An autumn morning in the arse end of Manchester sometime near the arse end of the Industrial Revolution - the early 1960s. Young Gummo Trotsky is walking to school along an unpaved street of black earth and gravel. Three storeys of cotton mill to the left, a patch of waste ground - a play ground for the kids of the neighbourhood, by courtesy of the Luftwaffe's urban renewal program of the early 1940s - to his right. He sees a couple of other kids approaching and quickens his step. Too little, too late.
"Where you going."
"School."
"Don't like your hair. Don't like redheads."
That's pretty much how it started, the little game the three of us played over the following months. Two boys whose friendship was incomplete without someone to really hate, found that person in me. On that day they showed a great inventiveness when it came to finding faults - besides the colour of my hair, there was the size of my freckles (too small to be proper freckles) and the fact that I went to the recently built "posh" school with all mod cons instead of the crumbling Victorian heap they'd been sentenced to. So the vicious little buggers made it their personal crusade to rid their part of Manchester of the scourge of red-headed kids with inadequate freckles who went to posh schools and were therefore snobs.
My part in the game was to force them to find me - I found about five different routes to and from school. Sooner or later, they would always work out which route I was using and confront me. Then they'd play their part; spit out some choice taunts and insults, with the implied threat of violence always present until they were in the right mood to face the school day. It was all done in private, a humiliating little secret for me, a satisfying one for them. Foggy days in November were a mixed blessing. It might have been hard for them to spot me on my way to school when you could hardly see from the front door to the edge of the pavement but there was also the risk that I might blunder into them unawares.
The game ended after they decided to pick me in front of my friends - as a private humiliation, the game was tolerable. It had to be. I'd received the traditional parental advice about standing up to bullies because they were all cowards at heart, but it didn't seem too useful when they made damn sure that they got me on my own, when there were just me, the two of them and no-one else - especially no adults - around. But doing it when I was walking home with a couple of friends along my latest "safe" route was taking things too far. I went for one of them - not the one who was always two steps back, providing the colour commentary, the other one. I had him on the pavement pretty damn quickly. A stranger, a woman, ran out of the greengrocer's across the road and started shouting "Stop it! Stop it!" That broke up the fight. A disappointment for me, because I was on top - but it was probably a good thing that the fight got stopped before it occurred to me to start bouncing the kid's head off the pavement. I went home feeling pretty pleased with myself
The next day they caught me on my own and gave me the hiding they'd been holding over my head for weeks. Lesson two in the practical, real life art of dealing with bullies - they're vengeful bastards and they don't give up. After they left, I stood there for a minute or two, struggling with the realisation that all yesterday's triumph had got me was deeper in shit. I might have stayed there all night if another good samaritan - a woman again - hadn't come by and asked me if there was "ought up, lad", or words to that effect. She gave me a handkerchief for the tears her simple question evoked and took me to the nearby house of one of my aunts. Finally, the adult world was forced to stop ignoring the situation - as mere kid's stuff - and do something about. The bullying stopped - from my point of view, quite inexplicably.
Late summer, 2006. Two nominal adults, actually children from the neck up, take it into their heads that the pseudonym "Gummo Trotsky" is as much an affront to decency and good taste as having the wrong hair colour and undersized freckles. The result is a blogospheric shit-fight which rampages across Larvatus Prodeo, Catallaxy and The Road To Surfdom. The one blog they conspicuously avoid bringing their confected outrage to, is this one. It's time to change that.
You guys want to play for egos? Fine, we'll play for egos. Here. And if the end result is that I run away from the internet with my tail tucked between my legs for a few months, so be it.
Pick your window.
Warning: the comments on this post are rated IB - suitable for immature boys only. They contain high level coarse language, frequent macho posturing, homophobic insults and references to violence.
Sunday, March 05, 2006
Friday, March 03, 2006
The Fool In History
No one dared tell the outcome of the [sea] battle [at Sluys in 1340] to Philip VI until his jester was thrust forward and said "Oh, the cowardly English, the cowardly English!" and on being asked why, replied "They did not jump overboard like our brave Frenchmen." The King eventually got the point ...
Tuchman, A Distant Mirror, Chapter 4.
Tuchman, A Distant Mirror, Chapter 4.
Toorak Baby Murder Shocks Residents
From The Melbourne Hun Monday, January 5, 1891:
Toorak resident George Cameron was shocked when he found the body of a young infant in St George's Road yesterday.
"I was shocked." he told The Hun, "I saw this bit of old black rag by the side of the road and when I picked it up there was this sacking underneath and the baby was wrapped in that. Gave me anasty turn, I can tell you."
Mr Cameron contacted the police and the body was taken to the Morgue. Sources have informed us that the baby was a 4 week old boy. His skull was fractured and there were bruises on his back and arms. "It's a good while since I've seen anything quite this nasty," said one Morgue employee, who declined to be named.
An inquest has been scheduled.
See how easy it is? Now come on people, I want some outraged editorials and opinion pieces to have a good giggle over by Sunday morning. Alright, Sunday evening at the latest.
Toorak resident George Cameron was shocked when he found the body of a young infant in St George's Road yesterday.
"I was shocked." he told The Hun, "I saw this bit of old black rag by the side of the road and when I picked it up there was this sacking underneath and the baby was wrapped in that. Gave me anasty turn, I can tell you."
Mr Cameron contacted the police and the body was taken to the Morgue. Sources have informed us that the baby was a 4 week old boy. His skull was fractured and there were bruises on his back and arms. "It's a good while since I've seen anything quite this nasty," said one Morgue employee, who declined to be named.
An inquest has been scheduled.
See how easy it is? Now come on people, I want some outraged editorials and opinion pieces to have a good giggle over by Sunday morning. Alright, Sunday evening at the latest.
Weaselversary Too
In yesterday's Age, John Carroll had this to say on the Stainless Steel Weasel's Prime Ministership:
The achievements are in the second half of the Howard decade. The turning point in the prime ministership was September 11, 2001. Machiavelli drew on the classical Roman view to assert that political success depends on a fusion of virtu - the character strength and virtue of the leader - and fortuna - good fortune.
Over at Catallaxy, Rafe Champion is wondering, purely rhetorically, who would pay money to read cartoonist Bill Leak's take on ten years of John Howard:
... Howard has reshaped Australia to conform to his own vision. We love the inflated feelings of international self-importance he has given us and we don’t seem to care about all the things he has taken away. Happy to live in an economy instead of a society, we might as well also accept that we are all Little Johnnies now.
Finally, a few words from one of Britain's foremost political analysts of the 1960's, sadly neglected these days:
Well of course he's bleedin' lied and broken promises, hasn't he? That's yer bleedin' statesmanship, that is. That's yer political greatness.
