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;

That's right - subject to a judicial warrant, once this bill has been passed the police ans other security agencies will have the power to tap your phone, just because you're known to communicate with "a person of interest". Rather takes the gloss of on-line dating doesn't it?

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/4668245.stm>

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.

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.

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?"

Say What?

Here's a little guessing game, or scavenger hunt, to help you while away a couple of weekend hours. What's the missing phrase in this quotation (first ellipsis):

The alternative to ... is reading nothing, having no interest in the amazing and the unpredictable. in the brilliance and stupidity of others ...

(Tip of the hat to Zeppo Bakunin for suggesting this post).

Update (Monday, 13 February) - here's the answer:

The alternative to the sharemarket is reading nothing, having no interest in the amazing and the unpredictable, in the brilliance and stupidity of others and never realising the opportunity to make money through the labour of others.

It is about taking an interest in the world. It's about opportunity and risk and taking both by the horns.

Marcus Padley in Saturday's Age.

A New Golden Age?

A couple of things struck me, while I was going through The Age Green Guide on Thurday to see if there was anything remotely worth watching coming up in the next week. Apart from Desperate Housewives, which would be much improved if they dropped Teri Hatcher's character Susan, and gave us more of Gloria Cross as Bree, there's not much. Scrubs has disappeared from Seven's programming schedule - last week's episode, of which more later, was screened at 1.40am Wednesday, Seven's usual dumping ground for programs that turn out to be too clever for the commercial stations' preferred demographic - people who like crap TV so much that they'll even sit still during the ad-breaks. The absence of Scrubs from the programming schedule was thing number one.

Thing number two was a review, by Jim Schembri, of a coming episode of Curb Your Enthusiasm. Jim writes:

For a first-class demonstration of just how far ahead of us the Americans are when it comes to post-PC comedy, you simply must check out this golden episode from season four [of this series].

If, as Jim's remark implies, we are now in an era of post-PC comedy, it obviously comes after an era of PC comedy, preceded, in its turn, by an era of pre-PC comedy (see Figure 1).

TV Comedy Timeline (Australia)
Era		Major Events/Comedy Shows	Start
Post-PC	Late
	Middle
	Early		10 years BP
PC	Late	Pauline Hanson's maiden speech in Parliament ends the PC era in Australian Politics.
	Middle
	Early	The Big Gig
Pre-PC	Late	The Naked Vicar Show, Kingswood Country, The Comedy Company, The Gillies Report (proto-PC or full-on PC?)
	Middle	The Mavis Bramston Show
	Early	Dawn of television.	50 yrs BP

Figure 1.

As you can see, there's still a fair bit of work to do on the timeline. At the moment it's an open question whether we've got to the Late Post-PC era or whether in fact we're still struggling to get through the Late-Middle, or worse yet, the Middle-Early or even the Early-Early. Some might maintain that we're still in the Late-Late-PC. Wherever we are, last week's episode of Scrubs showed that there's a way to go yet.

Sure, it featured Michael J Fox, an actor with Parkinson's Disease, playing Doctor Kevin Casey, a doctor with Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (OCD). Which ought to get it plenty of Post-PC cred points - what could be less politically correct than casting an actor with a well-known degenerative illness as a doctor with a chronic behavioural disorder? And then playing it for laughs for most of the episode. Unfortunately Scrubs has too many PC hangovers - an ethnically diverse cast of characters, female characters with careers and so on. The most absurd of these PC inclusions is the dwarf janitor, who regularly beats his less vertically-challenged colleague in roof-top wrestling matches. And all the post-PC cred the episode picked up with the string of OCD jokes was blown away in the final scene and the preachy "philosophical" final voice over.

To finish, I'm inviting anyone who can scrape together the least skerrick of interest in the subject to nominate TV comedies and significant events that should be included in the TV Comedy Timeline.

SIUYFA

If you live in Melbourne, you already know that BATBYGOBSTOPL is an acronym for something or other. By now you're bound to have seen that Metlink television advertisement explaining the acronym. The one that strikes you as completely humourless and witless on first viewing and doesn't grow on you - except perhaps in the sense that tinea grows on you - with repeated exposure.

Travelling to the Victoria Market today, by Metlink Tram, I had the misfortune to notice a poster featuring the BATBYGOBSTOPL acronym. To add to my troubles my mind immediately went into Now-What-Does-That-Stand-For-Again (NWDTSFA) mode. Which spoiled the first part of trip for me, until a young woman sat down a couple of seats forward of me, kindly interposing her scoop-necked T-shirt (worn over an under-sized brassiere) between me and the poster.

The title of this post is an acronym too. It stands for What I Wish They'd Told The Smart-Arse Advertising Agency Creative Who Came Up With This Bloody Stupid Campaign.

How to Starve a Blackbird Chick

It's a fairly typical morning in the back yard, except that the concrete is still damp from last night's rain and the sky is overcast with the promise of more showers to come. There's a female blackbird perched on the back fence, a worm clasped in her beak, still wriggling. She watches me warily as I come out the back door and light up a cigarette.

Her gaze follows me as I stroll across the yard to the gate and back again. We watch each other for a minute or two then it occurs to me to get out of her line of sight. She waits a minute more, then flies across the back yard of the neighbours behind, into the wisteria at the corner of the back porch where she has hidden her nest.

It's always the female; the male is usually perched in some high place - like a TV antenna or a vent pipe, keeping an eye out for worm-poachers and singing out the usual reminder that:

This land is my land,
This land is my land,
From that fence over there to somewhere near the dumpster in the service station at the corner,
Oh and that palm tree's mine too, so you just bugger off sport ...

It'd be a bugger for the both of them if they've been fostering one of those parasitic cuckoos, whose mother flew into the nest one day while they weren't looking and left behind her single egg and flew off again, with no more thought for her offspring than thank God that's done - bird, but it gives you a sore clacker.

Postscript: I started this piece a few days ago, at the start of my alleged hiatus. A day later a fledgling blackbird turned up perched on top of one of the bins. So it looks like that's the breeding season over for another year.

The Ghost of Blogs Past

Curious, how some things come back to haunt you, isn't it? Like when Tim Blair's having a bit of a stuck-for-material day and decides to stick his head up his own blog and play Ghost Whisperer, calling up the spirits of the dead to haunt your nights of insomnia. There I am, on Tim's blog, listed as number one member of the Loser Club, with Chris Sheil, Tim Lambert, John Quiggin, Tim Dunlop, Wayne Sanderson, Gianna, Mathew Henderson-Hau, Antony Loewenstein, Margo Kingston, David Heidelberg and Anonymous Lefty. All of us with annoying little errors in our blog archives, duly noted by Tim.

My boo-boo, and it was a biggie - if you're going to stuff up there's no point doing it by halves, was verballing Andrew Bolt verballing Justice O'Loughlin of the Federal Court in Cubillo v Commonwealth. On February 22, 2004 so the two year anniversary will be coming up soon. Now there's an excuse for a piss-up.

