called them.

Tiring of sheep breeding, he moved further north to buy a gorgeous colonial mansion in a proud country town in a burgeoning wine area. Here, for many years he used other skills to restore antiques and historic items for the National Trust. He enjoyed being a sort of curator in one of the local Trust properties and loved to show people the objects he had so skilfully restored.

And then, to everyone's amazement, he announced that he and his surly wife were moving to Booborowie - which has to be one of the world's dead end towns. He had emphysema by then and said the dry air out there was the best in the world. And so he settled in and lived out his last decade in a dreary cream brick house in a little grid-plan settlement where even the streets could not dredge up interesting names. First, Second, Third...

Booborowie has a pub, a general store, a farm store, a sports oval, a primary school and about five churches. Its town sign says it has a population of 130.

But we saw none of them when we visited. I heard a cock crow. I saw a dog. But no living human being. Nor car.

It was truly like entering a ghost town - empty streets, store closed, pub deserted. There were some caravans with all signs of people camping on an empty lot near the pub. But neither man nor child was to be seen.

We drove around the town - once, twice, thrice. I could not remember the house that Pop used to live in - and wondered vaguely if his widow was still alive. She was 25 years younger than Pop. She could be. But she was not in the phone book. At least, not as Harris. Had she remarried? Probably.
She had hated Pop's family from the outset. She made our visits with him into very tense affairs. Since we always had a long drive to get there, he'd insist that she serve us at least a light lunch. She did so grudgingly and, oh my, she made sure they were light. One shave of chicken, a sliver of ham, a slice of tomato...

Poor woman. I think she was deeply disappointed in life. I am not quite sure why she hated us so much - but we were part of the package of her punishment.

Once we had paid for Pop's funeral and headstone, we politely retreated from her life - sad that she could never bring herself to share any of my grandmother's rings with us. Oh well.

So around and around Booborowie we drove...me getting cheeky in the realisation that there was not another car on the road. I could drive backwards and on the wrong side of the road - and I did.
We kept driving because we figured that, surely, there would be some sign of life. Surely?

Then, with absolutely nothing left of not much to see, we headed for the Booborowie Cemetery to pay homage to Pop. I knew the cemetery was out of town, but I had not recalled how far. It was 7 kilometres. That is a long way away to keep your dead. How odd.
But what a lovely graveyard out there in the place of the landscape - gums and parrots and grasshoppers.
It was our day's reward. And Pop's of course.

Blog, Twitter, chat, snap...who can keep up?

2008-05-10T08:57:00.006+09:30

When first I heard of Twitter, it simply sounded like a silly name and yet another thing to have to juggle online.
Let's face it, online life can start to overwhelm that other life. How many more elements of communication can we or need we take on?

Let's see, I started out with bulletin boards in the early 90s but swifty discovered IRC wherein many, many hours were richly consumed. OK, I admit it, I was one of those people with a drawer full of Jolt to swill down so that sleep did not interrupt the thrilling flow of conversation with my mysterious new best friends around the world.
What interesting people they were - and are.

Albiet that those days were full of techno glitschs such as "splits" and hackers and pervs. And, of course, there was the business of getting online at all - through the hiccups of dialup. Oh, what music to the ears was that little chirruping buzz of connection. I still feel a little surge when I hear it. But back then, if someone picked up the phone? Oh no. One's contact with the world was cut. I could not cope with the competition from students and geeks to get phonelines into my young backyard provider of the day, so I paid him to put in a dedicated phone line at his end for me. Thankyou Adrian Corston, for being the best provider of those early days.

Adrian moved on when the big guns began to fire and took me with him - to Internode where I have remained these many long years. They have been good to me and, in my role as a newspaper Internet writer, I was happy to spruik for them and send hundreds of customers their way. Still do. They remain the class act and I am proud of them.

For years, IRC remained a large part of my after-hours life since it is simply a rich world in which I met many good people. Friends for life. But the WWW was growing, email had changed out of sight. When I began it was Pine and it was clunky and nasty - like everything else. Heavens, all those DOS commands one had to key in to make anything happen at all.
Today's net users would never believe how tough and slow it all was. When The Louvre first came online, the first major visual arts entity on the WWW, I could cook a whole dinner in the time it took to download just one image. And I did. Regularly. Feeling richly rewarded at the sheer miracle of seeing that work of art on my computer screen.

As for the coke machine at Berkley - didn't we love waiting for someone to come along and order a coke so we could share in the amazing thrill of being flies on the wall?

A few years later, we all had cams and were talking to strangers and seeing their faces. We even set up live cam websites. I wonder whatever happened to my Sazicam site? Died of neglect?
I will never forget the vet with whom I used to chat in France - who used to turn his cam to the window and show me the magnificent mountains of his world. Magic. More forgettable were the silly wankers who would invite you for a chat only to show their engorged penises.

And here one began to worry about the nature of the Internet. Why did it bring all this ugly sexual frustration into the open? There were stupid pervs messaging one on IRC with obscene proposals. There were exhibitionists flashing on cams. Porn sites were springing up. Porn channels on IRC...
I found this all very demoralising. I am very positive about sex as a natural part of the scheme of things but I find people who have never managed to get their heads to higher planes not just sad and inadequate but intolerably dull.

The preoccupative tedium of the sex players on the Internet really brought the world down. It created issues for use by children. It dominated bandwidth. It made money when nothing else made money. Oh, woe, to lowest common denominators.

The phenomenon has not gone away.

The Internet has liberated not just sex, but a vast world of angry, spiteful morons whose pleasure in life is spamming the Internet with aggressive and ignorance comments, attacking thinking people, honest people, funny people - interesting people with something to say.
The lowest common denominator has found a high niche.

But we old Netizens plough on through the varying morasses, exploring the new applications devised by the brilliance of geekdom.

So, the first communities evolved - IRC groups, The Well, Howard Rheingold's Brainstorms, AOL and then Yahoo groups, web collectives with hobbies, occupations, illnesses in common. And it has not stopped.

Now we have Flickr communities and other photo-based entities, growing blissfully with the evolution of digital cameras and photoshopping. For every development, there is an online expansion. And the blogs, of course, the blogs.

I began this one when writing a feature about them. I figured I needed to have done it to write about it. And them, once I had done it, I had to keep doing it. From time to time.

Now I have three blogs...two here on Blogger and one for the newspaper. Then I have my spots in Brainstorms, which could be a full-time job if one had the time. Rheingold, the master student of the potential for and meaning of online communities, quietly runs the big daddy of them all, having brought together a diversity of people whose lives, interests and opinions are shared to an intense and now long-established degree. Perhaps, despite geography and eclectica, they now are more a family than a community.

And along came Stumbleupon. I love Stumbleupon. It takes longer to get to know one's friends in that medium, but the richness is the sharing of links and webpages, the setting up of blogs which can be just for beauty or just to make a strong point. Or both. Or humour. Or whatever. There's about a million Stumblers out there - 200 of them are on my "friend" list and another few hundred are sort of linked, with more to be discovered. The links we send each other, with or without running commentary, keep us busy reading and responding, and they keep us very well informed. We are powerful as a knowledge gathering and sharing entity. And the foundation of friendships thus forged, has a strong cerebral element.

I tend to be sporadic in all my Internet niches - since my other job in that real world involves a lot of writing in its own right. One can get writ out, so to speak.

And there is all the reading. I have to read a lot of communities...Alternet and Huffington, Salon and Wonkette, friends' blogs

MySpace arrived. I never cared for it. Loud and messy. But the young thrived for a while and the music industry found a powerful meeting place.
Facebook has worked better as community. Well, it is more of a network than a community.
But it has been bringing the communities under its wing - so now we Brainstormers and Stumblers and Flickr community people are networked in Facebook, perchance engaged in killer games of Scrabulous.

And from many levels we converge on one.

Wherein, Twitter rears its chirpy face again.
I had played with it early - and could not really see the point. How much information do we want to put out there? Who are we putting it out there for? Who cares?

Oh yes, I know the conspiracy theorists bristle and run for cover. They are not going to be suckered into all this exposure to the marketing giants. They may have a point.

Then again, we are now enlightened enough to be able to look at ourselves. The Internet was evolved with the idea of the free sharing of knowledge. This is the most wholesome concept there is.
The more knowledge, the healthier the world.

I am not sure how much the minutiae of my movements adds to all of this. Do I tell Twitter that I am happy because I am by the sea? Do I tell it that petrol pump calibrations are criminally rigged? Either or both seems to be the way to go.

I am receiving news bulletins from the media and personal snippets from friends and associates. I think it is all good.
But I am not sure how much is enough.
Or how one keeps up with it all.

Oh, dear, there are 64 Stumbles waiting for me....and did I check my email yet?

Big Brothers and little brains.

2008-05-01T08:17:00.005+09:30

Big Brother has started again in Australia and, despite our better judgement, we are all looking in on it and checking out the new housemates.
Once again, it is a celebration of the lowest common denominator - a selection of the most vapid and unpleasant people.

Why do we want to waste time in observing them showing off in front of the cameras, playing drama queen, brandishing ignorance as if it is an achievement, proving how the English language is now completely rooted because they have no goddamn idea of pronouns or tense...?

I suspect it is because we love to have people to hate.

Two days into BB and I want to get half the housemates out of the house. I squirm with loathing and contempt. I want them to suffer. I want them brought down to size.

Perhaps I really want the makers of BB to suffer, too - since they have gradually manipulated a good concept and turned it into trash TV, pandering to a lewd, sub-brain demographic which has never read a newspaper let alone a book.

The producers have made an art form of finding people of that very ilk and promise them celebrity based on exposure of those very qualities. They seek the low, they exploit the low - and the rewards are high.

On so many levels, it is deeply demoralising. A hateful reflection on the values and aspirations of our society.

It certainly brings out the very worst in me.

And still I turn it on.

The Olympic torch debacle

2008-04-18T08:14:00.009+09:30

The Olympic torch relay should be canned.
In the last two Olympics, I recall perceiving it as a jealously-rivalled elitist exercise, a lot of fuss enabling selected people to show off for a moment here or there.

This Olympics, no one knows or cares who are the people getting to show off with a little torch dash. It is all about the Chinese goon guards "protecting" the torch - and, of course, the people protesting China's treatment of Tibet.
What a mess.

China, why can't you let us love you? What on earth are you thinking with the global turnoff you are engendering by sending these highly-trained military thugs around the world in the name of peace and sport? Ugly, ugly, ugly.

If it teaches us one thing, it is that the torch relay was always a grotesque piece of nationalistic overkill.
Let it not be forgotten, it was introduced by none other than Adolf Hitler!

This cartoon, so apt in its glorious ironies, has been doing the email rounds. I think the signature attributes Garison of the Milwaukee Sentinel.

Coorong so wronged

2008-04-07T17:02:00.002+09:30

I saw a t-shirt emblazoned with the message STOLEN WATER GENERATION at Goolwa market on the weekend.
I wish I had bought it.
I am a member of the Stolen Water Generation. We all are, here in South Australia.
And there, right by the market was the sign of the stolen water. The swans were walking in the river. Yes, walking. In fact I walked in the river – quite a long way across dry mud to photograph a group of perplexed-looking ducks and pelicans sitting on an island that did not used to be there.

Whole new opportunistic weeds have flourished in that river mud. Dry earth plants which do not belong amid the thirsty reed beds.

We have watched for months as the lower reaches of the River Murray dried up. We try to make light of it – but deep down an anger is brewing. Things would not be so bad if it was not for our neighbours in Victoria. They are holding back the river water. Now paid off by the Federal Government, billions of dollars, to play fair with their neighbours, Victoria intends to keep its claws on the water supply for a full three more years while it puts in place various irrigation projects to give itself a “food bowl’’.
Meanwhile, next door in South Australia, our ecology continues to descend into critical crisis – possibly, at this stage, irreversible.
The Vics don’t care. The Vics have always had an odd “thing” about taking whatever they could from South Australia – be it events like the Grand Prix or ideas like festivals. Water is just another thing they can “steal”.

Not that Premier Steve Bracks and his people are altogether to blame for the river crisis. There are also the rice and cotton farmers of Queensland and NSW – sucking billions of litres of water from the Darling river basin - the upstream catchment. More lousy neighbours.

Australia should not be growing these crops at all. We are not environmentally suited. Here is the proof – the dry end of the river!

Last time I mentioned the profligate misuse of the national water resources by these farmers, I had some indignant letters from farmers’ wives. They see themselves as battlers scratching a living. The hell they are. Theirs is a recent crop in this country – and a disasterous one. Can’t they see that? They need to grow something environmentally sustainable – something suited to the conditions. To add insult to injury, Aussie rice is not even good rice, in my culinary opinion.

Of course, these farmers pay for water. And the lower reaches of the River Murray – the lakes and the once-magnificent Coorong pay dearly for their entitlement.

Oh, God - thou ever was a forsaker.

2008-02-02T09:38:00.000+10:30

On some days, one can barely bear to read the news.
Today is one such.
The utter, morally-bankrupt act of harnessing mentally-retarded people with bombs, sending them off to a pet market and then detonating them by remote control to kill and multilate countless humans and animals is simply beyond one's comprehension.

If war is repugnant, such acts of war are somewhere so far down the levels of intellectual squalor as to make one wish for the very thing one opposes - retribution. One wishes to put out the lights of those who seek to do such harm - to ensure that they stop doing it.

And they will argue that they have a God who directs their sub-bestial behaviour.
Ah, yes, in God's name.
If it is not one God, it is another.
And one knows it is all just so hopeless.

Time to kick a Vic?

2008-01-30T16:34:00.000+10:30

For some reason the Vics have always had a fairly un-neighbourly attitude towards Adelaide. Indeed, one could say they are simply the pits as neighbours. The F1 pits.
They do border raids to steal our ideas, our events, our talent… They don’t want to share water with us.
And now, out of the blue, they throw insults at us.
Again.

We're a "backwater", eh?

Victoria, where are your manners?

Then again, maybe we should forgive them their boorishness because of their convict background. Were they abused when they were young?

Of course, Opposition Leader Martin Hamilton-Smith does not turn out to be much of a local hero in defending our state against this latest insult from the east.
The SAS superhero wants a bigger boy to defend us for him.
Premier Mike Rann should tell Brumby where to go, says Marty.
At the same time, he says it is all Mike Rann’s fault that Victoria's John Brumby has called us a backwater. Huh?
Buck-passing and finger-pointing all at once?
I, for one, expected better of our Marty.

But I guess he is just upset.
We have to get used to it, Marty.

