Since we don’t live by politix alone (I sincerely hope), what did people get up to this weekend? Join in, share some tales, regulars and lurkers all!
Life, Culture and Politics from BrisVegas
Larvatus Prodeo was an Australian group blog which discussed politics, sociology, culture, life, religion and science from a left of centre perspective. more»
Continued digging a rather large thesis-shaped hole for myself, full of nooks and crannies and cul-de-sacs that threaten to collapse and trap me in a world where social categorisations exist as naturally as gold and quarks and kittehs.
Emergency dentistry on Saturday morning due to a cracked upper molar tooth.
Why do teeth have nerves? What the hell is the purpose of that? I can’t imagine any evolutionary advantage to blinding, stabbing pain when eating. And as for creationists, those that point to the irreducible and improbable complexity of the eye as evidence of the hand of a creator – get a grip. Nerves in teeth are the clearest sign of a laughably unintelligent design I can think of. If there is a creator, well I’m sorry but he did a crap job: dental pain is a serious design flaw and I want a refund or free upgrade.
Don’t know if people remember the “Yes Men” and their Bhopal apology?…..well..they’re back http://theyesmenfixtheworld.com/
slow sunday…rain all day at last…listened to some Julliete Greco….watched the first of the “Red Riding” movies.
I was setting aside a bunch of old computers for an e-waste event next week when this little tweet crossed my path…Computers Faster Only for 75 More Years Which is good because I was getting worried that the mountain of junk accumulating in e-waste storage would start to interfere with the weather!
Lots of cleaning-up and fire season preparations after an average rainfall this year so far. And that’s a welcome change as it’s the first since ’96. Also getting ready for yet another trip to S.A. and my daughter who is now permanently in care.
Saturday.Caught up with an old friend by phone. Hour long conversation. She will visit next week. Spent most of Saturday day time writing second last section of ch. 3 of my book (on Francis Grose’s part in the battle of Lexington Concord)and completed it. Only one shorter section to go and the conclusion. But this first/second draft will require a massive edit. Already its well over 7000 words long. Hope to cut about 2-3000 words, without making it unintelligable but don’t know if that’s possible. Also taking notes from various books for the chapter on Bunker Hill. Normal Sat night TV.
Sunday – apart from getting on computer briefly after Insiders, stayed off it. Day turned out all thundery and lightning up here. Spent the day taking notes from The Lost War – a collection of letters from British Officers during the American Revoluition. Really looking forward to 39 Steps and Wuthering Heights on ABC 1. (though how anybody can compete with Olivier’s Heathcliff I don’t know.)
I had a lovely day yesterday.
Mum was visiting from Perth, and brought about 400 newly-digitised slides from the family vaults – which we’d never looked at much due to the hassle of setting up the projector. Memory lane aplenty. Cripes I was a cute kid.
Then we went for a walk through Princes Hill and North Carlton – stopped at a garage sale and got a 6-volume set on Aust contemporary art for $50 (for a mate), Spaceballs on VHS for $2 (for myself) and a nice green cardy for a fiver (for the Lady Friend).
Then we popped round the corner for the open day at the Albanian Mosque – a tad tedious, and I suppose understandably the pamphlets were alittle defensive, but it was nice to see such openness and engagement with non-Muslim locals, the petting zoo was cute, and the food was awesome.
The Geek and I took the Twig to see The Mikado at the Opera House. Anthony Warlow had a great deal of fun as Ko-Ko, and so did we! A nice introduction to grown-up-type concerts for our eight-year-old. ‘I’ve got a little list’ contained some expected lines (“I got it in an e-mail from that nice man, Godwin Grech” brought the house down), but also a few twists.
I saw The Mikado in the 1980s and this production is a revival. I recognised some costumes, but I’m not sure the sets and choreography were identical. Must say that while I enjoyed the Warlow performance — though the Geek and I are still arguing over whether that was a Broad Australian accent or Cockney — I think Graeme Ewer was better as a singer. Warlow tended to use Sprechstimme rather than an operatic voice. In fact, Yum-Yum was the only person belting it out — not that there were any difficulties with audibility, which is critical in G&S.