The bugger of it is, that in a column of 28 September, 2005, Bolt cobbled together selected excerpts from sections 393, 394, 395, 511, 408, 1535, 1148, 1159, 1160, 1304 and 1305 of Justice O'Loughlin's verdict (in that order) to come up with this summary:

[Evidence] showed the primitive conditions under which the missionaries were living. It would be safe to assume that the conditions under which the Aboriginal people were living would have been no better . . . Cynical though it may be to some, the conditions at Retta Dixon Home [in Darwin, to where Cubillo was brought] were preferable . . .

I limit myself to rejecting the claim that it was a 'myth' to think of a part-Aboriginal child as an outcast in Aboriginal communities . . .

The evidence does not support a finding that there was any policy of removal of part-Aboriginal children such as that alleged . . . [Gunner and Cubillo] have failed to prove that the 'purpose' of their removals and detentions was (or included) the purpose of destroying their associations and connections with their mothers, families and cultures.

Woulda had him on toast there if it weren't for a small boy-who-cried-wolf issue.

Tim's blogging record is, of course, impeccably boo-boo free. OK, so there was that little dust-up with MediaWatch over a US Flag that turned out to be embarassingly Pentagon-debris-deficient but that was all David Marr's fault, really.

Who Are These Faceless Men*?

Anyone who read yesterday's Senate Hansard, could be forgiven for thinking that the government of this country is slipping into the hands of a cabal of anonymous, unaccountable "experts", rather than a Cabinet of well-known, unaccountable Ministers. Well, that seems to be what a few of the opponents of the THERAPEUTIC GOODS AMENDMENT (REPEAL OF MINISTERIAL RESPONSIBILITY FOR APPROVAL OF RU486) BILL 2005 obviously believe:

Senator FIELDING (Victoria—Leader of the Family First Party) (5.34 p.m.) - Everyone has an opinion about abortion. It is one of those controversial issues that sparks great community debate. We have seen that in the last few weeks in relation to the abortion drug RU486. This debate has been prompted by a private member’s bill introduced by a National Party senator, Fiona Nash. The Therapeutic Goods Amendment (Repeal of Ministerial responsibility for approval of RU486) Bill 2005 is designed to shift responsibility for approving the drug from the health minister to the Therapeutic Goods Administration - that is, the TGA - a body which examines the safety of drugs. Put simply, the question is: who decides on RU486? Do we want our elected leaders deciding whether this drug should be approved in Australia or do we want to give that decision-making power to unelected bureaucrats?

Family First believes that this is a unique drug which raises major social policy and ethical issues as well as medical and safety issues. We cannot consider the social policy issues without taking into account community attitudes ...

Family First strongly believes that policy decisions should never be made by unelected bureaucrats; their job is to advise on policy and implement policy decisions.

Senator BARNETT (Tasmania) (5.47 p.m.) - I stand here today to oppose the Therapeutic Goods Amendment (Repeal of Ministerial responsibility for approval of RU486) Bill 2005 and its repeal of ministerial responsibility for drugs, including abortion drugs, in the category of restricted goods ...

How can this cocktail of abortion drugs, together with the controversial drug RU486, which is currently under intense scrutiny around the world, be the sole province of a team of unelected officials who would have ultimate arbitrary powers? RU486 can be used in the early to mid stages of pregnancy, up to 20 weeks. What is stopping another drug being designed in the months or years ahead to kill an unborn baby late term? Nothing at all. It would be up to an unelected team of bureaucrats, no matter how expert, in the TGA. What a cop-out for federal members of parliament.

Senator POLLEY (Tasmania) (6.20 p.m.) - I rise to speak on the Therapeutic Goods Amendment (Repeal of Ministerial responsibility for approval of RU486) Bill 2005...

The competence of the TGA is restricted to assessing medicines on medical grounds. Leaving out the cruel human rights considerations raised by RU486, the faceless public servants of the TGA should not make the decision. RU486 is not comparable with any other drug that may be considered by the TGA ...

Senator JOYCE (Queensland) (8.34 p.m.) - This is a very historic time in our parliament. There are very few times that one has the opportunity to have a responsibility for making a decision about a defining social issue that will permeate through the annals of our nation. It will be acknowledged as a personal position of commitment by the senators in this chamber. As with many other historical debates in other parliaments throughout the world, your position on this shall be written down in history and your role judged by history accordingly. As it is a conscience vote, it does the unusual thing of definitively stating who you are and the ethical issues that drive you.

This is a debate about the role of government and on the question of its determination in the lives of others and on the question of life itself ...

There is one thing that has definitely been portrayed during this debate, and that is that this is a highly contentious issue by reason of the closely held views of the citizens of Australia. The proponents of this bill believe that this ethos of political representation should not be respected. They believe a direct political remedy, reflected in the ministerial authority, should be subordinate to an unelected bureaucrat. By removing the path of authority on an issue, we allow the progression of unelected bureaucrats to attain the mantle that we believe, and the community believes, we have been elected for. The minister should be responsible for reflecting a hands-on role on contentious issues.
[my emphasis in all cases]

So who are these bureaucrats and experts who will usurp the authority of the Parliament, if this Bill passes? The bureaucrats are the public servants who work for the Therapeutic Goods Administration of the Department of Health and Aging. Apparently, they are not accountable to the Minister for Health - which would hardly surprise anyone, given the new conventions the Howard Government has adopted on Ministerial and Departmental accountability. And the experts are the members of the Australian Drug Education Evaluation Committee:

Role of ADEC

The ADEC is appointed by the Minister for Health and Ageing and provides advice to the Minister and the Secretary of the Commonwealth Department of Health and Ageing through the Therapeutic Goods Administration, on:

• the quality, risk-benefit, effectiveness and access within a reasonable time of any drug referred to it for evaluation;
• medical and scientific evaluations of applications for registration of prescription drugs (e.g. new chemical entities, new forms of previously registered drugs and therapeutic variations to registered drugs).

The Committee also provides services to other Government departments, committees and community-based organisations on a wide variety of regulatory matters related to prescription medicines.

But, once again, under the current understanding of the Westminster system, they're not accountable either. If we went back to holding public servants and Ministerial appointees accountable to Ministers, we might have to go back to holding Ministers accountable to Parliament. And we can't have that now, can we?

* - and women of course.

Bat, Ball, Home (Again)

Gummo Trotsky is overwhelmed with ennui. Bloggage will resume in a couple of weeks with another installment of The Enchanted Toasting Fork.

Slow Day at Spleenville

It looks like Tim Blair found himself stuck for material Sunday morning - how else do we explain his decision to get stuck into this Australia Day column by Christopher Bantick?

Bantick is one of those "Melbourne writers" who turn up in the op-ed pages of The Age from time to time and, three days after its publication, Tim decided to set Bantick straight on a few issues and provide a bit of historic perspective:

Back then [in Bantick's youth], there were no wire fences in the desert keeping new arrivals from the rest of Australian society.

“New arrivals”? He’s talking about illegal arrivals, who tend to turn up without passports or any other supporting documents. By the way, Australia’s enlightened post-war Labor government tried to ship refugees home. Here’s what went on in 1949: “The Chifley Government passes the War-time Refugees Removal Act in July, with a view to forcibly repatriating approximately 900 non-Europeans who had been admitted temporarily during the war. They had declined to be repatriated, wishing to settle in Australia.”

Never did I think I would have to explain to my young son why people were locked up in camps.