I mean, what's all this fuss over whether he knew about yer AWB payin' bribes to Saddam? Do yer think our Winnie would have been bothered about it? If Old Adolf had called him up before D-Day and arsked 'im, "Winnie, old mate, are you plannin' to invade Europe anytime soon?" would he have told him the truth. Nah! He'd tell him to stick it up his khyber, that's what he'd do! Bleedin' obvious, that is.
Here's hoping that this post will bring back the readers who have decided to take their business elsewhere in response to our recent focus on reality television and soft-porn.
The achievements are in the second half of the Howard decade. The turning point in the prime ministership was September 11, 2001. Machiavelli drew on the classical Roman view to assert that political success depends on a fusion of virtu - the character strength and virtue of the leader - and fortuna - good fortune.
John Howard has had an extraordinary and sustained run of good fortune. For one, he happened to be in Washington on September 11, when the third plane ploughed into the Pentagon. His political experience before 1996 had been virtually entirely domestic, and his early prime ministerial ventures into foreign affairs sometimes looked clumsy. From that day in 2001, he developed into a statesman who has very significantly changed Australia's geopolitical orientation. This is a major and lasting accomplishment.
Over at Catallaxy, Rafe Champion is wondering, purely rhetorically, who would pay money to read cartoonist Bill Leak's take on ten years of John Howard:
... Howard has reshaped Australia to conform to his own vision. We love the inflated feelings of international self-importance he has given us and we don’t seem to care about all the things he has taken away. Happy to live in an economy instead of a society, we might as well also accept that we are all Little Johnnies now.
Smaller, meaner and less attractive, we’re looking more like monkeys every day.
Well, now that I've read it on-line, I don't need to rush out and buy a copy of The Howard Factor - I can just relax and wait for it to turn up among the new acquisitions at the local library. Ta Rafe.Finally, a few words from one of Britain's foremost political analysts of the 1960's, sadly neglected these days:
Well of course he's bleedin' lied and broken promises, hasn't he? That's yer bleedin' statesmanship, that is. That's yer political greatness.
I mean, what's all this fuss over whether he knew about yer AWB payin' bribes to Saddam? Do yer think our Winnie would have been bothered about it? If Old Adolf had called him up before D-Day and arsked 'im, "Winnie, old mate, are you plannin' to invade Europe anytime soon?" would he have told him the truth. Nah! He'd tell him to stick it up his khyber, that's what he'd do! Bleedin' obvious, that is.
Here's hoping that this post will bring back the readers who have decided to take their business elsewhere in response to our recent focus on reality television and soft-porn.
Thursday, March 02, 2006
That's not Funny, That's Just Stupid
According to Tim Blair, a link may exist between a widespread mood disorder and the approval rating of Kim Beazard or Howzley or whatever his name is:
Australians genetically prone to depression: 43%.
Australians genetically prone to depression: 43%.
Kim Beazley’s current approval rating: 42%.
Wednesday, March 01, 2006
Announcing - Flag Elation!
It is the flag that does it for me, and I believe it does it for thousands and thousands of Australians. I would like to think we could see the flag on every street corner.
Bruce Scott (Nationals, Queensland) Member for Maranoa (Hansard, 27 February 2006)
Whoever you are, Flag Elation is ready to help you take your patriotic fervour to a whole new level! In stock now:
For Him: Aussie Flag Lycra Posing Pouches - she's going to love it when she sees one of thes little numbers bursting with your national pride!
For Her: Aussie Flag Peekaboo Bra and Crotchless Panties with lace trim (red, white or blue)! Show off your national assets in these beauties!
For Both of You: Scottie's Ribbed Rubber Johnnies! Run one of these up your flagpole and you'll really rouse her patriotic passions!
Plus - extensive range
of Aussie Flag Ticklers and Stims for adventurous patriots! Send for
our exclusive catalogue today!
(Images by His Excellency, Lord Sedgewick of Strathmore)
Bruce Scott (Nationals, Queensland) Member for Maranoa (Hansard, 27 February 2006)
***
Are you one of those thousands and thousands of Australians? Is it the flag that does it for you? Or are you one of those other Australians who wonder what all the fuss is about?Whoever you are, Flag Elation is ready to help you take your patriotic fervour to a whole new level! In stock now:
For Him: Aussie Flag Lycra Posing Pouches - she's going to love it when she sees one of thes little numbers bursting with your national pride!
For Her: Aussie Flag Peekaboo Bra and Crotchless Panties with lace trim (red, white or blue)! Show off your national assets in these beauties!
For Both of You: Scottie's Ribbed Rubber Johnnies! Run one of these up your flagpole and you'll really rouse her patriotic passions!Plus - extensive range
of Aussie Flag Ticklers and Stims for adventurous patriots! Send for
our exclusive catalogue today!
(Images by His Excellency, Lord Sedgewick of Strathmore)
Meme for Melburnians
The following report appeared in The Argus on Monday, January 5, 1891:
The dead body of a male child, apparently about 4 weeks old was discovered on Saturday in St George's Road Toorak by a man named Cameron. The body when found was wrapped in a piece of sacking, covered with a piece of black cashmere. It was taken to the Morgue by Constable Umbers and, when examined, it was found that the skull had been fractured and that there were bruises on the back and arms. An inquest will be held in due course.
I got to thinking today about how one of our current newspapers would report this event. How would it look on the front page of The Hun or The Age? What would the op-edsters have to say about it? Over to you.
Oh, alright, you don't have to be a Melburnian to pitch in. I'm sure someone at our national "Organ of Record" would have something to say on this item too.
Start hitting those buttons, people.
SUPPOSED INFANTICIDE
The dead body of a male child, apparently about 4 weeks old was discovered on Saturday in St George's Road Toorak by a man named Cameron. The body when found was wrapped in a piece of sacking, covered with a piece of black cashmere. It was taken to the Morgue by Constable Umbers and, when examined, it was found that the skull had been fractured and that there were bruises on the back and arms. An inquest will be held in due course.
I got to thinking today about how one of our current newspapers would report this event. How would it look on the front page of The Hun or The Age? What would the op-edsters have to say about it? Over to you.
Oh, alright, you don't have to be a Melburnian to pitch in. I'm sure someone at our national "Organ of Record" would have something to say on this item too.
Start hitting those buttons, people.