We were seated directly behind Nick and Kathryn Greiner and their grand-daughters. Strepsils kept my coughs at bay for a while. Rather shocked at the low quality of tea and coffee at interval for $3.50 a cup. Considering a Disgusted of Tunbridge Wells letter.
I went for a drive on a perfect Adelaide day up into the Hills, which in spring are full of paddocks full of frolicking newborn goats and such-like, to pick up my housebound best mate and take her to see Julie & Julia which we thought was charming.
Went to see Johnette Napolitano (ex Concrete Blonde) at the Gaelic Club. She still has an amazing voice.
Supported by Angie Hart who was great as ever, and Lonnie Lane whom I’d never heard of.
FDB – aren’t garage sales wonderful? Among other treasures I have some beautiful glassware and linen tableware picked up for a song at garage sales I’ve come across driving past at weekends. I always stop when I see one and I love buying books from them particularly children’s, nostalgically kept by grandparents over many decades. My grandkids get a real buzz out of any new finds I put on a special shelf for them to discover.
PS I note a slight surprise in your comment about the friendliness and willingness to engage by the Moslem community at the Albanian Mosque open day. Why would one expect them to be otherwise? That’s a rhetorical question, of course. I know the answer.
Before I retired a few years ago from my business I selected and trained quite a few Moslem people, mostly newly arrived from Bangladesh. A pre-requisite was fluent English, so they were a select group off to a good start, but they took to training with amazing diligence and humor and also had an old fashioned courtesy which later went down very well with clients.
Subsequently I got to know their families and community more generally and found them just like us in family values, but in other ways otherworldly and refreshingly different. It has been interesting to see how they have moved on to Public Service jobs and settling in to Australian life generally, while at the same time retaining habits of diet like fasting during Ramadan and prayer rituals regularly through the day, without, I hope upsetting fellow workers.
By the way our agencies generally trained and employed Anglos and more than once other Managers would comment, particularly after 9/11, that I was “brave” or somehow “lucky” or a “good judge”. In other words “It’s great that ‘these people’ are so successful, but isn’t it a surprise?”
FDB – and another thing! Your mum’s digitised slides – how did she do it or did she have it done? I have been trying to get around to the massive task of sorting and filing accessibly old family snaps and slides. I really need to be selective which seems too hard at present, so nothing is being done. Your comment has rekindled my interest in how I might approach it all from a new angle. I have few computer skills, but am willing to learn.
FDB and Patricia WA, perhaps this is the place to mention my joy at the return of East West 101 to TV this week. It’s so nice to see the real Sydney being shown. Not the explosions and crime, I hasten to add, but the cheery, open, multicultural buzz I find in my workplace, suburb and church. And with police cars, they don’t have to worry about the dreadful public transport in Western Sydney…
Patricia – my sentence:
“it was nice to see such openness and engagement with non-Muslim locals”
was ambiguous at best, even misleading. What I actually meant was:
“it was nice to see such openness and engagement
withfrom non-Muslim locals”As in, lots of local and not obviously Muslim families, young adults, hipster doofusses etc were there, apparently paying attention and sharing in the community spirit.
I’m quite sure one of the songs playing over the sound system was an Arabic cover of Kumbaya.
Re: slides – there are cheapish hardware devices to do it, but the Old Lady hired a pro.
http://tiny.cc/O7kYn
Thanks FDB – Didn’t mean to be critical – there was just enough ambiguity to make me rush to defend my old friends in Sydney’s west and to embark upon some happy reminiscing. And thanks too for the scanner details.
Patricia WA: “Subsequently I got to know their families and community more generally and found them just like us in family values, but in other ways otherworldly and refreshingly different.”
Are you aware you sound like a postcard from the 1950′s? Out of curiosity, when you say ‘just like us’, you are just referring to your own family aren’t you?
So anyway, I worked all weekend and was too tired to think straight by the end of it. Today I went to see Van Diemens Land, which is a brutal, depraved film that I would never want to see again.