Did Bantick’s own parents ever explain to him anything about 1950s refugee camps?

Tim describes this, accurately enough, as perverse nostalgia; the same perverse nostalgia Bantick displays in this December 2005 article, where he gets all gooey about the loss of childhood wonder since cyberspace came along. So far, so good - give or take the opposing twists in our funny bones, I might concede that Tim has point - Bantick is running a "We used to live in old shoe box in middle-o-road" number on us. Again. But then he blows it (guess he can't help himself) with this update, linking to one last article by Bantick. One from June 2000, for crying out loud:

More from Bantick: “Every faceless junkie has a name.” Yes. And also your DVD player.

The linked article recounts Bantick's encounter with one of his former students, now begging for spare change outside Melbourne University. I can see the humour in that final quip from Tim - it's funny the same way that kicking someone's teeth out and then calling them "Fang" is funny.

Over at Surfdom Tim Dunlop has also picked up on Timbo's post (OK, so it was before I did) and would like to know, if not even John Howard wants to return to the sort of monoculture Bantick describes in his Australia Day article, just what sort of monoculture Howard does want to return to. I think the answer might be in Howard's Australia Day address to the National Press Club:

Most nations experience some level of cultural diversity while also having a dominant cultural pattern running through them. In Australia’s case, that dominant pattern comprises Judeo-Christian ethics, the progressive spirit of the Enlightenment and the institutions and values of British political culture. Its democratic and egalitarian temper also bears the imprint of distinct Irish and non-conformist traditions.

That is, Bantick's nostalgia and Howard's conservatism bordering on reactionism, point to the same place - not a monoculture but one where the Judaeo-Christian ethic and the institutions and values of British political culture are very much in the ascendant. Forget the progressive spirit of the Enlightenment - recent actions of the Howard government speak a lot louder than the words on that point. Bantick's better age when we were much kinder to newcomers is the same as John Howard's better age when we were all much more in touch with our British heritage and it was no shame for an Australian Prime Minister to be British to his bootstraps.

Incidentally, checking the 23 links Timbo included in his Sunday posts, I found 13 to external sources and 10 back to his own blog. Looks like he was having a bit of a head up his own arse day as well. But we all have those from time to time.

Finally, while I'm having a bit of dangerous fun dissing RWDBs, I can't resist linking to this guest post by Antony Carr at Evil Pundit's:

It's a regrettable but now proven fact that Australian lefties lack both wit and humour.

Naturally, all thinking people would agree that it is quite inappropriate that a prime minister, especially a right-wing one such as John Howard, should display any wit or humour at all. Hence, this statement in his speech to the National Press Club in the Great Hall of Parliament House on January 25 was entirely uncalled for:

The strength and vitality of Australian democracy rests on three great institutional pillars: our parliament with its tradition of robust debate; the rule of law upheld by an independent and admirably incorruptible judiciary; and a free and sceptical press of the sort that we politicians simply adore.

So there you go - all this lefty agonising over Howard's speech, his historical agenda, and what it portends for the future has been a waste of time. The whole thing was a bloody great piss-take: Iron John fooled the lot of us.

Now it's time for me to kick back, relax and stay off-line for at least 24 hours, leaving whatever happens to just happen.

And the Wages of Sin is ... (Daniel 3:17)

Like a lot of laymen, I have a very simple view of the practice of medicine. The basic idea is, if you see a disease you cure it. Unless there's no known cure; then it's up to medical research to find either a cure or someway to prevent the disease. After reading this post at Larvatus Prodeo, I've realised that this view of medical practice and medical research is much too simplistic.

Some diseases, it seems, should not be treated, nor should they be prevented. Cervical cancer is one such disease:

DEATHS from cervical cancer could jump fourfold to a million a year by 2050, mainly in developing countries. This could be prevented by soon-to-be-approved vaccines against the virus that causes most cases of cervical cancer - but there are signs that opposition to the vaccines might lead to many preventable deaths.

The trouble is that the human papilloma virus (HPV) is sexually transmitted. So to prevent infection, girls will have to be vaccinated before they become sexually active, which could be a problem in many countries.

In the US, for instance, religious groups are gearing up to oppose vaccination, despite a survey showing 80 per cent of parents favour vaccinating their daughters. "Abstinence is the best way to prevent HPV," says Bridget Maher of the Family Research Council, a leading Christian lobby group that has made much of the fact that, because it can spread by skin contact, condoms are not as effective against HPV as they are against other viruses such as HIV.

"Giving the HPV vaccine to young women could be potentially harmful, because they may see it as a licence to engage in premarital sex," Maher claims, though it is arguable how many young women have even heard of the virus.
[New Scientist, 18 April, 2005]

Now, nearly a year later, Queensland Senator Barnaby Joyce (whose most recent major accomplishments was driving Senator Julian McGauran out of the National Party into the Liberal Party) has taken up this American moonbat idea:

... Senator Joyce said the decision whether to approve the [HPV] vaccine should not be left to the TGA because "they will talk about the therapeutic aspects - they are not there to talk about the psychological implications or the social implications".

"There might be an overwhelming (public) backlash from people saying, 'don't you dare put something out there that gives my 12-year-old daughter a licence to be promiscuous'," he said.

Senator Joyce - who has four daughters - said he would be "personally very circumspect" about giving such a vaccine to girls who were too young to cope with the potential consequences of sexual activity.
[The Australian, January 27, 2006]

Senator Joyce's statement just oozes sanctimonious disingenuity; what he's really talking about under the euphemism "psychological implications and social implications" is a personal religious objection to the idea of providing vaccinations to protect young girls from a sexually transmitted disease. Of course he hasn't the gumption to come out and say so directly, so he invokes a phantom legion of outraged parents instead. A vast unseen army of religious nutters who would be outraged if the Therapeutic Goods Administration approved a medical treatment which reduced the risks of committing the sin of Lust.

I reckon that if we're going to start banning medical treatments because they might undermine the dominant Judaeo-Christian ethics of Australian society, there's no good reason to confine ourselves to treatments that might encourage the sin of Lust. There are six other equally deadly sins out there - with some help from Zeppo Bakunin and one of his brother's old medical textbooks I've identified quite a few diseases that ought not to be treated because it might lead to very naughty behaviour.

Sloth: cholera, dysentry and typhoid are the biggies here. Back in the nineteenth century, some physician whose name I forget, became a medical legend when he stopped a local epidemic of cholera in one of the poorer districts of London by breaking the heads off all the local water pumps. The wells were all contaminated with sewage. If people are living in poor areas where they only have access to sewage contaminated water, they only have their own idleness to blame. If they got off their arses and did something to improve their situation they'd have the money to move to an area with clean drinking water. So away with all those development programs aimed at bringing clean drinking water to third world villages and away with the water supply and sewage disposal authorities in the developed countries. Public health problem be damned - these diseases are all work ethic problems and the solution lies with the individual.

Gluttony: All those diseases caused by diet or addiction - atheroschlerosis from cholesterol consumption, cirrhosis of the liver, dental caries (see also Vanity) most forms of hepatitis and diabetes - including insulin dependent diabetes. Let the buggers learn to live without sugar - it'll build up their fortitude.