Adelaide has been the brunt of the east’s limp idea of humour for aeons. It is all rather childish and ignorant – and there is a doubtless a lot of jealousy in much of the ribbing and japing we cop.
Whatever we have, they seem to want it – even our history. I have watched with absolute astonishment as so-called historians in the east simply make up the eastern-oriented “truths” just to escape mentioning South Australia. There is barely an arts administrator left here, so keenly do they steal them - not to mention festivals and car events, food and wine events...

And, as they plunder our wealth of ideas and talent, they have gratuitous digs at us.
It is all very irritating and disappointing from one’s fellow countryfolk.

What can we say?
Surely we would never sink to their level?

Well, I suspect we have to, if we are to be understood.

So, perhaps we should say to Victoria, very politely and in our poshest Adelaide accent:

We may be a backwater but at least we are not water hogs.

Forward this mail, now!

2008-01-13T08:32:00.000+10:30

Who is the tediously irritating idiot who spends their time copying and pasting Internet funnies to dispatch as forwards - ever with a message on the bottom instructing the recipient to forward the mail?

* Send this to the men you know, to warn them about arguments they can avoid if they remember the terminology.
* Send this to all the women you know to give them a good laugh, cause they know it's true.

Now that you've smiled at least once, it's your turn to send this to someone you want to bring a smile to (maybe even a chuckle)...in other words, send it to everyone. We all need to smile every once in a while.

I betcha' you can't resist passing this one on!

*** A SMILE - worth passing along!!!! ***

And then, of course, there are those which come with threats of dire ill fortune if one does not onsend. These are of the ugly spirit of the evil chain letter - nothing less than sheer cruelty to the naive and gullible.
What torment the email must provide for such people - who live in mortal fear if they don't spam their friends and contacts with the latest piece of so-called humour or tear-jerking schmaltz.

I recall sadly the sight of a colleague who recieved a chain mail letter at work some many years ago. I had no idea of what a poor, superstitious, naive woman she was until I saw her run to the photocopier to run off 20 copies of the chain letter, envelope them up and pass them out to everyone else. Poor thing. Instead of being sorry for her, we were amused and mocked her by putting all the chain letters back into her pigeon hole. She then had 20 chain letters, each of which told her to send out 20 chain letters - and we was back at the photocpier in tears.
We realised we had not been funny.

There are people out there who are terrified of threatened bad luck. It eats away and them and dominates their world - until they bring it on.
These poor things need protected.
The rest of us need to be left a-bloody-lone.

And this applies to all funnies.
I love to received an email funny.
If I think it merits it, I may onsend it to a friend or two.
However, this is something I will decide.

I don't need these pesky halfwits telling me what to forward.
It turns me right off forwardikng and, sad to say, it makes me wonder about the friend who forwarded the mail in the first place.

Has the ease of the Internet's communications hset free a plague of ditzes?
Er, yes.

The senders of this nonsense are a plague upon bandwidth.
They are a plague upon intelligence and commonsense.

Scientists with time and money to spare

2007-12-31T09:59:00.000+10:30

Scientists have created a Hebrew bible the size of a grain of sugar.
Why?
Not only have they created this nano bible, they are now working on applications by which they may magnify it 10,000 times so people can look at it displayed on a wall.
Why?

Why shrink it just to enlarge it? Why not leave it the way it was?

Do scientists have nothing better to do?
Are the worlds ills all cured? Is peace achieved? Is the environment healthy?

And what if someone sneezes on the nano bible?

The ugly world of website comment

2007-12-29T10:43:00.000+10:30

How come, as one who adores reading diary blogs, I cannot bring myself to do anything quite so straightforward?
I suppose this is a "comment" blog. I only blog when something gets up my nose.
Six months later, I am still wishing that it was smoke getting up my nose.
How tragic.
Oh, why can't being a non-smoker be easier?

For the last few months, I've been sidetracked into blogging for my newspaper's website.
It is a pretty unrewarding business.
There is a very different demographic going to those commercial sites - and it contains some rather ugly individuals who take the invitation to "comment" on stories as an opportunity to leap, in ill-educated English, into vicious personal attacks.
They misread the copy, misinterpret or perhaps don't read at all, since a few of them simply seem to want to talk about my photograph.
Most common comments are in the vein of "get off your high horse lady - X is a lot better than you are - go back to writing cookery books".

I am sure these people would not speak to one in the flesh in this manner.
It seems that the anonymity of the Internet is an enabler for sour, angry, frustrated and, dare I say it, pretty stupid people to hit rock bottom and be their true selves.
Cowardly, crude and venomous.

So, it is generally an unpleasant experience to log in to moderate the comments on the newspaper blog.

But, my compensation lies in the fact that these uglies are not as anonymous as they may think. Their email addresses may be private from the website readership but they are not concealed from the website administrators. So, guess what? I know who they are!

Oh, my, and wouldn't their employers be appalled at the sort of grotesque things their staff members are sending out online during the course of their working hours?

Aren't they lucky that I am not as vindictive and cruel as they are?

Googling up the dregs

2007-12-11T14:31:00.000+10:30

Somewhere along the line, a mob of tatty exploitationist amateur hour sods has totally screwed up the business of Google search.

These are the phoneys who leapt into what they assumed would be a zillion dollar business of rallying businesses to register on listing sites. Heaven knows what they charged them but, presumably, part of the deal was that they would buy priority listings for the listings with search engines. This all worked. Really badly. It has turned into an alienating mess which makes one shake one's head in despair and go back to the old phone book. Google has been nobbled by business listers.

I was searching for gelato manufacturers today.
Usually, doing a pure information search, one surfs quite neatly into news, web and blog data.
Search for something with a commercial edge and one comes up against the conmen who gave birth to these dire listings.
My suspicion, and please correct me if I am wrong, is that these sods ran around and rustled up the businesses, charged like wounded bulls, set up the sites - then took the money and retired.

All of us who know anything about the Internet know that it is an ongoing concern.
Data must be entered and updated. Websites must be maintained.
Things change. Things go out of date.

This is what happens with these assorted business listings. They are ad hoc. They are half out of date. And a lot of them are so badly programmed that they can't even sort themselves out into what purports to be categories.

These business listings, however, continue to claim priority on the Google spiders. Have they paid for these rankings? I guess so because there they are dominating the search results. One wades through them in pathetic hope that one may find what one seeks.

It is not to be.
One just finds more lists - often with maps. Gee.

Oh yes, the wide boys found themselves are chink of opportunity, made their money and ran - leaving chaos.

I liken it to tag graffiti scrawled all over a very fine and valuable edifice.

The pathetic Liberal diaspora

2007-11-26T23:33:00.000+10:30

In the aftermath of the Ruddslide Ausralian Federal Election, the Liberal Party heirarchy has been running like cowardly dogs, quitting the Party which, five minutes ago, was the avowed answer to all things, the pride of the country, the only path for the future.
It seems that those men of promises did not believe in the source of their promises - their party.
And so the tumbling dominoes of Liberal Party resignations go on - tearful politicians bowing out one after another. To do what?

"To spend more time with my family."

They all want to spend time with their families all of a sudden.
There is an epidemic of men wanting to spend time with their families.
They say they owe their families their time.
On and on...they bleat the same story. If they are ugly in gloating and smug victory, they are contemptible in their spoiled brat defeat. Disgraceful.

But what of the families?
Poor hapless things. Suddenly these soggy, defeated males descend on them to lick their political wounds.
Oh, boy, do these families get the short straw.

As for the politicians. Using their families as a cliched excuse is just another bloody lie. They can't even leave office without a lie.

Maxine!

2007-11-24T21:25:00.000+10:30

The Prime Minister loses his seat.
A female journalist usurps him.
How sweet it is.

An appalling, mean-spirited man replaced by an urbane and emancipated woman.
Maxine McKew replaced John Howard in the seat of Bennelong. A seat Howard has held for 33 years.

History can be beautiful.

This is the stellar moment in what is being described as a "Ruddslide".
A transforming moment for the country.

Faith is restored.

Qantas. Why do you insult us so?

2007-10-24T17:07:00.000+09:30

Qantas is failing Adelaide?
Tourism Commission chief Andrew McEvoy is right. Good on him for sounding off.
It is time Qantas was held to account. But perhaps Mr McEvoy has not gone far enough.
Perhaps Qantas is failing Australia.
It is not just that it is not putting Adelaide on its flight paths. It is that the national carrier has turned into the worst of all aerial cattle trucks. It insults its passengers –we good people who pay its bills and keep it aloft.

It packs us in mercilessly with never a seat to spare – and, worse, with less leg room than one finds elsewhere. Mean, nasty skimpy 31inch seat pitch which means that the moment the person in front reclines, one is pinned in. Trapped. Don’t even think about crossing your knees.

It is a sickening irony that Qantas plays inflight DVT (deep vein thrombosis) exercise videos to passengers who can’t move a muscle. Unless they are in Business or First, of course.

Don’t believe what you hear projected by the marketing spin doctors and travel writers. They all travel Business. They have no idea what hell we real people go through. Of course the executives will be screaming with indignation and saying that I am absolutely wrong in my descriptions. But this is my opinion and not theirs. My experience and not theirs. I’ve done the hard yards - a decade of trans-Pacific flights in Qantas economy. I have watched conditions worsening year by year, fewer cabin crew working harder, tempers fraying. Less oxygen, too, perhaps. I always seem to get sick after one of these flights.

The other trick Qantas has learned is to deny its passengers choice in seat allocation.

There is a mystery to this procedure now. Apparently only uber-platinum frequent flyers can get a decent seat allocation.
The rest of us can consider ourselves lucky if we even get to sit with our travelling companions.

No blame to the staff, poor darlings. It is not their fault they deliver the bad news. And, however frustrated, we passengers must never take it out on them.

Nonetheless, I am regularly dumped at the very back of the plane by the check in staff. It does not matter how many months earlier I have booked or how early I arrive at the airport. The seating hell is the same. Hateful. I have ended up feeling very demoralised because over and over again, I have been denied the one simple request I make – a window seat, please.

What has happened to Qantas’s ability to perform civilized seat allocations? What has happened to our once-cherished, national pride airline?

This year I baulked and flew United where, at least, one has an option for Economy Plus seating which provides a dignity of leg room but, otherwise, conventional economy conditions. Yes, they actually let you choose seating when you book. And, that bit of extra leg room is all one wants on the long hauls. Ahh.

United, however, gives lots more. It is a very pleasant airline, albeit they tell me it has been in a financial crisis for years.

I used to be so proud of Qantas.
It was a symbol of my beloved country, my laid-back and friendly fellow countrymen, our high standards and good quality of life...
The flying kangaroo used to warm the old heart wherever one saw it.
Now, I apologise for Qantas to my international friends. How embarrassing.

Qantas has retained the best safety record, which remains a significant point of pride – but it has cheapened itself with the worst economy cabin conditions and ever-declining passenger service.

So I was not surprised, on an Internet airlines standards page, to read:
Qantas' A330s "make the live sheep boats to the Middle East look positively luxurious (the boats have more room, fewer travellers and more interesting conversation).”

It is downright sad - not just for the airline but for all Australians on whom it reflects.

Bruce Hawker - Labor's man of the soak cycle

2007-10-21T09:12:00.000+09:30

The politicians, now vying for leadership of Australia, tell us that our broadband services cost nine times as much as that of the rest of the world and are 35 times slower. Labor candidate Kevin Rudd promises to amend this and to bring this nation up to speed, literally. Give or take five or so years to do it.
John Howard says Rudd is out of date and we've suddenly gone high speed.
Huh?
You could have fooled me.

This country is disadvantaged by its small population and large areas in issues such as the Internet. However, it really can't brag.
It has been slow to clue up from the word go - treating the Internet with absurd suspicion, unwilling to accept its global potency.
Right now there is a spin doctor called Bruce Hawker who is out there telling the country that "the internet is very much in its infancy"! The only value of YouTube and viral communications is that the mainstream media picks it up.
Huh?
Where has he been?

How embarrassing for a man to tout himself as a political strategist and be so painfully out of touch.
It has taken a long time for the mainstream media to clue up to the vast interactive population on the Internet. I know. I have tried to jog mainstream media for years and years - finding that they were only interested in stories which made the Internet into some sort of evil bogeyman.
This, of course, because mainstream media was frightened of the Internet. To its interests, the Internet was a bogeyman - a growing rival for consumer attention.
And so the scare stories revved up over the years and there was never anything positive to be said about the Internet.
And the real estate world moved online.
And the travel world moved online.
The marketplace was not as slow as the mainstream media. To hell with the bogeyman. It saw the consumers online en masse.
Financial institutions went online...everything has followed the people out into their anarchical virtual world of free speech.
Finally, the mainstream media realised that it had to bite the bullet, albeit reluctantly, and compete for an online market. If you can't beat 'em, join 'em.

So now the only person who seems to think the Internet is some sort of newly-spawned amateur hour is one Bruce Hawker.
Spin doctor? I don't think so. Soak Cycle is more like it.
Let me tell you Mr Hawker, the mainstream media picks up YouTube and blogs and internet activities because they are news. If the mainstream want to stay up with what is happening, it has to go online and be online. You could have called the Internet an infant a decade ago. But to do so in 2007 just shows how painfully out of touch you are.

God help Labor for employing you as an advisor.

Oh dear.

Downer with schools

2007-09-25T07:15:00.000+09:30

"Why this interest in history? Why this wish to reawaken the past?"

This question was asked on Fox News this morning. Now, of all people, I of course know that journalists fare well to ask the seemingly stupid question. It forces subjects to explain and articulate and it avoids presumptions.

But this question is revelatory.
It explains something of the contemporary attitude towards history - of closing doors on it and moving relentlessly, mindlessly forward. History is barely taught in schools these days. Somewhere along the line it was decided the history was hard, it was dry, and students could be alienated if they had to remember dates.

It was one of the victims of the dumbing down of education.

There was a spelling test recently which was spectacularly failed by Australian teachers. Why? Because they don't read.

That is ironic in this time when text has been given vigorous rebirth on this medium.

One may blame the spoon-feeding of television for the declines in basic education.

But the real culprit is, of all things, education and gender equality.
Teaching no longer the only career for many intelligent women. They can do whatever they want - and they do. Given the choices, however, the brilliant women who once dominated school education now take careers in the subjects they once taught. They are historians rather than history teachers, mathematicians rather than maths teachers...

Cultural progress has resulted in cultural decline.

Non-smoker mania

2007-09-21T12:14:00.000+09:30

It is now 15 weeks since “C-Day” – the day I stopped smoking cigarettes.
Why don’t I feel good?
If I dare to complain about the almost primal cravings which continue to grip me, I am told by my “supportive” friends and family that I should be over it.
No one has ever taken so long, my husband said. It should be right out of your body now.