Sunday, February 26, 2006
Chewing the Fat (Redux)
Shaun Cronin's post Survival of the Thinnest at Larvatus Prodeo is just the excuse I need to revive this oldie on the subject of obesity and my own physical perfection:
Lean, mean thinking machine Andrew Norton of Catallaxy Files and the Australian Libertarian Society seems to have developed a morbid obsession with fat recently. Principally it seems to be other people's fat: lesbian fat, lefty-columnist fat and most recently whiny fat people fat. In this last post, Andrew links to this Medical Journal of Australia article which identifies a number of causes of the increase in the number of whiny fat people in the Australian population. The article also canvasses and quickly evaluates possible approaches to the problem, commenting:
Even when "individual" treatment programs are effective (and they require continuing follow-up and involvement), the costs of making such programs widespread are likely to be prohibitive. Such programs are also unlikely to be accessed so readily by disadvantaged groups — increasing the already apparent socioeconomic differences. Public education should also be wary of overpromoting the virtue of thin bodies and inadvertently contributing to the development of eating disorders — the emphasis needs to be on healthy bodies. We must also guard against the victim-blaming approach, which can lead to obese people being labelled, if not bullied or demonised, and parents being criticised for their fat children to the point that issues of cruelty and child abuse are raised. A gain in physical health could easily be offset by deterioration in mental and social health. [my emphasis]
On that last sentence Andrew has this to say:
In individual cases, a tactful and kindly approach may well be the right one. But the language of 'victims' is likely to be counter-productive, encouraging people to think that their weight is the result of forces beyond their control, rather than their own actions. How many fat people have you heard saying 'it's my metabolism', as they tuck into another over-sized meal? Why justify such excuses? Fat people are mainly to blame for their own weight, and to the extent that they are not it is usually their parent's fault.
It's pretty obvious that Andrew is no endomorph. My guess is that he's a mesomorph; ectomorphs (like me) generally learn from experience that we can eat like pigs without turning into whiny fat people, much to the envy of our whiny fat friends. Comfortable in this knowledge we can turn an indulgent ear to their complaints about their metabolisms and respond with a sympathetic remark such as "Yes, I'm glad I don't have a lousy metabolism like yours. It must be hell being a whiny fat person."
Afterword: with so much earnest comment to come on The Biggest Loser it's going to save me a lot of work reposting this. Just to remind you all:
Shaun Cronin's post Survival of the Thinnest at Larvatus Prodeo is just the excuse I need to revive this oldie on the subject of obesity and my own physical perfection:
Lean, mean thinking machine Andrew Norton of Catallaxy Files and the Australian Libertarian Society seems to have developed a morbid obsession with fat recently. Principally it seems to be other people's fat: lesbian fat, lefty-columnist fat and most recently whiny fat people fat. In this last post, Andrew links to this Medical Journal of Australia article which identifies a number of causes of the increase in the number of whiny fat people in the Australian population. The article also canvasses and quickly evaluates possible approaches to the problem, commenting:
Even when "individual" treatment programs are effective (and they require continuing follow-up and involvement), the costs of making such programs widespread are likely to be prohibitive. Such programs are also unlikely to be accessed so readily by disadvantaged groups — increasing the already apparent socioeconomic differences. Public education should also be wary of overpromoting the virtue of thin bodies and inadvertently contributing to the development of eating disorders — the emphasis needs to be on healthy bodies. We must also guard against the victim-blaming approach, which can lead to obese people being labelled, if not bullied or demonised, and parents being criticised for their fat children to the point that issues of cruelty and child abuse are raised. A gain in physical health could easily be offset by deterioration in mental and social health. [my emphasis]
On that last sentence Andrew has this to say:
In individual cases, a tactful and kindly approach may well be the right one. But the language of 'victims' is likely to be counter-productive, encouraging people to think that their weight is the result of forces beyond their control, rather than their own actions. How many fat people have you heard saying 'it's my metabolism', as they tuck into another over-sized meal? Why justify such excuses? Fat people are mainly to blame for their own weight, and to the extent that they are not it is usually their parent's fault.
It's pretty obvious that Andrew is no endomorph. My guess is that he's a mesomorph; ectomorphs (like me) generally learn from experience that we can eat like pigs without turning into whiny fat people, much to the envy of our whiny fat friends. Comfortable in this knowledge we can turn an indulgent ear to their complaints about their metabolisms and respond with a sympathetic remark such as "Yes, I'm glad I don't have a lousy metabolism like yours. It must be hell being a whiny fat person."
Afterword: with so much earnest comment to come on The Biggest Loser it's going to save me a lot of work reposting this. Just to remind you all:
- I'm not fat;
- I'm not much impressed by all the self-righteous moralising I read around the place about how fat people should just stop eating crap and exercise more;
- I've taken the piss out of the whole thing once already and right now I can't be bothered doing it again.
- I'm not fat. OK there's that bespoke suit from twenty years ago that I can't get into any more, which is a bit of a shame in one respect because a three-piece white self-stripe does look rather natty but on balance it was no great loss because it was always a bugger of a thing to keep clean.
Saturday, February 25, 2006
What I Plan to be Reading as Soon as I Can Get My Grubby Hands on It
I noticed in today's Age that the second instalment in Arturo Perez-Reverte's Captain Alatriste series - Purity of Blood - is out in English translation. Furthermore, the review mentions that there's to be a Captain Alatriste film later this year with Viggo Mortensen as the captain. An obvious piece of typecasting, that - like casting Antonio Banderas to play Roald Amundsen in a remake of Scott of the Antarctic.
I noticed in today's Age that the second instalment in Arturo Perez-Reverte's Captain Alatriste series - Purity of Blood - is out in English translation. Furthermore, the review mentions that there's to be a Captain Alatriste film later this year with Viggo Mortensen as the captain. An obvious piece of typecasting, that - like casting Antonio Banderas to play Roald Amundsen in a remake of Scott of the Antarctic.
Last Week's Lost Weekend Posts (I)
Philosophy Cornered
Sorry to go all meta on you - well no, not really - but I've been putting a bit of thought into the question why do so many bloggers and blog commenters write so much crap? This led to some reflections on the nature of human reason which, while nowhere near as detailed as Hume's Essay Concerning Human Understanding, nonetheless yielded some valuable insights that are worth sharing with you lot. That about does it for the dilatory opening remarks - you can consider yourselves bloody lucky to have got any at all - let's hop into the argument.
I. Gummo Trotsky is perfectly rational in all respects.
I see no need to defend this proposition - it strikes me as intuitively obvious. I know that there are a lot of you out there for whom it's not intuitively obvious, but this post isn't addressed to you. It's addressed to the few readers I have who are sufficiently rational to recognise the obvious truth of the proposition. The rest of you may as well piss off and read something more suited to your intellectual capacities - like Winnie the Pooh.
II. All disagreements between Gummo Trotsky and others are caused by their failure to be as perfectly rational as Gummo Trotsky.
Corollary: you lot are only rational to the extent that your opinions and beliefs agree with Gummo Trotsky's opinions and beliefs. With one exception. Obviously anyone who is not Gummo Trotsky but who holds beliefs identical to those of Gummo Trotsky believes themselves to be Gummo Trotsky and is therefore delusional - and, eo ipse dixit dominus domino theorem, not rational. Got that? R D0 I HV 2 SA IT A77 AGN N TXT?