Vanity: cosmetic surgery is obviously out (see also Envy). As are acne treatments, treatments for warts, moles or winestain birthmarks, hair replacement for chemotherapy induced hair loss and all forms of cranio-facial and recosntructive surgery. If people are born hideously deformed, tough - surgical reconstruction might just encourage them to become vain in later life. Oh and all that root canalling and crowning and dental reconstruction that goes on to deal with the results of dental caries. And orthodonty (by the time I get through all the major sins, I suspect we'll have built a good case for banning dentistry altogether).

Avarice: obviously most of the depression that is epidemic in Australia is the consequence of living in a materialistic, consumer society where everyone more or less believes that they will be happy once they have the latest iPod, the latest Nokia mobile phone, etc, etc. It's all down to avarice. So are the rest of the work related disorders.

Anger: Congestive heart disease, hypertension, angina pectoris.

Envy: Penis extensions, breast implants and reductions are all medical treatments that obviously cater to patients' envy of people who are better endowed than they. Less obviously, infertility treatments have to go. Remember:

Thou shalt not covet thy neighbour's house, thou shalt not covet thy neighbour's wife, nor his manservant, nor his maidservant, nor his ox, nor his ass, nor any thing that is thy neighbour's.
[Exodus 20:17]

And that "any thing that is thy neighbours" includes the motility of his sperm and the fecundity of his wife, sport.

By Popular Acclamation

As I expected, Tug Boat Potemkin came nowhere near being voted Australia's best humorous blog. The Daily Flute came close but the laurel actually went to Samuel Gordon-Stewart on the back of TSSH preferences. So it such is. Nonetheless congratulations to Samuel. As for his sponsors, least said, soonest mended.

Looking to next year's awards, I've decided that the 'best humorous blog" is probably permanently out of reach. Right now I'm looking into the possibility of starting up a new community organisation - the Australian Foundation for Survivors of Dentistry, with a group blog on how to make the difficult personal journey from seeing oneself as a dentistry victim to the liberating realisation that one is a dentistry survivor. That might have reasonable chance of winning in the best new blog, best group blog, best overall blog and best community service blog categories.

Oh and that other bit of broken tooth came out this morning without any need to resort to the needle-nosed pliers. Which leaves me looking for a new excuse for feeling totally pissed off with life. So it such is.

Some Reader ...

I wasn't planning to write anything on that article by John Birmingham - the one where he takes the left to task for being completely humourless unlike Tim Blair, Australia's answer to P J O'Rourke. I haven't read enough of O'Rourke to comment on that comparison but, in my view, Tim's work is a match for the stand-up comedy of US comedian Andrew Dice Clay. I never found him particularly funny either but that was obviously something to do with my own personal tastes because on the one video tape I saw of "Dice" in performance his audience were pissing themselves - possibly quite literally - over such pearls as "What's with these bisexuals. Let's get this straight - you either suck dick or you don't!" That one had them all cheering and the little collegiate fists pumping in the air. Homophobic? Maybe, but the guy had found his audience and he knew how to work them. For all we know, off-stage, Clay might have been a flaming nancy-boy, slipping away to the seedier parts of town after each performance for a spot of rough sex, preferably with a stoker or greaser. That seems unlikely though; if it were true we would have read about it in the tabloids.

As I said, I wasn't planning to write anything on John Birmingham and why he's so utterly wrong about how humourless all us lefties are but a lot got written before I got around to it and my thinking on the topic didn't come to much. Then I got this e-mail which included this comment on the piece:

Was thinking - yeah but wonder what Gummo would say..
(no names, no pack drill because I haven't actually asked for permission to reproduce the contents of the e-mail).

Now I can recognise a hint as well as any other bloke - that is, well enough to studiously ignore it.And I would have gone on studiously ignoring this one if it weren't nearly six o'clock in the morning, all the sound and fury of thunder and lightning on the southern horizon signifies nothing - especially not the prospect of rain and a real cool change and I hadn't just found yet another fragment of broken tooth in the gum crater. That's the third so far. I got rid of two tonight but this one needs to poke its way out a little further before I stand any chance of getting to it with the needle nose pliers. Assuming that I still own a pair of needle nose pliers - otherwise I might have to make do some cheap eyebrow tweezers from the chemist. All in all it's a good night to write about John Birmingham, the topic of Phil Ruddock having been all used up a week or so ago.

Birmingham's article (which also gets a good bollocking at Helen's place) finishes with this sad prognosis of the future of a levity-challenged left:

The left, on the other hand, has indulged for so long now in the guilty pleasures of relativism, protected by a value system that says discussion of certain topics is off limits, that any sense of confidence they might have had at one time has now entirely disappeared. And with it their sense of humour.

It's like the old joke. How many angry feminists does it take to change a light bulb? Answer: that's not funny!

I'm old enough to remember when that old joke was a new joke and there was no pussy-footing around about "angry feminists". It was:

How many feminists does it take to change a light bulb?

That's not funny!

Of similar vintage are:

What do you call that useless piece of flesh on the end of a penis?

A man.

and this cracker:

How many men does it take to wallpaper a bedroom?

One, but you have to slice him very thinly.

Of course, only a man-hating feminist could find that last one funny - to anyone else it's another offensive example of man-hating feminist double standards. It did occur to me that, as a demonstration that lefty humour is still possible, it could be updated a little:

How many cabinet ministers does it take to whitewash a dunny?

It doesn't matter how fine you grind 'em up, they'll never come out the right colour.

But sadly, that's a bit of a failure in the funny stakes and quite possibly seditious too. So I'd better make it quite clear that I'm in no way advocating that cabinet ministers should be ground up and used to paint dunnies. Well, not today anyway. In any event, it's unlikely that cabinet ministers would prove a superior dunny paint to Wattyl Solarguard.

Since Birmingham brought the light bulb joke into play, I thought I might get some mileage out of How many neo-cons does it take to change a light bulb? But then I realised that the idea of neo-cons changing a light bulb is absurd. Let's face it, if George W Bush got up in his State of the Union address and told everyone that the way forward in the centuries old struggle between Christendom and the infidels (more commonly known as the War on Terror) was a restoration of hereditary monarchy and feudal vassalage, the buggers would be falling overthemselves to demand the return of ducking stools, scolds' bridles and the Black Death, not necessarily in that order. It took a while to get over that hurdle and I'm not sure the results were worth it:

How many neo-cons does it take to change a light bulb?

The end of the cold war and America's rise to pre-eminence as the world's only superpower (or hegemon) has made burnt out light bulbs a thing of the past.

We'll get the Marines onto it, as soon as they've finished with those drains we asked them to unblock.

Let me tell you, we have a smart missile in our armoury that can home in on that burnt out little sucker and take it out, without damaging any of the plaster ducks flying up your living room wall.

Update: Birmingham's article turns up again in the A2 section of today's Age. The front page of the section says of it "John Birmingham Lampoons the Left". Skimming it over a second time, I didn't feel lampooned so much as bored shitless. And it strikes me that someone who blows his punchline by wimping out on a feminist joke is in no position to complain about political correctness strangling humour. So there.