Well, I have no idea about anyone else and I had no idea I was on some sort of clock.

Then again, I know I am no longer allowed to wear the patches because the time of patches has run out.
I am not sure how helpful they were, anyway. The cravings were there with the patches and without the patches.
I am still not just craving but suffering these deep thirst-like sensations.
I have no social trigger. I don’t want a cigarette because someone else is smoking. I don’t want a cigarette because I have had a meal or I am on the phone or I am having a glass of wine. The problem I suffer is disassociated from activities.
It comes from within my body. It is a physical thing, not an issue of habit or emotional crutch.
Then again, my emotional wellbeing is, well, not well.
I continue to be on some sort of razor’s edge. There is an undercurrent of deep anger running through me. Odd things tip me right over the edge. I feel as if I am surrounded by extremely stupid people. An example.
I was at a formal function – an elegant brunch. We were about ten to the table with platters propped aloft in the centres of each table – one loaded with pastries and the other with fruit. The food just stayed there as the people settled in, as the speeches took place, as the entertainments were presented…It stayed until I made a move. When scones were delivered to the table, well the waitress was an idiot in that she put the two platters of scones together on one side of the table – the furthest, so far as I was concerned. And, of course, none of the women would touch them. The sat there pretending there were no fresh scones right in front of them. I waited for someone over there to make a move. But they sat about like idiot dumplings. I looked at them and, yes, it was dumplings they resembled. Big blobs of dough. Poor socially inept women awed by the occasion. And I knew it was up to me again to get that bloody food moving around the table. Despite the fact that I was absolutely furthest away from it. And I hated those poor, pretentious women. I hated them!!! I roiled and boiled with my fury. I am still pissed off with them, whoever they were.
This just ain’t like me!
It feels weird. Uncomfortable. Exhausting.
There is this whole emotional burden going on – a manic current.
Prod me and I erupt. Niggle me and I pop. And is that me talking, talking, talking? Why am I talking so bloody much? I want me to shut up. Why do I have to talk so much? Why do people keep asking me things and wanting more than I can give?

Oddly, I can do rather well on my own. Walking alone through the city, I am overcome by the loveliness of things and people around me. There are feelings that it is all just so beautiful. It is almost euphoria.
And I can ride waves of love for those I love – or even strangers.
I can be contented with my own thoughts…

Then some idiot sets me off, then that draining craving discomfort surges up through my body – that thirst-like thing.
And I’m nutty again.
This is all very disturbing.
My whole being is out of kilter.

Nice chat, by George.

2007-09-19T22:34:00.000+09:30

George Oates, one of the founders of Flickr, came to the office for a chat today. What a treat.
George is an Adelaide girl – home visiting her decidedly arty parents before going off to give important speeches on international web development in Sydney and then Spain.
Ours was the classic meeting of netizens.
She waved to me as she came in the newspaper’s revolving doors. I knew instantly who she was but wondered how she recognised me. I knew her because I had researched her online. I had visited her Flickr pages and her blog and assorted articles about her. What I had not anticipated was that she would do the same to me. So there we were, strangers confidently waving in recognition.
Photographer Mark Brake bought us both coffees and we sat in the purple plush chairs of in the grand atrium foyer of Sir Keith Murdoch House here and, well, chatted. I tried to “interview” George. But it is an odd thing. If one takes to one’s subject, it becomes more chat than interrogation. And, anyway, George turned out to be quite guarded on any half controversial issue regarding Flickr. It did not matter from a news point of view because whichever really important issue we may have plumbed – content filters and net neutrality, for example – would have taken more words to articulate than there is space provided in the news pages. News stories are short and tight. They are no place for extrapolation.

But I learned a number of interesting things about George Oates.
She is the classic unspoiled Aussie. She may have been part of the receiving end of a $35 million corporate buy from Yahoo, but there is not a ticket on her. She said yes, she had a few shares in the company and of course, the shares were bought out. I t was just “jam”. Plain good luck. She spends her life pinching herself at the wonder of it all, she said.
And having the same sort of fun she always had.
The great expression of her new-found affluence in the cultured high life of San Francisco would seem to be bacon parties. She explained the concept of wrapping bacon around all manner of foods and cooking the resulting bundle on her fancy BBQ, or as the Americans call it, “grill”. Anyone who had been once to one of her bacon parties was committed to come to the next one. That was the only rule of George’s bacon parties.
There ya go. Is that eccentric geek or what?

What I did not know about George Oates was that, after dropping out of two universities because she is “not the studying kind”, she turned up as a “red shirt” at Ngapartji Multimedia Centre in 1996. I gave speeches at Ngapartji. I was on the board at Ngapartji. I remember the red shirts well, but I do not recall George in particular. I wish I did. What a dividend she turns out to be of that now-defunct brave enterprise. It did not give her the training she now uses but it did give her the connections and enough HTML to springboard out into more serious software and onwards through the game that didn't to the photo sharing application that did.

The de rigeur question of the day was her take on the backward nature of Australia's broadband. It is one of the slowest in the world - definitely the slowest in the developed world. She made the right noises of disdain. And we talked some of censorship and how one defines porn and offensive material. George laughs at the misconception of so many that the admins of Flickr are sitting about waiting to pounce on unacceptable material. "We're not arbiters. We're stweards," she said. She was ready to give the concept of "unacceptable" a bit of dissection. It's all deeply moot. But the revelation was that the Flickr community was the decisive factor in judging Flickr content. "They sort things out," said George.

And the old Flickr rule of "don't be creepy" remained surprisingly effective.

The Flickr International issues were another kettle of fish, one that George really didn't want to explore for the mainstream media. She gave it a cautious shot, explaining that different countries had different laws and different filtering systems. One country may not necessarily be able to see content available to another country.
Different laws on content and copyright in different countries may be a headache on one hand but an advantage, perhaps, in the long run - when it came to keeping the liberty of the net alive. After all, said George, people can store data in different places and they can move date. The up side of this website mobility was the difficulty of over-regulating the net and perhaps it would be the net's salvation. We can only hope.

On YouTube George was generous spirited. She said she saw it as a vehicle for people to talk to and see each other. It expressed the voyeur in all of us. YouTube may be burdened with copyright issues from Disney and its ilk but, at the same time it was demonstrated a shift of content away from Disney and its ilk - the people producing their own content.

There are all sorts of new things afoot at Flickr. It continues to evolve and George sees immense promise in metadata - and is keen to play with time sliders. The way in which in just four years Flickr has shown itself to be such a brilliant recorder of history has rather fired her. Indeed, she is keen to know what the academics are finding interesting about Flickr and what they are studying. Some people already are doing their PhDs on the photo sharing phenomenon.

There are so many facets. George pointed out the "life cycle" she had observed among Flickr users. After posting humble first pix of family or friends, their subsequent photos would show greater effort with light, fancy backlit pictures, then they would have gone out and bought a Canon and started shooting macros and doing fashion shots - and the next thing you know they were working as wedding photographers.

There were myriad other facets of Flickr I'd have liked to explore but we were in the usual newspaper rush. The 'tog had to get his pix in - for which he wanted to walk George out in the city streets.

So I produced my camera to get my Flickr pic of George and she produced her camera to get her Flickr pic of me.

And, heavens above, the queen of digital photo sharing uses an old-fashioned film camera.

The obscene power of tradesmen

2007-09-10T08:15:00.000+09:30

The rich think they hold the power.
Once it was so.
These days, it is the tradesmen who hold the power.
It does not matter how rich you are, if a tradesman refuses to come and install your airconditioner or hot water service, then you have to go without. Until they are ready to give you some of their time, you are at their mercy.
Tradesmen can decide if you are to be cool in the heatwave or if you are going to have mud instead of cement in the drive, if your leaky roof keeps dripping, if your dishwasher is fixable, if you are going to get sharp TV reception, a floor polished or a carpet laid, a window repaired or replaced, a door fitted...
It is all done on their time, not yours.
Forget waiting for a doctor's appointment.
Doctors are a joy of accessibility compared to tradesmen.

How did this all come about. How did the tables turn so that tradesmen are the most powerful members of society?

Once upon a time, they were something of a lowly class -"blue collar" or "working class".
The management classes and professionals were the smug middle with the dynastic wealth and highly educated scoring "upper". Of course, these classes still were dependent upon the tradesmen. But, if one recalls the past of one's youth, not to mention the past as recorded in literature, they were a cap-tipping deferential class which sought to please those who employed them.

This has changed.
They could not give a damn whether you are pleased or not. They are indifferent as to how long they keep you waiting. They treat those who seek to use their services with sublime contempt - sometimes not bothering to turn up at all.
Certainly they are indifferent to returning phone calls.
What they are calling is the tune.

Why is this?
Perhaps because tradesmen are now in short supply.
The old apprentice traditions fizzled somewhere along the way. Meanwhile, families in the trades wanted something better for their children - university educations.

Even in trade schools, the traditional trades are out of fashion. Kids would rather study computer programming than plumbing.
Who leaves school saying they want to follow their dad into plumbing? In a world where the class system has disintegrated, there is no longer a sense of fraternity in the trades.

The sort of people entering the trades are doing so perhaps grudgingly.
Hence their resentment of the people for whom they are then to work. Well, contempt really.
Tradesmen can name their price. On top of this, they can choose simply not to turn up to do the job.
They don't have to worry about losing business because they know that they are as rare as hen's teeth and they will never run out of work. There is a world of poeple prepared to pay whatever they ask, prepared to beg them to do a job, prepared to wait on their convenience...

Why am I pondering all this?
Well, I may have moved house over a month ago had it not been for the tradesmen who have not turned up, who have put off jobs, who have not been accountable...
I am still waiting. I am not moved.

Oh yes, instead of being angry, I am just a grovelling supplicant, like everyone else.
One can't afford to be impatient with a tradesman let alone rude. They are in control. They are masters of our destiny. They might not be the upper class but they have the upper hand.

Fanks for the Formaldehyde

2007-08-20T20:12:00.000+09:30

Here we go again.
As expected.
The perfidy of Chinese manufacturers hits the headlines, again, and endangers consumers, again.
Formaldehyde in clothing. In children's clothing. Children of the west seem seriously targeted by the Chinese.
Chinese labels lie. "Low flame" labels on children's garments turn out to be sheer folly. The clothes catch fire. Two New Zealand children have been burned, so far.
Then there are the rashes being suffered by children wearing clothes which are drenched in formaldehyde - 900 times the maximum level deemed tolerable.
They are embalmed clothes, for heaven's sake - soaked in embalming fluid.
Embalmed pyjamas. Embalmed trousers. It's all a bit surreal.
Formaldehyde might be good at providing a permanent press in fabrics but it is permanent stress in the living human body. Carcinogenic, even.
Meanwhile, Indonesia has been discovering formaldehyde-tainted confectionery from China. Sweets! Candy!
This all comes on top of the lead paint on toys causing the greatest toy recall in history, the poisons in cough syrup, petfood...
It is hard to see this as error, as the blunders of an emerging capitalist society. Give us a break. The Chinese are not stupid people.
No, looking at the expanding scale of insidious forms of mass poisoning, it is all starting to look like terrorism.

Oh, Google, you let me down.

2007-08-02T08:10:00.000+09:30

How to lose faith in Google.
Just try popping in on its Mountain View HQ in California. If you loved Google before, you will have the old blood running cold afterwards.
I guess I was just naive to think I could swing past the Google building and take a couple of photos.
Well, I'd seen the stunning Yahoo building towering triumphantly out there in Silicon Valley and I had taken a zillion photos of the Oracle building - probably the most elegant and superior high tech establishment in the country, if you ask me. Its sleek blue cylindrical glass towers reach around a lake where a fountain plays in cheerful circles. It is a huge complex and, if there is security, it is pretty low-key.
Google, on the other hand, is the great paranoia security hell.
You can't even drive up the driveway. Security guards stop you and tell you that you will be trespassing if you cross the line into the staff carpark."The campus is private land", one told me when I asked if I could pop in and take some photos of the building.

Yes, we're talking a building here. Just a couple of exterior shots.
I wasn't asking for a the latest search secrets or even a guided tour. I was not trying to find the "Visitor Lobby" marked on the exterior signpost or to see if I could purchase a Google cap, although, had things worked out that way, certainly would have left the place wearing a Google cap, if there is such a thing.
But, as it happened, I was asking just to take a quick snap of the entrance to the building.

I was simply told that I was not permitted to take photographs anywhere on the property.
"You can go to the public field and take a photo from there," he said. "That is public".
Oddly, the field had a sign in the middle of it saying "Closed for Repairs". This had struck me as the funniest sign I had ever seen in a field. Not that it would have stopped me, had there been a way to get to the field.
The problem was that there was no where to park. Even to get to the neighbouring field.

You can't stop here,' the security guard insisted.
"But the whole parking lane right down the road has banned parking," I said.
It was not the security man's problem. All he had to do was to make absolutely sure that people like me did not go anywhere near the Google building. Even if we have identified ourselves and explained our humble mission.

It was an odd thing, the parking ban in the street. Amphitheatre Drive has only a few buildings on it - large outfits on huge chunks of real estate. They are on one side of the road only. Opposite is wasteland with a spectacular view of the mountains.
There is what looks like a parking lane along one side of the street - but it was entirely roped off and dotted with witches hats and signs insisting that there would be no parking. This covered the road for hundreds of yards both before and after the Google property. Half a mile or more. There was even a police car stationed at one point. This was serious no parking.
Apparently, some way further down is an Amphitheatre - for which parking is discouraged on the road to protect the businesses...the one or two of them on their vast acreages.

It surprised me that Google had no visitor parking lot....in fact, a lot of things were surprising me.

What happened was that I suddenly felt my faith in and loyalty towards Google shrivelling within me.
Suddenly the negative comments about the wicked Google empire started to make sense.
Only a world with something to hide would hide.
Paranoia belongs to people with agendas.

I felt like a complete idiot.
A few months ago I had written a vast weekend magazine spread on Google - its wonderful rise and the fair and emancipated way it treated its employees and kept the spirits up. How Google had ethics as well as the best staff conditions in the world.
My boss read my piece and said that he did not believe Google was wonderful at all, that I had been conned by Google propaganda.
I was furious. Google has had a few problems - but, as one who hooked straight into the search engine when it evolved, as one who was thrilled to be an early starter with Gmail, as one who looks for the changes in the home page and touts the brilliance of the search algorithm, I was confident in my judgements. I could mention legal issues on the Google record, I told the boss, but I simply would not turn my article into any form of Google-bashing. I genuinely admired Google and I wanted the article to reflect this. It went to print - and it did.

