Facebook and the face of history

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

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



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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

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!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"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

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.