The Enchanted Toasting Fork - Episode 7

The story so far: Episode 1, Episode 2, Episode 3, Episode 4, Episode 5, Episode 6

There are moments in men's lives - and women's too, no doubt - when all that has gone before is called into question and the habits and opinions of a lifetime crumble under the devastating impact of some new and transcendent insight. It may happen at night on a dusty road between the city one has purged of a troublesome new sect and the next city on your clean up list; it may happen in the depths of a south-east asian jungle, when one is shot with a metaphorical diamond that blows away all your pretensions to civilised standards; it may happen the morning you drain half a litre of sulphuric acid from your baldder and most of it misses the bowl; and it may happen when you are standing in the kitchen of a couple of friends, clutching a cheap "Paw of Renown" from Y'ha-nthlei in one hand, while the other rifles through kitchen drawers searching for that toasting fork you enchanted in a protracted fit of pique and gave away as a wedding present. These moments are called epiphanies. They are rarely pleasant.

Petro's epiphany, if such it was, was a slow grinding one. First, there was the realisation that the monkey-corpse light of the Y'ha-nthleian "Paw of Renown" was hopelessly inadequate compared to the full on corpse-light of a well-crafted Hand of Glory. The light from the birthday cake candles tied between the dead monkey's fingers, and the magical concealment it was supposed to provide, weren't going to last much longer. He still had the rest of Claudio and Cossima's house to search. After what he had seen so far, he wasn't enjoying that prospect. If only he'd taken up the six for the price of five offer when he had bought the paw. At least the house was empty so he might be able to risk turning on a few lights. After the blending of their families, it seemed unlikely that Claudio and Cossima had anything in the way of a spare room where they could stack away unwanted gifts - where then would the toasting fork be, if not in the kitchen? Under the house? In a stack of boxes on a couple of planks laid over the rafters in the roof space? One of those self-storage warehouses?

One after another, the errors and follies that had brought him to this last, most desperate folly of all, ground away at his spirits, wearing him down to the realisation my life is totally, completely and just about irredeemably fucked. Maybe I should check the bathroom cabinet for some St John's Wort. With so many kids in the house they're bound to keep in a good supply. Maybe I should have taken that phone call from Ruby instead of letting it slip through to the answering machine. Maybe I should get the hell out of here. Call Ruby when I get home. Find out if she's up for a visitor. Wonder what she's up to tonight. What do civil celebrants do on week nights?

***

There was no avoiding it - the most recent letter from the seventeenth junior clerk in the office of the King's Chancellor and Chief Busybody was quite clear. For bureaucratese, that is. "Celebrants are reminded that under the laws of the kingdom, marriage is the union of a man and a woman, forsaking all others. This office considers it inappropriate for licenced celebrants to place themselves in situations where they may be seen to be offering either active or passive endorsement to unions which do not conform to the legal definition of marriage. In the light of numerous complaints this office has received on this issue we will have no alternative but to review the licences of celebrants who are reported to have endorsed such unions."

This wasn't aimed at her personally, she assured herself. The fact that the letter had arrived today had nothing to do with the fact that she was invited to celebrate Jadwiga and Jennifer's not-a-marriage-just-a-life-long-commitment on Saturday night. All the same she had no choice but to call Jadwiga - her oldest friend - and tell her she had to cancel. Jadwiga wasn't going to take it well.

"Hello, Jennifer speaking."

"Hi Jen, it's Ruby. Is Jadwiga home?"

"Hi, Rube. You're sounding upbeat as ever. How do you manage that?"

"It's an enchanted princess thing." Ruby said. She had lost count of the number of times she'd had this exchange with Jennifer. "Could I speak to her please?"

"Oh, secret princess business, is it?" Repetition hadn't quite worn the edge of resentful commoner sarcasm off Jennifer's pronunciation off that phrase, "Sure, I'll get her for you."

Ruby heard footsteps then, at a remove from the other telephone, Jennifer said "It's Rube, for you. Wants to talk about princessy stuff again." Jadwiga responded with something indistinct, in a complaining tone. Which, thought Ruby, was typical when you thought about it. Jadwiga had missed out on the whole enchantment thing - lucky cow - so she had no idea what a drag it really was. Ruby doubted that the whole thing with Jennifer would have had a chance to happen if Jadwiga had pricked her finger on a spindle or had any of the other unfortunate accidents that routinely befell princesses and left them dependent on finding - or being found by - a handsome prince if they were to have any chance of a half-way normal life.

"Hi, Ruby. What's up."

Ruby came straight to the point. Despite her best efforts, the vibrancy in her voice could not be completely suppressed. "Bad news, Jadwiga" she said, trying to hold the gush down to a trickle, "I don't think I can make it Saturday."

"I can hear just how much that saddens you, Ruby dear."

"I would, if I could Jadz. You know that."

"Oh bollocks, Rube. You're barely trying to hide how bloody happy you are to be off the hook."

The conversation didn't improve. By it's end Ruby was fairly sure that she and Jadwiga were no longer friends. At least they wouldn't be until Jadwiga apologised for that crack about her vibrant voice being a childish affectation, like a lisp, and all she needed to sort it out was a few hours with a competent speech therapist.

***

In the end, getting out struck Petro as best idea. He closed up the kitchen drawers and cupboards. In the last dim glow of the Paw's monkey-corpse light he made his way to the front door. As he stepped into the hallway he heard footsteps on the front porch, followed by the scrape of a key entering a lock.

Down to Earth Club

"You ever had sex on a train?"

"Naah."

"Would you like to try it? Do you wanna do it?"

Smooth talker. Wish I could come up with lines like that. And hey, don't mind me sitting here across the other side of the carrriage - I'm getting off debarking in two stops.

"Naah. They have security cameras and guards and stuff."

Damn it, girl, you're in the prime of your youth! You're wasting the best years of your life. Wake up to yourself.

Nothing doing. They get off the train at the next stop. On the way out the door he asks: "What about the queue at Centrelink? Ever tried it there?"

Thanks for the Flowers

I've just realised that I've been nominated for an Australian Blog Award for Australia's Funniest Blog. Since I'm in the running, I suppose that sometime soon I shall have to get around to doing a little electronic ballot-box stuffing or look around for a graveyard of abandoned e-mail addresses to vote.

Anyway, thanks to whoever dobbed me in for this one. I'll be thinking of you when the inevitable happens and the award goes to some tosser who specialises in inocuous posts about the hilarious antics of the birds in their back yard, neurotic rants about dentists and other topics of burning public interest.

Worth Watching

If you missed out on it the first time round, SBS is screening The Staircase again in its "Hot Docs" spot, starting tomorrow night at 10.00 pm.

The ABC is once again repeating Walking With Beasts, on Saturday afternoons at 3.30. The last episode of the series, about homo erectus, is worth taking a look at, if only for the sequence showing two hominids copulating. In any other context, you might call it fucking but this is a nature documentary after all, so it's probably more appropriate to use the more respectable scientific term. It's pretty clear that the producers of the show went out of their way to forestall any accusation that they were just slipping in a gratuitous paleo-anthropological soft porn insert. In your average stick flick, the visuals would have been accompanied by some pretty enthusiastic grunting, gasping and give-it-to-me-babys accompanied by some off-the-peg electronic music, heavy on tinkly chimes and sugary synthetic strings but, instead of that, the action is accompanied by an earnest voice over from Kenneth Branagh, explaining how the vulva of the female erectus shifted forward to accomodate an upright posture, obliging homo erectus to copulate face-to-face. In the missionary position, of course, with the female lying back and distracting herself from the whole sordid business with thoughts of all the berry-gathering she'd be doing tomorrow.