Now I feel two inches tall.
The boss was right.
Google is not quite what we have assumed. Google has a friendly homepage but an unfriendly interface.

Google will not let its fans take a photograph.
Not just a fan, but a card-carrying visiting journalist from overseas. I had mentioned to the guard that I was an Internet writer from Australia - "just want to take a picture".

But the guards were there with rules to follow. Keep everyone out except employees.

OK Google. I got the message. I got more than the message.
I am as offended and alienated as you intended me to be.

I now will not laugh at those who say that you are moving towards becoming the new Microsoft, the evil empire.
Perhaps you now are too powerful.
Perhaps we do need to be concerned.

Beware the media beatup

2007-07-25T11:57:00.001+09:30

A few months in the USA and I am not sure if I am quaking in neurotic psychosomatics or I am simply shivering with resentment.

Day in and and day out, the US media warns us of things which are just about to do us lethal damage. There are new poisons in common foods, terrible perils in simple activities, what was good for us yesterday is dangerous today...

Let's see. What's new this week? Tomatoes that were good for you are now not good for you? Sunscreen that was safe is now hazardous. Sun that was hazardous is now life-giving. Soda drinks are bad for your heart...

The American consumer market dies a zillion little deaths every day - thanks to the mass media.

Truth is that most of these health scare stories are insubstantial with only a slim margin of truth. They are the beat ups of the desperate news media. Media sets itself rules. It will have a health story every day - whether or not there is a valid health story around.

The constant browbeating of the trusting and not profoundly informed masses empowers the media - and also its important supporters, the pharmaceultial companies.

The pharmaceutial companies bombard the public with ads for drugs while the news media bombards the people with illnesses.

Is there a pattern here?

Sure thing.

NowPublic

Organ donation, a soft tissue issue.

2007-07-20T05:21:00.000+09:30

Being an enthusiastic supporter of the power of the Blogsphere to make a difference as the brilliant, international pressure group, I embarrass myself by discovering that I am a day late in raising the flag for organ donors.
It is a cause which merits global attention. The Australian style is simply to sign up on one's driver's license. One would imagine, therefore that there are lots of donors registered. Yet, Australia has one of the lowest rates of donors in the developed world. This turns out to be because the words "Organ Donor" on your driver's license don't actually mean a damned thing. It is a "statement of intent" but it will not make you an organ donor. It remains an issue for next of kin to decide.
If Australians want to be organ donors, they have to go to a bit more trouble. They have to put themselves on a special register and carry a separate card. Another piece of bloody plastic in the wallet - because the driver's license, which is good enough for most ID requirements and is generally deemed the most pivotal personal document after the passport, is not good enough to be an organ donor card. Huh?
Is your head spinning? Mine is.
Well, Australia celebrated a lovely organ donors' week earlier in the year. Lots of nice people signed up. There are almost a million donors, 924,387, when last I checked. In a country of 21 million, I guess that makes one donor for every 21. I would not have thought it was a bad rate. But, of course, the donors have to be dead to be useful.

Or not. There are some nasty, scary stories out there because of which some people carry Organ Retainer cards.
Just to be fair to the other side of the story.
The tales of black market in human organs may not be myths. Certainly, there are some alarming stories from China, yes, China again, about harvesting organs from Falun Gong prisoners. There are tales of donor bodies left stripped, an abandoned gutted carcas on the slab, while the medics rush around saving lives with the harvested organs and tissues.
Those stories are a bit sad.
It is not perfect business and nor is it a perfect world.

But those of us who choose to do a bit of good, to give a second chance to the sick by dedicating our used bits to their rebirth, should make our intention crystal clear - especially to our next of kin.

...the China saga again

2007-07-12T22:03:00.000+09:30

The perfidious China saga goes on and on. At least the Government is clamping down, albeit on what may be a bottomless pit of cynical corruption. The latest lethal scandal is of polluted drugs prescribed to children with leukemia. Injections of Chinese methotrexate have caused pain and difficulty in walking in young leukemia patients - as if they are not suffering enough already!
Meanwhile, there are more recalls of dangerous Chinese goods - jewellery which could cause lead poisoning, magnetic toys which are choking hazards...
The shock and resulting pressure emerging from the West would seem to have rattled Chinese authorities - so much so that they punished their bribe-taking food and drug safety chief by killing him.
Now the push is on to show the West that everything is just A-OK, fine and dandy for the Olympics. As AP's Audra Ang reports:

Confidence in the safety of Chinese exports has severely waned internationally, as the list of products found tainted with dangerous levels of toxins and chemicals grows longer by the day.

China has taken significant steps in recent days to clean up its dubious product safety record, including executing the former head of its drug regulation agency for taking bribes and banning the use of a chemical found in antifreeze in the production of toothpaste.

In a report aired Wednesday night, China Central Television showed how a bun maker in a district in Beijing used cardboard picked off the street as filling for his product.

The undercover investigation report showed how squares of cardboard were first soaked to a pulp in a plastic basin of caustic soda — a chemical base commonly used in manufacturing paper and soap — then chopped into tiny morsels with a cleaver. Fatty pork and powdered seasoning were stirred in and minutes later, steaming buns were shown on screen.

Yum. Won't the Olympic athletes love it.
Well, to its credit, the Chinese government has installed a panel to screen products and will ban offending manufacturers from production for three years. But is the problem already too big and out of control? This is more than a distinct possibility.

American abuse of 9/11

2007-07-11T22:56:00.000+09:30

Because of 9/11, I am no longer allowed to have a "Welcome" mat at the door.

I was informed of this yesterday by the apartment complex manager after an unwelcome note was dropped on the "Welcome" mat requesting that said mat be removed as a safety measure. It has sat there safely for nearly nine years.

How is 9/11 a reason for people not to have Welcome mats?
Good question.

The answer is that 9/11 has become the obstructionist excuse for anything and everything in the USA. The idea is that there is no come-back if 9/11 is in the equation - even if it is not in the equation. 9/11 was such an appalling atrocity that it holds a position of high reverence, the most sacred of all cows...it cannot be challenged.

So I have removed my beautiful "Welcome" mat because of 9/11.
The great post-9/11 doormat ban of 2007 will make the world a safer place.

Who could have imagined that those acts of terrorism in 2001 would produce such ugly and bizarre dividends? Terrorists don't have to move a finger to castrate American culture. Americans are doing it in their name. Wouldn't Osama Bin Laden be amazed?

Put the words 9/11 behind it, and you can demand anything.

So it comes to pass that, after nine years, my slimline traditional American "Welcome" mat is a threat.

I am not an American so I dared to challenge the apartment complex manager when he made this claim. He said it was as an upshot of 9/11 that firemen needed clear, doormat-less access regulations. I don't remember hearing anything about doormats providing obstructions to rescue workers in the Twin Towers. This was the first time I had heard door mats and 9/11 mentioned in the same sentence. I simply did not believe him. Perhaps standard fire regulations are being toughened up, but not as a consequence of 9/11. They had fire regulations long before 9/11.

The apartment complex manager had quite a handful with this Aussie who simply would not take 9/11 as a rationale for the banning of the delightful American welcome tradition. I felt almost sorry for him. Then again, I am keen to discourage people for this sort of gratuitous exploitation of the 9/11. It is cheap and disrespectful.

The saddest part in this context is that it is gutting the country of that which is most sweetly and endearingly American.

Dainty yet hardy "Welcome" mats are a big American tradition, along with floral door wreaths and American flags. When first I came here, I was charmed by the warm, friendly spirit of these domestic statements. I was not quite ready for the door wreath or the flag, but I loved the vivid and welcoming "Welcome" mats and went off to reciprocate the good spirit with a mat of my own.

Nine years later, the apartment complex population has changed. There are fewer mature Americans here and more student sharers and foreigners. So one no longer sees these mats at every door. In fact mine is one of the last in our building. Well, it was. There are none now. A delightful American tradition is dying - perhaps in the name of fire safety but certainly not in the name of 9/11.

Punishments of non-smoking

2007-07-10T22:45:00.000+09:30

For those who so kindly ask how the non-smoking is going, I will now share.
It is not good.
What is with these nicotine patches which are supposed to help?
Is there any nicotine in them? At no stage have they released me from the clutches of the cravings. All they have done is give me ugly red rashes surrounded by glue frames which are the devil to wash off. Perhaps the itching of the patch spots is supposed to distract one from the urge to smoke? One is so busy scratching one does not have a hand for a fag?
I have gone without cigarettes for five weeks now.
It is strictly one-day-at-a-time - still!
It seems to get harder rather than easier.
I am at the stage of thinking that the whole thing is just plain stupid and I should really just relax and have a cigarette. Oh, what a relief that would be.
My husband was tender and supportive for the first week or two. But I suspect that he thinks that five weeks without cigarettes means that his wife is now a non-smoker and out of the woods. To be requiring special considerations over a month later reeks of exploitation. Surely it is not logical that she is in deeper water now that she was in the first few weeks?
Well, she is. She is tired of trying. She is tired of this clawing, wrenching, draining need endlessly welling up through her body. She is tired of being gung ho about it. She is frightened of compensatory eating - which does not work, anyway. It just keeps one distracted. It does not take away the cravings. It triggers another one - for a post-snack cigarette.

Stress levels could not be greater. We are moving. Upheaval - not just now, but for a very long time. Now is the time of sorting and counting the accumulations of nine years living in the USA, writing an inventory for the insurance and shippers and getting our world ready to be packed up and freighted off to Australia. We have to defend ourselves against the prospect of Australian duty people who will want us to prove that we have owned our stuff for more than six months. Why did I not keep receipts for everything? Does anyone actually do that? What of the family stuff which my husband inherited? What of gifts? Should friends give receipts with their wedding, Christmas and birthday gifts just in case the recipient moves country?
Of course, I would be one of those people who has difficulty throwing things out. If I have a pair of jeans which proved a bit coarse on the skin, a bit tight or a bit loose, I put them away "in case". It is a guilt and remorse thing for having managed to leave a shop with something less than perfection, to have been fooled by the retailer, to have failed as a shopper....The items may grow to be years old, but they sit there pristine and loathed but relentlessly kept as an act of embarrassment offset by the eternal hope of "you never know, they may come in handy".

The recognition of this syndrome, the unraveling of the cupboards and wardrobes, is simply making me grouchy. The prospect of travel is doing much the same. There is no looking forward to anything - since there are no cigarettes in the plans.
Did I mention that this is the pits?

China is not our friend

2007-06-29T03:41:00.000+09:30

If the people with extremely high IQs in China outnumber the population of the USA, how does it come that Chinese manufacturers are so damned stupid?

I am sickened by the endlessly unfolding saga of Chinese manufacturing corruption.
I am sick of writing about it - but I can't let go, since it is up to us in the Blogsphere to maintain the rage and propagate the message which is - boycott all things Chinese, including the bloody Olympics.

The Chinese must be made to realise that its corporate behavior has been internationally unacceptable.

OK, action is being taken in China. Factories are being closed down, they say.
BUT, the breadth of the criminal activity is only beginning to be uncovered.

Now we discover that people all over the world have been brushing their teeth with antifreeze.
Hundreds of thousands of people. Old folk in old folks' homes, for instance. All those in institutions wherein cheap generic products are supplied.. And, we are not sure who else and what else. Yet.

Now this, from today's Boston Herald.

Also Wednesday, Beijing police raided a village where live pigs were force-fed wastewater to boost their weight before slaughter, state media reported.
Plastic pipes had been forced down the pigs’ throats and villagers had pumped each 220-pound pig with 44 pounds of wastewater, the Beijing Morning Post reported Thursday.
Paperwork showed the pigs were headed for one of Beijing’s main slaughterhouses and stamps on their ears indicated that they already had been through quarantine and inspection, the paper said. Suspects escaped during the raid and no arrests were made, it said.
Earlier this week, inspectors announced they had closed 180 food factories in China in the first half of this year and seized tons of candy, pickles, crackers and seafood tainted with formaldehyde, illegal dyes and industrial wax.
"These are not isolated cases," Han Yi, an official with Wei’s quality administration, was quoted as saying in Wednesday’s state-run China Daily newspaper.
Han’s admission was significant because the agency has said in the past that safety violations were the work of a few rogue operators _ a claim aimed at protecting China’s billions of dollars of food exports.

The blood runs cold.

Just pop onto the Made in China directory to see how deeply exposed we are to the vast range of products being manufactured and exported by that populous nation.

Then on this technology site which reports on tainted dietary supplements, fake Chinese medicines and, for heaven's sake, lipsticks containing the carcinogenic Sudan red dye.

I would say that we can trust nothing bearing the words "Made In China" but, terrifyingly, some of the cheat products don't even reveal their origin.
We are in trouble.

Shame, China, shame!!!

Media screws the message

2007-06-28T22:37:00.000+09:30

One thing I find deeply irritating in my beloved America is the media's preoccupation with health scares. The old control-by-fear policy seems aggressively ubiquitous in this country. There are fresh scares every day - and endless marketing of drugs to either deal with or add to the scares.

Today a research finding on antidepressants and pregnancy has hit the media - with absurd results.

From the Los Angeles Times we get reportage headlined "Study shows antidepressants increase birth defects" with a story whipping up worry about pregnancy and depression treatment.
From the Associated Press comes a report headlined "Antidepressants pose low birth defect risk".

As one who reads two papers in the mornings, I reeled when I found these conflicting treatments of the same report. The AP report was carried in the Boston Globe, the other in the Nashua Telegaph. AP's was a much shorter report and it avoided the hysteria-raising of the Californian counterpart. How could this be?

Editorial sensationalist policy versus dispassionate reportage?
You can bet your bottom dollar on it.

China Redux

2007-06-27T10:37:00.000+09:30

Oh, no, it goes on. Now it is tyres or, for Americans, tires. Chinese manufacturers just happen to have left off a certain safety feature. Recall, recall!

The China problem escalates

2007-06-21T05:36:00.000+09:30

I feel another burst of China-bashing coming on.
It has been building up for a week along with the reports of China providing the world with toys covered in lead-laced paint. Toxic Thomas the Tank Engine? This could be seen to imply a whole generation of brain-damaged boys.

For someone who has always loved the Chinese people, this growing saga of perfidy from China is as heartbreaking as it is enraging.

What are they thinking? Is it greed or expediency that has an era of Chinese companies sending poisons to the world?
It certainly is not stupidity. The Chinese are not stupid. Therefor it is the most wicked and duplicitous greed which is rampant in modern China - industries all over the country substituting cheap toxins for the proper ingredients in the goods they purport to manufacture.
Shame, China, shame!!