III. Perfect rationality is only attainable by someone who is identical to Gummo Trotsky in all respects.
I know that's going to be hard for a lot of you to take but really, I have thought very hard on this. Once I realised that I was perfectly rational, I naturally turned to the question why me? How did I get stuck with this appalling burden? The simple answer is that it's partly an accident of birth, partly the result of my upbringing, education and experience. And the bad news just keeps on coming.
IV. Only Gummo Trotsky is identical to Gummo Trotsky.
That's an empirical fact, but it's also demonstrable a priori. Even if I did have a monozygoticly* twin brother (which I don't) his upbringing and education could not be identical to mine in all respects. Neither could his life experience; in fact whatever potential he might have would have been hopelessly warped by living in my shadow, always aspiring to be someone he couldn't be - me. On the whole, he's lucky he doesn't exist. It's probably better for the rest of the world too.
Conclusion: The only perfectly rational person in the world is Gummo Trotsky.
As far as I can see, that conclusion is incontestable. Quod erat demonstrandum and all that. If there's any smart arse out there thinking they can refute the argument by the simple expedient of substituting their own name for mine throughout, think again. If you really were the rationality hot-shot you think you are you would have come up with the whole thing for yourself, before I did. You didn't**.
* - Incidentally, if every human life begins at conception, every pair of monozygotic twins includes one entity which, by definition, isn't human. Bit of a puzzler that.
** - And don't forget, either, that I came up with this a week ago. So if you've just come up with a similar argument and posted it on your blog, you're still stuffed.
Philosophy Cornered
Sorry to go all meta on you - well no, not really - but I've been putting a bit of thought into the question why do so many bloggers and blog commenters write so much crap? This led to some reflections on the nature of human reason which, while nowhere near as detailed as Hume's Essay Concerning Human Understanding, nonetheless yielded some valuable insights that are worth sharing with you lot. That about does it for the dilatory opening remarks - you can consider yourselves bloody lucky to have got any at all - let's hop into the argument.
I. Gummo Trotsky is perfectly rational in all respects.
I see no need to defend this proposition - it strikes me as intuitively obvious. I know that there are a lot of you out there for whom it's not intuitively obvious, but this post isn't addressed to you. It's addressed to the few readers I have who are sufficiently rational to recognise the obvious truth of the proposition. The rest of you may as well piss off and read something more suited to your intellectual capacities - like Winnie the Pooh.
II. All disagreements between Gummo Trotsky and others are caused by their failure to be as perfectly rational as Gummo Trotsky.
Corollary: you lot are only rational to the extent that your opinions and beliefs agree with Gummo Trotsky's opinions and beliefs. With one exception. Obviously anyone who is not Gummo Trotsky but who holds beliefs identical to those of Gummo Trotsky believes themselves to be Gummo Trotsky and is therefore delusional - and, eo ipse dixit dominus domino theorem, not rational. Got that? R D0 I HV 2 SA IT A77 AGN N TXT?
III. Perfect rationality is only attainable by someone who is identical to Gummo Trotsky in all respects.
I know that's going to be hard for a lot of you to take but really, I have thought very hard on this. Once I realised that I was perfectly rational, I naturally turned to the question why me? How did I get stuck with this appalling burden? The simple answer is that it's partly an accident of birth, partly the result of my upbringing, education and experience. And the bad news just keeps on coming.
IV. Only Gummo Trotsky is identical to Gummo Trotsky.
That's an empirical fact, but it's also demonstrable a priori. Even if I did have a monozygoticly* twin brother (which I don't) his upbringing and education could not be identical to mine in all respects. Neither could his life experience; in fact whatever potential he might have would have been hopelessly warped by living in my shadow, always aspiring to be someone he couldn't be - me. On the whole, he's lucky he doesn't exist. It's probably better for the rest of the world too.
Conclusion: The only perfectly rational person in the world is Gummo Trotsky.
As far as I can see, that conclusion is incontestable. Quod erat demonstrandum and all that. If there's any smart arse out there thinking they can refute the argument by the simple expedient of substituting their own name for mine throughout, think again. If you really were the rationality hot-shot you think you are you would have come up with the whole thing for yourself, before I did. You didn't**.
* - Incidentally, if every human life begins at conception, every pair of monozygotic twins includes one entity which, by definition, isn't human. Bit of a puzzler that.
** - And don't forget, either, that I came up with this a week ago. So if you've just come up with a similar argument and posted it on your blog, you're still stuffed.
Last Week's Lost Weekend Posts (II)
My Saturday, By Gummo Trotsky, Age Whatever
Note: I wrote this on Saturday, 18 February. In today's Age, Ray Cassin pays out on all the TV critics who have been sucked in by The Biggest Loser. Ross Warneke isn't mentioned by name, but the "typical review" of the show that Cassin pays out on sounds a lot like Warneke's.
Zeppo Bakunin is of the opinion that I should give up reading - or at least restrict myself to fiction in future. He's got a point - reading blogs, blog comments and the papers hasn't doing much for my mood today - and he's had to put up with the consequences.
The trouble started this afternoon, when I looked in on a comments thread into which I'd dropped a little jocule, to discover that my comment had been bloody nit-picked. To make matters worse, I was pretty sure that the comment was nit free - but all I had to go on was vague memories of what I'd read in the PSSC Physics text back in the late sixties and a couple of somewhat dated books of the "complicated science stuff made more or less intelligible to the lay reader" genre. Neither of which I was able to find, naturally.
While Comrade Bakunin took himself off to the gracious City of Stonnington for a performance of Opera in the Park - which, he reported to me later, turned out as more of a Sixties style spontaneous audience participation "happening", with the singing and orchestral performance enhanced with improvisational percussion using found instruments such as wine bottles and bins, groups of amateur players performing improvised Theatre of the Banal dialogues on picnic rugs and a few solo performers on mobile phones - I took myself to the supermarket, to pick up some provender for a little ragu I decided to whip up by way of comfort food. Got home in time for MIIB on Channel Ten.
In the ad breaks I slipped out to the kitchen, sliced some celery very finely, started in on the onion, finely sliced to match the celery. I got half the onion neatly sliced before I realised I wanted the bloody thing minced and it was too late to do that little trick where you make parallel cuts down the onion, almost to the root, and then slice it and voila! Minced onion. Instead I had to do that holding the knife at both ends and chopping up the slices thing, which looks nowhere as neat in the mise en place.
Obviously, once I had the ragu cooking and the pasta on to boil (that came later) and the mushrooms had been sliced and tussed in as a last minute finisher, I started to run out of excuses to nick out of the room during the ad-breaks. Which included a fair few promos for Ten's latest foray into inspirational television, a home grown version of The Biggest Loser. The voice-over artist for the ad promised us an elimination. The ad also featured a scene where a guy was crying while a woman in a somewhat confrontational posture said something I couldn't quite make out.