I have no idea how Branagh kept a straight face while he was reading this guff, which tells you a lot more about the sexual experience of the narrative's author than it does about mating behaviour in homo erectus. The truth is, we have no idea how homo erectus went about the business of screwing although the current state of human sexual practice suggests that they had a lot of options. Whether they had the imagination to exploit them is another matter and somewhat moot; anything we say on the subject is completely speculative, however entertaining the possibilities might be.

Nostalgia Spot (Slightly Damp)

Over at Oz Conservative, Mark is pining for the days of good old fashioned romance, exemplified in the fashion philosophy of Alannah Hill:

When I was at uni (more than ten years ago now) one of my disappointments was the mannish style of appearance of the young women on campus. The women would typically wear boots, jeans, a T-shirt, and a windcheater, with no makeup or jewellery or ornamentation of any kind.

They actually managed to look a bit boring, despite being in the full bloom of their womanhood age-wise.

I felt a bit robbed. I thought it a waste of youth, both theirs and mine.

...

Earlier this year, Alannah Hill was interviewed for The Age newspaper. True to form, she described her fashion philosophy as follows:

I spend most days designing the most romantic clothes so that girls when they wear them will evoke some gush of love from the opposite sex.

When I was at uni (well over ten years ago now) a female friend of mine spent one vacation doing the obligatory cheap STA whip around a few European countries where you can't speak the language. Her tour included Paris, the city of eternal romance, where she left a crowded Metro carriage one evening to discover that she'd copped a quite substantial gush of love on her Levi's. It just goes to show that even a "mannish style of appearance" is no impediment to the flowering of romantic feelings in the male heart.

Simply Rotten

I didn't make any New Year's Eve resolutions this year, unless you count "First thing Tuesday I'm getting something done about this bloody tooth" which would make this year my first 100% success for keeping New Year's resolutions. A marked contrast to that disastrous resolution I made in the early eighties (I was totally shit-faced at the time) that "This year I'm going to get a lot more of the other". 100% failure on that one - it brought on a drought of El Ninõ proportions. The fact that I started cleaning up at the regular Friday evening office poker game was little consolation.

One resolution I have made recently is, once again, to cut back a bit on the on-line time but that has nothing to do with this being the first Year of the rest of my life; it's about the exorbitant amount I'm paying for all the time I spend on the web. That resolution got a bit dented when I got around to actually reading the Age I picked up this morning, after watching Thunderbirds on Channel 9 - insomnia again. I went to bed last night thinking that the phantom tooth pain was going away at last - instead, it underwent a weird mitosis and migrated into the two teeth adjacent to the gum crater. They were busily jostling to take possession of the vacant space before one of those poncy ceramic prosthetics moved in and their familiar tumbledown neighbourhood got all gentrified.

After ten days of enduring the world's most trivial agony, I'm feeling pretty pissed off. So I think I can finally produce that post on Phil Ruddock that I've tried to write, on and off, for several months. Our hollow, stuffed Attorney-General, his headpiece filled with straw, his shrivelled conscience pinned to the lapel of his jacket for all the world to see. I despise him.

I've tried, at least occasionally, to look on him as a man of principle who kind of lost his way but it's simply impossible. The first time was when I read an op-ed in The Australian, where the writer bemoaned how the Phil Ruddock he used to know had been ruined by his tenure as Minister for Immigration. Another time was when I saw the story of the split in Ruddock's family over his handling of the Immigration portfolio on Australian Story. I'm still tempted to look for something redeeming about the bloke when I see him interviewed on TV news and current affairs. But it's bloody impossible - he went to dinner with the devil and forgot to take his own cutlery. Just how low he's sunk showed up in this report on page 3 of today's Age:

THE Federal Government has moved to obstruct gay couples wanting to get married in countries that recognise same-sex nuptials.

The Attorney-General's Department last year told at least two of Australia's embassies in Europe to refuse help to citizens requiring proof of their single status for a same-sex marriage...

This comes on top of news on January 7, that:

... After shutting the door on gay nuptials, the Federal Government is clamping down on heterosexuals who deviate from a traditional wedding script.

In a series of edicts to civil celebrants that overturn at least 30 years of accepted practice, the Attorney-General's Department insists couples must exchange vows only as "husband" and "wife". Celebrants must also remind everyone that "marriage, according to law in Australia, is the union of a man and a woman".

(Julie Szego, The Age)

It's worth noting that, in both cases, Ruddock comes up clean under the current conventions on ministerial responsibility; it was the Attorney-General's Department, rather than the Attorney-General, which blocked consular assistance to gay couples seeking to marry overseas and issued the edicts to civil celebrants. In both cases, the Attorney-General's view on the actions of his department came via a spokesperson. On gay marriages overseas, the Attorney-Generals spokeswoman:

... said one purpose of the certificates was to certify a proposed marriage would be valid in Australia.

And on the instructions to civil celebrants a spokeswoman said:

... the Government is simply ensuring the country's growing number of civil celebrants understand their legal obligations ...

There's a couple of statements of principle delivered with all the ringing conviction of Pontius Pilate sending for a handbasin and towel.

I won't deny that these spiteful, petty intrusions into the lives of ordinary Australians can be justified - they are reminders of the legal basis of marriage in Australia and the tradition that underlies them. In their mean little way, both are defences of that tradition. So is the new policy requiring married couples to undergo three hours of compulsory counselling before heading off to the family court. Whether the last will amount to anything more than a gravy train for the organisations that win tenders to run the counselling centres is moot. All three of these defences of the tradition of marriage in Australia are idiotic.

Ruddock's willingness, on behalf of the Government, to accept his Department's obstruction of gay marriages overseas is of a piece with his equal willingness to accept more serious infringements on the rights of Australian citizens who just happen to be offside with government sponsored mainstream opinion. I refer of course to Mamdou Habib and David Hicks. It's of a piece with the willingness he showed, as Immigration Minister, to dump "criminal non-citizens" on countries they had not seen since childhood - a practice that was recently found unlawful by a couple of Federal Court judges (in the Nystrom case). A High Court challenge to this decision is still pending - it would be interesting to see what happens if the High Court upholds the Federal Court's ruling.

Because then we would have as Attorney-General, a man who will have been found by the highest court in the country to have acted outside the law in several cases where he exercised his Ministerial discretion to get rid of one of those "people like that" that we don't want in Australia. I like to think that his position as Attorney-General would become unsustainable. In wildly optimistic moments I imagine him being replaced by either a Burkean conservative or a liberal in the tradition of John Stuart Mill, either of which would be an improvement. The trouble is, off the top of my head, I can't think of any candidates who fit either bill.