This phenomenon is out of control. It is ongoing, consciously masked by hierarchies of of Chinese businessmen as they pocket the profits.
The New York Times reported vividly on the obfuscations placed in front of the US Food & Drug Administration as it sought to find the source of the diethylene glycol which has been poisoning children in fever medicines - killing children, for heaven's sake!
The Chinese subsituted antifreeze for glycerine.

I have written about this before, of course.
I reiterate because of the new crisis with lead paints on children's toys. Yes, again the victims are children.
Thomas the Tank Engine has been painted lead red. Millions of Thomas the Tank Engines!! Toys children often put into their mouths. Everyone has known for decades that paint with lead content is ferociously dangerous to children. Don't tell me the Chinese never caught up on the news.

Of course the Western passion for economic rationalism bears responsibility here, too - and the West should not be off the hook just because China has been the culprit.

Bottom line is that it is all about outsourcing.
Everything is made in China these days - cheap products made, supposedly, to the specifications of the ordering companies.
Cheap goods from China are the secret to much wealth among Western companies, just as they are creating new wealth for Chinese companies.

It could be a comfortable arrangement but the Chinese are cheating. They are in a hurry to catch up with Western affluence and any short-cut will do.

Who knows what other short-cuts are being taken?
These crimes may be just the tip of an iceberg of manufacturing corruption.
Already, with the Chinese melamine which has been used in lethal animal food and the diethylene glycol used cough medicines and toothpaste are all over the world as bulk chemicals ready to be used for who knows what!

The Chinese have created a consumer mine field in the West and we must all now beware. We must see the words "Made in China" as an alarm, a danger signal. For our own wellbeing, we must not buy Chinese goods. And we must keep on and on and on making a fuss until we can force our own corporations to cancel orders and stand up for the West.
Even if it means we have to pay more for things.

Toughing it out

2007-06-13T02:19:00.000+09:30

Blogging has taken a back seat while this blogger struggles with self-deprivation.
Being at the computer is a powerful smoking cue in my life - so I have been prowling about it rather than spending time on it. This means that I am desperately behind. And it also means that in doing without one thing I love and depend upon, I am also having to step back from the other thing I most love and depend upon.
It is tough.
I can't believe that the patches are really helping. The cigarette cravings come at all the usual moments and they are intense - rather like a desperate thirst.
They come from some deep visceral source, rising up to make a million receptors strain and reach for the soothing comfort of the cigarette, the civilized rituals, relief.
Only smokers known the calming pleasure tobacco delivers.
Only smokers appreciate the way tobacco can focus the mind and power the productivity.
It is extremely sad and mean that it has become the great danger - the most maligned of activities. Beer-swilling men who fall down dead drunk after beating their children and raping their wives are less criticised than smokers. Alcoholics are nurtured by society, given sympathy and treated as people who have a sickness. It is never their fault. Not even the massive collateral damage left in their booze-stewed wake.
But smokers?
The grotesque manner in which society has treated smokers is one of the things which has made me resist giving up. So repulsed am I by the behaviour of the Australian anti-smoking lobby that I do not wish to be associated with them - even in the business of not smoking.
They are self-righteous bullies who have blackmailed their way into sanction of society - inflicting their ugliness not only on smokers but on everyone. Look what they have been doing by way of shock tactic graphic advertising in Australia?

The medical grotesqueries they expose on television and cigarette packets is a form of violent pornography. It is driven not by a sense of being helpful towards smokers but by spite.
The Americans handle the smoking messages much better than the Australians. Their television ads are suggestive, warm, positive, encouraging... They don't threaten or criticise. They hold out a hand.

And, as I give up smoking, I make it quite clear that those crass and shameful graphic Australian messages bore absolutely no influence. Rather, I had to be on the other side of the world, far away from the ugly Australian anti-smoking campaigners, to be able to undertake the battle. The American hand of kindness has quietly worked.

Ah, but the American advertising industry is way more sophisticated than Australia's.
Here, in the land of Vance Packard and Marshall McLuhan, advertising is an art form.

Australia never quite got the media message about the media message. Gawd, I dread getting back to the cheap crap they call television advertising in Australia. It's nothing more than a talent-free con job. And, giving the advertising industry low-lifes lots of money from the anti-smoking lobby, they have come up trumps with a truly appalling job.
The campaign is a failure. It has not worked. It is a disgrace. It is a national embarrassment.

So I had better succeed in giving up smoking here in America because I know that once back in Australia, there were be only the negativity of that squalid mob in my face.

How the hell did we spawn such malicious marketing inferiority!

The Paris Hilton phenomenon

2007-06-09T23:57:00.000+09:30

The world has ground to a halt in the USA. I have surfed and surfed the TV news channels and there is only one subject being reported - being reported with obsessive minutiae, repetitive minutiae - and, of course, it is Paris Hilton, the tarty hotel heiress who is famous for being famous.
At first, I was amused and horrified. It seemed that the celebrity gossip which has been passing for news in this country had soared out of control.
But, pausing to scrutinise some of the coverage, it became apparent that, while it is, indeed, celebrity gossip reportage, there is something else at play here - something very interesting.

It is an exercise in national schadenfreud.
It is the display of country renewing its commitment to principles.

America has been inflicted with a daily diet of Paris's vapid and vulgar activities.
She has been a grotesque media creation, a cartoon of the American fascination with celebrity, riding high on endless concocted photo opportunities, not to mention the most artificially contrived un-reality TV show of them all.
But now she has tripped in demonstrating contempt for the DUI laws, in believing that as the celebrated Paris Hilton she is somehow above the laws, and the country has turned on her in a spirit of unified loathing.

Even Martha Stewart did not cop this sort of national vilification when she was jailed for insider trading. For all her faults, Martha has talent and has contributed to the world, albeit her contributions are stencilled cards and DIY Christmas decorations.
Paris Hilton is just the cheapest rich girl in the world. Even stencilling a card would be beyond her. But her country now is forcing her to contribute something towards its social mores. She is to be an example of comeuppance.
To that end, there were five helicopters and hundreds of media surrounding her house when she had her brief liberation from jail yesterday. The media halted all other news coverage to mull over the justice and ethics of her case. From channel to channel, there were debates, discussions and analyses - from Fox's savage talking heads to Larry King, from The View to Jay Leno.
And no one had a good word to say about her.
All of which has given her a new crown to wear.
Paris Hilton has taken over from O.J. Simpson has the most hated celebrity in the USA.

Screaming audience aversion

2007-06-05T04:12:00.000+09:30

When did women start screaming to indicate their enthusiasm?
Once upon a time there was a thing called "applause" - a clapping of the hands to convey delight or appreciation. Sometimes it came with added whistles.
Then the "whoop" arrived and audiences added whooping vocal sounds to applause.
Now they just scream.
If they are applauding with their hands, it is inaudible beneath the shrill of shrieks and screams.
It is a most terrible sound. It is a descent into inanity.
Is it clear how much I hate this development in the world of entertainment?
Or, how mystified I am about it?

The strident insistence of extended audience screaming has caused me simply to turn off television programs I otherwise may have watched, even enjoyed. Conan O'Brien, the offbeat late night presenter, actively encourages this animalistic nonsense from his audience, cueing the women to keep on and on with the screams as he basks in it its approbation.
On the NBC morning show, there are screamers waiting in the streets. The moment they see a camera light go on, they start with the screaming.
This mindless din accompanies more and more American television. Well, it accompanies anything that includes a live audience. God forbid they start injecting the canned screams to the recorded shows. Daresay it may come.
This phenomenon has acquired nauseating ubiquity. We have produced a whole generation of people who can only express themselves with primal high Cs.
And no one seems to complain, to ask them to try the old hand-clapping routine...

Am I the only person who is despairing of this?
It makes me want to scream!

Robin Cook, where are you?

2007-06-02T05:04:00.000+09:30

It reads like a Robin Cook medical thriller. Man with serious infectious disease defies his government and endangers innocent travellers in his desperate bid to slip back home under the radar.
But it is not fiction.

There are many questions we want to ask about Andrew Speaker and his rare and dangerous form of tuberculosis - the very variant which engages his new father-in-law in clinical research. Where and how did he contract this treatment-resistant illness? The microbiologist father-in-law, Robert Cooksey, has been facing news cameras, saying it has nothing to do with him or his work. But, what a co-incidence!

Speaker just married the doctor's daughter in Greece, we understand, and went on honeymoon in the Greek Islands, Italy and as yet unnamed other European countries. It was while he was out of the US that the US Centre for Disease Control and Prevention notified him of the exceptionally dangerous nature of his disease and instructed him not to take commercial transport. So what did Speaker do? He jumped on commercial transport. Lots - some six planes. To escape detection by US authorities, he took a Czech air service and flew to Montreal whence he drove into the US. The border guard who ignored the warnings for apprehension and quarantine which popped up on his computer now has been taken off the job.

Speaker's fellow passengers on the trans-Atlantic flight have been sought for testing. There are hundreds of them. But that is just a tip of the iceberg of possible infection. How many people were crammed in airport cattle-grid queues with him, dined in cafes beside him, inherited a hotel room from him, sat in front of him in a cinema...?
One reels at the potential contact one man could have as he moved around popular tourist spots and through airports.
It is the nightmare we all have, most especially in the cramped confines of air travel. I always come down with something after a long-haul flight - and I have written about this issue many times before. It long has worried me.

Of course, one sympathises with Speaker. One would not want to be in his shoes. He must have been very frightened - but only for himself.

How deeply ironic. Speaker should have been more conscious of his culpability than most. He is a personal injury lawyer.

He is a personal injury lawyer who may be having a lot to do with other personal injury lawyers.
Meanwhile, the his law firm's website is down. Too many hits or deep embarrassment?

The not-so-great outdoors

2007-05-30T00:54:00.000+09:30

Memorial Day marks the "unofficial" beginning of summer in the US. It is, indeed, warming up - from time to time - in New Hampshire. With it come the warnings - West Nile fever, encaphalitis, Lyme disease, rabies... Yep, you have to be wary when you go outside here.
I say this every year: Australia has an unfair rap as the dangerous creatures country.
I can't believe the way Americans cringe and squeal with horror at our snakes and spiders when they have a ubiquity of their own nasties.
Mosquitos are are a serious worry. So here we go again with the summer warnings and instructions. "Wear DEET and keep covered". DEET is the only chemical which really does it for mosquitos and ticks. A lot of so-called repellents are sold, but horrible old DEET is the effective one which does not so much repel the insects are confuse their sense of where we are. Yes, it is unpleasant to put this stuff on your skin - but it is a small price compared to the alternative of West Nile fever or Eastern Equine Encephalitis. Bird-borne West Nile has been growng more common leaving a lot of dead crows and sick people in its wake.
As for the bloody ticks. As if it is not bad enough that those repugnant little blood-suckers can give one Lyme disease and Rocky Mountain Spotted ningnong, this summer comes with the announcement that a new, really, really wicked disease is being spread through New England by the tiny wee deer tick. It is called Babesiosis - and it is a malaria-like disease which makes your spleen swell until you can barely breathe, among other things.
Any idea I had of lying on my belly to get a macro shot of insects like the one above - is just a no-no-no-goer!! I won't be lying in any long grass until I am somewhere where the wildlife is safe - like Australia.

The evolution of creationism

2007-05-27T22:09:00.000+09:30

Tara-Tara! Drumroll! Applause, applause.

A $27 million Creation Museum is opening in Kentucky - triumphantly demonising Darwinism with the "science of Genesis".
Recently we saw three Republican presidential candidates raise their hands to admit that they did not believe in evolution. Three out of ten. But, according to the Boston Sunday Globe, that is not representative of the country. The Globe asserts that fifty per cent of Americans believe that God created Adam and Eve just 6000 years ago - and the entire study of paleontology, geology, physics, biology and astronomy is meaningless to them.
This statistic chills my blood.
And, my mind reels at the leaps of logic that the creationist concept encompasses.
It's all about "faith". I recall my first husband urging me to join his religion by making "the leap in the dark" - which was faith. Blind belief.
I have never managed to make that "leap in the dark". I like the light. I am happy being illuminated by education.
This is not to say that I don't have a spiritual streak - for I have a deep sense of my place as a grain of sand in the vast organism which is our universe. I have profound love for life, nature and humanity - and believe passionately in the Dalai Lama's ethos of "compassion" as the core value for this life. Wonderment is no stranger to me. And yet, I cannot countenance the existence of a supreme being. If I were to do so, it would be with immense sorrow that any supreme being, intelligent designer, if you will, would, in fact, create so much cruelty and suffering. Why would an intelligent designer create disease and starvation, children in pain..?
Why would he/she give us an appendix or make the ageing process so degrading? Why would he/she make many religions and then make them divisive? And why would he/she create a complex paleontological record - just to test us?

It defies logic. To believe in all of this is not just a leap in the dark, it is a leap into a morass of denial. Which, of course, is the rub of religion - a prop humanity has required to cope with the concept of our transient existence in the chain of life.
Until the rise and rise of the combative creationists, I've been happy to respect the religions of others, seeing religion and ritual as an innate need.
But when we find a belief which seeks to crush science and human understanding, I recoil.
If they were to have their way, no more diseases would be cured and the earth would warm to environmental implosion. They would call it "God's Will".
They seem to have a pretty strong handle on God's Will. God wills whatever they choose. For some reason, enlightenment is not what they choose.

They have made the leap in the dark - and they are staying in the dark.

Spats and simpers: celebrities are news

2007-05-24T23:27:00.000+09:30

Ann Curry's simpering interview with Angelina Jolie has been aired over and over - as if it has some major news significance. Oh, lordy, where will I have to see it next? Curry whispers at her subject with coy adulation, leaning forward in her chair, nodding like a bobble-head and daring to inject her own opinions and moist-eyed life stories into her interview - as if she and Jolie are just such special peers. I think I will dub it the American "simperview" since the talent-challenged Curry is not the only interviewer who uses this cringe-inducing technique. It seems intended to inject some emotional gravitas into what is basically pretty airhead material. Let's face it, Angelina Jolie is doing interviews to promote a new movie. The whole vast "scoop" interview is just a plug. This is not to say that Jolie is not one of the more interesting actresses around. She has always been "different" and she has a powerful and admirable political conscience which, one hopes, is of some influence to the masses in this gob-smacking culture of celebrity. But, bottom line, when she goes out there doing a dollar-driven movie promo, the media dissolves into a pathetic goo of star-worship.