After Zeppo got back from Stonnington, and reported on the avant-garde doings in Stonnington, we both sat back and watched Eric Bana play that troubled guy with serious anger management issues in The Hulk. The promo came on again and I remembered that The Biggest Loser had been reviewed in The Age Green Guide, somewhere. Somewhere turned out to be page 7 and the reviewer turned out to be Ross Warneke in his Rewind column. Whatever generation he is, he does it little credit in this article:
...
But I confess: I am hooked on this show. And I am not alone.
How did Ross get hooked, despite his belief that it was going to be voyeuristic, degrading. pathetic and tacky? Well we'll come to that later. First we have to disarm any potential critics:
... the politically correct will claim, as they were doing even before the series began, that it is no more than an exercise in humiliation aimed at serving the voyeuristic demands of the masses - and making money for a commercial TV network.
And now that's out of the way, Ross feels it's safe to tell us why he likes the show:
I was one of those who assumed much the same thing - until Monday. What changed my mind was that the producers have been smart enough to select 12 contestants with whom we can feel some affinity and some compassion.
I'm buggered if I can think of a way to satirise this blindingly stupid paragraph. All it amounts to is that the producers got Ross's number: they were clever enough to pick a group of contestants whose exploitation would give the audience a nice warm inner glow of meretricious fellow-feeling. It may be exploitation but it's decent exploitation, which makes all the difference.
It's at this point in the review that the top of my head blew off. I handed the Green Guide over to Comrade Bakunin and he actually read on from there, to the finish of the article:
Before we turned off the TV, I caught that biggest loser promo one more time - and finally made out the words that the female trainer was saying to that bloke who was in tears: Why do you feel you're such a piece of crap?
My Saturday, By Gummo Trotsky, Age Whatever
Note: I wrote this on Saturday, 18 February. In today's Age, Ray Cassin pays out on all the TV critics who have been sucked in by The Biggest Loser. Ross Warneke isn't mentioned by name, but the "typical review" of the show that Cassin pays out on sounds a lot like Warneke's.
Zeppo Bakunin is of the opinion that I should give up reading - or at least restrict myself to fiction in future. He's got a point - reading blogs, blog comments and the papers hasn't doing much for my mood today - and he's had to put up with the consequences.
The trouble started this afternoon, when I looked in on a comments thread into which I'd dropped a little jocule, to discover that my comment had been bloody nit-picked. To make matters worse, I was pretty sure that the comment was nit free - but all I had to go on was vague memories of what I'd read in the PSSC Physics text back in the late sixties and a couple of somewhat dated books of the "complicated science stuff made more or less intelligible to the lay reader" genre. Neither of which I was able to find, naturally.
While Comrade Bakunin took himself off to the gracious City of Stonnington for a performance of Opera in the Park - which, he reported to me later, turned out as more of a Sixties style spontaneous audience participation "happening", with the singing and orchestral performance enhanced with improvisational percussion using found instruments such as wine bottles and bins, groups of amateur players performing improvised Theatre of the Banal dialogues on picnic rugs and a few solo performers on mobile phones - I took myself to the supermarket, to pick up some provender for a little ragu I decided to whip up by way of comfort food. Got home in time for MIIB on Channel Ten.
In the ad breaks I slipped out to the kitchen, sliced some celery very finely, started in on the onion, finely sliced to match the celery. I got half the onion neatly sliced before I realised I wanted the bloody thing minced and it was too late to do that little trick where you make parallel cuts down the onion, almost to the root, and then slice it and voila! Minced onion. Instead I had to do that holding the knife at both ends and chopping up the slices thing, which looks nowhere as neat in the mise en place.
Obviously, once I had the ragu cooking and the pasta on to boil (that came later) and the mushrooms had been sliced and tussed in as a last minute finisher, I started to run out of excuses to nick out of the room during the ad-breaks. Which included a fair few promos for Ten's latest foray into inspirational television, a home grown version of The Biggest Loser. The voice-over artist for the ad promised us an elimination. The ad also featured a scene where a guy was crying while a woman in a somewhat confrontational posture said something I couldn't quite make out.
After Zeppo got back from Stonnington, and reported on the avant-garde doings in Stonnington, we both sat back and watched Eric Bana play that troubled guy with serious anger management issues in The Hulk. The promo came on again and I remembered that The Biggest Loser had been reviewed in The Age Green Guide, somewhere. Somewhere turned out to be page 7 and the reviewer turned out to be Ross Warneke in his Rewind column. Whatever generation he is, he does it little credit in this article:
IT'S confession time. After more than 20 years of writing and talking about television, there are some shows that I know I will not like, even before I see them. Lately it has been reality shows built around exploitation and humiliation. Not the team game formats of Survivor or The Amazing Race, but the shows that are constructed solely around the belittling and shaming of contestants.
So when Channel Ten announced it was planning an Australian clone of the American fat-farm reality show The Biggest Loser, I knew I would hate it....
But I confess: I am hooked on this show. And I am not alone.
How did Ross get hooked, despite his belief that it was going to be voyeuristic, degrading. pathetic and tacky? Well we'll come to that later. First we have to disarm any potential critics:
... the politically correct will claim, as they were doing even before the series began, that it is no more than an exercise in humiliation aimed at serving the voyeuristic demands of the masses - and making money for a commercial TV network.
And now that's out of the way, Ross feels it's safe to tell us why he likes the show:
I was one of those who assumed much the same thing - until Monday. What changed my mind was that the producers have been smart enough to select 12 contestants with whom we can feel some affinity and some compassion.
I'm buggered if I can think of a way to satirise this blindingly stupid paragraph. All it amounts to is that the producers got Ross's number: they were clever enough to pick a group of contestants whose exploitation would give the audience a nice warm inner glow of meretricious fellow-feeling. It may be exploitation but it's decent exploitation, which makes all the difference.
It's at this point in the review that the top of my head blew off. I handed the Green Guide over to Comrade Bakunin and he actually read on from there, to the finish of the article:
These people are not being exploited. They have volunteered to appear on the show. They know from watching the American series of The Biggest Loser screened by Ten last year what they will have to endure. Some will be humiliated.
They know that lots of us will be following their progress, laughing at them sometimes, crying for them at others. And it might hurt. But is that any worse than having to live an entire life in which you know that you are seen, rightly or wrongly, as a loser?
Then he came up with that friendly suggestion that I lay off the reading for a while, or at the very least, stick to fiction. Right now that sounds very sensible, although it's going to make topical blogging a bit difficult. I'll have to consider other possible projects - a complete fisking of A la Recherche de Temps Perdu perhaps. That ought to provide a fair bit of material to be going on with.Before we turned off the TV, I caught that biggest loser promo one more time - and finally made out the words that the female trainer was saying to that bloke who was in tears: Why do you feel you're such a piece of crap?
