Bridge Run
The Blackmores Sydney Running Festival was today.  I've done the Bridge Run twice, now, having geared down from no training, injury, and just general lack of motivation, and while I'm glad to have finished the 9k, I'm not exactly proud of my finish, but I'll take it.  Must. Train. More.  Maybe it's time to get up another half marathon.

We’d all heard the story of when a plane crashed into the Empire State Building long ago and nothing bad happened beyond that, so when I got called up to the roof to see the plane that had crashed into the World Trade Centre all of us there just thought it was an accident, even when the second plane came in, which from our vantage point in Soho we couldn’t see, other than the fireball that came through the north face, but with cell phones it wasn’t long before we knew what had just happened, although we wouldn’t know for a few more hours just how bad it was, the full extent of death and destruction.

M. was working in midtown, just blocks away from the Empire State, and panicked, not an unreasonable response, so I headed uptown to get her. The subways were all shut, at least from downtown and Brooklyn. Buses were jammed, but I got on without too much delay. Lots of people did. The pace was slow, so I got off somewhere just above Astor Place and started walking. Above me were F16 fighters, and although I hadn’t considered any danger beyond the event itself, I was reassured. (Imagine M.’s perspective: she didn’t recognise the shapes; they just looked like war.) That was when I overheard someone saying that the first tower had come down. The smoke plume was maybe larger than when I’d last looked, but the towers hadn’t been visible to me for a while. I still hadn’t gotten used to the immediacy provided by cell phones.

In midtown, I found M. on the street, waiting for me, and we got a bus home to the Upper East Side. We stopped in the local grocery. M. wanted water and bread and milk. They were already nearly sold out, and it was only about 11 o’clock, if I remember it right.

The television was the part that was hardest. Over and over we saw the explosions, saw the towers fall, over and over. We saw the clouds and the crowds and couldn’t grasp the magnitude, just how big this was.

I wanted to go out, donate blood, although it wouldn’t be long before we knew there wasn’t any need, but stayed home, stayed with M., stayed to close the windows against the smell of the smoke and concrete dust that permeated the air, even as far uptown as we were. Who knows what was in that smell that far away, but it’s still in me, I reckon; it always will be.

Sexist

We’ve had a spate of media nonsense where women have suffered the slings and arrows, the sticks and stones, and we shouldn’t have to put up with it.  Not because such sledging isn’t to be expected, but because it’s been sexist.  It’s one thing to disparage someone, to insult them, but to do so on the basis of their sex or their ethnicity, well, that’s not acceptable.

I won’t comment about elsewhere, because that’s not the point, but in Australia, where Germaine Greer, among others, was invented, we really ought to know better.  So why jackasses like Gerard Henderson can get published in the mainstream media is beyond understanding.

Shall we take it point by point?  Mr. Henderson says it’s fair for a politician to call a woman journalist a “cow”, when she was pointed and sharp with the pollie’s boss over not answering questions and basically not being prepared for the interview, because (a) “shock jocks” not involved in the interview are shocking, (b) calling a person a cow goes back to Banjo Patterson (although he didn’t), and (c) the insulted party returned the insult by referring to the other as a “dinosaur”.  Plus, there was an apology issued, not that Idiot Henderson mentions the actual content of the apology.

So, (a) No, what, really? Wait, isn’t that someone else on another topic?  Yes, it is.  No points.

(b) Wait, what, how long ago was that, and wasn’t that a different context? Yeah, no points here, either.

(c) Not the implied ageism, just a dig at an anachronistic idiot being anachronistically idiotic, as is the Idiot Henderson.  Gerard: you are a dinosaur.  Idiot.

(d) If you don’t apologise properly, it doesn’t count.  “I’m sorry you were offended” is not the same as “I’m sorry for offending you”, to keep things simple.

OK, knowing that he’s an idiot, Henderson goes on to say that it isn’t fair because no one ever criticises when a right-wing moron is called out for being so.  But the examples offered provide only false equivalences.   For a man to refer to another man as a “douchebag” isn’t the same as calling a woman a “cow”.  Yes, it does compare a man negatively to a woman, insofar as anything feminine in relation to a man is considered effeminate, and that is wrong, but the comparison is far more tenuous.

For Germaine Greer to have called out the Prime Minister for her appalling dress sense isn’t sexist, it’s just sensible.  The PM really doesn’t dress suitably to her body type, under the present aesthetic circumstances.  I reckon that’s pretty fair really, and I wish someone would be as honest with me if I start dressing in spandex.  I don’t deserve it, don’t look good in it, and have alternatives that would be suitable.  Fair enough.

The criticism John Howard received, as reported by Idiot Henderson, also doesn’t make the cut as an excuse.  He was vilified (and never vindicated), but not because he was a man.  He copped his fair share because he was an evil, selfish, creep.  Whether any of the criticism is in a book on offer from the ABC as a publisher is irrelevant to the fact that the ABC is government funded, too.  It’s a positive that government media outlet can publish such material.  Hooray for Freedom of Speech!  Except when it’s directed at men, or Liberals, right, Idiot Henderson?  Seems so.

“A sense of perspective” is what’s called for is it? Well, I think it would help if the idiot employed by the Sydney Morning Herald to make such pronouncements would employ some himself.  It’s about time for dinosaurs like this to make a better attempt at the perspective of the women they vilify, whether directly or by imputation, as Gerald Henderson does regularly. He gets paid for this?