How very differently does the media treat Jolie, the political animal, from the way it treats Rosie O'Donnell, the political animal!

The big bad right wing men in suits can't spew enough bile about Rosie. Rosie, a self-described "fat lesbian", is a popular hate target for expressing views not dissimilar to those of the beautiful Angelina Jolie. Rosie is intelligent and highly articulate, but Rosie is portrayed as a wicked loudmouthed left-wing extremist. The big bad right wing men in suits devour her with relish as an outlet for their deep anger at the very existence of a thinking left. She's an easy target, a soft target - and there's nothing they like better.

After yesterday's The View, they are having a field day - since Rosie was in very heated dispute with the very pretty and pregnant poster girl of the right, Elisabeth Hasslebeck. Hasselbeck is The View's balance of opinion - since most prominent and politically aware females in showbiz are, in fact, of Democrat sympathy. Hasselback is the NeoCon plant. She is a creationist.

While Rosie rose through the ranks of showbiz with brains, wit, originality and talent as a comedian, Hasselbeck's vast achievement was being a pretty thing on Survivor: The Australian Outback. I watched that show and I can barely remember her, but apparently American viewers so adored the cute shoe designer that, while she did not win Survivor, she won the bigger prize of national celebrity. She's a pretty little blonde, after all. The stereotypical American mould.

Watching the political spat on The View, I saw Hasselbeck on the attack and Rosie on the defensive. Hasselbeck struck out stridently, a ferocious viper already enraged by Joy Behar's praise for Al Gore and criticisms of the Bush regime. "Poor little" nothing! As she, indeed, said. Hasselbeck is a confident, self-righteous Republican and, doubtless, she is subject to constant briefing and revving up by the party cronies who would see her as a media prize. If you watch footage of that now historic spat, you will see Hasselbeck doing most of the talking and shouting - not Rosie. In sad fact, the two of them drowned out the real speaker, comedian Joy Behar, who had outlined a carefully-considered list of the political crimes of George W. Bush and his administration.

Rosie was naughty because she had a personal agenda with Elizabeth and, in giving vent to it, she enabled Elizabeth's shrieking outburst - all of which effectively took the audience's eye off the significant political ball that Behar had put into play. And it gave the men in suits yet another opening for yet another onslaught against Rosie.

Rosie will be gone from The View in three weeks - rather controversially insofar as all the denials in the world will never convince us that her departure was not pressured by the men in suits.
Meanwhile, pretty little Mrs Hasselbeck will stay on, radiantly pregnant with the next generation of Christian Republican creationists.
And, here's the bet, it won't be long before Fox is making a lucrative offer to draw her into their fold of "fair and balanced" rabid righties.

Geoffrey Rush sweet in stardom

2007-05-24T00:22:00.000+09:30

Flicked on the telly this morning and what should I see but Geoffrey Rush cooking pavlova with Martha Stewart.
Good heavens. Geoff the chef.
Well, of course, it is uphill with Martha Stewart. She has an annoying habit of having to one-up her guests - so of course she was making a rival pav and decorating it with fruit in the American colours. How rude, when she is supposed to be demonstrating an Australian tradition. Geoffrey looked a bit nonplussed. Geoffrey put bananas and lashings of passionfruit on his - to which Martha raised her authoritarian eyebrows.
"I've never heard of anyone putting bananas on a pavlova," she snapped.
Well, she, of all people, would have heard!
Geoffrey looked nonplussed again - and politely explained that it was sort of, er, well, popular where the pav came from.

Rush has been doing the talk circuit this week, promoting the new Pirates of the Caribbean movie.
I get a rush of Rush pride whenever I see him - elegant and urbane Australian actor that he is.
And I get a little thrill in knowing that way back there in the beginning, I had a little hand in his success.
Not that he was not always an exceptional actor. He was based in Adelaide back in the 80s where I reviewed him in State Theatre Company productions, interviewed him on occasion and even, finding him alone at the bar in the legendary La Cantina restaurant , sat down and had a drink with him one late, late night.
I'd admired him from the first time I saw him in the theatre. He is an outstanding stage actor - somehow defying the extraordinary gaunt angularity of his build to embody a veritable panoply of diverse characters. 'Twas ever a pleasure to watch him work.

How did I have a hand in his success?
Well - I wrote the article that inspired the film that won him the Oscar!

May 28, 1986. Page 3, Adelaide Advertiser
Out of the gloom, a genius reborn

Meeting pianist David Helfgott is like tumbling out of everyday life into a softly eccentric wonderland of sounds.

But David, 38, is a world unto himself -- and his tale is one of genius, tragedy and triumph.

The extraordinary WA musician has recently returned to the concert platform after a decade of psychiatric treatment and musical obscurity, shepherded by a woman's love. He is in Adelaide to give a recital at Edmund Wright House tonight.

Peering myopically through milk-bottle-bottom lenses, he proffered a warm, long-fingered hand and his murmurous voice began a strange rhythmic exploration of the sound of new names: "Sssam-sam-samela-sam..."

Then, as if magnetically drawn to the piano, he sat at the sleek Steinway, caressed its keys and filled the ornate old room with the intricate sounds of Liszt's La Campella while transforming his name-refrain into friendly serenade.

Rocking on the piano stool, sometimes bowing his head to the keys, singing, sighing and occasionally asking for a cigarette -- yet never interrupting the fluidity of his music -- he resembled no other concert pianist.

As the musical prodigy son of impoverished Polish migrants, David Helfgott was, at 12, the youngest to enter the ABC's annual WA State concerto and vocal competitions, which he went on to win six times.

At 14, he was the youngest to reach the Commonwealth finals and he pursued a brilliant career to be assessed at 19 in London as a "near-genius" talent. His performance of the Liszt Concerto at the Royal Albert Hall received a standing ovation from an audience of 8000.

Soon afterwards Helfgott suffered a serious nervous breakdown. On his return to Perth in 1973, he was admitted to hospital and his psychiatric and drug treatments lasted 10 gloomy years.

He continued privately to play the piano, sometimes for 10 hours a day, in his cramped lodge where he lived with 60 other psychiatric patients.

His musical career was surprisingly revived in 1983 when a Perth restaurateur, Dr. Chris Reynolds, asked him to fill in for a sick pianist.

Nervously chain-smoking, he produced a few discordant two-fingered sounds on the restaurant's piano, and as the diners began to jeer, he launched into Rimsky Korsakov's Flight of the Bumble Bee.

It was an historic night at Riccardo's restaurant. Diners, drinkers and staff were stopped in their tracks. They gave a thunderous ovation -- and Helfgott played on for four hours of non-stop classics.

Helfgott was "adopted" by the restaurateur and it was while living in his home that he met visiting divorcee Gillian Murray. At their second meeting he proposed to her and within months they were married.

But he was subsisting unhealthily on 130 cigarettes and 25 cups of coffee a day and prescribed medication, while playing piano three times a week at the restaurant.

Since their meeting in 1984, Gillian has gradually limited his smoking to less than one packet a day, reduced his coffee intake to a maximum of five cups, eliminated his need for medication and strengthened his bowed and lean body with a shared regimen of swimming, jogging and yoga.

Mrs. Helfgott described her husband as "an absolutely unforgettable, irresistibly endearing, hopelessly impractical genius who does not know meanness or dishonesty."

She nurtures him like a rare flower, believing that "fine performers need special care and support so they can blossom to full potential."

Of his wife, Helfgott said she had restored his confidence and blessed him with the sweet fortune to resume the career he loved.

After his "return" tour of Australia, the Helfgotts will leave for a study tour of Britain and Europe and then, according to Mrs. Helfgott, Australia can look forward to hearing much more from "one of the few truly romantic pianists in the world."

On reading this story in the paper, film director Scott Hicks telephoned me and asked "is this man for real?" I assured him enthusiastically that David Helfgott was very much for real, had been quite the most extraordinary extraordinary to meet - and confirmed where Helfgott was playing that night. Scott subsequently excused himself from his wife's birthday party to leap off to hear Helfgott - and Shine was born - wherein, a decade later, Geoffrey Rush's name soared from the world of Australian theatre and into the shimmering lights of international movie stardom.

So, I like to think I was a little acorn...

More to fear from China

2007-05-22T06:24:00.000+09:30

"Under Agriculture Department rules, countries cannot export meat and poultry products to the United States unless the USDA certifies that the slaughterhouses and processing plants have food-safety systems equivalent to those here. Much to its frustration, China is not certified to sell any meat to the United States because it has not met that requirement.

But that has not stopped Chinese meat exporters. In the past year, USDA teams have seized hundreds of thousands of pounds of prohibited poultry products from China and other Asian countries, Agriculture Secretary Mike Johanns announced in March. Some were shipped in crates labeled "dried lily flower," "prune slices" and "vegetables," according to news reports. It is unclear how much of the illegal meat slipped in undetected.

Despite those violations, the Chinese government is on track to get permission to legally export its chickens to the United States -- a prospect that has raised concern not only because of fears of bacteria such as salmonella but also because Chinese chickens, if not properly processed, could be a source of avian flu, which public-health authorities fear may be poised to trigger a human pandemic."

Does this make your blood run cold? It does mine.

These words have been lifted from the very trusted source of the Washington Post, a Sunday, May 21 article by Rick Weiss, headed "Tainted Chinese imports common".
This is a deeply alarming piece which describes some of the 289 shipments the FDA has refused entry into the US because of contamination, toxic ingredients and pure fakery. As Weiss points out, the Chinese don't give up when refused entry for their goods. They try again and then again.

This is an epidemic.

Bravo to the Washington Post for running this deeply alarming piece. But the story needs more, more and more exposure than this. We face a dangerous scandal and it is going to take a massive public outrage to make governments confront the issue. They have to see it as an insidious form of terrorism. An attack on what we eat.

I am sure the Chinese people would be devastated to know what some of their manufacturers are doing. I am sure they don't know.
I am sure the Chinese Government will be embarrassed to realise how these exporters are shaming their country.

But the word needs to be spread. Chinese foods must be avoided and, as I have said before, countries affected by this sinister mode of attack should boycott the Olympics.

Theatre rage and I'm all for it

2007-05-22T01:05:00.000+09:30

Theatre rage.
It had to happen.
It could so easily have been me and not members of the audience of the Boston Pops who earned the first headlines for theatre rage. They are now all over YouTube, the people brawling in the dress circle on the glamorous opening night performance.
It was all about someone who would not stop talking and someone who really wished they would.
Talking during performance is the worst of bad manners. It goes against all the rules of theatre etiquette.
But no one knows etiquette any more. And, unforgiveably, the rules are not enforced.

Once upon a time, there was a rule that no food or drink was allowed in the auditorium. There used to be signs, reminding people of this.
The idea is that live performance is something special. It is an intimate interaction between performers and audiences. It also is work on behalf of the performers - risky work for which they need concentration. We of olde worlde theatre background have been brought up to respect this. Hence, the disappointment and annoyance we suffer when we find ourselves in audiences who seem to think that going to the theatre is not much different to watching the telly at home. They arrive late. They get up and go to the lavatory. They snack. I've seen people bring hot pizza into the theatre. They crackle crisp packets and crunch on crisps, suck loudly on candy and they glug, glug, glug on those bottles of water which they seem to think have to be attached to them at all times.

This behaviour has been driving me mad for years. My adrenalin levels rise and I want to call out "stop the show - and let's evict these noisy boors". I know the actors are distracted by these noises and movements just as other audience members are.

Theatre administrators are no help. They have let the rules lapse because they want the refreshment sales.

So, it is up to other audience members to ask for consideration.
It is an unpleasant burden to put on people - especially when they may have paid over $100 for a ticket.

As for the communications devices, the mobile phones and Blackberries...
Now we have to listen to pre-show reminders to turn them off and not use them for recording or photographing the show. This is irritating in itself. And those who think they are special, which is many people, take no notice at all. One will find them texting or holding up their phones to share their experience with someone at home...or to sneak onto YouTube or, damned if I know. But no rules apply any more.

Truly, the time has come for theatres to assert the rules of etiquette. To save the tradition that is the purity of live performance - the beauty and integrity of the experience.
The rules should be posted in the foyer, in the toilets and, maybe, even projected over the curtain before the show. They should be printed on tickets. Ushers should remind people at the door.

If the ignorant new generation of theatre-goers is allowed to continue in this trend of thinking that an auditorium is just another living room, the quality of live theatre is doomed.

I dunno, if I have to sit in theatres among slurping, sucking, crunching, texting, glugging, chatting cultural retards - then I will feel equally entitled to light up a cigarette.

Salem: Bonjour Tristesse

2007-05-15T06:07:00.000+09:30

Salem, Massachusetts, has the Witch Trials of 1692 as its strident claim to fame and it has created a witchcraft wonderland of kitsch to capitalise on this and lure in tourists by the busload. It's lots of fun - pure unadulterated corn and guileless exploitation.
But, behind the witch museums, tarot readings, crystal shops and Wiccan souvenirs, there is Salem, Mass, of the distinguished mercantile history. There is nothing phoney in this.

Salem's era of affluence from sea trade left a legacy of peerless architecture in the form of Chestnut Street - one of the most beautiful streets in the USA. It is now a National Historic Landmark street because, thanks to luck and perhaps foresight, the antique houses which line the cobbled street have never suffered at the whim of renovators or developers. The grand old homes retain their historic and architectural integrity.
Chestnut Street is simply a joy to behold, let alone to meander.

Bruce and I, with my birthday-sharing weekend guest, Aunt Libby, took a Saturday drive down to Salem, lunching luxuriously at the grand old Hawthorne Hotel - named after Salem's famous literary son, Nathaniel Hawthorne - and then taking a sightseeing trolly ride, a very comfortable and easy way to glean a full picture of the town and its history. Chestnut Street was the highlight of the drive - so much so that we decided to return on foot to soak in the beauty and antiquity of the architecture at closer quarters.
It was a briskly cool spring day. Forsythia, pansies and tulips were in full bloom all over the place and the trees were beginning to leaf out in brightest newborn green.

Strolling Chestnut Street's brick footpaths, which, underscored by ancient tree roots, undulate quite perilously, we were able to scrutinise the details of the grand old captains' and merchants's houses, marvelling at the famous "coffin doors". It seems bizarre that people should design front doors with their death in mind. Many of the Chestnut Street homes have these extra panels in the gracious, great front doors just so that coffins would fit easily in and out. They were handy for women in hooped skirts, too, we had learned earlier from our tourist guide. We thought they might be handy again for the new era of morbidly obese Americans.