The Questionable Consolations of Philosophy

257. "What would it be like if human beings shewed no outward signs of pain (did not groan, grimace, etc)? Then it would be impossible to teach a child the meaning of the word 'tooth-ache'." - Well, let's assume the child is a genius and itself invents a name for the sensation! - But then, of course, he couldn't make himself understood when he used the word. - So how does he understand the name, without being able to explain its meaning to anyone? - but what does it mean to say that he has 'named his pain'? How has he done this naming of pain?! And whatever he did, what was its purpose? When one says "He gave a name to his sensation" one forgets that a great deal of stage-setting in the language is presupposed if the mere act of naming is to make sense. And when we speak of someone's having given a name to pain, what is presupposed is the existence of the grammar of the word "pain"; it shews the post where the new word is stationed.

665. Imagine someone pointing to his cheek with an expression of pain and saying "abracadabra!" - We ask "What do you mean?" And he answers "I meant toothache". You at once think to yourself: How can anyone mean 'toothache' by that word? Or what did it mean to mean pain by that word? And yet, in a different context you would have asserted that the mental activity of meaning such-and-such was just what was most important in using language.

But - can't I say "By 'abracadabra' I mean toothache"? Of course I can; but this is a definition; not a description of what goes on in me when I utter the word.

Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations

And then 'abracadabra' might be a good enough name for the sensation you're left with after the source of a toothache is gone. For what it's worth, Wittgenstein pays a lot less attention to the philosophical issues raised by headaches:

314. It shews a fundamental misunderstanding, if I am inclined to study the headache I have now in order to get clear about the philosophical problem of sensation.

I reckon he's on the money there but it would be a different story had he suffered from migraines.

Just Speak for Yourself

Am I book slut? Hell no! No way would I ever

... go to sleep worrying whether Jennifer Anniston and Vince Vaughan are actually a couple, if Nadine Coyle from Girls Aloud is losing too much weight and how much cosmetic surgery Teri Hatcher has really had.

No, not me - that sort of stuff is pretty much a chick thing, right, and so is

[loving] all kinds of texts equally, refusing to play favourites and treating them all with the same kind of intense but ultimately casual affection.

Isn't that just typical. You'd never catch me doing that: like any bloke, I know that there are those books you just read for fun - cultural quickies you pick up at the library, skim through overnight, or over a weekend at most, then drop casually down the return chute on your next visit - and real, serious books that are actually worth shelling out your own hard-earned (or hard-bludged) readies for. And as for those gossip mags and women's magazines, no way I'd be caught dead reading one of those. You have to wonder what the editorial staff at Cosmo and Cleo are thinking when every time they run one of those articles on "Ten great ways to be better in bed", they follow up with a half a page of sex tips for guys. Who do they expect to read this stuff? I bet you wouldn't find the editors of Ralph making that mistake. Not that I'd be caught dead reading Ralph of course.

I'll admit that I've had a few disappointments with books - like the time I bought "the best novel to come out of New Zealand this year", and decided, after finishing it, that there would have been no great loss to world literature if it had stayed in New Zealand. Some of the alleged classics have been no better - like that fat-arsed tome by some dead Russian fart that begins "All happy families are alike but each unhappy familiy is unhappy in its own way ..." - or something like that. The sort of portentous bull that gets a novelist a totally inflated rep for giving good human condition. Over time I've learnt to ignore a lot of the gossip about authors who give good human condition, just as I learnt how little substance to all that talk about Marjorie Malvern-Starr's precocious sexual accomplishments back in my Greenfields High School days (all my two bob's worth of licorice bullets from the school tuckshop got me was an angry glare and a slap in the face).

"Intense but ultimately casual affection" indeed; you won't catch me ever falling for a book that way. I've read around a bit - I'm wise to their sly little ways, their so called literary conventions. Read 'em and leave 'em, that's the way to go. OK, now and again you find one that's worth keeping around for a while, good solid works of reference and such but they're few and far between. When it comes down to it, reading books is just a pleasant way to pass the time.

Tough Guy, Me

I was just about ready to bite down - hard - on the thumb she was pressing down on my lower jaw, when she said "OK, Gummo, take a breather." While I lay there, taking deep breaths to wash away the pain, she said, "I'm sorry Gummo, but I can't let you leave here with that tooth."

I wasn't fooled by the patient tone. To make sure I got the message, the dnetal nurse grabbed a handful of shirt and pressed the muzzle of a Glock 9mm into my left nostril. "One way or another," she snarled, "That tooth is staying here. Got that?"

I got it.

"OK, OK," I shed, "Issue theel thash thongly abad it, oo can have the toosh. Ish no damn ushe to me. Lesh get thish over widge."

The Misguided Doctor and the Good Sydneysiders

(A Fable for Our Times)

A man was leaving Oxford Street after the Sydney Mardi Gras in his parade costume - a gold lamé posing pouch and he fell among poofter bashers who beat him and departed, leaving him near dead.

Now by chance a doctor was going down that road; and when he saw him he started to cross the road. But his way was blocked by a pastor who said
"That man has been brought low by sin. If you treat him he will just continue in his sinful ways. Is this what you want?"

The doctor gently pushed the pastor aside and carried on but he found his way blocked by a columnist, who said: "That man lives an unacceptable lifestyle. If you treat him he will be back here next year to promote his unacceptable lifestyle. Is this what you want?"

The doctor gently pushed the columnist aside and carried on but he found his way blocked by a politician, who said: "Perhaps you think about the importance of family values before you go any further."

The doctor gently pushed the politician aside and finally reached the injured man. He took up his hand to check his pulse, then looked at his watch He opened a side compartment on his black bag, where he kept his prescription pad and a few other standard forms. He took the form he needed and on it wrote "Pansy Doe, Time of Death 1:37" and signed and dated the form. Then he folded the death certificate in four and gently tucked it into the gold lamé posing pouch.

Postscript: this piece could just as easily have been set in Melbourne after Midsumma. If you find the plot vaguely familiar, you might like to check out the original.

Dame Nellie, eat your heart out.

(With a tug of the forelock to Anthony at spiceblog).

C'mon Huey, Shift Your Bloody Arse

We've just turned on the air-conditioner for the first time in two years. There's enough airflow through the ceiling vent in the lounge to stir the cobwebs; after I finish here I'm going to go lie on the couch to see if under-powered air-conditioners produce a placebo effect. I went out into the back yard for a ciggie a few minutes ago, barefoot on sun baked concrete. Fire walkers are wimps. There were a few promising little clouds on the western horizon; if they actually get overhead before evening, I might shoulder the laundry bag and head up to the laundromat. Based on past experience it ought to start pissing down when I'm about halfway there.

Still, I'm not going to cite this hot spell as evidence of global-warming; that's a false induction, an example of confirmation bias and all the rest of it. All the same, I'm willing to bet that there are quite a few bloggers out there who're shaking their heads over the blizzards and record low temperatures that Europe is experiencing and asking, as usual, if global warming is real, how come this is happening? Don't expect an answer from me - all I want to do right now is get away from all the waste heat being pumped out by the PC's cooling fan.

Oh, and best wishes to all and sundry for the New Year. Hope your 2006 is, in every way, an improvement on your 2005. Actually there are few sundries for whom I'm inclined to wish the opposite but it's probably better not to mention that. Oops, too late.