I’ve also been pondering old-age, and my mothers entry into it, and wondering about my own ability to be patient enough to endure the minutiae her brain seems to want to explore and the rather obscure tangents she wanders off on….it’s excruciating.
Al Franken’s Al Franken’s Supply-side Jesus
Very amusing …
furious balancing – Is that a compliment? Why not say what you mean?
Or does the sudden “non sequitur” to old age and your mother in your last para mean that you found my comment “excruciating” too? I can only judge you by your words here but I very much doubt your ability to be patient not only with her but with people generally.
Perhaps it’s time for you develop some listening skills and a bit of patience with your poor old mum. After all she put up with your bawling and babbling and dirty bum for years before you could even string a sentence together.
There was no “non-sequitur” [whatever that is] Patricia, especially since I mentioned a film I attended in the paragraph that seperates my response to your post and the mention of my mum. This is the sunday thread, I was responding to your post before mentioning what was on my mind today.
The quote sounds like a postcard from the 1950′s, I don’t know how to be more direct than that, I am indeed saying exactly what I mean. I asked because your, “just like us” was something I was genuinely wondering about..I was seeking clarification, because if you weren’t talking about your own family, I wonder what “just like us” actually means? It sounds like the sort of thing said when people feel they live in some kind homogeneous society where people assume they share the same culture and values, therefore an ‘outsider’ surprises simply by being a good decent person. I don’t see how my questions was very different to your ‘rheotrical’ question earlier…although I did at least genuinely inquire as to why you said what you said, rather than just run with my interpretation of it.
In regard to my mother, again I was being honest, I don’t think there is anything admirable about my impatience with it, but it’s the truth…it is frustrating to me. Thanks for the lecture though, I wasn’t aware that my mother had nurtured me during my life, and that of course, should stop me about pondering my own fallibility in the situation I find myself in.
The story here recalls the system of transport that marked the early settlement of
the Australian penal colony — 25 to life for stealing a pair of socks or children’s shoes or in the case of PTSD-suffering Vietnam Vet Alex Maicey (sp?) being caught with residual heroin on a piece of cotton weighing less than 0.03g.
Apparently some 10,000 prisoners in California’s gaols (about 25%) are there on three strikes laws. Many of them may well be dangerous and beyond rehabilitation and deserve longterm incarceration, but quite a few, perhaps as many as 3000 of them, are not guilty of violent felonies, but are there for drug dealing, burglary and so forth.
Under the current system, two previous felonies — any felony — plus *any* other
crime — no matter how minor — gets you 25-to-life in California. Supporters of the three strikes law such as Mike Reynolds say that what most of us would regard as an anomaly — being locked up for stealing pizza — are the strength of the system. “That’s one tough law” three-strikes advocate Mike Reynolds chirps.
Sue Reeves was a California voter who supported the law. Sadly for her, her
drug-addicted son Shane had committed two burglaries of neighbours on one afternoon in 1991 and Sue thinking “tough love” was in order, insisted he turn himself in. Shane served two years but came out of jail still drug addicted and when he “kept nip” on a $20 cocaine sale, that was his trigger strike. Sue now understands that one should be careful what one wishes for.
Like many voters in California, Sue had been terribly distressed at a brutal crime, in which a murderously sociopathic and violent felon kidnapped a 12-year-old girl from her slumber party at knife point and raped and strangled her before dumping her body. He was, as Mike Reynolds noted “the poster boy” for three strikes, though why he was out at all is something of a mystery. Sue had two daughters and felt something had to be done, but as is often the case in law and order auctions, the solution was based on emotion rather than prospective harm and she now has to live with being amongst those responsible for putting her son into prison for life for quite minor offences that are related to his drug addiction.
The numbers of three strikers alone show that the three strikes law is not an efficient deterrent. Plainly, the drug laws themselves are wrong being in the felony class, and it seems to me that if there is to be a three strikes law then each of the strikes has to be a felony occasioning serious violence.
Now I don’t support the death penalty under any circumstances, but really, if you’re going to toss out proportionality as a concept and spend millions brutalising someone who has committed a minor crime by putting them into a massively overcrowded prisons, on the basis that they are beyond rehab, then maybe the death penalty is less cruel.