Some of the homes are brick, but most are clapboard, painted in handsome period colours of greys and blues and browns, with their neat shutters, doors and windowframes contrasting in black or white. Most of the houses are huge - mansions of opulent proportions, usually with a top floor which would have accommodated servants in the streets heyday.

One old house which brags a grand ballroom was having an event - a wedding reception we surmised, noting the flower-decked horse and carriage with its attendants in top hat and tails. We watched the smartly dressed locals parking their cars and hurrying down the road. We were amused to spot a husband and wife arriving in brand new his and hers BMWs and parking side by side. It was a rich event in this rich old street.
We were quietly fantasising about the people who lived in the street, how simply gorgeous it must be to live in such salubrious and historic quarters and what a responsibility it must be. How annoying, perhaps, to live in a tourist attraction - to have to put up with people like us taking photos and lingering longingly outside one's home.

We were doing just that outside the house we had agreed to be our absolute favourite on the street. We were paused, gazing at details and imagining the elegant , affluent and perfect life that must be going on within its walls when the front door opened and an elderly woman appeared.
"Hello," I said.
She did a quick double-take and then, returned my greeting with warmth.
"You have a lovely house," said Aunt Libby.
"Oh thankyou," replied the woman, descending the stone steps from the front door to stand beside us in the street. She was wearing a hat and carrying a handbag, clearly on her way somewhere.
"My tooth just fell out," she announced. "I'm very upset."
This was the last thing we expected to hear.

We expressed immense sympathy. She, rightly, was very agitated. She reiterated her horror at this sudden happening. No pain. No blood. She wasn't even eating. The tooth had simply fallen out.
Of course this was a little puzzling. But her distress was very real.
"I'm waiting for my daughter, is that Merridy?" she asked, pointing at a small clutch of tourists ambling slowly on the other side of the road. "The one in red, is that Merridy," she asked. "I'd better go and see." Of course, we did not know her daughter - but it was clear that the woman in red did not know our old woman. Libby offered to go with her, to take her hand across the road. The woman said she was glad of the company. But, as the tourists walked away, she realised her daughter was not one of them and returned to the front of the house, toying with the option of waiting for her daughter to come home or going to her dentist in another town - despite the fact that it was Saturday afternoon and she had not phoned him.
"Oh look, here comes the dentist," she said as a spunky young postman approached down the street. We corrected her and she called out and told him he was the postman. "But not doing your round," he replied, striding on past.
At this point, she decided to show us the tooth.
She opened and shut her hand quickly, exposing what was obviously a set of three teeth from a dental plate.

Of course, we had already silently ascertained that this poor woman had dementia, perhaps Alzheimers, so we were decidedly alarmed when she asked if her car was in the driveway. It was. She tried the doors. It was locked. Phew. She did not seem to have the key but returned to the front of the house where we assured her that her teeth would be OK until Monday when she could get an appointment with the dentist and we tried to coax her into returning indoors , to put her feet up, have a drink, try to relax, wait for her daughter... She was accepting this advice and was just mounting the stairs when her next-door-neighbour drove up and she announced that she would just go and talk to him first.

We bade her good luck and farewell and slowly resumed our path. Looking back, I saw the neighbour solicitously stroking her shoulder and knew she was in good hands. Poor, distressed and befuddled old girl.

And thus it was we realised that even the most perfect house does not a perfect world contain.

China out of control

2007-05-10T08:11:00.000+09:30

We were eyeing off the price difference between farmed and wild scallops in the supermarket tonight. It has always been an ethical preference to buy farmed fish since they are a renewable resource, so to speak. The wild fish are twice the price - and rightly so. But we noticed that the farmed scallops came from China and immediately we recoiled in horror. Such is the impact spurred by the Chinese pollution of the food chain.

Their toxins now are in fish food - and young farmed fish fed with their cheating ingredients are suspected to have been liberated into the streams of America. Heaven alone knows what the Chinese are using as feed in their own fish farms. One can only imagine that yet more corners have been cut. One simply has no trust in the Chinese any more.

Now there are poor people with kidney failure from the antifreeze ingredient, diethylene glycol, the Chinese substituted for glycerine. People drank it in cough syrups - took it as medicine to make them well. What a grotesque irony.

Sick and dead people, sick and dead pets, polluted fish...
Where will it end?

I'm now boycotting all foods from China. Every thinking person should do so.
In fact, they should boycott the Olympics, too.

China and melamine

2007-04-30T22:19:00.000+09:30

The poisonous petfood horror story gets bigger and bigger now the killer ingredient has been traced back to a massive Chinese scam of adding melamine to feed and fertiliser products to give them a false reading on protein content.
China turns out to have an industry devoted just to turning coal into melamine to enable Chinese companies to cheat their market. It is standard practice.

Wikipedia, as ever a brilliant resource, offers a succinct understanding of just what melamine is. It explains:
Melamine is used combined with formaldehyde to produce melamine resin, a very durable thermosetting plastic, and of melamine foam, a polymeric cleaning product. The end products include countertops, fabrics, glues and flame retardants. Melamine is one of major components in Pigment Yellow 150, a colorant in inks and plastics.
Melamine is also used to make fertilizers.

The awful issue here is that China, in the grip of capitalist frenzy, is employing any devious method of finding added profit that it can devise. Brilliant people with a brief for expediency will find some nasty shortcuts if there are no regulations to stop them.

The scam may now be exposed, but the problem remains, with melamine-containing feed and fertiliser products exported all over the world - and, alarmingly, some US pork products already out in the market before it was realised that the pigs had been fed melamine-containing swill.
Of course, it may yet come to pass that we discover that farm animals around the world have been eating it for years. After all, the idea behind the melamine con is that the foodstuff is rich in protein to help with the fast growth of animals.

One greed feeds another greed.
Again.

Hamming it down

2007-04-28T05:06:00.000+09:30

Now it is ham we have to avoid. Just like trans fats, we discover that nitrites, used in the curing of meats, has been poisoning us for aeons. It is being associated with emphysema, of all things.

If we are to consume ham and bacon, hot dogs and sausages, it should be less than 14 times a month.

Day by day we discover that for the sake of shelf-life, we are subjected to invidious chemicals. Trans fats are shelf life. Nitrites are shelf life. Shelf life trumps human life in the market place - albeit that it all began with the best of intentions. Trans fats make things taste good and are cholesterol-free. Nitrites make them look good and last. We demand those things.

So it comes to pass that science must look to safer alternatives - which are not too far away if one looks at the Food Product Design website. Fruit may bear fruit, says this article.
Well, let's hope it is organic fruit - or there's sure to be another great toxin kerfuffle.

Trans fats rampant

2007-04-27T04:42:00.000+09:30

The revelations about toxic nature of trans fats have turned me into one of those picky people. I ask before I eat.

In Australia, the news is invariably good these days. Doing a large investigative earlier this year, I discovered that the cooking oil companies have been helping their clients move to trans fat-free oils and large supermarkets, particularly Woolworths, have been demanding of their suppliers that all baked goods come in under the safety level for trans fats.

In America it is a different story.
The people are continuing to consume trans fats in blissful ignorance.
Oh yes, they have product labelling in the supermarkets so that those of us looking to avoid trans fats can do so. But it means not eating a lot of things - for instance, my favourite Shaws muffins.
I've also had to stop my rare, but adored indulgence in Dunkin' Donuts' Crullers. Dunkin' Donuts products are loaded in trans fats - which does not omen well for the heart function of US policemen who are reputedly hooked on them.
I also adore dining at a wonderful restaurant chain called Smokey Bones where, the big treat, is to finish the meal with one of the best a la mode apple pies in the world. But, when I asked, I was told, no, the apple pies are not trans fat-free.
At least Smokey Bones is honest. And we have stopped having their divine apple pies. Sigh.
McDonalds has said it is planning to abandon partially hydrogenated oils - but not until 2008. Why the wait? They have pretty much done it in Australia - before any legislation was made.

New York has issued an edict to eliminate trans fats from the restaurant world. Philadelphia has followed suit. California is making noises. But why is this country so reluctant?

There is a strong Ban Trans Fats lobby, working very hard at putting pressure on the food industry.

But eating out in the US is still like a lottery - and shopping for baked goods is a label-reading ordeal.

The businesses which have assured me that they are rid of trans fats now are my haunts - Panera Bread and Starbucks. No, I won't hear a word against the much-maligned Starbucks! They are my friends, a place where I can safely have the pleasure of a cake with a coffee.

At last, it's spring.

2007-04-23T08:54:00.000+09:30

Finally, the sun has come out in New Hampshire - after the terrible lashing we received last week when the nor'easter blew in and brought the place to a standstill. Days of high winds and driving snow/sleet/rain downed trees and powerpoles, closed roads and airports, flooded huge rivers and left a wake of sludge and devastation. We had an 8-hour power outage and a car breakdown all at once - which left us trapped in an increasingly cold apartment, putting on layers of clothing, reading by battery lamps, eating cold food and listening to the sleet slapping against the windows. Notorious New England weather which, I suppose, is worth experiencing - once!

The moment the sun emerged, just a couple of days later, spring erupted - as if it had been hunkered down waiting impatiently for its moment. Suddenly there are sprawls of jubilant daffodils leaning and beaming towards the light. Trees are budding and breaking into leaf. One has burst into blossom. And tulip leaves bursting from the soil so fast one swears one can see them growing.
We celebrated by heading out for walk along the canal stream and woodland trails of Mine Falls Park. Oddly, when we came to park the car in what had always been a rather grungy and derelict old industrial backwater of Nashua's mill district, we were assailed by, of all things, the moan of the bagpipes. And there was the piper, standing alone outside one of the formerly abandoned buildings which, it quickly become apparent, had been transformed into a thriving arts centre and was having a great big celebratory event.
Try to keep me out! I was inside like a bullet - to be greeted by very nice, homely ladies standing behind a refreshment table laden with dips and cheese, crudite and drinks. There were galleries in all directions - vast expanses arrayed with masses of highly enthusiastic art. No, I won't be calling The Australian Art Collector with any exciting new discoveries, although there were a couple of highly-priced gems outstanding amid the masses of mediocre mixed media. But there was no shortage of refreshments. Tables groaned with goodies all over the place - cakes and cookies, crackers and dips...hospitality which really made up for the art.
There were six separate exhibitions in the show - and many more scattered around the town, accesible by a shuttle, I discovered. It was an "Art Walk" in which people didn't actually walk.

One room was full of the most excellent basketweaving. I praised the weaver, noting that she had mastered the fine and complex art of classic Indonesian basketry. She was amazed. She had no idea of the background of any of the designs. How odd.

In another room there was a warm overcrowding of furniture and projects complete and pending - large screen panels, collages, bolts of fabric, baskets of dressed soft toys and some extremely quaint vanity objects - hand mirrors and hairbrushes with Scrabble pieces and rhinestones glued to them. As I walked around examining things, a massive woman heaved herself from a chair in the corner and moved to the centre of the room where she flopped down on a couch - the spread of her body taking up most of it. I hadn't noticed her amid the distraction of objects and furniture but now I greeted her and observed that she was one of the most immensely fat women I had seen, with very unkempt hair. And there she was, like a vast overwintering bear in her den of strange creations. Suddenly I felt as if I had stepped into a Fellini film.
She turned out to be very personable, albeit with some questionable artistic practices - dismembering fine old books and making collage-type restructures of them. "Librarians don't like it," she said. I didn't either.

Out into spring sunshine again, we set out on our familiar towpath walk, happy to see the understorey forest growth budding out amid the still stark and wintery trees. Chipmunks chirped, blue jays squawked, fish marked the spot against the current in the canal and several slider turtles came swimming along, less shy than they seem to be later in the season. It was on the low trail by the Nashua River that evidence of the flooding remained. Great lakes of crystal water lay in the glades, some of them with exquisite floating layers of autumn's leaves. In many places the trail was all but impassable and we picked out way gingerly through thick and muddy layers of river silt. Our shoes were a mess. But there was a large, only partially-melted snow pile up near the road and we shuffled around in it merrily, having found the perfect shoe-cleaner. How very New Hampshire.

This gun thing

2007-04-21T00:02:00.000+09:30

One after another my Australian friends have emailed their horror at the Virginia Tech massacre and asking "what is it about America and this gun thing?", "why doesn't America do something about gun control?", "who is this gun lobby?"
As if I have the answers, just because I am here.
Well, I don't. For all my time in the USA and for all my love of this country, I don't get it, either. Countries without gun culture have a hard time understanding gun culture - hence the uniformity of anti-gun outcry from other countries at yet another school massacre by a gun-totin' spite-bent psychotic.

I can pointer to a well-reasoned article in The Economist. It has no by-line, which is a pity. But it claims that the USA has half the privately owned guns in the world. It also ponders that Canada, also with liberal gun laws, has far less per capita gun crime.
According to the Johns Hopkins Centre for Gun Policy and Research, there were about 80 gun deaths a day in 2001 - and in 2002, some 58.841 gun injuries treated in emergency departments, with 49 per cent of gun injury costs borne by the US public. Billions of dollars. And, the rate of gun deaths in the US is eight times higher than in other high-income countries. It is a huge national burden.
Switzerland is riddled with guns - with a low gun mortality rate.

Why is the US different? Culture? Media? Temperament?
Perhaps all three. After all, there has been an historic sense of entitlement to private gun ownership in the USA - ever since the country's first fight for independence when it was believed that it was essential that there was an ever-ready private militia for national defence. Then again, some argue that when the right to "bear arms" was written into the US Bill of Rights, it really meant the right to engage in military service. Whatever it meant, it has been accepted and defended as the right to private gun ownership - and there is an adamant belief that everyone needs to be ready to defend themselves. From each other?
The US gun lobby can cite all manner of statistics about states which introduced tigher gun control thereafter experiencing higher gun mortality and injury. They have quite a legtimate case. Then again, some of them are claiming that, if the students of Virginia Tech had all had guns, they could have "taken out" the shooter.
That's where we foreigners recoil in incredulity. It seems plain nuts.

But there we have it. The gun thing is an American thing. It is a potent part of the national psyche and the country is prepared to carry the human losses rather than lose the right to "responsible" gun ownership.

Which is why no one is speaking out about it and why the status quo will not change - and why I am done with the subject, for once and for all!

Cho Seung-Hui and Columbine

2007-04-19T22:29:00.000+09:30

Does this remind us of anything?
“You have never felt a single ounce of pain in your life but you want to inject as much misery in our lives as you can just because you can, you had everything you wanted. Your Mercedes wasn't enough, your brats. Your golden necklaces weren't enough, you snobs. Your trust fund wasn't enough. Your vodka and cognac weren't enough. All your debaucheries weren't enough. Those weren't enough to fulfill your hedonistic needs. You had everything."