A Night to Remember, A Night to Forget
It happened in the back garden of one of Melbourne's most eminent conservative academics on a December night a few days before Christmas. Each year, the Professor and his family - wife Victoria and daughter Regina - put on an evening of pre-Christmas drinks for their friends. Me and the ex got invited through our social connections with the Professor's daughter, who was a little, even rather a lot, to the left of her father on political issues. As you might imagine the political positions of the guests reflected those of their respective hosts, so it was a very mixed gathering.
I forget his name - for present purposes we might as well call him Cedric Cudham and have done with it. Of his appearance, all I remember is that he wore a pair of coke bottle spectacles and academic deshabille - a pale cream open-necked shirt which may, or may not, have been graced with a cravat in lieu of a necktie. He spoke with an accent of the kind that once prompted a long-lost girlfriend - a working holidayer from the Old Dart - to ask "Why do so many people in this country work so hard at sounding like middle-class gits from Surbiton?" She laughed when I told her that they weren't working at it that, in fact, they picked up their Surbiton accents at our most exclusive private schools. In Cedric's case, I think she might have been on the money; whatever the source of his accent, he put a lot of effort into letting everyone know that he had one.
For Cedric, the Professor - who actually preferred to be called Albert or Bert - could only be addressed as Professor or Sir. Mrs Professor was Victoria and Miss Professor, their daughter, Regina. The rest of us were just you as befitted our status as nameless non-entities with no connections who could assist his rise to a lofty eminence of academic mediocrity. In other words, he was one of those kiss up and kick down guys.
The conversation was at that vague stage between the opening - when people are sounding each other out with questions like "So, what do you do for a crust?" staying well away from controversial topics, preferring to talk pop-culture instead until they've got some idea of how to get into the interesting stuff without provoking a blazing row - and the conversational middle game, when those controversial topics finally get opened. Possibly Cedric was impatient to get into his middle game. Whatever the reason, he asked apropos nothing at all "What do you think of this Royal Commission on Aboriginal Deaths in custody then, Regina?" Talk about bringing out your Queen too early.
Regina didn't take up his invitation; she said something non-commital and turned to another topic. You might say she castled short with a view to putting together a solid pawn position, but that's straining the metaphor a bit. But Cedric wasn't to be put off that easily - he pursued the topic until someone broke in to ask: "Well, what do you think of the Royal Commission then?"
It was a voice I recognised easily. It was that of my beloved - this was back in the old days, well before the night we broke the sacred oath we took one night that we would never be that couple in the restaurant who've decided to go out and talk their difficulties over on neutral ground, with a good meal thrown in to help keep things more or less civil, then fail miserably in the endeavour and put all the other customers off their food.
I recognised the look on her face too - seeing it, the last thing that I would be inclined to do would be offer an opinion on the Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody but Cedric was made of much denser stuff. "Well, I think it was gross waste of the taxpayer's money," he declared, "if you look at the statistics you'll find that most of the deaths in custody in Australia are of white prisoners but no-one's interested in having a Royal Commission into those."
Where precisely the dialogue went after that I don't recall, but it rapidly turned into one of those blazing rows that everyone had been trying very hard to avoid. Most of the blaze was on Cedric's side; there was a distinct chill on the other side of the table where my then-beloved was sitting. The two of them were gathering a bit of an audience too - there was a lot of jockeying for positions in the western stands, where it was easier to watch the spectacle of Cedric's facial expressions. All you could see from the eastern stands was the icy cold tigress-with-a-litter-of-cubs-to-feed glare of his interlocutor which, admirable as it was, was nowhere near as entertaining. Everybody looked very earnest and po-faced but there was a lot of traffic from the garden into the house, particularly the toilet, where people used the relative privacy to vent their feelings as best they could and restore their composure. I spent a good five minutes there myself, stamping my feet a few times and damn near biting off my index finger before I could get back to the impromptu entertainment.
When I got back, Cedric launched into a remark beginning "With all due respect ..." and faltered because nowhere in the course of the dispute so far had he bothered to find out who he was talking to. "Helga" offered the Valkyrie of my dreams.
"With all due respect Helga ..."
Helga pulled hard on the length of rope that he had just wound around his neck. "Don't give me 'with all due respect'," she said "We both know that means you don't respect me at all. I would never insult you by telling you that I respected you when I obviously didn't. Just come out and say what you have to say."
Poor Cedric was gobsmacked. His face glowed a deep scarlet and he sputtered a few times while he struggled to cope with the novel idea of delivering an insult without prefacing it with some mealy-mouthed periphrasis. He'd been called out to fight like a woman. It really was difficult for the poor chap so when he spoke again, it was with all the force of a stutterer finishing a long struggle with the word "pomposity".
"Alright Helga, you're a fool ..." he began, and went on to enumerate her several follies before restating his position with a few variations - there should have been a Royal Commission into white deaths in custody and the whole damn thing was a complete waste of time because no wrongdoing was found on the part of the police.
"They had a duty of care to all of those prisoners," Helga said, quietly but firmly "And they failed in that duty."
Once more, Cedric was gobsmacked. "But they all committed suicide!" he cried, "That's simply preposterous."
At this point, someone else jumped into the conversation - a retired businessman in his late fifties or early sixties, who had taken to writing crime fiction to make a few readies to pad out the income from his investments. "Actually, that's a pretty good point, regardless of whether a prisoner's black or white - while they're in custody the police do have a duty of care."
Finally, Cedric recognised that the audience was against him - he was outmatched on intellect, knowledge and simple good manners. He turned to his one last hope for salvation. "Well, what's your opinion, Professor, Sir?" he asked.
The Professor merely gave him a quizzical look and Cedric quickly subsided into silence. A few minutes later he said his goodbyes and left, working very hard at not looking like a man who is slinking away from an argument that he has just lost, making a complete fool of himself into the bargain. Once he was gone the conversation turned to the post-match commentary. Someone even made the mischievous suggestion that Cedric had primed himself for the evening by reading up on all the controversial topics he might find himself arguing about, the better to impress others - particularly Bert - with his compendious knowledge. OK, so that was me. Helga found a private moment to apologise to Victoria for her involvement in the whole kerfuffle.
"Oh, don't worry about it," Victoria reassured her, "It's about time Cedric was brought down a peg or two."
I learnt later that, in the New Year, Albert and Victoria had to get someone in to replace several cracked tiles and regrout the entire floor in the toilet.
It happened in the back garden of one of Melbourne's most eminent conservative academics on a December night a few days before Christmas. Each year, the Professor and his family - wife Victoria and daughter Regina - put on an evening of pre-Christmas drinks for their friends. Me and the ex got invited through our social connections with the Professor's daughter, who was a little, even rather a lot, to the left of her father on political issues. As you might imagine the political positions of the guests reflected those of their respective hosts, so it was a very mixed gathering.