The Survival Machine of Colin M Turnbull (III)

(Part I, Part II)
A lot of the difficulties in producing a synopsis of The Mountain People come from its novelistic construction so it might be helpful, at this point, to treat it as a novel. Viewing it this way, we see the book as the simple story of Colin Turnbull, anthropologist, who journeys to a remote part of Africa to study a fairly typical tribe of hunter gatherers. During the time he spends with them, he discovers that they are nothing like the obligate noble savages he imagines them to be; instead the Icien way of life turns out to be a grotesque caricature of the advanced western society he has left behind. The story is told in the first person, with three narrative threads running through Turnbull the author's straightforward plot; Turnbull the narrator's slow awakening to the realities of Icien life, the reflections this prompts on human nature and human societies and finally, the simple facts of Icien life as he has observed them. That may sound like a very post-modern take on a work of anthropological research and reporting but it has its uses. Such as, in this installment, finally moving our focus away from the concerns and character of Turnbull the narrator, to what he sees in his stays with the Ik.

First let's note a fact that Turnbull reveals quite slowly; at the time of his study, there was a great deal of starvation among the Ik. The Kidepo valley, their major hunting ground, was no longer available to them - it was a national park. The Ugandan government had encouraged them to take up farming but the mountainous country they had settled in was not good farmland. And there had been a prolonged drought. Turnbull cops a bit of stick around the traps for not noticing that the Ik were a society in crisis but it seems unlikely that this completely escaped his attention during the three years in which he did his field studies or that the realisation completely escaped him during the writing of The Mountain People. Where Turnbull does leave himself open to the charge of insensitivity is in his depiction of the way he learnt of living conditions among the Ik, for example this telling episode from the end of Chapter 3, "the Disenchanted Tree":

... Kauar was exceptional, and he used to volunteer to make the long two day climb back to get mail for me, or buy a few things for others. He was always pleased with himself when he came back, and asked if he had made the trip more quickly than the last time ... Then he used to sit and watch while I read the mail, studying the expression on my face to see if all was well. When we drank tea together he always took exactly the same number of teaspoons of sugar that I took, and helped himself to exactly the same number of biscuits, never more, never less. The biscuits he often kept for the children, who used to snatch them from him and run away laughing at him for the fool he was.

Then one day Kauar went to Kaabong and did not come back. He was found the day after he should have returned, high up on the last peak of the trail before it descends to Pirre, cold and dead. Then you could see how thin he was, or so I was told, for those who found him just took the things he had been carrying, pushed his body into the bush and left it. "Why bother carrying him back? He was dead!" they said as they distributed the goods ... I still think of him probably running up that viciously steep mountainside so that he could break his time record, and falling dead in his pathetic prime because he was starving.

The significance of this episode is difficult to miss; it reveals a great deal about the state of Ik society, the fact of starvation among them and some unpleasant and less than flattering things about Turnbull himself. Earlier in the chapter, there's another episode, whose significance is much less obvious, at least on a first reading:

On this occasion an antelope had been killed by Lomeja, a happy man in his late middle age, which is to say he was in his early twenties. He had set off early in the morning alone, and had picked up his bow and arrows where hehad concealed them during the night so that no-one would see that he was going hunting ... [p82]

Unfortunately for Lomeja, he was observed and followed; after he had killed an antelope another Ik, Lotibok appeared, claiming that it was by chance. While Lomeja and Lotibok were cooking the antelope, taking precautions against being seen, two more Ik saw the smoke of their cooking fire. They immediately set out in the direction of the fire, with Turnbull in hot pursuit. In the end, the antelope that Lomeja had planned to keep to himself had to be shared between five people:

It is a curious hangover from what must once have been a moral code that Ik will offer food if surprised in the act of eating, though they go to enormous pains not to be so surprised. [p81-82]

This is a far cry from the co-operative hunts that Turnbull imagines in Chapter One of the book. But here, once again, I'm going to give myself a break - this time so that I can put in some library time and get into some of the secondary references on Turnbull. That's my excuse and I'm sticking to it.

The Survival Machine of Colin M Turnbull (II)

(Part I)
His lack of enthusiasm for field work among the Ik declared, Turnbull uses the rest of Chapter One to tell us what he knew of the Ik before he set out for Northern Uganda. Just before World War II they had been encouraged to settle in the mountains in the northeast corner of the country, where it borders on Kenya and Sudan. Before then they had roamed as nomadic hunter-gatherers through all three countries. Their major hunting territory was the Kidepo Valley, now a national park:

Kidepo was undoubtedly where they spent the best part of the year, but, like most hunters and gatherers, these depended as much on vegetable resources as they did on game, and vegetable resources can be exhausted even more quickly and permanently than game if a band stays in one place too long. Mobility is essential to the hunting-and-gathering way of life and nomadism is by no means the random, aimless meandering it is sometimes thought to be. At the same time, hunting and gathering, even in a marginal environment, are neither as hard nor as precarious as they seem ... [The hunter] knows the world he lives in as few others do, and he lives in sympathy with it rather than trying to dominate it. He is the best of conservationists, knowing exactly how much he can take from where at any given time. His nomadic pattern is geared to this knowledge... [p 21]

From here through to page 31, Turnbull describes (admittedly in retrospect) the society he expected to find when he was in Kampala, preparing for his trip North. Of the people he expected to meet he says:

The smaller the society, the less emphasis there is on the formal system, and the more there is on inter-personal and inter-group relations, to which the system is subordinated. Security is seen in terms of these relationships, and so is survival. The result, which appears so deceptively simple, is that hunters frequently display those characteristics that we find so admirable in man: kindness, generosity, consideration, affection, honesty, hospitality, compassion, charity and others. This sounds like a formidable list of virtues and so it would be if they were virtues, but for the hunter they are not. For the hunter in his tiny, close-knit society, these are necessities for survival; without them society would collapse...

It was not foremost in my mind, I suppose, but, as with the physical conditions , I took it for granted that the Ik would possess these same qualities. it was a shock to find myself wrong on almost all counts... [p31 - original emphasis]

In Chapter 2, "Careless Rapture," Turnbull describes his journey from Kampala to North-Eastern Uganda. For all that he has said about his coolness toward his project in Chapter One, he depicts himself here as becoming more enthusiastic for it as he travels North:

The Administrator ... discussed freely many of his problems and said he would welcome any ideas that might come out of my researches. Thisis the kind of interest and co-operation that is all too often lacking and it added to my growing enthusiasm. [p38-39]

Turnbull's growing enthusiasm takes a severe hammering when he encounters his first Ik and is introduced to the Ik sense of humour. On the way to the first Ik village he visits, his guides take him along a perilous mountain trail and get a good laugh when he stumbles after traversing a ledge that is too narrow for two feet to be placed side by side. He is also introduced to the brusque, cursory nature of Ik manners; his polite traditional greetings are met with demands for tobacco. One of his guides greets the mother he hasn't seen for two years with the demand "Give me food" to which she replies "There's no food" (p49-50). From chapter 3 onwards the book becomes inceasingly depressing reading. It also defies synopsis, as Turnbull's account of Ik society freely switches between anecdote, reflection and analysis. So here I'll leave you with a choice of options; you can wait for the next instalment of this series, where I'll take on the task of providing a plausible synopsis with selected lowlights or you can bugger off to a library and track down a copy of The Mountain People to read for yourselves.