Cho Seung-Hui's words remind of the Columbine massacre kids.
These are the words of the scorned and ostracised - one who could never gain acceptance among the bright confident and, perhaps seemingly smug in-crowds of school and campus life. The partying jocks and popular girls. Cho was a shy boy, never included. His defences were to withdraw into a shell of resentment and loathing. Just like the Columbine boys - except that they were friends and Cho Seung-Hui had no friends at all.
He lived alone, a stranger in a shared dorm, pretending the others simply were not there, his acute loneliness and sense of rejection feeding his psychosis until it grew out of control.
There is a certain campus cultural syndrome echoed here - one which inadvertently taunts and tortures the outcasts other students blithely describe as "loners".
We saw it in Columbine and we see it again at Virginia Tech.

There is probably no campus in the country where there are not students in a similar state of mind. It can't be helped. There is no blame. Young people are not psychiatric diagnosticians. They are young people, self-interested and preoccupied - yes, hedonistic, even. Retrospect has 20/20 vision but busy daily life does not.
So a college policy must be established encouraging students to be on the watch for the lonely ones - and some sort of group activities should be gently but firmly encouraged in which such outsiders can be given a sense of belonging.

In every instance that Cho's dysfunction was noted, it would seem that he was just sent off on his own again - to feel yet more alienated. They say he simply "fell through the cracks" - but it is hard to see an easy solution. We must all ponder it - as, indeed, in our different ways we are. The whys of that deranged student haunt all our minds.

There really is no point in turning campuses into high security areas. That is not the solution. These acts of hideous spite and revenge - Virginia Tech and Columbine - have come from the inside the campus in a world where, lethally, guns are easily available.
Of course, one could ask the USA to do something about the 270 million guns in private hands and heaven knows how many sitting about in retail stores waiting for the 10 minutes it takes to buy them, but the gun lobbyists will justify even these atrocities in the name of their inalienable right to bear arms. They will just keep telling us that it is not the fault of the guns.

True enough. It all goes much deeper than that. But let's face it, mad Cho Seung-Hui would never have wiped out 32 lives and sent 15 to hospital and nor would Harris and Klebold have killed 12 and wounded 24 if their choice of weapons had been limited to kitchen knives.

To family of Cho Seung-Hui

2007-04-18T03:58:00.000+09:30

Now his identity is revealed - Cho Seung-Hui, a student of creativing writing who would appear long to have shown signs of psychotic behaviour. His imagination alone, one gathers from mentions of his "disturbed" creative writing. People described him as "a loner" - which, of course, means lonely, brooding, isolated, an outsider.

Amid the convulsions of shock and grief for those bright young lights snuffed out by his eruption of psychopathic violence, one must offer thoughts of compassion to his family - good, hard-working, hope-filled Korean dry-cleaners. And to his sister, another bright young light, a student at Princeton, whose future forever will be shadowed by the dark and awful shame of her brother's action.
Psychotics are hard to diagnose, hard to understand. People often just think they are moody and strange. They come in many degrees and usually are more harmful to themselves than to others. I am not sure that we ever will understand the mad voices which drove this young man to this deeply shameful act. But if we must apportion blame, let it not be to his family or to Koreans, but simply to guns, so easily purchased by all US citizens, including undiagnosed madmen bent on running amok.

Shame on the gun culture

2007-04-17T13:50:00.000+09:30

It's about guns!
The Blacksburg college massacre was a madman with a gun. It was a gun culture disaster.
It could not happen if guns were not so readily available and so absurdly legal.
It took the Port Arthur massacre in Australia to shock the government into serious gun action - through which it paid people to turn in their guns. Not that guns were ever as easy to own or as common in Australia.
America is rampant with people who believe that it is their absolute right to own guns - lots of them. They are a powerful group - gun-totin' and aggressive and they have the government in their thrall. Everyone is afraid of them. Well, they have guns, after all. And there is nothing people with guns like more than having an excuse to use them.
This appalling college massacre must be a wake-up call to the USA.
Every day we read stories about friends accidentally killing each other because they are brandishing their guns. People with guns love to play with them, flaunt them, carry them... And they are constantly having "accidents" with them. Small children kill each other playing with daddy's guns.
There have been too many of these mindless massacres. People emotionally disturbed, people with grudges... They should not have free access to weapons of death.
The time has come to clue up and kill this gun culture.

Kafka's airport

2007-04-14T03:19:00.000+09:30

Do not be tempted to change planes in Montreal en route to the USA. Who could have known that it would be such an exceptionally awful ordeal?

In blissful ignorance, we had accepted the Star Alliance option of flying Air Canada from Paris to Boston via Montreal. It was a bad start when Air Canada's Charles de Gaulle checkin desk insisted that, despite our long-standing booking and early arrival at the airport, we were destined to "the last seats on the plane" and hence, had to sit separately in central seats at the back of the plane. It was decidedly unimpressive, if not repulsive, to unfold my airline blanket after removing it from its plastic bag and find it absolutely covered in long blonde hairs. Such things seem par for the course these days. The cabin service was adequate and the seven-and-a-half-hour flight was pleasanty uneventful with good movies.

The big puzzle was when the stewards handed us all Canadian customs forms and said we had to fill them in - despite the fact that Canada was not our destination. There was considerable debate among incredulous passengers, but the air stewards just kept insisting, explaining that we had to collect our baggage on landing and go through Canadian customs. It seemed a bit odd.

But it came to pass. Of course, one of our bags was last off the carouselle, giving us some anxiety about our two hours of change-planes time. Little did we know that we would need every minute of it to stand about in slow cattle grid queues going through the most bizarre airport protocol in the world.

It turns out that Montreal takes transit passengers but does not have a transit area.

It is an airport designed by Franz Kafka!

The only way to get to the next plane is to go through all the formalities of entering Canada and then go through the formalities of leaving Canada and then go through the formalities of entering America. Hence we queued and queued in the cattle grids, firstly for Canadian Immigration stamps, then another queue for Customs. Then, lumbering along with our luggage, we had to follow signs around the airport to a Departure area where we had to queue at a checkin again, to show boarding passes, then fill in new Customs forms and join another cattle grid queue for US immigration and yet another cattle grid queue for customs before being able to part with the luggage and queue in another massive cattle grid for Security checking. By this time, we were not only cutting it fine to catch our plane, we were absolutely ga-ga with the infinity of zig-zag ropes and queues snaking to and fro across these endless hallways - and utterly mind-boggled that there was such a thing as a modern International Airport without a transit area.
If I was a gibbering cot case at the end of this absurd, impractical and insulting queue torture of officialdom, how on earth did old and frail people cope? Or mothers with bubs and toddlers?

Montreal, nice city that you are, you should be ashamed at this treatment of transit passengers. It is uncivilized and inhumane. Pure Kafka.

Ills of air travel

2007-04-03T04:16:00.000+09:30

Air travel has now descended to a point where one can only say it has become a squalid experience.

I am old enough to remember when people dressed to travel. It was big deal - even in economy.

Now, one can't say that air travel is cheap. It is not. But it certainly is popular, despite the fact that it also is hell. Has become hell.
It has become an animal scrum.

I truly believe that most people are really nice - and interesting. But put them in the miserable airport holding pens waiting to get on planes and they are all the enemy. They sit about looking suspiciously at their fellow passengers, readying themselves for a ruthless ritual of queue-push and trample they to get to onto the plane. As if it's going to leave without them. When called in to board first (after the elite travellers, wheelchairs and babies), because you're one of the poor bloody sods allocated seats in the arse end of the plane, you suddenly find access to the departure gate blocked by a cram of scowling people. You have to squeeze between these sods with the better seats because they simply don't want to let you get on ahead of them. They want to be first on so they can hold up all progress down the plane by fussing around in the aisles while trying to jam ten tons of handluggage into the overhead lockers. The logic of loading the rear passengers first seems to strike some nerve of outrage in the modern traveller. So they push their way on among the tail-seaters and there they are, blocking the aisles in elaborate displays of aerial luggage juggling.

The airlines have their passengers where they want them - absolutely under their power. Well, let's not say the airlines as such. Whatever service or product one mentions these days is in busy answering to voracious shareholders and boards which forever seek higher and higher profits. There is no such thing as enough profit. Only "more". Hence, the interminable cut-backs and compromises.

I've become very sad and disillusioned by Qantas in recent years. A lifetime of passionate loyalty to the "national carrier" has been eroded into, well, straight-out aversion. I feel badly treated. Disrespected.
It is a very long time now since I had a civilized seat allocation from Qantas. It does not matter how early I book and pay - a year ahead! I am still victim to some perverse check-in seat allocation which will put me exactly where I hate to be, bumping around in the tail of the plane. Yes, I know it's the safest place. But it is not the most comfortable. I happen to hate it.
Yet, somehow, there is never any other seat to be had - even if I check in four hours ahead. Told that I can only get seat allocation at check-in, I al told at check-in that all the seats already have been allocated. Am I the only person who can only get seat-allocation at check-in. Qantas told me last time I inquired that I simply did not have enough Frequent Flyer points to merit a good seat allocation. I am only a Bronze flyer. Therefore worthless.
So, this time I chose Singapore Airlines.
Uh-oh. Arriving early at Adelaide airport to get seat allocations, where was I seated? Right at the back of the tail. Again!
And on the next leg to Frankfurt? Well, not quite in the back rows - but in the centre block of the tail section. This was another experience altogether - very odd. It seems the air stewards just can't see you there as they roam the aisles with their trays of drinks or snacks.

On both legs, the aircraft were filled to capacity. Indeed, I heard one check-in queuer in Adelaide mention that the airline had phoned to offer Business class seating if she would reschedule for the following day - the plane was overbooked.
Out of Singapore, Singapore Airlines turned into the Star Alliance flight which meant that it was also taking Lufthanser passengers and those of several other airlines. Needless to say, it was packed to the gunwhales, so to speak.
And there is the barrel over which the airlines have us. Volume is all. Sardine travelling at all costs, sorry, I mean profits.
So it comes to pass that the passengers are just a hapless form of product - willing to accept the myriad inadequacies, most of them with no idea that it was ever otherwise.

And, here comes the crunch, they travel packed in together against all rules of personal space, cheek to jowl with strangers in proximity they would tolerate in no other circumstance. They are fed a thin supply of oxygen to make them docile and drowsy. And, in sharing this meagre air, they share generously the myriad germs being introduced amongst them. Yes, I sat beside a sore-throat and coughing Malaysian accountant on the first leg and across the aisle from a French woman with an incessantly sneezing, nose-blowing streaming cold on the second leg. An ugh of ambient illness. And, that is not counting the chorus of sneezing, hooting and coughing from the rest of the section. Bugs and viruses from everywhere poured into an an aerial petrie dish.
I give myself three days before I find come down with my share of these illnesses. It is the dividend of every long-distance air trip.

Not only do we pay a lot of money to travel, it costs us.
Yes, a squalid business it is.
It is time for some organised air rage.

Hicks is torture for us all

2007-03-28T20:54:00.000+09:30

As Australia goes into assorted paroxysms about the news on Australia's Gauantanamo detainee, David Hicks and his first court appearance, I slink into a corner of despair. I am sick and tired of hearing about this foolish would-be terrorist who now has pled guilty to supporting a terrorist organisation.
I think the American Government has been yet more obnoxious than Hicks in insisting on his lengthy and inhumane incarceration at Guantanamo, which is the very sort of hell hole of torment from which the US purports to want to rid the world. Its' treatment of Hicks has only served to turn him into a celebrated case - and, doubtless, a seriously traumatised nut case.

I venture to suggest that this whole shambles might have been avoided if David Hicks had stayed at school and learned a thing or two. He left school at 14, expelled - a raw boy with comic book dreams of being a warrior. He replaced school learning with gun learning, drugs, car theft and sex. He had two children by the time he was 20. At 24 he was off in Albania joining the Kosovo Liberation Army. Any fight would do. He tried to get into the Australian army, but it insists on education among its recruits. So he turned to Islam, headed off to Pakistan to be trained and the next thing, he was bragging he had met Osama bin Laden 20 times.
He was a pretty reprehensible young man.

But then the Americans mistreated him and denied him his rights in that vile detention centre - and he has been headlines ever since.
This man who sought to fight against his own people is now a cause celebre. Not a day goes by without mention of his name. He has turned into a major political issue - so much so that the forthcoming Australian Federal election is destined to be waving the flag of his case in a frenzy of point-scoring. It is going to go on and on.

And we are all punished for a school drop-out's stupidity.

Not just a petfood scandal

2007-03-24T11:45:00.000+10:30

Rat poison in wheat from China! This turns out to be behind the renal failure death of dogs throughout America.
How the wheat became contaminated is anyone's guess. A rat plague in the wheat storage facilities? Misuse of agricultural chemicals?
China has quite a history of the latter. It remains a very disturbing problem as Dune Lawrence points out in Bloomberg.
"Pesticide poisoning affects half a million Chinese a year, causing more than 500 fatalities"

For a long time Western bio-tech companies were dumping into the Third World markets products no longer saleable in their own arenas. This, notoriously, resulted in some serious pollution of food sources, especially in China, where farmers were making almost random chemical mixtures because they were unable to read the labels on the products. There was a time that Hong Kong put a ban on fresh foods from mainland China because of the toxic levels of pesticides etc.

My suspicion, therefore, is that we have here a tale of greed from two directions. Firstly, there are the agri-chem corporations which sacrifice ethics for profit in dumping discredited product on hapless poor countries. Secondly, we have the petfood people buying the cheapest ingredients to keep their shareholders' pockets lined. And, in a class of their own, there are the pet-owners who choose expediency as a way of nourishing their animals. Theirs is the crime of laziness.

It astonishes me that people who purport to love animals don't think about giving them more pleasure and better nutrition in their meals. Food is not only necessary, it is one of the fundamental sensual experiences of life. And yet, people who are prepared often to pay thousands for a pedigree animal will blithely fill its bowl with tinned or pellet food.

It truly is not hard to cook for the dog. We cook in three-day batches - ground chicken stewed with carrots, chard and parsley, bulked with pasta or rice and sprinkled with vitamins (plus, for our elderly doberman, Glucosomine). There are variations on this theme, of course. The dog loves the whole ritual of his food preparation, as he loves his food. He drools for handouts of carrot as the chopping goes on - his favourite treat, apart from blueberries. Cooking the petfood is as economic as it is wholesome - and it has provided a dividend of eliminating dog farts capable of asphyxiating a small nation.