I forget his name - for present purposes we might as well call him Cedric Cudham and have done with it. Of his appearance, all I remember is that he wore a pair of coke bottle spectacles and academic deshabille - a pale cream open-necked shirt which may, or may not, have been graced with a cravat in lieu of a necktie. He spoke with an accent of the kind that once prompted a long-lost girlfriend - a working holidayer from the Old Dart - to ask "Why do so many people in this country work so hard at sounding like middle-class gits from Surbiton?" She laughed when I told her that they weren't working at it that, in fact, they picked up their Surbiton accents at our most exclusive private schools. In Cedric's case, I think she might have been on the money; whatever the source of his accent, he put a lot of effort into letting everyone know that he had one.
For Cedric, the Professor - who actually preferred to be called Albert or Bert - could only be addressed as Professor or Sir. Mrs Professor was Victoria and Miss Professor, their daughter, Regina. The rest of us were just you as befitted our status as nameless non-entities with no connections who could assist his rise to a lofty eminence of academic mediocrity. In other words, he was one of those kiss up and kick down guys.
The conversation was at that vague stage between the opening - when people are sounding each other out with questions like "So, what do you do for a crust?" staying well away from controversial topics, preferring to talk pop-culture instead until they've got some idea of how to get into the interesting stuff without provoking a blazing row - and the conversational middle game, when those controversial topics finally get opened. Possibly Cedric was impatient to get into his middle game. Whatever the reason, he asked apropos nothing at all "What do you think of this Royal Commission on Aboriginal Deaths in custody then, Regina?" Talk about bringing out your Queen too early.
Regina didn't take up his invitation; she said something non-commital and turned to another topic. You might say she castled short with a view to putting together a solid pawn position, but that's straining the metaphor a bit. But Cedric wasn't to be put off that easily - he pursued the topic until someone broke in to ask: "Well, what do you think of the Royal Commission then?"
It was a voice I recognised easily. It was that of my beloved - this was back in the old days, well before the night we broke the sacred oath we took one night that we would never be that couple in the restaurant who've decided to go out and talk their difficulties over on neutral ground, with a good meal thrown in to help keep things more or less civil, then fail miserably in the endeavour and put all the other customers off their food.
I recognised the look on her face too - seeing it, the last thing that I would be inclined to do would be offer an opinion on the Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody but Cedric was made of much denser stuff. "Well, I think it was gross waste of the taxpayer's money," he declared, "if you look at the statistics you'll find that most of the deaths in custody in Australia are of white prisoners but no-one's interested in having a Royal Commission into those."
Where precisely the dialogue went after that I don't recall, but it rapidly turned into one of those blazing rows that everyone had been trying very hard to avoid. Most of the blaze was on Cedric's side; there was a distinct chill on the other side of the table where my then-beloved was sitting. The two of them were gathering a bit of an audience too - there was a lot of jockeying for positions in the western stands, where it was easier to watch the spectacle of Cedric's facial expressions. All you could see from the eastern stands was the icy cold tigress-with-a-litter-of-cubs-to-feed glare of his interlocutor which, admirable as it was, was nowhere near as entertaining. Everybody looked very earnest and po-faced but there was a lot of traffic from the garden into the house, particularly the toilet, where people used the relative privacy to vent their feelings as best they could and restore their composure. I spent a good five minutes there myself, stamping my feet a few times and damn near biting off my index finger before I could get back to the impromptu entertainment.
When I got back, Cedric launched into a remark beginning "With all due respect ..." and faltered because nowhere in the course of the dispute so far had he bothered to find out who he was talking to. "Helga" offered the Valkyrie of my dreams.
"With all due respect Helga ..."
Helga pulled hard on the length of rope that he had just wound around his neck. "Don't give me 'with all due respect'," she said "We both know that means you don't respect me at all. I would never insult you by telling you that I respected you when I obviously didn't. Just come out and say what you have to say."
Poor Cedric was gobsmacked. His face glowed a deep scarlet and he sputtered a few times while he struggled to cope with the novel idea of delivering an insult without prefacing it with some mealy-mouthed periphrasis. He'd been called out to fight like a woman. It really was difficult for the poor chap so when he spoke again, it was with all the force of a stutterer finishing a long struggle with the word "pomposity".
"Alright Helga, you're a fool ..." he began, and went on to enumerate her several follies before restating his position with a few variations - there should have been a Royal Commission into white deaths in custody and the whole damn thing was a complete waste of time because no wrongdoing was found on the part of the police.
"They had a duty of care to all of those prisoners," Helga said, quietly but firmly "And they failed in that duty."
Once more, Cedric was gobsmacked. "But they all committed suicide!" he cried, "That's simply preposterous."
At this point, someone else jumped into the conversation - a retired businessman in his late fifties or early sixties, who had taken to writing crime fiction to make a few readies to pad out the income from his investments. "Actually, that's a pretty good point, regardless of whether a prisoner's black or white - while they're in custody the police do have a duty of care."
Finally, Cedric recognised that the audience was against him - he was outmatched on intellect, knowledge and simple good manners. He turned to his one last hope for salvation. "Well, what's your opinion, Professor, Sir?" he asked.
The Professor merely gave him a quizzical look and Cedric quickly subsided into silence. A few minutes later he said his goodbyes and left, working very hard at not looking like a man who is slinking away from an argument that he has just lost, making a complete fool of himself into the bargain. Once he was gone the conversation turned to the post-match commentary. Someone even made the mischievous suggestion that Cedric had primed himself for the evening by reading up on all the controversial topics he might find himself arguing about, the better to impress others - particularly Bert - with his compendious knowledge. OK, so that was me. Helga found a private moment to apologise to Victoria for her involvement in the whole kerfuffle.
"Oh, don't worry about it," Victoria reassured her, "It's about time Cedric was brought down a peg or two."
I learnt later that, in the New Year, Albert and Victoria had to get someone in to replace several cracked tiles and regrout the entire floor in the toilet.
Thursday, February 23, 2006
Afloat Again!
Crossed my fingers and posted The Weaaselversary Post just now, to test whether that problem I was having on Sunday had gone away. Looks like I'm back in business.
There's still some refitting to do, come this weekend - a new template,a bit of a purge of the BlogIntern and switching fom Haloscan comments to Blogger comments. Commenting at this blog is generally light anyway but it's worth noting, so your pearls of wisdom and acerbic ripostes don't get lost in cyberspace.
The Weaselversary Post
This Week The Age is running a series on ten years of the Howard government. The general consensus seems to be that Howard owes his electoral success to low interest rates, low interest rates and low interest rates. Over at The Hun, Andrew Bolt has put a little more effort into analysing the Weasel's political success:
It seems Labor, at least, has finally learned not to be goaded into stupidity -- into monstering Howard just for saying an obvious truth, but one not endorsed by dinner-party moralists and snow-field socialists.
Of course, it should have learned this lesson long ago -- in 1996, when Howard won his first election.