If Californians believe that the people they are locking up now are so dangerous that they cannot be released in under 25-to-life or they believe they should be made to bear the full weight of deterring others even when they have done something quite minor, then perhaps they should simply execute them and have done with it. Three-strikes-and-you’re-dead. No appeal, no waiting, we take you out the back and do the deal.
And if they baulk at killing off 10,000 disproportinately black, hispanic and mentally ill people with summary execution then they should work out who absolutely needs to be in prison and make other arrangements for all the others. People who are dangerous and violent absolutely need to be kept secure but as to the others, I see no reason for putting them into brutal prisons for life so that the occasional two-time non-violent loser who pauses before a third minor crime pauses a little longer.
furious b
if with your Mum it’s the beginnings of dementia, there could be years of excruciation ahead: later stages may include a question repeated endlessly, or a 4-6pm rise in anxiety (“sun downing syndrome”). There are ways to adapt, and you’ll have depths of patience and cunning not yet plumbed.
A ‘reminder’ board (whiteboard) can be useful for a year or two….
But if it’s your MUM who’s getting the dementia, oh that’s different!
Thanks Ambigulous, I think she is aware of something being a bit well..different. I don’t know if it’s dementia or whether it is just getting older and the mind working differently, because most of the time she’s pretty sharp. She has been to see a doctor and has had some kind of brain activity test, and everything is fine apparently. This was of her own accord, I haven’t actually said anything to her about it, but I’m sure my impatience [or my utter confusion about the bizarro tangents] is noticable at times, my siblings have also noticed something different, though they see her less than I do. She has a lot going on at the moment and isn’t sleeping great, so it may be a tired brain, just chugging along, and doing weird things… I don’t know.
Also, MUM..? what does it stand for?
furious balancing – re-reading your original comment(16)in the light of your latest(19) and its second para I have some misgivings about the serve I gave you.
On initial reading 16 I rather liked the idea of being a postcard from the 50′s! Then I had second thoughts when you weighed in on your Mum. A bit of projection from me there – since I am in fact a postcard from the 30s and worry at times about losing my marbles!
And when I talk about people being like us I simply meant that aside from religion, race and nationality human beings generally share common family and social values.
However after reading Fran Barlow’s comment @ 20 about the Yanks and their treatment of lawbreakers I wondered about that too. In some societies they cut off your right hand if you steal. Is that more or less humane than the three strikes law?
Ambigulous @ 21 You are forgiven for your humor about what is a heartbeaking condition. You’ve obviously had first hand experience of Alzheimers, and I guess a sense of humor is one thing which can help – the carer at least! It didn’t occur to me that fb’s mum was edging towards that but rather he was showing a characteristic impatience. For his sake, and hers, I hope I was right.
No worries Patricia, I didn’t intend for what I said to come across the way it did.
My mum had an episode of Transient Global Amnesia [also known as total global amnesia] a few years ago – [this kind of manifests as the inability to form a memory, more than memory loss or disorientation], and whilst the doctor assured me it was not an early indicator of dementia or related illnesses, I am still probably a bit frightened about the prospect.
Regarding the postcard from the 1950′s, I’m a 70′s child so I don’t really know what it would have been like. When I first arrived in Adelaide in the late 80′s, I used to catch the train from Brighton station a lot, there are lots of elderly people living in Brighton and it’s quite ‘anglo’. I once met an old man who upon looking at the ethnic mix on the train, said that he didn’t recognise his own country anymore – ironically I didn’t even notice the mix of races and cultures – which is a different kind of homogeneity, I suppose.
Speaking of teeth (PaulRobert@2) I had to take my 16-year-old down to the dentist on Monday to have upper 15 and 25 extracted as part of his orthodontic program.
This experience was obviously more distressing for him than for me, but let me say that for a while I wasn’t sure. The phrase “it was like pulling teeth” is surely apt.
Despite enough local anaesthetic to stop an elephant he broke down during the process, stormed out and disowned me as his mother.
Much soothing talk later he returned to complete it … glad that’s over.