That's pretty telling in my book - Howard is pretty much an expert at goading his political opponents into stupidity. It's also something of an unwitting self-revelation on Andy's part - when you come down to it, this is why he admires the little bugger. So much so, that he reckons:
LOOKING back over Howard's 10 years of government, it is in fact hard to spot anything he should be downright ashamed of having said.
That's not to say he hasn't made mistakes -- whether claiming children were thrown overboard or believing Iraq still had weapons of mass destruction.
And looking back over Andy's columns, you'd find it hard to spot anything he should be downright ashamed of having said either - most of that stuff has disappeared down the pay-per-view memory hole. But the page does feature an advertisement for an upcoming collection of Andrew's "best" columns under the title still not sorry.Sunday, February 19, 2006
The Tragedy of the Uncommon
Courtesy of Daniel Barnes in this comment at Catallaxy, here's a tragic tale of what can happen when the irresistible intellectual force of Objectivism meets that stubbornly immovable object, human nature. If the story told here is true, I ought to be ashamed of myself for laughing at it so much. That's why I prefer to think someone's taking the piss. Here's a taster:I have a relative in Florida who thinks my philosophy is abominable. He worked three “shit jobs” (one of them was cleaning sludge out of swimming pools), Home Depot and some other job wheeling dead patients around a morgue, all of this, while he was undergoing chemotherapy for colon cancer. I laud his stalwartness, but I don’t share his level of ambition to scratch in the dirt for subsistence survival. I want more out of life than working without sleep for years on end, risking an auto accident due to sleepiness, and having no time to recreate. I’ve been there, and it was insane. I once had a dream that I could save money by working 16 hours, 7 days a week. In the end, the IRS won big, and all I could save in two years was $900. I’m through with working the hard, stupid way.
Thursday, February 16, 2006
Reasons to be Cheerful
Isn't it good to know that the Australian Government won't be having any truck with illegal phone taps of innocent citizens? Thanks to the Telecommunications (Interception) Amendment Bill, introduced into Federal Parliament today, we can rest assured that Wise King Otto will never have to stand up in Parliament and explain how tapping the phone calls of completely innocent citizens was all done in the interests of national security and the Attorney-General told him it was all OK really. That's strictly an only in America thing.The Explanatory Memorandum to the bill is pretty clear on the future here in Happy Valley:
4. In implementing recommendations of the Blunn Report, this Bill will amend the Act to:
(a) insert a warrant regime for access to stored communications held by a telecommunications carrier;
(b) enable interception of communications of a person known to communicate with the person of interest;
Right now, all the opposition to this intrusive expansion of police powers seems to be coming from within the Coalition and the usual legal big-wigs. Well, Big Kim has too many other things on his plate right now - such as staying on-side with his backers without coming out publicly against Simon Crean's pre-selection.
Happy VD
Two days late, this turned up in my E-Mail:HAPPY VD IT'S PATRICIA FROM LONDON
From Mrs Patricia Azia
Good Morning ,
How are you today? and Compliments of the Valentine's period I hope all is well and there is no problem with business ? Besides i will send my picture for you to know me well as you reply now. However my name is Mrs Patricia Azia from london- United Kingdom. I am the personal account officer to Late Mr _______, 55, who is a british citizen living here in London with his family before his sudden death. This mail is written to solicit your assistance to be presented as a business foreign associate to my Late Client Mr _______ . He made a fixed Deposit valued at USD8.8million (Eight Million ,Eight hundred United States Dollars Only) with a finance institution here in London. Unfortunately he lost his life on July 7 london bus bomb which took place at Tavistock Square-London. To see the details of this bomb blast and my late client Mr _______ , Please click on the <http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk
He left no clear beneficiary as to his business foreign associate but all documents relating to the claim of this fund will be processed in your name as his business foreign associate as soon as we agreed together ...
Obviously, Pat (who I'm pretty sure I don't know from Eve), doesn't live in London - she's one of those Nigerian financial wizards who are always coming across neglected bank accounts holding millions of dollars they'll happily share with some mug who'll just give them a bank account number. The unfortunate Mr _______ is real too, but I figured it might be tactful to suppress his name .
Anyway, I know it's now three days late and all, but a happy VD to you too, Patricia. And may you have lots of happy VDs to come.
Monday, February 13, 2006
Serengeti Slash
A couple of weeks ago I made a mental note to keep an eye out for the last episode of Walking With Beasts on our ABC. As usually happens with mental notes, I lost it so, while the last episode of the series screened on Saturday afternoon, I was sitting at my PC writing stuff. So I missed the chance to watch that homo erectus couple having decorously English missionary position sex out on the Serengeti Plain.By the way, have you heard the one about the Frenchman making love to an English girl? Afterwards, when he's lying back smoking his Gauloise, or a Gitane, or whatever brand Frenchmen prefer as a post-coital smoke, he remarks "Ma Cherie, I am so sorry that I hurt you?"
"No that was lovely," she answers, 'Whatever makes you think that you hurt me?"
"You moved."
OK, enough with the ethnic stereotype jokes, even if that one did come from a very respectable London broadsheet. Time to get to the point. Over at Club Troppo, in answer to a question from Anna Winter, Dr Troppo writes:
Perhaps other readers would like to assist Ms Winter in her campaign to ban ‘creepy’ fanfic by providing other examples of things that should never have been allowed. Ms Winter has expressed a special interest in fanfic based on bloggers.
I hope you'll excuse me if I pass on the opportunity to write a piece of fanfic about myself and, say, Andrea Harris of Spleenville fame. On the other hand, some might find this alternative narrative track for Walking With Beasts creepy enough to warrant banning:
One of the young females in the erectus group has commenced oestrus1. She signals her willingness to mate to a nearby male by bending forward and oscillating her rump.
The male approaches the female and tentatively sniffs at her vulva. Stimulated by the scent of the pheremones it is secreting, he tastes it. he quickly becomes sexually aroused and positions himself for coitus.
The alpha male of the group sees the couple about to mate; enraged by this challenge to his dominanace from the younger male, he pushes him away from the female. The two males fight - as they do the older male also becomes sexually aroused2.
The loser is quickly driven off and retreats, turning his back on the winner and the rest of the group. The winner mounts the female and they mate. The mating is quickly over3.
1 - Yes, I know, modern women don't have oestrus cycles they have that time of the month. As far as I know, nobody has any idea when this evolved.
2 - This behaviour has been observed in other species (deer as I recall). Did it happen in early hominids? Who cares - it makes a good story.
3 - Or maybe they went at it for hours, who knows? It all depends on whether you think all that Kama Sutra stuff is instinctive human behaviour, or a cultural development.
Sunday, February 12, 2006
Bird Blogging
John Quiggin has taken his first, hesitant step, into the exciting world of bird-blogging. If this catches on, it's pretty much inevitable that someone will raise the question: "Why are the Left so obsessed with birds all of a sudden?"
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